Makeup Man to the Stars

William J. Tuttle’s Bel Air Bay Club Home

By MICHAEL OLDHAM | Contributing Writer

For decades, William J. Tuttle was the face behind the stars’ faces seen on the silver screen—including time he spent living in Lower Las Casas.

Born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1912, Tuttle was a pioneering makeup man for Hollywood. He did makeup for a huge swath of Hollywood’s biggest stars, including Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn and Esther Williams.

As a makeup specialist, Tuttle was able to show three different sides of actress Lana Turner in the 1952 classic film “The Bad and the Beautiful.” Tuttle had Turner’s face looking like a drunk, a glitzy star and a lover in the throes of rejection.

Tuttle worked on the faces of leading-man male actors such Cary Grant for his 1959 Hitchcock film, “North by Northwest.” The makeup man turned Kirk Douglas into Vincent Van Gogh for the 1956 biographical film of the painter “Lust for Life.”

He was MGM’s makeup chief for a couple of decades. He held this job from 1950 to 1970, working the last chapter years of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Tuttle was the makeup creator for the 1951 Gene Kelly musical and dance film “An American in Paris.”

Tuttle was also the makeup artist or makeup supervisor for multitudes of ’60s-era films such as “The Singing Nun” of 1966 and the 1968 film, “Ice Station Zebra.”

Tuttle not only dressed up Oscar-winning faces such as actors Clark Gable and Doris Day, he was awarded his own Oscar in 1965. This special Academy Award was presented to Tuttle many years before there was an Oscar category created to recognize makeup skill, in 1981.

But, all of Tuttle’s accomplishments hide the fact that, as a teenager, he once helped hold up a struggling household.

When he was 15 years of age, Tuttle had to drop out of school to support a household that held his mother, younger brother and himself.

During these trying times in his life, Tuttle probably could not imagine he would someday live in an ocean-facing house, in the well-to-do Bel Air Bay Club community of Pacific Palisades.

Tuttle purchased a home on the lasso-shaped section of Aderno Way. The thin street offered the talented makeup artist a refuge from his busy schedule, for it is a quiet street. There is only room for two cars to pass each other on the stripe of Aderno Way that fronted Tuttle’s house.

Tuttle, who would live to be 95 years of age, resided in the Palisades for decades. He shared the house with his fourth wife, Anita. Tuttle had at least two children: a son and a daughter.

One of his previous wives was actress Donna Reed. Tuttle and Reed met each other inside the MGM makeup department one day in the 1940s. They both were working for the studio at the time—she as a budding actress and he was then the assistant to the head of the studio’s makeup department.

After Tuttle applied makeup on the actress during their fateful first encounter, the two hit it off romantically and soon married. The marriage though lasted only a little longer than Reed’s makeup he put on Reed: The partnering ended in divorce after only a few years.

The Aderno Way home that Tuttle lived in no longer stands. It was a stone’s throw away from the Bel Air Bay Club, and less than two miles from the sand and waters of the beach.

Though it is difficult to learn much about Tuttle’s now-demolished house, we can get a glimpse of his rise as a makeup artist from a 2016 book written by Justin Humphreys called “Interviews Too Shocking to Print!”

One such interview subject was Tuttle.

Tuttle got one of his first big movie makeup breaks by stumbling into an assignment. It was while he was working on the 1935 horror film called “Mark of the Vampire.”

In Humphreys’ book, Tuttle explains how he got this lucky break.

“The man who was assigned to [‘Mark of the Vampire’] had a heart attack and didn’t show up. When we got word about it … [MGM Makeup Department Chief] Jack Dawn said—he used to call everybody ‘son’—‘Son, get your kit and go down and see what you can do on that picture ’cause I want you to do all of those makeups, until I can get somebody to take it over.’

“I was making 60 cents an hour; I was making $50 a week in those days. He said, ‘See, what you can do.’”

And the rest was Hollywood history for Tuttle—the makeup artist to the stars.

William J. Tuttle passed away in 2007. Aderno Way was his last residence.

Michael Oldham, author of the novel “The Valentino Formula,” can be reached at hollywoodlandings@sbcglobal.net.