The woman at the next table drops her french fry and stares openmouthed at the man nearby; he is gesturing wildly and speaking with a peculiar glee.
By now the woman is 20 paces away, her Wendy’s lunch untouched, and she is not looking back. Too bad. Jeffery Lyle Segal is just as apt to be discussing the “nice things” he does: the people he’s aged for commercials, the costumes he’s made for Halloween, the makeup work he’s done for W. Clement Stone, Oprah Winfrey, and Gabe Kaplan.
With the exception of Re-Animator, which Segal worked on because he knew the director, Stuart Gordon, from Chicago’s Organic Theater, you probably haven’t heard of a Jeffery Segal film. Trapped? The Inheritor?
“In junior high school, I had an art teacher who made me draw plants for the whole year. That was his thing,” Segal reminisces. “At the end of seventh grade, I hated plants, but I could draw basically anything I saw. Eighth grade I spent carrying around a book of nudes copied with photographic accuracy from Playboy magazine, which scandalized my junior high school entirely.”
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At Highland Park High School, Segal decided that his art teacher was “a ditz” and he shifted his artistic interests to the makeup table of the drama department. Drama was nothing new to him; he’d acted in summer stock as a kid. Segal studied film and theater at Northwestern and got a master’s in theater direction from the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he also taught classes in stage makeup. In between, in 1976, he returned to Highland Park to manage a brand-new, beleaguered little company known as Steppenwolf.
Segal has worked as a magician and a clown; he made balloon animals for the old Pickle Barrel restaurant at Howard and Western. He still carries balloons around with him in case a conversation needs a little zip.
Before he started doing makeup full-time, Segal’s talents flourished on Halloween. During the Watergate period, he did a pretty convincing job of making himself look like Richard Nixon. “It was the scariest costume I could come up with,” says Segal, who loves to spin Halloween tales.
