We were unlikely friends. He was rail thin and meticulously groomed. I’m a little burly and have a hairstyle best described as benign neglect. I live in a uniform of big black boots, Levis, and western shirts. He loved Prada and Lanvin. He was obsessed with healthy eating and all of the latest dietary supplements and carried a small squirt bottle of some miracle phytonutrient to add to his water. I eat pizza. He sang show tunes. I listen to PJ Harvey. While I’m a night owl, he was the first person to leave a surprise birthday party I once attended in Miami. The thing is, the party was for him. He just turned to me, “I’m tired, time to go to bed!” and was gone.
Fred Brandt lived in a show tune world interrupted only by his own unexpected, freakishly funny, and uncannily good bouts as a freestyle rapper. The music came to a tragic end on April 5, when Fred, who was 65 but looked and acted much younger, took his own life at his home in Miami. In the world of dermatology he was the king, and as a person, he touched the lives of many, many people. Fred had the gift of generosity, and I was pleased to get to know him as both a doctor without peer and a man subject to the same pressures—sometimes crushing ones—as the rest of us.
When we first met in 1999, he was the newly crowned world’s largest user of Botox. And I was the one he wrested that title from. I had heard tales of this charming, singing, sartorially splendid dermatologist for some time: I practiced in New York City and he was in Miami, so the patients who visited me during the summer and fall were the same ones Fred saw in the winter. When we finally did meet at a faculty lunch during a medical conference, we initially kept our distance, like two circling prizefighters. But that didn’t last long, because it was impossible not to like Fred. He was funny and kind, a one-man floorshow.
He preferred to be called Fred, plain and simple, but I got to call him Freddie Baby—a nod to Martin Balsam’s character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He loved the very idea of Hollywood. Once he was preparing to perform live injections at a medical meeting and there was no nurse to assist him. The crowd was growing restless, so I ran up on stage and helped him. He called me “Nursie” for the next year. Being a guest on his radio show, Ask Dr. Brandt, on SiriusXM was also wildly fun. No other dermatology show on the air before or since has or will have Fred’s share of singing, joking, yelping, and laughing. He was in his element.
But probably the most fun I had with Fred was the ridiculous afternoon when my friend took me shopping at Barney’s in an attempt to burnish my personal style. This may have been the only thing he ever failed to accomplish. Then, as always, he teased me about my girlfriends with absurd one-word reviews. Reacting to one of my companions, he had to really concentrate for several minutes before looking at me and saying, “Crazy.” Another was “Beautiful.” He must have been feeling loquacious when he met my last girlfriend, who prompted a deadpan, “Congratulations: crazy and beautiful,” followed by his signature laugh.
I have said this a thousand times and it is as true now as ever: Fred was the single most kind-hearted man in the beauty doc world, which can be a wildly competitive, harsh, and vindictive place. He wasn’t any of those (well, maybe a little competitive) yet he was its master. We published the first two articles on Botox for the neck in the same issue of the same journal in 1999. My paper had 50 patients. Fred’s had 1,500. Fred didn’t hesitate to tell me, and everyone within earshot, that my Botox doses were too low and that his necks looked better than mine. I replied that his high doses would weaken and prematurely age the neck. We agreed to disagree.
As our friendship developed, I felt I could talk bluntly about Fred—but that nobody else could, at least not in my presence. He had a childlike innocence that made those close to him feel fiercely protective. While we both gave presentations and performed live injections at times in front of thousands of doctors, we were actually quite shy. And we both were intermittently depressed. The first time I saw him really down was in 2007, when we were secretly shopping for real estate together. I was in the process of leaving my old practice, and we thought that if we formed a dermatology-plastic surgery team together, we would be unstoppable—and the work, hilariously fun.
Fred was running late that night, and looking haggard. When I asked how he was, he replied he was exhausted, while uncharacteristically looking me straight in the eyes. “You don’t look so good yourself,” he added. I said I was feeling overwhelmed: One of my employees had been poached by a rival, I was overdue on a textbook chapter, and I had about a dozen presentations to prepare for academic meetings in Monaco and Australia. From then on, “overwhelmed” became the word we used; it sounded so much more benign than depressed.
Fred was concerned about his relationship with the toxin and filler industry. He worked exhaustively for the makers of Botox, Restylane, and Juvéderm and he loved doing it, making many good friends along the way. But when some of your best friends work in the industry, and you are a doctor, that part of your life becomes a sticky, gray soup. Fred often saw only the good in people and could be blindsided when his dealings with the industry got rough. He would feel bad about some slight or a little arm-twisting and say that’s what you get with people who are paid to be your friends.
Fred was also having a difficult time with some of his celebrity patients. They invited him to their homes and acted like confidants—some of were brilliant actors, after all—but then used him. He would be invited to the home of a star – as long as he brought his medical supplies and did a little work, often for free. They could be disrespectful, sometimes mean. Hollywood, which Fred loved, could also be cruel. He talked endlessly about the patients he truly adored, but also about how nearly everyone he met wanted something from him.
Fred seemed to rebound from his depression. He had wrangled his relationship with the industry, his friendships, and his superstar patients into perspective. Strangely, and in a particularly New York way, we never saw each other’s apartments, even though we lived close to one another. We would meet at the Standard Grill, or Morimoto if Fred was picking, and talk about new products, new projects, art, and music. And then, invariably, a patient would walk by and effervescent Fred would pop out of his seat, making small talk and jokes. It wasn’t an act. It was, however, exhausting.
The last time I had dinner with Fred was three weeks before he died. We had been at my office reviewing data from a study we had just completed. Fred gave me a sample of a new product from his skin care line, and I gave him a sample of mine. I was entering the skin care business, too, and instead of being competitive about it, he seemed genuinely happy for me. He told me to call anytime I had a question. He paused, reconsidered that last statement, and then the man who had less free time than anyone I know, said, “You know what? Let’s figure out a time and sit down to really talk about this. Skin care is a rough business. Oh, and I realize you didn’t ask me for help,” he added with a smile.
That evening we weren’t alone at dinner. But between rounds of conversation at the restaurant, Fred quietly told me he was feeling down again. He mentioned a former colleague who had behaved badly while leaving the practice. I knew this had actually happened years earlier, and thought it was odd that he was still feeling a sense of betrayal. Yet he was upbeat about his current crop of young colleagues. Fred said he was exhausted and needed to get ready for an upcoming American Academy of Dermatology meeting in San Francisco. When dinner was over, the host of the dinner called separate cars to take us home. But Fred insisted we ride together so we could talk in confidence.
For the first time in 15 years of friendship, he wanted to talk about his appearance. He told me people were making fun of him and he asked if colleagues were talking behind his back. He seemed in need of protection, so I lied and said “no.” In fact, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt had just been released on Netflix, with a character apparently (I have never seen it and never will) based on Fred and played by Martin Short. Everybody in the industry, all of our friends, were talking about it, and a few of them were being cruel. Fred was down, yes, but not as low as I had seen him before. For one thing, he was very happy with the success of his new Needles No More skin care product. We agreed to meet up in San Francisco.
I ran into Fred five or six times at the meeting, but we were never had a chance to speak for more than a few minutes. And then he was gone. Since the moment I heard the heartbreaking news of his death, I have replayed our final conversations in my head, no doubt like all of his friends and colleagues have, looking for clues. You wonder what deeper meaning you might have missed. You feel guilty. There have been some nasty things written about Tina Fey and Martin Short and the character they created for their TV show. It is unmistakably based on Fred, and reportedly in a very nasty, unflattering way. But did a caricature on Netflix take away my friend? No. Depression is a killer with many factors and triggers. Hollywood used Fred for a laugh. They used him for money. After that my dear friend was all used up.