Brushes with greatness mark makeup artist’s career

By Bill Gallo   |   September 10, 2009   |   7:01 AM

Makeup artist J.L. Laurence transformed John Elway, left, into Elvis for a Halloween party. Janet Elway is Priscilla Presley, center, accompanied by friends and other partygoers. (Photo courtesy of J.L. Laurence)

She darkened the famous blond locks to shimmering blue-black. She touched up the cheeks and chin. She glued on the fake sideburns and made sure the black satin jumpsuit and the white silk scarf fit just right. In fact, by the time J.L. Laurence got done with him, John Elway looked so much like mid-career Elvis that the quarterback started doing the singer’s strut and trying out his own baritone take on “Thank you very much.”

The Duke had been transformed into the King — just in time for Halloween.

J.L. Laurence has been working this kind of magic for more than 40 years. When the petite, blue-eyed Englishwoman advised TV personality Harry Smith to try nonreflective lenses in his eyeglasses, he went straight to the optician. When the director of The Legend of Alferd Packer needed a pack of sinister black rats, she made up white ones to fill the bill. When he asked for blood and gore, she opened the two 25-pound makeup cases she always carries with her and happily produced a camera-worthy catastrophe.

Former President Gerald Ford felt comfortable in her presence: “Call me Jerry,” he said.

In terms of beauty, illusion, even vanity — Laurence has seen it all and created most of it, for all three major TV networks, CNN and ESPN, for half a dozen movies, for candidates on the make, newscasters on the tube and actors on the edge.

As a teenager in the great port city of Liverpool, Laurence apprenticed as a window-dresser at a big department store called C. and A. Modes. It wasn’t long, however, before the salty kid, whose given name is Joan, turned her attention from mannequins to human flesh. At the Liverpool Art School, on Hope Street (where future Beatle John Lennon was a friend and classmate), she got her first glimpse of the possibilities.

As a professional makeup artist, she later worked in hotel rooms and TV studios, in the gutter and out of trucks, enhancing the look of everyone from Sandra Dee, James Garner and Michael Dukakis to the CEO of a global insurance company, upon whose face she painted all the continents and the seven seas.

Looking for a beard or a bruise, a perfect wig or a singular scar? J.L.’s your woman.

“I learned from everyone and everybody,” she says. “It’s been quite a life.”

For 15 years, Laurence and her husband lived in Montreal, where she did theater makeup for an English-language troupe called the Lakeshore Players, got faces (like Eartha Kitt’s) ready for their time on a local television station and worked part time for celebrities and politicians like Rene Levesque, leader of the secessionist Parti Quebecois.

In the late 1970s, Laurence moved to Denver, where she opened a short-lived salon at Evans and Monaco, called The Makeup Studio. But it was her reputation as a gifted, have-brushes-will-travel freelancer that sustained her career. She worked commercials for Cadillac, General Electric, Coors (pitchman: Mark Harmon), assorted phone companies and public agencies. She went to Canon City with a young TV reporter named Meredith Viera to interview a penitentiary inmate. She made up The Who at Red Rocks, then-Mayor Federico Pena at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw when the Pope came to town.

She had just arrived at Gerald and Betty Ford’s house in Beaver Creek for a 1980 photo shoot when U.S. Secret Service men “jumped out of the bushes with guns,” she recalls. “The license plate on my car said ‘MAKEUP’ but that didn’t matter. They had to check me out. That’s all right. I’ve been FBI’d and CIA’d several times.”

In Lamar, back in 2004, security officers confiscated her eight-inch scissors just moments before she went to work on the gaunt, exhausted face of presidential candidate John Kerry. Noticing her vivid accent, the Irish-American senator asked: “Where are you from?” Playing on her hometown’s role as a haven for immigrants, she answered: “From the capital of Ireland. Liverpool.”

Kerry laughed. And he relaxed.

“It’s interesting,” Laurence says. “When people are sitting in front of you in the chair, sometimes with their eyes closed, and you’re touching them, the relationship changes. It’s a kind of intimacy. Because they have to trust you.”

In such circumstances, Laurence chatted amiably with Betty Ford about alcoholism and breast cancer. After discussing health care with a very interested Hillary Clinton (in 1992, before a Prime Time Live interview), Laurence grew apprehensive as Clinton, with freshly redesigned eyes, vanished into the ladies’ room and let loose with an ambiguous but audible “Oooooh!”

Not to worry. A few minutes later, the future first lady and secretary of state had in her possession a sample case of the makeup J.L. Laurence swears by — manufactured by New York TV specialist Donald Britten.

The makeup artist also discussed cars with Lee Iaccoca — her 1968 Plymouth Barracuda, his red Chevy Corvette. But not before Iaccoca, apparently grumpy from fatigue, complained through an aide about the length of his makeup session at the Denver Convention Center.

“OK, you’re done,” Laurence said after performing a quick once-over. Iaccoca relented and remained in the chair, though, as Laurence gently chided him. “You have a cast on your foot,” she observed. “Have you been skateboarding?” He laughed.

Were she not the mother of three daughters, all now in their 30s, J.L. Laurence might have done the bulk of her facetime in Hollywood. But the 12-hour days and eight-week stints of movie location work deterred her: She turned down lots of studio offers and soldiered on here, turning Elway into Elvis and refurbishing everyone from Bertha Lynn to Bono.

In fact, when she last made up U2 for a concert/TV date, the Irish rock group’s frontman, like John Kerry, asked her where she was from. “From the capital of Ireland,” she answered. “Liverpool.”

Upon which Bono chased her about the room in mock anger, laughing and shouting “You little bugger!”

For her part, J.L. Laurence remains gobstruck, as they say back home on the banks of the Mersey, by her success and the life she’s led. “J.L.? That really stands for ‘Just Lucky,’ ” she insists. “I’m grateful. To Allah. To God. To Jesus. To the universe. To all of them: Thank you very much.”

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Categories: Arts, City

Tagged: j.l. laurence, makeup artist