While waiting for camera set-ups, Millicent drew pictures. Bud Westmore, head of the Universal Studio’s make-up department, saw this and hired her. She designed masks for Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the alien eyeball for It Came from Outer Space. Then she was assigned to design the head of The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Bud Westmore was famous for posing with other people’s work. When he found out that a publicity cameraman was coming to his department, he would give everybody the afternoon off and go down to the design-lab, so he could pose with the finished products.

The sculpture of the creature’s head was made by Chris Mueller (This Island Earth monster sculpture) who followed Millicent’s design. But when the cameraman showed up, those two were given the afternoon off so Westmore could pose with it, “holding a really inappropriate sculpture tool” (says monster-designer Rick Baker).

When a Universal Studio publicist found out it was a woman that designed the monster, he set up a large ‘Beauty and the Beast’ travel-campaign for Millicent. She would go to theaters and TV stations with drawings and prototypes of the creature, talking about the movie.

This made Westmore furious, yelling, “It’s my work.” He demanded that they change the tour from ‘The Beauty Who Created the Beast’ to ‘The Beauty Who Lives with the Beasts’. He also demanded that Millicent give credit for the creature design to ‘Westmore and his staff’ instead of her. She had to go along with it.

After the tour, Westmore fired Millicent and blackballed her from every makeup department in Hollywood. He also stole her drawings for This Island Earth and said they were his designs. It's a clear-cut case of a creature stealing the creatures.

However, Millicent, never stopped creating, doing clothes designs and portraits of movie stars. When Westmore died, she came out publicly about designing the creature.