Hansen: Costumes are real if you believe

Life feels better if you’re dressed for the part.

Ask Marilyn Sotto, sketch artist and designer.

Now 82, the Laguna Beach resident has been creating costumes most of her life for Hollywood and Disney.

If you Google her, the first image you see shows her at work in 1957, surrounded by her costume sketches for the movie “Man of a Thousand Faces.” She appears lost in thought, touching a ghoulish head and wearing a white shirt with a skinny dark tie.

Putting aside all the costumes and weird theatrics, what’s really remarkable is the fact that she’s dressed in men’s clothes, independent and ahead of her time.

Her sleeves are rolled up, and you can tell she is a self-made woman. Her clothes say it all.

“I always wanted to be a designer,” she said. “That was always in my head. I wanted to draw for the movies.”

And she did — lots of them.

“Ten Commandments,” “To Catch a Thief,” “The King and I,” “White Christmas,” “Rear Window,” “A Place in the Sun,” “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” and many others.

She grew up in the industry. Her father, Edward Sotto, was a scenic artist at MGM, so he would often take her to the movies, including the original 1938 version of “Marie Antoinette.”

“The one movie I saw that impressed me so much was Norma Shearer playing Marie Antoinette in that old movie,” she said. “And that’s when I got so interested in costuming — lots of wonderful, wonderful costumes.”

When Sotto talks about the films she has worked on, she doesn’t typically start with the title. She starts with the people, the actors, because that was her responsibility.

She immersed herself in the characters in order to understand how to dress them.

“We didn’t have the Internet, nothing magical like it is now, where you just get online and look things up,” she said. “You had to collect paper things and put them together — sheets of things, pictures. That’s how we did it.”

But before Sotto began working as an artist, she had to pay her dues. Talented but never formally trained, she had to learn the craft and start from the bottom.

So once again, she focused on people.

“We had Western Costume in Hollywood, and they were at the center of everything that was going on,” Sotto said. “I worked there for a while because I wanted to get to know people. And it helped. I got to see the sketches and how it was done, the different artwork. And I thought, oh, I can sketch like that. I could do it.”

But she toiled in the mail room of MGM before catching a break when the studio needed design assistance on short notice.

It was James Cagney who really helped her gain recognition, insisting that she get a film credit for her work on “Man of a Thousand Faces.” To this day, Sotto gets excited thinking about it.

“In fact, that screen credit on the original film was a whole big screen with just my name, Marilyn Sotto, big letters, right in the middle of the screen,” she said. “I can remember seeing it in the theater, and ‘Mr. Cagney’s costumes.’ And I flipped out.”

After a distinguished run in the movies, Sotto decided to switch gears and work for Disney, where she stayed for 20 years, designing the elaborate uniforms used in various productions such as “Fantasmic!”

“I turned out to be quite a good sketch artist, and I was in demand for a while,” she said.

A resident of Laguna since 1970, she has also drawn various local celebrities, including John Wayne, and sold her artwork.

Now, however, things have changed. Movies like “Transformers,” “Tammy” and “Sex Tape” are being made. Gone are the days of long silk gowns and dapper suits — for the most part.

“It’s really not like it was before,” Sotto said. “It’s different now. The subject matter is murder and blood and guts and things like that. It’s just not like it was. I don’t think I’d really like to do anything now.”

There are exceptions, like period English dramas and TV shows like “Mad Men,” and when Sotto watches, she relishes the details, knowing what goes into the recreations.

She still keeps an active drawing schedule and has several projects in the works.

“I love to keep drawing, I do,” she said. “I had such a wonderful experience with it. All the things that I should have done I did. Nothing haunts me. I have no regrets.”

DAVID HANSEN is a writer and Laguna Beach resident. He can be reached at davidhansen@yahoo.com.