New Faces

Jack Dawn, M.G.M.'s greying, clever make-up chief, has made false hair for balding stars, false breasts for slim seductresses. He has made a youthful character actor into Abraham Lincoln, and 200 Caucasians into Chinese peasants. About three months ago, he made a suggestion to the San Diego Naval Hospital: that he would like to help out fighting men whose faces and hands had been disfigured.

Captain H. L. D. Kirkham, Navy plastic surgeon, thought it over. When a man's eyes, ears or mouth are burned shut, when his nose or jaw is shot away, plastic surgery can usually restore the face. But the process sometimes takes seven or eight operations, weeks or months apart. Meanwhile the disfigured men usually prefer to stay out of sight in darkened wards. Jack Dawn's "inlays," however, could make many men appear normal between operations. Last week, under Kirkham's eye, a department of prosthesis* was being organized at the hospital. Besides designing new faces, by way of occupational therapy the department will teach injured men to make their own inlays. The Navy has assigned Lieut. Commander Michael Gurdin, peacetime plastic surgeon, and Lieut. Gordon Bau, peacetime head of Warner Bros. make-up department, to study Dawn's methods in Hollywood.

Sculpture Plus Chemistry. When he was a boy on a Kentucky farm, Dawn used to take a cold chisel, hammer and spoon over to the creek bank and chop faces in soft sandstone. Many years later, after time spent as a sailor, dishwasher and cowhand--always with a lump of sculptor's clay in his pocket -- a Hollywood studio hired him to be an Indian brave at $3 a day.

Dawn left Hollywood to fight with the British during World War I, but returned in 1919 as a make-up assistant with Universal. He began making whole false faces to suit parts. One of his first was a stiff, heavy irritating mask he wore in the role of an ape in 1925. In 1935, after nine years of research while doing makeups for M.G.M., he found what he wanted-- a synthetic plastic good for making mobile, lifelike masks. It is of secret composition (the process is patented, but he gives it to the Navy free) which he calls vinylite resin mixed with alcohol. Its first big trial was in Chinese faces for The Good Earth.

The Dawn Method. First step in making a Dawn inlay for a disfigured man is to make a life mask of his face with the missing parts added. Then the extra bit is removed and duplicated in Dawn's plastic. To stick the inlay on, the man wets the inside with alcohol. This dissolves the plastic a little, and the inlay clings perfectly when pressed into place. Next the inlay is touched up with make-up to match the skin.

The inlays are light, comfortable, and move enough to be convincing when face muscles move. Their only disadvantage is that they wear out fast. A long life for a nose is 15 days. But if the wearer has Dawn's equipment, he can make a new nose in short order.

So far, Dawn has made only about a dozen inlays for the Navy. But in the near future many cases may echo Dawn's sailor patient who looked in the mirror and cried: "God, I'm happy! Now I can go home."

* The addition to the human body of some arti ficial part.

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