Edith Head by Jay Jorgensen

Author:Jay Jorgensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2010-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

The Stars Are Singing (1953) starred newcomer Anna Marie Alberghetti as Katri Walenska, an illegal immigrant who wins a televised amateur contest. Rosemary Clooney played Terry Brennan, a Broadway hopeful, who secures the television appearance for Katri. “Rosemary Clooney asked for as much white as possible,” Edith said. “Rosemary says she feels wonderful when she wears white. It is probably a throw back to the days when she sang with dance bands. She wore white or pastel bouffant gowns then, and with the spotlight shining on her, she feels like a princess.” Edith designed a white linen dress with soft shoulders and a full skirt, rolled collar and cuffs, both of which were opened at the ends. For Alberghetti, Edith chose a dress of pale pink crossbar organdie over pink taffeta.

If Clooney felt comfortable in white for stage and screen, gray was the color she chose for her wedding to Jose Ferrer in July, 1953. Ferrer had brought Clooney some light gray herring bone tweed fabric from London the year before. Edith fashioned a wedding suit out of it for Clooney, who took it with her for her appearance in Dallas in Kiss Me Kate. “I just kind of felt that this was to be it,” Clooney said. “But I honestly didn’t know for sure.” But when then decision was made for the couple to wed, they didn’t waste any time. They traveled to Oklahoma because of the lack of pre-marital waiting time.

Glamorous Arlene Dahl first met Edith, not as an actress, but as a journalist. The red-headed beauty had begun her acting career at Warner Brothers, and then moved to MGM. In addition to her acting, Dahl had an entrepreneurial spirit and turned her interest in beauty and fashion into second and third careers as a writer and designer. In the early 1950s, Arlene interviewed Edith for her beauty, fashion and health column, which was carried by the Chicago Trubune/New York News Syndicate. The column ran in about 100 newspapers including The London Evening News. “I went into her office on the second floor at Paramount and I saw this very striking, not very tall, woman dressed in black,” Dahl says. “She was wearing what we called a model’s coat, with a very nice patent leather black belt, and black-rimmed glasses. She’d be perfect in today’s fashion climate, but that is what she always wore. She was absolutely disarming and charming and wonderful. When I interviewed Edith for my column, I asked her about fashion and she said ‘well, when a woman reaches 40 and over, she should never reveal what she should conceal.’ That includes the upper arms of course. She had many bon mots she would use. That was one that I particularly remembered.”

When Dahl came to Paramount in 1952 to make Caribbean with John Payne, she was able to see Edith’s formula first-hand for simplifying an actress’ look on screen. “I went up to her studio and she remembered me and she said ‘now let’s talk about what colors you like and what your character is, and we’ll go from there,’” Dahl says.

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