When Academy Award–winning designer Leah Rhodes took over stylist duties for Warner Bros. head designer Orry-Kelly in 1942, she doubted she could fill his shoes.
Orry-Kelly had enlisted in the army, and Rhodes, his assistant, suddenly found herself responsible for Bette Davis’s wardrobe in Old Acquaintance (1943). “Leah said she thought she could never become a designer because she didn’t argue like Orry-Kelly could,” said David Chierichetti, a friend of Rhodes. But Orry-Kelly, with his volatile and abrasive personality, was anything but missed by Warner staff during his absence. When he returned from his one-year commission, Jack Warner had little patience for his antics and soon fired him. Rhodes went on to have a notable career, dressing many of the day’s biggest stars, including Ingrid Bergman, Hedy Lamarr, Lauren Bacall, Doris Day, and Jane Wyman.
Rhodes started life as Leah Margaret Montgomery, born in Port Arthur, Texas, to Gulf Oil refinery stillman Frank Montgomery and his German immigrant wife, Katherine “Minnie” Layher. The Montgomerys married on January 28, 1901, in Port Arthur, and Leah, the first of their six children, was born the following year, on April 1, 1902. Leah and her siblings grew up in the gritty oil town, nestled on the Texas coast just miles from the Louisiana border. In her late teens, Leah apprenticed with a sign painter, then struck out on her own, designing windows for retailers in Port Arthur, and later in San Antonio. On May 4, 1921, she married Russell Spurgeon Rhodes, an auto mechanic. In 1926, the Rhodes moved to L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, where Russell managed an automobile dealership and Leah began her studio career in the wardrobe department of Warner Bros. Initially, Leah was a buyer and shopper for the workshop’s designers. Eventually, she became head designer Orry-Kelly’s girl Friday.
As her design career took off, Leah’s marriage faltered. She divorced Russell in 1937. By 1940, she was living with thirty-two-year-old Charles Barnes, a metallurgist from Utah who had returned to America after working as a mining engineer in the Soviet Union. Their relationship may have been romantic, but Rhodes held him out to the public as her “brother.” Whatever the nature of that relationship, Rhodes married U.S. Marine James C. Glasier within a couple of years. After the war, Glasier became a real-estate investor, and the two stayed together until his death in 1977.
Designer Leah Rhodes (left) and actress Virginia Mayo.
Some designers, like Edith Head, preferred to dress modestly. Not Rhodes. She was known for her personal sense of fashion. “She always looked so nice,” remembered designer Adele Balkan. “She was a spic-n-span kind of lady. She always looked like she came out of the bandbox.” Rhodes did no less for her actresses. Her gowns for Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep (1946) helped define the actress’s image of effortless glamour. She dressed Bacall in five films, including her re-pairing with husband Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo (1948). Rhodes won the first Oscar for the Best Color Costume Design for her work in Adventures of Don Juan (1948), shared with Travilla and Marjorie Best. The film starred Errol Flynn.
Rhodes left Warner in 1952 to freelance. She had designed wardrobes for nearly sixty movies. “She told me she was doing too many pictures. She wanted to do fewer and do them better,” Chierichetti said. Rhodes freelanced for Universal and Paramount studios. She designed costumes for film, television, and occasionally for Las Vegas revues. In her later years, to accrue hours for her pension, she worked as a sketch artist for designers Burton Miller and Edith Head. “Edith was doing her a favor by hiring her to do that, because she could have anyone,” Balkan said. “But I’m sure that Leah helped design, like we all did, but she wouldn’t have gotten credit for it. But I don’t think Leah was unhappy. I think she was pleased to do it.” Her last film credit was for Rio Lobo (1970), starring John Wayne. Rhodes worked into her eighties, and died at the age of eighty-four, on October 17, 1986, in Burbank.
A Leah Rhodes design for Ingrid Bergman in Saratoga Trunk (1945).
Leah Rhodes costume sketch for Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep (1946).
Ava Gardner in The Killers (1946).