THE STAR SHINER: Memoir of a Celebrity Make-up Artist (Preface. 1st Chapter)

SYNPOSIS: THE STAR SHINER: Memoir of a Celebrity Make-up Artist
by Evan Richardson
(published May, 2013, McFarland & Co.
Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-7096-9
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-4766-0137-3
http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-7096-9
http://www.amazon.com/author/evanrichardson)

The memoir traces a young man from a small rural Kentucky town coming to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York in the early ‘60s to study art and escape his domineering mother and abusive, alcoholic father.

After a successful beginning in New York City as a fashion illustrator, and modeling in Paris, he becomes a makeup artist, one of the first to do make-up for American fashion magazines, working with Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and with notable fashion photographers: Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Francesco Scavullo.

The story is centered mainly between the ‘70s into the ‘90s and weaves the stories of celebrities at a time in New York City’s history when the city suffered financial difficulties that led to a lack of police protection, corruption and decadence, played out against the backdrop of the fashion and cosmetic worlds.

While America concludes the war in Vietnam, the story takes the reader into wild nights at Studio 54 and into downtown after-hours sex dungeons, bars and discos on New York's lower West Side, seething with sex, drugs and violence, where people are treated merely as stepping stones to the next sexual encounter; culminating with the death of Richardson’s partner to AIDS in the early ‘80s that turns Richardson's life around with a spiritual awakening.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald described the ‘20s: “It was the most expensive orgy in history.”