Painter to the Stars

Aug. 17, 2005

You won’t find many artists working with a canvas of one million square feet, but that’s the challenge for Mark Eaton, who oversees a paint crew that’s transforming the massive, 120-year-old Building 50 at the Grand Traverse Commons.
And that ocean of paint will take many years to apply.
“If the work keeps going like it is, we’ll be painting for roughly 15 years,” says Eaton. “They’re going to renovate everything here; I’ll bet it will be close to a million feet of wall area by the time we’re done.”
Eaton has been interested in helping the restoration project of Building 50 ever since he moved to Northern Michigan from Seattle nine years ago. When his girlfriend Susan Leonard got a job as a server at Trattoria Stella, he pitched contractor Ray Minervini to get in on the ground floor of the paint job.
“I wanted to be part of this so bad that I was willing to take a fraction of what I usually earn because I really wanted to see this project work,” he says. “I’ve walked these grounds for eight years hoping that something would happen.”

ARTISTIC TOUCH
Working with 14-foot ceilings and century-old plaster walls, Eaton, 47, and his crew are transforming Building 50 from what looks like a haunted house into a palace. He has an exacting touch and a hawk’s eye for detail along with a sense of pride in workmanship that demands a job being done over if it’s not just right.
But more than that, Eaton is also keenly aware of the importance of high standards, having painted the homes of a number of Hollywood movie stars and the Beverly Hills mansions of the rich and famous years ago. His resume includes the homes of Shelley Long, Sylvester Stallone, Phyllis Diller, Patrick Swayze, the former Shah of Iran and the Revlon mansion, among others.
Born and raised in New Braunfels, Texas, a little town of German immigrants on the Guadaloupe River east of San Antonio, Eaton has lived in some of the world’s more exotic locales. In addition to
serving as a tank commander in the U.S. Army in Europe from 1976-’81, he spent
a year in Amsterdam as a tomato farmer
and has also lived in Hawaii, Seattle, and Venice, California, which he calls
“God’s asylum.”
Venice was throbbing with the rise of punk rock when Eaton lived there and the music’s political message had a lasting impact. “I’m an old punk rocker raised in a very political family,” he says.

OVER THE TOP
It was while living in Venice that he got into the construction trades and became a painter. His work gave him access to homes worth up to $10 million, but Eaton notes that some of the excess he saw there showed the ugly side of greed.
At the
Revlon mansion, for instance, one of the heirs of the cosmetic company fancied himself as a film director. “In the room where he screened his dailies, every 10 or 12 feet there was a solid gold hand coming out of the wall with a flickering light on it,” Eaton recalls.
“It’s Babylon out there, but I wanted the money,” he adds. “There were people who’d spend thousands and thousands to paint a house and then they wouldn’t like it so they’d say to paint it all over again. All that waste doesn’t make sense when there are starving people in our own country, not to mention the world.”
Another garish place was that of the ill-fated Shah of Iran, who had a home in Beverly Hills. Ejected from Iran by a revolution in the late ‘70s, the Shah fled to a succession of countries before dying of cancer in Cairo in 1980.
But the Shah lived long enough to check out his paint job in Beverly Hills.
“He had just a big, gawdy, gold-laden monster of a house and everything was inlaid with gold,” Eaton recalls. “He’d walk through with his guards to inspect
the work we were doing and we’d have to quit everything. There could be no nail
guns around or work going on -- it was just him and four guys with guns checking things out.”
It’s possible, however, that the Shah was ahead of his time in terms of interior design. “His house had a lot of strange colors that aren’t typically used in a modern-day millionaire’s home, but when it all came together, it looked very nice,” Eaton says.

STAR POWER
Some of the stars were quite pleasant.
“Shelley Long (star of “Cheers”) had a place in Beverly Hills that was like one of the nicer homes you’d find on Mission Peninsula,” he recalls. “It had a plush white carpet throughout the whole house and she was a very nice woman.”
Eaton was also impressed with comedienne Phyllis Diller who was exceptionally friendly and went out of her way to see that the workmen in her home were happy and had food to eat.
The stars also had their quirks. The actor who played Tattoo on “Fantasy Island,” for instance, spent much of his day sipping from a can of Foster’s while watching
the work going on. And when Sylvester Stallone stopped by to check out the remodeling of his beach home in Laguna, Eaton noted that the actor was considerably smaller than he appears on camera.
The whimsicality of a train-lover’s home made an impression:
“He took two houses on Rexford Avenue in Beverly Hills and made them into one big home that had a train running through it,” Eaton recalls. “He’d step out of his limo and into this little train which would run down into the wine cellar and out to the backyard where there was a little three-hole putting green. That’s telling you you’ve got too much money when you’ve got a train in your home!”
Eventually, other scenes called and Eaton moved on. He says a sad story brought him to Northern Michigan. His wife of 14 years, Rosemary, died of stress-related lung cancer in Seattle. Working through his grief, he decided to visit his sister here in the region. “I started working on a job in Suttons Bay and fall came around and the trees started changing
and something about that just clicked for me,” he recalls. “That’s when I knew I wanted to stay here.”

MOVING ON
Since then, Eaton has established his own Daisy M.A.E. Paint & Design company and has made a home in Interlochen.
He says a lot of thought has gone into painting his own home. “There are brick reds, greens, sunset orange and quite a variety of colors in my home. There’s a svelte green hallway and a mocha lava living room, and the colors all come together in the kitchen.”
Putting it all together as a commercial painter isn’t easy. “It’s a very trying job mentally and physically,” Eaton says. “Sometimes a project is such a mess that the only way to get through it is to envision it all finished.”
Such is certainly the case for the awesome Building 50, but you get the sense that if anyone can handle the job, it’s Mark Eaton.