Irene Lentz (1901-1962), often known professionally simply as “Irene”, or later sometimes “Irene Gibbons” after her second marriage, has over 200 screen credits as a Hollywood costume designer and supervisor, but I’m scarely going to touch on that aspect (which many would consider the main one) of her life and career here.
You know why. Not my wheelhouse. Not even my steamboat! It’s for hundreds of others much more qualified than I to chatter about needles and threads and fabrics and hems and necklines and what have you. What interested ME about her is what most other people would no doubt consisder a footnote: the Montana native started out as an actress working for Mack Sennett and others. Some sources sat she was a Bathing Beauty but that’s always to be distrusted. Nearly all old sources come to the sweeping, unproven conclusion that all young women who worked for Mack Sennett were among his Bathing Beauties. Simply not the case. Some, probably most, merely played roles in films without necessarily having frolicked on the beach in a swimsuit. What we know is that she appeared in Molly O (1921) with Mabel Normand, The Duck Hunter (1922) with Billy Bevan, A Tailor Made Man (1922) with Charles Ray, The Dare Devil (1923) with Ben Turpin, Ten Dollars or Ten Days (1923) with Turpin, Picking Peaches (1924) with Harry Langdon, and the Von Stroheim feature The Merry Widow (1925) for MGM. During her brief time as an actress she worked with such directors as Roy Del Ruth and Del Lord.
Irene married F. Richard Jones, director of Molly O, and Sennett’s production chief. When he died of TB in 1930, she hung out a shingle as a dressmaker, and this led to her first screen credit as a designer, costuming Lili Damita in Goldie Gets Along (1933). Over the next couple of decades, her costumes adorned stars like Mae West, Ginger Rogers, Carole Lombard, Rosalind Russell, Hedy Lamarr, Lana Turner, et al. In 1936 she married writer Eliot Gibbons, for whose brother the art director Cedric she worked at MGM.
In 1950, Irene left the film business to open her own fashion house, although he was lured back a decade later to dress Doris Day in Midnight Lace (1960) and Lover Come Back (1961).
Then in 1962, to the bewilderment of many, Irene widely distributed suicide notes, drank two bottles of vodka, slashed her wrists, and jumped from an 11th story window of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Los Angeles. There seem to be multiple explanations: she had a drinking problem, she didn’t get along with her husband, and she had long been in love with Gary Cooper, who had died of cancer the previous year. This last comes from the testimony of Day, in whom she had previously confided. Whether the two ever had an affair is unconfirmed.
For more on silent comedy film, including movies of Mack Sennett in which Irene appeared, please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube — now also available on audiobook!