Although he designed for more than one hundred films during his career, Michael Woulfe was always proudest of the black velvet dress he designed for Judy Garland’s first television appearance, the premiere event for A Star is Born (1954).
Trimmed in white piqué and crystal beading with a matching white satin hat, the ensemble embodied Woulfe’s skillful updating of traditional formal wear. While reporters raved that Garland looked radiant, no one in the television audience knew that she had instructed Woulfe to make the complementary black fur muff large enough to accommodate a flask of vodka, her self-prescribed cure for pre-show jitters.
Woulfe’s favorite creation happened almost by chance. At the time, Woulfe was under contract to RKO, and it was Jean Louis who had dressed Garland for the Warner Brothers’ musical drama. Months before the film’s premieres, Garland had admired one of Jean Simmons’s suits so much that she asked to borrow it. Sid Luft found out that Woulfe was the designer and invited him to their home to discuss designing a gown for Garland for the premiere. Because he was under contract, Woulfe needed RKO’s permission not only to design the dress, but the complementary maternity version for the 1955 Oscars as well. Despite Woulfe’s efforts, the latter gown was never worn. When Garland’s third child, Joseph Luft, arrived a month premature, NBC sent a camera crew to Garland’s bed at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. Garland donned a peignoir and feathery bed jacket hastily purchased in Beverly Hills to give an acceptance speech that would never end up being given. The Best Actress Oscar went to Grace Kelly for The Country Girl instead.
Perhaps what Woulfe appreciated most about the Garland dress was the freedom he enjoyed in designing it. At times, Woulfe found studio demands frustrating and restricting. In later life, he believed he had been hampered in realizing the full extent of his creative potential because of the incessant demands of one man: Howard Hughes. Although Woulfe was adept at designing the classy and refined, catering to Hughes for nearly a decade unfairly gave him a reputation as a designer who pushed the censorship envelope relentlessly. That was never his goal.
Woulfe did not seek out Hughes; he was acquired by him when Hughes took over RKO in 1948. Woulfe had found his first Hollywood assignment designing for Sylvia Sidney in William Cagney Productions’ Blood on the Sun (1945). Woulfe and Sidney enjoyed a long friendship. The two had much in common. Both were born in New York City—Woulfe on June 2, 1918, and Sidney on August 8, 1910. Both were first-generation Americans, each being born to Jewish immigrants from Romania. Both abandoned their birth names and assumed professional monikers—Woulfe was born Samuel Goldstein and Sidney started life as Sophia Kosow. And both had parents in textile-related industries. Woulfe’s father was a life-long furniture upholsterer with a shop in Brooklyn, and Sidney’s mother was a dressmaker from the Bronx.
Before his move to Hollywood, Woulfe had been a sketch artist and assistant designer in the New York garment industry. But thanks to the success of Blood on the Sun, Cagney Productions offered Woulfe a contract. He stayed for three years, though during his tenure, Cagney lent him to other studios, including RKO. In 1947, RKO put Woulfe on its regular payroll. Hughes’s takeover of the studio the following year initially had little effect on Woulfe. During the entire time Hughes controlled RKO, he never once visited the studio in person.
With one exception, the absentee studio head largely left Woulfe alone. “The only time he ever gave me any instructions,” Woulfe said, “was always on a picture with Jane Russell.” Hughes’s first missives regarding Russell came in 1948 during preproduction of Macao (1952). Hughes hired Josef von Sternberg to direct. Hughes wanted von Sternberg to work the same magic on Russell that von Sternberg had worked on Marlene Dietrich years before. During preproduction, von Sternberg instructed Woulfe not to design any low-cut dresses for Russell, so Woulfe designed a series of elegant dresses that tastefully covered Russell’s bustline. Howard Hughes saw the tests and was horrified. He could not see Russell’s cleavage. He then had Woulfe redesign all the dresses, except for a chainmail dress. Despite its high neckline, Hughes liked it. The dress proved to be a bit of a mechanical miracle. The interlinking metal pieces were cut with tinsmith’s shears and clamped together, and an inner belt helped distribute the hefty twenty-one pounds of links around Russell’s hips.
“The clothes couldn’t be terribly, what I would call, ‘chic,’” Russell said of her costumes. “Michael could design beautiful things,” she said, but “they always had to have the ‘movie star’ image.” Hughes’s obsession with Russell’s costumes was almost pathological. Hughes “drove us absolutely crazy,” the actress said. But it was Woulfe who mediated between the two. Sometimes Hughes would call Woulfe at three in the morning to discuss Russell’s dresses. “Now there are seven beads from below the bust up to the top of the bust,” Hughes said on one occasion. “I think there should be six.” He was that particular. “Then poor Michael would have to come and tell me,” Russell said. “And then I would disagree, and I’d argue and holler and yell, and Michael would have go back and tell Mr. Hughes ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or what. So the argument went on. I hate to be any issue, but it was fun from where I was.” Fun? Maybe not. Years later, Woulfe would recall Russell struggled with being true to herself while complying with Hughes’s wishes. “She definitely separates Jane Russell private with the Jane Russell that is presented on the screen,” Woulfe said. “She says, ‘If that’s what he wants, that’s what he gets,’ but she didn’t like it.”
After critics panned Macao, Hughes wanted to make a big splash with Russell in the musical comedy The French Line (1954). “Howard got the idea, since I had done Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), he wanted to do a musical and have it outdo that,” Russell said. “So he was going to have me in a bikini, and nobody wore bikinis in those days but the naughty girls in the south of France. It was just unheard of.” Russell flatly refused to wear one, especially since the scene required her to do a dance number. “Even the camera guys (were saying), ‘Oh, no, no, not that,’” Russell said. “So I just left and I went to the beach, and I said, ‘I’m going to stay here until you come up with a one-piece bathing suit.’”
Woulfe was stuck in the middle again. His solution was a skimpy dance leotard with three large teardrop cutouts centering on Russell’s navel, without actually revealing it. The cutouts were lined with nude-colored souffle fabric. The costume’s overall effect ignited the titillating thrill Hughes was hoping for while giving giving Russell the one-piece costume she demanded. Hughes shot The French Line in 3-D, then marketed the film with the tagline, “See Jane Russell in ‘The French Line’—she’ll knock BOTH your eyes out!” Censors across Middle America were outraged.
A design for Linda Darnell in Blackbeard, The Pirate (1952).
Jane Russell in The French Line (1954).
Jane Russell’s mesh dress for Macao (1952) weighed twenty-one pounds and was suspended between takes to relieve Russell’s shoulders.
“You see a hundred-percent more skin at the beach every day of the week,” Woulfe later said of the design. “But at that time, it was condemned by the Catholic Church and the Legion of Decency.” Actual censorship varied from state to state. Censors in Kansas City noted, “Dance is obscene as it emphasizes lewd and indecent movements tending to stimulate impure sexual desire and lascivious thoughts.” The dance sequence, along with Woulfe’s costume, was deleted because of “obscene movements of body of the dancer. Her bathykolpian posing in a brief revealing costume accompanying lust-provoking words of her song all deliberately sexually suggestive.”
Woulfe began designing for television in the 1950s, but his RKO contract prohibited him from claiming credit. His original designs for Marie Wilson, made when My Friend Irma (1952–54) transitioned from radio to the small screen, suffered subsequent alterations for the same reason his Macao designs had years before, to show more flesh. Without Woulfe’s knowledge, Wilson had a dressmaker cut down the necklines of the finished costumes. She still praised Woulfe in the press. “He made me sexy, but not censorable on television,” Wilson said.
When Hughes sold RKO in 1955, he put Woulfe under contract to Hughes Productions. Woulfe continued to create personal wardrobes for Garland, Russell, and Jean Simmons. He designed the employee uniforms for four Las Vegas hotels and casinos owned by Hughes, as well as the costumes for the Las Vegas nightclub acts of Debbie Reynolds, Lena Horne, Betty Hutton, and Joey Heatherton. Working into the 1970s, Woulfe retired in West Hollywood, then later moved to the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, where he died at age eighty-nine, on August 30, 2007.