All for Beauty: Makeup and Hairdressing in Hollywood's Studio Era 9780813563602

Citation preview

All for Beauty

Volumes in the Techniques of the Moving Image series explore the relationship between what we see onscreen and the technical achievements undertaken in filmmaking to make this possible. Books explore some defined aspect of cinema—work from a particular era, work in a particular genre, work by a particular filmmaker or team, work from a particular studio, or work on a particular theme—in light of some technique and/or technical achievement, such as cinematography, direction, acting, lighting, costuming, set design, legal arrangements, agenting, scripting, sound design and recording, and sound or picture editing. Historical and social background contextualize the subject of each volume.

Murray Pomerance Series Editor Jay Beck, Designing Sound: Audiovisual Aesthetics in 1970s American Cinema Lisa Bode, Making Believe: Screen Performance and Special Effects in Popular Cinema Wheeler Winston Dixon, Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical Hollywood Nick Hall, The Zoom: Drama at the Touch of a Lever Andrea J. Kelley, Soundies Jukebox Films and the Shift to Small-Screen Culture Adrienne L. McLean, All for Beauty: Makeup and Hairdressing in Hollywood’s Studio Era R. Barton Palmer, Shot on Location: Postwar American Cinema and the Exploration of Real Place Murray Pomerance, The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect Colin Williamson, Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism

All for Beauty Makeup and Hairdressing in Hollywood’s Studio Era

ADRIENNE L. M C LEAN

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McLean, Adrienne L., author. Title: All for beauty : makeup and hairdressing in Hollywood’s studio era / Adrienne L. McLean. Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021047839 | ISBN 9781978831377 (hardback) | ISBN 9780813563589 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813563602 (pdf) | ISBN 9780813575193 (epub) | ISBN 9781978807990 (mobi) Subjects: LCSH: Film makeup. | Film hairstyling. | Makeup artists— California—Los Angeles—Biography. | Beauty operators—California— Los Angeles—Biography. | Motion pictures—Production and direction— California—Los Angeles—History—20th century. | Motion pictures— California—Los Angeles—History. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.M25 M35 2022 | DDC 791.4302/7—dc23/eng/20220304 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021047839 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2022 by Adrienne L. McLean All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www.rutgersuniversitypress.org Manufactured in the United States of America

In loving memory of Larry and my father, and for my sweet mother

Contents Introduction: Art and Science in the Service of Loveliness

1

1

Makeup and Hairdressing as Studio Crafts: The Silent Period

31

2

The Classical Period: Craft Identity and the Labor Force

77

3

The Classical Period: Department Practices and the Commerce of Expertise

121

Cosmetics, Coiffures, and Characterization

164

Epilogue: Trophy Faces

219

Appendix Acknowledgments Notes Index

231 235 239 299

4

vii

All for Beauty

Introduction Art and Science in the Service of Loveliness In December 1936, Warner Bros. released a publicity story about the opening of a new facility on its Hollywood lot. “All for Beauty,” as the “exclusive” is titled, announces that the studio had just spent $90,000 renovating a building to house the “Department of Hairdressing and Make-Up.” Replete with “chromium and mirrors, vats and ovens, grease paint and real hair wigs,” in the “shiny new halls” of the building “art and science join hands in the service of loveliness.” Actresses might enter any one of thirty-six cubicles “sleepy-eyed and drawn, cross and crowfooted,” but, thanks to “the best equipment money can buy” and “hard, painstaking work” by executive Perc Westmore and his staff of “makeup experts” and “hair-dressers,” they would emerge an hour or two later as “the lovely creatures who have made Hollywood famous for its pulchritude and charm.” Extras, too, had “a battery of beauty experts [and] all kinds of beauty-increasing devices” to assist them, and even the giant “mobs” hired for crowd scenes could now be funneled through two large rooms—one for women, one for men—“in wholesale lots at top speed,” their body makeup “applied with sprays in the hands of expert attendants.” The piece concludes with the declaration that it takes “time and effort and money to keep the stars beautiful since they are as human as the rest of the world—and the studio supplies all this most willingly, knowing that beauty must be protected and preserved at all costs if pictures are to succeed.”1 Behind-the-scenes stories like this, about any aspect of moviemaking, were fodder for newspapers and magazines across the country, and studio writers churned them out regularly. “All for Beauty” is characteristically and quaintly 1

2 • All for Beauty

hyperbolic, but I engage it here because it both provides an introduction to my subject matter and alludes to what I believe are the predominant reasons for the comparative neglect of makeup and hairdressing to date in academic studies of studio-era Hollywood. In contrast to character makeup, which has acquired a fairly extensive literature through its connection to special effects,2 far less attention has been paid to straight makeup, a term that also came from the theater and that was by far the most common form seen in Hollywood films from the silent era through the demise of the studio system itself. Rather than the physical transformations and disguises that character makeup produced, straight makeup was meant, in the words of a 1927 book on cinematography, “to present upon the screen the most natural and true-to-life image possible for the actor,”3 whether that actor was male or female (in the silent era it was sometimes labeled “scientific” too).4 Even more to the point, “All for Beauty” is clearly focused on beauty makeup, a gender-specific appellation and compound noun of uncertain origin that was studio shorthand for the level of perfection in cosmetics and coiffures associated with the appearance of stars and would-be stars by the time the piece was written.5 Through its references to “time and effort and money” and the equating of the “pulchritude” of stars with the success of motion pictures, “All for Beauty” underscores the extent to which certain forms of makeup and hairdressing were presumed to be significant elements of the appeal of all Hollywood films.6 Indeed, those who were responsible for creating and maintaining the looks of stars and featured players were paid comparatively high salaries by all the major studios by the 1930s—considerably more than other journeyman laborers, although slightly less than technicians like editors. Yet their status at the studios was always ambiguous if not paradoxical, especially in the case of beauty makeup. As MGM makeup artist William Tuttle would later tell an interviewer, “For some reason they wanted to keep it a secret that there was such a thing as a makeup artist needed. It was assumed that actors knew how to do their own makeup, you see. Or that they didn’t wear makeup. It was a strange policy.”7 If that “strange policy” was belied somewhat by the higher levels of remuneration for makeup artists and hairdressers, its influence can still be felt in the faint air of disdain for both crafts that marks “All for Beauty,” an otherwise fulsome publicity piece, down to the carelessness with which it renders the crafts’ key words throughout—as makeup, Make-Up, and Make-up, hairdressing and hair-dressing. More interesting, “All for Beauty” even takes a subtle jab at the “expert” in charge of it all, Perc Westmore. It does so by continually naming his expensively renovated department incorrectly: it was not the “Department of Hairdressing and Make-Up” but the other way around. As was true at most studio makeup departments by the 1930s, Westmore was a makeup man, and hairdressers were women. So the misnaming of “his” fiefdom, even if it was nothing more than a repeated typo, he would undoubtedly have perceived as a slight, given his authority over not only

Publicity photo of Kay Francis and Perc Westmore outside the renovated Warner Bros. Department of Makeup and Hairdressing in 1937. (Collection of Mary Desjardins.)

4 • All for Beauty

the appearance of actors whose looks he designed and applied but also the numerous laborers, male as well as female, who worked in the department largely at his discretion and pleasure. Perc Westmore was arguably the most famous and ambitious member of the “rouge pot dynasty” of a father and six brothers who worked in Hollywood during the studio era. Yet his career, too, was affected by the studios’ ambivalence toward his profession, and to greater consequence than the verbal slights found in “All for Beauty.” First, and quite problematic for the researcher, is that even makeup executives were rarely given screen credit until the late 1930s, and then not consistently until acknowledgment of below-the-line craft workers was mandated by union contracts in the 1980s. (This in spite of the fact that, as Barrett Kiesling put it in 1937, “The art of the screen has advanced greatly . . . but it has been able to advance no faster than the art of make-up.”)8 With some exceptions, as for all crafts such credits were usually left up to the studio, and based on the film evidence most makeup credits until at least the 1940s were for the more transformative character variety. Especially if an actor was playing a historical figure like Abraham Lincoln, Benito Juarez, or Moses, character makeup could also usefully be exploited through “before” and “after” photos in promotional and publicity material.9 But even Wally Westmore’s renowned makeup for Fredric March in Paramount’s 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was not acknowledged in the credits, although Jack Dawn was luckier with MGM’s 1941 version, starring Spencer Tracy, and was billed as the film’s “makeup creator.” Attentive spectators will note, and I hope readers remember, that the women in both films are made up to look less Victorian than “modern,” especially apparent in the case of the close-ups of actor Rose Hobart’s face in the earlier adaptation as she gazes directly at the camera that has assumed the point of view of her fictional adoring fiancé. Second, but concomitantly, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ignored makeup and hairdressing during awards season throughout the entire studio era. Aside from a certificate to Hollywood cosmetics manufacturer Max Factor in 1928 for his contributions to “incandescent illumination research” (the so-called Mazda tests, named for General Electric’s Mazda lighting equipment), the Academy did not hand out any Oscars for makeup until the 1960s, the first to William Tuttle for 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964) and the second to John Chambers for Planet of the Apes (1968).10 And once more, in both cases the makeup in question was virtuosic character makeup that was designed at least partly to disguise the actors wearing it. In contrast even to costume design, which began earning Oscars in 1948, makeup did not become a regular Academy Award category until the 1980s, and only in 2012 was “hair styling” added to the category’s name.11 Ironically, the lack of collegial approbation might have been a side effect of the Westmores’ ubiquity not only in Hollywood (“There were so many of them,” Tuttle later exclaimed)12 but also in the popular press, where their skills at

Rose Hobart in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931, makeup and hair uncredited). Frame enlargements.

6 • All for Beauty

self-aggrandizement were legendary. The “peculiar willingness of [the] family to be quoted,” as the New York Times put it in 1939,13 helped them to create an aura of expertise that maintained the cultural capital of the family name off the screen—their Hollywood salon was called the House of Westmore, as was its associated consumer cosmetics line—as well as in what credits there were for their films. Third-generation makeup artist Michael Westmore, who shared the Oscar for Mask (1985) and earned many other awards for his work on Star Trek in its film and television iterations (and who was of tremendous help to me in the research for this book), states in his memoir Makeup Man that his uncle Perc told him that “a very influential producer once said that as long as he was president [of the Academy], there would never be any recognition for makeup artistry. One of his reasons was that a Westmore would win it every year.”14 None of the studio-era Westmores ever won an Oscar, although in his Best Actor acceptance speech Fredric March paid tribute to Wally Westmore for his makeup in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as did Paul Muni to Perc Westmore for The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936). More to the point, the Academy’s neglect of makeup and hairdressing generally, but especially the variety mocked in the press with terms like “lily gilding” and “star glazing,” I see as an analogy for the way some of Hollywood’s historians—myself included—have so often relegated much of the work of the crafts to the empty signifier of the term glamour. Even young stars routinely described by critics as utterly lacking in glamour, like Eleanor Powell in the 1930s and early 1940s, wore full beauty makeup in their films.15 Finally, while “All for Beauty” does its best to ignore the fact that a great many men would be made “beautiful” in the new Warner Bros. facility—the only mention of male performers is in reference to the body makeup sprayed on extras— in fact male actors, even or especially stars, wore nearly as many cosmetics for straight roles as women did. And this, certainly, the studios preferred not to publicize. The blandishment was not always as elaborate as that for women, but studio records, and films themselves, reveal that even the most rugged stars typically wore eyeliner (and sometimes mascara) and lip rouge in addition to what we would now call foundation. Along with various pomades that made their hair often shinier than that of their female costars, many male actors required specially designed toupees because they were bald or balding (their facial hair was seldom fully “natural” either). For all these reasons, I have appropriated the term beauty makeup for use on many if not most male stars as well, given that both off the screen and in even their sweatiest or dirtiest film roles they, too, were consistently designed to appear normatively attractive, however much they and the studios sought to minimize the cosmetic basis of their visual appeal. Interestingly, when men’s makeup was referred to, it was often with the assurance that it was not being applied by women, and that any products they might be wearing were created by “scientific” men, most prominently Max Factor. Other than a brief stint as “Makeup Department Chief” at Radiotone Pictures in 1929–1930, Factor did not work for the studios as a staff makeup or hair artist.16 But by the late 1920s

Introduction • 7

his corporation was, and would remain through the 1960s, the supplier of most of the cosmetic products and many of the wigs that even the Westmores—as well as department heads with other names—and their staffs employed in the service of both male and female loveliness. In the context of the male domination of the studio system from top to bottom—with the arguable exception of stars themselves—the fact that men ran makeup and hairdressing departments is not on its face unusual. For a number of reasons, it is more extraordinary that an important job like hairdressing, which in most cases included design and styling, was relegated to women, as long as the hair being dressed was that of women too. (Wigs had separate rules.) This was also the case with body makeup “girls” or “women,” the only cosmetic-related work women were allowed to perform and the lowest of all in prestige as well as pay scale. Yet the gender division of makeup and hairdressing departments turned out to be considerably less rigid before IATSE & MPMO Local 706, which ultimately became the Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild, was chartered in 1937. In fact, from the late 1920s until 1937, not only were there attempts by women to form their own labor organizations, but several smaller film outfits had women makeup department “chiefs”—even MGM, which alone among the studios had a separate head for women’s makeup and another for men’s. On the one hand, then, departments of makeup and hairdressing were likely more accommodating to women and their creative labor than was the case with virtually any other below-the-line craft, even costuming.17 Not until 1980 was the first woman admitted to the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), in existence since 1919, for example. On the other hand, the prohibition against women as makeup artists also profoundly skewed the jobs that they were obviously more than competent to perform. At the risk of sounding essentialist, I can think of no other film craft where the gender divide seems so odd—a twopart Photoplay series from 1939 about the studios’ blandishment of stars is titled “Miracle Men at Work” despite the fact that some of the “experts” they feature and quote are women hairdressers.18 Making the situation weirder still is that European studios appear not to have segregated the crafts as strictly. As one British female makeup artist, Teddie Edwards, put it in 1956, “I believe this is a woman’s job because for one thing she understands a woman’s face better than a man does, and she knows instinctively, if she is an artist, what can be done to improve a face.” And if that woman was an executive, she alone was “responsible for seeing that the results come up to the requirements of his (or her!) ally, the cameraman.”19 Even some latter-day labor histories of Hollywood appear to have assumed, not unnaturally but erroneously, that most if not all of the makeup artists as well as hairdressers involved in labor disputes were women. (The unions’ gender divisions, as well as their lack of Black workers, did not change much until the 1970s, when the effects of federal affirmative action as a remedy for decades of structural and institutional discrimination on the basis of gender and race reached Hollywood.)20

8 • All for Beauty

Any confusion about the gender of studio makeup artists likely comes from an awareness of the broader historical context of modern cosmetics and hairdressing, in which both were almost exclusively associated with femininity and women’s concerns (or “swishy” men).21 In addition to the fact that during most of the twentieth century women wore makeup in their daily lives but men did not (or were not supposed to), with very few exceptions the modern beauty industry in the United States was developed and maintained—down to the staffing of beauty parlors in towns large and small22—by “immigrant, working-class, or black women,” as Kathy Peiss puts it in her book Hope in a Jar.23 Madam C. J. Walker, Elizabeth Arden, and Helena Rubinstein all founded beauty empires whose influence extended across the country, although most of their firms—like most businesses—were run by men after the mid-1930s. (Walker died in 1919.) And no less than the Westmores or Max Factor, these women, too, were labeled, or labeled themselves, experts and geniuses and proffered not only products but also guidance to women of all ages in their eponymous salons, advice columns, and books. (Arden, however, reportedly disparaged cosmetics, as opposed to the more holistic exercise and diet regimens and treatments available at her salons, as the “temporary” beauty business.)24 Indeed, many of the innovations of Hollywood’s makeup men seem to have been highly publicized variations on the techniques, products, and even marketing strategies of these and other women in the business through the 1950s, making the prohibition against women makeup artists in Local 706, especially, even more bewildering. Dorothy “Dot” Ponedel, despite having been under contract to Paramount as a beauty makeup artist and department executive for several years, was allowed to join the union and continue to work after 1937 only because of the high-powered star clients—Marlene Dietrich, Carole Lombard, Mae West, and later Judy Garland, among many others—who demanded her and her skills on their films. But as will be discussed, Ponedel was both demoted to the status of body makeup woman and referred to in print as a hairdresser. She was finally admitted to Local 706 as a full makeup artist in 1942 (during World War II, when many male artists would have been away), which then made her the target of abuse by several of her male colleagues.25 Nor did she receive screen credit for her work. Conversely, the prolific male hairdresser Sydney Guilaroff—another exception who proves the rule—simply refused to join the union altogether, working out his own executive contracts with the studios, most famously MGM, or with stars (as Ponedel also did) from the late 1930s through the 1960s. And in yet another irony associated with this project, in 1938 Guilaroff demanded and received screen credit—usually as “hair styles by”—before most makeup men were granted such recognition. (I employ hairdressing in the book’s title because it was the most persistent public designation for women through the 1940s and I want to draw attention to their work; and conversely because, for modern roles, men’s hair, which was dressed primarily by men, was rarely styled.)

Introduction • 9

Dot Ponedel with Paulette Goddard, 1930s. (Courtesy Meredith Ponedel.)

Not surprisingly, studio-affiliated publicity and promotional material did its best to make the labor behind beauty makeup more “masculine” by emphasizing how lucky makeup artists were to interact physically with the most desirable and attractive women in the world. But attempts to prop up the men’s virility in fan magazines and the like could also trivialize the field in which they worked.

10 • All for Beauty

A “special publicity still” of Perc Westmore with Ann Sheridan, one of at least two from the same sitting that ran in fan magazines in 1941 in which Westmore appears to be whispering to or blowing on Sheridan’s face as she gazes into the camera. Photofest.

“Is this a job?” Photoplay asked in 1931 in a discussion of Perc Westmore’s twin, Ern, the spelling of whose name the article could not quite settle on. Another strategy was to elevate the skills of the male “experts” in various opaque ways, as with Ern’s claims in the same piece that “the average beauty operator is not skilled enough for studio work,” even as hairdressers were almost always recruited from

Introduction • 11

beauty parlors, where the Westmores actually began their careers as well.26 But no matter how many articles referred to Max Factor and the Westmores as miracle men, wizards, geniuses (Frank Westmore grew up thinking that his older brother Perc’s job title was “makeup genius”), or even scientists (Factor, and some of the Westmores, took to wearing lab coats for publicity photos, and “All for Beauty” emphasizes the “science” behind the products and procedures it otherwise does not name), nothing could disguise the reality that beauty makeup and hairdressing were both clearly feminine, and feminized, pursuits in ordinary life. And sadly, this may also have affected their status not only in Hollywood but in film history and its scholarship. I have presented what I believe are the most cogent reasons for the comparative neglect of makeup and hairdressing, of any variety, in many if not most studies of the industry except on a very basic level. But to rectify this lack, or simply to give the two crafts the prominence I believe they deserve, turned out to be a far more complex undertaking than I expected it to be. If I still remember my startled awareness as a very young teenager that Ginger Rogers in Top Hat (1935) was perfectly coiffed and cosmetically enhanced even when she was supposed to be asleep, a more recent prompt for this project was undoubtedly my research into the star image of Rita Hayworth, for which I sought to interview as many of her surviving colleagues as I could. Thus did I find myself, in 1992, at Disney Studios, where Robert Schiffer was then head of makeup and hairdressing.27 As a journeyman makeup artist at Columbia, Schiffer had worked closely with Hayworth in the 1940s and 1950s (he was another who claimed to have gotten into makeup “for the women”). And during our talk, he remarked that Columbia “always had that hard red mouth.” It did not have anything to do with Hayworth as such, but I was compelled to stop him and ask why. He looked at me for a beat and shrugged his shoulders. Since I was not there to get information about cosmetics and their application, we moved on. But Schiffer’s remark, like the sartorial perfection of the sleeping Rogers, remained with me, even if I can no longer remember the context in which he uttered it or find it in my notes, especially because from my subsequent observations Columbia’s makeup, at least on Rita Hayworth’s face, seemed to be a bit less “hard” than that applied to stars at other studios. Schiffer also taught me to look for how he, and other makeup artists at Columbia and elsewhere, dealt with the fact that Hayworth’s right eye was a different shape than her left. I did mention makeup and hairdressing in my Hayworth book, but not on their own terms. Rather, I discussed how the half-Spanish Rita Hayworth began her film career as Rita Cansino, a “Latin” dancer and player, noting that her naturally brown hair was darkened to black and styled—along with her eyes, eyebrows, and lips—according to stereotypes of what someone named Rita Cansino was supposed to look like. Around 1938 Columbia decided to place greater emphasis on the Irish side of her ancestry and the fact that she had been born in Brooklyn, using a version of her mother’s maiden name and dying the hair of the

12 • All for Beauty

newly christened Rita Hayworth red and raising her hairline slightly through electrolysis. As Rita Hayworth, but not as Rita Cansino, she could become the “All-American Love Goddess.” I chronicled how the transformation, including the electrolysis, was carried out in full view of the public and described in painful detail in the popular press and fan magazines (in contrast, the more extensive electrolysis on Tyrone Power’s hairline was not).28 With Hayworth—and, I know now, most female Hollywood stars—there was always a tension in the discourse which made her the agent of her own transformation even as the specialized and often grueling processes designed and carried out by studio makeup artists and hairdressers to effect the visual changes were being described in detail. Hayworth’s all-American but half-Spanish image also points toward some of the racial and ethnic prejudices that Hollywood films represented and maintained, given that foreign-born “Latin” performers like Carmen Miranda or Lupe Velez, despite their popularity with fans, were relegated to supporting roles, specialties, or B pictures. Even when “ethnic variety,” in Kathy Peiss’s words, was celebrated, whether in beauty culture or Hollywood films, underlying it was the “belief that the true American face was still a white face.”29 Throughout this book I trace how makeup was employed to regulate the colors of white flesh and skin, and I explore, when I have evidence with which to do so, the problems faced by Black actors, in particular, in relation to beauty makeup and its practices. But the uncomfortable fact is that there is little archival or primary material from the studio era that does not focus on or come from white or acceptably ethnic actors and craftspeople.30 A brief 1930 column in the Black newspaper the Philadelphia Tribune—one of the only such references I have seen—describes attempts by two white movie makeup artists, working on the East Coast, to create makeup that was “entirely different from a black-face make-up [which] shows up very badly on the screen in many pictures with Negro players.” But while the makeup artists had studied “under the famous Westmores of Hollywood, taking a compete course in screen make-up,” the Westmores “did not have much information to pass on to their pupils on that subject.”31 Max Factor reportedly “specially prepared” a greasepaint and a powder in that case, but from other of Factor’s remarks, and his company’s product lists, the only cosmetics for Black actors until the 1940s were designed for character roles played by white actors.32 And when Ruby Dee reported to Twentieth Century-Fox for No Way Out (1950), Sidney Poitier’s first major film, she was “immediately struck,” as she later reported, “by the fact that we didn’t see any black people working anywhere. . . . We didn’t see any dark skins in the makeup and wardrobe departments or as hairdressers. From the minute we entered the gate in the morning till the time we left, we were in an all-white world, and that reality was hard for us to ignore.”33 Turning to a makeup manual would not have helped much, since they, too, were steeped in racism.34 Rita Hayworth’s image opens up, then, into critical but difficult to research areas of identity politics that are enmeshed with makeup and hairdressing in

Introduction • 13

studio-era Hollywood. But I quickly learned that there was not much information about the two crafts as practiced in the industry by and on white people either, with the arguable exception of three books: The Westmores of Hollywood, a family history written by Frank Westmore, the youngest studio-era brother; and two others, Max Factor’s Hollywood: Glamour, Movies, Make-Up and Max Factor: The Man Who Changed the Faces of the World, by men who worked for the Factor corporation.35 Not surprisingly, these books have served as principal sources, whether acknowledged as such or not, for many if not all subsequent publications that mention or discuss Hollywood cosmetics and makeup practices (I learned an enormous amount from all three of them as well).36 But the main reason that much of my study is organized as a more or less chronological narrative of investigation and discovery is that the material I encountered in my primary research, especially, sometimes contradicted, or at least complicated, several of the anecdotal, and often hagiographic, accounts of the crafts’ evolution and existence in the studio system that these otherwise indispensable books proffer. For example, one of the most frequently invoked reasons for the Westmores’ importance to Hollywood is that in 1917 père George “established the first studio makeup department in history”—as is stated (twice) in The Westmores of Hollywood—at Selig Polyscope in Los Angeles.37 Discovering that this was not the case—the Westmores, as will be discussed in chapter 1, did not arrive in California until 1920, and Selig ceased production in 1918—was quite a revelation, but less because I and many others had taken this “fact” for granted for decades than because of whose stories and contributions the claim has functionally blocked out. Conversely, Factor’s chroniclers assert that “from the 1920s to the 1970s, all the wigs and hairpieces seen in motion pictures were made by the Max Factor hair department.”38 This statement can be countered by documents showing that, starting in the 1930s, the Westmore brothers manufactured hair products that they also sold or rented to the studios at which they worked. (Other studios had staff wigmakers as well, and Sydney Guilaroff also claimed to have made wigs.)39 This is not to take anything away from the influence and power of the Westmores or Factor and his organization, both of which remain vital to my study as a whole. But in producing what I believe to be the first industrial history of my two crafts I must also revise some of what we thought we already knew. Moreover, as I delved further and further into my topic, I came to feel that makeup and hairdressing affected, in material as well as ideological ways, everything we hold dear (or despise) in classical Hollywood cinema because they are connected to so many different areas of filmmaking, from cinematography and lighting to acting and costume design. Their significance to these other areas is a big part of their value, both practically to the industry and to me as a film scholar, even though they are so rarely discussed in histories of the studio system. But this also made it difficult to demarcate my study neatly. When I turned to ancillary material like fan magazines and other mass-market periodicals, where there is far more material on Hollywood’s “glamour masters” than in studio

14 • All for Beauty

archives, the project threatened to grow yet more intractably vast because of the sheer number of beauty and grooming articles and named product advertisements that can be found in any single issue of any fan magazine during the studio era. Although to treat all of that material at length would require another book, it would be impossible not to engage the immense syndicated presence of Hollywood’s makeup and hairdressing “experts” and their products in the ongoing and always contradictory negotiations of the relation of outer appearance to ideals of personality and attainment—of the “natural” to the applied and contrived—that are so much a part of the lore of Hollywood as well as our ordinary lives.40 Peiss claims that, in the twentieth century, the “creative ‘work’ of makeup tended in two distinct directions, toward an embrace of artifice, on the one hand, and toward an aesthetic of the ‘natural,’ on the other.”41 I believe that, in idiosyncratic and sometimes confusing ways, Hollywood and its experts and stars blurred these distinctions both on and off the screen. Other underexplored aspects of the crafts make them foundational (makeup puns can be hard to avoid) to narrative filmmaking in even more literal senses. Take, for example, the material and physical closeness of the makeup artist and hairdresser to actors themselves. Makeup was applied and hair was styled and dressed, or wigs and toupees fitted, prior to any effects, artistic or otherwise, of costuming, lighting, cinematography, editing, or even, as it were, acting and other modes of performance. To quote from “All for Beauty” again, the makeup and hairdressing building was the “busiest place on the studio grounds,” which was true not only at Warner Bros. but at every studio from at least the 1920s through the 1960s. It was the first stop of the day for most if not all Hollywood actors (mobile versions were set up for location shooting), and makeup artists and hairdressers became some stars’ trusted, and often influential, friends and companions. This was certainly the case with Rita Hayworth and Robert Schiffer and hairdresser Helen Hunt; Barbara Stanwyck and her hairdresser Hollis Barnes (“Barnsie”); and Marlene Dietrich, Joan Blondell, and Judy Garland and Dot Ponedel. Or, while they did not appear to socialize as much off the set, Perc Westmore and Paul Muni or Bette Davis, the latter of whom Westmore made up for more than thirty years and who called him one of her “truly great friends.”42 And yet two recent books that might well have considered makeup and hairdressing, Paul Coates’s Screening the Face and Noa Steimatsky’s The Face on Film, largely ignore both.43 I, too, grapple with the question of whether makeup artists and hairdressers were “mechanics or artists,” to quote film historian Patrick Keating about cinematographers.44 But I come back to the fact that even when the design of the makeup and hair was created by or credited to a department head or other executive, it is hard not to think of the personnel who actually applied the products to a performer’s face and body—even if doing so in accordance with someone else’s instructions, usually a makeup chart, the significance of which I explore in a later chapter—as intimately involved in the construction and meaning of

Introduction • 15

the film image in a way that just does not seem congruent with the work of gaffers, grips, or even focus pullers or costumers. For example, the 1958 budget sheets for Paramount’s From Among the Dead, the Alfred Hitchcock film that became Vertigo, show that two makeup artists, Ben Lane and Harry Ray, were employed on the production (Kim Novak had requested Lane from her home studio, Columbia, where department head Clay Campbell had helped create her star image), along with two hairdressers, Lenore Weaver and Florence Avery.45 (Novak’s desire to have her own hairdresser also brought from Columbia was apparently not met.) Yet only Paramount’s department head Wally Westmore and hairdressing “area head” Nellie Manley are listed in Vertigo’s credits, for “makeup supervision” and “hair style supervision,” respectively—an improvement, again, over earlier films that had no makeup and hairdressing credits at all. Given the extent of the Northern California location shooting on Vertigo, far away from the influence of Wally Westmore (who had jurisdiction over Manley’s work), it is hard to imagine that Lane and Ray, or Weaver and Avery, followed to the letter whatever directions Westmore gave them to produce the distinctive looks of Kim Novak in the dual role of the aristocratic Madeleine and the working-class Judy. Or that they did not make creative adjustments on the fly for James Stewart or Barbara Bel Geddes, as well as Novak, in order to satisfy Hitchcock’s (or the actors’) demands on a given day. Moreover, according to Novak’s biographer, the director “grumbled” halfway through filming that the star was “right” to prefer her usual Columbia makeup design to whatever Westmore might have dictated, which complicates the situation further.46 In fact, as Frank Westmore wrote in The Westmores of Hollywood, during the studios’ heyday from the 1930s through the 1950s, he saw his brothers “practically having to abandon doing creative makeup in order to administer their large departments,” which included, besides reading scripts and attending “daily production meetings and weekly budget meetings,” recruitment and training, assigning tasks to the right person, product and supply management, and “not only making suggestions for new makeup ideas for a film but—a Westmore specialty— dreaming up publicity gimmicks for it. Only occasionally were they able to get out in the field and use their skills on an especially important project.”47 His account exemplifies the hierarchization of filmmaking tasks that is the basis of the studio system itself, but it is also true that there were few other areas in which nonexecutive craftspeople could function as such materially critical constituents of almost every other visual “norm” of Hollywood filmmaking. Makeup artists and hairdressers were “always on the set,” in cinematographer John Alton’s words, to take care of the endless needs that arose during shooting in response to the temperature and humidity, the activity level of the actor, the duration of the workday, and the goals of the scene.48 They adjusted facial contours in response to lighting, they rearranged hair if it shadowed a face inappropriately,

16 • All for Beauty

and by the late 1920s they understood what the camera would record (or not) as “natural,” all of which for stars and most featured players, as I investigate and discuss, ultimately came to mean maintaining them in flawless if often narratively implausible perfection, especially in close-ups. So significant were close-ups that Alton, in his book Painting with Light, declares that they not only were the “export of the American film industry” but were “known the world over for their exquisite beauty.”49 Without close-ups we might not have stars or care about what they look like—“Bronco Billy” Anderson played at least three different characters in long shot in The Great Train Robbery (1903) with no noticeable alteration to his face and hair—but it does not necessarily follow that “exquisite beauty” would automatically have resulted from the close-up itself. In fact, in director Mervyn LeRoy’s words, “Almost every big star has an out-of-the-ordinary face. So do most of the great actresses. . . . In Hollywood there are ways to manufacture beauty; you can’t manufacture talent.”50 But for the purposes of this book, how the studios defined and fabricated human “beauty,” male or female, in close-up or a wider shot scale, is indeed the object of attention. For it was that beauty, created carefully not just by cinematographers but by makeup artists and hairdressers (of course, with the participation of players themselves, and at times their often unnamed maids or assistants), that made the close-up so major an “export.” Especially the “long” close-ups of the sound era, when they were no longer interrupted by intertitles. But it was not always that way. By 1919, according to one of the silent era’s contemporary chroniclers, at least half of a film’s scenes were close-ups, and as will be discussed, some critics were horrified by what they viewed as excessive or incorrect cosmetic use by performers in films of the day.51 Most actors in the “primitive” era of cinema applied their own makeup and sometimes styled their own hair under the more or less educated guidance and training of makeup artists, male and female, from around 1913 on (who physically applied makeup and dressed the hair or wigs of minor actors and extras as well as some stars). That their results were often unsatisfactory, or a slavish but practically or aesthetically unworkable mimicry of current modes of fashionable appearance, seems to have been the impetus for the cameraman then to be given authority to call the shots as it were, because he (and it was always a he) had at least learned from experience the properties of the film stock in his camera and how certain colors would photograph. Actor Alice Brady’s remarks to an interviewer in 1917 are instructive: “I consider that I could more easily do without my director than the best services of my camera man, for I know that my camera man can make or break me.”52 But by 1928, Davis Factor, son of Max Factor, told members of the newly formed Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (who repeatedly called him David) during the studios’ collaborative Mazda tests that “we cannot stress the fact too much that makeup is the greatest ally of the cinematographer, and the most pliant tool of the artist.”53

Introduction • 17

I present this brief divagation on the close-up to point out how closely cinematography and makeup were linked, and to some degree why, which makes the absence of any mention of the “greatest ally” from recent scholarship on cinematography somewhat puzzling. Keating’s superb book Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir does not mention makeup, as product or craft, even though trade journals and many if not most earlier camerawork or “motography” manuals expend pages on the topic. Carl Louis Gregory’s massive 1927 Motion Picture Photography includes a chapter on makeup.54 A 1928 American Cinematography article by Joseph Dubray not only calls makeup “an absolute necessity” but warns that it is “more than unjust to expect the cinematographer to perform the impossible feat of obtaining a well-balanced, perfect rendition of values” without it.55 Max Factor had a monthly advice column that ran in American Cinematographer for most of a year in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and he subsequently contributed a number of articles on makeup for black-and-white and color film there as well as to Cinematography, International Photographer, and the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers before his death in 1938 (after which his son Francis simply changed his name to Max to continue in his father’s footsteps; other Factor employees wrote for these journals, though less frequently than the original Max, through the 1950s).56 Perc Westmore and Jack Dawn also wrote articles on makeup for American Cinematographer and chapters for a number of books. Would that they all had had their own dedicated makeup and hairdressing journals instead, but no such periodical was published by any affiliated professional organization, or the union, until the 1960s, or close upon the studios’ demise as dedicated filmmaking concerns. One of my tasks therefore became simply to learn how makeup artists as well as hairdressers acquired what Keating calls a “public identity”57 in Hollywood, without which they would not have been able to organize themselves practically or to acquire the clout that made their professional input valuable. He is referring of course to cameramen, who became the more prestigious-sounding cinematographers with the formation of the ASC in 1919. Although there would never be an equivalent moniker for which the makeup man could strive—even makeup artist was already in use by the early 1910s—I will discuss how, just before the Mazda tests, an all-male association was formed that began the process by which its members could become experts and geniuses, advertising their capacity to “make or break” not only players but entire films. Along similar lines, I trace how Max Factor and his sons methodically made their expertise, and their Los Angeles makeup and wig factory, more or less indispensable to the industry as well as profitable for themselves. Factor donated the makeup used in the Mazda tests, and soon afterward his makeup ads would claim that “96% of all make-up used by the Hollywood stars and motion picture studios is Max Factor’s.” And although his company had several serious rivals over time, this would remain the case until movie stars themselves became less interesting to the public than rock stars, fashion models, or television personalities. “Percy” Westmore, then at First

18 • All for Beauty

National, also makes an appearance in the tests, both as a makeup man and as a Factor representative. One of the most frankly entertaining elements of the story I trace is the complex relationship of the Westmores and Factor in the 1930s— at some moments allies, at others fierce competitors, even enemies. The Mazda tests also included the input of actor Lon Chaney, whose film career depended on transformation and disguise. As film historian Alice Maurice writes, “all of Chaney’s performances were to some degree ‘about’ disguise. . . . Chaney’s star persona was unique for its time in this sense—the more hidden Chaney’s ‘real face’ was in a film, the more his presence as a performer was referenced.”58 Ironically, the industry’s switch from silent-era orthochromatic film stock to the more sensitive panchromatic—the different lighting requirements for which the tests were evaluating—would make some of Chaney’s stage-based makeup and wig techniques excessively obvious, a fear he poignantly expressed in the paper he wrote for the Academy’s “artistic” session. The association of character makeup with disguise is echoed by the comments of Bette Davis about her colleague and sometimes costar Paul Muni. Davis believed that the elaborate sublimation of his features made impossible the “familiarity with certain physical attributes that are ever present in each performance. Mr. Muni seemed intent on submerging himself so completely that he disappeared.”59 In contrast, the looks I investigate are presented in Hollywood films as the faces of ordinary people, people meant at base to be like “us,” the spectators, who in turn take the looks of movie stars as something to emulate, strive for, or conversely resent and rebel against. However, I do discuss makeup-based aging in my final chapter, partly because I am now old myself but also, more pertinently, because actors who have been artificially aged are still supposed to look like their younger selves. Aging thereby continues to use the crafts to negotiate and represent beauty and handsomeness, sometimes in surprising ways. (Moreover, many of the materials and methods engineered for the creation of monsters, historical personages, and supernatural beings were used to fabricate the aging face and body.) At times, makeup artists and hairdressers also employed mechanical cosmetic procedures for making an actor look years younger. In short, when I began this project, it felt constrained, if not overwhelmed, on one end by the outsize influence of the Westmores and Max Factor, and on the other end by the crafts’ lack of presence in academic scholarship—so much so in the latter instance that I initially thought about framing my study through what is by now the well-worn trope of invisibility. As James Naremore writes in his book Acting in the Cinema—which notably does include a short section on makeup (as an “aid” to performance)—“Certain forms of makeup [have] become the most truly invisible of movie crafts. Even when a film seems to be giving us the actor unadorned, the effect can be deceiving: Orson Welles [in Citizen Kane, 1941] was as elaborately designed when he played the young Charles Foster Kane as when he played the dying old man; and Barbara Stanwyck wears as much makeup at the end of Stella Dallas [1937], when she is

Introduction • 19

ostensibly plain, as she does in the earlier parts of the film, when she is ostensibly gaudy.” (Neither film has a credit for makeup or hairdressing; Robert Stephanoff was the lead makeup artist on Stella Dallas, and Maurice Seiderman created and applied Kane’s many looks.) Stanwyck is really not wearing as much makeup at the end of Stella Dallas as she does in earlier scenes, but her appearance did remain no less carefully “contrived,” to paraphrase Naremore about Hollywood’s screen faces generally.60 But I quote Naremore here to make a larger point: that it is only a slight exaggeration to say that many of Hollywood’s below-the-line crafts have at one time or another been called “invisible arts”: books on matte painting, dialogue editing, screenwriting, camera tracking, and film music all feature “the invisible art of ” in their titles.61 It was thus hard to come up with an original organizing approach because my arguments are perforce similar to those of others who have written on ostensibly equally invisible crafts. Keating’s lighting book opens, for example, by saying that “the art of Hollywood lighting remains so subtle that it usually escapes our attention,” and the same would be true of much beauty makeup and hairdressing. He is interested in not only the techniques but also the conventions of lighting, the varied functions that the conventions served, and how they were discussed and talked about both as potentialities and as limitations—“limitations [that] made the use of certain lighting strategies seem inevitable, and others inconceivable.”62 Substitute makeup and hairdressing (or again most other subsidiary film crafts) for lighting, and the task would unquestionably be similar. Keating does usefully note the logistical as well as aesthetic problems that the studio’s emphasis on “glamour” produced, laying out the “conflicting conventions” that cinematographers in the studio era were faced with: “When was glamour more valuable than storytelling? When was pictorial quality more valuable than realism?” As he puts it, “Glamour lighting did not even support the ideals of figure-lighting, since the most artistic figure-lighting was supposed to reveal the depths of a fictional character, not to idealize the surface of a star.” And he quotes Irving Thalberg’s reported claim that he did not care what lighting scheme was used: “My actors have got to look great, and actresses have to look beautiful. That’s where the money is, right?” But makeup and hairdressing were also important to looking “great” or “beautiful,” and again Keating mentions neither craft, beyond noting that the struggle between “aesthetic idealism . . . and the star-oriented strategy of the studios was one of the defining conflicts of Hollywood cinematography.”63 In this schema, makeup and hair perforce fall into the “star-oriented” category, but I will argue that, past the 1920s, cinematographers interested in “aesthetic idealism” were equally if not more reliant on the expertise of makeup artists than the other way around, whether the film was shot on black-and-white or color stock. This, in turn, can complicate even formal analysis of many studio-era films, especially when the actor being lit and shot is a female star.

20 • All for Beauty

For example, Keating discusses a “remarkable scene” in the black-and-white High Sierra (1941) in which “top-billed star” Ida Lupino’s face, with a bruise near her left eye and a bloody cut on her forehead, is illuminated by a “low, hard keylight, imitating the effect of a table lamp. It is important to be clear about why this is such an unusual scene,” Keating writes. “The salient point is not that [cinematographer Tony Gaudio] has sacrificed the narrative to create an extravagant, moody effect. Quite the contrary: the striking thing is that Gaudio is committed to storytelling here—so committed that he is willing to sacrifice glamour in the interest of appropriate characterization.”64 While I concur absolutely with Keating’s assessment of the lighting, I would point out that, but for the small, carefully applied injuries, Lupino’s cosmetically enhanced features and slightly mussed but clean and stylish coiffure remain flawlessly beautiful even under harsh narrative circumstances, bespeaking her both as a star and the story’s heroine. In a sense, that flawlessness is what Gaudio’s lighting reveals as well. Keating also parses a scene in the Technicolor melodrama Leave Her to Heaven (1945), analyzing the ways in which cinematographer Leon Shamroy “takes Technicolor lighting in a mannerist direction, pushing the pictorialism to the point where it dominates all the other functions” and creating different “color temperatures” on star Gene Tierney’s face.65 Yet it is clear from the color frame enlargement Keating provides that Tierney’s face already had certain “color temperatures” supplied by Ben Nye’s makeup design, as was the case with other dramatic moments in the film, such as Tierney’s self-inflicted but gradual death from poisoning, in which some—but not all—of her features are treated differently. And again, the Factor cosmetics used to contour and enhance Tierney’s face also helped to support Shamroy’s goals because, as products, they were formulated to absorb just enough of the light directed at them without producing a flat or pasty look. If they did not function in this way they could ruin the shot, as happened in early Technicolor films that used makeup developed for blackand-white stock. Perc Westmore was “horrified” when Marilyn Miller’s face in Sally (1929), shot on two-strip Technicolor, “turned up a bright red in the rushes. On checking, we found that her face had picked up a red reflection from the redand-white checkered cover of the table she was leaning on.”66 By the transition to three-strip Technicolor in the second half of the 1930s, Factor had already spent months ensuring that such problems were obviated before studios shot tests, much less feature films, with the new technologies, and provided instructions to makeup artists about what shades and methods of application would produce the most “natural” image on the screen. To be sure, from the way that Keating and others refer to glamour it is undoubtedly meant to encompass makeup and hairdressing, if not as discrete crafts. Stephen Gundle, in his book Glamour, writes that glamour “is best seen as an alluring image that is closely related to consumption. It is an enticing and seductive vision that is designed to draw the eye of an audience. It consists of a retouched or perfected representation of someone or something whose purpose

Introduction • 21

it is to dazzle and seduce whoever gazes on it.” The reference to photographic retouching is interesting here, for the earliest discourses about film makeup considered it to be a sort of a priori version of the retouching commonly employed with the large-scale portrait negative—an analogy, as I explore, mobilized continually in the ensuing decades, even after retouching as a concept was transmuted into the improvement-based correction in the 1930s. And not surprisingly, for Gundle the “most complete embodiment of glamour that there has ever been is the Hollywood film star” (he devotes a chapter to the topic). Gundle’s only reference to cosmetics, however, is to the way that Max Factor “highlighted the artifice of Hollywood make-up, celebrating the artificiality of the made-up face as proof of the democratization of beauty.”67 But even corrective makeup was supposed to create a “natural” appearance, and advice from Hollywood’s experts was virtually never couched in terms that highlighted “artifice.” That said, many did—and do—see the artifice in and of Hollywood’s madeup faces and styled coiffures, as an excoriating 1939 New York Times article called “A Glance at That Awful Thing Called Glamour” suggests. The piece points to the “basic fallacy of the glamour concept” as “strictly an applied art: a beauty not even skin deep which melts in the sun, streaks in the rain, grows straight and stringy on damp days, peels and rubs off—a mask to be removed at night, exposing the tired, all-too-human tissues beneath.” The author also claims that glamour “ruins actresses, making them vain and consequently lazy,” although he admits at least that men, too, were subject to its requirements: “Gable has managed to survive the pinning back of his ears with adhesive tape for full-face shots (in which he was said to suggest an angry elephant); it remains to be seen whether Robert Taylor will live down his artificial widow’s peak.” A movie actor’s tears, too, betray the “inescapably naturalistic art” of the cinema if they are from a menthol blower that made the eyes water or the application of thinned-out glycerin on the cheeks.68 More recent commentators, perhaps most famously Edgar Morin in Les stars (1957), also take glamour to be a product as well as an attribute, a commercialized value the maintenance of which preoccupied most if not all of Hollywood’s artists and craftspeople as well as executives and studio heads, who believed that it was what audiences went to the cinema to see. Indeed, for Morin, “Beauty is the actress in the movies. The star can be entirely inexpressive.” The “made-up face” of the female star thus becomes not a fallacy but “an ideal type. . . . Makeup accentuates, stylizes, and definitively achieves a beauty with neither fault nor shadow, perfectly harmonious and perfectly pure.” Only close-ups of the human face without makeup, Morin writes, can “transform the countenance into a continent and initiate us into the richest of human geographies.”69 Yet even Morin was clearly affected by the “ideal types” found in Hollywood films, whose geography was certainly different but to my mind no less “rich,” especially given the “out-of-the-ordinary” star faces on which beauty makeup was so often applied. Whether beauty makeup artists and hairdressers or cosmetics manufacturers were ever able to operate according to an “aesthetic idealism” rather than a

22 • All for Beauty

“star-oriented” strategy I will leave to the reader to decide at the end of this book. But even if the primary task was to keep stars looking “great” or “beautiful,” everyone in any studio’s makeup and hairdressing department was also tasked with telling a film’s story effectively, and at times they must have felt equally burdened by the persistence of directives like Thalberg’s. Ensuring that MGM aquatic star Esther Williams was as lovely swimming into Technicolor underwater close-ups as she was on dry land in the 1940s and 1950s required a level of experimentation and innovation that made dealing with the mere sweatiness of more normative musical performers—a huge problem on its own, for hair as well as makeup—seem straightforward by comparison.70 And if beauty makeup became the baseline for normative appearance in more genres than one would expect, multitudes of biographies and autobiographies of actors and directors indicate that they, too, alternately embraced and fought against it, as with the famous stories about producer David Selznick’s exploitation of his new star Ingrid Bergman, imported from Sweden in 1939, as the “Nordic Natural” because she refused to allow her eyebrows to be plucked. Yet Bergman was meticulously polished and coiffed with beauty makeup for all of her Hollywood films, just as she had been, and even more obviously, in the European films that brought her to Selznick’s attention. Nor did Selznick allow Bergman to be photographed or even seen publicly without having been carefully styled according to some agreedupon complex of convention and originality first, even as he denied the full extent of his star’s manufacture. In fact, there were few, if any, Hollywood genres in which beauty makeup was not employed, even period pictures. As fashion historian Alicia Annas argues in her essay “The Photogenic Formula: Hairstyles and Makeup in Historical Films,” “modern” makeup was crucial to maintaining the level of visibility and recognizability on which stardom depended—Chaney’s or Muni’s images notwithstanding—regardless of the era being represented. Hair and wigs could be a bit less anachronistic, but if “both studios and stars ended up locked into a modern makeup image no matter what the period of a film,” in Annas’s words,71 the photogenic formula nevertheless clearly varies from star to star and from movie to movie—sometimes subtly, sometimes accompanied by a press release by Max Factor or a Westmore. Indeed, although she does not mention it, the formula was almost literally encoded in the studios’ chart system for beauty makeup for men and women, which detailed the precise application of products by actor. A chart theoretically could be handed to any craftsperson at any studio—and accompany an actor, like Kim Novak on Vertigo, who was loaned out—to achieve the same cosmetic look. But charts were not always followed, whether because powerful stars could make alterations of their own or because subaltern makeup artists adjusted them on the set. In a sense, then, I employ Annas’s photogenic formula as a thread—or weft, to use a wig and false-eyelash term—to tie my study together. As the rendering of fashionable beauty or handsomeness located always in the “present” rather than any historical past, I take

Introduction • 23

Makeup card, by William Tuttle, for Eleanor Parker as a “young girl” in Interrupted Melody (1955, makeup credit William Tuttle). There are several such cards for all the narrative circumstances of Parker’s character, including hospitalization and performing onstage as an opera singer. William Tuttle papers, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

the formula as the beginning rather than the end of exploration, for it changes across time, and for different reasons, even when at any moment it may appear to be making everyone look “the same.”72 I also appreciate, and was inspired by, Keating’s invocation of the work of historian James Lastra, who in turn draws on David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s canonical study The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 in order to complicate their notion of classical style. As Keating writes of the “notable shift in emphasis” of Lastra’s study on sound technology, “Hollywood was not a single institution; it was composed of several institutions that were simultaneously competing and overlapping. These institutions shared a general set of principles (such as the commitment to storytelling), but each institution may have interpreted those principles in different ways. In order to understand Hollywood as a whole, we need to pay more attention to these individual institutions, with their specific agendas, their specific cultures, and their specific ideals.”73 This is even more applicable to makeup and hairdressing than to lighting because of the overlapping motives of designers and manufacturers who were not only creating the looks of a story’s characters in diverse genres with particular practical as well as aesthetic requirements but also

Debbie Reynolds in a hair test for Singin’ in the Rain (1952, hair credit Sydney Guilaroff). John Truwe papers (scrapbook), Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Introduction • 25

often selling their own services, product lines, and advice columns and manuals off the screen. Costume design, too, had identities and meanings beyond film texts, but its products were arguably more expensive—and less “personal,” as Annas puts it74—than the cosmetics that spectators could and did acquire easily and, usually, cheaply. Even instructions for how to create this or that star’s coiffure were published in fan magazines every month. I engage all of these tensions and lacunae in the following chapters, along with others derived from the dialectic within Hollywood’s construction of movie stars and would-be stars between the natural and the contrived, the realistic and the highly stylized, the plausible and the almost risibly implausible. Even when Hollywood is looking back at its own past, older star looks are often conveniently pointed to as embarrassing in their excesses or strange practices—excesses and practices that Hollywood itself created or represented. I seek ways to parse the history of beauty makeup and hairdressing through Keating’s “potentialities and limitations” as centered on particular, sometimes competing, desires: what the studios wanted for their actors, what the actors wanted for themselves, what a film narrative demanded or at least suggested, and finally what makeup and hair designers and artisans wanted to accomplish for their own aesthetic or commercial purposes. That perfection ultimately became the accepted goal of beauty makeup— which is allied to but again not necessarily synonymous with glamour—is perhaps made most apparent by the lapses that my obsessive interest in the topic has helped me to find in virtually any studio-era movie that I watch: visible wig or toupee joins, roving lip lines, improbable eyebrows, or the tuft of hair that sticks off the back of Humphrey Bogart’s head after he removes his hat early in The Maltese Falcon (1941). That tuft is not terribly obvious, and there is plenty going on in the scene to take our minds, and our eyes, off of it; few would notice it except by accident, or if one were looking—as I inevitably do now—for such things on purpose. This book is not a list of flubs, however, nor do I in the main make judgments about whether a makeup or coiffure is “good” or “bad” or discuss them in a fashion sense. (In other words, I will not spend much time on the purportedly scandalous influence of Joan Crawford’s excessive lipstick on young women spectators in the 1930s, or Veronica Lake’s notorious peekaboo bang during World War II.)75 Nor do I discuss dental work or who had plastic surgery or on what feature, although these were so common that even fan magazines devoted attention to both from time to time.76 I attend primarily to how beauty and handsomeness functioned in different narrative and industrial contexts—allowed for some, denied for others—and how and why deviations from perfection were instantiated as failure. We all go through our lives with weird hairs sticking out or with lipstick on our teeth or with odd smears of this or that product in unexpected places, because it is normal for such things to happen. But in the movies were any of these to be foregrounded they would have to be read as comic, pathetic, or even tragic moments, because by the end of the 1920s virtually no

26 • All for Beauty

young and nominally attractive star—even if sporting bruises, smudges of dirt, or a scar—was consistently photographed in anything other than what was, at base, carefully crafted visual perfection. (Warner Bros. even had a staff “hair disheveller,” Helen Turpin, in the 1930s; she ultimately became the studio’s head of hairdressing.) Only in the 1950s would this begin, gradually, to change, and then mainly in particular “realistic” genres that were themselves influenced by live television and European films. Rather than pondering beauty makeup and hairdressing as “invisible” crafts, then, it ultimately seems more useful to view them as the industry did, as indispensable but taken for granted. This point of view is underscored by a 1938 story in Variety that refers to makeup and hair artists as “the more or less forgotten folks among the film industry’s technical divisions,” with the increase in the use of Technicolor suddenly making “producers makeup-conscious.”77 Stars were often used to endorse cosmetic and other personal products in very visible ways as well. Beauty makeup, especially, therefore occupies a space of paradox, made up of valueinflected tropes involving the natural and the glamorous, presence and absence, visibility and invisibility. Journalist Jake Page, in a 2000 Smithsonian article on Michael Westmore’s character creations for film and television, trenchantly calls makeup a “disposable art,” which alludes to its nature as both transient and without practical value.78 Even Local 706, the crafts’ union, does not have organized archives or much detailed material about its own history, although there is now a push to create a “historical committee,” the union’s first.79 If that committee is created, I hope it considers this book an essential resource for understanding how makeup and hairdressing became, and operated as, film-specific crafts and departments from the first silent one-reelers through the end of the studio era. My organization is as follows. Instead of taking the achievements of Max Factor or the Westmores as my starting point, or skipping to the mid-1920s (or later), when many of the major studios had already consolidated into the wellcapitalized structures that would persist into later decades, for the first chapter I went back to the beginning. There are few studio records from the early silent period, so I utilized trade and technical publications and fan magazines, books about filmmaking, autobiographical accounts, and acting manuals contemporary to the era to ascertain how and when the crafts, and those who practiced them on people other than themselves, were identified and characterized, both within the growing industry and to a public ever more fascinated with films and their stars. While I have spent many months in motion picture archives and libraries over the years, my research was facilitated here (as in the rest of the book) by the online availability, through the remarkable Media History Digital Library, of large amounts of primary material one once had to travel long distances to see.80 My second and third chapters focus on the roughly thirty-five-year “classical” period following the transition to synchronized sound at the end of the 1920s. I divide the study along this well-worn axis for reasons not related to sound as such, although actors speaking and singing did necessitate the development of

Introduction • 27

cosmetics that did not crack or craze with the increased facial mobility of takes uninterrupted by intertitles. Rather, as I discuss in chapter 2, the transition to sound happens to have been coincident with both the full-scale switch from orthochromatic to panchromatic stock and the formation of the first professional body nominally comprising makeup artists, the Motion Picture Make-Up Artists Association. Each of these events transformed makeup and hairdressing on a number of levels, from the formulation of transparent cosmetics and the refinement of wigmaking to who would apply them and under whose authority. While I could find no information about the all-male organization in any scholarly source, it turned out to be crucial to how the crafts, and their gender divisions, evolved over the next decade and functioned within the studios’ hierarchical divisions of labor. I wanted to elucidate who performed what tasks, and ostensibly why; what recruitment and training practices were instituted and followed; and how workers were organized (or conversely were prevented from doing so), remunerated, and credited, both before and after the chartering of Local 706 in 1937. In addition to the resources employed for chapter 1, I also scoured Hollywood labor histories, and benefited greatly from the help and documentation provided by Sue Cabral-Ebert, the president from 2003 to 2018 of Local 706 in Hollywood as well as a practicing makeup artist herself (Michael Westmore began his career as a union apprentice in 1961). Although some frustrating lacunae remain in the account, I found the research for this chapter among the most exciting, if at times dismaying, that I have ever undertaken. In chapter 3, I explore the same temporal terrain but now with a focus on department organization and routine (Michael Westmore’s prodigious memory was valuable here too). I investigate how both makeup artists and hairdressers increasingly identified themselves as creative artists in the 1930s, even as the studios’ push for economy and efficiency during the deepening Depression led to further standardization and routinization of much of their work. The segregation of labor both within and among different unions and guilds discussed in chapter 2 also led to turf wars with cinematographers, all of which was affected, and affected by, the profligacies of the star system across different genres and modes. Throughout these chapters and the often vexing ideological issues they raise about gender, race, and power, I address the off-the-screen commerce of expertise, for want of a better term, that resulted from cosmetics manufacturers and studio personnel using stars and films in order to sell their own products and reputations in the vast and lucrative, but also fashion-based, consumer marketplace. The book’s final chapter focuses on films—the proof, as it were, of the chemical and practical innovations and techniques that were developed for makeup and hair to look at once “normal” and glamorous on the screen as opposed to the theater stage or the street. I discuss how facial components—skin and its tones, eyes and eyebrows, and lips, as well as hair and wigs—were calibrated and

28 • All for Beauty

recalibrated in ostensible service to characterization and narrative. The primary concern here is how makeup and hair constructed and defined beauty and handsomeness, glamour and ordinariness, across all stages of adult life in a range of films and genres.81 Sometimes the crafts are used without nuance, other times in remarkably interesting and subtle ways, or conversely withheld from certain types of roles or professions. The formal and visual analysis undertaken for this chapter, especially, benefited from digital technologies that allow makeup and hairdressing to be examined frame by frame—and publicity photographs by high-resolution enlargement, which can reveal the “hair lace” at the edges of wigs and toupees or how lip lines have been altered or blemishes removed or hidden— at a level of detail that in the period I investigate could hardly be imagined.82 Following a brief epilogue, an appendix provides a collated list of studio department heads from 1930—when makeup and, sometimes, hairdressing began to be recognized in published studio personnel lists—until 1965. If I have been faced with the usual documentation problems that affect Hollywood craft historians, the gaping holes in my puzzle are matched by equally challenging areas of exaggerated clarity because of the outsize personalities, like Factor and the Westmores, who have loomed so large for such a long time that their stories have been accepted as the last word. But even the blind alleys I found myself in turned out to be intriguing, as when I sought to document when and where makeup first became a presence in the U.S. commercial film industry. A 1915 piece about an award given to “Dick Leslie, Vitagraph’s able make-up man,” in Motion Picture News seemed promising, given that he was also listed in the Motion Picture News Studio Directory in 1916 as a Vitagraph actor and an “expert make-up artist” (as are several other actors). But the 1915 piece does not discuss cosmetics at all. Instead, it comments on how Leslie “made up the attractive souvenir program” for the evening—including arranging photographs “of practically every member of the studio”—which implies that “make-up” could also mean print editing.83 Worse, a 1917 column in Moving Picture World defines the “make-up man” as the person who “cuts the negative and assembles it for the final printing in the celluloid press,” such that “make-up” referred to a type of movie editing as well, at least with regard to the “animated news film,” as early newsreels were called.84 I would find these “make-up men” mentioned, though with less and less frequency, as late as the mid-1920s. (Interestingly, I do not recall ever coming across references to make-up men in academic studies of film editing, perhaps because no one researching editing would pay attention to articles about makeup in any of its iterations.) I conclude this introduction with a confession. If I have seemed to cast aspersions on any Hollywood historian for not explicitly writing about the fact that, by the end of the 1920s, essentially no costumed film actor arrived on a studio set or an interior or exterior location—to be lit and filmed, and later the movie in which they appeared promoted and publicized—without having had their

Introduction • 29

Left, Rita Hayworth with makeup man Robert Schiffer in 1952. (Photo by Lippman. Collection of the author.) Right, Hayworth with hairdresser Helen Hunt having her hair cut and dyed for The Lady from Shanghai (1947). Bison Archives and Hollywood Historic Photos.

faces expertly made up and their hair dressed first, I was no paragon in that regard. If I discussed Hayworth’s image change in the 1930s, or the publicity stunt of Columbia hairdresser Helen Hunt cutting the star’s then long red hair and dying it blond for Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai in 1947; or noted Hayworth’s close friendship with Robert Schiffer and Hunt and the like, otherwise I, too, ignored the crafts as forms of trained and skilled labor and at least potential artistry. (I am rectifying the situation in some of my other work as well.)85 And while I had what I thought were sound historical reasons for doing so, I also used “glamour” in the title of an anthology about stars of the 1930s without specific reference to cosmetics or hair.86 Just the past several years, however, have seen a burgeoning of work that can be said to circulate around, if not center on, Hollywood’s relationship to the beauty of women and occasionally men off the screen. There are now books on lipstick alone and another just about eyebrows, in addition to new histories of cosmetics and hair in general. The internet is dotted with makeup-focused websites such as themakeupgallery.com and Australian James Bennett’s essential cosmeticsandskin.com, as well as blogs and videos by beauty gurus of all sorts. I therefore now think of this project as adding my voice to a developing public conversation, one that had been desultory and marked by diffidence and long stretches of silence but that now is growing louder, more intense, and more

30 • All for Beauty

crowded—in the manner of a studio-era makeup and hairdressing department in the early morning, perhaps. It is clear that many more of us are “joining hands,” if not “in the service of loveliness” then with the worthy goal of understanding its creation and function in an important and influential medium of twentiethcentury art and popular culture.

1

Makeup and Hairdressing as Studio Crafts The Silent Period In this chapter, I begin the process of understanding how straight makeup and hairdressing went from being something that actors managed themselves—with initially little in the manner of feedback or oversight beyond the results that appeared on the screen—to crafts that could efficiently serve the broad goals of Hollywood’s hierarchized mode of film production. Many if not most such practices, as is well known, evolved from the need to maintain visual continuity across scenes that were shot out of sequence or days or weeks apart. But makeup and hairdressing also became major factors in the creation of characters whom audiences would care about and admire or conversely could be cued to loathe or ignore. As the industry moved from the wildcat days of the turn of the twentieth century to a more Taylorist, and star-dependent, factory system in the 1920s, makeup and hairdressing, or failures thereof, introduced problems that, had they not been solved or at least ameliorated, would substantially have undermined that system and thus Hollywood’s profitability. Ultimately beauty makeup, for white men and women, would form the practical basis of Hollywood stardom as an achievement located in a kind of ostensibly “natural” visual perfection that was shown to be possible for some but not others.1 For female players, it became standard even when a film’s narrative expressly called for it to be—or maintained that it was—altogether absent. Conversely, the faces of male actors in straight roles were supposedly bare of anything but the “character of the individual,” in 31

32 • All for Beauty

cinematographer John Alton’s words,2 despite the foundation, eyeliner, and lipstick—not to mention pomades and toupees—that showcased or defined their features.3 The largely chronological approach that I take here is again the result of realizing how little we knew about the crafts’ history other than what had come down to us as anecdotes written years, even decades, after the fact. While I set out assuming that I would be adding nuance and detail to these canonical versions of events—most if not all of which starred George Westmore, his sons, and Max Factor—it turned out that they did not fully comport with the complicated realities of the silent era in particular. Not until the late 1920s do named individuals like the elder and younger Westmores or Factor receive real attention in the press on their own—no small amount of it self-generated—although Factor already had been working in the industry for years. Moreover, despite the subsequent historical prominence of these men, evidence suggests that it was largely women who created the first “realistic” straight makeup, even as the “make-up man,” as he was called by 1916 (except when quoting directly, I will dispense with the hyphen throughout this book), would predominate in the end. Women in their ordinary lives created the looks of movie stars off the screen first, and as Hollywood turned to the casting of “types”—people who already physically resembled the roles they were playing—rather than stage-trained actors in the 1910s, women gave as much makeup advice, in person and in print, as any of the familiar male geniuses and experts.4 Indeed, the interaction of women as spectators with early motion picture makeup and hairdressing practices instantiates an interesting chicken-and-egg conundrum, one of several that mark the period. I begin by addressing two of them. First, as is well known, motion pictures are often invoked as major factors in turning ordinary women’s cosmetic use into normative, indeed indispensable, components of public femininity rather than signs of moral looseness or depravity. Aside from some advertisements not related to films as such or even endorsed by anyone associated with them, however, there is comparatively little mention of makeup—which again as a generic term often comprised hairdressing as well—in trade journals or fan magazines before roughly 1912. This period coincides with the heyday of the “picture personality,” as Richard deCordova calls the earliest featured players, who were defined by and discussed in relation to their intertextual relationships to films and film acting rather than their personal lives or anything else they did off the screen.5 By 1913–1914, according to deCordova, questions about the player’s “real life” became the primary focus of the bulk of fan-directed discourse, which he asserts was one of the defining characteristics of the movie star. (On the “make-up man” as film editor during this period, see this book’s introduction.) But before the end of the nineteenth century, stage actors, from Lillie Langtry and her talc-based “Lillie Powder” on, had already helped to popularize cosmetics use for women and girls in print media through their endorsements of

Makeup, Hairdressing as Studio Crafts • 33

and testimonials about the importance of makeup and associated products to their physical attractiveness. Historian Marlis Schweitzer, in her article about stage actresses and the “democratization of beauty” in the early twentieth century, claims that by 1910 women “utilized a variety of techniques to recreate stage fashions, copying actresses’ hairdos, dress styles, and other accessories” in what one advertiser characterized as “the female consumer’s ‘emulative eagerness.’” Stage actresses proved particularly appealing as models given that they were already known as experts in the “artificial processes that transformed [them] from attractive women into exceptional beauties”—processes, as well as products, that held out promise that they could “do the same for every woman.”6 However, if stage actresses were the first “acknowledged beauty experts,” in Schweitzer’s words, of the modern era and had graduated by the 1910s from “social pariahs to trendsetters” in terms of cosmetics use, deCordova conversely and convincingly details the many ways that film actors, who by that point tended to be younger than any of their theatrical cohorts who chose to work in the new industry, sought from the earliest years of narrative filmmaking to distinguish themselves from stage performers through publicity and promotional material that emphasized the comparative naturalness, normality, and ordinariness of stepping in front of a camera—in sunlight—rather than disguising oneself to appear at night on a stage as someone other than who you “really” were in actual as well as visual terms.7 In turn, Schweitzer claims that although by 1910 “cinema had become one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the United States,” it was cinema’s “questionable status” that kept film performers out of advertisements until 1916, when “Mary Pickford began to endorse Pompeian Beauty products.”8 Schweitzer also makes it clear that, by the mid-1910s, “women who did not use cosmetics were somehow less attractive and less ‘natural’ than those who did. A ‘natural’ beauty was no longer the woman who eschewed cosmetics, but rather the woman who embraced them.”9 But it seems less likely that it was stage actresses who effected this change. Partly but not exclusively through the growing importance of the close-up during this time, it was the young women of the cinema who most forcefully tied the term natural, even in black and white, to making up one’s face and dressing one’s hair and who ultimately transformed the use of certain kinds of cosmetics into signs of respectable modernity. (As makeup historian Fenja Gunn reminds us, “clever simulations of natural beauty are far removed from the appearance of a truly ‘natural’ face, which would be totally devoid of cosmetics.”)10 While I am aware of no indications that D. W. Griffith required that Blanche Sweet wear a particular sort of makeup to perform the role of an ordinary young working woman in The Lonedale Operator (1911), for example, nor Dorothy Bernard in the narratively similar A Girl and Her Trust (1912), both women have groomed and darkened eyebrows and eyelids and are wearing lip rouge and powder, but not to an extent that would read across the footlights of a proscenium stage. They have merely subtly accentuated their features, possibly in response to seeing

34 • All for Beauty

themselves as well as others on the screen before them, but perhaps also simply in concert with what many young women were doing in their daily lives across the country during a period in which, as a 1947 history of cosmetics in America put it, “the entire feminine world had become cosmetic conscious” as women entered the workforce in ever greater numbers.11 (In 1918 actor Alice Joyce, in an article titled “How to Make-up,” stated that “at least sixty per cent of femininity” then applied cosmetics “to their cheeks, eyebrows, and lips.”)12 Cosmetics use, in other words, became respectable and widespread at precisely the time that cinema became popular as a middle-class form of public amusement, but the use of cosmetics by ordinary women and girls was also employed to make young women on the screen look normative in relation to their audience. A second chicken-and-egg problem with ramifications for film makeup and hairdressing is the turn in theatrical stagecraft and acting from a “presentational” to a “representational” mode of performance, or from what film historian Roberta Pearson calls the “histrionic” to the “verisimilar” code of acting.13 “The standardization of the histrionic code,” Pearson writes of the acting in Griffith’s Biograph films, “had imposed a certain uniformity on dramatic characters: with each emotion and state of mind represented by a certain prescribed pose or gesture, characters expressed themselves in precisely the same fashion. A young woman and an old man both portrayed grief by raising the back of the hand to the forehead.”14 In contrast, the verisimilar mode “depended a great deal on use of the eyes and face,”15 especially what Janet Staiger calls “the suppressed-emotion acting style” of early cinema, in which “facial expression through eyes and lips became ‘an art within itself.’”16 Pearson quotes Griffith’s remarks on “the grim, coldblooded, truth-in-detail telling camera” before which actors needed to be “real,” especially in close shots that showed the face. “The close-up,” Griffith continued, “enabled us to reach real acting, restraint, acting that is a duplicate of real life.”17 Yet there is no easy linear trajectory here either. Even after the close-up became more common in the mid-1910s, there was still what Barry Salt calls a “patternless diversity of acting styles” in cinema during the period, with some film as well as stage actors being lambasted for being too histrionic, others for not being histrionic enough, depending on the preference of the critic—and the audience.18 “We shall probably never know,” Pearson writes, “whether the close-up preceded the change in performance style or vice versa, but we do know that by 1913 Griffith had fully pledged himself to the verisimilar code, the new style that was to win for motion-picture acting ‘recognition as a genuine art.’”19 And whether one takes this shift as being produced by rather than influencing film acting is less important than the concomitant and widespread assumption by the end of the decade that movie parts were better played by proper “types” than by stage-trained actors pretending to be, and made up to look like, a given character with whom they physically might have had little in common.20

Makeup, Hairdressing as Studio Crafts • 35

Pearson notes that there is not much discussion of film acting as such in early film journals, so it is not surprising that little attention was paid to screen makeup and hair either. Yet examination of the very earliest narrative films, those made before the nickelodeon boom of 1905, helps to remind one graphically that, and in some cases why, makeup and hairdressing needed to evolve into film-specific rather than theatrically based crafts, whether or not a given film included closer shot scales in which human faces occupied the majority of the frame. The first more or less nonfictional actualities, of course, like those of the Lumière brothers in the 1890s, had featured what we would now technically call medium closeups, the faces of Auguste Lumière and his wife and baby at a tea table in one of the first motion pictures projected for an audience in 1895 seeming unremarkable to us today, beyond the quaintness of antique hairdressing or mustache fashions that such films inevitably register. Stage actors May Irwin and John Rice in Edison’s controversial kinetoscope The Kiss (1896), although replicating in close-up a moment in the final scene of their popular stage production The Widow Jones, wear little makeup either, and certainly not the forms that would have been required for theatrical legibility. The same is true of a lesser-known actuality, Something Good—Negro Kiss (1898), released in Chicago by Selig. It is framed less tightly, and the kisses are more numerous than in the earlier film.21 But here too the only makeup worn by Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown, popular vaudeville performers and dance partners of the day, appears to be powder and light eyeliner, although as in The Kiss the hair of both is stylishly cut and dressed. In stark contrast, in early narrative motion pictures that seem conceptualized as a form of canned proscenium theater, shots tend to be taken at some distance, and few human figures are shown other than in full frame. In Georges Méliès’s legendary short film A Trip to the Moon [Le Voyage dans la lune] (1902), for example, there is an obvious abundance of wigs and fake beards and eyebrows among the astronomers, with facial features and even expressions defined or highlighted by painted lines and thick encrustations of greasepaint, as they would be on the stage. Old Man Saturn, especially, is mainly delineated as “old” through a wild white wig and wilder white eyebrows. Peripheral characters, on the other hand, like the workmen banging away on an anvil in the scene in which the spacecraft is built, do not seem to be made up at all, while the formations of scantily clad girls in tights who populate various shots appear more or less as they would across the footlights of a cabaret or small theater. The same wide framing, even in scenes shot outdoors, occurs in Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), and again wigs and mustaches seem to be the dominant, if not the only, mode of facial differentiation, even in the film’s famous final close-up of a desperado “firing” straight into the camera. In a surviving scene from Méliès’s later Delirium in a Studio [Ali Barbouyou et Ali Boef à l’ huile] (1907), the camera is placed closer to the action than in A Trip to the Moon. But the two male characters—the painter is played by Méliès

May Irwin and John Rice in The Kiss (1896); Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown in Something Good—Negro Kiss (1898). Frame enlargements.

Makeup, Hairdressing as Studio Crafts • 37

“Manuel” (uncredited) in Georges Méliès’s Delirium in a Studio [Ali Barbouyou et Ali Boef à l’ huile] (1907). Frame enlargement.

himself—still wear heavy theatrical makeup and wigs, with the chemically inebriated servant marked as stereotypically “Oriental” through his badly fitted topknotted bald cap, slanted black eyebrows, and a long painted-on mustache. The tighter shot scale makes the artificiality of the makeup even more apparent, and inadvertently risible, beyond the knockabout humor and fantasy of the story itself. Ironically, in his “Kinematic Views” of 1907, Méliès wrote about the care with which makeup needed to be designed and applied because of the distorting properties of film stock; he insisted that cosmetics (along with every other element of the mise-en-scène) be in shades of black and white because, if his actors used ordinary rouge on lips or cheeks, “they would be turned into Negroes.” But he did not seem to notice the peculiarities and exaggerations produced by his reliance on “the way they do [things] in the theater” (much less his racist stereotyping).22 Although the weakening of audience fascination with Méliès’s films around 1912 has been attributed to their repetitiveness and his lack of interest in character development, the implausibility of the makeup, or its excessive obviousness in an exhibition context in which spectators increasingly desired to immerse themselves in a more visually “realistic” story world, also likely contributed to the filmmaker’s decline in popularity. That said, if the straight makeup in Griffith’s early work is considered more subtle than in the contemporary films of Méliès, Griffith was no less pernicious in matters of race or ethnicity. Like his later features, Griffith’s shorts are famously rife with ethnic and racial

Blanche Sweet and Francis J. Grandon, Dell Henderson, and Joseph Graybill (all uncredited) in The Lonedale Operator (1911). Frame enlargements.

Makeup, Hairdressing as Studio Crafts • 39

stereotypes, with some of the villains in The Lonedale Operator and The Girl and Her Trust visually identified as such by their painted-on swarthiness and darkly shadowed eyes in addition to intertitles or furtive or violent gestures. Unfortunately, Méliès’s mention of the practical adjustments made necessary by the stock on which he shot his films does not tell us much about it. According to historian Brian Coe, the “first movie films” were shot on material coated with “ordinary” emulsion that was sensitive to blue and violet, and somewhat to green, and hardly at all to yellow and red; it could produce fairly normative white skin tones, but only in bright sunlight.23 There is otherwise little information about the type of stock that any professional filmmaker used before World War I, although based on how Méliès describes his difficulties, he appears to have been dealing with some version of the orthochromatic emulsions available in the United States by the 1910s as well, the manufacture of which would soon be standardized by Eastman Kodak through its participation in Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company (the notorious “Trust”). Orthochromatic stock was sensitive to a broader range of colors—the ortho actually signifying “right” or “correct”—but again not to red, which meant it could be processed with a red safelight, a convenient feature for an increasingly busy and lucrative but also costconscious fledgling industry. (Panchromatic stock, which reproduced colors and tones across a broader range of the visible spectrum, was more expensive than orthochromatic until the late 1920s, but Richard Koszarski maintains that laboratories also resisted it “because its sensitivity to red prevented them from using their traditional red-light illumination during development.”)24 The greater latitude and crispness of orthochromatic stock was achieved at the cost of yet greater lighting requirements, whether daylight or high-intensity arc lights or cooler mercury vapor lamps, the latter of which produced blue and ultraviolet illumination to which orthochromatic film was especially sensitive. Even bright sunlight often had to be augmented by artificial sources. The “electrification of film lighting,” in Patrick Keating’s words, thus went hand in hand with the adoption of orthochromatic stock.25 Despite its many practical advantages, orthochromatic film did turn reds into blacks on the screen, and pinks into gray smudges. It was not just bad wigs and thick or exaggerated greasepaint that would prove problematic to early narrative filmmakers and untrained performers, then, but that the procedures that experienced or “legitimate” actors brought to cinema were often unsuitable for it even when employed subtly. And it was hard to make any cosmetics use subtle given the sheer size of the face in close-up, where “an eye-lash assumes the proportion of the thickness of one’s wrist,” in the words of one makeup man in the 1930s.26 Even a lovely girl in perfectly applied street makeup could look ghastly when the healthy pink of her cheeks was rendered as a mottled gray, her blue eyes and blond eyebrows were bleached to invisibility, and her ruby lips became starkly black. Given all this, it is not surprising that the earliest articles or columns about film makeup and hairdressing are of two sorts: those that praise individual actors for

40 • All for Beauty

the skill and comparative refinement with which they turn themselves into characters far away from their actual age, nationality, class, race, ethnicity, or physical ability and whose performances were judged in terms of how well the makeup worked as a form of near-complete disguise; and those that recoil, for lack of a better term, from the distortions that straight makeup itself often produced in the playing of “types.” These discourses are what I turn to now. References specifically to movie makeup expertise began to appear in the trade press in the early 1910s, applied predominantly to stage actors—virtually all male—who designed and wore their own character makeup in films made on the East Coast. Character makeup would remain important to Hollywood and its films not only in fantasy genres but whenever an actor had to age or grow younger; undergo an extensive transformation because of illness, injury, or deformity; or appear as another race or ethnicity. The makeup itself could then become the point—the “attraction,” to use Tom Gunning’s famous designation of the appeal of much early cinema,27 as in the case of Lon Chaney’s career. Chaney realized, for example, that the size of the close-up and the peculiarities of orthochromatic stock meant that wrinkles and the lines of age needed to be made three-dimensional rather than drawn on the face as lines or even areas of shading. That said, stories that he took his treasured makeup “secrets” with him to his grave when he died in 1930 are hyperbolic, since many of the materials that he used to render scars and alter skin texture or face shape came from the stage and are described in film acting and makeup manuals of the 1910s and 1920s. (We may never know, however, how he created “sightless” eyes, the method for which he entrusted to Cecil Holland, who never publicly divulged it.)28 But Chaney became a master in the subtle application of otherwise familiar materials, building up and manipulating his facial features into those of the fantastical or damaged characters who made him famous.29 (As discussed in chapter 2, some of Chaney’s three-dimensional makeup would still prove too obvious or unworkable for the fine-grained panchromatic stock and yet hotter tungsten lighting of the sound era.) Chaney’s reticence about how he achieved his effects was not uncommon, for many stage actors held their methods closely, as a proprietary advantage if not trademark. But other theatrical actors with expertise in the application of makeup became makeup artists for films, adapting their procedures, with greater or lesser degrees of success, to the requirements of the new medium. The first named movie “makeup artists,” certainly, were or had been stage actors. William West’s “specialty,” a trade paper wrote in 1912, “is character work; he is considered an authority on the art of make-up.”30 Similar terms were used in 1913 to describe William Clifford, “a master of makeup and expression,” and Will E. Sheerer, who was “strong on the importance of make-up, and will, in no circumstance, slight the smallest detail.”31 By 1914, Sidney Bracy had already been called “‘a master of make-up,’ not once but several times, and by men who know the business,”

Makeup, Hairdressing as Studio Crafts • 41

while Carlton King, “the Edison character man and comedian,” was referred to as “one of the greatest makeup artists in moving pictures.”32 In 1916, Albert Roccardi appears to have become the first film actor to be labeled “The Man with a Thousand Faces”: “Mr. Roccardi would be better known to the movie millions were his disguises not so complete. With no two characters alike he might play a hundred parts and not be recognized in a dozen, for only close students of the art of make-up would be able to see underneath the paint.”33 If Roccardi’s name, like that of the others mentioned here, is not familiar—he continued to play character parts as an older man, which he then was, in the early sound era—it is precisely because his disguise was so “complete” (however obvious it looks to our eyes now) that he could not be recognized visually as “himself,” as a picture personality or even a star. By the early 1910s, however, some film outfits appear to have had one or two of these men under contract specifically as makeup artists, whether or not they were hired as such initially or indeed whether they continued as screen players. Louis Fitzroy, for example (another 1913 “master of the art of makeup”), became an assistant director.34 Victor A. Stewart, described in a 1922 book on screen acting as a “recognized expert on make-up” and “one of the greatest authorities on this branch of motion picture work,” acted until at least 1919.35 Carl Axzelle ultimately became a makeup artist and ran the “beard department” as Perc Westmore’s assistant at Warner Bros. in the 1930s after performing in silent films.36 Cecil Holland made his way from England to the United States as a teenager and acted for several East Coast film companies before ending up at Selig in Los Angeles in 1913 (he returned there following service in World War I). And he, too, would be described as both a “make-up artist” and another “Man of a Thousand Faces” (it was Holland who supposedly passed the title on to Lon Chaney) before writing The Art of Make-Up for Stage and Screen, an early makeup manual that included film, in 1927, when he was “now under contract” to MGM (born as a new studio in 1925).37 Chaney wrote, in the introduction to Holland’s book, that Holland was “director of makeup at the Metro-GoldwynMayer studios, which is recognized as the most important position held by any makeup artist in the motion picture business.”38 But while there are various publicity photographs of Holland making up actors at MGM in the 1920s, a fan magazine article about “plastic dentistry” in the movies that same year calls him merely an “M-G-M featured player.”39 In the murkiness of this early history one can discern how strongly the qualifications for being a makeup expert in the 1910s were tied to being a theatrical character actor, a legacy of early cinema’s adoption of stage values and techniques. Adolphe Menjou, in his 1948 autobiography, recalled his first acting role in a 1914 Vitagraph film, describing “the long dressing table with mirrors at which several actors were already putting on make-up, for in those days everybody applied his own grease paint and false whiskers. In fact, a man who was clever with makeup was assured of steady work because of the variety of parts he could play.”40

Albert Roccardi, “The Man with a Thousand Faces,” Motion Picture Classic, January 1916. Media History Digital Library.

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Almost none of the material I have yet come across discusses women in similar terms, although in 1916 “character actress” Margaret Whistler, of Universal, was lauded as “an expert at make-up” (as well as an “artistic dress designer, an architect, and, because of her travels abroad, an authority on foreign sets”).41 But other young women who created film careers, first as picture personalities and then as movie stars by the mid-1910s, represent the competing and arguably far more significant terms to which film makeup and hairdressing would need to adapt if not to create, namely those of artlessness rather than artifice, of naturalness rather than virtuosic masquerade. I frankly am not sure whether the lack of attention paid to women’s expertise in straight makeup, especially, during this time means that it was taken for granted that they knew how to wear cosmetics already, or paradoxically that the women were able to do so in such a manner as to appear not to have made themselves up at all to the men who were evaluating their physical appeal.42 According to film historian Janet Staiger, the closer framing of narrative films after 1908 developed in order to allow the spectator “to see the actor’s facial expression. . . . If character was to be portrayed not by body gesture or posture but by facial expressions, then visibility of the narratively-significant portions of the body was of primary concern. This was apparent to U.S. filmmakers by 1912, when the closer-framed shot [to us now a medium long shot] was already being called ‘the American foreground.’”43 Once facial expression became the major attraction of narrative films, character makeup based on obvious stage techniques would become less and less effective in the verisimilar or representational mode that was a growing element in cinema’s appeal. Instead, the more “realistic” the better. Staiger does not mention makeup in her discussion, perhaps because it was not yet apparent as a craft or a set of techniques—or not as such in connection with other elements of film form like the close-up. But as her photographic illustrations (and the aforementioned Griffith films) attest, even the most “natural” or “realistic” of performers of the early 1910s—male or female—was wearing makeup on eyes, brows, and lips and had artfully arranged hair. A 1911 story cited by Staiger titled “Eyes and Lips” makes those two elements the basis of an “entirely new” art of acting that was “coming into existence through facial expression in the photoplay,” according to critic Louis Reeves Harrison. Harrison maintains that this acting “gracefully” produces a kind of mask: “We all wear masks in our daily intercourse, but . . . the eyes and the lips are most effective in facial expressions of any kind, whether the emotion be open or subdued.”44 Given the lack of mention of makeup, the eyes and lips in this case are implied to be natural, unadorned, their power coming from the shot scale that magnified the face so remarkably in combination with any acting talent that these attractive new photoplayers possessed. Yet once more this article’s four photographic illustrations are all of women who are wearing cosmetics—Mary Pickford is one—which attentive female readers would surely have noticed. If

44 • All for Beauty

they did not, it might have been because the amount was not much more than that sported by readers themselves, or else was comparable to what would have been visible around them everywhere, on the faces of ordinary women whether at home or out in public. A 1913 characterization of Blanche Sweet, then with Griffith at Mutual, is instructive as well: “Although Miss Sweet is only nineteen years of age she is recognized as one of the greatest emotional actresses in the silent drama. Her versatility is said to be remarkable, in that she plays light ingenue roles or portrays extreme characters with equal cleverness. A remarkable case is recorded on the film in which she played the part of a woman of thirty-four years of age and successfully changed to a woman of forty without the aid of makeup. She accomplished the difficult feat of showing the difference in years merely by her finished knowledge of the art of facial expression.”45 The piece does not name the film in which this “remarkable” display occurred, but because of the visible makeup she sports in other films it is difficult to imagine that Sweet was not wearing some here. (A 1914 article in Mutual’s fan magazine also has her “wav[ing] off” the “seemingly indispensable articles” of makeup and wig “proffered by the [female] wardrobe keeper.”)46 Nevertheless, Staiger points to the growing interest in the more “natural” face as the locus of effective film performance, a conception of acting that was not unknown on the stage but that was becoming a major element in the appeal of films and in the growth of the star system. In essence, the beauty that women created for themselves with cosmetics would, adapted for cinema by “experts” and used on men as well, become the basis of movie star looks for the next hundred years. The problem for the “natural” film image, of course, was that, owing to the peculiarities of orthochromatic stock, it was not easy to produce with an unadorned white face in the silent era—or at least not with the degree of attractiveness that audiences had learned to expect from retouched publicity and promotional photographs, or from their own photographic portraits (an affiliation that will be returned to shortly). This disconnect is usefully illustrated by the critical attention paid to makeup as such (for men too) within the verisimilar mode of acting in narrative cinema after 1910, the issues registered by writers whose main point of view about what they were looking at on the screen was horror, disgust, or dismay. Such attitudes had previously been generated mainly by the so-called facial expression films of the nickelodeon age (which are referred to as “grotesque” in the 1911 “Eyes and Lips” feature). Tom Gunning, in his essay on the topic, writes that these brief motion pictures, often racist caricatures, consisted of close-ups of “monsters and giants, their mouths swallowing and chewing,” for viewers “fascinated (and sometimes repulsed) by the new revelations of such unusual sights.”47 The tight framing endowed the faces “with a sense of physical proximity that was particularly startling given the actions portrayed, inviting scrutiny and delivering surprise. While the ideology of the close-up in later narrative cinema invited

Makeup, Hairdressing as Studio Crafts • 45

emotional intimacy, the physical closeness of these early images seems rather to be confrontational and comical.”48 In contrast, the dismay being provoked by faces after 1910 was not strictly speaking a function of the close-up itself—or even necessarily the actions of the eyes and lips—but of what critics, not always coherently, connected to the use, or more to the point the misuse, of makeup itself. In a 1912 book about filmmaking, Frederick A. Talbot invokes horror in relation to the cosmetics that were now adorning the giant screen face. If their use was not reduced “to the minimum,” he warns, the “huge enlargement which the picture undergoes in projection” would render “such artifices”—by which he likely means conventional theatrical greasepaints and other preparations, though he does not say—“hideous.” All cosmetics therefore are for him “practically out of the question,” yet he is also concerned that if faces are not “whitened,” then the impression may be given “that the part has been performed by a negro or mulatto.”49 So on the one hand it was clear that the products being used were not working in film as a verisimilar medium because, especially in the increasingly common close-up, they were too obviously artificial or unflattering, according to the racist discourses of the day. The lure of the mask so “gracefully” produced by the subtle actions of the eyes and lips was undercut when makeup revealed that mask to be calculated and obviously applied. But on the other hand, without makeup a performer might also look “hideous” or wrong for other reasons, ones that increasingly actors seemed unable fully to ameliorate but that were making them into objects of ridicule rather than admiration. The title of Harry Furniss’s “Those Awful Cinematograph Faces” in 1913 makes his point of view immediately clear. A British critic who valorized the representational and verisimilar modes, he too begins with the matter of facial expression. “Cinema faces, as a matter of course, should be absolutely natural,” Furniss writes, “and up to a year or so ago it must be said that they practically were so, but in more recent days I have been impressed by the fact that films . . . are displaying a marked and unfortunate tendency towards quite abnormal facial contortion, and a complete overdoing or ultra-emphasizing of what should rightly be the natural expression.” Because of the close-up, it is now “the play of the features, instead of the play of the author, [that is] made the main consideration. Long practice in the art apparently breeds perpetual facial contortion, and it is this pandering to play of expression that we have to blame for inflicting upon us the everlasting cinematograph grin.”50 But by far Furniss’s strongest criticism, like Talbot’s, is aimed at makeup, the application of which he assumes is the province of actors themselves: “The fact is, that both male and female performers, with a few notable exceptions, sadly overdo the facial make-up for the camera. Some of them, indeed, go so far as to give one the impression that they have blacked their faces to play coon parts, and afterwards only washed their cheeks and foreheads, leaving a heavy deposit of black in the concavities of the face, particularly around and under their eyes.” Furniss also lambastes an unnamed actor whose face painting turns a character

46 • All for Beauty

meant to be “a natural, guileless, unsophisticated maiden in high society” into a “semblance of an abandoned Continental adventuress in highly colored melodrama, or a wicked demoness in pantomime.” He questions why she turned her eyes into “coal-black, coquettish orbs” with lashes “made so extremely jet-black as the thickness of your own hat-pins or your grandmother’s knitting needles,” and heaps scorn on the “mistaken make-up” that added “a good ten or twenty years” to an actor who was “only nineteen.” More generally, Furniss rails against the “blackened eyes and eyebrows arched like semi-circular seams of coal, the painted lips and palpable false whiskers and mustaches, to say nothing of false noses,” that populated films of the day and that were emphasized ever more strongly “in consequence of the tremendously strong lighting power indispensable to the process” of shooting itself. “On the other hand,” Furniss writes, “on the stage of the theater, it is quite an easy matter for an experienced actor to take years off his actual span by dint of a clever make-up.”51 Although Furniss does not name the films, or the actors, he criticizes so extravagantly, what leaps out now is that his descriptions of those “awful cinematograph faces,” again like those of Talbot earlier, both assume the proper rendering of the “natural” white face to be the highest good even of popular cinema and also seem driven by a sort of moral panic about forms of “unnatural” representation. Alice Maurice examines Furniss’s article in her meticulous study of the “racialized rhetoric” of early cinema and its bodies and faces,52 which would persist throughout the studio era in makeup manuals as well as countless discussions of the appropriateness of a shade of greasepaint or powder in relation to whether a white actor appeared to be an “Arab” or a “red Indian” in addition to any number of other racist epithets. Maurice notes in fact that it is “actually a bad makeup job that triggers [Furniss’s] spectatorial (and racialized) nightmare,”53 but again the unadorned face presented problems as well, pulling attention away from the lips and eyes as major components of the suppressed-emotion style of acting that was “the prestigious method of portraying characters,” in Staiger’s words,54 and toward the film face as always potentially a displeasing or inadvertently racialized spectacle. However, if it was becoming clear that making up for the movies would require new materials and techniques, no one seemed to be sure who was qualified either to invent or to adjudicate on such matters. Although some stage stars, most notably Mary Pickford, easily made the transition to straight roles in motion pictures, early fan magazines are also littered with proclamations about the promise of this or that theatrical performer who did not. Even stage-trained actors who had been pronounced “makeup masters” were having to change their ways “before that awful lens which catches everything,” as one actor filming In Mizzoura in 1913 put it, lamenting that in order to make “the joining of hair and beard perfect I’ve had to let my hair grow at the side. I used to be good looking, but now I have long locks over the temples.”55 Griffith’s embrace of the verisimilar code was a substantial factor in Pickford’s success as a plucky young girl who

Makeup, Hairdressing as Studio Crafts • 47

played primarily plucky young girls, and while I will not move too much farther afield into the history of film acting or even the star system as such, at the center of the aforementioned preference for “types” like Pickford—who played “herself,” or what her “self” seemed to resemble physically—was the realization that the most effective screen performers were those who already looked like the characters they were “playing.” Intriguingly, Pickford began her stage career as a tiny child and was a young teenager in her first films in 1909, many of which she made with Griffith, and she was also regarded as something of a style icon. It seems possible that it might have been Pickford who understood the verisimilar code first, and that in fact she, or her popularity as “herself,” helped Griffith then to articulate publicly what demarcated the brand-new art of “photoplaying” from acting on the stage, or really acting at all. Talbot in 1912 had stated that the “cinematographic stage has its own peculiar requirements. The pre-eminent one is that the actor or actress must not only act but look the part. A young man cannot make up to take an old man’s part—he must be an old man. A woman of middle age may on the legitimate stage excel in a young girl’s rôle; but she may not take it on the camera stage.”56 But Blanche Sweet’s or Pickford’s acting “cleverness” aside, screen acting manuals of the day also recognize that being of the right “type” was not alone sufficient for success in photoplaying either. Frances Agnew’s book Motion-Picture Acting (1913) gives some insight into the problems that continued to plague actors and would-be actors even within the type-based verisimilar mode.57 Although the first movie makeup manuals were supposedly not published until 1927, when Cecil Holland’s The Art of Make-Up for Stage and Screen and Harry Barton Oldridge’s Movie Make-up Manual appeared,58 women like Agnew often wrote about film makeup in relationship to acting, always emphasizing the notion of “looking natural” but aware—as Pickford and Sweet, or arguably most urban women of the day, would already have been—that this still required the judicious application of cosmetics (a connection that the Westmores and Max Factor would promulgate as their own insight years later). About types, Agnew certainly takes a rueful tone: Oh, that word “type”! In days of yore, an artist was always an artist. By the aid of make-up and artistic temperament a young man or woman played a character many years his senior, or an older player was likewise considered capable of giving an artistic youthful characterization. . . . Today, the cry of the managers is for types; a child must be played by a child, sweet sixteen must be sweet sixteen, not only in years, but in appearance “off stage” as well as on. . . . Managers are fully aware that facial make-up is a marvelous aid. By its intelligent use a complete change in appearance is possible. It is a wonderful disguise. . . . Of course, it is necessary in the creation of some characters to adhere to these old methods, but for the most part managers to-day demand “types.”59

48 • All for Beauty

Agnew also echoes previous comments about the importance of “natural actions and expressions” on the screen, cautioning would-be film thespians with “Don’t overact! Be natural in all your portrayals, actually living the rôles—for the moment, of course.”60 The discourse of “naturalness” forms the basis of all of her instructions for how to get ahead as an actor in motion pictures, but she understands that there are “very, very few who can boast of remarkable natural beauty,” adding that if this were the case, “cosmetics would be little in demand and there would be no opportunity for the richly paid beauty specialist.”61 In fact, Agnew maintains that between the poles of the “natural” and “beautiful,” on-screen as well as off, lay makeup itself, which she implies was already a component of studio production practices: Rouge, powder, cosmetic, foundation sticks, and cold cream are furnished by most of the studios, but it is far more satisfactory to work with one’s own tools. Very little make-up is used for “straight” parts—that is, a character very like yourself in age, type, and appearance. The straight make-up is the simplest and most frequently used, especially in photoplays where the question of types is so carefully considered. This consists of a delicate foundation of flesh color grease paint, the tint a little deeper for men, in order to give a faint ruddy appearance. Just a particle of this is used, about the size of a pea being sufficient.

Agnew also writes that for some character parts “it is necessary to use a wig, mustache, etc., but these are furnished by the studios” as well. And yet in the section on how actually to apply makeup in order to get a movie job or to keep one, Agnew gives detailed instructions for shaping eyebrows and beading lashes with black wax—the latter the antithesis of the “natural,” yet common as a stage fashion—even as she tells readers not to apply rouge for film “except to the lips. Bloom on the cheeks would ‘take’ dark, giving a sunken appearance to the face.”62 As the star system began to organize film production and, in deCordova’s historical outline, the player’s existence off the screen grew to fascinate fans as much as, or more than, his or her films, acting ability began to matter less than what the player looked like in relation to the shadow characters he or she created—helped, or not, by whatever makeup professional a studio might have employed. Ironically, in contrast to the situation only a few years later (and ever since), filmmakers mid-decade were desperate for photoplay actors. (Adolphe Menjou considered himself “lucky” because he “got into the business when casting directors interviewed anybody who claimed to be an actor.”)63 Yet if all involved understood by then that orthochromatic film stock did not “automatically” register the “natural beauty” of anyone or anything, to be a professional actor still seemed to mean being able to perfect the form of one’s own representation, a tradition retained from stage acting that still had some pro forma

Makeup, Hairdressing as Studio Crafts • 49

validity in the new industry. (Menjou also wrote of his first encounter in 1914 with experienced actors making up in Vitagraph’s men’s dressing room: “I was outclassed. These fellows were artistes. I was just a novice.”)64 Yet there was still little agreement, in manuals or the trades, about what the best makeup practices were or should be. In December  1914, a magazine asked fans to send in their responses to a question presented in an article titled “What Improvement in Motion Pictures Is Needed Most?” At the top of the list was “the art of makeup.” One letter noted that what might “pass muster before a painted act-drop” would not work in a scene “depicting Nature in all of its reality . . . [which] must be peopled by genuine human beings” rather than “crude monstrosities” or a “pack of painted mannikins.”65 And increasingly, filmmakers had to grapple with the fact that young and inexperienced photoplayers, male or female, were among the least likely film personnel to understand how they were going to look on the screen. Or rather, by the time they figured it out, the film was already in the can, leaving the question of whether they came across as “crude monstrosities” or a “painted mannikins” to spectators, and critics, alone. But in another interesting paradox, even as film stories turned more and more toward the “realistic” rendering of life—from settings to costumes to acting itself—so did film actors seek new ways to assert their visual difference not only from stage actors but from ordinary people. It is not always easy, therefore, to determine the semiotic significance of Theda Bara’s “overdone” makeup— “particularly in the close-ups”—in The Galley Slave in 1915, in the words of a disapproving critic.66 It could be, and obviously was, read by some as a fault, but might also have been meant to serve as a sign of her professional status.67 (Spectacular but narratively inappropriate costuming could function in the same way.) Nor is it easy to discern how the experts and products “provided by the studios” interacted with the actor’s responsibility for his or her own image during this time, especially in straight roles. According to film historian Sarah Berry, Helena Rubinstein designed, and perhaps applied, the “Orientalist eye makeup” for Bara in A Fool There Was (also 1915).68 These points of view intersect because of the prominence of the close-up in narrative films by mid-decade, which in turn made screen makeup itself the subject of a striking number of articles in the trade press and fan magazines in 1916 alone. The at times hysterical tone of the material, some of which continues to take the form of advice offered by and to actors themselves, seems to make everyone, and no one, an expert. (The notorious blackface on both white and Black supporting actors in Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation [1915], or on Black Broadway star Bert Williams in his phenomenally successful Vitagraph film Natural Born Gambler [1916], on the other hand, passes entirely unremarked, even in photo captions.)69 I begin with James Young’s “Tailoring One’s Face,” published early in 1916, and then proceed through other articles and books published in the trade press and fan magazines that year.

50 • All for Beauty

Young was a transplanted stage actor and future director, as well as husband to another stage transplant, Clara Kimball Young, who had been appearing in Vitagraph films and would become one of the outfit’s major stars. Once again, he reiterates the demands of the “merciless” film audience for “realism, more truth . . . than ever was demanded on the stage.” No matter how effective in the theater, a “false bald head” is out. Not only can audiences “quickly discover ‘faked’ matter, [they] take personal offense at faults in make-up and atmosphere.” There is “but one end in view” in making up for pictures, and that is “to make the character appear real, and avoid the semblance of artificiality. Acting for the pictures is not the only art in the play.” Makeup itself is “another art, almost as important, that comes before any acting at all.” The actual advice that Young gives confirms the fact that makeup was now part of the industry’s toolbox even for “types,” but he also reveals the extent to which women were criticized for the faults of film makeup while also letting it slip that some of them knew quite a bit about it—even if they were not, as yet, stars: I remember the advent of yellow powder for make-up. My wife . . . had always used a pink powder, which resulted in a chalkiness of face, especially for make-up. I think the yellow powder originated at the Biograph studios. Some extra girls introduced Mrs. Young to it, and the chalky defect was at once obviated. There is one thing it is necessary to combat all the time because of the persistence of women in the error. They do not seem able to restrain the barbaric desire to see their lips crimson with red, regardless of advice, and the awful effect apparent in the pictures. They might as well paint their lips jet black. . . . The eyes in all cases should be made up, but differently from stage make-up. There should be shadows instead of decided lines around the eyes. Blue should never be used. Black is preferable. The eyelashes may be accentuated by a little black, but big globs are ruinous.70

As the reference to the use of “yellow powder” suggests, actors continued to experiment with shades of greasepaint and powder in order to mitigate the problems of representation that orthochromatic stock entailed in relation to the broader value of screen “realism.” How Young’s wife learned about the trick, however, suggests that there was no one in charge of makeup at Vitagraph, at least, but rather a range of practices being tried out on an ad hoc basis that might or might not work for everyone or on every film. (Another stage transplant, Mark MacDermott, had already claimed to be “the first one” to use yellow makeup, at Edison in 1914, which he got from “Japanese fans”: “Did you ever notice how yellow the faces of the Japanese figures on the fans are, in the day-time? And at night the tinting is just natural. That was what gave me the idea for a yellow makeup.”)71 But whether offered by men or by lowly women, advice about filmspecific problems was now also coming from people who were not, and apparently

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had never been, stage actors, with virtually all of it couched in terms of a need for subtlety rather than histrionic display. Jean Bernique’s book on motion picture acting “for professionals and amateurs” is partly a visual compendium of emotions as expressed by the face on film through almost 200 full-page production and publicity photographs. Regardless of the emotional condition to which Bernique links the “close-ups,” especially through captions, the images are useful for indicating the ways that straight makeup was evolving toward film specificity, a slant that also marks the book’s text. He includes both “general rules” and detailed instructions for “the technique of makeup,” but his “first and last caution” is “DO NOT OVERDO IT.” (Hairdressing is discussed in his makeup chapter as well as in the one on costumes.) “Theatrical powders are not permissible,” he writes, and he names products—like “yellow powders” known as “Special Film No. 1 and No. 2”—that had been “specially mixed for the purpose” of motion picture performance (“Do not accept others”—but who the manufacturer is he does not say). Beading of the eyelashes is out as too obvious (beaded lashes cast dark shadows on the cheeks and other areas of the face in close-up), and in fact many of the women’s eyes in the photographs he reproduces are lined but show little sign of lash augmentation at all. He urges actors to take the time to make “each application as nearly perfect as possible. Do not slight the work in any particular. Do a clean, neat job. Makeup is necessary. BUT DO NOT OVERDO IT,” he repeats. Bernique references “experts,” but not whether they are male or female, actors applying their own makeup, or studio personnel, noting only that “many stage stars believe in their superior knowledge of what is most suitable for their particular type. Theirs is a sad mistake.”72 The demotion of the stage-trained artist continues in Arthur Hornblow Jr.’s “Have You a Camera Face?” Hornblow, who was producing plays in New York and would eventually become a producer in Hollywood, quotes Ben Wilson, a “well-known Universal star and director,” as Wilson describes why “there are so few blonde movie queens” due to the fact that “certain colors photograph exactly alike. White and yellow and light blue all look white.” The “camera face” needs “prominent features,” but lines, unless one is playing someone “old,” are “fatal” because of the close-up—“that placing of the camera very near to the characters to permit the audience to see better what they are doing.” Stage actors who might have been lured to try motion picture acting “took hasty fliers [back to the stage],” Hornblow writes, “when they saw that the deadly ‘close-up’ was not so kind to them as grease-paint and the spotlight!” Hairdressing, too, was changing for the screen, because regardless of how “becomingly” a style worked in real life, hair that covered “the temple, forehead, ear, or some part of the face or head” would also block access to “that something which the camera needs to bring out [the actor’s] personality more forcefully.”73 (And in arranging hair to give clearer access to the face, as stars became objects of veneration many spectators, too, would likely have adopted similar styles, in turn creating new “types” for motion

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pictures to reference.)74 In 1915, Ernest Dench, in a book called Making the Movies, had claimed that “when a director requires a good-looking woman, he will turn her down should her beauty merely be in the coloring of her hair and face. What he wants is a face whose beauty is its shape.” But in contrast to Hornblow, Dench would “select a blonde in preference to a brunette, as the hair of the blonde comes out dark on the screen and contrasts well with the face. The same is true of people with red hair.”75 In a long article called “Making Up for the Movies,” critic J. W. Chamberlain even more confidently, though no less confusingly, elaborates on the differences between straight stage and screen makeup. Although he asserts that there are as yet “very few real masters” of makeup for film—despite the large number of people given that title only a few years, even months, before—he also notes that “every big film-producing concern has its make-up man and his assistants.” And if the “acting is up to the director, [the] color values are always up to the movie make-up man.” The “hideous mess” of colors on a film actor’s face were “grotesque, laughable and clownish to look at”—here Chamberlain echoes Méliès in 1907—but recorded by a motion picture camera “the result is perfection.” Wigs, too, had to be made with a “finer” grade of hair or else they would look “more like the stuffing of a hair mattress than the hirsute adornment of a human being.”76 In now differentiating the “comparatively new” art of making up for the “searching lens” of the camera from the “ancient art” of “making up for the footlights,” in Chamberlain’s words, these treatises imply that many if not most of the problems of screen makeup were on their way to being solved. There were few “masters,” but the “big film-producing concerns” already had makeup men, and assistants for them, on staff, even if we know little about them or their training. By late 1916, however, there was a marked shift in tone in the makeup pieces back to, or more properly beyond, the satire of Harry Furniss and others in the early teens, and which drew other film personnel into the fray as well. “Captain” Leslie T. Peacocke was apparently a writer, director, and sometime actor, and his “Grave Faults in Pictures,” published in September 1916, is worth exploring at some length not only because of its level of detail but because of the new battle lines it draws. It opens with an editorial note: “Exhibitors, as well as patrons, often express a keen desire for the improvement of screen make-up, particularly for the elimination of the over-accentuation of features which is prevalent even in some of the best producing companies. Captain Peacocke’s article is timely and drives the critical knife into the sore spot where the operation is  needed.” Peacocke then takes over with a series of scornful but familiar questions: Why do actors and actresses smother their faces thickly with grease-paint, so that they look like plaster masks, expressionless and scarcely human? Why

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thickly rim the eyes with black, and under the eye-brows with blue, giving slightly the effect of having played a losing bout with [a boxer]? Why “bead” the eye-lashes with a thick, black mess that even chorus girls facing the calcium lights in a big theater would hesitate in employing? Why smear the lips with red paint and cosmetic that can only photograph deadly black, and distort what is supposed to be a human mouth into a dark cavern, unpleasant to the sight? Why is all this? Who is at fault? Is it the directors, or is it the actors themselves? Are they like children in the nursery, and find it difficult to “act” unless partially disguised by a mask—or whiskers?77

Peacocke cautions readers that he is “not trying to suggest, for a moment, that actors should not employ make-up whilst enacting roles before the camera. It is the abuse of make-up that I am inveighing against. It is such a grave evil that daily one hears audiences in theaters audibly protesting against it,” and it causes “sneers” even in dramatic scenes. And for Peacocke, directors, some of whom were “drawing salaries bigger than that of the president of the United States,” were the villains. After being directed to make up either heavily or lightly (as pleases the director), . . . the actors are rushed from the studio into automobiles and driven off to some outdoor location, and forced to face the camera in the searching rays of the sun, with the same mess of grease-paint on their faces as was employed especially to meet the conditions of studio lighting! The lay mind will question the veracity of this. It will ask, “Can such ignorance be possible?” But I have seen it myself—time and time again, in some of the biggest studios in the country— and I have marvelled. The public sees the results on the screen, and—the public sneers.

Although Peacocke wonders whether actors are “blind,” because “so many of the leading players, of both sexes, allow themselves to be depicted as veritable scarecrows,” the actors really have “no voice in the matter. They are being ‘directed!’” Directors are also to blame, Peacocke believes, for their “ignorance” in using makeup to differentiate the professional film actor from the amateur. In commenting on a visit to a Los Angeles set where a “great concourse of ‘actors’” were supposed to be playing Romans but had “true East-Side hair-cuts” and faces that were “heavily smeared” with greasepaint and rouge and whose eyes were “blacked and beaded like totties of the chorus” even in the sunlight, Peacocke records the director’s “undisguised scorn” in response to his questions about why the actors had to have “that stuff on their faces”: “‘You don’t want them to look like a bunch of amateurs do you? Of course they’ve got to have make-up. They wouldn’t look like actors if they hadn’t.’” As derisive as Peacocke is, he reports on what is implied

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Heavy makeup on Syd Chaplin and Joy Lewis in A Lover’s Lost Control (1915), and Anna Pavlova and Rupert Julian in The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916). Frame enlargements.

to be a common but increasingly paradoxical point of view, namely, that “a person enacting before a camera minus the full stage make-up . . . is an amateur. An actor must wear his mask of office.” Arguably the most significant element of Peacocke’s article historically is that he names the cameraman, whom he labels as both “the man who knows” and, “when all is said and done, [the] most important element in the studio,” as he who should be in charge of makeup, though he believes that cameramen have been “practically ignored since the inception of the moving picture industry.” Some of the “best directors”—William C. De Mille and Raoul Walsh (though not Griffith) are two whom Peacocke names—are to be commended for realizing the importance of the “lighting conditions of individual scenes, and the various distances from the camera,” and for giving “careful thought” to “essential details.” Actors are no longer to be trusted as arbiters, because too many “seem to be unable to grasp the fact that colors do not register in photography. [And] that red paint or cosmetic on the lips must necessarily depict them as black on the screen, and that rouge on the cheeks registers not as a maidenly blush, but as

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splotches of dirt!” Peacocke finally belittles wigs and other types of applied hair, although as we have seen, actors were least likely to have been responsible for their application. “You may fool your best girl with a toupee,” he writes, “but not the camera. I have never seen a false beard, or toupee, or moustache, or hirsute appendages of any cut or make that did not cry aloud to the screen, ‘I am stuck on!’” Peacocke is at base reactionary, but he also lays out the points of contention at an important transitional period: what an actor’s “mask of office” should look like, of what it should consist, and who should be the arbiter of its value. As hard as it is for us now to imagine that directors—much less those commanding huge crowds of made-up extras—would have no idea that interior and exterior shots, or close ones compared with far, required different lighting and therefore makeup,78 film historian Richard Koszarski has referred to this period as a “hodgepodge” in terms of practices, studio names, and even the number of reels in a standard film, and the moniker makes sense applied to makeup practices as well.79 But while Peacocke blames directors, others over the next few years continued to lay bad makeup at the feet of actors—even, or especially, when they were presumably cast for “type,” and even when cameramen were increasingly being given the authority to call the shots, as it were, at larger filmmaking concerns. A 1917 piece titled “Getting Too Near the Make-Up,” by critic Edward Weitzel, quotes actor Mary Garden’s remark that “the camera has made acting natural,” so it is not unexpected to find yet more criticism of close-ups with “the over-accentuation of a circus poster” or that are “but a grotesque exaggeration of anything human” because of actors’ “incorrect” cosmetics use. Even the donning of makeup by “certain foolish females” in ordinary life, Weitzel writes, “does not offer any excuse for the human caricature too often thrown on the screen as the counterfeit presentment of an attractive and charming woman.” Although he notes that many close-ups in the “better class of photoplays” have “artistic appeal,” faulty makeup in others was “robbing every type of lovely woman of her beauty and charm.”80 (In “How To Be a Moving Picture Actress—In One Lesson,” a comic piece the same year by Bernadine Hilty, she writes of first smearing yellow greasepaint “all over your face” and then “lay[ing] on about an inch of powder” in addition to “[swabbing] your lashes” with “black goo” to make them “stand out like awnings.”)81 In another 1917 article, titled “Two Unlovely Black Eyes,” Louis Reeves Harrison also rails against actors who violate the “position of trust” that their prominence gives them over the scenario writer or the director (both of which Harrison was at various times): “The author is rarely present to criticise; the director is concerned with an infinity of detail besides the whole effect of the picture: it is up to the performer to make a study of himself as an entirely new individuality in each story, not to be occupied with a representation of his eternal self.” But even more than previous writers, Harrison turns the proper use of straight makeup into a moral imperative as he decries the “inanity of the imitations” of certain star fashions—such as the curls of Mary Pickford, though he does not name her (curls for which George Westmore and Max

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Factor each later claimed credit)—or the inappropriateness of a “Kentucky mountain maid going barefoot in a frock to her knees shown with chalk-white face, arms and legs” and the “poor little girl who has had nothing to eat for several days and has barely survived a starving environment for many weeks [coming] on with a round doll face, bright eyes and pink [gray] cheeks.” Harrison does acknowledge that in order to meet “the requirements of impersonation under the powerful glow of studio lights actors are compelled to produce certain shadow effects for the eyes. Aside from accenting the brows and lashes, and elongating the effect by horizontally curved lines, it is necessary to darken the upper lids, but this has been taken to mean that they should be daubed lamp black.” Actors should be working hard “for the sake of winning credulity,” but they “kill the whole effect of reality” when, “contrary to the ordinary laws of life,” they instead “paint and plaster the human countenance out of human recognition, thereby exposing an entertaining interpretation to honest contempt in the audience and an earnest one to derision.”82 The continued criticism of actors is significant to my chronicle for another reason—namely, that valorization of the photoplay as fundamentally “realistic” was increasingly running up against the notion of the film star as young and attractive regardless of narrative circumstances. In 1917, in “How Elsie Ferguson Learned the Screen Art,” the popular stage ingenue received instruction not only about “the camera, the lights, make-up, focus lines, ‘close-ups’ and other motion picture accessories” but also about the manifestly unnatural requirement that actors “stand in the centre of a ‘set’ flooded with powerful lights without blinking.”83 Beauty, and handsomeness, needed to come across as perfect but not “faked,” with looking “real” and “natural” now linked not to a lack of adornment, blandishment, or augmentation but to the correct forms—pleasing and attractive and fashionable forms—of all three. Distortion and exaggeration were the problems, not using makeup as such, which in any kind of role was now clearly “normal,” for men as well as women. In the polemical tone of these writers against actors and even directors, Ferguson joins Peacocke in arguing that the cameraman was the “one who knows,” but other material indicates that cameramen were already being given authority over the looks of actors in straight roles and therefore their makeup and hairdressing, at least at some filmmaking concerns. In 1916, for example, “future star” June Caprice, along with nineteen other girls, was “on the way to the [unnamed] studio” to have a “camera ‘test.’ We are told to make up. My face has had its first introduction to powder. The camera man has just told us that some faces reflect all the light and others absorb it all, and that the powder—just enough to take the ‘shine off’—is to aid the light making true impressions upon the film in his camera.”84 The cameraman as arbiter also appears in Rob Wagner’s Film Folk (1918): “The camera man has absolutely final say on the quality of all make-up. If he wishes to be especially disagreeable he can keep the poor actor humping to the make-up room all morning to rectify his tint to conform to the changing light.”85 (Wagner also includes a

Makeup man at Universal, 1918. From Rob Wagner, Film Folk: “Close-Ups” of the Men, Women, and Children Who Make the “Movies” (Century, 1918). The light rectangle on the left is in the original. Media History Digital Library.

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photograph of an unnamed “make-up man at Universal Studios”—who may be Jack Pierce—applying beauty cosmetics.) And in his 1919 book Behind the Motion-Picture Screen, Austin Lescarboura states that makeup for film “cannot be studied in a mirror, despite the very stubborn will of some ‘stars’ to abide by that criterion. All facial camouflage which is to appear before the camera must be translated into the black-and-white language of photography, and until that has been done no makeup is of any value. A beautiful face in actual colors may prove a perfect fright on the screen; and so all questions of makeup are generally decided by the cameraman.” That said, “Some ‘stars,’” according to Lescarboura, “refuse to make up according to the cameraman’s directions. In which case it becomes necessary to resort to certain lighting effects to secure the desired results.”86 As stated in the introduction, one of my overarching goals is to understand how perfection or flawlessness came to be associated with the star face—every feature rendered precisely, every hair and eyelash coiffed in place, on male as well as female players. While it may seem odd to bring up perfection in the context of the late 1910s and its “hodgepodge” of makeup procedures and sometimes ludicrous results, this period and its practices are the source of much of the rhetoric by which a highly stylized visual flawlessness became aligned with “looking natural.” False eyelashes, for example, which over time replaced beading, became ubiquitous on women stars and would-be stars in virtually every narrative circumstance as well as publicity and promotion in subsequent decades. But they were developed on an ad hoc basis for film by at least three separate makeup artists in the late 1910s to make actors’ eyes look “twice their size,” as Griffith put it about Seena Owen on the set of Intolerance (1916).87 Before the 1920s, however, discourses about beauty makeup and hairdressing—and blinking—mobilized a host of assumptions about visual perfection that were linked to photography rather than performance, attitude, or facial expression in a narrative context. (Partly because the process was similar to making a single row of hairs for a wig, Factor’s company would ultimately manufacture most of the false lashes used in studio departments.) Patrick Keating’s discussion of gender in still photography and cinematography lays out the reasons why conventions in portrait photography in the silent era could not serve as templates for the cinematic close-up: the differences in lighting requirements for motion picture film stock, for example, or the subsuming of the cinematic portrait to the demands of narrative and characterization as well as the maintenance of star pulchritude. In passing, he mentions retouching as an option open to the portrait photographer but not the cinematographer.88 Yet from the mid-1910s on I found retouching referred to again and again in movie makeup advice, a litany that, born from an explanatory analogy, would become a powerful and long-lived ideal. Precisely because the motion picture negative could not be retouched, the reasoning went, makeup had to cover blemishes, lines, and facial flaws and enhance the features (and coiffures) that would

Contrasting makeup on Constance Talmadge and Seena Owen (with false eyelashes) in Intolerance (1916). Frame enlargements.

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loom literally so large on the screen. “Making up for the camera is, though in a lesser degree, to gain the same results as obtained by portrait photographers through the art of retouching and etching,” Jean Bernique had written in 1916.89 A 1927 book on motion picture photography claims still that “a photograph of a human face as nature made it” would be one “almost without exception . . . spotted and blotched in a very unnatural manner. . . . However, as the individual frames of a motion picture cannot be re-touched, we retouch the face before making the exposure!”90 In contrast to still photography, then, beauty and handsomeness needed to be in place before a “portrait” was committed to film. And as the cameraman was master of the camera and the film stock within it, so might he be made master of the “retouching” made possible by makeup as well. The problem was that, while it might follow that a portrait photographer knew how to retouch a negative, there was no such obvious correspondence between the technical and even aesthetic expertise required of a motion picture cameraman and the design and application of makeup, much less of designing and styling hair with taste and an eye for fashion or characterization. Indeed, the section in Lescarboura’s book titled “The Gentle Art of Facial Camouflage” suggests that, beyond the emphasis given to the cameraman’s authority over what he photographed, the results on the screen were still not reliable or consistent.91 What seems clear is that at the end of the 1910s the era of the “makeup expert” was both drawing to an end and just beginning. Keating speaks of the change of the “public identity” of the cameraman to that of cinematographer by the 1920s, in part due to the chartering of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) in 1919.92 Equally important was the ASC’s monthly professional journal, The American Cinematographer, in which standards and practices could be discussed, and potentially routinized, among members (it evolved from newsletters the organization began publishing in 1920). I suggest that one of the ways that the cinematographer would differentiate himself practically from the earlier cameraman was to separate his job, and his art, from that of monitoring whether a player’s skin was too blotchy, lips too red, or hair too wild or inconsistently styled—a process that, as I explore more fully in chapters 2 and 3, required, and was required by, the rise of a new kind of dedicated and trained makeup expert. I wish mightily that makeup artists and hairdressers had quickly formed a trade society with an associated journal—in response, perhaps, to the pointed critical attention that makeup had been given by so many articles and books in 1916 and 1917 (around the time that the Society of Motion Picture Engineers was also founded). Especially since those years coincided with the tremendous rise in the power of the star image in the film industry, to the extent that, in Richard Koszarski’s words, “star prominence was the single most important factor in determining a film’s box-office success.”93 Instead, while awareness of how makeup, hairstyles, and wigs interacted with lighting, lenses, and film stock became more sophisticated, the status of the makeup man remained amorphous.

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Photographs of “makeup experts” applying cosmetics to stars were featured in books like Lescarboura’s, but these craftspeople were rarely named, their “public identity” similar to that of gaffers or grips rather than cinematographers. And whereas some writers criticized stars for seeking to look like movie stars rather than the characters they were playing, audiences now also expected stars to look like stars, their faces on the screen, regardless of role, not too dissimilar to those of their publicity portraits. The 1920s are therefore a swirl of many things at once, in which atavistic practices coexisted with new and “improved” ones. Cultural history is always like this, but Hollywood’s history is arguably always more full than most of the ballyhoo written by or about those who prevailed in the end. Cinematographers certainly knew before 1920 that the close-up required less makeup than long shots and that “electrified” shots required more than those taken in sunlight. As quoted by Kevin Brownlow, cameraman Charles Rosher selected Mary Pickford’s greasepaint (from Leichner) when he worked with her during the era, but she applied it herself because there were “very few make-up men in those days.” Rosher also recalled having “a special powder mixed by Max Factor under my supervision in his hole-in-the-wall shop down in Los Angeles” in the 1920s.94 Ironically, a Scientific American article from 1921 titled “Film Lighting as a Fine Art” recommends that makeup be “studied by the electricians and cameramen”—which they had presumably been doing for years already—because “when there are two persons in the scene, possibly a star and a leading player, if one has a dark makeup and the other a light, much care must be exercised in so regulating the light that it neither ‘burns up’ the light make-up nor is of insufficient strength to light up the dark make-up.”95 Yet critics continued to evaluate actors in straight roles on their “lack of experience in the arts of make-up,” as one film review did in 1924, or reproved the “slovenly cosmetics that have been slopped on the faces of various film players,” in the words of American Cinematographer as late as 1926.96 But whether such comments mean that the players were wearing too much makeup or too little, or of the wrong sort, is rarely detailed. Again, as their status rose, cinematographers undoubtedly grew less fond of spending large amounts of time sending stars back to the “make-up room” to fix their makeup, or in lighting shots based on whether or not a star was wearing the right shade of powder or had his or her hair styled as it had been the day before. Regardless of the efforts of Max Factor or the Westmore family to change practices and products behind the scenes in the 1920s, then, before roughly 1926 it was often movie history books and acting manuals—the growing quantity of both serving as signs of the importance of movies in American life as well as of the dream of stardom that movies increasingly promulgated in their narratives— that offered advice to actors and would-be actors. Acting manuals, some of them written in England but published simultaneously in the United States, virtually without exception still included sections on makeup and, by implication but also sometimes as its own topic, hairdressing as well. Facial acting and

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expression in the close-up also continued to generate discussion, but always in relation to the type, now firmly the presumed substrate for motion picture acting rather than stage training as such. These resources, whether penned by women or men, help delineate both the crafts’ aesthetic and practical positioning in the studios and the final domination of the type-based and representational mode of photoplay acting while also showing that, despite the authoritative tone with which advice was dispensed, how contradictory much of it remained. In 1921, Mae Marsh’s Screen Acting takes as a given that the screen player will have “youth, good health and vitality,” such that he or she “will not have to resort to tricks of make-up.” She then expends close to two chapters describing such “tricks,” including wigs and plastic surgery, as used by others, although her ultimate advice is again to use makeup “as little as possible.” It is not just the realism of film as against the artificiality of the “spoken drama” that comes in for comment, but how to make sure that “natural” attractiveness—now a defining value in itself—in “real life” comes across as such on the screen. Marsh claims that it “has never been necessary for me to expend any great amount of time in make-up” because “I look as I look.”97 But other critics were pointing out—and Marsh herself hints at it—that beauty and the properties of the “camera face” were not always congruent, and certainly she is never without makeup on the screen. As John Emerson and Anita Loos write, also in 1921, in their best-selling book Breaking into the Movies: Considerations which do not matter in the slightest degree in facial beauty on the screen are those of coloring and of fineness of the features. The pinker a woman’s cheeks may be, the hollower they appear to the camera, for red photographs as black, and a face which is beautiful, but coarse in its outline, frequently photographs quite as well as the beautiful face which is exquisite in every detail. A screen star should be equally beautiful in every expression and from every angle. This is not so true of the stage star. . . . On the screen, however, important scenes are always taken in “close-ups” wherein the star, whether portraying rage or pain, love or hate, must be equally charming, at the risk of making a permanently bad impression upon her audience.

If Norma and Constance Talmadge, along with “dozens of others,” were now stars, Emerson and Loos continue, it was because they had, “by accident or design, solved at the start the great problem which confronts all movie actors, that of finding the correct make-up.” And while they repeat the by-now standard advice not to “overdo it”—and, like Jean Bernique, declare beaded eyelashes “ridiculous”—they also again offer detailed advice about makeup application, although only the actor can determine whether green, blue, brown, or black

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eyeliner “makes your eyes look deepest and most luminous.” On the one hand, Emerson and Loos claim, all of the “necessary cosmetics may be secured through any drug store or theatrical costumer. If you want to find out how you will look in the movies, it is not necessary to have a film test made. Just buy some make-up and have someone take a few ‘close-ups’ of your head with an ordinary camera. But do not retouch the negatives—for movies are not retouched, you know.” Yet on the other hand they also refer to the studio “make-up department,” which here seems primarily to be associated with hair and wigs: “Neither in men nor in women is the hair an essential for screen beauty. Wigs and trick arrangements of the hair are a function of the make-up department, and a man or woman with no hair at all could still be made to appear most attractive to the unsophisticated camera.”98 The dialectic between the natural and the contrived continues in Screen Acting: Its Requirements and Rewards (1922), by Inez and Helen Klumph. They write that “successful make-up is invisible to the audience; only its effect is noticeable. To bead one’s eyelashes until they stick out in spikes; to draw a Cupid’s bow mouth over one’s own when it is decidedly out of character—that is merely playing with cosmetics.” The Klumphs claim, “Many actresses use almost no makeup at all. . . . Lillian Gish uses none for inserts; only when she is making long shots does she look more made up than do girls in everyday life who use almost none.” Parsing these statements, it would seem that “more made up” is associated primarily with treatment of the lips and eyes. Otherwise, the signal term here is almost, for given all that has been discussed so far, it goes without saying that Gish would have worn greasepaint and powder—some of it perhaps of the lighter consistency and film-specific tones that she could have bought from Max Factor by then—especially in close-ups, where an even skin surface would have been expected. The Klumphs likewise state that makeup “is a thing that must be learned in the studio. But if you are seriously interested . . . you can practise with it at home. . . . Then, when you are exposed to the lights of the studio, you will see how your knowledge of make-up can be developed and how to make the necessary changes to adapt yourself to working conditions.” They cite “expert” Victor A. Stewart, who “has worked for years on this problem, and has advised more than one famous star on the most effective make-up.” The products they list are made by Stein’s, the theatrical outfitter, but, in contrast to Bernique in 1916, beyond noting that some studios “insist that a yellow make-up be used, and some prefer pink,” there is no reference—no “Special Film No.  1 and No.  2”—to makeup designed only for use by film actors, nor to prior advice that pink was to be avoided because it made the skin appear a muddy gray.99 Agnes Platt’s Practical Hints on Acting for the Cinema (1923), in addition to discussing the precise application of unnamed products and linking making up again to photographic retouching, even suggests that the would-be actor inquire about the number of “lamps” a studio or filmmaking concern possessed, since makeup “is apt to differ according to the lighting of the studio. Studios vary in size, and it is obvious that if a studio has but twenty lamps a pale make-up is possible. But if it is a large

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studio, with forty-five or fifty lamps, any shade of fairness in the make-up will come out a ghastly white.” Indeed, being a “chalkwhite,” like having “blackberry lips,” she claims was already a term of opprobrium at the studios.100 I am not sure why six of the seven entries on makeup in a 1924 advice book called The Truth About the Movies: By the Stars—published, as Marsh’s had been, in Hollywood—are by male actors.101 But some of the titles—“Is the Art of Make-Up Difficult” (Warner Baxter), “My Idea as to Make-Up” (Jean Hersholt), “Is Make-Up an Art” (Lucien Littlefield), or “Is Make-Up Really Needed” (David Dunbar)—give an indication of why I believe the pieces serve as a useful cap on the “hodgepodge” of the makeup situation in the orthochromatic era if not in the 1920s themselves, a decade whose final years would be so tumultuous for the industry overall. (There is an additional entry by Lon Chaney, who ironically enough does not mention makeup at all in his “What Is Characterization,” instead referring to character acting as something one is “born for” or that “calls” one to a “dramatic destiny.”)102 Not surprisingly, the male actors in The Truth about the Movies downplay or even deny the significance of straight makeup altogether. Warner Baxter dismisses the “things that come out of the actor’s make-up kit” as “minor aids,” instead claiming that “mingling with men and women from every walk of life, studying their manner of living, their mode of thought and conduct and familiarizing one’s self with their reactions and emotions in given situations [is how] the actor learns to ‘make-up.’”103 Jean Hersholt does list some products he likes— one a Leichner theatrical greasepaint, the other a department store powder, Bourjois—but also waxes philosophical about the inutility of painting “another face on top of your own if you don’t inject a soul into the character you portray. Study, dream, act and walk the character you are playing.” And he claims that in “Von Stroheim’s new picture, ‘Greed,’ I played without a speck of grease paint on my face, I only combed my hair in a way different than usual.”104 David Dunbar, an actor and director, invokes makeup yet again in connection to retouching: “The average member of the public is under the impression that the screen actor uses make-up to beautify his appearance, which supposition is entirely wrong. For instance in a straight make-up, it is used because each piece of film called a ‘frame,’ could not be retouched like an ordinary photograph. The makeup destroys facial blemishes.”105 Cecil Holland, however, listed as “make-up expert, actor,” provides a detailed “beginner’s outfit for straight make-up” in his entry “The Art of Screen MakeUp.” And in addition to items like powder puffs, a mirror, a brush and comb, and “2 towels,” the products are either theatrical greasepaints and powders or consumer products such as mascara and lip rouge. Like earlier experts, he seems still to be offering advice to other actors, given that everyone else who writes about the topic does so as though they apply their own makeup. Indeed, Holland declares that, if actors makes “mistakes,” they “will be detected” and will bring “drastic criticism” down upon themselves as the responsible party. The

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longest entry in the section by far, Holland’s is the most specific in explaining why makeup is necessary—“to cover up the blood that is under the surface of the skin which, without this make-up, would photograph dark, as all cardinal colors, such as red, black and brown, are the most severe and will be picked up more readily by the eye of the camera”—and also discusses some of the problems produced by “incorrect” makeup in a manner that resembles the Scientific American advice of a few years earlier. If you have a “ruddy or olive complexion,” Holland writes, and attempt to make up “lighter,” then the face becomes “almost the same shade photographically as the whites of your eyes. Therefore, if you did not have a shadow around the eye in a long shot, the face and the whites of the eyes would run together and all one would see would be two black spots, the pupils of your eyes, so that the shadow around the eye acts, as it were, as a frame, bringing out the correct shade of the eye.”106 The lone female actor, Enid Bennett, in an entry simply titled “Make-Up,” points in contrast to the absence of any true rules—the multitude of advice in manuals of the era notwithstanding—that seemed to work for everyone. Stressing that the camera is “so tricky,” she writes: It seems to have varying moods and it is difficult to take a person and at a glance know just what shades of grease paint and powder will be best and where needed. There are certain people in the profession, of course, who are experts in the line of make-up, but even they are sometimes baffled at the way in which certain players photograph. Sometimes it is necessary to take tests with varied types of material used—the eye touched here one time; the chin rouged a bit; the nose powdered heavily or rouged at the tip. The result is only to be ascertained in the projection room the next day and then another trial made if it does not prove satisfactory. . . . . I think for the beginner, learning makeup is even more trying than searching for jobs. There is no way of practicing, for the camera is the only judge and one must wait its favor.107

Taken together, all of this material indicates that even toward the end of the 1920s makeup procedures and products were still being evaluated in relation to the results they produced on the screen, and that if an actor, or a makeup artist, made the wrong choices, his or her career as well as any specific film in which they appeared was always potentially on the line.108 Nothing much had changed since Jean Bernique’s exhortation of 1916: “Herein lies your movie success, or failure: IT IS THE FILM THAT COUNTS. You are viewed in the light of a good or bad bit of celluloid. If you are one of the faults of the film you will be eliminated.”109 Lon Chaney wrote in Holland’s 1927 The Art of Make-Up for Stage and Screen that Holland “created the office of staff makeup expert at a studio, and is acting in this capacity at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer plant, where it was

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MGM makeup department, 1928. Cecil Holland is at the far end, and note that daylight is used as the primary lighting source. Bison Archives and Hollywood Historic Photos.

found that such a functionary could save much trouble and time dealing with such problems as special disguises for principals—or wholesale disguises for extras, such as the crowds in ‘Ben Hur,’ etc. Holland knows both angles. He can dispense illusion wholesale or retail.”110 Holland had previously been at Goldwyn as an actor and “make-up expert,” and in 1923 a Los Angeles Times report indicates that he was advising and aiding in “making up the other principals” on the productions in which he appeared there.111 But no one was yet routinely designing or applying straight makeup to all the stars and featured players at every studio, and it was perhaps these for whom Holland’s book—like Oldridge’s even more specific Movie Make-up Manual, published in New York the same year— was intended as an aid. What is to us obviously missing in the 1920s, as from the makeup practices of earlier decades, is the sense that not only character makeup but also straight makeup and hairdressing, even on movie stars, should be part of the overall design of a film, or considered in relation to narrative, to the nature and emotional meaning of the story a film was trying to tell. We know now that Max Factor, a Polish-born Russian émigré who opened his first wig and makeup emporium in

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Los Angeles in 1908, was selling his “own small line of theatrical make-up products” along with other more famous brands, like Leichner, Stein, and Minor, for which he became the West Coast distributor, by the mid-1910s.112 In 1916 he also began selling a new “flexible” cream-based greasepaint of his own design to movie actors; it made him successful enough to open a larger House of Make-Up, which included a cosmetics and hair salon, nearer to the movie studios. And according to his biographers, Factor was hired in 1917 to “supervise” the makeup and hair of Cecil B. DeMille’s Joan the Woman for Paramount beginning in the script phase.113 But no notice was taken of this in the trade or fan press—or, as far as we know, by other studios and makeup artists themselves (nor did DeMille refer to it in his own accounts of the film’s production). Griffith had clearly made gestures toward this in Intolerance, and an idiosyncratic filmmaker-designer like Natacha Rambova, who designed abstract sets as well as moderne and formally distinctive costumes for Salome (1923), would certainly have considered makeup and hairdressing as part of a film’s total aesthetic project. But in such cases the categories of “character” and “straight” merge in often eccentric ways. Moreover, regardless of how many actors personally preferred, and indeed used, Factor’s greasepaint or any other of his burgeoning line of products in Hollywood, studio makeup artists continued to depend on whatever product they themselves were familiar with. What mattered—and certainly to the stars themselves—was whether they looked good or not in close-ups. One of the books on Factor describes a star like Gloria Swanson “[putting] herself completely in the hands of the Max Factor studio for her make-up and hairstyles” by the 1920s,114 but the plethora of such claims now does not address the day-to-day processes of filmmaking itself, in which Factor would have played little role.115 Swanson’s biographer claims that it was not Factor but Hattie Wilson Tabourne, a Black hairdresser (and also maid) at Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount), who was responsible for Swanson’s hair for many years.116 Unfortunately, Swanson’s autobiography refers to Tabourne merely as “the little black woman” and “a tiny black woman,” listing her in the index only as “Hattie (hairdresser).”117 Tabourne, who died in 1925, also styled the hair of male stars like Rudolf Valentino. That said, the attractiveness and profitability of many if hardly all movie star looks in the 1920s might well have been due to the increasing availability in Hollywood of Factor products and advice, although even Swanson was at times criticized in reviews for the exaggeration of some of her makeup—as was, more notoriously, Valentino, for whom Factor and Mont Westmore also designed cosmetics.118 Nevertheless, Factor repeatedly touted the superiority of his thinner “Supreme” and “flexible” greasepaint, introduced broadly in the early 1920s, not only to maintain an even tone across a day’s shooting but to improve performance and to appear more “natural.” Whether apocryphal or not, he claimed several times to have been told by actors that theatrical greasepaints “hampered their freedom of action and expression” and that his product, which came in a tube

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rather than as a solid stick, was the “first and only step ever made” to remedy that circumstance.119 (I found the first national ads for Max Factor’s “Supreme preparations,” ironically with no reference to the motion picture industry, in Variety in 1923.) Aside from what the cosmetics looked like on the screen, the salient point is that the lack of makeup artists, or departments, was not the biggest problem by the 1920s.120 It was more that most affiliated craftspeople seem to have had no real charge to apply the considerable knowledge they had acquired about straight makeup, especially, to a star’s face unless requested to do so by the actor, a cinematographer, or a director. This would change during the decade, and quite drastically. The full effects of what came to be called the “option contract” lay in the future, but partly as a result of the sensational scandals in 1921–1922 involving extremely well-paid stars (comic actor Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, matinee idol Wallace Reid, and ingenue Mary Miles Minter, among others), the studios did begin to police their stars more carefully soon afterward, locking into contracts the terms not only of a player’s on-screen representation (supported by the selfcensorship mechanism of the Production Code written, though not stringently enforced, partly as a result of the scandals) but of his or her off-screen behavior as well.121 Filmmaking had simply become too complex and expensive—and, since movies had been denied the protection of the First Amendment by the Supreme Court in 1915 because “they may be used for evil,” liable to threats of audience boycotts, which the Code was also implemented to forestall—to do otherwise. Talent contracts were always “pliable documents,” according to film historian Emily Carman, but “the standard actor’s agreement was generally structured on a long-term basis, by renewal, and determined by the studio. In the 1920s, the typical Hollywood studio contract for actors was limited to a five-year term.” Signally, by 1931, Carman states, the five-year contract had been extended to seven, and all renewal options, year by year, were left to the discretion of the studios, which meant that “the studios steamrolled the empowered and financially lucrative contracts that popular, money-making stars of the 1920s (such as Gloria Swanson and John Gilbert) had previously enjoyed.”122 Most significant for studio makeup artists, even the “Players’ Standard Contract” adopted by the actors’ branch of the new Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and put into effect in January 1928 (and employed industry-wide before the incorporation of the Screen Actors Guild in 1933) included specific references to the studios’ rights over their actors’ “name and likeness, photographic or otherwise,” in advertising and publicity as well as films.123 This, it seems clear, would have helped to restructure makeup departments toward the end of the 1920s. Kathy Klaprat’s article on how Bette Davis’s image was manufactured at RKO and Warner Bros. in the early 1930s, for example, describes substantial changes to Davis’s makeup and hair that turned her image from the less successful blond and virginal ingenue as which she began the decade to the more brittle, and more popular, darker-haired actor as which she earned Academy

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Awards as well as box-office success.124 Klaprat does not mention who helped instantiate these sartorial changes, but clearly the crucial ingredient of some degree of studio-backed power had been added to the arsenal of the makeup artist and hairdresser at the managerial or executive level, at least. This does not mean that actors, especially women, no longer materially participated in decisions about their looks or even that they stopped applying their own makeup in some cases. But by the end of the 1920s, appearing on-screen or off in a manner of which the studio did not approve increased the risk of suspension, without pay or the ability to seek jobs elsewhere. (Bette Davis later referred to long-term contracts as “bed and board in jail.”)125 Even freelance stars had to accept the same amount of studio control on the films for which they were hired. As will be discussed in chapters 2 and 3, the unionization of most belowthe-line crafts in the 1930s would also lock in the hierarchical and gendered structure of makeup departments and give department heads both true executive status and material control over the purchasing and stocking of products, staffing and training, and the institution of routinized processes of which the application of straight makeup would have been the most common. This is partly what helped make Max Factor and the Westmores so critical to the managing of Hollywood’s contradictory interests in star glamour, realism, and efficient visual storytelling. These men enter my saga in the final section of this chapter as intrepid inventor-entrepreneurs with their own goals and desires, which they made congruent with those of the studios as the silent era drew to a close. Ironically, given that hairdressing would soon be the only named makeup-related studio profession (other than body makeup) open to women rather than men, it was really wigs and hairdressing that brought Max Factor, and the Westmores, to the attention of the industry. The sign outside Factor’s first Los Angeles emporium in 1908 read “Max Factor’s Antiseptic Hair Store,” and within three months he founded Max Factor and Company, again with wigs the primary product.126 According to legend, Factor convinced Cecil  B. DeMille to try Factor’s “real hair wigs” on The Squaw Man in 1913–1914 (generally regarded as the first feature-length film made in Hollywood). And as suggested in some of the comments from the acting manuals mentioned earlier, the use of such wigs was routine enough by the early 1920s to obviate the “I am stuck on!” problems lamented by Leslie Peacocke in 1916. Wigs had always helped to mitigate continuity and time-management issues presented by the daily maintenance of complicated or period styles, especially. But real-hair wigs, while expensive, suited the realist aesthetic of type-based acting, and their use—and reuse—could save studios money across the production of increasingly complex and costly films. Yet Factor’s desire to tap the consumer marketplace seems ultimately to have been a major impetus behind his interest in motion pictures, and as stars became popular idols—and began to endorse other manufacturers’ cosmetics in print advertising in the mid-1910s—he worked even harder to align himself with them

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and their appeal. In 1927, he became the client of a public relations and advertising firm, Sales Builders, Inc., which organized the national distribution of Factor makeup to ordinary women near the end of the year.127 Sales Builders was also instrumental in the actions Factor and his firm took that, in combination with the increasing hierarchization and standardization of crafts from cinematography and lighting to editing to storytelling and even acting, made his products attractive not only to technicians and actors but also to studio management and budget officers, as will be detailed in the next chapters as well. George Westmore’s prowess as a hairdresser and wigmaker, which he passed on to his older sons, was also the basis of his initial involvement in the industry. He and son Perc both met famous actors while working at the Los Angeles salon Maison Cesar, connections that, in a star-driven industry, counted for much and that they, and the other Westmore brothers, exploited to the full then and throughout their careers.128 Yet even with the most careful triangulation of the evidence it is difficult to understand precisely how George allied himself with the studios while he worked at Maison Cesar or, indeed, afterward, when subsequent accounts place him at several studios and also running his own “one-chair” hair salon in Hollywood. As mentioned in the introduction, many historians, and websites devoted to makeup or the Westmores, have for decades repeated as settled fact that George Westmore founded the first makeup department in Hollywood at Selig Polyscope in 1917 (and the second, soon afterward, at Triangle).129 But Perc, in the last interviews he gave before his death in 1970, stated that George and the family did not arrive in Los Angeles until 1920 (this is borne out by the fact that George is listed as a “hairdrsr” with a permanent address in Cleveland in the 1920 U.S. census and by the same occupation in the Cleveland phone directory; he does not appear in the Los Angeles directory—again as a hairdresser—until 1921).130 Since Selig ceased film production in 1918, George’s involvement there would have been unlikely, especially given contemporary evidence from trade papers indicating that Cecil Holland was at Selig as a “makeup artist” and actor by 1913.131 As for George’s expertise with cosmetics, it is difficult to evaluate the veracity of Frank Westmore’s claim that his father “moved beyond hairstyling to creative makeup techniques for women’s faces” by “practicing” on prostitutes in Cleveland (in a letter from a publicist “selling” a story about Perc in 1956, the “ladies-of-the-evening” in the anecdote now lived in the Hollywood hills).132 The same is true of a 1929 story in Variety that they all learned about makeup color and its response to light from “painting china” as a family hobby (later Perc claimed to have been a portrait painter too).133 The final twist is that Perc himself took credit for founding the first studio makeup department, which occurred, he claimed, when he “sat down with the head of [First National]” in 1924 and told him that what was needed was “a chart system and records on every player and what they wore and how they made up in each scene. Then, if we get that same player back in a future film, we can adhere to the way we know she has photographed before.” With “that idea,” Perc asserts,

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“they gave me a makeup department! The first in the whole industry.” But even if he was “given” a makeup department in 1924, apparently so was his twin brother, Ern, at Warner Bros. More important, in light of all that I have reported here, neither would initially have been a remarkable circumstance. That is, First National and Warner Bros. did not begin making feature films until the early 1920s. And it would have been expected that both organizations then seek makeup and hairdressing staff, in concert with practices at most if not all of the other studios at that time. More to the point is that, after Perc was hired at First National, by his own admission he had to call in Cecil Holland from MGM for help with cosmetic application on The Lost World (1925), since Perc’s only expertise was in hair and wigs. It was when Holland refused to let him in on his makeup “secrets” that Perc, in his own words, told Holland that he, Perc, “was going to make makeup a profession. And everything that I develop I will expose within twenty-four hours. And in due time, we will have what is known as makeup artists.”134 That many film makeup men—including Holland—had been called “artists” since at least 1914 is not in doubt given the historical record. But Perc may simply have been ignorant of this fact, or of the work of his predecessors, when he began at First National, just as he initially knew more about hair than cosmetics. In other words, however talented the Westmores were, and regardless of what skills they had developed during their salon work, the evidence suggests that once they passed through the studios’ gates in the 1920s, their duties, and their lack of public visibility, were similar to those of other makeup artists of the period. Similarly, the family seem to have developed their expertise in the use of cosmetics for motion pictures, like everyone else had, more or less on the job.135 But the Westmores not only were endowed with native intelligence, talent, and huge amounts of ambition but also were unburdened by outmoded theatrical traditions—none was an actor—and able to apply novel and inventive approaches to problem-solving. Soon they would, with the substantial help of Max Factor, begin to function as a makeup dynasty, with brothers in charge of three to five studio makeup and hairdressing departments over the next four decades. And the “chart system” is indeed one of the most important innovations that the Westmores, alone or separately, introduced to the motion picture industry. It is in some ways, I will argue, the practical foundation of Alicia Annas’s aforementioned “photogenic formula,” where stars were designed to look modern and fashionable regardless of the time period in which a film’s story took place. But evidence suggests that makeup charts were a product of the 1930s, not the 1920s. In the end, many if not most historiographical issues with the Westmores’ chronicling of their own history can be linked to their penchant for hyperbole, as though the family’s extraordinary achievements need to be bolstered by the notion that they not only singularly but instantly revolutionized the industry, for example. To wit, The Westmores of Hollywood claims that George arrived with his large family in Los Angeles in 1917, found his first job as a hairdresser and

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wigmaker at Maison Cesar, and rented a house for them all to live in on the same day, a chain of events that in reality began in 1920 and then took at least five months to complete.136 In similar fashion, Perc’s hiring by First National, his interaction with Holland on The Lost World, his becoming department head at Warner Bros., and his participation in the creation of a professional makeup artists’ organization collapse the developments of at least three years into one. No such organization was created until 1926 or 1927 at the earliest, and it is far more likely that the department that Perc was “given” was the larger one created when Warner Bros. and First National merged in 1928—at which point, according to Frank Westmore, Perc’s equally talented but alcoholic twin sabotaged his own chances by “disappearing on a two-week bender, during which Perc got the job.”137 Even then, the “job” may not have been Perc’s entirely, because as late as 1932 several sources list him as head of hairdressing while Walter Rodgers, a former actor, ran the makeup side.138 Also curious is the fate of George Westmore. Frank claims in The Westmores of Hollywood that in 1926 George went “into a decline from which he never emerged” because his sons, with whom he reportedly had an at times fraught relationship, were being given studio departments while he was not.139 But based on facsimile documents featuring his signature and title, as well as studio personnel listings (see the appendix), George appears to have been “Director of MakeUp” at MGM from 1929 to at least 1930, surely a prestigious appointment—he would have replaced Cecil Holland—that is not so much as mentioned in Frank’s book. Not only are the precise circumstances of George’s tenure at MGM unknown, but it is not even clear whether he was still there when, in mid-1931, he committed suicide—which was not publicized as such then or for years afterward—at the age of fifty-two.140 It is possible, though unlikely given the personalities involved, that the MGM appointment was temporary, since Holland returned to MGM—which was Westmore-free, so to speak, during the rest of the studio era—in 1931 and remained there until 1935, when he retired or was let go; he subsequently became a freelancer. Even in the case of the comparatively well-documented Westmores, then, there are a number of plot holes. Mary Astor’s 1971 A Life on Film is wonderfully evocative about the day-today labor of motion picture work in studio-era Hollywood. And while it was written from a considerable temporal distance, she does take as a given that Perc and Ern Westmore, at least, were doing something unique when she worked with them on Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925). Yet her account also suggests that not much had changed since the early 1910s and that actors, especially stars, were often responsible for their own makeup application (she even claims that her coiffure in the film came from Elinor Glyn, who at a party styled the actress’s curly hair smooth with “warm butter”): Perc and Ern Westmore were handling makeup and hairdressing on Don Q: As I remember, it was the first time these departments had been created.

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Greasepaint came in a stick—somewhat like a big lipstick. Stein’s Pink #2, I remember, was what I used. And it was pink, whitish pink. It was applied in streaks all over the face, and then smoothed until it filled every pore. With a towel wrapped turbanlike around the head, you leaned over and using a powder puff loaded with a pinkish powder slapped it all over until the grease had absorbed it. . . . Eyebrows disappeared, eyelashes were coated, lips covered. Then it was brushed off nice and smooth. Lipstick was a dark red. Reds went black on film, but if the tone was too light one’s mouth would look white. The men used a lighter lipstick and less base makeup. There was eyebrow shadow, brown, and mascara, black, and then something that was called “cosmetique,” a black cake of guck that was melted over a spirit lamp and then applied to the ends of the eyelashes with a match or a toothpick. This was “beading”: It accomplished what false eyelashes do today. . . . . One day in the makeup room Perc Westmore and I played around with mixing the Stein’s Pink with just a touch of the brown eyeshadow. We melted it together and stirred it up and put it on, and there was an ivory cast to the color that had never been used. On the screen it was miraculous. Bones began to show, skin looked natural and the tiny muscles of facial expression that had been blanked out before now were more evident. It was the beginning of panchromatic makeup. I wish I had held a patent on it!141

In noting that she not only put on but also could mix her own makeup, and that the result she felt was hers rather than that of a studio makeup man (or men), Astor reinforces the account of the crafts’ status in the silent era’s industrial structures that most of the trades, acting manuals, fan magazines, and other accounts have provided thus far (though she seems to have been unaware of the benefits of “yellow powder”).142 Max Factor may have been ministering to other stars, but not yet to Astor. Nor was she, or the Westmores with whom she interacts in this anecdote, apparently using Factor’s “Supreme” products. But at the same time, she introduces complications by reifying the notion that Perc and Ern Westmore had for the “first time” created departments even as Don Q was shot at the Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Studios, not Warner Bros.–First National, so she may have conflated events she later heard about with those she personally experienced. Astor does not mention this anecdote in her 1959 autobiography My Story, for example, and she wrote then that Don Q was made on the “Goldwyn lot” (perhaps because Goldwyn did indeed rent space at the Pickford/ Fairbanks location at some point in the 1920s).143 Equally confusing, Perc Westmore later claimed that he had worked on three Fairbanks films before he was hired at First National (which would exclude Don Q), while one of Fairbanks’s biographers states simply (unfortunately without providing a source) that “Fairbanks enlisted the prominent makeup artists Perc and Ern Westmore to handle all aspects of the production’s makeup and hairdressing demands.”144 Worse,

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even though Frank Westmore reports that George was Fairbanks’s “shadow, always there when Fairbanks was jumping over high walls or otherwise flinging himself around” (as he certainly did in Don Q),145 George is not mentioned in books about or by Fairbanks himself, nor is he the only makeup artist who claimed to have “gotten his start” with Fairbanks during this period. So did Robert (Blagoe) Stephanoff, who would become department head at United Artists in the late 1920s and 1930s and work subsequently as Samuel Goldwyn’s makeup executive. Astor nevertheless, if perhaps inadvertently, alludes to another looming change that would affect makeup and hairdressing at the end of the 1920s. I refer to her odd statement about the “beginning of panchromatic makeup”—odd in that panchromatic makeup would have had little usefulness for a film shot, as Don Q was, on orthochromatic stock. The price of panchromatic film was equalized by its manufacturer to that of orthochromatic in 1926, however.146 And the motion picture industry, which had already been experimenting with panchromatic in outdoor scenes, soon began the shift to the new stock, a shift that I discuss in chapter 2 and that initially came accompanied by rumors—as would be true of the introduction of three-strip Technicolor as well—that it potentially would make straight makeup obsolete. In facing down this challenge, if it was that, to the domination that they were just beginning to secure and grow accustomed to, it was not Factor or the Westmores alone who mattered but their alliance, one hinted at through the solicitation from George of a letter to Factor in 1929 about the “vital importance” to MGM of the “perfect results and reliability” of Factor’s makeup and cemented by Factor’s hiring of Perc and Ern the same year as wig designers.147 The relationship between Factor and the Westmores, however, is also marked by a number of lacunae and unanswerable questions. In addition to the fact that a book about Factor, rather than The Westmores of Hollywood, establishes that George Westmore was director of makeup at MGM, for instance, the Westmore book in turn mentions Factor only in relation to Perc and Ern’s stint in Factor’s Hair Department, although most of the brothers would use Max Factor products at their studios for the next thirty-plus years, even after they began manufacturing their own competing brand in 1935. But whatever the precise contours of their interactions, their collaboration helped both dynasties to acquire power over Hollywood and its star looks in ways that are almost unimaginable now. As will become clear in the pages that follow, I believe that the most profound insight of the Westmores, and of Factor, was their recognition that providing ways to improve and manage the application of straight makeup was far more important to the studios than the “secrets” of character makeup or hairdressing would ever be. And that this may be the true meaning of Perc’s invocation (and possibly George’s, though that is less clear) of the term first in reference to his career. Rather than tacking beards onto or painting the faces and spraying the bodies of extras and “supes” (supernumeraries) and advising or assisting inexperienced featured players or stars, in other words, Perc’s “new” department, and

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Women working in the Max Factor wigmaking studio in 1940. Bison Archives and Hollywood Historic Photos.

the type of makeup artist with which it would be staffed, would not only apply straight makeup to players but also design their looks for them, from hair to eyes and eyebrows to lips to skin, carrying the notion of makeup as motion picture “retouching” to its limit and beyond. And they would do so with economic and practical efficiency, with men in charge but women performing much of the labor, as they also did in Factor’s cosmetics and wig factory.148 In the culture more broadly, women would remain as likely to proffer expert advice about making up as men, consistent with the simultaneous existence of cosmetics businesses and beauty parlors run by women. And women, not men, used cosmetics on a daily basis and could easily have been trained to be motion picture makeup artists—indeed, several women had become studio makeup department “chiefs” by the 1930s. But the Westmores, and Factor, would adopt, if not co-opt, many of the advertising and public relations strategies, as well as ideals and techniques, of the female entrepreneurs who had been marketing their products and their expertise to women as consumers since the 1910s at least. Thus, straight makeup, which on many women would soon be called simply beauty makeup (note Perc’s use of “she” in his reference to the chart system,

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quoted earlier), meant far more for Hollywood’s makeup men than association with the loveliest movie stars (and the most handsome, though studios would remain far less likely to acknowledge their male stars’ blandishment).149 It also provided access to the pocketbooks of spectators who identified with and desired to emulate those stars. The more spectacularly virtuosic character makeup would continue to be pointed to as testament of the makeup man’s creativity and inventiveness, but beauty makeup was where audience interest, and therefore the money and fame, really lay. They might not always receive screen credit for their work—or their crafts respect from studio moguls—but beginning in the 1930s the names and sometimes faces of Max Factor and the Westmores (Perc’s especially) would become almost as recognizable to Hollywood’s public as those of the stars whose looks they had helped to create.150

2

The Classical Period Craft Identity and the Labor Force On April 18, 1928, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held an open meeting concerning “make-up and color values” near the end of its fourmonth-long evaluation of “transactions, enquiries, demonstrations, tests, prepared papers and discussions” on the subject of incandescent illumination during the studios’ transition from orthochromatic to panchromatic film stock. In the course of the meeting, cinematographer John Boyle provided his opinion on what he called “the question of make-up,” both then and in the past: This question . . . is one that has always been a source of a lot of trouble for cinematographers, and it is only in recent years that the make-up man has come to our rescue. When an actor came on the set, if he didn’t look just right, we all tried to tell him what was wrong, but it wasn’t expert opinion, and it was up to the man himself. Some of our stars have played around with make-up and they have succeeded to a certain extent. The big stars know just what it is possible. For instance, Mr. Chaney, I don’t think any of us could tell him what to do, but the rank and file of people that we have photographed require the expert make-up man and I think we have gained a lot from these people and this Associaion [sic] which has been recently formed has done marvelously well to educate the make-up man himself. All these tests that have been conducted

77

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and the experiments that the Factor organization have carried on have done a lot toward solving all our trouble.1

I open this chapter with Boyle’s remarks for two reasons. They succinctly cap the status of motion picture makeup, if not hairdressing, near the end of the silent era—necessary, but also the “source of a lot of trouble,” for cinematographers as well as actors. But he also usefully presages, as do the Mazda tests as a whole, some of the issues I explore in this and the next chapter: namely, the professionalization and standardization of makeup and hairdressing as products and as studio crafts. Moreover, while he mentions Lon Chaney, the primary “question” that concerned Boyle and his colleagues had little to do with the individualized character creations for which Chaney was famous. Rather, what inspired the meeting itself was the issue of how to make actors, especially stars, “look just right” in straight roles. The Mazda tests, which included the participation of virtually all of the industry’s larger studios and their technical personnel, got their name from the Mazda incandescent “lamps”—extremely high-wattage tungsten light bulbs— that had been donated by General Electric for the film tests (as were those of other manufacturers). Panchromatic was generally thought an improvement over orthochromatic because of its greater sensitivity to more areas of the color spectrum. (As Daniel Clark, then president of the American Society of Cinematographers, had put it in 1927, panchromatic was “something for the cinematographer to conjure with.”)2 It had also come down in price just as the industry was facing an economic slump in 1926–1927. But, as David Bordwell points out in his discussion of the tests, most of the studios were already using tungsten illumination because it was cheaper and easier to maintain—if far hotter—than arc lighting. To Bordwell, therefore, the tests’ main significance was that they “established service firms as the chief sources of systematic, industry-wide technical innovation and made the Academy the coordinator of large-scale technological change.” Even aesthetics could be standardized across the studio system, he notes, his example being the softer image that panchromatic stock and incandescent lighting could maintain without the degree of diffusion that orthochromatic often required.3 As one of the participants had stated in the minutes of the tests’ first general committee meeting on January 4, 1928, “The great problem in the matter of lighting as well as in all other phases of production was to establish standardized equipment of all kinds so that each studio could use the best and most economical.”4 One of the major Hollywood “service firms” that Bordwell names is Max Factor’s organization. Factor donated a range of his company’s products and a dedicated makeup artist not just for the tests but to any studio that might want to experiment with them on its own. (A Warner Bros. soundstage was the physical location for the Mazda tests.) And through its participation, Factor’s

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organization—which was represented by his son Davis in the open meeting— was able to experiment with, refine, and ultimately demonstrate a new complete line of “Panchromatic Make-up.” Indeed, the meeting was referred to by one participant as a “great Max Factor night”—a remark, the transcript reads, that was followed by laughter.5 The Mazda tests therefore not only made panchromatic stock and incandescent lighting into industry standards, but also did the same for Factor’s Hollywood cosmetics factory and the products it would continue to churn out there for the duration of the studio era.6 Within a year of the tests, Factor’s advertising in American Cinematographer and other trade publications was proclaiming that “Panchromatic Make-up is today universally accepted as the only safe and sure make-up for Panchromatic Film and Incandescent Lighting. Panchromatic Make-up is made exclusively by Max Factor.”7 The Mazda tests were not overtly considering issues related to the nearly simultaneous transition to sound at the end of the 1920s (the first sound features were released just before and during the tests). But it is now understood that they helped the industry, including the craft departments, to adapt more easily to the noiseless lighting that would be necessitated by the use of sound-recording equipment on the set. Although the fact that actors could “talk” would not seem to have much to do with cosmetics as such, actors speaking dialogue—and singing, too—would introduce interesting challenges to cosmetics manufacturers and makeup men already comparatively well versed in how to create normative looks for feature-length narrative films shot on orthochromatic stock.8 If, as Bordwell explained, the Mazda tests’ “investigation into panchromatic film and incandescent lighting paralleled and reinforced Hollywood’s decision to adopt sound,”9 they also paralleled and reinforced issues that would be faced by the makeup and hairdressing departments of every major studio, and minor ones as well, during the sound era. Interestingly, Bordwell does not mention that, in addition to Factor’s corporation, the Mazda tests included help by the first known trade organization devoted to makeup, the Motion Picture Make-Up Artists Association—the “Associaion” referred to in the transcript of Boyle’s statement. While there is much about the Mazda tests we will never know—little information exists about how they were conducted day-to-day, for example, nor does the footage exposed during the tests survive—it is certain that the association featured prominently not only in helping cinematographers and directors to experiment with how skin, facial features, and all kinds of hair and wigs would look on panchromatic stock but also in publicizing Factor’s new products and methods. According to the Academy’s report, the association was not at that time a familiar one, even though it supposedly included most of the makeup artists then working in Hollywood. (Perc Westmore, who was participating in the tests as the head of First National’s makeup department, and Charles Dudley, a former actor who was makeup

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chief at Fox, also contributed to the makeup session, as did Lon Chaney, through a paper read for him by the Academy’s secretary because he was unable to attend in person.) The earliest public mentions of the organization that I found date from 1927, when Film Daily referred briefly to the “newly formed Make-Up Artists Ass’n” whose purpose was “to bring together make-up artists of the industry throughout the country.”10 According to its appearance, as the Motion Picture Makeup Artists’ Association, in Film Daily’s yearbook in 1928, the group’s membership comprised forty-six “make-up artists and directors of Hollywood studios,”11 a number that had increased to fifty in 1929 (from these lists, it does not appear that the members were working anywhere other than in Hollywood). In both 1927 and 1928, the president was Jack Dawn, who would become MGM’s makeup head in 1935, replacing Cecil Holland. (Lillian Rosine, who was trained by Lon Chaney and started as a makeup artist on Ben-Hur in 1925, remained in charge of makeup for women at MGM until 1937.)12 “Percy” Westmore was vice president for the first two years and became president in 1929, followed by his brother Ern in 1930 (Fox’s Dudley was listed as president in 1933). Elections were held semiannually, and the group met weekly, on Mondays, at Max Factor’s makeup factory at 1666 North Highland Avenue. But despite the fact that there were women makeup artists and even executives—like Rosine—then working in Hollywood (and for close to a decade thereafter), all the members of the association were men. Who came up with the idea for such a group, much less its gender restrictions, is a question that cannot now be fully answered. The crafts’ current union, Local 706, in a 2012 anniversary issue of its quarterly magazine The Artisan, stated that the association was organized by Festus B. (“Dad”) Phillips “and other make-up artists” during production of Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings in 1926 (Phillips was treasurer in 1927 and 1928).13 But as noted in chapter 1, in 1970 Perc Westmore claimed to have desired to create such an organization in the early 1920s as a means by which to disseminate information across a field that he believed did not then exist in any cohesive manner.14 Ern Westmore’s granddaughter maintains that the “Motion Picture Make-up Artist’s Association” was founded by Perc and Ern, and that “Ern would serve a term as the first President.”15 But nowhere else in the family’s considerable public identity is their participation in creating such an organization referred to (nor does the union mention the Westmores in its account of the association’s origins). That said, George and two of his sons had also worked on King of Kings, and George was a member by 1929 since, according to International Photographer, he helped to organize demonstrations at some of the weekly meetings that year.16 Certainly the Westmores needed such an organization, if only because of their comparative lack of experience with motion picture makeup at the time. In other words, since all evidence suggests that the Westmores knew more about hairdressing and wigmaking than they did about makeup—much less cinematography—when they first began to

Max Factor in the 1920s and his salon and factory, where the Motion Picture Make-Up Artists Association met, shortly after its first renovation in 1928. Hollywood Filmograph, July 21, 1934; American Cinematographer, February 1929. Media History Digital Library.

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work in the industry in the mid-1920s, the association and its members would have helped all of them, father and sons, to fill the gaps in their knowledge. But to confuse the situation even further, during the Mazda tests’ makeup session it was Davis Factor (whose name is rendered as David throughout the transcript) who claimed authorship, as it were, for the association through his father’s company: I would like to dwell just a few moments upon the Make-up Artists’ Association. There are few who really know who the members are or what the organization is. We found that there was, and had been for some time, a lack of cooperation between the various make-up artists. They hid their secrets from each other. It was his property and not to be given to anyone else. Under the Association, we have brought these men together. We have fifty members which is 98% of the Make-up Artists of the motion picture business. They are now friendly with each other. At the meeting last Monday night, Percy Westmore showed how they put on side burns and side pieces in a recent First National Production. There was a demonstration of straight make-up and the application of fish-skin for scars. In this manner, each artist shows the others what he knows about make-up and how each one is progressing. We considered the question of make-up from every angle and we wish to divulge our experiences and findings. We had a make-up artist at Warner Bros. at all times during the Incandescent lighting tests. We photographed the make-up and found its shortcomings and its defects, setting out to overcome them, one by one, and today we have a new make-up.17

By whomever it was created, then, the Motion Picture Make-Up [or Make-up] Artists Association—sometimes with an apostrophe, sometimes without; although I have not seen it rendered as an acronym, to avoid confusion I will refer to it in this chapter as the MPMAA—was crucial to the alliance of the Factor organization with makeup artists generally and the Westmores, father and sons, in particular. Even more important is that the authority given to or assumed by the association would have profound effects on the labor organization of makeup and hairdressing, at every studio, into the 1930s and beyond. It was not only that Factor hosted the meetings of the association but that, during the Mazda tests, he hired twins Perc and Ern Westmore—who already had studio jobs, which they would retain—to design wigs for him and to run his Hair Department (its actual name). Although Factor products were of course used by non-Westmores, the two families’ ambitions meshed especially well because of their dynastic propensities and a shared desire to exploit their Hollywood work as a means to gain entry into the consumer marketplace. For reasons I will discuss, the FactorWestmore alliance weakened in the mid-1930s, but the power that both families had already acquired remained in place for the duration of the studio era.

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Overall, then, the Mazda tests are a nexus of the issues that I discuss in this and the next chapter. It was not inevitable that Max Factor and the Westmores became prime movers in Hollywood, and their hegemony would at various times be challenged. But starting in the late 1920s they together offered their colleagues assurance that any makeup problems that an actor, director, or cinematographer might encounter had a solution in place, or would shortly; that makeup and hairdressing could best be managed by dedicated and trained studio experts rather than cameramen or actors themselves; and that even the application of cosmetics and the styling of hair or wigs, as well as the manufacture of all products needed to do so, could be standardized for straight roles across the industry economically and efficiently. From the Mazda tests on (and continuing after Factor’s death in 1938), studio makeup and hairdressing would mature practically into something like an “institutionalization of artistry,” to borrow Patrick Keating’s words about cinematography during the sound era.18 The chronicle is replete with turf wars and labor strife, sometimes violent, that occurred in tandem with the entrenchment of many other practices related to narrative filmmaking and its exploitation—in lighting and camerawork and editing, in acting styles, and in costume design, for color as well as black and white. But tying the story together was a stunning interest in growing and maintaining Hollywood’s profitable image as the glamour capital of the world—and with men largely in charge of the design and creation of that glamour (there were no women admitted to the ASC until 1980 either), and despite whatever aesthetic or narrative incongruities it might produce. However, unlike chapter 1, which rendered more or less chronologically the events and circumstances by which makeup and hairdressing became consequential to U.S. filmmaking, from the late 1920s on the historical account is far messier because of the way so many issues present a number of “meanwhile, back at the ranch” moments. For example, to discuss departmental organization one needs information about the labor force working there; but to discuss labor it would help to understand the jobs that workers were expected to perform. Still, it makes sense to continue my historical investigation into the professionalization of makeup and hairdressing as studio crafts, and so I begin with the labor force. In addition to investigating how workers were recruited and trained (or vice versa, in some cases), I seek to understand how authority was distributed among and wielded by those responsible for the appearance of actors and/as characters on and off the screen. In chapter 3, I turn to inter- and intrastudio organization and practice—how makeup artists came to be assigned to specific films; what procedures they followed; and how models of beauty and handsomeness were designed, standardized, and disseminated. Once routine procedures were in place, they appear to have operated comparatively smoothly through the 1950s at least, but beauty makeup as a form of visual perfection also gradually went from being a more or less admired ideal to a potentially repressive standard or

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anachronism—and the makeup man or hairdresser from a friendly ally to a quasi despot—at least at some studios and for some actors. Even before addressing these topics, however, I am compelled to my first bit of crosscutting by an “insidious” rumor that started circulating just before the Mazda tests began: namely, that panchromatic film and its improved tonal rendering would obviate the need for most straight makeup altogether. We already know, of course, that to Hollywood, makeup and hairdressing became more significant rather than less in the 1930s (when the terms beauty makeup and glamour both came into popular use in association with movie stars). So assessing whether the rumor was true is not the point. What does matter is how, and as far as possible why, it was explicitly or implicitly raised and discussed in several sequential articles in American Cinematographer (as well as in at least one book) in 1928. The first two articles are by cinematographers, the final three by Max Factor (the first makeup professional, as far as I can tell, to write for the magazine). In Louis Physioc’s “Movie Make-Up: A Technical and Artistic Analysis of Motion Picture Make-Up with an Historical Sketch” in February 1928 (the second month of the Mazda tests), cinematographer and painter Physioc claims that he was worried about the “great variety of treatment” of faces on the screen that he was seeing around him. Ironically, he begins—after, as usual, comparing makeup to photographic retouching—by criticizing the “state of ultraconservativism” into which makeup had then fallen, a conservativism whose “fetters” were being loosened by the adoption of panchromatic stock. He argues that “characters and types should require no make-up” with panchromatic because “their value lies in giving to the camera all they have.” But he urges “caution among the stars and principals in relinquishing make-up entirely. We cannot yet retouch the motion negative [sic], and their beauty is of paramount importance to their public.” Again ironically—given his remarks on “ultraconservatism”—Physioc concludes that it is “highly important to work for a uniform system of treatment. . . . Otherwise, it would entail considerable trouble and study on the part of the actors in modifying their make-up to keep up with the great range of panchromatic film.”19 The following month, Joseph Dubray weighed in (but without mentioning Physioc) with “Movie Make-Up: Is Make-Up to Be or Not to Be—Panchromatic Film Causes Misapprehension.” Calling the situation “unfortunate” and decrying the “dangerous conclusion arrived at, we do not know from what source or why,” that “The use of panchromatic film will release the actors from the use of makeup,” Dubray instead calls makeup an “absolute necessity.” It is true, he argues, that “less and more natural coloring in make-up could be used” with the new stock, but to turn that into a call for the “abolition” of makeup was leading to a lot of “unpleasant results thrown on the screen and blamed upon everything and everybody instead of being charged upon their real cause—the absence of make-up.” Many of the benefits he lists are familiar: makeup turns diverse “skin

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textures or colorings” into “a more pleasing uniformity”; improves “imperfections of contour and features”; checks “uncontrollable elements” like sunburns so that continuity can be maintained “throughout the picture”; and covers up “evident signs of fatigue prominently visible and occasioned by the strenuous work” of production. Panchromatic “does not correct the differences in color and unsightly patches latent in the smoothest skin and the most pleasing complexion which the camera unmercifully discloses.” It was therefore “ridiculous,” Dubray declares, that cinematographers should be made “to perform the duties and labors that fall upon the retoucher of portrait photography” and “more than unjust to expect the cinematographer to perform the impossible feat of obtaining a well-balanced, perfect rendition of values [without makeup] and [then to face] bitter criticism, poor screen rendition, disillusionment, heart-ache and perhaps ill-feeling.” The role of makeup was to “put beauty in truth [and] to correct the imperfections of nature and to add that element of Beauty that we call Art.” Dubray ends with a set-off reiteration of his title: “IS MAKE-UP TO BE OR NOT TO BE?”20 It is possible that Max Factor was simply asked for his opinion on the matter for the April and May issues, but it seems more likely that the conjunction of his articles with the previous two was yet another consequence of the Mazda tests. Two days after the makeup meeting, the Academy held the tests’ “final session,” during which Factor’s “demonstrations,” along with those of the MPMAA, were mentioned by Frank Woods, the Academy’s secretary, in terms of the “perfection of make-up materials” that the demonstrations had exhibited.21 The “very close contact” of the Academy with the two organizations, and the “joint work” of the makeup artist and cinematographer (Dubray participated in the makeup session; it is not clear that Physioc did), “if supported by actors and directors, studio managers and producers,” would “produce excellent results.”22 Moreover, the title of Factor’s first American Cinematographer piece—“Movie Make-Up: A Master of the Art Sets Forth That Make-Up Is the Cinematographer’s Best Ally”—reproduces almost verbatim the concluding remarks of his son’s paper during the makeup session: “In closing, we cannot stress the fact too much that make-up is the greatest ally of the cinematographer, and the most pliant tool of the artist.”23 After an introduction by American Cinematographer’s editors mentioning Factor père’s arrival in the United States from Russia in 1901, his settling in Los Angeles in 1908, and his early work there at his own emporium and in conjunction with his “near neighbors” the Western Costume Company, Factor lays out the rationales for using his makeup rather than any other in the industry. These comprise his interest in considering “the psychology of make-up, in regard to photographic values”; his “feeling” that “make-up should appear as natural to the eye as it would be on the screen” and that “the performer should not in the least bit be conscious of being made up”; and his development, in 1923, of “the first flexible make-up that could be applied on the skin very thin,

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and yet retain all the covering and coloring qualities necessary.” And because “a great many performers and cinematographers” relied on his advice, he wants to “convince [his] readers that the future holds a new and wonderful era for make-up,” and that he would, with the help of the ASC, willingly “supply every photographer with sufficient material to make his own tests for the betterment of pictures.”24 The Academy is not mentioned in any of Factor’s articles. But in the second, simply called “Panchromatic Make-Up,” he writes that, since the “last issue,” he had been doing “an immense amount of experimental work with this type of make-up” and now is “more than delighted to state at this time that the results from these tests more than exceeded my fondest expectations. As a result of these successful tests, two of the largest studios are now using the Panchromatic Makeup exclusively and a large majority of the others are beginning to use it, having come to the realization that this new type of make-up is a major improvement.”25 (Factor’s final 1928 article offered a reassurance that his makeup was made only of pure ingredients and would not “injure the skin”—taken for granted now, but important in an era in which cosmetics were not federally regulated for safety, as would become the case at the end of the 1930s.)26 There is some evidence that certain Hollywood actors—most if not all men— already claimed that they rarely if ever used makeup. (See, for example, Jean Hersholt’s 1924 comments about his acting in Greed in chapter 1.) But in the section titled “Grease Paint” in actor Oswell Blakeston’s memoir and acting manual Through a Yellow Glass (1928), Blakeston describes by-now familiar procedures for using greasepaint (Factor’s is one among several that he lists) in motion pictures, before turning to its future: “You see, grease paint may soon be a thing of the past. With panchromatic film and incandescent lighting ‘make-up’ is unnecessary for men, although there is a special panchromatic foundation for women. Carl Dreyer did not allow any of his artists to use ‘make-up’ in Saint Joan [sic] and he gained a thousand times in character; while purely commercial films like Wings have presented their heroes without ‘make-up.’ It is a step nearer life, a revolt against china-like simulation, and therefore welcome. The effects are incredibly lovely.” Blakeston concludes his chapter by stating, “I should have hated the old grease paints to have passed away before you had known how to use them.”27 But a film like Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) only proves the rule, one that even Wings (1927) largely followed, for the men as well as the women. It is true that panchromatic recorded more colors as a range of similar tones of gray and therefore rendered (white) skin with less of the mottling associated with orthochromatic. And this did allow Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers to forgo obvious greasepaint and powder in some scenes in Wings. But in others their eyes, eyebrows, skin, and hair are almost as cosmetically enhanced as those of their costar Clara Bow. Thus, by the end of the 1920s, far from makeup becoming a “thing of the past,” it was in fact assumed in the industry that all actors were

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going to be made up in Hollywood films, if only because, as was pointed out by director Irvin Willat during the Mazda makeup meeting, “make-up is most important, regardless of whether you use Panchromatic or the ordinary film. There should be a certain amount of make-up on our leading men, especially as the leading woman is bound to make-up, and if the leading man doesn’t he is going to suffer by comparison.”28 This would become even more of an issue in the “dialogue shots” of sound films, in which two or more actors conversed in the same frame. As in the silent era, how to render white skin on the screen with panchromatic would remain one of the primary concerns of the industry, but arguably to an even greater degree less for matters of realism than ideology. It is well known that, as Brian Winston writes in the section “Pleasing Flesh Tones” in his book Technologies of Seeing, “Exact reproduction, a supposed goal of the photographic and cinematographic project, takes second place to inexact, culturally determined, ‘optimum’ reproduction. Caucasian skin tones are not to be rendered as they are, but rather as they are preferred—a white shade of white.”29 The issue of how the largest organ of the human body affected and was affected by conventions of cinematic representation has been well elaborated in Alice Maurice’s Cinema and Its Shadow: Race and Technology in Early Cinema and Richard Dyer’s canonical study White,30 and I will return to it in chapter 4 of this book. But the point I make here is that Hollywood films constantly invoked, if they did not directly create, persistent racist fears of actors inadvertently appearing “almost as dark as Negroes,” as Harry Barton Oldridge put it in his Movie Make-Up Manual (1927),31 due to the vicissitudes of the camera’s engagement with white flesh tones regardless of what film stock was used. Because of panchromatic’s properties, however, there was no longer a need for the cold-cream-covered-with-greasepaint-and-powder (yellow, pink, or white) facial treatment that had become standard with orthochromatic in order to make the skin of white actors appear smooth and of an even tone. Rather, panchromatic film—which was manufactured to similar specifications by Eastman, DuPont, and Agfa—most naturally responded, as it turned out, to a “neutral” palette of brownish or gray tones (the same was true of “Super [Sensitive] Pan,” a faster panchromatic stock adopted industry-wide around 1931). Factor made his panchromatic colors uniform across liquid greasepaint and powder as well as other cosmetics, but as his biographer Fred Basten put it, the new makeup had “only one drawback. Because it was designed for black-and-white film, it looked bizarre in real life. For example, actresses wore dark brown lipstick, which photographed as ‘red’ on film. The new line was impossible to wear as everyday makeup” and was even “horrifying to look at.”32 In 1930, Ginger Rogers was working in the East Coast film industry and performing in the musical Girl Crazy on Broadway at night. And as she writes in her autobiography, “I took off the [panchromatic] screen makeup, a base of ocher yellow and a lip rouge of chocolate brown, and replaced it with normal flesh tones, pink rouge, and red lip rouge. I

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felt restored to life by the stage makeup. The natural flesh tones of today are not as depressing as the Egyptian colors of screen makeup in days past.”33 It probably goes without saying that “Egyptian” is itself Rogers’s latter-day euphemism for Black, an ironic turn given the purpose of the makeup itself. Moreover, despite the confidence with which any and all makeup, facial hair, and wig issues were pronounced conquered at the end of the Mazda tests (Davis Factor also claimed that all the new Factor cosmetics would work well with orthochromatic and the then-available color stocks too, which, as Rogers’s remarks suggest, was an oversimplification), in fact for more than a year there was an additional series of makeup tests that “directly continue[d] the famous Mazda Light Tests made by the A. S. C.,” in the words of American Cinematographer in November 1929.34 Partly as a result of “such amazing technical innovations as sound, natural-color cinematography, and wide-film” in addition to the industry’s wholesale adoption of panchromatic, it really was many months after the original Mazda tests that Factor’s Panchromatic Make-up was “perfected”: “a complete range of make-up, every shade being a perfectly balanced blend of colors from the entire range of the spectrum, so blended as to create a beautiful flesh tone, which photographs practically the same under any style of lighting—incandescent, arc, or sunlight.” These new tests were made at the TecArt Studio, “under as nearly as possible the same conditions met with in regular production”: The subjects were chosen less for beauty than for the opportunities they offered for corrective make-up. In all cases the tests included identical views of the subject without make-up, with the old style, and with the new Panchromatic makeup; also, in some cases, direct comparisons of any two of these. . . . Furthermore, the Research Sommittee [sic], in coöperation with the Factor organization, is devising a convenient quick-reference make-up chart with which all A. S. C. members will soon be supplied, and is also coöperating in experiments looking toward the standardization of make-ups for natural color cinematography. These latter experiments are still proceeding, and their results will be announced in due time.35

Perhaps the conjunction of the rumor, the articles, and Factor’s involvement was fortuitous, but by October 1929 Factor had a monthly advice column in American Cinematographer (it ran until June 1930), in which he answered any questions readers, male or female, might have had about makeup and hairdressing, including the proper use of his new consumer Color Harmony cosmetics in daily life.36 So it would appear that Factor ultimately used the controversy to make himself and his “magnificent” organization “internationally famous over night [sic],” as a caption of a large photo of his Hollywood factory in the February  1929 issue of American Cinematographer exclaimed (because the photo

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accompanied no article, it, too, may have been an ad disguised as editorial content).37 Who or what was behind the rumor we will never know. But the rhetoric rebutting it serves as a record of how makeup artists as well as cinematographers were negotiating their studio and labor identities in a new era, one that would include not only the adoption of panchromatic and sound but also, a few years later, three-strip Technicolor, the latter of which would make Factor’s company even more famous as well as profitable. However, the assertions made at the end of the 1920s that everything was well in hand due to the organization of a dedicated craft association obscure the fact that labor struggles involving makeup artists and hairdressers continued for years. As I begin to discuss now, the 1930s and its economic, social, and cultural upheavals were the ground on which these struggles played out. Not everything can be clarified neatly or completely from this distance because many of Hollywood’s early labor unions no longer exist, or, if they do, they have always been busy serving current members rather than pondering the future needs of historians. But at the same time, in contrast to the comparative paucity of even published information in the silent era, I was faced with a surplus, as it were, of promotional and publicity material from the 1930s on. (Archival studio documentation remained scarce, although I found more than I could have hoped for.) In addition to more or less straightforward journalistic reportage, I also had to sift through glittering heaps of entertaining but at times deceptive or selfaggrandizing pieces in fan magazines and the like, many of which were designed explicitly or implicitly not only to burnish credentials but to sell products other than films, or even stars, themselves. In general terms, the labor history of makeup and hairdressing is not dissimilar from that of other below-the-line crafts whose initial identities came from outside the industry (costuming and set design especially) but whose practitioners were perforce continually confronting whether they were of value to the studios as “mechanics or artists,” to repeat Patrick Keating’s paraphrasing of cinematographer Carl Louis Gregory’s words.38 The fact that the MPMAA had a membership of close to fifty upon its founding in the late 1920s suggests just how many makeup men there were already at work in Hollywood by the end of the decade. But while membership lists were intermittently published in the Motion Picture Almanac between 1928 and 1936, there is less information available about how the organization functioned internally. A brief column in International Photographer in mid-1929 comments on the “remarkable growth” of the “unique organization” in “only two years” and describes its “beautiful headquarters” in the Max Factor building, adding that at its weekly meetings “demonstrations are given by the various members to the extent that each artist helps the other in solving the problems relating to their particular branch of the industry,” such that the organization’s growth has been “conductive of good feeling between the

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boys.”39 Given the location of the column, “the boys” might also have included cinematographers, but it is hard to tell given the lack of available information about many of the names. That all of the makeup artists were “boys” is not. We can never confidently be sure why almost all the labor organizations related to makeup in the studio system decided to limit women’s participation either to body makeup—everything “below the neck,” but also, sometimes, ears—or to hairdressing.40 The current union, IATSE Local 706 (the Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild), has no written history on the subject. So, in the words of former president Sue Cabral-Ebert, “It’s all storytelling. (Why would men write down stories that make them look like jerks?) The version we always heard was that the women were hair stylists on a shorter guarantee of hours so they could go home and get dinner ready, and the male makeup artists would get the overtime and watch the set.”41 Even if makeup men simply wanted to avoid being feminized, the fact remains that both Factor and the Westmores began as wigmakers and hairdressers and yet would cede much of that craft— though hardly all, as we will see—to women. (Paradoxically, in a 1937 Hal Roach Hollywood-set musical comedy called Pick a Star, the story’s makeup man appears stereotypically “swishy” and the female hairdresser “butch”; neither actor is credited.) Until the 1970s, the union’s regulations continued to stipulate that makeup artists had to be male and hairdressers female.42 Perhaps predictably, hairdressers, as among the only female craftspeople on a movie set, could endure various forms of sexual harassment, which MGM, at least, attempted to manage by making it the responsibility of the women, who had little institutional power against their persecutors, to “look and act respectable.”43 (Again, as was the case with all other Hollywood craft and technical unions, it was taken for granted that studio makeup artists and hairdressers would be white.)44 If the chronicle of labor organization in relation to makeup and hairdressing begins with the MPMAA, however, the organization did not simply “become” Local 706 when the latter was chartered in 1937 by IATSE & MPMO (the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employe[e]s and Moving Picture Machine Operators; the MPMO was dropped in the late 1960s), although that is how the union has couched its own history.45 It is not clear how women were allowed or recruited to join “the boys” as hairdressers, for example, given that even women makeup artists were not members of the MPMAA itself. Nor do we really know how male makeup artists—much less entities like the beauty salon Maison Cesar, the first employer of George and Perc Westmore after their arrival in Hollywood in 1920; or Max Firestein, the business manager of the Factor organization— became listed members of the association, whether by invitation (the ASC’s modus operandi) or petition, nor what their contributions were. What became of the 2 percent of makeup artists who were not members is opaque too, although some of them were likely women. What can be documented is that many of the association’s members, and most certainly the Westmores, were working by the early 1930s to make it into the

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governing body of studio makeup and, by implication, hairdressing. But by 1929, “all members of the Association,” International Photographer reports, were already also members of another Hollywood labor organization: “Local No.  235, The United Scenic Artists Union.”46 The final amalgamation of makeup and hairdressing into a single union was therefore actually a quite complex and contentious process, although, as with other crafts, it cannot be separated from the precipitous decline in studio profits from 1929 to 1933 that caused drastic reductions in below-the-line personnel, nor from the labor strife that gripped Hollywood as a result of New Deal legislation following the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. There would be competition between members of the association—with the Westmores together on one side—and the union the association had joined, and if ultimately the hegemony of the Westmores was strengthened by the chartering of Local 706 in 1937, the actions they took to exert their authority during the late 1920s and early 1930s also appear to have become a source of some resentment. Prior to 1937, at least, there were attempts to create competing labor organizations, by women as well as men, although there is frustratingly little information about the circumstances of either their founding or what happened to them. As is well known, in general Hollywood filmmaking concerns, like much of the rest of the country’s industries, actively resisted labor organization during the silent era. In her book on fashion in silent film, Michelle Tolini Finamore quotes Lillian Gish’s autobiography as evidence for the “consolidation of the film industry that took place between the 1910s and the mid-1920s.”47 In Gish’s account, when the actress returned to Hollywood in 1925 after having signed a lucrative two-year contract with MGM to make six films, she claimed that the “whole structure of film making had changed”: “Unions had been formed. Everybody’s job was circumscribed. Actors could not move a prop. Most of the time they had nothing to say about the choice of costumes. . . . A small army of assistants (from a dozen departments that had never before existed, including set designers, wardrobe managers, hairdressers, makeup artists, and script writers) were responsible for the work that [D. W.] Griffith had handled alone for each of his films. . . . Money was abundant. Luxury was everywhere. . . . Films had become big business.”48 While films were certainly big business by 1925, and the studios’ various departments were becoming increasingly hierarchized, Gish was likely misremembering the situation in relation to union organization, given how few unions existed then in Hollywood, none of them involving the “departments” she describes. In his 1941 history of labor organization in Hollywood, Murray Ross notes that there had been some strikes by studio craftsmen—of which branches he does not indicate—in 1918 and again in 1921, and an intervening strike by cameramen. But all returned to work “without having secured the recognition [by the studios] of their unions.”49 Instead, “the open-shop plan prevailed” until what became the Studio Basic Agreement (SBA) was negotiated and

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signed in 1926, under the terms of which producers would negotiate with five groups representing stagehands, carpenters, electricians, painters, and musicians.50 But notably, “small crafts”—like makeup and hairdressing and their personnel— were excluded from the SBA as individuals or as separate organizations. While this partly explains the affiliation of the MPMAA with a member union of the SBA like United Scenic Artists—which was itself an “autonomous” local of the Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers of America—I have no information about the process by which the affiliation occurred, or whether it was a decision made with the agreement of or in spite of the Westmores and Max Factor, who housed the makeup association’s meetings.51 The constitution of the Brotherhood, which applied to United Scenic Artists, was written in 1905 and amended at least seventeen times, likely well before Local 235 joined or was created. But by September 1929—when the earliest version of the constitution I have seen was published—it refers to “the art of make-up and all its various effects” as a craft under the Brotherhood’s jurisdiction.52 Interestingly, when in the summer of 1929 the League of Art Directors (formed in 1928) had tried to establish the basis for forming a union separate from United Scenic Artists with IATSE, it did not list the contributions of makeup artists and hairdressers among the “over two hundred professional workers, men and women,” whom they wanted the new organization to represent. IATSE and the American Federation of Labor would not endorse such an organization, however, because of the “very serious jurisdictional difficulty” it would present given the existence already of Local 235, with which the members of the league no longer wished to remain affiliated. Although the rationale and precise steps by which it happened remain unclear as well, in August  1930 United Scenic Artists divided, or was divided, into two organizations: a “professional” group that retained the original charter named “Two-Three-Five,” and a “labor group” that was rechartered as Motion Picture Painters Local 644 of the larger Brotherhood (hereafter referred to, in common parlance, as the Painters).53 Most later accounts, and Local 706 today as well, maintain that makeup artists and hairdressers were members of Local 644, but at least in the early 1930s (as the 1931 “Working Rules” of Two-Three-Five laid out), makeup artists, body makeup “girls,” and hairdressers all remained members of the originally chartered organization.54 More will be said later about how the categories were defined and regulated and by whom, but for now the important fact is that the Painters for several years in the early 1930s were either not receptive to, or were unable to assume authority over, makeup and hairdressing. A 1932 article in Hollywood Filmograph (a weekly trade paper for actors), for example, notes that “the union”—which it does not name—had demanded that “members of the makeup artists organization walk off of a Radio pictures location owing to the fact that men were employed who were not members in good standing.” The article claims that the association as a group was “split wide open” that year when Perc and Ern Westmore, along with “certain [other] members,”

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refused to strike and decided that they were “through with Local 235 since the Motion Picture Make-up Artists are not recognized by the producers, as are other crafts of the local, and they openly defied representatives of the union, and continued to work on the location.” It is not clear who the “certain members” were, but they had “sort of pooled together and started their own group and have even opened a make up branch where they are making their own cosmetics.”55 This, I believe, refers to a “cosmetics concern,” as the Los Angeles Times put it in 1932, called Associated Motion Picture Make-up Artists, Inc. The group had submitted a trademark application that year and received a permit to manufacture and sell “a new line of cosmetics for street wear,” and its directorate consisted “entirely of [film] make-up artists,” among them Robert Stephanoff, Phil Gastrock, Bert Hadley, and Cecil Holland.56 Although the firm—its name now legally changed to Hollywood Motion Picture Make-Up Artists, Inc., Ltd.—was offering public shares in 1934, it was nevertheless sued by the MPMAA because of the similarities in their monikers.57 And while the newer company prevailed on appeal in 1936,58 the victory appears to have been moot given that the company had already disappeared from the public record. (Stephanoff remained an important studio makeup artist and executive, and Hadley would ultimately serve as the first president of Local 706.) If I could find neither further information about the lawsuits nor much about the contentious 1932 events Hollywood Filmograph describes, certainly the article’s subheading, “ERN AND PERC WESTMORE FIGHT TO MAINTAIN POSITION WITH THEIR CO-WORKERS,” should be kept in mind in light of subsequent developments.59 The corruption and nefarious machinations of IATSE in the 1930s following ineffective studio labor strikes in 1933 (in which makeup artists again participated) is far beyond my book’s topic. So is the relationship generally of organized crime’s movement into labor activism in Hollywood as across the country, partly in response to the repeal of Prohibition earlier in the year. That said, the overall point is that, throughout the classical era, the studios were most worried about work stoppages or strikes by workers they considered “irreplaceable,” such as cinematographers, lab and sound technicians, and editors. As a consequence, in the 1930s they were seeking ways to “force their restless workers into a union controlled by men who were willing to stop strikes and to trade workers’ wages in return for payoffs,” in the words of Hollywood labor historian Mike Nielsen.60 And these facts certainly form part of the narrative of how makeup and hairdressing became a named union that was recognized by every studio. Records from the early 1930s show how quickly Hollywood was thrown into turmoil following Roosevelt’s signing into law of the National Industrial Recovery Act on June 16, 1933. Barely a week later, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences circulated a bulletin stating that it hoped “to represent and coördinate the various branches of the motion picture production industry in their activities and relations with each other.”61 Documents from Local 706’s archives also show that some thirty-eight men—including all four of the

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working-age Westmore brothers—were signatories to a document, dated June 29, 1933, that presented the MPMAA as their labor representative, whether they were “members” or “non-members” of the organization, and which clearly represented an attempted break with Local 235: We, the undersigned . . . hereby declare; that we accept this Association as our representative in the preparation of a Code of Ethics and Regulations, covering the salaries, hours, and working conditions, of our profession, and which is to be presented to the Motion Picture Industry, or the representatives of same, or to the Federal Government, noting under the rights given us in Section Seven of the Industrial Control Act, as signed by President Roosevelt, in which we are given the privileges of collective bargaining with our employers, through an organization of our own choosing, and with representatives of our own choosing; and on [sic] our own free will and without restraint or coercion, we hereby declare that it is our desire to be represented by the Motion Picture Make-Up Artists Association, and by no other individual and/or any other group or organization.62

The next day, the same paragraph accompanied two pages of signatures of forty-five women, but with the “organization of their choosing” now called the Motion Picture Hairdressers Association (with “Motion Picture” typed above the line on both pages, as though it were inserted later). I wish there were available minutes for whatever discussion led to what may have been the first Hollywood labor organization with an all-female membership (and what the women’s status had been previously vis-à-vis the MPMAA). Michael Westmore did tell me that he thought that Perc was “involved with making many of the rules, especially ‘men-makeup artists/women-hairstylists’”63—which would be an especially ironic state of affairs not only given the Westmores’ original training but also the fact that their own salon, the House of Westmore, employed women makeup artists in the 1930s, among them Perc’s fifth wife, Ola Carroll.64 I do not know of any other craft union that officially restricted its membership to women, but I can at least note, first, that the 1931 “working rules” of United Scenic Artists already had divided makeup artists (and body makeup “girls”) and hairdressers on the basis of gender; and, second, that by December 1933 the new women’s organization had its own letterhead identifying itself as the Studio Hairdressers Association (one can but wonder whether the name change was an attempt to assert at least some degree of agency against their governing makeup-artist masters). And the women officers were negotiating on their own with the Association of Motion Picture Producers about hours and salaries, pointing out in a letter that the new organization represented “over 45 out of approximately 60 persons engaged in this profession.”65 The address of the Studio Hairdressers Association, however, was the same as that of the MPMAA, in the Max Factor building. And given the way makeup and hairdressing departments had been

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practically organized by that point—about which more later—it would appear that hairdressers were still employed, or not, at the pleasure of the makeup executives who remained their bosses. (By my estimation, seventeen of the thirty-eight male signatories served, then or subsequently, as studio makeup department heads; it is more difficult to discern with the women because hairdressers’ names were rarely included in personnel lists, but at least eight, and possibly more, ultimately became heads of hairdressing.) This early attempt to create a separate instrument by which makeup artists and hairdressers could negotiate on their own with the studios is interesting both with respect to the 1932 Hollywood Filmograph piece and as an example of the precise form of labor organization that the studios were seeking to avoid, through which one small organization (the League of Art Directors was another) could threaten to or actually disrupt productions across the industry. However, studios frequently granted small wage increases through such organizations, since the salaries of below-the-line personnel represented a comparatively negligible percentage of any film’s production costs.66 Decades later, William Tuttle recalled that the MPMAA also had dues that supported a secretary, which helped it to function much like the union would, where “studios could call and give out calls to people and they would contact them.”67 Signally, during an earlier March 1933 walkout of makeup artists ordered by Local 235 in response to the studios’ “wage waiver”—the across-the-board wage reduction in purported response to declining profits and the effects of Roosevelt’s bank holiday—Hollywood Filmograph again wrote that several makeup “heads” had returned to work in defiance of the walkout and were “ordered removed from the union roster as violating the union’s orders.”68 This, then, would seem to have helped throw at least some makeup artists toward the Painters and Local 644. Were the June documents an attempt to separate the MPMAA from both Local 235 and Local 644? And given that the originals of the signed statements remained in the archives of the current union, were they ever delivered, and if so, to whom? Similar questions arise about an undated telegram sent by makeup man Jack Dawn to General Hugh S. Johnson (it has to be from 1933 or 1934, the dates of Johnson’s tenure in Roosevelt’s New Deal administration), which Dawn wrote as “a laborer in my industry.” Dawn had been asked to join “either of two labor organizations[,] one an independent association that has a majority of the men and the other a labor union having only a small minority but union insists I join them[.]” Dawn wanted to join the association, but the union was trying to “stop [him] from working by threatening my employer with strike[.] Please advise if under Federal Industrial Control Act union can force me to join them or stop me from working if I don’t.”69 Dawn, too, had signed the 1933 document, so one assumes that the MPMAA was the “independent association” and that the “labor union” was either United Scenic Artists or the Painters, both of which were under the jurisdiction of the Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers.

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Despite any dissension between makeup artists and whichever union was representing them, however, or among makeup artists themselves, neither makeup artists nor hairdressers seem to have materially participated in IATSE’s failed strikes against the studios later in 1933, after which it withdrew from the SBA. But IATSE was readmitted to the SBA in 1936 as producers realized the benefits of colluding with its henchmen, mobsters Willie Bioff and George Browne, who promised the producers that they could keep laborers from striking—and productions moving smoothly—as long as IATSE was given, Mike Nielsen writes, “complete control over the key workers in the industry.”70 This became an even more compelling strategy for the producers when Roosevelt’s National Labor Relations Act (generally referred to as the Wagner Act), which gave all workers the right to organize and bargain collectively, was declared constitutional in April 1937.71 No longer could producers simply point to the terms of the Studio Basic Agreement and bargain with the representatives of five unions and five only. They would instead potentially have to work with the representatives of any organization created by the laborers affiliated with a particular craft, and about many sorts of issues other than wages. The studios had already offered the Painters, too, the right to rejoin the SBA if they ceded the makeup artists and hairdressers to IATSE. But instead the Painters and several other smaller crafts—among them makeup and hairdressing, as well as disparate categories ranging from plasterers and set designers and painters to studio plumbers and cooks—organized themselves into a democratic and worker-led collective, Federated Motion Picture Crafts (FMPC), that would enable laborers in smaller unions to bargain individually or as part of the larger group with the studios. The only restriction to any one of the eleven member crafts’ bargaining abilities was that no single union within the FMPC could enter into an agreement that damaged or infringed upon the rights of another member union.72 As is well known, however, the studios refused to bargain with the FMPC, so at the end of April 1937 the new organization called a strike against Warner Bros., Universal, Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, RKO, Twentieth Century-Fox, Columbia, United Artists, and the Hal Roach Studios, demanding that the studios recognize the FMPC and provide separate contracts, a closed shop, and increased wages for all of its members. As film historian Ida Jeter and others have documented, the ironic effect of the six-week strike, during which initially the FMPC was joined by workers outside the new organization (including the “informally aligned” Screen Actors Guild),73 would be the dissolution of the FMPC altogether and the takeover of much of the Hollywood labor force by IATSE, which had recruited various forms of mob muscle to break up the strike—often in violent ways—while also offering union cards to strikers and strikebreakers alike. In the end, as Jeter writes laconically, “most of the crafts obtained contracts, but an initial goal, recognition of the [FMPC], was not achieved.”74 Indeed, following the 1937 strikes, Mike Nielsen claims that IATSE, thanks partly to the ruthless tactics of Bioff and Browne, was “in control of some

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12,000 [studio] workers. . . . In a tax hearing on the estate of [mobster] Frank Nitti in 1949 studio executives admitted under oath that their deals with Browne and Bioff saved the studios approximately $15 million.”75 That makeup and hairdressing are mentioned in almost all accounts of the FMPC strike is partly because of the Westmores’ participation in it, or rather their refusal again to join their rank-and-file colleagues and instead to claim that, in contrast to the workers who populated the departments they ran (at the time Perc was at Warner Bros., Wally at Paramount, Mont at Selznick, and Ern at Twentieth Century-Fox), they were not “labor” but “management.” The brothers, urged primarily by Perc, had begun openly to challenge Max Factor’s company as well in 1935, when Perc and Ern quit working as Factor wig designers in order to manufacture their own cosmetics brand and open a salon the same year (discussed at more length in chapter 3). Although a Louella Parsons column reported that two other makeup executives—Jack Dawn at MGM and Dorothy “Dot” Ponedel, then at Paramount along with Wally Westmore—also refused to strike,76 because of their fame the Westmores were singled out. Early on the morning of May 3, 1937, the House of Westmore was vandalized; the perpetrators, who were never identified, poured creosote on the furnishings as well as the luxurious drapes and carpeting and caused what news reports claimed was $10,000 to $20,000 in damages.77 (The status of the House of Westmore as a Hollywood tourist attraction was only increased by national coverage of the vandalism.) In combination with other material presented here, then, the FMPC strike suggests that there were significant divisions between members of management, some of them Westmores, and the workers who “manned” the picket lines. Certainly the brothers’ refusal to abide by the rules of the FMPC, and the defection of others who followed them and were quickly offered union cards by IATSE, doomed the new federation even though some makeup artists and hairdressers resisted IATSE’s overtures.78 Murray Ross, writing less than five years out from the strikes, claimed that makeup artists as a group proved “unreliable” as strikers, and that some of the violence was sparked by the firing of a female extra from the Screen Actors Guild who had defied the strike by obtaining a card from IATSE and working (quite successfully, one imagines) as a makeup artist (which also undermined the validity of the men’s exclusive claim on the field).79 Further urgency for resolution was likely prompted by the fact that, as the six-week strike deepened during the production of several big-budget Technicolor films, Variety reported that the studios “dispatched calls for auxiliary make-up artists and extra girls were enlisted as hairdressers. Producers claimed the situation was well in hand and that the strike would not interfere with production schedules.”80 The gender of the strikers, however, is rarely discussed in subsequent academic labor histories, beyond the fact that women pickets were often relegated to “supporting” functions like holding bake sales or even beauty contests to raise money. Historian Laurie Pintar, writing seventy years later about the “muscular militancy” of one of the strike’s leaders—the Painters’ business manager

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Herbert K. Sorrell—in the 1930s and 1940s, claims that “it is no surprise that during the 1930s, working men infused their labor activism with militant shows of physical strength, in an attempt not only to recoup lost economic power but lost social power as well. This muscular version of labor militancy continued into the 1940s.”81 Pintar claims that when Bioff and Browne ordered IATSE’s members to cross the picket line to take the jobs of the strikers, “The violence [became] so prevalent that within the first week the few women pickets, who came from the ranks of hair stylists and make-up artists, were ordered off the picket lines by FMPC leadership. Thereafter the strike became an exclusively male drama as workers battled against IATSE thugs on the picket lines.”82 But of course many if not most of the striking makeup artists were men—which Pintar might not have understood—and she does not describe how their militancy, “muscular” or otherwise, interacted with that of their female colleagues. Indeed, Sorrell’s identity as a “working man,” in addition to his ability to work with producers, was part of his appeal, Pintar claims. And when he negotiated a contract for the Painters that was generally regarded as “the best [non-IATSE] contract in the studios,” as she reports, he characterized it “as a victory for real working men.”83 In contrast, it is hard to imagine that the Westmores would have been content ever to remain part of a federation that, with some exceptions, comprised primarily “ordinary” white-collar or manual laborers rather than creative “artists” or even technical workers. In addition to the conflict between the various locals of the Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers of America, before the FMPC strike Variety reported that the makeup artists and hairdressers—who specifically the report does not say—were “demanding autonomy from painters, and [planned instead] to join cameramen,” which, given their practical interdependence as “allies” (at least as far as the makeup artists were concerned), made a certain sense.84 But there is no sign that makeup artists, much less women hairdressers or body makeup “girls,” would have been invited to join what I assume was IATSE Local 659, the cinematography union formed in 1928, given how fiercely cinematographers protected their own (masculine) identity and on whose turf makeup artists appeared to some to be actively encroaching by 1937 (see chapter 3). The demise of the FMPC in June 1937 was ultimately followed by the chartering of IATSE & MPMO Local 706, Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists, on November 1.85 But in the interim IATSE appears to have put the makeup artists into another union, Studio Makeup Artists, under the jurisdiction of Local 37, which had been one of the only IATSE “back-lot” locals prior to the strikes (the other was the Conference of Studio Unions).86 Although I could find little information about Studio Makeup Artists as such—or indeed Local 37, which was disbanded in 1939—the two organizations must have been contiguous given that Local 706 would retain the same president and secretary. Moreover, Dot Ponedel’s application to Studio Makeup Artists in September  1937—“he” having “fully complied with the requirements” for membership—was stamped

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“approved” on November  1, literally the same official date as Local 706’s charter.87 Intriguingly, Ponedel notes on her application to Studio Makeup Artists that she already belonged to a completely different organization, Local 731, which she handwrites was called “Make-up Artists.” About all I could discover about that organization comes from a January 1936 Variety squib that refers to the fact that “Motion Picture Hair Stylists Guild and Make-up Artists have amalgamated as Local 731,” and which also gives a list of “reelected” officers—all of them women, though all studio hairdressers rather than makeup artists.88 Perhaps Local 731, which was under the jurisdiction of the Brotherhood rather than IATSE, divided the FMPC strikers, and I assume this is what Murray Ross is referring to when he writes that one of the Painters’ “imaginative business agents” in 1934 suggested that the union “absorb” the makeup artists “even though,” in Ross’s words, “their brushes moved over faces instead of walls.”89 But this anecdote also seems apocryphal given the fact that makeup artists had been members of United Scenic Artists already (which Ross does not mention). Nor does hairdressing fit the story, and it was a major component of makeup as a studio craft by that point as well as of Local 731. It does appear, however, that makeup artists as well as hairdressers were working to leave Local 235 well before unionization in 1937, with the MPMAA, in whole or in part, leading one way and, whenever it was created, Local 731 the other—the latter and its female membership also indicating that there were attempts to counter the male dominance of makeup as a craft even if ultimately, and unfortunately, they proved futile in institutional terms.90 Ironically, and in contrast to the MPMAA, once Local 706 was successfully chartered and accepted to the SBA as the representative of all studio makeup artists and hairdressers, the Westmores appear never to have served as officers. (Not until 1965 was a Westmore—Monty, Mont’s son and Michael’s brother—elected as secretary-treasurer.) And while for a single year, 1938, a hairdresser, Carmen Dirigo, served as vice president, thereafter no woman appears publicly as a union officer until the 1970s. Indeed, while the Westmores all retained union memberships throughout their careers,91 they mostly would continue to sign executive contracts with the studios and to run departments that were now populated by union laborers over whose careers they exerted substantial influence. More to the point, many if not all of the rules and much of the structure of the new union—including its gender divisions—were those of the original organization they and Factor had founded and that was of such importance to the Mazda tests, and that had been further codified in the rules of Locals 235 and 644. Again, before 1937, although men dominated the ranks of makeup “chiefs,” several women, like Lillian Rosine at MGM or Dot Ponedel at Paramount, also served as such, and were routinely working as makeup artists too. As Nellie Manley, a signatory to the 1933 document who ultimately became a head hairstylist at Paramount, later put it, “Before the days of the union Paramount used to have

Leonora Sabine (her first name is frequently misspelled in print as Lenore, Leonore, or Leanora) with Betty Grable on the set of College Swing (1937). Sabine was one of the officers of Local 731. Bison Archives and Hollywood Historic Photos.

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Perc, Wally, and Bud Westmore with the Lane sisters in 1939. Publicity photographs (group portraits), Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

four girls who did only face makeup. When the union was organized, all the makeup artists were men, and all the hairstylists were women.”92 (Manley does not indicate what became of those “makeup girls,” nor do I know whether she was including Ponedel on her list.) But after 1937, with Hollywood a more or less closed shop and a third of its approximately forty-five unions IATSE affiliates, with a vanishingly small number of exceptions the only women allowed to join Local 706—and hence to work on films and in studio departments—were hairdressers and body makeup women,93 with neither group actually called “artists” like the men were. (According to her obituary in Variety in 1979, Rosine continued to work at MGM until 1948, most likely as a nominal body makeup woman.)94 Dot Ponedel had been admitted to the new union immediately, but once her Paramount contract was terminated after unionization, she was told that she was now limited to “performing body makeup.” Not until 1940 was she granted a “temporary permit” to “make up faces of women in the makeup departments of the various motion picture studios,” and even this was on a standby basis and required that a journeyman makeup artist—the gendered “journeyman”

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signifying, as it did for other crafts, having successfully served an apprenticeship or otherwise meeting the qualifications for membership in a union—be “in charge of the company on the set.”95 Prior to 1937 there are also some references to male “hair stylists,” like Denis Phillips, in fan magazine beauty columns,96 but perhaps because of the overlap between Factor and the Westmores as hairdressers and wigmakers by training (makeup men also applied hairpieces and wigs to male actors, and certain kinds of wigs to women),97 gender seems to have posed fewer problems for the men. Larry Germain was admitted to Local 37 and then 706 as a hairdresser in April 1937, although he apparently remained the only union male hairdresser through the 1970s.98 Sydney Guilaroff, the most famous male hairdresser in classical Hollywood, was made “head of the hairdressing department” at MGM in the mid-1930s according to his 1996 autobiography. (Both Joan Crawford and Louis B. Mayer’s daughter Irene Selznick claimed separately to have discovered and brought Guilaroff to Hollywood from a New York salon around 1934.) He was never a member of the MPMAA, of any hairdressers’ organization, or of the union itself until Local 706 granted him a “life member” card in the 1970s.99 Indeed, Guilaroff maintains that everyone, including MGM department head Jack Dawn, “turned a blind eye” as he “crafted most of MGM’s star coiffures between 1934 and 1936,” after which Guilaroff simply “ignored” the union altogether while signing studio contracts that gave him screen credit for hair— ultimately on hundreds of films—from 1938 on.100 Later Guilaroff crowed that his credits were an “innovation [that] was recognized by the industry as a historic breakthrough.”101 Unfortunately, although the union’s IATSE-MPMO charter included “hair stylists” from the beginning, the women continued to be referred to as hairdressers in many contexts, and not until the mid-1940s did they begin to appear in some screen credits as well. (Carmen Dirigo’s 2007 obituary states that she was the first credited hairstylist; I assume this means the first female credited hairstylist, which is hard to substantiate but makes historical sense.)102 It was also during the war, when women were actively being urged to work outside the home, that Dot Ponedel—who, like Guilaroff, had a number of high-powered star clients who demanded her services—was finally allowed to join Local 706 permanently as a makeup artist rather than a body makeup woman or a hairdresser.103 The union’s categories and classes for makeup artists and hairdressers varied across the years, but the major divisions were always between those who would work on stars and featured players (“first-class” or, later, “key” makeup artists and hairdressers) and those who would handle lesser performers, including extras and bits (the “second-class” makeup artist or, by the 1940s, simply the ordinary “makeup artist” or “hair stylist”).104 The MPMAA did not take apprentices at first—ironic given its purported interest in sharing techniques among its members—but seems to have done so in later years, and a three-year makeup apprentice program, with the (male) recruits paid low weekly salaries that

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Nellie Manley and Gertrude Michael during production of Cleopatra (1934, no credit for makeup or hair). Core collection production files, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

increased if they successfully completed each six-month session, was put into place from the first union contracts. (United Scenic Artists also had an apprentice program.) In all of the makeup-artist categories, there were journeymen who had passed the union’s exams and were members in good standing, and “auxiliaries” who worked as apprentices. But there was no equivalent program for hairdressing during the classical era; women were not called journeymen but were

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given other labels, like “assistants.” As had been the case since the crafts’ involvement with United Scenic Artists, instead the union relied on the licensing and testing required for women to work in local beauty parlors, so that they arrived already trained.105 Makeup artists were paid the most, of course, followed by hairdressers and, below them, body makeup women (a step up from the “girls” they had been in the early 1930s); even a “head body make-up woman,” an “optional” category at the discretion of a producer on any film, had a minimum pay less than that of any journeyman makeup artist or a hairdresser. If a makeup artist temporarily substituted for a department head, he—or she, if the “head” in question was a supervising hairdresser—would receive either higher weekly pay or a bonus, but neither option could exceed the pay of the executive in question.106 Finally, there were “senior” and “junior” groups of makeup artists and hairdressers based on the date of union membership, with junior members to be laid off first.107 These basic hierarchies are similar to those of other “back-lot” workers whose contributions to motion pictures, in the words of a 1955 booklet on collective bargaining in the industry, were those of “technical rather than artistic skill” but who exhibited wide differences in “earning power, skill, and status . . . complicated by conflicts of ambition and ideology.”108 The Westmores and other executives continued to apply makeup, create wigs, and style hair themselves, but by the late 1930s they were doing so mainly for the biggest stars—Perc cut Mary Astor’s “skull shaped hairdo” for The Great Lie in 1941, for example, and he made a hair lace toupee for Humphrey Bogart in 1942, when Bogart succumbed to stress-related alopecia109—and designating underlings or assistants to do the rest, according to designs that journeymen or auxiliaries and hairdressers presumably did their best to instantiate (see chapter 3). Stars could also exploit their status by demanding the attention of a department head or lead designer. Leslie Caron has reported on what she found to be the hilarious jockeying of various MGM stars for the personal attention of Sydney Guilaroff on their coiffures—“Don’t you think my hair’s too curly today, Sydney?”—and even routine comb-outs while she was making her first film, An American in Paris, in 1951. The technique, according to Caron, was to “capture Sydney . . . so that some girls would have to go onto the set without having had Sydney’s final touch,” because the actors, “to show their importance, had to be combed by him.”110 Conversely, as was true for other crafts like set design and costuming, while some makeup men, and hairdressers, “did their job and went home just like a mechanic at an auto repair,” in the words of Michael Westmore,111 others, like Dot Ponedel, were creative and talented individuals whose names are unknown simply because they were rarely if ever publicly acknowledged or credited. Some of the men who were members of the MPMAA were encountered in chapter 1—not only the Westmores, father and older sons, but Carl Axzelle, Cecil Holland, Jack Pierce, and Walter Rodgers, virtually all of the latter of whom came to the craft from acting. But we have little to no information about many

John Truwe with Moira Shearer on The Story of Three Loves (1953, makeup credit William Tuttle and hair Sydney Guilaroff). John Truwe papers (scrapbook), Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

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of the rest, a situation that would not improve much in subsequent decades, and for hairdressers and body makeup women it is even worse. In some resources, from various memoirs or biographies to the Film Daily Yearbook and trade papers, the spelling of names is so idiosyncratic as to make even basic research daunting: I have seen John Truwe, who served as an apprentice under Jack Dawn and then a journeyman makeup artist at MGM in the 1940s and 1950s, referred to in print as Truii, Truee, and True, and hairdresser Jane Romeyn as Romaine and Romain, to give two examples out of many.112 Today, when there are around 2,000 members of Local 706—the majority of them women—whose credentials are earned working on productions for a certain number of hours before they are eligible to apply to the union (and all hairdressers must be licensed as cosmetologists),113 it is important to note that the professional training and identity of the makeup artist in the first half of the 1930s was, in many cases, no less ad hoc than it had been in earlier years. (Truwe had begun his MGM career as a busboy in the studio commissary; his subsequent boss, William Tuttle, started as an office boy at Fox.) But as discussed in the next section, by the end of the 1930s there was a marked shift in the discursive representation of makeup men, at least, one that was designed partly to win them more respect from their colleagues than they had heretofore enjoyed. And while unionization certainly created more equitable remuneration and a number of crucial worker protections, some mechanisms and practices continued, as was the case with other organizations, largely to cement the power—never completely, however—of many of the men who had always wielded it. Cinematographers had been calling themselves artists since the mid-1920s, and it made sense, given their shared history, that makeup artists would also begin to take the term more seriously, and to deploy it as a means to separate themselves from, as well as to elevate themselves above, their silent-era brethren, women, or their own previous public image. (Recall Joseph Dubray’s 1928 exhortation that the role of makeup should be “to add that element of Beauty that we call Art.”)114 Patrick Keating points out that it was never clear “what sort of art the cinematographer is supposed to make,” a circumstance that marks the discourse about makeup as well. Indeed, he states that the ASC had little interest in defining art—a “famously ambiguous concept”—but rather in exploiting the “polyvalence” of the term itself and to use “any and all evidence that seemed plausible: the cinematographer practiced an art of beauty, an art of realism, an art of expression, an art of skill, and an art of storytelling.”115 (Again, there were no women cinematographers during the studio era.) I will explore these issues further in chapter 3—and practically, through motion pictures, in chapter 4—but I raise the point here because of its relationship to how apprentices themselves were recruited to become makeup artists, or at least to how their bosses claimed they were.

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In an entry by Jack Dawn titled “Make-Up” in the book Behind the Screen: How Films Are Made (1938), for example, Dawn—a silent-era actor—writes of his “belief that the basis of screen make-up is artistic rather than scientific or technical. [When] I recently wished to add six members to my staff, I interviewed more than 500 applicants, and each one I picked had graduated from an art institute.”116 In later interviews Perc Westmore claimed to have recruited most of his Warner Bros. staff from local art schools, and many well-known makeup artists, among them William Tuttle, Mel Berns, Ben Nye, and Robert Schiffer, had also been amateur or commercial artists of various kinds (Dawn himself was an amateur sculptor). By valorizing an art background as the primary requisite for apprentices, the program, which was closely controlled by makeup executives, became the primary mechanism not only for hiring and training makeup artists but also for popularizing the notion, in Dawn’s words to his protégé Tuttle, that makeup men should be “artists, not mechanics.”117 There are few signs that women hairdressers or body makeup women were referred to using the same rubric, and the only apprenticeship program for hairdressers was not instituted until the 1960s, just as departments were being shuttered (MGM’s closed in 1969) and all such apprenticeships discontinued.118 Although he himself had never been an apprentice, Robert Schiffer, who worked as a journeyman at MGM in the 1930s and at Columbia in subsequent decades and became head of makeup and hairdressing at Disney in the 1990s, claimed in a 2001 interview that the apprenticeship program “was the only really good program the Local ever had. Back then, Journeymen used to volunteer their time and services at night to teach the trainees their tricks.”119 Schiffer was probably thinking about the union’s testing process, which did take place over three evenings, because general evidence suggests that apprentices learned their craft on the job, just as everyone had in the silent era. Bob Dawn, the son of Jack, completed his apprentice training at MGM in 1952 and later described how the training worked: “It was a good apprenticeship, partially because of Dad. There was a kind of practice session that went on almost every day. We worked on each other, on models; and I probably got to a point where I was as good a makeup man then as I’ve ever been in my life because of the things we repeatedly did; [facial] hair work and various kinds of age makeup. That’s when we were very fast, very quick, and very thorough. It’s improved technique-wise, but as far as knowing what you’re doing, that was probably the best time.”120 It is perhaps not surprising that so many apprentices, whether they had artistic training or not, were relatives of department executives. In addition to his son Bob, Jack Dawn trained his half brother Lyle as a makeup artist and employed his half sister as a body makeup woman. Michael Westmore reports that his oldest brother, Monty, and his uncle Frank both had apprenticeships at Warner Bros. starting in the 1940s, and Michael himself became an apprentice at Universal in 1961 after getting a college degree in art history (Michael remembers

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being the only apprentice at Universal, where his uncle Bud was department head, when he started).121 Ben Nye Jr., like Bob Dawn, was an apprentice in the department run by his father. The elder Nye had begun as a department store illustrator before becoming a makeup apprentice himself in 1935, at Fox; he then worked under several chiefs there (one of them Ern Westmore) and with Selznick’s company for a year (he was Mont Westmore’s assistant) before becoming head of makeup at Twentieth Century-Fox in 1946, where he remained until the early 1960s. Robert Bau, whose father, Gordon, followed Perc Westmore as chief at Warner Bros. in the early 1950s, completed his apprenticeship at that studio in 1957. Eventually, a book on monster makeup could blithely ignore the union’s structural gender discrimination in reporting on the makeup apprenticeship of Robin LaVigne, the daughter of Emile LaVigne (who began working as a prop man in the early 1930s before becoming a makeup artist at MGM): “Robin is now working at Walt Disney Studios. . . . There are many father and son makeup artist combinations, but Emile and Robin are the first father/daughter team in Hollywood today.”122 While such nepotism was not a factor in every apprenticeship—though the union appears to have kept few records on the program to check—it helped to maintain the hegemony of a department head’s routines and ideologies. But “family” was not the only way to extend such influence. Clay Campbell, the department head at Columbia from 1941 until 1966, began his career sculpting and painting heads for a Los Angeles wax factory in 1922, abilities that brought him to the attention of Perc Westmore when Campbell was sent to “baby-sit” wax figures for the film The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). While he was an apprentice, Campbell had become Westmore’s assistant at Warner Bros.,123 and placing men that Perc had trained in other departments was also a sign of his authority in the studio system by the end of the 1930s. (Ultimately Perc claimed to have trained some “sixty-five or seventy men in the profession” in addition to “all [his] brothers”; he also stated that the union allowed one apprentice for every five journeymen.)124 It is likely that other makeup chiefs also trained “dozens of apprentices,” as Ben Nye did, over the years.125 Despite not being paid much, union apprentices had perhaps one small advantage over journeymen makeup artists: namely, because apprentices were contracted for continuous six-month periods, if they passed muster they theoretically had a bit more job security over three years than some journeymen may have had.126 Much of the union activism of the 1920s and 1930s across the country, as in Hollywood, had been instigated, after all, by the often extreme and unfair exploitation of salaried labor, such as forcing workers into eighty-hour and sevenday workweeks—or worse—without overtime or extra compensation or routine advance scheduling, even on weekends and holidays. It was to ameliorate these conditions that all of Hollywood’s craft unions set “minimum call” pay standards for a day or a week of employment; instituted rules about when a call could be canceled; and laid out requirements for mealtimes, overtime, weekend,

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Michael Westmore as an apprentice in the Universal makeup lab in 1963. (Courtesy Michael Westmore.)

“on-call,” and holiday pay, and the hours and conditions for location—“near-by” or “distant”—versus studio shooting.127 By the mid-1940s, a paid vacation plan was also instituted for Local 706, based on the number of days worked in the preceding year, with the maximum being twelve days—including Saturdays—and granted only to people employed for more than 240 days.128

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Early in the 1950s, health insurance and pension plans were negotiated and added to the union’s contracts.129 Makeup and hairdressing, like other crafts, had also been given considerable “wage tilts,” in Variety’s patois, by unionization (as they had by joining Local 235 years earlier), although the terms seem less than ideal to us now given that the workweek agreed to ranged from forty-eight hours for “first makeups, assistants and apprentices” to sixty hours a week for “key men.” Nevertheless, this was an improvement over the conditions set by the Motion Picture Industry Code in 1933, in which makeup artists and hairdressers were put in the class of laborers who could be asked to work any number of hours because time limits might “hinder, reduce or delay production.”130 But with the exception of office and clerical workers, night watchmen, and anyone else handling facilities management and the like (including those who kept makeup and hairdressing departments clean), for most below-the-line workers unionization ended up replacing some of the stress and anxiety of exploitative salaried employment with that of “casualization.” Casualization meant that workers were hired for a specific film production (and if lucky rehired for new ones) rather than being employed on salary year-round, and that they were now at the mercy of studio production schedules and genre preferences—historical epics and big-budget musicals employed far more makeup artists and hairdressers than the average screwball comedy, for example.131 Jobs therefore became increasingly competitive, a situation that did not improve much as the decades wore on. According to a 1949 analysis of the Motion Picture Costumers union (IATSE Local 705) that I believe can be fairly extrapolated to makeup artists as well, only a little more than a third of that union’s labor force worked more or less continuously throughout the year: 35.2 per cent of the membership was employed throughout the year in the studios, 32 per cent being employed for only three-fourths of the year or less, 18.8 per cent for half the year or less, and 6.6 per cent for one-fourth of the year or less. The periods of unemployment for each individual could not be regarded as vacations, for they meant a constant, anxious waiting for a telephone message calling them to work. A few of those persons who are very irregularly employed have private incomes, and several are married women, but we find that ninety-three, or 9.0 per cent of the membership, had to take employment outside the industry for part of the year in order to augment their incomes.132

Thus, although obituaries in trade papers might later state that someone had been “a makeup man at Warners for [the] past 25 years”—as Variety did about Walter Rodgers in 1951133—the fact remains that most nonexecutive union craft employees were subject to periods during which they did not work and therefore received no pay.

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Despite this basic job insecurity at all but the executive level, after the late 1930s makeup and hairdressing appear never again to have participated in public labor activism during the studio years. (Some prestigious “straight salary” jobs could also remain functionally exploitative, as Ben Nye discovered working eighteen-hour days week after week as Mont Westmore’s assistant on Gone with the Wind [1939].)134 In November 1937 a strike was called at Columbia, according to Variety, because “makeup artists were being laid off and small-bracket actors instructed to make up themselves. Walkout was ended after one day, however, when studio agreed to the demands of the IATSE that sufficient makeup men be employed to take care of the work.”135 Makeup artists and hairdressers are not mentioned in accounts of the violent labor strikes that rocked the Painters and other unions in 1945 and 1946, nor of the various postwar investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and their aftermath. And while some studios experienced more frequent turnover of department heads, several executives remained in place for decades—including, among others, Wally and Perc Westmore at Paramount and Warner Bros.–First National, respectively, and eventually their younger brother Bud at Universal; Jack Dawn and William Tuttle at MGM; Mel Berns at RKO; and Clay Campbell at Columbia (see the appendix). William Tuttle later said that department heads made “good money” at MGM—where the “department head was king”136—and “Percy” Westmore was the only makeup artist or hairdresser whose name appeared on a notorious public listing of 1936 Hollywood salaries in Motion Picture Herald in January 1937 (he earned only a little less than Bette Davis did at that time).137 Westmore’s salary, however, was hardly enormous in the larger “film field,” suggesting again the ambiguity of even his status in the system in the 1930s: he was at once the industry’s best-paid makeup man, but no matter how many publicity stories he circulated about his importance, he earned less than most cinematographers or editors. But as a few of Wally Westmore’s available Paramount contracts from the 1940s indicate, executive status had other benefits: Wally was hired for three-year terms at an escalating weekly salary; he traveled first-class on Paramount’s dime; and, while he could not work for another studio, he was allowed to “render services for Westmore’s Inc., and/or The House of Westmore, with whom he is associated, at such times as will not conflict with his services for the Corporation, the decision of Corporation in this respect to be final and conclusive.”138 Assuming that the basic terms of these contracts were fairly standard, clearly executives had secure jobs over the conduct of which they had a strong degree of control. (In the 1960s Tuttle, too, would be allowed by MGM to conduct an extracurricular “mail order course of instruction in home make-up for non-professionals” while identifying himself “as the head of our Make-Up and/or Hair-Dressing Department.”)139 And this was in contrast to virtually everyone else—with the exception, one hopes, of female “heads” of hairdressing,

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about whose employment status far less is known beyond the fact that they were subordinate to the makeup chiefs—who worked in their departments.140 Yet the stresses even of casualization were clearly worse for some than others. For as was the case with other unsalaried craft workers, many journeymen makeup artists and hairdressers did remain affiliated with one or another studio for a number of years—even if they still had to “stick close to the phone,” as studio and star hairdresser Ginger “Sugar” Blymer writes in her memoir, so they “wouldn’t miss that all-important call.”141 To conform to holiday release schedules and the like, studios planned their production year well in advance, and by the mid-1930s the number of craftspeople required for any given production, large or small, would have been possible to estimate and employment offered, with the union also maintaining lists of auxiliaries to add to the journeymen assigned to films or to stars themselves. A preliminary budget sheet for a 1953 Twentieth Century-Fox baseball programmer, The Kid from Left Field, shows that Ben Nye recommended one key makeup man for twenty-two days plus “extra help only as needed”; one key hairdresser, but “only as needed”; no body makeup woman at all; and supplies and expenses that were a little more than 10 percent of the overall amount computed.142 In this scenario, only the key makeup man was assured of employment, and for less than a month. Ironically, stars themselves were in some ways both the raison d’être of beauty makeup artists and hairdressers and potentially a barrier—as Leslie Caron’s anecdotes about Guilaroff suggest—to the smooth running of departments and the maintenance of strict labor categories. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the five-year and then seven-year option contract gave studios substantial control over an actor’s on-screen as well as off-screen image—including rights to “photograph and reproduce any and all of the artist’s acts, poses, plays, and appearance of any and all kinds,” as the standard boilerplate put it.143 But it was also in the studio’s best interest to maintain a profitable star’s equanimity whenever possible, whether by letting him or her make alterations to a makeup or hair design or by hiring and retaining obliging as well as able personnel.144 But intelligent stars usually recognized that at least some of their popularity derived from the way these craftspeople made them look. In Mary Astor’s memorable words, “After every take a swarm of bees would surround me. A wardrobe lady to adjust a belt. The makeup man to brush on more powder. The hairdresser with her swoosh gun. The body makeup girl to dab at an ear. . . . And all those hands, touching, picking, patting; the various breaths being blown at one. Well, it was their job.”145 Legends do persist that stars routinely designed and applied their own makeup or dressed their own hair for their screen appearances. Marlene Dietrich’s daughter, Maria Riva, who as a young child accompanied her mother to the Paramount set in the 1930s, has promulgated the notion that Dietrich “all by herself ” came up with makeup tricks—running a white line (in some accounts it is silver) down her nose to straighten and slenderize it, lining the inside “shelf ” of her lower eyelids with white to make her eyes appear larger, cosmetically

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hollowing out her cheeks, and using a dark greasepaint in the crease of her eyes.146 But Dot Ponedel claims that these are techniques that she, Ponedel, “stole from the works of all the great artists—the Louvre had nothing on me”— and created specifically for the star on director Josef von Sternberg’s command.147 (Paramount was reportedly not happy that he insisted that a woman make up Dietrich, but the studio then gave her a contract as a makeup executive.) Another legend is that Von Sternberg himself was responsible for Dietrich’s look, which, in Nellie Manley’s words, is also “sort of a myth. He was a great director, . . . but didn’t actually design her clothes, do her makeup, plan her hairstyles, or anything like that. That reputation has been very wrong.”148 That said, it is completely plausible that Dietrich, in Riva’s words, did “[push] skilled hands away”149 to do her own makeup once she had been shown how, but Ponedel was Dietrich’s makeup artist on every film the star made at Paramount, though her work was uncredited.150 But Caron also notes that “there were stars who would insist on putting on their own makeup and who did it badly”; and when this occurred, it was the makeup artist, usually the one who accompanied her to the set, who would “get into hot water because they hadn’t been able to tell [the star] to take her hands off her face.”151 William Tuttle has also reported on the power of stars to alter even an executive’s carefully designed and applied makeup at the expense of other actors. Because Technicolor tended to emphasize red, for example, cheeks were made rosy in a prescribed fashion to obviate the clown-like appearance that the normal use of rouge would produce. But Jeanette MacDonald, according to Tuttle, persisted in dusting her entire face with rouge for every Technicolor film in which she starred: “Then she would go to see it on the screen. She says you see, it looks just great. Which it did. But she didn’t observe that everybody else in the picture went pale because they were taking the red out because of her. You can’t take it out of one place without taking it out of the whole thing.”152 In the case of Dot Ponedel, the relationships she fostered with clients—not only Dietrich but also Joan Blondell, Gary Cooper, Mae West, George Raft, Paulette Goddard, and Judy Garland (to whom she was introduced by Sydney Guilaroff)—were significant enough that some stars wrote access to her labor into their own contracts.153 Stars also helped her to deal with the harassment she endured at the hands of the men with whom she worked, which predictably extended to calling her a lesbian. Barbara Stanwyck was equally dependent on a hairdresser she first met on the RKO lot, Hollis Barnes, whom she called “Barnsie.” Barnes became Stanwyck’s secretary as well as personal hairdresser and followed Stanwyck from film to film—“always there, sitting with her, watching, never excusing herself,” in the words of Stanwyck biographer Victoria Wilson.154 The pair worked together “six days a week. On Sundays, Holly went to Barbara’s to go over her fan mail and to do Barbara’s nails. Barbara felt comfortable with Holly. . . . Their closeness annoyed people.”155 Other craftspeople socialized with their star clients, and while such relationships probably did “annoy”

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Left, Dot Ponedel with Marlene Dietrich at MGM in 1944. MGM production photographs, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Right, Ponedel with Judy Garland and an unidentified body makeup woman on the set of Till the Clouds Roll By (1946, makeup credit Jack Dawn and hair Sydney Guilaroff). Note smudges being applied on top of Garland’s flawless makeup. (Courtesy Meredith Ponedel.)

department heads, they functioned perfectly well as long as the stars were happy and the results passed muster with directors and fans—results for which executives took screen credit anyway. But no one was able to please everyone all the time. Ponedel ran into trouble at MGM with producer David Selznick on her makeup for Jennifer Jones in Madame Bovary in 1949. Although Jones (Selznick’s then wife) and director Vincente Minnelli, who had asked for Ponedel, were happy with the design and application, Selznick refused to hire her. As he wrote to Minnelli, “Too much make-up creates a maskline [sic] impression that is most undesirable and that destroys all character” and “I find it not even possessing the same faults and virtues of the old-fashioned thick cake make-up of the M-G-M so-called glamour stars, Circa 1929.”156 He continued, “I urge that whoever made her up not be used, because I cannot tell you how strongly I feel that this make-up is just awful, and precisely what is not indicated, either for Miss Jones or the role.”157 Ponedel was replaced on the production, although it is not clear by whom (the makeup is credited to Jack Dawn; Larry Germain did Jones’s hair). Such aesthetic disagreements aside, then, a cooperative journeyman makeup artist or hairdresser who could do a job well and who was familiar with a department’s and a studio’s routines, schedules, and work practices could effectively remain in more or less steady employment at one studio from the 1930s through the early 1960s. (At MGM, as at Warner Bros., each journeyman had his own

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separate makeup room, according to Sugar Blymer.)158 It did not even matter if a director knew who you were. Nellie Manley, who was hired for her first hairdressing job by George Westmore in the 1920s at the DeMille and Goldwyn Studios (the two entities shared an address at the time), went to Paramount in 1931 and remained there for thirty-one years. Despite working often with DeMille, the director never remembered Manley’s name, although he later gave her a percentage of the profits on Samson and Delilah (1949).159 But if you displeased an executive or a coworker with more seniority or of a higher grade, or conversely were so good at your job that you fomented their jealousy, then employment could be contingent on elements that had nothing to do with talent or ability. (Dot Ponedel believed that male competitors sabotaged her in the case of Selznick and Madame Bovary.)160 In 1944, “auxiliary man” Jack Dumont wrote an anguished letter to Jack Dawn to protest having been fired from his MGM apprenticeship for unspecified allegations made against him by a journeyman whom he does not name. Dumont was particularly bitter because Dawn’s assistant, William Tuttle (in whose papers I found the three-page letter; Tuttle was promoted to “Assistant Head” of the department that year), had both praised Dumont extensively for his skill and initiative and told “the ten men at the beginning of the [apprentice] class that we should never let any personalities interfere with us; that we would be judged by our ability and our work.”161 The career of Maurice Seiderman, who created the “thirty-seven phases” of the character of Charles Foster Kane for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane at RKO in 1940 and who arrived in Hollywood in 1936 with twelve years of stage makeup experience, is arguably—Dot Ponedel’s entire career aside—the most notorious example of how ability and talent could themselves be threatening to union and studio labor hierarchies. A Saturday Evening Post profile from 1942 states Seiderman not only had to serve first as an apprentice when he applied at RKO but throughout 1937 kept being told that he had “flunked” the exam to become a journeyman. Therefore, despite being requested by Welles himself, on Citizen Kane Seiderman had to be overseen by a union makeup artist (which “tripled” the makeup labor cost to the studio). “A tight and jealous craft,” the profile reports, “make-up artists mumbled against the upstart, orally scorned his work and studied it diligently.” And at some point, Seiderman, like Dumont, was also suddenly and anonymously accused of “unspecified unethical conduct” and expelled from the apprenticeship program, though the “mysterious sins were mysteriously forgiven”—and he was admitted to the union as a journeyman—when Mel Berns, RKO’s makeup chief since 1933, refused to fire him. While Seiderman was not “able to apply the standard vacuous veneer to a standard Hollywood blonde,” in the profile’s words, he remained employed as a makeup artist at RKO for the rest of the studio era.162 When Berns left RKO temporarily in 1945, Seiderman even became department head, a position he subsequently indicated he did not seek or enjoy. Undoubtedly because of his association with Welles, the career of Seiderman is better documented than that of Dumont (IMDb.com lists exactly two films

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on which Dumont worked as an uncredited makeup man, the first in 1945 and the second in 1970). But Dumont’s frustration, like that of Seiderman (or Ponedel), was no doubt felt by many other apprentices, journeymen, and innumerable “girls” or “women.” Union contracts did not even contain written provisions for how far in advance an employee would be notified of termination (and an executive could fire anyone “for cause”), so workplace politics could be demoralizing. According to Michael Westmore, for example, Perc was often a generous and supportive boss, but he also “had the power to control many situations, even to the extent of blackballing an individual from the film business.”163 The same was true of Sydney Guilaroff, who, in Caron’s words, “could be extremely helpful and also extremely cutting, depending on his mood,” and who was known, as Sugar Blymer recounts, for imperious and even “hostile” behavior toward underlings.164 William Mann, in his biography of Elizabeth Taylor, calls Guilaroff a “strutting peacock” whose stories could be “more than a little fanciful,” but nevertheless Guilaroff was Taylor’s confidant for most of her film career. Betsy Blair, who began her short film career in the 1940s, states that he “ruled with gentle charm and intelligence—and, of course, his talent.”165 And even makeup department executives could get into trouble, as when Warner Bros. producer Hal Wallis criticized the “element of fakiness” in the “phoney flesh” Perc Westmore had used on his makeup for Paul Muni in The Life of Emile Zola (1937): “let us keep away from using that stuff and just make Muni up so far as the beard and hair are concerned,” Wallis wrote in a memo (Westmore complied). Wallis was even more excoriating about Perc’s beauty makeup for Bette Davis in In This Our Life (1942) because after a preview “far too many” comment cards had mentioned her makeup and hairdress “in most uncomplimentary terms.” “In the future,” Wallis wrote to Perc, “before you change anyone’s makeup as radically as you did Davis’ in this picture, I would like to be informed of the fact so that we can discuss it carefully, make exhaustive tests, and then determine just how far we want to go.”166 Executives also had to mediate difficult situations that the union’s regulations helped to support, if not create, such as when MGM’s hairdressers, according to dress designer Helen Rose, refused to work on Lena Horne in the 1940s.167 Horne, however, was being literally groomed for stardom, and rather than get into a dispute with the union, Guilaroff not only took over and did her hair himself but hired one of Horne’s friends, Noelia “Tiny” Kyle, to be her hairdresser on the set and “made the union accept her,” in Rose’s words.168 Other Black hairdressers, like Elizabeth Searcy and Hazel Washington, had also worked on films on an ad hoc and uncredited basis; in 1949, for example, Searcy styled Ruby Dee’s hair for her role in No Way Out (1950), and Donald Bogle claims that Washington, who was responsible for the hair of the actresses in Black-cast films like Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather (both 1943), was the first Black hairdresser accepted into the union, in the 1950s.169 Guilaroff later maintained that he hired Washington to become part of the staff of MGM, specifically to attend to

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Sydney Guilaroff with Lena Horne and Noelia [Nolelia] Kyle, 1946. MGM production photographs, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

performers of color.170 Bogle also writes that department head Jack Dawn designed and applied Horne’s makeup himself as well, and I assume that the same was true of William Tuttle, Dawn’s successor in 1950. (According to Bogle, actor Herb Jeffries, who “had experimented with makeup for Black Americans,” also had a substantial impact on the looks of Horne and Dorothy Dandridge in their films and personal appearances, although white makeup artists worked on both.)171 In earlier years, Hattie McDaniel was listed as an actor on whom Ben Nye, then working as an assistant to Selznick’s Mont Westmore, had exerted his talent “for finely crafted character detail” on Gone with the Wind.172 As is the case with all forms of palace intrigue, then, villains and heroes are often the same individuals depending on one’s relationship to them. Jack Dawn, according to William Tuttle, “was always firing people,” but he would often bring the same person back after two or three days (whether Dumont was rehired I do not know).173 In addition to providing glimpses into the interplay of talent, skill, studio politics, and sexist and racist power structures in makeup

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Left, Lena Horne with an unidentified makeup artist at MGM for Till the Clouds Roll By. MGM production photographs, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Right, Bob Dawn applying Dorothy Dandridge’s makeup for the MGM film Bright Road (1953, makeup credit William Tuttle and hair Sydney Guilaroff). Bison Archives and Hollywood Historic Photos.

and hairdressing as crafts, such stories help support the contention made by several Hollywood labor historians that by the mid-1940s many if not all of the below-the-line crafts had become entities to which the “tight and jealous” label could be attached. When even Alfred Hitchcock, at or near the height of his considerable power as director and producer following The Birds (1963), wanted “Alexandre of Paris” to design and receive screen credit for Tippi Hedren’s hairstyles in Marnie (1964) and to have her hair dressed during production by Alexandre’s assistant, union regulations meant that, while Hitchcock apparently succeeded in getting a hairdryer and supplies through the film’s credited makeup artist Jack Barron (possibly under the radar of department head Bud Westmore, whom Hitchcock disliked), Hedren’s hair had to be styled off the Universal lot and a union hairdresser, Virginia Darcy, hired as well.174 I do not have enough information to proclaim that, in every classical studio craft department, union regulations and hierarchies of power, as well as personality and ideological conflicts, mattered as much as or in some cases more than the aesthetic or commercial value any individual artist might contribute to a given motion picture. But Murray Ross, writing in the early 1940s, considered the effects of craft unionization on the industry as a whole to have been ambivalent at best, although he cautioned “It is very difficult to draw general conclusions

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from the study of labor-management relations in the studios. The diversity of behavior exhibited by the various unions and guilds makes any generalization precarious.”175 In Ross’s estimation, the issue had become “the shrinkage of employment opportunities” in the industry precisely because of the regulations governing employment categories that unions so assiduously maintained: The studio craft unions have not helped to stabilize employment or increase the volume of work. Their rigid wage policies and insistence on the maintenance of wage scales regardless of the economic condition of the industry have occasionally contributed to the reduction in the number of jobs. Artisans are now hired only when they are absolutely essential. Much experimental work, which might have been undertaken under less rigorous rules and more favorable wage conditions, is not even considered. . . . Because of the job scarcity, the craft unions have made every effort to limit the supply of labor in the industry. Since they all operate under closed charters and have enjoyed the closed shop since 1936, they admit no new members except in extraordinary circumstances. They charge high initiation fees and membership dues and levy occasional special assessments. They have established a very low ratio of apprentices to journeymen, hoping that the number dropping out will exceed the number entering the local. These policies have contributed to a decline in membership and to a rise in the average age of members. . . . This perpetuates an aristocracy of studio craftsmen. While such policies may solve the unemployment problem within the local, they considerably reduce the opportunities for the young who seek to enter a studio trade.176

This issue—which I stress is not a problem with unionization as such but with the politics within a given union, and within studio departments themselves— would become even more pronounced in the postwar era, when television was initially seen as a form of competition rather than, as it is today, another opportunity for employment embraced by Local 706. (One reason Hitchcock was not happy with Bud Westmore was the latter’s refusal to let television shows, like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, use Universal’s makeup facilities.)177 Sugar Blymer, who began her career as a studio messenger at MGM in the early 1950s and then became a stock clerk in Tuttle’s makeup department, was urged by her colleagues to become a hairdresser in the early 1950s. But there was no studio apprenticeship for her. Rather, she had to pay for and complete cosmetology school at night—a process that took six years—while working a full-time job and raising her children in addition to working thirty hours on film and television productions.178 And when she applied to Local 706 in 1959, she writes, “They hadn’t taken anyone into the union for more than seven years”; she even had to wait an extra month to be sworn in because they could not muster a quorum for her first union meeting.179 The situation by the end of the studio era was even more dire in the opinion of makeup artist Ben Nye Jr.: “I think the people we have

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coming in today are talented, they’re fine people. There’s just nobody to teach them. . . . The system doesn’t exist to pass it down anymore. We need an apprenticeship program. Who’s going to finance it? The studios used to.”180 Conversely, Sydney Guilaroff later claimed that, even in the early 1930s, MGM studio executive Irving Thalberg cautioned him about joining any labor organization at all: “They are going to ask you to join the Makeup and Hair Stylists Guild [sic], but ignore them. When we make you head of the new hairstyling team, union membership could stifle your creativity.”181 The problem with Guilaroff ’s account is that his “creativity” as an executive had little to do with his union status. Rather, Guilaroff, though not a union member, was part of the aristocracy that Ross describes, someone who created and maintained departmental rules and regulations not only in forms of work but in their results, the effects that appeared on the screen or that defined a performer’s visual image. And these routines and procedures that the “aristocrats” put into place, even if interpreted creatively or at times subversively by rank-and-file “artist” journeymen or auxiliaries, are also primary intertexts for understanding how the crafts operated during the classical period. So I turn now to how notions of beauty and handsomeness became codified to the degree that, discourses about makeup men—if not hairdressers—as “artists” aside, a writer could valorize Maurice Seiderman’s talent while disparaging the “standard vacuous veneer [of] a standard Hollywood blonde.” Complicated forms of character makeup, as I have said, have always been perceived as more virtuosic, more “masculine,” than beauty makeup, and character makeup continues to earn more industry awards in both film and television. But as much if not most of the entire silent era had shown to the industry, its stars, and the film audience, beauty was in some ways the most elusive star property of all to produce quickly and reliably. Perhaps putting “beauty in truth” in any larger philosophical sense was not on the minds of most studio makeup artists and hairdressers. But from the end of the 1920s through the next three decades at least, they understood that the mandate for them, as for most studio craftspeople, was to make stars and would-be stars as visually flawless as they could possibly be by the most efficient means available.

3

The Classical Period Department Practices and the Commerce of Expertise Ronald Davis’s book The Glamour Factory: Inside Hollywood’s Big Studio System, which draws extensively from interviews he and his colleagues conducted for an oral history project Davis administered, provides much useful material about how classical Hollywood’s “mature” craft departments worked. In the chapter covering makeup and hairdressing, he states that the design process, as for most crafts, began with department executives—who “usually sat behind a desk”—and their assistants studying the script of a film being put into production. In consultation with others responsible for what would end up on the screen, the executive estimated what cosmetic and hair supplies the story, or sometimes particular stars, would require, as well as how many makeup artists and hairdressers would be needed on and off the set. Individual stylists (stars often asked for their “favorites”) would also talk to stars whose looks they would create and apply, checking in with “the director, producer, and cameraman to make sure they agreed that what was being planned was acceptable.” Next, makeup and hairstyling tests were filmed to evaluate how designs and products would appear on the screen. (“We used to spend days screen testing hairstyles,” in the words of Paramount hairstylist Nellie Manley.)1 Once everything was approved and shooting began, the routines were similar from production to production. “On filming days,” Davis writes, “actresses reported first to their hairdressers when they arrived at the studio in the 121

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morning,” usually at six thirty for an eight o’clock set call. Unless they were wearing wigs, their hair would be washed and ironed dry or, in “later years,” put into pincurls or rollers. Then the women were sent to makeup, where it was the makeup artist’s job “to see that a star’s complexion appeared flawless”—“Two stars might share the same makeup artist, while six character actors often stood in line waiting for one person”—before returning to hairdressing to have their coiffures combed out and set or their wigs applied. Male actors, in contrast, “normally arrived at the studio around seven or seven-thirty” for makeup, and only if they “had to be fitted each morning with a toupee” did they stop off at hairdressing first. (At Twentieth Century-Fox, stars could have “their hair and makeup done in private dressing rooms in the stars’ building,” Davis reports, but most preferred going to the makeup and hairdressing department because it “offered a chance to socialize.”) After the hair-makeup-hair routine had been completed, there was usually “a last-minute rush to the various sound stages; on the set a hairdresser made sure each actress’s hair looked perfect, and a makeup artist added final touches. While the director lined up the first shot, . . . the body makeup girl might dab an ear with her sponge.” Missing from The Glamour Factory is discussion of the reality that if a star had a call for early in the morning—such as Elizabeth Taylor’s 5:45 a.m. makeup calls for some scenes in Giant (1956), to give one available example2—it would have been even earlier for the craftspeople tasked with creating or maintaining that star’s appearance. Davis does provide information from an interview with William Tuttle about Tuttle’s earliest years under Jack Dawn, before there was a union, in which Tuttle claims to have been on duty “twenty-four hours a day”; he opened the makeup department “at six o’clock in the morning” and closed it “at seven or eight at night.” He worked Saturdays and sometimes Sundays. His phone number was printed on the door of the department in case someone needed information at night, since “Dawn didn’t want to be bothered.”3 Davis also writes that hairdressers were “on their feet most of the day, making certain the performer’s hairdo matched in every shot,” and he paraphrases a 1970 interview with Nellie Manley, who had been the head of hairdressing at Paramount: “There was hardly ever any place to sit down. You had to carry your equipment everywhere you went. And the hours were especially long.”4 But these exceptions only help to show that, at least in terms of makeup and hairdressing, Davis, like many (including myself) who have written about Hollywood’s “golden age,” is predominantly interested in actors and what they endured in order to become gods and goddesses of the silver screen. In fact, Hollywood has been called a glamour factory for so long that it can be hard to remember when studio departments did not have all of their routines and procedures in place. I do not mean how eyebrow pencils were kept sharp or hairbrushes were cleaned or wigs reblocked each night. (As an MGM makeup department stockroom clerk in the 1950s, Sugar Blymer spent a lot of her time sorting hairpins into little bundles to hand to hairdressers in the morning as well

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as making sure that sweaty wigs dried with all their curls in the proper places.)5 I speak, rather, of how Davis never questions why there were no makeup women in studio departments like there were in beauty salons. Or why a body makeup “girl” would be allowed to “dab an ear with her sponge” but to touch no other area on the star’s face. He takes for granted that stars “were expected to look their best at all times, although there were fleeting lapses into realism, sometimes covertly achieved,” as when Gregory Peck’s hair and makeup on The Gunfighter (1950) were allowed to be “authentic” rather than glamorous despite the protestations of the president of Twentieth Century-Fox. (The subterfuge of inflating the cost to reshoot allowed “authenticity” to prevail in that case.)6 Such “lapses” did not apply to Audrey Totter in High Wall (1947), who, playing a “lady psychiatrist, wore no makeup at all, since Metro felt professional women of that sort should look plain.”7 Davis’s book remains an impressive achievement, but I also want to examine—as far as is possible now—how and why procedures for designing and applying beauty to stars and other players were themselves instituted, which then governed associated tasks like the purchase and distribution of supplies in times of plenty and scarcity. The “money is no object” profligacy for which Hollywood was renowned always operated in tension with various drives for economy, especially in craft departments, where exceptionally expensive or rare supplies might be kept under lock and key, accessible only by permission of an executive. Although World War II was a boon for Hollywood’s box office generally, unlike the Depression it produced shortages not only in draft-age makeup artists but also in materials used in the manufacture and application of cosmetics and wigs—silk for hairnets, fats for greasepaints and rouges, peroxide and henna for dyes, latex for sponges and three-dimensional appliances, nylon and rayon (as well as human hair, typically imported from abroad) for wigs, metal for hairpins and rollers, all of which were requisitioned for the U.S. war machine and rationed for consumer use and other industrial applications until the cessation of hostilities in 1945.8 That said, certain cosmetics for women—because they “improved morale”—were exempted by the U.S. government from these restrictions, as were Hollywood studios themselves to some degree. (It is well known that motion pictures were deemed an “essential industry,” the trade-off being that their content was subject to federal oversight in the interests of supporting the war effort.) Nevertheless, as was true of all departments, publicity material stressed the patriotism of makeup executives during the war and their strict management of scarce supplies even though, as William Tuttle later stated, he had seen “thousands of dollars in costumes and wigs just thrown out” over the years if they were not quite right.9 Continuing to loom over this chapter is the Hollywood makeup “expert” as a figure whose advice was promulgated nationally, even internationally, in various forms of popular discourse. Again, to do justice to the material about cosmetics and hair in fan magazines would require another book-length study, but generally I conceptualize these figures as emblematic of what historians Barbara

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Ehrenreich and Deirdre English describe as the rise of “distinctly masculinist” forms of advice to women that turned “consumer education” into “consumer manipulation” in the middle decades of the twentieth century.10 As Ehrenreich and English write, popular culture’s hortatory methods dictated or imposed standards that women were asked to meet by bending to the authority of “science” and the educated and trained “expert,” even in matters of taste or decoration, rather than depending on each other for advice or counsel.11 The desire for offscreen fame, of the Westmores, especially (William Tuttle and others would develop makeup lines and write stories for syndication in the 1950s and 1960s too), also affected the forms that the standardization of makeup and hairdressing departments would take in the classical period, as did the Max Factor organization’s perpetual interest in the consumer marketplace. The gendered labor organization discussed in chapter 2 is part of this, but the Westmores (like stars themselves) also claimed to be experts in matters that had little to nothing to do with cosmetics—how to raise girls to be “young ladies,” whether or not women should smoke, how wives should treat their husbands, and so on.12 To be sure, Nellie Manley’s byline was attached to material sent out by Paramount’s publicity department for Salon Beauty Magazine in the 1940s,13 and hairdressers were also featured in fan magazine and newspaper articles from time to time.14 But they had nowhere near the public presence of their male colleagues, although fan magazines had their own beauty experts who doggedly maintained detailed monthly advice columns—sometimes but not always quoting movie craftspeople therein—throughout the studio era.15 My historical study ends in the 1960s not only because many large departments, like MGM’s, had closed by 1970 but because by then television became the primary employer of makeup artists and hairdressers in the entertainment field and the heyday of the Hollywood expert ended as movie stars were supplanted as models of appearance by rock stars, fashion models, and other kinds of nonfilm celebrities.16 First, however, another bit of crosscutting to point out that so-called directors of makeup were almost certainly in place before the “factory” procedures by which the work would be designed and performed, and by whom, on individual films had been established. While he or she probably materially participated in the photographic makeup tests that had become routine by the 1920s, from this distance we may never fully understand the full meaning of the terms director of makeup or makeup chief as late as the early 1930s. There are hints that the personnel that these men, and some women, “directed” were at times housed in wardrobe departments, for example. And as the 1936 Warner Bros. publicity story with which I began this book implies, if there was a dedicated makeup and hairdressing facility already on a studio’s lot, it may not have been adequately equipped or staffed to produce the results then required. Not until unionization set routine personnel and labor categories in the late 1930s did most if not all the rest of the big studios invest “important money,” according to Variety, in their makeup and hairdressing facilities.17 So here I partly extrapolate from accounts

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that lay out the duties of executives in later years, in order then to return to how such duties interacted with and defined departmental as well as larger studio practices. In the introduction I noted Frank Westmore’s dismay at seeing how much time his older executive brothers spent administering the business of “their large departments” rather than “doing creative makeup,” and Ronald Davis employs the same remarks in his aforementioned description of the managerial duties of makeup executives generally. In a longer oral history for the American Film Institute, however, William Tuttle maintained that it was not until the 1970s that “what few department heads” were left in Hollywood (he was not one of them) became “more or less business managers.” Instead, he remembered that in earlier years the department executive “did all the creative work plus the business managing”: You were responsible for all the money that was spent in the department. You did all the hiring. All the setting up. All the preparations. I would work out, design practically all the makeups for whatever picture. And then I would turn it over to somebody to follow through for production. All the creative work and all the business work was my job. And believe me when you had as many as 18 features at once you were busy. You were plenty busy. . . . And I’d have to see all the dailies. Everyday [sic] sit through hours [of] everything that was shooting. Every department head had to attend these runnings. . . . My budgets—overhead plus production budgets—would go a million and a half to two million a year. That’s a lot to be responsible for. So you had the business end, and preparation and production. It was a tough job but a very rewarding one.18

And if anything was “wrong” in a picture, Tuttle “had to answer for it. No matter who did it. You were responsible. So if I saw something wrong I would contact whoever did it and say watch this or watch that or that isn’t right or such and such. Then in the mornings I would usually walk around and supervise. See that everything was going right.” (Tuttle does admit that he had “an assistant— two assistants at one time—who would do a lot of the leg work for me.”)19 Whether Sydney Guilaroff had equivalent duties as an executive hairstylist at MGM, or was instead a “whoever did it” whom Tuttle would have contacted about perceived problems, is difficult to tell. Guilaroff does not mention Tuttle’s name in his autobiography, as though Guilaroff alone, not any makeup “chief,” was responsible for the studio’s hairstyles, and for managing the many supplies and personnel needed to create them, for three-plus decades. And in the Tuttle interview I am quoting from, he omitted Guilaroff’s name when asked about the head hairstylists he had had over the years, the last one of which was Mary Keats. In the senses Tuttle describes, then, makeup and hairdressing departments were similar to those of wardrobe and costume or set design. Yet past the early

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William Tuttle and Ann Ayars in 1941, for Dr. Kildare’s Victory (1942, no credit for makeup or hair). Bison Archives and Hollywood Historic Photos. Note Tuttle’s brush storage system.

silent era, in which actors usually supplied their own modern clothing for films, costume and set designers were able to become publicly recognized components of a film’s visual appeal. From the 1920s art directors and those, male or female, who designed a star’s gowns were regularly given screen credit, and their names and even likenesses were often featured in studio promotion and publicity campaigns. For makeup artists, however, such cachet was harder to come by. Tuttle’s aforementioned remarks about the studios’ “strange policy” of denying that actors wore makeup in straight roles suggest one reason for the absence of screen credits, but worse was that the policy also affected the seriousness with which the crafts were taken at studios themselves in matters of budget and recognition. Beyond the “loud mouth attitude” of the Westmores—from George on down—that Tuttle believes had a lot to do with “attract[ing] attention” to the makeup artist in Hollywood,20 if actors played characters “very like themselves” as the type-based system called for, and a studio already had a makeup department and makeup men and hairdressers on staff as they had in the silent era, how did a makeup executive’s duties become as complex as those of other departments whose significance to films as expressive commodities were more obviously touted? And how did the discourse valorizing art in the makeup artist’s training and labor in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s function in interplay with the standardization of the design and application of beauty itself?

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I referred in chapter 1 to a claim made by Max Factor’s biographers about the “first time” a makeup artist was involved in the planning stages of a commercial narrative film, namely Factor’s participation from the script phase on in Paramount’s Joan the Woman (1917), directed by Cecil B. DeMille. But the transcripts of the 1928 Mazda tests suggest that, at least for nonperiod or other genre films without large amounts of character makeup, such a process was not yet routine even in the late 1920s. One important step toward tying makeup artists, and hairdressers, to individual films was signaled by a brief mention in Variety in 1929: “First National has established a precedent in studio operation by assigning a make-up man and hairdresser to each production unit. These people will work under the supervision of Percy Westmore, who heretofore centralized the work of make-up and assigned the men as needed.”21 First National, which employed Perc, had been acquired by Warner Bros. the year before, and his actual status there and at the combined entity in the late 1920s and early 1930s is, as I have suggested, difficult to discern because of conflicts between primary material that, through the early 1930s, indicates that the “makeup department” at Warner Bros.–First National consisted of Westmore in hairdressing and Walter Rodgers in makeup (as opposed to Westmore’s own claims about his executive status in makeup from 1924 on). Also confusing are detailed fan magazine and newspaper articles from the late 1920s about ciphers like another “Beauty Wizard of Hollywood,” V. E. Meadows. Photographically a dead ringer for Max Factor— who was also called a “Wizard of Make-Up” in the press—Meadows had, according to Screenland in 1928, been “installed as official consultant of beauty and grooming for United Artists, Warner Bros., Tiffany, De Mille and First National,” which means that he, too, might have worked with several Westmores and Rodgers as well.22 Meadows appears on no rosters of the Motion Picture Make-Up Artists Association, however, nor in much publicity material in the public record past the early 1930s. Whatever Perc Westmore’s precise duties at Warner Bros. or First National in 1929 (Picture Play called “Percy” a “young make-up artist at Metro-Goldwyn” that year, possibly mistaking him for George),23 he was by all accounts an observant, talented, and exceptionally driven individual, and his and his family’s “loud mouth attitude” at least help us to understand that they were working to turn makeup and hairdressing into crafts as crucial to the studios as any other—if not (yet) at the script phase, then certainly as a production was being shot. But Perc’s reported restructuring of makeup duties at First National in 1929 cannot be separated from how other departments were being built up at the time, especially costume and art departments. Studio art departments had been organized in the 1920s, according to Tino Balio, using a “two-tier system of organization that divided responsibility between a supervising art director, who visualized the script, and a unit art director, who did the actual design and oversaw its construction.”24 This may well have been the model that Westmore was invoking for Warner Bros. in 1929, though it appears that

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others had begun thinking along the same lines, as a typed document by Bob (Robert) Stephanoff makes clear. Despite the many classic films on which Robert Stephanoff worked—among them Stella Dallas (1937), Wuthering Heights (1939), That Hamilton Woman (1941), and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)—his name is not as familiar today as that of the Westmores or William Tuttle. Born in Turkey and an actor before he arrived in the United States in his twenties, his actual first name was Blagoe, which was occasionally used (along with Bob, Robert, Blague, and Blago) in his screen credits. Stephanoff also served as the makeup director at United Artists from at least 1929 through the mid-1930s, after which he worked, primarily as Samuel Goldwyn’s chief, until 1951, when Stephanoff died in an apartment fire.25 The document in question, titled “The Importance of Make-Up in Motion Pictures” (its subtitle is “Save Fifteen Dollars, but Lose Hundreds”), is undated, but there are clues that he wrote it in 1929 or 1930.26 From his position as “Director of Make-up, United Artists, Hollywood, California,” Stephanoff argues that studios were losing money by not having “stand-by” makeup men on every film set during production. Without such makeup men (he does not mention hairdressing or body makeup), actors would go back to their dressing rooms either to “patch up” their own makeup or have it done for them; makeup “difficulties” would cause lengthy delays because of how much time it took for a department makeup artist “to get down to the set and straighten [it] out”; and finally, since all actors became “sweaty” during camera rehearsals and shooting, it would be much more economical to have the “necessary touching-up while the system was in operation.” He ultimately asks producers to “verify” his statements themselves, claiming that if they do, they will avoid the “unnecessary financial evil” of saving the fifteen-dollar daily salary of a makeup artist while spending hundreds in lost time. Given that by 1931 the “working rules” of Local 235—to which many if not most makeup men belonged and which was part of the Studio Basic Agreement— required the employment and “detail[ing] for duty” of at least one standby makeup artist on every film made by a “producing unit or company” of greater than “four standard reels” in length,27 it would appear that Stephanoff’s and Westmore’s recommendations quickly became standard. Yet such adaptations were also likely to have been implemented because of other changes being made to studio as well as labor organization by the mid-1930s. The profitability of motion pictures in 1929 and 1930 made it seem as though they were “Depressionproof,” but in 1931 it was a different story, and the downturn in studio fortunes until 1933 would lead to some of the labor issues discussed in chapter 2. The shift from a “central producer” to a “unit-producer” system also “grew out of the Depression,” in Balio’s words, “and answered a need to maintain fiscal restraints. This slight restructuring of production at the executive level,” he notes, “did not loosen the studios’ grip on talent; rather, the shift further concentrated production into the hands of executives.”28 Although Balio uses the word executive here

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to refer to producers, most departments were also structured in this way by 1933, the difference being the degree to which crafts were required, or allowed, to collaborate from the earliest stages of production. Executives of art departments, for example, which included set design, were brought in early, at or near the script phase, for the obvious reason that a film could not be shot until a set was designed, approved, and built (deciding whether or not, or what, to shoot on location would also have required early participation). Cinematographers, in contrast, were “seldom consulted in pre-production. Typically, they were required to move from project to project with little preparation time in between,” Balio states.29 If one reverse engineers Frank Westmore’s and William Tuttle’s lists of the duties of makeup department executives, it is reasonable to believe that their jobs ultimately straddled those of other designers and cinematographers, with more time and advance preparation given to prestige or period films than to routine “modern” movies, whether A or B pictures into which studio production was divided by the institution of the double bill early in the Depression. Moreover, while Balio does not discuss makeup or hairdressing as crafts, he notes that in the 1930s “the prime responsibility of the director of photography in a picture was to safeguard the image of a star. Protection meant designing the lighting to present the star’s image to best advantage.” He points to Gregg Toland’s remarks that such “photo-flattery” often meant “the subjugation of realism to personality,” and also quotes Karl Strauss, director of photography at Paramount: “We must strive to convey an impression, not alone of actuality, but of perfected actuality. Our aim is to show players and settings, not merely as they are, but as the audience would like to see them.”30 To perfect the star’s image, then, was at once the impetus behind and the result of the rising consequence of makeup artists, hairdressers, and Max Factor that the Mazda tests and Westmore’s and Stephanoff’s actions register. If cinematographers were given “little preparation time” in the 1930s, as Balio claims,31 it might well have been because producers believed that cosmetics manufacturers and makeup artists had already taken care of much of the work of making sure that the star or other featured player was presented “to best advantage.” Whether the reduction of time given to cinematographers was felt as a benefit or a burden is hard to assess, but in the mid-1930s some were clearly concerned about the encroachment of their so-called allies into what had developed into one of the major imperatives of lighting, namely the manner of making stars or even minor actors to look in their “physical appearance . . . photographically perfect,” in the words of the secretary of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1928.32 (At Columbia, the less prestigious back row of the daily screening room was reserved for cinematographers, makeup artists, and costume designers, so at least one studio lumped all of those responsible for the visual appeal of actors into the same group.)33 While the analogy of retouching also contains within it the goal of perfection, the latter term had not necessarily previously been associated with cosmetics, at least for cinematographers writing about makeup

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themselves. As Carl Louis Gregory states in his 1927 motion picture photography manual, “It is only natural that the actress especially should attempt to improve her beauty in the process of make-up, but its primary purpose is to secure a natural likeness of the actor and nothing more.”34 That said, producing a “correct image” had been a professed goal of many working in Hollywood since at least the late 1910s, and versions of “correct” appeared frequently, with reference to both makeup and lighting, in acting and photography manuals through the 1920s. American Cinematographer referred to “corrective make-up”—whether it came from Factor, a Westmore, or a cinematographer I do not know—in summarizing its research committee’s tests of Factor’s panchromatic line of cosmetics in 1929, and thus the American Society of Cinematographers participated in turning makeup’s purpose into something far more elaborate than “securing a natural likeness.”35 In “The Art of Motion Picture Make-Up,” which Factor wrote for the 1930 Cinematographic Annual, he begins with the statement that without makeup, “properly applied, the players would appear as almost hideous individuals on the screen. With make-up artfully applied even a decidedly homely woman can be made to look beautiful, and close-ups become joys to the observer. However, there are not many people who can make themselves up without considerable instruction.”36 Here we are far from the rumor that the transition from orthochromatic to panchromatic film stock would make makeup obsolete in straight roles. And beyond issues of the maintenance of “true” (white) skin tone across different conditions—suntans or “the strain of hard work and long hours”—most of the advice Factor proffers is about exceeding the possibilities of reality, even “retouched” reality: “Artistically done, make-up is the most practical way to correct and adjust facial deficiencies” and had therefore “contributed to the perfection of cinematography.”37 If in the early silent period the advice was generally to wear as little makeup as possible in close-ups and concomitantly more in long shots where the face would be less legible, by the end of the 1920s far more cosmetics were being worn in closer shots, with the goal ironically to produce an artlessly natural appearance that was also flawless. As a reminder, the Mazda tests had helped make Factor’s panchromatic makeup into “the industry standard,” in David Bordwell’s words.38 They also marked, if they did not initiate, an alliance between Factor and the Westmores, one that fractured just as corrective makeup was set to become “the industry standard” as well. To understand all of this, I must first cut back to the topic of Factor and his company’s dominance as a cosmetics supplier to the studios, a situation that remained in place after his death in 1938 and that continued through the 1960s. The Factor monopoly has been couched partly as a matter of propinquity: it was simply more convenient for the studios to work with someone whose factory was located nearby. But by the mid-1930s there were some “250 cosmetic and makeup manufacturers operating plants in the Los Angeles area,” according to Variety, among them at least one, the (Robare) DeLong

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Make-up Studio, that was also advertising its own “perfect motion picture make-up.”39 During and after the Mazda tests, Factor made his products available for free to any film professional who wanted to experiment with them. But evidence from the advertisements he placed in technical journals suggests that by 1929 he had also arranged a quid pro quo that enabled him to promote his products as being used for particular films and on particular stars at a range of studios. I imagine to earn the goodwill of everyone involved, by 1930 the ads included the names of the makeup artist and cameraman for each film.40 In turn, Factor exploited his motion picture connections in his consumer marketing campaigns, an enterprise that his 1928 contract with Sales Builders was designed to further and that by 1929 also involved securing the “exclusive endorsements” of stars for Factor’s products in print ads for a period of five years, during which they could advertise no other cosmetic. The single-page typed “contracts” that stars signed with Factor from 1929 on, for one dollar, do exist (I have seen Jean Harlow’s “in person,” as it were), and their “testimonials” were often reproduced in ads themselves.41 But the real contracts, written or implied, would have been between Factor’s organization and the studios that controlled their actors’ “name and likeness, photographic or otherwise,” a reciprocal relationship that was crucial to maintaining the authority of the Factor name. (Even the claim about exclusive endorsements may not be entirely trustworthy; Rita Hayworth, for example, appeared in Factor, Westmore, and Maybelline cosmetics ads in 1941 and 1942.) In this sense, the outcome of the infamous “triangular powder puff war” that Variety reported on in 1935 for the “grab” of studio cosmetic business among Factor, Elizabeth Arden, and the Westmores, who had just opened their own House of Westmore salon and associated cosmetics factory that year, was substantially preordained.42 But it was not just that Factor (whose four sons, though not his two daughters, also worked for the organization) had “tied up for endorsements practically every femme star in pictures with the exception of Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Miriam Hopkins,” as Variety claimed. Rather, what the article does not mention is that Factor and Sales Builders traded the stars’ endorsements for reduced prices on the supplies to stock makeup and hairdressing departments themselves along with publicity for the star’s current films, which would remain the case for thirty-plus years. (Michael Westmore told me that most of the cosmetics used when he was an apprentice in the 1960s were, still, from Factor’s.) The lower prices were in turn made possible by Factor’s enormous success using stars to sell consumer cosmetics across the country (he opened “identical” factories in Europe too).43 Film historian Kirsty Dootson, in her article about the powder puff war, focuses on the development of cosmetics for color films in the mid-1930s and particularly “the erasure of Arden’s product from this historical moment.”44 Dootson argues that, because Arden’s makeup showed up “darker” on-screen, Factor’s

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“won” at least partly because of his “ability to maintain a palatable form of whiteness as a beauty ideal during the transition from black-and-white to color film.”45 Given that the majority of Hollywood films were still shot in black and white through the 1950s, there was arguably no clearly marked “transition” to color film, but the “moment” Dootson refers to was the industry-wide adoption of Technicolor’s “perfected” three-strip process, which did indeed require new makeup products (for reasons indicated earlier, Factor’s panchromatic makeup did not look “natural” in color). What is more intriguing to me is the erasure of Robare DeLong, if not the Westmores, from most accounts of the “war”— especially since “maintaining a palatable form of whiteness” had notoriously long been, and through the end of the studio era would remain, Hollywood’s ideal for any body-related craft. DeLong had opened a cosmetics plant in Hollywood in the early 1930s, where he developed and manufactured his “Nuchromatic make-up” specifically for motion picture production.46 And from at least 1934—the earliest ads I have seen date from that year—he advertised his makeup as “INEVITABLE”: it took “one-fourth of the time to apply or remove,” stayed on “much longer without frequent touching-up,” did “not shine, crack nor fade,” and was “absolutely harmless to the skin” in comparison with other “greasepaint.” (Robert Stephanoff’s Associated Motion Picture Make-up Artists, Inc., which had licensed its name in 1932 and began offering shares in 1934, is not mentioned in Variety’s report, perhaps because its cosmetics would have been designed for “street wear,” although that company, too, intended to use stars in its advertising.) For the Westmores (two of whom, Perc and Ern, had been directors of Factor’s Hair Department since 1929), 1935 was the year they struck out on their own to compete directly with Factor’s empire. In 1931, Perc (as Percy) submitted a patent application, for Max Factor & Co., for a new hairpiece that, when the patent was granted early in 1932, the twins named the “Percern toupée.”47 Unlike other toupees, the Percern used a “fine, open mesh net material” to make the edges of toupees all but invisible even in close-ups. Perc transferred the patent to Factor for a dollar and a share of the profits from future sales before their departure. (Michael Westmore believes that Perc and Ern left because they were angry that they were not made partners in Factor’s organization.)48 With the financial help of several stars, the brothers together opened the luxurious House of Westmore salon, at 6638 Sunset Boulevard, with an extravagant celebration in April 1935, and a cosmetics plant a few blocks down the street. They hired some of Factor’s marketing personnel away from him, and Perc, especially, began in earnest to identify himself and his family as Hollywood’s premier makeup experts, helped by their own “Westmore’s [sic] News Service” through which they disseminated products and advice in print, on radio, and in short promotional films.49 It surely should not have been difficult, under these circumstances, for the Westmores, if not DeLong, to have had a fighting chance in the powder puff war.

Ad for Robare DeLong’s Nuchromatic makeup, Film Daily Yearbook (1934). Media History Digital Library.

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Although, as Dootson notes, details about the transaction are scarce, Elizabeth Arden’s strategy was apparently simply to buy DeLong’s factory outright and to market his Nuchromatic as part of her Screen and Stage line.50 (According to what little published material there is on DeLong, he continued to manufacture cosmetics suitable for “street and evening wear, as well as for photography,” into the 1940s in the New York area.)51 Arden made only “negligible” alterations, Dootson states, to DeLong’s cosmetics—which, unlike those marketed by the House of Westmore, seem meant from the outset to have been “professional” rather than consumer products—before selling them as her own.52 The problem for both competitors, however, was a combination of their products’ limitations and, in the Westmores’ case, bad financial decisions. Whether Arden and her chemists altered DeLong’s formulation or his own advertising was making inflated claims, her Nuchromatic turned out to entail a far longer “two-color” multistep application process than either Factor’s flexible greasepaint or the new Pan-Cake, developed for Technicolor, that Factor and others were writing about in the pages of American Cinematographer and International Photographer from 1936 on.53 (Depending on the actor, a beauty makeup could take fifteen minutes to two hours to apply, not including hairdressing.) Worse, it “doubled the amount of foundation used by the studio makeup department,” in Dootson’s words.54 Finally, in contrast to any of Factor’s products, Nuchromatic even required special instructions and products to remove because it was waterproof. Arden’s Nuchromatic was used on a few color films, but somewhere around 1938 it disappeared; an article in Fortune that year claims that the Screen and Stage line had produced “little but deficits and lawsuits,” the latter— about which I have found no further information—perhaps contributing to its demise.55 And Factor’s Pan-Cake—and in 1947 a similar but greasier makeup in an even more convenient twist-up stick form, Pan-Stik—became a staple at every studio, suitable for both color and black-and-white films. (DeLong’s Nuchromatic, if not Arden’s, apparently could be used for panchromatic as well.) For the Westmores, the lavishness of their new salon combined with various forms of personal indulgence (gambling, buying yachts) meant that by 1936 they were forced to sell their factory to keep the salon open.56 While the factory continued to manufacture cosmetics bearing the House of Westmore name, it was now a “mass price field” dime-store line.57 Because of the sale of their factory, Dootson dismisses the Westmores from the powder puff “fray”; but paradoxically, had their ambitions been less grandiose and their financial management better, they might have given Factor cause for concern. Indeed, Factor was angered enough by what he considered their treachery to refurbish his own salon in 1935—it had already been completely remodeled in 1928—and introduce the results with a celebration featuring a constellation of stars that outdid that of the Westmores a few months earlier. (Not surprisingly, Factor also ceased his hosting of the weekly meetings of the Motion Picture Make-Up Artists Association, and the “Percern toupée” almost immediately became the “Max Factor

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hair lace wig”; Fred Frederick then ran the Hair Department for four decades.)58 And when Ern and Bud Westmore published a book in 1947 titled Beauty, Glamour and Personality in which they used “pan-cake” as a generic term, they were forced to insert a correction: “The word Pan-cake . . . is the registered trade mark of Max Factor & Company, of Hollywood, California, . . . and this term should not be used in referring to other ‘cake make-up.’”59 Ironically, the Westmores deployed Factor’s own methods in making their family name famous (“The Westmores have a great deal in common with the Factors,” wrote Stage in 1936).60 By the 1940s, as publicity photographs and advertisements show, the Westmores were using at least some of their own cosmetics, as were other makeup artists, at the studios at which they worked, though they never succeeded in supplanting the Factor corporation’s dominance. They also began to employ their studios’ stars and current films in House of Westmore product advertising. (The consumer brand Maybelline, the only makeup line contemporary to the studio era to have remained continually in existence since, also began to use Hollywood stars, often a year or two past their prime, in their full-color print ads by the 1940s.)61 More to the point of this chapter, given the emphasis that Perc, especially, would lay on cosmetics as the route to both the “natural” and the “perfect,” they also clearly adapted much of their motion picture makeup discourse from Factor and from the cinematographers with whom Factor had worked over the years.62 They, like Factor, surely also benefited from, if they did not directly plagiarize, the many beauty manuals by women that always contained advice on correcting facial “flaws.” See Helena Rubinstein’s assertion in her book The Art of Feminine Beauty (1930) that “art can correct nature” through contouring with cosmetics, for example, as well as Rubinstein’s own advertising as a lab-coated “artist as well as scientist.”63 Whether Perc and Ern Westmore had already left Factor’s employ when Perc wrote his first technical article for American Cinematographer I do not know. But certainly following Factor’s death—after which fewer advice columns or articles emanated from the corporation Max had founded—it would be the Westmores who would be identified with, and take credit and institute careful procedures for, corrective makeup as a studio practice, to which I now return. Perc’s 1935 article—the earliest technical piece I have come across by any Westmore—is titled “Corrective Makeup as An Aid to Cinematography.” It begins with a familiar analogy before laying out the terms that would define motion picture beauty makeup for the next two decades at least: Ever since the first crank turned, cinematographers and Makeup Artists have been comparing makeup to retouching in “still” portraiture. The comparison is a good one, but we’ve made it inaccurate: in retouching, both the contour and the texture of the facial areas are rendered more pleasing; in conventional makeup, we deal almost exclusively with complexion and texture, leaving the

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modelling of objectional contours almost entirely to the cinematographer and his lights. That is all well enough, for cinematographers can, by painting with light and shade, modify facial contours. . . . But since makeup can, as has been proven, aid the cinematographer in modifying facial textures, would it not be even better for the makeup artist to aid him even more by correcting objectional contours? We have answered the question with a vigorous affirmative. Within the past year, we have put into practice at the Warner Brothers’ studios a new system of makeup which we call “Corrective Makeup.” With it, we have been able to simplify the work of the cinematographers, and to greatly enhance the facial attractiveness of our stars. In some instances, we have virtually remodelled famous faces; in others, we have, so to speak, salvaged budding starlets from the obscurity which often waits for players—however promising—who “don’t photograph well” . . . . It should be understood, of course, that these corrective makeups are rigidly adhered to, and that they are applied, not by the player herself, but by the studio’s makeup artists. Virtually every feminine player on the studio’s contract list has her specially prescribed corrective makeup; and the same course is followed with players borrowed from other studios, or engaged for a single production. Regardless of the player’s natural beauty, we have found that this system of makeup can be used to advantage, for even the most completely beautiful woman has some minor irregularities of contour which can be smoothed out in this fashion. The system can be applied with equal precision to men, of course, but in practice, we rarely do so, as most of our male stars are of types which benefit by wearing little or no makeup.

Westmore also uses the article to make the link between makeup expertise and art that Dawn would soon publicly assert: “Personally, I find my own early experience as a portrait-painter invaluable in this new interpretation of cosmetology. Moreover, I venture to say that such experience will prove absolutely essential when natural-color cinematography comes into its own, as it soon must. . . . And our corrective makeup will then have to be applied as an artist would apply his paints, moulding the face in the most delicate nuances of tone and color.”64 I have not seen other public references to Perc Westmore as a portrait painter, but what matters is how he, like Jack Dawn (an amateur sculptor), conjoins art, expertise, and perfection in the person and function of the studio makeup artist, and “his” importance to stardom itself through the institution of systemic methods of not only “enhancing” or even “improving” but “virtually remodeling” faces—not for character roles but simply “facial attractiveness.” The notion of “specially prescribed makeup” replicated the standardized procedures of other crafts, especially cinematography’s three-point “glamour” lighting or the gendered practice of lens diffusion for romantic close-ups of women.65 And it added to the ability of makeup artists (and presumably hairdressers) to hierarchize their

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crafts under the leadership of a few individuals who could create beauty and handsomeness—Westmore’s comments about male stars and their natural pulchritude notwithstanding—briskly and competently and with results that could be replicated by underlings. As Perc wrote again in a lengthy book chapter titled “Corrective Make-Up” (1937), it “has proven to be the cameraman’s best and only ally. These two arts are very closely related. . . . There can be no error—there is no excuse for a mistake. A miracle is expected and a miracle it must be.”66 The “Westmore Make-Up Chart,” two examples of which he provided, was designed to be the blueprint for such miracles. The charts in “Corrective Make-Up” are marked, like later versions, “Copyright 1936 The House of Westmore.” One is filled out by hand for “Claudett” Colbert for an unnamed Paramount production that same year, the other, also for an unnamed film, for Josephine Hutchinson. On the first, the makeup artist was “Wallie” Westmore, the cameraman Victor Milner, and the hairdresser Jane “Romaine”; on the second, the makeup artist was Clay Campbell (then Perc’s assistant) and the hairdresser, Joan St.  Oegger. Like most charts I have come across, these include a list of products by number: foundation, eye shadow, powder, rouge for cheeks and lips, pencils of various kinds (there are also spaces for toupees, falls, switches, curls, beards, and body makeup). In the center is a generic line drawing of a face (in this case a female face; there were otherwise identical charts for men) on which areas of shading and highlighting can be indicated with color (“Use Blue Pencil for Shadows. Use Red Pencil for Highlights”). The numbers in the various categories correspond to Max Factor products—interestingly, his “flexible greasepaint” rather than his panchromatic line in the Colbert example, and at least one of his new “Technicolor” rouge products for Hutchinson. Colbert’s correction is mainly around her eyes, whereas Hutchinson’s chart is broken up into many more discrete areas to be shaded in different ways to alter the perceived shape of her face. As the chapter’s figure legend puts it, “The chart, noting as it does the shading and corrective methods employed, together with details of the staff responsible for camera-work, make-up and hairdressing on that particular picture, can be used in subsequent productions and can be sent to another studio in the event that the star is on ‘loan-out’; by this method the studio can insure themselves that the player will look ‘just as good’ in her next picture!” Colbert’s chart is marked for “production” and “portrait” photography, Hutchinson’s for “portrait” only. (There are two typos—“rough” for “rouge”—on the form.) I will return to how the chart and its applications changed over the years, but even in the mid-1930s—a fraught time in Hollywood for many reasons—there were signs that corrective makeup and its goals, while streamlining the work of makeup and hairdressing departments, were creating some internecine strife not only between cinematographers and makeup artists but between the Westmores, as the primary proponents of what they wanted to be their proprietary method, and MGM’s Jack Dawn as well as Max Factor. Late in 1936, in an article about “three-dimensional make-up” using plastic formulations of his own design, Dawn

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spoke to cinematographer William Stull in American Cinematographer about “the weakness of today’s so-called ‘corrective’ or shaded make-up”: “Our ultimate picture may be flat, but our actor’s face isn’t. And the camera and actor both move around, so that the make-up is not regarded from one fixed viewpoint. Cosmetic painting can give a smooth texture to the skin, and a photographically even coloring at all points. As far as texture and color go, such make-up is good from all angles; but while our painted highlights and shadows can give an illusion of altered contour—if viewed from certain specific angles—they cannot be expected to do so from all angles, or under all conditions.”67 Factor’s organization joined the fray in 1937, in an article by one of his makeup executives, Bernard Shore, in International Photographer: It is certainly established that a player cannot come before a camera without make-up, and it is equally as certain that this make-up can either accentuate or detract from the amount of personality which is presented to the camera’s recording lens. The make-up artist’s responsibility, then, is a heavy one. He must deliver to the cameraman a made-up personality which, as far as its recording on film is concerned, must appear to have on no make-up whatsoever. And, the make-up creator must also in many cases super-impose his own artistic judgment over that of his subject; there are occasions when the artist, besides doing the actual creation of the make-up, must devote a great deal of his time and energy to an advance sales talk to convince the players that his taste in coiffures, or eye shadowing, or lip definition may be superior to theirs, and is more suitable to the particular picture role than the make-up details which are of their own expression. On the other hand, there have been times known when the player’s instinctive selection of make-up details, even though these selections were in defiance of some basic rule of make-up harmony, were, for that particular person, superior to the set rules. A true make-up artist must be perpetually prepared for proper departures from the basic precepts of his art, in order that he may finally present to the cameraman, not a rule-perfectly made-up and consequently stereotyped person, but a vividly accentuated character, with all of its strengths and weakness treated in such a manner as to make them stand out together and register in their film perpetuations.68

Because the term corrective makeup had been around for some years, I read Dawn’s and Shore’s comments partly as reactions to the growing presence of the Westmores as executives and popular experts. Moreover, in connection with the opening of the House of Westmore, the brothers had accelerated the process of building their family’s reputation as industry makeup and hairdressing “pioneers.” A typical rendering of this is Liberty magazine’s description in 1937 of

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the brothers’ careers as the culmination of George Westmore’s “vision”: “‘Makeup some day will be one of the most important industries in the world,’ George told his sons before he died. ‘I want you boys to stay in the make-up business. Working together, you may become a power.’”69 Usually represented by Perc, the Westmores not only published more “secret” makeup charts but in 1937, with yet more fanfare, also began to connect corrective makeup to an ideal based on what they called their own “discovery”: namely, that there were “seven facial types,” of which only the rarest of the seven, the “oval,” was “perfect.” And correcting every face, on-screen and off, to correspond to that platonic ideal became the hallmark of Westmore “beauty.” Alicia Annas does not use the Westmore name in her discussion of what she names the studios’ “photogenic formula,” but she clearly had the brothers in mind when she wrote about “a pseudo-scientific corrective makeup technique, based on the classical Greek ideal of beauty,” in which the “ideal camera face, male or female,” was the “oval” (undoubtedly the “set rules” referred to by Factor’s representative).70 In 1937 and 1938, the Westmores, through their news service, flooded print media with material about the “seven faces formulation” and which stars’ faces were of which shape—Kay Francis’s and Olivia de Havilland’s were oval, Joan Blondell’s was square, Ann Sheridan’s was triangular, Ruby Keeler’s was oblong, and so on.71 And in 1939 the House of Westmore produced and immediately sold 50,000 copies of “Perc Westmore’s Perfect Make-Up Guide,” a booklet in which female stars, in black-and-white photographs, were organized by face shape, and women were shown how to use the enclosed “measuring wheel” to make themselves “look like their type” with the Westmores’ “typeharmonized” cosmetics,72 a variation on Max Factor’s “color harmony” principle from the 1920s, which was tied to eye and hair color. This sort of discourse notably inverts the “type” of silent cinema: rather than actors becoming picture personalities or stars based on what they already looked like according to the needs of the film stories in which they appeared, it was now taken for granted that stars were themselves the “type” against which spectators were to evaluate and improve their own beauty or handsomeness. The “formula” part of Annas’s rubric is thus partly produced, I believe, by corrective makeup and the charts that were designed to instantiate its application. And the studio era’s emphasis on speed and standardization in both products and labor practices meant that satisfactory outcomes were likely to become routine across many studios at once. (As Patrick Keating puts it, in Hollywood efficiency was always on a continuum with the “values of art,” such that if a technique was effective, “why shouldn’t everyone use it?”)73 But women have always employed cosmetics to draw attention away from problematic features while enhancing others, and as mentioned most acting and all makeup manuals I have come across deal with issues relating to face shape in some way—see, as another non-Hollywood example, Virginia Vincent’s booklet Make-Up (1932)

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that details (usefully in color) the contouring of “broad,” “long oval,” and “narrow” faces and how to handle “prominent jaws,” in addition to the usual advice for making the eyes appear wider apart or closer together and the like.74 The “seven faces” theory (in The Westmores of Hollywood, Frank Westmore calls it a “scheme,” which is probably more truthful)75 merely increased the range of possible shapes that deviated from “perfection” (worse, some faces were a “combination” of shapes). And while the oval is an attractive shape, the discourse by which it becomes “perfect” can strain the bounds of credulity, as when the Westmore Beauty Book (1956) states that the oval has “long been recognized as Nature’s purest, most perfectly balanced design” partly because we each begin life “in egg-shape, in the ovum.”76 As to cinematographers and their relationship to facial correction, it may or may not have helped that Perc asserted that his charts had “proven to be the solution to the cameraman’s problems” (a copy was given, he wrote in “Corrective Make-up,” to the hairdresser “as well as to the cameramen on each respective picture”).77 What the cameraman’s problems were he did not say, but generally speaking, Westmore was correct that no glass diffusion disc or any amount of silk gauze could obscure the fact, in cinematographer John Alton’s words, that for “a beautiful close-up, good make-up is absolutely essential” (Alton called such shots “the jewels of the picture”).78 Or conversely, in the words of an American Cinematographer review of Kitty Foyle in 1941, that an “excellent cinematographer” could be “saddled” with the “unnecessary handicap” of a makeup job that made Ginger Rogers look like she had a “dirty face” (for which the reviewer, perhaps in an attempt at collegial diplomacy, blamed primarily Rogers herself).79 The cinematographer’s reliance on the professional makeup artist, then, may itself have been a cause of disaffection between the two fields, at least at some studios or on certain films. Especially since what was rarely acknowledged in Perc’s accounts is that charts depended on photographic and motion picture makeup and hairdressing tests that included, as they had since the 1910s, not only lighting but also setting angles from which flaws in an actor’s countenance could be minimized.80 (A chart would have been useless if the results did not look good on film.) Whether such disaffection had anything to do with the Westmores’ aforementioned desire to be affiliated with cinematographers in the labor unrest of 1936 and 1937 I do not know. But in December 1937 Perc Westmore felt compelled, or was compelled, to make an amelioratory address to the ASC that was also published as two sequential articles in American Cinematographer.81 In the first entry, “Cooperation Bulks Big in Work of Make-Up” (which also includes makeup charts), Perc begins with the following statement: “The most important factors in the success of any kind of make-up work are thorough understanding and cooperation between the cinematographer and the make-up artist.” Though he himself was giving the address “to try to encourage such a spirit of understanding,” he acknowledged that the two crafts were, as is “too often the case, at swords’ points”:

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It has been charged that this method of make-up attempts to light the players for the cinematographer. This is not true. No possible combination of make-up can take the place of the cinematographer’s lighting. But correctly used, “corrective” make-up can supplement the cinematographer’s work, and make his problems easier. The whole system is built on the simple idea that concave areas in a face absorb more light than do convex areas. Conversely, a protruding area, since it is not physically shadowed, will reflect more light than a hollow. . . . Once the make-up artist and the cinematographer have agreed on what is to be done we prepare a detailed chart of the make-up.82

In the next entry, “Make-up Specialist Can Do Much To Assist the Cinematographer,” Perc again stresses that, like “anything else in the picture, the makeup must be made to be photographed. It must be planned to coordinate with the lighting plans of the cinematographer. Otherwise, you are likely to have a make-up that is trying to do one thing to a player’s face while the lighting is planned to quite a different end. The result won’t reflect much credit on either.” He also refers to the importance of “photographic tests made with the man who is to photograph the production. . . . Therefore our make-up artists work in close partnership with the photographers, and due to this cooperation make-up troubles have been exceedingly rare”—their goals, after all, were “the same.” And while I have not seen references in material about the seven face shapes that mentions men, Perc does state here, in contrast to his earlier claim, that “at Warner Brothers’ all players—men included—wear make-up. In many cases the men, too, benefit as much from corrective make-up as do the women. And as you can readily appreciate, the result on the screen is much better if the men are all made up, while the cinematographer’s task is much easier.”83 Jack Dawn, however, again took aim at the sort of correction Perc espoused in a chapter simply titled “Make-Up” that Dawn wrote for a 1938 book about filmmaking. Dawn comes close to dismissing the claims made by the Westmores when he points out that some actors need almost no “make-up aid” and others maybe “a little high lighting at the sides. . . . But there is no more to it than that.” Indeed, Dawn scorns “beautification by the use of cosmetics” as “the most trivial part of the work of the film studio make-up department. It is not the peak achievement of my work but the basis of its routine to be able to make photographically attractive, with fifteen moves of my hands, any normal man or woman in the world.” He also made the notion of correction itself considerably less complex: “Any normal defects, such as twisted or too-thin lips, drooping eye muscles and sagging chins, I can correct easily.”84 To Dawn, then, beauty makeup did not require charts and scientific justification, though his assistant William Tuttle was certainly using charts by the late 1930s, and any department would have needed some such tool to pass instructions on to subordinates and to organize fiscal matters like budgeting for

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supplies. But the influence and prevalence of corrective makeup does help to explain how discourses about artistic ability as one of the most valued talents of the makeup “man” of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s interacted with standardization and the studios’ increasing bureaucratization. Although there would always be rule breaking, or different ways to accomplish the same result, only an artist could design or implement corrective makeup, even “trivial” varieties,85 in addition to whatever was required for the character makeup in which Dawn, at least, was more interested; see his well-known work delineating the fantastic denizens of Oz in The Wizard of Oz (1939), for example. According to Michael Westmore, Tuttle, too, had taken Dawn’s “artists, not mechanics,” edict to heart, and when Tuttle succeeded Dawn at MGM in 1950, he not only “hired new people with artistic ability [but] insisted they went to art school when they weren’t apprenticing during the day.”86 Another irony of corrective makeup is that it was most widely publicized just as Technicolor was becoming an industry force significant enough to lead to something like a powder puff war. For as Bernard Shore wrote in International Photographer in 1936, with Technicolor “highlights and shadows cannot be employed and less latitude is given for what is known as correction [sic] makeup. Imperfections of features or skin can be disguised no more successfully than with street make-up the average woman wears.”87 Factor also remarked in an interview with American Cinematographer the same year that “shaded or ‘modeling’ make-up, which has been developed to a high perfection for black-andwhite, loses much of its value in color. . . . In color, such shadings generally appear merey [sic] spotty. A certain amount of such correction may at times be achieved, but this technique, in general, is of little use in color.”88 Equally concerning to Factor and his relationship to the studios was that the browns and grays of many of the products in his panchromatic line were unsuited to Technicolor, despite his assertions to the contrary during the Mazda tests. But his Pan-Cake, first seen on the screen in 1937, could be used with panchromatic as well, and Factor’s company ultimately provided conversion charts and instructions for using it as “corrective make-up for panchromatic photography” through a sort of subtraction method—shadowed areas, those marked in red pencil on a makeup chart, should be applied first, then the Pan-Cake on top of those areas rubbed away until the shadows were just “barely visible,” the effect “best judged by looking into the mirror.”89 And Perc Westmore in 1938 claimed, contra Factor, that the procedure for corrective makeup for color photography was “fundamentally the same” as for black and white.90 In consistency, Pan-Cake, in Factor’s words, was “vastly thinner than greasepaint” and more “light-reflecting” than panchromatic, and it required “four times less light and will save the studios hundreds of dollars in electricity bills. The comfort to the stars resulting from the lessened light and heat is another major benefit of the new make-up.”91 Both Pan-Cake and, later, Pan-Stik provided an uncannily smooth and even tone to the skin if one had acquired the proper shade,

Esther Williams in an ad for the “miraculous” Pan-Cake (which ironically was not waterproof), McCall’s, August 1951. (Collection of the author.)

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and for films powder was then used to “to eliminate any trace of the oily sheen which would photograph as an unnatural glare,” as Factor put it in 1936.92 Michael Westmore told me, “There’s a technique with Pan-Cake. The basic secret was to use glycerin water, and not much powder. You had to be on top of it all day long, but it covered up absolutely everything. It created a flawless satin finish.”93 That flawless coverage under different lighting conditions also enabled Factor’s company to create an even stronger link between star beauty and consumer products; both Pan-Cake and Pan-Stik were among the most popular “street” as well as professional makeup products it ever sold. (Perc Westmore made a few promotional references in 1937 to his own unnamed “street” makeup, but I found no further references to it as such, perhaps because of the sale of the House of Westmore cosmetics factory; Associated Motion Picture Make-up Artists, Inc., also seems to have ceased operation by that time.)94 For all these reasons, in 1938 Variety published a short report titled “Makeups’ Prestige Up.” Calling makeup artists “the more or less forgotten folks among the film industry’s technical divisions,” the report argues that the increase in the use of Technicolor had made producers “makeup-conscious,” with the result that studios were “suddenly swelling budgets for both personnel and equipment for facial painters and hair dressers” and investing “in new quarters for the workers, more modern gadgets and really scientific lighting. Warners has already installed its crew in a new home. Metro and Fox have had plans readied, and will shortly start construction on similar laboratories and work rooms. Paramount is expected to follow suit within the next six months.”95 (“Makeup-consciousness” was also undoubtedly raised by the fact that the studios were a closed shop by then on labor terms.) In the end, I would argue that corrective makeup, and all it gave rise to, was the more powerful element in making Hollywood “makeup-conscious” than Technicolor, much less other shorter-lived color technologies like the Keller-Dorian process, TruColor, or Ansco color. Production of Technicolor films did increase from the late 1930s on, and it was certainly a major element in the appeal of some of Hollywood’s most famous films (Gone with the Wind and portions of The Wizard of Oz are early blockbuster examples). But not until the mid-1950s and the advent of the simpler and cheaper Eastman Color, which studios could license under their own names (see Metro Color or Warner Color),96 did color films come close to dominating studio production schedules. By 1941 even Jack Dawn had produced an article for American Cinematographer titled “Corrective Make-Up Can Help The Cinematographer,” although he writes, “As a make-up artist myself, I must admit I am embarrassed by some of the caricatures which result when an unskilled make-up man tries to use this technique and does it crudely.” He also excoriates make-up men “who apply shadowed make-up simply because they have heard that other members of their profession use it,” and in turn any cinematographer “who refuses to photograph something which could actually help him.”97

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Whether one agrees that the design and application of beauty makeup were the most “trivial” of the makeup artist’s jobs, or instead that without it no cinematographer could hope to create close-ups of Hollywood stars that would be “known the world over for their exquisite beauty,” to repeat Alton’s characterization,98 makeup charts of some kind, for men and women, became common tools in the studio era, although they did not appear to be actually standardized except in Westmore-led departments. Perc claimed that the House of Westmore versions, some of which later included profiles, had been made freely available, but evidence suggests that they were also, in the 1930s anyway, simply copied. (On a typed version of the 1936 Westmore chart with the face traced, MGM’s Tuttle wrote instructions for making up Mary Beth Hughes on a chart designed for men.)99 Warner Bros. used a redesigned Westmore double-sided chart that included profiles and even icons for the seven face shapes in the 1940s (in the examples I have seen, the icons are always blank).100 MGM actor Betty Garrett later described that studio’s “mimeographed” charts by the 1940s and 1950s as a “generic face” that the studio used “to make everybody’s face conform to a certain kind of look, a certain idea of what beauty was.”101 Away from Westmore influence or simply over time, however, many makeup charts ultimately became little more than an abbreviated list of products and a few crosshatches and remarks on a crude drawing stamped on a drugstore index card or even just written on a sheet of paper. These sorts of charts would have been useless to cinematographers but served to remind or instruct a makeup artist in how a star or other actor was to be made up for a particular role or photo shoot. (One, by Charles Schram at MGM, is for “Kirk Douglass [sic]” in an unnamed film; it bears the handwritten reminder to curl the star’s eyelashes. A John Truwe card meant for a human is marked “Terrier” and sketches out where a Pan-Stik base would be applied to add shadows to the dog’s white fur.)102 Moreover, makeup tests were made for different purposes, and a test for a specific production was different from those designed to evaluate someone’s potential for stardom. A film test, in Tuttle’s words, was not made “to see how you were going to look. It was how you were going to look in this part.” Only following the “numerous tests” in which every makeup change or hairstyle was evaluated “prior to the start of a picture,” as Tuttle puts it (“you may do 14 or 15 different hair styles” and makeup could be “too dark, too light, too pink” and so on), would a chart have been made for a film rather than a star.103 Dot Ponedel preferred to keep her charts to herself and claimed that “make-up men hated my guts. They called me everything under the sun because I wouldn’t make charts to show them what I was doing.”104 Charts and their use varied widely, then, in some cases handed to subordinates to implement and in others held close by the artist who created them. One can well imagine why Ponedel would have been reluctant to circulate the instructions for her effects among her often hostile male colleagues. That she viewed them as proprietary is also, unfortunately, illustrated by the fact

William Tuttle makeup chart for Mary Beth Hughes, December 10, 1938. The form is a typed MGM version of the 1936 House of Westmore chart for men (down to the typos of “rough” for “rouge”). William Tuttle papers, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Makeup cards by Charles Schram for Marilyn Monroe, The Asphalt Jungle (1950, makeup credit Jack Dawn), and for an unnamed Kirk Douglas film. The “Kurlash” reference is to a device used to curl eyelashes. John Truwe papers, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

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that, in the late 1960s, she destroyed those she had made and implemented over her decades of work in the industry.105 As all of this suggests, the contradictions that Patrick Keating discusses in relation to cinematography in studio-era Hollywood—“When was glamour more valuable than storytelling? When was pictorial quality more valuable than realism?”106—always faced makeup artists as well, especially if “pictorial quality” is understood in relation to the actor made up and shot strictly, in Alton’s words, for the “purpose of beautifying.”107 But in contrast to cinematographers, men like Factor and the Westmores complicated beauty makeup’s relation to narrative and even stardom by linking it to their own product lines (which included coiffure designs),108 for purchase or imitation by spectators who could use them to emulate stars they admired. The idea that a chart would accompany a star on loan-out ignored the role that star might have been loaned out to perform. It also undercut Perc’s claim that if an actor “is to portray the rôle of a country girl, we cannot apply the same make-up colourings we used for her in the rôle of a sophisticated woman of the world.”109 Corrective makeup in the hands of the Westmores and their disciples made their version of “scientific” glamour always already the basis of storytelling—even when realism or “looking natural” was ostensibly the governing framework, or the narrative context meant that flawless skin, artificial eyelashes, and clean and styled hair would have been impossible to maintain. Factor’s organization, too, continued its “close cooperation with all leading film companies” in color as well as black and white.110 While beauty is not mentioned in American Cinematographer’s “Make-up Magic for Today’s Color Films” (1955), the conversion charts the Factor organization provided for “correct makeup methods and colors which should be used for the various new color negatives” clearly have primarily glamour in mind (mascara is “a must for all women”) although rendering “the most natural results” is claimed—repeatedly—to be the goal.111 Ironically, little attention is paid in the article to the problems presented to makeup artists by widescreen technologies like CinemaScope, which caused specific problems for close-ups. On the one hand, in widescreen faces no longer “all-but-filled screens,” as Paul Coates notes in his book Screening the Face.112 On the other hand, the image was larger, and when close to the center of the frame faces were crisper in definition. This meant that, as Tuttle put it, makeup colors “had to be much more subtle. They had to appear much more natural,” and any “blending edge”—including wig joins—had to be “perfect.” Lens diffusion was even more unsuitable for CinemaScope than Technicolor, lest the entire image appear “fuzzy.”113 Perhaps the most bizarre twist in the complicated imbrication of art, ego, and “science” that corrective makeup represented is that in 1957 American Cinematographer once more featured an article, by Leigh Allen, titled “Corrective MakeUp Aid to Cinematography.”114 It is an almost verbatim plagiarizing of Perc Westmore’s 1935 and Jack Dawn’s 1938 pieces, some years after both men had left

Jane Russell in a Westmore makeup ad publicizing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Life magazine, March 25, 1953. (Collection of the author.)

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their studio executive positions. Because I did not find any acknowledgment of the plagiarism in subsequent issues of the journal, I am torn between taking Allen’s pastiche as an indication that corrective makeup was no longer common practice, or, conversely, that it was so routine that no one bothered to read the article and so the plagiarism passed unnoticed. Signally, in 1957 the woman’s magazine McCall’s also stated, in an article titled “Beauty Wears Many Faces,” that “By today’s standards the oval is no longer the only facial shape for true beauty,” and quoted William Tuttle as saying that “there is no longer THE beautiful face; there are many.”115 Vincent “Vin” J.-R. Kehoe’s The Technique of Film and Television Make-Up for Color and Black and White, written the same year, also calls corrective makeup’s emphasis on the oval “a difficult and rather arbitrary system” because makeup artists “often disagreed about the actual shape of a particular face.”116 But Tuttle, at least, could have been channeling a Westmore when he went on to claim that “there could be many more [beautiful faces] if women, with the aid of cosmetics and hair styles, would make the most of the good looks they were born with.”117 Of course, much if not most beauty advice—in the past or present, by men or women—is at base similarly contradictory: you must not look like you are wearing cosmetics, but without them, expertly applied, you might not look “natural” or even normal. Robin Tolmach Lakoff and Raquel L. Scherr, in their book Face Value: The Politics of Beauty, refer to this as the “myth” and the “countermyth” of beauty: beauty is “God-given” and “cannot be acquired by deliberate effort,” but “many kinds of looks are thought to be beautiful precisely because they are unnatural, and clearly must be the result of artifice and application.”118 (As a fan magazine put it in 1936, “If you would rely on your charm for success, if you would be yourself, then unmask your true personality—but only under the careful surveillance of the world’s foremost cosmeticians and creators of beauty, the Westmores.”)119 Aside from any issues created by the Westmores’ desire to be all-purpose “experts,” then, beauty makeup for motion pictures invoked both these and further complexities because it was supposed to be invisible, or “natural,” in its own right while “vividly accentuating,” to paraphrase Dawn, an actor’s narrative function, which may or may not have required facial perfection. In the postwar era, the emphasis on flawlessness in hair and makeup promulgated and maintained in studio departments began to change, but not at all linearly or smoothly. Most films were in widescreen by the mid-1950s, and the glamour of big-budget Technicolor musicals and period epics coexisted across Hollywood with more “realistic” documentary-inflected films. The latter were influenced both by television and by international trends such as Italian neorealism in the 1940s and the cinéma vérité methods of the French New Wave of the 1950s and 1960s (as well as notions of directorial auteurism to which these modes gave rise). Sophia Loren’s early star career is instructive here.

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After acting in several Italian films following World War II, Loren signed a five-picture contract with Paramount in 1958. As the 1958 list of wardrobe and makeup tests for the Technicolor and VistaVision Heller in Pink Tights (1960) indicates, she was given the full panoply of cosmetic attention by Wally Westmore and Nellie Manley, the film’s credited makeup and hair “supervisors.” This included ten different makeups for Loren’s role as a nineteenth-century stage performer in the American West (during the tests the film was called Heller with a Gun). After the tests, director George Cukor railed to Westmore against the “Anna Mae Wong look” of Loren’s eyes and the “movie-queen look” they gave her (as he did her “very moviefied” rather than “natural” eyebrows), expressing concerns that there was not enough contrast from “the stage makeup to her look throughout the picture.”120 But with the exception of some desert scenes in which her lips and cheeks are pale (and the two red wigs and bright cheek rouge worn for her theatrical roles), in the final film there is little difference between how Loren, in an elaborate blond wig meant to represent her “natural” hair, is made up from scene to scene. Indeed, she is often wearing more beauty makeup off the “stage” than on it, and her eyes, regardless of narrative circumstance, remain made up with anachronistic false eyelashes, eyeliner, and groomed brows. (As a result of the tests, she also was shot from a slightly higher angle in some closeups to minimize circles under her eyes.) But following her Paramount films—in others of which she was starred opposite Cary Grant, Tab Hunter, and in one, shot in Naples, Clark Gable—Loren left the studio for Vittorio De Sica’s harrowing World War II story Two Women [La Ciociara] in 1960, opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo, who had played one of the leads in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless [À bout de souffle] a few months earlier. While Two Women (for which Loren won a Best Actress Academy Award) has a credited makeup artist and hairdresser (Giuseppi Annunziata and Maria Angelini), in all but a few scenes glamour is eschewed in favor of the black-and-white gritty visual realism De Sica had employed in arguably his best-known films, Bicycle Thieves [Ladri di biciclette] (1948) and Umberto D. (1952). But by 1963 even De Sica, like other Italian directors, was back into Hollywood-style glamour, as Loren’s appearance—and that of her frequent costar Marcello Mastroianni (the “Italian Cary Grant”)—in two of the three tales told in the same director’s Technicolor comedic romance Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow [Ieri oggi domani] indicates (ironically, there are no credits for makeup or hair). Or compare Breathless itself, which was certainly inflected by Hollywood’s visual luxury but did not employ its methods in production, with just slightly later New Wave films like Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad [L’Année dernière à Marienbad] (1961), with couture for star Delphine Seyrig by Chanel and high-fashion beauty makeup and hairdressing, by Elyane (Éliane) Marcus, to match. Whether to emulate or react against, then, Hollywood’s ideals of beauty and handsomeness continued to hold enormous sway both domestically and internationally.

Sophia Loren in Heller in Pink Tights (1960, makeup credit Wally Westmore and hair Nellie Manley), showing the muting of lip color and eye makeup to indicate deprivation. Frame enlargements.

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What changed most decisively for makeup artists and hairdressers in the postwar period was the filmmaking industry itself. Although Hollywood and its technicians and artists had previously been able to adapt in response to technical pressures of many kinds, the tremendous and complicated edifice of the studio system had evolved precisely to ignore political and cultural realities in favor of forms of entertainment based on highly polished versions of a world into which the aleatory was rarely allowed to intrude. There were again always scattered exceptions to this even before the razor-thin profit margins of most big studios faded in the latter half of the 1950s—see the films released by the “poverty-row” studios so admired by New Wave filmmakers, or topical adaptations like Twentieth Century-Fox’s The Grapes of Wrath in 1940 (which has no credited hair or makeup artists). But now it was flawlessness itself that seemed a quaint artifact of an industrial approach based on fantasy and escape rather than representing the world as it was. The pressures on Hollywood’s hierarchized and executive-led departments all came from plummeting revenues in the postwar era. These were linked to a number of well-elucidated and interrelated situations, including—in no particular order—the enforced breakup of the studios’ monopoly over production, distribution, and exhibition such that by the 1950s the studios no longer had guaranteed outlets for their films (and which in turn made independent modes of production more financially viable); the elimination of the seven-year option contract for actors in the late 1940s, which removed some of the power that studios had to control their players (who increasingly set up their own small production companies); the rise in the cost of almost everything as wartime price restrictions were lifted (which led to more location shooting for which lavishly appointed and expensive studio makeup and hairdressing departments and their daily routines would have been rendered partly moot); the Supreme Court decision in 1952 that gave movies First Amendment protection for the first time since 1915 (which not only ultimately led to the final demise of the Production Code that had partly regulated who was allowed to be beautiful or handsome on the screen but, combined with the auteurist ethos of European cinema, meant that films could do more than serve primarily as vehicles for creating and presenting flawless stars); and, finally, the competition from television (whose tiny screens made having each eyelash perfectly in place a little beside the point). Added to this were the new rounds of labor unrest and the anticommunist political environment of the Cold War, and burgeoning social movements that made young women, men, and people of color considerably less interested in hewing to anyone’s “ideals” of appearance. The public presence of the Westmores largely mirrored their status as industry executives, and despite several beauty books and the addition of younger brothers or sons to their ranks, they arguably suffered most as the world changed. Beauty makeup’s loudest maven, Perc Westmore, claimed that Jack Warner liked to say, “We hire talent, Westmore does the rest.” But Perc was the first of the

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family to be cut loose when in 1950, according to Frank Westmore, a letter of resignation that Perc submitted to Warner Bros. in response to an across-theboard executive salary cut was unexpectedly accepted (Perc had written several such letters over the years, but reportedly previous ones had been met, as he intended, with better contract terms).121 Perc continued to work, but without the institutional power that had backed him for so many years.122 Wally was the next to “retire” when he was let go from Paramount after more than forty years in the mid-1960s; he had not “worked on an actor’s face or cast a face mold in his superb laboratory” there, according to his brother Frank, in years (the whole department closed in 1967).123 Bud was fired, after almost twenty-four years, from Universal in 1970.124 Even the House of Westmore salon, Perc’s “self-proclaimed ‘monument’ to himself,” in Frank’s words, had grown shabbier and shabbier before closing, to no great fanfare, in 1965.125 Perc’s twin, Ern, thought by Frank to be the most talented of the brothers, had a checkered career in Hollywood, serving stints of no more than two or three years at various studios from 1931 to 1949, after which he left Hollywood altogether, returning just a few years before his death in 1968. William Tuttle, who succeeded Dawn at MGM when Dawn retired as the studio’s makeup chief in 1950, was considered “pompous” by many actors, according to hairstylist Sugar Blymer,126 but stayed on there as long as he could. As the studio’s production slowed, Tuttle gradually let go, “one by one,” his makeup artists and hairdressers, the lab personnel, and finally his assistants, after which he “sat for a year” by himself, in his words, spending as much time on tour giving makeup advice to women and even male businessmen at department stores and the like as he did designing star faces.127 In 1975, he sent samples of his makeup to Princess Grace (Kelly) of Monaco, writing poignantly in the accompanying letter that the “MGM Makeup Department has been closed since the end of 1969 when I departed, but I am still active as a freelance makeup artist in the motion picture business, though it little resembles what you and I enjoyed. MGM resembles a ghost-town; Lot 2 is in ruins, Lot 3 fell to the real estate developers.”128 Blymer, who joined the union in the late 1950s and worked at MGM before moving to Paramount and then becoming a freelancer, also began to reassess the methods of Sydney Guilaroff in the 1960s. Guilaroff “still did hair the way he had when he worked on Greta Garbo” and, like the Westmores, seemed more invested in his own fame than in the current realities of film production: “Everyone admired him and did what he required of them. But the reality was, he got the big designing fees and the hairstylist on the set suffered with whatever was really required for a hairstyle to work on production.”129 If the sometimes enormous egos of the executives who ran studio makeup and hairdressing departments had become more trouble than they were worth, then, again this was itself partly the result of the crumbling of the structures and routines that not only supported them but that they had helped to put into place, even as the rise of science fiction film and television and new special effects

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products and appliances kept many craftspeople—among them thirdgeneration Westmores like Michael and his brother Marvin—busy indeed (as they do today). Equally consequential, as films were set up as package deals rather than by studio contract personnel, freelance makeup artists and hairdressers, who often got their own screen credits, more often followed stars from production to production. While stars had always been able to request attention from particular favorites at their home studios, Blymer earned far more money as Natalie Wood’s personal hairdresser in the mid-1960s, for example; and in addition to a guaranteed fee, she was given screen design credit regardless of who a film’s named hairstylist was. Perhaps the ultimate irony was that by the early 1960s even Max Factor’s company was no longer using film stars, or indeed Hollywood itself, to endorse its products. Rather, in 1963, as Max’s son Davis told an interviewer, “Today the influence of California is far greater than that of Hollywood. We have lent the California atmosphere to a great deal of our advertising and promotion.”130 The Factor luster was in turn dimmed by the fact that almost any consumer cosmetic could be used with Eastman Color,131 although even today makeup artists have preferences for what to use in practice (in the 2010s, according to Michael Westmore, MAC cosmetics were “very IN”).132 By 1972, Factor had closed its iconic Hair Department altogether; the lavish salon followed a few years later.133 To cap this three-chapter historical overview, I return to the dichotomies of the postwar era, which was marked on the one hand by the desire of some Hollywood cinematographers and directors to produce greater degrees of visual realism in their films, and on the other by the persistence in many genres of a high level of glamour as a sign of entertainment value. In the first instance I am not referring to the new resins and plastics that made effects makeup more clinically convincing during and after World War II, especially, when Jack Dawn and Gordon Bau, among others, worked to create lifelike three-dimensional appliances that could be used to replace or disguise the damaged features of returning servicemen. Their knowledge and methods, and the recruitment of younger apprentices from the burgeoning field of prosthetics makeup,134 did result in the casting off of some older makeup men, among them Jack Pierce of Universal, whose stage- and puttybased monster-makeup methods, especially for television and B films, were considered cumbersome and time-consuming.135 (Pierce had been replaced by Bud Westmore in 1948; Bau succeeded Perc Westmore at Warner Bros. in 1950.) The greater realism of these forms of makeup did not imply any reduction in the use of cosmetics—quite the contrary—but rather what they were used for. (By the mid1940s Westmore makeup charts had the added injunction to use brown pencil to indicate “disfigurement.”) That said, these practical developments do help to elucidate some of the postwar changes in beauty makeup as well. Once more the colorful words of Mary Astor serve as a reminder of classical Hollywood’s characteristic attitude toward the entire visual realm of its films,

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the realm that beauty makeup helped create and maintain: “You practically had to go to the front office if you wanted something as real as having your hair mussed. You’d argue, ‘I’ve been out in the wind. When did I get a chance to reset it?’ ‘Well, it won’t look good. Just loosen a strand maybe.’ Everyone had that ‘just from a beauty parlor’ look. The sets were perfect, all automobiles were shiny. A picture never hung crooked, a door never squeaked, stocking seams were always straight and no actress ever had a shiny nose.”136 It is not clear with whom Astor is “arguing” here, but it is true that even “mussed” hair was typically the province of studio stylists rather than allowed to happen as a result of action, as its appearance following an edit so often indicates, or the comparatively wellgroomed hair of all those actors “driving” on rear-projected roads in open convertibles. But by the late 1940s, given the box-office success of the semidocumentary realism of Universal’s The Naked City (1948), even Astor could tell that the system was loosening up, though again not linearly or consistently. As Keating points out, the cinematographers on films like The Naked City were “old Hollywood pros who had been around for decades,”137 and the same was true of Bud Westmore and Carmen Dirigo, the makeup artist and hairdresser given credit at the end of the film (this despite the film’s opening voice-over, by producer Mark Hellinger, promising that the cast would be shown “without makeup”). As throughout the studio era, technical journals help to chart the material basis of the changes that are so apparent in certain genres. By 1949, many of the pages of any issue of American Cinematographer, at least, are devoted to television rather than film, and perhaps as a corollary it should be noted that changes to Hollywood’s definitions of the “real” and the “natural,” and how to produce both, were predominantly confined, in the period I am investigating in this book, to films shot in black and white. Cinematographer Robert Surtees, for example, in 1948 pointed to the new “production trends” exemplified by his MGM film Act of Violence (1949), among them the use of reflected lighting, natural locations, and an absence of makeup: “No make-up of any kind was used on any member of the cast. We tried to maintain on the screen a high standard of skin texture—no mask-like faces in a production of this type.”138 Act of Violence is indeed notable for the haggard appearance of the men, and of Mary Astor herself, playing what she later called a “sleazy, aging whore,” who is shot in several of her scenes with hard top lighting that reveals every wrinkle and bag in her face.139 Surtees does not mention Astor, however, instead reassuring readers that glamour was not being eliminated from Act of Violence: “We were fortunate in that the leading woman’s role was played by Janet Leigh, a young and beautiful girl who photographs well without diffusion and who can take any kind of a key light.”140 And as would be implied by the film’s credited makeup and hairdressing designers—Jack Dawn and Sydney Guilaroff—Leigh and Astor both have well-groomed eyebrows, eyelashes, lips, and even hair (Leigh’s coiffure is often reset and brushed smooth between shots in the same scene). Yet the lack of lingering close-ups of the women’s faces

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Janet Leigh and Mary Astor in Act of Violence (1948) and Little Women (1949), both with makeup credited to William Tuttle and hair to Sydney Guilaroff. Details of frame enlargements.

in comparison to those of Van Heflin and Robert Ryan, as the film’s morally ambiguous protagonists, is striking, as though it was taken for granted that closeups of women in the absence of full beauty makeup were risky, which is the case in other films of the period as well. And both Leigh and Astor were returned to full formula glamour by the Technicolor sumptuousness of MGM’s Little Women (1949), in which Leigh played Meg, and Astor the matriarch Marmee. In 1950, MGM released another black-and-white film with a quasidocumentary ethos, The Next Voice You Hear . . . , the production of which was chronicled in producer Dore Schary’s book Case History of a Movie, published the same year. Although the film—which proclaims itself as made in “Hollywood, U.S.A.”—has no credited makeup or hairdressing personnel, Schary quotes “[Jack] Dawn’s guiding principle [that] all make-up must seem like no make-up, and our desire for absolute realism . . . resulted in the decision to use no make-up at all on anybody, not even the stars. Hair stylist Sydney Guilaroff gave Nancy [Davis] a simple bob which, like [character] Mary Smith, she would wash and set herself, and, except for Nancy’s normal lipstick, that was that.”141 But there are obvious careful cosmetic ministrations to Davis’s skin and eyes— including shadow and mascara—as well as perfectly made-up lips that persist in each of her close-ups, awake or asleep, all of which undercut Schary’s claims of

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“absolute realism.” As with Act of Violence, what does support the documentary feel of the film—besides frequent location shooting—is the hard, high-contrast lighting of many scenes, the reduction of lens diffusion, and a lack of powder in some of the brief close-ups of the few female characters. Other genres were also venturing, albeit gingerly, into realism in the postwar era. In the popular and critically acclaimed Technicolor period action-romance The African Queen (released by United Artists in 1951, makeup by George Frost and hair by Eileen Bates), much of which was shot on location in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart played an ill-matched couple often bathed in sweat and dirt, though Bogart still wears a toupee.142 Even MGM’s black-and-white romantic comedy Pat and Mike (1952), in which Hepburn plays a female athlete being groomed for success by Spencer Tracy’s sports journalist, deglamorized Hepburn’s appearance somewhat. On the one hand, this may have been simply because of Ronald Davis’s aforementioned point that MGM (like most studios, based on the film evidence) believed that “professional women” should look “plain,” but on the other hand this had rarely applied, for more than a scene or two, to stars. And again there seem to be fewer close-ups of Hepburn’s deglamorized face in the film. In such cases, the idea that men did not need makeup because they wore “character” in their faces143 can be turned on its head—and not just because men were always wearing cosmetics too.144 Rather, if a star is both female and “plain,” why would she, too, not be revealing through her “real” face that she has character as well as glamour? But, as in The African Queen, the deglamorization is never complete in Pat and Mike. While some of Hepburn’s “14,231,119 freckles,” in the sardonic words of a columnist in 1936,145 are clearly visible and her hair is somewhat blowsier and more casually dressed in the sports scenes (the makeup and hair are credited to executives Tuttle and Guilaroff), her eyebrows and lips remain perfectly groomed. And any audience fascination with Hepburn’s deglamorization in this and her other films (and arguably in the case of Janet Leigh and Mary Astor as well) surely derives from its contrast with the flawlessness of her visage and her loosely but perfectly styled hair in earlier modern vehicles in which she also played professional women—see Woman of the Year (1942), in which Spencer Tracy claims to notice Hepburn’s freckles when they are not visible, or Adam’s Rib (1949). And as will be addressed in chapter 4, once the romantic valence of any of these films increases, so too does the amount of beauty makeup Hepburn wears. More important, comparing the makeup in MGM’s big-budget 1952 Technicolor musical Singin’ in the Rain with Pat and Mike—or any of the “realistic” films just discussed—shows again that in some genres the drive toward the deglamorization of stars did not occur, for men or for women, in the studio era, or did so in very limited ways. In a scrapbook covering the years 1949 to 1952, John Truwe saved the small index cards that he employed as makeup charts for Singin’ in the Rain’s four stars, on which are typed lists of the cosmetic products

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he used as well as any specific instructions for how to apply them.146 As usual, highlights and shadows are indicated with red and blue pencil. But given that the runic numbers—665-I, 626-A, D-Tec, T2, 1-c-C, and so on—refer to nowdefunct Max Factor products (Michael Westmore, in combination with vintage sales brochures and makeup manuals, helped me to decipher them), these charts and others in Truwe’s scrapbook are most valuable here for showing just how much makeup even the male stars were wearing several years after the “production trends” that yielded the “natural” faces in The Naked City, Act of Violence, or The Next Voice You Hear . . . or even, nearly simultaneously, The African Queen and Pat and Mike.147 In addition to the colorless powder that was used to “set” most cosmetics and to absorb sweat, Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor wore several shades of PanStik depending on whether it was applied as a base, to cover their “beards,” as a “hi-lite,” or as body makeup; their eyebrows and eyelids were penciled in a shade of brown; their lips were covered with a moist all-purpose rouge colloquially known as “Tec” or “Tech” that came in only a few shades that closely matched most Caucasian lip tones; and their eyelashes were coated with black (Kelly) or brown (O’Connor) mascara. Indeed, the main difference between their charts and those of Debbie Reynolds and Jean Hagen is that the women’s Pan-Stik was lighter, and they wore eye shadow and cheek rouge as well as a clear red lip color (there were more colors available for women) rather than the all-purpose “Tec.” Interestingly, while Reynolds wears false eyelashes in all of her scenes, they are not indicated on her chart as they are on Hagen’s. (It is unusual, according to Michael Westmore, that there is any chart notation about eyelashes because it was assumed that all women stars in beauty makeup of that period would be given a “full false eyelash,” in his words.)148 Reynolds’s face is, however, given much more corrective treatment—shading under her chin and cheeks, extending the line of her lips outside their natural shape—than either the men’s or Hagen’s (Hagen’s brows were to be “arched high”). If the injunction to “powder well” does not appear on Hagen’s chart, it was likely because she did not do the sweaty dancing that the other three engage in throughout the film (with O’Connor apparently the sweatiest of them all; he also needed “plenty of witchhazel”). And the charts do not include the hairpieces and toupees used on three of the stars, as William Tuttle’s list of “hair goods purchased in 1951” for MGM indicates: one toupee and one wig for Kelly, a “three-stem switch” for Reynolds, and four wigs (two “repaired”) for Jean Hagen.149 (Janet Leigh also has several wigs and “curls” on the list.) I position the attractive and highly polished stars of Singin’ in the Rain, then, against a concomitant postwar resistance to narratively or generically unmotivated beauty makeup and hairdressing. Younger actors, especially, faced an increasing number of contradictions as the studio system began the teetering that preceded its ultimate fall, and many biographies or autobiographies of an actor or director who came to fame during or after World War II, especially, contain

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John Truwe makeup cards for the stars of Singin’ in the Rain (1952, makeup credit William Tuttle and hair Sydney Guilaroff) used for all of their scenes. John Truwe papers (scrapbook), Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

some account of his or her first encounter with the full beauty bureaucracy of studio-era makeup and hairdressing departments in which every potential star was expected to conform to the prevailing ideal enshrined through corrective makeup. But to a degree these contradictions were, and always had been, the stuff of stardom itself. As mentioned previously, some actors, like Ingrid Bergman in the late 1930s, had also been marketed on the basis of their resistance to such “handling,” but Bergman had had no issues with beauty makeup or graphically tweezed and thin eyebrows in her prior Swedish films. (See her appearance, and that of the men and even the child actor, in the Swedish-language Intermezzo [1936].) Bergman’s fundamentally regular and lovely features—even if her face was not perfectly oval—were as carefully made up, and her light brown hair as expertly cut and coiffed (when she was not wigged), in all of her Hollywood vehicles and publicity photos as those of anyone else even if her nose was sometimes shiny, she did not always wear false eyelashes, and her eyebrows were thicker.150 Bergman’s U.S. image also benefited from, or could be contextualized in reference to, the “documentary motive” that, in historian William Stott’s words, marked much of U.S. art and popular culture toward the end of the Depression.151 As Margaret Farrand Thorp wrote in her 1939 book America at the Movies, U.S. audiences were exhibiting a “growing desire for realism, for movies concerned with life as they know it,” as they worked their way through the

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Ingrid Bergman’s highly polished “natural” look. Modern Screen, October 1941. Media History Digital Library.

troubles that so much of Hollywood’s glamour had been designed to hide from view.152 These impulses not only helped make a film like The Grapes of Wrath commercially viable but also supported the move to more natural eyebrows for women in most Hollywood films (such brows also looked better in Technicolor than the graphic thin lines, some containing no hairs whatsoever, of the 1920s and early 1930s). So did scattered attempts by established stars, among them Joan Crawford and Ginger Rogers, to be taken more seriously as actors by headlining

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melodramas like Strange Cargo or Primrose Path (both 1940), respectively, in which they claimed to go “without glamour” (and for which both women did indeed receive Academy Award acting nominations; these films are discussed further in chapter 4). But when MGM brought in “serious” Greek actress Irene Papas to groom for stardom in that studio’s prosperous early 1950s, because she refused to be corrected “to fit MGM’s type” according to Leslie Caron (who also had issues conforming to the “fashionable look of the day,” in her own words), Papas was simply “discarded.”153 Sophia Loren, in contrast, was more biddable, though she paradoxically also benefited from the increasing attention being paid to Hollywood-style glamour in the Italian film industry after the war, of which her stardom was already something of an exemplar.154 Of course, Hollywood movies had for some time been a named element in what a 1931 Harper’s Magazine article called “an ideal monotony” of appearance in modernity created through the “mass production of beauty as of everything else,” such that women were “no more differentiated than are the sands of the sea.”155 The Westmores did continually insist that they “[did] not work for a standardization of beauty—in fact such a suggestion would probably get you thrown out of their studios,” as Liberty had put it in 1937.156 But Michael Westmore told me, “Every woman who sat down in your chair was made up in basically the same way. You didn’t get creative”; although “now it’s different,” there actually was then, he claimed, a kind of “formula beauty.”157 Ronald Davis writes that actors, male or female, “tended to look alike during Hollywood’s Golden Era,” and he quotes actor Jean Porter as saying, “Our mouths were all made up the same, . . . our eyebrows were very much the same, our makeup was an awful lot alike.”158 Thus did a “brainless producer” seek to have the distinctive cleft in Ava Gardner’s chin disguised with mortician’s wax, according to her biographers, when she was first signed by MGM in 1941.159 William Tuttle, however, would likely have pointed to MGM’s, and the public’s, ultimate acceptance of the individuality of Gardner’s looks to support his opposing assertion that, during the studio era and in contrast to the 1970s, “There were no two people who looked alike. Each was an entity on their own. . . . And I think that’s what gave them a certain charisma.”160 As Michaela Krützen writes in her 1992 study of the fabrication of Garbo’s screen image, in spite of “all the standardization, the star must remain an unmistakably identifiable individual. Even when the theory of stars has deciphered this as an ideology, the essence of being a star is the embodiment of the special, of a superlative.”161 Actual imitation, in all periods, does seem characteristically to have been the case with new players—like Gardner—who had not yet crafted a screen identity through successful film roles (imitation is very efficient). Newcomer Bette Davis, to use a well-known prior example, was given blond curls in the early 1930s in the hopes of making her “another [Constance] Bennett” (Carole Lombard suffered the same fate initially).162 Lauren Bacall, a former model, had to elicit Howard Hawks’s help to keep Perc Westmore from straightening her teeth, plucking

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her eyebrows, shaving her hairline, and in general “redesign[ing her] face” for her first test in 1943 for To Have and Have Not. Hawks, not the unknown Bacall, had the authority to tell Westmore that he wanted her “exactly as she is, nothing changed, a light natural make-up” (which now appears to us to be quite glamorous).163 Nor were men exempt from being designed to correspond to the “fashionable looks” of whatever star was popular at the moment. In his autobiography Robert Stack writes of the efforts studio head Jack Pierce and the “makeup boys” at Universal made to turn him into a “young Robert Taylor” for his first starring role, opposite Deanna Durbin, in 1939, which included darkening and straightening Stack’s hair and giving him a hair lace widow’s peak. Although Stack dispensed with these “improvements” later in his career in film and television, the studio “purred with approval,” as he put it, when reviewers and columnists did indeed note the young actor’s resemblance to Taylor.164 But as has been argued in other contexts, something similar was the case with Hollywood’s output as a whole: besides film genres as such, there were broad industry-wide conventions for cinematography, editing, sound, costuming, set design, and every other element of narrative film production, which could all nevertheless function on a more or less expansive continuum between the routine and the quasi-experimental. My historical account has aimed both to understand and to restore to beauty makeup and hairdressing some of the value, however equivocally articulated, with which the studios endowed them. It is clear what the investment of so much “time and effort and money,” to return to the Warner Bros. publicity piece from 1936 with which I began this book, did for the maintenance of the glamour of stars and featured players. But the piece also claimed that beauty needed to be “preserved and protected at all costs if pictures are to succeed,”165 and I hope I have demonstrated that, no less than three-point lighting or continuity editing, beauty makeup and hairdressing were constitutive of classical Hollywood cinema as a mode of filmmaking. But what kind of stories did such faces and bodies, male or female, tell on the screen? What kind of characters did beauty makeup, or its strategic absence in whole or in part, help to create? How did different genres adapt to the photogenic formula—and vice versa? These questions are what I turn to in chapter 4.

4

Cosmetics, Coiffures, and Characterization

Paramount’s Roman Holiday (1953) is perhaps most famous for being Audrey Hepburn’s first Hollywood movie (she won a Best Actress Oscar for it as well). She plays a young and sheltered princess named Ann who, on a European goodwill tour, spends a rebellious twenty-four hours of unsupervised adventure with cynical American journalist Joe (Gregory Peck) and his photographer pal Irving (Eddie Albert). Joe, who has recognized the princess, plans a “day in the life of” scoop as everyone searches for her, but when he and Ann fall in love, he gives up the scoop and she goes back to being a princess. Photographed in black and white in Rome with several local Italians in supporting roles, the film represents certain postwar changes in Hollywood filmmaking not only because it was shot mostly on location but also because, though a romantic comedy, it ends “tragically” since the primary couple’s relationship will likely remain forever unconsummated. But Roman Holiday was still a Paramount production, one of the studio’s major releases of the year, although director William Wyler’s insistence that it be moved to Italy meant that it would be too expensive to shoot in Technicolor as originally planned. Paramount’s makeup department head Wally Westmore remained back at the studio, but he sent detailed instructions to Rome for making up the stars, along with boxes of cosmetics with which to do so. Alberto De Rossi is also included in the film’s credits, below Westmore’s name, for makeup supervision, and was the key makeup artist on location. (Hepburn continued to ask for De Rossi, and his hairdresser wife, Grazia, on all of her subsequent European vehicles.)1 164

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Westmore’s instructions are among the few available practical archival documents that detail the application of beauty makeup for a specific film. They are useful not only for what they reveal about standard Hollywood practice but because, in contrast to the makeup charts and cards discussed in the previous chapter, they are not aimed at studio employees already versed in departmental procedures and routines. The instructions could be followed by anyone even now, in fact, although the products, most of them Factor’s but a few unidentified, would perforce be different. (In my summation I have not used product numbers and have corrected Westmore’s spellings of Factor’s Pan-Stik as “Panstick” or “Pan-Stick” and Pan-Cake as “pancake.”) The men were first. For Gregory Peck, as for virtually all clean-cut male stars during the studio era, the primary issue was the “beard,” the management of which occupies the bulk of Westmore’s instructions. (It was assumed, as had been the case since the silent era, that Peck’s hair would be groomed in whatever short style was then fashionable.) First, the growth area, including the upper lip, was to be covered all over with highlight (“in the small white flat containers”). After powdering, a white rubber sponge (“cut to 1½ in. squares”) was to be rubbed over a solid stick of Pan-Stik and used to transfer the cosmetic to the skin. After the face was completely covered, hands dipped in water were to buff down the greasepaint “so that it is very thin. . . . DO NOT POWDER.” (If the designated PanStik turned out to be “too dark,” then two shades could be melted together to the “desired color.”) Westmore provides no instructions for any other feature on Peck’s face, nor for contouring; clearly, the aim was to make Peck’s facial skin as uniform as possible but without the final powdering that would render its surface flawless. Some indication of how ordinary Peck’s guidelines were lies in Westmore’s final exhortation: “The same instructions apply to Eddie Albert.”2 Since Albert sports a beard and mustache in all his scenes but Westmore does not mention it, who decided on both (and whether Albert grew them himself) I do not know. The instructions for Audrey Hepburn were sent several days later. Her time in the makeup chair was also to commence with highlight and powder for the dark circles under her eyes, and over this would go Pan-Stik, which was to be gently rubbed in and “patted” to remove any finger marks. Pan-Stik and the highlight were then to be mixed and applied “lightly under the eyes in the same dark area as above” before blue-gray eye shadow was smoothed onto the eyelids. This was to be followed by more powder, under the eyes first and then on the rest of the face and the eyelids, with the excess to be brushed off. (Westmore interjects at this point “IMPORTANT: Don’t use too much powder. She should have a nice skin sheen and not the dull flat look.”) Brown pencil (“NOT BLACK”) was supplied to line the upper eyelids “to make the lashes appear heavier,” with brown mascara for the lashes themselves (“ONLY THE UPPER LASHES”). The final step was a “subtle red” lipstick, but any other exposed areas of her body—so often more numerous for women than men—were also to be covered with Pan-Cake.3

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(Pan-Cake did not rub off as easily as the greasier Pan-Stik and would not be as likely to stain the clothing worn over it; Hepburn spends much of the film in a white shirt.) There is again no reference made to contouring, or to Hepburn’s famous eyebrows, although a black pencil was included in the box of products and was perhaps meant to be used to accentuate them. To me, Westmore’s instructions suggest that there was nothing unusual about the treatment of the stars in Roman Holiday. Nor is there really about the roles they play, beyond the generically atypical fact that both Peck’s and Hepburn’s characters learn that love might not conquer all. It is also apparent from the film that De Rossi made changes to Westmore’s design for Hepburn’s eyes, giving her strong black eyeliner on her upper lids as well as partial false eyelashes, both of which would come to define her Hollywood star image. (Hepburn later claimed she did not have “beautiful eyes” but “beautiful eye makeup,” for which she credited De Rossi.)4 He also frequently lightened the tone of her lips and, like any other makeup artist anywhere, would have made adjustments to Westmore’s instructions based on local conditions like heat and humidity. But the point remains that beauty makeup and hairstyles are, still, significant elements of Roman Holiday’s form as well as its appeal. They are there before the acting, so to speak; they are there before anything “happens” narratively; and they help us to understand that Hepburn, Peck, and even Albert, in contrast to the less blandished but charming character actors and native Italians all around them, are worthy not only of our sustained attention but of their status as leading men and women. With the exception of the change from the long princess hair of her first scenes to the short, curly bob that Ann sports throughout the rest of the film (designed by Nellie Manley and cut during tests with Hepburn in New York; the long hair that was cut on camera later in Rome was made up of three separate falls),5 the makeup on the lead actors is consistent regardless of narrative circumstances, including sleep and a soaking in the Tiber. (After the couple emerges from the river, Hepburn’s mascara is visibly smeared under her right eye, mascara that her character could not possibly have applied; and though their hair gets wet, on both Peck and Hepburn editing allows it to dry quickly and fully styled.) Had the film been shot in color, there would have been further cosmetic adjustments to skin tone because of Technicolor’s “great affinity” for red, in William Tuttle’s words,6 but the design, and most of the cosmetic products if not their exact shades, would otherwise likely have remained the same. The history I have explored thus far in this book has aimed to elucidate how and when beauty makeup and hairdressing became so important to the U.S. film industry and its stars, and how and by whom the crafts were established in Hollywood’s studio system. In this chapter I turn my attention more forcefully to films themselves, which are the primary reason that beauty makeup existed in the first place as well as for my own interest in it. Moreover, both stars and the many makeup “experts” who became luminaries did so at least partly, if not essentially, through the film characters they created and the stories those

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Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday (1953, makeup credits Wally Westmore and Alberto De Rossi). In the first image, Hepburn is ready for bed, but eye makeup is the same in all shots. Frame enlargements.

characters helped Hollywood to tell. And as is the case with most who study a particular element of cinematic form such as lighting or editing, the films ultimately serve as the evidence for how that element functioned in a narrative context from the first silent one-reelers through the demise of the studio system itself. Some filmmakers, of course, such as those working in the Soviet Union in the 1920s or in neorealist modes in Europe during and following World War II, explicitly eschewed cosmetic blandishment altogether or relegated it to more or less villainous characters, whether because it was perceived as a barrier to depicting the “truth” or in reaction to the fascist or capitalist ideologies that deployed it in popular entertainment to obscure inequitable conditions in the modern world under false masks of putatively “natural” beauty and handsomeness. But Hollywood usually embraced visual flawlessness for leading characters from the top down during the studio era—even in films that, like Roman Holiday, were overtly influenced by at least some of the visual, if not political, tenets of Italian neorealism itself. As with all elements of a film’s mise-en-scène, it is never easy to separate the material basis of the image, starting with the actor, from the film stock, lighting, framing, and focus that give us access to it and that help to construct it. (The same could be said of the posed glamour photos that fan

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magazines reproduced in their rotogravure sections or that were sent out to fans from the studios.)7 But here I engage some of the effects on narrative films of the fact that in Hollywood many stars or leading players arrived in front of the camera to be lit and shot already substantially approaching the cinematographer’s “ideal of perfection,” in Patrick Keating’s words, “with all unusual features smoothed away.”8 The analogies of beauty makeup as a form of photographic retouching and correction and ultimately improvement, along with the equating of glamour with a routinized surface perfection that paradoxically was also meant to maintain the individuality and recognizability of each star (the basis, in a nutshell, for Alicia Annas’s “photogenic formula”),9 suggest the power of this “ideal of perfection.” Unfortunately, we cannot now know whether Wally Westmore, Nellie Manley, and those who were involved in the usual photographic testing and chart creation on Roman Holiday—or Alberto De Rossi on location later—spent much time pondering what cosmetics would best represent Audrey Hepburn as a fractious but naive European princess or Gregory Peck as a jaded American newsman working abroad. Certainly both the film and Westmore’s instructions suggest that the goal was primarily to make skin, eyes, and lips blemish-free and attractive. Costume and demeanor aside, only the change in Hepburn’s hairstyle visually underscores Ann’s growth from innocence to sophistication, with Peck’s unkempt hair and five o’clock shadow serving as shorthand for his character’s perturbation or emotional distress at various points. Conversely, for the black-and-white Paramount period film The Heiress (1949), Wally Westmore’s makeup for the protagonist, played by Olivia de Havilland, was clearly designed with the character rather than the star in mind. As pointed out in previous chapters, some Hollywood producers or directors had strong opinions on what they wanted from all levels of the mise-en-scène, makeup and hairdressing included. And Manley’s description of the many hair tests done for The Heiress suggests that several people, among them undoubtedly director William Wyler (the director of Roman Holiday), were involved in adjudicating de Havilland’s appearance as a wealthy but dowdy nineteenth-century spinster conned by a handsome playboy. But in The Heiress the photogenic formula is maintained by other female characters who are made up like movie stars even if they are playing that spinster’s housemaids or younger relatives. Keating turns to the art historical dyad of classicism and mannerism to explore how studio cinematographers either resolved the tensions between glamour and expressivity via compromises of various kinds or exposed the fact that the “problem of conflicting conventions cannot always be solved.”10 But for many reasons this model makes less sense for makeup and hairdressing and their practices. That the young woman playing a corpse on a dissecting table in the black-and-white Cary Grant vehicle People Will Talk (1951), for example, is wearing full beauty makeup—only her lips are a bit lighter than was then fashionable—is straightforwardly classical in its conventionality: young women whom we are meant to

Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress (1949, makeup credit Wally Westmore, no hair credit). In the second shot she is compared to the formula beauty of her character’s niece. Frame enlargements.

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be emotionally affected by are usually lovely in Hollywood films, as are male stars like Grant playing doctors.11 Creepily, however, Grant toys with the long, flowing hair of the cadaver as he lectures the class of medical students, several of them young women (one of whom will become his patient and, later, wife). And while I do not believe that this was makeup artist Ben Nye’s overt intention, this scene also could be plausibly interpreted as mannerist, because of the attention it draws to the inappropriateness of the conventions of beauty makeup itself in that particular context. (Critic Manny Farber was also struck by this moment, which he calls “bewitching for its pure unusualness; Cary Grant’s classy erotic playing with the dead girl evokes a compound of evil, new kinds of sex, and terrific grace.”)12 Indeed, I would argue, contra Farber’s reference to “pure unusualness,” that fealty to convention regardless of narrative circumstance is what makes beauty makeup always potentially classical and mannerist at once. Whether in war films, westerns, period melodramas, or musicals, flawless makeup, on the face and body, was close to ubiquitous, although the problems presented by the management of both areas required new approaches in order to make sweaty hoofers, cowboys, swimming champions, or military nurses trapped on a Pacific island look glamorous as well as plausible in a narrative sense. (Perhaps the limit text of this is the anachronistic musical number “Powder, Lipstick and Rouge” in the Betty Grable/June Haver period biopic The Dolly Sisters [1945, makeup Ben Nye], which features women in full modern beauty makeup singing about and costumed to represent “Lady Lipstick,” “Patricia Powder,” “Patsy Powder Puff,” “Rosy Rouge,” and “Mascara.”) Character makeup, on the other hand, even when it is employed simply to make a young actor appear to be much older (or when it is not actively creating an expressionistic or fantasy being like a Munchkin or Frankenstein’s monster), engages more conspicuously with the tensions between visual realism and conventionality, and departments worked constantly to produce ever more practical methods for creating convincing renditions of various physical states, some of which now read to us as highly stylized. (I do wonder whether mannerism in lighting and framing, which Keating links primarily to the postwar period, was not also tied to concomitant, if partial, deglamorizing changes in beauty makeup, which is so often what is lit and framed in Hollywood films in close shots of stars.) However, in lighter genres—romantic comedies and most musicals, which, like other modes, have also included notorious instances of headliners in blackface or yellowface—it is especially difficult to discuss star makeup and its flawlessness as much more than what Keating, in reference to glamour, calls an “independent imperative.”13 In these films, beauty or handsomeness is heightened obviously and completely, with scant regard for the story’s needs, through the skillful and precise application of cosmetics designed to enhance the actor rather than the character he or she is playing. But straight dramatic films—which have their own instances of stereotyped racial or ethnic appropriation—often rely on a similar model. See Kay Francis in the black-and-white Warner Bros.

Cary Grant and an uncredited Carol Varga as the cadaver (who has her own close-ups) in People Will Talk (1951, makeup credit Ben Nye). Frame enlargements.

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film Secrets of an Actress (1938), to pick a random example from my voluminous viewing notes, whose makeup is the same whether her character is performing on a theater stage or not. (The film has no makeup credit, which, as with hairstyling, should be taken to be the case throughout this chapter unless otherwise noted.) This is not to say that the classical-mannerist model may not have some value for understanding how, or why, a makeup artist or hairdresser could push a convention beyond its standard usage, especially following the war—though always ambivalently, as the People Will Talk example suggests. Moreover, as with most of Hollywood’s formal conventions, even if an element is utilized in a somewhat less rote or stereotypical way, the deviation is rarely demonstrated consistently across an entire film. Instead, the photogenic formula was continually being calibrated and recalibrated within and across films and star images, sometimes according to the needs of the story, and sometimes with the story adapting to the “independent imperative” itself. In fact, even in films that, like The Heiress, pursue strategies other than making stars look glamorous at all times, from the late 1920s through the 1960s flawlessness remains the overriding value against which deviations from the photogenic formula acquire their meaning. Yet beauty makeup can at times serve as a form of support for a story, or in a narratively plausible way, while also retaining its “independent” value. In the black-and-white The Grapes of Wrath (1940), for example, whose Depression-era story concerns the fortunes of the impoverished migrant Joad family, Henry Fonda and other of the film’s stars usually wear only thin eyeliner that keeps their eyes from blending visually into the glare from and shadows of their otherwise documentary-like and “natural” faces. But there is beauty makeup too, applied essentially to a single member of the family, Rosasharn (Dorris Bowdon); the implication here is that glamour is materially beyond the Joads, not that it has no worth. Even with shine and some unevenness in her skin tone, Rosasharn’s makeup, like her clean, styled hair, gives her a youthful but jejune beauty that contrasts with the craggy, kind, and perpetually worried face of Jane Darwell as her mother, Ma Joad. At the other end of the spectrum are Gordon Bau’s makeup and Sydney Guilaroff’s wigs for Elizabeth Taylor in the black-and-white Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), in which the demolition of beauty makeup itself becomes part of the story. Playing a frustrated and boozy professor’s wife, Taylor’s groomed hair, heavy eyeliner and mascara, sculpted black brows, and perfectly outlined lips disintegrate before our eyes, becoming blasted and ravaged versions of the cosmetic glamour that had helped make Taylor a star since childhood; and with any contouring, by both makeup and hard lighting, now used to emphasize rather than disguise her double chin and the dark circles under her eyes. Here the star’s formula beauty is a sad façade that, while signifying her attractiveness in some scenes, cannot protect the character Martha in the emotional battles she is waging on several fronts, especially against her needling and equally bibulous and frustrated husband George (Richard Burton, makeup by Ronnie Berkeley) and

The Grapes of Wrath (1940, no makeup or hair credit). Henry Fonda (note black eyeliner) as Tom Joad, and Jane Darwell as his mother and Dorris Bowden as his sister Rosasharn. Frame enlargements.

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the traumas of their shared past. Yet, as with Katharine Hepburn’s aforementioned turn in the MGM romantic comedy Pat and Mike (1952), the selfreflexivity produced by the spectator’s relation to Taylor’s image is the source of much of the makeup’s ironic effect. For audiences unaware of such intertexts— not only Taylor’s typically glamorous star image but the jet-setting marriage and previous films of “Liz and Dick,” especially the enormous anachronistic spectacle of Cleopatra (1963); or how Pat and Mike interacted with other films starring Hepburn and Spencer Tracy together or even tabloid rumors about their real-life romantic relationship—the makeup would seem as realistic, and as narratively plausible, as that in The Grapes of Wrath. While beauty makeup can, then, serve a story and the development of its characters, for most of Hollywood’s history glamour for the sake of glamour was the more common approach and, equally important to some makeup artists, the one most closely linked to the goal of creating female actors as emblems of desirability whose potency would extend to the purchase of proprietary products by which, with “expert help,” spectators could seek to emulate them. The paradox was always that throughout the studio era the goal of such extreme blandishment was, according to much promotion and advertising, simply to burnish or to create only a completely “natural” beauty. So was the fact that, in Michael Westmore’s words (they could have been uttered about any studio craft), “makeup artists and hair stylists were just another pair of hands to accomplish a particular function for a film. Several built a reputation and have become known, many more just came to work, did their job, and disappeared into history.”14 Changes in fashion have rendered many star looks less normative than they once were—a process that occurred in the past too15—but it is also important to remember that at times critics and spectators contemporary to the films in question complained about the problems for narrative plausibility produced by Hollywood’s insistence, in film after film, on maintaining Mary Astor’s “just from a beauty parlor” look.16 The Twentieth Century-Fox Technicolor Betty Grable musical Pin Up Girl (1944), whose makeup is credited to Guy Pearce, is, like Secrets of an Actress, a typical example of employing makeup and hairdressing mainly to embellish a star. Pin Up Girl follows the attempts of Grable’s character, Lorry, to become a famous stage performer, but its story also hinges on men’s inability, including a heroic soldier just returned from overseas on whom Lorry has set her sights, to recognize her when she disguises herself with nothing more than a different hairstyle and a pair of borrowed glasses (sometimes she also crosses her eyes). The film’s stateside military valence extends to the finale, a “number” in which corps of uniformed rifle-toting women march on a massive nightclub stage under “commander” Lorry’s barked orders. But throughout Pin Up Girl, Grable’s facial features are treated in the same way whether she is working in an office, going out on the town, or singing and dancing. Only her coiffures vary (most involve hair rolls or three-quarter wigs), although they are always, unless she is wearing a hat

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Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, makeup credit for Taylor is Gordon Bau, and her hair, or the styling of her wigs, Sydney Guilaroff). Frame enlargements.

or actively brushing her hair, elaborately styled and a shiny golden blond. Moreover, while hair colors for all other women in the film whom we are meant to understand as attractive or at least potentially attractive—including physical comic Martha Raye and a minor character taking a bath—run the gamut from dark brunette through blond, their makeup design is more or less identical to Grable’s. Not only their skin tones but the eye shadow placement and color— teal blue—and the use of false eyelashes are the same, as is their dark red lip color.

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Even in a Pullman sleeper car getting ready for bed, Grable wears the heavy makeup that she does performing on the stage of several nightclubs—more, in fact, because of the lower light levels. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), whose credited makeup artist is Ben Nye (again there is no hairstylist listed), is also a Twentieth Century-Fox Technicolor “backstage” musical, starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, with a plot that again partly involves women’s ability to trick men through their appearance. (Hollywood lore claims that Monroe was groomed to be Grable’s successor in the “blonde bombshell” category at Fox, and that Monroe’s personal makeup artist was Grable’s as well, Allan “Whitey” Snyder.) Both Monroe as Lorelei and Russell as Dorothy are, like Grable in her vehicles, stunningly attractive throughout (one can see a visible makeup line at the back of Monroe’s neck in one scene that indicates how much color has been added to her face). And again there is a consistency to the way the women’s facial features are made up for every narrative event, whether they are just hanging out, are happy or discouraged or angry, or are dancing and singing, on a nightclub stage or off (other young and attractive female characters are again made up according to the same design). But while undeniably luscious, even on the film’s stars the cosmetics use is now comparatively restrained: the lips are not quite the scarlet red that Grable sports, or that Monroe did in the previous year’s “Technicolor noir” Niagara, but a darker wine color. (Monroe’s lips glisten a bit more than Grable’s or even Russell’s, according to legend because of Monroe’s addition of a coating of Vaseline.) And while the lip treatment never changes for the stars in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, there is no blue eye shadow on anyone as there is in the Grable film (and many MGM musicals, modern or period, released in the 1940s and 1950s), and the false eyelashes have been trimmed to be barely distinguishable as such. Even older characters, such as Lady Beekman (Norma Varden), are made up similarly, down to the placement of rouge on the cheeks and the shape and definition of the brows. But Varden is not given false eyelashes or otherwise emphasized eyes, and her lips are of a paler matte finish, all signifying her lack of desirability against the head-turning—literally, in some scenes—beauty of Monroe and Russell. There are other ways in which Gentlemen Prefer Blondes seems to have considered makeup and hair in relation to characterization somewhat more carefully than in the Grable musicals I have seen. Russell’s dark brown hair, for example, is generally loose throughout the film, whether she is performing a musical number—integrated into the narrative or as part of a stage show—or not. And it is arguably Russell, not Monroe, who plays the freer, more confidently assertive, and more morally consistent character. (Russell’s plastered wet hair after she is tipped into a swimming pool was reportedly the result of an accident that remained in the film.) Conversely, when she is wearing a blond wig to impersonate Monroe’s Lorelei in a French courtroom, Russell’s makeup now includes the line of white drawn on the shelf of the lower eyelid that marks Monroe’s makeup

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design—but not Russell’s—throughout the film; and the wig, while a bit longer than those worn by Monroe, is styled to look like Monroe’s hair, not a blond version of Russell’s. In turn, Lorelei’s flightiness coupled with her single-mindedness about attracting rich men is surely supported by the frequent unmotivated changes in her hairstyles, which are, despite being styled very differently, all somewhat rigid golden helmets as against Dorothy’s looser, more “natural” curls. Moreover, only in a few close-ups in either film are there signs of lens diffusion—beyond Technicolor’s inherent tendency to produce slightly offregister prints that, in William Tuttle’s words, did a “marvelous thing for people” by wiping out facial lines17—to the degree that, when it does occur, it is somewhat jarring, for it seems unnecessary given how flawless the surfaces of the women’s faces already are. As for the men in Pin Up Girl as well as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the “attractive” ones have uniformly tan but not overly powdered faces, lightly lined eyes, slightly rosy lips, and full heads of pomaded short hair, while the older ones, especially Charles Coburn’s villainous “Piggy” in the later film, are comparatively colorless except for their sagging skin. See also the lined eyes and even darker body makeup on the hordes of male athletes dressed in nothing but beige briefs whose amorous attention Russell’s Dorothy is fruitlessly demanding in “Is There Anyone Here for Love.” In short, the consistency of the makeup, regardless of narrative context, in both Pin Up Girl and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes still does not mean that it functions identically in both films. True, the musical was a genre in which implausibility was to be expected, but even in films in which breaking into song and dance is not a normative event the same caution pertains: to understand how beauty makeup functions as an element of characterization often, if not usually, requires paying attention to nuance or lack thereof. Monroe’s stunning high-key appearance in the Technicolor and CinemaScope comedy The Seven Year Itch (1955), with Ben Nye again as the makeup artist and Helen Turpin credited as hairstylist, is of basically the same design as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, as are most other of Monroe’s 1950s films regardless of studio (possibly due to the continued attentions of Snyder). But the huge size of the widescreen image made lens diffusion inadvisable, though the Eastman Color basis of the film’s DeLuxe color stock could more easily handle pure reds than Technicolor, and Monroe’s lips are an even glossier scarlet in every brightly lit scene. Only in Tom Ewell’s fantasies about “the girl” in the apartment upstairs does the lighting or Monroe’s hairstyles change, along with her costumes. Indeed, to watch sequential Grable and Monroe films, like those of other women stars whose physical attractiveness was thought to be the main reason for their appeal, is to understand that such uniformity is usually the case, even when filmmakers were evincing an increased interest in greater visual realism. (Audrey Hepburn wears a lot of narratively unmotivated eye makeup and hair pomade in Roman Holiday—interestingly far more than Wally Westmore called for.) Evelyn Keyes, playing the “boring” but

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still beloved and attractive wife in The Seven Year Itch, is again made up as literally a subdued version of Monroe—less vivid and shiny lip and cheek color, mousier and duller and more controlled hair, and no false eyelashes. In films like this, it is easy enough to malign or ridicule the ubiquity of glamour. Yet I hesitate to discount its expressive potential in certain political rather than strictly narrative contexts. That is, given the Production Code’s prohibition against “miscegenation”—the main reason Lena Horne could not star in Show Boat (1951), for she would have been paired romantically with a white actor— glamour for Black performers was often denied in films with white stars. Archival evidence in the form of MGM assistant director (AD) reports shows that some Black specialty performers, usually featured in musicals, were simply costumed and sent directly to the soundstage and not given much sartorial attention once they got there. In contrast to the many pauses for attention to makeup and hair in the daily AD reports of the shooting of musical numbers starring white performers, male or female, in Lady Be Good (1941), for instance, there are exactly zero such pauses during the long days it took to film the two strenuous numbers performed by the three Berry Brothers, a Black “flash” dance team, even when they are wearing white tie and tails.18 It can be construed as a sign of a kind of “progress,” then, that an uncredited Ruby Dee is wearing beauty makeup and styled and glossy hair in both the black-and-white No Way Out (1950, makeup credited to Ben Nye), and in the comparatively few scenes in which she appears as the girlfriend and wife of sports legend Jackie Robinson (who plays himself) in the independent black-and-white production The Jackie Robinson Story (1950, makeup credited to Dave Grayson). This arguably pertains even more to Otto Preminger’s big-budget Black-cast musical adaptation Carmen Jones (1954), in CinemaScope and DeLuxe color (there is, somewhat unusually for the time, no credit for makeup or hair).19 As was the case with Audrey Hepburn, Grable, Monroe, Russell, and others, in Carmen Jones Dorothy Dandridge’s glamour in the title role is maintained across a wide range of narrative circumstances. These include, besides singing and some dancing, physical fights with other women and men; traveling in a jeep through clouds of dust; broiling summer heat; and even her own murder at the hands of her lover Joe (Harry Belafonte)—none of which substantially alter the satin finish on Dandridge’s skin, her smoky eye shadow and false eyelashes, her glossy red-pink lips and rouge, and the stylish short coiffure she sports throughout.20 (Like some visible moisture at her temples, if her hair becomes disheveled or dusty it is adjusted during a continuity cut.) Flawlessness as an independent imperative marks the other young female characters in Carmen Jones as well in terms of the cosmetic treatment of their faces and bodies. The more innocent Cindy Lou (Olga James), however, has observable freckles and no false eyelashes, and her stylized and juvenile pigtails remain from our first view of her to the scene in which she tries unsuccessfully to “save” her former sweetheart Joe from the clutches of Carmen. Belafonte is also treated similarly to white male stars

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associated with some species of virility, such that Joe’s fatal attraction to Carmen is shown by the increase of “sweat” on his face and body. That said, the glistening even shine on Belafonte’s naked torso in the extended scene in which Joe sits singing about a rose Carmen has given him is also part of the racialized spectacle of the film. Such images of white male stars, some of whom also revel in their own physical pulchritude, are more often featured in action sequences— even the athletes in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes are “doing something,” in Richard Dyer’s words about the naked or nearly naked sweaty white male body as twentieth-century spectacle. Instead, in Belafonte, as with Dyer’s subject Paul Robeson, we see “a potential for action only, not action itself.”21 But the world in which Carmen Jones takes place is, like most of Hollywood’s Black-cast films, devoid of white presence in a visual sense. Aside from all-Black musicals like Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky (both 1943; there were several in the 1930s as well), Black performers were otherwise limited to supporting roles or specialty appearances. With these and a few other exceptions the stories Hollywood told during the studio era would have little place for glamorous Black women or men except as specialties, aside from the spate of “Negro problem pictures” of the postwar period of which No Way Out, in which Sidney Poitier plays a doctor confronting the racism of patients and colleagues alike, and The Jackie Robinson Story are examples. (As is well known, the HUAC investigations and the general hysteria about communist influence after the advent of the Cold War led to the blacklisting of many of the directors, writers, and performers associated with such films.) For Black spectators, then, the conventionalized star glamour of Horne, Dee, and Dandridge, as Olga James later recalled, was contradictory—it was undoubtedly on white terms—but, like Hollywood itself, was also a “big, big deal.”22 The same was true of the attention paid to the handsomeness of male stars like Belafonte and Poitier. To continue my investigation of how the “just from a beauty parlor” look functioned under pressure from particular stories and star images, I turn next to the conventions that governed Hollywood’s treatment of individual features— skin, eyes and eyebrows, lips, and hair. I then move to the compromises that were made—or not—in the photogenic formula in service to various tropes, including those involving aging, that were themselves instantiated by fealty to flawlessness as a value. Finally, in the chapter’s last section, I focus at greater length on selected films or moments from films whose richness as objects of study for me comes from how they appear, not always successfully, actively to engage the hegemony of the “independent imperative” in some manner. To be clear, others would undoubtedly have chosen different films (by the time this appears in print, I likely would too). But these limitations are partly the point: I want to provide examples, buttressed by whatever practical or archival information is available, of what I found when I watched or rewatched a sampling of films through the framework this project provides. Any form of interpretation from a historical distance always risks imputing intention where

Ruby Dee and Jackie Robinson in The Jackie Robinson Story (1950, makeup credit Dave Grayson) and Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones (1954, no makeup or hair credit). Only the women’s hairstyles change much across either film. Frame enlargement details.

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there may have been none. But the effects—even if the processes by which they were created were meant to be “invisible”—nevertheless remain on the screen for us to ponder. For all the attention given to Norma Desmond’s scripted line in Sunset Blvd. (1950, makeup supervision by Wally Westmore) that silent film actors “didn’t need dialogue” because they had “faces” with which to communicate instead, for much of the orthochromatic era the “pasty-looking” visages of stars on the screen, to borrow the 1956 words of Wally Westmore about the period, were more masklike than those of later decades.23 As discussed previously, this sort of makeup was also disparaged in the 1920s and at times even in the 1910s, but “progress” of the sort the Westmores traded in also depended on treating the past with scorn or amusement. (“It’s no secret that Hollywood once believed makeup should be applied to the face with a spatula,” as one writer put it in 1942.)24 The eccentric response of orthochromatic to the mosaic of colors that make up most white skin not only meant that even lighter greasepaints and powder were applied more thickly in order to turn—or “retouch”—the face into a uniform surface, but also that facial modeling with cosmetics was more difficult because any application of color or shading was likely to read as a dark blotch or a stark line. Filmmakers working with orthochromatic were therefore unable to employ either foundation or rouge to represent basic states like robust health, a tan, youth, or a bloom on the cheeks. (As Kevin Brownlow remarks, silent actors are “strangely pale; there are no olive skins or tanned complexions” because of the amount of greasepaint and powder used.)25 Other than reinforcing the whiteness of a particular character, then, skin had less value, less flexibility, in the photogenic formula than coiffures, lips, and eyes. Sometimes strong lighting could help, but even if a clear skin tone was achieved, any move into shadow, in Mary Astor’s words, could make it suddenly “go black.”26 And the more intense the light, the more other facial features tended to look like holes in a flat surface. Astor was teamed with an actor, Lloyd Hughes, in 1926 who she later reported “could never take being made up as part of the job. The makeup man would come at him to pat down a greasy spot with powder and he’d immediately clown and camp and lisp. . . . [But] in those days everybody had to have makeup or look very dirty on the screen.”27 Following the aforementioned “pink powder puff” editorial attacking Valentino (also in 1926; whether Hughes’s behavior was a reaction to it is impossible to know), the studios further minimized references to cosmetics in publicity about male stars. Especially publicity about “pretty” men like Robert Taylor and Tyrone Power— “creatures of classic perfection,” as Margaret Farrand Thorp wrote in 1939— whose looks were positioned against those whose appeal was thought to derive from their “personality,” “charm,” or “character.”28 Nevertheless, while a makeup artist would not have used the term beauty makeup even in reference to what another 1939 study called the “handsome ladies,” they, along with the “he-men”

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and the “ugly monsters,” continued to wear some version of foundation.29 “They all did,” in Michael Westmore’s words. “If the woman was made up and flawless, the man had to be made up too. Beard lines are acceptable now, but they all wore makeup. It might be a light foundation, but it was there.”30 As with other facial effects, makeup was also the only way to be certain that narrative continuity could be maintained when scenes were shot out of sequence or if an actor showed up sunburned after a weekend of golf. Ironically, a star like Cary Grant—who, in William Tuttle’s words, made himself “very, very, very tan” in an attempt to obviate the need for cosmetics—could be especially problematic for makeup artists, not only because it is “more difficult to put a light color on a dark skin than it is to put dark makeup on a light skin” but for the effect that lighting for his skin tone produced on his costars. “If they [didn’t] get enough light on him, he could be almost a black man,” Tuttle claimed, a locution that separates skin color from racial identity even as it evinces fear of being mistaken for “not white.”31 For MGM’s North by Northwest (1959), Eva Marie Saint had to wear foundation, according to Tuttle, “probably two or three shades darker than we’d put on the average man to get a closer relationship between the two. So that when they lightened the print to suit him, she wouldn’t wash out completely.”32 But Grant’s quite orange skin still required cosmetic blandishment on his visible torso and arms and in order to hide his beard. Thus, Leslie Caron enjoyed teasing Grant for his professed hatred of cosmetics on the set of Father Goose (1964, makeup credited to Bud Westmore) when he “shaved his beard for our marriage scene [and] had to cover his white chin with makeup. I pointed out mischievously that this is exactly what we ladies do when we wear makeup—smooth out the imperfections.”33 Caron’s remarks likely also hit home because of the amount of eye and lip makeup that Grant had been happy to wear in his first films in the early 1930s, and did still, though it is less obvious in his star vehicles. (There may be more lingering close-ups of Cary Grant’s face across his career than of any other male star in Hollywood’s history.) Despite, or perhaps because of, the rumors about whether the shift to panchromatic at the end of the 1920s would make many cosmetics unnecessary, ensuring that white skin looked white enough also involved mitigating shine, regardless of film stock, especially on women performers. As Agnes Platt had written in her Practical Hints on Acting for the Cinema in 1923, “One of the most important things is always to have a powder-puff handy, as any shininess is fatal to the good effect of the film.”34 Practically this was due partly, as has been mentioned, to fears about the “unpleasant surprises,” in Jack Dawn’s words, that could come from “reflected light.”35 But it also again stemmed from racist fears of white skin appearing greasy or shiny, which Richard Dyer links to the “mirror effect of sweat, itself connoting physicality, the emissions of the body,” and, for women, “unladylike labour.”36 That Clark Gable is sweaty in various of his he-man roles— see Red Dust (1932), for example, or Strange Cargo (1940), discussed further

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later in the chapter—does not obscure the fact that, in romantic encounters, his skin has been cleaned up and powdered. For women, according to Astor, if this or that studio factotum was watching rushes and saw so much as “a bit of shine around the nostrils,” it could lead to expostulations like “‘What the hell have we got makeup people for?’”37 Even corrective makeup with Factor’s and others’ cosmetics continued to navigate how to provide the “nice skin sheen” Wally Westmore was seeking for Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday that could model facial features without tipping over into shine whether the film was in black and white or color. Hitchcock’s 1963 instructions during a staff meeting about Tippi Hedren’s makeup for Marnie (1964, makeup credited to Jack Barron) were that the makeup should be based in “REALITY”—the primary avenue to which was not to “overpowder”—and he wanted her face “clean, with shine,” for a horseback ride in the countryside.38 But in this and his other instructions about her face— “overdone to cheapen her a little, probably change powders and heavier eye line” for one scene and “quiet, good taste, neat and not overdone” in another; and adding “shadows above and below her eyes” as she is forced to kill her beloved horse near the end of the film though they are minimized for the final romantic scenes—it is taken for granted that these are adjustments to a formula still rooted in flawlessness. The racist dimensions of the prohibition against the appearance of sweat on white women’s skin unless there was a specific narrative reason for it—illness, intense fear, or a horseback ride—are underscored by the dearth of dedicated cosmetic products for Black performers for much of the studio era. One of the most famous of Lena Horne’s stories about her early days at MGM in the 1940s has to do with the Max Factor company’s development of a “Light Egyptian” Pan-Cake especially for her (there were other shades of “Egyptian” as well), which Horne claims was instead used on white actors (like Ava Gardner as Julie LaVerne in Show Boat) who were taking roles that Horne herself was not allowed to play.39 Donald Bogle reports that the makeup department at Twentieth Century-Fox ultimately just gave up on foundation for Ruby Dee in No Way Out and made her up “as little as possible with just a bit of powder.”40 Otherwise, since a scene in which a Black actor performed with a white actor was going to be lit and printed in the white actor’s favor, darker features were hardly modeled at all. Two of the four Black singers—they all play dining-car waiters on a train—in MGM’s Technicolor Esther Williams musical The Duchess of Idaho (1950, makeup by Jack Dawn) are of the same shade as most of the white male performers for whom the scene was lit and who are covered with Pan-Stik, but the two darker singers are almost literally less visible.41 If a white star, male or female, sports a substantial deviation in skin tone or texture, then, it is either for comic reasons or to signal something about a character’s health, class, or race or social status. The sweaty realism of male actors in so many postwar melodramas, or in The Grapes of Wrath or even Who’s Afraid

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of Virginia Woolf?, is narratively motivated, in other words, in contrast to the almost hysterical denial in the generic musical of the normal perspiring that would accompany strenuous dancing under hot lights. (If sweat accidentally appears on an otherwise glamorous face or body it is cleaned up by the next shot.) Even when tied to characterization, however, what we see is rarely “real” because perspiration was idiosyncratic and hard to control. Instead, foundation was applied first, and the condition indicated or re-created by glycerin applied on top of it with a stipple sponge, or water mixed with glycerin and sprayed on with an atomizer; for men especially, the skin could be coated with Vaseline and misted with water (all of these were routine methods employed in studio makeup departments, according to Michael Westmore).42 This, too, could have racist dimensions; as one Black critic wrote of Gone with the Wind (1939), “They must have spent hundreds of dollars on glycerine to make all the black people look greasy. Every black person looked like they had been in 100-degree sun for hours.”43 The ubiquitous act of crying also required particular ingenuity in terms of managing ancillary skin effects—red and swollen eyelids, runny noses—and matching shots. Therefore, whether a performer was able to generate tears naturally (many could) or had eyes that nicely watered in response to a blast from a menthol or ammonia pipe, the transition from tears welling in the eyes to running down the face is typically handled with a cut, on the other side of which the tears’ putative tracks have also been painted on with glycerin of various consistencies in order to control the overall effect.44 Interestingly, what to do when a performer’s skin, facial or otherwise, arrived damaged, as it were (even by freckles), depended on a star’s gender and also, from some film evidence at least, race. This is distinct from the creation of scars, bruises, and the like through makeup (again on a more or less flawless surface), though if a mole or pimple projected above the skin’s surface only careful lighting could hide it. One can notice such bumps under the foundation on Mary Astor’s face in The Maltese Falcon (1941), on Hepburn’s right cheek in Roman Holiday, and on Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960), and a number of stars have facial moles. That on Ginger Rogers’s left cheek, for example, was covered by makeup in the 1930s and early 1940s but, likely due to the popularity of Marilyn Monroe, Arlene Dahl, and Elizabeth Taylor and their moles, emphasized in her later films. Various stories also circulate that Merle Oberon had pockmarked skin around her mouth and on her chin—in some accounts it was due to acne, in others an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug, in yet others to the corrosive effects of the skin-lightening products by which Oberon sought to disguise her mixed-race heritage—that was smoothed not only by cosmetics but also by the use of strong key light and diffusion in her close-ups (even in Technicolor).45 Similarly, the long scar on her left cheek that Carole Lombard suffered as the result of a 1926 automobile accident was acknowledged in interviews and fan magazines at the time, but disguised by makeup as well as careful framing in her films and publicity photos.

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In contrast, a short, straight scar on Gene Kelly’s left cheek was retouched out of existence in his first MGM publicity photos in the early 1940s, but the studio agreed with him that it looked rakish and the scar remains undisguised in all his films, starting with For Me and My Gal (1942). (When asked, Kelly tended to proffer the truth, that it was due to a fall from his tricycle when he was a “sprout of five,” but as his star rose, studio publicists assured the public that it was due to a more virile “motorcycle accident many years ago.”)46 Van Johnson, however, was made up heavily with greasepaint to cover not only some of his many freckles but also the damage, mainly on his forehead (a metal plate replaced part of his skull), acquired in an automobile accident during the filming of MGM’s wartime fantasy A Guy Named Joe (1943).47 The same treatment was used on Montgomery Clift’s shattered face following yet another car crash during production of Raintree County (1957). Although I do not know the reason for it, Bill Robinson’s exposed arms and chest in Stormy Weather feature several large, flat scars—they may be from gunshot wounds Robinson is rumored to have sustained at the hands of police or during his service in the Spanish-American War—and I assume this means that no attempt was made to cover them. Despite claims that color film stock would make it possible to “record such realistic touches as a blush, or a players [sic] turning white with fright or crimson with anger,” as Photoplay augured in 1935,48 these, too, continued to be managed with makeup. Indeed, there was little interest in portraying such emotional states “realistically,” which would have risked blotches and other hive-like effects. With panchromatic, rouge was mainly a component of corrective makeup and used to add shadows, while in Technicolor it was applied to women as a matter of routine, whether for contouring or because of stereotyped ideas about healthy white beauty. With the exception of its typical absence from characters who are ill or dying—on whom a gray foundation was sometimes employed; the same foundation could be spot-applied under Pan-Cake and other foundations to hide blemishes49—it is therefore rare to see rouge used expressively. (Character actors were sometimes given red noses and cheeks for various purposes, from indicating alcoholism to playing Santa Claus.) In Gone with the Wind, however, an uncredited Mont Westmore appears to have aimed for a greater degree of narrative plausibility in the scene in which Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) first protests her love for Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard, wearing considerable amounts of Pan-Cake and powder to cover his uneven skin tone and comparatively advanced age, as well as a toupee and eye makeup). When her love is spurned, the amount of rouge on Leigh’s cheeks increases as the character grows more and more angry, turning a rote tool into an expression of extreme emotion from shot to shot in a continuous but edited scene. For other areas of the face, based on the film evidence Hollywood never gave up its earliest romantic notions, discussed in chapter 1, about the singular expressiveness of eyes (in which I include lashes and brows) and lips. Although many young women were wearing eye shadow and lipstick before the rise of the movie

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star, one form of blandishment that seems to have become “respectable” for average women through the influence of Hollywood alone was artificial eyelashes. (See chapter 1 as well for the various versions of by and for whom they were invented for use in film in the 1910s; mascara in a form we would recognize was developed by Maybelline for consumer use around the same time, and implements for curling the lashes were available by the 1920s.)50 To be sure, not every star in a studio-era film wears extra eyelashes. According to legend, and the comments of at least one hairdresser who worked with her, Garbo’s eyelashes were long and thick on their own.51 And the lushness and length of Joan Fontaine’s natural eyelashes apparently drove producer David Selznick to distraction: in one account, he responded to Fontaine’s test for Gone with the Wind by excoriating Mont Westmore in a memo for “those damnable false eyelashes on Miss Fontaine [that] stick out like multi-antlers on a freak elk.” In another memo, concerning her appearance as the mousy protagonist of Rebecca (1940), Selznick railed about the fact that the actor “has on eyelashes that compare with Marlene Dietrich’s at her worst (even if they are her own eyelashes, they are made up in such a fashion as to look fake).” In the latter instance, Selznick went so far as to blame Westmore and “you make-up men” for contributing to the “destruction of stars.”52 Selznick’s hyperbolic venting aside, it is true that, by the 1930s, lush and evenly spaced eyelashes (especially feared, apparently, were lashes that crossed)53 became one of the primary identifying features of the female movie star in any and all roles, regardless of period or genre, frequently lit to produce a lacy pattern on the cheeks (in contrast to the dark shadows produced by beading). Conversely, by the end of the 1910s, the absence of lush eyelashes was often enough to mark a character as plain, old, haggard, and so on, as with Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress or Katharine Hepburn masquerading as a boy in Sylvia Scarlett (1935)—although in scenes where Hepburn is meant to be an attractive boy, or of course when in the narrative she doffs the impersonation, the longer and darker eyelashes return. The large female casts of two 1943 war films, Paramount’s So Proudly We Hail! (makeup supervised by Wally Westmore) and MGM’s Cry ‘Havoc’ (makeup created by Jack Dawn), are convincingly dirty and often disheveled in their roles as nurses trapped, under appalling battle conditions, in the Philippines. But most of the named stars, like Claudette Colbert and Paulette Goddard in the first case and Ann Sothern and Margaret Sullavan in the second, are given false eyelashes, eyeliner, and eye shadow in even the most harrowing scenes—the close-ups, especially, which are usually softly lit—when they have narratively been subject to starvation, illness, and sleep deprivation for weeks. Even the eyebrows of most female stars of any age in a studio film in the silent or sound eras are virtually always well groomed (see the war films just mentioned). In the 1920s and early 1930s, as most spectators know, brows were often tweezered into thin lines, or shaved off and redrawn, a fashion that has come and gone throughout human history. The graphic design of such brows suited the

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A tableau of women, with flawlessly enhanced eyes, eyebrows, and lips, under dire narrative circumstances in the Philippines in Cry ‘Havoc’ (1943, makeup credit Jack Dawn). Frame enlargement.

black-and-white moderne aesthetic of those years but was less successful when rendered in color. Another film technique was the “half-shaved brow,” which helped the makeup artist control the outer edges more precisely and to alter them from their natural contours.54 As mentioned in chapter 3, for many reasons the “natural” brow grew popular in the late 1930s and 1940s. But even these brows were still shaped and darkened by cosmetics. Somewhat surprisingly, the halfshaved brow itself persisted into the late 1950s in both black-and-white and color films, likely because it enabled the use of dark pencils to make the brows a focal point of the face. (Alberto De Rossi claimed that, while Audrey Hepburn’s angular face “needed eyebrows,” he was always trying to “reduce” hers in the films she made in Europe.)55 Whole books have also been written on lipstick and the shapes it was used to create for the lips of screen women, whether the dark and heart-shaped “beestung,” “rosebud,” or “vampire” lips—all more or less synonyms terms—of the silent era and the 1930s or the various versions of the “hunter’s bow” of the 1930s and beyond, the latter named for the line drawn outside the natural line of the lips that makes the top lip, especially, bow-shaped or straight.56 (In contrast to

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Close-up of Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958, makeup and hair credits Wally Westmore and Nellie Manley), showing her half-shaved brow under the cosmetics enhancing if not artificially creating a fuller version. Frame enlargement.

male stars—whose lips were emphasized slightly but usually within their natural contours—by the 1930s women’s lips, of whatever shape, were often made larger than they would be in real life.)57 Given that lips were virtually always made up, modulations of saturation or shade (from light to dark) and, sometimes, shine became the conventional methods of indicating deviations from or adherence to glamour. For women singing—or appearing to sing, given the ubiquity of the playback system by 1931—in color, especially, the shading and finish of the inside of the lips in close-up also had to be maintained. Because of the use of transparent powder over lipstick, and thanks to judicious framing and editing, kissing scenes seldom resulted in a transfer of shade or color: in the black-and-white Swing Time (1936), when Fred Astaire appears to be wearing Ginger Rogers’s lipstick after a hidden kiss, the imprint was painted on his face by a makeup artist.58 (Astaire was wearing lipstick too, but of a lighter shade than that worn by Rogers.) Finally, hair, or more to the point its styling, was both more variable than makeup and equally subject to conventional treatment in relation to perceived attractiveness. If a female star’s hair, short or long (past the silent era it rarely fell much below the shoulders), is left lank and unstyled for other than comic reasons, it stereotypically signals a lack of desirability; see the “before” version of a young woman, played by Dorothy McGuire, transformed by love in The Enchanted Cottage (1945). Conversely, for Marnie, as discussed in chapter 3, Hitchcock wanted Alexandre of Paris rather than studio hairdresser Virginia Darcy to style Tippi Hedren’s many blond coiffures even though the character she played lacked the means to acquire such glamour for much of the film (and

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again despite the fact that Hitchcock had asserted that the “key” to the character’s makeup was “REALITY”). In period films, Alicia Annas argues, hairstyles “were not so dependent on the contemporary look” that underpinned the treatment of the face.59 But the stars of many period films sport hairstyles, partly or completely wigged, that are only slightly altered from anachronistic fashionability—see Bette Davis in Jezebel (1938), Rita Hayworth in My Gal Sal (1942), Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Betty Grable in Mother Wore Tights (1947), Esther Williams in Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949), or Elizabeth Taylor in early scenes in the dynastic saga Giant (1956) and in all of Raintree County. Nellie Manley’s heavily styled yet severe partially wigged hairdresses for Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress are all the more remarkable, therefore, for how unflattering they are (even though de Havilland was one of the lucky actors with a naturally oval face, according to Perc Westmore). But a stylish modern coiffure can still mean something narratively; see the famous hard and shiny blond helmet of wig worn by Barbara Stanwyck as the duplicitous femme fatale of Double Indemnity (1944), Rita Hayworth tossing or hiding behind her long bob in Gilda (1946), or, far more subtly, Jane Russell’s loose hair in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. In some films a hairdress can function even more like an objective correlative. In addition to the famous whorl of Kim Novak’s blond chignon that underscores the spiraling nature of the plot and the San Francisco setting of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), for example, Tippi Hedren’s many hairstyles in Marnie are often as complex as the disturbed character she plays. And in The Great Man’s Lady (1941) and Now, Voyager (1942) there are arresting long takes of the backs of women’s heads as they learn something distressing or unexpected. In The Great Man’s Lady, a twenty-two-second tracking shot, from medium close-up to close-up, of the back of Barbara Stanwyck’s complexly woven wigged period hairstyle suits the convoluted nature of her character’s strange past, about which she is being pestered by an off-screen interlocutor (at the end of the shot she twirls around to scream imprecations at him). In Now, Voyager, an extended off-center shot of the circular bun on the back of Gladys George’s head suggests, as in Vertigo and Marnie, the twists in the various plots we have watched George’s character foment, here against the daughter (Bette Davis) who is resisting her. The limited time frame of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—the story begins in the evening and continues to early the next morning—means that variations in Elizabeth Taylor’s single hairstyle, as with her makeup, are situated on a continuum from well-groomed to messy. But within these limitations the disarray of her hair from its previously careful styling visually accentuates Martha’s emotional turmoil. On male actors, however, hair seldom functions as expressively. Certain wigged period films aside,60 the finish and length of the hair—virtually always above the collar except in period or character roles and gleaming and pomaded in most black-and-white films, often less reflective in films shot on color stock— are consistent and meant to look like what any man in the audience might

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wear.61 (Some makeup artists and hairdressers believed that wavy hair on men was too feminine, which partly accounts for the abundant pomade use.) A male character’s hair can be disheveled because of physical action of some kind, but it can also be stringy and messy to indicate class status, as The Grapes of Wrath, where there is often facial stubble too (which could be natural or created with cosmetics).62 But both can also signify the loss of control, as with Lee Marvin’s cornered mobster Vince in The Big Heat (1953, makeup and hairstyles credited to Clay Campbell and Helen Hunt), or when strands of Fred Astaire’s toupee fall over his face during a drunken dance rampage in The Sky’s the Limit (1943) or his character jerks awake from a dream-ballet nightmare in Yolanda and the Thief (1945, makeup credited to Jack Dawn). But until Yul Brynner, reprising his Broadway role, created a minor fashion for bald heads in The King and I (1956), having a full head of hair, disheveled or otherwise, was so constitutive of stardom that there were few male actors who did not wear some kind of toupee if they were lacking in that area, however much the studios wanted to pretend otherwise. (Sometimes actors joked about their own baldness, as Bing Crosby frequently did—but he seldom appeared that way in public.) Indeed, arguably the most interesting features of even modern-day male coiffures in classical Hollywood films is the extent to which what we are looking at is often not the actor’s own hair, or not only his.63 (The same was true of many mustaches, and real beards were virtually nonexistent among leading men off the screen.) Women frequently wore extensions, or three-quarter wigs that fit over and merged with their own tresses, in modern as well as period roles. And, if a role required it, most actors underwent the hairpin-heavy and sometimes uncomfortable process of wearing a full wig, because wigs made the maintenance of complicated or period hairstyles far easier than daily styling. (At the same time, Barbara Stanwyck refused a wig for some scenes in Stella Dallas [1937] because she wanted to be able to run her hands through her hair.) An available “stock list” just of MGM wigs consists of not only four closely written pages listing hundreds of women’s wigs and hairpieces in that studio’s collection from 1939 through 1961, but seven additional pages of men’s wigs and toupees.64 With the exception of some “character” wigs—“Negro,” “Zulu,” “Indian”—which were probably made of crepe wool, most were made of human hair (the cost to produce them now would be astronomical). A few are “weft” wigs, meaning that their edges were not visible, and the hair was sewn into rows by hand or, more often, a machine (as hair historian Kurt Stenn puts it, a weft “looks something like a clothesline crammed with hairs hanging out to dry”; the same technique could be used to produce false eyelashes and mustaches).65 But the vast majority, page after page, are designated “H.L.,” for hair lace. The circumstances of the patenting of the “Percern toupée” by Perc Westmore in 1932 and the transfer of the patent to Max Factor in 1935 were recounted in chapter 3, but the importance of hair lace to motion pictures—and to many ordinary people, given that Factor sold “nonprofessional” hair lace toupees and wigs

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too66—can scarcely be overestimated. Hair lace, an open mesh or net into which individual hairs were “ventilated” (knotted) one at a time, was woven out of fine thread or even hair itself (the lace is likely the source of the derisive Hollywood sobriquet “scalp doily”).67 But in contrast to many weft wigs (which could look “stuck on,” to return to silent-era parlance), hair lace became a visible—or rather invisible—component of the wig or toupee as well. A “hair lace wig” thus ultimately designated any hairpiece with lace at the edges that, glued down with spirit gum and covered with greasepaint, became virtually undetectable even in close-up and also allowed a coiffure to be brushed back from the forehead and temples or up from the neck naturally. (Elizabeth Taylor wears hair lace wigs in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) Like regular coiffures, toupees and wigs were styled with pomades like Factor’s Brillox or even literally shellacked into place (hair spray was not in commercial use until the 1950s).68 Since so many male stars were resistant to wearing, or admitting to wearing, makeup, a full head of hair played an outsize role in creating their masculinity and pulchritude as well as their fame.69 In the end, the perceived value of visual flawlessness as a Hollywood value may be demonstrated most completely and graphically by the film career of Esther Williams, whose Technicolor swimming musicals were among MGM’s biggest box-office draws of the 1940s and early 1950s. Williams called herself a “Technicolor baby,” like Betty Grable, because she, too, was substantially dependent on the “special glow” she acquired in color. But in contrast to Grable—or almost anyone else—Williams had to look perfectly groomed underwater as well as on dry land, and the same was true of the ranks of chorines, male and female, who populated many of her most spectacular numbers, and the men who swam with her (Van Johnson, Ricardo Montalban, and Fernando Lamas, among others). MGM’s technicians worked overtime to create an “efficient production unit,” as Williams later wrote, devoted to making sure that her hair, her skin, and every one of her facial features were always perfectly groomed, which entailed making her “as waterproof as a mallard.” (She claims that “hairdressers and the makeup artists loved working on these movies because it gave them a chance to play with a new set of toys.”)70 The evolution of Williams’s appearance from her first star vehicle, Bathing Beauty (1944), through her final musicals of the mid-1950s is a record of the growing efficacy of these “toys,” for some but not all of Factor’s cosmetics were waterproof. (Pan-Cake just “left a cloud of pale beige floating on the surface of the pool,” in her words, while greasepaints rubbed off too easily; waterproof mascara, according to some reports, was “invented” for Williams, but others dispute this.) The body makeup that William Tuttle eventually settled upon for Williams, a mica-laced powder with the salubrious name of Texas Dirt, was also used to “dye” other white stars, like Williams and Cyd Charisse as actors playing Pacific Islanders in On an Island with You (1948), though their skin tone grows lighter and lighter as the film wears on.71 (As Tuttle wrote to his wife during the location

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shooting of the film, “This dark makeup requires constant attention—and with Esther and Cyd both working it really keeps me on the jump!”)72 Williams’s first underwater hairpiece in Bathing Beauty appears to come partly unattached following her first on-screen dive, and she, or her hair, also suffered some mishaps with shellac (which had to be removed with corrosive acetone).73 Ultimately simple Vaseline mixed with baby oil (Sydney Guilaroff later claimed it was olive oil) was used for the maintenance of her hair in studio tanks and pools. Yet perhaps Williams’s image, and the resulting cosmetic and hairdressing procedures that were employed on other “wet” performers in her and other films, simply represents the limit of one of Hollywood’s longest-lived tropes, namely that virtually every romantically inflected character, male or female, not only bathes or showers in full beauty makeup—though they seldom wash their faces in such scenes—but wears it to sleep.74 Other familiar tropes include that in which a character is applying cosmetics or styling her own hair or claims to be some version of “hideous” because she has not yet done either. The latter I call the “Don’t look at me, I’m a sight” trope, after the remark made by Karen Morley’s character in Dinner at Eight (1938) when she appears in a robe, fully made up and coiffed, after a night during which she “didn’t sleep a wink,” such that dialogue alone is the unreliable source of information about what we are actually looking at on the screen.75 In the black-and-white Professional Sweetheart (1934), among many such examples, Ginger Rogers, playing a radio “Purity Girl,” proclaims that she is sick of wearing “no makeup, no jewelry, nothing!” (Her manager even tells her to go “fix” her face, that she is “a sight,” after a tearful encounter in which crying is indicated only by tone of voice and facial grimaces.) But the marcelled waves in Rogers’s shiny blond hair, the dark and precise lipstick, the graphic eyebrows, and the long false eyelashes do not vary across the film, nor do her coiffures beyond a few loose curls from time to time. Even The Women (1939), with its many scenes in and references to a beauty salon named Sydney’s (reputedly named for Sydney Guilaroff when Elizabeth Arden, on whose New York salon it was modeled, refused to have her name attached),76 reveals little difference in its many stars’ appearances whether they are entering the salon or leaving it. One of the few exceptions to this, beyond disheveled hair during the film’s famous dude ranch catfight, is that Joan Crawford’s lips are a bit lighter and her skin shinier while her character is taking a bath. But when Norma Shearer’s Mary is in bed preparing for sleep, she is again made up just as heavily (Guilaroff coiffure included) as when she appears in the next scene dressed to the teeth in a nightclub, a scene in which she will also powder her already flawless face and apply lipstick to her already made-up mouth. Marie Dressler’s star image is not based on glamour—with the possible exception of Dinner at Eight, in which her former beauty was enough to have driven Lionel Barrymore’s character to distraction in his youth. But in most if not all of Dressler’s films there are young characters, like that played by Morley, who

Esther Williams in full beauty makeup with Red Skelton in Bathing Beauty (1944) and with Van Johnson in Easy to Wed (1946) (makeup credit for both Jack Dawn, no hair credits). In the first image Williams has a flap of latex from her hairpiece over her left ear, and in the second Van Johnson’s scars are covered by greasepaint but still visible. Frame enlargements.

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exemplify the manufactured visual polish on which Hollywood’s glamour depends. Moreover, these tropes dominate even in those films that are about being a star or making Hollywood movies. Beginning, according to Steven Cohan, with A Girl’s Folly in 1917 and The Extra Girl and Souls for Sale in 1923 and continuing through the present day, the stories of some of these “backstudio” vehicles center on the trials and tribulations of people who are being turned into movie stars.77 And yet, while some (though not all) of the films contain self-reflexive scenes that detail the application of cosmetics or the styling of hair in a studio or on location, rarely is either craft employed in particularly expressive ways in relation to characterization. The black-and-white The Bad and the Beautiful (1952, hair credited to Sydney Guilaroff and makeup to William Tuttle) has one short makeup-chair scene featuring uncredited makeup artist Del Armstrong and hairdresser Helen Young working on the actor played by Lana Turner. Armstrong’s pencil is shown hovering in close-up over Turner’s already drawn and noticeably hair-free brows, and Young is styling a three-quarter wig in the background (Turner’s hair, under a wrap, is already perfectly coiffed). But all the scene tells us is that she is a star playing a star. The two studio-era versions of A Star Is Born (1937 and 1954, the first in Technicolor and the second in Eastman Color and CinemaScope) are famously both focused on women who are transformed into Hollywood movie stars at the behest of their mentors and ultimately self-destructive and suicidal husbands. But again the makeup design (only the second has makeup and hair credits, ironically including Del Armstrong and Helen Young as well as Sydney Guilaroff for Garland’s coiffures) is largely the same on the female leads—Janet Gaynor and Judy Garland, respectively—before and after the comedy-inflected scenes in which their faces are puzzled over by motion picture studio makeup artists. (In 1954, magazine writer Katherine Albert wrote a fan letter to director George Cukor about everything he got “right” in A Star Is Born, among which was “the make-up department that looks like the operating theater of the Mayo Clinic.”)78 Indeed, in each version of A Star Is Born, the makeup department scenes—with eyebrows and liplines drawn on Gaynor in odd places in the first film, and, after an ellipsis, Garland ending up with a latex nose and stiffly curled red wig in the second (both of which James Mason, as her future husband Norman Maine, mocks and discards)—are merely interruptions to the consistent design and application of the “before” and “after” beauty makeup, variations in lip hue or color intensity notwithstanding, that both women sport in other narrative contexts. Gaynor’s facial appearance remains virtually identical whether she is ostensibly acting on a film set—even in a white period wig—or just coming from one, making breakfast in a trailer in the woods, or accepting an Academy Award. Garland’s looks are more variable partly because of her stylized production numbers, and following her husband’s death her lips and skin are muted in tone. But otherwise she, too, looks the same before her discovery and afterward,

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accepting her own Academy Award in cosmetics that are identical to those she is wearing when we see her for the first time. When she applies her own lipstick in several scenes, she is again adding to what has already been perfectly limned by a studio makeup artist. Even when Garland cries real tears in a single threeminute take in her character’s dressing room, wiping them from her face as they fall from her eyes and smearing her makeup as a consequence, both the tears and the smears are minimized by the close-up at the end of the scene. In other words, while we are purportedly given access to a behind-the-curtains reality in such films, in fact their makeover scenes virtually always produce a face that is there already, as it were, since there is no prior “naked” version of that face to which we are given access. This is especially ironic given that, in both versions of A Star Is Born, “glamour” is made the narrative object of derision that the “natural” appearance of the “new” stars is meant to supplant. The famous “magic carpet ride” montage in the Technicolor Rita Hayworth–Gene Kelly musical Cover Girl (1944), on the other hand, though set in and about Broadway and New York City rather than Hollywood, again features an uncredited makeup artist “played” by Columbia’s department chief Clay Campbell (who is the credited artist on the film, as Helen Hunt was for hairstyling), who is wearing a fair amount of foundation himself. Perhaps because in this instance glamour is the narrative goal, the scene is more instructive both for what it does, and does not, show about the studio processes that construct it. (Campbell is using a “set case” for his cosmetic supplies, of the sort that a makeup artist would have carried to a film set.) To prepare Hayworth’s character for a magazine cover shoot, Campbell first rubs her face with a heavy coating of cold cream. Only in this shot can we briefly glimpse, through the smears, the outline of her natural lips and her thin shaved eyebrows as she sits with her hair wrapped in a white towel. Campbell next precisely paints color on and slightly outside her lips before dusting her entire face liberally with powder that he brushes off. All is followed by the removal, by an uncredited hairdresser (who is not Helen Hunt) and her assistant, of the pins holding Hayworth’s curls in place. The final shots are of the star in the full beauty makeup that she has worn prior to this scene and that she will wear after it. Notable is the absence from the montage of the application of foundation, rouge, or other products besides powder, or any eye treatment whatsoever, as though the flawless satin finish of Hayworth’s skin, her rosy cheeks, her painted eyebrows, and her gray-blue eye cosmetic and long false eyelashes were all there to begin with. Her coiffures sometimes change—she is given one of the most obviously unusual ones, upswept and with an artificial roll in the front, for the scene preceding the montage, which is similar to those Hayworth wears when she is playing her own grandmother, in modern makeup, in flashback—but the hairdress in which she emerges from her “makeover” is identical to the long, curly bob with fluffy bangs that she has sported in early scenes, and will retain in most later ones, on or off a theater stage.

Clay Campbell’s makeup set case and palette in Cover Girl (1944, makeup credit Clay Campbell and hair Helen Hunt), and dusting Rita Hayworth’s made-up face with powder. The blue-gray colors on the palette were used frequently on eyelids. Max Factor products are visible in the background. Frame enlargements.

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Even Vertigo, in which Kim Novak’s visual transformation from the workingclass Judy into the aristocratic Madeleine Elster is such an important plot point and which is also handled through an (even briefer) makeup and hairdressing montage at a department store Arden salon, depends less on the alteration of Novak’s facial features than on returning the color and style of her partly wigged coiffures from a long, dark russet bob with fluffy pincurls across the brow to the iconic blond chignon that so obsesses James Stewart’s Scottie. The hue of her lips and half-shaved dark eyebrows is slightly desaturated for the blond Madeleine, and the applied beauty mark on Judy’s left cheek disappears; there is also more diffusion in some of Madeleine’s close-ups. The chic beauty of Madeleine herself, moreover, invokes the “lavender blonde” star image of Novak, designed by Clay Campbell, that had made her a potent box-office name and that Hitchcock, through Madeleine’s comparison with Judy, both deconstructs and glorifies. Aligned with but also in contrast to the recursive “makeovers” of the films just mentioned are those in which a female lead character is transformed from an “ugly duckling” into a swan, such that the beauty makeup now supports the characterization as well as the story. However, sartorial and physical transformations in these films virtually always occur off-screen. The black-and-white Now, Voyager (makeup by Perc Westmore) is one of the most famous examples of this strategy, in which a severe wig, heavy eyebrows, and a lack of eye makeup and lip color on the artificially dumpy character as which Bette Davis first appears give way to a vision of fashionable loveliness, without showing any of the steps— other than getting rid of spectacles she does not need—by which this occurred. Stills of Davis’s “ugliness” in the film were even used in promotional magazine articles—which showcased Perc Westmore—as examples of “incorrect” makeup and hairdressing.79 (When Ginger Rogers played a movie star with agoraphobia attempting to remain incognito by wearing glasses and false teeth—and full beauty makeup everywhere else—in In Person in 1935, however, the studio refused to release any publicity photographs of the deglamorized star at all.)80 In the romantic fantasy The Enchanted Cottage, Dorothy McGuire’s character is also transformed from “terrible homely,” as a young boy calls her, to lovely, though much of her homeliness is rendered by her roughly cut and stringy hair and the unflattering shadows of hard, high-contrast illumination. The latter is replaced by three-point and diffused lighting and lens filters as she later becomes beautiful through the love of her facially disfigured husband (Robert Young), who also becomes flawlessly handsome to her through the same methods. (Maurice Seiderman was the uncredited makeup artist.) Leslie Caron, in the widescreen and Eastman Color literal Cinderella story The Glass Slipper (1955, makeup by William Tuttle and hair by Sydney Guilaroff), begins the film with her entire face and visible body skin covered with shiny black smudges (applied over Pan-Stik and body makeup), but every other feature is perfectly groomed with cosmetics.

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When she is “transformed” for the ball, the only change—down to the asymmetrical cut of her short hair—is the removal of the “dirt.” In these cases makeup and hairdressing must be employed both to make the star unattractive and to convert her (or him) to the glamour that the narrative demands, though the processes by which this occurs are elided. (Toward the end of The Heiress, de Havilland’s character is given a softer and better-fitting costume, slightly heavier mascara, and more elaborately styled hair that covers her somewhat prominent ears, but the rest of her makeup does not change.) But consider also Sunset Blvd., in which, rather than being deployed uncritically as a Hollywood trope, the issue of what Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond looks like undergoing a “merciless series of treatments” to look younger, or wearing a chin sling and wrinkle tape, becomes a sign of Norma’s tortured relationship to her past identity as a movie star. But while William Holden’s voice-over proclaims that she “put on about half a pound of makeup” to visit Cecil B. DeMille at her old studio, she looks the same then as she does in other scenes. (Before she leaves, Erich von Stroheim, as Norma’s former director and now factotum Max, tells her to correct a shadow that is “not quite balanced.”) Moreover, both her upper and lower eyelids are rimmed with white and her artificial lashes laden with mascara to resemble beading, which reinforces the wide-eyed crazed look that situates the character in the past, such that Norma’s foil really becomes the youth and “natural” eyebrows and beauty makeup of Nancy Olson, who plays a studio story editor. (Given Olson’s surface flawlessness, she is likely equally laden with cosmetics, including artificial eyelashes.) And only female characters, of course, ever smear their faces with cosmetics as a function of despair and rage about the loss of their youth and beauty, as Vivien Leigh—then fifty-two, playing a divorcée who was forty-six—does in the black-and-white Ship of Fools (1965), which, as with Sunset Blvd., simultaneously draws attention to and undercuts the notion that glamour can be created purely through the proper deployment of the photogenic formula.81 But arguably the clearest demonstration of the odd but fascinating conventionality of beauty makeup occurs in films whose narratives must visually represent aging, the topic of the next section. As is the case with some of the other tropes discussed above, films with a story in which a star’s character grows older draw their force as much from the contrast between the glamour of anachronistic formula makeup denoting youth and that by which, through various degrees of science- and art-based virtuosity, he or she is transformed in ways that are often unconnected to the realities of advancing age’s effects on most men and women. (As is well known, Gloria Swanson had to be artificially aged for Sunset Blvd. because she did not appear old at fifty.) The amount of effort expended on realism depended on many variables, including how willing a performer was to surrender his or her artificially created flawless skin and other features in the depiction of narrative events. (“If you really

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went for natural [in aging], you wouldn’t be considered glamorous,” as Michael Westmore put it to me.)82 But for ambitious actors, aging was a chance to show that glamour was not the only basis of their appeal nor the limits of their skill, and the same was true of the makeup artists and hairdressers who helped them create an alternate characterization of their glamorous selves in a recognizable way. Thus, while makeup artists certainly worked to develop new additive techniques for changing the physical contours of the face that resulted, ultimately, in what most would understand to be a far more convincing representation of wrinkles, sags, and other such signs by the 1940s, once more there is no straightforward trajectory of “progress” toward realism at any studio. For many in charge as well as for some stars, “all they cared about,” in Michael Westmore’s words, “was that there was a change, not that it was realistic. There had to be a semblance of age, but the change could be slight if it read as ‘getting old.’” (This is in contrast to today, he notes, when “it had better be real—if the script says you’re fifty, you’d better look fifty,”83 notwithstanding the enormous visual variations of “middle age” that so flummoxed the producers of Sunset Blvd.) Besides the familiar all-purpose strategy of reducing the contrast of the tone of lips, eyes, and skin, methods in use during the studio era included what Perc Westmore called the “squint system,” which he claimed to have developed for the 1925 Goldwyn production of Stella Dallas, whereby he traced, with a makeup pencil, the “natural” facial lines and wrinkles created when a performer tightened his or her facial features.84 Michael Westmore described to me a later version of this method: “You’d put on a darker shade of makeup, then the actor squinted up their face; you put a coat of grease on it, then powdered it. You could use up to three coats of grease, and it made the wrinkles more obvious but subtle.”85 The method for making a performer look temporarily younger by a few years was accomplished by the “instant face-lift,” tabs glued to the skin at various spots around the hairline that were attached to elastics or strings that were tied at the top and back of the head and covered by hair or a wig. (The Westmores gave instructions for how ordinary women could accomplish this—one wonders how many tried— in their 1956 Westmore Beauty Book.)86 Esther Williams recounts slapping costar William Powell, then in his midfifties, during the filming of MGM’s The Hoodlum Saint (1946) and thinking he had had a stroke because her slap (which was in the script) had broken the elastics holding up one side of his face—“half of him looked thirtysomething; the other half looked like the picture of Dorian Gray,” in her words.87 Genre was also a potent force in how aging was handled. Comedies often involved stereotypical looks drawn from vaudeville or other theatrical conventions; see Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour as comic geezers at the beginning and end of Paramount’s The Road to Utopia (1945), whose young and smooth skin is crisscrossed with the unconvincing lines and splotches of

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“old-age” stage makeup. That said, until the 1940s, regardless of genre the physical effects of advanced age on the skin were rarely indicated by much more than shadowing and lines drawn on the face, even if realism was the ostensible goal. This is the case for Norma Shearer as Nina and Clark Gable as Ned in the black-and-white MGM adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude (1932). The characters begin the film in their twenties, and the only sign that Nina has reached the advanced age of what the shooting script says is thirty-eight is a wide white streak in Shearer’s hair that accompanies the same full beauty makeup (Gable gets both gray temples and a gray mustache). But when Nina and Ned reach their stooped and feeble fifties, the number of metonymic signs increase: their lips are pallid, their faces marked with painted lines and shading, and both are completely “gray,” all of Gable’s hair and mustache streaked with encrustations of nearly white cosmetic in a manner that will be familiar to any classical Hollywood movie fan, whether the film is in black and white or color and regardless of genre. (The same method was used to age Paul Robeson, playing Joe, for the first sound version of Show Boat [1936]; in The Road to Utopia; and even on the male chorus in “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.) The uncredited makeup by Ern Westmore for the first film version of Edna Ferber’s western Cimarron (1931), however, in which the leads, Irene Dunne and Richard Dix, age a couple of decades too was careful and expert. But even with stars willing to forgo glamour for some of the duration of the film, the available techniques simply did not allow for the building up and incising of surfaces on the face and body in close-up, such that the depredations of time are indicated primarily through what Ern’s nephew Michael calls “very obvious” shading and lines drawn on the forehead, at the corner of the eyes and mouth, and under the eyes88 (Dunne’s neck and chest, when visible, are impossibly youthful), which the panchromatic stock makes more convincing than they would be in color. For the 1960 CinemaScope and Metro Color version, William Tuttle and John Truwe were able literally to furrow brows and wrinkle skin as well as to build up bags and create sags with thin latex “makeup.” Like the aging of Bette Davis, by Perc Westmore, into an diphtheria-ravaged woman of fifty in Mr. Skeffington (1944), Wally Westmore’s extraordinary makeup for Barbara Stanwyck playing a centenarian in the framing story of The Great Man’s Lady also benefited from the development, across several studios at once, of liquid latex and other chemicals that, when dried over stretched skin, produced wrinkling, or that could be used to make convincing skin-like masks for the neck or the entire face.89 (These products also enabled the developments of appliances, such as noses and ears, that could be used on the damaged faces of returning war veterans and accident victims and the like, and studio makeup artists, including the Westmores and Gordon Bau, participated in this important work.)90 See also the rendering of Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson from youth to old age in Giant (makeup supervisor, Gordon Bau).

Publicity photograph of Jack Pierce applying old-age makeup to Paul Robeson for Show Boat (1936). (The scene was ultimately cut from the film.) Bison Archives and Hollywood Historic Photos.

Barbara Stanwyck as a centenarian in the present in The Great Man’s Lady (1941, makeup credit Wally Westmore) and in modern makeup in a flashback to her character’s past. Frame enlargements.

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Arguably more important than such cosmetic innovations, however, is that in the films mentioned here much of the running time is devoted to showing the stars as young and glamorous versions of whatever old age they achieve narratively. In the majority of films, then, aging is meant to be understood in comparison with the flawlessness of the star not only in his or her other films but also in different scenes in the same film.91 Thus, when a film does not include a younger version of a leading character, she or he is even less likely to be aged in any realistic sense. In the Technicolor The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), for example, a thirty-year-old Bette Davis plays a Queen Elizabeth who is repeatedly referred to, by herself primarily, as “old.” But there are no scenes in the film of the queen in her youth, and Davis sports virtually no signs of age on her smooth, unwrinkled face and neck beyond the use of a grayish foundation on her cheeks and the tip of her nose (her lips are a bright coral pink, but her eyes lack color as well). Davis’s forehead and natural eyebrows were famously shaved—the brows are redrawn as sharp thin lines—and her eyelashes cut in the interests of “historical accuracy.” But the one thing that the credited makeup artist, Perc Westmore, avoids is indicating visually that the character is actually an old lady rather than a young actor somewhat impressionistically made up to suggest one. (Harsh toplighting in one scene does a better job of making her look haggard.) This is really the same strategy followed even in Sunset Blvd. or A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, makeup by Gordon Bau), in which the antinomies of glamour and undesirability are often indicated by how intently a character pursues the maintenance of youthful features through artificial blandishment. The irony is that even a visually lovely woman trying to look young, like Norma Desmond, Vivien Leigh’s Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, or Rita Hayworth playing a movie star past her prime in Separate Tables (1958, makeup credited to Harry Maret and Frank Prehoda, hairstyles to Joan St. Oegger and Helene Parrish), is, like Davis in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, far more to be punished by the story (and hard lighting) than an elderly character who ends up in a full gray or white wig and a face covered with painted lines and circles or latex wrinkles. Not until the studio system was in decline was beauty makeup itself used in more highly stylized ways in connection with aging, such as the gruesomely exaggerated makeup and hair (there is no credit for either) sported by Davis (who was fifty-four) in the Grand Guignol of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), in which there is no possibility offered of real contrast between the young Davis and her garish “present.” If Davis is to be believed, she designed her own makeup and wanted to look like old women on Hollywood Boulevard who “once were actresses, and were now unemployed. I felt Jane never washed her face, just added another layer of makeup each day.”92 (Michael Westmore, however, claims that Perc created Davis’s makeup, grinding artists’ pastels on sandpaper to use as eye shadow—“Why? Because he could.”)93 In contrast, the past glamour of Joan

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Crawford as Blanche is shown in the old films that Blanche watches on television. Indeed, Crawford’s makeup, until the end when dark shading is used to turn her cheeks hollow and her eyes sunken as she dies at the seashore, is substantially the same, though more starkly lit, as that employed in the romantic roles of her late career. And while we never see a younger version of Elizabeth Taylor as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, again most spectators would have compared Martha’s appearance to Taylor’s other glamour roles and her comparative youth (she was thirty-three, while in the Edward Albee play on which the film is based Martha was in her early fifties). As this excursion into one of the most common forms of character makeup has aimed to suggest, even as new techniques became available the representation of a star’s aging was often less concerned with reality-based transformation than with maintaining the ideals of beauty and handsomeness as the normative state of individuals whom Hollywood deemed worthy of our attention. The same is true of characters in narratives in which there would be no reasonable explanation of glamour at all, or at that moment in the story at least, yet there it is. However strong the pressure that a film’s story could exert on the photogenic formula, then, beauty and handsomeness persist as the ideals against which these register as such, supported by their absence from certain sorts of characters and, to some extent, the actors who played them. And of course even “plain” or “unattractive” characters (if they are putatively white enough; racism is as usual a complicating factor here) are never “uncontrived,” to repeat James Naremore’s words, though the amount or visual intensity of the cosmetics they wear may be less.94 For an uncredited office worker in the black-and-white Barbara Stanwyck vehicle Baby Face (1933), who sports a severe smooth bob and thick glasses and pale lips, her apparent lack of beauty makeup is expressly designed to define her against the au courant platinum coiffure and heavily accented skin, eyes, and mouth of Stanwyck’s social-climbing siren. Interestingly, in part because of the film’s pre-Code status, Black actress Theresa Harris, playing the Stanwyck character’s family servant and friend, wears makeup throughout Baby Face that is strikingly similar to that worn by the star herself in many scenes, although she has fewer close-ups. Harris, who had a fairly extensive Hollywood career but not in the starring roles she deserved, plays Ginger Rogers’s equally glamorous and au courant maid in Professional Sweetheart as well—also pre-Code—and takes her place as a radio singer in one scene. Working within the technical and ideological limits as well as potentialities of the crafts at particular historical junctures, the often breathtaking skill and sometimes artistry of makeup artists and hairdressers, credited or not, marks all the films and the tropes I have just discussed. In the remainder of this chapter, I focus in more detail on films that, while their reasons for doing so are various (or unknown), even more clearly engage what fealty to glamour means to stories and characters and, by extension, stars in connection to visual realism—if not consistently then in certain noteworthy moments. I begin with a film made at

Barbara Stanwyck’s glamour contrasted with that of an uncredited office worker, and her visual similarity to the maid and friend played by Theresa Harris in the pre-Code film Baby Face (1933, no makeup or hair credit). Frame enlargements.

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the height of the silent era, and end in the 1950s. Some of these films I stumbled upon; others I sought out because of what I had read about them. MGM’s Lady of the Night (1925) is notable for the two different sorts of glamour in which it trades because of the double role played by its star, Norma Shearer. After a scene in which a poor man (played by Lew Helmer) is sentenced by a rich judge to twenty years in jail, leaving his wife (uncredited) and baby daughter unsupported, the narrative moves forward to show his now-motherless eighteenyear-old daughter Molly (Shearer) being released from reform school. At the same time, the judge’s motherless daughter Florence (also Shearer) is leaving her exclusive girls’ school, and the rest of the film details how each falls in love with the same inventor (Malcolm McGregor), who of course does not seem to notice the girls’ physical resemblance (nor does anyone else in the film). When the two women eventually meet—Lady of the Night is now perhaps most famous for the shot of the two hugging in a cab, in which Shearer is replaced, for a few seconds, by Joan Crawford, her future MGM rival—Molly decides that Florence would make the better match for the inventor, and gives him up. Throughout the film there appears to be less powder and greasepaint on the skin of the lower-class Molly than the upper-class Florence, perhaps because the latter is shot with more diffusion and softer lighting. Molly’s “hardness” is thus also indicated through the clarity of her face in her close-ups as opposed to the misty haloed shots of Florence. But it is the treatment of eyes, lips, and hair that most obviously demarcates the two. In Molly’s introduction as an adult, when she “graduates” from reform school, she is given several lengthy close-ups that are denied to Florence, and her makeup appears designed to look pretty but not glamorous. (Molly’s two friends wear far more makeup than she in these outdoor shots.) But otherwise, with a few important exceptions, in the rest of the film Molly has heavily lined and shadowed eyes, eyelashes loaded with mascara (they are not quite beaded), starkly drawn eyebrows (random hairs are visible between the half-shaved brows, the outer edges of which have been redrawn well beyond their natural length), and precisely outlined and glossy “black” bee-stung lips. Her dark hair is pomaded, with large spitcurls in front of each ear, and she also has acquired two beauty marks, one of which comes and goes. We are undoubtedly meant to see this makeup design as a sign of Molly’s lack of class, but it also gives her a strong resemblance to other popular stars of the era, like Pola Negri and Gloria Swanson. And as the film’s title suggests, Molly is the protagonist rather than the lovely Florence, who has lighter lips, eyebrows drawn in a straighter and shorter line, less eyeshadow and mascara, and fluffy rather than pomaded hair that haloes her head. The emphasis on, and sympathy toward, Molly not only adds to her glamour but makes cosmetics largely the source of it, while the diffused Florence, though certainly designed to be attractive as well, becomes a character whose appearance one scarcely can remember after the film is over.

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When the persistent gum-smacking and outré egret “hat” that Molly wears to her favorite dance hall are gone in more intimate domestic scenes, she looks even more like a movie star, and without the “pasty-looking” face of Mary Pickford, for example, in that year’s Little Annie Rooney. Although a few of the dance hall denizens in Lady of the Night do have powdered white faces, others, like Molly’s father, do not. To us, now, Helmer looks normal, real, his face ruggedly handsome (he somewhat resembles Spencer Tracy in any of his star vehicles). But at the time, the variations in his facial contours and the shading of his skin were likely emblematic of something different. To be a leading man—or lady—in most silent films was not to have any “greasy spots,” to repeat Mary Astor’s words, as opposed to an actor playing a criminal. (We never learn what crime Molly’s father is guilty of, just that his sentence was harsh; his wife in bed with their new daughter is, in contrast, made up as her daughter will be later.) McGregor’s face is a blend of the two, both less masklike and less natural than Helmer’s, as befits his educated and honest but working-class status, which he will rise above through marriage to Florence. But it is the uneasy balancing act by which cosmetics are made part of both Molly’s and Florence’s attractiveness, and—costuming aside—only hair, beauty marks, and diffusion are used to differentiate the two characters, that makes Lady of the Night a primer for how cosmetic-based glamour and “looking natural” could be reconciled in star images more broadly. The beauty makeup is calibrated differently on the two women, but in both cases it is meaningful as makeup. Molly’s hairdress is subdued when she is at home alone, and in other scenes in which she is demonstrating her forlorn affection for McGregor’s character, the diminished number of beauty marks and the plainer hair serving as signs of who she “really” is as opposed to the brassy and overdressed “lady of the night” who frequents the dance hall. (The seediness of that milieu is partly indicated stereotypically by the presence of Black musicians and a white man lustfully kissing an Asian woman as they dance.) Florence lets down her long, girlish hair when she prays before going to bed, and of course wears beauty makeup—as does Molly—to sleep. But in a crosscut scene in which both characters prepare for dates, Molly gazes directly into the camera, the “mirror,” in sharp focus as she applies lipstick, while the misty Florence looks off to the side more demurely and instead touches a perfume stopper to her lips. Although we have only seen one woman apply makeup, because of the casting stunt the scene, like the entire film, suggests that, diffusion aside, only makeup and hairdressing distinguish one character from the other, creating a tension between the put-on and the natural that helps us to see Molly as a human being as worthy of love as Florence. A different dynamic marks another MGM Shearer vehicle, the “comedy drama” Let Us Be Gay (1930). In contrast to Lady of the Night, Let Us Be Gay suggests that there is only one type of beauty—and it depends absolutely, in ways the film does not show us, on makeup and hairdressing. In a sense, Let Us Be Gay also features Shearer in a double role, but this time the transformation is of the main character alone. Shearer plays Kitty, the mousy wife and mother of two

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whose husband (Rod LaRocque) is cheating on her. After divorcing him, she takes a three-year trip to Europe, which we do not witness, returning transformed visually and winning him back. And in the film’s opening—and noncomic— scenes, Shearer is made exceptionally plain: her skin and lips are of an equivalent pale shade, and her eyes and even her brows show no signs of any form of enhancement. (Her fuzzy and untidy hair, an obvious weft wig, is also drawn low over her forehead.) But when Kitty returns from Europe—indicated by an intertitle and dialogue only—she sports flawless beauty makeup and a new hairdo, her appearance now an intriguing, and increasingly characteristic, blending of the approaches to Molly and Florence in the earlier film. That the visual change to someone even her former husband can scarcely recognize is the result of cosmetics and a new hairdress is never mentioned, but the husband is so attracted to Kitty’s increase in what is simply referred to as “sophistication” that she takes him back. (Marie Dressler plays a society matron who enlists Kitty’s help in trying to keep him from marrying her granddaughter.) Here, the lack of makeup on a star—Shearer was one of the biggest in Hollywood at that point—is more noticeable than her subsequent glamour, which is now naturalized as what attractive and fashionable women “should” look like, although neither Shearer’s biographer nor the contemporary reviews I have read refer, beyond the occasional use of the word dowdy, to the fact that the star is virtually unrecognizable in the film’s opening scenes. (Incredibly, Louella Parsons’s review mentions only Shearer’s “ability to look beautiful all the time” and states that she is “dazzling to look at,” while the film’s advertising uses the catchphrase “stunningly beautiful” to refer to the star.)95 In fact, I have found no resource that provides any information about who or what motivated the use of Shearer’s unadorned features in Let Us Be Gay. Given her power as “queen of the lot” at MGM at the time—she was married to executive producer Irving Thalberg—she certainly had a great deal of say about how she looked. (According to rumor, she had at least one director fired because he did not properly handle the fact that one of her eyes was slightly crossed.) And the wig, and her shapeless costume, would have provided sufficient narrative information even if she also wore lipstick or mascara. That there are so few other films in which a young and glamorous star is visually not wearing any cosmetics at all for an extended period is yet another sign of the presumed value, to stars and studios, of beauty makeup itself. (Even Barbara Stanwyck’s famously plain features at the end of Stella Dallas are supposedly those of someone old enough to have a grown child.) That said, in the aforementioned Ginger Rogers vehicle In Person (1935), in addition to the buck teeth and glasses and a dark wig that her character wears for much of the first quarter of the film—the on-screen removal of the wig reveals perfectly coiffed and shiny platinum hair underneath—there is a scene in which Rogers’s face and dinner dress are smeared due to an exploding stove. I have never seen any other film of the era—even Let Us Be Gay—in which a female star’s face is made so

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Above, Norma Shearer in a dual role in Lady of the Night (1925, no makeup or hair credit); Molly putting on lipstick, crosscut with Florence touching perfume to her lips in a diffused shot. Below, before and after the “trip to Europe” in Let Us Be Gay (1930, no makeup or hair credit). Frame enlargements.

bizarre in its appearance, the smudges and shadows giving Rogers’s face the appearance of a damaged photographic negative in the subsequent shots. The desire of the famously ambitious Rogers to be a good actress, however, led her to insist on appearing in dramatic films following her nine 1930s musicals with Fred Astaire, and the dialectic of realism and glamour is foregrounded to an even greater extent in RKO’s black-and-white Primrose Path (1940), which costars Joel McCrea. The same dialectic marks MGM’s Strange Cargo (also, like The Grapes of Wrath, released in 1940), starring Joan Crawford—who was also legendarily ambitious and wanted to be taken seriously as an actress—and Clark Gable. And in contrast to the films just discussed, we do have some information about the intentionality behind the female stars’ appearance: in their later memoirs each claims to have herself made the decision “not to wear any” cosmetics (Rogers) or to “eschew” makeup (Crawford) in the interests of realistic characterization.96 (Both women did receive Academy Award nominations for their acting; Shearer won one in 1930 for her glamour-drenched role in The Divorcee—her fifth “talkie”—but I cannot help but feel that Let Us Be Gay influenced the voters too.) In Crawford’s case, she was apparently partly reacting to “cracks” then rampant in the press about her characteristic “[false] eyelashes and exaggerated makeup,”97 while Rogers was trying to exceed the limits of the romantic

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comedies and musicals that had heretofore defined her screen persona. (In Person was also an attempt to “go solo” in the midst of her partnership with Astaire.) Both films’ narratives certainly make the lack of makeup plausible, but in fact nothing of the sort transpires, or not to the degree that the actors’ comments would lead a viewer to expect. (That they state that they determined their own looks in these and other of their films I do not take to mean that Rogers or Crawford designed or applied all of their cosmetics themselves; rather, as was usually the case, as big stars they would have been able to collaborate with studio personnel about how they wanted to look.) In Primrose Path (no credited makeup artist), women and their concerns drive the narrative. Rogers plays a poor teenager, Ellie May, growing up along the shore. She has an alcoholic and dysfunctional but highly educated father whom she adores and a mother who likes to “party” with other men (as did her grandmother before her). Ellie May falls in love with Ed (McCrea), the owner of a local diner, and leaves her family behind to marry him. Though Ed finds out about the career path the women in the family have followed (which Ellie May’s young sister gives every indication of joining), after a series of contrived misunderstandings—and the accidental death of Ellie May’s mother at the hands of her father in an alcoholfueled rage—all ends happily, with Ed eventually taking firm masculine and unintellectual control of the fortunes and future of the wayward female family. The working-class ethos of the film is supported by the sets—especially the shabbiness of Ellie May’s dwelling—and the frequent references to the nearby cannery which is the major source of local employment. (Many scenes are shot outdoors on or near the shore.) But the first sight of Rogers gives an indication of the film’s strategic deployment of both makeup and hairdressing, which is somewhere between full romantic glamour—as is the case with the “Portugee gals” who work at the cannery as well, whom Ellie May sees as competition for Ed’s attention—and the more documentary realism of the setting. Rogers is introduced in what would appear to be a gray sweatshirt over a skirt and tennis shoes, but all of her other costumes, including her waitress uniform, are tailored and lovely. And while her pigtailed hair in the first scenes is now dark rather than the bright blond of most of Rogers’s previous star vehicles, the hair at the crown of her head is carefully waved, and will remain so in the fashionably coiffed, and very clean, long bob she wears for the rest of the film. As for the lack of makeup, here it applies not to her eyes (without exception Rogers wears liner, shadow, and false eyelashes in every scene), eyebrows (they are always perfectly groomed), or darkly glossy mouth (which is always lined just outside the natural contour of Rogers’s lips), but purely to her skin, which throughout the film is shiny and, in close-ups, adorned with some of Rogers’s “real” freckles too. Strange Cargo, in which Crawford plays Julie, a “dance-hall girl who is kicked off a tropical island and falls in with an escaping band of convicts,”98 in Crawford’s words, has a credited makeup “creator,” Jack Dawn, who was likely primarily interested in the sweaty and stubbled formula ruggedness of Clark Gable

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Ginger Rogers in Primrose Path (1940, no makeup or hair credit) and Joan Crawford in Strange Cargo (1940, makeup credit Jack Dawn). In both cases the stars claimed not to be wearing makeup, a circumstance that applies primarily to skin and, in Crawford’s case, the shade of her lips. Frame enlargements.

and the other male actors—Crawford is the only female star—as the small band of miscreants makes its way through a jungle and ends up stranded at sea alone in a boat before reaching shore. Julie’s glamour is established quickly by her tight sequined dress, her perfect hunter’s bow lips, her flawless matte skin and shaped eyebrows, and, in addition to eyeliner and shadow, her obvious false eyelashes. (Crawford is made up similarly, in fact, to the sexualized marriage-busting character she had just played in The Women.) But as Julie’s narrative situation progressively deteriorates, not only does her dress become more ragged (Crawford claims to have herself bought it off the rack) but the blandishment of her features is reduced, first with the addition of facial smudges, then by lips—still lined into a hunter’s bow—made to be almost the same pale shade as her slightly shiny skin. Her hair, too, becomes wilder, though it is always visibly clean even as the amount of dirt on her face grows. Not until a scene on the boat where Julie is close to dying of starvation and exposure does she finally, for the first time, go without false eyelashes or heavy foundation—some of Crawford’s freckles are visible here—though she is still shot with diffusion and three-point lighting. When the boat’s passengers are saved, though there has been no break in the action the false eyelashes return to stay. The convincing beard that Gable had

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begun to grow—his hair, though, remains the same length across the film—is shaved in an ellipsis before the final romantic clinch, when Julie, or rather Crawford, is again fully “herself,” a flawlessly polished and glamorous star. For Rogers and Crawford, then, as for all of those male actors resistant to “wearing makeup,” it was what was done to the skin that seemed to matter the most, such that “realism” came not from an absence of cosmetics on the eyes or lips or a lack of carefully dressed hair but from drawing attention to what is usually underneath the greasepaint and powder that were the primary indicators of white glamour in the 1930s. (This is in contrast to The Heiress, in which de Havilland’s features are comparatively plain but Pan-Cake is used to smooth out her skin.) That said, only Crawford has unkempt hair and gives up false eyelashes, however briefly, in the service of narrative. Ironically, in RKO’s Kitty Foyle (1940), for which Rogers did win a Best Actress Oscar, she plays a motherless workingclass character who is fifteen in some scenes, and only as a teenager is her nose shiny. And as in Primrose Path, in all other scenes of Rogers in Kitty Foyle—as a teenager, as an office worker, going out on the town, even while recovering in a hospital bed after giving birth to a baby who dies—she wears long artificial eyelashes and again hunter’s bow lips, though in the hospital bed they are of a lighter shade. Never is her coiffure disordered, except for a very effective crooked part in her pigtailed teenage hair which says more than dialogue about the fact that Kitty has effectively raised herself; when she needs help taking care of her invalid father as an adult, however, Myrtle (Hattie Noel), a Black caretaker, is always available. Rogers also claimed not to have worn “too much makeup” in Heartbeat (1947), in which she played a “simple street girl.”99 As in Primrose Path, this meant that her face, in Rogers’s words, “shines like a polished apple” in a few scenes, while across the film every other feature is flawless, and her blond hair impossibly and fancily styled. Yet the mole on Rogers’s face is not visible except as a slight bump in either Primrose Path or Kitty Foyle, meaning that even her skin was not completely makeup-free. (In terms of at least momentary deglamorization, In Person remains to me a far more daring film than either Primrose Path or Kitty Foyle, though it was a box-office as well as a critical disappointment perhaps as a result.) Only in the postwar The Heiress is a star’s glamour reduced altogether, but even there, by contrasting de Havilland’s makeup and hair with those of the actors playing her “prettier” relatives and servants, formula beauty is the characteristic whose absence makes her undesirable to Montgomery Clift’s fortune-hunting Morris, which everyone but the protagonist understands. (De Havilland also won an Oscar for The Heiress.) Full beauty makeup, of course, continued to dominate in many films in the postwar era, especially in Technicolor musicals and big-budget spectaculars. But even studios that had once gloried in the extravagance of their production values became interested in lower-budget films as their perpetually thin profit margins declined in the 1950s. And for some makeup artists and hairdressers, the increase of independent and on-location production freed them from the

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strictures of the makeup chief’s directions, and allowed them to be recognized with the screen credits those chiefs had always taken for themselves. In marked contrast, for example, to Columbia’s studio-shot film noir The Big Heat (1953) and its considerable star glamour, the Samuel Fuller film Pickup on South Street, made the same year for Twentieth Century-Fox and with makeup credited to Ben Nye, features hard, high-contrast lighting; much location shooting; documentarystyle character actors; and a protagonist, Skip (Richard Widmark), who is a cheap crook, unlike the detective hero played by Glenn Ford in The Big Heat. Skip steals the purse of a woman named Candy (Jean Peters) in a crowded subway car, but the purse turns out to contain government microfilm that she is delivering to her crooked boyfriend. And as one might expect given the strategies employed in Primrose Path and Strange Cargo, Candy’s skin is uniformly shiny throughout as a sign of her class status. (The film implies that she, like Gloria Grahame’s Debbie in The Big Heat, is a prostitute with a heart of gold.) Nevertheless, despite a lack of diffusion in some of her close-ups, Peters always wears, even when she is soaking wet, heavy eye and lip makeup and false eyelashes, and has thick and dark but beautifully groomed eyebrows. (Thelma Ritter, playing a doomed police informant, appears to be wearing little makeup and is lit harshly in nearly all her scenes, several of which are tight close-ups.) When Candy is in a hospital bed after a beating, with two bruises and a cut above her lip and glycerin tears added to her face, her other features are flawless; only her lips, though still made up outside their natural contours, are lighter. And in all of her romantic scenes with Skip—which includes the hospital scene—the lighting and focus on Candy are softer, as befits a pair of lovers who will eventually try to give up their criminal ways. Her curly hairstyle remains similar throughout but for a continuity error in the first subway scene where the back is arranged differently from shot to otherwise matched shot, or when her head is bandaged in the hospital bed. However much cosmetics and coiffures are calibrated to convey narrative information as well as to identify and define characters and their values, then, the very skillfulness with which cosmetics are applied even in the postwar period serves to make us aware that the protagonists, regardless of genre, remain movie stars who are acting. (When Debbie in The Big Heat has a pot of boiling coffee thrown in her face, she quickly ends up with an unconvincing latex “burn” on half of her face while the other half remains lovely.) Thus, the removal of one or more of the material constituents of glamour also paradoxically reminds us of how dependent stardom remained on flawlessness as a value. But the lead actors, Ernest Borgnine and Betsy Blair, of the black-and-white Marty (1955), had no prior star roles to define their images, although Borgnine had appeared in a number of character roles in film and on television. Shot cheaply and quickly on location in New York, Marty was a box-office and critical success, both partly due to what Blair later wrote was the story’s “simplicity [and] authenticity.” The characters—a plain schoolteacher, Clara (Blair), and a chubby butcher (Borgnine)—also were of a type “who don’t usually figure in

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the world according to Hollywood.”100 (In contrast to Pickup on South Street or The Big Heat, there is no crime or fantastic event to drive the narrative, simply a man living with his mother who has to decide whether he wants to be happy or not.) Robert Schiffer was credited with the makeup, Agnes Flanagan the hairstyles. And even in the absence of big names or flashy drama it should not shock any reader that it is primarily the sheen of Blair’s unpowdered skin and the lighter shade applied to her lips that signify her lack of glamour as against her mascara, groomed eyebrows, and simple but well-coiffed long, curly bob—or that Marty’s emotional states are rendered by the condition of Borgnine’s skin, the range stretching from shiny to very shiny. But the makeup and hair do serve first to literalize the blandness of Clara’s and Marty’s lonely lives and then, as their attachment strengthens in one long scene, to signal the couple’s growing love and even passion through a subtle increase in the intensity of Blair’s lip color and eye makeup and extra curl in her hair, and a concomitant muting of the sweaty crags of Borgnine’s face. Schiffer also designed the makeup for Crime of Passion (1956), another melodrama starring Barbara Stanwyck as what the New York Times called a “homicidal housewife” named Kathy. Kathy has given up a successful career as a newspaper advice columnist with a vast female readership to marry a police detective, Bill (Sterling Hayden), whose lack of ambition to “be somebody” and her own boredom with her new life drive her to push him up the career ladder herself. She conspires to get access to Tony (Raymond Burr), the head of Bill’s department, who is about to retire. During their meeting, Tony sexually assaults Kathy, and she unwillingly acquiesces to a brief affair thinking it will help Bill acquire the power she wants for him. But while the transgression has filled her with guilt, when Kathy confronts Tony, he sneers at her and tells her that he will not consider Bill as his replacement. (There is also another scheming wife, played by Virginia Grey, who wants her husband to get the job.) During the confrontation Kathy shoots Tony with a gun stolen from one of Bill’s cases. Stanwyck’s makeup as Kathy, like her short 1950s bob, is typically flawless but comparatively subdued—she does not wear false eyelashes—whether as a professional woman or a housewife, although her lips are well enlarged outside their natural lines throughout. (Nothing much changes in her makeup, or her coiffure, by Shirley Madden, across the film.) In romantic scenes and some closeups, she is lit to minimize the shadows and lines on her face, but in others, especially once her moral status begins to decline, the lighting is harsher. Interestingly, nothing is made of Stanwyck’s age, which was the same—fifty—as Gloria Swanson’s in Sunset Blvd. (Hayden, as her husband, was forty-one), beyond keeping Stanwyck’s face somewhat in shadow in some of her scenes whether alone or with other actors. But on the other women in Crime of Passion, beauty makeup is used in far more intriguing, even unsettling, ways. As is the case with the opening montage of The Naked City (1948), the faces of various secondary or nameless characters

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in Crime of Passion become ciphers in the context of the glamour that audiences had learned to expect in Hollywood films, and which they could find all around them still in musicals, biblical epics, and romantic comedies. Virginia Grey’s face sports full beauty makeup, but, in combination with sharp focus and overhead lighting in her close-ups, it serves mainly to emphasize her age even though Grey was ten years younger than Stanwyck. The montage of women reading aloud or quoting from Kathy’s newspaper piece that references the perfidy of “a world made by men for men” is especially arresting because of the very close framing of the faces and the stark lighting of some of the hoariest elements of beauty makeup in the movies—false eyelashes, groomed brows, and heavy but precise lipstick—as against the pockmarks on the skin of one young woman, the wrinkles and bags of another, and the beads of “sweat” literally covering the face of a women resting next to her oblivious husband in bed. There are other montages of “ordinary” faces in Hollywood films—in addition to The Naked City, consider the shots of men and women reading about or leering at photos of the movie star Jean Harlow plays in Bombshell (1933), for example—that demarcate such faces from those of the stars. And there are any number of young and middle-aged female character actors in other films who are also frequently deglamorized or “plain.” But here, the “real” or “ordinary” women are, with one exception, made up according to current fashion. They have bought the products and listened to the experts, as it were, which makes it seem as though the women are attempting glamour but failing, putting them somewhere on a continuum from pathetic to ludicrous to heartwrenching, since their attempts are also naturalized because they are, after all, women. I remain ambivalent about the effects here, perhaps because I feel at base that it was not Schiffer’s goal to foreground the fact that most beauty makeup would look like this in hard or raking light, or to interrogate the material basis of glamour itself. Rather, most of the women are made to seem delusional about their own attractiveness, even Stanwyck as Kathy, as though Schiffer himself was bitter about the job—making already lovely women even lovelier—that he had been performing for so many years. That said, the men in the film, beyond their thin eyeliner, are not glamorized either, the desperation or intensity of their narrative predicaments indicated as usual by low-key lighting, disheveled greasy hair, and lots of facial moisture. In the postwar era, beauty makeup was still everywhere, in other words, but in many films it was functioning more fitfully, glimpsed in flashes or becoming partial, conditional, the metonymic signs formerly reserved to suggest a deviation from glamour now more likely to constitute the remaining signs of that glamour. This is made clear, but also quite confusing, in the last film I will discuss, Anthony Mann’s Technicolor period western The Naked Spur (1953, makeup by William Tuttle), the third of Mann’s westerns with James Stewart and the only one made at MGM. The four men in the small featured cast are uniformly filthy and greasy, as is—sometimes—the lone female (Janet Leigh). The story of

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Crime of Passion (1956, makeup credit Robert J. Schiffer and hair Shirley Madden). Barbara Stanwyck’s bob and makeup, which remain consistent throughout the film, and three shots from the montage of women reading her words aloud. Frame enlargements.

The Naked Spur involves a bounty hunter (Stewart) attempting to take a murderer (Robert Ryan) to justice, with Leigh playing first the murderer’s girlfriend and, after Ryan’s character dies in the film’s final showdown, walking into the future with Stewart’s bounty hunter. Leigh wears men’s clothing throughout the few days and nights of the plot, and very little beauty makeup beyond a nicely tousled (and always clean) short, curly bob atop her smudged face. And yet makeup is still used to add glamour to Leigh’s character as her romance with Stewart grows, such that even in the wilderness her lips and cheeks are suddenly drenched with color and she grows false eyelashes as well. Mannerist? Perhaps, given the narratively unmotivated contrast between Leigh’s more realistic looks and her almost expressionistic glamour, especially at night (when Stewart becomes only slightly less scruffy), which arguably draws attention to the inability of the film to reconcile its competing impulses. But the contrast is also at base almost risibly stereotypical in its depiction of a beautiful woman attracted to a handsome man whose loveliness is a sign of her desirability and her value to that man. Thus, regardless of how much realism a studio-era film appears to be trading in, beauty makeup and hairdressing cannot be separated from the ideologies of flawlessness, whiteness, and correctability that had defined stardom for so many years. In all the films I discuss, in this chapter or previously, beauty makeup, writ large, remains part of the meaning of every studio-era narrative and its characters. It defines those who are not wearing it, and indicates something important, to Hollywood and its commercial as well as ideological interests, about those who

The narratively unmotivated increases in the intensity of Janet Leigh’s cosmetics as she falls in love in The Naked Spur (1953, makeup credit William Tuttle). Frame enlargements.

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do. Moreover, even in films with ostensibly more corrosive views of glamour, beauty makeup continues to serve the most pervasive, and paradoxical, trope of all, the one that comprises those I have already mentioned and that demarcates the fabricated and the natural in gendered and racialized ways: namely, the circular and impossible logic that flawless surface beauty is the result of being desirable, and desirability is the result of possessing and displaying flawless surface beauty. Moreover, the continual insistence that male stars are natural because, in contrast to women, they simply look like they are not wearing makeup (or toupees) even when they most assuredly are, puts their distaff counterparts into another paradoxical and untenable position, due to Hollywood’s insistence that the normative appearance of attractive women is fully made up and lovely during virtually every moment of their waking, and sleeping, lives. Although this trope is no longer as ubiquitous or as powerful as it was during the studios’ heyday, expertly designed and skillfully applied beauty makeup and hairdressing, even if meant to appear more “subtle” or “natural,” can still remain the mechanisms by which it is reified—in films or television shows or even computer games— over and over, again and again, directing us how to think and feel about characters and the stories they tell.

Epilogue Trophy Faces This project was born mainly of my desire to understand why people in studioera Hollywood movies, usually but not always stars, look so unnaturally perfect on the screen. How, and when and where and at whose behest, did visual flawlessness become an ideal and then a standard across film after film, decade after decade, regardless of narrative circumstances, genre, or production company? As this book records, I did of course eventually learn the “answers” to some of my questions: beauty makeup was developed to mimic the retouching of photographs, as were the products invented or refined to instantiate the process; and it is now fairly clear to me how studio departments were structured and run and what sorts of people were employed there and to what ends and under roughly what circumstances. But the practical information I amassed through my research never goes quite far enough. Retouching implies correction, for example, but there are few reasons given for why it had to be pushed to such extremes; knowing that makeup was supposed to be applied by men and hair dressed by women creates as many questions as it answers; and even if I can confidently proffer explanations for a number of conditions or situations, most are tied to intertwined and interdependent ideologies like patriarchy, capitalism, and racism that were seldom acknowledged publicly by almost anyone with power in the industry at the time. As mentioned in the introduction, when I began working on this more than a decade ago I thought that my task would primarily consist of fleshing out the details of what I took to be a fairly uncomplicated and straightforward history whose facts were uncontroversial. I imagined back then that I would spend most of the book demonstrating the significance of the “forgotten” first- and 219

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second-generation Westmores, or Sydney Guilaroff, to the industry and its films. But while I believe I have accomplished this task (although there is much more to say about all of it), I also obviously became disturbed by some of the mechanisms and stratagems by which these men acquired their prominence, or at whose expense, even as my admiration for their accomplishments grew. The journey that the project took me on has been, then, at once satisfying and confounding. It sent me, over and over again, down a number of side alleys—some blind, others opening up into new but often murky vistas requiring yet more research in order to navigate my way to clarity. It was my many encounters with the unexpected, through both research and film spectating, that led me to organize the chapters as chronologies of the journey itself. Some issues, or rather the lack of information about them in any historical record currently available, continue to frustrate me. In contrast to those who write about cinematography, for example, by whom women’s labor need not be addressed at all since women never worked as cinematographers in the studio system, it is still not clear what women, beyond the amazing Dot Ponedel and a few others, thought about the male domination of their craft, nor what degree of authority hairdressers—even area heads—had in their male-run departments. In her book Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?, Jane Gaines argues that it was women’s very success in creating templates and structures for the “pair of conventionalizations” of narrative and genre that enabled their later marginalization in classical Hollywood. After establishing themselves as writers, editors, and directors in the early silent period, women “could easily be replaced by men,” in Gaines’s words, as could their “viewpoints” and the “efficient machinery of production” that the women had helped to put into place so competently.1 This is also the perspective of Erin Hill in her larger history of women’s work in U.S. media industries. As Hill writes, the achievements of women filmmakers “probably hastened the end of [the] fluid, heterosocial work environment” that the women themselves had created. “For, with each successful film they made,” she states, “early female filmmakers increased the viability of movies as an industry by increasing consumer demand. Movies would soon follow other American industries down the path of scientific management, standardization, and sex segregation. As the number of available female workers in Hollywood increased, their agency in production decreased and was channeled into increasingly feminized forms.”2 Gaines’s and Hill’s analyses ring true for how male makeup artists, who sometimes seemed to be more interested in their own images and power and the profitability of their eponymous consumer products than even the films whose faces and coiffures they were designing, took over authority from women who were always already, by the early years of the twentieth century, used to creating the looks that the men would ultimately insist were the results of their expertise. (Hill does briefly describe studio makeup departments as being “masculinized,” while hairdressing, “typically classified as a subdivision of makeup

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departments,” was “female-dominated.” But she does not ask by whom or how the gender divide was put into place, nor the mechanisms and regulations by which it was maintained for so many decades.)3 Indeed, at the end of it all I find myself still a bit amazed by the fact that women, and lots of them, were allowed to be studio and star hairdressers, to the extent that there were more women in that craft than in most others in the industry. And while perhaps this was due practically to a comparative dearth of men working in the field, I also want to read even the women’s contingent authority as a sort of inadvertent or unacknowledged atonement for the pretense, after and often before 1937, that they were not skilled or resourceful enough to apply cosmetics to actors. (I also will never stop pondering Ponedel’s claim that a woman “can’t fool a woman where make-up is concerned. But a woman can fool a man any time.”)4 The author of the 1939 New York Times piece about that “awful thing called glamour,” quoted in the introduction, had ended his remarks with the hope that “a new generation will reclaim the movies from the beauty-parlor industry and the hairdressers of America and restore it to the people. Only time will tell.”5 Given that so many local beauty parlors were created and run by women, and that women predominated among the “hairdressers of America” at the time, I do not think the parlor “industry” was the problem. I wish, rather, that we could somehow learn whether, and how, women makeup artists, much less women departmental executives, would have designed and applied beauty makeup differently in motion pictures. Would there have been such emphasis on “ideal” face shapes? (I have no doubt they would have come up with ways to correct “drooping eye muscles” and the like, and to keep records on makeup and hair designs by film if not by actor.) Would characters in a hospital bed or stranded on a Pacific island in wartime always have false eyelashes and clean hair, or conversely might “professional women” like judges or teachers, or mothers as well as femmes fatales, be allowed more routinely to look as au courant as so many of them were in real life—would there, in fact, have been so standardized a photogenic formula across every genre and every sort of story Hollywood told? Would male characters always have had full heads of glossy hair and an even skin tone? Finally, what if women were behind the camera too during the studio era, whether as cinematographers, directors, or producers? The few who did serve in the latter two capacities, at least, such as Dorothy Arzner or Virginia Van Upp, could not do much on their own, as the brevity of their careers implies.6 I also want to know more about the agency of actors themselves in determining what they looked like on the screen, especially once they became (profitable) stars. As has been discussed, some of the accounts of women, like Marlene Dietrich or Ginger Rogers (or men, like Cary Grant), who claimed such control remain contradictory. And if the comparative paucity of archival information about white women’s participation in studio departments is daunting (and of course in such documents it is assumed that the women, like the men, were always binarily heterosexual),7 it is close to tragic in relation to understanding the

Ginger Rogers and an unidentified assistant on the set of Swing Time (1936, no makeup or hair credit). Bison Archives and Hollywood Historic Photos.

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contributions of Black laborers. There is little material available about the maids and barbers—many of them, as Hill discusses, African American8—who were employed by or served actors and who may well have been talented and skilled makeup artists and hairdressers too. From photographic evidence we know that maids often accompanied stars to the set—as can be seen in a photo of Rogers on the set of Swing Time (1936) checking her makeup as an unnamed Black woman stands by with a cosmetics case to assist her—but our knowledge of their work usually consists of what some white star said about it in passing. As mentioned previously, Gloria Swanson apparently never learned the full name of Hattie Wilson Tabourne, her hairdresser at Famous Players-Lasky, although at least one writer contemporary to the period claimed not only that Swanson’s “faithful negress” was, through the coiffures Tabourne designed, the one who “first called the attention of the public to the woman who is said to have earned three thousand pounds a week,” but also that “such dressers” were “in reality beauty doctors.”9 A scene in the Hollywood backstudio film The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), in which Lana Turner’s character Georgia, a movie actress, becomes hysterical at her studio makeup table and is consoled by her Black maid Ida (an uncredited Marietta Canty), is telling in this regard, as are other scenes with Ida in attendance on the set. Ida is not only a confidante but of material help to the construction of Georgia’s image, though we know comparatively little about anyone in Turner’s actual retinue, the one that would have accompanied her to virtually every film set during her heyday as a star. Yet in spite of all of these lacunae, or barriers, in the historical record I cannot help but remain impressed by, and at times in awe of, the skills and artistry of all of Hollywood’s studio makeup artists and hairdressers—men as well as women. However ambivalent my pleasure at the end of the journey, there are still close-ups, so clearly created with pride,10 that can “blister my eyeballs,” to paraphrase Leonard Hall in his article “The Glamor Factories of Hollywood” (1936), as ineffable images of cosmetically enhanced and stylized loveliness and handsomeness,11 especially when they are of Black actors who were so often not considered eligible for such treatment. It is also important to remember that many of those who underwent the sometimes complex and time-consuming procedures discussed in this book had their own eyeballs “blistered” by what they saw as improvement at the hands of makeup artists and hairdressers. “I never considered myself any great beauty,” Bette Davis stated in the 1970s, “except for my large eyes, which I knew were my best feature”; but after Ern Westmore redesigned her mouth at RKO in 1931, she continued, “my face suddenly seemed to come together and I began to think I was rather beautiful, even if I wasn’t.”12 William Mann, in his biography of the famously nonconformist Katharine Hepburn, reports that she “let out a gasp when the studio cosmetician”—whom Mann does not name—“turned her around in the chair to face the mirror, revealing her perfect skin, lustrous hair, and lacy lashes” as she was groomed for her first starring role in RKO’s A Bill of Divorcement (1932). Upon seeing herself on the screen,

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Hepburn “whispered,” in Mann’s words, to her director George Cukor “that she never thought she could look so pretty.”13 The “cosmetician” may have been Ern Westmore or Mel Berns, who overlapped as department heads that year at RKO. But to Mann, as is so often the case with historical accounts, director Cukor must have been the one responsible for Hepburn’s transformation. Conversely, when Dot Ponedel was introduced to Judy Garland at MGM in the early 1940s, Garland “opened her hand toward me,” Ponedel later stated, and in it “were little rubber discs and tooth caps,” presumably both required or approved by Jack Dawn. “The little rubber discs go in my nose and the caps go over my teeth,” Garland told her (they are mentioned in 1954’s A Star Is Born too). But Ponedel did not see “anything wrong” with Garland’s nose or teeth (“Let’s put these things in the drawer and forget about them”—also paraphrased in A Star Is Born).14 Despite the vicissitudes of Garland’s often traumatic career, I can only imagine what a relief Ponedel’s approach must have seemed, and how pleasant it made at least some of the star’s mornings in the makeup chair (they remained close friends until Garland’s death in 1969). Moreover, the photogenic formula that Ponedel created for Garland made her arguably lovelier than she had ever been in her life—see Garland’s wildly anachronistic but stunning makeup in the Technicolor Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) or most of Easter Parade (1948) or in the black-and-white The Clock (1945). Even if a star did not purchase his or her makeup artist an automobile or a “star ruby” in gratitude for their help—as Marlene Dietrich did for Ponedel15—many felt, as Myrna Loy later wrote, that “makeup people were always your friends. . . . They got you first thing in the morning, scolding and chattering: ‘What were you doing last night? You look awful!’ You took a lot of punishment from them, but it was all in fun, and they really saved you on bad days.”16 Kay Francis was so grateful for Perc Westmore’s work at Warner Bros. that in 1935 she handed him a blank check to complete the decorations for the House of Westmore so that it could open on schedule.17 Irene Dunne even kept an autographed glamour photo of Ern Westmore from 1931, when he made her up as Sabra for the epic Cimarron, until her death some sixty years later.18 There are, of course, still makeup artists and hairdressers working in Hollywood, including descendants of the Westmores, Jack Dawn, Ben Nye, and other former department heads. But studio-era practice does not always map easily onto the present, and not only in terms of the products used, the degree of visual polish desired, or the variability of looks from star to star—or of stars themselves in terms of race and ethnicity. The main difference is that “corrective beauty makeup,” as the union continues to call it, is not always the routine baseline for creating a normative human appearance regardless of story or context, even for stars. (Another difference is that today most makeup artists specialize in straight makeup or special effects, because “there is no time to learn it all,” in Michael Westmore’s words.)19 Stars, especially in lighter genres, can remain preternaturally polished, and the narrative tropes I discussed in chapter 4 still frequently

Dot Ponedel’s makeup for Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, makeup credit William Tuttle) and The Clock (1945, no makeup or hair credit). Details of frame enlargements.

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pertain. But today we are more likely to look for flawless glamour off the screen, on the red carpet or in relation to some other special show business event like a talk- or fashion show, where stardom’s “royal beauty,” in Edgar Morin’s phrase,20 is put on, by everyone (or their professional stylists), as part of a game, the game of show business and/as self-promotion. Ordinary women or young girls also can style themselves to the hilt in their ordinary lives or on their social media accounts or on various reality shows—or not, as their choice. In fact, if an actor were to appear in a modern film role today as carefully groomed and as highly burnished as the average star or featured player of the studio era, it would likely be read selfreflexively, not as a sign of stardom or potential stardom but as a form of disguise or masquerade, a pretense indeed too perfect or decorative to be trustworthy. Arguably the canonical example of this is Laura Harring’s femme fatale “Rita” in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), whose 1940s-era beauty and hair— because of the amount of character makeup the film required, it has some eleven credited makeup artists and hairdressers—refract and reconfigure the polished beauty of dangerous women of Hollywood’s films noirs, especially. A star’s beauty makeup and coiffures can also be made monstrous, however, as in the Joan Crawford biopic/horror film Mommie Dearest (1981). As more than one critic has noted, Faye Dunaway’s resemblance to Crawford was created primarily through reproducing the thick black eyebrows and long artificial lashes, wide red hunter’s bow lips, and powdered skin that Crawford adopted as her own photogenic formula in the 1940s and 1950s and of which, like other stars, she became something of a prisoner. (Lee Harman was Dunaway’s makeup artist; Kathryn Blondell, Joan Blondell’s niece, designed the actor’s hair, and Claude Diaz her wigs.) In her later years Ginger Rogers emphatically returned to the styles of her popular youth, retaining a blond curled pageboy bob and heavy cosmetics through her death in 1995. Bette Davis, unlike Crawford and Rogers (and many others), never underwent plastic surgery in an attempt to restore her looks to their youthful form, yet she, too, seemed programmatically to believe that a particular photogenic formula defined her looks as a star.21 Michael Westmore, whose uncle Perc had been Davis’s makeup artist and friend for so many years, prepared Davis at her apartment for a television appearance on NBC’s Today Show just before her death in 1989. And as Westmore recounts, the star was not happy with his comparatively subtle work: She picked up a sponge and the pink crème rouge. My heart sank as she dug into the rouge and rubbed gobs of it up and down her cheeks. She then seized an eyebrow pencil and crudely drew three intersecting half circles above her eyebrows onto her forehead. . . . When she had finished her handiwork in about three seconds flat, she looked like she could have been the prototype for Bozo the Clown. I gulped, smiled, and politely asked which circle she wanted me to complete. . . . I wiped away two of the circles while she smeared on some red lipstick, took a deep drag

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on her cigarette, and informed me that we were ready to go. . . . There I was, pushing the legendary Bette Davis through the studio, and she was looking even scarier than when she had played Baby Jane. The unintended consequence of her makeup job was to make her look deranged.22

But I find it difficult to judge Davis’s actions here—nor, despite the comic tone, does Westmore really do so—given that she was trying to reproduce the looks that had been designed for her by Ern and Perc Westmore and that had made her feel so “pretty” for so many decades. She had a right, after all, to look however she wanted to whenever she wanted to, even if it made her resemble those “sad” old actors whose grotesque makeup she once pitied. (Moreover, Murray Pomerance quotes an oral history with a former Warner Bros. film editor, Rudi Fehr, who encountered Davis six weeks before her death and claimed she “looked wonderful” and that her makeup was “perfect.”)23 Kim Novak, whose enameled beauty in Vertigo—whether as Judy or “Madeleine”—served so well to make her plausible as a lure in a fraud designed to trap an obsessive but damaged man, apparently later underwent what is usually described as “excessive” plastic surgery and has been ridiculed in recent years as a result, even though all she was trying to do was to look like people assume she still “should.”24 For many, then, whether actor or spectator, the carefully created face that stars encountered in the mirror, in their films, and in promotion and publicity—and that then defined, for better or worse, their images to themselves, as to us—was what German art historian and theorist Hans Belting, in his book Face and Mask, would call a “trophy face.” Belting is referring specifically to a photograph of Garbo, but the term could be applied equally well to any other star who, in Hollywood face and hair, “plays herself as she displays the famous face that played different characters while she always remained herself. It is a trophy face. Even her smile is iconic. Here it is directed at no one and nothing in particular, but is simply a representation of her legendary face without any real corporeal presence.”25 Is this not true of most stars in close-up, in films of whatever genre, who, because of discontinuous shooting and the continuity system of editing, are also directing themselves at the camera, which becomes “no one and nothing” in practical terms? If Garbo’s face has inspired more philosophical musing than most—see one of the most famous essays about any star ever, Roland Barthes’s 1957 “The Face of Garbo”26—it is largely because she retired while it was still youthful and, not coincidentally, after makeup and hairdressing as studio crafts had reached their full maturity in terms of producing images of flawlessness that were also, at their most successful, human and affecting. It goes without saying that I would adjust Belting’s description to apply to many male stars as well—see Cary Grant’s no less “famous face that played different characters while he always remained himself” and that was, also not coincidentally, as carefully coiffed and polished as that of Garbo. But the clock ticked far less rapidly for stars like Grant than for the women who played opposite him.

Ann Sheridan with, from left, makeup artist Otis Malcolm and hairdressers Anita De Beltrand and Joan St. Oegger, ca. 1952. Photo Scotty Welbourne. Core collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

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In the end, who were, and are, these trophies for? In an unpublished essay from the 1940s titled “Secrets of a Hairdresser,” Joan St. Oegger, who worked in the studio system for more than three decades, recounted the day when “a great and glamorous star got down on her knees to me and begged me to perform a miracle, begged me to make her beautiful and more beautiful, begged me to keep her beautiful so that she might hold a man, himself a star, who didn’t want to be held.”27 St. Oegger also describes the other “agonies” she had encountered in too many studio makeup and dressing rooms, the “passionate, praying hands trying to hold on to something that cannot be held on to”—the youthful and perfect beauty they saw on the screen. Our agony, like theirs, is nevertheless also a form of rapture. For however false it may ring in certain narrative, cultural, and political contexts, we can indeed hold on to their flawless beauty, through the films for which it was designed and created. Their trophy faces now belong to us, to make of what we will.

Appendix

The two tables on the next two pages are for Los Angeles studios only. The information was gathered primarily from the Film Daily Yearbook (which went to print in February), from 1930—when makeup artists began to be listed in the section “Personnel of Studios” (which eventually became just “Personnel” for the film and television industry)—until 1965 (the yearbook ceased publication in 1970). The titles by which executives were identified—as chiefs, heads, or just by the department itself (makeup, hairdressing)— changed from year to year, sometimes idiosyncratically. I have corrected the typos in names (Mel Berns as Burns, Walter Rodgers as Rogers, etc.) and standardized others (Perc for Percy, Mont for Monty, etc.). The arrows and areas of uniform color indicate continued service; two arrows indicate that both names continued together; hatch marks indicate no information. If I have other convincing sources or am unsure of dates I add a question mark. (Robert Stephanoff appears in both tables due to the interaction of Goldwyn’s production company with United Artists.) Table A.1 includes the “Big Eight” studios, in alphabetical order from left to right; names are simplified for space reasons (Warner Bros. and First National were separate until 1928; Universal did not become Universal-International until 1946; etc.). Note the women as makeup chiefs prior to unionization in 1937, and the longevity of some makeup artists (not all of them Westmores). Note also that by the late 1930s United Artists was really a releasing organization for some of the smaller producing units in Table A.2, like Samuel Goldwyn Productions. Table A.2 includes smaller or “poverty row” studios and independent production outfits that were in existence for two or more years. (Thus Radiotone Pictures Studio, which employed Max Factor as “Makeup Dept. chief ” for a single year, 1930, is not included.) Because by the 1950s virtually no smaller concerns included makeup artists and hairdressers in their personnel lists, I concluded this table in 1955. As with Table A.1, note the women in charge of makeup prior to 1937. 231

Columbia Pictures

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

George Westmore Cecil Holland Cecil Holland (men) Lillian Rosine (women)↓↓

1960

M Ben Lane H Helen Hunt↓↓ 1961 1962 1963 MH Ben Lane 1964 M Ben Lane↓ 1965

1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959

M William Tuttle↓ [H Mary Keats?↓]

M William Tuttle H Sydney Guilaroff↓↓

1950

1951

[H Helen Turpin?↓]

M Ben Nye↓

M Walter Pearce H Wayne Forrest M Walter Pearce↓

M Walter Pearce↓

M Clay Campbell↓

M Jack Dawn (men) M Lillian Rosine (women)↓↓ M Charles Dudley/Fox M Ern Westmore/20th M Ern Westmore↓ M Jack Dawn↓

M Charles Dudley↓ [H Jane Romeyn?↓]

M M M M

1949

M Clay Campbell H Helen Hunt↓↓

Fox/20th Century-Fox

M Charles Dudley M James Barker↓

M Jack Dawn H Sydney Guilaroff↓↓

1948

1947

1946

1945

1944

1943

1937 1938 1939 M William Knight↓ 1940 1941 1942 M Clay Campbell↓

1936 [H Helen Hunt?↓]

1935 M John Wallace↓

1933 1934

1932 M Norbert Myles↓

1930 1931

[H Nellie Manley?↓]

[H Leonora Sabine?↓]

M Wally Westmore↓

M James Collins↓

Paramount Pictures

Makeup and Hairdressing Executives at the Big Eight Studios

Table A.1 RKO Radio

M Harry Maret Jr.↓

M Mel Berns↓

M Gordon Bau↓

M Maurice Seiderman

M Mel Berns↓

M Harry Pringle M Ern Westmore↓

United Artists

Universal [International]

M Jack Pierce M Robert Stephanoff

[H Nina Roberts?↓]

M Bud Westmore↓

M Bud Westmore H Carmen Dirigo

M Jack Pierce H Carmen Dirigo↓↓

M Robert Stephanoff↓ M Jack Pierce↓ [H Emily Moore?↓] [H Hazel Rodgers?↓]

Warner Bros.

M Gordon Bau↓

M Gordon Bau H Margaret Donovan

[H Joan St. Oegger?↓]

[H Helen Turpin?↓]

M Perc Westmore↓

M Walter Rodgers H Perc Westmore↓↓

M Perc Westmore↓

1961 1962 1963 1964 1965

1960

1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959

1951

1950

1949

1948

1947

1946

1945

1944

1943

1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942

1936

1935

1933 1934

1932

1930 1931

Crescent Pictures

1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955

1948

1947

1946

M William Riddle↓

M Paul Stanhope

M John Powers

Harry Sherman Prod.

1941 1942 1943 1944 1945

M Cecil Holland

M Jack Casey↓

M Dorothy Callahan

Hal Roach Studios

M Jack Casey↓

M Ern Westmore H Joan St. Oegger↓↓

Eagle-Lion

1940 M Phillip Shear

1935 1936 1937 M Steve Corso 1938 M Walter Hermann 1939

1934

1930 1931 1932 1933 M Irene Gregory↓

Hollywood Studio

M Harry Ross↓

M Fred T. Walker

MH Bob Mark

M Bob Mark ↓ M Bob Mark H Peggy Gray↓↓

M Ern Westmore↓

M Robert Stephanoff↓

M Robert Stephanoff [M Robert Stephanoff?↓] [H Nina Roberts?↓]

Samuel Goldwyn Prod.

M Herman Buckman

M Bob Mark↓

Republic Pictures

M Robert Stephanoff H Nina Roberts↓↓

M Harry Ross

Monogram

M James Aubrey

Metropolitan Pictures

Makeup and Hairdressing Executives at Smaller Studios and Producing Units

Table A.2

[H Hazel Rodgers?↓]

M Mont Westmore↓

M Paul Stanhope

[H Hazel Rodgers?↓]

Selznick International

1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955

1948

1947

1946

1941 1942 1943 1944 1945

1940

1935 1936 1937 1938 1939

1934

1930 1931 1932 1933

Acknowledgments There are a lot of people to thank for helping me with this project, which has taken more than a decade to complete. While I was luckier than many in having concluded much of my research before so many scholarly resources were put out of reach in March 2020, I also benefited from crucial assistance offered remotely during a pandemic that, as I write this, is being prolonged for reasons that I frankly find difficult to understand. I can only hope that someday soon writers of all sorts will not need to refer in their acknowledgments to the research barriers with which they were, and often still are, confronted by the closure of universities, libraries, and archives around the world and the difficulties of traveling to them. I offer my deepest gratitude to everyone whose name appears here, and if I have left anyone out I ask them to forgive me, for there is no reason for the omission other than the passage of time and the faultiness of memory. I need first to thank editors Leslie Mitchner and Nicole Solano of Rutgers University Press, as well as Murray Pomerance for asking me to write about “anything I wanted to” for the series of which this book is a part. Leslie contracted the project, and Nicole took it over—very patiently—when Leslie retired. Leslie and Jon Lewis also gave me a leg up by asking me to edit the costume, makeup, and hair volume for Jon’s series “Behind the Silver Screen.” Writing All for Beauty was rewarding as well as therapeutic for me over the past two years, especially, and I am fortunate indeed to have worked with such kind and considerate people, especially my affable and talented production editors, Vincent Nordhaus and Kristen Bettcher. I also thank the project’s anonymous readers, who each recognized what I was aiming for—beyond my wildest dreams, in fact—while also making suggestions and comments that improved the manuscript immeasurably (any faults, of course, remain mine). It is a melancholy pleasure to thank archivist Ned Comstock of the Cinema Arts Library at the University of Southern California, without whose help 235

236 • Acknowledgments

virtually none of my scholarship over the past thirty years would have been possible. Ned’s retirement is truly the end of an era, and I, along with so many others, have been blessed by his knowledge and curiosity about all of our work. The breadth and depth of his professional expertise, along with his friendliness and affability, will never be matched. At the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, I was helped by many people in person (thank you, even if I do not know all of your names) but also long-distance, as I attempted frantically to obtain some important documents just as everything shut down due to the pandemic. My heartfelt thanks to Kristine Krueger, the coordinator of the National Film Information Service, with whom I enjoyed phone conversations about our lives and those of our families; we may never have met in person, but I look forward to doing so someday. Linda Harris Mehr, the director of the Herrick Library, also helped to coordinate the responses to my pleas; and I am eternally grateful to Warren Sherk, the associate director of special collections, and Louise Hilton, the supervising archivist for research, for their help in realizing them. I also appreciate the assistance and collegiality of Barbara Hall over the years, and that of Lynne Crandall in the acquisition of photos from the Bison Archives. And I once more thank Pierson Blaetz and Shannon Fry and their daughter, Isadora, for providing me (and two dogs) with a place to live in Los Angeles during several of my initial research trips. I was extremely fortunate to have been able to present portions of my research, including material that did not make it into the final version of the book, in invited conference presentations—two in Paris, one in Ontario, Canada, and a keynote address that was delivered remotely. My thanks in the first instance to Pierre-Olivier Toulza, Marguerite Chabrol, and N. T. Binh for their enthusiasm about my work (and to Binh also for sharing observations drawn from his vast experience in the film world); in the second to Alice Maurice—whose own scholarship on the film face is superlative—and her delightful graduate student Denise Mok, who organized our panel; and in the third to Karen McNally, with whom I also hung out in Paris. Steve Cohan, too, participated in the Paris conferences, and made useful suggestions on our perambulations around the city, as he had before and has since. I am grateful to Mary Desjardins for the loan of the book’s opening image, and for her own work on stars and stardom. All of you are wonderful colleagues as well as really nice people. At the University of Texas at Dallas, I thank the former dean of the School of Arts and Humanities, Dennis Kratz, for a Special Faculty Development Award in the winter and spring of 2020, which enabled me to make a final research trip to Los Angeles and then to concentrate on writing. I am grateful as well to the interim dean, Nils Roemer, along with Michael Thomas and Pierrette Lacour of the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, for timely subventions to help with illustrations. The library personnel at UTD were also, as usual, indispensable;

Acknowledgments • 237

I was told recently that I am Interlibrary Loan’s “best customer,” a circumstance that will likely remain the case forever. Other of my colleagues at UTD have also been of enormous support, especially Michael Wilson, Erin  A. Smith, Deborah Stott, and Peter Park. Although retired from UTD, Peter drove me around Los Angeles on my last visit there, and I would have starved during long research days had he not taken me to Trader Joe’s for lunch supplies. I also thank the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas (Austin), which awarded me a Robert De Niro Fellowship that enabled me to consult the center’s collections, especially those of David O. Selznick and Gloria Swanson. And while I have already acknowledged them in the text, this project became a veritable magnum opus thanks to the help of Michael Westmore (Mike), truly a great guy, whose patient, timely, and detailed responses to my endless questions filled in many opaque or blank spots, both practical and historical (and who loaned me photos and other archival material); Meredith Ponedel, whose stewardship of her remarkable aunt Dot’s work came at just the right time and whose conversations with me enriched the project on many levels (and who also sent me photos and other crucial documentation); and Christiana Benson, the Westmore “family historian,” in Mike’s words, who answered my questions as well. My fascination with the labor history of the crafts led me to Sue Cabral-Ebert, the president of Local 706 until her retirement in 2018, and since to Kathryn Sain, the office administrator, both of whom provided me with documentation and the answers to questions that I could not have engaged otherwise (Sue in fact put me in contact with Mike Westmore). I thank you all for your generosity and interest in the project. I realize that not every part of the book will be what you expected, but I hope you understand that a historian must follow the evidence wherever it leads. All film scholars also owe a debt of gratitude to Eric Hoyt for founding the Media History Digital Library; it is a resource that grows more valuable with every passing day. Finally, there are so many people in my life—in addition to the dear colleagues already listed—who have listened to me expound on studio-era makeup and hairdressing for years, and/or helped me to refine my topic and polish its presentation. Among these is Kelli Marshall, my former, and sterling, UTD graduate student and the founder and owner of Chicago Movie Tours as well as the enormously valuable website genekellyfans.com. I benefited in huge and sometimes hilarious ways from Kelli’s familiarity with social media and online research tools, with how to make a spreadsheet more comely, and with everything and anything to do with Gene Kelly. Arthur Davis—Artie—is the corporate lawyer in my family, and I thank him for his help in figuring out the weird legal circumstances of some of the issues I explore in the book’s second chapter, especially. My uncle Jimmy (James Albert) McLean, my aunt Ruth (McLean) and uncle Bob Turner, and my “stepmother” Lynne McLean were invaluable supports, as were my friends Gail Schwartz, Robin Blaetz, Annie Morgan,

238 • Acknowledgments

Scott Belville, and Shirley Hammond McLafferty, all of whose fellowship and conviviality, even long-distance or while quarantined, helped to keep me sane. I also thank a new friend, Marla Platt, for enabling me to add one of the “small mix” puppies she fostered to my menagerie just as I was completing the book. I will always miss those, human or animal, who did not get to see it through to completion.

Notes Abbreviations AFI AMPAS CAL/USC JLWC JTP LKKP MHL PWP WTP

American Film Institute, Los Angeles, California Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, California Cinematic Arts Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Jack L. Warner collection John Truwe papers Leo “K” Kuter papers Margaret Herrick Library (AMPAS), Beverly Hills, California Perc Westmore papers William Tuttle papers

Introduction 1 Quotations in this paragraph are from Carlisle Jones, “All for Beauty” (1936), folder

“Makeup,” JLWC, CAL/USC. There is a clipping of a truncated version published in the San Diego Union, December 7, 1936, under the title “Magic $90,000 Beauty Department At Warner’s Creates Loveliness,” in the PWP, scrapbook 8, MHL, AMPAS. 2 See, for example, Al Taylor and Sue Roy, Making a Monster: The Creation of Screen Characters by Great Makeup Artists (Crown, 1980); Richard Rickitt, Special Effects: The History and Technique (Billboard Books, 2006), chap. 6 (“Make-Up”); Lisa Bode, Making Believe: Screen Performance and Special Effects in Popular Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2017). See also the discussion of the “realities of the screened body” throughout Murray Pomerance, The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect (Rutgers University Press, 2013). Even Max Factor thought that character makeup was “quite as much a special purpose artifice [as] double exposure.” Max Factor, “Make-Up as Aid to Amateurs Is Described by Veteran Specialist,” American Cinematographer, August 1938, 337. 3 Carl Louis Gregory, Motion Picture Photography, 2nd ed. (Falk Publishing, 1927), 315. 4 The use of the term straight to denote a cisgender heterosexual person is a midtwentieth-century development.

239

240 • Notes to Pages 2–6

5 For reasons that will become clear, in archival or primary material it is often taken

6

7 8 9

10 11

12 13 14

15

16

for granted that beauty makeup comprised hairdressing. But the crafts were also frequently discussed separately, as will be the case in this book when it increases clarity or to make a point about one or the other alone. There are of course exceptions, like the older Marie Dressler or her frequent costar Wallace Beery in the 1920s and 1930s, but care was also taken to make their appearance fairly normative. Moreover, as I will discuss, their characterizations are virtually always posed against those of younger actors, usually an idealized romantic couple. William Tuttle, corrected typescript of AFI oral history, 1975–1976, WTP, MHL, AMPAS, 120. Barrett C. Kiesling, Talking Pictures: How They Are Made, How to Appreciate Them (Johnson Publishing, 1937), 154. Occasionally a transformation into a nonwhite ethnicity—but not, as far as I can tell, blackface—also fit the bill. The literature on the Black image in film is extensive, but blackface was rarely publicized as a form of virtuosic character makeup, likely because even in “respectful” versions—Fred Astaire or Eleanor Powell impersonating Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in Swing Time (1936) or Honolulu (1939), respectively, for example—the simplicity and/or crudeness of the stereotype was the point, and because no white actor starred as an actual Black character in a studio-era feature. In contrast, although Karla Rae Fuller’s approach to makeup and hairdressing in her Hollywood Goes Oriental: CaucAsian Performance in American Film (Wayne State University Press, 2010) is primarily descriptive, she also mentions two cases in the 1930s in which the process of transforming a white actor into an “oriental” itself became the topic of articles in Photoplay. (I have seen other articles involving different ethnic transformations as well.) Interestingly, Fuller, Hollywood Goes Oriental, does not mention 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, even in her extended filmography. For further discussion, see the introduction to Adrienne L. McLean, ed., Costume, Makeup, and Hair (Rutgers University Press, 2016), as well as the collection’s appendix listing Academy Awards given in each of the three categories. Tuttle, AFI oral history, 118. Douglas W. Churchill, “Hollywood Does It All with Mirrors,” New York Times, July 16, 1939, X3. Michael Westmore, with Jake Page, Makeup Man: From Rocky to Star Trek: The Amazing Creations of Hollywood’s Michael Westmore (Lyons Press, 2017), 10–11. Michael’s father, the oldest Westmore brother, Mont(e), died at the age of thirtyseven in 1940, when Michael was two years old; Michael grew up spending Saturdays at Warner Bros. and later Eagle-Lion with his hairstylist mother, Edith (McCarrier) Westmore. Mike is not only generous and kind but also clear-eyed about both the peccadilloes and the brilliance of his famous uncles. As Louella Parsons wrote in her review of Powell’s first starring role in Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935), “Miss Powell is not the accepted glamorous type of motion picture favorite, but she is a nice-looking girl.” Los Angeles Examiner, August 25, 1935, n.p., CAL/USC clipping file. The Cincinnati Enquirer wrote in its review (September 28, 1935) that her “handling by makeup men” was one of the elements that “enhance[d] her value as an entertainer.” Quoted in Margie Schultz, Eleanor Powell: A Bio-bibliography (Greenwood Press, 1994), 105. This information comes from the “Personnel of Studios” list in the Film Daily Yearbook in 1930, the only year for which there is an entry for Radiotone Pictures.

Notes to Pages 7–8 • 241 17 I am here distinguishing costume design, which had several female luminaries

18

19 20

21

22

23 24

25

(Renié, Irene, Helen Rose, and Edith Head, to name a few) from costumers, who were largely uncredited women. I do not know why Elizabeth Nielsen, in her study “Handmaidens of the Glamour Culture: Costumers in the Hollywood Studio System,” in Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body, ed. Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog (AFI/Routledge, 1990), writes that “during the ‘Golden Era’ (1920–1960)” of Hollywood, “the majority of women were clustered in two local unions—the film lab workers and the costumers union” (160). Adele Whitely Fletcher, “Miracle Men at Work,” Photoplay, July 1939, 26–28, 89, followed in August by the second identically named entry that this time focuses substantially on women hairdressers (14–15, 78). I am not making any kind of argument about gender or sexual identity in relation to the crafts as practices, but rather pointing out how strange it was for Hollywood to segregate makeup and hairdressing on the basis of gender under the historical circumstances, especially. [Miss] Teddie Edwards, “Make-Up,” in Adrian Brunel, Film Production (Newnes, 1956), 163–166 (the “[Miss]” is in the original). This is not to say that all has changed for the better. In the context of ongoing protests against persistent racism in the entertainment industry, actor Gabrielle Union tweeted in January 2020 about the “egregious lack of diversity” in the “hair & makeup dept” on the NBC reality television show America’s Got Talent. And in March 2021, hairstylists Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson became the first Black women to be nominated for Oscars in makeup and hairstyling. With Sergio Lopez-Rivera, they won the category for the Netflix film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Too-obvious makeup on men, especially lipstick, was a trope Hollywood commonly employed to signify a character as a “sissy” or a “pansy”; see the many examples provided in the film The Celluloid Closet (1995), based on Vita Russo’s book of the same name. On the image of the male hairdresser as gay, see Julie A. Willett, Permanent Waves: The Making of the American Beauty Shop (New York University Press, 2000), 160–163: “By World War II, U.S. male hairdressers were inextricably bound to a gay identity” (161). I should note that there is no mention of movie stars or Hollywood “experts” in academic histories of beauty parlors in the United States such as Willett’s Permanent Waves and Julia Kirk Blackwelder’s Styling Jim Crow: African American Beauty Training during Segregation (Texas A&M University Press, 2003). Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (Henry Holt, 1998), 5. “I Am a Famous Woman in This Industry” [Elizabeth Arden], Fortune, October 1938, 142; Lindy Woodhead, War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden (John Wiley, 2003); Beverly Lowry, Her Dream of Dreams: The Rise and Triumph of Madam C. J. Walker (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). Interestingly, in a chapter on Walker in the years 1905–1907, Lowry refers to the opening of Max Factor’s “cosmetics shop in Hollywood to serve the movie industry” as a spur for Walker to start her own mail-order business, but Factor did not open his Hollywood shop until 1908. And while he would indeed “serve” the industry, motion pictures did not become a California-based business until the mid-1910s at least. I will return to Ponedel’s complicated career later in this book, but all information here is from Susan Cabral-Ebert and Meredith Ponedel, “And the Answer Is . . . [Dorothy Ponedel],” The Artisan, Winter 2007, 12–15; Martha Wade Steketee, “Dorothy Ponedel (1898–1979)” (2010), in Judy Garland: A Celebration, issue 2, International Judy Garland Club (Winter 2011); Dorothy Ponedel and Meredith

242 • Notes to Pages 11–12

26 27

28

29 30

31 32

Ponedel, with Danny Miller, About Face: The Life and Times of Dottie Ponedel: Make-Up Artist to the Stars (BearManor Media, 2018). Ponedel’s niece Meredith also provided me with useful information about her aunt (and her father, Bernard, who also was a makeup artist). I use Dot in this book because that is how she signed her name. All here from Jeanne North, “Do You Want a Job in the Studios?,” Photoplay, May 1931, 68–70, 116–120. The piece refers to Ern as Erne and Ernie too. I was working on my dissertation at the time, which became Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom (Rutgers University Press, 2004); see also Adrienne L. McLean, “‘I’m a Cansino’: Transformation, Ethnicity, and Authenticity in the Construction of Rita Hayworth, American Love Goddess,” Journal of Film and Video 44 (Fall 1992–Winter 1993): 8–26. Schiffer and I exchanged letters a few times following our long interview, but they were not about makeup; sadly, he died in 2005. Although Jeanine Basinger claims that “all it took” for Tyrone Power to “[buy] himself a chance to become a movie star” physically was “shaved eyebrows” (The Star Machine [Alfred A. Knopf, 2007], 145), Darryl Zanuck is reported to have “screeched” while watching Power’s screen test that “he looked like a monkey” (Penny Stallings, with Howard Mandelbaum, Flesh and Fantasy [Harper and Row, 1978], 34); and in fact Power did, like Hayworth, have his hairline raised as well. Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 149. See Diane Negra, Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom (Routledge, 2001), which considers “Euro-American” stars in Hollywood’s history. Negra discusses Hayworth as well (primarily through my article “‘I’m a Cansino,’” cited in note 27). See also Sarah Berry, “Hollywood Exoticism: Cosmetics and Color in the 1930s,” in Hollywood Goes Shopping, ed. David Desser and Garth S. Jowett (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 108–138. Berry discusses “thirties’ exotic makeup lines,” including those from Factor, which she sees as “an early form of commodified multiculturalism aimed at maximizing cosmetics sales” (109) rather than an interrogation of whiteness as an ideal. Throughout this book I will employ the word white, without the quotation marks it deserves, when the “ideal” itself is being taken for granted in the circumstances under consideration. Quotations from “Negroes Made Up for Screen as Carefully as White Players,” Philadelphia Tribune, March 27, 1930, 6. Although cosmetics were often referred to by number in the studios, Max Factor’s darker greasepaints and powders, like those of other manufacturers, were also labeled with a mishmash of stereotypes of religious, ethnic, and racial identities: “Arab or Hindu,” “Indian,” “Mulatto,” “Mikado,” “Light Negro,” “Dark Negro” (as well as “Othello”), “Mexican,” and so on. As he stated in “Make-up for the New Technicolor Process,” American Cinematographer, August 1936, “Special make-ups for racial groups are also being made. . . . In addition, make-ups have already been devised for South Sea Islanders, Eskimos, Negroes, Orientals, and other types. Ultimately, one will be able to call upon his Make-Up Artist for anything from a Negro to an Albino, with confidence that the make-up will not only be correct, but that it will suit the intricacies of the Technicolor process so perfectly that the resulting character will look perfectly convincing in the screened color picture” (334). Although the language is ambiguous, I take the statement to mean that white actors could successfully appear as these “racial groups,” not that these cosmetics were meant for people of color themselves. See “A Catalog of Max Factor’s Theatrical Make-Up” (1938), http://www.cosmeticsandskin.com/booklets/max-theatrical -1938.php; Scott Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the

Notes to Pages 12–13 • 243

33 34

35

36

1930s (University of Texas Press, 2007), 87–88. Again, past the silent era, white stars only wore blackface in numbers or set pieces framed by a narrative that highlights their whiteness. Quoted in Donald Bogle, Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood (One World/Ballantine, 2005), 292. It is hard to know how, or whether, makeup manuals were used in studio departments. Virtually all contain instructions and often product lists for how to put on blackface and other forms of racialized “character” makeup, however. I do not include the first film-specific makeup manual on this list—H.[arry] B.[arton] Oldridge, Movie Make-up Manual (Oldridge Studios, 1927)—because he focuses entirely on straight makeup. But others freely engage in racist stereotyping (some were written in or published in England but were sold in the United States). See Cecil Holland, The Art of Make-Up for Stage and Screen (Cinematex Publishing, 1927); Helena Chalmers, The Art of Make-Up: For the Stage, the Screen, and Social Use (D. Appleton, 1930), in which Chalmers uses the N-word liberally throughout her section on white people making up to look “negro” and offers gratuitous remarks about how “unfortunate [it is] that negresses with histrionic abilities are prone to copy the make-up of their white sisters. Some use a stick of light flesh grease paint, others put on several coats of a liquid wash; the result in either case is weird” (she also goes on about their “black and kinky” hair) (121–125); John F. Baird, Make-Up: A Manual for the Use of Actors, Amateur and Professional (Samuel French, 1931), which at least wants to “give true representations of nationalities other than our own” rather than emphasizing “racial characteristics” for comic effect, and which, alone among the early manuals, does give advice both on making up a “Negro” as a white person and on what makeup “Negroes” could use themselves (104, 114–115). Postwar manuals tend to be more circumspect; in addition to several translated European manuals, see Vincent J.-R. Kehoe, The Technique of Film and Television Make-Up for Color and Black and White, rev. ed. (Communication Arts Books, 1969). In the introduction to the first 1957 edition, Kehoe writes: “In the discussion of racial and national types, one should bear in mind that . . . recent studies in genetics, human biology and anthropology indicate that the actual phenotypic variations possible in the human races are almost limitless; hence no individual characteristic of any national group should be construed as a valid criterion for the distinction of this particular group” (13–14; italics in original). Yet even Michael G. Westmore’s The Art of Theatrical Makeup for Stage and Screen (McGraw-Hill, 1973), which he intended for college students and those seeking careers in the crafts, does not offer instructions for making up people of color, only how to create “the illusion of a Mexican, Indian, or Negro” (55–57). As Alice Maurice notes in Cinema and Its Shadow: Race and Technology in Early Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), most forms of racialized makeup in early cinema—which I would extend, as a generalization, to the later studio era, and which also applies to age makeup—depended on whether “a character is comic or dramatic” (138–139). Frank Westmore and Muriel Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood (Lippincott, 1976); Fred E. Basten, Robert Salvatore, and Paul A. Kaufman, Max Factor’s Hollywood: Glamour, Movies, Make-Up (General Publishing Group, 1995); Fred E. Basten, Max Factor: The Man Who Changed the Faces of the World (Arcade Publishing, 2008). Among the studies that use The Westmores of Hollywood as a primary source are Janet Staiger’s discussion of movie makeup in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and

244 • Notes to Pages 13–15

37 38 39 40

41 42 43

44 45 46 47

Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (Columbia University Press, 1985); Lisa Eldridge, Face Paint: The Story of Makeup (Abrams Image, 2015); Mallory O’Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick (Hanover Square Press, 2019). See also Robyn Cosio and Cynthia Robins, The Eyebrow (HarperCollins, 2000), which reproduces Westmore anecdotes likely drawn from the book but does not list it in the bibliography. Other histories that employ one or another of the Factor books as significant “Hollywood” resources are (in chronological order) Kate De Castelbajac, The Face of the Century: 100 Years of Makeup and Style, ed. Nan Richardson and Catherine Chermayeff (Rizzoli, 1995); Sarah Berry, Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood (University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Teresa Riordan, Inventing Beauty: A History of the Innovations That Have Made Us Beautiful (Broadway Books, 2004); Gabriela Hernandez, Classic Beauty: The History of Make-Up (Schiffer Publishing, 2011). Although Ronald L. Davis mainly employs oral histories of Hollywood stars and other studio personnel that he and his staff conducted for his The Glamour Factory: Inside Hollywood’s Big Studio System (Southern Methodist University Press, 1993) (see chap. 3), he also quotes frequently from The Westmores of Hollywood. Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, 15, 45. See also westmoresofhollywood.com. Basten, Max Factor, 95. Sydney Guilaroff and Cathy Griffin, Crowning Glory: Reflections of Hollywood’s Favorite Confidant (General Publishing Group, 1996). Lois Banner writes, in her classic American Beauty (University of Chicago Press, 1983), “From the period of the movies’ initial popularity in the 1910s, film stars had governed the definitions of ideal female beauty in the United States. . . . Thus the history of models of physical appearance during those decades is virtually synonymous with the history of film, and this close relationship remained the case through the 1950s” (283). Banner, like most historians of beauty, says nothing about men, but I have no doubt that the influence was equally strong; see the comments of high school and college students—male and female—on how they were influenced by movie stars in the 1920s collected in Herbert Blumer, Movies and Conduct (Macmillan, 1933). See also Elizabeth Hawes, Why Is a Dress? (Viking, 1942): “A great mass of women in the United States are certainly influenced by the taste of a few rich women, either social registerites or movie stars. I believe the movie stars have a far greater influence than the socialites” (33). Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 185–186. Bette Davis, The Lonely Life: An Autobiography (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962), 195. Paul Coates, Screening the Face (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Noa Steimatsky, The Face on Film (Oxford University Press, 2017). Both discuss the film performances of a number of actors whose appearance was at least partly the result of the attention of unacknowledged studio makeup artists and hairdressers. Coates and Steimatsky are hardly alone in this, however; see also Jacques Aumont, “The Face in Close-Up,” in The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History, ed. Angela Dalle Vacche (Rutgers University Press, 2003), 127–148. Patrick Keating, Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir (Columbia University Press, 2010), chap. 1. Paramount Pictures production records (Vertigo), MHL, AMPAS. Peter Harry Brown, Kim Novak: Reluctant Goddess (St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 144. Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, 175.

Notes to Pages 15–23 • 245 48 John Alton, Painting with Light [1949] (University of California Press, 1995), 3. 49 Alton, 85. 50 Mervyn LeRoy, with Alyce Canfield, It Takes More Than Talent (Alfred A. Knopf,

1953), 113.

51 Austin Lescarboura, Behind the Motion-Picture Screen (1919; Benjamin Blom, 1971), 92. 52 Margaret I. MacDonald, “Alice Brady Talks about Dress and Make-Up,” Moving

Picture World, July 21, 1917, 426.

53 AMPAS, “Incandescent Illumination,” Academy Reports No. 1, July 1928 [tests

conducted January–April 1928], 24, digitalcollections.oscars.org.

54 Gregory, Motion Picture Photography, chap. 21, “Making Up for Motion Pictures.” 55 Joseph Dubray, “Movie Make-Up: Is Make-Up to Be or Not to Be—Panchromatic

Film Causes Misapprehension,” American Cinematographer, March 1928, 25.

56 According to IMDb.com, the junior Max also worked on a few, primarily indepen57 58 59 60

61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70

71

72

dent, films as a makeup artist during the 1930s. What his job entailed I do not know. Keating, Hollywood Lighting, 24. Maurice, Cinema and Its Shadow, 139. Davis, The Lonely Life, 186. Quotations from James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (University of California Press, 1988), 95–96. I paraphrase Naremore’s statement “there is no such thing as an uncontrived face in the movies,” which of course applies to hair as well, or indeed most elements of studio-era mise-en-scène. I did a search for the word invisible in the titles of film books on Amazon.com. Keating, Hollywood Lighting, 1. Keating, 7, 173, 180. Keating, 253–254. Keating, 219. Westmore’s 1949 remarks, from “Make-Up for Color by Technicolor: An Interview with Perc Westmore,” Technicolor News & Views, December 1949, 2, are quoted in James Layton and David Pierce, The Dawn of Technicolor: 1915–1935 (George Eastman House, 2015), 220. Stephen Gundle, Glamour: A History (Oxford University Press, 2008), 5, 194. Chap. 6 is titled “The Hollywood Star System.” B. R. Crisler, “A Glance at That Awful Thing Called Glamour,” New York Times, March 12, 1939, X5. Quotations from Edgar Morin, The Stars [Les stars, 1957], trans. Richard Howard (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 34, 131. The lighting required for Technicolor, especially, was so hot that even the grease in actors’ hair could begin to smoke. See Layton and Pierce, The Dawn of Technicolor, 220. Alicia Annas, “The Photogenic Formula: Hairstyles and Makeup in Historical Films,” in Hollywood and History: Costume Design in Film, ed. Edward Maeder (Thames and Hudson/Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1987), 52–77. Books like Larry Carr’s Four Fabulous Faces [Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich] (Arlington House, 1970) and More Fabulous Faces [Dolores del Rio, Myrna Loy, Carole Lombard, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn] (Doubleday, 1979) are useful for showing the changes in a particular star image across time, but there is little if any discussion of how or by whom the changes were effected. The same is true of studies like Michaela Krützen’s fascinating The Most Beautiful Woman on the Screen: The Fabrication of the Star Greta Garbo (Peter Lang, 1992), whose section titled “Beauty and Cosmetics: Make-Up, Hairstyle and

246 • Notes to Pages 23–26

73

74 75

76

77

Wardrobe” (71–87) describes Garbo’s changing appearance but again without moving much beyond the statement that “the creation of Garbo required several hours of work in make-up, hairstyle and wardrobe” (71). James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2000), discussed in Keating, Hollywood Lighting, 8. Annas, “Photogenic Formula,” 52. On the public “controversy” created by fans emulating Joan Crawford’s “over-use” of lipstick in the 1930s, see Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Hollywood Catwalk: Exploring Costume and Transformation in American Film (I. B. Tauris, 2010), 135–137. Veronica Lake’s peekaboo bang (designed by an uncredited Paramount hairdresser, La Vaughn Speer; see Nellie Manley in Hollywood Speaks! An Oral History, ed. Mike Steen [G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974], 281) became the topic, as Jeff Lenburg writes in Peekaboo: The Story of Veronica Lake, rev. ed. (Moonwater Press, 2020), of “a Paramount News newsreel released to theaters on February 24, 1943; a ‘Wartime Living’ photo story published in the March 8, 1943 edition of LIFE magazine; and [a] U.S. News Review No. 5 newsreel issued in September of that year” because the hairstyle was so popular that “many female war workers sporting Lake coiffures and operating turret lathes in war plants across the nation were getting their tresses caught in the machinery. Thus, Veronica supposedly patriotically complied with the War Production Board’s request” to cut and restyle her hair. But it was all a publicity stunt, according to a Paramount press agent Lenburg quotes: “‘It sounded good and it was just one of our publicity dreams’” (229). Films themselves reveal that the top teeth, at least, of most stars are even and white, whether through permanent or temporary caps and whitening enamels or plastic veneers (the latter two applied by makeup artists). It seems to have been common knowledge that, in the words of Modern Screen, May 1940, “No movie beauty, however talented or otherwise dazzling, is ever allowed to pose for a single picture until every slight imperfection about her mouth and teeth has been entirely corrected” (“Keep Your Smile in Style [Here’s how it’s done in Hollywood where teeth are priceless assets to success],” 45). See also Louis B. Jacobs, “Plastic Dentistry New Hollywood Art,” Photoplay, October 1928, 72, 106. Regarding plastic surgery, see Harry Lang, “Would You Like a New Nose? [How Hollywood submits to the knife of the plastic surgeon in the name of Beauty],” Photoplay, August 1930, 58–59, 102: “You’d be surprised at the famous names whose screen beauty is synthetic; who have had nose corrections, new chins, pinned-back ears, face lifts, deep acid peels, fat removals, and other operations at the hands of these specialists in putting beauty where it isn’t!” (58). This honesty is muted in later years, perhaps to valorize Hollywood’s cosmetic experts and consumer products. Gretta Palmer, in a June 1939 Photoplay article called “Beauty through Surgery,” earnestly states that “the surgical methods described in this article have not been used appreciably by well-known personalities in the picture industry, because so much emphasis must be placed upon natural beauty, heightened by natural methods of beautification” (25). An interesting exception that also reifies the importance of female beauty is Heather Addison, “‘Actor Denied Straight Nose’: Louis Wolheim and the Gendered Practice of Plastic Surgery in Silent-Era Hollywood,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58, no. 4 (Summer 2019): 1–20. Wolheim was an actor who was not allowed by Warner Bros. to have surgery to correct his broken and crooked nose in the 1920s. “Makeups’ Prestige Up,” Variety, October 24, 1938, n.p., clipping file (“Makeup”), MHL, AMPAS.

Notes to Pages 26–32 • 247 78 Jake Page, “Beauty and the Beasts,” Smithsonian 31, no. 2 (May 2000): 116. Page’s

79 80

81

82

83 84 85

86

account of the Westmore family’s history draws heavily, if not exclusively, from The Westmores of Hollywood. Email from Sue Cabral-Ebert to the author, March 11, 2019. The website is mediahistoryproject.org. Founded by Eric Hoyt, it is a massive, and still growing, database of books, periodicals, and other such documents, scanned and uploaded in facsimile, related to “film, broadcasting, and recorded sound.” All material, according to the site, either is out of copyright or has been licensed for public distribution. I do not discuss the often clearly visible makeup of movie children, partly because—publicity about Mary Pickford’s and Shirley Temple’s carefully crafted and enumerated corkscrew curls aside—there is little information with which to do so, but also because one has to draw the line somewhere. Ironically, the extreme visual detail made possible by high-definition television and digital high-frame-rate filmmaking in the twenty-first century is again complicating beauty makeup in close-ups, especially, and leading to new products like Kryolan’s “Digital Complexion” line. Motion Picture News, November 13, 1915, 74; Motion Picture News Studio Directory, October 21, 1916, 52–53. Frank E. Woods, “Editing a Motion Picture,” Moving Picture World, July 21, 1917, 371. In addition to considering makeup and hairdressing in a monograph I am preparing on the film dance of Eleanor Powell, see also my essays “The Faces of Ginger: Beauty Makeup, Facial Acting and Hollywood Stardom,” in Faces on Screen: New Approaches, ed. Alice Maurice (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 195–210, and «Le glamour et le corps dansant dans la comédie musicale hollywoodienne» [“Glamour and the Dancing Body in the Hollywood Musical”], in Le Musical hollywoodien: Histoire, esthétique, création, ed. N. T. Binh and José Moure (Les Impressions Nouvelles/Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2021), 157–184. I am referring to Adrienne L. McLean, ed., Glamour in a Golden Age: Movie Stars of the 1930s (Rutgers University Press, 2011), in which neither I nor anyone else specifically discusses makeup or hairdressing as crafts that helped to construct the stars in question.

Chapter 1. Makeup and Hairdressing as Studio Crafts 1 For more on beauty makeup on Black performers, see chapter 4. 2 John Alton, Painting with Light [1949] (University of California Press, 1995), 96. 3 Except in the case of historical curiosities, like eyelash beading, throughout this

book I will use current ordinary terminology for makeup—foundation, rouge (for lips or cheeks), powder, mascara, eye shadow or liner, lipstick, eyebrow pencil. For the history of particular cosmetics, such as how mascaro and cosmetique became mascara, or when lipstick in a tube was invented and the like, see the many books on the history of makeup—starting perhaps with Fenja Gunn, The Artificial Face: A History of Cosmetics (David and Charles, 1973)—or the website cosmeticsandskin.com. 4 The cosmetics enterprises of Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden were founded and grew famous during these years as well. See Lindy Woodhead, War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden (John Wiley, 2003). For information on the history of makeup use in relation to women’s identity generally in the twentieth century, see Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (Henry Holt, 1998).

248 • Notes to Pages 32–34

5 Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in

America (University of Illinois Press, 1990).

6 Marlis Schweitzer, “‘The Mad Search for Beauty’: Testimonials, the Cosmetics

7 8 9 10

11

12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19

20

Industry, and the ‘Democratization of Beauty,’” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4, no. 3 (July 2005): 255–292. All quotations are from this article, though some of the material can also be found in her book When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Black women’s cosmetics use simply does not feature in the white press of this period; for discussion, see Beverly Lowry, Her Dream of Dreams: The Rise and Triumph of Madam C. J. Walker (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); Peiss, Hope in a Jar, chap. 7. DeCordova, Picture Personalities. Schweitzer, “‘The Mad Search for Beauty,’” 268–269. Schweitzer, “‘The Mad Search for Beauty,’” 292. Gunn, The Artificial Face, 179. I would argue that the “natural” beauty of stars, sold on and off the screen, is virtually always—as in Hollywood during the studio era itself, for men as well as women—the result of “clever simulations.” Gilbert Vail, A History of Cosmetics in America (Toilet Goods Association, 1947), 116. See also the lipstick-wearing activists campaigning for the suffrage that women were granted in 1920. As Gunn writes, “Female emancipation, paradoxically, inspired women to make greater use of cosmetics” (The Artificial Face, 148); but so undoubtedly did movie stars. Alice Joyce, “How to Make-up,” Picture Play, February 1918, 238. Roberta Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (University of California Press, 1992). See also Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford University Press, 1997); David Mayer, “Acting in Silent Film: Which Legacy of the Theatre?,” in Screen Acting, ed. Alan Lovell and Peter Krämer (Routledge, 1999), 10–30. Mayer disagrees with Pearson as well as with Brewster and Jacobs on several points due to what he characterizes as their “lesser understanding of Victorian and Edwardian theatrical practice” (and Pearson’s pejorative characterization of melodrama as “cheap”). But Pearson also acknowledges that many different forms of acting profitably coexisted through the early 1910s, and Mayer does not counter her claim that a verisimilar mode became dominant in popular U.S. cinema by the end of the 1910s. Pearson, Eloquent Gestures, 34. Pearson, 126. Janet Staiger, “The Eyes Really Are the Focus: Photoplay Acting and Film Form and Style,” Wide Angle 6, no. 4 (1985): 22. Quoted in Pearson, Eloquent Gestures, 93. Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (Starword, 1983), 119. See also Mayer, “Acting in Silent Film.” Pearson, Eloquent Gestures, 94. The “genuine art” comment comes from an advertisement Griffith took out in the New York Dramatic Mirror, December 23, 1913, 36. This period also undoubtedly marks the beginning of the association of the commercial film close-up with stardom itself. See Michaela Krützen, The Most Beautiful Woman on the Screen: The Fabrication of the Star Greta Garbo (Peter Lang, 1992): “To be a star means to have the right to a close-up” (17).

Notes to Pages 35–41 • 249 21 This staged actuality was recently recovered and restored and can be seen on

22

23

24 25 26

27

28

29

30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37

38

YouTube.com, as can another fragment with the performers kissing once in full frame but otherwise identically made up and dressed. Georges Méliès, “Kinematographic Views” (1907), ed. Jacques Malthête, trans. Stuart Liebman and Timothy Bernard, in André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema, trans. Timothy Bernard (University of Chicago Press, 2011), 136–152 (explanatory notes are numbered 171–175). Brian Coe, The History of Movie Photography (Ash and Grant, 1981), 88–89; see also Herbert C. McKay, The Handbook of Motion Picture Photography (Falk Publishing, 1927), 195–196. Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928 (University of California Press, 1990), 140. Introduction to Patrick Keating, ed., Cinematography (Rutgers University Press, 2014), 13–19. Vern Murdock, “Make-Up Now an Exact Art,” International Photographer, April 1938, 49. Murdock remarks, in a strangely worded sentence, that the “normal head is nine inches, while a big head close-up on a theatre screen is approximately thirty-nine feet or a magnification of the head to a dimension increase fifty-five times.” Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8, nos. 3–4 (1986): 63–70. In later reprints “Attraction” became “Attractions.” “Make-Up Expert Plays Sightless Soldier in Film,” Los Angeles Times, February 8, 1932, 7: “Finally Cecil Holland, make-up expert, was persuaded to play the part himself but refused to put the make-up on any actor who might discover the secret Chaney entrusted to him before his death. ‘I promised Chaney never to reveal it,’ Holland explained.” On the continuities between stage and film makeup even in the 1920s, see Holland’s manual The Art of Make-Up for Stage and Screen (Cinematex Publishing, 1927). For analysis of disguise in Chaney’s image, see Alice Maurice, Cinema and Its Shadow: Race and Technology in Early Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 137–139. See also Lisa Bode’s discussion in chapter 2 of her Making Believe: Screen Performance and Special Effects in Popular Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2017). “Motography’s Gallery of Picture Players,” Motography, December 7, 1912, 425. “Motography’s Gallery of Picture Players,” Motography, June 28, 1913, 459; “Will E. Sheerer of the Eclair,” Motion Picture News, October 18–25, 1913, 46. A. Danson Mitchell, review of The Miser’s Reversion [Thanhouser], Motion Picture News, March 21, 1914, 52; “Brevities of the Business,” Motography, October 17, 1914, 538. “The Man with a Thousand Faces,” Motion Picture Classic, January 1916, 60. “Brevities of the Business,” Motography, May 17, 1913, 375. Inez Klumph and Helen Klumph, Screen Acting: Its Requirements and Rewards (Falk Publishing, 1922), 141. “Beards,” folder “Makeup,” JLWC, CAL/USC. Holland, The Art of Make-Up; “Selig’s Versatile Character Man,” Movie Magazine, December 1915, 74; “Character Actors Signed,” Los Angeles Times, February 9, 1923, II10. In Holland, The Art of Make-Up. The book has no page numbers, but this would be page 1.

250 • Notes to Pages 41–49

39 Louis B. Jacobs, “Plastic Dentistry New Hollywood Art,” Photoplay, October 1928,

106.

40 Adolphe Menjou and M. M. Musselman, It Took Nine Tailors (McGraw-Hill,

1948), 6.

41 Motography, April 29, 1916, 1003. 42 Interestingly, in 1939 Dot Ponedel told an interviewer that a woman “can’t fool a

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58

59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66

woman where make-up is concerned. But a woman can fool a man any time.” Quoted in Martha Wade Steketee, “Dorothy Ponedel (1898–1979)” (2010), in Judy Garland: A Celebration, issue 2, International Judy Garland Club (Winter 2011): n.p. Staiger, “The Eyes Really Are the Focus,” 21. Louis Reeves Harrison, “Eyes and Lips,” Moving Picture World, February 18, 1911, 348–349. Quotations here are from the first page of the piece. “Some Excellent Feature Offerings from Eastern Studios,” Motography, Christmas 1913, 468. “Miss Blanche Sweet,” Reel Life, February 2014, supplement, iii. Tom Gunning, “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film,” Modernism/Modernity 4, no. 1 (1997): 23. Gunning, 23. Quotations from Frederick A. Talbot, Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked (J. B. Lippincott, 1912), 150–151. All quotations from Harry Furniss, “Those Awful Cinematograph Faces,” Motography, May 3, 1913, 329–330. Furniss, 329–330. Maurice, Cinema and Its Shadow, 17. Maurice notes that Furniss’s article originally appeared in the British periodical the Bioscope (239n45). Maurice, 140. Staiger, “The Eyes Really Are the Focus,” 22. “‘Good Photography’ His Slogan” [Burr McIntosh], Motion Picture News, November 22, 1913, 23. Talbot, Moving Pictures, 150. Frances Agnew, Motion Picture Acting: How to Prepare for Photoplaying / What Qualifications Are Necessary / How to Secure an Engagement / Salaries Paid to Photoplayers (Reliance Newspaper Syndicate, 1913). Holland, The Art of Make-Up; H. B. Oldridge, Movie Make-up Manual (Oldridge Studios, 1927). Oldridge, like Holland, was trained as an actor; he worked mainly in the New York studios. Agnew, Motion Picture Acting, 59–60. See also Heather Addison, “‘Must the Players Keep Young?’: Early Hollywood’s Cult of Youth,” Cinema Journal 45, no. 4 (2006): 3–25, in which she discusses how youth as such, for women especially, became a value not just in Hollywood but in U.S. industry and culture in the 1910s and 1920s—a value whose growing importance Agnew is obviously responding to in her remarks as well. Agnew, Motion Picture Acting, 66. Agnew, 30–31. Agnew, 77–79. Menjou and Musselman, It Took Nine Tailors, 2. Menjou and Musselman, 7. Quotations from “What Improvement in Motion Pictures Is Needed Most?,” Motion Picture, December 1914, 126. Motography, December 11, 1915, 1246.

Notes to Pages 49–52 • 251 67 When comedian Harold Lloyd was trying to break into the movies in the early 1910s

68

69

70 71 72

73 74

75 76

and could not get past the studio gate, he simply “put on a make-up” and was allowed in without question as a member of a group of extras. In Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By . . . (Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 459. Sarah Berry, “Hollywood Exoticism: Cosmetics and Color in the 1930s,” in Hollywood Goes Shopping, ed. David Desser and Garth S. Jowett (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 113. Conversely, in 1915 two actors, Boyd Marshall and Lorraine Huling, became known as the “Dimpled Duo,” and “photoplay patrons from everywhere,” according to several publicity stories, wanted to know whether the dimples were “real” or produced by “a spot of black cosmetic,” with the fact that they were real being proffered as a sign of the authenticity of their performance as well. See Motion Picture News, July 10, 1915, 66; Motography, July 10, 1915, 75. As is well known, Griffith wanted only white performers in blackface to interact physically with white actors, and in most scenes he made Black performers wear it as well. On Williams, see “Follies Star Screened,” Motography, July 15, 1916, 128, which refers simply to his “laugh-producing expressions.” The success of Natural Born Gambler, the most famous of Williams’s three shorts, continued to be noted in subsequent issues of several trade journals. He returned to the Broadway stage and the Ziegfeld Follies before his death in 1922. Quotations from James Young, “Tailoring One’s Face,” Photoplay, February 1916, 144–145. Mabel Condon, “Sans Grease Paint and Wig,” Motography, April 18, 1914, 275. All quotations here from Jean Bernique, Motion Picture Acting for Professionals and Amateurs: A Technical Treatise on Make-up, Costumes and Expression . . . (Producers Service Company, 1916), chaps. 6 (“The Technique of Makeup—How to Prepare for the Movie Camera,” 171–179) and 7 (“Costumes,” which includes the section “Hair,” 178–186). I could not find any information about Bernique, which suggests that he was not an actor (Motion Picture Acting is his only currently traceable book). Quotations from Arthur Hornblow Jr., “Have You a Camera Face?,” Motion Picture Classic, May 1916, 14–15, 64. In the United States, the popularity of bobbed hair for women from 1915 on is frequently linked to Irene Castle, of the popular show business dancing couple Vernon and Irene Castle, who according to legend cut her hair short to make it easier to care for while recovering from a 1914 appendectomy (when Ginger Rogers played Castle in the last of the nine RKO Astaire-Rogers films, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, in 1939, her hair was left considerably longer than Castle’s to conform to current fashion and Rogers’s star image). With some exceptions, fairly tight variations of shorter hairstyles—from bobbed to shoulder length—remained the norm for women’s modern coiffures throughout the studio era, partly because, I would surmise, they were easier to style to differentiate one star from another and could be used to frame the face in interesting ways in close-up. See also Julie A. Willett, Permanent Waves: The Making of the American Beauty Shop (New York University Press, 2000), 34–42, for how short hair and various treatments thereof, like marcel waves and permanents, led to an increase in the number of beauty parlors across the United States starting in the 1910s and 1920s. On men, hair would remain some version of short, except in period roles, throughout the studio era. See chapter 4. Ernest A. Dench, Making the Movies (Macmillan, 1915), 5. All quotations here from J. W. Chamberlain, “Making Up for the Movies,” Motion Picture Classic, June 1916, 39–43.

252 • Notes to Pages 53–58

77 Captain Leslie T. Peacocke, “Grave Faults in Pictures,” Motography, September 23,

78

79 80 81 82

83 84 85 86 87

1916, 695–697. Because the article is dense but appears on not much more than two pages, I am not citing specific quotations by page. (The editor’s note, of course, appears on the first page.) Especially since, as was written in another early book on filmmaking, “It is the business of the director to indicate by the make-up, the costume and the subtleties of pantomime, the nature of the characters.” See Eustace Hale Ball, The Art of the Photoplay (G. W. Dillingham, 1913), 49. Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment, 64. Quotations here from Edward Weitzel, “Getting Too Near the Make-Up,” Moving Picture World, November 17, 1917, 993; the article is a single page long. Bernadine Hilty, “How To Be a Moving Picture Actress—In One Lesson,” Film Fun, November 1917, n.p. Louis Reeves Harrison, “Two Unlovely Black Eyes,” Moving Picture World, August 25, 1917, 1190; the piece is one page long. See also Margaret I. MacDonald, “Alice Brady Talks About Dress and Make-Up,” Moving Picture World, July 21, 1917, 426: “I was curious also to know why so many players treated their faces, and particularly their eyes, to an unnecessary and ugly daubing of make-up for the taking of close-ups. The reason why, of course, was not explained; but I learned that Miss Brady’s method of making up her eyes for picture work consisted in a touch of brown rubbed with the thumb across the lid of each eye to emphasize the shadow where it really ought to be, a slight beading of the eyelashes and a delicate line at the outer corner of each eye.” “How Elsie Ferguson Learned the Screen Art,” Photo-Play Journal, October 1917, 23. “Diary of Future Star,” Motography, June 3, 1916, 1283. Rob Wagner, Film Folk: “Close-Ups” of the Men, Women, and Children Who Make the “Movies” (Century, 1918), 131. Austin C. Lescarboura, Behind the Motion-Picture Screen (1919; Benjamin Blom, 1971), 44, 46. Beading was a stage tradition designed to emphasize the eyes at a distance, but it was very obviously fake in close-up. Lillian Gish, in Lillian Gish and Ann Pinchot, Lillian Gish: The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me (Prentice-Hall, 1969), maintains that Griffith sparked a demand for artificial lashes when he was annoyed on the set of Intolerance because Owen’s blue eyes were not “supernatural” enough for him in close-up. Griffith called in a wigmaker to ask “if it would be possible to paste lashes around her eyes.” The methods Gish claims that Owen “explained” to her involved weaving human hair through the warp of thin gauze, with tiny pieces being cut off as needed and fastened to the eyelids with spirit gum. The contraptions did make Owen’s eyes swell shut, but Gish reports it did not matter, since “Mr. Griffith had already shot the important scenes with her” (45). Fred E. Basten, Robert Salvatore, and Paul A. Kaufman, Max Factor’s Hollywood: Glamour, Movies, Make-Up (General Publishing Group, 1995), claims that Max Factor “invented” false eyelashes in 1919, for Phyllis Haver (45). Frank Westmore and Muriel Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood (Lippincott, 1976), credits the “birth” of false eyelashes to George Westmore, who clipped pieces of hair off the back of Billie Burke’s wig and “pasted them, one at a time, to her own lashes” at an unspecified date (46). There have been many versions of eyelash augmentation using hair or fur throughout history, however; the first patent for artificial lashes in a form similar to that Gish describes was registered in 1911 by a Canadian woman, Anna Taylor. That said, as will be discussed in chapter 4, it is generally agreed that motion pictures made their

Notes to Pages 58–67 • 253

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101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108

109 110 111 112 113 114

use acceptable for street wear. See Alanna Martine Kilkeary, “Beauty P.I.: The Fascinating Origin of the False Lash,” January 29, 2018, https://www.makeup.com /makeup-tutorials/eyes/makeup-history-of-false-eyelashes; “False Eyelashes,” https://www.cosmeticsandskin.com/cdc/false-eyelashes.php. For contrast, see some of the pre-1916 publicity and production stills in Bernique, Motion Picture Acting, in which the eyes, while emphasized at times by liner or shadow, look strangely plain because the lashes are not made up. Patrick Keating, “From the Portrait to the Close-Up: Gender and Technology in Still Photography and Hollywood Cinematography,” Cinema Journal 45, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 90–108. Bernique, Motion Picture Acting, 171. Carl Louis Gregory, Motion Picture Photography, 2nd ed. (Falk Publishing, 1927), 315. Lescarboura, Behind the Motion-Picture Screen, 44–46. Patrick Keating, Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir (Columbia University Press, 2010), 24. The organization was formed at the end of 1918. Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment, 71. Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, 230. Rosher also claims to have shot Pickford’s publicity stills in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Frederick S. Mills, “Film Lighting as a Fine Art,” Scientific American, February 19, 1921, 148. Review of The Whispered Name, Moving Picture World, January 19, 1924, 218; Foster Goss, “Concerning Make-Up,” American Cinematographer, December 1926, 5. Quotations and references from Mae Marsh, Screen Acting (Photo-Star Publishing, 1921), 4, 51–72. Quotations from John Emerson and Anita Loos, Breaking into the Movies (George W. Jacobs, 1921), 13–15, 17, 19, 21. The cover also refers to the couple’s prior book How to Write Photoplays. Klumph and Klumph, Screen Acting; all quotations are taken from chap. 26, “The Question of Make-Up,” 141–147. Agnes Platt, Practical Hints on Acting for the Cinema (E. P. Dutton, 1923), 84. The book indicates that Platt lived in London, and that she also wrote Practical Hints on Training for the Stage. As with the Klumphs, it does not appear that Platt was a movie actor. Laurence A. Hughes, ed., The Truth About the Movies: By the Stars (Hollywood Publishers, 1924). Hughes, 199. Hughes, 299. Hughes, 301, 303. Hughes, 307. Hughes, Holland quotations from 295–297. Hughes, Bennett quotations from 299. Jameson Sewell, “What Is Camera Beauty? [Some leading cameramen select the perfect photographic types],” Photoplay, August 1925, 38–39, 108, which shows that cameramen of the era were still not agreeing on the “best” hair and eye color for film. Bernique, Motion Picture Acting, 172. Chaney in Holland, The Art of Make-Up, n.p. “Character Actors Signed,” Los Angeles Times. Basten, Salvatore, and Kaufman, Max Factor’s Hollywood, 26. Basten, Salvatore, and Kaufman, 36. Basten, Salvatore, and Kaufman, 40.

254 • Notes to Pages 67–70

115 The exception, I would assume, being his heretofore unacknowledged stint in

1929–1930 as makeup department head at Radiotone Pictures Studio.

116 Stephen Michael Shearer, Gloria Swanson: The Ultimate Star (St. Martin’s Press,

2013), 48.

117 Gloria Swanson, Swanson on Swanson (Pocket Books, 1980), 9, 102. 118 Valentino, an immensely popular star with women and men, was victimized by the

119 120

121

122 123

124

125 126

127 128

129 130

publication in a Chicago newspaper in July 1926 of an anonymous editorial that blamed the actor—and Hollywood, as the “national school of masculinity”—for corrupting young men through the popularization of cosmetics use. For detailed discussion of the so-called “pink powder puff” editorial, which is rumored to have hastened Valentino’s death a few weeks later, and its ramifications for Hollywood’s subsequent approaches to representing “traditional masculinity,” see Mark Lynn Anderson, Twilight of the Idols: Hollywood and the Human Sciences in 1920s America (University of California Press, 2011), 91–103. On Valentino, Factor, and Mont Westmore, see Basten, Salvatore, and Kaufman, Max Factor’s Hollywood, 40; Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, 53–58. Max Factor, “Movie Make-Up: A Master of the Art Sets Forth That Make-Up Is the Cinematographer’s Best Ally,” American Cinematographer, April 1928, 8. See “New Fox Studio to Be Built in Los Angeles,” Motion Picture News, July 7, 1923, 90, which touts the plans for the “new studio of Fox Film Corporation, soon to be erected in a suburb of Los Angeles,” which would have a “cosmetic parlor” in “close proximity” to star dressing rooms. For more on these and other scandals, and on the Production Code’s relationship to them, see Adrienne L. McLean and David Cook, eds., Headline Hollywood: A Century of Film Scandal (Rutgers University Press, 2001). Emily Carman, Independent Stardom: Freelance Women in the Hollywood Studio System (University of Texas Press, 2016), 15–18. See Murray Ross, Stars and Strikes: Unionization of Hollywood (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 38. The text of the contract can be found in any issue of the Film Daily Yearbook from 1929 until 1933, when the Screen Actors Guild drew up their own version that actors could use to negotiate with studios on more flexible terms. Nevertheless, some version of the “name and likeness” clause whereby the studio controlled, unless otherwise negotiated, the actor’s image on and off the screen persisted through the end of the studio era. Kathy Klaprat, “The Star as Market Strategy: Bette Davis in Another Light,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio, rev. ed. (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 351–376. Bette Davis, The Lonely Life: An Autobiography (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962), 197. Basten, Salvatore, and Kaufman, Max Factor’s Hollywood, 25. (As noted earlier, there was no film industry on the West Coast in 1908, although Factor did benefit from the fortuitous growth of the industry hard upon his move to Los Angeles.) Basten, Salvatore, and Kaufman, 75. I have taken this general information largely from Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, and from Perc Westmore’s 1969 and 1970 interviews combined in Mike Steen, ed., Hollywood Speaks! An Oral History (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974), 258–273. In The Westmores of Hollywood the salon is named “Maison Cesare”; my spelling comes from the salon’s own advertising. See Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, 15, 45. Perc Westmore in Steen, Hollywood Speaks!, 258–261. Wally Westmore, in Wally Westmore, as told to Pete Martin, “I Make Up Hollywood,” Saturday Evening Post,

Notes to Pages 70–72 • 255

131 132

133

134 135

136

August 11, 1956, says it was 1919 (85). Christiana Benson, Ern Westmore’s granddaughter, sent me a Westmore “working timeline” that has Bud (Hamilton Adolph) Westmore being born in Los Angeles in 1918. But from his draft card, visa documents, the 1920 and 1930 census records, and other material available on ancestry .com as well as in Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, it seems clear that Bud (who later at times went by George Hamilton) was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, that year. In fact, The Westmore Beauty Book: A Concyclopedia of Beauty, by Perc, Wally, Bud, Frank, and Mont Westmore (Melvin Korshak Publishers, 1956), states outright that “Bud was born in New Orleans” (16). Ironically, the first appearance I have found of the department-founding legend is on the dedication page of The Westmore Beauty Book, where George is described as being “the first to establish a make-up and hair-styling department in the motionpicture industry,” which story Frank perpetuated in The Westmores of Hollywood. As Frank was publishing his book in 1976, however, MGM’s William Tuttle was attributing the Westmores’ importance simply to their abilities as “great salesmen [who] made a lot of noise and attracted attention” to makeup until “finally the publicity people connected with motion pictures decided to give the makeup artist a little credit.” William Tuttle, corrected typescript of American Film Institute oral history, 1975–1976, WTP, MHL, AMPAS, 121. By the mid-1930s, the sons were pushing their dead father’s status as a “pioneer,” but without the departmentfounding rubric, in connection with publicity about the opening of their salon, the House of Westmore; see Madge Kelly, “Shoes On—Hats Off—To the Westmores,” Hollywood Low-Down, May 15, 1935, 6, 21 (Hollywood Low-Down was a publication for and by fan clubs). See also Harry Burns, “The House of Westmore,” Hollywood Filmograph, “Special Edition,” Saturday, April 13, 1935, which refers to George’s “foresight” in realizing the importance of “the make-up and cosmetic field” to motion pictures (Hollywood Filmograph, started in 1922, was a weekly trade paper for actors), PWP, MHL, AMPAS. See “Selig’s Versatile Character Man,” Movie Magazine, December 1915, 74. Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, 37, 40; typescript of letter from Dorothy Deere to “Jan,” October 9, 1956, PWP, MHL, AMPAS. And in a story about House of Westmore cosmetics being sold in Britain, it was “Montreal’s ladies of the evening” (“The Lucky Barbers,” Time, November 26, 1945, 84). “Make-Up and the Westmores,” Variety, September 18, 1929, 61 (the column appears on the “Women’s Page”); Perc Westmore, “Corrective Makeup as An Aid to Cinematography,” American Cinematographer, May 1935, 188 (“Personally, I find my own early experience as a portrait-painter invaluable in this new interpretation of cosmetology”). All from Perc Westmore in Steen, Hollywood Speaks!, 260–262. Among the first references I found to the Westmore family in a movie magazine was in a photo caption in Photoplay, February 1927, 102: “The big crepe hair and mustache man from Hollywood, George Westmore, make-up man de lux [sic], handles three thousand extras a day on DeMille’s ‘The King of Kings’ set. He has twenty assistants. Two of them are his sons—Wallie and Monty, who are seen here. There are three more Westmore heirs, not apparent—Percy, Erne and Dorothy, also tonsorially talented.” The idiosyncratic spelling of the Westmores’ names (as of many others) would never quite abate in the decades that followed, but one notes that none is referred to as a studio department head. King of Kings was George’s last film. Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, 43. For Perc’s longer version, see Perc Westmore in Steen, Hollywood Speaks!, 258–259.

256 • Notes to Pages 72–76

137 Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, 67. 138 The 1933 Motion Picture Almanac lists “Purc” Westmore for hairdressing and Walter

139 140

141 142

143 144

145 146 147 148

149 150

“Rogers” for makeup at Warner Bros.–First National. The 1932 Film Daily Yearbook simply lists “Percy” Westmore and Walter Rodgers (though his name is again misspelled) in the “Makeup Dept.” As far as I can tell, the [International] Motion Picture Almanac went to print in July of the subsequent year, the Film Daily Yearbook in February. Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, 71. George’s gruesome suicide may have been inadvertent; he drank bichloride of mercury, which took four days to “eat its way through his guts,” in Ern Westmore’s reported words. George’s daughter Dorothy (b. 1907), who shared her mother with the rest of his sons (he had another daughter by a second wife), also died a few months later during botched pelvic surgery. Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, 31–32, 71–72. Mary Astor, A Life on Film (Delacorte Press, 1971), 32. Acting manuals of the sound era no longer refer to makeup or hairdressing, I presume because it was understood that the studios were responsible for it. See, e.g., Josephine Dillon (Gable), Modern Acting: A Guide for Stage, Screen and Radio (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1940). Mary Astor, My Story: An Autobiography (Doubleday, 1959), 80. Perc Westmore in Steen, Hollywood Speaks!, 260; Jeffrey Vance, with Tony Maietta, Douglas Fairbanks (University of California Press, 2008), 186 (Vance does not mention George Westmore or other makeup artists). Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, 47. See Foster Goss, “Panchromatic Predictions,” American Cinematographer, January 1927, 5. Basten, Salvatore, and Kaufman, Max Factor’s Hollywood, 64. The labor force of studio makeup and hairdressing is discussed in chapter 2. Although Max Factor’s empire was run by men, photographs of his factory in all its iterations—now hanging in the current Hollywood Museum that occupies the former Max Factor building on Highland Avenue in Los Angeles, where I saw them—show ranks of almost exclusively women at tables and counters manufacturing cosmetics and ventilating wigs; sometimes men appear to be supervising them. Again see the homophobic editorial about Valentino’s cosmetics use in 1926. Interestingly, some of the first public attention paid to the Westmore brothers was for shady behavior. Ern Westmore was named as one of two men—both part of a “tieup with the Max Factor makeup concern” (which employed Ern and Perc at the time)—who attempted to swindle money out of the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers (WAMPAS) and a local hotel in 1929; see “Wampas Stops Bogus Splurge on Baby Stars,” Variety, March 20, 1929, 4. Ern also attracted coverage when he married his second wife in 1930 (who actually had been a WAMPAS baby star), and his first wife showed up at the wedding “clad in rags, their little [daughter] in her arms, to emphasize the alleged state of poverty in which Ern had left her”; Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, 70–71. See also Photoplay, May 1930, 90, which claims Ern “wallop[ed]” the news photographer, who sued him for assault. I found no such stories, or public references to these, following the death of George; they may have been muted as the brothers, including even the comparatively peripatetic Ern, established themselves as studio executives.

Notes to Pages 78–85 • 257

Chapter 2. The Classical Period 1 AMPAS, “Incandescent Illumination,” Academy Reports No. 1 (July 1928) [tests

2 3

4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11

12

13 14 15

16

17 18 19

20

conducted January–April 1928]. Unless otherwise noted, all material is from the session “Make-Up and Color Values,” 22–38. Available at digitalcollections.oscars.org. Foster Goss, “Panchromatic Predictions,” American Cinematographer, January 1927, 5. Quotations from David Bordwell, “The Mazda Tests of 1928,” in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (Columbia University Press, 1985), 294–297. AMPAS, “Incandescent Illumination,” 8 (italics added). AMPAS, 27. Bordwell, “The Mazda Tests,” 296. It was trademarked in December 1928. In addition to films themselves, the basic similarity of much of the advice in H. B. Oldridge, Movie Make-up Manual (Oldridge Studios, 1927), and Cecil Holland, The Art of Make-Up for Stage and Screen (Cinematex Publishing, 1927), indicates that a degree of standardization was in place already in the matter of straight makeup, especially. Bordwell, “The Mazda Tests,” 296. “Make-Up Artists Organize,” Film Daily, June 19, 1927, 9. Film Daily Yearbook (1928), 524. The organization is listed in every iteration of the yearbook through 1936, and all information reported about meetings, officers, and membership comes from there. I did not have access to all issues of the [International] Motion Picture Almanac, but those I could examine also listed the association and sometimes included a membership roster. Information on Rosine comes from obituaries in Variety (August 24 and September 5, 1979) and another, unsourced (August 20, 1979), from the Rosine clipping file, MHL, AMPAS. IMDb.com, however, lists her death as February 1978, on what basis I do not know; the several dated obituaries refer specifically to the fact that “services are pending,” so I believe they are accurate. See Michael F. Blake, “75 Years of Wonderful History,” The Artisan (75th Anniversary Issue 2012): 28–39. Perc Westmore in Hollywood Speaks! An Oral History, ed. Mike Steen (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974), 260–261. At the time of this writing, Christiana Benson (Ern Westmore’s granddaughter) manages the Westmore website at https://www.westmoresofhollywood.com, which is the source of this information. See “Make-up Artists Progress,” International Photographer, March 1929, 5. The journal was the “official inter-local bulletin” of IATSE Local 659, International Photographers (the union no longer exists separately but appears to have been chartered around 1928). AMPAS, “Incandescent Illumination,” 23. Patrick Keating, Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir (Columbia University Press, 2010), 29. All quotations in this paragraph from Louis W. Physioc, “Movie Make-Up: A Technical and Artistic Analysis of Motion Picture Make-Up With an Historical Sketch,” American Cinematographer, February 1928, 6, 25. All quotations—and italics—in this paragraph from Joseph Dubray, “Movie Make-Up: Is Make-Up to Be or Not to Be—Panchromatic Film Causes Misapprehension,” American Cinematographer, March 1928, 8, 25.

258 • Notes to Pages 85–90

21 “Final Session” (April 20, 1928), AMPAS, “Incandescent Illumination,” 58. 22 “Final Session,” 61. A list of participating cinematographers can be found in “The

Mazda Tests,” American Cinematographer, April 1928, 30, 32.

23 Max Factor, “Movie Make-Up: A Master of the Art Sets Forth That Make-Up Is the

24 25 26

27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39

Cinematographer’s Best Ally,” American Cinematographer, April 1928, 8, 25; AMPAS, “Incandescent Illumination,” 24. Quotations here from Factor, “Movie Make-Up,” 8, 25. Quotations from Max Factor, “Panchromatic Make-Up,” American Cinematographer, May 1928, 22. Max Factor, “Movie Make-Up [Mr Factor tells of the purity of materials and destroys the myth of poison in make-up],” American Cinematographer, June 1928, 22–23. For more on the sorts of publicity about the dangers, to women especially, that Factor was reacting to, see M. C. Phillips, Skin Deep: The Truth About Beauty Aids (Garden City Publishing, 1934); Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (Henry Holt, 1998), 197–200. See also Richard Corson, Fashions in Makeup: From Ancient to Modern Times, rev. ed. (London: Peter Owen, 2003): “The first Food and Drug Act in the United States since 1906 went into effect in 1940 [it was passed in 1938]. Since it now covered the field of cosmetics, it was called the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and covered all cosmetics involved in interstate commerce” (519). Oswell Blakeston, “Grease Paint,” in Through a Yellow Glass (Pool, 1928), 12–17. AMPAS, “Incandescent Illumination,” 27. Brian Winston, Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television (BFI, 1996), 55–56. See also L. T. Troland’s discussion of “flesh tints” in “Some Psychological Aspects of Natural Color Motion Pictures,” Transactions of S.M.P.E. 11, no. 32 (September 1927): 680–698. Alice Maurice, Cinema and Its Shadow: Race and Technology in Early Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Richard Dyer, White (Routledge, 1997). Oldridge, Movie Make-up Manual, 13. Fred E. Basten, Max Factor: The Man Who Changed the Faces of the World (Arcade Publishing, 2008), 62. Ginger Rogers, Ginger: My Story (HarperCollins, 1991), 76. “A.S.C. Research Committee Completes Make-up Tests,” American Cinematographer, November 1929, 13. The tests were all done with Factor cosmetics. “A.S.C. Research Committee Completes Make-up Tests,” 13. The first of the Max Factor series, which was called “Your Makeup Problems,” was titled “What Makeup You Need,” American Cinematographer, October 1929, 37, 47; the series appeared through June 1930 (I found no entry for February). The entries began as two pages but by January were reduced to a single page. According to Basten, Max Factor, national distribution of the Color Harmony “Prescription Make-Up” coincided with “the Hollywood premiere of the world’s first ‘talkie’ feature, The Jazz Singer,” in October 1927 (61). Basten also claims that “from the moment [Factor] coined” the word “make-up” in 1920—rather than using the more “acceptable” term cosmetics—he “spelled it with a hyphen” (ix), but this is not true of any of the Factor American Cinematographer advice columns. American Cinematographer, February 1929, 30. See also “Hollywood’s Service Army,” International Photographer, April 1938, 11–13. Keating, Hollywood Lighting, chap. 1. “Make-up Artists Progress,” 5.

Notes to Pages 90–93 • 259 40 According to Wally Westmore, male makeup artists were not allowed “to touch an

41 42

43

44

45

46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54

55 56

57

actress below the neck or above the wrists.” In Wally Westmore, as told to Pete Martin, “I Make Up Hollywood,” Saturday Evening Post, August 4, 1956, 78. Sue Cabral-Ebert, email message to author, July 17, 2018. The “revised” constitution of the Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Local 706, of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Machine Operators of the United States and Canada, dated February 16, 1957, states in Article Two, Section 3: “Applicants to Make-Up Artists craft must be male, . . . Applicants to Body Make-Up craft must be female. . . . Applicants to Hair Stylists craft must be female and licensed by the California State Board of Cosmotology [sic].” The race of applicants is not mentioned. John Truwe papers, “Make-Up and Hair Stylists Local 706—1957,” MHL, AMPAS. According to Sue Cabral-Ebert, the same restrictions existed until the 1970s. Quotation from Ginger “Sugar” Blymer, Hairdresser to the Stars: A Hollywood Memoir (Infinity Publishing, 2000), 27, in reference to the standards insisted upon by MGM’s then head of hairdressing, Mary Keats, in the late 1950s. According to James Gavin, Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne (Atria Books, 2009), 170, “less than two percent of the industry’s 30,000 technical employees were black” in the 1940s and 1950s. See The Artisan (75th Anniversary Issue 2012): “In the 1920s, a group of make-up artists and actors who became make-up artists, formed the Motion Picture Makeup Artists Association. Hair stylists and wig makers worked here [sic] as well and eventually, both make-up and hair joined forces to form IATSE Local 706” (4). “Make-up Artists Progress,” 5. Michelle Tolini Finamore, Hollywood before Glamour: Fashion in American Silent Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 140. Finamore, 140. Murray Ross, Stars and Strikes: Unionization of Hollywood (Columbia University Press, 1941), 7–8. Ross, 13. I am assuming Ross’s use of “painters” here refers to the Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers of America. Again, the California branches of such pre-1937 unions no longer exist; the most useful source of material about Local 235 or, later, Two-Three-Five has been the papers of a Hollywood art director, Leo “K” Kuter. LKKP, MHL, AMPAS. Constitution of the Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers (Haywood Pub., September 1929), 41–42, LKKP, MHL, AMPAS. Correspondence between the League of Art Directors, the American Federation of Labor, and IATSE, April–November 1929, LKKP, MHL, AMPAS. “Working Rules, Two-Three-Five, Hollywood, United Scenic Artists of America,” 6–7. The booklet’s first page states, “Effective September 15, 1931.” LKKP, MHL, AMPAS. Quotations from “Union Trying to Force Issue With Make-up Artists,” Hollywood Filmograph, May 21, 1932 [column, n.p.]. “Cosmetics Concern Gets State Permit,” Los Angeles Times, January 13, 1932, n.p., clipping file [Robert Stephanoff], MHL, AMPAS, which continues, “Upon completion of a new plant in Hollywood, the new products are expected to be on sale by March 15.” “Incorporations,” Variety, August 22, 1934, n.p.: “Hollywood Motion Picture Make-Up Artists, Inc., Ltd. New name for Associated Motion Picture Make-Up

260 • Notes to Pages 93–96

58

59 60 61 62

63

64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72

Artists, Inc., as per certificate”; Variety, November 13, 1934, n.p.: “Hollywood Motion Picture Make-Up Artists, Inc. Cosmetics, Capital, 10,000 shares at $10 par value. Directors: Cecil Holland, Blagoe Stephanoff, Raymond Lopez” (both items from clipping file [Robert Stephanoff], MHL, AMPAS). The original suit was based on the group of fifty-five makeup artists functioning as a nonprofit corporation, which then sued the new for-profit company because of the similarity in their names, perhaps based on California’s “unfair competition law.” But on appeal the evidence for the legal challenge was ruled not sufficient, and the for-profit company prevailed. I could find no publicity about the original lawsuit or the victorious appeal in 1936; the latter, however (Motion Picture Make-Up Artists Ass’n v. Association of Motion Picture Make-Up Artists, Inc., ll Cal.App. 2d 320; B. A. J. I. l. 005), has been mentioned in subsequent lawsuits as precedent. I assume that the new company was no more by 1936, rendering its court victory moot for reasons that we may never fully understand. “Union Trying to Force Issue With Make-up Artists.” Mike Nielsen and Gene Mailes, Hollywood’s Other Blacklist: Union Struggles in the Studio System (BFI, 1995), 10, 19. Nielsen wrote the sections I quote from. AMPAS Bulletin 14 (June 22, 1933), in Ross, Stars and Strikes, 99. Original documents cited in this and the subsequent paragraph are from the files of Local 706 in Los Angeles, scanned and sent to me by Sue Cabral-Ebert. According to the membership lists in the Motion Picture Almanac, there were some twelve members of the MPMAA that year who did not sign the document. Michael Westmore, email message to author, January 28, 2019. It is interesting that in LeRoy and Canfield, It Takes More Than Talent, the appendix section “Make-Up Artists” states simply that “Ninety per cent of make-up artists are men” (293)—and the section ends with the ludicrous claim that “Women can’t seem to stand the terrific tension” of the “nerve-wracking, hard work” (294)—whereas in the section “Hairdressers” no such reference to gender is made. Ironically, being a hairdresser was, of course, physically hard and often “nerve-wracking” work; see chapter 3 of this book. Frank Westmore and Muriel Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood (Lippincott, 1976), 119, 121–122. From the files of Local 706. According to Film Facts in 1941, as cited in a paper written by Evelyn Wright, “Labor Relations in Motion Picture Production” (June 3, 1946), for Business Administration 251 at the University of California, Berkeley (available in the Online Archive of California, https://oac.cdlib.org/), “the labor cost of craftsmen is only 5% of the total cost of a picture” (8). William Tuttle, corrected typescript of AFI oral history, 1975–1976, WTP, MHL, AMPAS, 122. “April Third Will Be the Deadline for General Walkout,” Hollywood Filmograph, March 25, 1933, 1. From the files of Local 706. As a telegram, it is all caps and has no punctuation. Nielsen and Mailes, Hollywood’s Other Blacklist, 18–19. See “Wagner Disturbs H’Wood,” Variety, April 14, 1937, 1, 2; “Strike of Painters Threatens Studios,” Film Daily, May 1, 1937, 1, 3. For a general narrative of this period, from which much of this information is taken, see Ross, Stars and Strikes; Hugh Lovell and Tasile Carter, Collective Bargaining in the Motion Picture Industry: A Struggle for Stability (Institute of Industrial Relations/University of California, 1955); Ida Jeter, “The Collapse of the Federated

Notes to Pages 96–98 • 261

73 74

75 76

77

78

79 80

81 82 83 84 85

86

Motion Picture Crafts: A Case Study of Class Collaboration in the Motion Picture Industry,” Journal of the University Film and Video Association 31, no. 2 (1979): 37–45. Not all of the “eleven crafts” are named, however. “I.A.T.S.E. Launches Drive to Sign Up Painters and Laborers,” Film Daily, May 3, 1937, 3. Jeter, “The Collapse of the Federated Motion Picture Crafts,” 37. See also “Studio Labor Situash Easing Off, Makeups, Stylists Reach Agreement,” Variety, July 21, 1937, 7. Nielsen and Mailes, Hollywood’s Other Blacklist, 21. Louella O. Parsons, “Hollywood Buzzes with New Topic about Movieland’s Big Strike as Film Players Are Forced to Don Own Make-up,” San Antonio Light, May 4, 1937, scrapbook 19, PWP, MHL, AMPAS. “Westmore’s 10G Damage,” Variety, May 5, 1937, 2. Sheilah Graham, in “Hollywood Today,” Scranton (PA) Times, May 5, 1937, puts the cost of the damage at $15,000 (scrapbook 19, PWP, MHL, AMPAS), while in Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, it is $20,000 (119). Scrapbook 19 of the PWP contains clippings about the vandalism and the strikes, and according to “Sabotage in Movie Strike,” Des Moines Register, May 5, 1937, n.p., “Police said the sabotage was committed on the belief the firm was supplying nonunion makeup artists to replace striking makeup men.” For more on the salon itself see chapter 3. See “Federated Rejects Peace Plan by Vote of 640–276,” Film Daily, June 2, 1937, 1, 8: “It is understood that make-up men, hair dressers and scenic artists affiliated with the painters union are to be taken over by IATSE. By vote of 640 to 276 Federated members decided to continue on strike. They rejected verbal agreement made by [George E.] Browne and [Joe] Clarke which would have returned strikers to work and placed hairdressers and makeup artists under jurisdiction of IATSE.” Ross, Stars and Strikes, 199. “See Film Peace This Week, SAG, IATSE Not Backing FMPC,” Variety, May 5, 1937, 1–2. See also Victoria Wilson, A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907–1940 (Simon and Schuster, 2014), 631: “The start of Stella Dallas had been delayed by a makeup artists’ and hairdressers’ strike in an effort by the Federated Motion Picture Crafts unions to win recognition as a guild shop; when production finally began on Stella Dallas, there was only a skeletal crew to cover for those artists on strike” (631). Wilson also reports that actor Barbara O’Neil was upset both by not being able to put on her own makeup as she had in the theater—Stella Dallas, a Goldwyn production, was her first film—and also by crossing a picket line, as did apparently Goldwyn’s chief makeup artist Robert Stephanoff. Laurie Pintar, “Herbert K. Sorrell as the Grade-B Hero: Militancy and Masculinity in the Studios,” Labor History 37, no. 3 (1996): 392–416. Pintar, 401–402. Pintar, 405. “Wagner Disturbs H’Wood,” 2. The text from the original charter of Local 706 was provided to me by Kathryn Sain; while it instructs that the charter “bear date November 1, 1937,” it was signed on October 21, 1937. It must have been very annoying to the hairdressers that Local 706 was referred to in the Film Daily Yearbook only as “Make-Up Artists” until 1944, when “and Hair Stylists” was finally added. The information about “Studio Makeup Artists” and its status within Local 37 I am taking from Dot Ponedel’s application to the group on September 13, 1937 (a copy was provided to me by Meredith Ponedel). On Local 37 itself, see “The War for

262 • Notes to Page 99

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Warner Brothers” on IATSE’s webpage, https://www.iatse728.org/about-us/history /the-war-for-warner-brothers. Ponedel’s younger brother Bernard, who had followed in his sister’s footsteps, was admitted to Local 706 at the same time. William Tuttle also later wrote that when the union was formed, “all the people who had worked in the industry as makeup artist [sic] up until that time were automatically accepted without initiation fees” (Tuttle, AFI oral history, 119), and this may be how Dot Ponedel ended up on the first roster. Tuttle does not mention hairdressers. “Beauticians Unionize,” Variety, January 29, 1936, 3. The officers were hairdressers Leonora Sabine, Nina Roberts, Alta Hitchcock, and Ethel Hogan. Other references I found to the Motion Picture Hair Stylists Guild were the registering of a copyright for a “design of lady’s head” in 1935 and in Duart ads for hair products and a face cream in fan magazines in 1936 and 1937, as well as at least one “article.” See Catalogue of Copyright Entries, pt. 4, Library of Congress Copyright Office/U.S. Government Printing Office, vol. 30, nos. 1–4, 1935, 10288; Doris Dumont, “Hollywood’s Beauty,” Hollywood, May 1936, 36–37 (which is in the advertising section next to a Duart ad): “Spring is the time to look for new hairstyles and new beauty ideas so I decided to visit several of the leading lights of the Motion Picture Hairstylists Guild. The members of this organization compose the hairstyling departments of every studio in Hollywood. They are the most distinguished, most highly paid group of hairstylists and beauticians in the world today. Every lovely star you see on the screen has been beautified by a Guild member.” The “advice” is from “Leonore [Leonora] Sabine, the head hairstylist” at Paramount; Nina Roberts, “head hairstylist” at “United Artists Studio”; and Helen Hunt, “head hairstylist at the nearby Columbia Studios” (the names and titles are real), who all endorse Duart’s “Creme of Milk” and “report that already a jar of Creme of Milk is to be found in almost every star’s dressing room.” Duart was hit with a cease-and-desist order in 1937, however, for false advertising and was specifically enjoined from using the organization’s or the women’s names until the product “is endorsed by the Motion Picture Hairstylists Guild or any other group of persons, unless and until it is a fact that such Guild or group as such or an officer thereof, after being duly authorized to do so, has given such endorsement.” See Federal Trade Commission Decisions, June 1, 1937–November 30, 1937, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1939, 1622–1623. Perc Westmore features prominently in other Duart ads for “perm waving pads” as a “famed hairstylist and cosmetician of Warner Bros. Studios,” where no mention is made of his female colleagues. I do not know who was responsible for the cease-and-desist order, the women or the union they had joined (or Perc Westmore). Ross, Stars and Strikes, 193. I know that Local 731 was a member of the Brotherhood through a facsimile of Larry Germain’s unsuccessful application to be a hairdresser there. See The Artisan (75th Anniversary Issue 2012), 13. Some women hairdressers also attempted to establish their independence in publicity, at least. In addition—ambiguously—to the Duart ads cited previously, see their remarks in “Studio Hairdressers, The Stars You Don’t Know [Wave experts rule beauty of film glamour exponents],” Evening Sun (Baltimore), September 16, 1936, 20: “Expert but unknown, these studio hairdressers are a vital part of the movie industry—and stars, themselves, in their own field. . . . The most skilled hair operators in the world, the studio experts are powers behind the thrones occupied by the incredibly lovely stars. . . . Every moment, on the set, a hairdresser hovers over a beautiful star. Between each take the actress’ complicated waves are restored to

Notes to Pages 99–102 • 263

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93

94 95

96 97

98

99 100

101 102 103

perfection. After she’s through working, at night, a star’s hair is shampooed and set for the next day’s glamour. Literally, she is powerless without her hairdresser.” The piece also goes out of its way to differentiate the hairdressers from domestic help: “Nellie [Manley] is no maid—but a great specialist in the art of smart coiffure.” Interestingly, no studios or (male) makeup artists are named. Information provided by Kathryn Sain of Local 706. Nellie Manley in Steen, Hollywood Speaks!, 284. See also the table of studio crafts in Leo C. Rosten, Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1941), 374, which, oddly, lists “Makeup and Hairdressing Men” (only for the year 1938), the total number of which was 136. Women did not even do body makeup, according to a short chapter titled “Beauty Builders” in Beth Day’s anecdotal account This Was Hollywood: An Affectionate History of Filmland’s Golden Years (Doubleday, 1960), until the brief attire of pre-Code musicals required the evening out and burnishing of the skin tone of all “dancers, singers, and chorines” who soon complained that “the boys got a little gay” (171). Variety, September 5, 1979, n.p., Rosine clipping file, MHL, AMPAS. Correspondence between Dot and the union cited in Susan Cabral-Ebert and Meredith Ponedel, “And the Answer Is . . . [Dorothy Ponedel],” The Artisan, Winter 2007, 14. See, for example, “‘La Belle,’ Coiffure Created by Denis Phillips for Blanca Visher,” Photoplay, August 1935, 82. I assume this from United Scenic Artists’ 1931 “Working Rules,” given that so many other of that union’s “rules” persisted into Local 706: makeup artists “shall not be permitted to dress hair, or place or adjust wigs (hairlaces excepted) upon other than male actors” (6–7), while hairdressers “shall be employed for the purpose of dressing hair, making wigs, applying wigs to the heads of women and for no other purpose” (7). Bizarrely, Local 706 possesses only Germain’s rejected application to Local 731 in its files, which is dated the same day (April 14, 1937) as his apparently successful application to what was likely IATSE Local 37/Studio Makeup Artists. He may have applied to both at the same time, and his acceptance into Local 37 made his continuation into 706 automatic. According to the 1943 Film Daily Yearbook, Twentieth Century-Fox also had a male “coiffure stylist,” Wayne Forrest, for that year only (the makeup chief was Walter Pearce; see the appendix to this book). This would have been because affirmative action meant that unions could no longer discriminate on the basis of gender, not because he applied to the union as such. Sydney Guilaroff and Cathy Griffin, Crowning Glory: Reflections of Hollywood’s Favorite Confidant (General Publishing Group, 1996), 57–59. Dawn did not become department head until 1935. Guilaroff and Griffin, 89. Los Angeles Times, August 26, 2007, n.p., in Dirigo clipping file, MHL, AMPAS. See Dorothy Ponedel and Meredith Ponedel, with Danny Miller, About Face: The Life and Times of Dottie Ponedel: Make-Up Artist to the Stars (BearManor Media, 2018). The frontispiece of the book is a facsimile of the letter Dot wrote on February 23, 1942, to “Make-Up Artists Local Union #706” (she specifically addresses “Mr. E. Westmoore [sic],” though he was not a listed officer at that time). She protests that “again I have been informed that there is a movement to oust me from the Union for the crime of being a Woman,” and notes that she had been working as a makeup artist for thirteen years. “That my work has been of the very highest calibre,” she continues, “can be attested by the fact that I have always worked for

264 • Notes to Pages 102–106

104

105

106 107 108 109

110

111 112 113

salaries above the minimum scale, and that many of the leading stars have had clauses inserted into their contracts insisting upon my services. However, . . . I have at all times insisted that a make-up man be employed on any set where I have worked, as well as a body make-up girl where there was any of that work to be done.” It is not stated in the book what might have precipitated either the move to oust her or how Ern Westmore was involved. See also Cabral-Ebert and Ponedel, “And the Answer Is . . . ,” which quotes correspondence from April 1942 in which Ponedel requested a union card and thanked the “Executive Board and all members of the Body who have been so nice to me in this case” (14). See Jeanne North, “Do You Want a Job in the Studios?,” Photoplay, May 1931, 68–70, 116–120, which gives pay scales and employment categories (how trustworthy they are I do not know). The rest I base on facsimile reproductions from the archives of Local 706 reproduced in The Artisan. For IATSE categories and wage scales effective October 1, 1937, see The Artisan (75th Anniversary Issue 2012), 14; for “Wage Scales, Hours of Employment and Working Conditions” (“Effective between January 1, 1947 and December 31, 1947”), see The Artisan, Summer 2013, 38. See also the “Make-up Artist” and “Hairdresser” entries in the appendix of LeRoy and Canfield, It Takes More Than Talent, 293–294. The change from “dressing” to “styling” hair seems to have been in nomenclature rather than a difference in duties, although LeRoy and Canfield state “Hair stylist creates hairdo of star and featured players. Hairdresser does actual work on cast and star” (294), which is not a distinction—except in the case of Sydney Guilaroff’s assessment of his career—that I came across in most other sources, when the “stylist” and the “dresser” were the same person. Hairdressers arrived already trained in creating the basics—bobs of all lengths, waves and curls, coronets and the like, etc.—of women’s modern hair designs. The 1931 “Working Rules” of United Scenic Artists stipulated a “State license” and the ability to conform to “all laws of the Cosmetology Act” (7). Certainly by 1937 the rigor of salon training was already extensive; see the dense detail, including diseases of the skin and scalp and their treatment, of Frances A. Macmullen’s textbook Practical Science of Beauty Culture (Hollywood Publishing Company, 1937). As the foreword states, “The cosmetologist will find [these instructions and methods] readily adaptable to whatever routine is followed in the salon in which she is ultimately employed” (n.p.). LeRoy and Canfield, It Takes More Than Talent, lists the “schooling” and “experience” required for makeup and hairdressing as “Beautycollege graduate, license and diploma,” and “Top beauty salon excellent reference,” respectively (294). Wright, “Labor Relations in Motion Picture Production,” 28–34. Wright, 28–34. Lovell and Carter, Collective Bargaining in the Motion Picture Industry, 3. Described in the interviews with Perc Westmore in Steen, Hollywood Speaks!, 258–273. For more about how hair lace was made and what it meant to male stardom see chapter 4 of this book. In Donald Knox, ed., The Magic Factory: How MGM Made An American in Paris (Praeger, 1973), 110–111. Interestingly, Knox interviewed none of MGM’s makeup artists or hairdressers themselves for his oral history. Michael Westmore, email message to author, January 25, 2019. My spelling of names comes, when possible, from an individual’s actual signature. The qualifications for becoming a union member now are the usual Catch-22 that marks the entertainment industry as a whole—namely, that to be admitted to the union one must have experience working on “shows,” but it is not easy to get such

Notes to Pages 106–107 • 265

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115 116 117 118

119 120

experience without being a union member. In the words of Sue Cabral-Ebert, “Everyone applying for membership must have real-life working experience in film, television, commercials and productions made for the internet. That work experience is gained in the non-union world. (The union is not for beginners.) To attain that experience you would need what is referred to as the 60-60-60. Sixty days of non-union work per year, for three years out of a five year period (e.g., 2015, 2016, 2018). We do not help people wind their way through the non-union world; it’s part of the learning experience of someone in this business to do their own networking for jobs.” As for the cosmetology license, it is “actually more of an insurance to the employers that the hair stylist has been properly trained—it has nothing to do with the skill level or work experience. It is a contractual obligation for the ability to work on roster productions, and it is a requirement of membership as a hair stylist in film and television.” Sue Cabral-Ebert, email message to author, August 1, 2018. See also the organization’s website, Local706.org. Whether Dubray’s invocation of beauty had anything to do with the term beauty makeup I wish I knew. But the equation of beauty with truth in assessments of art generally and the film face in particular has a fairly robust and equally gendered lineage. See Jacques Aumont’s discussion of Béla Balász in “The Face in Close-Up,” in The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History, ed. Angela Dalle Vacche (Rutgers University Press, 2003), in which Aumont characterizes Balász’s belief that “If female movie stars must be beautiful—he is not much concerned with male stars—it is because, in cinema, appearance is not pure decoration, but already an interiority. The stars’ beauty, in film, is simply beauty, that symbol of good hoped for by Kant—because their beauty is a physiognomical expression” (133). Given Aumont’s lack of attention to the film face’s professional blandishment, he seems to concur that beauty comes from “the miracle of physiognomy” (134), which is in marked contrast to Dubray’s take on the situation. Keating, Hollywood Lighting, 24. Jack Dawn, “Make-Up,” in Behind the Screen: How Films Are Made, ed. Stephen Watts (Dodge Publishing, 1938), 69–75. William Tuttle interview, August 12, 1976, DeGolyer Institute of American Studies, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, 18 (italics added). See again “Studio Hairdressers, The Stars You Don’t Know,” however, in which Sally Wacker, Lenore [Leonora] Sabine, and Nellie Manley are described—in fact introduced—as “creative artists” as well. As for makeup apprenticeship programs, all of them were discontinued, according to Sue Cabral-Ebert, by the mid-1970s, “when the producers would no longer pay for training. There have been no programs since that time. That is when makeup schools began popping up. Los Angeles had the only schools in the country—E.I. was the first and only for many years (a.k.a. Elegance International), then came Joe Blasco and Westmore Academy. E.I. is still in existence, but Blasco is now only in Orlando (I think), and Westmore is gone. The most notable schools nowadays are MUD (Makeup Designory—worldwide) and Cinema Makeup School. It is not a requirement to attend a makeup school, it is only one of the processes. Many are either self-taught or work in makeup labs to get training. The makeup labs primarily create prosthetic makeups for films and television projects.” Sue Cabral-Ebert, email message to author, August 1, 2018. Barney Burman, “Robert Schiffer: No Shaggy Dog Story,” Makeup Artist Magazine, no. 33 (October/November 2001): 45. In Al Taylor and Sue Roy, Making a Monster: The Creation of Screen Characters by Great Makeup Artists (Crown, 1980), 30.

266 • Notes to Pages 108–112

121 Michael Westmore, email messages to author, July 19, 2018, and August 16, 2018. See

122 123 124 125 126

127 128 129 130

131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138

139 140

also Michael Westmore, with Jake Page, Makeup Man: From Rocky to Star Trek: The Amazing Creations of Hollywood’s Michael Westmore (Lyons Press, 2017), 26–33. Taylor and Roy, Making a Monster, 90. Most of the other information in this paragraph comes from the book’s chapters on the makeup artists named. Taylor and Roy, chap. 5, “Clay Campbell.” Perc Westmore in Steen, Hollywood Speaks!, 262. “A Tribute to Ben Nye, Sr.,” n.d., n.p., Ben Nye clipping file, MHL, AMPAS. According to one makeup artist, Lee Greenway, interviewed for Taylor and Roy, Making a Monster, “Because they were under contract, apprentices couldn’t be fired” (60). Greenway is speaking of his apprenticeship at Twentieth Century-Fox in the 1940s, under Guy Pearce, but other information contradicts Greenway’s assertion. Wright, “Labor Relations in Motion Picture Production.” Wright. “In Memoriam” [Howard Smit], The Artisan, Summer 2009, 16. See the “Motion Picture Industry Code” [“submitted yesterday . . . to the NRA”], Film Daily, August 24, 1933, 6–7. In the 1931 working rules of Local 235, women had been prohibited from working “more than eight hours in any 24-hour period, except as provided by the laws of the state in which the work is performed” (“Working Rules,” 8). See Anthony H. Dawson, “The Patterns of Production and Employment in Hollywood,” Hollywood Quarterly 4 (Winter 1949): 338–353. Dawson, 347–348. Variety, April 25, 1951, obituary for Walter Rodgers, n.p. Clipping in JLWC, CAL/USC. In Taylor and Roy, Making a Monster, 110. Ralph Roddy, “Labor Picture in Hollywood,” Variety, January 5, 1938, 54. Tuttle, AFI oral history, 62–63. “46 Per Cent of Hollywood’s High Bracket Salaries Go to Taxes,” Motion Picture Herald, January 16, 1937, 19–20, 64, 66. Paramount Pictures contract summaries, “Westmore, Walter (head of make-up department),” MHL, AMPAS. The first contract of the two in the folder was to commence “following date of expiration of agreement of 5-13-43—to render services in ‘making up’ Artists and to be in charge of the ‘Make-up’ Department.” The second is dated February 18, 1948 (and stamped March 5, 1948), for the same period and services. I have been unable to find contracts for Perc Westmore in the Warner Bros. Collection at the University of Southern California, which would have allowed me to learn whether or not Perc’s contracts did, in fact, include a clause that he could not be fired (but only resign) per Westmore family legend. See Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood: “Few people knew, least of all the movie stars, that Perc had a lifetime contract with Warner Brothers as head of their makeup department, breakable only by Perc himself ” (23), or “Only if Perc quit could the notoriously short-fused Jack Warner get rid of him” (176). Folder “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—agreements,” WTP, MHL, AMPAS. All are one-year contracts, the first in 1964 and the last in 1968, his final year at the studio. Tuttle, AFI oral history, 107–108. According to Tuttle, he was mainly the “business head” of hairdressing, at least at MGM: “I am not a hair stylist per se. By that I mean I’ve been involved in some of the styling of the hair from an artistic standpoint, but not actually doing it. Men’s hair styles I have been more involved in.” But while he “left it up to the chief hairstylist” as to whom to hire on a production he

Notes to Pages 112–113 • 267

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144

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147

was working on at the time (1976), he also states that “when it comes right down to it, I will be telling her what is expected of her,” which I assume was also the case in the studio era. However, given that so many of the Westmores were “hair stylists per se,” they were likely considerably more involved than Tuttle, though precisely how it is hard to tell. Blymer, Hairdresser to the Stars, 25. “Makeup Dept. Budget” signed by Ben Nye, The Kid from Left Field (1953), Leonard Goldstein papers, MHL, AMPAS. As Emily Carman writes in Independent Stardom: Freelance Women in the Hollywood Studio System (University of Texas Press, 2016), the 1930s established a “paradox between the stars’ ‘glamorous’ images and their material labor as contractually obligated workers; although they were well compensated, stars still had to conform to the decrees of studio bosses and the hierarchy of their assembly-line production practices” (20). In her autobiography Ginger: My Story (HarperCollins, 1991), Rogers insists that all but one career hair color change had been her decision: “The papers used to write articles saying that the studio forced me to become a brunette for this or that movie, but in truth, except for my initial blonding, no studio ever told me what color my hair was to be for any movie. It was always my decision, based on my understanding of the role. Right or wrong, I made the decision”—only one of which, to black in 1940, does she call a “mistake” (240). One does wonder whether anyone else was blamed for the “mistake,” such as Mel Berns—RKO’s department head—or the hairdresser who dyed the star’s hair. Mary Astor, A Life on Film (Delacorte Press, 1971), 185–186. Unfortunately, in Michael Westmore’s words, “Many great makeups and hairstyles have gone uncredited to the actual appliers” (phone conversation with author, August 18, 2018). Maria Riva, in Lutz Koepnick, “Dietrich’s Face,” in Dietrich Icon, ed. Gerd Gemünden and Mary R. Desjardins (Duke University Press, 2007): “‘She had done it! All by herself, she had achieved what she had set out to do! I was so proud of her—I could have kissed her! Of course I couldn’t because of the makeup, but I felt like it anyway’” (50). See also Teresa Riordan quoting Riva in Inventing Beauty: A History of the Innovations That Have Made Us Beautiful (Broadway Books, 2004): “The smell of greasepaint, fresh coffee, and Danish pastry, the big Make-Up Department all garish light, famous faces naked, devoid of adornment, some tired, half awake, all imperfections showing—terribly human, somehow vulnerable— awaiting the application of their masks of painted perfection. . . . My mother becoming one of the crowd, an astounding revelation to me, who believed she was unique, the only one of her kind. Watching as she pushed skilled hands away, took over the task of doing her own face, drawing a fine line of lighter shade than her base down the center of her nose, dipping the rounded end of a thin hairpin into white greasepaint, lining the inside of her lower eyelid. Looking at her in the big bulb-festooned mirror, seeing that suddenly straightened nose, those now oversized eyes, and coming all the way back to my original concept: that yes . . . she was, after all, truly unique” (11–12). The list of techniques, which are virtually identical to those Maria Riva describes, is from Ponedel and Ponedel, About Face, 20–21. The contouring and the use of white to line and visually enlarge the eyes were, from film evidence, Ponedel innovations, and ones she used on other stars too, including Judy Garland in her MGM films starting with Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) (62).

268 • Notes to Pages 113–117

148 Nellie Manley in Steen, Hollywood Speaks!: “I did with [Von Sternberg] only what I

149 150 151 152 153

154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163

164 165 166 167 168 169

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did with every other director. I’d do Marlene’s hair for a role, then ask him if he liked it or not, and he would say yes or no or tell me to try something else. But he built a reputation of being the big boss and telling everyone else how to do their work” (279). Riva in Riordan, Inventing Beauty, 12. Ponedel and Ponedel, About Face, 26. There are several photographs in the book, and in other collections, of Ponedel applying makeup to Dietrich. Caron in Knox, The Magic Factory, 123. Tuttle, AFI oral history, 92. Ponedel and Ponedel, About Face. Ponedel worked with many other stars and players as well. But post-union she was sometimes referred to in print as a hairdresser. See Edward Churchill, “Santa Is a Headache,” Hollywood, January 1940, 62; George Benjamin, “Paulette’s Outsmarting Her Rivals,” Modern Screen, July 1940, 83 (“One morning I said to Dot Ponedel, my studio hairdresser . . .”). See Wilson, A Life of Barbara Stanwyck, 303, 451, 633. Wilson, 633. Quoted in Vincente Minnelli, with Hector Arce, I Remember It Well (Doubleday, 1974), 204. Quoted in Minnelli, 205. Blymer, Hairdresser to the Stars, 51. Dot Ponedel had her own room when she was at Paramount. Nellie Manley in Steen, Hollywood Speaks!, 277–278. See Ponedel and Ponedel, About Face, 60. Letter to Jack Dawn from Jack Dumont, August 30, 1944, folder “Dawn, Jack,” WTP, MHL, AMPAS. All quotations here from Henry A. Reese, “Merlin of the Movies,” Saturday Evening Post, February 28, 1942, 22–23, 37–38. Michael Westmore, email message to author, August 18, 2018. He later reiterated that Perc “controlled the fate of many!” Michael Westmore, email message to author, September 19, 2019. Caron quoted in Knox, The Magic Factory, 110; Blymer, Hairdresser to the Stars, 189 (Blymer reports several times on Guilaroff’s imperious behavior). William J. Mann, How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 76. Quotations from Rudy Behlmer, ed., Inside Warner Bros. (1935–1951) (Viking, 1985), 37–38, 164. In James Gavin, Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne (Atria Books, 2009), 107–108. Gavin, 108. I have seen Noelia also spelled as Nolelia. Donald Bogle, Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood (One World/Ballantine, 2005), 219. Walter [Guy] Pearce, the makeup chief at Twentieth Century-Fox from 1941 to 1946, is credited as the makeup artist on Stormy Weather; MGM’s Cabin in the Sky has no makeup credit. Bogle, 219. See also Donald Bogle, Dorothy Dandridge (Amistad, 1997), 121–122. I am assuming that the “first black hairstylist in the history of MGM” that Guilaroff refers to in his autobiography is Washington, but he does not give her name in the account (Guilaroff and Griffin, Crowning Glory, 242). Bogle, Dorothy Dandridge, 122–123. “A Tribute to Ben Nye, Sr.” See also the chapter on Nye in Taylor and Roy, Making a Monster, which claims that Hattie McDaniel became a “good friend of Nye’s for many years” (110).

Notes to Pages 117–124 • 269 173 William Tuttle interview, August 12, 1976, 24. 174 All information from the folder “MARNIE (hairdressing),” Alfred Hitchcock

collection, MHL, AMPAS. Ross, Stars and Strikes, 218. Ross, 202–203. Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, 234–235. All from Blymer, Hairdresser to the Stars. Blymer, 23–24. Quoted in Alexandra Brouwer and Thomas Lee Wright, eds., Working in Hollywood (Crown, 1990), 233. 181 Guilaroff and Griffin, Crowning Glory, 57.

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Chapter 3. The Classical Period 1 All here and in the next paragraph from Ronald L. Davis, The Glamour Factory:

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12

Inside Hollywood’s Big Studio System (Southern Methodist University Press, 1993), 223–231. The book is based largely on the oral history of the performing arts that Davis ran at the DeGolyer Institute of American Studies, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, from 1972 through the early 1990s. In addition to working as a transcriber myself on the project, I accompanied him and Ann Burk, who conducted William Tuttle’s interview, to Los Angeles in 1976 (I briefly met Tuttle there, in fact). Davis donated his personal copies of the transcribed interviews to the MHL, AMPAS; the originals of the tapes and bound transcripts remain at Southern Methodist University. Davis takes Manley’s words from her interview in Hollywood Speaks! An Oral History, ed. Mike Steen (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974), 277. Information from the George Stevens collection, Giant, folder “prod. (make-up),” MHL, AMPAS. Tuttle quoted in Davis, The Glamour Factory, 228. Davis, 230. Davis claims to be quoting Manley, but he has changed the tense of her statements from the present to the past; see Manley in Steen, Hollywood Speaks!, 285. Ginger “Sugar” Blymer, Hairdresser to the Stars: A Hollywood Memoir (Infinity Publishing, 2000), 24–25. Davis, The Glamour Factory, 224. Davis, 226. For an overview of such restrictions and how departments were dealing with them, see Frederick C. Othman, “War in the World of Make-Believe,” Saturday Evening Post, October 17, 1942, 28–29, 110–111. William Tuttle, corrected typescript of AFI oral history, 1975–1976, WTP, MHL, AMPAS, 386. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (New York: Anchor Press, 1978), 16, 163. Ehrenreich and English, 161–163. The broadness of the advice offered by Perc Westmore, especially, can be gleaned from the forty-two scrapbooks of clippings in PWP, MHL, AMPAS. For celebrities as experts, see Heather Addison, Hollywood and the Rise of Physical Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003); Adrienne L. McLean, “‘Give Them a Good Breakfast Says Nancy Carroll’: Fan Magazine Advice across Time,” in Star Attractions: TwentiethCentury Movie Magazines and Global Fandom, ed. Tamar Jeffers McDonald and Lies Lankman (University of Iowa Press, 2019), 11–28.

270 • Notes to Pages 124–127

13 There is a typescript for one such piece, dated 1947, in the Paramount Pictures

14

15

16

17 18 19 20

21 22

collection, MHL, AMPAS. I have not been able to find issues of Salon Beauty Magazine and other material published by and for the beauty parlor industry during the studio era, in which I would expect to find contributions by Hollywood’s experts, some of whom likely would have been women. Again see “Studio Hairdressers, The Stars You Don’t Know,” Evening Sun (Baltimore), September 16, 1936, 20, and the second of a two-part series by Adele Whitely Fletcher, “Miracle Men at Work,” Photoplay, August 1939, 14–15, 78 (the first entry was in July), which despite its title discusses hairdressers Emily Moore (Universal), Hazel Rogers [Rodgers] (Selznick International), and Jane Romeyn (Twentieth Century-Fox). Though the columns and articles do not always have a byline, devoted readers would have been familiar with Mary Biddle of Modern Screen and Carolyn Van Wyck of Photoplay. In addition to Addison, Hollywood and the Rise of Physical Culture, see also Sumiko Higashi, Stars, Fans, and Consumption in the 1950s: Reading Photoplay (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), for detailed exegesis of the magazine, including ads, in a single decade. By the late 1960s, Kathrin Perutz writes in Beyond the Looking Glass: America’s Beauty Culture (William Morrow, 1970), “Movie stars [were] not considered swinging and therefore weren’t imitated,” though “movies themselves, notably Bonnie and Clyde [1967], could ‘create’ a look, and then the actors are brought along in the general upheaval” (220). “Makeups’ Prestige Up,” Variety, October 24, 1938, n.p., clipping file (“Makeup”), MHL, AMPAS. Quotations here from Tuttle, AFI oral history, 61–63. Tuttle, AFI oral history, 63–64. Tuttle, AFI oral history, 120–121. Interestingly, in “The Great Art of Make-Up,” Hollywood Filmograph, March 4, 1933, 8, the unnamed writer ignores the Westmores altogether. Instead, in discussing how “the same men who made film history in the old days are making history today, by carrying on their marvelous work as make-up artists,” the article refers only to Charles Dudley, Jack Pierce, Cecil Holland, and “Bob Stephenhoff.” “Make-Up-Hairdresser with Each F N Unit,” Variety, September 18, 1929, 4. Quotations from Helen Ludlam, “The Beauty Wizard of Hollywood [V. E. Meadows tells the science of beauty to the screen stars and rubs it in],” Screenland, May 1928, 18–19, 88–90 (as the issue’s cover exhorts, “Every Woman Can Be BEAUTIFUL, Learn the Tricks of Hollywood”). On Max Factor’s simultaneous wizardry, see Alma Talley, “A Wizard of Make-Up [Some of the wonders performed by Max Factor for the stars],” Picture Play, June 1929, 72–73, 117; this is the first Factor article I have come across in a fan magazine. On Meadows, see “Keeping in Touch with the Suburbs: Women Paint and Powder Disgracefully, Says Man Who Tells Correct Way,” Washington Post, January 17, 1926, S12, in which he is called a “Film Cosmetician”; “Educates Women in Art of Makeup: Expert Says 90 Percent of Beauty Is in Eyes,” Boston Globe, March 19, 1929, 11, which labels him “the internationally known makeup expert” and also claims he worked on The Jazz Singer; Corianne Danforth, “Most Women Paint Like Savages: V. E. Meadows, Beauty Expert and Hollywood Makeup Consultant, Tells Fair Sex How to ‘Look Like Civilized Human Beings,’” Boston Globe, March 29, 1929, B2. By 1933 he was conducting a thrice-weekly beauty course on the radio, where he was advertised as a “well known beauty specialist”: “Mr. Meadows for several years has been the adviser

Notes to Pages 127–130 • 271

23 24

25

26

27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36

37 38

to many of Hollywood’s movie stars” (“W-G-N Beauty Expert to Hold 4 Free Schools,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 17, 1933, S4). See also Kathleen M’Laughlin, “Movie Expert Tells How to Select Rouge,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 18, 1933, 15, where he’s “V. E. Meadows of Hollywood, for many a year cosmetic consultant to the film stars.” In the 1940s he became a “vitamin expert” (“Diet Deficiency Costly, Vitamin Expert States,” Newsday, September 10, 1942, 7; there is no mention of makeup). I could find no information about Meadows after the 1940s, nor have I come across his name in any studio records or technical journals. The brief mention is in Picture Play, January 1929, 90. Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (University of California Press, 1993), 85. Balio discusses costume design in his book, but not makeup and hairdressing. See “Make-Up Man Bob Stephanoff Dies in Blaze,” Los Angeles Times, February 22, 1951, Stephanoff clipping file, MHL, AMPAS: “Blagoe Stephanoff, 60, Samuel Goldwyn Studio make-up man, was found suffocated yesterday in his fire-seared apartment. . . . One of the top make-up men in the industry, he was known in the studios as Bob Stephanoff. . . . He came to Hollywood in 1917, playing small parts. In 1924, working as a technical director for Erich von Stroheim on ‘The Merry Widow,’ he made up gypsy orchestras. He had continued in make-up ever since, working for Goldwyn for 20 years, beginning in 1929.” Quotations here and in the next paragraph from Bob Stephanoff, “The Importance of Make-Up in Motion Pictures,” undated double-sided typescript sent to me by Michael Westmore. See the rules for makeup artists, “body make-up girls,” and hairdressers in Local 235 in “Working Rules, Two-Three-Five, United Scenic Artists of America” (“effective September 15, 1931”), 6, booklet in the LKKP, MHL, AMPAS. See also chapter 2 of this book. Balio, Grand Design, 76. Balio, 97. Balio, 96. Balio, 97. AMPAS, “Incandescent Illumination,” Academy Reports No. 1 (July 1928), 60, digitalcollections.oscars.org. See Peter Harry Brown, Kim Novak: Reluctant Goddess (St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 63. Carl Louis Gregory, Motion Picture Photography, 2nd ed. (Falk Publishing, 1927), 315. “A.S.C. Research Committee Completes Make-Up Tests,” American Cinematographer, November 1929, 13. Perc and Ern Westmore may have been working for Factor by then, so it is hard to know who came up with corrective makeup as a term. Max Factor, “The Art of Motion Picture Make-Up,” Cinematographic Annual, vol. 1 (1930), 157 (Factor also has an advertisement in the issue). Who actually wrote the article is not clear, given that Factor repeats verbatim several of the sections of a piece with a byline by Max Firestein, “Making Up for Color,” American Cinematographer, August 1930, 18, 28. According to Fred E. Basten in Max Factor: The Man Who Changed the Faces of the World (Arcade Publishing, 2008), Firestein (whose name is spelled Feuerstein in some sources) was “vice president in charge of the [wig] department at Factor’s” (97), but he does not say for how long. He was also apparently Factor’s son-in-law, married to his daughter Cecilia. Factor, “The Art of Motion Picture Make-Up,” 158. David Bordwell, “The Mazda Tests of 1928,” in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of

272 • Notes to Page 131

39

40

41

42

43

Production to 1960 (Columbia University Press, 1985), 296. See also Max Factor, “Standardization of Motion Picture Make-Up,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 28, no. 1 (1937): 52–62; interestingly, it discusses only “monochrome” film and does not mention the products Factor’s organization was then developing for color. See “Star Hands Help Gild the Lilies of the Earth—And Coffers of Those Who Make Beauty Aids,” Daily Variety, September 24, 1936, clipping file (“Makeup”), MHL, AMPAS. The article mentions only Factor and the Westmores by name. For one of DeLong’s advertisements, see the full-page example in the 1934 Film Daily Yearbook (134); I came across several of his ads in trade and technical journals in the mid-1930s. There are a number of these full- or half-page Max Factor ads in International Photographer in 1929 and 1930; see also those for the Tiffany-Stahl Production Peacock Alley (black and white, 1929), MGM’s The Rogue Song (“all [two-strip] Technicolor,” 1930), and RKO’s Dixiana (which had a Technicolor sequence, 1930), among other examples. While each features a publicity photograph from the film, only in the 1930 ads are the names of the makeup artists added along with those of the cameramen, suggesting that there was growing cooperation between Factor and the studios as well as between the ASC and the Motion Picture Make-Up Artists Association, which Factor’s organization was then hosting and had participated in founding. See chapter 2. See Fred E. Basten, Robert Salvatore, and Paul A. Kaufman, Max Factor’s Hollywood: Glamour, Movies, Make-Up (General Publishing Group, 1995). The star testimonials were “the brainchild of Sales Builders, Inc.,” and the endorsement arrangements “were made with the stars, through their studios, to promote Max Factor make-up. In turn, Max Factor would promote the stars’ latest films—all for the grand sum of one dollar” (75, italics added; see also Basten, Max Factor, 70). I photographed Harlow’s contract at the Hollywood Museum in Los Angeles in 2017: “Dear Mr. Factor:- / In consideration of $1.00, and other valuable considerations, receipt of which is hereby acknowledged, I hereby authorize Max Factor Sales Corporation to use for advertising, publicity or trade purposes, the original or reproductions of my photographs, and the following signed testimonial for the period of five years. I also hereby agree not to lend my name, photograph or endorsement to any other cosmetic or cosmetic manufacturer. / (Signed) Jean Harlow.” The testimonial is in boldface: “The fact that all the stars of the screen use your make-up both for professional and social uses is a guaranty of its excellence.” The museum’s label for the special Harlow exhibit stated that her endorsement began in 1929 and ended in 1937 (the year of her death), but other material on display showed that her image was used in advertisements for “Blondex” in 1930, Kleenex in 1931, and Lux toilet soap in 1932, suggesting that it was only cosmetics as such that the Factor deal restricted. The key phrase in the letter is obviously “and other valuable considerations,” which likely referred to the quid pro quo between Factor and the studios. But as I mention in the text, the exclusivity, like the dollar fee, may have been a stunt too. “H’Wood Powder Puff War [Trio in grab of cosmetic field / Max Factor has exclusive star endorsements—Elizabeth Arden and Westmores pluming to give battle for top recognition],” Variety, July 10, 1935, 3, 67. See “Max Factor—Hollywood & London [A new label makes its bid for recognition in the British Empire],” International Photographer, September 1936, 3:

Notes to Pages 131–132 • 273

44 45 46

47 48 49

“Mr. [Davis] Factor also pointed out the absolute necessity for maintaining identical laboratory set-ups on the two continents.” Kirsty Sinclair Dootson, “‘The Hollywood Powder Puff War’: Technicolor Cosmetics in the 1930s,” Film History 28, no. 1 (2016): 107–131. Dootson, 109. See Vivian Denton, “Robare DeLong,” Hollywood Filmograph, March 31, 1934, 5, which notes that DeLong was ordering “new equipment for his Hollywood laboratory due to expansion of business and the demand of [sic] DeLong cosmetics, not only locally but from Australia and England, as well. Mr. DeLong is preparing to have his products on the open market shortly. Here is an organization that is forging right ahead due to good make-up merchandise.” See also “Cosmetic Business Control Is Being Fought [Leader is fighting to continue his supremacy],” Hollywood Filmograph, April 28, 1934, 1, 7. The magazine’s previous issue has an ad on the back cover for the DeLong Make-Up Studio: “DeLong Nuchromatic Make-up Foundation and Lip Rouge are unsurpassed as to quality and durability. . . . DeLong Products have thousands of satisfied users throughout the country.” Finally, see Arthur Forde, “DeLong Make-Up Studios Busy Spot,” Hollywood Filmograph, July 7, 1934, 2: “With new machinery installed in the DeLong Cosmetic Laboratories, and a heavy production schedule ahead, Robare DeLong, president of the organization, is kept busy personally supervising the manufacturing of his excellent product which bears his name. Many celebrities in filmdom use DeLong Make-up for their screen activities as well as scores of stage artists. This worthwhile organization has one of the most up-to-date plants on the Pacific Coast, with the very latest in new equipment, and according to Mr. DeLong, they are fully prepared to give the best in quality merchandise, as they have always done in the past.” Interestingly, at the bottom of the page is an ad for “Max Factor’s Satin Smooth Make-Up” (“Applies Easily—Photographs Beautifully”). The following week, Hollywood Filmograph featured another article by Forde about Factor, “The Daddy of ’Em All” (July 21, 1934), 2, that refers to Factor as “The dean and daddy of all cosmeticians” and that touts his contributions to “cinema history”: “Max Factor gave us the first make-up to give natural tones to the skin in 1920; the first perspiration-proof liquid body make-up in 1923; the first under-water make-up in 1926; the perfection of Panchromatic make-up in 1928; the first SunburnWaterproof make-up in 1929; and Satin Smooth make-up in 1934. What a background of achievements! It is indeed a mighty parade of progress, and worthy of a place in the cinema hall of fame.” Although I could not find much information about the process by which Elizabeth Arden purchased DeLong’s company, it seems clear that Factor was already feeling some heat from the competition DeLong was providing. The original three-page patent application, including figures, can be seen at patents .google.com/patent/US1845380. Michael Westmore, email message to author, July 19, 2018. Photos of the salon show that it actually bore on its street side a large threedimensional sign that read “Westmore’s” (in one announcement of the grand opening it is rendered “Westmores’”; both are grammatically strange under the circumstances). But painted in small letters on the side gables of the building (the structure of which still exists) is “The House of Westmore,” which seems to have become the preferred moniker for the place, as for other of the family’s enterprises described in this chapter. The information about Westmore’s News Service comes

274 • Notes to Page 134

50

51

52 53

from Liz Willis-Tropea, “Hollywood Glamour: Sex, Power, and Photography, 1929–1939” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2008), 273–274, 291. The source for some of the valuable material in Willis-Tropea’s chapter on the Westmores is listed as the PWP, but in a few cases, such as her references to “Contracts, letters, and advertising releases (signed by stars)” that endorsed Westmore cosmetics, there are no such documents in either the PWP or the MHL according to the latter’s archivists (this does not mean that Willis-Tropea’s claims are incorrect). Other of her sources are no longer open to researchers, such as the Max Factor Archive at the Hollywood Entertainment Museum. Like the original Max Factor Museum that closed in 1992, the museum was housed in the iconic salon and factory on Highland Avenue and since has become simply the Hollywood Museum; personnel there told me in 2017 and 2019 that they do not know where the archival material ended up other than with the Factor “family.” (I attempted to contact Willis-Tropea, but to no effect.) The defection of Factor’s employees is also covered at http://www.cosmeticsandskin.com/companies/westmore.php: “Two Max Factor employees defected with [Ern] Westmore: Leonard Dean Smith, who was put in charge of the House of Westmore advertising and publicity; and Ismael R. Alvarez, who was made Westmore’s general sales manager.” See also Muriel C. Henry, “The Rise of the House of Westmore,” American Perfumer and Essential Oil Review, January 1940, 29–31, 112, which gives an overview of the business end of the family’s enterprises to that time. Wally Westmore, “head of the Paramount Make-up Department,” is noted to have “evolved a standardized system of make-up for the Keller-Dorian three-color process” that used “the DeLong (Elizabeth Arden) products” (“Keller-Dorian Three-Color Process,” International Photographer, June 1936, 29). Lindy Woodhead, in her War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden (John Wiley, 2003), does not mention DeLong but only the “Nuchromatic” name in discussing Arden’s 1935 “foray into film make-up”: “Who lobbied Miss Arden to enter such a specialist market—one, after all, already dominated with great professionalism by the Max Factor corporation—isn’t clear. . . . It’s possible it was Hedda Hopper, but it’s more likely that her lawyer J. Robert Rubin, with his involvement at MGM, was the guiding hand. As usual with any new project, she waxed lyrical and invested heavily. And as usual with many of her pet projects, it was ill-thought-out, costly, and quietly folded” (211). See also “Discoveries in Beauty,” Vogue, July 1, 1935, 59, 70, which in six photos shows the somewhat complicated steps by which a full Nuchromatic makeup would be applied, from foundation to lips, and removed; “Arden’s New Nuchromatic Make-Up,” Drug and Cosmetic Industry, July 1935, 57, describes the products as “definitely for the special occasion” and, “of course, for professional stage and screen appearances” (again there is no mention of DeLong). See Sara Sutton, “Artists’ Technique in Painting of Oil Portraits Can Be Applied to Modern Make-Up Principles,” New York Herald Tribune, October 16, 1940, 21, which features a photo of DeLong applying makeup to an unnamed woman and discusses the advice that he proffers in his “uptown salon.” Dootson, “‘The Hollywood Powder Puff War,’” 110. Pan-Cake was called “T-D” in the research stage; what the “D” stands for (perhaps “development”; I assume the “T” was for Technicolor) I have not seen elucidated in any primary or secondary source. See Silvio Del Sarto, “Current Productions in Color,” International Photographer, April 1936, 31; “Avalanche of Color On the Way,” International Photographer, April 1936, 11 (which is marked as a “contributed”

Notes to Pages 134–135 • 275

54 55 56

57 58

59

article); Nancy Smith, “The New Max Factor Technicolor Make-Up,” International Photographer, June 1936, 10; Max Factor (“an interview with”), “Make-up for the New Technicolor Process,” American Cinematographer, August 1936, 331, 334; “Technical Progress in the Industry During 1936,” American Cinematographer, December 1936, 502–503, 510–512: “Two important developments may be chronicled in this field. The Max Factor laboratories introduced the ‘T-D’ series of make-up materials, primarily a range for the new Technicolor, but also applicable to black-and-white” (510). Again, given DeLong’s own claims about the time savings possible with his Nuchromatic as against the numerous steps of Arden’s version, I wish I knew how the two actually compared, and in turn how they measured up against what ultimately became Pan-Cake. Dootson, “‘The Hollywood Powder Puff War,’” 110. “I Am a Famous Woman in This Industry,” Fortune, October 1938, 142. For an account of how Perc and Ern Westmore “kept spending their share of the profits so wildly that the entire enterprise was endangered,” and the ultimate inducement, by the family’s business manager, to “sell the retail cosmetics line outright, along with the [factory], and agree to allow the Westmore name to continue to be used on the products,” see Frank Westmore and Muriel Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood (Lippincott, 1976), 122–123. Henry, “The Rise of the House of Westmore,” 29. On how Factor handled the defection of the Westmores from the Hair Department, see “Max Factor Signs Hair-Dress Genius,” Hollywood Low-Down, August 1935, 15, in which the genius, James Barker, is characterized as “the best wig designer and hair dress creator in all England.” Barker is not mentioned in books about Factor, however, and Fred Frederick seems quickly to have taken over; see Basten, Kaufman, and Salvatore, Max Factor’s Hollywood: “Fred Frederick had eagerly awaited the Westmores’ move. A former wigmaker’s apprentice, he had come to Los Angeles from New York in 1929 solely to work for Max Factor. ‘It wasn’t possible then because of the Westmores being there,’ he remembered, ‘so to kill time I ran a beauty shop, giving perms’” (193). See also Max Firestein, “The Importance of Hair in Films,” International Photographer, November 1935, 5 (in the advertising section), in which Firestein seems to taunt the Westmores by claiming that “Fredericks, too, is a make-up artist as well as hair expert. We feel that this combination of knowledge is necessary for the best film results. You cannot transfer a brilliant hairdresser from private practice into the studio field and expect him to be of great value, for he does not know the technical needs of film-making,” a situation that corresponds to the Westmore family’s status upon their entry into the motion picture business. On Factor’s taking credit for hair lace, see Firestein’s article as well: “During the past year more wigs have been used in films than during any other similar period in the history of picture making. . . . Already our organization had gone deeply into the wig field. It has developed the ‘hair lace’ creations which made it possible for the cameramen to photograph wigs so that they look as natural as though they had grown on the players’ heads.” Factor had developed hair lace and used it in wig and toupee parts, but it was the Westmore twins who “came up with the idea to use hair lace for hairlines as well” (189). See also Pete Martin, “Mister Wigs” [Fred Frederick], Saturday Evening Post, May 19, 1945, 37, which concurs that the idea for the use of hair lace at the edges of wigs came from Perc. For more on hair lace toupees and wigs in films, see chapter 4. Ern Westmore and Bud Westmore, Beauty, Glamour and Personality (Prang, 1947).

276 • Notes to Pages 135–137

60 Marguerite Wagner, “Face Concession [To look Hollywood’s best, you must shop

for your face as well as your house and car],” Stage, September 1936, 68.

61 See Sharrie Williams, with Bettie Youngs, The Maybelline Story and the Spirited

62

63

64

65

66

Family Dynasty Behind It (New York: Bettie Youngs Books, 2010), 232, 244–245. Although other brands, like Max Factor, have come and gone and come again (Factor products are currently sold in Europe but not the United States), Maybelline is the only U.S. cosmetics line to have been sold under the same name from its founding in the 1910s until the present. See Mel Archer, “The Make-Up Artist in Hollywood,” National Board of Review Magazine, October 1939, 4–6, which was taken from a radio broadcast and ends with the statement “the aim of every good make-up artist should be to make the star look as natural and normal as the girl in the street. I cannot emphasize enough that our aim is naturalness and individuality, and that the only real difference between the star and her sister is that the former has an expert to handle her make-up and a highly sensitive camera to record the results.” Archer is described as the “New York representative of Hollywood’s famous House of Westmore,” and he calls Warner Bros., Perc’s domain, his “home-lot.” Despite the article’s general title, Archer focuses solely on the Westmores and does not mention their earlier association with Factor. The subheading of the chapter “The Art of Make-Up” in Helena Rubinstein’s The Art of Feminine Beauty (Horace Liveright, 1930) is “Art Can Correct Nature” (235–253). Quotations from Perc Westmore, “Corrective Makeup as An Aid to Cinematography,” American Cinematographer, May 1935, 188, 198. Westmore is listed as “President, Motion Picture Makeup Artists’ Association,” as well as “Director of Makeup, Warner Brothers’–First National Studios.” On diffusion in close-ups, especially, see Charles B. Lang Jr., A.S.C., “The Purpose and Practice of Diffusion,” American Cinematographer, September 1933, 171, 193–194, which links diffusion to retouching too: “First of all, it must be borne in mind that the physical nature of the cinematograph film effectively precludes recourse to the still photographer’s expedient of retouching. None the less, recourse to some means of attaining a similar end is often desirable, and sometimes highly necessary” (171). While women “require more diffusion than do men; and older players more, as a rule, than do younger ones,” he does not approve of the diffusing of all female close-ups (193), which suggests how common the practice was. See also Gilbert Warrenton, A.S.C., “Filter Your Close-ups,” American Cinematographer, July 1934, 132, 141, which makes many of the same points, though he also notes the necessity that actors “always” wear makeup. Finally, John Alton, in his 1949 book Painting with Light (University of California Press, 1995), defines diffusion as the “process of making the camera lie” (89) and discusses the various means by which this could be achieved, which included fabric and glass discs placed before the lens (89–91), as well as “lamp diffusion” with “a silk or other translucent material” (91). He also connects the “rule” of diffusion to feminine beauty: “With but few exceptions where the scene calls for a special type of illumination, feminine close-ups or portraits should always be beautiful” (97). (Alton even advocates for the use of “beauty lighting” in homes and other public spaces in the chapter titled “Day and Night, Ladies, Watch Your Light.”) See also chapter 4 of this book. All quotations in this and the next paragraph from Perc Westmore, “Corrective Make-Up,” in John Paddy Carstairs, Movie Merry-Go-Round (Newnes, 1937), 115–125 (italics added).

Notes to Pages 138–140 • 277 67 William Stull, “New Make-up That Is Sculpture-like,” American Cinematographer,

68 69 70

71

72

73 74

75 76

77 78 79

80

September 1936, 374–375, 380. Although the “new make-up” is not named, it is almost certainly a variety of foam latex, which would be used to make threedimensional “appliances” to augment the physical dimensions of the face and body throughout the studio era. See also Pete Martin, “Make-Up Magician,” Saturday Evening Post, March 11, 1944, in which Perc Westmore turns Martin into Will Rogers, Ben Franklin, and Dick Tracy: “Putty is not used anymore. Five years ago, it was tossed into the discard as old-fashioned, and latex took its place” (16). Bernard A. Shore, “Makeup and Lens,” International Photographer, August 1937, 10, 12. Robert Neal Leath, “Fascinating Faces—To Order,” Liberty, April 24, 1937, 54. Alicia Annas, “The Photogenic Formula: Hairstyles and Makeup in Historical Films,” in Hollywood and History: Costume Design in Film, ed. Edward Maeder (Thames and Hudson/Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1987), 52. See, among many possible examples, Antoinette Donnelly, “Hollywood Expert Describes Types of Facial Contours,” Chicago Tribune, May 14, 1937, n.p.: “Mr. [Perc] Westmore has studied hundreds of faces in the course of his work and has discovered that every face falls into one of seven categories. The classifications are oval, round, square, oblong, triangular, inverted triangular, and diamond shaped”; Perc Westmore, “Learn to Star Your Beauty,” Syracuse Journal, n.d., n.p., which ran as a syndicated series in the late 1930s with each entry devoted to one of the “types” and centered on the “wrong” and the “right” way to correct the face of a representative star (all PWP scrapbook 8, MHL, AMPAS). Interestingly, in “The Lucky Barbers,” Time, November 26, 1945, a story about the Westmores, there are only five “basic types” (85). See Henry, “The Rise of the House of Westmore,” 29. Perc and Ern had earlier floated the concept of contouring the entire head “according to the fundamental rules of beauty” with skull measurements and hairdressing, but this seems not to have caught on; see Perc and Ern Westmore, “Hairdressing for Perfection,” Movie Mirror, January 1933, 68–69. Patrick Keating, Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir (Columbia University Press, 2010), 29. Virginia Vincent, Make-Up (1932), reprinted in facsimile by Bramcost Publications in 2007. This is one of several useful vintage makeup and hairdressing guides republished by Bramcost. Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, 137–139. Perc, Wally, Bud, Frank, and Mont Westmore, The Westmore Beauty Book: A Concyclopedia of Beauty (Melvin Korshak Publishers, 1956), 30–36. The writing of this section is ascribed to Frank. Westmore, “Corrective Make-Up,” 118. Alton, Painting with Light, 96–97. “Kitty Foyle,” American Cinematographer, January 1941, 32. Warner Bros. also appeared to be having issues “with their make-up for men” in Eastman Color; see “Stop, You’re Killing Me!” [film review], American Cinematographer, November 1952, 470. Analogue motion picture tests were expensive, but always necessary for each new design or product change (or if a performer had gained or lost weight or acquired a sunburn) because of how much money they saved down the line (tests can now be done instantly). According to former child star Angela Cartwright in Styling the Stars: Lost Treasures from the Twentieth Century Fox Archive (Insight Editions,

278 • Notes to Pages 140–144

81

82 83 84

85

86 87

88

89 90

91 92

2014), photographic tests could also be identified by whether an actor was “holding a brush, comb, or powder puff,” which designated “which department would receive the images once they were developed. If a brush or comb (or sometimes even a broom) was present the image went to hair; if a powder puff was present or the image showed an actor with downturned or closed eyes to reveal nuances of eye makeup, the image went to makeup” (17). I have noted few such symbolic indications in my research, however, which suggests that this may have been a studiospecific practice. Perc Westmore, “Cooperation Bulks Big in Work of Make-up,” American Cinematographer, December 1937, 496–497, and “Make-up Specialist Can Do Much To Assist the Cinematographer,” American Cinematographer, January 1938, 13, 40, both “abridged from an address given at the September meeting of the American Society of Cinematographers.” Quotations from Perc Westmore, “Cooperation Bulks Big in Work of Make-up.” Quotations from Perc Westmore, “Make-up Specialist Can Do Much To Assist the Cinematographer.” Quotations here from Jack Dawn, “Make-Up,” in Stephen Watts, Behind the Screen: How Films Are Made (Dodge Publishing, 1938), 69–75. There is an editor’s note referring to the fact that the “old idea of make-up was that every player’s face had to be smothered in elaborate cosmetics and transmuted into a mask of stylised beauty or contorted into something weirdly rivalling Lon Chaney. . . . But the naturalism of the modern studio has changed all that. The make-up artist’s art now is, in general, to conceal every trace of artifice” (68)—this despite the continued discursive references to makeup as versions of retouching and correction. Michael Westmore also told me that “if Perc could complicate a makeup he would do it” (Michael Westmore, email message to author, July 28, 2018). In Michael Westmore’s words (applicable to other areas of work and life), “Basically I have found there are no set rules, we make them up as we go along. . . . I had ten different makeup artists teach me how to apply a black eye when I was an apprentice and each one was different in their approach; I was told I had to create my own technique, one that worked best for me”(Michael Westmore, email message to author, February 15, 2019). He also eloquently wrote, “In the darkness behind the camera you can never assume anything. As soon as you think you have it figured out it all changes” (Michael Westmore, email message to author, January 28, 2019). Michael Westmore, email message to author, August 16, 2018. “Avalanche of Color on the Way,” 11. The use of the term correction makeup may not have been a typo but a dig at the Westmores’ concomitant trumpeting of the value of “corrective makeup.” Factor, “Make-up for the New Technicolor Process,” 331–334. Scott Higgins also discusses the article in Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s (University of Texas Press, 2007), 87–88. Undated legal-size typescript, presumably from Factor’s company, clipping file (“Makeup”), MHL, AMPAS. Perc Westmore, “Make-up Specialist Can Do Much To Assist the Cinematographer,” 40. See also Perc H. Westmore, “Make-Up for Black and White,” Complete Photographer, September 30, 1942, 2436–2448, which includes sections on corrective makeup as well as the “seven basic types” of faces. Quoted in Smith, “The New Max Factor Technicolor Make-Up,” 10. Factor, “Make-up for the New Technicolor Process,” 331.

Notes to Pages 144–148 • 279 93 Michael Westmore, telephone conversation with author, September 6, 2018. In my

94

95 96 97

98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105

106 107 108

109 110

college life “on the stage,” I became quite familiar with Pan-Cake and Pan-Stik, and they were indeed a marvel in terms of what they covered—but even Pan-Cake was too heavy for daily life in the 1980s. Manitowoc (WI) Times, May 3, 1937, PWP scrapbook 10, MHL, AMPAS: “Bette Davis is the first Warner Bros. star to use Make-up Chief Perc Westmore’s newly created ‘street make-up.’ Made possible by the latest type sensitive film material which records in black and white all shades in their relative color proportion, the new ‘street make-up’ eliminates the old type heavy coating of cosmetics, which required so much time to apply. Miss Davis is using the new make-up in ‘That Certain Woman,’ in which she appears with Henry Fonda.” Whether this makeup was to have been sold to consumers is not clear, given that the references are to how it appeared in black and white. Quotations from “Makeups’ Prestige Up,” Variety, October 24, 1938, n.p., clipping file (“Makeup”), MHL, AMPAS. I am reproducing the formulations of technical journals as I found them, but these terms can also be singular—Eastmancolor, Warnercolor, and so on. Quotations from Jack Dawn, “Corrective Make-Up Can Help The Cinematographer,” American Cinematographer, November 1941, 514, 540. William Tuttle also refers to the potential tension between a “cameraman [who] has neglected what he’s supposed to do” and the makeup man’s inability to “see how it looks through the camera,” as well as the need to “talk that all over” lest the corrective makeup and lighting together become “too contrasty” and make the “whole thing [look] phony.” Tuttle, AFI oral history, 94–95. Alton, Painting with Light, 85. The 1938 chart is in the WTP, MHL, AMPAS, and reproduces the typos of “rough” for “rouge” from the House of Westmore original. For a published example of the chart, see “Make-Up for Color by Technicolor: An Interview with Perc Westmore,” Technicolor News & Views, December 1949, 2. Quoted in James Gavin, Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne (Atria Books, 2009), 112. Both cards are from the JTP, MHL, AMPAS. Tuttle quotations from his AFI oral history, 78–80. Dorothy Ponedel and Meredith Ponedel, with Danny Miller, About Face: The Life and Times of Dottie Ponedel: Make-Up Artist to the Stars (BearManor Media, 2018), 18. Meredith Ponedel as a young teenager who “didn’t know any better” helped her aunt Dot to burn them; she told me also that they were on thick laid paper and painted in full color. Keating, Hollywood Lighting, 7. Alton, Painting with Light, 85. There are instructions for and views of Westmore coiffures like the “Tiara,” the “Aureola,” the “El Toreador,” and even the “King Edward VIII” dotted throughout fan magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. Factor also sold hair products like toupees. Westmore, “Corrective Make-Up,” 121. See Walter Ramsey, “Make-up Magic for Today’s Color Films [Recognizing the varied problems posed by the new color emulsions, American Cinematographer calls upon Hollywood’s topmost make-up authority for answers],” American Cinematographer, September 1955, 526–528, 544: “Here, . . . Max Factor, Jr., recognized expert in the field of motion picture make-up, gives the answers to these

280 • Notes to Pages 148–154

111 112 113 114

115

116 117 118 119 120

121 122

problems in simple, easy-to-understand terms and reveals the correct make-up methods and colors which should be used for the various new color negatives [“Ansco color, Technicolor and Eastman Color No. 5248”; ironically, the final Hollywood films in Ansco color were made in 1955]. Nor is the information gleaned by mere chance, but results from Mr. Factor’s years of careful research and close cooperation with all leading film companies” (526). Ramsey, 526, 527. Paul Coates, Screening the Face (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 63. Tuttle quotations from his AFI oral history, 102. Leigh Allen, “Corrective Make-Up Aid to Cinematography,” American Cinematographer, January 1957, 36, 44, large portions of which are taken from Westmore, “Corrective Makeup as An Aid to Cinematography,” and Dawn, “Corrective Make-Up Can Help The Cinematographer.” “Beauty Wears Many Faces,” McCall’s, March 1957, 94–95. Interestingly, in Bud and Betty Mills Good, “Change of Face—in Hollywood,” Photoplay, February 1953, 58–59, 74–75, the notion that “the whole secret of appeal was supposed to be an oval face” is claimed to have come from the 1920s (74). Vincent J.-R. Kehoe, The Technique of Film and Television Make-Up for Color and Black and White, rev. ed. (Communication Arts Books, 1969), 58–59. “Beauty Wears Many Faces,” 94. Robin Tolmach Lakoff and Raquel L. Scherr, Face Value: The Politics of Beauty (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 24–25. B. Beth Schiff, “Westmores MARCH On,” The Hollywood Low-Down, “The Holidays ’36–’37” (16), in scrapbook 8, PWP, MHL, AMPAS. Material here and later in this paragraph from the file on Heller in Pink Tights in the George Cukor collection, MHL, AMPAS. Cukor sent a memo to Nellie Manley praising her for the “wonderful job” she had done on Loren’s hair for the star’s “very exciting” tests, but he wanted to “repeat that we cannot go too bold with her. That goes for the height, the length, and the fullness of the hair.” See Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, 178–179. In the mid-1950s Perc also helped create, or perhaps founded, a “prestige” organization, the Society of Make-Up Artists. It allowed its invited members—men only—to put acronyms after their names in film credits in the manner of other groups like the ASC. The group then, in 1957, gave Perc a “Golden Palette” award for his “Outstanding Contribution to the Art and Profession of Make-up.” See “Westmore Wins Honor,” Los Angeles Times, June 22, 1957, B2. Whether first or in response, women hairdressers created such an organization at around the same “to enhance the position of its members in the industry,” as its first president, Nellie Manley, stated; see “Hairstylists Unite,” Variety, November 1, 1955. This organization was first named Cinema Hairstylists, then Society of Cinema Hairstylists, and finally Cinema Hair Stylists, the group having decided, according to Variety, that “C.H.S.” was “more euphonious” for some reason than “C.H.” or “S.C.H.” (“Hairstylists Apply Brush to Society,” Variety, August 26, 1957). See also “Cinema Hairstylists Form Organization,” Hollywood Reporter, November 1, 1955: “An organization to be known as the Cinema Hairstylists has been formed by a troup of the top hairstylists in the film industry. . . . . First move made by CH was to apply for membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the application has been accepted” (according to the Academy’s archivists, however, the organization was never a member). All clippings, unpaginated, from MHL, AMPAS. Both organizations were disbanded sometime in the late 1960s. According

Notes to Pages 154–155 • 281

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125 126 127 128 129 130

131

132

to Sue Cabral-Ebert of Local 706, “The SMA was not an official organization within Local 706, it was an elitist professional organization made up of the crème de la crème of (male) makeup artists. [There] is really no official documentation. . . . We actually tried to revive it, but labor laws would have considered it preferential, so we had to abandon the idea” (Sue Cabral-Ebert, email message to author, September 24, 2019). Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, 226. According to Frank Westmore, Wally refused to let television companies, which were generating an increasing amount of the studios’ revenues, use Paramount’s makeup facilities. And after a series of small strokes that impaired “his memory and thought processes,” he became increasingly feeble even when he was working. Frank does not give the exact date for the termination of Wally’s contract in the late 1960s; he had been at the studio since 1926 (225–227). Nellie Manley also “retired” from Paramount as head hairstylist in 1967. For Bud Westmore, the problem was not only the headaches he, too, was causing in relation to the growth of television production at Universal but that there were by then “too many free-lance makeup men on call for contract work” who were less trouble; he also faced “revolt from below by those assistants he had ground down over the years” (Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, 234–235). This last is elucidated further in Mallory O’Meara, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick (Hanover Square Press/ Overdrive eBook, 2019), a study of Milicent Patrick, a woman artist working in Universal’s special effects shop, for whose design for the creature’s appearance in Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) Bud took credit both before and after arranging to have Patrick fired simply for becoming somewhat famous herself on publicity tours. Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, 224–225. Blymer, Hairdresser to the Stars, 80. Tuttle, AFI oral history, 185. Copy of letter dated January 19, 1975, to Princess Grace of Monaco, WTP, MHL, AMPAS. Blymer, Hairdresser to the Stars, 51, 189. Martin Rossman, “Cosmetics: The Sweet Smell of Success [the California Factor],” Los Angeles Times, October 12, 1963, n.p., Max Factor clipping file, MHL, AMPAS. See also Mary Desjardins, “‘Marion Never Looked Lovelier’: Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood and the Negotiation of Glamour in Post-war Hollywood,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 16, nos. 3–4 (1999): 421–437, which discusses how “the power which had been previously derived from the exclusivity of the Hollywood scene” was replaced in the late 1960s by that of the “California look” in fashion, which displaced the “fiction that the Hollywood film community was privileged as the upscale leader in every lifestyle trend” (434). Gordon Bau was one of several makeup artists who created “new” foundations for Eastman Color—since he worked at Warner Bros. it was called “Warnercolor” or “Warner Color” there—that, in the last analysis, consisted of a basic cosmetic that was able to even out the “wide variety of tones, colors, and color tones” in any “white” skin as well as “daily variations” from sunburn to windburn while looking somewhat more “natural” than Factor’s Pan-Cake and other makeup designed for Technicolor. See Lou Hippe (a makeup artist himself), “Make-Up for Warnercolor,” Production Design Magazine, April 1952, 20–21. Michael Westmore, email message to author, July 19, 2018.

282 • Notes to Pages 155–158

133 For a history of the Max Factor building’s subsequent life, see Basten, Max Factor,

155–165.

134 See “New Faces,” Time, July 12, 1943, 56, 58, which discusses Dawn’s and Bau’s work

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139 140 141 142

143 144

to “help out fighting men whose faces and hands had been disfigured” with inlays and appliances made of “a synthetic plastic good for making mobile, lifelike masks. It is of secret composition (the process is patented, but he gives it to the Navy free) which he calls vinylite resin mixed with alcohol.” Again, this would seem to be the foam latex that Dawn, as the article states, had “found” in 1935 while at MGM and that was first used in quantity on The Wizard of Oz (1939); Dawn apparently also formed his own Third Dimensional Makeup company that involved “appliances for maimed soldiers” (see the chapter on Jack and Bob Dawn in Al Taylor and Sue Roy, Making a Monster: The Creation of Screen Characters by Great Makeup Artists [Crown, 1980]). See also Frank Westmore’s mention of the work of his nephews Michael and Marvin in the area of “medical makeup” in The Westmores of Hollywood; the pair ran a clinic in the 1970s in which they taught “therapeutic makeup techniques” to patients referred to them “by physicians, mostly plastic surgeons and psychiatrists” (244). Frank Taylor, in “Jack Pierce: Forgotten Make-Up Genius,” American Cinematographer, January 1985, also reports on the younger men “trained in the use of latex and techniques developed by the medical profession to help injured veterans,” who flooded the studios in the postwar era and whose labor practices and methods were quicker and cheaper in a period when box-office receipts were deteriorating (41). See Taylor, “Jack Pierce,” 33–40 (there is also a chapter on Pierce in Taylor and Roy, Making a Monster). Frank Taylor reports that, despite Pierce being department head at Universal for two decades and his iconic work on the studio’s monster-film cycle of the early 1930s, almost no one knew who he was when he died in 1968. His name is not mentioned at all in Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, although he was a member of the Motion Picture Make-Up Artists Association (and its secretary in 1936), as well as one of the signatories to the 1933 document requesting that the studios recognize the association as the craft’s labor representative (see chapter 2). Mary Astor, A Life on Film (Delacorte Press, 1971), 185. Keating, Hollywood Lighting, 245. Robert Surtees, A.S.C., “The Story of Filming ‘Act of Violence’ [Reflected lighting, no makeup, natural locations and use of a 28mm. lens for all shots are some of the new production trends explored in the making of this picture],” American Cinematographer, August 1948, 268–269, 282–283. Astor, A Life on Film, 198–199. Surtees, “The Story of Filming ‘Act of Violence,’” 282. Dore Schary, as told to Charles Palmer, Case History of a Movie (Random House, 1950), 51. According to Martha Wade Steketee, “Dorothy Ponedel (1898–1979)” (2010), in Judy Garland: A Celebration, issue 2, International Judy Garland Club (Winter 2011), n.p., Hepburn met with Ponedel privately “to create a make-up chart for Kate’s own use on [The African Queen].” To John Alton, male faces were “a symphony of highlights and shadows.” Alton, Painting with Light, 96. Even Paul Newman in MGM’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), according to the handwritten notes of makeup artist John Truwe, was wearing custom-mixed

Notes to Pages 158–160 • 283

145 146 147

148 149

150

151

Pan-Stik on his nose, forehead, and chin and brown eye pencil on his lower lids, and had his eyebrows “lifted” with pencil. JTP, MHL, AMPAS. Leonard Hall, “The Glamor Factories of Hollywood,” Stage, July 1936, 20. References in this and the next paragraph from the scrapbook in JTP, MHL, AMPAS. See also Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and Movies in the 1950s (Indiana University Press, 1997), 186–187, for discussion of a February 1953 Photoplay article, by George Armstrong, called “Are Actors Sissies?” The question is raised by Armstrong because of the fact that all male stars—even John Wayne—wore makeup in their films. Michael Westmore, email message to author, July 26, 2018. See also chapter 4. Typescript, “Hair Goods Purchased in 1951,” WTP, MHL, AMPAS. The list is arranged by stars, with the cost and style of the “good” indicated as well as the production number on which it was employed. The total for just that year was $18,297; according to online conversion resources, that would be roughly $182,000 in the 2020s. For more discussion of MGM wigs and hairpieces, see chapter 4. The meaning of Bergman’s looks as “natural” derived from a publicity campaign by David Selznick (supported by his wife, Irene Mayer Selznick) that in truth centered more on the degree of blandishment than the total absence thereof, as is made clear by numerous makeup and hairdressing test photos of and memos about Bergman, from 1939 to 1951, in the Selznick Collection of the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, as well as in Rudy Behlmer, ed., Memo from David O. Selznick (Viking, 1972). (I could not find some of the memos cited by Behlmer in the Selznick Collection itself.) In one memo dated March 4, 1941, concerning publicity photographs taken by MGM’s Clarence Sinclair Bull, Selznick writes, “One of the things we have sold so strongly with Bergman is that she uses no makeup whatsoever. Her eyebrows are natural, her lips are not loaded with lipstick, her eyelashes are not coated with junk” (italics added). Selznick also counts himself “amazed” that “Ingrid would wear this kind of makeup in stills,” when she was “averse to it” on the screen (in her Swedish films there is little evidence of this “aversion”). Yet he was adamant that lines in the star’s neck and any other facial imperfection be retouched out of publicity photos, and of course she was often shot with lens diffusion in her Hollywood close-ups—even in Intermezzo (1939), of which, famously, Graham Greene remarked in his January 26, 1940, review, “What star before has made her first appearance on the international screen with a highlight gleaming on her nose-tip? That gleam is typical of a performance that doesn’t give the effect of acting at all, but of living.” In The Pleasure Dome: Graham Greene, ed. John Russell Taylor (Oxford University Press, 1980), 266. In her autobiography, Bergman also pushes the notion that she wore no makeup whatsoever—“I don’t have a make-up box because I do not use make-up,” she claims she told Irene Selznick in 1939—but I believe the issue, to Selznick and I presume to Bergman, was to avoid a photogenic formula that automatically, by that point, would have connoted glamour; publicly she is always wearing lipstick, eye shadow, and rouge. See Ingrid Bergman and Alan Burgess, Ingrid Bergman: My Story (Delacorte Press, 1980), 64–69. Although Mont Westmore was Selznick International’s makeup executive when Bergman arrived in the United States, she refers to him only as “this highly qualified make-up man” (69). William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (University of Chicago Press, 1986), is one among several studies of the issue in U.S. art and popular culture during the Depression.

284 • Notes to Pages 161–163

152 Margaret Farrand Thorp, America at the Movies (Yale University Press, 1939), 189. 153 Donald Knox, ed., The Magic Factory: How MGM Made An American in Paris

154

155 156 157

158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165

(Praeger, 1973), 110; Leslie Caron, Thank Heaven: A Memoir (Viking, 2009), 68–69: In ballet, Caron recalled, “my face was my own, and I designed my own makeup and hair, but here [at MGM, for An American in Paris] William Tuttle and his staff were in charge. They wanted me to adopt the fashionable look of the day. Suddenly my eyebrows were threatened by a pair of tweezers! ‘No! Please don’t! Don’t touch my eyebrows!’ An agreement was reached.” She also cut her own hair without consulting the studio, which resulted in shooting delays and Gene Kelly telling her “They fire girls for less than that, you know!” Rita Moreno faced the opposite situation when Kelly asked her to cut her “long curly black hair” for her supporting role in Singin’ in the Rain; she replied “I don’t cut my hair, Mr. Kelly,” and although he “caught his breath,” she reports, he allowed her to wear a wig instead. In Rita Moreno, Rita Moreno: A Memoir (Celebra/Penguin, 2013), 96–97. See also Priscilla Peña Ovalle, “Rita Moreno’s Hair,” in Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity, ed. Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett (Rutgers University Press, 2020), 231–245. See Stephen Gundle, “Hollywood Glamour and Mass Consumption in Postwar Italy,” in Fashion: Critical and Primary Sources, The Twentieth Century to Today, ed. Peter McNeil (Berg, 2009), 261–282. I could not help but note that Gundle makes the mistakes of claiming that Rita Hayworth was “of Mexican origin” and that her image was on the first nuclear bomb to be dropped on Japan during World War II (it was, rather, on the bomb dropped in a later test on the Bikini Atoll). Jeanette Eaton, “The Cosmetic Urge,” Harper’s Magazine, February 1, 1931, 330. Leath, “Fascinating Faces—To Order,” 52–54. Michael Westmore, telephone conversation with author, September 6, 2018. See also chap. 7, “Masks and Mascara,” in Elizabeth Hawes, It’s Still Spinach (Little, Brown, 1954): “The way things are in the make-up department, you’d think few American females over fifteen had faces of their own. Their goal and desire is to be made-up as identically as possible with all other American female faces. The use of make-up in the United States may once have been a sign of greater freedom of the female, but it seems today to have become a symbol of their sheeplike ability to follow a pattern thoughtlessly” (115). Of hair, Hawes, a popular fashion journalist of the 1940s and 1950s, noted, “It’s terrible, since the advent of the permanent wave, how extraordinarily alike most women’s hairdos are” (126). In most of her books, Hawes writes about movie stars as the originators of these “patterns,” though she rarely discusses the personnel who helped to manufacture their looks. In an earlier book, Fashion Is Spinach (Random House, 1938), she refers to style-setters, including stars like Garbo, who “decide everything” simply as “they” (7–8). Davis, The Glamour Factory, 226. Kendra Bean and Anthony Uzarowski, Ava: A Life in Movies (Running Press, 2017), 30–31. Tuttle, AFI oral history, 75. Michaela Krützen, The Most Beautiful Woman on the Screen: The Fabrication of the Star Greta Garbo (Peter Lang, 1992), 101. Bette Davis, The Lonely Life: An Autobiography (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962), 125–126. Lauren Bacall, By Myself (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 79–82. Robert Stack, with Mark Evans, Straight Shooting (Macmillan, 1980), 59–61. Carlisle Jones, “All for Beauty” (1936), folder “Makeup,” JLWC, CAL/USC (italics added).

Notes to Pages 164–170 • 285

Chapter 4. Cosmetics, Coiffures, and Characterization 1 See Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn (Berkley, 2001), 119. See also Donald Spoto,

Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn (Harmony Books, 2006), 82.

2 All from instructions for Peck and Albert sent from Frank Caffey to Henry

3

4 5 6

7

8 9

10 11

12

Henigson in Rome, attached to a letter of May 20, 1952. Paramount production records (Roman Holiday), MHL, AMPAS. All from instructions for Hepburn attached to a letter of May 31, 1952 (from and to the same individuals as in note 2). Paramount production records (Roman Holiday), MHL, AMPAS. Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 119. Nellie Manley in Hollywood Speaks! An Oral History, ed. Mike Steen (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974), 278–279. William Tuttle, corrected typescript of American Film Institute (AFI) oral history, 1975–1976, William Tuttle papers, MHL, AMPAS, 84. According to Tuttle, “We even had to have special lights in the makeup room so that we were able to see the red come out. We had Macbeth filters which is sort of a blueish filter to go over the incandescent lights so that we could spot the reds in the face. . . . Oh, it was kind of a pain in the neck really to do a makeup for this” (86). One of the enduring imponderables with regard to Hollywood’s makeup and hairdressing is how consumers navigated the fact that both were so often experienced on-screen in black and white. Fan magazines and their color advertisements and, most obviously, cover illustrations—somewhat garish paintings through the end of the 1930s before their replacement by at times badly printed photographs that were as often hand-tinted as actually shot in color—are crucial if complicated intertexts for understanding how audiences interacted with films and beauty makeup. Ginger Rogers, for example, appears on-screen to have blond hair in all of the nine black-and-white films she made with Fred Astaire in the 1930s, but fan magazines, and her films’ dialogue, sometimes refer to her as a redhead—and her eyes as green or blue. Spectators seeking to emulate her looks would then have had to decide for themselves which were “real,” since hand-produced color images and descriptions in magazines could be either as well, which would have been even more confusing with the marketing of Factor’s “Color Harmony” consumer makeup line starting in the late 1920s that was designed expressly to complement the wearer’s “natural” hair and eye color. Patrick Keating, Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir (Columbia University Press, 2010), 50. Alicia Annas, “The Photogenic Formula: Hairstyles and Makeup in Historical Films,” in Hollywood and History: Costume Design in Film, ed. Edward Maeder (Thames and Hudson/Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1987), 52–77. Keating, Hollywood Lighting, 257. Conversely, we are cued to loathe Margaret Hamilton’s meddlesome character partly by hard lighting and her lack of visual glamour. The cadaver is played by an uncredited Carol Varga. Manny Farber, “Movies Aren’t Movies Any More,” Commentary, June 1952, discussed in Robert Sklar, “‘The Exalted Spirit of the Actual’: James Agee, Critic and Filmmaker, and the U.S. Response to Neorealism,” in Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style, ed. Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar (University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 72. It was gratifying, if also annoying, to discover Farber’s assessment months after I had written about People Will Talk.

286 • Notes to Pages 170–181

13 Keating, Hollywood Lighting, 5–6. Among the Hollywood stars known for their

14 15

16

17

18 19

20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28

turns in yellowface and/or blackface in the sound era are Irene Dunne, Fred Astaire (both types), James Stewart, Eleanor Powell, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney (both types), Bing Crosby, Ava Gardner, and Katharine Hepburn. Michael Westmore, email message to author, January 25, 2019. See, for example, the before and after photos in “Was It Really Only Yesterday? [A few years in Hollywood and look how they change],” Photoplay, June 1932, 34–35; “Yesterday’s Glamour [Guess who these stars are],” Picture Play, March 1938, 42–42; and, about older stars, “Great Glamor Girls of Yesterday and Today,” Motion Picture, October 1940, 22–25, 58, which refers to Theda Bara’s “chalk-white make-up [and] weird red mouth” and claims that older “vamps,” like Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow, are now “miserable.” See also Harold Heffernan, “They’ve Taken Ham Out of Makeup,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 22, 1942, n.p., clipping file (“Makeup”), MHL, AMPAS. Again, see Mary Astor, A Life on Film (Delacorte Press, 1971), 185; B. R. Crisler, “A Glance at That Awful Thing Called Glamour,” New York Times, March 12, 1939, X5; or any number of film reviews, especially those in characteristically satirical venues like the New Yorker. Tuttle claims that the slight off-registration of Technicolor prints “was not enough to disturb you. . . . But it did a marvelous thing for people. It wiped out all the lines in their face. They always said that for any aging star we better make it in Technicolor because it will make her look younger. Take a good 15 years off, you know.” Tuttle, AFI oral history, 85. These valuable reports are unfortunately available only in a few collections. The ones I consulted are from the Arthur Freed collection, CAL/USC. IMDb.com does not offer even uncredited makeup or hair personnel for Carmen Jones. Because the film was shot largely at Twentieth Century-Fox, the makeup artist may have been, or been trained by, Ben Nye. For more on the influence of the “shorter, sleeker styles worn by celebrities such as Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge,” see Ayana D. Byrd and Lori L. Tharps, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, 2nd ed. (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2014), 44–45. Both quotations from Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2004), 120. Donald Bogle, Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood (One World/Ballantine, 2005), 345. Wally Westmore, as told to Pete Martin, “I Make Up Hollywood,” Saturday Evening Post, August 11, 1956, 83. Heffernan, “They’ve Taken Ham Out of Makeup.” Heffernan also calls silent-era makeup “far funnier than anything you could dig out of that old family album up in the attic,” and Bud and Betty Mills Good, “Change of Face—in Hollywood,” Photoplay, February 1953, 58–59, 74–75, claims that such makeup was “judged more by its weight than by the artistry of its application.” As was the case throughout the classical period, the “new” secret to beauty was “naturalness” (58). Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By . . . (Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 412. Astor, A Life on Film, 32. Astor, 52. Margaret Farrand Thorp, America at the Movies (Yale University Press, 1939), 66–71. See also the introduction, “Stardom in the 1930s,” in Glamour in a Golden

Notes to Pages 182–183 • 287

29

30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41

Age: Movie Stars of the 1930s, ed. Adrienne L. McLean (Rutgers University Press, 2011), 1–17, which discusses Thorp’s assessments further. See the section titled “Make-Up” in Ray Hoadley, How They Make a Motion Picture (Crowell, 1939), 45–50. Hoadley’s final statement is that it “sometimes takes quite a bit of argument to persuade some boy new to the studios that the make-up man isn’t trying to make a ‘sissy’ of him with a powder-puff!” (50), likely a conscious or inadvertent reference to the Valentino “scandal.” See also George Armstrong, “Are Actors Sissies?,” Photoplay, February 1953, 52–53, 97, which begins by addressing the fact that all actors wear makeup but primarily labors, not always convincingly, to underscore the ways that they “compensate for the frills and furbelows of their film careers by leaning over backwards in private life to be very, very masculine” (97). Michael Westmore, telephone conversation with author, September 6, 2018. Gregg Toland, in “Cameraman’s Views on Color Pictures,” Film Daily, August 21, 1936, 26, was worried that “male stars with heavy beards” would have problems with Technicolor because “such beards, cropping out late in the day,” could not be “concealed by color film make-up” as they could “for black-and-white pictures,” and thus “male players with heavy black beards will find their hours of usefulness on a set shortened— or face the necessity of shaving several times a day.” But in fact Pan-Stik and powder seem to have been used successfully to hide the beards of most male stars. Tuttle, AFI oral history, 90–91. Tuttle, 90–91. Leslie Caron, Thank Heaven: A Memoir (Viking, 2009), 167. Agnes Platt, Practical Hints on Acting for the Cinema (E. P. Dutton, 1923), 85. Quoted in Barrett C. Kiesling, Talking Pictures: How They Are Made, How to Appreciate Them (Johnson Publishing, 1937), 151. Richard Dyer, White (Routledge, 1997), 122. Astor, A Life on Film, 186. All the information here from the folder on Marnie in the Alfred Hitchcock collection, MHL, AMPAS. As Horne remembered the situation in 1965, MGM “set the make-up department to work on creating a kind of pancake that would make me look as dark as they thought I should without turning me into a grotesque. Eventually the [sic] came up with a shade that they called ‘Light Egyptian’ which had an unfortunate side effect. They used it on white actresses they wanted to play Negro or mulatto parts; which meant there was even less work for the Negro actors, with whom I was already in trouble.” In Lena Horne and Richard Schickel, Lena (Limelight, 1986), 136. But according to James Gavin in Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne (Atria Books, 2009), “No white woman’s foundation would have worked for Horne, so Jack Dawn, the head of the makeup department, commissioned one from Max Factor Cosmetics. It bore the quizzical name of ‘Light Egyptian.’ Years later Horne would turn that makeup into an object of both scorn and ridicule; she made it sound as though Light Egyptian were akin to blackface. But according to Dawn’s assistant (and later successor) William Tuttle, ‘it more or less matched her coloring’ and, like all other foundations, hid every freckle and blemish” (112). Bogle, Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams, 292. Dee is also wearing eyeliner, lipstick, and mascara. Despite such variation in tone, Hollywood tended to treat Black skin as being uniform in color, implying that, for most of the studio era, little attempt was made to observe the reality of the actors themselves. Donald Bogle, in Bright Boulevards,

288 • Notes to Page 184

42

43 44

45

Bold Dreams, quotes Carmen De Lavallade about some of the “absurdities at the studio when she and other black actors appeared in Lydia Bailey [1952, Fox]. ‘The day of shooting, the first thing you have is makeup. [Dancer] James Truitt . . . told me about this special makeup, Negro Number Two, because he did Mighty Joe Young, which had African dancing. I laughed at him and told him, ‘It’s not true.’ And he told me, ‘You just wait.’ And sure enough . . . I looked up and saw a makeup labeled Negro Number Two. The director had looked at us all, and he picked the darkest guy, a beautiful black guy, and he said, ‘I want them all that color.’ Well, we all kind of looked at each other. There was one lady, Florence, who had green eyes, and she was very, very fair. Well, when they put that stuff on our skin, we looked green. It was so funny. . . . Oh, my goodness, if we didn’t look weird. And we started laughing. And we’d find each other walking down the studio street, and it was so embarrassing, and we’d start laughing” (294). I assume the makeup was by Max Factor, but there is no such named shade; it may have been a colloquial designation by makeup artists for his “Dark Negro” and “Light Negro” greasepaints. Michael Westmore, email messages to author, March 23 and March 26, 2019. For further information, see the instructions in his manual The Art of Theatrical Makeup for Stage and Screen (McGraw-Hill, 1973), 49. Quoted in Stephen Bourne, Butterfly McQueen Remembered (Scarecrow Press, 2008), 26 (no name is given for the speaker other than “Gladys”). Michael Westmore describes ways both to make the eyes water and to “simulate a tear or tear-streaked cheek” with glycerin in The Art of Theatrical Makeup for Stage and Screen (49). See also the famous anecdote by director Elia Kazan, who found himself hounded by MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer about Katharine Hepburn’s actual crying in The Sea of Grass (1947); as Kazan later recounted Mayer’s words, “The channel of her tears goes too close to the nostril; it looks like it is coming out of her nose like snot.” When Kazan protested that this was not something he was interested in changing, Mayer reportedly answered, “Young man, you have one thing to learn. We are in the business of making beautiful pictures of beautiful people, and anybody who does not acknowledge that should not be in this business.” Quoted in Ronald L. Davis, The Glamour Factory: Inside Hollywood’s Big Studio System (Southern Methodist University Press, 1993), 103–104. Ironically, in 1951 Mayer would be replaced at MGM by Dore Schary, the producer of The Next Voice You Hear . . . (1950), who was more interested in visual realism, at least in some topical genres (see chapter 3). According to Charles Higham and Roy Moseley, Princess Merle: The Romantic Life of Merle Oberon (Coward-McCann, 1983), Oberon suffered “from a recurring skin problem that had plagued her in India, probably caused by her use of the highly toxic heavy makeup that was designed to whiten her face. It was a bitter irony that her perfect face began to break out severely in rashes, particularly around the mouth” (59). They state that in 1940 Oberon also suffered an allergic reaction to sulfa drugs, which led to her “entire face and neck” being covered “with hundreds of red, oozing pustules” that they also connect to “toxic makeup” (121), after which she underwent several treatments with dermabrasion that in turn led to “a visible pitting and indentation of the skin, particularly around the mouth, and it was years before all trace of it disappeared through constant and fanatical beauty treatment” (123). Michael Westmore, however, who first told me about Oberon’s skin issues and how they were minimized by makeup and lighting, had heard in his youth that she simply had acne scars around her mouth and on her chin (Michael Westmore, telephone conversation with author, September 6, 2018).

Notes to Pages 185–186 • 289 46 Clive Hirschhorn describes the tricycle accident in Gene Kelly (Regnery, 1974), 25.

47

48

49 50

The “sprout” quotation is from Kay Proctor, “Hey Irish!,” Photoplay, May 1943, 37, 94, and the “motorcycle accident” from the “Question Box” in Photoplay, October 1949, 31. On Johnson’s accident and recovery, see Ronald L. Davis, Van Johnson: MGM’s Golden Boy (University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 63–69. A Guy Named Joe also had to deal with an additional kind of “skin problem” that no one but Irene Dunne, the female romantic lead (in her first MGM film), apparently knew about. Namely, Dunne had been taking three to six years off her age since her arrival in Hollywood in 1929 or 1930, so that she was really forty-five at the time of shooting, a discrepancy she did not admit until after she retired; see Wes Gehring, Irene Dunne: First Lady of Hollywood (Scarecrow Press, 2006), 140. Dunne was therefore two years older than costar Spencer Tracy, who played her eventually ghostly former fiancé, though everyone believed that they were roughly the same age (Johnson was twenty-seven). There must have been some awareness during production that Dunne was showing signs of age in her face and neck, first because William Tuttle reports the “strange thing” that they did her tests with “three different makeup artists” (Tuttle, AFI oral history, 77), and second because she is given obvious diffusion in every close-up, even in a number of complicated two-shots in which Tracy or Johnson is carefully positioned on a different plane of sharper focus and hard lighting. Johnson’s scars did eventually become less prominent over time, and in later Technicolor MGM films, in many of which he starred (several with Esther Williams, who plays a small role—in full beauty makeup—in A Guy Named Joe), most of the freckles and all the scars are covered with cosmetics and are noticeable only if he is shot—rarely—with any form of raking light. Thus, in contrast to A Guy Named Joe, in which post-accident shots of Johnson are dark and shadowy, in Technicolor, in combination with the skill of makeup artists, the brighter the light the better, for (as was the case with Merle Oberon’s pockmarks) the lighting also visually “filled in” the dents in his skull. See Mildred Mastin, “Will Your Favorite Star Survive Color? [You can’t fool the color camera! It’s going to set a new standard of beauty!],” Photoplay, January 1935, 26–27, 104–105, which makes a number of claims about what color would and would not be able to accomplish that turned out to be incorrect, such as that skin “defects cannot be hidden beneath a coat of grease-paint and powder. Freckles can’t be powdered over,” and that eyes that are “too small can’t be made to look large by tricky use of mascara and eye shadow”—and even that “artificial coloring or bleaching [of hair] photographs badly” (104). Regarding “artificial coloring,” the opposite was often the case: when I spoke with actor Moira Shearer—a natural redhead with copious freckles to match—about Rita Hayworth, she stated that Hayworth’s dyed red hair, which worked so well on the screen in Technicolor, looked unnatural in real life because it did not match the star’s “olive” skin tone. Tuttle, AFI oral history, 84–85. According to https://www.cosmeticsandskin.com/cdc/false-eyelashes.php, “Although false eyelashes were available in the early part of the twentieth century, they would not become really fashionable until the interwar years. The probable reason for this was the rise of Hollywood.” In addition to books on Factor and his cosmetics, see the makeup manuals referenced in the introduction; Vincent J.-R. Kehoe, The Technique of Film and Television Make-Up for Color and Black and White, rev. ed. (Communication Arts Books, 1969), for example, includes a three-page appendix on artificial eyelashes alone (269–271). On the history of

290 • Notes to Pages 186–190

51

52

53 54

55 56

57

58

59 60

61

62 63

Maybelline’s mascara—its first product—see Sharrie Williams, with Bettie Youngs, The Maybelline Story and the Spirited Family Dynasty Behind It (New York: Bettie Youngs Books, 2010). Michaela Krützen, in The Most Beautiful Woman on the Screen: The Fabrication of the Star Greta Garbo (Peter Lang, 1992), refers to the “curve of the natural and artificial eyelashes” that she assumes Garbo wore (76), but Lillian Rosine [Wilson], who was the female head of makeup at MGM before unionization, told an interviewer many years later that “Garbo’s eye makeup was so simple it was difficult to imitate. And her lashes were not false,” which the interviewer says “[corrected] some widely gossiped misinformation.” Pat Nation, Los Angeles Times, February 10, 1978, n.p., Lillian Rosine clipping file, MHL, AMPAS. The first anecdote comes from Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, 128, the others from a memo to “Mr. Monty Westmore” dated October 9, 1930, in Memo from David O. Selznick, ed. Rudy Behlmer (Viking, 1972), 290. Tuttle, AFI oral history, 100. See Fred E. Basten, Robert Salvatore, and Paul A. Kaufman, Max Factor’s Hollywood: Glamour, Movies, Make-Up (General Publishing Group, 1995), which claims half-shaved brows were a “partial holdover from the 1930s” (280). Interestingly, there is no mention of the practice in Robin Cosio and Cynthia Robins, The Eyebrow (HarperCollins, 2000); and as with completely shaved brows—which Cosio and Robins do discuss—I wonder how actors felt about them. Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 119. There are several discussions of lip shapes and the Factor products used to create them over the years in Basten, Salvatore, and Kaufman, Max Factor’s Hollywood. For more on lipstick’s political as well as fashion valence, see Meg Cohen and Karen Kozlowski, Read My Lips: A Cultural History of Lipstick (Chronicle Books, 1998); Jessica Pallingston, Lipstick (St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (Henry Holt, 1998), 154–155, 188, 239–240. There are doubtless sexual dimensions to the emphasizing of women’s lips in this way, but in panchromatic and color the greater size is accompanied by lighter shades of lipstick. Ginger Rogers, Ginger: My Story (HarperCollins, 1991): “In Swing Time Fred and I step behind a door and when it’s opened, he has lipstick on his mouth. Did we kiss off camera? No sirree. A makeup artist came and painted the imprint on Fred” (203). Annas, “The Photogenic Formula,” 57. Sydney Guilaroff claims to have designed 4,200 wigs, for men as well as women and most for manufacture by Factor’s Hair Department, for the extravagant biopic Marie Antoinette (1938), though he received no screen credit. Sydney Guilaroff and Cathy Griffin, Crowning Glory: Reflections of Hollywood’s Favorite Confidant (General Publishing Group, 1996), 86–88. Black dancer Bill Robinson lent his name to a “Hair Dressing” in the 1930s or 1940s as well, manufactured by Burton Brothers in Virginia. According to the tin in my possession, “When you purchase a can of this hair dressing [price ten cents], part of your money goes to me for my charity fund.” Although I could not find out more about this line of products specifically, Robinson was legendary for his charitable giving throughout his career. Michael Westmore discusses the use of cosmetic stippling to produce the “unshaven look” in The Art of Theatrical Makeup for Stage and Screen, 49–50. See Penny Stallings, with Howard Mandelbaum, Flesh and Fantasy (Harper and Row, 1978), 34. Stallings lists James Stewart, Frank Sinatra, Jack Benny, George

Notes to Pages 190–191 • 291

64

65 66

67

68

69

Burns, Brian Aherne, Fred Astaire, Brian Donlevy, Bing Crosby, Ray Milland, Charles Boyer, Gary Cooper, David Niven, Charlton Heston, Laurence Olivier, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Montgomery, George Raft, Henry Fonda, Sean Connery, Fredric March, Peter Sellers, Franchot Tone, Gene Kelly, Van Heflin, and Fred MacMurray as among the many stars who wore toupees in their films. See also S. R. Mook, “Keeping Handsome in Hollywood,” Screenland, September 1932, 52–53, 91, which, despite its title, is about how male stars maintain their “crowning glory” with nary a mention of toupees. “MGM Wig Notebook Log,” MHL, AMPAS. Although apparently incomplete (the first page is numbered 51, and there are other large gaps), the log comprises a “stock list of women’s wigs,” a “stock list of men’s wigs,” and a list of “men’s toupees and wigs/falls.” There are designations as to color, quality (weft or hair lace), type (modern, character, “colonial,” “Negro,” and so on), and, in many cases, whom the hairpiece was made for (Gene Kelly has no fewer than twenty very dark brown or black toupees on the list); films are listed by production number. Kurt Stenn, Hair: A Human History (Pegasus Books, 2016), 107; his discussion of wigmaking, including facial varieties, is on pages 103–110. See Pete Martin, “Mister Wigs” [Fred Frederick], Saturday Evening Post, May 19, 1945, 29: “As big as Factor’s movie wig business is, the business it does in nonprofessional hairpieces is even bigger.” Perc’s 1931 patent application mentions “lace” or a “mesh net,” not what it was constructed of. According to Basten, Kaufman, and Salvatore, Max Factor’s Hollywood, Factor himself had invented a lace that was made of human hair (189), which would have made the edges even more invisible. According to Michael Westmore, before the marketing of aerosol hairspray in the 1950s there were many pomades and “grease products” available to maintain the hairstyles, wigged or natural, of men and women. One “product” that he learned about from his uncle Perc was called “Chinese shavings,” which involved “a specific wood chip that was soaked in a gallon of water for a long period of time. As it soaked a rosin was leeched from the wood and created an amber, thick liquid. This liquid could be combed through the hair and dried with a hair dryer. When dry nothing could move it until it was removed [with a solvent].” Until the 1950s, this product was used on particularly complicated hairstyles to ensure “nothing would move or fall out of place. When they started to use it I don’t know.” Michael Westmore, email message to author, July 22, 2018. In mid-March 1946, Perc Westmore appears to have arranged for the writing and publication of an Associated Press story that men were going to start wearing makeup in their ordinary lives. One of his own scrapbooks (scrapbook 37, PWP, MHL, AMPAS) is mostly devoted to some forty-two long or shorter iterations of the same story, all by Bob Thomas, in which Perc, “who was perfectly groomed but apparently wore no makeup, proclaimed that for years men have been thefting their wives’ powder and foundation cream to use after shaving and also to cover up that late afternoon shadow.” Although Perc did not “foresee the day when the average man will be wearing lipstick, [he] will be using more and more cosmetics to help his appearance.” Whether the intent of the stunt was gleeful, satirical, or serious is hard to tell, especially given the headlines that were perhaps made up by individual newspapers to sensationalize the material further, among which were “What’re Men Coming To? Make-Up, Says Expert in Cosmetics,” “Men Are Taking Tip from Girls in Making Up,” “Male Make-Up Coming Foible Says Westmore,” “Now It’s Makeup for Men!,” “Nation’s Men Go Feminine Using Makeup,” “He Used to Raid

292 • Notes to Pages 191–194

70

71

72 73

74

75

76 77

the Refrigerator But Now It’s the Cold Cream Jar,” “Comes the (Whoops!) Revolution, You Guys: Makeup for Men Is Here,” and “Omigosh, Men Will Eventually Be Using Cosmetics Says Westmore; But Not Lipstick.” But according to Kathy Peiss, other than preparations for shaving and managing the beard there were no real cosmetic products marketed successfully to U.S. men until the 1980s (Hope in a Jar, 158–166, 264–265). Thus, while Perc’s status as an “expert” is employed here in much the way it had been in any number of articles aimed at women, it can also be argued that his status is itself being called into question—how trustworthy can an expert be who is suggesting that men are going to wear makeup, in other words, especially when the studios preferred to minimize the fact that men did so even on the screen—and it is thus interesting that some headlines omit Westmore’s name entirely. All quotations by Williams in this and the next paragraph from Esther Williams, with Digby Diehl, The Million Dollar Mermaid (Simon and Schuster, 1999), 118–119, 127. See also “Technicolor’s Hall of Fame” in the industry publication Technicolor News & Views, a full-page feature in the 1950s devoted to a color photo of a female star with vivid coloring (which of course was substantially aided by makeup and hair dye). Among the stars so honored were Dorothy Lamour (December 1952), Arlene Dahl (November 1953), Jeanne Crain (June 1954), Rhonda Fleming (September 1954), and Maureen O’Hara (April 1955). Texas Dirt came in only one color, but it happened “to be the right color for Esther Williams,” according to William Tuttle. “And it’s waterproof. It seems to be water repellent. And you put it on with a powder puff. You can just smear it on. And rub it down. And it looks so natural because it has this little shine to it.” Tuttle, AFI oral history, 172. Texas Dirt is still sold, though without the lung-damaging mica that gave it the “glisten” that Tuttle admired. Letter sent from location shooting in Winter Haven, Florida, June 6, 1946, WTP, MHL, AMPAS. When Williams resurfaces after the dive—her first interaction with water in a Technicolor film—and swims over to kiss Red Skelton at the side of the pool, a square flap of latex can be seen over her left ear, likely because they had not yet determined the best way to attach wigs for underwater work. One wonders whether the latter trope was the basis for a woman who, according to Katrin Perutz, Beyond the Looking Glass: America’s Beauty Culture (William Morrow, 1970), “had never allowed her husband to see her naked face in three years of marriage” and “instructed readers in her methods” in a magazine article (8). That said, in Easter Parade (1948), Judy Garland’s character appears, though not in close-up, with mussed hair, pale lips, nearly invisible brows, and no artificial eyelashes in a brief scene following a sleepless night, and is told to “do something” about her “horrible” face before she reappears in triumphant glory for the film’s final romantic scenes. Dot Ponedel was Garland’s makeup artist at the time (Jack Dawn is credited on Easter Parade), and while Garland’s “misfit” persona allowed for such deglamorization I wonder if the shocking visual contrast was Dot’s idea. Although a period musical, the film may also have been registering, in however slight a way, the increasing realism of other postwar genres, even at MGM. See chapter 3. See Lindy Woodhead, War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden, Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry (John Wiley, 2003), 250. Steven Cohan, Hollywood by Hollywood: The Backstudio Picture and the Mystique of Making Movies (Oxford University Press, 2018). See also Karen McNally, The Stardom Film: Creating Hollywood’s Fairy Tale (Wallflower Press, 2020).

Notes to Pages 194–203 • 293 78 In Rocky Lang and Barbara Hall, eds., Letters from Hollywood: Inside the Private

World of Classic American Moviemaking (Abrams, 2019), 214–215.

79 See “Tricks That Make or Mar a Face [Illustrated by Bette Davis],” Good House-

80

81

82 83 84 85 86 87

88 89

90 91

keeping, September 1943, 156–157, which includes photos of Davis in Now, Voyager, Old Acquaintance, Elizabeth and Essex, Juarez, The Little Foxes, and Of Human Bondage: “When a part demands it, she can look mean, coarse, old, awkward, or drab. But when she adds droops to show age, or uses garish make-up to cheapen her face, or tightens her lips to indicate selfishness, she knows exactly what she is doing. Many women do the same things without realizing the effect. That is why these pictures and every part Bette Davis plays are well worth study. They point the way to what to do, what to avoid, to play a lovely role and to look as young as you really are” (156). But while these words insinuate that Davis is the agent here, a photo caption proclaims “Perc Westmore’s make-up magic did all this. Note the changing hair fashions” (157). This is according to Time magazine’s review as quoted in Homer Dickens, The Films of Ginger Rogers (Citadel Press, 1975), 122: the “sight” of “Miss Rogers in black wig, spectacles, [and] false teeth [made] her so thoroughly unattractive that RKO’s publicity department refused to release ‘stills’ of her thus disguised.” See Mary Desjardins’s discussion of how stars like Swanson negotiated their glamour in middle age on and off the screen in Recycled Stars: Female Film Stardom in the Age of Television and Video (Duke University Press, 2015), chap. 2. Michael Westmore, telephone conversation with author, September 6, 2018. Telephone conversation with author. Perc Westmore in Steen, Hollywood Speaks!, 262. Michael Westmore, telephone conversation with author, September 6, 2018. Perc, Wally, Bud, Frank, and Mont Westmore, The Westmore Beauty Book: A Concyclopedia of Beauty (Melvin Korshak Publishers, 1956), 110–111. Williams and Diehl, Million Dollar Mermaid, 126–127. Williams continues: “The makeup people came right onto the set and began working on him. To my astonishment I saw an intricate network of rubber bands all around his face, all running into a knot at the top of his head. . . . I had hit him so hard that I’d broken the bands on one side of his face. . . . It was an instant face-lift, which is what they did for older actors instead of plastic surgery back then.” Older actors also had plastic surgery, but not to appear younger in a short film scene. Michael Westmore, telephone conversation with author, September 6, 2018. A complete list of the twenty-four practical steps for turning Bette Davis “into ‘Fannie!’ [sic]” in Mr. Skeffington, most likely dictated by Perc to his then-wife Margaret O’Donovan (“Maggie”), can be found in the PWP. The process involved multiple layers of latex applied to stretched skin as well as the application of heavy makeup and a full wig; Donovan was also Perc’s head hairdresser at Warner Bros., though for how long and precisely when I do not know. See chapter 3 for discussion of Bau’s and Dawn’s work in this area. This is literalized in articles like Harold Heffernan, “Screen Stars Give Up Glamor to Portray ‘Grandma’ Roles,” Detroit News, May 11, 1941, PWP, scrapbook 24, MHL, AMPAS, in which glamour photos of, among others, Helen Hayes in The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931), Jeanette MacDonald in Maytime (1937), Bette Davis in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Vivien Leigh in That Hamilton Woman (1941), and Barbara Stanwyck in The Great Man’s Lady (“Barbara Stanwyck’s role . . . is the oldest makeup job ever attempted by a Hollywood actress. Plastic rubber molds turned the facial trick”) are paired with stills of their old-age versions.

294 • Notes to Pages 203–221

92 Bette Davis, with Michael Herskowitz, This ’n That (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1987), 137.

93 94

95 96

97 98 99 100

Davis also states, “I decided to do my own makeup for Baby Jane. What I had in mind, no professional makeup man would have dared to put on me. One told me he was afraid that if he did what I wanted, he might never work again.” Michael Westmore, email message to author, July 28, 2018. James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (University of California Press, 1988), 96. Less desirable (young) characters are also more likely to be asked to wear props like spectacles, as in several instances already mentioned. See Louella O. Parsons, “Norma Shearer’s Acting Delights in ‘Let Us Be Gay,’” Los Angeles Examiner, September 12, 1930, n.p., clipping file, CAL/USC. Rogers, My Story: “I was playing a poor teenager and chose not to wear any makeup. In a further attempt at realism, I dyed my hair brunette, which I thought more appropriate for my character” (215); Joan Crawford and Jane Kesner Ardmore, A Portrait of Joan (Doubleday, 1962): “With Clark in Strange Cargo, I eschewed makeup for the first time since Paid [1930]. There had been cracks about my eyelashes and exaggerated makeup. As the dance-hall girl who is kicked off a tropical island and falls in with an escaping band of convicts, I used none” (125). See also Adrienne L. McLean, “The Faces of Ginger: Beauty Makeup, Facial Acting and Hollywood Stardom,” in Faces on Screen: New Approaches, ed. Alice Maurice (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 195–210. Crawford and Ardmore, A Portrait of Joan, 125. Crawford and Ardmore, 125. Rogers, My Story, 275. Betsy Blair, The Memory of All That: Love and Politics in New York, Hollywood, and Paris (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 261.

Epilogue 1 Jane Gaines, Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?

(University of Illinois Press, 2018), 193.

2 Erin Hill, Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production (Rutgers

University Press, 2016), 27.

3 Hill, 68–69. I should note that Ally Acker’s Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema,

4 5 6 7

1896 to the Present (Continuum, 1991) and J. E. Smyth’s Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood (Oxford University Press, 2018) make no mention of makeup or hairdressing at all, likely for some of the reasons I outline in the introduction to this book. Quoted in Martha Wade Steketee, “Dorothy Ponedel (1898–1979)” (2010), in Judy Garland: A Celebration, issue 2, International Judy Garland Club (Winter 2011): n.p. B. R. Crisler, “A Glance at That Awful Thing Called Glamour,” New York Times, March 12, 1939, X5. It goes without saying that we need more work on the history of makeup and hairstyling in entertainment industries since the end of the studio system too. Sydney Guilaroff’s autobiography (written with Cathy Griffin), Crowning Glory: Reflections of Hollywood’s Favorite Confidant (General Publishing Group, 1996), details his romantic conquests of several women stars, including Garbo and Ava Gardner, who had all died before his book was released. But Gardner’s biographers maintain that, despite his “transparent denial,” Guilaroff’s homosexuality “was an open secret in the film community”; Kendra Bean and Anthony Uzarowski, Ava: A Life in Movies (Running Press, 2017), 32.

Notes to Pages 223–224 • 295 8 Hill, Never Done, 65–69. 9 Oswell Blakeston, “Grease Paint,” in Through a Yellow Glass (Pool, 1928), 16. As

10

11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18

19

mentioned in chapter 2, in the 1930s hairdressers partly defined their professional identity by stressing that they were not maids. See again “Studio Hairdressers, The Stars You Don’t Know,” Evening Sun (Baltimore), September 16, 1936, 20. Who first thought to put gold dust in Marlene Dietrich’s movie hair seems like a small thing, but it was important enough that three people—besides Dietrich herself—have taken credit for it since. Sydney Guilaroff claims to have originated the process for A Thousand and One Arabian Nights in 1943, when for her “Middle Eastern harem-girl look” he “suggested that she spray some sort of metallic sprinkles on her hair to give it more of a shimmer under the lights. Marlene one-upped me, going to Tiffany’s to have real gold ground into a fine powder, and at a total cost of $12,000, she sprayed her hair every morning before stepping in front of the camera” (Crowning Glory, 234). Fred Basten claims it was Dietrich’s own “glamour trick” from the early 1930s; because she had “poor hair, which was never captured on film,” and therefore wore wigs almost exclusively, Dietrich insisted that Max Factor sprinkle real gold dust into her wigs “to make her appear more luminous onscreen.” Factor, through combing and shampooing the wigs after use, was able to salvage most of the gold dust (Fred E. Basten, Max Factor: The Man Who Changed the Faces of the World [Arcade Publishing, 2008], 100–101). Paramount’s Nellie Manley states that cinematographer George Barnes on an unnamed film wanted Dietrich’s hair to “shine more,” so Manley got “a little bag of gold dust from the paint shop, and if George couldn’t get the light to shine on a certain part of her hair the way he wanted it to, I would sprinkle the area with gold dust!” (Nellie Manley in Hollywood Speaks! An Oral History, ed. Mike Steen [G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974], 280). Leonard Hall, “The Glamor Factories of Hollywood,” Stage, July 1936, 18. Quoted in Frank Westmore and Muriel Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood (Lippincott, 1976), 67–68. William J. Mann, Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn (Henry Holt, 2006), 174, 176. Dorothy Ponedel and Meredith Ponedel, with Danny Miller, About Face: The Life and Times of Dottie Ponedel: Make-Up Artist to the Stars (BearManor Media, 2018), 56–57. Ponedel and Ponedel, 25. Meredith Ponedel (phone conversation with author, June 24, 2021) attests to the veracity of these anecdotes; Dietrich also provided the down payment on Dot’s house. And when Dot could not attend Meredith’s high school graduation in the 1970s (Meredith’s mother died when Meredith was a toddler), Joan Blondell went instead. James Kotsilibas-Davis and Myrna Loy, Myrna Loy: Being and Becoming (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 47–48. Westmore and Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood, 109. The autographed head shot is inscribed “To ‘Sabra’ Irene Dunne, may I always be to you what you have been to me, a pal—with everything sweet—yours till my gums drop[,] always[,] Ern.” Irene Dunne collection, CAL/USC. Michael Westmore, email message to author, January 27, 2019. In fact, while there were certainly specialists in the studio era, it was expected that every staff makeup artist or hairdresser be able to handle both beauty and character effects, as job descriptions written by the union for the federal government during World War II indicate (note the lack of attention paid to the union’s gender restrictions here): “The Make-up Artist applies make-up to actors, actresses and other performers to

296 • Notes to Pages 226–229

20 21

22 23 24

25 26 27

enhance or alter their appearance in accord with their roles. This includes application of all types of beards, chin pieces and eyebrows on live performers. The make-up artist makes up and applies prosthetic appliances and make-up designed to change such physical characteristics of performers as facial features, skin texture and body contours. A Hair Stylist dresses and styles performers[’] hair for the Motion Picture and Television Industries according to the style, period or character portrayal as outlined in any given script. He or she cleans, blocks, fits and dresses toupees and hairlace wigs as well as all other kinds of wigs for both modern and artistic effect or for the period style required in the story.” Sue Cabral-Ebert, email message to author, July 12, 2018. For a detailed discussion of character makeup as well as the straight “makeup” and “hairdressing” of digitally created beings, see Lisa Bode, Making Believe: Screen Performance and Special Effects in Popular Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2017). Edgar Morin, The Stars [Les stars, 1957], trans. Richard Howard (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 39. See also Mary Desjardins, “‘Marion Never Looked Lovelier’: Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood and the Negotiation of Glamour in Post-war Hollywood,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 16, nos. 3–4 (1999): 421–437, which begins with a discussion of one episode of Hopper’s gossip- and interview-based television program (which frequently featured makeup experts like one or another Westmore): “At one telling point in the program, we briefly encounter an aged Marion Davies, whose youthful facial beauty had been approximated by make-up artist Gene Hibbs’ concoction of nets, hooks, rubber bands, and adhesives.” She also notes that one of the show’s critics “detailed the cosmetic concoctions that transformed Hopper and Davies into younger-looking women, and suggested that the Westmore brothers appeared to be lined up like judges at Nuremberg. Another said that Hopper was ‘wearing a face that I suspect Loretta Young had loaned her for the afternoon’” (432). Desjardins also explores how aging stars navigated the postwar era in several chapters of her Recycled Stars: Female Film Stardom in the Age of Television and Video (Duke University Press, 2015). Michael Westmore, with Jake Page, Makeup Man: From Rocky to Star Trek: The Amazing Creations of Hollywood’s Michael Westmore (Lyons Press, 2017), 142–145. In Murray Pomerance, The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect (Rutgers University Press, 2013), 173. Novak’s appearance as a presenter at the 2014 Oscars is what generated much of the discussion; an internet search will bring up quite a bit of material, some by plastic surgeons, offering opinions about “what happened” to her face. Hans Belting, Face and Mask: A Double History [2013], trans. Thomas S. Hansen and Abby J. Hansen (Princeton University Press, 2017), 178–181. Roland Barthes, “The Face of Garbo” [1957], in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (Hill and Wang, 1972), 56–57. All quotations here from an undated double-spaced typescript, “Secrets of a Hollywood Hairdresser,” by Joan St. Oegger, in the Gladys Hall collection, MHL, AMPAS, which from the stars discussed seems to have been written in the 1940s. St. Oegger also reveals the costs of flawlessness as an imperative—which may be why the piece appears not to have been published—when she describes an unnamed “very great star, still is a great star, who was aging but had never admitted it, not even to herself,” who asked her to her dressing room and, behind a “closed and locked door . . . peeled off her wig. . . . I never saw anything like it in my life. Her poor, little shrivelled head was as bald as a skinned billiard ball. Not a hair grew on it. She’d

Notes to Page 229 • 297

been lifting her face for years. She was all gummed up with pieces of adhesive tape that had been there, I swear, for years. They were moldy. When she cut the tapes holding up her face, you couldn’t see her eyes. I’ve never seen a woman, a reputed beauty, at that, fall to pieces, literally fall to pieces, God help her, before my very eyes! And I hope to the good God I never will again.”

Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964), 4, 240n10 Academy Awards (Oscars): actors thanking makeup artists for, 6; first Black hairstylists nominated/winning, 241n20; for character makeup, 4, 120; lack of category for makeup and hairdressing in studio era, 4, 6; straight makeup and, 151, 162, 209 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS): crafts and, 77, 93, 129, 280n122; as labor organization, 68, 93. See also Mazda tests (AMPAS) Acker, Ally, 294n3 Act of Violence (1949), 156–158, 157, 159, 282n138 acting manuals, 47–48, 61–64, 69, 86, 256n142 Adam’s Rib (1949), 158 Addison, Heather, 246n76, 250n59, 269n12 African Queen, The (1951), 158, 159, 282n142 aging in film, 18, 198–204, 286n17, 296n21 Agnew, Frances, 47–48, 250n59 Aherne, Brian, 290–291n63 Albert, Eddie: in Roman Holiday (1953), 164–166 Albert, Katherine, 194 Alexandre of Paris, 118, 188 Allen, Leigh, 148–149 Alton, John, 15–16, 31–32, 140, 145, 148, 276n65, 282n143

American Federation of Labor, 92 American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), 7, 17, 60, 78, 83, 86, 90, 106, 130, 253n92, 272n40 AMPAS. See Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Anderson, “Bronco Billy,” 16 Anderson, Mark Lynn, 254n118 Annas, Alicia: “The Photogenic Formula,” 22–23, 25, 71, 139, 168, 189 Ansco color, 144, 279–280n110 appliances and prosthetics, 123, 155, 200, 277n67, 282n134, 296n19. See also aging in film apprentice (makeup). See Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild (IATSE [& MPMO] Local 706): apprentice program; Motion Picture Make-Up Artists Association (MPMAA): apprentice program. See also individual artists Arbuckle, Roscoe “Fatty,” 68 Archer, Mel, 276n62 Arden, Elizabeth, 8, 192, 197, 247n4; Nuchromatic makeup, 131–134, 273n46, 274n50, 275n53; in “powder puff war,” 131–134 Arlen, Richard, 86 Armstrong, Del, 194

299

300 • Index

Associated Motion Picture Make-up Artists, Inc./Hollywood Motion Picture Make-Up Artists, Inc., Ltd., 93, 132, 144, 259–260n57; sued by Motion Picture Make-Up Artists Association, 93, 260n58 Astaire, Fred, 168, 190, 209–210, 240n9, 251n74, 285n7, 286n13, 291n63 Astor, Mary, 104, 112, 155–158, 157, 184; A Life on Film, 72; on silent-era makeup and hairdressing, 72–74, 181, 207 Aubrey, James, 233 Aumont, Jacques, 265n114 Avery, Florence, 15 Axzelle, Carl, 41, 104 Ayars, Ann, 126 Baby Face (1933), 204, 205 Bacall, Lauren, 162–163 Bad and the Beautiful, The (1952), 194, 233 Baird, John F., 243n34 Balász, Béla, 265n114 Balio, Tino, 127–129, 271n24 Ball, Eustace Hale, 252n78 Banner, Lois, 244n40 Bara, Theda, 49, 286n15 Barker, James, 232, 275n58 Barnes, George, 295n10 Barnes, Hollis (“Barnsie”), 14, 113 Barron, Jack, 118 Barrymore, Lionel, 192 Barthes, Roland: “The Face of Garbo” (1957), 227 Basinger, Jeanine, 242n28 Basten, Fred E., Robert Salvatore, and Paul A. Kaufman, Max Factor’s Hollywood: Glamour, Movies, Make-Up, 13, 252n87, 275n58, 290n54, 291n67 Basten, Fred, Max Factor: The Man Who Changed the Faces of the World, 13, 87, 258n36, 271n36, 295n10 Bathing Beauty (1944), 191–192, 193 Bau, Gordon, 108, 155, 172, 200, 203, 232, 281n131, 282n134 Bau, Robert, 108 Baxter, Warner, 64 beading, eyelash, 48, 51, 58, 63, 73, 186, 252n82, 252–253n87. See also eyelashes, artificial; mascara beards, 35, 41, 46, 55, 116, 159, 190, 211–212, 295–296n19; beard as facial area on men, 19,

165, 182, 287n30, 291–292n69; “unshaven look,” 290n62. See also mustaches; wigs and toupees beauty makeup: as baseline for normative appearance of stars, 2, 6, 11–12, 22, 26, 31, 75–76, 145, 156, 159, 289n47; comprising hairdressing, 240n5; and crying/tears, 21, 184, 195, 213, 288n184; definition of term/ goals, 2, 25–26, 58, 84, 135–136, 163, 183, 265n114; and extras, 1, 50, 102; film tropes involving, 26, 192, 218; gender and, 6, 9–11, 75, 84, 120, 163, 181–183; and illness, 183, 185; narrative meanings, 172–174, 177, 194–195, 197, 198, 204, 206–209, 213–216, 226, 285n11; as “natural,” 14, 16, 20–21, 31, 33, 43, 47–48, 56, 58, 62–63, 85, 88, 130, 150, 218, 218, 276n62, 278n84, 286n24; postwar changes in, 155–159, 170; as potentially mannerist, 170, 216; race and ethnicity and, 12, 178–179, 183, 204; as “retouching,” 60, 63, 84, 168, 181, 219; as sign of stardom, 31, 58, 166, 174, 178–179, 204, 226–227; time required to apply, 134. See also aging in film; character makeup; corrective makeup; glamour; hairdressing; straight makeup; individual actors; individual artists and films Beery, Wallace, 240n6 Belafonte, Harry: in Carmen Jones (1954), 178–180, 180 Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 151 Belting, Hans, 227 Bennett, Constance, 162 Bennett, Enid, 65 Benny, Jack, 290–291n63 Bergman, Ingrid, 22, 160–161, 161, 283n150 Bernard, Dorothy, 33 Bernique, Jean, 51, 60, 62, 65, 251n72, 252–253n87 Berns, Mel, 107, 111, 115, 224, 232, 267n144 Berry Brothers, 178 Berry, Sarah, 49, 242n30, 243–244n36 Best Years of Our Lives, The (1946), 128 Bicycle Thieves [Ladri di biciclette] (1948), 151 Biddle, Mary, 270 Big Heat, The (1953), 190, 213–214 Bill of Divorcement, A (1932), 223–224 Bioff, Willie, 96–98 Birds, The (1963), 118 Birth of a Nation, The (1915), 49

Index • 301

blackface, 50, 170, 240n9, 242–243n32, 243n34, 251n69, 286n13, 287n39. See also makeup manuals Blackwelder, Julia Kirk, 241n22 Blair, Betsy, 116; in Marty (1955), 213–214 Blakeston, Oswell, 86 Blondell, Joan, 14, 113, 139, 295n15 Blymer, Ginger “Sugar,” 112, 115–116, 119, 122–123, 154–155, 259n43, 268n164 Bode, Lisa, 249n29, 295–296n19 body makeup (craft), 1, 6, 106, 107, 112, 123, 263n93; gender and, 7–8, 69, 90, 92, 94, 98, 101, 263n93; lack of prestige of, 7, 101, 107; pay scale, 104 Bogart, Humphrey, 25, 104, 158, 290–291n63 Bogle, Donald, 116–117, 183, 287–288n41 Bombshell (1933), 215 Bonnie and Clyde (1967), 270n16 Bordwell, David, 78–79, 130, 271–272n38 Borgnine, Ernest: in Marty (1955), 213–214 Bow, Clara, 86, 286n15 Bowden, Dorris, 172, 173 Boyer, Charles, 290–291n63 Boyle, John, 77–78, 79 Bracy, Sidney, 40 Brady, Alice, 16, 252n82 Breathless [À bout de souffle] (1960), 151 Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers of America, 92, 95, 98 Brown, Gertie, 35, 36 Browne, George, 96–98, 261n78 Brownlow, Kevin, 61 Brynner, Yul, 190 Buckman, Herman, 233 Burke, Billie, 252–253n87 Burns, George, 290–291n63 Burton, Richard, 172, 174 Byrd, Ayana D., 286n20 Cabin in the Sky (1943), 116, 268n169 Cabral-Ebert, Sue, 27, 90, 259n42, 264–265n113, 265n118, 280–281n122 “California look” (in makeup), 155, 281n130 Callahan, Dorothy, 233 Campbell, Clay, 15, 108, 111, 137, 190, 195–197, 196, 232 Canty, Marietta, 223 Caprice, June, 56 Carman, Emily, 68, 267n143 Carmen Jones (1954), 178–180, 180, 286n19

Caron, Leslie, 104, 113, 116, 162, 182, 197, 284n153 Cartwright, Angela, 277–278n80 Casey, Jack, 233 Castle, Irene, 251n74 casualization (of labor), 110–112 Celluloid Closet, The (1995), 241n21 Chalmers, Helena, 243n34 Chamberlain, J. W., 52 Chambers, John, 4 Chaney, Lon, 18, 22, 40–41, 64–65, 77–78, 80, 249n28, 249n29 Chaplin, Syd: in A Lover’s Lost Control (1915), 54 character makeup, 2, 4, 12, 18, 40–43, 47–48, 64, 66–67, 74, 76, 78, 84, 120, 127, 136, 142, 170, 185, 239n2, 295–296n19; character wigs, 190, 197, 204, 291n64; race and ethnicity and, 40, 240n9, 242–243n32, 243n34. See also aging in film; latex (makeup); makeup manuals; individual artists and films Charisse, Cyd, 191–192 charts and chart system (makeup), 14, 22, 70–71, 75, 88, 139–142, 148, 155, 158–160, 165, 168, 279n99, 279n100; House of Westmore charts, 137, 145–146; and Westmore “seven faces formulation,” 139–140, 150, 277n71. See also cinematography and makeup; corrective makeup; individual artists Cimarron (1931), 200 Cimarron (1960), 200 Cinema Hair Stylists (CHS; prestige organization), 280–281n122 CinemaScope, 148, 177 cinematography and makeup, 15, 19, 85, 106, 135–138, 150, 168, 182, 271n36, 272n40, 276n65, 279n97, 279–280n110, 281n131, 287n30; close-ups, 16–17, 21–22, 33–34, 39–40, 44–45, 49, 51, 55, 58, 61–62, 130, 136, 140, 145, 148, 184, 188, 247n82, 248n20, 249n26, 251n74, 252n83; lens diffusion, 78, 136, 140, 148, 158, 177, 197, 206–207, 211, 276n65, 283n150, 289n47; lighting, 15, 18–20, 39–40, 55, 58, 60–61, 78–79, 86, 88, 129, 136, 156, 163, 181–182, 184, 245n70, 276n65, 279n97. See also Mazda tests; individual films Clark, Daniel, 78

302 • Index

Clarke, Joe, 261n78 Cleopatra (1934), 103 Cleopatra (1963), 174 Clifford, William, 40 Clift, Montgomery, 185, 212 Clock, The (1945), 224, 225 Coates, Paul: Screening the Face, 14, 148, 244n43 Coburn, Charles, 177 Coe, Brian, 39 Cohan, Steven, 194, 283n147 coiffures. See hairdressing Colbert, Claudette, 137, 186 Collins, James, 232 Columbia (studio), 11, 15, 29, 96, 107, 108, 111, 129, 195, 213, 232, 262n88 Conference of Studio Unions, 98 Cooper, Gary, 290–291n63 corrective makeup, 21, 88, 130, 135–144, 148–150, 159, 160, 183, 185, 224, 271n35, 278n87, 278n90, 279n97. See also charts and chart system (makeup); individual artists Corso, Steve, 233 Corson, Richard, 258n26 Cosio, Robyn, 243–244n36, 290n54 cosmeticsandskin.com (James Bennett), 29, 247n3, 273–274n49, 289–290n50 cosmetic use (non-film): film-industry promotion of, 44, 58, 132, 144, 174, 197; by men, 291–292n69; by women, 32–34, 248n6. See also “types”/type-based acting cosmetics (products). See Factor, Max; foundation and greasepaint; hair pomade; House of Westmore: brand; lip rouge and lipstick; mascara; Max Factor (brand); powder; rouge (cheek) cosmetique, 73, 247n3 costume in film, 4, 13, 25, 49, 67, 123, 125–126, 129, 241n17, 271n24; costume and wardrobe departments, 12, 91, 125–126; wardrobe tests, 151 Cover Girl (1944), 195–196, 196 Crain, Jeanne, 292n70 Crawford, Joan, 25, 102, 192, 203–204, 209; excessive/exaggerated cosmetics use, 25, 246n75, 209; in Strange Cargo (1940), 161–162, 209, 210–212, 211, 294n96; subject of Mommie Dearest (1981), 226 Crime of Passion (1956), 214–216, 216 Crosby, Bing, 190, 199, 286n13, 290–291n63

Cry ‘Havoc’ (1943), 186–187, 187 Cukor, George, 151, 194, 224, 280n120 Dahl, Arlene, 184, 292n70 Dandridge, Dorothy, 117, 118, 286n20; in Carmen Jones (1954), 178–180, 180 Darcy, Virginia, 118, 188 Darwell, Jane, 172, 173 Davies, Marion, 296n21 Davis, Bette, 69, 111, 116, 189, 197, 279n74; changes in star image, 68–69, 162, 223, 226–227, 245n72, 293n79; film aging of, 200, 203, 293n89, 293n91, 294n92; friendship with Perc Westmore, 14, 226; on Paul Muni, 18 Davis, Nancy, 157 Davis, Ronald L., 289n47; The Glamour Factory, 121–123, 125, 158, 162, 243–244n36, 269n1, 269n4; oral history of the performing arts (SMU), 269n1 Dawn, Bob, 107, 108, 118 Dawn, Jack, 4, 80, 95–97, 114, 150, 182, 210; background and training, 107, 136; as boss, 115, 117, 122, 142; on corrective makeup, 138, 141, 144; at MGM, 80, 97, 102, 106–108, 111, 117, 122, 137, 142, 154, 157, 224, 232, 263n100, 282n134, 287n39; prosthetic/ three-dimensional makeup of, 137–138, 142, 155, 282n134; writing by, 17, 107, 141–142, 144; writing plagiarized, 148–150, 280n114. See also individual films Dawn, Lyle, 107 Day, Beth, 263n92 De Beltrand, Anita, 228 De Castelbajac, Kate, 243–244n36 De Havilland, Olivia, 139; in The Heiress (1949), 168–169, 169, 186, 189, 198, 212 De Lavallade, Carmen, 287–288n41 De Mille, William C., 54 De Rossi, Alberto, 164, 166, 168, 187 De Rossi, Grazia, 164 De Sica, Vittorio, 151 DeCordova, Richard, 32–33, 48 Dee, Ruby, 12, 116, 178–180, 180, 183 Delirium in a Studio [Ali Barbouyou et Ali Boef à l’ huile] (1907), 35, 37, 37 DeLong, Robare, 132, 133, 274n51; DeLong Make-Up Studio, 130–133, 273n46; Nuchromatic makeup, 132–133. See also Arden, Elizabeth: Nuchromatic makeup

Index • 303

DeLuxe color. See Eastman Color/ Eastmancolor DeMille, Cecil B., 67, 69, 80, 115, 127, 255n135; in Sunset Blvd. (1950), 198 Dench, Ernest, 52 Desjardins, Mary, 281n130, 293n81, 296n21 Dietrich, Marlene, 131, 221; as client and friend of Dot Ponedel, 8, 14, 113, 114, 224, 268n150, 295n15; hair of, 195n10, 295n10; taking credit for own makeup, 112–113, 267n146, 267n147, 295n10 digital makeup, 295–296n19. See also Bode, Lisa Dinner at Eight (1938), 192–193 Dirigo, Carmen, 99, 102, 158, 232 Divorcee, The (1930), 209 Dixiana (1930), 272n40 Dolly Sisters, The (1945), 170 Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925), 72–74 Donlevy, Brian, 290–291n63 Donovan, Margaret (Maggie), 232, 294n89 Dootson, Kirsty Sinclair, 131–132, 134 Double Indemnity (1944), 189 Douglas, Kirk: makeup card for, 145, 147 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), 4–6, 5 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), 4–6 Dressler, Marie, 192, 208, 240n6 Duart, 262n88 Dubray, Joseph, 17, 84–85, 265n114 Duchess of Idaho, The (1950), 183 Dudley, Charles, 79–80, 232, 270n20 Dumont, Jack, 115–116, 117 Dunaway, Faye, 226 Dunbar, David, 64 Dunne, Irene, 200, 224, 286n13, 289n42, 295n18 Dyer, Richard, 87, 179, 182 Easter Parade (1948), 224, 292n75 Eastman Color/Eastmancolor, 144, 155, 177, 279n96, 280–281n110, 281n131 Eastman Kodak, 39, 87 Edwards, [Miss] Teddie, 7, 241n17 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 123–124 Eldridge, Lisa, 243–244n36 Emerson, John, 62–63 Enchanted Cottage, The (1945), 188, 197 English, Deirdre, 123–124 eyebrows, 22, 161, 186–187, 290n54, 295–296n19. See also individual actors and films

eyelashes, artificial: history of, 58, 186, 190, 252–253n87, 289–290n50; ubiquity on women stars, 58, 151, 159, 176, 178, 186, 209, 221. See also individual actors and films Factor, Davis, 16, 155, 272–273n43; and Mazda tests, 79, 82, 88 Factor, Max, 6, 8, 11, 12–13, 18, 32, 47, 55–56, 61, 63, 66–67, 69–71, 73–76, 81, 85, 87, 127, 137, 142, 183, 239n2; 287n39, 241n24, 242–243n32, 252n87, 254n118, 254n126, 270n22, 272n39, 273n46, 295n10; death, 17, 83, 130, 135; House of Make-Up, 67; invention of hair lace, 134–135, 190–191, 275n58, 291n67; and Joan the Woman (1917), 67, 127; and Mazda tests, 4, 16–18, 78–79, 82–83, 85, 88, 99, 129–131, 142, 258n34; and Motion Picture Make-Up Artists Association (MPMAA), 80–81, 89, 92, 94, 99; in “powder puff war,” 131–134, 142, 274n50; at Radiotone Pictures Studio, 6, 240n16; “T-D” research, 274–275n53; using hyphen in “make-up,” 258n36; and Westmores, 18, 71, 74–76, 82–83, 90, 92, 97, 130, 132, 134–135, 190, 256n150, 271n35, 274n49, 275n58, 276n62; as wigmaker, 13, 69, 102; writings of, 17, 84–86, 130, 239n2, 258n26, 258n36, 271n36, 271–272n38. See also makeup manuals; Max Factor (brand) Factor, Max Jr. [Francis], 17, 279–280n110 Fairbanks, Douglas, 72–73 Famous Players-Lasky, 67, 223 fan magazines: beauty advice in, 14, 25, 102, 123–124, 150, 262n88, 270n15, 279n108; and film makeup, 39, 49, 73, 285n7 Farber, Manny, 170 Father Goose (1964), 182 Federated Motion Picture Crafts (FMPC), 96–99, 261n80. See also Motion Picture Painters (Local 644); United Scenic Artists (Local 235) Ferguson, Elsie, 56 Film Daily Yearbook, 256n138 film noir, 189, 213, 226 Finamore, Michelle Tolini, 91 Firestein, Max, 90, 271n36, 275n58 First National (studio), 70–73, 79, 82, 111, 127, 256n138. See also Warner Bros. (studio) Fitzroy, Louis, 41 Fleming, Rhonda, 292n70

304 • Index

Fonda, Henry, 172, 173, 279n94, 290–291n63 Fontaine, Joan, 186 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, 258n26 Fool There Was, A (1915), 49 For Me and My Gal (1942), 185 Ford, Glenn, 213 Forrest, Wayne, 232, 263n98 foundation and greasepaint, 6, 39, 45–46, 48, 50, 55, 61, 86–87, 134, 165, 184–185, 191, 195, 203, 211, 212; and Black performers, 12, 183, 287n39, 287–288n41; and maintenance of white skin tone, 73, 134, 181–183, 185, 281n131. See also Arden, Elizabeth: Nuchromatic makeup; DeLong, Robare: Nuchromatic makeup; Factor, Max; makeup manuals; Max Factor (brand); individual actors and films Francis, Kay, 3, 139, 170, 172, 224 French New Wave, 150–151, 153 Fuller, Karla Rae, 240n91 Furniss, Harry, 45–46, 52, 250n52 Gable, Clark, 21, 182, 200; in Strange Cargo (1940), 209–211 Gaines, Jane M., 220 Galley Slave, The (1915), 49 Garbo, Greta, 131, 154, 162, 227, 245–246n72, 284n157, 294n7; eyelashes of, 186, 290n51 Garden, Mary, 55 Gardner, Ava, 162, 183, 286n13, 294n7 Garland, Judy, 189, 225, 286n13, 292n75; as client and friend of Dot Ponedel, 8, 14, 113, 114, 224, 267n147; in A Star Is Born (1954), 194–195 Garrett, Betty, 145 Gastrock, Phil, 93 Gaudio, Tony, 20 Gavin, James, 259n44, 287n39 Gaynor, Janet, 194 General Electric, 4, 78 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), 149, 176–177, 179, 189, 200 George, Gladys, 189 Germain, Larry, 102, 114, 262n89, 263n98 Giant (1956), 122, 189, 200 Gilda (1946), 189 Girl and Her Trust, A (1912), 33, 39 Gish, Lillian, 63, 91, 252–253n87

glamour: as anachronistic, 198; Black performers and, 178–179; definition of, 6, 20–21, 25–26, 168; glamour [three-point] lighting, 136, 163, 197, 211; as Hollywood product, 21, 28, 83–84, 121–123, 148, 151, 155, 157–158, 161–162, 168, 170, 174, 194; in postwar Hollywood, 213–216, 281n130, 293n81. See also aging in film; beauty makeup; corrective makeup Glass Slipper, The (1955), 197 Glyn, Elinor, 72 Godard, Jean-Luc, 151 Goddard, Paulette, 9, 113, 186 Goldwyn Productions/Studios, 66, 73–74, 115, 232–233, 261n80, 271n25 Goldwyn, Samuel, 73–74, 128, 199 Gone with the Wind (1939), 111, 117, 144, 184, 185, 186 Grable, Betty, 100, 170, 177, 178, 189, 191; in Pin Up Girl (1944), 174–177 Grahame, Gloria, 213 Grant, Cary, 151, 168, 171, 182, 221, 227 Grapes of Wrath, The (1940), 153, 161, 172–174, 173, 183–184, 190, 209 Gray, Peggy, 233 Great Lie, The (1941), 104 Great Man’s Lady, The (1941), 189, 200, 202, 293n91 Great Train Robbery, The (1903), 16, 35 Greene, Graham, 283n150 Greenway, Lee, 266n126 Gregory, Carl Louis, 17, 89, 130 Gregory, Irene, 233 Grey, Virginia: in Crime of Passion (1956), 214, 215 Griffith, D. W., 33–34, 43, 44, 46–47, 54, 67, 91, 248n19; and artificial eyelashes, 58, 252n87; racism of, 37–39, 49, 251n69 Guilaroff, Sydney, 8, 13, 102, 104, 113, 117, 125, 154, 157, 172, 192, 194, 264n104, 290n60, 295n10; ego of, 116, 154, 268n164; and film credits, 8, 102; hiring of Black hairdressers, 116–117; and Local 706, 8, 102, 120; as MGM executive, 102, 116–117, 120, 125, 232, 268n170; relationships with stars, 102, 104, 112, 116, 294n7 Gundle, Stephen, 20–21, 245n66, 284n154 Gunfighter, The (1950), 123 Gunn, Fenja, 33, 247n3 Gunning, Tom, 40, 44 Guy Named Joe, A (1943), 185, 289n47

Index • 305

Hadley, Bert, 93 Hagen, Jean, 159; makeup card for, 160 hair lace. See Percern toupée; wigs and toupees: hair lace hair pomade, 6, 189–190, 291n68; Brillox (Max Factor), 191; “Chinese shavings,” 291n68; aerosol hairspray, 291n68 hair styling/hairstyling. See hairdressing hairdressing: academic neglect of/difficulty of researching, 2, 6, 11–12, 13, 163, 244n43, 247n86, 271n24, 294n3; Black hairdressers, 67, 116–117; gender of personnel, 2, 7–8, 69, 90, 94–95, 98–99, 101–102, 106–107, 220–221, 241n17, 241n21, 256n148, 260n63, 262n88, 262–263n90, 263n92, 270n14; importance to Hollywood cinema, 2, 4, 7, 12–17, 19–20, 25–26, 31, 51, 66, 74, 78, 83–84, 95, 99, 110, 114, 116, 122, 127–128, 140, 153–154, 262–263n90; as term, 8, 17, 32, 94, 240n5, 261n85, 264n104; training and duties of personnel, 10–12, 83, 102–104, 106–107, 119, 121–124, 263n97, 264n104, 264n105, 265n118, 295–296n19; white hairdressers and Black actors, 12, 116–117. See also acting manuals; Cinema Hair Stylists (CHS; prestige organization); Federated Motion Picture Crafts (FMPC); Make-up Artists (Local 731); Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild (IATSE [& MPMO] Local 706); Motion Picture Painters (Local 644); Studio Makeup Artists (IATSE Local 37); United Scenic Artists (Local 235); wigs and toupees; individual artists and films; individual stars and films Hal Roach Studio[s], 96, 233 Hall, Leonard, 223 Hamilton, Margaret, 285n11 Harlow, Jean, 131, 215, 272n41 Harring, Laura, 226 Harris, Theresa, 204, 205 Harrison, Louis Reeves, 43, 55–56 Haver, Phyllis, 252–253n87 Hawes, Elizabeth, 244n40, 284n157 Hawks, Howard, 163–164 Hayden, Sterling, 214 Hays Code. See Production Code [Hays Code] Hayworth, Rita, 11–12, 14, 29, 29, 131, 189, 195, 196, 203, 242n27, 242n30, 284n154, 289n48

Heartbeat (1947), 212 Hedren, Tippi, 118, 183, 188–189 Heflin, Van, 157, 290–291n63 Heller in Pink Tights (1950), 151–152, 280n120 Hepburn, Audrey, 164, 187; in Roman Holiday (1953), 164–168, 167, 177, 178, 183, 184 Hepburn, Katharine, 158, 174, 186, 223–224, 286n13, 282n142, 288n44 Hermann, Walter, 233 Hernandez, Gabriela, 243–244n36 Hersholt, Jean, 64 Heston, Charlton, 290–291n63 Hibbs, Gene, 296n21 Higashi, Sumiko, 270n15 High Sierra (1941), 20 High Wall (1947), 123 high-definition television, high-frame-rate filmmaking: cosmetics for, 247n82 Hill, Erin, 220–221 Hilty, Bernadine, 55 Hirschhorn, Clive, 289n46 histrionic code/mode (of acting), 34, 51 Hitchcock, Alfred, 15, 118–119, 183, 188–189, 197 Hitchcock, Alta, 262n88 Hoadley, Ray, 287n29 Hobart, Rose, 4–5, 5 Holland, Cecil, 40–41, 64–65, 70, 72, 93, 104, 232–233, 249n28, 259–260n57, 270n20; The Art of Make-Up for Stage and Screen, 41, 47, 65–66, 243n34, 249n28, 257n8; as “Man of a Thousand Faces,” 41; at MGM, 41, 65–66, 66, 71–72, 80, 232 Honolulu (1939), 240n9 Hoodlum Saint, The (1946), 199 Hope, Bob, 199 Hopper, Hedda, 274n50, 296n21 Hornblow Jr., Arthur, 51–52 Horne, Lena, 116–117, 117, 118, 178–179; beauty makeup and glamour of, 117, 179, 286n20; “Light Egyptian” story, 183, 287n39 House of Westmore: brand, 131–132, 134, 139, 144, 255n132; makeup charts of, 137, 145–146, 146, 275n56, 279n99; salon, 6, 94, 97, 131–132, 134, 154, 254–255n130, 273–274n49; salon vandalized, 97, 261n77. See also Westmore brothers House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 111, 179 Howard, Leslie, 185

306 • Index

Hoyt, Eric, 247n80 Hudson, Rock, 200 Hughes, Lloyd, 181 Hughes, Mary Beth, 145 Hutchinson, Josephine, 137 IATSE. See International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employe[e]s (IATSE) In Mizzoura (1913), 46 In Person (1935), 197, 208–210, 293n80, 212 In This Our Life (1942), 116 Intermezzo (1936), 160 Intermezzo (1939), 283n150 International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employe[e]s (IATSE), 7, 90, 92–93, 96–99, 101–102, 111, 259n45, 261n78, 261n80, 263n98, 264n104 International Photographers (IATSE Local 659), 98, 257n16 Interrupted Melody (1955): makeup card for Eleanor Parker, 23 Intolerance (1916), 58, 59, 67, 252–253n87 Irwin, May, 35, 36 Italian neorealism, 150, 167 Jackie Robinson Story, The (1950), 178, 179, 180 Jeffries, Herb, 117 Jeter, Ida, 96 Jezebel (1938), 189 Johnson, General Hugh S., 95 Johnson, Van, 185, 191, 193, 289n47 Jones, Jennifer, 114 journeyman: definition, 101–102. See also individual artists Joyce, Alice, 34 Juarez (1939), 293n79 Julian, Rupert: in The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916), 54 Kazan, Elia, 288n44 Keating, Patrick, 17, 19–20, 23, 25, 39, 58–60, 83, 106, 139, 158; cinematographers as “mechanics or artists,” 14, 17, 89; on glamour as studio imperative, 19, 148, 168; on mannerism in cinematography, 168, 170 Keats, Mary, 125, 232, 259n43 Keeler, Ruby, 139 Kehoe, Vincent J.-R., 150, 243n34, 289–290n50 Keller-Dorian process, 144; makeup for, 274n50

Kelly, Gene, 185, 195, 284n153, 289n46, 290–291n63, 291n64; makeup card for, 159, 160 Kelly, Grace, 154 Keyes, Evelyn, 178 Kid from Left Field, The (1953), 112 Kiesling, Barrett, 4 King and I, The (1956), 190 King of Kings, The (1927), 80, 255n135 King, Carlton, 41 Kiss, The (1896), 35 Kitty Foyle (1940), 140, 212 Klaprat, Kathy, 68–69 Klumph, Inez, 63, 253n99, 253n100 Klumph, Helen, 63, 253n99, 253n100 Knight, William, 232 Koszarski, Richard, 39, 55, 60 Krützen, Michaela, 162, 245–246n72, 248n20, 290n51 Kryolan, “Digital Complexion” cosmetics, 247n82 Kyle, Noelia [Nolelia], 116–117, 117 Lady Be Good (1941), 178 Lady from Shanghai, The (1947), 29 Lady of the Night (1925), 206–207, 209 Lake, Veronica, 25, 246n75 Lakoff, Robin Tolmach, 150 Lamour, Dorothy, 199, 292n70 Lane, Ben, 15, 232 Langtry, Lillie, 32 Last Year at Marienbad [L’Année dernière à Marienbad] (1961), 151 Lastra, James, 23 latex (makeup), 123, 194, 200, 213, 282n134, 293n89; foam latex, 277n67, 282n134. See also character makeup LaVigne, Emile, 108 LaVigne, Robin, 108 League of Art Directors, 92, 95 Leave Her to Heaven (1945), 20 Leichner (greasepaint), 61, 64, 67 Leigh, Janet, 156–157, 157, 158, 159, 184; in The Naked Spur (1953), 215–216, 217 Leigh, Vivien, 185, 198, 203, 293n91 Lenburg, Jeff, 246n75 LeRoy, Mervyn, 16 Lescarboura, Austin, 58, 60–61 Leslie, Dick, 28 Let Us Be Gay (1930), 207–209, 209

Index • 307

Lewis, Joy: in A Lover’s Lost Control (1915), 54 Life of Emile Zola, The (1937), 116 lighting. See cinematography and makeup: lighting lips: lip rouge and lipstick, 6, 25, 33, 73, 87, 157, 188, 241n20, 246n75, 291–292n69; lip shapes, 187, 290n57; politics and, 248n11, 290n56. See also individual actors and films Little Annie Rooney (1925), 207 Little Women (1949), 157, 157 Littlefield, Lucien, 64 Lloyd, Harold, 251n67 Lombard, Carole, 8, 162, 184 Lonedale Operator, The, 33, 38, 39 Loos, Anita, 62–63 Loren, Sophia, 150–151, 152, 162, 280n120 Lost World, The (1925), 71, 72 Lowry, Beverly, 241n24 Loy, Myrna, 224 Lumière, Auguste, 35 Lupino, Ida, 20 Lydia Bailey (1952), 287–288n41 MAC cosmetics, 155 MacDermott, Mark, 50 MacDonald, Jeanette, 113, 293n91 Macmullen, Frances A., 264n105 MacMurray, Fred, 290–291n63 Madame Bovary (1949), 114–115 Maison Cesar (salon), 70, 72, 90, 254n128 Make-up Artists (Local 731), 99, 262n89; women in, 99–100. See also Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild (IATSE [& MPMO] Local 706); Studio Makeup Artists (IATSE Local 37) Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild (IATSE [& MPMO] Local 706), 7, 8, 26, 80, 90, 92, 106, 109–110, 119, 262n87, 264–265n113, 280–281n122; apprentice program, 102–103, 106–110, 115–116, 142, 265n118, 266n126; chartering of, 27, 90–91, 98–99, 261n85; gender discrimination in, 101–102, 104, 259n42, 263n97, 263n98, 263–264n103; requirements to join now, 264–265n113; wage categories, 102–104, 106, 264n104. See also Federated Motion Picture Crafts (FMPC); Make-up Artists (Local 731); Motion Picture Painters (Local 644); Studio Hairdressers Association; Studio Makeup Artists (IATSE

Local 37); United Scenic Artists (Local 235) makeup charts. See corrective makeup: chart system make-up man: as film/print editor, 28 makeup manuals, 12, 41, 40, 46–47, 49, 65, 66, 135, 139–140, 159, 289n50; racism of, 12, 243n34 makeup/make-up artist: as “expert,” 1, 6–8, 10, 14, 21, 32, 40–44, 60, 61, 63–66, 83, 123–124, 136, 138, 150, 174, 220, 241n22, 246n76, 270–271n22, 275n58, 291–292n69, 296n21; as film character, 194–197; gender of, 7–11, 16, 43, 75, 80, 90, 94, 98–99, 101–104, 108, 220, 260n63, 263–264n103, 264n104; and stars, 14, 112–113, 223–224, 226–227, 268n172; status in Hollywood, 2, 4, 6, 11, 17, 26–27, 68–69, 110, 126–127, 129, 144, 153–155, 174, 254–255n130; as term, 16–17, 40–43, 71, 106. See also cinematography and makeup; hairdressing; Mazda tests; individual artists Malcolm, Otis, 228 Maltese Falcon, The (1941), 25, 184 Manley, Nellie, 103, 124, 166, 168, 189, 262–263n90, 265n118, 269n4, 280n120, 280n122, 281n123, 295n10; and Cecil B. DeMille, 115; on myths about Josef von Sternberg, 113, 268n148; at Paramount, 15, 99–101, 115, 121, 122, 232, 281n123 Mann, William, 116, 223–224 March, Fredric, 4, 6, 290–291n63 Marcus, Elyane (Éliane), 151 Maret Jr., Harry, 232 Marie Antoinette (1938), 290n60 Mark, Bob, 233 Marnie (1964), 118, 183, 188, 189 Marsh, Mae, 62 Marshall, Boyd, and Lorraine Huling (“The Dimpled Duo”), 251n68 Marty (1955), 213–214 Marvin, Lee, 190 Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Studios, 73 mascara, 6, 64, 73, 148, 186, 191, 289n48, 289–290n50 mascaro, 247n3 Mastroianni, Marcello, 151 Maurice, Alice, 18, 46, 87, 243n34, 249n29, 250n52

308 • Index

Max Factor (brand), 74, 82, 148, 159, 190–191, 242n30, 276n61, 279n108, 290n56; alliance with Sales Builders, Inc., 70, 131, 272n41; Brillox, 191; Color Harmony Make-up, 88, 139, 258n36, 285n7; company/corporation, 13, 17, 67, 69, 78–79, 82, 88–89, 99, 124, 148, 272n40, 272n41, 272–273n43, 274n50; decline, 155, 281n130; Los Angeles salon and factory, 67, 69, 75, 81, 88–89, 134, 155, 256n148, 273–274n49; Max Factor hair lace wig, 133–134, 190; Pan-Cake, 134–135, 142–144, 165–166, 183, 185, 191, 274–275n53, 279n93, 281n131; Panchromatic Make-up/panchromatic makeup, 79, 86, 88, 130, 132, 137, 273n46; Pan-Stik, 134, 142–145, 159, 165–166, 279n93, 283–284n144, 287n30; personnel of, 90, 131, 256n148, 273–274n49, 274n134, 275n58; relationship with studios, 17, 66–70, 78, 124, 130–131, 135, 142, 272n40; Satin-Smooth Make-Up, 273n46; star endorsements of, 131, 272n41; “Supreme” makeup, 67–68, 73. See also Factor, Max; Max Factor Hair Department Max Factor Hair Department, 13, 74, 75, 75, 82, 134–135, 256n148, 271n36, 275n58, 290n60, 291n66; closing of, 155 Maybelline, 131, 135, 186, 276n61, 289–290n50 Mayer, David, 248n13 Mayer, Louis B., 288n44 Mazda tests (AMPAS): and makeup, 16–18, 78–80, 82–85, 87–88, 99, 127, 129–131, 142; name, 4, 78; and panchromatic film stock, 78–79, 84–88, 130–131, 142 McDaniel, Hattie, 117, 268n172 McDonald, Tamar Jeffers, 246n75 McGuire, Dorothy, 188, 197 Meadows, V. E., 127, 270–271n22 Media History Digital Library, 26, 247n80 Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), 189, 224, 225, 267n147 Méliès, Georges, 35, 37, 39 Menjou, Adolphe, 41, 48–49 Metro Color/Metrocolor, 144, 200 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) (studio), 7–8, 41, 66, 72, 74, 80, 90, 99–102, 106–108, 111, 114–115, 119, 120, 122, 145, 157–158, 162, 182, 191, 208, 287n39, 288n44; assistant director (AD) reports from, 178; female head of makeup, 80, 99, 101, 290n51; makeup department closing, 124, 154;

stock list of wigs and toupees, 190, 291n64. See also Dawn, Jack; Tuttle, William Michael, Gertrude, 103 Milland, Ray, 290–291n63 Miller, Marilyn, 20 Milner, Victor, 137 Minnelli, Vincente, 114 Minter, Mary Miles, 68 Mommie Dearest (1981), 226 Monroe, Marilyn, 176, 178, 184; in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), 176–177; makeup card for, 147 Montgomery, Robert, 290–291n63 Moore, Emily, 232 Moreno, Rita, 284n153 Morin, Edgar: Les stars, 21, 226 Morley, Karen, 192–193 Mother Wore Tights (1947), 189 Motion Picture Almanac, 256n138 Motion Picture Costumers union (IATSE Local 705), 110, 241n17 Motion Picture Hair Stylists [Hairstylists] Guild, 99, 262n88 Motion Picture Hairdressers Association, 94–95 Motion Picture Industry Code, 110, 266n130 Motion Picture Make-Up Artists Association (MPMAA), 27, 79–81, 90, 92, 95, 99, 102, 104, 259n56, 260n58, 272n40; apprentice program, 102–103; gender discrimination in, 89–90, 94, 99; Max Factor and, 80, 82, 85, 89, 94, 134; membership of, 89–90, 94, 260n62, 282n135; Westmores and, 82, 92, 94, 99. See also Associated Motion Picture Make-up Artists, Inc./Hollywood Motion Picture Make-Up Artists, Inc., Ltd.; Federated Motion Picture Crafts (FMPC); Make-up Artists (Local 731); Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild (IATSE [& MPMO] Local 706); Motion Picture Painters (Local 644); Studio Makeup Artists (IATSE Local 37); United Scenic Artists (Local 235) Motion Picture Painters (Local 644), 92, 97–98, 111; makeup artists and hairdressers in, 95–99, 261n78 Moving Picture Machine Operators (MPMO), 7, 90, 98, 102, 259n42. See also International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employe[e]s (IATSE)

Index • 309

MPMO. See Moving Picture Machine Operators (MPMO) Mr. Skeffington (1944), 200, 293n89 Mulholland Drive (2001), 226 Muni, Paul, 6, 14, 18, 116 Murdock, Vern, 249n26 mustaches, 37, 46, 48, 190, 200, 255n135. See also beards; wigs and toupees My Gal Sal (1942), 189 Myles, Norbert, 232 Mystery of the Wax Museum, The (1933), 108 Naked City, The (1948), 156, 159, 214, 215 Naked Spur, The (1953), 215–217, 217 Naremore, James, 18–19, 204, 245n60 National Industrial Recovery Act, 93 National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act), 96 Natural Born Gambler (1916), 49, 251n69 Negra, Diane, 242n30 Negri, Pola, 206 Newman, Paul, 282–283n144 Next Voice You Hear . . . , The (1950), 157, 159 Niagara (1952), 176 Nielsen, Elizabeth, 241n17 Nielsen, Mike, 93, 96–97 Nitti, Frank, 97 Niven, David, 290–291n63 No Way Out (1950), 12, 116, 178, 179, 183 North by Northwest (1959), 182 Novak, Kim, 15, 22, 188, 189, 197, 227, 296n24 Now, Voyager (1942), 189, 197 Nye, Ben, 20, 107–108, 111–112, 117, 224, 232, 268n172, 286n19 Nye Jr., Ben, 108, 119–120 O’Connor, Donald, 159; makeup card for, 160 O’Meara, Mallory, 243–244n36, 281n124 O’Neil, Barbara, 261n80 Oberon, Merle: skin problems of, 184, 288n45, 289n47 Oldridge, Harry Barton, 250n58; Movie Make-up Manual, 47, 66, 87, 257n8 Olivier, Laurence, 290–291n63 On an Island with You (1948), 191–192 orthochromatic film stock, 18, 27, 39–40, 44, 48, 50, 64, 74, 77–79, 86–88, 130, 181

Oscars. See Academy Awards (Oscars) Owen, Seena: in Intolerance (1916), 58, 59 Page, Jake, 26, 247n78 panchromatic film stock, 18, 27, 39–40, 77–79, 130, 132, 134, 137, 142, 182, 185, 200, 273n46, 290n57; rumors about eliminating need for makeup and, 74, 84–89; “Super Pan,” 87 Papas, Irene, 162 Paramount (studio), 8, 15, 67, 96–97, 99–101, 111, 113, 115, 124, 127, 129, 144, 154, 232, 262n88, 281n123. See also Manley, Nellie; Ponedel, Dorothy “Dot”; Westmore, Wally; individual films Parsons, Louella, 97, 208, 240n15 Passion of Joan of Arc, The (1928), 86 Pat and Mike (1952), 158–159, 174 Patrick, Milicent, 281n124 Pavlova, Anna: in The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916), 54 Peacock Alley (1929), 272n40 Peacocke, “Captain” Leslie T., 52–56 Pearce, [Walter] Guy, 176, 232, 266n126, 268n169 Pearson, Roberta, 34–35, 248n13 Peck, Gregory, 123; in Roman Holiday (1953), 164–166, 167, 168 Peiss, Kathy, 8, 12, 14, 247n4, 291–292n69 People Will Talk (1951), 168, 170, 171, 172 Percern toupée, 132, 134, 190, 291n67. See also Max Factor Hair Department; wigs and toupees: hair lace Perutz, Kathrin, 270n16, 292n74 Peters, Jean: in Pickup on South Street (1953), 213 Phillips, Denis, 102, 263n96 Phillips, Festus B. (“Dad”), 80 Physioc, Louis, 84–85 Pick a Star (1937), 90 Pickford, Mary, 33, 43, 46–47, 55, 61, 207, 247n81 Pickup on South Street (1953), 213 Pierce, Jack, 58, 104, 201, 270n10, 282n134; at Universal, 58, 155, 163, 232, 282n135 Pin Up Girl (1944), 174–177 Pintar, Laurie, 97–98 Planet of the Apes (1968), 4 plastic surgery, 25, 62, 246n76, 293n87 Platt, Agnes, 63–64, 182, 253n100 Poitier, Sidney, 12, 179 Pomerance, Murray, 227, 239n2

310 • Index

Ponedel, Bernard, 241–242n25, 262n87 Ponedel, Dorothy “Dot,” 8, 9, 104, 114, 114, 220–221, 224, 250n42, 262n87, 292n75; and Local 706, 8, 98–99, 101–102, 263–264n103, 268n153; and Local 731, 99; makeup innovations of, 112–113, 267n147; as Paramount executive, 8, 97, 99, 268n158; star clients and friends, 8, 9, 14, 102, 113–114, 224, 268n150, 282n142, 295n15; treatment by male colleagues, 8, 115, 145, 147, 263–264n103 Ponedel, Meredith, 241–242n25, 279n105, 295n15 Porter, Jean, 162 powder: for Black performers, 12, 183; on men, 283n147, 287n29, 287n30, 291–292n69; and shine/sweat, 56, 144, 159, 172, 182–183, 188, 212; and white skin tone, 45, 61, 65, 73, 165, 181, 185, 191, 195, 207, 287n29; “yellow powders,” 50–51. See also Max Factor (brand); Texas Dirt Powell, Eleanor, 6, 240n9, 240n15, 286n13 Powell, William, 199 Power, Tyrone, 12, 181, 242n28 Primrose Path (1940), 162, 209–213, 211 Pringle, Harry, 232 Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, The (1939), 203, 293n91 Production Code [Hays Code], 68, 153 Professional Sweetheart (1934), 192, 204 Psycho (1960), 184 Radiotone Pictures Studio, 254n115 Raft, George, 290–291n63 Raintree County (1957), 185, 189 Rambova, Natacha, 67 Rebecca (1940), 186 Red Dust (1932), 182 Reid, Wallace, 68 Reynolds, Debbie: makeup card for, 159, 160; in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), 24, 158–160 Rice, John, 35, 36 Riordan, Teresa, 243–244n36 Ritter, Thelma: in Pickup on South Street (1953), 213 Riva, Maria: on Marlene Dietrich: 112, 267n146, 267n147 RKO (studio), 68, 111, 115, 223–224, 232, 267n144, 293n80. See also Berns, Mel; Rogers, Ginger Road to Utopia, The (1945), 199, 200

Roberts, Nina, 232–233 Robeson, Paul, 179, 200, 201 Robins, Cynthia, 243–244n36, 290n54 Robinson, Bill, 185, 290n61 Robinson, Jackie, 178, 180 Roccardi, Albert (“The Man with a Thousand Faces”), 41–42, 42 Rodgers, Hazel, 232–233, 270n14 Rodgers, Walter, 72, 104, 110, 127, 232, 256n138 Rogers, Buddy, 86 Rogers, Ginger, 11, 87–88, 140, 184, 188, 192, 204, 221, 222, 226, 251n74, 267n144, 285n7, 290n58; in In Person (1935), 197, 108–209, 293n80; in Primrose Path (1940), 161–162, 209–212, 211 Rogue Song, The (1930), 272n40 Roman Holiday (1953), 164–168, 167, 177, 184 Romeyn, Jane, 232, 270n14; variations in name, 106 Rooney, Mickey, 286n13 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 91, 93–94, 95, 96 Rose, Helen, 116, 241n17 Rosher, Charles, 61, 253n94 Rosine, Lillian, 80, 99–101, 232 Ross, Harry, 233 Ross, Murray, 91, 97, 99, 118 rouge (cheek), 48, 54–55, 113, 185. See also individual actors and films Rubinstein, Helena, 8, 49, 247n4; on corrective makeup, 135, 276n63 Russell, Jane, 149; in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), 176–178, 189 Ryan, Robert, 157, 216 Sabine, Leonora, 100, 100, 232, 262n88, 265n118 Saint, Eva Marie, 182 Sales Builders, Inc., 70, 272n41 Sally (1929), 20 Salome (1923), 67 Salt, Barry, 34 Samson and Delilah (1949), 115 Schary, Dore, 157–158, 288n44 Scherr, Raquel L., 150 Schiffer, Robert, 11, 14, 29, 29, 107, 242n27; makeup for Crime of Passion (1956), 214–216 Schram, Charles: makeup cards by, 145, 147 Schweitzer, Marlis, 33–34, 248n6 Screen Actors Guild, 68, 96–97, 254n123 Sea of Grass, The, 288n44

Index • 311

Searcy, Elizabeth, 116 Secrets of an Actress (1938), 170, 171 Seiderman, Maurice, 19, 115–116, 197, 232 Selig [Polyscope] (Los Angeles studio), 13, 41, 70 Seller, Peters, 290–291n63 Selznick International (studio), 97, 108, 283n150 Selznick, David O., 22, 114–115, 186, 283n150 Selznick, Irene Mayer, 102, 283n150 Separate Tables (1958), 203 Seven Year Itch, The (1955), 177–178 Shamroy, Leon, 20 Shear, Phillip, 233 Shearer, Moira, 105, 289n48 Shearer, Norma, 192, 200, 208–209; in Lady of the Night (1925), 206–207, 209; in Let Us Be Gay (1930), 207–208, 209 Sheerer, Will E., 40 Sheridan, Ann, 10, 139, 228 Shore, Bernard, 138, 142 Show Boat (1936), 200, 201 Show Boat (1951), 178 Sinatra, Frank, 290–291n63 Singin’ in the Rain (1952), 158–160, 284n153; makeup cards for stars of, 160 Skelton, Red, 193, 292n73 skin (in film): Black, 12, 117, 178–179, 183–184, 287–288n41; white, 65, 86–87, 130, 148, 166, 181–184, 198, 200, 212, 281n131. See also blackface; foundation and greasepaint; makeup manuals; yellowface; individual actors and films Smyth, J. E., 294n3 Snyder, Allan “Whitey,” 176, 177 So Proudly We Hail! (1943), 186 Society of Make-Up Artists (SMA; prestige organization), 280–281n122 Society of Motion Picture Engineers, 60 Something Good—Negro Kiss (1898), 35 Sorrell, Herbert K., 98 Sothern, Ann, 186 Speer, La Vaughn, 246n75 Squaw Man, The (1914), 69 St. Oegger, Joan, 137, 228, 229, 232–233, 296–297n27 Stack, Robert, 163 Staiger, Janet, 34, 43, 44, 46, 243–244n36 Stallings, Penny, 290–291n63 Stanhope, Paul, 233 Stanwyck, Barbara, 14, 18–19, 113, 189–190, 204–205, 205, 208; in Crime of Passion

(1956), 214–216, 216; in The Great Man’s Lady (1941), 200, 202, 293n91 Star Is Born, A (1937), 194–195 Star Is Born, A (1954), 194–195, 224 Steimatsky, Noa: The Face on Film, 14, 244n43 Stein (theatrical makeup), 63, 67, 73 Stella Dallas (1925), 199 Stella Dallas (1937), 18–19, 128, 190, 208, 261n70 Stenn, Kurt, 291n65 Stephanoff, Robert (Blagoe), 19, 74, 93, 128, 233, 261n80, 270n20, 271n25; different names of, 128, 270n20; and Hollywood Motion Picture Make-Up Artists, Inc., Ltd., 93, 132, 259–260n57; at United Artists, 74, 128–129, 232 Stewart, James, 215–216, 286n13, 290–291n63 Stewart, Victor A., 41, 63 Stormy Weather (1943), 116, 179 Story of Louis Pasteur, The (1936), 6 Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, The (1939), 251n74 Stott, William, 160 straight makeup, 2, 6, 31–32, 37, 40, 43, 48, 51–52, 55–56, 61, 64, 66–69, 74–75, 82–84, 130, 224, 279n94; as term, 2, 239n4. See also beauty makeup; character makeup; corrective makeup; makeup manuals Strange Cargo (1940), 162, 182, 209–211, 211, 213, 294n96 Strange Interlude (1932), 200 Strauss, Karl, 129 “street” makeup, 39, 93, 142, 144 Streetcar Named Desire, A (1951), 203 Studio Basic Agreement (SBA), 91–92, 96, 128 Studio Hairdressers Association, 94. See also Federated Motion Picture Crafts (FMPC); Make-up Artists (Local 731); Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild (IATSE [& MPMO] Local 706); Motion Picture Painters (Local 644); Studio Makeup Artists (IATSE Local 37); United Scenic Artists (Local 235) Studio Makeup Artists (IATSE Local 37), 98, 102, 261–262n86, 263n98. See also Motion Picture Make-Up Artists Association (MPMAA) Stull, William, 138 Sullavan, Margaret, 186 Sunset Blvd. (1950), 181, 198, 199, 203, 214 Surtees, Robert, 156 Suttle, Saint, 35, 36

312 • Index

Swanson, Gloria, 67–68, 206, 223, 286n15, 293n81; in Sunset Blvd. (1950), 198, 214 Sweet, Blanche, 33, 38, 44, 47 Swing Time (1936), 188, 222, 223, 240n9, 290n58 Sylvia Scarlett (1935), 186 Tabourne, Hattie Wilson, 67, 223 Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949), 189 Talbot, Frederick A., 45, 47 Talmadge, Constance, 62; in Intolerance (1916), 59 Talmadge, Norma, 62 Taylor, Anna, 252–253n87 Taylor, Elizabeth, 116, 122, 184, 189, 200, 204; in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), 172, 174–175, 175, 189, 191, 204 Taylor, Robert, 21, 163, 181 Tec-Art Studio, 88 Technicolor, 20, 26, 74, 89, 97, 113, 132, 134, 137, 148, 161, 166, 177, 185, 212, 242–243n32, 245n70, 274–275n53, 279–280n110, 281n131, 286n17, 287n30, 289n47, 289n48, 292n70; and corrective makeup, 142, 144 teeth, 224, 246n76 Temple, Shirley, 247n81 Texas Dirt (cosmetic product), 191, 292n71 Thalberg, Irving, 19, 120, 208 Tharps, Lori L., 286n20 That Hamilton Woman (1941), 128, 293n91 themakeupgallery.com, 29 Thorp, Margaret Farrand, 160–161, 181 Tierney, Gene: in Leave Her to Heaven (1945), 20 To Have and Have Not (1944), 163 Toland, Gregg, 129, 287n30 Tone, Franchot, 290–291n63 Totter, Audrey, 123 toupees. See wigs and toupees Tracy, Spencer, 4, 158, 174, 289n47 Triangle (studio), 70 Trip to the Moon, A [Le Voyage dans la lune] (1902), 35 TruColor (film technology), 144 Truitt, James, 287–288n41 Truwe, John, 105, 145, 200, 282–283n144; makeup cards by, 145, 158–160, 160; variations in name, 106 Turner, Lana, 194, 223 Turpin, Helen, 26, 177, 232 Tuttle, William, 2, 4, 95, 113, 117, 124, 126, 150, 162, 191–192, 262n87, 279n97, 287n39,

292n71; background, 106–197, 122, 289n47; as boss, 111, 125–126, 129, 142, 154, 266–267n140; on CinemaScope, 148; makeup cards and charts, 23, 141, 145–146, 146; and MGM, 115, 122–123, 159, 182, 232, 266–267n140, 284n153; on Technicolor, 166, 177, 285n6, 286n17; on Westmores, 4, 26, 254–255n130. See also individual films Twentieth Century-Fox (studio), 12, 96, 97, 108, 112, 122–123, 183, 263n98, 266n126, 268n169, 286n19 Two Women [La Ciociara] (1960), 151 Two-Three-Five (union). See United Scenic Artists (Local 235): as Two-Three-Five “types”/type-based acting, 21, 32, 34, 40, 47–51, 84 Union, Gabrielle, 241n20 United Artists (studio), 74, 96, 127–128, 262n88 United Scenic Artists (Local 235), 92, 266n130; as autonomous local of the Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers of America, 92; labor activism by, 93, 95; makeup artists and hairdressers in, 92–94, 99, 128; as Two-Three-Five, 92, 259n51, 271n27. See also Motion Picture Painters (Local 644) Universal (studio), 43, 51, 57–58, 96, 107–108, 111, 118, 119, 154, 155, 163, 270n14, 281n124, 282n135 Valentino, Rudolph, 67, 254n118, “pink powder puff” editorial about, 181, 254n118, 287n29 Varden, Norma, 176 Varga, Carol, 171, 285n11 verisimilar code/mode (of acting), 34, 43, 44–47, 248n13 Vertigo (1958), 15, 22, 188, 189, 197, 227 Vincent, Virginia, 139–140 Vitagraph (studio), 28, 41, 49–50 Von Sternberg, Josef, 113, 268n148 Wacker, Sally, 265n118 Wagner, Rob, 56–58 Walker, Fred T., 233 Walker, Madam C. J., 8, 241n24, 248n6 Wallace, John, 232 Wallis, Hal, 116 Walsh, Raoul, 54

Index • 313

Warner Bros. (studio), 1, 6, 14, 26, 41, 68, 71–73, 78, 82, 96–97, 108, 114, 127, 276n62, 293n89. See also First National (studio) Warner Color/Warnercolor, 144, 281n131 Warner, Jack, 153, 266n138 Washington, Hazel, 116–117, 268n170 Wayne, John, 283n147 Weaver, Lenore, 15 Weitzel, Edward, 55 Welles, Orson, 18, 29, 115 West, Mae, 8, 113 West, William, 40 Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers (WAMPAS), 256n150 Western Costume Company, 85 Westmore brothers, 4, 13, 70–71, 94, 97, 135, 138–139, 240, 254–255n130, 267–268n140, 275n57; 296n21; Beauty, Glamour and Personality, 135; A Concyclopedia of Beauty, 254–255n130; The Westmore Beauty Book, 140, 199, 254–255n130. See also House of Westmore; individual names Westmore, Bud [Hamilton Adolph], 101, 118–119, 134, 135, 154, 155, 156, 232, 254–255n130, 281n124. See also Westmore brothers Westmore, Dorothy, 255n135, 256n140 Westmore, Edith (McCarrier), 240n14 Westmore, Ern [Ernest Henry], 71–73, 80, 82, 92–93, 97, 108, 135, 154, 200, 223–224, 232–233, 242n26, 255n135, 256n140, 256n150, 263–264n103, 271n35, 273–274n49, 275n56, 277n72. See also Percern toupée Westmore, Frank, 11, 70, 72, 74, 107, 125, 154, 254–255n130, 277n76; The Westmores of Hollywood, 13, 15, 72, 140, 243–244n36, 255n130, 281n123, 282n134. See also Westmore brothers Westmore, Frank, and Muriel Davidson, The Westmores of Hollywood. See Westmore, Frank: The Westmores of Hollywood Westmore, George, 55–56, 70–72, 80, 90, 115, 126, 127, 139, 252–253n87, 255n135, 256n140, 256n144, 256n150; at MGM, 72, 74, 232; myths about, 13, 70–72, 254–255n130 Westmore, Marvin, 155, 282n134 Westmore, Michael, 243n34 Westmore, Michael, 6, 26, 99, 104, 142, 144, 155, 162, 174, 182, 184, 199, 226–227, 240n14; on aging in film, 199–200; The Art of Theatrical Makeup for Stage and Screen, 243n34, 288n42, 288n44, 290n62; as

makeup apprentice, 27, 107–108, 109, 131; Makeup Man (memoir), 6, 240n14. See also Westmore, Perc Westmore, Mont (Monte) [Montague George], 67, 233, 240n14, 255n135; on Gone with the Wind (1939), 111, 185; at Selznick, 97, 108, 186, 233, 283n150, 290n52. See also Westmore brothers Westmore, Monty [son of Mont], 99, 107 Westmore, Perc [Percival Harry], 3, 4, 6, 10–11, 10, 14, 20, 70, 72–74, 76, 80, 82, 90, 92–94, 97, 101, 104, 111, 144–145, 148, 162, 197, 199, 200, 203, 227, 232, 255n135, 275n56; as boss, 116, 135, 268n163, 277n67, 277n72, 278n84, 280n122, 291–292n69, 293n79, 293n89; at First National, 17–18, 70–73, 79, 127, 255n133, 255n135; and Max Factor, 74, 76, 82, 97, 122, 132, 134, 190, 256n150, 271n35; “seven faces formulation,” 139, 141, 277n71; at Warner Bros., 1–4, 72, 97, 107, 108, 111, 116, 127, 153–154, 224, 232, 256n138, 262n88, 266n138; writing by, 17, 135–137, 140–141; writing plagiarized, 148–150, 280n114. See also corrective makeup; House of Westmore: salon; Motion Picture MakeUp Artists Association (MPMAA); Percern toupée; individual films Westmore, Wally [Walter James], 4, 6, 101, 168, 181, 200, 232, 259n40; at Paramount, 15, 97, 111, 151, 154, 274n50, 281n123; and Roman Holiday (1953), 164–166. See also Westmore brothers Westmore’s News Service, 132, 139, 273–274n49 westmoresofhollywood.com, 257n15 Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), 203–204, 294n92 Whistler, Margaret, 43 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), 172, 175, 189, 191, 204 Widmark, Richard: in Pickup on South Street (1953), 213 wigs and toupees, 1, 7, 13, 16, 22, 25, 28, 35, 37, 48, 52, 55, 58, 62–63, 79, 88, 102, 104, 122–123, 148, 159, 174, 194, 197, 203, 208, 263n97, 284n153, 292n73; hair lace, 28, 135, 163, 190–191, 275n58, 291n67; MGM Wig Notebook Log, 291n64; in period films, 69, 158, 189–190, 295–296n19; “scalp doily” as term, 191; ventilators, 256; weft wigs, 190–191. See also beards; hairdressing; Max Factor Hair Department; mustaches; Percern toupée

314 • Index

Willat, Irvin, 87 Willett, Julie A., 241n21, 251n74 Williams, Bert, 49, 251n69 Williams, Esther, 22, 143, 183, 189, 191–192, 193, 199, 289n47, 292n70, 292n71 Willis-Tropea, Liz, 273–274n49 Wilson, Ben, 51 Wilson, Victoria, 113, 261n80 Wings (1927), 86 Winston, Brian, 87 Wizard of Oz, The (1939), 142, 144, 282n134 Wolheim, Louis, 246n76 Woman of the Year (1942), 158 Women, The (1939), 192, 211 Wood, Natalie, 155

Woods, Frank, 85 Wright, Evelyn, 260n66 Wuthering Heights (1939), 128 Wyler, William, 164, 168 yellowface, 170, 286n13; “oriental” makeup, 37, 240n9, 240n10. See also makeup manuals Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow [Ieri oggi domani] (1963), 151 Yolanda and the Thief (1945), 190 Young, Clara Kimball, 50 Young, Helen, 194 Young, James, 49–50 Zanuck, Darryl, 242n28

About the Author ADRIENNE  L. M C LE AN is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas and is the author of Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom and Dying Swans and Madmen: Ballet, the Body, and Narrative Cinema. She is the editor of several anthologies, among them the volume Costume, Makeup, and Hair for the book series “Behind the Silver Screen” and, with Murray Pomerance, the eleven-volume series “Star Decades.”