As a young woman, Theadora Van Runkle was desperately trying to break into show business while struggling to make ends meet. She had already spent several years in the Hollywood wilderness, illustrating fashion designs for the May Company and drawing at night while holding her children in her lap, when one Sunday afternoon she was hand-watering the roses in her garden. A rainbow suddenly appeared in her sprinkler.
“I just felt the presence of a great spirit,” the Oscar-nominated costume designer recalled years later for the Oral History project at the Margaret Herrick Library. Van Runkle had a message for the spirit: “I said, ‘Please, please give me some recognition for my artwork, I beg of you!’”
The following morning, she received an unexpected phone call from the costume designer Dorothy Jeakins, who had hired her as a sketch artist several years earlier—and then fired her after a month.
This time, Jeakins told Van Runkle that Warren Beatty and director Arthur Penn were producing “a little cowboy movie” about two Depression-era bank robbers and needed a costume designer. “It’s just a very small thing, and you can do it,” she said.
Instead of going to Warner Bros., Van Runkle went straight to Beatty’s penthouse, at the Beverly Wilshire, where she met with Beatty and Penn. The actor’s career was at a turning point. He had lived down a negative article about him in The New Yorker that “really reduced him to nothing more than a lover boy,” Van Runkle recalled.
Beatty and Penn were impressed with her portfolio, but the next time they met, Beatty told her they couldn’t hire her because she wasn’t in the Costume Designers Guild. Van Runkle leapt across the room and grabbed Beatty by the shirt. “You’ve got to hire me!”
“O.K., O.K.,” he said.
In an early meeting, Van Runkle asked Beatty, “Who are you going to cast as Bonnie?”
“I’m casting Natalie Wood,” he said.
“Oh, you can’t. She isn’t right.”
“Well, if you know so much, look through this and find me somebody,” Beatty told Van Runkle, tossing the New York casting book toward her.
Flipping through the book, Van Runkle stopped on the headshot of a newcomer named Faye Dunaway: “This is what you want.”
Van Runkle had her first job on a Hollywood movie, but as a self-taught novice, she found little encouragement in the industry. “Nobody in the wardrobe department would help me,” Van Runkle remembered, so she turned to Walker Evans’s Depression-era photographs “to get me in the mood” for Bonnie and Clyde, but “that was about the extent of the research. The rest, right or wrong, was out of my own head.”
Bonnie and Clyde was costumed before the popularity of vintage clothes, so the kinds of outfits she wanted “were all up in somebody’s attic.” Van Runkle found the foulard she tied around Dunaway’s neck at a small store in Beverly Hills. She remembered making Beatty’s pinstripe suit, and layering two or three T-shirts underneath his shirt “so he’d appear more beefy.... Everybody starved themselves by 1970, but at this time he still wanted to be big.”
Flipping through the book, Van Runkle stopped on the headshot of a newcomer named Faye Dunaway: “This is what you want.”
Bonnie’s beret was taken right from an actual photograph of the two outlaws. “Luck was with me,” Van Runkle remembered. “It just turned out that Faye looks ravishing in berets.” As a result of the movie, beret orders more than doubled, to 12,000 a week. Grateful milliners would approach the costume designer at parties “with tears streaming down their faces,” Van Runkle said.
Some of her colleagues criticized Dunaway’s sleek bob—“the arrow cut,” re-interpreted by Vidal Sassoon—which was more in the spirit of the Swinging 60s than Depression-era America. But Van Runkle defended the choice because it looked great under a beret, reminding her critics, “It’s the movies! Glamour and beauty come first.”
When Penn first saw Van Runkle’s designs, he said, “If the film is as good as your costumes, we’ll have a hit!” To the astonishment of Warner Bros., Bonnie and Clyde became one of the top five grossing films of 1967 and won two Academy Awards, for best supporting actress and best cinematography.
But the real validation of Van Runkle’s costuming was how much her unfussy, wearable designs were adopted by the fashion world. “The fantasy of the star is over,” she said. “We are designing realistically, as opposed to the past, when one could dream up 65 expensive dresses for Joan Crawford in the role of a shopgirl.”
“Every so often somebody does a Bonnie line, to this day!” she remarked decades later. “This tailleur casual look speaks for the liberated woman of the 20th century.”
From Riches to Rags
“I always tell people I was born in L.A., but the truth is, I was born somewhere mysterious,” Van Runkle said, “somewhere in Pittsburgh.” Her father was Courtney Schweppe, an heir to the Schweppes beverage fortune, but her unmarried parents separated, and her mother, Eltsey Adair, decamped to California with a young Van Runkle in tow.
At the age of five, Van Runkle was sent to the private San Marino Hall School for Girls, in South Pasadena. A bored and indifferent student, she came to life the one semester she spent at Beverly Hills High. “All the girls had such beautiful clothes,” she recalled.” The theatrical events were just fabulous, and everybody seemed to be beautiful.”
But that paradise was painfully brief. “I failed at everything,” she said. Van Runkle dropped out of high school in the 10th grade and found a job downtown selling art supplies.
Looking back, Van Runkle felt that she “was never encouraged in any way.” Her mother would laugh at her “attempts to sew,” and her stepfather would “tear up” her watercolors. “I don’t know where what little self-esteem I had came from,” she said.
As a result of the movie, beret orders more than doubled. Grateful milliners would approach the costume designer at parties “with tears streaming down their faces.”
When Van Runkle was 13, her stepfather committed suicide. “It was a relief in a way because he was a horrible man, but it still affected me,” she recalled. Six months of hospital stays and nerve-related illnesses followed, but once cured, Van Runkle asked to be sent to Chouinard, an art school in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles where Walt Disney sent his animators for Friday-night classes. Given little spending money, she began modeling for the school’s fashion-illustration classes, instead of attending them.
But then it happened. Edith Head came to the school one day. “I was 16 and just overwhelmed by her,” Van Runkle said. It would be the first of many encounters with the heralded costume designer, who began her career in the silent era, worked on more than 1,000 films, and won eight Academy Awards.
One day, while sitting on the floor of Western Costume’s warehouse, searching for just the right Depression-era button for one of Dunaway’s Bonnie Parker costumes, Van Runkle felt a shadow pass over her. She looked up and saw Head peering down at her through her trademark blue-tinted eyeglasses (customized so she could assess her designs in black and white).
Head asked her who she was designing for. Van Runkle explained that it was a movie about a pair of fugitive bank robbers set in the 1930s.
“Oh darling, do everything in chiffon,” Head told her. “You’ll have no problem.”
Thankfully, Van Runkle did not take her advice, but the two designers became friends, often having coffee together. Sometimes Van Runkle would run into Head at Hollywood parties, “and I would be the only designer that spoke to her; the other designers were very hostile to Edith.” Van Runkle once asked Head why she always wore those thick eyeglasses. “So they don’t see the tears,” Head responded.
Years later, the two women would work on the movie adaptation of Gore Vidal’s outrageous, satiric comedy Myra Breckinridge, starring Raquel Welch and Mae West. The last time Van Runkle saw her, in 1981, Head came into Western Costume wearing a wig. “She’d had chemotherapy,” recalled Van Runkle. Head would die a few months later.
After Bonnie and Clyde, Van Runkle went on to costume dozens of notable and important films in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, including I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!; The Godfather: Part II; Rhinestone; Peggy Sue Got Married; and Everybody’s All-American. Her work on The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt established the fair-haired, Indiana-born Steve McQueen as the “King of Cool.”
But as the decades passed, the movie industry became more corporate. Actors, with their multi-million-dollar salaries, grew more demanding. Eventually, Van Runkle had had enough. She left the movie industry in 1999 and, with her second husband, photographer Bruce McBroom, bought and renovated the Milano Hotel in Northern California.
Helen Mirren often stayed in the hotel, with her husband, the director Taylor Hackford, and became close friends with Van Runkle. “I just wanted to spend all my time with her,” Mirren says. “She was very camp and theatrical, and her clothing was wonderful. She was always wearing incredible vintage shoes, or an amazing, beautiful green velvet top. She was like something out of the Bohemia of the 1920s—more hip than hippie.”
Van Runkle died at home in 2011, at 83. “I’m still missing her,” says Mirren, “because it’s hard in L.A. In all the years I was here, I never had friends that I really loved. Theadora was the first, and, in a way, the last.... I felt that I was of her ilk—or wanted to be. She had a group of people who adored her like that—instantly. We were all in the Theadora Club.”
Sam Kashner is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. Previously a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he is the author or co-author of several books, including Sinatraland: A Novel, When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School, and Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends
Nancy Schoenberger is the author of several books, including Wayne and Ford: The Films, the Friendship, and the Forging of an American Hero and Blanche: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation
