How Not to Wear a Tub

Somewhere between high fashion and highfalutin' lies a heap of high-priced clothing turned out over the years for a peculiarly critical, not necessarily tasteful eye: the movie camera's. Hollywood rarely originates style, rarely fails to exaggerate what is popular at the moment. If low necklines are in vogue, movie designers drop them a little lower; if padded shoulders are in this year, every Hollywood dress slightly resembles a football uniform. The result is that Hollywood's powdered, pinched, pushed, pneumatized darlings flash across the screen looking just a little bit more like what every American woman yearns to look like.

Highest-ranked of the practitioners of this tricky craft is a little (5 ft. 1 in.) Californian of 52 named Edith Head, boss designer at Paramount since 1937. In her autobiography The Dress Doctor (Little, Brown; $3.95; written with Jane Kessner Ardmore) Edith gushily suggests that a designer must drop names as fast as she picks up stitches.

Designer Head is most impressed by actresses who are themselves designing women. Edith's first solo effort on a movie, She Done Him Wrong (1933), was a remake of Broadway's Diamond Lil and brought her measure to measure with Mae West's 38-24-38. "I like 'em tight, girls," growled Mae, and was soon jammed into costumes in which she could not "lie, bend or sit." So that West could relax a bit between takes, a board was set up for her to lean against. Marlene Dietrich, arriving for a fitting, "quickly peels down, revealing the most beautiful French lingerie I've ever seen, all white, just a touch of lace."

The Dress Doctor is crammed with this sort of peep-show item. Some readers may be fascinated to learn that Eva Marie Saint has "a perfectly good figure," that Mitzi Gaynor, in the right kind of "red-spangled straight jacket," exhibits a "rounded female figure, good bosom, tiny waist," or that Hedy Lamarr, though "she's slim, actually," does not allow herself to be padded out. As for Anna Magnani, "When she undressed, we were amazed. Under the black slacks and sweater was the most exquisite of black French foundations." Sophia Loren refuses to wear blue jeans, and Designer Head agrees with her: "There's nothing wrong with her figure, but she isn't the cowboy type."

To get new ideas for covering the foundations, Edith finds it necessary to visit supermarkets, watch women in bargain basements and cafeteria lines. "To look lovely," says Designer Head, who has been married 18 years, "a woman will suffer. She'll wear a waist cincher that squeezes her, boned bras that dig her, heels that tilt her to the sensitive balls of her feet." But it is all worth it because "clothes have to do with happiness, and can actually give a woman personality. A woman in a bathtub has little personality; she's just a woman without clothes."

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