BURIED TOGETHER

Partner Tom Lyle, buried together

Queer Places:
Villa Valentino, Hollywood Fwy, Exit 9A, Los Angeles, CA, Stati Uniti
Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks & Mortuaries, 1712 S Glendale Ave, Glendale, CA 91205, Stati Uniti

Thomas Lyle "Tom" Williams, Sr (1896, Morganfield, Union County, Kentucky - Sep. 26, 1976, Los Angeles County, California) was the founder of Maybelline cosmetics. Tom Lyle met Emery Shaver (Sep. 15, 1903 - Oct. 22, 1964) one night at a party, in 1919. Tom Lyle brought him home to his family, who were all living in an apartment above the first little Maybelline Company warehouse/office, in Chicago. TL's father TJ, called Emery, "The man who came to dinner," and never left. TL and Emery, were together from that day on, until Emery's death at 61 years of age. Tom Lyle never got over losing Emery.

His parents were Thomas Jefferson "TJ" & Susan Williams. At age 16 he had a brief marriage to Bennie Gibbs. They had one son, Thomas Lyle Williams, Jr. Shortly after the marriage was annulled, he moved to Chicago and got a job with Montgomery Ward, a catalogue business. Soon, after experimenting on his own with a variety of mail-order ventures he left Montgomery Ward to start his own business.

Then in 1915, after watched his sister Mabel apply a mixture of Vaseline, ash and coal dust, to her eyebrows which she had singed from a stove fire, he used a chemistry set to produce a product for enhancing the eyes. Although his first attempt was unsuccessful, he commissioned Park-Davis, a wholesale drug manufacturer, to make a suitable product for sale. He named this created product Lash-Brow. In 1917, with the assistance of Park Davis, he began production and sale of a cake eyelash and eyebrow beautifier. He named the new product,‘Maybelline', after his sister, Mabel. Maybelline was the first mascara in America, and its secret to success was selling at an affordable price. Maybelline spent over one million dollars on advertising between 1915 and 1929 with advertising featured actresses such as; Phyllis Haver, Ethel Clayton, Viola Dana, and Natalie Moorhead. In the 1920s stage and screen helped promote the use of eye make-up. In 1929 eyebrow pencils and eye shadow were added to Maybelline's line of products. In 1937 Maybelline began new packaging for the solid and cream mascara and received the ‘Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval'. In the 1930s Maybelline expanded into Canada and Europe. Then, after the war, South America was added and other countries soon followed, making Maybelline global.

He moved to Hollywood, California, with his long-time companion, Emery Hall Shaver, although continuing to run the business based in Chicago. Affectionally known to his family as "Unk lle", and called The King of Advertising by the business world, he left stockholding family members wealthy when he sold Maybelline in 1968. The company was renamed ‘Maybelline New York' in 2001 by its current owners L'Oreal USA.

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