BOOK OF THE WEEK

Women I've undressed

by Orry-Kelly

(Allen & Unwin £25)

Those of us who assume Hollywood costume designers are as camp as Christmas - e.g. Cecil Beaton or Dame Edna’s son Kenny - will need to have a rethink in the light of this tremendous book.

The manuscript of the tome was only recently found in Orry-Kelly’s great-niece’s friend’s laundry cupboard, where it had lain forgotten for 30 years.

Cary Grant became close to George Orry-Kelly during their time in Hollywood after meeting when they were both starting out, one as a British born actor, the other as an Australian costume designer

Orry-Kelly was born as Orry George Kelly in the Australian bush in 1897. ‘Anyone who knows anything about the Aussies,’ he states, ‘knows we have spunk and spine. True bloody right we have.’

Despite being the head of the costume department at Warner Bros., for example, Orry immediately enlisted when World War II broke out. Astonishingly, his IQ turned out to be the lowest recorded for any soldier in the American army, ‘including a handful of Mexicans who couldn’t speak English’.

Orry was quickly discharged because he was ‘pickled in alcohol’. It is true he liked a tincture, eventually switching to vodka because ‘you can’t smell a vodka hangover’.

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Unsurprisingly, Orry was to die of liver disease in 1964 - but not before winning three Oscars for An American In Paris, Les Girls and Some Like It Hot.

In total, Orry designed the clothes for 295 films, from gangster pictures to Busby Berkeley extravaganzas.

Orry made the earring when Edward G. Robinson was a Portuguese pirate, turned Bette Davis into Queen Elizabeth I and transformed Tony Curtis into such an alluring female in Some Like It Hot, the crew gave the actor wolf whistles.

Orry’s father, from the Isle of Man originally, was a tailor in the suburbs of Sydney. ‘I remember much talk of importing worsteds, flannels, serges and tweeds.’

George Orry Kelly's life story chronicling the glamour and escapades of Hollywood's golden years has been published (pictured, the costume designer with Ann Sheridan in 1940)

Though Orry won a bronze medal for swimming and collected dung in a wheelbarrow to fertilise his parents’ prize carnations, he was happiest with his toy theatre, making scenery and puppets out of spools of coloured silk.

He went to Sydney to work in a bank but quickly got a job in the music hall, where the gas jets highlighted the pale enamelled faces, mascaraed eyelashes and cardinal red lips of the chorus girls and floozies.

Orry, in fact, makes this period of his life sound like an Australian Toulouse-Lautrec painting - or as he puts it, the girls resembled ‘Aubrey Beardsley drawings or the wild mysterious plumed birds of the Australian bush’.

Women I've Undressed by Orry-Kelly

Orry thoroughly enjoyed Sydney’s 3,167 bars. By pawning his suits (‘with the exception of the cross-bar tweed and my grey homburg’), however, and with the proceeds from appearing in a chorus line, he booked passage to America, arriving in New York in 1924 - the era of ‘cloche hats, beaded sheaths and rolled stockings’.

He appeared briefly on stage with Bela Lugosi, but was soon out of work. He earned a crust painting murals of frogs and dragons on the walls of speakeasies. He also block-printed shawls and ties with Fatty Arbuckle’s sister-in-law as his assistant.

His roommate in Manhattan was an impoverished stilt-walker from Bristol called Archie Leach, later better known as Cary Grant. Orry helped Archie with groceries, paid his medical bills, gave him a 50-50 split when he leant a hand stencilling shawls and ties. He even won him a screen test, using Charlie Chaplin’s brother’s wife as a contact.

Archie showed his gratitude by drinking bath-tub gin and punching Orry’s teeth out. Actually, during Prohibition, everybody seemed to be violently drunk on spiked beer or home-made hooch, and Orry decided to open his own speakeasy, which was soon patronised by prize-fighters, baseball players, gamblers - and the mob.

He was told to pay protection money or else he’d be buried in quicklime and only ‘the ring on his finger’ would aid identification. He immediately borrowed a car and drove right across America to Hollywood, where he found employment at Warner Bros.

Orry’s genius as a costume designer was to realise that his task was to improve on real life, by using the sheerest chiffon or white feathers to disguise ‘crepe-paper armpits, shrivelled elbows, knotty knees’.

The camera spots defects mercilessly, and he was required to solve the problems of sloping shoulders, sagging busts and misaligned hips.

He put wide, coloured hoops around Betty Grable to conceal her pregnancy, created vampish designs for Bette Davis, who had a tiny waist and broad shoulders, and lowered Lauren Bacall’s neckline, so she’d intoxicate Bogart by saying: ‘You know how to whistle, don’t you? You just put your lips together and . . . blow!’ He made the ‘simple, peasant-style skirts and blouses’ for Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca.

He produced strapless evening gowns for Rita Hayworth and made Ginger Rogers’s frocks for her musicals.

Cary Grant, left, with Eva Marie Saint, his co-star in North By Northwest, is exposed as a monster of meanness and vanity in the book

Mae West was so short she wore huge lifts in her shoes, which together with her ‘more than ample bosom’, gave her that comically cautious undulating totter. Drinking brandy enlarged Tallulah Bankhead’s head until her hats fell off.

Nothing much could be done with Marilyn Monroe’s enormous bottom. Boobs loom large in this book. Stars would inject their bosoms with paraffin to make them expand - dangerous near any naked flame, surely?

The other primitive enhancement technique was to get a plastic surgeon to insert a lump of vinyl. Orry says the effect was like taking hold of ‘two apples as hard as rocks’.

The prize for best breasts went to Ava Gardner. ‘I’d never seen nipples tilted like hers,’ says Orry. Chapel hat pegs will immediately spring to mind in my Welsh readers.

'Gone was Archie Leach full of fun. He was adjusting the mask of Cary Grant’ and didn’t want to associate with folks who’d known him before he was famous 

Hollywood’s Golden Age sounds a riot, a place of ‘beautiful jazz babes, champagne baths, midnight revels, and petting parties in the purple dawn’. Plus Cary Grant - who never did play the East Coast vaudeville circuit. He went directly into movies at $350 a week.

Orry couldn’t believe it when his old friend presented him with a bill for $360.48 - half his share, apparently, for meals in diners and so forth from their struggling days, on the rare occasion Archie Leach picked up the tab.

But evidently, ‘gone was Archie Leach full of fun. He was adjusting the mask of Cary Grant’ and didn’t want to associate with folks who’d known him before he was famous.

Orry angrily handed over the $360.48. ‘You really don’t owe me this,’ said Grant, embarrassed. But nevertheless he took it.

Orry says that Grant never stopped being the kind of person who saved brown paper and string and hoarded free matchbooks.

Years later, he offered Rosalind Russell the use of his spare Rolls-Royce. She looked pleased, until Grant added: ‘Call my agents. They will give you the rental fee and the cost of the chauffeur.’

If Grant is exposed as a monster of meanness and vanity, the richest character in Orry-Kelly’s gallery is Dame Edith Sitwell, who was found in Los Angeles wearing ‘an ankle-length dark dress covered with two coats with bat-like sleeves. The outer one was fur-trimmed’.

Dame Edith was an unaffectedly preposterous natural star. ‘I am like an unpopular electric eel in a pond full of flat fish,’ she announced. ‘I am simply alive. Nobody has been more alive than I.’

The next time an Australian met such a remarkable creature was when Barry Humphries discovered Dame Edna in Moonee Ponds.

 

 

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