I can’t remember how I spotted the above, nor why I decided to lob a tweet back over the parapet of costume designer Jean-Pierre Dorléac. Elizabeth Taylor, in all her flawed glory, is an idol of mine, not least for her AIDS work. I definitely called Dorléac a has-been, and as I recall, I also asked what he’d ever done for AIDS charity that compared with Elizabeth Taylor. (I did not point out that the clip showed Jean Simmons, whom Dorléac always described as a dear friend.)
I have only one screenshot from his multiple responses over the next two days.
Needless to say, his account stayed on Twitter, until it was nuked a few days before The Hollywood Reporter broke that Jean-Pierre Dorléac died of natural causes. Dorléac had a notable career as a costume designer, and also made a name for himself with a memoir (The Naked Truth: An Irreverent Chronicle of Delirious Escapades), a handful of recent I-Was-There gossip columns at the Daily Mail, and a personal Twitter full of what he claimed were first-hand reports of what went down in Tinseltown.
I lead with our spat as a matter of full disclosure. I’m not hiding that what follows is coming from a person who disliked the man. As you can see, he despised me in return. I make no apologies. Dorléac never held back. He insulted some showbiz figures virtually minutes after their death announcements. On Twitter, he raged in quote tweets if someone called his tweets “gossip” or “tea.” It is truth! said Jean-Pierre Dorléac. People need to know the TRUTH, not PR!
OK. Here’s some other truth.
Dorléac and I blocked each other, but I kept seeing his stuff. Friends sent me direct messages with screenshots of his latest stupefying boast or rant. Together we pondered: Who is this guy? and why does he hate Grace Kelly and gentle Audrey Hepburn the way other people hate air pollution and termites?
Below is one of the first articles I found about him in newspapers-dot-com. I think of this as the Rosetta Stone for what follows, because it unlocked more information than Dorléac could have imagined at the time. The interview with reporter Linda Helser ran on Christmas Day, 1981, in the Arizona Republic.
There’s a lot going on here, but for now let’s start with the third graf: “On a March Tonight Show, Edith Head was asked who, among the up-and- coming costume designers, will carry on in the same tradition that Hollywood is noted for when it comes to authenticity and glamour. Her answer was, ‘Just one designer, and only one—Jean-Pierre Dorléac.’ ”
Edith Head died Oct. 24, 1981, almost exactly two months before this interview. Would it be possible to find a clip from the March 1981 Tonight Show where she praised Dorléac/Jerry Paine to the skies?
No, it would not. So far as I have been able to ascertain, Edith Head did not appear on The Tonight Show in 1981. Or 1980, or 1979, or 1978, or 1977... see for yourself. Where, then, did reporter Helser get the notion that Edith Head, who had long been dying of an incurable bone disease, gave Johnny Carson that effusive quote? Gee whiz. I can’t say for sure. Although I can sure as hell conjecture. For one thing, this other interview has Dorléac citing a different TV show.
In April, Edith Head was still alive. Doesn’t that second interview make it more likely that her compliment is real? Maybe. It was the Fresno paper’s exclusive, not a wire story. Did Edith Head have The Fresno Bee delivered?
Back to our Rosetta Stone, fifth graf: “ ‘I was shocked, absolutely and totally, with her comments. I had lunch a couple of times with her and would see her on the set, [my emphasis] but I never knew that’s how she felt. She was always wonderful to me, and I was very saddened by her death,’ said Dorléac from his boutique in Los Angeles.”
In my estimation, “lunch a couple of times” doesn’t add up to “I was her one and only protégé.”
Dorléac didn’t stop there. As the years went by, he put himself forward as THE expert on Edith Head, the heir to her legacy who had heard her most confidential confidences. He claimed to own the muslin for the black cocktail “Sabrina dress” in the 1954 Billy Wilder film Sabrina, which spawned coast-to-coast knockoffs and has usually been attributed to Hubert de Givenchy. In interviews for costume sites and in memoir excerpts for the Los Angeles Times, Dorléac proclaimed that Edith Head Had Told Him The Real Deal, oh yes Edith told him how that simpering two-faced Audrey Hepburn conspired to give Givenchy credit for Edith’s Sabrina dress and Edith’s embroidered ballgown. “I was the only costume designer she ever mentored,” declared Jean-Pierre Dorléac.
The discrepancy between things Dorléac had said in the past, and things he said now, bothered me. The fact that I couldn’t find a record of Edith Head mentioning Dorléac that didn’t come from the man himself also bothered me. I don’t like unsourced Hollywood stories. They make me itch. Four years ago that itch led me to write “John Wayne and the Six Security Men,” an article that drew some fierce responses (and at least one person who still likes to subtweet me occasionally from behind a block, hello there person). An update to the John Wayne piece will have to wait, but I’ll get to it because I’m even more right now than I was then.
More bluntly, I don’t like liars, and I really don’t like a man elbowing his way into the life story of a famous woman after she’s dead and can neither confirm nor say “Hey, I don’t know you like that.” Another from Dorléac:
And an earlier tweet, next to a screenshot of the scissors in Dial M for Murder.
Things look different on camera, don’t they.
Meanwhile, Dorléac—or Jerry as I began calling him among friends—was still setting fire to Old Hollywood Twitter. And Jerry’s tales had a certain slant, especially when it came to women.
A sample, but you get the idea — the venom, the vulgarity, the indifference to proof. And the seething resentment of women, or do I mean cows, bitches, and (a favorite word whose use as an insult Jerry hotly defended) cunts. And the bottom right Audrey tweet is a doozy—not many people are willing to deny Nazi war crimes just to score a point against a skinny woman. In another tweet, for which I don’t have a screenshot though its infamy lives on, Jerry scoffed at Audrey and the Dutch eating tulip-bulb flour during the Hunger Winter, calling that historical fact “twee." Then the ones below (also about Audrey Hepburn) pulled me up short.
Jerry, as he never disputed, was born April 12, 1943, so what we have here is a claim for Infant Purple Heart status. On top of that, Jerry many times claimed to be related on his French mother’s side to Les Soeurs Dorléac—that is, the divine Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac. Of course we’re related! he snapped, it’s an uncommon name.
My friends and I took to DMs in dismay. Could two such charming women share DNA with this man whose public persona struck us as anti-charm, in the sense of anti-matter?
Short answer: No.
Here’s the long answer.
Return, please, to that first interview. Jerry says his Air Force father’s name was Joseph Paine. He says his mother was French, but she met Joseph when she was in the U.S. visiting her sister (I hope she arrived before 1939). Sometime between late 1942 or early 1943, Joseph’s pregnant wife went home to France. Jerry said Maman had to “pick up some things.” From France. When she was married to an American airman. And could have stayed in sunny bomb-free California.
Jean-Pierre was born in Toulon (according to Wikipedia and his obits), in Vichy France, after which he and his mother were “detained because of the war.” As though their flight was grounded due to wintry mix. In fact, Toulon had the living hell bombed out of it, starting in November 1943. Here is Toulon by August of 1944.1
None of this shit makes any sense, of course. Could I unravel the truth by searching for information about Joseph Paine? You remember, the guy whose wife supposedly said “Bye honey, love you lots, but I can’t function without some of my French things” and took herself and his unborn son to a Nazi-controlled region everyone knew could be invaded at any moment?
Mr. Paine apparently served in the Asia-Pacific theater—not Europe. The third graf lists Jerry under his stage name, misspelled as “Jean Piere Dorleac,” with no hyphen, which probably pissed him off no end. I looked for his mother’s obituary.
“Ruby Mae” doesn’t sound very French, does it? Long story short, I believe this is her despite the small spelling difference. She had a brief first marriage to a man named Bennett, then stayed with Joseph Paine for life. She was no more French than I am, and neither was her son.
And there you are. The newspaper announcement for the birth of Jerome Benson Paine, April 12, 1943—in San Bernardino, California. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with a stage name, unless you insist it’s real and claim it means you’re related to a celebrity (or two) when you’re not. I hope someone updates2 Dorléac’s Wikipedia page, his IMDB biography, and especially his IMDB Trivia section.
And if I were a reporter, I would not waste my time pestering Catherine Deneuve for a memorial quote about her late American cousin. Just saying.
I was now more fascinated than outraged. Jerry appears to have invented a detailed personal history, switching anecdotes in and out like seasonal wardrobe items. Plus, no internet in 1981 and for years after. That meant Jerry could say one thing to one newspaper and something else to another, secure in knowing the only way to catch him would be to hit the physical archives in multiple states.
In addition to what his followers thought was inside dish (although Jerry insisted he was a bold teller of truth, not a gossip, how dare you), Jerry shared evocative observations3 about his past life. I don’t want to clutter this up with endless tweet screenshots, though I have receipts. Remember, I can’t link because Jerry’s Twitter account was nuked so fast—can’t imagine why.
Dorléac said he’d been a child actor; that he had acted in many movies and IMDB was wrong in omitting those credits; that he came from “a long line of entertainers and artists;” that Marlene Dietrich was a frequent dinner guest in his childhood home; that before his costume career in Hollywood he had met, befriended and/or worked with Alain Delon, Brigitte Bardot, Claudia Cardinale, Francois Truffaut, Givenchy, Dior, Cardin, Edith Piaf, Cary Grant, and last but not least, Marilyn Monroe. As some of us already noticed, several of those names are chronologically implausible for a guy born in 1943.
But as for the education claimed in the first interview—Jerry did probably go to school in England, as I found an item about his father sailing with the family to England in 1949. Jerry also told the truth about high school in Japan. A mention of “Jerrie” Paine in an Itazuke Dependent School history online:
What happened between England and high school? As an Air Force brat, maybe he did spend time in some European countries and learn French there, although I have yet to find a single Youtube clip of him speaking it. In the Rosetta Stone interview, Jerry says breezily that he got his “degree in historic apparel from Les Beaux Arts (University of Paris).” That vague “degree” was enshrined as a doctorate long before Jerry arrived on Twitter, and he waved it around every chance he got.
There’s a problem, however. The École des Beaux-Arts in Paris does not, and never has so far as I can tell, offer a PhD in “historical apparel.”4 Nor do any of Dorléac’s names appear on lists of graduates, such as this one.
But even if I’m wrong, and Les Beaux-Arts did offer a degree in historical apparel, or plain old fashion, I don’t think Jerry would have been able to attain it. Because the record indicates he spent much of the 1960s in the Air Force, stationed in California.
All along I had wondered if Jerry was drafted; his dad was a veteran, and he was the perfect age for Vietnam. None of his names came up in any context for the early 1960s. Finally I found this.
Jerre, with an “e.” When did he join? In 1962, I believe. I found an item in the Biloxi Sun-Herald, Nov. 16, 1962, that said JerrE Paine would be doing a “modern jazz dance” for the Holy Angels Kindergarten Christmas Show. He was appearing with a fellow airman stationed at Keesler Air Force Base. If you’ve seen Biloxi Blues, you know that Keesler was the site of Air Force basic training for many years.
From here through 1966 it seems Jerre was stationed at George AFB in California. A number of notices in the Victorville, Calif., Daily Press show Jerre attending classes at Victor Valley Community College and playing supporting and other small roles in the college’s productions.
After mid-1966, Air Force stories end. In the spring of 1967, Jerre appears in Arizona doing regional theater (including one production with Nick Nolte). How and why he left the service, I don’t know; if I’m right about when he started, his time might have been up. Signs of him are spotty for the rest of the 1960s. The only thing I see for 1968, for example, is a bit part in a January production of Orpheus Descending in Flagstaff.
But 1969 brings a startling development.
How long did the interior design gig last? Not long, though I guess it’s possible this next gig was job-related.
But this next job was not about set design.
“Others in the cast include.” That must have been a phrase Jerre Paine, after years at the bottom of cast lists in community college, was sick of hearing by the end of 1971.
And so, ladies and gentlemen, almost exactly a year later, here we have the debut of Jean-Pierre Dorléac, or at least the first credit I can locate under that name. He was also in the cast — but it’s the costumes that got a nice nod from the critic. And the next year, it was Dorléac’s costumes that won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Award.
Was it hard to change goals? Probably not. He was Jean-Pierre Dorléac from there on out. Had he been willing to tell the true story of how it happened, his path would have been genuinely impressive. This man—with ten Primetime Emmy nominations and two Emmy wins, plus an Oscar nomination—worked steadily from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s, often in period costumes. And he was self-trained!
Now that I’ve given some praise at last, here are other good things about Jean-Pierre Dorléac, né Jerome Benson Paine, aka Jerre Paine, aka Jerry Paine. His friendships with Jean Simmons, Olivia Hussey, Marisa Pavan, and Roddy McDowall5 were apparently genuine. Several actresses, including Morgan Fairchild, had warm nostalgic exchanges with him on Twitter. His gowns for Jane Seymour in Somewhere in Time were lovely and unique.6 And whatever his real relationship to Edith Head was, there was no more ardent partisan for her work. I have some ideas about what might have made Dorléac so attached to Edith Head, and so vicious toward a lot of actresses, especially Audrey Hepburn. I may write that up too, depending on the response to this exceedingly long post.
For now—when Jean-Pierre Dorléac told people not to believe everything they heard about Hollywood, he was, in that moment, speaking the truth.
A note to readers: This story is free for the moment, but it will probably go behind a paywall by the end of Tuesday. Articles like this take a lot of time and work, and the fact is that right now, I can use all the subscription income I can get. I’m always grateful to every single reader, but I’d be extra grateful to anyone who decides to take out a subscription. Many thanks for reading.
The catastrophic destruction in Toulon could be why Jerry claimed it as his birthplace. Not so easy to track down public records from a town that was leveled just after your birth.
For reasons I’ve never been able to figure out, neither Wikipedia nor IMDB has ever accepted an edit from me, and I gave up long ago.
“Evocative Observations” was the planned title of Jerry’s next book, which would have been about Montgomery Clift, Roddy McDowall and Elizabeth Taylor. Jerry, who does seem to have been a friend of McDowall’s, claimed Roddy’s fabled journals had been bequeathed to him. McDowall was long rumored to have kept explosive diaries that would be sealed until everyone mentioned was long dead. But his archive at Boston University was unsealed in 2020, and contained no such material.
Yes, there are fashion designers who attended, but not for “historical apparel.” Valentino studied art and drawing, while learning fashion at a different Paris school; Givenchy went for drawing; Manolo Blahnik studied art.
Dorléac posted photos of himself posing with all of them. Simmons spoke warmly of him to the reporter in the Rosetta Stone interview. Hussey mentioned him once in her autobiography, as a “good friend.”
There has been controversy, however, regarding Dorléac’s costumes for Battlestar Galactica, for which he won the Emmy.
I had never heard of this guy, so I'm glad that *this* piece was my introduction (and conclusion) to what a weird and unfortunate phony he was.
"Did Edith Head have The Fresno Bee delivered?" was a literal LOL moment. Maybe it was a bundled subscription with the San Bernardino Lamplighter, per Renee Patrick.
Wow...I know these take a lot of time and effort, but you really shine when you dig into something like this! Thank you