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By Phil Williams and Jean Cleveland
Sylvia Hillyard Pannell stands over a table in the university’s Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, smiling and shaking her head in amazement.
 “They’re extraordinary, aren’t they?” she asks a visitor. Indeed, they are. Stacked before her are dozens of brightly colored gouache renderings of men and women in dazzling costumes, captured on heavy cream paper straight from the imagination of Freddy Wittop--one of the most admired costume designers in American theatrical history. The costumes span a large range of historical and stylistic periods, but each is still bright and immediate, as if executed a few days earlier, instead of decades ago.
Pannell, who counts costume design among her fields of expertise in drama, is using the Wittop collection in a biography she is writing about the noted designer, who is now retired in Florida at the age of 87.
“This collection here is just remarkable, and it’s almost unheard of to have what is nearly a person’s life work at hand to examine,” says Pannell, a professor in the department of drama and theatre. “It’s a great opportunity to study his genius.”
Pannell has been working on her book for several years and expects to have a complete draft early in 1999. Wittop himself, a frequent visitor to the Hargrett Library, has closely collaborated with Pannell on the work.
The man’s life has been phenomenal. A native of the Netherlands, he moved with his family to Brussels when he was six, and he became a full-time designer in 1924 at the age of 13. He began classes in ballet the same year, preparing for a life that would include, for many years, equal parts dance and costume design. He spent years designing for Paris music halls before coming to the United States in 1936.
 Wittop’s signature work is Hello, Dolly!, for which he won a Tony Award for costume design. In that production alone, his designs were worn by Carol Channing, Ginger Rogers, Mary Martin, Martha Raye, Betty Grable, Pearl Bailey, Phyllis Diller, Ethel Merman and Dorothy Lamour. In all, he was nominated for the Tony Award five times.
“Our total Wittop collection includes about 3,000 costume sketches,” says Mary Ellen Brooks, head of the Hargrett Library. “It’s really quite an amazing group of pieces.”
Wittop’s work first came to UGA in the late 1960s, when the libraries acquired a large group of costume designs called “The Paris Music Hall Collection.” The group of nearly 7,000 drawings included work by a number of well-known and unknown artists who worked for such institutions as the Folies Bergère in the 1930s. More than 20 years later, the libraries obtained a much larger collection from Wittop himself, who had retired to Florida after many years in New York theater.
“We are fortunate to have one of the largest collections of costume designs in the country,” says University Librarian William Gray Potter. “The work of Freddy Wittop represents the very best of this collection.”
In her biography, Pannell will trace Wittop’s rise from his early days in Br ussels to his glory days working on Broadway with such producers and directors as Bob Fosse, Gower Champion and David Merrick. His costumes appeared in more than 75 productions, including I Do, I Do; Carnival; On a Clear Day You Can See Forever; The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd and George M.
“I am examining his work through historical periods of theater, as well as the 20th-century art movements, including art nouveau, art deco and on to what is generally called modern,” says Pannell. “But in writing his biography, this is all secondary to his genius and personality.”
Mary Ellen Brooks believes the Wittop materials are an important part of the Hargrett collection.
“One of the main reasons we were able to get the second part of the Wittop drawings was through the encouragement and support of Bill Prokasy [recently retired as vice president for academic affairs],” she says. “His vital support helped us preserve something that’s a real treasure. That we even had the opportunity to get this collection is remarkable.”
While the original costume sketches and finished drawings are available only to serious scholars, the original 7,000 images from the Paris Music Hall Collection have been scanned and can be seen on computer terminals in the Hargrett Library, located on the third floor the main library on North Campus.
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