When curating Beinecke’s social media, I often seek out images within the collection that inspire nostalgia. Perhaps stemming from an urge to find myself in the collection, the buzzwords—Los Angeles, Hollywood, California—transport me to places I no longer have unequivocal access to. Using the archives as a means of travel and memory, I came across the lives of Irene Sharaff and Mai-Mai Sze.
Irene Sharaff, born in 1910, was an American fashion designer for the screen and stage. The Irene Sharaff Papers contain artwork and clippings from her work on West Side Story, An American in Paris, The King and I, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?. The below costume designs for West Side Story will be featured in the Beinecke 2022 exhibition: BRAVA! Women Make American Theater.
Nominated cumulatively for nine Academy Awards, Sharaff won five for her costume designs. Her partner, Mai-Mai Sze, was a Chinese American painter, translator, and political activist. Even despite a disheartening rejection from James Cahill and Nelson Wu on her first publication, Sze is known for her translation of Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting in The Tao of Painting (1956), the fictional piece Silent Children (1948), and an autobiography Echo of a Cry: A Story Which Began in China (1945).
While neither artist write about their partnership in auto-biographical pieces, their romantic devotion has been documented by friends and acquaintances. Living together in an apartment on 66th street in New York, the couple accompanied each other to work and social functions from the mid-1930s until their death. The Beinecke Library contains letters jointly written between Sharaff and Sze, to mutual friends like Carl Van Vechten and Carlotta O’Neill—actress and third wife of author Eugene O’Neill.
Both images above are copies of Mai-Mai Sze’s drawing of Eugene O’Neill. The first copy is from 1945 and can be found in the Eugene O’Neill Papers. Call number: YCAL MSS 123. The second copy was photographed by Peter A. Juley & Son. It was inscribed by Eugene O’Neill to Jane Rubin in July, 1953 and is from the Eugene O’Neill Collection. Call number: YCAL MSS 124.
Mai-Mai, famous for her caricature of Eugene O’Neill, writes with fondness to Carlotta in December of 1958:
Irene and I found this celestial treasure for you–for your birthday–a very special occasion. It is, as you will see, nothing less than the whole miniature?
So we send you Heaven + Earth with much love + manys sentimental and Edwardian thoughts on this birthday eve– Mai-Mai ___.xxx
From a collection of letters from Mai-Mai Sze in the Eugene O’Neill Papers (1957-1962, n.d.). Call number: YCAL MSS 123.
Mai-Mai’s letters to Carl Van Vechten, Bernardine Szold-Fritz, Monroe Wheeler, and other friends are scattered throughout the Beinecke’s Collection. Sharaff and Sze were both photographed by Carl Van Vechten, Sze’s photograph finding its way to a publication of Vogue. Both write to Van Vechten of their delight about their portraits, and Sharaff specifically highlights her experience in Hollywood at the burgeoning of the McCarthy era:
I wish that in some way I could explain what Hollywood at the moment is like but I am afraid that I cant. But the key note is fear and panic. I have just started to work on a picture for Danny Kaye at Warner Brothers and it is my first experience at a studio that is only comparable to a factory. It is in Burbank and each morning I leave and am swallowed up in a stream of cars that go to the same place that I go to and then suddenly people lose all human qualities and become something out of H.G. Wells.
But the nice thing is that the weather is heavenly and after work the sky belongs to one and so does one’s thinking.
Letters from Irene Sharaff to Carl Van Vechten (includes letters co-signed by Mai-Mai Sze), dates ranging from 1940-1969. From the Carl Van Vechten Papers. Call number: YCAL MSS 1050.
The contrast between the Los Angeles heavenly sky and the mechanical nature of traffic during rush hour can only spark nostalgia for Los Angelenos, who are all too familiar with the pleasures and pains of the city.
The couple’s legacy lives on not only in their artistic and literary endeavors, but also in their endowment of the Needham Research Institution and the Lucy Cavendish College at Cambridge University. Reading about the college in the New York Times, Sze and Sharaff donated 1 million to the college and endowed the the Alice Tong Sze Research Fellowship and the Lu Gwei Djen Research Fellowship. Neither visited the college prior to their death, yet their ashes are buried together in the gardens of the college.
Sharaff and Sze’s correspondence shed light on the precarious social conditions for laborers in Hollywood during the 1950s, as well as the gentle web of friendships behind big Hollywood names. While there is debate on using the term lebsian to describe Sharaff and Sze’s relationship, we can infer from letters in the Beinecke of their romantic companionship. The lack of auto-biographical documentation of their relationship stems from precarious political and career conditions for LGBTQA+ partners during the mid-20th century. The dynamic of their private and personal lives has been written about by The Journal of History and Ideas.
Their relationship also speaks to our archival process: networks of relationship and friendship can be mapped out across the Beinecke’s collection, as much as it can be from delving into a singular collection. The joys of connecting historical lives in the archive, to our own, await us in the Marble Kingdom.
Collections to Explore
Irene Sharraf Papers
YCAL MSS 1201
Eugene O’Neill Papers
YCAL MSS 123
Carl Van Vechten Papers
YCAL MSS 1050