studio – BEGUILING HOLLYWOOD

July 1, 2019 / Vickie Lester

“What a costume designer does is a cross between magic and camouflage.” Edith Head

From left to right – Model, Orry Kelly, Bernard Newman, Travis Banton, Edith Head, Adrian, and Irene. With model showing evening gown, 1955: Edith at bat 1957: A fashion show from the “Think Pink” sequence at the premiere of “Funny Face” – model Ginni Adams with Edith Head: Dressing Debbie…

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October 28, 2015 / Vickie Lester

Edith Head, who was born Oct. 28th, 1897, was married to Wiard Ihnen – Production Designer

Even Google got into the act today with Miss Edith’s birthday: They lived in a wonderful house called, Casa Ladera…

November 14, 2014 / Vickie Lester

The Elizabeth Taylor Salad at the MGM Commissary

Now then, if you were working at MGM in the late 1950s or early 1960s this is what was on the menu — wait, we’ll start with an aerial view of the studio: Okay, now the menu: . . .

June 7, 2014 / Vickie Lester

Hollywood Wardrobe Department

1939 – inside a studio sewing room.

April 26, 2014 / Vickie Lester

Once upon a film set dreary, while I pondered weak and weary…

April 21, 2014 / Vickie Lester

The novel, in which I spill the beans, let loose, tell all, well, all that I know about Tinsel Town. And that’s plenty!

Neither did it have to do with the Easter Bunny, or any various and sundry muses, unless you switch out muses for informants, and then you might get a better idea how I got the inside skinny on many things beguiling—and not so—in Hollywood. The unleashing of the novel, six…

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April 6, 2014 / Vickie Lester

All of these individuals were in the film business or married to it…

In contrast, the other guests glistened in tanning oil. There they were, half-naked, with implausibly buoyant bosoms and supplemented bums and biceps, radiating a carefully constructed beauty; all of these individuals were in the film business or married to it. The women were skeletal; Anne assumed they had all…

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April 6, 2014 / Vickie Lester

The movie colony, an old area of town right under the hills, once home to Elvis and Frank Sinatra and…

Dutifully, Anne navigated her hired Prius through a terrain at once dusty and opulent; Palm Springs is, after all, an exorbitantly irrigated pile of sand. Her destination was a taupe Mid-Century house, all angles and vertical glass walls. Anne parked the car by the curb and buzzed at the gate.…

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April 6, 2014 / Vickie Lester

The travel itinerary from the Paramount Pictures specified her arrival in Palm Springs…

To say Anne was stunned when she was summoned to the winter home of Becky Nelson—head of production at a very well-known studio—would be an understatement. Becky had cut her teeth working for Anne’s father: nepotism, there was that inconvenient word again. Was this a real deal? Had it ever…

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January 9, 2014 / Vickie Lester

Star Spangled Joan Crawford – a reprise from the beginning of the blog

Happy 4th of July! (On January 9th, 2014, we’ll call it a little sparkle in the midst of the Polar Vortex.) For an amazing account of Hollywood from it’s inception to one screenwriter’s declaration of independence get your hands on a copy of, “The Shocking Miss Pilgrim” by Frederica Sagor…

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Tag: studio