[AUDIO LOGO] ANNOUNCER: This program was made possible by the generous support of Great Southern Bank and Jan and Gary Baumgartner [MUSIC PLAYING] SUSAN SCOTT: The whole story of Kewpie is the Kewpie goes from place to place, and does good deeds, and spreads love and laughter.

That's Rose O'Neill.

That's what she did.

They are just like their creator.

DAVID O'NEILL: She was a little bit of everything.

She was an artist.

She was an illustrator.

She wrote comics.

She wrote poetry.

She wrote novels.

I mean, she could do it all.

SUSAN STRAUSS: She was an artist.

She was an Illustrator.

She was a sculptress.

She was a writer.

She campaigned for women's suffrage.

And she lived a very unusual life for a woman of her time.

She was a brilliant woman, who had an imagination and talent that was boundless.

KAITLYN MCCONNELL: I think Rose is inspirational because she didn't let the circumstances around her dictate what she felt she was compelled to do.

I think that if she had, she would not have been a creator in the way she was.

CONNIE PRITCHARD: She was unique in so many ways with her art, and the way she lived her life, and the way she didn't care what people thought.

DONNA DAVIS: I always consider her as a Renaissance woman, and there's just so much to her that people just can't comprehend past the dolls.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: Everything about her was unique.

The fact that she was a woman and had this extremely successful career.

She was definitely a barrier breaker and very independent woman.

SUSAN STRAUSS: Rose herself was just such a fascinating woman.

She came from nothing, she was the subject of prejudice, and she overcame that.

Her artwork speaks for itself when you look at it.

I mean, you look through here and you see her original works, it's beautiful.

[MUSIC PLAYING] We kind of claim Rose O'Neill in the Ozarks today, but she actually didn't come from here.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: Rose was born in 1874, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Her father owned a bookstore there.

They had quite a nice little life.

And they lived in a cottage called the Emerald Cottage, which even as a very young child, she had fond memories of.

Patrick O'Neill was her father.

Mimi, they called her Mimi O'Neill, was their mother.

Both very, very well-educated people, well read.

They all lived in a fantasy world.

You know, Mimi and Papa taught all of the kids about fairies and trolls, and had lots of books about Greek mythology.

Back in those days, there was no TV or radio, so they read a lot, and they also acted a lot in their homes.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: Rose and her older brother, John Hugh, they were reading and performing Shakespearean plays when they were like 9 and 10 just for themselves, and the family would put on plays.

And constantly reading the classics.

She had access to all of these wonderful books that her father had.

ROSE O'NEILL: "I had already begun the principal occupation of my youth.

Lying on a bed, reading anything in my father's library.

I remember a special feeling of isolation and comfort, being small in the middle of a wide, smooth bed.

I sung, I recited, and danced.

I made-up plays and tormented my brothers and sisters into performing them.

My father had never been an actor, but he had a passion for rolling forth Shakespearean lines and stabbing pillows."

He loved to read.

He loved the theater.

He loved the classics.

He didn't fit necessarily into the father-provider role of that time.

He wanted them to have careers, including the daughters, in what he called the sister arts.

So education in the arts was very important to him for all of his children.

Throughout their childhood, Mimi was the one that went to work as a teacher and supported the family when Patrick would stay home, sometimes, and take care of the kids when she was out teaching.

They always struggled with money.

When he went out West, to Nebraska, instead of loading up his wagon with seed and implements you would use for farming, he took all of his books and his art.

They lived in eastern Nebraska for a while in a sod hut.

Patrick thought he was going to be a gentleman farmer, even though he had never farmed.

ROSE O'NEILL: "My father had romantic ideas about country life, so we went first to the Nebraska prairie.

Papa's idea was to lead the glamorous life of a farmer, who has nothing to do but read poetry and love.

I don't remember any actual farming, for Papa went away to neighboring towns to sell books to people who did not feel the need for them."

Needless to say, you probably imagine how well that went.

There's a lot to farming.

ROSE O'NEILL: "We came to decide we were not successes as agriculturists.

Rather, suddenly, we abandoned the prairie and went to Omaha."

CONNIE PRITCHARD: If there seemed to be a disgruntled person on the porch, she knew that they would probably be moving in the middle of the night.

Rent didn't get paid, so they bounced from house to house in the Omaha area.

ROSE O'NEILL: "In the 12 years we lived in Omaha, we never really lived any place long.

All our houses were rented places, except for the three my father built."

As a child, she would just draw.

She'd sit under tables, and she'd draw.

And then she moved on and would look at his books and the illustrations, and she would copy some of those illustrations.

She loved it, and she just kept pursuing it.

Totally self-taught.

ROSE O'NEILL: "There were days when I would not do anything, but lie on a bed on my tummy, drawing with the illustrated "Iliad" and "Odyssey" and the statue book beside me."

KAITLYN MCCONNELL: It seems like it was really kind of born into her.

She was a pretty young age when she began developing that skill as an artist.

I think it was something that was just part of her.

Maybe it wasn't even something that she consciously knew or didn't know.

It just was always there.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: She would go to the library and the librarians got to know her, and they also knew that the family didn't have a lot of money.

They would let her sit there with these beautifully illustrated books, and they would give her pencil and paper and encourage her there to draw, too.

And her father saw her talent, and he would spend hours whittling her pencils to make them very, very sharp so she had the best tools to draw with.

ROSE O'NEILL: "When I was nearly 14, the "Omaha World-Herald" offered a prize for the best drawing by a Nebraska schoolchild.

I took the prize.

The subject of my drawing was "Temptation Leading Down Into an Abyss."

The "World-Herald" editors thought I must have copied the drawing somewhere and had me come to the newspaper office to show them I could draw.

My father took me there, and they set me tasks in drawing.

They made me draw drapery, folds and folds.

I recall wondering, why they should think it difficult to draw folds, for I had drawn them a lot in my studies of free productions of Michelangelo and Greek statues."

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: I have never seen a 13-year-old produce a picture, a drawing like that, let alone calling it "Temptation Leading Into the Abyss."

ROSE O'NEILL: "In Denver, Papa got me a long distant employment on the magazine "The Great Divide."

I remember I illustrated, in pen and ink, a series of Arabian Nights tales done in verse by the editor."

After she won that contest, she started getting some assignments through these editors for illustration.

She was working on a portfolio, looking at all the publications in New York City to see what kind of style they used.

And she realized, and the family did, that she could make money at this.

And so when she was the age of 19, her parents said, yes, you can go.

You can go stay with the nuns, travel with the nuns, and nuns will take you from publication to publication in New York, so that you can show your work.

CONNIE PRITCHARD: Being Irish Catholic, Papa O'Neill went to New York with her and set her up to stay in a convent out there, so she would be in a safe environment while she was trying to sell her artwork.

She had a portfolio that she took around to different potential publishers and kind of gave some examples of what she was able to do.

I would think that having nuns accompany you to go around to publishers would certainly been a very memorable experience, both for them and for her.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: When things started rolling and she was getting money for these commissions, because she took her drawings to these publications, and they loved it, but to the point where they said, "Don't sign it Rose O'Neill, sign it O'Neill," because they didn't want their readers knowing she was a female, she was getting money and she was sending it home.

That was always a priority for her, was to help support her family and her sisters and brothers.

CONNIE PRITCHARD: She illustrated for "Puck", "Good Housekeeping," "Rock Island Railroad," "Cosmopolitan."

If there was a popular magazine, Rose was illustrating for it.

KAITLYN MCCONNELL: I would have to imagine, it was quite striking for her to be so instantly successful.

You think about the ideas of starving artists and someone who really has to struggle for a long time to make an impression, and it does not appear that was the case with Rose.

It seems like what she was able to do was pretty instantaneous.

[MUSIC PLAYING] ROSE O'NEILL: "While I was still at the convent, my father finally found the right place for a home in the Ozark Mountains, in Taney County, in southern Missouri.

It seemed sufficiently wild, being almost inaccessible, and romantic enough with a brook and a forest.

There was a sprinkling of log cabins in the region far apart, with little stony fields lost in the wilderness.

It was 1894.

I had been staying at the convent in New York, where I had already been publishing a few drawings.

Later I joined them.

They were already settled in log cabins by the brook, and had become companions of tree toads and owls."

Missouri was handing out homesteads.

"Come to Missouri, you'd get 160 acres."

And this just happened to be the 160 acres that was available, and that they chose.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: So she took the train to Springfield, and it was a two, two and a half day trip by horse and wagon to get here.

And you see, as she's getting closer and closer, she's just falling in love with, I guess, what she'd call the scrabblyness of the Ozarks.

ROSE O'NEILL: "We went deeper and deeper into the thick woods.

I forgot my fears and shouted with joy.

I called it the tangle, and my extravagant heart was tangled in it for good.

The leafy darkness seemed peopled with elves, exquisite little presences, weaving enchanted webs among the boughs.

I did not dream then that they were previews of Kewpies.

I had no inkling that my own beloved elves were waiting in that wilderness for me to give them birth.

We named the place Bonniebrook and fell in love with it for good.

We were lost in a legend.

For the first time in our lives, we learned by heart, the sound of solitude.

That mystical voice made up of winds, flowing water, rustling leaves, and little secret feet, soliloquies of birds and insects, the long lament of owls.

And we have been coming back to it all these years from New York, London, Paris, and Italy.

None of us ever thought of giving up Bonniebrook."

For someone who lived in these really cosmopolitan places, for her to really find Bonniebrook the place that she felt most at home, I think says a lot about her, as well.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: She would come here, and she would stay for periods of time, and do a lot of her illustration work here, and send it back to New York.

ROSE O'NEILL: "It was some years later, in my large cubbyhole studio on the top floor of Bonniebrook, that I had a dream in which the Kewpies were born, but it was in a log cabin or by the brook that I first made a pile of drawings that were sold to magazines when I went back to New York.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Oddly enough, I developed quite a style in the forest.

My drawings, rolled around smoothed sticks of wood and well wrapped, were sent out across the hills on horseback.

When my first illustrated story was accepted by "Cosmopolitan," I galloped my horse home from the post office, singing in a pounding rain.

This was her sanctuary.

She would come back here to relax and to recoup, and it shows up in her drawings a lot.

It shows up in her attitude toward other people.

We're all in the same boat.

Regardless of what our economic level is, we were all equal.

ROSE O'NEILL: "We were delivered over to enchantment.

The people about us were like characters of delightful ballads and legends, and we had never heard such talk.

The charm of long ago words.

The drawl, we never tired of the drawl.

It seemed like a song, the recurrence of delightful old time refrains.

There were occasional dances in the cabins, and we learned the glorious rhythm of the old square dances accompanied by a fiddle and magnificent stomp.

When I returned to New York, I had a pile of drawings in my trunk.

Some had accompanying verses, and others were suitable to have jokes or conversations attached to them.

I found that all or nearly all were saleable, so I never had that period of disappointment that is such a gruesome memory to many draftsmen.

At first, my drawings appeared mostly in the illustrated weekly called "Truth."

I also had drawings in "Life Magazine.""

"Cosmopolitan," "Puck" magazine, "Ladies' Home Journal," really, all the big ones at that time.

She was able to tailor her style of illustrations to the specific magazines, and what they used.

KAREN SALAZ: She brings to life characters that have personality, and they have warmth and depth.

And they show, it's not always the best parts of life, but all parts of life and living and growing up in America from the 1890s up.

And you can look back and see Americana in a way that otherwise you wouldn't be able to experience.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: She was extremely versatile.

So I don't know that I'd put any particular label on her style because she could do anything.

SUSAN SCOTT: She had her sister, Callista, with her going to New York.

They ended up renting a little apartment someplace, and she was making some money off of some of her art.

But her sister, Callista, was not an artist, but she was a very close sister.

ROSE O'NEILL: "I was about 17 when I fell in love with a young Virginian named Gray Latham, who happened into Omaha, and whom I afterwards married.

He had a charming Virginian accent and an enchanting smile."

He was from a Southern family in Virginia.

He was very refined.

He spoke with a wonderful Southern drawl.

He had a lot of personality and was very charming, and it was love at first sight.

CONNIE PRITCHARD: He was a handsome man, and a lot of other women in New York City thought he was handsome, also.

ROSE O'NEILL: "Gray used to visit me at the convent, where one of the nuns was always present with us, saying her beads.

In 1896, I had begun my seven years on the staff of "Puck."

After I married Gray, that year, I began to sign my drawings, "O'Neill Latham."

The public thought I was a man.

And before the truth came out, I received an abundance of letters, often with locks of hair and verses such as, "I want a little Latham of my own."

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: Her career for the illustrations was taking off, and she had a lot of commissions.

And she started to go to each of the publications to ask for her check, and they'd tell her, "No, we gave your check to your husband yesterday," and this was one after the other.

He had quite a little gambling problem.

ROSE O'NEILL: "Gray had no idea of mine and thine in the matter of money.

He would go to offices and collect the money I had earned or was about to earn.

This was hard on me, for I wanted to pay our expenses, and to send the rest to my family who were depending on me."

She was making quite a bit of money before the Kewpies with her illustration career, because that money that she was sending back went to build the big house at Bonniebrook.

ROSE O'NEILL: "I ought not to remain in a situation where there was so little respect for property rights.

I once had to walk home from the "Puck" office on Houston Street to 82nd Street because I found the remuneration had already been collected, and I was without carfare.

I still held to it that I could not go on living with Gray.

So after a while, I took Callista and a train for Bonniebrook.

I stayed in the country 10 months, and the Bonniebrook house grew along the bank to the brook.

Payment for my drawings came directly to me, so there was plenty of money.

I was planning for a divorce when one evening, there was Gray.

The smile, the embrace, the jig at the door.

I went back to New York with him and resumed that life on precisely the same terms."

She left him two or three times in New York, and he found out where she was, and he would come.

And she'd open the door, and he'd start doing a little dance and charming her again.

And she would go back, until finally she left New York, came to Bonniebrook, and her parents said, "Enough is enough."

On a couple of the pieces of art, you can see, it's "O'Neill Latham."

Well, then it comes along and it's "O'Neil," and there's just an "L." He's almost gone.

ROSE O'NEILL: "After some months, I decided to go back to Bonniebrook.

Papa and I rode horseback to Forsyth, the county seat, and I got my divorce."

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: So she was the first female illustrator of "Puck" magazine, which was the kind of humor magazine of the time in New York City, and she was doing illustrations, meeting with the art director there.

And through the glass, she'd see this man, he looks sort of stern, but she didn't really know who he was.

And not long after she finished her relationship with Gray Latham, she starts getting these anonymous love letters.

ROSE O'NEILL: "Then began the most charming, unsigned letters with comments on the drawings I was making and stories I was writing.

In my desolation and the loss of Gray, these letters became priceless.

Scarcely a day went by without a communication.

I lived on them.

By and by, one of the letters was signed, Harry Leon Wilson.

It said, "You knew."

I had not, but the mystery was out."

And so that starts their relationship, and he becomes her second husband.

ROSE O'NEILL: "In June 1902, he made his farewells at puck and we were married in Jersey City.

He was the editor of puck magazine.

He also wrote several novels.

He was very much in the upper echelon of the writing world of New York City.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: The problem was, once they were married, even starting on the honeymoon, he would go through these periods where he'd be really happy, and things were great.

And then he, like, wouldn't talk to her for weeks at a time.

You know, emotional, up and down.

ROSE O'NEILL: "Many times when we would be at a beach, perhaps for dinner and a swim, he would become silent, avert his eyes, and leave me without explanation.

His moods could reduce me to absolute silence.

And him, too.

People who had been with him in a playful moment were very much taken aback meeting him again when the mood had changed.

The metamorphosis could occur without work as an explanation or any other intelligible warning.

He even felt jealous of his own letters.

Later, at Bonniebrook, he destroyed the letters.

They were full of good things.

In fact, they had the best of him.

Living with a person who was incomprehensible to me had taken away my courage.

And it was to be a year or two before I could draw a free breath.

Harry had always treated me as if I were lacking in intelligence.

"Now, I shall be a fool," I said.

"And no one has the right to reproach me with my folly.""

It got to a point where she just got fed up with it, so it ended in divorce after five years.

ROSE O'NEILL: "I saw him only once more, 11 years afterward.

In 1918, he came to see me in New York.

He examined my drawings with enthusiasm.

And whereas he had always called me chucklehead before, now, he called me master.

[MUSIC PLAYING] My sister Callista and I stayed a while in New York, then went back to Bonniebrook, where the Kewpies were born in 1911.

In illustrating love stories, I had a way of making decorative head and tail pieces with cupids.

Edward Bok, of the "Ladies' Home Journal," cut out a number of these and sent them to me.

He had asked me if I could make a series of the little creatures, and said that he would find someone to make accompanying verses.

I replied that I would make the verses up myself, and wrote him an illustrated letter in which I created the character of the Kewpie, a benevolent elf who did good deeds in a funny way.

I invented the name for little cupid, spelling it with a K because it seemed funnier.

Kewpie, short for cupid.

Thus, he's shorter than that famous cuss.

I thought about the Kewpie so much that I had a dream about them where they were all doing acrobatic pranks on the coverlet of my bed."

KAITLYN MCCONNELL: They sort of appeared in a vision in the way that she manifested them as doing these good deeds.

Well, maybe it was a good deed for her that they showed up in her mind to begin with.

ROSE O'NEILL: "I told Mimi that I adored her babies.

That's where I learned about Kewpies.

I stored up all that babyism, then clapped on a pair of wings, and turned the transitory baby into the immortal elf."

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: In print, the first ones came out as comics.

That took on a life of its own and became-- they became so popular that kids were cutting them out and backing them on cardboard, so they'd have something to play with.

This was before the actual dolls were designed.

ROSE O'NEILL: "I had plenty of news of children learning the verses by heart and quoting them liberally.

Parents loved them.

And even yet, I hear of children having been brought up on the Kewpie rhymes."

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: She actually was the first female American comic.

She would do monthly stories, and she'd write the comic strip too, with it, the stories.

She wrote books about Kewpie, though, which was the whole story about where the Kewpies lived.

CONNIE PRITCHARD: There was a story every month.

The magazine always sold out because the women were wanting to read the continuation like a soap opera, really.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: They were happy, and they did good deeds in a funny way.

So you'll see some of her illustrations or drawings where the child is sort of sad or maybe picked on, and the Kewpies kind of come in and help them and save the day.

So it was very positive, uplifting.

That's what she wanted them to be.

SUSAN SCOTT: The Kewpies, they do good deeds, and they help other people.

They are just like their creator, Rose O'Neill.

Kewpies are just adorable.

They're just, like, the cutest little, pudgy things.

And on top of that, the way they were just always doing something fun or something cool.

Their body language speaks a lot.

KAITLYN MCCONNELL: These creatures were ones that people really found endearing and something that clearly resonated, because quickly they went from illustrations to being everywhere.

You can see Kewpies on about anything.

There were companies like ice cream companies, JELL-O, it was a big one for her.

ROSE O'NEILL: "When the Kewpie drawings and verses had been appearing for some time in magazines, I began to receive letters from children postmarked everywhere, from New Mexico to New Zealand, asking for a Kewpie they could hold in their hands.

Soon after, in 1912, several toy factories got the same idea and approached me about it.

Georg Borgfeldt and Company, gigantic distributors of toys, seemed the most impressive power to contact me.

I promised Borgfeldt I would model a standing figure in plasticine.

She was working to design an actual Kewpie doll, and she had worked to sculpt it herself.

Even had some help from somebody, and she didn't like the way it came out, so she did it herself.

ROSE O'NEILL: "In an hour or so, I had demolished her passionate handiwork and was on the way to materializing my own.

Absurd dimensions, tummy, topknot, wings, smile, and all, he came out well.

His winsomeness emerged from the gray plasticine loomed up in the spotless white.

He had become such a person, the self, in those years of drawing him.

A symbol of wise, kind, and comic things all done up in babyism.

There was a salute of New York voices when I unwrapped the Kewpie.

One saying, "Take it from me, this little fellow is going to steal the world."

They had all the necessary dimensions.

They could be touched, encircled by the fingers, hugged.

The children who had written to me were to have their Kewpie that could be held in hand.

But there was more.

The little, round faces were telling me something.

The sidelong eyes, the smile.

I thought, while there is anything it wants so funny and so loving, there is hope.

Love and the laugh, The invincible pair.

The first fruit of the factory, what was called a Kewpie, was the worst shocking travesty of Kewpish face and form.

For some unguessable reason, the factory had not cast from my statuette.

"That's the end of that," I said.

"We'll have to give it up.

They can't make it because they can't see it.

There won't be any Kewpie in the hand."

But Callista said, "Oh, yes, there will.

We'll go and see that there is."

So we forthwith took an express to Naples and shot straight toward Berlin, where I stayed until I had modeled 12 sizes of Kewpie and launched the doll factories."

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: When she first went over to work with the designers in Germany, she insisted that the smallest one be perfect.

And she's, like, I was poor, and I want the poorest child to be able to afford a beautiful, little Kewpie for not much money at all.

DONNA DAVIS: The fact that she wanted the very smallest of the Kewpies to be just as important and just as well made as the others, you know, for children that couldn't afford a doll, but could afford maybe a penny Kewpie.

ROSE O'NEILL: "I must have been something of a swashbuckler in those days, for the Borgfeldt's still recount my ordering of all the models and molds destroyed, along with a large stock of already manufactured ogrelings.

The Borgfeldt's still seemed to enjoy describing the disaster.

I, represented as a Valkyrie, complete with helmet, breastplate, and sword, the Borgfeldt's liked to say that without that carnage, the Kewpie success would have never occurred.

But even then, it never entered my mind that there would be no corner of the world where Kewpies would not take their smile.

Some time later, Kolbe wrote me that within 24 hours after the first Kewpies were shown in New York, the telephones were vibrating with inquiries and orders from shops and department stores.

Then came the avalanche of orders from all over the country.

In the summer of 1913, thousands of people were taking Kewpies home from various resorts.

Factory after factory had to be put into action.

And in a short time, a score of manufacturers of bisque Kewpies were working at top speed in France and Belgium.

In my profound isolation by the brook, I could not believe the rumors that reached me.

Not until the autumn of 1913 did I realize that there was a Kewpie craze.

The greatest success, I was told, in the history of toys.

In the spring of 1914, I joined Callista in New York, and the thing burst upon me.

People were carrying Kewpies in the train, and there were troops of the elves in the stations along the way.

Pictures of them smiled from magazines and newspapers in the hands of passengers.

When I reached New York, it seemed they were everywhere.

While I had been in the Ozark woods, the Borgfeldt's had set an incalculable number of energies to playing with the Kewpies.

I stood staring into shop windows where they frolicked in endlessly different guises.

Soon, all sorts of little bisque novelties were made from my darlings.

They were painted on dishes and cards, fans, and all sorts of objects.

They appeared on buttons, jewelry, children's clothing, toy furniture.

There were Kewpie books and Kewpie clubs.

KAITLYN MCCONNELL: The Kewpies were on a little bit of everything.

I mean, you had Kewpie the dolls, of course, but then you had dishes and home goods and radiator caps and things that were very unexpected.

ROSE O'NEILL: "I had never made a doll before, and the process had seemed full of problems.

When I imagined them all achieved and the creature actually smiling in the hands of people, I had extra throbs of the heart."

She looked at the Kewpies as sort of like her children.

She loved them.

And they started taking off.

ROSE O'NEILL: "I received endless heaps of letters that arrived from children who wrote to me from all points of the compass.

There were letters from hospitals, telling of sick children with the dolls in their beds.

I frequently distributed baskets full of Kewpies to such children.

News of women comforted with Kewpies after the loss of babies.

News of Kewpies in pulpits.

News of a shop near the Vatican, which sells sacred objects to be blessed by the Pope.

A Kewpie among the figures of the holy child.

News of English princesses and a Siamese prince with Kewpies.

Young women with Kewpie eyebrows, plucked to the mere dot, which distinguishes the elves."

KAITLYN MCCONNELL: Once Rose became successful, she was quite cosmopolitan.

She had a very affluent lifestyle, and again, would have been very atypical, I would think, for a woman in that era, especially a single woman, to be able to finance that sort of lifestyle.

ROSE O'NEILL: "I was rather flabbergasted to learn what the word royalties might come to mean.

That every time some unknown person succumbed to Kewpish charms, by an inevitable process, it meant pennies in my pocket."

She was worth about $1.4 million at the top of her career, which would be about $40 million now.

For a woman, a single woman, to have a career like that was really, really amazing.

DAVID O'NEILL: She was the highest paid woman artist in the world at that time.

And the Kewpies made her a millionaire.

She built a house down in Taney County way back in the woods.

It was hard to get to back then.

Three-story and had indoor plumbing, which was quite rare at the time.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: She funded this house for her family at Bonniebrook.

She had her apartments in Washington Square.

I understand, they were pretty big apartments.

There were two right next to each other.

Callista had one, she had the other.

And in Rose's, there was a big studio.

She had a lot of gatherings there of her friends and artists and parties.

The song "Rose of Washington Square," there's always some question about who it was written for, but a lot of people say it was written for her, because she was right in the center of all of it.

DAVID O'NEILL: Rose had a villa on the Isle of Capri, and then she had one in Connecticut.

Carabas was another one of her houses.

You she had quite a bit of property back then.

ROSE O'NEILL: "We bought Carabas, so named after Puss in Boots castle by us, because of our weakness for cats.

A long succession of whom were destined to reign there.

The house was always full.

I never knew where all the guests slept.

Though, some stayed a year or two.

The guests were all young or youngish."

CONNIE PRITCHARD: She had a circle no matter where she was.

And she even had a circle here in the Ozarks.

She rubbed elbows with the highest echelons from the city and from Italy.

But she also was right here, down home with the kinfolk around here, too.

KAITLYN MCCONNELL: She was unencumbered by what people expected or what would have been typical.

And I assume that, that kind of fed into her artwork and the ability for her to be as successful as she was, because if she'd felt held back by typical norms of the day, she probably would not have done most of the things that she did.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: She didn't like the fashions of the time.

She didn't like women being kind of bound up by corsets and all of that.

So she felt it stunted your creativity and blood flow to the brain, so she wore kaftans everywhere.

She didn't care what the style was.

She dressed the way she wanted to in what was comfortable.

A lot of the country folk around here kind of was taken aback by that.

My father said, he never did see her mad.

She always was jolly and friendly.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: Her sister, Callista, would wind up being her very close business partner through all her successes.

Callista became sort of her business manager and traveled with her to oversee the design of the Kewpies.

Callista actually was an integral part of coming up with the Kuddle Kewpies, which was a version that kids could hold, as opposed to a porcelain or bisque version.

I believe she probably couldn't have done a lot of the things that she did without that lifelong friendship and management from her sister.

She got apartments in Washington Square, New York, and she had two apartments that she and Callista had.

There were wonderful parties with writers and artists, and that's, too, where she became very involved in the suffrage movement.

ROSE O'NEILL: "Callista and I were keen about the fight for women's suffrage, and I walked in some parades, wore a placard, and made drawings for the cause."

She was a firm believer in women's independence.

She believed that women should be able to forge their own paths.

So when she was approached by people in the suffrage movement-- Kewpies were big.

They wanted her Kewpies for posters-- she went about and designed suffrage posters with the Kewpies.

She organized meetings at her apartments.

She marched.

KAITLYN MCCONNELL: Rose was a huge fighter for equal rights.

And you think about her timeline, where she was born in 1874, she was well into adulthood before she even earned the right to vote.

And so you could see why this would be something that was very important to her, and something that, I think, even today we can all be grateful for.

ROSE O'NEILL: "I went up on the platform to make my first and only suffrage speech.

I began well, for I was introduced as the mother of the Kewpies to thunderous applause.

When I came down from the platform, they received me in their bosoms.

As I walked home to Washington Square, I felt as if I was walking on air.

I was full of a sense of power.

I kept saying to myself, "I am an orator," and laughing in triumph.

Now that I had plenty of money, I did not illustrate as much, but let my hand and imagination have free play.

I would pull up a big rocking chair under the light and let myself go.

Marvelous nights with the sound of passers in the square growing few, perhaps a moon crossing the sky beyond my large, high windows, and rustling images of ancestral things surging through my head and projecting themselves upon my paper, all wrapped in mesh of endless line convolutions.

Another monster had been born.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: Where Sweet Monsters are examples of her fine art, she talks about, when she was younger, she went through this big mythology craze.

She drew these sweet monsters that sort of had a combination of a mythological feel, but a cross between the human form and nature.

And she did that for herself, and she actually exhibited them in Paris and became an associate of the society des Beaux-Arts, which she was the first American artist to be taken in there.

ROSE O'NEILL: "while I drew them, I had ecstatic images of the upsurge of life from the ancestral slime.

This progression seemed, to me, the epic of epics.

People used to wonder how the hand that made the Kewpies could bring forth those monstrous shapes, with their mysterious whisperings of natural forces and eons of developing time.

Witter Bynner once said the Kewpies were the bubbles on that sea."

CONNIE PRITCHARD: The Kewpies and the illustrations is probably what made her money, but her heart was in her fine art.

And that's the "Sweet Monsters."

CHRISTINE RIUTZEL: Those are my favorite works, the "Sweet Monsters" and the kind of, like, the dark, really mysterious, mythology-type of inspired work.

CONNIE PRITCHARD: The more you look at some of those "Sweet Monsters," the longer you stand there, the more you see something is revealed, you know?

You can walk through these woods, and you might see a face peeking around a tree limb at you.

I think, a lot of that did come from being here at Bonniebrook.

I don't think she'd become an untouchable person like some people do when they gain notoriety and fame and money.

Actually, it was almost the opposite.

She was a philanthropist with her money.

ROSE O'NEILL: "It got about that I was willing to share this fabulous money, so I had letters from all parts of the world asking me to put children to school, buy property, pay mortgages, bring people to America, et cetera.

Persons in Australia living in the bush needed a trap to go to town.

Persons in Newfoundland wanted a boat for fishing.

People in New Zealand needed a tent and circus wagon.

I did, in fact, keep up a good many establishments."

DONNA DAVIS: She was interested in people.

She would inspire other artists.

She would invite them into her home, and they might stay one month, and they might stay two years.

But she was interested in supporting other people, as well as her family.

I think her main thing throughout her life was supporting her family.

DAVID O'NEILL: She helped people.

There's a restaurant in New York where they had a table set aside for people that didn't have any money, musicians or whatever, that needed a place to eat.

Well, she'd pay for it and take care of the bill.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: She had parties.

She supported artists.

She felt if artists had a roof over their head, clothes on their back, and food to eat, they could create.

So that was very important to her.

That's kind of where the money went.

KAITLYN MCCONNELL: You know, Rose loved helping people.

Probably, you could think that went back to the art she created and creating good in the world, wanting to be a force for good and a force for change.

And when it came to people, I think she felt like she wanted to help them.

CONNIE PRITCHARD: I think that goes back to her growing up, being poor.

I don't think she wanted anyone else to experience having to move in the middle of the night because the rent wasn't paid.

She was generous to a fault.

So you get to a point where, in the early '30s, illustrations in magazines is going more towards photography, Kewpies, maybe, the popularity isn't quite what it was, but she was giving money to people.

I mean, people would come and stay with her for two days and stay for two years.

They would write her letters, and she laughingly talks about all the different endeavors that she helped finance.

I don't think the money was the thing with her.

It was the creativity and fostering that.

And she supported her family, her entire family.

KAITLYN MCCONNELL: There were instances where, she was very wealthy at different times of her career, ended up giving away a lot of that money.

And unfortunately, towards the end of her life found herself in very dire financial straits because of that generosity.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: She hits hard times financially, and the various properties get sold off.

Carabas, Villa Narcissus gets sold off.

She gives up the apartments in New York.

ROSE O'NEILL: "1937, Mimi is dead.

We buried Mimi beside the brook.

Papa had died the year before.

He had wanted to live near an old soldier's home so he could have a cannon fired across his bier at his funeral.

It had always been a somewhat important thing to him, being a veteran of the Civil War.

After Mimi's death, I made a final visit to New York, and then closed up my little apartment on Washington Square.

After 15 years of inhabitation, Carabas was sold.

Out into the Ozarks went trucks with treasures, including my 2 ton statue, "The Embrace of the Tree," and I followed after.

I had decided to stay in Bonniebrook.

More and more, I felt disinclined to get out from under the trees.

The turmoil of the world seemed increasingly impossible to go into.

None of this come and go life reaches the silent wilderness of Bonniebrook, which remains as tangled as when we first came to it nearly a half century ago."

She didn't have much money, and the house started to fall into wrack and ruin.

Rain was coming through the roof, and she lived here.

She spent the last years of her life here.

ROSE O'NEILL: "It is 1940, and I am writing this book at Bonniebrook in my deep retirement.

I am a witness, and no one is more coldly conscious of the ephemeralness of all we do.

The race, the planet, the terrible matrix of life, the whole, all is for me a dream, in that summer, long ago.

I have lately sculpted a new little figure.

It is a laugh.

It is a squatty, little laughing Buddha.

His hands on his knees, the shoulders hunched up, and the laugh of the ages on his dimpled face.

I don't know what came over me in these unmerciful times, but suddenly, I had to make a laugh.

I call him Ho-Ho.

I am rather proud of myself for having dug Ho-Ho out of my cosmos at this late day."

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: She tried one more time to make a figurine, called the Ho-Ho, which was sort of like this Buddha figure that was supposed to be wisdom, but it didn't really go anywhere.

So it was thin times while she was here.

Even while she was here and times were tight and she didn't have a lot of money, she was very generous with her neighbors.

She didn't let it bother her, the rain falling through the roof into the pots on the floor because there were so many holes.

She looked at that as beautiful music.

She loved the sound of the tinkling of the rain in those pots.

[RAINING] ROSE O'NEILL: "It is raining on all the roofs of Bonniebrook.

In my high studio, there is a great clatter.

The hills and the thick trees with their swelling buds seem to press closer around the house.

The brook is full and roaring.

There has been lightning and thunder.

My kind, metallic.

It is spring.

The wild flowers are all down the valley and on the hills.

Sap is running in the branches of the birds.

Their sounds have changed.

The Wood Thrush, the Cardinal, and the Mockingbird.

Few there are who live, alas, and they are far from here, who know how young and dear I was, when I was young and dear."

KAITLYN MCCONNELL: She was in her 60s and suffered a stroke in the early 1940s.

And her health began to dramatically decline at that point, and actually passed away just 69 years old.

She was in Springfield at that point.

She'd come to live with a nephew.

Rose O'Neill was my great aunt.

Rose passed away when I was five years old.

All I remember is when she passed away, she was living in our house on Summit Street.

Me and my sister watched them bring her down the stairs after she had passed away.

When she died, she was broke.

She'd spent all of her money.

She enjoyed it, and she helped people.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: The original house burnt down in 1947, three years after she died.

And in the '70s, the Bonniebrook Historical Society was formed, and they underwent a fundraising effort to try to rebuild the house as it was, which they did in the '90s.

And then through donations from her family and works that were collected, we have a museum that exhibits her fine art, as well as all of her illustrations and some of her suffrage work.

We have this Kewpie museum that shows how the genesis started and they developed.

KAITLYN MCCONNELL: The whole transformation of Bonniebrook is a fascinating point to me.

There was such love of Rose and her work and Kewpies and all these things that people did not forget it.

And, fast forward decades into the future, it was still important enough for people to want to rebuild Bonniebrook and make it a testament to her life.

CONNIE PRITCHARD: It's dedicated to the art of Rose O'Neill.

We have represented in her museum, her fine art, which is we have a portion of her "Sweet Monsters."

We have the suffrage movement.

We also have a lot of her illustrations.

And then, of course, we have the Kewpie room.

There's a lot of people stop in there, and it keeps the memory of Rose going.

That's one reason I donated a lot of the artwork to different museums and colleges and what have you.

Some of it went to School of the Ozarks, some to Drury.

Got it out to where more people could see it.

It's amazing, the amount of work that she put out.

And I had over 300 pieces of her artwork and donated to 20 different museums and colleges and what have you.

We have the International Rose O'Neill Club, which meets at Branson once a year in April, and got members from all over the United States.

Kewpiesta is the celebration of Rose O'Neill.

Club members come together once a year in Branson, and we have workshops, we have programs.

Everything revolves around Rose O'Neill and different aspects of her life and work.

It started back in the '70s, but it started off as a club, and then it grew to a national club, and then it grew to an international club, and then finally, a foundation.

So it's been evolving and changing.

It started off just as a group of ladies who were interested in the arts.

Actually, we are starting to see a resurgence of interest with younger people in the Kewpie figure.

CHRISTINE RIUTZEL: So about a year ago, I had visited Bonniebrook and took pictures and posted them to my Instagram story.

And someone who I follow, who I've never met before, we started chatting about how much we love Rose O'Neill.

And I told her my idea for wanting to paint a mural in tribute to Rose and her life legacy.

And Delaney, which is now my partner, she said, "What can I do to make this happen?"

And so she lives in Kansas City, and so we met up about January of 2023, and we started talking about what we could do to make it happen.

Part of the team, my friend, Mary Evelyn Tucker, she's incredible at painting flowers, and she offered to help me out.

I just feel a connection to her and to her work.

She was such a humble person who gave a lot of her money away.

I have lived here for over 25 years, and it wasn't until 2017, 2018 that I actually went to Bonniebrook and saw her incredible fine work, and was just absolutely blown away.

Like, this woman has so much talent.

She wasn't just the inventor of the Kewpie.

She was so much more than that.

And so I felt led to tell other people, especially artists, about her incredible work, and hope that she can be an inspiration to the next generation.

I hope that when locals and tourists walk by and see this work, that whether they like the work or not, I'm hoping that it will spark people to look her up, do a little bit of research, and be, like, wow, this woman lived in this area?

How did I not know this?

Like, I want to go out to Bonniebrook.

I want to support those people out there so that her legacy can continue on.

And no, I don't collect any of the dolls or anything, but I do have a Kewpie tattoo.

And I think it's really cool.

I've seen a lot of tattoo artists in the area get into the Kewpie imagery in tattooing, which I think is really cool.

It's almost like the next generation of Kewpie collecting, but through tattoos.

ALBERT RIVAS: Kewpies to my life through tattoo flash.

I'm a tattoo artist.

And when I was starting to create, like, some of the vintage designs, because that's what we do is kind of reproduce some of the old art and make it new again, make it fresh for fresh eyes, I would see Kewpies all the time, and I didn't know why.

I kind of assumed that sailors and gentlemen that would go off to the military or whatever would probably get them tattooed as a remembrance of their children and kids in their lives.

So I think that's why they popped up in a lot of tattoo culture and a lot of stuff that I got to see.

YOSHIKAZU ISONO: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] INTERPRETER: The Kewpie Corporation is a Japanese food manufacturer founded in 1919.

The company launched a mayonnaise high in egg yolk in 1925, with the aim of improving Japanese people's physiques and health.

Originally, it started as a business producing canned food.

The founder of the corporation, Toichiro Nakashima, went to the United States and encountered mayonnaise for the first time.

And he wanted to bring it back to Japan.

YOSHIKAZU ISONO: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] INTERPRETER: Back home in Japan, he was looking for a name for the brand of the product.

Around that time, the Kewpies were sensational.

They were popular all over the world, including Japan.

They were very cute and loved by everyone.

He hoped their product would be loved by everyone, too.

So he selected Kewpie as the corporation's brand.

YUMI KANEMARU: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] INTERPRETER: We didn't know about the existence of Rose O'Neill.

We just thought that Kewpie dolls were very popular.

And we thought the Kewpie was developed naturally without any particular creator, like angels or elves.

So we thought it was in the public domain.

The Kewpie Corporation has had a very friendly relationship with Bonniebrook since 2014.

We visit Bonniebrook every year around the time of the open house.

We interact and exchange information with the volunteers at Bonniebrook, and we also help with the preparations for the open house.

KAITLYN MCCONNELL: I think that Rose's legacy is still ongoing.

It's amazing to think that she passed away, 80 years ago, 150 years old this year, and she's still being recognized by different entities and organizations for her work today.

I mean, it was a couple of years ago she was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame for her illustrations.

She's kind of found, I think, a new following in people who never had heard of her before.

And that maybe is another chapter of testament to her story, that you can have passed away lifetimes ago, for generations who are around today, yet your work still resonates.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: In 2019, she was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame for her suffrage work.

She was last year inducted into the Toy Industry Hall of Fame.

She was the first American female cartoonist.

I want to see her get the notoriety she deserves.

CHRISTINE RIUTZEL: I love Rose because she was way ahead of her time.

She was breaking barriers and boundaries for the time and the day.

She was very much, like, I don't care what society says, I'm going to do whatever I want, and do whatever makes me happy.

And then, of course, like, her involvement in women's suffrage, I think, is a really important part of women's rights, and that is super inspirational to me.

KAITLYN MCCONNELL: Most artists, we generalize and say they're much more famous after they're gone.

And I think Rose was an exception to that because she had this huge amount of popularity, very young age, that was sustained for most of her life in different ways.

Most artists, we feel sad that they didn't understand, maybe, or see the value they brought during their lifetimes, and she was an exception to that.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: She was very artistic, and she was a dreamer with an imagination, you know?

I mean, she was really kind of an interesting woman.

I would've liked to hang around her.

ALBERT RIVAS: I always talk about how strong of a female she was, a female artist of her time to just have had so many accomplishments.

And I believe she was just ahead of her time.

So for me, it's been what a cute little doll to what a cool life.

I wish that I could have known, Rose.

I wish that I could have a conversation with her.

SUSAN SCOTT: Every year when I come to Kewpiesta, I wonder what Rose would think if she knew that she had such a deep impact on so many people through the years long after she passed away.

What a woman.

Amazing woman.

CONNIE PRITCHARD: She wasn't the highfalutin artist that lived in New York City or on the Isle of Capri or in Westport, Connecticut.

She was just another Taney County lady, who really cared about her neighbors.

SUSAN STRAUSS: I wish more people knew about her and could cherish who she was, her memory, what she did.

She did a lot of things for women, for women artists, and I don't think she gets the credit she deserves.

She was an interesting person.

She really was.

GLORIA COWPER-JEN: I think her story serves as an example not just for women, but for anybody who wants to achieve something through grit and determination, do it.

Take what you're good at.

Foster it.

The biggest thing is just her fearlessness of taking on what was considered the norms, and just having this career and this life that women couldn't really aspire to.

And her suffrage work and her helping other artists, to me, that's probably her biggest achievement is the barrier she was able to break through and her good works.

[MUSIC PLAYING] [AUDIO LOGO] ANNOUNCER: This program was made possible by the generous support of Great Southern Bank and Jan and Gary Baumgartner