Take One (Oct 1976)

Clothes -—Wise: Edith Head by Virginia Wright Wexman and Patricia Erens Edith Head began her proféssional life as a schoolteacher. Born in 1907, she received a B.A. from the University of California and an M.A. from Stanford in Romance Languages and Literatures. On graduating, she accepted a teaching position at the exclusive Bishop School for Girls in La Jolla, California. While teaching, she began to take night courses in art at the Otis Art Institute and the Chouinard Art School. Eventually her interest in art led her to Paramount Studios where she accepted a position as sketch artist. Her subsequent career in Hollywood has been a challenging and distinguished one. She has worked on over 1,000 motion pictures from various studios including MGM, Warner Brothers, Columbia, 20th Century Fox, and Universal Studios, where she is currently employed. With eight Academy Awards, thirty-three Oscar nominations and numerous other honors to her credit, she remains the pre-eminent costume designer in the whole of American cinema. Over the years she has worked with such directors as Alfred Hitchcock, William Wyler, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Cecil B. DeMille, Robert Mulligan, John Ford, Stanley Donen and Joseph L. Mankiewitz. Her autobiography, The Dress Doctor, was published in 1959. Having been in Hollywood since the heyday of silent cinema, you have obviously seen a great deal of change in motion pictures. How has this affected screen fashions? Do you see a perceptible pattern in the shifts from 1920-1970? Head: Actually I've given that a lot of thought and | do see a very definite pattern of change over the past fifty years. During the early days of Hollywood, the age of DeMille and Swanson if you will, the screen was dictated by a sense of fantasy and unreality. Movie-goers were not very sophisticated and we could get away with just about anything. For instance, in Mr. DeMille’s The Golden Bed (1925), my first big assignment, | conceived of girls dressed as lollypops, peppermint sticks and chocolate drops. Unfortunately the designs weren't very practical. The painted stripes ran, the candy canes broke, and the dancers kept sticking to each other. Mr. DeMille, who was never a patient man, was exasperated. From that day on, I’ve never drawn anything | couldn't make. Although this period was a period of great imagination, | wouldn't exactly call it fash Patricia Erens is working on a doctorate at Northwestern University. She has written for Film Comment, Films in Review, The Velvet Light Trap, and Jump Cut. Virginia Wright Wexman is a Chicago-based writer and critic who teaches English. 12 ion. The next period, the sound period of the thirties and forties, was truly the ‘golden age’ in every way. This was the period of Lombard, of Garbo, and of Dietrich. These women had great flair and_ influenced the taste of American women as no actresses had really done before. The screen world presented in their films was a world of high fashion, elegance — sheer joy. But all this came to an end during World War Il. We began getting directives from Washington — no trouser cuffs, no patch pockets, no extraneous material. Now we’re in a period of realism. In part this is due to the influence of the New Wave, although there are many reasons why realistic films should now appeal to American. audiences. Right now we’re caught up in a series of “peril pictures” which demand rather ordinary, casual clothes. |’m sure this fashion will give way to another trend in its time. Could you say a little more about the new realism in movie costuming? Well, the public travels a lot and knows what the rest of the world looks like these days, and we can’t kid them anymore. | dressed my Airport characters to look like the average: person looks on a flight, so the scenes would be almost documentary-like. | even talked to Gloria Swanson about the kind of clothes she would normally wear on a flight, since she plays herself in the film. How did your education and background help prepare you for your present career? Well, | can’t sew on a machine, but | can sew by hand, and that is very useful, naturally. And, of course, | can draw easily and have studied design. Also, | have found that the fact that | have a good all-around education has helped me enormously. My training in psychology has come in especially handy in dealing with the variety of temperaments and egos in this business. In fact, I’m so enthusiastic about education that | recently embarked on a Ph.D. program at U.C.L.A. When you begin work on a new project, what is your procedure for getting the right grip.on the film? It's very simple. You get the script and then you do what the script says. You see it’s not a matter of doing what you would like to do. People don’t understand that costume designing is not self-creative. A couturier creates clothes for women to make them look beautiful. A film designer is different. You don’t do your own thing; it’s more like a craft or a business. My job is to read the script and interpret it visually. Then everybody has to be consulted — the producer, the director, the stars, the art director and the set decorator. So in the end it’s never just your personal vision. Is there a great deal of difference in the desires and participation of different directors? Most certainly. It’s like a caste system, structured along the lines of control. Mr. Hitchcock exerts a high degree of control. He always gives me a very detailed script which even includes notations on color. Other directors exert very little control or just aren’t as interested. For instance, William Wyler always said, “Do what you want and show me the sketches.” Besides Hitchcock, whose reputation for control is notorious, which directors have taken an active role in planning the costumes? On the contemporary scene George Roy Hill immediately comes to mind. He’s almost like a fellow designer. When we were on The Sting and Butch Cassidy, he insisted on great accuracy, and he was equally exacting for The Great Waldo Pepper. He’s a stickler for detail. Of the older directors, George Cukor is probably one of the greatest perfectionists. He always insisted on doing thorough research, and he knows how to create a sense of beauty and glamour. How do you go about convincing the stars of how they should look? How sophisticated are they in understanding the nature of their own image? My training in psychology has come in very handy here. Usually | say to the star: “Here are three sketches.” | point out that this one is sexier, that one more romantic and then they are free to choose what they prefer. The older actors and actresses are no problem — Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner; they’re real pros. They understand that my job is to transform them into what they are not. Where | run into trouble is with the new stars who think they can walk in and decide what they want to wear. Actually, today’s stars are much more difficult to dress. It’s not just a question of clothes — it’s hair styles and make-up as well. Current fashion just doesn't lend itself to imaginative design. Contemporary films emphasize the problems, not the clothes. If | had done Airport 75 fifteen years ago, the clothes would have been elegant, the men suave. If the dress was inappropriate, it wouldn’t have mattered. Have you ever had a real battle with a star over the costume for a film? | don’t usually get into battles, but dressing Kim Novak for her role in Mr. Hitchcock’s Vertigo put to the test all my training in psychology. On our first meeting she told me, “I'll wear anything so long as it isn’t a