All for Beauty: Makeup and Hairdressing in Hollywood's Studio Era

By Adrienne L. McLean

Ever wonder why so many stars and featured players, male or female, in movies of Hollywood’s “Golden Age” look like they just stepped out of a beauty parlor even if the story places them in a jungle, a hospital bed, or the ancient past? All for Beauty examines how and why makeup and hairdressing evolved as crafts designed partly to maintain the white flawlessness of men and women as a value in the studio era. The book pays particular attention to the labor force, exploring the power and influence of cosmetics inventor and manufacturer Max Factor and the Westmore dynasty of makeup artists but also the contributions of others, many of them women, whose names are far less known. At the end of the complex, exciting, and at times dismaying chronicle, it is likely that readers will never again watch Hollywood films without thinking about the roles of makeup and hairdressing in creating both fictional characters and stars as emblems of an idealized and undeniably mesmerizing visual perfection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780813575193

Book preview

Cover: All for Beauty, Makeup and Hairdressing in Hollywood’s Studio Era by Adrienne L. Mclean

All for Beauty

Volumes in the Techniques of the Moving Image series explore the relationship between what we see onscreen and the technical achievements undertaken in filmmaking to make this possible. Books explore some defined aspect of cinema—work from a particular era, work in a particular genre, work by a particular filmmaker or team, work from a particular studio, or work on a particular theme—in light of some technique and/or technical achievement, such as cinematography, direction, acting, lighting, costuming, set design, legal arrangements, agenting, scripting, sound design and recording, and sound or picture editing. Historical and social background contextualize the subject of each volume.

Murray Pomerance

Series Editor

Jay Beck, Designing Sound: Audiovisual Aesthetics in 1970s American Cinema

Lisa Bode, Making Believe: Screen Performance and Special Effects in Popular Cinema

Wheeler Winston Dixon, Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical Hollywood

Nick Hall, The Zoom: Drama at the Touch of a Lever

Andrea J. Kelley, Soundies Jukebox Films and the Shift to Small-Screen Culture

Adrienne L. McLean, All for Beauty: Makeup and Hairdressing in Hollywood’s Studio Era

R. Barton Palmer, Shot on Location: Postwar American Cinema and the Exploration of Real Place

Murray Pomerance, The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect

Colin Williamson, Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema

Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism

All for Beauty

Makeup and Hairdressing in Hollywood’s Studio Era

ADRIENNE L. MCLEAN

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McLean, Adrienne L., author.

Title: All for beauty : makeup and hairdressing in Hollywood’s studio era / Adrienne L. McLean.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021047839 | ISBN 9781978831377 (hardback) | ISBN 9780813563589 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813563602 (pdf) | ISBN 9780813575193 (epub) | ISBN 9781978807990 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: Film makeup. | Film hairstyling. | Makeup artists—California—Los Angeles—Biography. | Beauty operators—California—Los Angeles—Biography. | Motion pictures—Production and direction—California—Los Angeles—History—20th century. | Motion pictures—California—Los Angeles—History.

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.M25 M35 2022 | DDC 791.4302/7—dc23/eng/20220304

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021047839

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2022 by Adrienne L. McLean

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

In loving memory of Larry and my father, and for my sweet mother

Contents

Introduction: Art and Science in the Service of Loveliness

1 Makeup and Hairdressing as Studio Crafts: The Silent Period

2 The Classical Period: Craft Identity and the Labor Force

3 The Classical Period: Department Practices and the Commerce of Expertise

4 Cosmetics, Coiffures, and Characterization

Epilogue: Trophy Faces

Appendix

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

All for Beauty

Introduction

Art and Science in the Service of Loveliness

In December 1936, Warner Bros. released a publicity story about the opening of a new facility on its Hollywood lot. All for Beauty, as the exclusive is titled, announces that the studio had just spent $90,000 renovating a building to house the Department of Hairdressing and Make-Up. Replete with chromium and mirrors, vats and ovens, grease paint and real hair wigs, in the shiny new halls of the building art and science join hands in the service of loveliness. Actresses might enter any one of thirty-six cubicles sleepy-eyed and drawn, cross and crow-footed, but, thanks to the best equipment money can buy and hard, painstaking work by executive Perc Westmore and his staff of makeup experts and hair-dressers, they would emerge an hour or two later as the lovely creatures who have made Hollywood famous for its pulchritude and charm. Extras, too, had a battery of beauty experts [and] all kinds of beauty-increasing devices to assist them, and even the giant mobs hired for crowd scenes could now be funneled through two large rooms—one for women, one for men—in wholesale lots at top speed, their body makeup applied with sprays in the hands of expert attendants. The piece concludes with the declaration that it takes time and effort and money to keep the stars beautiful since they are as human as the rest of the world—and the studio supplies all this most willingly, knowing that beauty must be protected and preserved at all costs if pictures are to succeed.¹

Behind-the-scenes stories like this, about any aspect of moviemaking, were fodder for newspapers and magazines across the country, and studio writers churned them out regularly. All for Beauty is characteristically and quaintly hyperbolic, but I engage it here because it both provides an introduction to my subject matter and alludes to what I believe are the predominant reasons for the comparative neglect of makeup and hairdressing to date in academic studies of studio-era Hollywood. In contrast to character makeup, which has acquired a fairly extensive literature through its connection to special effects,² far less attention has been paid to straight makeup, a term that also came from the theater and that was by far the most common form seen in Hollywood films from the silent era through the demise of the studio system itself. Rather than the physical transformations and disguises that character makeup produced, straight makeup was meant, in the words of a 1927 book on cinematography, to present upon the screen the most natural and true-to-life image possible for the actor,³ whether that actor was male or female (in the silent era it was sometimes labeled scientific too).⁴ Even more to the point, All for Beauty is clearly focused on beauty makeup, a gender-specific appellation and compound noun of uncertain origin that was studio shorthand for the level of perfection in cosmetics and coiffures associated with the appearance of stars and would-be stars by the time the piece was written.⁵

Through its references to time and effort and money and the equating of the pulchritude of stars with the success of motion pictures, All for Beauty underscores the extent to which certain forms of makeup and hairdressing were presumed to be significant elements of the appeal of all Hollywood films.⁶ Indeed, those who were responsible for creating and maintaining the looks of stars and featured players were paid comparatively high salaries by all the major studios by the 1930s—considerably more than other journeyman laborers, although slightly less than technicians like editors. Yet their status at the studios was always ambiguous if not paradoxical, especially in the case of beauty makeup. As MGM makeup artist William Tuttle would later tell an interviewer, For some reason they wanted to keep it a secret that there was such a thing as a makeup artist needed. It was assumed that actors knew how to do their own makeup, you see. Or that they didn’t wear makeup. It was a strange policy.⁷ If that strange policy was belied somewhat by the higher levels of remuneration for makeup artists and hairdressers, its influence can still be felt in the faint air of disdain for both crafts that marks All for Beauty, an otherwise fulsome publicity piece, down to the carelessness with which it renders the crafts’ key words throughout—as makeup, Make-Up, and Make-up, hairdressing and hair-dressing. More interesting, All for Beauty even takes a subtle jab at the expert in charge of it all, Perc Westmore. It does so by continually naming his expensively renovated department incorrectly: it was not the Department of Hairdressing and Make-Up but the other way around. As was true at most studio makeup departments by the 1930s, Westmore was a makeup man, and hairdressers were women. So the misnaming of his fiefdom, even if it was nothing more than a repeated typo, he would undoubtedly have perceived as a slight, given his authority over not only the appearance of actors whose looks he designed and applied but also the numerous laborers, male as well as female, who worked in the department largely at his discretion and pleasure.

Publicity photo of Kay Francis and Perc Westmore outside the renovated Warner Bros. Department of Makeup and Hairdressing in 1937. (Collection of Mary Desjardins.)

Perc Westmore was arguably the most famous and ambitious member of the rouge pot dynasty of a father and six brothers who worked in Hollywood during the studio era. Yet his career, too, was affected by the studios’ ambivalence toward his profession, and to greater consequence than the verbal slights found in All for Beauty. First, and quite problematic for the researcher, is that even makeup executives were rarely given screen credit until the late 1930s, and then not consistently until acknowledgment of below-the-line craft workers was mandated by union contracts in the 1980s. (This in spite of the fact that, as Barrett Kiesling put it in 1937, The art of the screen has advanced greatly … but it has been able to advance no faster than the art of make-up.)⁸ With some exceptions, as for all crafts such credits were usually left up to the studio, and based on the film evidence most makeup credits until at least the 1940s were for the more transformative character variety. Especially if an actor was playing a historical figure like Abraham Lincoln, Benito Juarez, or Moses, character makeup could also usefully be exploited through before and after photos in promotional and publicity material.⁹ But even Wally Westmore’s renowned makeup for Fredric March in Paramount’s 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was not acknowledged in the credits, although Jack Dawn was luckier with MGM’s 1941 version, starring Spencer Tracy, and was billed as the film’s makeup creator. Attentive spectators will note, and I hope readers remember, that the women in both films are made up to look less Victorian than modern, especially apparent in the case of the close-ups of actor Rose Hobart’s face in the earlier adaptation as she gazes directly at the camera that has assumed the point of view of her fictional adoring fiancé.

Second, but concomitantly, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ignored makeup and hairdressing during awards season throughout the entire studio era. Aside from a certificate to Hollywood cosmetics manufacturer Max Factor in 1928 for his contributions to incandescent illumination research (the so-called Mazda tests, named for General Electric’s Mazda lighting equipment), the Academy did not hand out any Oscars for makeup until the 1960s, the first to William Tuttle for 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964) and the second to John Chambers for Planet of the Apes (1968).¹⁰ And once more, in both cases the makeup in question was virtuosic character makeup that was designed at least partly to disguise the actors wearing it. In contrast even to costume design, which began earning Oscars in 1948, makeup did not become a regular Academy Award category until the 1980s, and only in 2012 was hair styling added to the category’s name.¹¹

Ironically, the lack of collegial approbation might have been a side effect of the Westmores’ ubiquity not only in Hollywood (There were so many of them, Tuttle later exclaimed)¹² but also in the popular press, where their skills at self-aggrandizement were legendary. The peculiar willingness of [the] family to be quoted, as the New York Times put it in 1939,¹³ helped them to create an aura of expertise that maintained the cultural capital of the family name off the screen—their Hollywood salon was called the House of Westmore, as was its associated consumer cosmetics line—as well as in what credits there were for their films. Third-generation makeup artist Michael Westmore, who shared the Oscar for Mask (1985) and earned many other awards for his work on Star Trek in its film and television iterations (and who was of tremendous help to me in the research for this book), states in his memoir Makeup Man that his uncle Perc told him that a very influential producer once said that as long as he was president [of the Academy], there would never be any recognition for makeup artistry. One of his reasons was that a Westmore would win it every year.¹⁴ None of the studio-era Westmores ever won an Oscar, although in his Best Actor acceptance speech Fredric March paid tribute to Wally Westmore for his makeup in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as did Paul Muni to Perc Westmore for The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936). More to the point, the Academy’s neglect of makeup and hairdressing generally, but especially the variety mocked in the press with terms like lily gilding and star glazing, I see as an analogy for the way some of Hollywood’s historians—myself included—have so often relegated much of the work of the crafts to the empty signifier of the term glamour. Even young stars routinely described by critics as utterly lacking in glamour, like Eleanor Powell in the 1930s and early 1940s, wore full beauty makeup in their films.¹⁵

Rose Hobart in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931, makeup and hair uncredited). Frame enlargements.

Finally, while All for Beauty does its best to ignore the fact that a great many men would be made beautiful in the new Warner Bros. facility—the only mention of male performers is in reference to the body makeup sprayed on extras—in fact male actors, even or especially stars, wore nearly as many cosmetics for straight roles as women did. And this, certainly, the studios preferred not to publicize. The blandishment was not always as elaborate as that for women, but studio records, and films themselves, reveal that even the most rugged stars typically wore eyeliner (and sometimes mascara) and lip rouge in addition to what we would now call foundation. Along with various pomades that made their hair often shinier than that of their female costars, many male actors required specially designed toupees because they were bald or balding (their facial hair was seldom fully natural either). For all these reasons, I have appropriated the term beauty makeup for use on many if not most male stars as well, given that both off the screen and in even their sweatiest or dirtiest film roles they, too, were consistently designed to appear normatively attractive, however much they and the studios sought to minimize the cosmetic basis of their visual appeal. Interestingly, when men’s makeup was referred to, it was often with the assurance that it was not being applied by women, and that any products they might be wearing were created by scientific men, most prominently Max Factor. Other than a brief stint as Makeup Department Chief at Radiotone Pictures in 1929–1930, Factor did not work for the studios as a staff makeup or hair artist.¹⁶ But by the late 1920s his corporation was, and would remain through the 1960s, the supplier of most of the cosmetic products and many of the wigs that even the Westmores—as well as department heads with other names—and their staffs employed in the service of both male and female loveliness.

In the context of the male domination of the studio system from top to bottom—with the arguable exception of stars themselves—the fact that men ran makeup and hairdressing departments is not on its face unusual. For a number of reasons, it is more extraordinary that an important job like hairdressing, which in most cases included design and styling, was relegated to women, as long as the hair being dressed was that of women too. (Wigs had separate rules.) This was also the case with body makeup girls or women, the only cosmetic-related work women were allowed to perform and the lowest of all in prestige as well as pay scale. Yet the gender division of makeup and hairdressing departments turned out to be considerably less rigid before IATSE & MPMO Local 706, which ultimately became the Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild, was chartered in 1937. In fact, from the late 1920s until 1937, not only were there attempts by women to form their own labor organizations, but several smaller film outfits had women makeup department chiefs—even MGM, which alone among the studios had a separate head for women’s makeup and another for men’s.

On the one hand, then, departments of makeup and hairdressing were likely more accommodating to women and their creative labor than was the case with virtually any other below-the-line craft, even costuming.¹⁷ Not until 1980 was the first woman admitted to the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), in existence since 1919, for example. On the other hand, the prohibition against women as makeup artists also profoundly skewed the jobs that they were obviously more than competent to perform. At the risk of sounding essentialist, I can think of no other film craft where the gender divide seems so odd—a two-part Photoplay series from 1939 about the studios’ blandishment of stars is titled Miracle Men at Work despite the fact that some of the experts they feature and quote are women hairdressers.¹⁸ Making the situation weirder still is that European studios appear not to have segregated the crafts as strictly. As one British female makeup artist, Teddie Edwards, put it in 1956, I believe this is a woman’s job because for one thing she understands a woman’s face better than a man does, and she knows instinctively, if she is an artist, what can be done to improve a face. And if that woman was an executive, she alone was responsible for seeing that the results come up to the requirements of his (or her!) ally, the cameraman.¹⁹ Even some latter-day labor histories of Hollywood appear to have assumed, not unnaturally but erroneously, that most if not all of the makeup artists as well as hairdressers involved in labor disputes were women. (The unions’ gender divisions, as well as their lack of Black workers, did not change much until the 1970s, when the effects of federal affirmative action as a remedy for decades of structural and institutional discrimination on the basis of gender and race reached Hollywood.)²⁰

Any confusion about the gender of studio makeup artists likely comes from an awareness of the broader historical context of modern cosmetics and hairdressing, in which both were almost exclusively associated with femininity and women’s concerns (or swishy men).²¹ In addition to the fact that during most of the twentieth century women wore makeup in their daily lives but men did not (or were not supposed to), with very few exceptions the modern beauty industry in the United States was developed and maintained—down to the staffing of beauty parlors in towns large and small²²—by immigrant, working-class, or black women, as Kathy Peiss puts it in her book Hope in a Jar.²³ Madam C. J. Walker, Elizabeth Arden, and Helena Rubinstein all founded beauty empires whose influence extended across the country, although most of their firms—like most businesses—were run by men after the mid-1930s. (Walker died in 1919.) And no less than the Westmores or Max Factor, these women, too, were labeled, or labeled themselves, experts and geniuses and proffered not only products but also guidance to women of all ages in their eponymous salons, advice columns, and books. (Arden, however, reportedly disparaged cosmetics, as opposed to the more holistic exercise and diet regimens and treatments available at her salons, as the temporary beauty business.)²⁴

Indeed, many of the innovations of Hollywood’s makeup men seem to have been highly publicized variations on the techniques, products, and even marketing strategies of these and other women in the business through the 1950s, making the prohibition against women makeup artists in Local 706, especially, even more bewildering. Dorothy Dot Ponedel, despite having been under contract to Paramount as a beauty makeup artist and department executive for several years, was allowed to join the union and continue to work after 1937 only because of the high-powered star clients—Marlene Dietrich, Carole Lombard, Mae West, and later Judy Garland, among many others—who demanded her and her skills on their films. But as will be discussed, Ponedel was both demoted to the status of body makeup woman and referred to in print as a hairdresser. She was finally admitted to Local 706 as a full makeup artist in 1942 (during World War II, when many male artists would have been away), which then made her the target of abuse by several of her male colleagues.²⁵ Nor did she receive screen credit for her work. Conversely, the prolific male hairdresser Sydney Guilaroff—another exception who proves the rule—simply refused to join the union altogether, working out his own executive contracts with the studios, most famously MGM, or with stars (as Ponedel also did) from the late 1930s through the 1960s. And in yet another irony associated with this project, in 1938 Guilaroff demanded and received screen credit—usually as hair styles by—before most makeup men were granted such recognition. (I employ hairdressing in the book’s title because it was the most persistent public designation for women through the 1940s and I want to draw attention to their work; and conversely because, for modern roles, men’s hair, which was dressed primarily by men, was rarely styled.)

Dot Ponedel with Paulette Goddard, 1930s. (Courtesy Meredith Ponedel.)

Not surprisingly, studio-affiliated publicity and promotional material did its best to make the labor behind beauty makeup more masculine by emphasizing how lucky makeup artists were to interact physically with the most desirable and attractive women in the world. But attempts to prop up the men’s virility in fan magazines and the like could also trivialize the field in which they worked. Is this a job? Photoplay asked in 1931 in a discussion of Perc Westmore’s twin, Ern, the spelling of whose name the article could not quite settle on. Another strategy was to elevate the skills of the male experts in various opaque ways, as with Ern’s claims in the same piece that the average beauty operator is not skilled enough for studio work, even as hairdressers were almost always recruited from beauty parlors, where the Westmores actually began their careers as well.²⁶ But no matter how many articles referred to Max Factor and the Westmores as miracle men, wizards, geniuses (Frank Westmore grew up thinking that his older brother Perc’s job title was makeup genius), or even scientists (Factor, and some of the Westmores, took to wearing lab coats for publicity photos, and All for Beauty emphasizes the science behind the products and procedures it otherwise does not name), nothing could disguise the reality that beauty makeup and hairdressing were both clearly feminine, and feminized, pursuits in ordinary life. And sadly, this may also have affected their status not only in Hollywood but in film history and its scholarship.

A special publicity still of Perc Westmore with Ann Sheridan, one of at least two from the same sitting that ran in fan magazines in 1941 in which Westmore appears to be whispering to or blowing on Sheridan’s face as she gazes into the camera. Photofest.

I have presented what I believe are the most cogent reasons for the comparative neglect of makeup and hairdressing, of any variety, in many if not most studies of the industry except on a very basic level. But to rectify this lack, or simply to give the two crafts the prominence I believe they deserve, turned out to be a far more complex undertaking than I expected it to be. If I still remember my startled awareness as a very young teenager that Ginger Rogers in Top Hat (1935) was perfectly coiffed and cosmetically enhanced even when she was supposed to be asleep, a more recent prompt for this project was undoubtedly my research into the star image of Rita Hayworth, for which I sought to interview as many of her surviving colleagues as I could. Thus did I find myself, in 1992, at Disney Studios, where Robert Schiffer was then head of makeup and hairdressing.²⁷ As a journeyman makeup artist at Columbia, Schiffer had worked closely with Hayworth in the 1940s and 1950s (he was another who claimed to have gotten into makeup for the women). And during our talk, he remarked that Columbia always had that hard red mouth. It did not have anything to do with Hayworth as such, but I was compelled to stop him and ask why. He looked at me for a beat and shrugged his shoulders. Since I was not there to get information about cosmetics and their application, we moved on. But Schiffer’s remark, like the sartorial perfection of the sleeping Rogers, remained with me, even if I can no longer remember the context in which he uttered it or find it in my notes, especially because from my subsequent observations Columbia’s makeup, at least on Rita Hayworth’s face, seemed to be a bit less hard than that applied to stars at other studios. Schiffer also taught me to look for how he, and other makeup artists at Columbia and elsewhere, dealt with the fact that Hayworth’s right eye was a different shape than her left.

I did mention makeup and hairdressing in my Hayworth book, but not on their own terms. Rather, I discussed how the half-Spanish Rita Hayworth began her film career as Rita Cansino, a Latin dancer and player, noting that her naturally brown hair was darkened to black and styled—along with her eyes, eyebrows, and lips—according to stereotypes of what someone named Rita Cansino was supposed to look like. Around 1938 Columbia decided to place greater emphasis on the Irish side of her ancestry and the fact that she had been born in Brooklyn, using a version of her mother’s maiden name and dying the hair of the newly christened Rita Hayworth red and raising her hairline slightly through electrolysis. As Rita Hayworth, but not as Rita Cansino, she could become the All-American Love Goddess. I chronicled how the transformation, including the electrolysis, was carried out in full view of the public and described in painful detail in the popular press and fan magazines (in contrast, the more extensive electrolysis on Tyrone Power’s hairline was not).²⁸ With Hayworth—and, I know now, most female Hollywood stars—there was always a tension in the discourse which made her the agent of her own transformation even as the specialized and often grueling processes designed and carried out by studio makeup artists and hairdressers to effect the visual changes were being described in detail.

Hayworth’s all-American but half-Spanish image also points toward some of the racial and ethnic prejudices that Hollywood films represented and maintained, given that foreign-born Latin performers like Carmen Miranda or Lupe Velez, despite their popularity with fans, were relegated to supporting roles, specialties, or B pictures. Even when ethnic variety, in Kathy Peiss’s words, was celebrated, whether in beauty culture or Hollywood films, underlying it was the belief that the true American face was still a white face.²⁹ Throughout this book I trace how makeup was employed to regulate the colors of white flesh and skin, and I explore, when I have evidence with which to do so, the problems faced by Black actors, in particular, in relation to beauty makeup and its practices. But the uncomfortable fact is that there is little archival or primary material from the studio era that does not focus on or come from white or acceptably ethnic actors and craftspeople.³⁰ A brief 1930 column in the Black newspaper the Philadelphia Tribune—one of the only such references I have seen—describes attempts by two white movie makeup artists, working on the East Coast, to create makeup that was entirely different from a black-face make-up [which] shows up very badly on the screen in many pictures with Negro players. But while the makeup artists had studied under the famous Westmores of Hollywood, taking a compete course in screen make-up, the Westmores did not have much information to pass on to their pupils on that subject.³¹ Max Factor reportedly specially prepared a greasepaint and a powder in that case, but from other of Factor’s remarks, and his company’s product lists, the only cosmetics for Black actors until the 1940s were designed for character roles played by white actors.³² And when Ruby Dee reported to Twentieth Century-Fox for No Way Out (1950), Sidney Poitier’s first major film, she was immediately struck, as she later reported, by the fact that we didn’t see any black people working anywhere.… We didn’t see any dark skins in the makeup and wardrobe departments or as hairdressers. From the minute we entered the gate in the morning till the time we left, we were in an all-white world, and that reality was hard for us to ignore.³³ Turning to a makeup manual would not have helped much, since they, too, were steeped in racism.³⁴

Rita Hayworth’s image opens up, then, into critical but difficult to research areas of identity politics that are enmeshed with makeup and hairdressing in studio-era Hollywood. But I quickly learned that there was not much information about the two crafts as practiced in the industry by and on white people either, with the arguable exception of three books: The Westmores of Hollywood, a family history written by Frank Westmore, the youngest studio-era brother; and two others, Max Factor’s Hollywood: Glamour, Movies, Make-Up and Max Factor: The Man Who Changed the Faces of the World, by men who worked for the Factor corporation.³⁵ Not surprisingly, these books have served as principal sources, whether acknowledged as such or not, for many if not all subsequent publications that mention or discuss Hollywood cosmetics and makeup practices (I learned an enormous amount from all three of them as well).³⁶ But the main reason that much of my study is organized as a more or less chronological narrative of investigation and discovery is that the material I encountered in my primary research, especially, sometimes contradicted, or at least complicated, several of the anecdotal, and often hagiographic, accounts of the crafts’ evolution and existence in the studio system that these otherwise indispensable books proffer.

For example, one of the most frequently invoked reasons for the Westmores’ importance to Hollywood is that in 1917 père George established the first studio makeup department in history—as is stated (twice) in The Westmores of Hollywood—at Selig Polyscope in Los Angeles.³⁷ Discovering that this was not the case—the Westmores, as will be discussed in chapter 1, did not arrive in California until 1920, and Selig ceased production in 1918—was quite a revelation, but less because I and many others had taken this fact for granted for decades than because of whose stories and contributions the claim has functionally blocked out. Conversely, Factor’s chroniclers assert that from the 1920s to the 1970s, all the wigs and hairpieces seen in motion pictures were made by the Max Factor hair department.³⁸ This statement can be countered by documents showing that, starting in the 1930s, the Westmore brothers manufactured hair products that they also sold or rented to the studios at which they worked. (Other studios had staff wigmakers as well, and Sydney Guilaroff also claimed to have made wigs.)³⁹ This is not to take anything away from the influence and power of the Westmores or Factor and his organization, both of which remain vital to my study as a whole. But in producing what I believe to be the first industrial history of my two crafts I must also revise some of what we thought we already knew.

Moreover, as I delved further and further into my topic, I came to feel that makeup and hairdressing affected, in material as well as ideological ways, everything we hold dear (or despise) in classical Hollywood cinema because they are connected to so many different areas of filmmaking, from cinematography and lighting to acting and costume design. Their significance to these other areas is a big part of their value, both practically to the industry and to me as a film scholar, even though they are so rarely discussed in histories of the studio system. But this also made it difficult to demarcate my study neatly. When I turned to ancillary material like fan magazines and other mass-market periodicals, where there is far more material on Hollywood’s glamour masters than in studio archives, the project threatened to grow yet more intractably vast because of the sheer number of beauty and grooming articles and named product advertisements that can be found in any single issue of any fan magazine during the studio era. Although to treat all of that material at length would require another book, it would be impossible not to engage the immense syndicated presence of Hollywood’s makeup and hairdressing experts and their products in the ongoing and always contradictory negotiations of the relation of outer appearance to ideals of personality and attainment—of the natural to the applied and contrived—that are so much a part of the lore of Hollywood as well as our ordinary lives.⁴⁰ Peiss claims that, in the twentieth century, the creative ‘work’ of makeup tended in two distinct directions, toward an embrace of artifice, on the one hand, and toward an aesthetic of the ‘natural,’ on the other.⁴¹ I believe that, in idiosyncratic and sometimes confusing ways, Hollywood and its experts and stars blurred these distinctions both on and off the screen.

Other underexplored aspects of the crafts make them foundational (makeup puns can be hard to avoid) to narrative filmmaking in even more literal senses. Take, for example, the material and physical closeness of the makeup artist and hairdresser to actors themselves. Makeup was applied and hair was styled and dressed, or wigs and toupees fitted, prior to any effects, artistic or otherwise, of costuming, lighting, cinematography, editing, or even, as it were, acting and other modes of performance. To quote from All for Beauty again, the makeup and hairdressing building was the busiest place on the studio grounds, which was true not only at Warner Bros. but at every studio from at least the 1920s through the 1960s. It was the first stop of the day for most if not all Hollywood actors (mobile versions were set up for location shooting), and makeup artists and hairdressers became some stars’ trusted, and often influential, friends and companions. This was certainly the case with Rita Hayworth and Robert Schiffer and hairdresser Helen Hunt; Barbara Stanwyck and her hairdresser Hollis Barnes (Barnsie); and Marlene Dietrich, Joan Blondell, and Judy Garland and Dot Ponedel. Or, while they did not appear to socialize as much off the set, Perc Westmore and Paul Muni or Bette Davis, the latter of whom Westmore made up for more than thirty years and who called him one of her truly great friends.⁴² And yet two recent books that might well have considered makeup and hairdressing, Paul Coates’s Screening the Face and Noa Steimatsky’s The Face on Film, largely ignore both.⁴³ I, too, grapple with the question of whether makeup artists and hairdressers were mechanics or artists, to quote film historian Patrick Keating about cinematographers.⁴⁴ But I come back to the fact that even when the design of the makeup and hair was created by or credited to a department head or other executive, it is hard not to think of the personnel who actually applied the products to a performer’s face and body—even if doing so in accordance with someone else’s instructions, usually a makeup chart, the significance of which I explore in a later chapter—as intimately involved in the construction and meaning of the film image in a way that just does not seem congruent with the work of gaffers, grips, or even focus pullers or costumers.

For example, the 1958 budget sheets for Paramount’s From Among the Dead, the Alfred Hitchcock film that became Vertigo, show that two makeup artists, Ben Lane and Harry Ray, were employed on the production (Kim Novak had requested Lane from her home studio, Columbia, where department head Clay Campbell had helped create her star image), along with two hairdressers, Lenore Weaver and Florence Avery.⁴⁵ (Novak’s desire to have her own hairdresser also brought from Columbia was apparently not met.) Yet only Paramount’s department head Wally Westmore and hairdressing area head Nellie Manley are listed in Vertigo’s credits, for makeup supervision and hair style supervision, respectively—an improvement, again, over earlier films that had no makeup and hairdressing credits at all. Given the extent of the Northern California location shooting on Vertigo, far away from the influence of Wally Westmore (who had jurisdiction over Manley’s work), it is hard to imagine that Lane and Ray, or Weaver and Avery, followed to the letter whatever directions Westmore gave them to produce the distinctive looks of Kim Novak in the dual role of the aristocratic Madeleine and the working-class Judy. Or that they did not make creative adjustments on the fly for James Stewart or Barbara Bel Geddes, as well as Novak, in order to satisfy Hitchcock’s (or the actors’) demands on a given day. Moreover, according to Novak’s biographer, the director grumbled halfway through filming that the star was right to prefer her usual Columbia makeup design to whatever Westmore might have dictated, which complicates the situation further.⁴⁶

In fact, as Frank Westmore wrote in The Westmores of Hollywood, during the studios’ heyday from the 1930s through the 1950s, he saw his brothers practically having to abandon doing creative makeup in order to administer their large departments, which included, besides reading scripts and attending daily production meetings and weekly budget meetings, recruitment and training, assigning tasks to the right person, product and supply management, and not only making suggestions for new makeup ideas for a film but—a Westmore specialty—dreaming up publicity gimmicks for it. Only occasionally were they able to get out in the field and use their skills on an especially important project.⁴⁷ His account exemplifies the hierarchization of filmmaking tasks that is the basis of the studio system itself, but it is also true that there were few other areas in which nonexecutive craftspeople could function as such materially critical constituents of almost every other visual norm of Hollywood filmmaking. Makeup artists and hairdressers were always on the set, in cinematographer John Alton’s words, to take care of the endless needs that arose during shooting in response to the temperature and humidity, the activity level of the actor, the duration of the workday, and the goals of the scene.⁴⁸ They adjusted facial contours in response to lighting, they rearranged hair if it shadowed a face inappropriately, and by the late 1920s they understood what the camera would record (or not) as natural, all of which for stars and most featured players, as I investigate and discuss, ultimately came to mean maintaining them in flawless if often narratively implausible perfection, especially in close-ups.

So significant were close-ups that Alton, in his book Painting with Light, declares that they not only were the export of the American film industry but were known the world over for their exquisite beauty.⁴⁹ Without close-ups we might not have stars or care about what they look like—Bronco Billy Anderson played at least three different characters in long shot in The Great Train Robbery (1903) with no noticeable alteration to his face and hair—but it does not necessarily follow that exquisite beauty would automatically have resulted from the close-up itself. In fact, in director Mervyn LeRoy’s words, Almost every big star has an out-of-the-ordinary face. So do most of the great actresses.… In Hollywood there are ways to manufacture beauty; you can’t manufacture talent.⁵⁰ But for the purposes of this book, how the studios defined and fabricated human beauty, male or female, in close-up or a wider shot scale, is indeed the object of attention. For it was that beauty, created carefully not just by cinematographers but by makeup artists and hairdressers (of course, with the participation of players themselves, and at times their often unnamed maids or assistants), that made the close-up so major an export. Especially the long close-ups of the sound era, when they were no longer interrupted by intertitles. But it was not always that way.

By 1919, according to one of the silent era’s contemporary chroniclers, at least half of a film’s scenes were close-ups, and as will be discussed, some critics were horrified by what they viewed as excessive or incorrect cosmetic use by performers in films of the day.⁵¹ Most actors in the primitive era of cinema applied their own makeup and sometimes styled their own hair under the more or less educated guidance and training of makeup artists, male and female, from around 1913 on (who physically applied makeup and dressed the hair or wigs of minor actors and extras as well as some stars). That their results were often unsatisfactory, or a slavish but practically or aesthetically unworkable mimicry of current modes of fashionable appearance, seems to have been the impetus for the cameraman then to be given authority to call the shots as it were, because he (and it was always a he) had at least learned from experience the properties of the film stock in