Marie Irvine, 99; makeup artist to Marilyn Monroe

Marie Irvine was 99 years old when a chapter in her longago career became a TikTok sensation. During a crucial period late in Marilyn Monroe’s life, Ms. Irvine was her makeup artist in New York City, and when a TikTok star learned of her story, it blew up the internet this month.

In 1958, Life magazine commissioned photographer Richard Avedon to reimagine Monroe as screen and stage sirens Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, Theda Bara, Jean Harlow, and Lillian Russell. It was Ms. Irvine who assisted with her makeup — turning her into Russell’s candy-box pinup, and Dietrich’s steamy Lola Lola from the film “The Blue Angel.”

The photos ran in the Dec. 22 issue of the magazine, with an article written by Monroe’s husband at the time, playwright Arthur Miller, with the headline “My Wife Marilyn.” He described the photos “as a kind of history of our mass fantasy, so far as seductresses are concerned.”

And when Monroe, having been sewn into her skintight sequined gown, sang a breathless “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy at a Democratic fund-raiser at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in May 1962, it was Ms. Irvine who prepared her beforehand in Monroe’s apartment on East 57th Street, and then rushed to the Garden later with the star’s drop earrings, which she had left behind.

Erin Parsons, a 45-year-old makeup artist and TikTok star with a passion for vintage makeup and Monroe, had read of Ms. Irvine’s part in these iconic moments, and she tracked her down to learn more. And when she posted about her search on Jan. 8, her video went viral.

More than 1 million people have viewed it, and it has accrued more than 1,600 comments. One woman was particularly moved by the $125 fee that Ms. Irvine had charged for her services on the night of the Garden event, the equivalent of more than $1,200 today. (Parsons had a photo of the bill, an artifact that sold at auction for $1,152, and showed it in her video.)

Ms. Irvine died a week after Parsons’ post, on Jan. 15, at a care facility in Sarasota, Fla. Her daughter, Jane Bentley Sullivan, announced her death.

Ms. Irvine was not the architect of Monroe’s signature look. Her sleepy, bedroom gaze, articulated by the swoop of her liquid eyeliner, her bright red moue, and her beauty mark were the star’s own creations, conceived with her longtime West Coast-based makeup artist, Whitey Snyder. Her fans and fetishists, from Norman Mailer to Parsons’ audience, knew that she used a secret blend of three shades of lipstick and a gloss made with Vaseline. Mailer spends a page describing it in his 1973 biography, “Marilyn.”

Ms. Irvine met Monroe because she was an on-call makeup artist to Avedon in the 1950s, and he hired her to help with the Life magazine project. It took three months to complete, largely because of Monroe’s erratic schedule.

“We could shoot it only when Marilyn felt like it,” Ms. Irvine told an interviewer in 2014. “Sometimes it was in the middle of the night with a short notice. One time it was such a short notice, that I couldn’t find a babysitter so Marilyn said, ‘Bring your baby to the set.’” (That was Sullivan, who was 9 months old at the time.)

“So it was like a family atmosphere,” Ms. Irvine added. “She told me how much she wanted a baby.”

Marie Irvine was born Dec. 16, 1924, in Pawling, N.Y., the only child of William and Theresa (Brendlin) Irvine. She attended a one-room schoolhouse through grade school.

Toward the end of World War II, she met a naval officer at Delmonico’s restaurant when he was on leave; they married in 1947. In addition to her daughter, Sullivan, she leaves a son, who requested anonymity for himself and his father, whose name he shares, and two grandchildren. Ms. Irvine’s husband died in 1994.

Ms. Irvine was pleased she had had her moment of fame, although she wished, as she told her daughter, that the attention came when she had more energy to pursue it.

“I told her that the important thing was that it had happened at all,” Sullivan said. “She was an original and one of a kind laboring in obscurity to create many beautiful images with the pioneering photographers of the 20th century. After all, how many 99-yearolds who attended one-room schoolhouses go on to be TikTok stars?”