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.
“Then set the style. Last year you looked like spooks: sackcloth and ashes.”
At least, we managed to re-establish the tradition that year that women should dress for the night they hand out the gold-plated little men who first saw life in 1927, when Cedric Gibbon roughed in the design for them on a tablecloth at the Ambassador Hotel.
But the Academy Awards I’ve cared about most over the years had nothing to do with glamour. They had to do with life, exclusively, in full measure. The first were the two Oscars that went to the crippled veteran, Harold Russell, who proved in The Best Years of Our Lives that a man can lose his hands but not his courage.
The second was willed to Howard University by Hattie McDaniel, who won hers for the best supporting role in 1939 for Gone With the Wind and died penniless in 1952 in the Motion Picture Relief Home.
The third was won by James Baskette for Song of the South, after a campaign in which Jean Hersholt, then president of the Academy, and Freeman Gosden gave their immediate support. Some members disdained my idea that a special Oscar should go to a man for playing Uncle Remus, a slave, and they fought at a meeting on the eve of presentation until 4 A.M. Jean finally sent them home with this warning: “If he doesn’t receive an Oscar, I shall stand up tomorrow night and tell the world the whole disgraceful story.”