On a spring day in 1981, costumers Margo Baxley and Andrea Weaver drove Irene Sharaff to Los Angeles International Airport. Sharaff was eager to catch her flight back home to New York. “I won’t be coming back,” Sharaff told her colleagues.
“And she didn’t,” Weaver said years later. “She never worked on another film.” Several months earlier, the Oscar-and Tony-winning designer had come to Los Angeles to design Anne Bancroft’s wardrobe for Mommie Dearest (1981), the story of Joan Crawford’s tempestuous relationship with adopted daughter, Christina. Many actresses had turned down the role of Joan, unwilling to bring an unsympathetic portrait of the Hollywood legend to the screen. Bancroft was willing, provided Frank Yablans deliver his promised script that “balanced the scales” by presenting Joan’s perspective too, something missing from Christina’s original work. The screenplay did not live up to Bancroft’s expectations and she quit, opening the door for Faye Dunaway to star in the most badly reviewed movie of her career. While Dunaway’s ability to portray Crawford was uncanny, the movie utterly failed to give the audience any insight into Crawford, her daughter, or anyone else unfortunate enough to be portrayed in the disjointed tale of child abuse.
“The acting community was not keen about making a film about Joan Crawford,” said Weaver, who assisted Sharaff on the production. “They didn’t want to denigrate her.” By the time Bancroft departed, Sharaff had already finished the designs and was having the clothes made in England because Sharaff believed the better tailors were there. When Dunaway replaced Bancroft, she demanded an entirely new wardrobe. “I didn’t design the clothes for Anne Bancroft, I designed them for Joan Crawford,” she told Dunaway. “That was the beginning of the problems,” Weaver said.
Trepidation permeated Sharaff and Dunaway’s relationship throughout production. Most of the film’s $9.4 million budget was spent on the lavish sets and costumes. “The people who were making these clothes were going berserk,” Sharaff said. “I was going berserk too! I don’t like making actors unhappy in what I design for them. If they dislike something violently, I’ll do something else. I’m not despotic.” But the animosity between Dunaway and Sharaff defied belief. “[Dunaway] would stand for five hours measuring a shoulder pad in a suit, bringing it in a sixteenth of an inch and taking it out a quarter,” Sharaff said. The constant tension week after week took its toll on the seventy-one-year-old designer. By the time Sharaff finished her work on Mommie Dearest, she was finished with Hollywood as well. Although she returned to her Broadway roots and designed for stage productions, she never worked in film again.
Sharaff’s retreat was somewhat surprising. During her forty-three-year film career, she intimidated most everyone in Hollywood. “I liked her, but people were a little scared of her,” colleague Albert Wolsky said. “Lily Fonda (a cutter/fitter) adored her, was scared of her, and respected her a great deal, because she knew she would be pushed into doing wonderful work.” Known around Hollywood as the “Black Widow”—purportedly because she usually wore black—Sharaff left a wake of uneasiness wherever she tread. “People would whisper and get out of her way,” Weaver said, “but she was a lovely person.”
Perhaps Hollywood’s uneasiness stemmed from Sharaff’s thoroughly New Yorker quality. She could seem abrupt. Take her first meeting with Yul Brynner, when Sharaff was designing the wardrobe for the Broadway production of The King and I (1951). She met him as she was going to the Rodgers and Hammerstein office to show her sketches for the first time—“always a pretty frightening ordeal,” Sharaff said. As Sharaff got out of her cab in front of the Look building with her portfolio in hand, Jerome Whyte, the production manager, introduced Sharaff to Brynner.
“What should I do about my hair?” Brynner asked Sharaff. He had a fringe of hair around his head and three strands across the top.
Irene Sharaff (left) fits a costume for the Broadway production of Me and Juliet (1953).
Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron in An American in Paris (1951).
“Shave it off,” Sharaff replied. She would later say she had no idea what prompted her brusque reply.
“I can’t,” Brynner said. “I have a bump on the top of my head.”
“Look, it doesn’t matter. You can’t go on this way. I will have to get you a wig, so why not shave it off? And if you need a wig, we’ll get you a wig. It’s very easy.”
And that was their first meeting. “So he left, looking at me as though I were a monster,” Sharaff said. “I was taking away the last few hairs that he had on his head.” According to Sharaff, Brynner was slow to accept her advice. “He came up for one fitting with Gertie Lawrence and I said, ‘Yul, cut your hair off!’ It wasn’t until we opened in New Haven that he tentatively cut some of it off. Then he finally shaved it all off. It became a ritual each night. He would take an electric razor and just go over his head. I don’t think that made Yul, but it gave him a kind of logo.”
Sharaff’s life and career started and ended on the East Coast. She was born Irene Frances Sharaff on January 23, 1910, in Boston. Her father, Ralph Sharaff, emigrated from Russia in 1892. He married Rose Ethel Levy, a native New Yorker of Russian extraction, in 1900, and their first daughter, Adessa, was born a year later. Ralph spoke Yiddish and worked at a shirt waistcoat company. By 1915, he brought the family to New York, where he also worked in manufacturing. Young Irene grew up surrounded by dressmakers, including the family’s next-door neighbor, and Ralph’s sister, Ada Brenner.
Originally Sharaff wanted to be a painter. She studied at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts and the Arts Students League of New York. In 1928, while she was still a student, Sharaff met actress Eva La Galliene, the founder of the Civic Repertory Theater in New York City. La Galliene arranged for Sharaff to meet the Civic’s scenic and costume designer, Aline Bernstein. Sharaff was hired—though for the first six months she received no salary. The Civic had so little money that Sharaff had to be remarkably inventive with materials—discounted curtain and lampshade fabrics became pirate costumes in Peter Pan, and gold necklaces were fashioned from brass toilet chains from the hardware store.
In 1931, Le Galliene closed the Civic for a year. Sharaff spent the year-long hiatus in Paris, studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and drinking in the theatrical designs of local artists Christian Bérard and Pavel Tchelitchew. She also studied the great designers working in Paris at the time, including Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, to understand perfection in the design and finish of clothes. After five months, Le Galliene visited Sharaff in Paris and asked her to return for the 1932 season at the Civic, offering to let Sharaff design both sets and costumes for the upcoming production of Alice in Wonderland. Sharaff suspected Le Galliene had had too much wine at lunch, but realized she was serious when the script arrived the next day.
Sharaff spent her remaining seven months in Paris working on the designs, which she based on the illustrations from the original book. Although Sharaff’s designs won the Donaldson Award, the revenue from the production was not enough to save the Civic. Sharaff was out of work after the production, but not for long. Irving Berlin, who had seen photographs of Sharaff’s Alice in Wonderland designs, hired her to design a comic strip number and the “Easter Parade” scene in As Thousands Cheer. For the latter sequence, Sharaff chose an unusual palette of brown, sepia, umber, sienna, and taupe. The effect onstage was a fashion parade as it would have looked in the rotogravure section of the New York Times in 1885. Opening on September 30, 1933, As Thousands Cheer ran for an impressive four hundred performances, and Sharaff became an in-demand theater designer. She would go on to design sixty Broadway and London theater productions—thirty-three of them musicals.
An Irene Sharaff sketch for Brigadoon (1954).
Sharaff was one of the few designers to work on the same production for both the Broadway and film versions, including The King and I (1956), West Side Story (1961), Flower Drum Song (1961), and Funny Girl (1968). Working mainly as a freelance designer in Hollywood, Sharaff traversed studios including MGM, Samuel Goldwyn, and RKO. When she arrived at MGM, there was no musical in production, so she was assigned to Madame Curie (1943) with Greer Garson. Film was an entirely different discipline for Sharaff, so beginning on a black-and-white film that was not a musical was an ideal first assignment. Producer Samuel Goldwyn hired Sharaff to design for The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Guys and Dolls (1955), and Porgy and Bess (1959).
Deborah Kerr in The King and I (1956).
Irene Sharaff dresses Elizabeth Taylor for Cleopatra’s entrance into Rome in Cleopatra (1963).
Irene Sharaff’s costume sketch for the entrance into Rome in Cleopatra.
Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).
Between 1943 and 1945, Sharaff worked with the Arthur Freed unit at MGM, designing Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and Yolanda and the Thief (1945). She later contributed designs to An American in Paris (1951). An American in Paris was nearly finished by the time Sharaff reported for work in Los Angeles. Orry-Kelly had done all the contemporary clothes for the film, and Walter Plunkett had done the Beaux Arts Ball sequence. Sharaff designed Leslie Caron’s wardrobe for a series of short dances and the entire “An American in Paris” ballet. Design “a ballet about painters” was the only instruction Sharaff received as she began the sequence. George Gershwin had written the concert piece, but Sharaff was tasked with crafting the libretto. She chose painters who offered the best visual possibilities—Raoul Dufy, Toulouse-Lautrec, Utrillo, Rousseau, Van Gogh, and Monet. Kelly was keen to portray Chocolat, the well-known figure of Montmartre, as a dancer in the Toulouse-Lautrec sequence. Having lived in Paris, Sharaff knew much of the city well. She immersed herself in Gershwin’s music, listening to his score constantly as she worked on the sketches. She had just ten days to get her ideas down on paper. Once completed, her designs, as well as those of art director Preston Ames, were taken to Dore Schary’s office for approval. With just slightly fewer than five hundred costumes, Sharaff likened the ballet sequence to staging a full-scale Broadway show.
In an odd encounter with body dysmorphia, Sharaff found one actress who did not desire a bigger bust, but had a yearning for a smaller neck. “Loretta Young had a perfectly beautiful swanlike neck, but she would have liked to have had two inches cut off of it,” Sharaff said. Young’s neck obsession became problematic during The Bishop’s Wife (1947). “All the tricks of the trade that I could come up with to make her neck look shorter—ruffles or a scarf, even building shoulder pads—she said ‘no’ to. So the only solution was to have a whole body—a cuirass—made out of foam rubber to change the proportions of her figure. Actually she had a good model’s figure—she was very long-waisted and had long legs. I not only had to raise the neck about two inches, but the bosoms and the waistline also had to be raised. It was so unattractive to do that to an attractive human being, when it would have been so simple to do a double collar, a frill, or something. God knows, the clothes were nondescript enough in The Bishop’s Wife!”
Sharaff was regularly requested by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1960s for films, including Cleopatra (1963), The Sandpiper (1965), and The Taming of the Shrew (1967). Sharaff designed the softly pleated silk jersey gown of primrose yellow in which Elizabeth Taylor married Richard Burton the first time.
Oliver Messel had originally been brought in to design the costumes for Cleopatra, but his authentic costumes did not flatter Taylor’s figure. “A high waist, large bosom, short arms, wide hips but no behind—difficult proportions to dress,” Sharaff said of Taylor. “Our problem during Cleopatra was Elizabeth’s gaining weight and taking it off very quickly,” said Margo Baxley, who assisted Sharaff on the production. Director Joseph Mankiewicz also disliked Messel’s designs for costar Rex Harrison. He turned to Sharaff for help. “Look, Irene,” Mankiewicz said, “he looks absolutely ridiculous in these things.” And he did, but it was not Messel’s fault. Harrison usually appeared in beautifully tailored suits. “I don’t know who tailored him in London, but it was always marvelous,” Sharaff said, “but take that away and his arms were too thin. His legs were too bony. He had no chest. His shoulders were not broad enough.”
Costume designs by Irene Sharaff for Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl (1968).
“I remembered Loretta’s cuirass and got a wonderful sculptor in Rome to make a cast of Rex’s body, and we worked from that,” Sharaff said. “I started to do some research, and I had read in Suetonius, ‘Beware of the chap in the long sleeves!’—the loose clothes—so that gave me a clue what to do.” She built up and covered up Harrison, giving him long sleeves, brass breast plates, and thick flowing capes that hit the ground. “I did the equivalent of tights out of leather, and I designed a very long leather jacket for most of the military scenes in which he didn’t wear his cuirass.”
Taylor required sixty-five costume changes—a record at the time. For Cleopatra’s entrance to Rome, Sharaff was expected to design something spectacular, and she did—a cape of twenty-four-carat gold cloth patterned after the wings of a phoenix. Producer Walter Wanger complained about the $2,000 price tag, but each time he told anyone how much it had cost, he inflated the number even higher. At lunch with the Baroness de Rothschild, Wanger claimed that the costume cost $7,000, according to Sharaff. “Oh, that’s nothing,” the baroness purportedly exclaimed, “I can’t even get a raincoat at Balenciaga for that!”
Barbra Streisand in Hello, Dolly! (1969).
In contrast to the extravagant luxury of Cleopatra’s garb, Taylor gladly eschewed glamour for the complex role of bipolar alcoholic Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). “Mike (Nichols) agreed with me that the character of Martha should look like a slob,” Sharaff wrote in her autobiography, “her clothes so commonplace that at a glance she was the one with the disorder and sloppiness, and indifference that reigned in her house.” Sharaff padded Taylor’s hips to make her look more like an aging, unhappy Martha. “I chose suede for the dress that she first appeared in because it is a bulky material that tends to make a person appear heavier. Suede also soaks up the light on a set, so that on film the dress looks dull and tired.”
Sharaff had a willing subject in Taylor, who embraced her character’s wardrobe. “She went the whole way—she didn’t care,” Sharaff said. “This was one of those magic things about Elizabeth that I always remember. If an actress has a rapport with the camera, you can really feel it, and that’s what happened when we did the costume tests for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Burton came on and went through the test halfheartedly. George Segal, who hadn’t done many pictures, was very self-conscious, and Sandy Dennis was scared stiff. But Elizabeth came on—and remember, this was a great challenge for Elizabeth; here she was working with Burton in a very important, heavy role, and Sandy Dennis had gotten so many notices (in the play).
“When Elizabeth came on, everybody around the set—the stagehands, the cameraman, the wardrobe people—was absolutely hypnotized, and you felt it. The moment that camera started to buzz something happened between Elizabeth and that mechanical thing. Cukor said it once, ‘It’s the camera that chooses the star.’”
Sharaff designed the costumes for the Broadway and film versions of Funny Girl. Newcomer Barbra Streisand intrigued her. During fittings, Streisand impersonated stars like Greta Garbo when trying on the clothes. Streisand also seemed to exhaust herself attempting to micromanage every aspect of production, overthinking camera angles, lighting, and even the kind of film to use, Sharaff said. During their next collaboration, Hello, Dolly! (1969), Sharaff finally asked Streisand why she attempted to involve herself in so many aspects of production when she clearly found that process so stressful. She had “to be able to suffer to perform,” the actress replied.
Sharaff was nominated for the Oscar fifteen times and won for An American in Paris (1951), The King and I (1956), West Side Story (1961), Cleopatra (1963), and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Sharaff maintained a long-term relationship with the Chinese writer and painter Mai-Mai Sze. Though Sharaff never publicly acknowledged that she was a lesbian, she lived openly with Sze and was frequently photographed with her. Costume designer Florence Klotz maintained a similar relationship with Ruth Mitchell, who was Hal Prince’s producing partner. “It’s a generational thing,” costume designer Gary Jones said. “These women were together at parties, in that they were in the same room, together, but they couldn’t operate the way they do now. In the 1960s or 1970s, I don’t think they would have denied it, but I don’t think the word lesbian would have come out of their mouths.” (Klotz was described as Mitchell’s companion in Mitchell’s obituary in 2000.) Mai-Mai Sze died in New York in 1992, and Sharaff followed a year later, dying of congestive heart failure, complicated by emphysema, on August 10, 1993. Sharaff’s obituary made no mention of Sze.