A fter 30 years of being tucked away in a pillowcase for safekeeping by his grand-niece, legendary Australian-born Hollywood designer Orry-Kellyâ€[TM]s unfinished memoir finally sees the light of day. And itâ€[TM]s been worth the wait.
â€oeBetween life and death there is a big funhouse,â€ the three-time Oscar winner writes towards the end of Women Iâ€[TM]ve Undressed. â€oeIâ€[TM]ve never been afraid to gaze into those rounded mirrors which exaggerate my worst features. So many people run away from their distorted image. In this funhouse life is what you make of it. As you live, love, play and work, some are free, some not quite free, and others have no freedom at all.â€
That gives you a good sense of where Orryâ€[TM]s coming from, and while he proves as elegant a writer as he was a fashion designer, heâ€[TM]s not afraid to tell it like it was. Hereâ€[TM]s a typical passage, where Orry describes a dinner at Cole Porterâ€[TM]s with Clark Gable and Errol Flynn in attendance.
 â€oeErrol was in rare form as he proceeded to mix the B and Bs. He told us how heâ€[TM]d started smoking the opium pipe, then mentioned his early cocaine addiction. Cole left us and joined the ladies.â€
And if youâ€[TM]re wondering just how highly â€oethe Kid from Kiamaâ€ was regarded, itâ€[TM]s worth knowing his pallbearers â€" he died in 1964 after a battle with cancer â€" included Cary Grant, Tony Curtis and directors Billy Wilder and George Cukor, while Warner Bros president Jack Warner read his eulogy.
But Orryâ€[TM]s story begins in 1897 in Kiama, New South Wales, born Orry George Kelly to an Isle of Man tailor, William Kelly, and his Australian wife, Florence. A quadruple threat â€" he studied art as well as acting, dance and voice â€" Orry moved from Sydney to New York in 1921, where he ended up painting murals and befriending Grant, then Archibald Leach, with whom he shared an apartment. 
Orryâ€[TM]s work soon attracted the attention of Fox Film Corporation, for whom he designed sets and costumes for Katharine Hepburn and others. The next decade found him working for Warner Bros in Hollywood until the mid-1940s, after which he worked for 20th Century Fox and then became a freelancer. 
Over a period of 30 years, Orry worked on 295 films and, in addition to Hepburn, dressed the likes of Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman â€" â€oeone of the most un-actressy of all the actresses I have ever dressed â€" Betty Grable, Shirley MacLaine, Natalie Wood and, famously, Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon for Some Like it Hot, for which he won an Academy Award.
Chock-full of photographs, film stills, paintings and movie posters, Women Iâ€[TM]ve Undressed is a must for fashion freaks and movie buffs alike. But wait â€" thereâ€[TM]s more: Gillian Armstrongâ€[TM]s documentary Women Heâ€[TM]s Undressed is in limited release around the country; for more details, see womenhesundressed.com. And the exhibition Orry-Kelly: Dressing Hollywood is at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image at Melbourneâ€[TM]s Federation Square until   January 2016, see acmi.net.au.  
Women Iâ€[TM]ve Undressed 
Orry-Kelly 
(Random House, $40)