Waxing Philosophic Over Her Artwork

It makes for a tricky turn through customs, Judy Craig admits, as she unzips her nylon carry-on.

One can’t help but call up a perp walk of creepy creatures plucked from murky “Outer Limits” episodes as Craig pulls out what at first glance is a head--a real head. But not just any head--the head of the Italian Stallion himself, Sylvester Stallone.

She sits it upright on the hotel bed. It stares quizzically into space from its quilty peach perch.

After sizing it up for a moment, her own head cocked, Craig pulls out a styling comb and fluffs up Sly’s hair. Ready for a photo op.

Across the room, Arnold Schwarzenegger presides, his trademark grimace--temple veins protruding--a centerpiece for a table where Craig and traveling companion Caroline Packman most likely take their morning tea.

So who are these curious women? It’s not a scene plucked from Wes Craven, but unsettling nonetheless--the precision of Craig and her design team’s handiwork. “I sculpted him,” Craig says, picking up Stallone, cradling the crown. “He’s my baby.”

Craig, 53, who has been head of Madame Tussaud’s Portrait Studio in London since 1987, oversees each wax “portrait” from conception to completion. She landed in town briefly on a media tour to promote the world’s premier paraffin parlor.

“The wax museums here,” she says diplomatically, “are of a little different quality.”

Obliterating childhood visions of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” or the Hollywood Wax Museum isn’t easy. Waxy countenances dance through our collective consciousness. “We want [people in the United States] to understand,” says Craig of Tussaud’s wax works, “that ours are very naturalistic. That they are works of art.”

And what better place to kick off that tour than the undisputed capitol of illusion--Los Angeles.

Craig herself started out at Madame Tussaud’s as a sculptor, with a background in painting and sculpting.

The process is precise and rigorous. “It takes a lot of people and a lot of time,” Craig explains. Five to six months to complete a portrait and, depending upon the size and detailing, “about 75,000 American dollars,” says Packman, Tussaud’s international marketing manager.

A different team is assigned to meet with each subject, armed with a tray of faux eyeballs, big and “fine” calipers, steel rules, cloth tape measures and a photographer who shoots roll after roll of film. “Because when they go away that’s all you have to work with,” Craig says.

A molder then makes a plaster “negative” from the sculpture. Eyes are individually constructed for perfect color matches, while human hair is inserted strand by strand into the wax scalp. A dry brush stipple technique helps authenticate the gradations in “skin tones” and, yes, someone has the tedious task of painting in every single freckle in varying shades.

The process is exacting and there is no room for slip-ups, says Craig: “They get a good skull shape because when the girls come to do the [hair] insertion, if [it] doesn’t spring out in a natural way from the right shape, then it can look all wrong . . . you lose the whole look of the person.”

Ideally, Craig requires at least 2 1/2 hours with each subject, but she has braved the tougher moments: Such as the whirlwind sitting in a tiny dark room with an exhausted Nelson Mandela, who only had 20 minutes before he was to board a plane to South Africa.

“I couldn’t match his eyes,” Craig remembers. “I had to invite him to go [where] there was a brighter light: ‘Come into the toilet with me, Mr. Mandela.’ ”

Women and children are the most difficult subjects, as their faces have soft and subtle turns. “There’s nothing to get hold of,” she says. “There’s not any craggy corners or wrinkles. In certain ways, wrinkles might take longer, but they are easier. A very craggy face, if you overdo it, turns into caricatures. If you underdo it, it looks mean and underfed.”

Some subjects are taken aback or embarrassed by the results, while others find it sobering. Romance novelist Barbara Cartland was unsettled by the rather profound character in her face. Craig recalls Cartland’s assessment: “ ‘One knows that one gets wrinkles as one gets older, but does one have to show them all?’ She thought we could have been kinder.”

From the Dalai Lama, Queen Elizabeth II and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, to magician David Copperfield, Sir Anthony Hopkins and works in progress (Naomi Campbell and Janet Jackson), the field is wide open.

“Sometimes it’s almost self-selecting. People are so famous and people are so interested in them you think, ‘We really want to have them in the exhibition,’ ” Craig says. “A committee meets every two months and goes through a list of suggestions we get from the staff and the public.”

It’s an honor, by all accounts.

This 200-year-old tradition was begun by Madam Tussaud, who toured Ireland and Scotland exhibiting her wax works before finally settling in England in 1835.

“The only reason we feel she survived the French Revolution,” Craig says, “is because of her ability to make portrait heads. When they cut the heads off the royals, they wanted to keep a record of the heads. She had to go to the cemetery and pick up the heads, wipe them clean and make a mold in plaster, and then make a wax positive head. She would put hair on them and make them as lifelike as possible. And we still have those [wax] heads--the ones of Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette, Robespierre.”

Needless to say, 200 years of Tussaud--the namesake died in 1850 at age 89--can’t be housed under one roof. Curators try to show as much of the collection as they can in rotation in the Garden Party area of the Baker Street museum. When a figure is retired from display, the heads (i.e. Sophia Loren) are arranged for display in the Grand Hall--with Madam Tussaud’s self-portrait presiding.

But Craig knows it’s more than just about art. It’s fascinating, she says, to watch people look at the sculptures: “They love to go up and look how wide their shoulders are, how big their feet are. You can get close to them.”

“Aw,” quips Packman, getting down to brass tacks: “It’s like having inside knowledge. Like in L.A. It’s like knowin’ a bit a’ gossip about someone.”