Haute History: Vera West
The Unsolved Mystery of an American Costume Designer's Death
On Sunday, June 29, 1947, at about 3:30 AM, Robert “Bob” Landry was coming home to the guest house he rented. His landlords were ex-Universal Pictures costume designer Vera West and her husband, Jacques “Jack” C. West. Landry told reporters “I always come in the back way…but I heard the dogs fretting and I saw that all the lights were on in the house, so I started to investigate. The body was already floating.” Landry had heard West’s two Scottish terriers, Duffie and Tammie, distressed and whimpering beside the “red and blue tiled” swimming pool, and he went to check on them. In the pool, floating face-down, was Vera West, dressed in her nightgown. She had just turned 47; it had been her birthday on Friday. Landry called the police, who immediately came out to the “sprawling Ranch home” in North Hollywood, 5119 Bluebelle Avenue.
The officers who responded to the scene, and the reporters who quickly followed, turned up a variety of clues and stories, very few which were actually investigated. A search of the home would turn up an empty bottle of sleeping pills, but these would be excused away as both husband and wife both used them regularly. They found two notes in Vera’s bedroom, both on torn greeting cards, both addressed to ‘Jack Chandler’.
“This is the only way. I am tired of being blackmailed,”
“The fortune teller told me there was only one way to duck the blackmail I’ve paid for 23 years – death.”
Everyone assumed that the scrawls were intended for Vera’s husband, which seems reasonable, at least at first. Jack said that he found out about his wife’s demise from a newspaper headline he’d read while staying at a hotel in Beverly Hills. The day before West died, the day after her birthday, the couple had been fighting; Jack told the police that they had a “violent quarrel.” He said that Vera threatened to contact a divorce attorney come Monday morning as “she had threatened to do many times before.”
Jack said he stormed out, started to drive north to Santa Barbara, but gave up and spent the night in his car before driving back to Beverly Hills and checking into his hotel. He blamed her apparent suicide on their marital problems, and appeared baffled by the notes she had left behind. He told Sergeant R.P. Kealy that Vera suffered from a “persecution complex,” and explained away the blackmail references by saying that his wife “was always imagining things like that. There was absolutely no blackmail involved. She just imagined it.” He stated emphatically that the cards were “gremlins of my wife’s imagination.” Jack told the police that he was thoroughly acquainted with his wife’s finances, and that there was nothing to suggest blackmail in her records, and mentioned that her behavior had become increasingly erratic. Later, he told Lyman A. Garber, his attorney, that Vera did not know how to swim, and that she “hated the water.” Apparently the only way she was comfortable sitting by the pool was when her husband was with her. After the initial meeting with the police, Jack would only communicate through his attorney.
Vera West had many assistants working under her at Universal, including Adele Palmer, Brymer, David Cox, Ernest Dryden, Doris Zinkeisne, Kathryn Kuhn, Muriel King. It doesn’t seem that any of them were interviewed following her death, not as suspects, but to fill in any blanks about the marriage, the tenant, the fortune teller, blackmailer or mental illness.
There are no records to indicate that the police ever followed up on Jack’s story; it doesn’t appear that her bank records were ever examined by authorities. Stopping to sleep in his car on the side of the road, halfway through an impulsive late-night road trip to Santa Barbara is not an easily verifiable alibi. The press, in their very brief coverage of West’s death, painted a conflicting story. Immediately following her death, the The New York Times and the The Miami Daily News Ran stories. The Times reported that the case was under investigation, an article which was never followed up on. When first interviewed Jack would tell reporters that he had been “out-of-town on business” on when Vera died. Though West was famous, there was barely any coverage of of her death, past the initial reporting that it had occurred. The autopsy was done by Dr. Marvin Goodwin, and his report suggested that she died from “asphyxia, probably due to drowning” but the senior coroner, Dr. Frederick Newbarr, refused to sign the report.
Friends of Vera, including actress Ella Raines and designer Yvonne Wood, would cast suspicion on the suicide theory, and both suggested that Vera’s marriage was in such a shambles; that perhaps her death had been made to look like a suicide. A lot of questions were never asked, let alone answered, by any authorities, at least not publically. Vera West’s death was declared a suicide.
Jack immediately sold the contents of the Bluebelle Avenue home, which the couple had custom built about a decade earlier. When empty, Jack had the entire property bulldozed and sold the land to developers before he disappeared completely. Three houses were soon built on the property that had been the West’s home. Before and after Vera’s death, Jack (remember that this was a nickname, that his real name was Jacques) was known to use aliases. There is very little documentation about his life, period. There are records that indicate that he was a salesman and then at some point during his marriage owned or ran a cosmetics company. After 1948, one year after Vera’s death, there are no records at all.
Vera West was a costume and apparel designer, who had been living and working in Hollywood since the mid 1920s. Much of her career was at Universal Pictures; as Head Designer she created or supervised the costuming for more that 400 films made between 1928 and 1946. She also designed the personal wardrobes for many of the studios biggest stars.
West was born Vera Flounders on June 26, 1898, though her birth year is commonly reported as 1900. She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, her father, Emer Lovell, was a sheet metal worker, her mother died when she was only two. Emer Lovell would remarry and have two children with his new wife, Clara Ringe, though their son died in infancy. Lovell died in 1917, which is about when West began to work as a dressmaker, presumably to support her sister and stepmother.
West got her degree at the Philadelphia Institute of Design, after she worked at an atelier owned by Lucille, Lady Duff-Gordon in New York City. (Sidenote: Gordon was both a survivor of the sinking of the Titanic and was the inventor of the ‘Mannequin Parade’ – what we would today think of as a fashion show.) In New York, historian W. Robert Lavine says that “she [Vera] learned how to get along with rich, often spoiled women who demanded special attention.” It appears that Lucille had taken West under her wing, mentored the young designer. Then something happened in the early 1920s, a mysterious scandal (Baby? Crime? Lover?) that cut short West’s tenure in New York. Whatever happened, it was significant enough that it ended her east coast life entirely. West had married in 1924, to Stephen D. Kille, but when she moved to Los Angeles shortly after, it was without him. There do not seem to be any records of a divorce, but Kille did not die until 1931, and Vera married Jacques West around 1930. So it is possible that she was, technically, a polygamist, and 23 years after 1924 is 1947, the year Vera died.
Almost immediately upon arriving in Hollywood, she was hired by Universal Pictures’ costume design department, first assisting Lucia Coulter, who was 63 when West was hired in 1924. In 1927 she became Head Designer. Most of her work was for horror movies, period pieces, and science fiction. Some of the most iconic screen heroine looks of the era were her designs, including The Bride of Frankenstein, Dressed To Kill, Dracula and The Mummy. She didn’t design the monsters themselves; she made the frothy gowns the leading ladies wore (often the hats perched on her starlets’ heads were designed by Lily Dache). Most sources say that Ed Ware designed the men’s costumes in these films, though this is difficult to confirm as much of his work was uncredited. Some sources say that West made “modifications” to the men’s costuming.
This was the era of the Studio System, so we know these people in film were most likely working under domineering contracts with tricky morality clauses. Vera started with uncredited costume design work, on Boris Karloff’s first Frankenstien movie and for Bela Lugosi’s English language Dracula. Her first credited film for Universal was 1928’s The Man Who Laughs. She worked on many of James Whale’s films with Universal (between 1931-1937, his career ended over 1937’s The Road Back), including Elsa Lancaster’s gowns in The Bride of Frankenstein.
West had a system for the characters she dressed. In the first act of a film, she dressed her leading ladies in snappy suits of wool or tweed. The next act was a slinky evening gown. Almost always, the third major costume was a white gown, often satin, nightgown or a formal dress, sometimes a wedding gown, for a scene that was almost always at night. While it is not made explicitly clear that these white dresses (when not wedding gowns) were intended as an explicit hint that a wedding occurred before anything too ‘romantic’ happened on screen, given the (post 1934) Hays Code, it is pretty likely that a semblance of pre-marital chastity was a studio requirement.
In 1946 West resigned from her position at Universal; supposedly she had become tired of making movies. It is worth mentioning that when she left, International Pictures was merging with Universal (would become Universal-International). William Goetz, son-in-law of Louis B, Mayer became Head Of Production and was intent on taking the studio in “a new direction.” West left the studio and opened a boutique, or an atelier, a business at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. As always, her clients were very wealthy women; actresses, socialites, the wives of film studio executives. Then about a year later, she was dead.
When West died, Bob Landry was 33, it’s not entirely clear why he was staying with her, or if he was working at the time. The impression seems to be that he was recovering from the assignments he took during the Second World War, and there are references to work on a Hollywood project. There is also a claim that Landry was retired when he moved into West’s guest house. He photographed the Korean War, toured with fellow photojournalist Sandy Cohen in the 1950s. He was later a part of an effort to create an agency working to protect photographer’s copyrights for their own work, a company called Maganum. On May 24, 1954 Landry was killed when he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam while on an assignment.
Vera West is buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles. She never received any awards for her design work, possibly because the Academy Award for Costume Design was not an existing category while she was working. It was awarded for the first time in 1948, about two years after her retirement and a year or so after her death. In 2005 she was inducted into the Costume Designers Guild Hall of Fame