Production Design: Gene Allen

Iris, Allen's wife of over four decades, offers us coffee, as Allen acknowledges that he's well aware his film output seems meager when compared to that of some colleagues. He jokes that a British biographer once noted that "Mr. Allen must be extremely selective." But, in fact, Allen says he just didn't want to be consumed by the motion picture business, despite offers to scamper up the ladder of clout. "Jack Warner wanted me to produce," Allen says modestly, "and I had offers to direct, which I could have done. After ten years with George Cukor, I could have directed anything. Audrey Hepburn [with whom Allen had worked in My Fair Lady] said to me, 'Gene, what's taking you so long? Be sure to remember me when you do your first picture.' But I had a family. I didn't want to become a seven-day-a-week man."

Oscar-nominated for A Star Is Born and Les Gills (which lost to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Sayonara, respectively), Allen finally won his Oscar for My Fair Lady, against stiff competition [Mary Poppins, Becket, The Unsinkable Molly Brown and What a Way to Go). He shared the honor with Cecil Beaton, who had designed the landmark musical on Broadway and finagled a production design credit for the film although, at least according to Allen, he designed only the costumes. Beaton, who has been described in biographies as shamelessly self-mythologiz-ing, took most of the credit for Allen's work, going so far as to make sketches from completed models and exhibit them as Beaton design drawings.

Twenty-five years after the fact, Allen is willing to state with delighted irony: "Cecil Beaton had nothing to do with the sets of My Fair Lady. He was never involved in the filming. He hated the Wimpole Street I built, he hated Higgins's house--he said it was too 'baronial.' "Even mild-mannered Cukor grew weary of Beaton, who had taken to dragging Audrey Hepburn off for still photo sessions when she was needed on the set. Allen, vindicated in part by longevity, is almost impish when he hefts the gilt Academy statuette and points out that his name comes first. "I don't know if it's alphabetical or in order of importance," he chuckles.

Allen's justly celebrated design for My Fair Lady is a particularly winning use of the sleight of hand employed by all good production designers. Though Allen conducted meticulous research into period historical photographs of Edwardian London, his response is a study in contrasts: for the early scenes in Covent Garden, the working-class background that flowergirl Eliza Doolittle longs to escape, Allen ordered up a realistic, brick-and-cobblestone recreation; but for the Ascot races, which serves as Eliza's introduction to the rarefied world of high society, Allen created trompe l'oeil sets to depict the way outsider Eliza might see it--all heightened fantasy. The trick is in finding a visual style so that these choices mesh in the mind of the viewer, a seeming seamlessness.

But making movies after the commercial and artistic success of My Fair Lady provided a significant number of disappointments for Allen. There were half a dozen Cukor projects that never saw film, even though research, designs and sometimes even the sets were fully complete. Over a year was spent on Nine Tiger Man, a drama set in Victorian India that would have starred Robert Shaw, and more than a year on what turned out to be Marilyn Monroe's last studio assignment, Something's Got to Give. "Cukor was very fond of Marilyn," Allen recalls, "and thought she had a terrific talent. He went out of his way to help her, even when things got really bad."

Though filming on 1960's Let's Make Love had gone tolerably well, Monroe's chronic demons so plagued Something's Got to Give that Fox pulled the plug on their problematic blonde before the production was finished. The film was eventually made after Monroe's death in 1962 as Move Over, Darling with Doris Day in the Monroe role--and without Cukor or Allen. Move Over, Darling was shot, however, on Allen's set (a meticulous recreation of Cukor's own home), for which Allen received no credit whatever.

His last movie assignment was in 1975, on Peter Bogdanovich's catastrophic Burt Reynolds/Cybill Shepherd musical, At Long Last Love, which Allen describes as "the worst picture ever made."

Mementos of Allen's career fill his home library: the leatherbound script of The Chapman Report, which Allen wound up writing as well as designing for Cukor in 1962; Ron Haver's book about the recent restoration of A Star Is Born; a carved wood and black leather armchair used by Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda in The Cheyenne Social Club (which Allen designed for director Gene Kelly in 1970); his collection of Impressionist art tomes, which he finds invaluable as inspiration in his research ("That little flicker of light the Impressionists capture is just like a single frame of film," he says with touching affection); and, of course, his Oscar, for the art direction of My Fair Lady.

In a corner behind a paint-ing-in-progress are a half-dozen simply framed photographs, including signed portraits of George Cukor, Audrey Hepburn, and Ava Gardner. An entire wall is covered with plaques commemorating services rendered and achievements duly rewarded.

Though these days Allen's executive director of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Art Directors (and was a recent president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences), don't count him out: he's not ready to wash Hollywood out of his hair. What would it take to get him back into the fray? "Not much. Not money, not fame, just a good cast of characters to work with. It would have to be a special project for me to really get back into it, but I'd like to do a good story about people by a sensitive director. After all, I feel like I'm only thirty-five."

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Michael Lassell is a writer and photographer, and the managing editor of L.A. Style magazine.

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