About to turn 81, Calvin Richard Klein has generated concern about the physical deterioration that is evident in the latest published images of him. Sitting on a terrace in New York’s Soho and having to be flanked by a friend from his seat to the car, the fashion designer shows a face very different from the one he wore a year ago, when he boasted of being a couple with former adult film actor Kevin Baker. , which he has been with for more than half a century.
That Calvin Richard Klein is in love with aesthetics, beauty and muscular bodies is evident in the advertising that made the brand he led famous for years. But before coming out he was married to two women.
His first wife was the textile designer Jayne Centrem, whom he married in 1964 and had a daughter, the television producer Marci Klein, known for her work on Saturday Night Live. Ella Marci funnyly commented on one occasion that every time she slept with a man she “read my father’s name on her underwear.”
In his second marriage, he married Kelly Rector, who was his assistant at the time, during a trip to Italy. He was married to her for 20 years until they signed the divorce in 2006, but ten years before that they were already living separate lives. She became a successful photographer.
Klein, before forming a stable relationship with Kevin Baker, with whom she has been with for more than 8 years, had another long relationship with Nicholas Gruber, another gay adult film actor, when he was also old enough to be his father or even his grandfather. At that time the press highlighted how much Gruber and Klein were alike, taking into account the age difference, and called him a narcissist for “being in love with himself” by making the boyfriend twin trend visible.
The relationship with Gruber ended in the worst way, and the young man’s drug addiction caused Calvin Klein to continue taking care of him until he was recovered. In a later memoir, Gruber said that one of the worst moments she had to live with the designer was when he made her take a lie detector test to find out if he had been unfaithful. The young man passed the test and Calvin gave him a $250,000 Bentley.
Klein was born on November 19, 1942 in the Bronx, New York, into a Jewish family from Hungary. He enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, but never managed to graduate and years later, in 2003, he received an honorary doctorate. Together with his childhood friend Barry K. Schwartz, he founded his first company while he was married to his first wife, but the designer’s worldwide recognition came after being protégé of Nicolas Louis Alexandre de Gunzburg, Baron of Gunzburg, whose presentations made him the star of the fashion scene among the New York elite before triumphing on international catwalks.
