Back in Fashion : Former Actress-Model Returns With Tome on Style and a Stylish Era

Marsha Hunt has this love affair with the camera: It worships her, captures her, challenges her. And she has given it lots of opportunities.

She can’t help it. Point the camera’s eye at the 77-year-old former model and actress and she immediately goes into pose--tipping her head, unleashing a smile that over the years has promoted movies and sold everything from cars and mink stoles to summer cruises.

Model-thin and primed for stardom, Hunt was photographed thousands of times--mostly throughout the 1930s and ‘40s--for major studio production stills, publicity shots and fashion layouts. So, as a photographer aims a lens in Hunt’s direction in the living room of her Sherman Oaks home, she is primed to revisit an old friendship.

“I hate to waste film,” she says shyly, offering the camera a knowing gaze. Her glasses are off, of course. And any cigarette she might have had would have been snuffed out into the nearest ashtray: just an old habit.

“Any time a camera was in the room, the MGM publicity people were always there to yank that cigarette out of your hand,” says Hunt, widow of the late novelist and playwright Robert Presnell Jr. “And you knew better not to wear glasses. As an actress, you knew that your image represented the studio, first and foremost.”

Photographs of Hunt are now back in the public eye, thanks to a book called “The Way We Wore: Styles of the 1930s and ‘40s and Our World Since Then.”

The book, published in 1993 and now in its second printing, is far more than any self-indulgent paean to a Hollywood film star’s memories of yesteryear. It has become a reference work among academicians nationwide.

For example, two respected reference guides--the Library Journal and Booklist, published by the American Library Assn.--have called the book a must-buy. Numerous universities have also sought the book for their own libraries and fashion design departments, its publisher says.

Along with its 500 photographs, the book includes Hunt’s chatty notes and personal insights into the politics and social forces of the era--along with everything from the price of shoes to the look of hair, hips, hats and racy cars.

Hunt’s book project became a reality in unlikely fashion. “The Way We Wore” makes use of some of the thousands of fashion and film photographs and stills that Hunt had kept tucked away for decades in the barn of her ranch-style house.

In the late 1970s, Hunt’s photographs were displayed at the opening of the Sherman Oaks Galleria, when she was approached about turning them into a book project. So she gathered up thousands of photographs and went in search of a publisher.

For Hunt, a longtime community activist, the honorary mayor of Sherman Oaks and founder of the San Fernando Valley Mayor’s Fund for the Homeless, the book has brought a new focus to her semi-retirement years.

While Hunt is still active in community affairs, the project has reignited a creative urge that has her at work on a book of song lyrics.

When she talks about “The Way We Wore,” Hunt attributes the book’s success not to the woman in the clothes, but the outfits themselves.

“It’s not me. It’s the clothes,” she says. “I’ll admit that I was concerned when I first took all these pictures and asked publishers if they were worth anything. But they said that the eye would be on the outfits. . . . It wouldn’t be on me. And I felt comfortable with that.”

Fashion design experts say the photographs capture the era as well as the woman.

“For me, this is so much more than a book of photographs, it’s a textbook--it’s fabulous,” said Lynette Schweigert, a professor in the design department at the University of Nevada at Reno.

“It’s so coincidental. The university hired me to teach a course in contemporary design concepts, what influences since the 1900s have affected design. . . . And then I find this book to use as our guide to the fashion and politics of the period.”

Louise Coffey-Webb, an instructor of fashion design at Woodbury University in Burbank, said part of the book’s value is in its filmography and apparel indexes.

“You could, for example, look up hats of the 1930s,” she said. “In that way, it’s specific. These are Hollywood publicity shots, not the Sears catalogue. It captures Hollywood of the day, not the rest of America. Once you understand that, the book is very helpful.”

And Hunt’s impressions of the period also have not gone unnoticed.

“I’m using the book for a history of movie costuming,” Coffey-Webb said. “Hunt’s essays are very personal and impressionistic. She gives information about the big studio wardrobes and points out differences between then and now.”

Dirk Summers, a friend of Hunt’s and publisher of the book, says “The Way We Wore” has both historical value and the personal integrity of one actress’ insights into her Hollywood heyday.

“This book is about beauty and real style and class,” he said.

For Hunt, working on the book has brought back a flood of memories, she says, “like the fizz that rises to the top at the uncorking of a bottle of champagne.”

Page after page, the book is testimony to a young girl’s dedication to become a model and actress. Hunt was just 17 when she signed with Paramount Pictures in 1935. Four years later, she moved to MGM, a time she has described as “sweet beyond my wildest imaginings.”

In all, she made 62 motion pictures and at one time was among Hollywood’s youngest character actresses.

Over the years, she also starred in six Broadway plays, dozens of other productions and countless radio and television dramas. Most recently, she has appeared in such television shows as “Murder, She Wrote,” “Matlock” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

In the early ‘30s, Hunt made her living as a fashion model, making $5 an hour in New York. The image was romantic. The reality, of course, was not.

She recalls selling everything from Goodyear tires to Cadillacs. Because everything was shot months in advance, she posed in fur coats in July and wore shorts and a sleeveless blouse on a cruise ship in Hudson Bay in the dead of winter.

But Hunt’s dream was to become an actress, not merely a model. So, she took acting classes in Manhattan and hit every audition that came her way.

In 1935, she moved to Hollywood and signed with Paramount. Soon, Hunt developed a reputation for versatility. “I wanted to become an actress, not a star, and there’s a difference.”

The young Hunt played the society snob, the schoolmarm, unwed mother, Brooklyn chorus girl replete with accent, the maid, hairdresser and lovelorn secretary. The only thing she would not do, she recalls, is pose for the cheesecake bathing-suit photographs popular among actresses of the day.

To get their young talent’s name in the papers, the studios used Hunt for fashion layouts and production stills, the bulk of which appear among the pages of “The Way We Wore.”

Along with the warm memories of Hollywood, however, come the bittersweet.

Such as Hunt’s October, 1947, trip to Washington during the McCarthy era. She and a group of other Hollywood actors, producers and directors--including Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall--came to testify about film and politics to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. What they did not count on, she says, was character assassination.

“It was an attack,” Hunt says. “Congressmen from tiny states quickly found out they could make headlines by attacking Hollywood. We went to Washington in protest, because we were concerned about the good name of the movie industry.”

When they returned, Bogart and Bacall retracted statements made at the hearings. Hunt did not and was blacklisted. The incident derailed a career she could never quite get back on track. “They punished everyone who had ideas and were not afraid to speak them,” she recalls.

Hunt still has ideas. And she has liberal politics. A longtime spokeswoman for the United Nations and its work around the world, she was recently honored by the organization for her contributions. She’s still not afraid to speak her mind.

Take the movie industry’s role as a societal influence since the 1930s. “We’re bankrupt from ethics and grace. People’s values are shot to hell and the movie industry has encouraged it, speeded it up. Everything today is sensation, jump cuts, a shock assault to the nervous system.”

Television fares little better. “The biggest laughs the people like Jay Leno get are from an outrageous contempt of people in high places. It’s a nightly assault on the presidency. Everyone’s got feet of clay. . . . We’ve got no role models unless they’re mass murderers. It’s dreaded, depraved and sick.”

These days, the unflappable Hunt is taking a step back and examining the best way to make her mark. No longer does she rush out with datebook and checkbook in hand at the drop of a social cause.

She is still on the board of several groups, including the Valley Mayor’s Fund for the Homeless, but now she has her own criteria for involvement in new causes: Is it important? Is it urgent? Is it neglected?

The time she saves, she says, can be given to family and friends. And to any new projects, like the book of lyrics on which she is hard at work.

Looking back at the modeling, the film career and the success of her book, the self-effacing Hunt plays down any influence of her beauty.

“I never considered myself a beauty, in the mold of the classic features of a Joan Crawford or a Jean Harlow,” she says. “I’m fortunately put together. But that’s not an accomplishment. It’s nothing to be proud of. It’s simply heredity.”