Gail Patrick: The Forgotten Star

gail_patrick 2

Gail Patrick was the perfect contrast for such sweet and adorable blond stars as Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey and Irene Dunne in My Favorite Wife. She could also play the perfect bitch, roles that didn’t seem to phase her. She knew that with her tall, lithe figure, she was also the perfect model, and she need never be intimidated in any room, especially with a Baccalaureate degree tucked away in her purse pocket.

This post is part of the Classic Movie Blog Association’s Forgotten Star Blogathon.

Gail Patrick was born  Margaret LaVelle Fitzpatrick in Birmingham, Alabama, on June 20, 1911,  She had an older and a younger brother, and thus grew up competing for attention. Her family was very social, and  in the Southern manner, talk and storytelling were part of the environment. Gail received a B.A. from Howard College where she also served as dean of women for a period. She pursued a law degree at the University of Alabama, but after entering a publicized nation-wide contest by Paramount Pictures to play the “Panther Woman” in Island of the Lost Souls in 1932, she gave up her academic life and went Hollywood.  She lost the role to Kathleen Burke, who she nonetheless befriended. It turned out to be a good thing for Gail, her friend Kathleen later related to her that she could never get another good role after being identified as “the Panther Woman.”

 

Gail Patrick Death_Takes_Holiday_1934
Frederick March at left with Gail Patrick as a blond in Death Takes a Holiday, 1934, Photo courtesy Photofest

Gail was nevertheless placed on contract at Paramount Pictures for $50 a week. Not a large sum by movie star standards but a lot of money compared to what many people were earning during the Depression. She was given several uncredited roles in 1932-1933, and with her legal education she quickly negotiated her salary to $75 a week, and added a clause in her contract that she would not pose for cheesecake photos. In 1934 she played a minor role in a more important film, Death Takes a Holiday, shown above. It was directed by Mitchel Leisen and starred Frederick March and Evelyn Venable. In what would later be remade as Meet Joe Black.  This was Gail’s first film to be dressed by the talented Travis Banton. From here on, with the exception of a few westerns, Gail Patrick would be a fashion plate on film.

 

Gail Patrick 3

In the photo above Gail Patrick does her best dark Marlene Dietrich imitation in a publicity shot for Mississippi, 1935. The movie has apparently never made it to video or DVD, but was a classic pairing of W,C Fields and Bing Crosby. Crosby played Gail’s beau, until he didn’t meet up to her Southern ideals, whereupon he was relegated to her sister Joan Bennett’s attentions. This was one of eight movies Gail Patrick made in 1935.

Gail’s tough sister act in Mississippi must have made an impression on director Gregory LaCava, who cast her as Cornelia Bullock, the tough and jealous socialite sister of Carole Lombard in the wonderful My Man Godfrey. As Cornelia she tries her best to get William Powell as Godfrey fired since she couldn’t win his attention. As devious as Cornelia is in the movie, and in the best use of characterization, one can  be redeemed, and here we see Gail/Cornelia transformed by the nobleness of Godfrey.

 

Gail Patrick My Man Godfrey 1936
Carole Lombard, William Powell, and Gail Patrick in My Man Godfrey. Photo courtesy Photofest

 

Gail married Robert Howard Cobb in 1936, the first of her four husbands. He was the owner of the famed Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood. The second was the derby-hat shaped restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard accross from the Ambassador Hotel, and its famed Coconut Grove lounge. All were famous as hang-outs for the stars. Alas , all are now gone. One lasting tradition, the Cobb salad, invented at the Brown Derby and named after its owner.

Gail played a leading role in a little known film titled Her Husband Lies  (originally The Love Trap), from 1937. The story is based on the character of the notorious gambler and gangster Arnold Rothstein (characterized in Boardwalk Empire). Gail plays a nightclub singer married to Spade Martin played by Ricardo Cortez as the Rothstein character. He swore to his wife he was going straight but due to a variety of circumstances involving his younger brother, he gets sucked back into the underworld of gambling. Gail goes back to singing torch songs at the nightclub, and film noir starts early in this movie from the late 1930s.

Gail was dressed by Edith Head in this film as Travis Banton was having his problems with alcohol. Edith would soon be made head designer at Paramount. She followed his advice though, “When in doubt, trim in fur.”

Gail Patrick_The Love Trap
Gail Patrick in Her Husband Lies.

Gail’s next big role was as a society beauty in Artists and Models, in 1937, co-starring Jack Benny, Ida Lupino, and Richard Arlen. The movie was a Paramount take-off from the Shubert’s Broadway Revues of the same title, the musical and chorus-girl themed shows popular in the 1920s. The central plot involved the production of the Artists and Models Ball. Jack Benny as the Ball Chairman had offered the “Queen of the Ball” role to his girlfriend Ida Lupino, a working class girl. But then he meets society girl Gail Patrick playing the part of Cynthia Wentworth, selling tickets for a charity benefit, and he offers her the “Queen of the Ball” role. The plot hinges somewhat on who will win out, but the real action is in the models and the musical numbers, including numbers by Louis Armstrong and Andre Kostelanetz. A real controversy ensued from the film’s showing in the South due to the  musical number with Martha Raye, this due to her apparent interacting with the black musicians and  dancing and gyrating in a style of the “negroes.”*

With all the emphasis on fashion and the musical stage costumes, Travis Banton got serious and produced some beautiful costumes for the film

 

Gail Patrick Artists And Models1937
Artists and Models – Left to right: Leroy Prinz; Ida Lupino; Raoul Walsh; and Gail Patrick. Photo courtesy Photofest.

Her next film was another classic and one of my favorite movies, Stage Door (below), directed by Gregory LaCava, whom she had worked with in My Man Godfrey, but this time at RKO. Before The Women, this was the women’s film par excellance. Its cast is a good indication of that: Katharine Hepburn; Ginger Rogers; Eve Arden; Lucille Ball; Ann Miller; Constance Collier; Andrea Leeds and of course Gail Patrick. Moreover, they are all roomates at the Footlighters Club, a boardinghouse for aspiring actresses in New York, supporting (or competing with) each other for roles on the stage. Constance Collier serves as a reminder of how it can all go bad, a sort of Norma Desmond without the mansion. This is also the model movie for delicious wisecracking and the women’s dialogue talking all over each other. The instant antagonism between roomates and polar opposites played by Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers reflected their own rivalry at RKO, and the boarding house rivalry between the Ginger Rogers and Gail Patrick characters is feisty to say the least, spiced up with the wisecracks of Eve Arden and Lucille Ball,  some of it apparently improvised. Only the Andrea Leeds character is innocent, a victim of the system. Competing for roles and sometimes competing  for the same men, Stage Door shows the highs and lows of the stage life.

The women’s wardrobe for Stage Door was designed by Muriel King, a freelance costume designer and fashion designer.

 

gail-patrick-in-stage-door-(1937)

Several B movies and smaller roles followed: Mad About Music; Dangerous to Know; Wives Under Suspicion; King of Alcatraz; Disbarred; Man of Conquest; Grand Jury Secrets; Reno; and The Doctor Takes a Wife, where she plays the “other woman” to Loretta Young.

 

Gail Patrick My_Favorite_Wife_1940_

And then came My Favorite Wife, 1940, where the “other woman” role got really close to importance, as the groom was Cary Grant. As character Nick Arden he was finally free to marry Gail playing Bianca Bates after his wife was declared dead after seven years of being missing at sea.  The couple drive off to a honeymoon at a Yosemite lodge, unfortunately the same spot of his first honeymoon, where the now just-returned first wife played by Irene Dunne goes looking for him.  Plenty of surprise, embarrassment, and consternation is had by all.  And then Cary has to make a decision between her and Irene Dunne. Maybe Randolph Scott that Dunne dragged home with her from the shipwreck island where they lived together will complicate things sufficiently, it certainly did with the movie’s censor. Now if only his wife will take him back, but which one?

This was another RKO film, directed first by the talented Leo McCarey, but following a serious car accident Garson Kanin finished directing the film. Costume designer Howard Greer, formerly at Paramount, who now had his own fashion business based in Los Angeles, designed the women’s wardrobe.

 

gail patrick william powell 1

 

By 1941 Gail had perfected the “other woman” role, as she was once again cast the part, this time as William Powell’s old flame in Love Crazy. In this film he’s married to Myrna Loy, and they are about to enjoy their 4th wedding anniversary when the mother-in-law visits, slips on a carpet, sprains an ankle and prolongs her visit. It’s his job now to go mail an important letter since his wfe was out, whereupon, low-and-behold, he runs into his old flame Gail in the elevator, finding out that she has just moved into the building with her husband. Sure enough, the elevator breaks down and he ends up with a concussion, but with some special nursing by Gail as seen above, a spark is relit (enough for the plot amyway). There are complications galore, although everyone ends up with their respective spouses, Gail Patrick is all fun in this movie, and as usual beautifully dressed.

No costume credit is given in the film, a time of transition between several designers coming and going at MGM. But my eye says it was designed by Adrian.

 

hit parade 1943

Gail starred in the Tales of Manhattan in 1942 and Hit Parade of 1943, as seen above. She appeared in several more films through the mid 1940s, but none with any major roles. She retired from acting in 1948, her last film being The Inside Story, produced at Republic Pictures, one of the “Poverty Row” studios.

In 1947 she married Thomas Cornwell Jackson, her third husband. He was the literary agent for Erle Stanley Gardner, who wrote the Parry Mason mysteries. Gail and her husband produced the TV show based on the book series, which ran from 1957 – 1966. For a few years previously she also designed a line of children’s garments.

Gail Patrick died in 1980 of leukemia at age 69. She bequeathed $1 million to her sorority  Delta Zeta, the largest gift it has ever received.

 

Gail Patrick 1

 

 

 

*American Film Institute, Catalog of Feature Films. Artists and Models.  http://www.afi.com/members/catalog/DetailView.aspx?s=&Movie=5196

HOLLYWOOD COSTUME: THE ACADEMY’S EXHIBITION

LA Hollywood Costume 4

After opening in London’s V&A Museum in 2012, traveling to Australia and two American cities,  Hollywood Costume finally comes to Los Angeles, where the vast majority of the films and costumes  that make up the exhibition originated. The idea and impetus for the exhibition also started in Los Angeles, well Beverly Hills, with Deborah Nadoolman Landis, costume designer and current professor,  founding director, and Chair of the David C. Copley Center for for the Study of Costume Design at UCLA. It is altogether fitting that the exhibition be in Los Angeles, but even more significantly, that it opens on the site of the future home  of the Museum of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The museum has been in the planning stages for years, but is now solidly in the works and set to open in 2017 in a major reworking of the former May Company department store on Wilshire Boulevard in the “Miracle Mile,” a site leased from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  Hollywood Costume the exhibition is open now through March 15, 2015.

 

LA Hollywood Costume 1A

Some 150 costumes are on exhibit, ranging from the silent era through Hollywood’s Golden Age to last year’s Oscar nominee The Dallas Buyer’s Club. Iconic costumes are included such as Marilyn Monroe’s “subway dress” from  The Seven Year Itch, Judy Garland’s pinafore from The Wizard of Oz, and the Academy Museum’s recently acquired treasure, the “#7” pair of the Ruby Slippers, the ones in the best condition out of all those known to exist. Other wonders include Marlene Dietrich’s sequins and crystal-studded gown and cape from Angel designed by Travis Banton, Norma Shearer’s court dress from Marie Antoinette designed by Adrian, Jean Hagen’s flapper dress from Singing in the Rain designed by Walter Plunkett, and Marilyn Monroe’s sequin decorated and fur-trimmed gown from Some Like it Hot, and Ginger Roger’s mink skirt lined in sequins designed by Edith Head.

Hollywood costume VA SomeLikeItHot
Marily Monroe’s dress from “Some Like it Hot.”

 

The exhibition as conceived by Deborah Nadoolman Landis was to put costume in the context of the character, the actors, the plot and the total movie experience. So sections of the script are on view, as are screens with projections of the actor’s faces. The multimedia approach has filmed interviews, monologues, and film clips. The costume design process is explored through scripts highlighting personality clues, costume sketches, budget breakdowns, and fittings.

 

LA Hollywood Costume 3

Above is pictured a blown up section of a script. The costumes shown are from Kim Novak in Vertigo and Joan Crawford  in Mildred Pierce, designed by Edith Head and Milo Anderson respectively.

 

LA Hollywood Costume 5

The Indiana Jones costume is well recognized. It was designed by Deborah Nadoolman Landis herself.

 

LA Hollywood Costume 6 jpg
Photo KABC

Some other well recognized costumes are on view. The eye-popping red gown at left was worn by Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, Barbara Streisand’s costume in Hello Dolly, at left and Funny Lady at right, and in the background is Ginger Rogers in Lady in the Dark, and at right Kate Winslet in Titanic.

LA Hollywood Costume 8

Marilyn Monroe’s “subway dress” is shown above. It was designed by Travilla, who designed many of her film costumes. It was sold in the famous Debbie Reynolds auction in 2011 for $4.6 million, minus commission, by Profiles in History.

Larry McQueen Hollywood costume V&A Angel Travis Banton

One of the most fantastic costumes from Hollywood’s Golden Age is Marlene Dietrich’s gown from Angel, 1937, designed by Travis Banton. It is a marvel of Hollywood studio craftsmanship.  It was made from chiffon and embroidered with thousands of hand-sewn silver and gold  sequins and Austrian crystal beads, which took weeks to make. The stole is trimmed in Russian sable. It was lent by Larry McQueen who took great pains to restore it.

 

Superhero costumes are shown on display at the Hollywood Costume exhibit in Los Angeles

Men’s costumes, and the blockbuster superheroes, are represented as well, including Superman, Batman, and Captain America.

 

LA

 

Deborah Nadoolman Landis introduced the exhibition opening on October 1st.

Matt Petit / ©A.M.P.A.S
Michelle Monaghan views the exhibition during the opening event. Matt Petit / ©A.M.P.A.S

If you are in the Los Angeles area in the next several months and can book a ticket, go a see it. This is one of those very special exhibitions that will not likely come around again.