Lillian Brown dies at age 106
Beginning in the 1950s, Lillian Brown made dozens, if not hundreds, of visits to the White House. In some ways, she was closer to more presidents than any other adviser.
For each visit, Brown brought a small bag, which she called her kit, packed with creams, powders, brushes, pads and tissues — and a spare necktie and pair of black socks. With a deft hand and an encouraging voice, she became one of Washington’s first TV makeup artists and image consultants, helping journalists, congressional leaders, first ladies and no fewer than nine presidents put their best face forward.
Brown, a onetime country schoolteacher who began producing television programs in the 1950s and taught speech and elocution until she was 95, died Sept. 13 at her home in Mclean, Va. She was 106.
The cause was a stroke, said one of her daughters, the Rev. Carla Gorrell.
Brown got her start in television in 1953, when she volunteered to produce education programs for the public school system in Arlington, Va. Knowing nothing about the medium, she produced a series on the churches of the presidents and another on Virginia mansions.
She was also the host of a weekly educational series for children, “Do You Wonder?” which was produced at the same studio as CBS News’s “Face the Nation” in the mid-1950s. The producers of “Face the Nation” noticed Brown’s guests, including men, always wore makeup when appearing on camera. They asked if she would touch up guests on “Face the Nation,” at $19 a show. The first person she worked with was House Speaker Sam Rayburn, D-texas.
“I said, ‘Mr. Sam, if you let me powder your nose, I will not relieve you of your manhood,’” Brown recalled in a speech years later. “Once he recovered, he said, ‘ Well, you just go
ahead, honey.’”
Brown was not a cosmetologist. She learned the importance of television makeup by looking through cameras and viewing monitors: One of the first things she observed was that someone like Rayburn needed a dusting of powder to keep his bald head from gleaming under the studio lights.
In 1956, Brown joined George Washington University’s public relations office as director of radio and television. Among other duties, she developed one of the first college courses presented for credit on television
— a class in Russian, for which 3,000 people were registered.