One of the greatest enigmas of silent-film era costuming must be Clare West, the first individual to achieve celebrity status as a costume designer.
Appearing on the Hollywood scene in 1914 with no appreciable experience or training, West designed for the screen’s biggest stars in some of the most well-regarded silent-era classics, and then seemingly vanished.
Born Clara Belle Smith on January 30, 1879, in Missouri, West was the sixth of eight children. Her parents, Abraham Chapman Smith and Jane “Jennie” Smalley married shortly after Abraham returned from serving in the Civil War. Throughout West’s childhood, the Smiths eked out an existence farming in Caldwell and adjoining Clinton counties, northeast of Kansas City.
On August 24, 1898, West married salesman Otis Oscar Hunley in Missouri. The couple made their home in Billings, Montana. When the couple divorced in 1902, West was awarded custody of their only child, one-year-old Maxwell Otis Hunley. A year later, West married musician Marshall Elmer Carriere in Tulare County, California. Their first son, Leonard Carriere, arrived in 1908 in Bakersfield, California. Shortly after that, the couple moved to Missoula, Montana, where Marshall opened the Carriere School of Music. He and a business partner, Charles Freshwater, also owned and operated the Star Theater, a venue for traveling acts. Around 1912, Carriere sold his interest in the theater to Freshwater, and moved his family, which now included a third son, Lester Carriere, to Los Angeles.
Carriere and West divorced soon upon their arrival in Los Angeles. Carriere remained in town playing piano for silent movie houses. West, who had developed a penchant for sketching gowns, began selling her designs to makers of fine clothes and peddling her artistic talents to the film industry.
The details of how West actually acquired her design skills are lost. She probably learned to sew as a Missouri farm girl, and likely took note of the costumes of the various acts booked at her husband’s theater in Montana. But as she gained fame as a costume designer, the press unabashedly ascribed to West a truly impressive résumé. “Madame Clare West, a trained Parisian designer and formerly head of ‘The Maison Clare’ in New York is now head of the Fine Arts costume department,” Motography magazine announced in its March 11, 1916, issue. Other than the fact that West had indeed been hired by D. W. Griffith’s studio, nothing else in the announcement was true. West had never lived in New York, nor had she ever left the country.
West was a savvy innovator who happened to be in the right place at the right time. In 1914, director D. W. Griffith was readying a film in Los Angeles that would make cinematic history. “Miss West had been an ardent picture fan, and the idea came to her that a unit in costuming would greatly improve a picture. She presented her dress plan to David Griffith and ‘sold’ him the idea so well that she was given the opportunity to costume The Birth of a Nation (1915),” Jean Mowat wrote in 1927 of West’s entry into film design.
Based on The Clansman, a novel and play by Thomas Dixon Jr., The Birth of a Nation starred Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, and Henry B. Walthall in a tale about family and friends divided by the Mason-Dixon Line during the Civil War. Fans today revere the film for cameraman Billy Bitzer’s pioneering cinematic techniques. Sadly, the film also suffers from blatant racism. Filming took place from July to November, 1914, in the San Fernando Valley. West shared costuming duties with Robert Goldstein, who owned a costume house in Los Angeles and supplied authentic Civil War uniforms, which were still available in 1914. West dressed the prominent female stars, including Mae Marsh in a well-known tattered post-war dress. Wanting to greet her returning brother in splendor, Marsh’s character, Flora, styles pieces of cotton to resemble fur accents on her dress, referred to in the intertitles as “Southern Ermine.”
The Birth of a Nation made millions at the box office, despite protests at screenings organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Its depiction of African Americans as inferior people bent on interracial marriage caused a reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan, which used the film as a recruiting tool in the South. Woodrow Wilson, who became the first president to screen a movie in the White House, called the film “unfortunate.”
Mae Marsh inscribed this photo of herself in costume for The Birth of a Nation (1915) to Clare West.
(l-r) Bebe Daniels in the famous “octopus” dress, Agnes Ayres, Gloria Swanson, Cecil B. DeMille, and Wanda Hawley on the set of The Affairs of Anatol (1921).
Griffith’s next film, Intolerance (1916) was his response to the backlash, which he found painfully unfair. He again hired West. With four diverse stories—a contemporary one, a story about Jesus Christ, a depiction of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, and the fall of the Babylonian empire—all intertwined in a three-and-a-half-hour epic, Intolerance presented huge design challenges for West. Griffith amassed scrapbooks of research for each story, including decorative objects and costumes. He strove for historical accuracy, although he allowed West to tailor her designs somewhat to each individual actor. West’s stint at Fine Arts ended after one year. Although Intolerance did excellent at the box office, its extravagant production costs made the film a financial failure. Griffith could not recover and closed down his studio. Nonetheless, West’s years with Griffith had made her a celebrity in her own right, the first costume designer to achieve that status.
In 1918, director and showman Cecil B. DeMille hired West to oversee Famous Players-Lasky’s costumes and to design for his protégée, Gloria Swanson. DeMille’s early work pushed the envelope on sex and extravagance on-screen. West swathed Swanson in rich fabrics, jewels, and furs. The themes of DeMille’s films included marital strife among the rich, and the subject matter was aimed at adults only. Film trade magazines, aimed at exhibitors, began specifically mentioning West’s designs for DeMille’s female stars.
Clare West
As West’s career flourished, she developed a disinterest in her family that bordered on disdain. “If there was anything else to do other than taking care of the boys, Clare was doing it,” said Clarissa Carriere Abbott, West’s granddaughter by her middle son, Leonard. “She used to have some hellacious cocktail parties, with actors and actresses there,” Seth Carriere, West’s grandson, added.
In May 1920, West married cinematographer Paul P. Perry in San Diego. Shortly after the wedding, Margaret Tally brought suit against Perry for breaching his promise to marry her. The case never went to trial, but the Perry-West union ended two years later. When word of West’s divorce hit the papers in 1922, she announced that she was “through with husbands forever and a day, or at least until 1930, by which time the model found today may have changed for the better.” Apparently, West never found the hoped-for “better model” of husband, as she never married again. “I had the feeling that she thought she was above most people,” Clarissa said. “She certainly was ahead of her time in her thinking. She was promiscuous, as I understand from my father, but she was also very strict.”
Norma Talmadge and Hector Sarno in The Song of Love (1923).
In 1921, Photoplay magazine devoted a full-page photograph to West’s design for Bebe Daniels in The Affairs of Anatol (1921). Called “The Octopus Gown,” West’s creation of pale gray georgette included a cape of black velvet attached to the back with eight “tentacles” outlined in enormous pearls. Appearing as the vamp Satan Synne in the film, Daniels also wore a headdress of loose pearls woven into her hair. “Any man that gets within reach of those arms is never going to escape, but who would want to?” the accompanying copy said of Daniels’s promotional photograph.
In January 1923, West finally made her first visit to Paris. DeMille sent her there to do research and buy fabrics for The Ten Commandments (1923). West used 333,000 yards of cloth to make over three thousand costumes for the production. West also used the Paris trip as an opportunity to knock European couture. Upon her return, she declared triumphantly, “I am more proud than ever of our own United States. Our designers, especially those whose work is reflected on our screen, are months ahead of those of Paris and London, and the Europeans very evidently realize it.” By this time, West’s identity was so well known to the American public that she played herself in a cameo, along with thirty other stars, including Fatty Arbuckle and Mary Astor, in Hollywood (1923), the industry’s comedic exposé of itself.
Later that year, West left Famous Players-Lasky and signed a long-term contract to head the new costume concern of Joseph M. Schenck Productions. John Considine, general manager of Schenck Productions, planned to erect a three-story building at United Studios at a cost of $100,000 to house the costume collection West would oversee. But within a year, the contract was cancelled; West instead agreed to design for actresses Constance and Norma Talmadge and for the actresses who appeared in films for their company, First National Pictures.
At this point, West seemed to be changing jobs yearly, but press interest in her remained high through 1925. For Photoplay readers, she gave a daring fashion forecast: “This year, evening gowns will be worn without stockings, underwear will be of black chiffon and black Chantilly lace, and milady must expose practically all of her spinal column in the evening if she is to be really in vogue.” In December, West opened her own dress salon in downtown Los Angeles. Then something inexplicable happened: silence. The interviews stopped. Films for the Talmadges stopped. Everything seems to have stopped for West.
“I don’t believe her store survived long,” Seth Carriere said. By 1930, West was living on Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles and designing for Buffums, a chain of upscale department stores in Southern California. While Buffums traded on West’s star stature, once she left the store, her visibility completely ended. “I believe she vanished intentionally,” Seth said. “My father told me that she was probably bipolar. Back then they didn’t realize what it was. She would spend weeks at a time sequestered in her living quarters and wouldn’t come out, not even to see her children.”
West’s press interviews may have ended because “even though Clare wanted fame, she wanted acceptance in her field more,” Clarissa said. “She wanted the approval of Cecil B. DeMille and the stars for whom she worked and knew. She didn’t care a lot for the press. She told my father they were all ‘consummate asses’ and had contempt for news people.”
In the late 1940s, West moved to Carson City, Nevada, where Clarissa remembers visiting her once-famous grandmother in 1947. “Dad hadn’t seen his mother in quite a while. I was about seven and Seth had just been born, and my parents wanted to show Clare the baby. I remember driving down her long driveway, which was surrounded by beautiful walnut trees. When we arrived Clare bent down and gave me a hug, and I loved the smell of her perfume. She wore a green top with cream-colored silk pants and offered us cold drinks. As she sat down with a cigarette in one hand and iced tea in the other, she glided on to the sofa as if she was royalty. She was very graceful, though her voice was very commanding. As I sat there drinking my lemonade, I watched her. She had auburn hair and a beautiful complexion, and golden brown eyes, which matched her hair. Her hair was bobbed with bangs, and I had never seen anyone with hair like that.”
A year later, in 1948, West garnered press attention one last time, albeit unintentionally. Her live-in maid, Jennie Belle Bartlett Kniess, dressed herself in West’s diamond earrings and expensive clothes, then left for Salt Lake City just ten days after West had hired her. The local newspaper reported the crime after West filed a complaint with the police. Kniess had insisted on referring to West as “mother,” and in a farewell note to West said that she “would give a million dollars to have a real mother like her.” Kniess was apprehended a few days later with West’s possessions still in tow.
The reclusive designer never developed a close relationship with her son Leonard. “My father and Clare were close enough to talk maybe once a year by telephone,” Seth said. The only emotional bridge between them was their mutual respect as artists. Leonard was a sculptor working in glass and eventually owned his own studio. In 1954, he carved glass panels depicting the history of banking and finance that still adorn the interior of J. P. Morgan Chase bank on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. “He loved her and admired her for what she accomplished in her life,” Seth said of his father and grandmother. “All he ever wanted as a young man was her acceptance. But the only time she ever expressed approval was the few times she came to see his glass art.”
The second and last time Clarissa recalls seeing her grandmother was at her father’s glass studio in the 1950s. West still exuded the regal air that she recalled from their first meeting. “She was so in command,” Clarissa said. “But it was apparent that she appreciated my father’s creative ability with glass.” Leonard died in Twisp, Washington, in 2002, never receiving the maternal acceptance he craved. “He really loved Clare and was sad that he didn’t get the same kind of love from her,” Clarissa said. Despite a distant relationship with his mother, West’s youngest son, Lester, adopted West as his last name, though no one today knows how the designer came to choose that as her professional surname.
Constance Talmadge and Conway Tearle in The Dangerous Maid (1923).
West spent her last years living in the Paradise Travel Trailer Park in Ontario, California, about forty miles east of Los Angeles. “She became reclusive and didn’t want to be around anyone,” Seth said. “She just alienated herself from society. While I was growing up, I more or less just felt sorry for the woman because she was missing out on some great kids.” West died in Ontario on March 13, 1961, at the age of eighty-two.