Grace Kelly

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i seldom see Grace in this hairstyle

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Fillm Quarterly
ashion dreams: Hitchcock, women, and Lisa Fremont


Lisa Fremont

Lisa Fremont, in Rear Window, represents the Hitchcock heroine par excellence. To begin with, she is played by Hitchcock's favorite muse, Grace Kelly, the actress to whom no other actress Hitchcock worked with could, he felt, quite compare. Kelly was a former model who wore her clothes with unparalleled elegance. Hitchcock was at the height of his powers and discovering the expressive qualities of color film. The result is one of Hitchcock's richest evocations of fashion and feminine grace. "Every costume was indicated when he sent me the finished script," remembers Edith Head. "There was a reason for every color, every style, and he was absolutely certain about everything he settled on. For one scene he saw her in pale green, for another in white chiffon, for another in gold. He was really putting a dream together in the studio"(Spoto 372).

Head's comments indicate how powerful Hitchcock's vision of Kelly was. But she makes other crucial points about how fashion figures into Hitchcock's art also. First, there is an idea behind each clothing choice. Hitchcock was extraordinarily conscious of what was in his screen, how it would show up, and what effect it would have. He was nearly religiously opposed to allowing anything incidental in his screen and that goes for costume also. Secondly, Head sees in Hitchcock's fashion choices the expression of a dream, a striving

toward the realization of an inchoate vision. Hitchcock's color choices relate most directly to the intuitive, dream-like, Expressionist goals of his filmmaking. Each of the six outfits Lisa Fremont wears carries with them a feeling that Hitchcock is trying to convey in that scene.

Finally, Hitchcock's fascination with his actress's wardrobe is not just the result of a Svengali-like determination to control his actresses but is indicative of how central his actresses, his women characters, were to the visual scheme of the film, how central they were to the personal dream that the film was to Hitchcock.

Fashion was always important to Hitchcock but there are few films in which fashion becomes as central to the storyline of a Hitchcock film as it does in Rear Window. Hitchcock had a fetish for unity and if he brought an element into his film he tended to work and rework that element. It is no surprise then that, in this film starring a former model, Kelly, the character she plays works in the fashion world also, nor that the issue of fashion becomes central to the storyline. Fashion is what Lisa and Jeff fight about as Lisa tries to get Jeff to commit to a relationship and Jeff seeks to avoid that commitment. Jeff sees himself as a rugged world traveler living out of one suitcase. Lisa's love of fashion is, to Jeff, indicative of her superficiality, why she is not right for him. Jeff holds Lisa's elegance against her.

Critics and viewers of Rear Window often make the mistake of identifying Hitchcock's point of view with that of his male protagonist. Jeff is impressed with himself but Hitchcock is not impressed with Jeff. Hitchcock and Jeffrey Michael Hayes's script is replete with zingers at Jeff's expense, most coming from Lisa and Jeff's crusty insurance nurse, Stella, and most having to do with Jeff's weak libido and his fear of women, sex, and commitment. One of Jeff's longest speeches about how he needs "a woman who can go anywhere, do anything" takes place while Stella, the irritable nurse played by Thelma Ritter, literally throws a helpless Jeff (he's in a waist-high cast) around the room during a rubdown. Jeff makes fun of Lisa, but while he is doing that Hitchcock makes fun of Jeff-for hiding his fear of women behind a screen of male bombast and for not being able to see what is evident to the filmviewer, especially as the film evolves, that Lisa is not only
pretty, but of the two, probably the bravest and most capable (that's Lisa climbing into the murderer's apartment window, not Jeff.)

 

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Film Quarterly
Laura Mulvey is one critic who falls into the trap of thinking like Jeff. She too criticizes Lisa for being a superficial, fashion-conscious bimbo who struts her stuff for Jeff's male gaze (31-39). But Tania Modleski specifically refutes Mulvey, emphasizing Lisa's fashionableness as a sign of her independence from Jeff, a means of expressing herself that makes Jeff uncomfortable. "If, on the one hand," Modleski notes, "women's concern with fashion quite obviously serves patriarchal interests, on the other hand this very concern is often denigrated and ridiculed by men (as it is by Jeff in the film" [77]). What Modleski understands here is that while some might find an attention to fashion superficial, Hitchcock most certainly did not. Hitchcock has Lisa parade around in the latest fashions not only for the sake of her elegance (though that was important to him) but to bring out certain cruel and immature tendencies in Jeff, who is afraid of committing to
Lisa and who rationalizes his fear by attacks on her style and way of expressing herself.

Many of Hitchcock's greatest films are studies in male condescension, studies in the ways men pigeonhole, trivialize, or reduce women. Dev in Notorious and Roger in North by Northwest both assume the women who love them are more duplicitous and promiscuous than they really are. Scotty in Vertigo similarly assumes Judy is more superficial and criminal than she really is. Jeff, too, assumes Lisa is too superficial and delicate for his rugged life. He also underestimates how profound her loyalty is to him, often comparing her to the sexpot who lives across the way and who has a tendency to juggle several men at once. All of these Hitchcock heroes are woefully unaware of how loyal these women are to them, how much they are putting up with for the men's sake, how much they suffer. Hitchcock was drawn to situations where his men were blind to the virtues of a woman's character. This makes us root for the heroines that much more. Hitchcock was always conscious
of speaking to a female audience and, consequently, he keeps the spotlight on the women's emotions. That such a woman-oriented director should suffer from a reputation as a misogynist is at least partially explained by the delight he took, particularly toward the end of his career (in its more powerful, cocky phase), of describing his approach to women in the most insensitive way possible: "I always believe in following the advice of the play-write Sardou.... `Torture the women. . . The trouble today is that we don't torture women enough" (Spoto 483). That quote alone suggests why Hitchcock's films are so feminine in nature and yet at the same time perceived as being so hostile to women.

Jeff's character fits into the lead male patterns in the films mentioned above. The way Jeff denigrates Lisa's interest in fashion is part and parcel of his generally superior and dismissive attitude toward her. His denigration of her fashion reflects his weakness, not Lisa's-his cruelty, not her superficiality. On the contrary, on the subject of fashion, Hitchcock's sympathies lie much closer to Lisa than Jeff. Hitchcock took fashion very seriously. He was no rugged adventurer, like Jeff, living out of a single suitcase. His were the fantasies of the urban sophisticate, even if he never quite shook the dust of his middle class background. He liked good food, wine, and clothing, to the point of pretension. His closet was an ode to his conservatism and sophistication, lined as it was with rows of nicely tailored suits of the same cut and color. The man who "prefers talkative colors to somber ones in a room, properly introduced through flowers or fine
paintings" (Hitchcock "Woman" 52) is a great deal closer to Lisa's sensibility than Jeff's. When Lisa tells Jeff that it is "time to come home," open up a photography studio and wear nice, elegant blue suits, she is asking him to be, by appearance and vocation, more like Hitchcock. And the definite attitude in this film is that a willingness on Jeff's part to settle down, to drop his pseudo-Hemingway shtick and settle into some sensible clothes and a correspondingly sensible life, would be a sign of maturity. Hitchcock may be ambiguous at times in this film in his attitudes toward men and women and marriage but on the subject of fashion he is rock solid with Lisa. It is only a sign of irresponsibility and a certain lack of refinement not to see the dignity of couture clothing.

It is part of the film's charm and impressive unity, that that which seems like Lisa's weakness, her preoccupation with fashion, becomes the skill by which she (not Jeff) cracks the case. Lisa gets the evidence that will convict Lars Thorwald (his deceased wife's wedding ring) through her understanding of jewelry, handbags, and women. And it is Jeff who is reduced to sitting passively in his chair, consigned to those bland pajamas, while Lisa does all the work, scaling fences and fire-escapes, digging in the garden, all the while dressed impeccably. The point seems to be that not only can Lisa do all that Jeff thinks she cannot, she can do it better than Jeff, and, most importantly, she can do it while dressed to the nines.

 

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Film Quarterly
Lisa's Outfits

Edith Head's comments about wardrobe in Rear Window make it clear then that Hitchcock chose Grace Kelly's outfits with a great deal more in mind than making her look pretty. Each of Lisa's six outfits (four dresses, one nightgown, and one pants and shirt outfit) are chosen with precise care and each is expressive of ideas in the film. For example, when we see her for the first time, the night Lisa brings a dinner from the exclusive restaurant, "21," she dresses appropriately, in Manhattan black and white, a gorgeous dress with a pleated chiffon skirt adorned with black embroidery, a black, close-fitting short-sleeved bodice with a light tulle wrap. It is a glittering introduction to Kelly who wears this kind of clothing with unparalleled ease and to Lisa who brings a breath of exciting Manhattan air into Jeff's dreary, souvenir laden apartment. It should be noted that as Kelly swirls through the film in this variety of stunning outfits, Jimmy Stewart is
reduced to a single pair of bland pajamas, a comment both on Lisa's central importance in the film and on the blandness of Jeff's character, his lack of vivacity and style.

The night of her second visit Lisa is dressed in black, but this time more of it. This is the scene that discovers her in Jeff's lap and in which she and Jeff engage in the most playfully erotic (at least on her part) dialogue of the film. Accordingly she is in a lacier, closer fitting black dress, with transparent sleeves. It's the right outfit for a petting party, as elegant as the last outfit, but darker and more casual. The first outfit was meant for sweeping into a room. This is better for reclining on a divan.

Keeping in mind Head's comment that Hitchcock sought correlations in the costumes of Lisa and the women across the way, the chief reference point in this scene has to be Miss Torso (the exhibitionist dancer who lives across the courtyard) who is dressed in a frothy black teddy that seems to be cut of the same material as Lisa's dress. Ironically, it is Mis
s Torso at whom Jeff gazes, abstractly, after Lisa has given up trying to seduce him, and stares at him accusingly from the other side of the couch. The suggestion is that as black and lacy as Lisa is she cannot compete with the even blacker and lacier fantasy interest across the street.

Lisa's third outfit is more formal: a pale green suit, loosely but elegantly cut. Her hair is for the first time, up and closely bound, under a small hat with a light veil. It's a look that anticipates Madeleine's buttoned down look in Vertigo and Tippi Hedren's suits in Marnie and The Birds. Here Lisa is adopting a more conservative or business-like look, perhaps because the pace of the film is picking up a bit. These scenes preoccupy themselves less with Jeff and Lisa's relationship, and more with their joint investigation of the crime at hand. Accordingly, she sports clothes that fit the lady detective.

 

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Film Quarterly
Also, the formality of Lisa's attire this evening has something to do with Hitchcock's propensity for contrasting stiff, formal exteriors with a softer interior passion. We know that Hitchcock favored a stiff look in his actresses because, he felt, it made their sexuality more hidden, more powerfully evocative. The night Lisa wears the somewhat conservative suit, she surprises Jeff by telling him that she intends to spend the night at his apartment. In true Hitchcock fashion, Lisa goes through the bedroom door, hair up, in the classic formal Hitchcock suit, but emerges, hair down, in a soft, swirling negligee.

Even here, though, Hitchcock plays little games with Lisa's clothes. Her negligee is a dead-ringer for the one we have seen, from a distance, the murder victim, Mrs. Thorwald, wear. Hitchcock made Mrs. Thorwald physically a double for Lisa to emphasize the parallel between Jeff's desire to get rid of Lisa and the murderer Thorwald's desire to get rid of Mrs. Thorwald. The fact that Lisa's nightgown evokes the specter of the murdered wife offers a macabre undercurrent to the scene. On the surface, it seems like the classic scene in which the leading lady has "slipped into something a little more comfortable," leaving the leading man speechless in the face of her glamour. But, Hitchcock rarely gives us sex without ominous undertones and while we, like Jeff, are wowed by Kelly's beauty, our enthusiasm is hampered by the visual reminder of Thorwald's dead wife.

Hitchcock makes one more statement through Lisa's fashion that night. When she first arrives that evening, Lisa shows off the designer "Mark Cross handbag" that contains, so economically packed, her nightgown and slippers. "You said I'd have to live out of one suitcase," she says, referring to Jeff's argument, earlier in the film, that Lisa could never live out of one suitcase as he does. Lisa mocks Jeff by following through on his orders, but on her own terms ("I bet yours isn't this small.") She trims herself down to one bag, but a bag specifically tailored to her view of life. It is only one of many moments (witness her courage in tackling Thorwald) where she shows that she can do anything that Jeff can, and do it more elegantly.

Lisa's last dress is a sleeveless red and gold floral print, belted at the waist. Whereas Lisa is elegant and formal the night she swishes brandy snifters with Jeff and Lt. Doyle, tonight (the night they capture the murderer) she will be digging in the murderer's garden and scaling fences, fire-escapes, and window ledges. Accordingly, the dress is a more open, sweeping cut that allows for activity, and the floral print strikes just the right outdoor note. It suggests a flowered trellis and goes nicely with the brick exterior of Thorwald's apartment building when Lisa is clinging to it.

A pair of smart, well-pressed jeans and a flannel shirt represent Lisa's final outfit in the film. She wears this outfit during the film's coda, when the action has passed and it is assumed that Jeff has come to value, rather than shun, Lisa. Obviously, there is a suggestion in this casual wear that she is seeking to compromise with Jeff. She is wearing hardier, outdoors clothing and reading a book on the Himalayas, although not too seriously, as we find it conceals a fashion magazine. Obviously, this compromise only goes so far.

There are various ways to interpret Lisa's final outfit. One is that she has been somewhat transformed by the experience of the last few days. One of the themes the film clearly articulates is that Lisa is more adventurous and courageous than Jeff had suspected, that she has more guts and character than your average city model. She is dressing, then, according to her new persona, expressing a more masculine, adventurous self. In fact, you might say that Lisa now wears the pants in the family, because Jeff, recumbent and double-tasted (he had broken his other leg in a fall during the film's climactic encounter with the murderer) and sleeping like a baby, is more immobile and in greater need of nursing than ever. Of the two, Lisa seems much more likely to actually scale the Himalayas. The clothes in this final scene give us the impression more than ever that Lisa is in control, even if she does only pretend to play Jeff's game. The jeans and flannel shirt,
like the Mark Cross handbag, suggest she is willing, to a point, to play Jeff's game. But, the sharp crease in the jeans, the Vogue magazine she has hidden under the Himalayas book, and her feline pose of selfsatisfaction suggest she will do it according to her sense of style.

This, then, is the flip side of the obsessive relationship Hitchcock had with his actresses that Spoto documents. The Svengali habits that developed late in life were the darker expression of a talent that had been at the center of what made his best films elegant and graceful: his sensitivity toward women, toward their carriage, their charm, their particular style. His interest in his actresses was so intense that he filmed them more lovingly, in greater detail, and in greater sympathy than other directors. And with more intimacy. We might remember the biographical details of Hitchcock and Kelly-that he felt betrayed, almost like a forsaken lover, by her retirement from film, that, according to some, he seemed to obsessively re-create Kelly in a series of subsequent actresses (Vera Miles, Kim Novack, Tippi Hedren) in much the same fashion as Scotty tries to re-create the dead Madeleine through Judy in Vertigo. All this bolsters our sense of Hitchcock as
a Svengali who was obsessed by his actresses and used his power as a film-director to dominate women. But the real legacy of Hitchcock and Kelly is their films, the best films Kelly made, and the best because she found in Hitchcock, the most feminine of directors, an artist who centered his films' scripts and visual designs around his actresses and who registered their style and elegance more lovingly and sensitively than any other Hollywood director.

 

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Daily Beast
In Tony Curtis’ new memoir, the marriages, the sex, and the movies are all there. But the book, like the man himself, lacks a certain oomph.
Many years ago my old friend Irving (“Swifty”) Lazar liked to begin his day by calling New York book editors from his poolside breakfast table in Beverly Hills and trolling through a list of movie stars who might, if offered enough money up front, consent to write a memoir, or at least let some poor schlub of a ghostwriter write it for them. Towards the end of the list, if he hadn’t got any nibbles for Gene Kelly or Glenn Ford, he would always say, in desperation, “Alright, alright, already, you’re not in a buying mood, I can tell that—but how about Tony Curtis, kiddo?”

Everybody always said “no” to Tony Curtis—he was a movie star, sure; he had appeared in eighty-eight movies, okay; he had slept with practically every woman in Hollywood, true (except Joan Collins, he makes it clear somewhat gracelessly in his book; Grace Kelly, with whom he only got a chance to neck; and Marlene Dietrich, because he won’t sleep with women old enough to be his mother). But somehow nobody took Curtis seriously—he had slipped from boyish charm into bloated middle age, apparently without any transition, and his wonderful work in a few great motion pictures like Sweet Smell of Success and Some Like It Hot, was heavily outweighed by awful pictures in which he appeared to be playing a caricature of himself or somebody else. He was therefore more famous than anything else for pronouncing the line “Yonder lies the castle of my fodda,” in a strong New York accent, while co-starring in a desert costume clonker called Son of Ali Baba with Piper Laurie. (The studio offered him $30,000 to marry Piper Laurie, he says, but he turned the offer down, and married Janet Leigh instead).
Tony Curtis was dressed in a black velvet suit of rompers, like the costume worn by the Little Lord Fauntleroy, only in size XL, with a long black scarf draped around his neck, like Dracula.

Lazar would always respond to a “no” by telling the story of how the young Bernie Schwartz went to Hollywood for a screen test, and on a visit back to New York to promote a movie saw his old pal and fellow New York stage actor Walter Matthau standing on Broadway in the rain, rolled down the window of the studio limo, and shouted out, “Walter, it’s me, Bernie! I went to Hollywood, they changed my name to Tony Curtis, I made a couple of movies, I ****ed Yvonne de Carlo!”

Since this was the only tempting morsel Lazar had to offer, it is a relief to note that this story does indeed appear in Tony Curtis’s memoir, American Prince. But sad to relate, Curtis doesn’t tell it with anything liked the verve that Lazar did—in fact there is a curious flatness to the whole book, as if the “ghost,” Peter Golenbock, lost interest early on in the proceedings, or perhaps Curtis did. It is, in fact, exactly the book that publishers feared they would get when they said “no” to Lazar all those years ago—essentially a long list of the pictures Tony Curtis made and the women he slept with, the only news in it being the fact that the line he is famous for is misquoted. It read, Curtis points out irritably, “Yonder in the valley of the sun is my father’s castle,” apparently unaware that the whole point of the story is his pronunciation of the word “father,” not the exact line.

In fact one problem of the book is that Tony Curtis takes himself more seriously than the reader is likely to, and lacks a gift for irony, or even, strange for an actor and an enthusiastic painter, an eye for detail. Even his affair with the young Marilyn Monroe seems curiously listless and perfunctory, and his account of the making of Some Like it Hot is chiefly remarkable only for his not altogether convincing attempt to get around the fact that he compared kissing Marilyn Monroe to kissing Hitler—a remark, which, when it got back to Marilyn, caused her enormous distress.

The difficulty is not that this book is short on “kiss and tell”—on the contrary, it’s full of it—but that most of what Curtis has to tell is either ungracious or apparently written on automatic pilot.

I am not surprised by this, since at one point, Lazar persuaded me to have lunch with Tony Curtis, who was then in New York briefly. “A waste of time and money,” my boss Dick Snyder told me, but always the optimist, I went ahead. I waited for a long time in the Four Seasons Grill Room for Curtis to appear, but when he did the sight of him brought a moment of silence to the room, as he shuffled unsteadily up the stairs. He was dressed in a black velvet suit of rompers, like the costume worn by the Little Lord Fauntleroy, only in size XL, with a long black scarf draped around his neck, like Dracula. His feet were shod in the smallest pair of patent leather slippers I had ever seen—his feet were apparently even smaller than Lazar’s, which was saying something. It wasn’t the fact that he was a star that caused people all over the Grill Room to stare and hold their breath—these were people used to stars—it was the sheer strangeness of his appearance, and the fact that the features somehow stuck in the dough of his face were faintly familiar, so that people said, “Hey, wait a minute, isn’t that------?” while others said, “I thought he was dead.”

He was not, as it turned out, but he seemed heavily sedated, as if prepared for major surgery, and I was not able to get out of him any news or tidbit which might have convinced Dick Snyder, except the Yvonne De Carlo story, which Lazar had already told me. When I got back to the office, late, because Curtis seemed to have difficulty reading the menu so it took forever to order, Snyder stuck his head in my office and asked how it had gone. I shook my head. “I told you so,” he said. “There’s nothing there. Call Swifty and tell him to forget about it.”

Well, as it turns out there is something there, lots of names, lots of pals from the old Ratpack days, lots women, lots of marriages, lots of children, a frank account of Curtis’s cocaine addiction (at one point he tried to sail through H. M. Customs on landing at Heathrow with a .38 revolver and a bag of marijuana in his luggage). But the spirit, the anger, the determination to tell his side of the story that marked, say, Kirk Douglas’s memoir, are all lacking. The book ought to be fun, the stories of high jinks on and off the set are there, but instead of being high-spirited and outrageous they are somehow dull and boring; there is more than enough shtupping, but Curtis (or perhaps his ghost Golenblock) isn’t able to make it seem sexy and exciting and fun, indeed it seems thrown in as if somebody had said, “It needs more shtupping, if it’s going to sell.” But that’s not what it needed, really. It needed a certain good humored grace, and an earthy appreciation for a good life well lived (and to hell with what other people say or think), and the sense that in old age the author at last knows who he or she really is. . . When you think about it, just the qualities that Joan Collins showed in her memoir, and which led Tony Curtis to call her “a ****” on the set of The Persuaders. (He didn’t like Shelley Winters, either, but it has to be said that her memoirs were a lot gutsier and funnier than his.)

That’s really the problem with the book. The one thing a movie star memoir has to be is fun—it doesn’t have to be true (few of them are that), or fair to ex-wives or husbands or old lovers (few of them are that either), but it does need to be fun, to lift us out of the humdrum problems of our own life for a few hours, and, alas, American Prince is no fun at all.

It seems Dick Snyder was right again.

 

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Lovely Pics with Stephanie and Albert Thanks

 

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