Exclusive Preview: SongWriter Season 4 Continues with Halston Producer Ned Martel, Stephan Moccio

SongWriter is a podcast that turns stories into songs, featuring David Gilmour, Joyce Carol Oates, Steve Earle, Roxane Gay, Amanda Shires, Susan Orlean and Katie Melua. You can hear an exclusive preview of next week’s episode featuring the story of Halston and Stephan Moccio, only at Paste.

The life of mononymous fashion designer Halston was recently made into a Netflix biopic starring Ewan McGregor. Halston’s story is at once inspiring—a gay man in 1970s America who rose from obscurity to build a fashion empire that was valued at a billion dollars—and heartbreaking. Ned Martel, a producer of the show, says this combination is the key to making compelling television.

“The saddest part of our story is to have the audience watch the character struggle with drugs, and ultimately the plague that so many of his generation succumbed to,” says Martel. “That’s part of the drama, and part of the tragedy.”

Halston got his first big break when he designed a distinctive pill box hat for Jacqueline Kennedy to wear at her husband’s inauguration. From here the designer pivoted into women’s fashion, dressing Liza Minelli, Lauren Bacall, Greta Garbo, Anjelica Huston and Elizabeth Taylor. Eventually Halston’s brand covered a vast swath of American consumer goods: women and men’s fashion, luggage, carpets, and even the uniforms on Braniff airlines.

“He was inescapable in American culture,” Martel says.

Sadly, profligate spending, drug abuse, and eventually illness from HIV/AIDS caused the designer to lose control of the brand. In the last years of his life, Halston was barred from using his own name on his designs.