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Cabbage Rose

Rose Cecil O'Neill And Her Kewpies

In early 20th-century America, perhaps no product was as famous as the Kewpie doll. These cute, chubby toys with their mischievous smiles and distinctive topknots were everywhere: They were Beanie Babies, Barbies and Cabbage Patch Kids rolled into one. Though their popularity has waned, they still rank as one of their era's best-known symbols of American popular culture.

The story of the Kewpies, however, goes beyond the dolls themselves. They were the creation of a flamboyant artist named Rose Cecil O'Neill, an unusual woman for her time in almost every way. O'Neill lived grandly, enthusiastically and, most of all, artistically, and the Kewpies were a vital part of the persona she projected. "I have put all of my love of humanity into this little image," she remarked once. Indeed, the story of the dolls is impossible to separate from the story of their creator.

"The fairies endowed Rose O'Neill with dazzling gifts," a biographer wrote, and it was true. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in 1874, O'Neill had remarkable artistic talent. At 13 years old, 10 years after her family moved to Nebraska, she won a drawing contest in her adopted home city of Omaha. Her picture was so sophisticated that the judges did not believe a child had done it. (Its title, "Temptation Leading Down an Abyss," was sophisticated, too, or perhaps just pretentious; with O'Neill, it would sometimes prove difficult to tell the difference.) Four years later, after touring briefly with a professional acting troupe, she had become an up-and-coming commercial artist whose work appeared in magazines throughout the West and Midwest.

For a young woman in late 19th-century America, this was no small accomplishment. Female visual artists of the time got very little recognition. "I will not admit that a woman can paint like that," the French artist Edgar Degas had said earlier about the work of American expatriate Mary Cassait; and, although Cassait had made a name for herself regardless, Degas' attitude prevailed in American thought. It seemed unlikely that O'Neill, at 17, would ever do more than crank out drawings for regional publications.

Working on a limited stage, however, was not O'Neill's style. Independent and ambitious, she was determined to make her way in the arts. Accordingly, when her family moved to the Missouri Ozarks in 1891, O'Neill elected not to join them. Instead, the teenager traveled to New York City, boarded at a convent and set out to persuade the country's premier magazine editors to publish her work.

This could not have been an easy task. Not only was O'Neill a woman but she was also so young that convention required a chaperone-in her case, a nun-to accompany her when she visited the offices of male editors. And while her art was appealing, O'Neill had never mastered some of the basics of drawing. Largely self-taught, she had attended art school briefly in hopes of learning more, but found the curriculum and the teaching methods dull. "She knows so little about perspective," one person claimed, "that she is baffled by even so simple a feat as putting a table or chair into a picture for background."

Nevertheless, O'Neill had plenty in her favor. She "oozed talent," as another put it, and she oozed certainty and self-assurance as well. The combination of portfolio and personality convinced editors to take a chance, and her work, signed only with initials to disguise the fact that she was female, soon began appearing in national magazines such as Life, Puck and Harper's Monthly. Next, she drew advertisements for Jell-O, Kellogg's Corn Flakes, Oxydol and other products. By the early 1900s, she was one of the nation's bestknown illustrators.

With no money worries, O'Neill began to dabble in other artistic endeavors. She studied sculpture, wrote the first of four novels and tried her hand at poetry, most of it passionate, otherworldly and mystical. Some readers heaped praise on O'Neill and the grand yet cryptic themes of love and death that ran through her literary works. "There is something stupendous about Rose O'Neill," mused one later critic, speaking for many. "She is not to be judged by any of our ordinary standards." Others, though, found her writing overblown and pretentious. "Completely undisciplined," fulminated one reviewer. "Grammar and even sense are frequently abandoned in her anthropomorphic descriptions."

O'Neill was encouraged by the positive reviews, but she took equal pleasure in the negative ones. As her career blossomed, O'Neill adopted a self-consciously "artistic" pose. She saw herself as a great creative soul untrammeled by mere convention. Eager to show off this persona, she dressed in long flowing robes, affected baby talk and delighted her artistic friends with philosophical pronouncements about the connection between "life" and "art."

Unfortunately, O'Neill's love life was not going nearly as well as her career. She married twice but each marriage-both childlessended in divorce. She found her first husband controlling, her second depressed. In 1908, after the second relationship fell apart, O'Neill left New York for the quiet of her parents' Missouri town. There she bought her family a fine home and settled down to lick her wounds.

Time away from the bustle and drama of New York City was exactly what Rose O'Neill needed. With no fellow artists to impress and no limelight to fill, O'Neill devoted herself to her drawing. Her art was already leaning toward a cute, sentimental style, and now she experimented further in that direction.

In 1909 O'Neill sent her editors in New York her most recent work: sketches of pudgy, smiling babies with topknots and big eyes. Taken with the little creatures, Edward Bok of the Ladies' Home Journal suggested that O'Neill expand the drawings into a one-page comic feature. O'Neill quickly agreed. Refining the characters further, she named them Kewpies, a word that she explained as a diminutive of Cupid.

 

While the derivation of the name is clear, the inspiration for the drawings is not. At one point, O'Neill described the Kewpies as a cross between Cupid and one of her brothers as a small child. Later, though, perhaps fearing that this explanation was not artistic enough, she insisted instead that the creatures had appeared to her in a dream. "They were all over my room," she said breathlessly, "on my bed, and one perched on my hand. I awoke seeing them everywhere!"

Whatever her inspiration, O'Neill made the Kewpies simultaneously kind and mischievous. She invested them not merely with character but also with a suitably artistic vision. Kewpies were simple, playful and good-hearted. But O'Neill, of course, preferred her own usual grandiloquent way of saying it: "Kewpie philosophy takes the unwieldiness out of wisdom, puts cheerio into charity and draws the fangs out of philanthropy."

The first Kewpie adventure, "The Kewpies' Christmas Frolic," appeared in the December 1909 Ladies' Home Journal. Written in verse, the story described how the Kewpie band mixed up presents as a practical joke one Christmas morning, leaving "guns for grandmas" and dictionaries for babies, and then provided presents for a poor girl who had none. The poetry left something to be desired, with couplets such as:

The Kewpie wights stay up at nights,

All gaily singing rum-te-tum,

Like puddings they are pleasant sights

Well rounded at the tum-te-tum.

But the drawings more than made up for the banality of the verse. Smiling cherubic Kewpies covered the page-tugging at toys, peering into packages and generally having a ball.

O'Neill had designed the Kewpies to be whimsical, yet enough like real toddlers to pull at readers' heartstrings. Her drawings nailed the combination beautifully. Letters poured into Bok's offices, begging for more. Eager to cash in before interest dropped, O'Neill continued the Ladies' Home Journal series, hurried a Kewpie children's book into print and marketed paper dolls called Kewpie Kutouts-the first paper doll to be printed front and back.

Interest, however, did not drop. Instead, it soared. A shrewd businesswoman despite her artistic temperament, O'Neill gave the public what it wanted. Quickly, she launched an array of tie-ins and ancillary products that would have done Disney proud. Kewpie neckties, music boxes and inkwells appeared. Kewpie soap hit the market, as did Kewpie saltshakers, Kewpie earrings and dozens more Kewpie products. O'Neill was happy to license all types of merchandise-and happier still to watch the money pour in.

In 1912, nearly three years after the initial Kewpie adventure, O'Neill hit upon the greatest marketing spinoff of all: the Kewpie doll. With the help of a design student, she constructed a doll out of an inexpensive type of porcelain called bisque. The doll looked just like the magazine Kewpies, with topknot and goofy grin. The first product runs sold out so fast that O'Neill knew she had a winner on her hands.

Quickly, O'Neill decided to branch out. The key to success, she reasoned, was to develop dozens of different dolls and encourage customers to buy as many as possible. Models made from wood, ivory, celluloid and rubber soon joined the bisque dolls. Factories churned out Kewpies small enough to fit in a pocket and Kewpies nearly as large as a toddler. O'Neill produced soldier dolls, ethnic dolls, character dolls and more. She was a pioneer: Since her time, many successful toy marketers have followed exactly this strategy of appealing to the collector in their customers.

Kewpie dolls took the country by storm. Carnivals purchased thousands to give away as prizes. Kewpie trading clubs sprang up in cities across America. Children begged their parents for one model after another. Kewpie factories in several countries worked overtime meeting the demand. Not even the outbreak of World War I could diminish the Kewpies' hold on the national consciousness. They were no longer a fad-they were a way of life.

In fact, the passionate interest in all things Kewpie did not run its course until the middle of the 1920s. By then, O'Neill had made nearly $1.5 million from her creation. She spent most of her time at the mansion where she had lived with her second husband, in rural Connecticut, not far from the Manhattan literary world. Wealthy beyond her dreams, she mostly gave up illustration and concentrated instead on her much less lucrative literary career.

Primarily, however, she concentrated on being Rose O'Neill, the artist. Her eccentricities mushroomed: She named her home after a fairy tale character and called her hot water heater "Kewpie." Her mansion was full of aspiring young poets and painters, with whom she discussed art and philosophy at all hours. One young couple, invited to visit for a weekend, stayed for two years. Many of these people had no apparent artistic talent but that mattered not at all to O'Neill. "They were all geniuses to her," wrote a 1930s journalist, "for it was by their intentions and not their works that she judged them."

But even Kewpie money could not maintain this lifestyle forever. O'Neill's generosity and tastes eventually outpaced her fortune. In 1936 she sold her Connecticut home and returned permanently to Missouri. She tried once or twice to replicate her Kewpie success with other dolls, but times and tastes had changed. When O'Neill died in 1944, she was completely broke.

Though O'Neill is dead, her invention lives on. Manufacturers continue to produce replicas and knockoffs of the dolls, mostly for the collectors' market. The Internet auction site eBay has an entire category devoted to Rose O'Neill's Kewpies, with about 200 Kewpie items for sale at any given time. Singers are described as having "Kewpie-doll" voices, actresses as having "Kewpie-doll" looks. Nearly a century after their introduction, Kewpies remain an icon of American popular culture.

As for Rose O'Neill herself, she occupies a place in American history, though perhaps not the one she would have chosen. Her highbrow literary efforts are largely forgotten. Her drawing style was too commercially oriented to have much of an effect on serious art. Today, few encyclopedias of American artists mention her, an omission that she no doubt would have found infuriating.

Yet O'Neill would be delighted to know how well her creations have survived. She never thought that the Kewpies were beneath her or a waste of time. Instead, she took great pride in their creation and even more pride in their popularity. That is fitting, for they were an extension of her unusually successful career in commercial art. While her serious work did not last, Rose O'Neill's contribution to American culture has stood the test of time.

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