©GettyCinema history: Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’
Most people discard dry-cleaning receipts, but not Vivien Leigh. The Oscar-winning actress, who appeared in 19 films and nearly 40 stage plays over more than 30 years, found time to file hers among 10,000 documents in her personal archive.
Today’s fashion historians are grateful: Leigh’s laundry records offer insights into how mid-20th century haute couture was preserved and presented in public. And cinema historians seize on details of how costumes were chosen for her character of Blanche DuBois, revealed in correspondence with costumiers who worked on the 1951 film, A Streetcar Named Desire.
“You never know what is going to be of interest to future generations,” says Keith Lodwick, theatre and performance curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which took over Leigh’s archive last year. “It is fascinating – her scripts are annotated, and film lines are rewritten with her thoughts. Anyone like her retaining such information does not have a sense that one day [their documents] will end up in research.”
Leigh filed papers throughout her life, but many people put off organising documents, letters and photographs.
“People sometimes come to us when they are reaching the end of their careers, or perhaps when they are [moving] house,” says Christopher Marsden, senior archivist at the V&A. “But usually relatives come after the person has died.”
Relatives make poor archivists, he says. Some are reluctant to throw anything away, which means the material is chaotic, while others over-edit until little of interest remains. Far better, says Marsden, for owners to get to grips with their own documents.
Provenance – a formal record that guarantees authenticity – is another reason. “It’s important to do this while you are still around,” says Helen Hall, founder of Dig Management, a legacy protection and collection management consultancy. “Once you are gone, the stories are lost, then the importance is lost.”
Hall, a former head of entertainment memorabilia at Christie’s, the auction house, set up her business in 2010 to help politicians and businesspeople, as well as people in the entertainment industry, understand how and what to preserve. “The company was born out of protecting those back stories.”
She cites the Marlon Brando archive, which she documented after the actor’s death in 2004. “We found a 1957 letter from Jack Kerouac, suggesting [Brando] make a film version of On the Road.” The correspondence points to a tantalising but unexplored area of cinema history. “It would have been great to know how that conversation continued … but there was no more information,” says Hall.
Even an archive’s owner can lose track of the significance of their documents. Martin Rowson, a political cartoonist whose work has appeared in the British newspapers the Guardian and the Independent, is organising his archive of 32 years’ worth of drawings, which he keeps in his house.
“I occasionally look in and have no idea what a cartoon is about,” he says. “I forget – they are about daily or weekly news stories that disappear. There are no notes about what the news story was.”
Rowson recruited a family member to put his drawings in chronological order, but she gave up halfway through. “What’s left is older stuff; it needs sorting and it’s pretty massive.”
He has hired a professional to handle the rest and has given items to the British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent and his old Cambridge college, but as for the rest, he says he sees it “as a problem to bequeath my legatees”.
Others become absorbed by the task of archiving. Tim Angel, chairman of Angels The Costumiers, a family-owned company, was the first in seven generations to organise thousands – 174 years’ worth – of documents stored at the shop in Shaftesbury Avenue in London. It took him a year.
“No one had put them together and we didn’t know what stuff was here,” he says. “We found letters from [John] Garrick, [Henry] Irving and [Charles] Dickens. Dickens was complaining about the bill.”
Angel began by scrutinising formal company records such as minute books before moving on to ad hoc documents. He keeps physical files at the shop and has scanned many documents for digital storage. “I’m not glad it’s over, he says. “It’s very satisfying.”
Digital storage frees up space, but technology is presenting problems for future historians. File formats become obsolete, passwords are lost, storage media decay and laptops can be stolen. The V&A has come up with a surprisingly low-tech solution: “We print [emails and Tifs] to paper,” says Marsden.
But the biggest menace, according to Lodwick, is digital photography. “Vivien Leigh kept more than 1,000 stereoscopic slides. All were numbered and dated on the back, so we have a view of her and her world, but today, who prints things off?
“Are people dating photos on the back and noting down who is in the photo?” he asks. “I’m not – and I’m an archivist.”
-------------------------------------------
Think inside the box: preserving the past
A personal archive is not just for those in the arts or entertainment – businesspeople are also likely to have documents worth preserving, says Helen Hall of Dig Management. “Americans have been personal archiving for a long time. In Europe and the UK, we are starting to understand the value.”
One challenge for archivists is “airbrushing” – the removal of evidence of inconvenient episodes, such as professional disputes or failed marriages. The ideal archive, says Christopher Marsden of the V&A, is “an unselfconscious thing; it’s less artificial and sanitised – a more honest picture”.
To avoid the loss of digital documents, Marsden suggests owners at the very least ensure their files are preserved in common formats, such as Tifs or Microsoft Word documents, to lessen the chance of files becoming obsolete.
Record-keeping need not be onerous, says Hall. “Tag everything as you go along. It sounds cold, but keep a record of where something came from and how it was used, even if it’s just a scribbled note here and there.”
The ideal storage space is cool, dry and out of sunlight, says Marsden. “A lot of archives get damp and are ruined. But if put in a box, papers and photos are generally still dry after 10 or 20 years.”
But don’t be tempted to store your archive in the garage, Marsden adds. “It’s usually damp and we do get archives riddled with mould and insects. My heart sinks when we get a call to say, ‘We have this wonderful archive in the garage…’”
Replies
I love this...
"The V&A has come up with a surprisingly low-tech solution: “We print [emails and Tifs] to paper,” says Marsden."
Sometimes the low-tech solutions are the most reliable in the long-term!
This would be absolutely useful in one of my assignments and interest of Gone with the wind. Awesome find as I normally just scroll through my emails without much of a look.
Really enjoyed this article. A few examples of "a day in my life" moments working in an archive. Some great items to share and feeling suitable satisfied that the "contents of a garage delivery" happens to us all.