When Erté quit MGM after one year of being frustrated with the motion picture business, an Italian American young man from Oakland immediately assumed design responsibilities for Paris (1926), starring Joan Crawford.
But unlike Erté, André-Ani would have a long career as a costume designer, dressing Hollywood’s biggest stars in more than fifty-five films before his untimely death at age fifty-one.
André-Ani first fashioned Greta Garbo as an exotic, untouchable creature when she arrived at MGM in 1925. That first year, he dressed her in Torrent (1926), Flesh and the Devil (1926), and The Temptress (1926). “I did have some difficulty with Greta Garbo,” the designer later confessed. “She is very difficult to do things for. She has a difficult figure; she has set ideas and very foreign ones. She has innumerable dislikes. She will wear nothing that has fur, absolutely nothing. She goes in for flaunting, bizarre collars and cuffs. She likes short skirts when she should wear longer ones.” Garbo’s dislike of velvet particularly challenged André-Ani, who ordinarily relied on velvets, brocades, and flowing soft materials to hide an actress’s imperfections.
André-Ani was born as Clement Henri Andreani on April 22, 1901, in Oakland, California, the youngest of six sons born to Italian immigrants. His parents, Massimo Andreani and Angiolina Reali, had married in Como, Italy, and immigrated to the United States in 1888. They settled in Alameda County, California, where Massimo operated a successful saloon a few blocks from the family home on 14th Street in Oakland. Tragically, Massimo suffered a stroke and died suddenly on March 8, 1903, at the age of forty-seven; André-Ani was just a month shy of his second birthday. André-Ani’s mother died two months later, on May 10, 1903, leaving André-Ani and his five older brothers orphaned.
The Andreanis’ maternal aunt, Quinta Reali Bardoli, took in the toddler, but was too busy caring for her own family as a single mother to be much help to her older nephews. Their parents’ deaths forced the older Andreani boys to grow up quickly; some of them claimed to be adults while still minors in order to obtain employment and housing.
As if being orphaned at age two did not make young André-Ani’s life difficult enough, he was short of stature and suffered from a spinal deformity that left him noticeably hunchbacked. Like his brothers, André-Ani was forced to lie about his age and enter the adult world while still a teenager. After André-Ani’s talent for art began to emerge, his friends helped the promising young artist receive an art education in San Francisco. The faculty of the school was so impressed with the young man’s skill that within a matter of days, he joined their ranks.
At sixteen, André-Ani became an artist for the Selectasine Serigraphics Company in San Francisco. During his time there, the company developed its “Selectasine process,” a method of producing a multicolor composition using only one screen and heavy, opaque pigments. The process was patented in 1918, and dominated screen printing until the late 1930s, when multiscreen processes with thinner color layers became the method of choice. The future designer’s experiences at Selectasine would serve him well later. When he could not find a fabric to meet his needs for a costume at MGM, André-Ani printed his own designs on fabric in-house.
After leaving Selectasine in 1918, André-Ani continued to work as an independent artist from the home of his aunt Quinta in Oakland. The timing of his arrival in Los Angeles is not certain. If Marriage Fails, released in the summer of 1925, was the first film on which he was known to have worked.
After leaving MGM in 1928, André-Ani worked for Universal, and later as a freelancer. His last movie was Hal Roach’s Vagabond Lady (1935), starring Robert Young. Like both of his parents, André-Ani’s was fated to die young. His passing came on April 3, 1953, in his hometown of Oakland, just nineteen days shy of his fifty-second birthday.
André-Ani
When reflecting back on his life, André-Ani never disclosed how difficult his childhood had been. “I’ve always been interested in women’s clothes,” he once said. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t working on designs or fooling around with fabrics and scissors. I must have been born that way. And I have had a very fortunate time, really. No desperate struggles, no tale of bitter hard luck.”
Norma Shearer in The Demi-Bride (1927).