She achieved wider notice as a Home Shopping Network host for some 25 years, but her peak notoriety was an unwelcome one. After her developer husband, Lee, was murdered in 1997, the case became a tabloid tale when the perpetrator, Andrew Cunanan, went on to kill fashion designer Gianni Versace. Marilyn Miglin was played by Judith Light in a 2018 "American Crime Story" series.
In 2004, when Marilyn Miglin LP had $50 million in sales, Crain's recounted her unlikely journey from being a teenager sitting at the back of the bus, hoping no one would notice her complexion.
"Marshall Field's rejected Miglin three times as a runway model before the fashion director finally told her, 'Your hair is awful, your makeup is terrible and you walk like a duck,' she recalled. She polished her image and eventually became a top model at Field's.
"She also joined a national tour with Jimmy Durante as a dancer, after attending Northwestern University for two years on a math scholarship. But dancing and modeling weren't long-term careers, so in 1963, Miglin opened a 250-square-foot shop in a city where, almost everyone warned her, a cosmetics business could never flourish."
The store flourished, and Miglin became a staple on the city's social scene. In the late 1990s, facing increased competition from Sephora, Saks Fifth Avenue and Barney's, she spent $1 million remodeling her Oak Street store. But she also had wisely turned to a precursor of online marketing.
In 1993, Crain's reported on Miglin's foray into TV land and cubic zirconium, a culture switch that took her from Oak Street "to home-bound shoppers in fuzzy animal slippers, prone in front of the tube with a jar of Cheez Whiz in one hand and a stack of charge cards in the other."
Meanwhile, at UIC one Friday each month, she or a staff member were teaching patients how to enhance their looks and donating mirrors and makeup.
"One of the things I'm very proud of," she told the Chicago Tribune in 1989, "is that doctors have realized that makeup is important. It can make a great difference in (patients') confidence. I'm lucky. After all the surgeries and operations, I'm the one who gets to paint the prettiest picture."
In 2007, Miglin was forced to declare personal bankruptcy after falling victim to an investment scheme in a needle to treat spider veins and facing a $16.8 million preliminary judgment.
"I believed so strongly in the promise of this needle to help both women and men, I followed my heart instead of the advice of my family and my advisors," she said in a statement to the Tribune at the time.
Her business, in contrast, continued to grow, reaching an estimated $95.5 million in revenue in 2015.
"My distribution to department stores has dropped 35% because so many have gone out of business," she said in 1993. "There are limited opportunities in the retail arena. The consumer has changed. In the '90s, time is her enemy."
She added, presciently: "It's the wave of the future. It'll probably overtake catalogs."
No services are planned. Her firm's website suggested donations to the UIC facility, the Chicago Lighthouse for the blind and visually impaired, the American Red Cross Burn Unit, the Anti-Cruelty Society or the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
