“Perhaps you would describe me as jaded, darling, but I prefer to say that in living there is absolutely nothing that is bad. I can only say that I live fully 24 hours a day—and I regret nothing.” - Victor Hugo (Rojas)
In the 2019 documentary film Halston, filmmaker Frédéric Tcheng questions Halston’s former illustrator and confidant Joe Eula about the nature of the fashion designer’s relationship with his lover, Victor Hugo. Tcheng asks, “Why did Halston put up with Victor?” to which Eula replies, “Because he was in love with him.” Tcheng then presses further, asking: “When did it fall apart?” and Eula, without skipping a beat, retorts, “The day they met.” Victor Hugo was born Victor Rojas in Caracas, Venezuela during a coup d'état that took place on November 24th, 1948, when Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, Marcos Pérez Jiménez and Luis Felipe Llovera Páez overthrew the elected president, Rómulo Gallegos. Not much else is documented surrounding Rojas’ early life in Venezuela, but sometime in the early 1970s, he and his mother emigrated to the United States, landing in New York City.
Beginning in 1972, Victor Rojas catapulted from being an anonymous immigrant in the U.S. to a headline-making celebrity when he met Roy Halston Frowick–known mononymously as the famous American fashion designer Halston–while working as a male escort to make ends meet. In their initial encounter, Victor, then a 24-year-old student, informed Halston that his name was Victor Hugo and not Victor Rojas. Victor’s chosen surname “Hugo”, however, was not an homage to the 19th-century French author of the same name, but rather a playful pun on the size of his own anatomy. In other words, Rojas fabricated “Victor Hugo” as a sobriquet for his job as a hustler in order to emphasize his being “huge” below the belt. Despite its provocative origin, the “Hugo” surname stuck and “Rojas” from then on was no more.
At the time of their meeting, Halston was arguably at the peak of his career but had recently broken up with his boyfriend, Ed Austin. Emotionally vulnerable, the designer had taken up the practice of calling on escorts to meet his physical needs, and he became infatuated with Hugo almost immediately. Though Halston and Hugo’s initial encounter was purely lust-driven and transactional, the pair continued to see each other and their relationship progressed into a romantic one. According to Steven S. Gaines, author of Simply Halston: The Untold Story: “It was pure lust. I think Halston had a life that was barren of romance and tenderness…Halston liked being humiliated and having the shock value of having Victor around…It was a whole other side to Halston…Halston liked to be on the shocking end of things…He couldn’t get rid of him…And believe me, Victor wouldn’t let him go.” Regardless of whether it was love or lust that motivated Halston at first, Hugo, on the other hand, was a young immigrant student struggling to earn a living, and feelings aside, likely saw that he could benefit from continuing to see Halston even if he was no longer being paid directly for his services. As journalist Tim Blanks described, “Halston’s money and Hugo’s appetite for excess made the pair an accident waiting to happen.”
Smitten by his energy both in and outside the bedroom, Halston moved Hugo into his lavish home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and even added his lover to the company payroll. Shortly thereafter–and perhaps to account for putting him on the payroll–Halston allowed Hugo to work on designing window displays for his Madison Avenue store despite the fact that Halston’s ex-boyfriend, Ed Austin, was already doing that exact same job. According to Austin, Halston brought in Hugo to redecorate a window he’d already completed during the Christmas season of 1973, and Austin was fired on the spot.
As a window dresser, Hugo’s unique mind found its first public forum, and he was able to showcase his creativity as an artist in his own right. As photographer and artist Christopher Makos explained: “[Hugo] was a ball full of energy and creative force. If you hung around him for a while, it rubbed off on you.” Hugo had a remarkable ability to make Halston’s demure and sophisticated clothing come off as absolutely scandalous, and he is said to have been the first window dresser to incorporate the trending Pop Art movement into his work. Halston himself once admitted that some of his customers found Hugo’s window displays to be in “bad taste and vulgar.”
One such notable display of Hugo’s featured a mannequin posed mid-birth in the windows of Halston’s shop. Another display depicted a reenactment of the aftermath of the 1975 LaGuardia Airport Christmas bombing, a blast that in reality killed 11 people and seriously injured 74 others. Andy Warhol perhaps described it best, writing in his 1980 photo book, Exposures: “[Halston] gave [Hugo] a job doing windows. Soon Halston had a theater on the street. His Madison Avenue windows were filled with pregnant mannequins, suicidal mannequins, and mannequins reading my magazine, Interview.” In another instance, Warhol once noted that he told Hugo he loved a particular window display the Venezuelan had done which prominently featured turkey bones.
All in all, the avant-garde eye that Victor Hugo brought to his window displays showcased that the Venezuelan was striving to not simply remain the arm-candy of a wealthy, creative fashion designer but to also become a successful artist in his own right, and to be perceived as an individual with his own ingenuity. This notion is confirmed by the fact that it was around this time that Hugo also began showing Warhol some of his artwork beyond window displays, including a collection of Mona Lisa portraits he made of the muse wearing various Halston fashions. Warhol reportedly told Hugo that he found the pieces amusing, and encouraged Victor to keep making more art.
Though Hugo remained Halston’s romantic partner, a strong kinship between Hugo and Warhol also began to flourish. Warhol, in fact, was smitten by Hugo in his own right, once calling the Venezuelan in his diaries a “hot tamale”. Warhol was inspired by Hugo’s erotic nature, and Hugo soon became a muse to the artist, stripping down to model for both Warhol’s “Torso” and “Sex Parts” series. Hugo’s lascivious lifestyle also found him scouting other models for Warhol’s art, and Warhol’s diaries are filled with entries of Hugo coordinating the logistics of photoshoots: “Victor came down with a nude pose-er. I’m having boys come and model nude for photos for the new paintings I’m doing. But I shouldn’t call them nudes. It should be something more artistic. Like “Landscapes…” or “Took ‘landscape’ pictures of an ex-porno star Victor brought down.”
Hugo also worked with and for Warhol in various other ways. He served as an artistic collaborator of sorts when he became a regular contributor to Warhol’s “Oxidation” Series by urinating on canvases that Warhol then coated with wet copper paint. Hugo also became one of the artist’s assistants at Warhol’s Factory, as well as a contributing editor for Warhol’s Interview magazine, conducting Q&As with various celebrities and designing advertisement pages for the publication. Hugo himself was famously quoted in the April 1975 issue of Interview describing his hedonistic habits: “Perhaps you would describe me as jaded, darling, but I prefer to say that in living there is absolutely nothing that is bad. I can only say that I live fully 24 hours a day—and I regret nothing.”
Hugo’s sybaritic lifestyle truly entered new heights with the opening of the legendary disco nightclub Studio 54 on April 26, 1977. At the time the club opened, Halston had been under a lot of pressure at work and he consequently began partying as a means of stress release, bringing Hugo along for the ride. Halston went so far as to change his office hours to cater to his extensive partying schedule, which included cocaine-fueled “man-on-man” orgies that the designer would host in his Upper East Side townhouse, at which Hugo often played a starring role while Warhol photographed from the sidelines. During these parties, Hugo allegedly had keys to Halston’s safe, which is where cocaine and other assorted drugs were stored and out of which said drugs flowed freely and constantly.
Victor Hugo is, in fact, cited quite frequently throughout Warhol’s diaries as either doing or doling out the drugs on a given day–anything from the party-favorite cocaine to fake poppers was fair game. As a result, Warhol also began to carefully document the effects that constant drug use started having on Hugo, which serves to explain the more violent downward spiral period of life that Hugo then entered. As Warhol wrote: “Victor called and I’m just afraid that drugs have taken over Victor’s brain, because you know, you’re emotional, and then you take all the drugs, and do all the fighting, and then suddenly, it happens–you're over the brink. I'm afraid he’s having a nervous breakdown. He said he was in a hospital and had all these stitches and bruises, and it was too crazy.”
Interweaving Hugo into both his personal and professional life was perhaps not entirely a coincidence on Warhol’s part. For a long time, the artist had been jealous of Halston’s success and in part began to leverage Hugo in order to make a fool of the fashion designer whenever he could. According to Warhol biographer, Bob Colacello, “Andy loved it when Victor showed up at [Studio] 54 in a jockstrap or at a Halston party in a Halston dress, in both cases much to Halston’s embarrassment…Victor later told me that Andy actually paid him to do these things.” That being said, Warhol also saw Victor as someone with a creative imagination who didn’t know what to do with it, and perhaps also utilized him as a fertile source of artistic ideas.
As both Hugo and Halston continued to drown themselves in non-stop partying, their chaotic lifestyle choices led to the haphazard demise of their relationship with one another. At some point early on, Halston & Hugo stopped sleeping together, and Halston turned to other escorts, like Robert Rogers, “an unassuming Black man of medium height and build in his late twenties who was one of Manhattan’s most successful male prostitutes.” Hugo’s worsening drug addiction and tempestuous nature in particular contributed to the couple’s frequent breakups and reunions. As Warhol noted in a diary entry: “Halston called, he said he’d left his vacation in Montauk because Victor was going crazy and he’d gone too far…we sat there and then in the other room were three bodyguards that Halston hired because Victor threatened to come and break all the windows from the outside. You know, Victor is saying he loves Halston too much to stand by and let him get so grand but I mean it’s Halston who works so hard, and if he wants to get grand then he can do it. I know, though, that the drugs do take over, so I guess that’s what’s wrong with Victor.”
Hugo & Halston’s on and off relationship is in fact frequently mentioned throughout Warhol’s diary. One entry cites Warhol going to a Studio 54 party thrown by a publicist simply to showcase that Hugo wasn’t blackmailing Halston. Another entry is recorded right after a phone call during which Hugo informed Warhol he’d been thrown out by Halston, accused of stealing cocaine and having an orgy without him. Yet another entry notes a call from Victor in which he happily mentions that he was back together with Halston and that life was wonderful again. Meanwhile, many other figures close to the couple expressed their own opinions on the dynamics of Hugo and Halston’s relationship. Halston’s personal assistant, Peruchio Valls, for example, stated that “the person that Halston loved, more than his own life, was Victor.” Meanwhile, Bob Colacello called Victor Hugo a destructive force, while fashion journalist André Leon Talley wrote of Hugo: “That Venezuelan call boy was his downfall. He was a grifter who clung on like a parasite, like a barnacle on a ship.” In truth, there have been many varying opinions as to whether Victor Hugo was genuinely in love with Halston at all or was simply concerned with advancing his own interests in life. In all likelihood, both were at play.
After seventeen turbulent years together as a power couple, Hugo and Halston officially ended their relationship. Shortly before then, Hugo was pushed to sign a nondisclosure agreement in which he agreed not to speak publicly about his relationship with Halston in return for a large monetary sum. Despite the breakup, Halston continued to bankroll Hugo’s lifestyle—paying for his housing and writing him checks on a regular basis. Meanwhile, Hugo’s addictions worsened, and he reportedly began stealing items from Halston, as well as works by Warhol and the belongings of designer and model Elsa Peretti to help pay for his drug habits.
By 1986, Victor Hugo’s world started crumbling in quick succession. Warhol’s diaries mention him less and less, and Hugo’s more sporadic appearances come in the form of a phone call to Warhol after which the artist documented that Victor always sounded heavily under the influence. An entry in December 1986 is Warhol’s last that ever mentions Victor: “The other day Victor sounded so sick I thought he had the magic disease [AIDS], but yesterday he sounded fine, totally recovered.” On February 22, 1987, Warhol himself passed away after failing to recover from a surgery. Within a year, Halston tested positive for HIV, and when his health began to fail, he moved to San Francisco to be closer to his family but also to be further away from Hugo. In 1989, The Andy Warhol Diaries were published posthumously, and Hugo publicly decried his portrayal in them and threatened to auction off any Warhols in his possession as a result: “I feel like the Central Park jogger…I’ve been gang-raped and beaten by a dead person and bunch of thugs that work for him. It is the most vile, disgusting piece of pulp literature I have ever read…” Then on March 26, 1990, Halston died of Kaposi’s Sarcoma, an AIDS-related illness, in San Francisco.
With both Warhol and Halston gone for good, Hugo’s relevance to the public diminished, and his life in the early ‘90s was far less scrutinized. Even after Halston’s death, however, Hugo seemingly continued to try making money off the designer. According to Steven Gaines, a Halston biographer: “Victor absolutely would not give me an interview unless I paid him. All the money just went up his nose and on crazy spending and destructive stuff.” By 1993, Victor Hugo was allegedly working on his own autobiography, though the project was never completed. By December of ‘93, artist Scott Covert encountered a seemingly homeless Victor Hugo sleeping in the park after he had run out of money from staying at the Hotel Chelsea. Covert, along with Hotel Chelsea resident Colleen Weinstein, began trying to help Victor Hugo, who was already sick with AIDS himself. By then it was too late to do much and Victor Hugo died from AIDS-related complications shortly thereafter at the age of 51. Both Covert and Weinstein did not have the funds to bury Hugo at the time, and it took them two weeks to save up enough money to finally bury Victor Hugo on Halston’s birthday in a cemetery in East Hampton, New York.
After his tragic death, Hugo’s legacy as an artist and innovative window dresser remained primarily unappreciated and forgotten until 2007, when an exhibition of mannequins dressed by Hugo from Andy Warhol’s collection was held at the Milk Gallery in NYC. Then in 2010, Juliana Cairone, the owner of a clothing store called Rare Vintage, used Hugo as inspiration to create her own unique window displays for a clothing sale. More resurging interest in Victor Hugo as a figure returned both in 2019, with the release of the documentary film, Halston, written and directed by Frédéric Tcheng and then again in 2021, with the release of Ryan Murphy’s Netflix miniseries, also entitled Halston. In the miniseries, Hugo is portrayed by Gian Franco Rodríguez, who conducted extensive research with one of Hugo’s old friends in order to help prepare for the role. Meanwhile, Daniel Minahan, the director and executive producer of the miniseries also went to great lengths to better understand Hugo and to establish him as a fully dimensional character. According to Minahan, Halston's protégé Naeem Khan enlightened him, saying that “despite all of his insanity and the disruption, Victor was a person who could make you see things in a different way.”
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material
Blanks, Tim. “The Mad Hatter.” The Telegraph, 2001, December 6. http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/news-features/TMG3292682/The-mad-hatter.html
Colacello, Bob. Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up. New York, Vintage Books, 2014.
Gaines, Steven S. Simply Halston: The Untold Story. 1991. New York, Putnam, 1991.
Grudin, Anthony E. Like a Little Dog: Andy Warhol's Queer Ecologies. Oakland, University of California Press, 2022.
Haden-Guest, Anthony. The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night. New York, ItBooks, 1997.
Hernández, Robb. Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde. New York, NYU Press, 2019.
Miller, Julie. “Inside Halston’s Destructive Real-Life Relationship With Victor Hugo.” Vanity Fair, 2021, May 14. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/05/halston-victor-hugo-real-life
Nugent, Mitchell. “Dangerous Liaisons With Halston’s Lover, Victor Hugo.” Interview Magazine, 2021, May 13. https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/dangerous-liaisons-with-halstons-lover-victor-hugo
Perich, Anton. “Victor Hugo Rojas.” Youtube, 2013, July 11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbV0vUSUjcE
Stein, Ellin. “What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in Netflix’s Halston.” Slate, 2021, May 14. https://slate.com/culture/2021/05/halston-netflix-true-story-ewan-mcgregor-ryan-murphy-accuracy.html
Warhol, Andy. The Andy Warhol Diaries, edited by Pat Hackett. New York, Twelve Hachette Book Group, 1989.
Wilson, Eric. “Not Just Window Dressing.” The New York Times, 2010, July 26. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/fashion/29ROW.html