Vera Moore broke barriers in soap operas and skincare

Vera Moore has one piece of advice that has guided her choices since she was a child.

“Try it. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.”

The words of wisdom from her mother have echoed in Moore’s ears throughout her eight decades as she debated each new step into uncharted territory, first as a Black actress breaking into national television and then as an entrepreneur seeking to start one of the first cosmetic companies dedicated to women of color.

“Nothing ever deterred me, and it was all because of my parents,” said Moore, 80, of Woodbury. “That’s not to say I didn’t have challenges. But they didn’t crush me. Actually, I think they fired me up.”

Moore grew up in Corona, Queens, the youngest of five brothers and a sister. Her mother was a domestic worker, her father a train porter who couldn’t read. She sometimes went to school with holes in her shoes. In a small backyard they grew their own collard greens, string beans and beets.

Moore said she never resented her meager circumstances, even when she couldn’t get the things she wanted. She saw the dirt-covered knees her mother came home with after scrubbing others’ floors and felt only love.

“The only thing I thought was ‘How can I help?,’ ” she said. “I never did a pity party.”

It wasn’t until she was a teenager in the early 1960s that Moore said she was confronted head-on with racism.

Looking for an after-school job to help her parents, Moore sat down at the counter of a Woolworth’s in Flushing. The white woman behind the counter ignored her, she said, her calls of “Hello?!” yielding no response.

“She didn’t say anything, didn’t say, ‘We don’t want any Black people here.’ She just kept passing me by,” Moore said. “Eventually I just got up and left.”

A 5-YEAR PLAN

Moore began singing in her church choir, and in high school she was picked to join the prestigious All-City High School Chorus. She was drawn to the arts, but after high school took a job as a secretary in the U.S. Custom House in downtown Manhattan.

“I wanted to be a singer,” she said. “But I took this job so I could help my mom and pay for some [singing] lessons.”

Moore set a five-year plan for herself.

One day she ventured up the grand marble staircase from her first-floor secretary pool to the third floor, where she spied the packed floor-to-ceiling shelves of the library for the solicitors’ office. She also noticed there was no secretary pool up there: Each attorney had their own secretary.

“I didn’t want to be downstairs,” she said. “I knew I could do better. I always knew my value.”

She asked her mother for advice.

“Try it. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.”

Despite not seeing another Black face in that department, she took a test for the job and passed. At night she took acting and singing lessons.

Moore began going on “cattle call” auditions during her lunch hour, eating on the subway ride uptown with a change of clothes in a bag. She was rejected time and again, but one day she got a role in the chorus of a summer stock production of “South Pacific” at the theater at Jones Beach. That allowed her to get her acting union Equity card, which meant no more cattle call auditions.

So she quit her job.

ON STAGE AND TV

Other Off-Broadway theater roles followed, and she went on to perform on Broadway in the musicals “Purlie Victorious” and “A Teaspoon Every Four Hours.”

But it was during this time that Moore once again experienced racism. Standing backstage after trying out for a period show, she overheard someone say, “Her voice is gorgeous but we can’t use her.”

“It was inferred, but I understood,” she said.

Moore’s career segued from the stage to performances in commercials and television shows. When she and a white actress both did commercials for the same product, Moore learned the other woman was earning significantly more. Her agent told her the sponsors couldn’t air her commercials down South because she was Black so therefore it was a smaller market and a smaller paycheck. Moore was undeterred.

“I think most Black actors — or doesn’t even have to be an actor, could be in a corporation — you just have to be focused on what you want to do,” she said. “You have to have blinders on like a horse.”

Moore’s television work culminated with her longest and most significant role, playing Linda Metcalf on the soap opera “Another World.” From 1972 to 1981, Moore was a regular on the series, breaking ground as one of the first Black actresses in a recurring role on a soap opera. Her character, a nurse, was part of a Black family portrayed on the show.

“They’d had Black people on soap operas before but they never had a family,” she said. “So for them to do that ... it was a barrier-breaker.”

The feedback from the Black community was immediate and profound, Moore said: Adults came up to her on the street telling her what it meant to see someone who looked like them on television, and young girls sent her letters saying they wanted to become nurses because of her.

MIXING HER OWN MAKEUP

The show also led to a new venture. As one of the first Black actresses on the show, Moore struggled to get the right makeup for her skin tone. The foundation used was greasy, rubbed off on her clothes and made her skin look gray.

She started mixing makeup, located a manufacturer and soon founded Vera Moore Cosmetics.

Her husband, Billy Helms, whom she married in 1971, owned a beauty salon, where she began selling the products.

“We wanted to target where there was a void for women of color, particularly for Black women of a darker hue,” she said.

The actress longed for a brick-and-mortar shop and set her sights on the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, which at the time was an upscale mall in the midst of a renovation and expansion. It also had never had a Black tenant, Moore said. Moore’s mom’s advice when she pitched the idea of a Green Acres store?

“Try it. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.”

First, the mall owners ignored her calls, she said. So she sent them certified letters. Eventually, they agreed to meet with her.

Moore persuaded the mall to take her on, but she and her husband couldn’t get a loan to open a store there. The couple ended up mortgaging their Laurelton home.

“I was in that store every day, greeting customers like a politician,” Moore said.

‘SO MUCH PRIDE’

Marcia Wilson-Ahmad, 59, remembers being in the mall at age 17 and walking past Moore’s store.

“I saw an image of this beautiful woman on the wall, and as a young Black girl it caught my eye,” she recalled.

She spotted a Black woman wearing a black and white houndstooth pantsuit and bright red lipstick sitting at a table with two white men who just kept nodding.

“Whatever she was selling, they were buying,” Wilson-Ahmad said. “She just looked beautiful, and then I realized it was the woman from the wall of the store.”

Wilson-Ahmad began working at Moore’s store soon after.

“People would come from all over just to support her,” she said. “It was like she was a unicorn or something. It just filled you with so much pride.”

WALGREENS, DUANE READE

Vera Moore Cosmetics took off, in part because of Moore’s approach, said longtime friend and fellow entrepreneur Dee Rivera, 60. Moore talked to customers about skin care and self-care, looking to build the confidence of women of color, she said.

“She’s always had the holistic view approach first and then the makeup comes second, and you really don’t see that a lot,” Rivera said. “She was breaking barriers not only for her brand but for other women behind her.”

Vera Moore Cosmetics was in the mall from 1979 to 2004, then for a decade in Duane Reade and Walgreens stores before Moore took her company online only, where it continues to operate with the help of her daughter, Consuella Helms-Jeune, who is chief operating officer. For a time, business “plummeted,” Moore said, as she spent more than a decade caring for her ailing parents.

Through it all, Moore has retained complete ownership, despite offers to sell or take on partners.

Moore, who travels around the world giving speeches about her life and work, has taken on a mentor role to those closest to her.

“Any kind of major questions that I had in starting my businesses, I always asked Vera,” Rivera said. “I’ve been asked to sell my companies, but nope, I own it 100% — and I learned that from her.”

Wilson-Ahmad said in her decades working in corporate America she often found she was the only Black person at the table.

“When I was feeling less than or like an imposter, I would think about Vera and how strong and beautiful she is, and it would give me the energy and the courage to not feel defeated or inferior, to know that I deserved to be there and that I had something to offer,” she said.

NEW MOVIE ROLE

Moore just landed her first acting role in 30 years with a new movie, “Tried by Fire,” and last year she started teaching the Empire State After-School Program’s Skincare and Essentials Class at Hempstead High School.

Moore credits her success to her Christian faith and working to develop relationships. Building bonds with her students has proved vital. Beyond just recommending products, the class is helping the teens find self-worth, she said.

“When I first started that class they would barely speak up,” she said.

Moore uses acting exercises to connect with the students and instill confidence in them.

Stefanie Aguilar Sanchez, 17, said the class has helped with more than just skin care.

“They show you a lot of things, like how to care for yourself and love yourself,” she said. “I feel like a different person.”

Moore said her trailblazing journey has had bumps, but she ultimately met the goals she set out to achieve.

“Being first is difficult,” she said. “Financially, socially, politically, you don’t have the backing. . . . But I wanted to level playing fields, and that’s what I feel I did.”