Riccie Johnson, the venerated makeup artist who spent more than a half-century with 60 Minutes and put eyeliner on The Beatles for their first U.S. TV appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, has died. She was 101.
Johnson died Jan. 3, her family announced. CBS Sunday Morning paid tribute to her soon afterward, but otherwise her death had not been reported. For more than 20 years starting in the 1990s, she worked on the program, preparing host Charles Osgood and others.
A protégé of the late Dick Smith, known as “Godfather of Makeup,” Johnson also dealt with Milton Berle on Texaco Star Theatre — and just may have been responsible for his popular powder-puff gag — with Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows and on the CBS Morning News.
Johnson began on 60 Minutes with the newsmagazine’s first episode on Sept. 24, 1968, making sure hosts Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner were camera-ready, and was listed in the program’s credits as recently as December 2018.
Through the decades, she touched up the likes of Dan Rather, Morley Safer, Roger Mudd, Ed Bradley, Bob Simon, Leslie Stahl, Anderson Cooper, Lara Logan, Steve Kroft and Scott Pelley. Andy Rooney, though, typically applied his own makeup; if Johnson did anything, he’d tell her not to go near the eyebrows.
It’s hard to come up with a famous person that hasn’t sat in Johnson’s makeup chair at one time or another. She applied her makeup brush on TV news giants (Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow), showbiz icons (Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Arthur Godfrey, Tallulah Bankhead) and presidents (Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon — not in time for his sweaty debate performance opposite John Kennedy, alas — Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton).
Clinton resisted her help at first. “He was afraid he was going to look too made up,” she told the New York Post in 2014. “He came in rather tense. I told him, ‘Mr. President, I assure you I have a very light touch.’” Clinton signed a photo for her and wrote, “Thank you for making my old face look good.”
Perhaps her most memorable assignment came on Feb. 9, 1964, when The Beatles arrived in New York to perform on CBS’ The Ed Sullivan Show.
“I heard all this din outside,” she told Mo Rocca in 2016. “I looked out the window and saw all these young people. And I talked to the doorman. And he said, ‘Oh, some group from England.’ I said, ‘Wow. This looks serious!’ So I called home and said to my husband, ‘I can get the children in to a dress rehearsal.’ The children didn’t want to come. So of course, now they’re very sorry about that!”
Johnson remembered Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr being a bit nervous and wondering what she was doing to their faces.
Years later, she ran into McCartney in a hallway at CBS and, much to her surprise, he remembered her and their time together on the Sullivan show. He said, “You used pancake makeup and eyeliner, and when we asked you about the eyeliner, you said, ‘It’ll be fine,’” Johnson said in 2014.
She was born Florence Riccobono on Feb. 27, 1924, in Clifton, New Jersey. At Georgian Court University, a Roman Catholic college in Lakewood Township, New Jersey, she picked up the nickname Riccie as well as a bachelor of arts degree, then pursued her master’s in Theater Arts at the Pasadena Playhouse.
Her real makeup education began in 1950 when she was hired at NBC. Back then, she wanted to be an actress. She was offered a position in the makeup department and turned it down before she took a friend’s advice and reconsidered.
The NBC makeup department was headed by Smith, who would go on to work on such films as Little Big Man, The Godfather, Amadeus and The Exorcist and receive an honorary Oscar.
“He was very enthusiastic and a generous teacher,” Johnson told this writer during a 2015 interview for Makeup Artist Magazine. “He had us make each other up for practice when we weren’t busy. One day, he asked me to go with him to the control room during a dress rehearsal. In a whisper, he would show me what the lighting was doing — how it was causing shadows and where you needed to highlight.”
One of her first assignments came on Texaco Star Theatre. (Berle did his own makeup on the sketch-comedy program, but she was in charge of the guests.) In one of the comedian’s most famous bits, he would yell “Makeup!” on stage, and someone would smack him in the face with a giant powder puff, covering him with white dust.
Though the gag was as old as vaudeville itself, Johnson noticed that Berle began incorporating it on his show after she was stationed offstage with a powder puff and instructions to touch up the guests if needed.
“I don’t want to take credit for that. I have no idea,” she said. “He didn’t use it before. I know that. It wasn’t like it was anything new, but I wondered if he didn’t think of it because I was standing there with a powder puff.”
Johnson also did the makeup for another famed NBC comedy-variety program, Your Show of Shows, starring Caesar and Imogene Coca.
An opportunity to tour Europe lured Johnson away from NBC, but she landed at CBS when she returned, working on the game shows I’ve Got a Secret, To Tell the Truth and What’s My Line?
In 1952, she segued to the soap opera Guiding Light and met her future husband, James Johnson, a CBS cameraman. She first laid eyes on him after she was hit in the head with a boom that broke her glasses. “I was standing there with my hands in front of my face, and I hear this voice saying, ‘CBS will pay for these,’” she said. “And there was Jay, with the two pieces of glasses.”
The two married in 1953 and had seven children in 10 years, raising them on the Upper East Side of New York.
When CBS launched a weekday morning news show, Johnson was asked to do the makeup, and that worked out just fine with the demands of motherhood. She stayed with the CBS Morning News for a dozen years until offered the 60 Minutes gig.
Her husband died in 1999. In addition to her seven children, she is survived by 14 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. Donations in her memory may be made to Catholic Charities.
In her interview with Makeup Artist Magazine, Johnson seemed astonished by her brush with so much greatness.
“When you’re working — like when I made up The Beatles — I had no idea they would be so big. I just knew there were a lot of screaming kids out on the street, and there was talk about how important the group would be in the music world. But who knew how big they were going to be? And that’s the same with everything that I’ve done,” she said.
“Of course, if you make up a president, he’s a president. But a lot of things that you do … Your Show of Shows, did we know that was going to be such history? Did we know 60 Minutes was going to last all these years? It’s just wonderful because [I’ve made so many] professional friends. I feel very honored to be able to say that I worked with them … and to have them acknowledge me.”
