Academy Award Nominee's Legacy Lives On

Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part series on Palos Verdes resident and Academy Award nominee Ralph Jester and his family.

He was nominated for an Academy Award for best costume design for two Cecil B. DeMille films: The Ten Commandments (1956), and again for The Buccaneer (1958).

But the late Ralph Jester, who died at age 90 in 1991, was much more than a designer of period dress for stars such as Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner and Gina Lollobrigida.

“Ralph liked the creativity of the movies,” Lois Jester, 90, said one recent morning in the light-filled living room of the Portuguese Bend home she shared with her husband of 46 years. “But he didn’t live a Hollywood life.”

The names and dates that inhabited her husband’s illustrious career come as easily to her as the precious events and milestones that made up their life together.

Serving as a lasting metaphor for Jester’s love for Lois and their two grown sons, Lee and Leven, is their home above the sea.

Signs of Jester are everywhere—the sculpture of Claudette Colbert as Cleopatra in the master bath; the bust of actor Warren William as Julius Caesar in the hall; the photograph of Jester taken by Lollobrigida on Lois' desk, the portrait of him painted by Palos Verdes artist Jean West.

But it is the house itself—a 1949 Lloyd Wright design, with built-in cabinets, walls of windows and sweeping angles—that most expresses the reverence Jester had for his family, as well as for the wondrous landscape first introduced to him by Frank A. Vanderlip Sr. in the 1930s.

Jester had gotten to know the Vanderlips in the 1920s through their daughter, Narcissa, who was at Vassar when Ralph was at Yale, Lois explained. He was also a frequent guest at Beechwood, Vanderlip’s vast estate on the Hudson River in New York.

“On Ralph’s first trip to California,” Lois said, “a Hollywood colleague told him: ‘I’m going to show you a place that will make you think of the French Riviera.’ ”

After winding down the road from Miraleste (now Palos Verdes Drive East), they headed along the coast, until Jester told his friend to turn into a gated area.

I can’t turn in there,” Jester’s friend said. “It’s a private estate.”

“The Vanderlips are friends of mine,” Jester said, gaining entry past the gate house. Thus, they headed up Narcissa Drive under a canopy of Brazilian pepper trees, until they reached the Old Ranch Cottage, Frank Vanderlip's main residence.

From then on, Lois said, Jester lived in one of the cottages on the Vanderlip estate, driving to Hollywood in the days before freeways.

That was long before Jester and Lois married in 1945. The two were introduced in New York by a mutual friend, Josephine Hughes, a protégé of Hattie Carnegie, a famous designer of the day.

One afternoon at Hughes' apartment, the two women were discussing Lois modeling for a Carnegie fashion show when Jester called and invited Hughes out for cocktails.

Hughes told him to come up to her place instead, and Jester—some 20 years older than the blond beauty he met that day—wasted no time asking Lois out.

“Ralph and I had a date the next morning at 10:30,” Lois said, smiling at the memory of the dashing Air Force lieutenant colonel, then making films for the military.

The smitten couple went to the Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to medieval art and architecture, one of Jester’s many passions. Six months later, they were married in Bennington, VT.

After receiving a medical discharge that same year, Jester drove his new bride out to California, stopping in Texas to introduce her to his family.

“There were a lot of Jesters,” Lois laughed, a fact supported by the numerous portraits of Jester ancestors decorating the walls of their home.

They rented a house for a short time on Via del Monte in Palos Verdes Estates, and then moved to an apartment near the library in Malaga Cove. Their first Thanksgiving was spent with guests, including Lloyd Wright, son of the noted American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.

A close friend of Jester’s, Lloyd Wright was the architect eventually chosen by Mrs. Frank Vanderlip Sr. to design the Wayfarer’s Chapel—at Jester’s suggestion.

But it was following a trip to Europe in 1948 to scout for locations for a DeMille movie, Samson and Delilah, that Jester invited Lois to join him for a picnic in Portuguese Bend.

Stopping at a spectacular spot that overlooked the Pacific Ocean, Jester told his wife, “This is a surprise for you. I bought this lot so we can build a house here.”

The architect was to be Lloyd Wright.

“I was thrilled to death,” said Lois, who was not the least concerned that she had not been consulted.

Jester had also been friends with Frank Lloyd Wright, who had designed a home for him in 1938 consisting of a series of circular rooms. Although the plans never materialized into a house in Palos Verdes, drawings and a model of "the Ralph Jester Project" are on display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and an adaptation of the house was built in Arizona in 1971.

At the same time Lloyd Wright was involved with the Jester home, he was designing and building the Wayfarer’s Chapel. Although Jester, who had studied architecture at Yale, had been Mrs. Frank Vanderlip’s first choice to design the church, Jester convinced her otherwise.

“I think Lloyd would do a better job for you,” Jester told her. He made the introductions and the landmark glass chapel resulted, Lois said.

Lee Jester, 61, something of an authority on his father's work, produced endless sketches from Jester’s costume designing days, photos of him with film stars and the plaques commemorating his two Academy Award nominations.

At a showing of Cleopatra at the Palos Verdes Library last September, he brought some of his father’s photos and memorabilia from the film and ended up speaking at length. He has another library presentation scheduled for the fall.

But Lee’s most treasured memories of his dad were of the early years, especially when he and his older brother, Leven (named after his Scottish grandfather), were about 8 and 10 years old.

“We had a closet door in our bedroom that was chalkboard, and dad would do chalk drawings just for our entertainment,” he said.

Lee, who shares the family home with his mother, said he and Leven, 64, a dealer in fossils and minerals in Fallbrook, were as in awe of their father's talent then as they are today.

Now, Lee’s two daughters, Rebecca 12, and Elizabeth, 17, who inhabit the guestroom every other week, are beneficiaries of Jester lore and all that Portuguese Bend has to offer.