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.