Hollywood's only female director loved women
Trousers, one great love, no labels: in the 1930s, Dorothy Arzner was Hollywood's only female director.
On 3 January 1897, Dorothy Arzner was born in San Francisco. In the thirties, she would be the only woman directing feature films for the big studios in Hollywood. And she did so without hiding her private life.
Arzner grew up in Los Angeles. Silent film stars and directors frequented her father's restaurant, so she found her way into the film business early on. She started as a stenographer, wrote screenplays and made a name for herself as an editor. At the end of the twenties, she was allowed to direct herself. With "The Wild Party" she directed Paramount's first talkie, becoming the first woman ever to direct a sound film. According to legend, she had a microphone attached to a fishing rod so that the star, Clara Bow, could move freely. She is therefore credited with inventing the boom microphone.
Sixteen feature films bear her name. No other woman in Hollywood made so many films in such a short time. Arzner gave Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell and Lucille Ball early roles and became the first woman member of the directors' guild, today's Directors Guild of America.
Her appearance was also striking. Arzner wore trousers and short hair and made little secret of the fact that she loved women. She lived with the dancer and choreographer Marion Morgan for around forty years. Nevertheless, she did not like labels: she saw herself simply as a filmmaker.
After retiring from feature films, she made commercials with Joan Crawford and taught at the film school of the University of California, Los Angeles. When the directors' guild honoured her in 1975, Hepburn had a telegram read out. In essence, she wrote how wonderful it was that Arzner had had such a great career when she had no right to have one at all. Arzner died in the autumn of 1979, shortly after the women's movement had rediscovered her work.