Neysa McMein: Illustrator and Jazz Age Icon
Illustrator Neysa McMein (1888-1949) was born Marjorie McMein in Quincy, Illinois in 1888. She left Quincy and the name Marjorie behind as soon as she could.
After high school, Marjorie left Quincy for Chicago where she studied commercial art at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1913, she moved to New York, where she changed her name to Neysa, reportedly on the advice of a numerologist. (She chose the name of a racehorse she admired.) Neysa tried her hand at acting for a short time–she worked occasionally as an extra at the Metropolitan Opera at a pay rate that kept her in popcorn and not much else. But she didn’t have the passion or the talent to succeed and soon returned to art. She paid for studies at the Art Students League by working as a sketcher and clothing designer for Ebenezer Butterick, who, as we recently learned, is one of the contenders for the title of the first person to mass-produce paper sewing patterns.[1]
Neysa sold her first commercial illustration to the Boston Star in 1914. A year later, she sold a cover illustration to the Saturday Evening Post, which was a really big deal for any illustrator .
When the United States entered World War I, she created posters for the United States and French governments and the American Red Cross. In 1918, she went to France where she entertained the troops, drew cartoons for them and painted insignia on the airplanes of the 93rd Bomb Squad.
Back in the United States after the war, Neysa flung herself into Jazz Age life, complete with homemade wine made in her studio bathtub.. She became part of the Algonquin Round Table, thanks in part to her close friendship with Alex Wolcott. She kept open house at her studio, issuing casual invitations to stop by to friends and strangers alike. On any given day Jascha Heifetz would be pounding out music on one of the two pianos that stood back to back in the corner, egged on by Irving Berlin; members of the Round Table would be playing poker on a rickety table; and aspiring actresses would be screaming to make themselves heard over and contributing to the general noise. Through it all, Neysa stood at her easel in the middle of the chaos, creating one of the pretty-girl magazine covers for which she was known, using the pastel sticks that were her favorite medium.
May 13, 1916
Neysa was considered one of the most beautiful women in New York and the subject of plenty of attention as a result. Although she was married in 1923 to successful engineer, Jack Baragwanath, whom she met at a party at the home of Irene Castle, she had numerous affairs with prominent men, and earned a reputation for promiscuous behavior. Harpo Marx quipped that “the biggest love affair in New York City was between me—along with two dozen other guys—and Neysa McMein.”[2]
Her public persona aside, Neysa was a highly successful commercial artist, known for drawings of chic young women that graced the covers of, and illustrated stories in, magazines such Collier’s, McClure’s, Liberty Magazine, Women’s Home Companion, Photoplay, Liberty, and most notably the Saturday Evening Post, for which she created almost sixty covers between 1916 and 1939, and McCall’s, for which she painted all the covers from 1923 and 1937. (Unlikely as it seems, she also served as the McCall’s film reviewer in 1932 and 1933.) The “McMein Girl” was as distinctive as the Gibson Girl had been several decades earlier. She also illustrated ads for products like Palmolive soap[3], Lucky Strike cigarettes, Cadillac, Colgate and Coke. Probably her most influential drawing was the first image of the fictional Betty Crocker, which General Mills commissioned her to create in 1921 and which she updated several times over the years. ( Ironic, given that the Betty Crocker brand was based on middle-class domestic values —as far away from McMein’s personal style as it was possible to be.)
McCall’s canceled their contract with Neysa in 1938. New four-color printing technology allowed magazines to use color photographs for their cover art at a much lower cost than expensive illustrations. As it became harder to get illustration jobs, McMein pivoted to painting portraits, a difficult transition which she made largely with the help of her famous friends including Dorothy Parker, Charlie Chaplin, Ferdinand von Zepplein, who she met during the war, and Janet Flanner.
Neysa died in 1949 from an embolism that occurred during surgery for cancer.
[1] The man appears to be tracking me down. If I stumble across him one more time I may have to give him a blog post of his very own.
[2] It’s only fair to point out that her husband also had a number of extramarital affairs, but the double standard being what it was his affairs don’t seem to have generated the same public commentary.
[3] I just realized that the name tells you what the original bar soap was made from: palm and olive oils! Rabbit hole!
Madame Demorest, Women’s Magazines, and Fashion
In the mid-19th century, Ellen Curtis “Madame” Demorest (1824-1898), aided by her husband William, created a fashion and media empire in New York built on the growing magazine industry and the aspirations of middle-class women who wanted to reproduce current French couture at home, something that was previously only available to the wealthy.
The connection between women’s magazines and fashion wasn’t new. Godey’s Lady’s Book, for instance, which was published from 1830 to 1896 and was the most widely circulated magazine before the American Civil War,[1] was best known for the hand-tinted fashion plates at the front of each issue. Those plates gave women not only a glimpse of what was fashionable, but measurements and patterns.[2]
Madame Demorest leaned into that connection and expanded it. In 1860, the Demorests opened their first shop, on lower Broadway in New York: Madame Demorest’s Emporium of Fashions. Soon thereafter, they began to publish fashion magazines. The first, and the jewel in their publishing crown, was Mme. Demorest’s Mirror of Fashions, which they described as “The Model Magazine of America.” It started out as a quarterly magazine. Five years later it was successful enough to be published monthly. Eventually the couple published five separate publications, with a combined circulation of more than one million.[3]
Each issue included “Splendid engravings, Original Music, Mammoth Fashion Plates, Entertaining Poems & Stories,[4] Valuable Recipes, Full Size Fashionable Patterns & Other Valuable Novelties.” The back of the magazines were devoted to advertisements, most notably ads for Madame Demorest’s eponymous beauty products: “Mme. Demorest’s Everlasting Perfume,” “Mme. Demorest’s Lilly Bloom for the Complexion,” “Mme. Demorest’s Self Tucking Attachment,”[5] “Mme. Demorest’s Spiral Spring Bosom Pads,”[6] and “Mme. Demorest’s Superior French Corsets.” No matter what your beauty needs, Madame Demorest had you covered–and the magazines were the vehicle for telling you so.
The “Full Size Fashionable Patterns” proved to be the most important part of Madame Demorest’s business. She was probably the first to mass-produce paper dress patterns and sell them directly to customers, using a mathematical system she called the “Excelsior Dress Model” to print different sizes on one pattern. The patterns were included as fold-outs in the magazine, but sales agents also sold “Mme. Demorest’s Reliable Patterns” in cities throughout the United States. They were so popular that the instructions were printed in French, Dutch, Portuguese, German and Spanish as well as English. In 1876, they sold three million patterns through 1500 agents.
The success of the pattern business depended on that of another American innovator, Isaac Singer, whose domestic sewing machines were becoming a staple in American homes.
Demorest was an advocate for women in business as well as a fashion arbiter. Building on her own experience,[7] she urged parents to “teach your daughters some remunerative business. Select for them as you do your sons.” She set off the nineteenth century equivalent of a flame war in 1868 in the Letters to the Editor section of the New York Times when some luckless man dared to opine on “Women’s Work and Wages”—her first response began “Inasmuch as you are not a women, and do not, to any extent, employ women, allow one who is, and does, to reply…” Later that same year, she joined journalist Jane Cunningham Croly in creating the first professional women’s club in New York, after women journalists were barred from attending a reception for Charles Dickens given by the New York Press Club.
There is some disagreement as to whether Madame Demorest or Ebenezer Butterick was the first to mass-produce paper patterns. The timing as I read it leans toward Demorest, but Butterick patented his system and Demorest did not. Guess whose name we remember?
[1] Not the most widely circulated women’s magazine. The most widely circulated magazine. It is easy to dismiss publications for women as somehow lesser than general interest publications.
[2] It is only fair to point out that Godey’s Lady’s Book, like women’s magazines today, was not devoted solely to beauty and fashion. It published stories by men and women, including Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, and Frances Hodgson Burnett. The magazine advocated for education for women and included a regular section titled “Employment for Women” that discussed women in the workplace. And its editor, Sarah, Hale, used it as a platform for her campaign to make Thanksgiving an official holiday. But I digress.
[3] At its height, Godey’s Lady’s Book had a circulation of 150,000.
[4] Including stories by Louisa May Alcott and Julia Ward Howe
[5] Apparently an attachment for sewing machines making it easier to sew tucks, not a better way to keep your shirtwaist tucked-in.
[6] I must admit to curiosity about the spiral spring. The image that came to mind has a Wile E Coyote feel to it, complete with “boing”. The drawing that accompanies the ad did nothing to dispel that since it looks like there is indeed a spiral spring inside the pad. Ouch!
[7] She opened her first business, a successful hat shop, at the age of eighteen—with a little help from her father who owned a men’s hat factory. She ran it until she was 34, when she met and married William Demorest and swept the widowed owner of a dry-goods store into a fashion empire.
History on Display: The National Civil Rights Museum
Because we are heading into the Martin Luther King holiday weekend here in the United States. I thought it was an appropriate time to re-run my post on our visit to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis in the spring of 2024. It turns out that I didn’t write one. With questions of institutionalized violence, resistance, and civil rights in the headlines and in our hearts I still think it’s the right subject for today’s post, so I’m going to have to dig back into my notes/memory to tell the story I should have written then.
The National Civil Rights Museum, built around the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated, is rightly described as a sacred space. The exhibits use a brilliant blend of space, light, music and photographs to immerse viewers in familiar stories–the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, the student sit-ins of 1960, and the freedom rides of 1961— and those less well known. (Perhaps only less well known to those of us who were not directly affected by the events or the need for them.) The museum ends with the room in which Dr. King died–the atmosphere when we were there was reverent.
I strongly urge you to visit the museum if you have the chance. I came away both proud of those who fought for civil rights and ashamed that the need had existed.