Author and Designer Profiles

Foreword by Bob Mackie

Table of Contents

sample chapter: Studio Style

Star and Designer Index

The night was also an extraordinary fashion night because Frank Capra, as Academy president, had sold the rights to Warner Brothers to make a documentary of the ceremonies. Studios had instructed their stars to go all out in the dress category, knowing that this short film would be shown in theaters all over the country and promote the glamorous image of the industry. Only two years later the mood had changed.

After President Roosevelt saluted the industry's patriotism speaking by telephone at the 1941 Awards, when Pearl Harbor was bombed in December of that year, there was talk of canceling the next Awards ceremony completely. Early in 1942, however, cooler heads had prevailed and the Awards were slated for February twenty-sixth. Rather than the splashy banquet and dance format of the past, the 1942 event was a more somber evening. No dancing, no formal dress. Women were asked to make donations to the Red Cross instead of wearing flowers. Even the Oscars were made of plaster. Austerity was the byword.

Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper was angry at the Academy's ban on formal wear and led what she called a "guerrilla war of my own to doll up the Academy Awards, when the studio chieftains still wanted the presentation to look no dressier than a missionary's sewing bee." She waged her campaign for four years, telephoning the stars directly, telling them to celebrate in true star style. "Last year you looked like spooks: sackcloth and ashes," she chastised. "But nobody's going to be dressed," the stars replied to Hopper. "Then set the style. What are you going to do? Let those clothes rot in your closets?"

Most women followed the Academy's dictates, however, and wore knee-length dinner suits or simple dresses and hats. Joan Fontaine, for example, came draped in a black mantilla secured with two roses to accept her Best Actress Award for Suspicion (1941). Even Loretta Young, known for her flamboyant, impassioned sense of style, attended the 1942 ceremony dressed simply with her only nod to glamour coming from a pillbox hat covered in faux pearls. Ingrid Bergman, perhaps the most conservative of all, wore the same dress two years in a row when she was nominated for Best Actress.

Hersholt's successor, Charles Brackett, decided to join forces with the enemy and use it to full advantage. The Academy Awards presentation was televised on March 19, 1953, and the show had the largest audience in television's then-short history. Coincidentally, sexy Marilyn Monroe was almost single-handedly bringing America back to the movies as the prosperous Eisenhower years gave the public both dollars and leisure time. What fun it was to watch the "Oscars" and then head to the movies.

Despite her disappointment at losing that first Oscar, soothed by winning the next two in succession, Head accepted an appointment as official fashion consultant to the televised Academy Awards ceremony in 1953. "I was appointed guardian of hemlines and bodices," she quipped. Before the big evening, NBC had advised nominees and presenters to avoid wearing white because the lights would cause a glare. Head would help the stars choose pale colored gowns and shirts, beforehand. Then backstage, she was actually charged with making certain that the stars were dressed appropriately to pass the uptight television censors. She was on hand to put roses in decolletages that were revealing too much bosom and spray a dimming film on diamonds that sparkled too brightly. "We couldn't trust the stars who were to go on stage," Head recalled. "After I approved their gowns, some would push up their cleavages just before going on." In 1958, Edith and everyone else involved in the show got a memo from producer Jerry Wald stating "There will be no cleavage on this year's Oscar Awards show. This was one of the major criticisms we received last year, that the necklines were too low. Most of the complaints came from the middle west. If you need any help, a wardrobe mistress backstage is equipped with enough lace to make a mummy."

By the mid-fifties the television show had become not just an Awards show, but a long-awaited fashion show with the "supermodels" of the day: Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, Lana Turner, Marlene Dietrich and Audrey Hepburn. Talk in newspapers and magazines centered not just on the winners and losers in the various film categories, but the winners and losers in the fashion race. Press agents and studio wags started taking advantage of the fashion opportunity. They'd create sagas about gowns: Joanne Woodward sewed her own gown one year, Lana Turner was going to look like a mermaid, Vera-Ellen was going to dress in tight gold lame to look "like Oscar, himself."