Tova Borgnine, Cosmetics Maven and QVC Star, Dies at 80

Ms. Borgnine was a serial magnificence entrepreneur who discovered success with an unique skincare line that had a pedigreed again story. Apprehensive that the dry desert air was making the Las Vegas showgirls who have been her clients look older than their years, she got down to discover an emollient to right their pores and skin. Because the story goes, she pressed the actress Merle Oberon into revealing the key to her dewy complexion, which turned out to be a masks based mostly an historical Aztec method involving cactus, made by a household in Mexico. Ms. Borgnine tracked the household down, they usually agreed to promote her the method.

However within the fall of 1976, earlier than she had a correct firm or had sorted out manufacturing and distribution, an merchandise in a syndicated gossip column famous Mr. Borgnine’s personal newly dewy complexion and plugged his spouse’s cactus face masks. Inside days, because the Borgnines advised it, they’d obtained a whole bunch of letters clamoring for the product, and checks totaling $56,000.

“It should have been a gradual information day,” Ms. Borgnine appreciated to say.

The Borgnines pitched the brand new enterprise collectively. They referred to as it Tova 9, a play on their final title. Mr. Borgnine referred to as himself “Guinea Pig No. 1” and sometimes recalled his spouse coaxing him to make use of her masks.

“So she says to me, ‘Honey, strive it.’ I say, ‘Grumble, grumble.’ However I put the stuff on,” he advised The Boston Globe in 1978. “So assist me Hannah, I just like the stuff.”

In an interview, Cristofer Borgnine confirmed that the tales weren’t apocryphal: He recalled commonly coming dwelling and seeing his father studying the newspaper in the lounge, his well-known options frozen in a brilliant pink face masks.

Mr. Borgnine would go on to boast to reporters of his spouse’s merchandise: “I shave with it, bathe with it, shampoo with it, clear my enamel with it and easy my pores and skin with it.” The cleaning soap lathered properly in laborious water, he mentioned, and his buddy Steve McQueen as soon as took 60 bars on location. Burt Reynolds, an avid catalog shopper, was a buyer. So have been Elke Sommer and Charo. (Ms. Borgnine’s enterprise was all the time mail order solely.) Within the early Eighties, she added a Burt Reynolds males’s line, created at his request.