Word: edith
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Highest-ranked of the practitioners of this tricky craft is a little (5 ft. 1 in.) Californian of 52 named Edith Head, boss designer at Paramount since 1937. In her autobiography The Dress Doctor (Little, Brown; $3.95; written with Jane Kessner Ardmore) Edith gushily suggests that a designer must drop names as fast as she picks up stitches...
Designer Head is most impressed by actresses who are themselves designing women. Edith's first solo effort on a movie, She Done Him Wrong (1933), was a remake of Broadway's Diamond Lil and brought her measure to measure with Mae West's 38-24-38. "I like 'em tight, girls," growled Mae, and was soon jammed into costumes in which she could not "lie, bend or sit." So that West could relax a bit between takes, a board was set up for her to lean against. Marlene Dietrich, arriving for a fitting, "quickly peels down...
...next dozen years, blonde, blue-eyed Columnist Edwards was as sassy as she could be for Lord Beaverbrook's bustling Daily Express (circ. 4,084,603). Her weekly 8-in. column grew to a half page as she worked over tempting targets, from Labor's formidable Dr. Edith Summerskill ("Flossie bang-bang") to Queen Elizabeth; she once ran a picture showing the rumpled derriere of the Queen's gown, cattily commented that wrinkleproof fabric evidently was unknown at Buckingham Palace. Drawn by Anne's sharp, sure feline touch, women formed fully 46% of the Daily Express...
...Regis Maisonette in a $1,000 spangled black velvet gown, and she sings the song with gay sophistication. Blonder Lilo bounces about the Plaza's Persian Room in brief white tights, and sings La Vie with brassy triumph. But tiny (4 ft. 10 in.), frizzle-topped Edith Piaf wears a shapeless black silk dress and sings the tune (which she herself wrote twelve years ago) as a lament for everything that ever went wrong with love in Paris or anywhere else. Aging (43) Piaf seems hardly to have changed since she first appeared in Manhattan in 1947. Suave Vicky...
Montmartre Authority. Edith Piaf is still incredibly corny, but with such artful simplicity that the corn becomes completely convincing. Arms akimbo and skinny legs aspraddle, her only jewelry a silver crucifix, accompanying musicians hidden behind a curtain, she stares past the spotlight and pounds honest emotion into some wretched lyrics ("When at last our life is through, I shall share eternity with you"). Since most of her songs are in French, Piaf prefaces them with a dry, straightforward English precis ("She meets her lover; he goes away; she weeps"). But the translation is seldom necessary. Her hands and face...