For a designer trained in the couture houses of Europe, Elois Jenssen had a surprisingly irreverent attitude toward fashion.
Although her costumes for Hedy Lamarr were as elegant as any Dior or Chanel creation, Jenssen believed that an actress should dress as she pleased offscreen, no matter how tasteless or over-the-top. “If she wants to wear beaded dresses and marabou and ostrich feathers, let her,” the Academy Award–winning designer once said. “It’s going to make her a lot happier than the latest creation and will get her the attention she wants. I don’t know who started all this business about a star being well dressed anyhow.”
Jenssen certainly knew about movie stars. She grew up among the privileged elite of Bel Air and Beverly Hills. She was born Elois Wilhelmina Jenssen at the start of the Roaring Twenties. Her father, Gunnar Darre Jenssen, a Norwegian immigrant, initially formed an engineering consulting firm with his brother in New York City. There he married Jenssen’s mother, Elois Frances Collard, on December 24, 1919, before heading west. In the early 1920s, the Jenssens spent considerable time in the San Francisco Bay area, their base for several voyages to Asia, where Gunnar secured resources for his ink recovery and paper mill manufacturing business. Elois was born in Palo Alto on November 5, 1922.
By the mid-1920s, the Jenssens moved permanently to California, first residing in Oceanside. By 1930, the Jenssens moved to Los Angeles, living in a beautiful Mediterranean-style home in Beachwood Canyon and later moving to Holmby Hills. The Jenssens enrolled their future designer daughter in the Westlake School for Girls, a prestigious private institution in Holmby Hills.
At the age of thirteen, Jenssen enrolled in the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts (now Parsons The New School for Design). Her parents moved with her to Europe to enable Jenssen to study at the school’s Paris atelier. The outbreak of World War II cut her studies short, but her time spent in Paris was invaluable, as visits to the great couture houses were part of the curriculum. Upon returning to Los Angeles, Jenssen completed a four-year course in design at the Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts). Years later, Jenssen would teach motion picture and television design at her alma mater.
Upon graduating in 1943, Jenssen presented herself to Hunt Stromberg, who had just left MGM to start his own production company. Natalie Visart had just signed with Stromberg and needed a sketch artist and assistant. Jenssen worked with Visart for three years. During Visart’s tenure, Jenssen’s sketches for The Strange Woman (1946) especially pleased star Hedy Lamarr. After Visart’s departure, Lamarr asked Jenssen to design her clothes for the next Stromberg production, Dishonored Lady (1947).
After Stromberg closed his production company, Lamarr continued to require producers to hire Jenssen as a freelance artist. In Let’s Live a Little (1948), Lamarr played a psychiatrist and author who falls in love with one of her patients. Arrayed in Jenssen’s creations, Lamarr looked stunning, a fact even critics panning the film had to concede. At the end of 1948, five designers began work on the mammoth task of creating costumes for the Cecil B. DeMille’s religious epic Samson and Delilah (1949). They included Edith Head, Dorothy Jeakins, Gile Steele, Gwen Wakeling, and, at the insistence of Lamarr, Jenssen.
Head was not particularly friendly toward Jenssen during production. She did not want the less-experienced Jenssen to do much of anything. Which costumes Jenssen actually designed is not certain. Some sources credit her with Lamarr’s stunning peacock robe, famously decorated with feathers from DeMille’s own flock on his ranch in Tujunga. Others claim that Head designed the flowing frock after researchers told her that ancient Minoans may have actually used peacock feathers in their designs. What is certain: all five designers shared the 1950 Academy Award for best color costume design. In later years, Jenssen lived near Head and frequently dropped in, though not always when Head wanted to see her. Head was not much of a drinker, but Jenssen, who developed a habit of calming her jitters with a cocktail before meetings with producers, was known to raid Head’s bar during the day. During Head’s terminal illness in 1981, Jenssen frequently took the ailing designer to the hospital for her blood transfusions.
An Elois Jenssen sketch for Patricia Neal in Diplomatic Courier (1952).
The 1950s brought significant changes to Jenssen personally and professionally. On April 2, 1952, she married Thomas Jefferson Andre, an assistant director seventeen years her senior. Though their marriage was at first stormy enough to warrant mentions in gossip columns, the two stayed married until his death in 1983. Jenssen never had children, but was a stepmother to Andre’s son from his first marriage.
With the advent of television, Jenssen left the movie wardrobe department. “The clotheshorse is returning and she’s going to be on television,” Jenssen said in a 1953 interview. Surprisingly, in some ways, Jenssen found designing for television less mundane than designing for movies. “Nobody in television is telling us that we have to dress stars like every other woman,” she said. Clearly television producers seemed less concerned about realism in wardrobe design, as evidenced by Jenssen’s designs for Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy. Though playing an “ordinary” housewife, Ball’s wardrobe had flair and sophistication, but still seemed appropriate for a middle-class homemaker. Though Jenssen could not design the elaborate gowns she had done in the movies, she said, “Still, all and all, we’re getting a lot of zip and dash into their clothes. If I tried it in a movie, I’d have some producer yelling to keep it looking like a $5.98 dress and asking what was I trying to do—make the heroine look like a kept woman?”
During the next two decades, Jenssen designed for Ann Sothern in Private Secretary (1953–57), Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy (1951–57), Julie Newmar in My Living Doll (1964–65), and Evelyn Keyes in Bracken’s World (1969). Jenssen largely retired by 1970, though she was only in her fifties. Drinking cocktails to cope with her nerves before job interviews no longer seemed to be working for her. She had increasing difficulty finding work notwithstanding her impressive portfolio. Jenssen came out of this quasi-retirement a few times in the 1980s. She received a special wardrobe credit for the Jack Palance-Martin Landau horror flick Without Warning (1980). In 1983, she was nominated for an Oscar for her work on the futuristic scifi film, Tron (1982). Her last project was an episode of Designing Women in 1986.
As she approached her eighties, Jenssen left her home and the neighborhood where she had once lived next to Rock Hudson and moved to the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. After suffering a series of strokes, she died in her sleep on February 14, 2004. She was eighty-one.
Lucille Ball (left) and Elois Jenssen look over sketches for I Love Lucy.