You Must Remember This (21 page)

Nice work if you can get it.

I
have long maintained that the most influential figure in twentieth-century American fashion was an Englishman: the Duke of Windsor. I realize that posterity has not dealt kindly with the duke—there was that flirtation with the Nazis during World War II, and succeeding decades spent drifting around the world without purpose.

But when it came to matters of style, Edward obliterated the expectation of rigid conformity that was the norm when he was a boy.

In the years when he was the heir to the throne, he was by far the world’s most eligible bachelor, and everything he wore was immediately copied. He avoided stiff evening clothes, preferring midnight blue tuxedos. He wore double-breasted suits, often in a gray chalk stripe. He also liked Fair Isle sweaters, and anything with a check pattern immediately became part of every Englishman’s—and a good many Americans’—wardrobe.

The duke’s first acolyte wasn’t an Englishman, and he wasn’t an American, either. He was Italian: Rudolph Valentino is recorded in the ledgers of bespoke tailors like Huntsman in 1923 and Anderson & Sheppard in 1924. Valentino’s relationship with his tailors was cut
short as he died young, but the allegiance to a Savile Row tailor often transcended generations, and even sexes.

Marlene Dietrich was introduced to Anderson & Sheppard by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in 1936, when they were having an affair. Fairbanks had been infused with enthusiasm for Savile Row by his father. Dietrich’s relationship with Fairbanks didn’t last, but she stayed with Anderson & Sheppard for decades—they tailored all the flannels, tweeds, and blazers that she wore off-screen.

It’s interesting to note that while the wardrobes of actresses were all rigorously controlled by the studios, the wardrobes of the actors were largely left up to their own taste. Nobody got near Marlene Dietrich’s movie wardrobe but Travis Banton and Josef von Sternberg. Her leading men, however—Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Charles Boyer, Robert Donat—were all regularly outfitted on Savile Row. When I knew him in the 1950s, Gary dressed mostly in Brooks Brothers. Cary Grant wore Kilgour, French & Stanbury, who made the gray suit he wore in
North by Northwest
. It never got wrinkled. But then, neither did Cary.

There were two men who were at the leading edge of the British cut in Hollywood: Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Fred Astaire. Both of them had lower-middle-class upbringings—Fred from Nebraska, Fairbanks from Colorado. More important, both were fairly devout Anglophiles, perhaps because it was another way of leaving the hometown and the rough early years behind.

Fred once recalled his first meeting with the Prince of Wales in 1924, when he was working in London with his beloved sister Adele in Gershwin’s
Stop Flirting
. Edward, he said, “was unquestionably the best-dressed young man in the world. I was missing none of it. I noted particularly the white waistcoat did not show below the dress-coat front. I liked that.”

Fred made some inquiries but found that the prince’s tailor—Hawes & Curtis—would not work for him because he was a mere actor. But Anderson & Sheppard would.

Fred was immediately won over: “It was difficult not to order one of every cloth that was shown to me, particularly the vicuña.” (Fred loved Anderson & Sheppard, but the tuxedo he wore in 1935’s
Top Hat
was tailored by Kilgour, French & Stanbury.)

Fred took the prince’s look and brought his own creativity to it. Buying stylish clothes is really more about taste than creativity, but Fred’s genius for the latter came out in his casual wardrobe. When Fred rehearsed, he would wear gray flannels, perhaps a silk shirt, with a scarf or a necktie knotted around his waist in homage to Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who invented that look.

My favorite picture of the great FA

Courtesy of the author

Whether in full dress or casual, though, Fred’s hands were apt to be in his pockets—he didn’t like his hands. He thought they were large and ugly.

Next time you watch him dance, observe how he never has to compete with, let alone fight, his clothes—they move with him, and the soft shoulders that Anderson & Sheppard gave him glide as smoothly as Fred does. Fred’s wardrobe, no matter how formal, bespoke a casual elegance that was the essence of the English cut he did so much to popularize.

In Los Angeles a tailor named Eddie Schmidt was a genius at copying anything the Savile Row firms did, but the people we’re talking about were purists. Even Clark Gable, who wasn’t ordinarily thought of as stunningly well dressed—probably because his body was bulkier than Fred’s or Cary’s—was recorded as a customer at Huntsman in 1943, as well as at Lesley & Roberts and Stovel & Mason.

By the 1950s Hollywood’s taste for the English cut had moved beyond Anderson & Sheppard and Kilgour, French & Stanbury to Huntsman, who dressed actors as varied as Tyrone Power, Laurence Olivier, and Stewart Granger.

But Hollywood fashion had already begun changing radically by then. Studiously informal actors like Brando, Clift, and Dean wouldn’t get dressed up for anything less than an Oscar ceremony. I understood it—I was of the same generation—but I didn’t sympathize with it. My allegiance was to the styles of an earlier era.

An effective halfway house was erected by Frank Sinatra, who didn’t dress English—not at all—but did attach a great deal of importance to the way he looked. His cuffs extended a half inch from his sleeves—no more and no less—and his pants ended just a tiny bit above his highly polished shoes. For a long time Frank liked his suits to be made by Sy Devore, whose clothes would be considered
slightly loud today. Sy loved shine—rayons and mohairs and sharkskins. Dean Martin started buying Sy’s clothes, and then Jerry Lewis did, followed by Frank and Elvis. At some point in the early sixties, Frank had 150 suits, which sounds like a lot until you remember that he owned three or four houses, with wardrobes in each, and was working incessantly.

Frank’s ties were a single color, and usually silk; he liked Sulka, an enthusiasm I seem to recall he got from George Raft, who wore Sulka all the time. He also liked the ties made by Turnbull & Asser. He always had a beautifully folded handkerchief in his breast pocket—he liked to fix the handkerchief of any man who couldn’t fold one as perfectly as he could, which definitely included yours truly—and he liked cuff links but not other jewelry. And let’s not forget the fedora, which suited his face, but also meant that he didn’t have to wear his toupee.

That’s an important part of style: the way that personality makes the style work for one person in a way it wouldn’t for someone with a different personality. Frank wore hats when he was a kid—and supposedly he had thirteen sport coats by the time he was in high school—but I don’t honestly think he had a lasting allegiance to them. He started wearing them all the time in the early 1950s, when his hair began to thin out. That’s the same reason Bing Crosby was usually seen in public with a hat. But hats looked natural on Frank, who wore snap-brims made by Cavanagh, black and gray felts, or even straw hats with pastel bands.

People who keep track of such things report that Frank wore hats on twenty of the albums he made for Capitol in the 1950s, and on another thirteen albums he made for his own company, Reprise.

And then one day Frank stopped wearing hats, sometime after men’s hats went out of fashion. At the same time, he abandoned Sy Devore, and not a moment too soon. He took up Dunhill, and Carroll & Co., which was based in Beverly Hills but made its clothes in the formal style of British tailors. When he was older, Frank went slightly informal; around the house, he would just wear a baseball cap or a golf cap.

Frank was very particular. He had rituals. He showered twice a day, sometimes more. His aftershave was witch hazel or Yardley’s English Lavender. He was always adjusting his jacket, shooting his cuffs, picking an imaginary piece of lint off his coat.
He was fastidious about his nails and would think nothing of using cuticle scissors or an emery board to make sure they looked good.

Natalie and me with Frank Sinatra during a surprise twenty-first-birthday party held for Natalie at Romanoff’s. Frank’s eye is bandaged because he had been slightly injured while shooting
Never So Few
at MGM.

Getty Images

He loved colors—the more flamboyant the better. He liked pink, he loved orange. Around Frank, orange could be found everywhere, from his shirts to his paintings to his sweaters. As a matter of fact, the only place he would avoid orange was in a tie or a jacket.

He hated shoes that weren’t polished. And if you were going out at night with Frank, you had better be wearing dark gray or black, or you’d hear about it. Frank didn’t like to sit down, because it wrinkled his suits. If he had to sit down, he wouldn’t cross his legs. For evening dress, Frank wouldn’t wear anything but black; he didn’t believe there was any excuse for wearing brown, blue, or gray after sunset.

Frank was something of a dandy, but he never gave that impression—even if he was dressed formally, his body language was relaxed, which took the edge off the formality of the clothes. Frank knew who he was, and was remarkably secure in that knowledge, which informed all of his decisions in fashion and in life.

There wasn’t a lot of conversation about clothes in Hollywood beyond “Where did you get that?” But there was the occasional blazing insight. I believe that the most profound remark about Hollywood fashion—and quite possibly about Hollywood—came from Adolph Zukor, one of the founders of Paramount Pictures.

“Dress British,” Zukor said, “think Yiddish.”