“Who was Harold Grieve?” by S.M. O’Connor

Harold Grieve (1901-1993) was successively a silent film era costume designer and set designer who parlayed his talents and reputation into being interior designer to the stars. Grieve started his career in Hollywood as a costume designer. At the age of twenty-three he designed the costumer of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), the second of what have been, thus far, four adaptations of General Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel of the same name.[1] In the 1920s and ‘30s, he worked as a set designer.[2] He was married to Dutch-born silent film star Jetta Goudal (1891-1985) from 1930 until her death.[3] After she retired from acting, she joined her husband in his interior design business.[4] He designed interiors for the Pickfair residence of actress-producer Mary Pickford (1892-1979) in Beverly Hills; the residences of the singer-actor Bing Crosby (1903-1977) at Toluca Lake and Rancho Santa Fe; the residences of actor-director-screenwriter-producer Robert Z. Leonard (1889-1968) and his wife, silent film star Gertrude Olmstead (1897-1975), at Malibu and Hollywood, as well as his office at M.G.M. Studios; the residence of screenwriter-director-producer Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) in Bel Air; the residence of director-producer Hal Roach, Sr. (1892-1992) in Beverly Hills; the residence of director-producer Raoul Walsh (1887-1980) in Beverly Hills; and the residence of comic actress Gracie Allen (1895-1964) and her husband and straight man, actor-writer George Burns (1896-1996) in Beverly Hills.[5] He joined the U.S. Navy during the Second Great World War and rose to the rank of commander.[6] In 1946, he designed a new village on Rongerik Atoll for the benefit of the inhabitants of Bikini Atoll, whom the U.S. Government moved to allow for the test detonation of an atomic bomb on Bikini Atoll on July 1, 1946.[7] Grieve served as president of both the American Institute of American Designers (now the American Society of Interior Designers) and the Los Angeles chapter.[8] The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has the Harold Grieve Papers.

Grieve, who had re-designed silent film star Colleen Moore’s mansion, designed the interiors of Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle, in particular, the Library.[9] “The leading characters in Fairyland will live in this house,” he told Colleen Moore, “and they will naturally be interested in antiques. They’ll want to shop all the auction galleries and antique places in Fairyland, hunting for King Arthur’s Round Table to go in the dining room, and Sleeping Beauty’s bed. There will have to be a mixture of periods and places. For instance, Aladdin’s Lamp will have an oriental connotation. How will that go with pre-Tudor English? We’ll have to come up with a new theory of interior design.”[10]

END NOTES

[1] Myrna Oliver, “Harold Grieve; Designer in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, 21 November 1993 (http://articles.latimes.com/1993-11-21/news/mn-59241_1_harold-grieve) Accessed 12/04/17

[2] Myrna Oliver, “Harold Grieve; Designer in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, 21 November 1993

[3] Myrna Oliver, “Harold Grieve; Designer in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, 21 November 1993

[4] Myrna Oliver, “Harold Grieve; Designer in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, 21 November 1993

[5] Myrna Oliver, “Harold Grieve; Designer in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, 21 November 1993

[6] Myrna Oliver, “Harold Grieve; Designer in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, 21 November 1993

[7] Myrna Oliver, “Harold Grieve; Designer in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, 21 November 1993

Four days later, when French fashion designer Louis Réard (1897-1984) had model Micheline Bernardi parade down a Paris runway in his new two-piece swimsuit, he called it the “bikini” to assure the attention of the press. See Charles Panati, Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers (1987), p. 322

[8] Myrna Oliver, “Harold Grieve; Designer in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, 21 November 1993

[9] Colleen Moore’s Doll House: The Story of the Most Exquisite Toy in the World. Garden City, New York: Garden City Publishing Co., Inc. (1935), p. 5

Museum of Science and Industry, The Doll House of Colleen Moore: A Fairyland Castle. Chicago: Museum of Science and Industry (1949), p. 6

[10] Colleen Moore, Colleen Moore’s Doll House. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc. (1979), p. 11

The Field Museum of Natural History in March, 2018

The Field Museum of Natural History’s entrance pavilions are at opposite ends of Stanley Field Hall, which has a north-south axis. The two porticos (porches) are each reached by two successive flights of stairs.

Both porticos of The Field Museum of Natural History are flanked by two small porches, which each have two caryatids (columns in the shape of maidens). On the facade, the wings are adorned with a colonnade of attached fluted Ionic columns. The building’s fluted Ionic columns have volutes (spiral-scroll-shaped crowns).

Each portico of The Field Museum is tetrastyle in antis with double-ranked fluted Ionic columns capped by volutes. An entablature crowned by a pediment rests atop the columns. The continuous frieze in each case is relatively plain. The wave-themed acroteria that crown the pediments are borrowed from the Palace of a Fine Arts, which housed The Field Museum until 1920 and now houses the Museum of Science and Industry.

The Field Museum of Natural History isn’t “just” a museum. Visitors can watch scientists at work through windows at the Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice DNA Discovery Center’s Pritzker Laboratory.

Mrs. Charles (Laura) Schweppe, a daughter and co-heiress of John Graves Shedd, the former partner of Marshall Field I who succeeded him as president of Marshall Field & Company, and who, under the guidance of Stanley Field founded the Shedd Aquarium, donated an exhibit of 100 bronze sculptures by Malvina Hoffman to The Field Museum. They represent every race, nation, and tribe in the human family (more or less). On January 9, 1933, the first group, Unity of Man, went on display.

In addition to the four figures Henry Hering (1874-1949) made for the corners of Stanley Field Hall, he also made the twelve plaster round lion head shield escutcheons that line it. These are replicas of the marble round lion head shield escutcheon he made for the pediment of the facade of The Field Museum of Natural History.

Christmas at Chicago’s Union Station

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a POLAR EXPRESS display in the Great Hall of Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a closeup of the THE POLAR EXPRESS steam locomotive mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is the headlamp of THE POLAR EXPRESS steam locomotive mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This Union Station Company rail car loaded with super-size gifts is part of THE POLAR EXPRESS mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a Christmas tree in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This Christmas tree in the Great Hall of Union Station in downtown Chicago has emblems of Amtrak, Metra, and historic railroad companies whose routes they now operate like Burlington.

Cinemas sculptor Alfonso Iannelli (1888-1965) Helped Design

This is the Pickwick Theatre Building, an Art Deco movie palace and office building erected in downtown Park Ridge, Illinois in 1928.

The architects were Roscoe Harold Zook and William F. McCaughey. Sculptor Alfonso Iannelli, who also worked on the Adler Planetarium, contributed to this building.

In recent years, the Vlahakis family, who’ve owned the building for 50 years, have been able to turn the building into a multiplex by adding smaller theaters around the original auditorium. The latest one, with a screen four times the size of the one in the auditorium, will open in time to screen INFINITY WARS in May, if all goes well.

The Catlow Movie Theater is a cinema that opened in downtown Barrington, Illinois in 1927. The Tudor Revival style of architecture is not confined to the facade of the cinema. As with the Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge, Illinois, sculptor Alfonso Iannelli (1888-1965) played a role in the design and decoration of The Catlow Movie Theater.