Dorothy Jeakins Costume Design Archive, 1932-1975

Processed by Arts Special Collections Staff; machine-readable finding aid created by Sue Hwang and Julie Graham.
UCLA Library Special Collections
Performing Arts Special Collections
Room A1713, Charles E. Young Research Library
Box 951575
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1575
spec-coll@library.ucla.edu
URL: http://www2.library.ucla.edu/specialcollections/performingarts/index.cfm
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.


Descriptive Summary

Title: Dorothy Jeakins costume design archive
Date (inclusive): 1932-1975
Collection number: 124
Creator: Jeakins, Dorothy
Extent: 14 boxes (7 linear ft.)
Abstract: Dorothy Jeakins built an impressive list of credits in theater, film, and television and came to be respected as one of the best costume designers in the entertainment industry. The collection contains costume designs, preparatory sketches, textile swatches, and designer notes related to her career.
Language: Finding aid is written in English.
Repository: University of California, Los Angeles. Library. Performing Arts Special Collections.
Los Angeles, California 90095-1575
Physical location: Stored off-site at SRLF. Advance notice is required for access to the collection. Please contact the UCLA Library, Performing Arts Special Collections Reference Desk for paging information.

Administrative Information

Restrictions on Access

COLLECTION STORED OFF-SITE AT SRLF: Open for research. Advance notice required for access. Contact the UCLA Library, Performing Arts Special Collections Reference Desk for paging information.

Restrictions on Use and Reproduction

Property rights to the physical object belong to the UCLA Library, Performing Arts Special Collections. Literary rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright.

Provenance/Source of Acquisition

Gift of Dorothy Jeakins, 1990.

Preferred Citation

Dorothy Jeakins Costume Design Archive (Collection 124). Performing Arts Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

Biography

Dorothy Jeakins was born January 11, 1914, in San Diego, California; her father, George Tyndall Jeakins, was a stockbroker, and her mother, Sophia Maria (von Kempf) Jeakins, was a couture dressmaker. After her parents separated, Jeakins was placed into foster care. Following graduation from Fairfax High School, in 1931, Jeakins submitted original drawings to a competition and won a three-year fine arts scholarship to the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, where she studied drawing and painting. Jeakins graduated from Otis in 1934 and joined the Works Progress Administration, Southern California Art Project as its youngest woman artist. In 1936 she accepted a position painting animated cells in the color department at the Walt Disney Studio , then in the late 1930s, she joined the Los Angeles department store I. Magnin, drawing fashion layouts in the advertising department. Her work caught the attention of a Twentieth Century Fox art director, who hired her as an assistant to illustrate costumes for the studio; she was eventually assigned as an assistant to costume designer Ernst Dryden.
After a short marriage Jeakins resumed her career in the mid-1940s and began sketching the couture creations of Balmain and Dior. In 1948 Jeakins became an assistant to the RKO studio costume designer Madame Karinska and worked on Joan of Arc (1948). She was awarded an Oscar for her work on this film, the first of three Oscars she would receive, out of twelve Academy Award nominations. Joan of Arc also made history as the first film to be recognized by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences for excellence in the category of costume design in color. In the years that followed, Jeakins built an impressive list of credits in theater, film, and television and came to be respected as one of the best costume designers. She was affiliated with nearly eighty film productions, including Samson and Delilah (1949), for which she earned her second Academy Award; The Children's Hour (1961); The Night of the Iguana (1964), a solo credit for which she received her third Academy Award; The Way We Were (1973); Young Frankenstein (1975); On Golden Pond (1981); and her last film, The Dead (1987).
Jeakins's strong ties with the theater brought opportunities on both East and West Coasts to work on productions for the American Shakespeare Festival, Los Angeles Civic Light Opera, UCLA University Theater Group, and Los Angeles Center Theater Group. Among her theater credits are King Lear (1950 and 1964), The World of Suzie Wong (1958), The Winters Tale (1958; 1960-61), Juno and the Paycock (1974), and both the Broadway and film versions of South Pacific and The Sound of Music. In 1962, Jeakins was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship to study traditional Japanese costume in Noh drama and spent a year in Tokyo. In 1969 she was appointed curator of costumes and textiles for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Scope and Content

The collection contains costume designs, preparatory sketches, textile swatches, and designer notes related to the career of costume designer Dorothy Jeakins. The bulk of the costume designs are original color works documenting precise details of buttons, bows, trim, hair styles, and, occasionally, props. Additionally there are pencil sketches that were probably not intended to function as exact costume drawings; instead, it is likely they were created to capture the characters' collective persona. Many of the renderings include swatches of fabric representing the designer's ideas for color, texture, and/or fabrics, and some contain her handwritten annotations documenting a project title, scene, actor and/or character name, measurements, or other notes about the character. The sampling of projects document numerous motion picture and theater projects in which Jeakins was involved including All's Well That Ends Well (American Shakespeare Theatre), Any Wednesday, Hawaii, Joan of Arc, Juno and the Paycock, The Music Man, and The Winter's Tale, among others.

Indexing Terms

The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog.

Subjects

Jeakins, Dorothy--Archives
Women costume designers--United States--Archival resources.

Genres and Forms of Material

Swatches.
Slides.
Costume design drawings.


Box 12

Loose pages from designer work book(s) with moslty swatches

Note

(5 folders)
Box 14

Loose pages from designer work book(s) with moslty swatches

Note

(4 folders)
Box 4

Slides of sketches and swatches

Note

Represents various projects.
Box 13

Swatches

Box 8

1776

Physical Description: 1 item

Note

Color sketch.
Box 10

4th of July

Physical Description: 4 items

Note

Color sketches with swatches.
Box 6

All's Well That Ends Well

Physical Description: 7 items

Note

Color skethes with swatches. American Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford, CT, 1959. (folder 2 of 3)
Box 6

All's Well That Ends Well

Physical Description: 7 items

Note

Color skethes with swatches. American Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford, CT, 1959. (folder 3 of 3)
Box 6

All's Well That Ends Well

Physical Description: 7 items

Note

Color skethes with swatches. American Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford, CT, 1959. (folder 1 of 3)
Box 8

Annie Get Your Gun

Physical Description: 1 item

Note

Color sketch with swatch. L.A. Civic Light Opera, 1957.
Box 1

Any Wednesday

Physical Description: 15 items

Note

3 original sketches with swatches and 12 photocopies of sketches for Jane Fonda character. Warner, 1966.
Box 7

Besty (The)

Physical Description: 1 item

Note

Worklog (schedule).
Box 11

Besty (The)

Note

Notes from designer work book (with swatches).
Box 8

Carousel

Physical Description: 10 items

Note

Pencil and color sketches with swatches. L.A. Civic Light Opera, 1953
Box 11

Childrens Hour

Note

Notes from designer work book (with swatches).
Box 5

Coriolanus

Physical Description: 14 items

Note

Color sketches with swatches. Possible UCLA Theatre Group.
Box 11

Dead (The)

Note

Notes from designer work book.
Box 8

Duchess of Malfi

Note

Work log (schedule) and cast list. L.A. Civic Light Opera, 1975.
Box 8

Duchess of Malfi

Physical Description: 7 items

Note

Mostly color sketches with swatches. L.A. Civic Light Opera, 1975.
Box 8

Duchess of Malfi

Physical Description: 8 items

Note

Mostly color sketches with swatches. L.A. Civic Light Opera, 1975.
Box 11

Duchess of Malfi

Note

Playbill for performance at the L.A. Mark Taper Forum, 1976.
Box 11

Duchess of Malfi

Note

Notes from designer work book (with swatches).
Box 8

Elmer Gantry

Physical Description: 2 items

Note

Sketches with swatches.
Box 11

Green Mansions

Note

One page of notes from designer work book (with swatches)
Box 7

Hawaii

Physical Description: 4 items

Note

Color sketches with swatches for Thetis Voyage.
Box 10

Hawaii

Physical Description: 3 items

Note

Color sketches with swatches and pencil drawing. United Artists, 1966.
Box 1

Jack Cole Las Vegas show

Physical Description: 7 items

Note

Color sketches with swatches.
Box 8

Joan of Arc

Physical Description: 5 items

Note

Color sketches. RKO, 1948.
Box 11

Joan of Arc

Note

Notes from designer work book (with swatches).
Box 7

Juno and the Paycock

Physical Description: 10 items

Note

Color sketches with swatches and one schematic of swatches only.
Box 11

Juno and the Paycock

Note

Notes from designer work book.
Box 11

Juno and the Paycock

Note

Playbill for performance at the L.A. Mark Taper Forum, 1974
Box 15

Les Miserables

Physical Description: 1 item

Note

Pencil sketch with swatch.
Box 10

Little Big Man

Physical Description: 1 item

Note

Color sketch with swatch. National General, 1970
Box 11

Little Big Man

Note

Notes from designer work book (with swatches).
Box 11

Loose pages from designer work book(s) with moslty swatches

Note

(2 folders)
Box 15

Masquerade

Physical Description: 2 items

Note

Color sketches.
Box 3

Merry Wives of Windsor

Physical Description: 9 items

Note

Color sketches with swatches. American Conservatory Theatre, San Francisco, 1975. (folder 1 of 2)
Box 3

Merry Wives of Windsor

Note

Worklog (schedule). American Conservatory Theatre, San Francisco, 1975.
Box 3

Merry Wives of Windsor

Physical Description: 19 items

Note

Color sketches with swatches. American Conservatory Theatre, San Francisco, 1975. (folder 2 of 2)
Box 11

Merry Wives of Windsor

Note

Press clipping.
Box 11

Merry Wives of Windsor

Note

Notes from designer work book (with swatches).
Box 10

Michele Abele

Physical Description: 1 item

Note

Color sketch with swatch.
Box 9

Molly Maguires (The)

Physical Description: 5 items

Note

Color sketches most with swatches
Box 15

Molly Maguires (The)

Physical Description: 1 item

Note

Sketch with swatch.
Box 1

Murder in the Cathedral

Physical Description: 10 items

Note

Color sketches with swatches. UCLA Theatre Group, 1960
Box 1

Music Man

Physical Description: 6 items

Note

Mostly black and white ink sketches with swatches. Warner, 1961
Box 10

Music Man

Physical Description: 5 items

Note

Black and white and color sketches most with swatches. Warner Bros., 1961.
Box 15

My Cousin Rachel

Physical Description: 3 items

Note

Color sketches. Fox, 1952.
Box 11

North Dallas Forty

Note

Notes from designer work book (with swatches).
Box 5

Oliver!

Physical Description: 5 items

Note

Color sketches with swatches along with one black and clear transparency. L.A. Civic Light Opera, 1962.
Box 11

Oliver!

Note

Playbill, telegram, pages from designer work book (with swatches).
Box 2

On Golden Pond

Physical Description: 2 items

Note

Not originals. Photocopies of black and white pencil sketches of Katherine Hepburn, 1981. Original sketches found under The Prodigal on the verso of The Priest and Agamemnon sketches in box 5; and under Juno and the Paycock on the verso of Sean O'Casey in box 7.
Box 11

On Golden Pond

Note

Notes from designer work book (with swatches). Appears to include unindentified pages not related to On golden pond.
Box 5

Othello

Physical Description: 5 items

Note

Color sketches with swatches. L.A. Mark Taper Forum, 1971
Box 2

Postman Always Rings Twice (The)

Physical Description: 2 items

Note

Not originals. One is a photocopy of sketch of Cora found under The Prodigal on the verso of Aegisthus in box 5. One is a commerical reproduction of color Cora sketch.
Box 11

Postman Always Rings Twice (The)

Note

Pages from designer work book (with swatches).
Box 5

Prodigal (The)

Physical Description: 10 items

Note

Color sketches with swatches and one black and white photograph. UCLA Theatre Group, 1960. Original drawings of Cora from Postman Always Rings Twice found on verso of Aegisthus. Original sketch of Hepburn from On Golden Pond found on verso of Agamemnon.
Box 9

Rainmaker

Physical Description: 1 item

Note

Color sketch Tommy Lee Jones, Paramount TV, 1982.
Box 15

Samson and Delilah

Physical Description: 2 items

Note

Color sketches with swatches. Paramount, 1949
Box 9

Santa Barbara Museum of Art Dorothy - Jeakins Drawings for Actors

Note

Exhibit announcement, 1969. Not an original.
Box 15

Sound of Music

Physical Description: 1 item

Note

Color sketch with swatch for Julie Andrews character. Fox, 1965.
Box 15

South Pacific

Physical Description: 8 items

Note

Ovesize black and white photographs of island natives for Boar ceremony.
Box 10

Winesburg, Ohio, National Theatre, N.Y., 1958 (George Wallace)

Physical Description: 1 item

Note

Color sketch.
Box 2

Winter's Tale (The) (folder 1 of 3)

Physical Description: 12 items

Note

Moslty color sketches with swatches. 2 black and white photographs of sketches and a page of swatches. American Shakespeare Theatre, CT, 1958 or 1959.
Box 2

Winter's Tale (The) (folder 2 of 3)

Physical Description: 9 items

Note

Moslty color sketches with swatches. American Shakespeare Theatre, CT, 1958 or 1959.
Box 9

Winters Tale (The) (folder 3 of 3)

Physical Description: 1 item

Note

Pen drawing of Bear.
Box 2

Within the Gates

Physical Description: 6 items

Note

Color sketches. Student assignment from Otis Arts Institute, 1932
Box 15

Within the Gates

Physical Description: 2 items

Note

Color sketches with swatches of Young Whore and The Athesist.
Box 2

World of Suzie Wong (The)

Physical Description: 2 items

Note

Color sketches with swatches. Broadhurst, NY, 1958.
Box 15

World of Suzie Wong (The)

Physical Description: 2 items

Note

Color sketches with swatches of Coolie Blue and Prostitute.
Box 7

Yeats plays

Physical Description: 2 items

Note

Color sketches (one with swatches). Inlcudes Cathleen NiHoulihan (1952-1953); and Full Moon In (UCLA, March 1965).