In the 1930s, the actress Luise Rainier found herself seated next to Robert Taylor, then on the cusp of matinee-idol status, at a Hollywood luncheon. Possibly stuck for small talk, she asked him to sum up his aspirations for life. Without hesitation, Taylor replied that he dreamed of owning 10 perfectly tailored suits.
For decades afterwards, the German-born Rainier would repeat this anecdote to illustrate what she saw as the epitome of American materialism and crassness. The consensus among Taylor’s peers was that he, in turn, was illustrating the fatal sense-of-humour failure allegedly prevalent among the Teutons. But there’s a strong case for taking Taylor’s remark at face value: few Hollywood leading men, before or since, have been as aware of clothing’s power to maketh the man (and, by extension, the role), whether pressing his tailor for “a navy blue gabardine serge or sharkskin, or , in which he was suitably smitten opposite Greta Garbo — Taylor was mobbed in public and mentioned in the same breath as Rudolph Valentino. The Nebraska-born Taylor also seemed a model of midwestern rectitude (in his funeral eulogy for Taylor, his friend Ronald Reagan noted approvingly that “he can be remembered by millions of moviegoers with gratitude that in the darkened theatre he never embarrassed them in front of their children”), while his $5,000-a-week salary put him on a par with contemporaneous luminaries like Clark Gable, Shirley Temple, and Astaire and Rogers. Through it all, he remained staunchly unassuming. “Darned if I know,” he replied when asked, in 1957, for the reason his star had continued to shine through the decades. “I’ve been wondering about it myself for years. I guess the most important thing is to get a good picture once in a while. Acting is the easiest job in the world, and I’m the luckiest guy.”
