The Dress Detective, Case #735/b

The first day I saw the Orange Lady it was October and the smog hung low in a fair attempt at a moody atmosphere in Los Angeles.

The film industry was slow and jobs in wardrobe on movie sets were few and far between. I’d been lucky to find a steady but flexible “job between jobs” at a little place tucked in the corner of one of the more established wardrobe rental houses for the motion picture industry. We ferreted out old costumes and prop film memorabilia and sold them off, either directly or through auction, to collectors: a passionate and strange mix of old film buffs, the new rich and celebrity souvenir hunters.

On this particular afternoon, I was going through a batch of uncatalogued vintage items purchased from the legendary Paramount Studios. Paramount liquidated their wardrobe stock when they closed down the costume department just a few years ago.

Organizing, writing descriptions, and researching the costume pieces to find which films they belonged to may sound tedious. It is tedious—but can be secretly satisfying for the obsessive-compulsive.

Gregory Peck in Twelve O'Clock High

Every day, I’d unlock the door to the small and windowless back storage area crammed with floor to ceiling racks, push my way past a rainbow of dusty tulle, sequins and ruffles, and begin a new series of miniature treasure hunts. I was handling some beautiful old Hollywood pieces worn by some of my favorite actors, including Veronica Lake, Maureen O’Hara, and Gregory Peck (oh, Gregory! What a man…)

I took each piece down from a wall-long rack of two hundred garments, checking each inside for clues to their origins. That’s how we met.

She didn’t walk into my office, light a cigarette and tell me she was in trouble, but she might as well have. She was built for drama.

Bright and beautiful, the silk charmeuse gown was designed in the elegant Empire style, suitable for Napoleonic-era stories set in the early 1800’s. It had a slight pointed train, high Empire waist with silver tissue across the bust, short slashed sleeves and intricate silver glass beading around the hem.

Unlike many of the other garments, which had fallen victim to decades of dust and bad storage, this one was in incredible condition. The beading was intact, the hem wasn’t torn or frayed and the silk, a fabric not known to keep itself together over time, was perfect and unfaded.

It hadn’t seen the light of day, sandwiched between other dresses on an overstuffed rack for so long that it had miraculously escaped deterioration.

What I found inside was also unusual: not the small, white, ubiquitous Paramount label sewn inside with an actor’s name written in faded black ink, but a large printed label from the unfamiliar BJ Simmons Theatrical and Court Costumers, in London.

It was inscribed “Miss Titheradge.”

Hello, Orange Lady.

Madge

I hoped Miss Titheradge wouldn’t be an extra—rarely credited studio contract “chorus” members who performed in countless films. Luckily, a unique character name is the friend of Internet searches, and in half an hour I knew a lot.

Madge Titheradge came from a theatrical family, debuting in the London theatre at age 15 just after the turn of the last century. She became a popular actress, starring in silent films from 1915 to 1920, and continuing in stage productions until 1938. She had an older sister who was also an actress, but my Guy Noir detective nose told me this was the right lady. Except – none of her films were Paramount Pictures.

Rats.

Ok, no problem. Costumes sometimes moved back and forth between studios in circuitous ways. I decided to look into the BJ Simmons Costume Company printed on the label. It turns out too many men in this world are named “BJ Simmons,” but finally I got a hit.

The clue came from the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin Costume Design Records Index, the Congressional Library of wardrobe history.

But no, they wouldn’t, couldn’t, have anything as far back as a forgotten actress from the early part of the 20^th century, could they?

Yes they could, bless them. God, I love archivists: the protectors of all that is dusty and random.

I called, thinking I’d reach out and touch someone the old fashioned way, and the person I reached gave me…. an email address. OK, great! I sent off a very polite request for any records relating to Madge Titheradge, popped in some pictures of the dress and label, and kept my fingers crossed for any clue at all. I was hoping for one line in a ledger with a production name to go on.

This was October 25, 2007.

I got an answer five days later:

“. . .The only reference to Ms. Titheradge in the BJ Simmons archive is to her role as Baroness Ostermann in “Such Men are Dangerous” (Job #772, b.165.5-7),” wrote the research associate for the Performing Arts Collection. “I have attached an image of a costume design for “Ostermann, 1^st Entrance” which is similar to your dress.  I hope you find it useful . . ..”

Wonder of wonders! An original costume design sketch?  I opened up the attachment, and was stunned. It was improbable that both the dress and the sketch would both be in existence, but there it was, in all of its bright orange glory.

I said I love archivists, right?

Intoxicated by this new information, I dove right in. Immediate frustration – searches for “Such Men Are Dangerous”, which does have a Baroness Ostermann character, and “Titheradge” didn’t lead anywhere,

Then I came across a German play, Der Patriot, written by Alfred Neumann, and adapted by Ashley Dukes into English, who was also credited with “Such Men Are Dangerous” in 1928. Both were semi-biographical stories about the mad Czar Paul I of Russia, betrayal, political upheaval, assassination plots, and all the good stuff that makes for an entertaining historical costume drama.

Deeply ashamed that I had even flirted with the thought that the good people at the University of Texas had misfiled something, I got it. Two names, one play.

The Patriot, Take One

Sir John Gielgud

Madge Titheradge played Anna, Baroness Ostermann in the 1928 Broadway production of The Patriot at the then-newly built Majestic Theatre on West 44^th Street in New York, the same play in which the now legendary Oscar and Tony Award winning actor Sir John Gielgud made his Broadway debut.

The Patriot and Titheradge are mentioned in Gielgud’s memoirs, A Life in Letters, and I found several contemporary reviews in the New York Times archives. I contacted the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which had a collection that included photos of the play.

I even had my little sister, currently in graduate school at the University of Chicago, act as my girl Friday and check on a photo collection that included Titheradge in her school library. I hoped, insanely, that I could track down a picture of Miss Titheradge in the dress.

I needed a paper trail or photographic evidence to get the dress from London to New York. I knew she was my Orange Lady, but I needed proof.

Nada. Zip.

Then I hit up the archives at the Schubert Organization in New York, which now owns the Majestic Theatre (archivists!). They emailed a copy of the original theater program. To me. For free. Stunned again.

On page 15, right across from the ad for Pep-O-Mint Lifesavers (“The prologue to every good show” – I guess the wrappers weren’t as loud in 1928), and above the theatre exit diagram: Proof.

“Miss Titheradge’s, Mr. Faber’s and Mr. Gielgud’s costumes by Simmons of London.”

Reality

I was done! I’d solved the mystery of my Orange Lady.

Oh silly, silly me.

I had been doing the research on my own time.  I’d fallen in love with the story and the history, and had forgotten the point of all this.

Money. It’s always about the money and where the interest lies. The dress had to sell, and the reality is this: there isn’t a lot of interest in old Broadway costumes from forgotten theatrical stars. There isn’t much interest in theatre anymore, period.

People are interested in what they can see, and continue to see. A living visual record that others will also recognize. Madge Titheradge may have been a star in her day, but she’s gone from our consciousness because of time, a lack of photographic record, and our modern mercurial relationship with fame and the famous.

A T-shirt worn by a background actor in The Terminator is worth more than this verifiable historical artifact with a narrative and an improbable amount of provenance. The dress belongs in a museum, but the memorabilia business isn’t much on donation.

I was left with the other half of this mystery, the half I had forgotten in my theatrically-disposed zeal. How did this dress make it from Broadway to Paramount Studios, and more importantly, can it be seen on film?

The Patriot, Take Two

Back to IMDB. On a whim, I checked for “The Patriot”, and I felt like an idiot.

In 1928 Paramount made a silent film adaptation of the play using some of the most prestigious names in Hollywood, directed by the great Ernst Lubitsch, and starring Emil Jannings, the first actor to win an Academy Award, and Florence Vidor as Baroness Ostermann. It was the last silent film to be nominated for Best Picture Academy Award (the only one nominated that year, or any other year after that). It won an Oscar for Best Writing, and was nominated for Best Actor, Best Art Direction, and Best Director.

Paydirt! This was too good to be true. All of the connections for this random treasure languishing in a storage space in North Hollywood. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy and see if the dress was also worn by – could it be hoped – silent film legend Florence Vidor in such a significant film?

And then I read, “Only pieces of this film are left; there is no complete copy. It is the only Best Picture nominee for which no complete or near-complete copy exists”, and proceeded to bash my head into the table.

Screw it. I was going to find a picture if it killed me.

I went straight to a contact at Paramount Studios, which is fortunately still headquartered here in Los Angeles, along with their archives, and got the bad news. Most of their silent film era history had been tossed out in the early 80’s. Another reason to hate that decade. No film stills existed, apart from those I had already found in an Internet search, which yielded nothing. They did have something for me, though.

According to a production ledger in the Paramount archives, The Patriot was shot in Los Angeles. The play closed after only ten performances, on January 28, 1928. The film didn’t premiere until August 17, 1928. Aha! Paramount still had studios in New York in 1928 and it was not unusual for them to purchase the costumes from a closed Broadway production if they were producing the film version of the play, and ship the costumes to Los Angeles. Finally, the missing New York to Hollywood link.

Great…. But still no proof, no pictures, no film.

Thwarted

I was getting discouraged. I had located the trailer for the film at the UCLA film archives, which shows Emil Jannings bellowing (silently).

One last morsel of hope: a lone reel at the Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museo do Cinema. The Portuguese Film Archives.

I sent off an email on January 12, 2009, over a year after I’d first met the Orange Lady.

Two days later, this arrived: “Following your communication we inform you that the Access to our collection is provided at our archive. For that we need to receive information regarding your research context and aims.”

Let me amend a previous statement: I love most archivists.

I’m saving up for Portugal. Who knows – I might try to crash the gates and the Orange Lady herself may be there, striding on to the screen in the light of an old projector. But maybe not.

So there she hangs, just as she has for the last 81 years, waiting for someone who appreciates a good story and theatre history, the imagination to fill in the blanks. Until then, she’ll just be waiting, hanging around, until her next dramatic scene unfolds.

–Sierra Robinson

Sierra Bay Robinson ’97 is a motion picture costumer in Los Angeles. She is a member of SAG and IATSE Local 705 and a designer of clothing she hopes is half as cool as Madge’s.

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