One bright morning last spring, a fat young woman with a baby carriage ambled along Hollywood Boulevard. First to catch my eye were the pink Capri pants and her wabbling derrière that was threatening to burst right out of them. Next item I spotted was the cigarette dangling out of her mouth, sprinkling ashes on the baby. I put on speed to catch up with her, though I didn’t know her from Little Orphan Annie.
“I wonder if you know how you look from the rear. You should be ashamed of yourself, and you a mother, too.”
That stopped her dead in her tracks. “And who might you be?”
“Doesn’t matter, but you’re disgusting.” With that, I walked on, feeling I’d done my bit for the cause. I wasn’t exactly running any risk. Though she outweighed me by thirty pounds, I knew she couldn’t leave the baby to come after me.
The cause is glamour, for which I’ve been fighting a losing battle for years. Our town was built on it, but there’s scarcely a trace left now. Morning, noon, and night the girls parade in babushkas; dirty, sloppy sweaters; and skin-tight pants. They may be an incitement to rape, but certainly not to marriage. Unless the era of the tough tomboy ends soon, the institution of matrimony is doomed to disappear forever.
The geniuses who conduct the motion-picture business killed glamour when they decided that what the public wanted was not dream stuff, from which movies used to be made, but realism. They took the girls out of satin, chiffon, velvet, and mink, put them first into gingham and then blue jeans. So what happened? They converted the heroine into the girl next door, and I’ve always advocated that if they want to see the girl next door, go next door. Now they’ve thrown the poor kid out to earn her living on the streets.
The milliners, especially the males, have helped stitch glamour’s shroud. Deep inside whatever they call their souls, they hate women. They made the most ridiculous concoctions for women to wear on their heads. Hats like table doilies, little pot holders, coal scuttles, dishpans, crash helmets, bedpans. Husbands were ignored when they complained: “Where in God’s name did you get that thing? Whoever made it must hate your sex.”
Not until other women laughed at them did the glamour pusses discard their psychotic chapeaux and go bareheaded. By then the designers had ruined their own racket; they’d killed the sale of hats. I can walk six blocks today in any city and see nothing more than hair or a scarf covering anybody else’s hair but mine.
Studio wardrobe departments that employed cutters, seamstresses, and embroidery hands by the dozens are empty, staffed by skeleton crews. The stock rooms were crammed with bolts of magnificent brocades, satins, laces; now most of the shelves are bare. One odd sight you’ll see, though—rows and rows of realistic breasts cunningly contoured from flesh-colored plastic, complete with pink nipples, hanging in pairs, labeled with the name of the underprivileged star they were created for. Some deceivers are made of rubber and inflate to size.
Everything else in Wardrobe was real—furs, fabrics, and feathers. The cost of sheer labor that went into making the clothes drove the accountants cross-eyed. One costume Garbo wore in Mata Hari took eight Guadalajaran needlewomen nine weeks to complete. In my wardrobe I have the most beautiful coat I have seen anywhere, which Travis Banton of Paramount designed. The embroidery alone cost $4000.
The studio designers were brilliant men and would have succeeded as artists, painters, decorators. One or two were addicted to the bottle, but they all blazed with talent. Travis at Paramount, Adrian at Metro, Omar Kiam at Goldwyn, Orry-Kelly, now free-lancing and making more money than ever. He designed the clothes for Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, but she recut them to suit herself, and he refused to do her next picture.
There are only two women associated with the movies now who make sure they look like stars, and they both live in New York. Joan Crawford won’t venture out of her Fifth Avenue apartment to buy an egg unless she is dressed to the teeth. Marlene Dietrich does more—she’s made herself a living legend of spectacular glamour around the world.
For her opening night the first year at the Sahara in Las Vegas I had a front-row seat. She came on in a white dress that was poured over her. She wore layers of sheer soufflé, infinitely finer than chiffon, but only one layer to protect her chest from the evening air. The audience let out a gasp that threatened to blow away the tablecloths. The next night she wore the same gown, but she’d had two little circles of seed pearls sewed strategically on the bodice and forever after swore she had never appeared any more naked than that. But I’d seen both of them.
Every year she outdoes herself. One season she succeeded with a full-length coat of rippling swan’s-down that for sheer beauty surpassed anything in fabulous fashion. Jean Louis designed it, but it was made by my furrier, Mrs. Fuhrman. In her shop one day, where the coat was kept in cold storage, she asked me to try it on. I felt like a maharaja’s mother.
“We had a terrible time getting the swan’s-down,” said Mrs. Fuhrman, as I preened my borrowed feathers. “You know, you have to pull the feathers off the living swans—”
“You what?” I gulped. “I don’t want to see it again.”
Marlene was invented as a fashion plate just as Pygmalion created Galatea. The first time Travis Banton saw her, I thought he’d pass right out at her feet. Soon after she landed here, as Josef von Sternberg’s protégée, she turned up at an afternoon tea party wearing a black satin evening gown complete with train, trimmed with ostrich feathers. Her hips were decidedly lumpy. Except for her beautiful face and perfect legs, which we’d seen in The Blue Angel, she could have passed for a German housewife.
Travis, a Yale man, took her in hand, taught her everything he knew about art, clothes, and good taste. She slimmed down, was made over into the most strikingly dressed clothes horse on the screen. She had some keen competition to contend with at Paramount. Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Kay Francis, Evelyn Brent, and, later, Mae West fought for Travis’ most stunning designs.
For one picture Mae insisted upon having only French clothes. She had posed for a nude statue and sent it to Paris to have the clothes fitted on it. They were beautiful clothes that arrived back, but when they were tried on Mae, they didn’t meet by ten inches. Everything had to be remade at the studio.
There aren’t any Marquis of Queensberry rules when an actress wants to win, but Marlene walked off with the honors. She was Travis’ favorite. Nothing was too good for her. As top star at Paramount, she allowed herself the luxury of a raging temper unless she got her own way, but she took care not to rage at Travis.
At Christmas time she showered him with presents by way of thanks. He invited my son Bill and me to help trim his tree one Christmas. I saw him unwrap twenty-two separate packages from Marlene, covering the whole gamut of giving, from sapphire-and-diamond cuff links with studs to match, to Chinese jade figures and a kitchenload of copper pots and pans.
She is a complex woman. A different side showed when she wanted a hat, made almost entirely of black bird-of-paradise feathers, which she was going to wear at the race track. Trouble was that federal agents had just swooped down on the Wardrobe Department and confiscated its entire stock of egret and paradise feathers—$3500 worth. The law said that importing, buying, or possessing them was forbidden, though these particular items had been carried on the inventory for years.
So Marlene’s precious hat had to be made of substitute plumage by a staff of expert milliners—one of them even came out from New York for the occasion. Marlene took one look at the result, tried the fine feathers disdainfully on for size, then in silence ripped them to shreds. The milliners worked for days before they came up with a hat she’d wear.
The same perfectionism blazed again when Ouida and Basil Rathbone announced a costume ball they were giving at the old Victor Hugo Restaurant in Beverly Hills. This was going to be the diamond-studded social event of the season. Our hosts counted the invitations they’d sent out, then thoughtfully had the restaurant install extra plumbing and built two complete extra powder rooms, ladies’ and gents’.
Marlene, as ever, was intent on outdoing everybody. She decided to come as Leda and the Swan. Paramount’s sewing ladies labored for weeks on the costume. The studios in those days took care that wherever a star appeared, she lived up to the glittering image of a star that they—and the public—carried in their minds. If she showed up at a private gathering looking less than immaculate, she’d be hauled on the carpet next morning by a head executive and advised to mend her manners.
On the evening of the Rathbones’ party Marlene made up at home and went to the studio at 8 P.M. to be poured into her Leda gown. She regarded herself in the mirrors, then cried: “It won’t do. I can’t possibly wear a swan whose eyes match mine.” So the sewing girls fell to, and the embroidered blue eyes were picked out and green ones substituted. Marlene sent out for champagne and sandwiches for them all to have an impromptu celebration in Wardrobe. She arrived at the Rathbones’ shivaree five hours late and was the sensation of the evening.
I’d intended to go in a borrowed brocade that had a coronation look, with a jeweled crown to match, toting a baby lamb with gilded hoofs on a leash. But the lamb submitted to his pedicure for nothing. I was working on a picture with Louise Fazenda until midnight. When I got home, I was too tired to look at the lamb or do anything but flop into bed.
Under the swan’s-down and sequins, Marlene remains at heart what she was in the beginning: a Hausfrau with a mothering instinct a mile wide. She has mothered every man in her life. They’ve loved her for that, and much more. Mike Todd enjoyed a special place under her warm, protective wing. A great friendship started when he went to see her in Las Vegas to ask her to appear as a “cameo” star along with Frank Sinatra, Red Skelton, and George Raft in the San Francisco honky-tonk sequence in Around the World in Eighty Days.
She agreed and instantly took on the full-time job of mothering Mike. She saw to it that he ate regularly, and the proper food. She helped him with advice. She bought him his first matched set of expensive luggage when she saw the ratty collection of cheap suitcases in which he’d been living. “You are a very great man, Mike,” she told him; “you must look and act like one.” He bought her nothing in return. Every dollar he could scrape up had to go into completing his picture. He hadn’t then met Elizabeth Taylor.
I watched Marlene play the honky-tonk scene, which wasn’t suited to her—she could have written a much better script herself. Then Mike drove me over to Metro, the only place where Todd-AO equipment had been installed, to see José Greco, David Niven, Cantinflas, and Cesar Romero in the flamenco and bullfight sequences. I sat stunned. “If the rest is as good as this,” I told Mike, “you’ve got one of the greatest spectacles ever made.” Joe Schenck, who’d sat with us, agreed. “If you need money to finish it,” he promised, “all you have to do is come to me.”
Mike gave Marlene and me his word that we could see the first rough cut of the complete picture. He kept his promises with most people, certainly with us. We had a six o’clock date to attend the screening with him before the three of us ate a quick dinner at Chasen’s and he flew to New York. He was late, as usual, but at six-thirty he was there to call: “Roll ’em.”
When the screening ended, Marlene and I sat in total silence. Mike couldn’t stand it. “Why don’t you say something? What’s the matter? I’ve never known you two broads at a loss for words.”
“Shall I tell him?” I asked Marlene.
“Go ahead.”
I gave it to him on the chin. “Who cut this picture? A butcher? Where are those wonderful scenes I saw in the gypsy tavern and the bull ring? Why have they been cut to bits?”
“She’s right,” murmured Marlene. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“The cutter said they ran too long,” Mike explained.
“Well, fire him. Get the negative put back together and start all over again. Pay him off and find yourself an artist, not the man who did this.”
“I don’t know if I can do it. I gave him a year’s contract. It’d cost a fortune.”
“If you don’t, it will cost you a great picture.”
“Who could I get?” he begged.
“You’ve got one friend in this town who wants to see you succeed, not fail,” I said, “and that’s Sam Goldwyn. He has saved his own pictures in the cutting room many a time. Go to Sam and let him find you the finest cutter in the business. It’s the only way you can save it. You haven’t got a picture unless you do.”
Mike sat there churning with anger. This was his first picture. We made a sad threesome in the restaurant, with Mike complaining about how hard he’d worked already and us not listening to him. “You’re going on a plane and you’ll get no food there,” Marlene interrupted. “I’ll order dinner for you. Hedda and I will eat later.”
He accepted that idea, then grumbled that he didn’t feel like going to New York anyway and he’d cancel his reservation. “You must go. You’ve got money questions to settle there,” said Marlene, the mother again.
After he’d left, she telephoned the airport: “Mr. Michael Todd will be a few minutes late for his flight, number ten, TWA, for New York. Would you please hold the plane for him? It’s very important.” Then she asked me: “Are you hungry?” We hadn’t eaten a mouthful with him.
He went to New York. On his return he saw Sam Goldwyn, who came through with the right cutter. The first real preview, loaded down with Hollywood and New York big shots, was a sensation. But by then Mike had met and been dazzled by Liz, who arrived late at that screening nursing a highball, and sipped her way through the performance. Marlene saw very little of him after that, and Liz got all the glory.
On the afternoon of March 22, 1958, I was in Havana, Cuba, bowing before Madame Fulgencio Batista, wife of the reigning dictator, who was guest of honor at a fashion show being staged to celebrate the opening of a new Conrad Hilton hotel. In my outstretched hand I held a hat for presentation to her. A newspaperman in the crowd couldn’t wait until I’d finished. He hurried forward and whispered in my ear: “Mike Todd’s dead—his plane crashed.”
I quickly dipped my head to Madame. “Will you excuse me? I’ve had some very sad news.”
When I flew back to New York next day, Marlene telephoned me at the Waldorf Towers, broken up by the news of Mike. We talked for ninety minutes. She wept for him, and so did I.
Over cocktails in Havana I’d met an ex-subject of my movie-making days. Ernest Hemingway had cursed like a troop of cavalry in 1942 when my cameraman trailed him around Sun Valley and ruined a day’s quail hunting for him. I wanted to bag him and the Gary Coopers on film for my series of two-reelers called Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood. In Cuba I got very chummy with Ernest and his lovely wife, Mary. “We should have met twenty-five years ago,” he said gallantly.
“Yes, I think we might have made some sweet music then.”
“It’s not too late now,” the old flirt replied.
“It is for me,” I said.
He sighed. “I was boasting a bit. I guess for me, too.”
The following winter in New York I saw Mary at a Broadway opening. “Where’s your ever-loving?” I asked.
“Out with Marlene Dietrich. He preferred dining with her to coming to see this play.”
“Can’t blame him. But how come I never get that much attention from your husband?”
“Because you don’t do as much for him as Marlene,” said Mary.
* * * * *
Where Marlene was a challenge and an inspiration to Travis Banton, Garbo was a challenge, exclamation point, to Gilbert Adrian at Metro. Marlene loves seductive glamour in clothes, and she finished up knowing as much as her master. The Swede hated dressing up, enjoyed wearing only her drab woolen skirt, turtle-neck sweater, flat-heeled shoes, and men’s socks on her big feet.
Travis delighted in high fashion. Adrian came up with more fantastic designs, though when femininity was in order, his clothes dripped with it for Greer Garson, Norma Shearer, Jeanette MacDonald. He sized up Garbo like a bone surgeon, with his keen, kind, hazel eyes. She moved like a man, and she had a man’s square shoulders. Her arms were muscular; her bosom—let’s just say meager. Yet on the screen there was a commanding presence and luminous beauty.
She had an acting secret that only a few of us who watched her closely caught on to. In every clinch, a split second before the leading man put his arms around her, she would reach out and embrace him. It was one of the subconscious things that marked the difference between a European and an American woman—and Americans were always awed by Garbo. Her pictures are still earning lots more praise and money overseas than at home.
Her face hinted at sadness. She suffered her first bitter taste of that not long after she was brought over from Stockholm by Metro, to land in the middle of a New York heat wave, when she spent most of her days sitting in a hotel bathtub full of cold water. It wasn’t Garbo that the studio wanted but Maurice Stiller, the Swedish director who had discovered her and refused to travel without her. But Stiller was subsequently fired by Irving Thalberg, and it was Garbo who was given the build-up. Stiller returned to Stockholm, a defeated, ailing giant of a man, and she was heartbroken.
She stored up bitterness against MGM. In her early days Pete Smith, head of publicity, had her pose for cheesecake shots wearing track shorts, to be photographed with another Scandinavian, Paavo Nurmi, the record-breaking runner, on the athletic fields of the University of Southern California. When she had made her name a household word and insisted on working in complete privacy on the set behind tall screens, Louis B. Mayer brought six important New York stockholders to see her. She sent them packing. “When Lillian Gish was queen of the lot, all I was allowed to do was show my knees. Now let these visitors bend their rusty knees to me, but they shall not watch,” she said.
Once Arthur Brisbane, Hearst’s top editor, came on the set to watch. When she saw him she walked out of the scene. “If he wants to see me, he can see me in the theater.” She went to her dressing room and wouldn’t come back until he’d gone.
Adrian accentuated Garbo’s assets and concealed her liabilities. For her he devised the high-necked, long-sleeved evening gown that swept the world of fashion in the thirties. For As You Desire Me, in which I played her sister, he invented the pillbox hat with strings tied under her chin, which became part of every smart woman’s wardrobe. He had her dripping in lace and melting costume lines for Anna Karenina, sent the dress industry off on an oriental kick with her exotic outfits for The Painted Veil. Her costumes in Grand Hotel could be worn today and still be high fashion.
He achieved much the same kind of fashion influence for Crawford. Her padded halfback’s shoulders in Chained and a dozen other movies convinced half the women of America that this was exactly how they wanted to appear. His Letty Lynton dress, with wide sleeves and sweetheart neck, was a garment-center classic. “If Crawford has an apron,” we used to say, “it has to be by Adrian.”
His new clothes for any top star were guarded like the gold of Fort Knox. Until the premiere costumes were kept under lock and key so manufacturers’ spies couldn’t run off with his designs and pirate them. A new Garbo or Crawford or Norma Shearer picture carried the fashion wallop of a Paris opening today.
No more. The tradition that the designers fostered has vanished. Women used to follow Hollywood fashion as avidly as they copied Veronica Lake’s peekaboo hairdo or dreamed that some miracle might endow them with legs like Betty Grable or Esther Williams’ classy chassis. Now they haven’t got much to build their diet of dreams on except Ben Casey’s surgical smock—television doesn’t go in strong for women, much less gals in glamorous gowns.
When I look at Jackie Kennedy these days I think: “If those fellows were around today, what they couldn’t have done for her!” She’d be queen of fashion the world over. Oleg Cassini can’t hold a candle to any of them, and he never had it so good, not even when he was married to Gene Tierney.
Who’s left in motion-picture fashions? Nobody much outside the industry has heard of Irene Sharaff, or Helen Rose. Edith Head started as Travis Banton’s sketch girl, and her designs continue to follow his lead. Jean Louis is the one designer that picture stars ask for today, just as stage stars beg for Mainbocher.
Sometimes Jean overdresses Doris Day, but the clothes he makes for her, at producer Ross Hunter’s insistence, have transformed Doris from a plain Jane into a fashion plate. One difference between Jean Louis and Adrian: Doris Day and Lana Turner got all the clothes to keep, as a wonderful bonus from Ross Hunter. At Metro, the dresses belonged to the studio, and Adrian had to ignore the pleas from a New York socialite who, after every Garbo picture, used to send him a blank check, willing to pay anything for just one of the costumes Garbo wore.
Metro’s meanness and lack of judgment was one reason he quit and opened his own salon. A New York wholesale house wanted him to design a total of thirty-five dresses a year and offered to pay $150,000 for the job, split between him and Metro. “What’s that to us?” his bosses said. “That’s peanuts. No, you can’t take it, and that’s final.”
Reason number two was the reaction Adrian got from director George Cukor to the twenty-four beautiful costumes designed for Garbo in Two-Faced Woman. I saw them hanging in the Wardrobe Department and drooled over them. But Cukor made up his mind that for this picture she was going to look as she does in reality. No glamour; two fake diamond clips in her frizzed-up hair. No clothes to make an audience’s eyes pop, but wool sweaters and sack frocks.
“After making her a fashion legend, you want to do this to her?” cried Adrian. “Won’t you at least come and see the clothes I’ve made?”
Cukor refused even that. Two-Faced Woman was the last picture Garbo made. She respected Adrian, to the point where she’d sometimes eat her vegetarian lunch in his office. The picture was one of her few failures. He handed in his notice. Metro was burned to a cinder when it had to hire six people to replace him. He’d been in the habit of designing clothes not only for the stars but for the whole company in movies he worked on.
When Garbo retired from the screen, she gave only one autograph as a souvenir. It went neither to Adrian nor Louis Mayer. To her colored maid, the only living soul allowed in her dressing room, whom the studio paid for, she presented a framed photograph of herself on which she had written: “To Ursula, from your friend, Greta Garbo.” I’ve heard of only one similar gesture of hers. Dr. Henry Bieler, of California, put her on a diet to which she’s clung over the years. When he wrote a book, he asked her for an endorsement, which she promptly sent him.
Nowadays she’s lost the passion for self-effacement that had her masquerading as “Harriet Brown,” hidden in a floppy hat and dark glasses. Neighbors in the New York apartment where she lives are devoted to her. Their children exchange greetings with her on the street. Among those neighbors are Mary Martin and Richard Halliday. Their daughter Heller lived with them until she eloped last year.
One day Mary’s front-door bell rang. Garbo was standing outside. “Forgive my intrusion,” she said shyly, “but I have often watched from my window and seen you and your family. Sometimes going shopping. Sometimes getting into your car. You look so happy, and I feel so alone.”
Over the tea that Mary insisted on serving for them both, Garbo found one more friend, to add to the precious few she’s made in her lifetime. Two others, who are devotion itself, are the designer Valentina and her husband, George Schlee.
There was a Christmas Eve before Adrian resigned when I was the stooge in a plot to turn him green around the edges. Omar Kiam, who designed for Sam Goldwyn, was the one to arrange it. Adrian had just announced his engagement to Janet Gaynor. He was giving a party, and Omar was to be my escort. On December 22, Omar informed me that I had to have a new gown. But I hadn’t time to get anything, I told him. “Then I’ll make one. You won’t even need fittings; I’ve got your dress form at the studio. You’ve got to be dressed to the teeth.”
At six o’clock on Christmas Eve, ninety minutes before he was due to collect me to go to Adrian’s, Omar arrived on my doorstep with the dress over his arm. I have never seen anything lovelier: American Beauty red velvet, tightly fitted, with a full, flounced skirt and train. “If this doesn’t knock their eyes out, nothing will,” he grinned.
“It sure will,” I said. “I’ll be ready sharp on time.” But I was still waiting at eight-thirty. Wondering what went wrong, I telephoned Omar’s house. His butler answered: “I’m terribly sorry, and I should have let you know. Mr. Kiam won’t be able to come for you. He has retired for the night.”
It dawned on me then what had happened. After delivering the gown he went home to celebrate, not wisely but too well, and had to be put to bed. I swept into Adrian’s living room an hour late. My red gown dimmed everything else in the room. Ina Clair, who was there, said: “You did it on purpose.”
I still have that red velvet—as the upholstery on two French chairs once owned by Elinor Glyn. Every morning when I open my eyes I see a memento of Omar Kiam. He did the clothes for both the pictures I made for Sam Goldwyn. In one of them, Vogues of 1938, which Walter Wanger produced, I played Joan Bennett’s mother. She and I had a certain exchange of words some years later.
Two lines in my column brought me the gift of a skunk from her. Here’s the story. Mothers usually had a tough time in pictures, especially with close-ups. They came almost always at the end of the day when you were tired and your make-up was messy. So it was on this picture.
It was not only the end of the day but the last scene in the picture and I was feeling desperately weary. I went to Walter Wanger and said: “I don’t think I can do that close-up. If you’ll let me come tomorrow morning, it won’t cost you anything.”
He said: “You’ll have to do it—I’d have to bring the whole crew in; it would cost a day’s salary for everyone.”
So I finished the scene and went to my dressing room and for the first time in my life fainted. How long I lay there I don’t know. When I woke I called for help. There wasn’t a soul around; everybody had gone home. I finally found a telephone and got the gateman to order me a cab, which took me home. Then I sent for a doctor.
Years later, when Joan was playing mother to Elizabeth Taylor in Father of the Bride, I went on the set to interview Liz. There was Joan doing her close-up. I looked at my watch: it was 6:30 P.M. I remembered the misery I’d once endured, and in my column the following day, I wrote: “At last Miss Bennett knows how it feels to get her close-up at the end of the day and not at the beginning.”
For that she sent me a deodorized, live skunk. I christened it Joan and gave it to the James Masons, who had been looking for one as a companion for their nine cats.
In its rosier days, Hollywood Boulevard saw glamour by the carload on Oscar nights. Movie fans drove in, goggle-eyed, from every state in the Union to see the stars; a hundred searchlights would crisscross the sky. Bleachers set up on the sidewalk overflowed. Flashbulbs flared by the thousands as the queens slid out of their limousines, owned or rented, in minks and sables, which the studio would lend to dress up the show if your wardrobe didn’t run to such luxury. They’d glide across the sidewalk like some special, splendid race of the beautiful and the blessed; gowns swishing, hairdos immaculate; teeth, eyes, and diamonds gleaming together.
Just watching them walk in was as good as a ticket to a world’s fair. They all had gowns made for those evenings, each trying to outdo the other. They’d pester the studio designers to find out what the other girls were getting. “You’ve got to top them for me,” they’d all plead, and the boys would smile the promise to do their best with sketch pads and shears.
During World War II the women of Hollywood let the producers talk them into surrendering every shred of glamour even on Oscar nights. “If you go out, you mustn’t be well dressed,” the front-office men argued, “or else the public will be offended. What you’ve got to do is to look austere.”
I knew this was malarkey. So did they. From the mail that poured in, it was as plain as a pikestaff that servicemen were starving for glamour. They wanted pin-up pictures of glamorous girls. I sent out ten thousand of them, until the studios rebelled and pretended they couldn’t afford any more. But they didn’t get away with that.
I waged a little guerrilla war of my own, too, to doll up the Academy Awards when the studio chieftains still wanted the presentation to look no dressier than a missionary’s sewing bee. Telephone calls by the dozen worked the trick. “What are you going to do,” I demanded, “let those clothes rot in your closets? You’re not going to wear anything but your most beautiful gown.”
“But nobody’s going to be dressed,” the girl at the other end would wail.