In the early morning hours of October 19, 1947, authorities were called to 4329 North Agnes Avenue, the North Hollywood residence of costume designer Robert Kalloch and his boyfriend, Joseph Demarais.
The latter had called for assistance, as his boyfriend of seventeen years had been suddenly stricken. Before he could be taken to a hospital, Kalloch died at 6:00 a.m. in his home. He was only fifty-four. Authorities responding to the emergency that morning had no way of knowing that they would be returning to the residence just a few hours later. At 3:15 p.m., Demarais also died in the Agnes Avenue home. He was forty-four.
The sudden and inexplicable death of Kalloch alone could have aroused some suspicion. After all, Demarais was the sole beneficiary of Kalloch’s will. Kalloch had been the principle breadwinner, his salary as Columbia’s head designer having financed the purchase of the residence in 1939, as well as the antiques and paintings that furnished it. Although Demarais had been on the studio’s payroll as Kalloch’s secretary, he had spent more time in rehab during the last few years than he had in assisting Kalloch. But any suspicions about Demarais’s possible involvement in foul play disappeared upon his passing that afternoon. Still, a couple mysteriously dying on the same day seemed too improbable. The Los Angeles coroner ordered autopsies for both men. The results revealed that the simultaneous deaths happened purely by coincidence. Kalloch had been suffering from arteriosclerotic heart disease, triggering a fatal heart attack that morning. Today his condition could have likely been treated successfully with bypass surgery. Demarais, on the other hand, was found to be suffering from alcoholic fatty liver disease. He had simply drank himself to death.
While the timing of the deaths occurred by happenstance, the order of the deaths triggered a legal battle that would rage for four years. Kalloch’s last will—a handwritten holographic document he had prepared without assistance of an attorney—left everything to Demarais. Because Demarais survived Kalloch, even for just nine hours, he inherited Kalloch’s estate. Demarais had a will, but it was ineffective, as it left everything to Kalloch. With no contingent beneficiary named in Demarais’s will, his estate, including the property he inherited from Kalloch, was postured for distribution to Demarais’s heirs by law. Horrified at the specter of their nephew’s estate passing to the family of his alcoholic lover, Kalloch’s aunt and uncle filed a will contest, hoping to invalidate their nephew’s will and to claim Kalloch’s estate as his intestate heirs.
Robert Kalloch meets with Irene Dunne for The Awful Truth.
Like their deceased relatives, the competing families could not have been more different. Kalloch was born Robert Mero Kalloch III on January 3, 1893, in New York City, to Dr. Robert Mero Kalloch II, a prominent dentist, and Emily Maguire. He enjoyed a thoroughly middle-class upbringing. He studied at Dwight School on the Upper Westside, and during his last three years there, also attended the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts. He passed the entrance examination for Yale University, but never attended. Instead Kalloch apprenticed as a dress designer at the New York branch of Lucile Ltd., where he began as a sketch artist in 1917.
Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night (1934).
In contrast to Kalloch, Demarais was born to dirt-poor French Canadian immigrants, Emile and Caroline Ouillette Demarais, in Tiverton, Rhode Island, on December 27, 1902. The youngest of five children, Demarais went by his middle name, Heliodore, as a youngster. Emile and Caroline worked in the local cotton mill. As soon as their children were old enough, they joined their parents at the mill as weavers. Eventually, Demarais left the looms to try to enter the New York City art scene, where he met Kalloch.
Being a decade older than Demarais, Kalloch was well established as a designer long before Demarais left the mill. Even before graduating from school, Kalloch was so confident in his artistry that he sought design work from his idol, Anna Pavlova, the famous Russian dancer. Because of his adoration for the artist, Kalloch waited night after night with his sketches at the stage door where Pavlova performed until he finally was able to make a presentation. Pavlova was impressed, and at age eighteen, Kalloch designed the costumes for an entire Pavlova ballet.
In 1919 and 1920, Kalloch worked at the London and Paris branches of Lucile Ltd., the couture house of British dressmaker Lady Duff-Gordon. Kalloch took his mother Emily abroad with him, “as otherwise his home life would be broken up,” Lucile stated in her declaration in support of the Kallochs’ joint passport applications. Emily had been widowed in 1915, and Kalloch maintained an unusually close relationship with his mother for the rest of her life.
During his year in Paris, Kalloch designed the costumes for the Casino de Paris La Grande Revue and studied the work of the city’s great couturiers. After his year abroad, Kalloch returned to America and began working at the Madame Frances & Company Dressmakers in New York City. He worked for Frances for five years, during which time he and Madame Frances made twenty-eight trips to Europe to study fashion trends.
After leaving Frances, Kalloch worked for Hattie Carnegie for a year before Hollywood came calling in 1932. That year, Harry Cohn recruited Kalloch to become Columbia Pictures’s first contract designer. Signing Kalloch was a great coup for the struggling studio. Since its founding in 1918, Columbia had been thinly capitalized and could only make low-budget pictures. The studio suffered from a small-time image, making it unable to attract any major stars for long-term contracts. To improve the image of Columbia, Cohn persuaded actresses like Irene Dunne, Nancy Carroll, Grace Moore, Lilian Harvey, and Fay Wray to star in his films. Kalloch was a double selling point for Cohn—the actresses he wanted to attract to the studio felt secure in having an accomplished New York designer dress them, and film magazines wanted to cover his sophisticated wardrobes for films.
Kalloch moved with Emily to 1355 N. Laurel Avenue in Los Angeles. Demarais followed Kalloch to Los Angeles and took an apartment a few miles away, on North Las Palmas in Hollywood. Although Kalloch and Demarais met in New York City, the timing of that first meeting is uncertain. By the late 1920s, Demarais was living in New York City, sharing an apartment with other struggling artists. He may have worked with Kalloch at Madame Frances, as his holographic will dated February 9, 1932, referenced his chattels stored at Madame Frances’s salon on 54th Street in Manhattan. Whenever Demarais may have met Kalloch, by 1932 he was enamored of him enough to leave him his entire estate. Demarais wrote his will on stationery from the famous Westward Ho Hotel in downtown Phoenix while making his cross-country move to California. Although Demarais appears to have simply written his will while staying as a guest there, his will mentions leaving his entire estate “including real property here in Phoenix” to Kalloch.
During his first two years in Hollywood, Kalloch designed for nearly three dozen pictures, including Claudette Colbert’s wardrobe for It Happened One Night (1934). After virtually sweeping the 1934 Oscars, It Happened One Night gave Columbia the respect that had eluded the studio for years and proved that Cohn’s efforts to boost Columbia’s prestige and profits were working. Because of Cohn’s dislike of period films, Kalloch was given plenty of opportunity to design sophisticated, contemporary wardrobes at Columbia, which always garnered publicity in the film magazines. Notwithstanding Kalloch’s popularity with the press, Cohn insisted on checking his costume sketches for all his leading ladies to make quite sure that they were dressed “in good taste.”
The blue-eyed designer was never seen without his round-lensed glasses and his silver cigarette case. He was rumored to suffer from phobias and neuroses, including the fear of riding seated upright in an automobile. To avoid panic attacks, he purportedly reclined in the backseat under a blanket. “Even Hollywood, which should be inured to idiosyncrasies, stands agape and agog,” a reporter once wrote of Kalloch’s peculiarities. That story focused on Kalloch’s conversion of his spare room into a private home for his pet cat. “The walls are protected by ivy-covered chicken wire and the floor is covered with cushions designed for Tabby’s comfort,” the reporter wrote. “Tabby, by the way, is a very ordinary black alley cat—a stray that Kalloch picked up in Central Park. But she wears a solid gold collar now that would support the average family in comfort for many a week.”
For all his quirks, Kalloch sounded amazingly “normal” when talking about his favorite actresses to dress. Take Carole Lombard. “Carole would look smart in a kitchen apron,” Kalloch once said. “She has a way of wearing things that gives them style. She understands the value of line, and her clothes are always very, very simple, and correspondingly stunning. She loves daring clothes, cut so that people would gasp if that is in character with the part she is playing. She loves to shock people.” Lombard not only liked to shock her audience, but her coworkers as well. “She says the most amusing things while being fitted,” Kalloch said, “always a little naughty, and has us all in spasms of laughter. Risqué, of course, but very funny.”
Just as Kalloch settled into his new career as costume designer, his mother died at their apartment on June 29, 1935. Perhaps because of her death, Kalloch returned to New York to rejoin Madame Frances for a year. Returning to Columbia after Madame Frances retired in 1936, Kalloch designed some of the studio’s most classic films, including The Awful Truth (1937), starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) with Jimmy Stewart, and His Girl Friday (1940), starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.
Robert Kalloch fits actress Virginia Bruce.
Barbara Stanwyck in Golden Boy (1939).
A Robert Kalloch sketch for Ida Lupino in Let’s Get Married (1937).
Kalloch stayed at Columbia until 1941, when he left to replace Adrian at MGM. There, he designed costumes for Ann Sothern’s character Maisie Ravier in Ringside Maisie (1941) and Maisie Gets Her Man (1942). That Brooklyn burlesque dancer character, originally intended for Jean Harlow, made Sothern a star. “Ann Sothern wants light colors and is always sure she doesn’t look well if the dress is dark,” Kalloch said of the comedienne. “She hates everything tight and won’t wear a dress that binds her anywhere. She says she must feel comfortable or she can’t work.”
In October 1939, Kalloch and Demarais bought their Agnes Avenue residence. They paid $10,000 and took title as joint tenants. In the 1940 federal census, Demarais talked to the enumerator personally. He reported Kalloch’s salary at “$5,000+,” which was the highest income bracket used in the census that year. He listed his own salary as Kalloch’s secretary at “$950.” Demarais listed Kalloch as head of the household, and, surprisingly bold for the time, described his relationship to Kalloch as “partner.”
Kalloch stayed at MGM for two years, designing for Judy Garland in Babes on Broadway (1941); Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver (1942) and Random Harvest (1942); and Norma Shearer in Her Cardboard Lover (1942). After leaving MGM in 1942, Kalloch only designed two more films—Suspense (1946) for Warner Bros. and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948) for RKO. The drop in Kalloch’s professional productivity coincided with Demarais’s personal decline. Beginning in 1941, Demarais was repeatedly placed in a convalescent home run by Georgia Anderson, in a quiet residential neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills. His stays were brief, lasting only three or four days at a time. If he finally did succeed in rehabilitating his drinking addiction during his last visit to Ms. Anderson’s home in November of 1946, Demarais was never able to undo the damage to his liver, as his autopsy revealed eleven months later.
Within days of Kalloch’s and Demarais’s deaths, the Los Angeles Public Administrator opened probates for both men. At the time, no one in the Public Administrator’s office knew the identity of Kalloch’s or Demarais’s heirs. Designer Travis Banton stepped forward to advance more than half of the costs of Kalloch’s funeral, an expense that Kalloch’s estate never reimbursed. By May of the following year, Kalloch’s heirs—Parker Kalloch and Anges K. Willis, who were the only surviving siblings of his now long-deceased father—filed a will contest, seeking to prevent their nephew’s estate from passing to his boyfriend’s brothers, Arthur and Emile Demarais, who had been found living in Rhode Island.
In a lapse of logical reasoning that seems risible today, Parker and Anges alleged in their pleadings that Demarais’s relationship with Kalloch had done “great damage” to his reputation as a costume designer and concurrently argued that Kalloch had left his estate to Demarais solely because Demarais had “threatened to damage and impair” Kalloch’s reputation—something they alleged had already occurred. Though Parker and Anges never expressly said that their nephew and Demarais had been lovers, the words they used in their pleadings to describe the relationship—a “strange attachment” induced by “unnatural flattery” that conferred upon Demarais a “strange power” over Kalloch—were unambiguous enough to keep the press from covering the dispute, as gay relationships were considered too obscene and immoral to be mentioned in newspapers of general circulation in the 1940s.
Negotiations continued for years. In a move that seems surprisingly progressive for the times, the Los Angeles Public Administrator opposed the contest, characterizing Kalloch and Demarais’s relationship as one of “mutual trust, respect, and affection.” Noting that the two men had mutual wills in place for nearly ten years prior to their deaths, the Public Administrator found no basis to invalidate Kalloch’s last testament. Nonetheless, after four years of legal wrangling, Parker and Anges settled their contest out of court for a mere $750, which they divided among themselves and their attorney. Kalloch and Demarais’s cumulative net estate—valued at $10,000 after taxes and creditors—was distributed to Demarais’s two brothers. The two, who had labored in the cotton mill with their brother during their childhood, divided a sum valued in excess of $110,000 in 2015 dollars.