THE DRESSING ROOM A GOOD NOSE by Liesl Schillinger

What with the hubbub over Nicole Kidman’s nose in “The Hours”—the film didn’t get a best-makeup Oscar nomination because the nose was digitally enhanced—this is a good time to be a maker of bona-fide artificial noses. John Caglione, Jr., who won the Oscar for makeup in 1991, for his work in the movie “Dick Tracy,” takes great pride in his craft. “You have to be a really good sculptor to make a foamed-latex nose,” he explained the other day from his studio, on Long Island. He was busy baking nose molds for the actress Tovah Feldshuh, who plays Golda Meir in the play “Golda’s Balcony.” “A nose is a tricky appliance, because it has to blend in with the whole face—it’s kind of the bull’s-eye on the target,” Caglione said.

It is widely understood in the industry that the best makeup artists work in film, not theatre, because of the closeup. So when David Fishelson, the artistic director of the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre, which is putting on “Golda’s Balcony,” went looking for a nose man for the show he looked to Hollywood. “Caglione is Pacino’s personal prostheticist,” Fishelson said. “This guy’s a major Hollywood guy—he’s the one people go to when they want a nose.”

“For ‘Dick Tracy,’ I made Al a nose and an upper lip and a chin appliance,” Caglione said. “He said he looked like a cross between Adolf Hitler and Groucho Marx.” Caglione’s expertise doesn’t come cheap. “It’s not too bad, price-wise,” Fishelson said philosophically. “It’s kind of the cost of another actor.”

The Golda nose is made of foamed latex. “I first have to make positive and negative molds, which get baked in the oven for two hours,” Caglione explained. “The positive mold represents Tovah’s nose, the negative mold is Golda’s nose, and then the two molds lock together. To make Tovah’s mold, I took an impression of her face—the same way a dentist uses that jellylike stuff to make a mold of your teeth—but there’s this special kind that’s used for prosthetics, for people missing arms and legs. It’s called prosthetic alginate. Then on top of that I lay plaster-of-Paris bandages. To make the negative mold of Golda’s face, I surround my desk with photographs of her, and I get out my clay and make a guesstimate. In the airspace between Golda’s nose and Tovah’s mold, I pump in latex. When you pry the molds apart, you have a custom-made foamed-latex appliance that fits Tovah’s nose exactly! I’ve done four molds, so I can make, like, eight noses a day. It’s an assembly line—the mass production of noses.” During the eleven-week run of “Golda’s Balcony,” Tovah Feldshuh will go through eighty noses, which are all applied at the theatre by Caglione’s colleague Trevor McGinniss. The process takes forty-five minutes. “It’s one nose per day,” Fishelson said. “When the nose comes off Tovah, it has to be destroyed.”

In the seventies, before he started making noses, Caglione made the cones for the Coneheads on “Saturday Night Live.” John Belushi’s cone sits on a shelf in his studio. “I also made the chin patches for the Blues Brothers,” he said. His interest in makeup started early. “I saw the old Frankenstein movie, with Boris Karloff—I must have been eight years old—and I asked my dad, ‘Is there an island where they get people who look like that?,’ and my dad said, ‘No, there’s a makeup artist who makes them look that way. It’s a trade, and you can learn how to do it.’

“When I was twelve, I sent my brother to the emergency room. One night, when he was maybe twenty, I tried to make a cast of his face. This is before I knew about alginate. I had this stuff called dental stone. I put it on my brother, but I didn’t know that as it sets it goes up to about 220 degrees Fahrenheit. I nearly baked him! We tried to chisel it off, but the stuff was like granite. I had stuck straws through his nostrils so he could breathe, but it was hot under there. I remember my dad and I dunked his face in water in the bathroom sink, and when the water came out of the nostril holes my brother looked like a fountain. So we took him to the emergency room around midnight. The doctors just ripped the stone straight off. It took his eyebrows and his mustache with it—and it was the early seventies, so he also had these big long sideburns. He still has a chunk of the mold on his bureau; it’s weird to see the eyebrow emerging from the dental stone. It’s a perfect eyebrow, every follicle ripped right out.”

In the intervening decades, Caglione evidently got better. “I gotta tell you,” he said. “Making noses, it’s like a drug to me.”