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Loretta Young and Fashion

“A charming woman...

doesn't follow the crowd. She is herself.”

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EDWARD STEICHEN: IN HIGH FASHION

CHANGING THE FACE OF FASHION

The Condé Nast Years 1923-1937 by William A. Ewing and Todd Brandow

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Actress Loretta Young, who made as many as seven or eight movies a year, won an Oscar in 1947 for her performance in 'The Farmer's Daughter.' In 1949 Young received another Academy Award nomination for 'Come to the Stable,' and in 1953, she appeared in her last film, 'It Happens Every Thursday.' Here, she is photographed by Cecil Beaton in the October 1931 Vanity Fair.

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THE IMAGE is frozen in the scrapbook of memory: Loretta Young twirling through the door in an elegant gown to introduce her weekly television show.

Even now, more than 30 years after the last episode was broadcast, a visitor to Miss Young's home in this fashionable desert community is instructed by office colleagues -- old enough to remember -- to make special note of how she enters the room.

Will she waltz through the door? Or float gracefully down the stairs?

Forget that this classic beauty of television and screen is now 82. Can she still make an entrance?

"Do you know how it came about?" Miss Young says, referring to her famed entrance. Nestling comfortably in an adjoining room, an intimate space where Tiffany lamps illuminate a full-length oil portrait of her circa 1930, she continues: "It was to save the feelings of Marusha, the dress designer for the show. She'd made a beautiful dress, all draped to the back. The plan was that I'd just open the door, walk toward the camera and say, 'Good evening.'

"I did that and the director said fine, but I noticed Marusha pouting in a corner.

"I asked, 'What's wrong?' And she said, 'No one will see the wonderful back of the dress.'

To mollify the designer, Miss Young asked for a retake in which she pirouetted before walking toward the camera.

Millions remember her best for "The Loretta Young Show." In the half-hour series, which ran from 1953 to 1961, Miss Young played everyone from Queen Nefertiti to a nightclub singer in wholesome, sentimental skits. At the end of the show, she would deliver a homily to the audience. She won the first of three Emmys in 1953, making her the first actress to garner both an Oscar and an Emmy.

She rhapsodizes about Hollywood's golden era of movies, when leading ladies fell in love with their leading men, actors worked for studios and stars wouldn't be caught in public looking grungy.

The huge doe-eyes bat flirtatiously one moment and well with tears the next. The long fingers are constantly in motion -- punching the air to emphasize a point, framing the face, folding and unfolding. Her speech is punctuated with "dear" and "lovely."

It becomes clear as afternoon stretches into evening that Miss Young's dramatic gestures are not mere affectations. After all, this is a woman who at age 4, playing the part of a fairy in the silent film "The Primrose Ring," knew she wanted to be a movie star.

"Not an actress, mind you," she declares. "A movie star."

And they don't make stars the way they used to, in Miss Young's opinion.

Though she relishes her reminiscences, Miss Young says this is the happiest time of her life.

She admits having had crushes on all her leading men, a virtual "Hollywood Who's Who" -- Tracy, Gable, Rudolph Valentino, Jimmy Cagney, Cary Grant, Tyrone Power, Jimmy Stewart and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

"I've always been very susceptible to men, and all of them were gorgeous," she recalls with a sparkle in her gray eyes. "I was reared with women and understand everything about them. And I love them in spite of themselves. Men, I don't know anything about really."

When talk shifts to Mr. Louis's fashions, Miss Young giggles with delight.

"Jean Louis was a genius, in that he dressed a woman's body," she said. "He didn't make a dress, then put it on the woman. There is a difference."

She searches through a hall closet, overflowing with evening wear, for one of the gowns Mr. Louis designed for her over 30 years. On the shelf above her head, her visitor spots her Emmys and Oscar.

"Mother put them in the closet," she says nonchalantly. "Mother used to always say: 'Oscar will upstage you. Why not put it in the coat closet? That way, people will get to see it when they get their coats.' "

She retrieves a cranberry beaded gown and its matching velvet coat, trimmed with mink cuffs and collar.

A few months ago, she wore the dress to a retrospective in Palm Springs honoring Mr. Louis.

"I arrived wearing this, in my 1967 sable-and-sand Rolls-Royce, with Jean Louis on my arm."

She smiles. "Every now and then, you just have to be Loretta Young."

Designer Jean Louis created 52 signature gowns for Loretta Young to wear on her 1953-61 series The Loretta Young Show. "Jean felt it was important to see the woman," says Young, who married Louis in 1993, "not the dress."

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