Gone With Neglect : ‘Recycling,’ Sales and Rentals Have Resulted in the Loss of Many Hollywood Costume Favorites
Tonight a slice of vanishing Hollywood history will make its way down a runway at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Anne Bancroft’s leopard-trimmed dress from “The Graduate” will be paired with Carol Baker’s leopard-trimmed dress from “The Carpetbaggers.” Three period pieces from “Cleopatra,” nine from “My Fair Lady” and seven “Lovely to Look At” gowns will join the leopard-spotted duo as will more than 130 other costumes for “Fashion in Film--The Hollywood Years.”
The show’s full list of nostalgia-laden outfits is impressive, but just as remarkable are the many costumes that the show’s producer, James Watterson, hoped to include, only to learn they no longer exist.
Watterson, vice president of publicity and special events for the May Co., and a number of well-known Hollywood costume designers volunteered their services for tonight’s AIDS Project Los Angeles benefit, and in the process discovered how some vintage Hollywood outfits have been damaged or lost all together.
“In the ‘50s and the ‘60s, studio managements were less than enlightened,” Watterson explains. “I don’t think they realized what they had. Costumes were sold, lost and otherwise gotten rid of. Now, people can’t account for them.”
Donfeld, whose film credits include “Prizzi’s Honor” and “Days of Wine and Roses,” is among the costume designers who worked on tonight’s show, supervising the re-creation of nine Bette Davis costumes. He believes the studios’ policy of recycling clothes is another major factor in the low survival rate of some classics.
At one studio, he recalls, all the fur collars and cuffs from 1940s-era costumes were systematically removed for use as trims on peasant costumes for the 1967 movie “Camelot.” At another studio, a dress made for the movie “Excalibur” was found to be unusable for tonight’s show because the daughter of a studio chieftain, exercising her father’s executive privilege, had borrowed it and hacked it off at the knees to wear as a cocktail frock.
“I’ve seen many of the clothes I designed for movies at 20th Century Fox appear time and again on television,” Donfeld says of the recycling system. Things he designed for stars are worn again by extras.
Mary Kay Stolz, a costume designer whose latest film project was to dress Dennis Quaid for “Great Balls of Fire,” also met with frustration while working on tonight’s show. She managed to get permission from Paramount to borrow Grace Kelly’s ice blue strapless gown from “To Catch a Thief” and a Jean Louis gown that Marlene Dietrich wore in “Blonde Venus.” But both dresses were pulled back at the last minute because Paramount wants to prepare them for auction. They’ll go on the block at Christie’s in New York next month, along with more than 150 pieces from the Paramount storerooms, says Joe Gruca of the studio’s men’s wardrobe department.
This is not unusual. Studio wardrobe departments operate like sales and rental offices. They sell clothes at auction and lease them to TV and movie production companies. Over the years, some of the stock has been altered to fit the renter’s needs, without studio permission. Now a more careful watch is kept over the inventory.
Other fashion treasures have spent time in such rental shops as Western Costume, where some prize possessions can still be leased by ad agencies making commercials and even private citizens looking for Halloween costumes. Among the greats at Western have been one pair of Dorothy’s ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz,” eventually sold at auction, and the riding habit and white pantaloons young Bonnie Blue wore in “Gone With the Wind,” still in stock but not available for rental.
In the last decade, says Watterson, a new appreciation for historic Hollywood costumes has led studios to document and protect their prize holdings. At the Burbank Studios, which gets high marks from Stolz for its well maintained collection, David Davidson heads the men’s costume department. He says that now, items from the studio’s “special wardrobe” of clothes worn by leading actors and actresses in classic films are almost never rented out. The bread and butter of the studio rental business is in uniforms: policemen, waiters, postmen, doormen and nondescript period clothing for the extras to wear.
Still, not all screen gems are particularly well cared for. To help Stolz locate some of them, Donfeld, who has worked with most of the studio wardrobes in town, drew what Stolz calls a treasure map, pinpointing the resting places of many of the costumes. Armed with this information and the names of stockroom personnel, Stolz was able to locate pieces the studios didn’t even know they owned. She unearthed two Bob Mackie dresses from “Lady Sings the Blues,” as well as costumes from “The Great Gatsby” and “The Untouchables.”
Locating costumes was not Stolz’s only challenge. As she gathered them, it became apparent she would have a hard time finding models to fit them. Average runway models stand at least 5 feet, 9 inches tall, and many of the actresses who originally wore these costumes barely topped 5 feet, 3 inches. Natalie Wood was so thin that her clothes from “Gypsy” have tiny, 21-inch waists and are fully padded on top. Diana Ross achieved anorexic proportions for her role as Billie Holidayin “Lady Sings the Blues.”
One of Stolz’s assistants found a Marilyn Monroe look-alike in Pamela Stonebrooke, a singer-songwriter who has the Monroe act down pat, even to the half-closed eyes and quivering lips. The sylph who fits into the Ross dresses was found in the parking lot of Otis Parsons. She models for drawing classes at the school. But by the middle of this week, Stolz still hadn’t found anyone who could match the voluptuous curves and small waist of Sonia Braga, whose dress from “Moon Over Parador” is scheduled to be modeled tonight.
A great-moments-of-costume-history segment in this evening’s show will start with Rudolph Valentino’s costume from “The Sheik” (designed by his wife Natasha Rambova) and will include pieces from the three most recent Academy Award costume design winners: “Dangerous Liaisons” and “The Last Emperor” (James Acheson), and “Room With A View” (Jenny Bevan and John Bright). Two of Scarlett O’Hara’s hoop-skirted “Gone With the Wind” dresses will be there, as will “Kitty Foyle’s” simple black shirtwaist with pristine white collar and cuffs.
Some of the clothes are re-creations, constructed exactly like the originals and made of the same type of fabric, as stipulated by the Hollywood costume guild. Scarlett’s barbecue dress for tonight’s show was partially re-created more than 20 year ago. The only pieces left from the original are the velvet ribbons and lace; the fragile silk skirt had disintegrated. It was remade in the same fabric, although with a different print.
Every time a show like this is mounted, there is an outcry to preserve Hollywood’s great costumes, to start a museum, to find a safe place for them. Yet to date there is no major Hollywood costume museum. There are only small collections, some contained within such institutions as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, others privately held.
“I don’t think people realize a Hollywood costume museum could be a money-making situation, “ says Edward Maeder, LACMA’s curator of costumes and textiles. “Costumes are still looked at as a recyclable source of income in Hollywood. That’s the bottom line.”
The new owners of Western Costume--Paul Abramowitz, Sidney Sheldon and Bill Haber--plan to upgrade their collection and continue to rent it out. They will move their holdings from their ancient building on Melrose Avenue to a new facility in North Hollywood. They expect to provide complete wardrobe services with a dye shop, millinery and shoe shop.
Several costume designers say they are pinning their hopes on the executives of Sony, the Japanese electronics firm that recently bought Columbia pictures, to take an active role in protecting Hollywood’s costume legends.
The outspoken Donfeld ruminates, “We never realized it would come to this. We thought the studios would always have the costumes. We thought they were like banks, that they would never fail.”
For information regarding tickets for tonight’s event, please contact the AIDS Project Los Angeles office: (213) 962-1600, Ext. 254.
