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Kevyn Aucoin a beautiful life: The Success, Struggles, and Beauty Secrets of a Legendary Makeup Artist
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About Kevyn Aucoin A Beautiful Life: The
Product Description The late A-list celebrity makeup artist recounts his painful childhood, early career with Vogue magazine, and behind-the-scenes perspectives on the fashion industry, offering tips on how he created some of his most popular looks. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One: 1962-1977. The Foundation Years. "I understood early that beauty was power." "I made a crash landing here on earth on February 14, 1962, in the Shreveport Catholic Charities Home for un-wed mothers. The infamous Bonnie and Clyde lost their lives just miles from where I was born. Like outlaws ourselves, my birth mother and I were on the run from the day she found out I was part of her." As an adult, Kevyn Aucoin led the kind of glamorous, fast-paced life that can only be imagined. He tended to the face of every A-list star, penned bestselling books, met princesses and presidents, and commanded thousands of dollars for a single day's work. Few could have predicted this incredible rise given his heart-wrenching childhood. The complications began well before Kevyn was born. His mother, Nelda Mae Sweat, was a scared, pregnant sixteen-year-old with strict Baptist parents. His father, a handsome football player named Jerry Burch, didn't believe that the baby was his. When Nelda's parents discovered her condition, they shipped her off to St. Ann's, a home for unwed mothers in Shreveport, Louisiana, where she lived for three months. Nelda went into labor on Valentine's Day and almost died during the delivery when her blood pressure dropped precipitously. Her parents forbade her to see the baby boy, but she managed to slip into the nursery each night and rock him to sleep. She named him Scott Kevin. Right before she was discharged, Nelda made one last secret visit to the nursery. She clipped off the baby's ID bracelet and returned home, heartbroken about the child she was forced to leave behind. She had no idea if she would ever see him again. Across the state in a town called Lafayette, Isidore Aucoin, Jr., a telephone company manager, and his wife, Thelma, had filed an adoption request with the Catholic Charities and were put on a waiting list. The couple, childless after a decade of marriage, desperately wanted a baby. A month later, while Thelma was washing dishes in their modest home, the phone rang. A newborn was available. The Aucoins named him Kevin James. (Almost twenty years later, Kevyn would change the spelling of his first name.) Thelma doted on her baby, and he grew into a plump, jowly toddler. "When he was two, he was so fat his legs would rub together until they were raw," recalls his aunt Laura Bourgeois. "The pediatrician made Thelma put him on a diet, and Kevyn cried and cried." By this time, Kevyn had a baby brother named Keith, who also came from St. Ann's. Over the next eight years, two adopted girls rounded out the family -- Carla, gregarious and feminine, and Kim, tomboyish and introspective. The girls shared one bedroom and the boys another in the red brick house that Isidore had built years earlier in the middle-class neighborhood. The Aucoins had a carport, a big backyard, and one bathroom. The monthly mortgage payment was $74.66. Like other little boys, Kevyn liked to climb trees and run around barefoot. But he also loved to dance, draw, and listen to songs (such as "Raindrops Keep Falllin' on My Head") over and over. "I was a regular little boy who also enjoyed things that girls did," Kevyn told the producers of Oliver Button Is a Star, a documentary based on the 1979 children's book Oliver Button Is a Sissy. "I was a tomboy and a sissy boy." Kevyn wore bright green patent-leather loafers on his first day of school and regularly rearranged the living-room furniture -- both with his mother's approval. "She was very supportive of me being who I was and understood my femininity," said Kevyn. "That gave me the impetus to be who I am today." By the age of six, Kevyn re
