Old Movie Costumes: a Clothes Encounter

The dust is still flying over a few hundred pieces of movie memorabilia that have been locked away in a jail for the last 20 years as a Hollywood historical organization fights to keep 300 glitzy costumes in the movie town.

Hollywood Heritage, which operates a small museum out of a renovated barn used by legendary director/producer Cecil B. DeMille, is protesting a Board of Parks and Recreation decision to lend the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, a school and museum complex in downtown Los Angeles, garments and accessories worn by such Hollywood luminaries as Fred Astaire and Marlene Dietrich.

The costumes, only a small part of a 5,000-piece collection of scripts, equipment and other memorabilia, landed behind bars in 1968 when the now-defunct Hollywood Museum Assn. gave custody of the garments to Los Angeles until a new Hollywood museum could be built. After private storage for the costumes became too expensive, they were packed away in boxes and locked into cells at the vacant Lincoln Heights Jail.

Because of winds that blow dirt and rain through open windows at the run-down, five-story building on the edge of the Santa Fe Railroad yard, the costumes are deteriorating and the city late last year began to look for a new home for the items. The rest of the collection has already been lent to various museums and libraries around Southern California.

A spokesman for Hollywood Heritage argued unsuccessfully at the commission’s meeting earlier this month that the board should award it the costumes, claiming that to do otherwise would violate a 1968 agreement between the city and the Museum Assn. to keep the artifacts in Hollywood. The agreement states that if a Hollywood museum doesn’t exist, the collection must be displayed around the Los Angeles area to “memorialize Hollywood.”

Any contract between the city and the Fashion Institute, which are currently in negotiations, must be approved by the City Council. The loan would be for 25 years.

“We are a Hollywood museum and as such should receive this material,” said Richard Adkins, Hollywood Heritage executive director. “The original intent of the donors is for a Hollywood museum. We have provided that on the original site (of the Hollywood Museum Assn.) and in an original building.”

But in a report prepared by the Department of Parks and Recreation general manager’s office, the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising was chosen because of its ability to restore a large number of costumes quickly, and its better security and methods of storing the costumes in climate-controlled vaults. Along with the institute and Hollywood Heritage, Max Factor & Co., a subsidiary of Revlon Inc. and an Irvine doctor had also bid for the costumes.

Department administrator Linda Barth, who has overseen the collection for the last two years, said that although Adkins claims that Hollywood Heritage’s Hollywood Studio Museum, on Highland Avenue near the Hollywood Bowl, is able to perform restoration as well as display the costumes, she does not consider the organization to be the “Hollywood museum” envisioned by the original donors.

She said such a museum should have a larger staff to perform the 36 costume restorations a year that the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising’s 30-member staff promises, should have more space to display the items and have better security.

“We have to consider what is in the best interest of the entire collection,” Barth said.

Adkins, who has the support of Hollywood Councilman Michael Woo, has vowed to take the fight to the City Council, where the agreement could be blocked.