Fantastic Frocks - Bette Davis evening gown "All About Eve"

I thought I'd give you a shorter watch this week - a little snippet about a gown with a great story behind it.

 The many dramas that came as a result of making 'All About Eve' are legendary. Fortunately, the one about this dress did not involve a marriage breakdown. Well, not directly...

Edith Head had an excellent working relationship with Bette Davis, as she had managed to find a way to worth with Bette's unusual figure. As a result, even though her gowns ought to have been designed by Charles Le Maire, who was Head of Costuming at Twentieth Century Fox, she was able to get Edith on board specifically for her. Charles Le Maire was perhaps both alarmed and alert at this news, but he took the lines of least resistance (far better to keep silent and watch carefully than to complain loudly and have it bite you in the butt later) and they worked together successfully on the film. Both Bette Davis' and Anne Baxter's gown for the party scene reflect this - Eve's gown had to be like Margo's to indicate stuff that I won't give away if you haven't seen the film!

From 'Edith Head' by David Chierichetti - courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

If you have seen the film, isn't it terrific? Love it. If you haven't - watch it. It won't disappoint, and all of a sudden a vast swathe of filmic references you haven't quite understood over the years will suddenly make sense.

I will leave you with this excerpt from 'Edith Head: The Life and TImes of Hollywood's Celebrated Costume Designer" by David Chierichetti.

"There's an old saying: 'You don't kid a kidder'. It might be rephrased: 'You don't play a player,' and Charles Le Maire was a player second only to Edith when it came to studio politics. He had received his job at Fox as a reward for agreeing to marry the soon-to-be-discarded wife of a Fox executive. The lady in question was willing to give her husband a divorce, provided that the studio would find her a second suitable husband, and Le Maire, a longtime Broadway designer whose assignments had been  getting infrequent by the early 1940's, agreed to marry her if he were made the head of the Fox costume department. It had worked out well all around: for several years, Fox had been needing a strong hand on the job, which Le Maire supplied, and he lived happily with his new wife until her death."

 Stranger Than Fiction