Esme & Chester (continued)—It’s a solace each day to see the faces of these dear friends from long ago: these large publicity posters (each about a meter across) adorn my office wall in Kaysville today (14 January 2009). They show Esmé and Chester as they looked around 1920, when she was the first Miss Paris, and he was known in the world of traveling performers as “Chester Kingston, the Chinese Puzzle.” In 1963, Chester took me out to their garage to find these relics, which had been there over 40 years already. Mine may be the only surviving copies.
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Late middle age had not been kind to the Kieslings: not only was he severely crippled, but she was fighting the effects of leukemia. She’d pretty much lost her eyesight and gained 40 or 50 pounds. But shortly after her conversion (because of it, according to her) she had a remission of her cancer, lost the weight, regained her sight, and took up dancing again. And in her sixties, having never held a brush in her hand, Esmé decided to become a painter.
Less than a year from that decision, specializing in gardens and landscapes, she was named painter laureate of the French Horticultural Society. They honored her that year with a solo exhibition in the Petit Palais on the Champs-Élysées, building it around two paintings depicting scenes central to early “Mormon” history: the Hill Cumorah (with golden plates) and the Sacred Grove. Just her way of making a down payment on her missionary responsibility.
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