Lillian Brown, makeup artist to 9 presidents, dies
On Aug. 8, 1974, Lillian Brown, a longtime makeup artist for presidents, was urgently summoned to the White House, where she saw President Richard Nixon sobbing. Engulfed by the Watergate scandal, he was about to go on national television and announce that he was resigning. If he didn’t stop crying, she knew, his makeup would streak down his face.
“He was in bad shape,” Brown recalled years later. “We had six minutes to air, and I thought, What can I do for this man?”
She tried humor. She reminded him of the time one Christmas when his Irish setter, King Timahoe, kept bumping into the tree and destroying the ornaments. To get the dog away from the tree, Brown took him into a bathroom, and somehow, as if scripted by the Marx Brothers, she, the dog and Nixon all ended up locked in the loo by the Secret Service.
Nixon burst into laughter. With no time to spare, Brown made him presentable, and he went before the cameras.
Long before there were high-priced media consultants coaching the political elite, there was Lillian Brown, a common-sense farm girl from Ohio. She applied makeup for nine presidents, from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Bill Clinton. But she did much more than powder noses. She advised on diction, apparel and camera angles. And long before there was Room Rater, the Twitter account that has commented on the backgrounds of Zoom calls since the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Brown moved flower vases to strategic positions within a TV frame, underlined important words on teleprompter copy and helped calm nerves before big moments.