Marie Osmond

A porcelain toddler doll named Olive May, after her mother, sold more than $3,000,000 worth in its first airing on QVC, which went out at midnight. That is the figure the collectors' press still cites for Marie Osmond's first sculpture, and it is the moment her second career stopped being a celebrity endorsement and became a business. The line began in 1991 with Knickerbocker Creations, a Nevada maker, and the Deseret News described the launch on November 10, 1991: about 40 dolls in six series, priced from $65 to $600, sold at Walt Disney World, Disneyland and on the QVC shopping channel, with a former Ideal sculptor, Vincent DeFilippo, doing much of the modelling. Two of the series were called Miracle Children, dolls in casts and bandages, and a share of their price went to the Children's Miracle Network telethon. Osmond told the paper she had refused to endorse many products because she could not be involved in making them.

She got involved here. By 2001 she told the Chicago Tribune she had designed 550 dolls and sculpted nine or ten of them herself; the ones she sculpted carry a small dot beside the left eye, her own beauty mark, as a trademark. Cheaper dolls went into Walmart from $29 and the top of the range reached $2,000. Her website says the line sold for 25 years, in the millions, won several Doll of the Year awards, and that Mattel made the first celebrity Barbie in her likeness. She is now retired from dolls. Nobody has published the line's total revenue, and this profile will not invent one.

The early 1980s matter here. Wikipedia's summary is that the Osmond family lost most of its fortune then, and Marie went back to work alongside her brothers. Every later venture reads as a decision not to be in that position again.

Children's Miracle Network started in 1983 as a telethon: Mick Shannon and Joe Lake had the idea, and Marie Osmond and John Schneider, then the star of The Dukes of Hazzard, hosted it. The first broadcast raised $4.8 million for 22 hospitals. Osmond's own account, given in 2009, traces the interest to watching her two deaf brothers, Virl and Tom, struggle to learn to speak, and to parents who treated giving as part of the weekly schedule rather than something for spare time. The organisation is based at 205 West 700 South in Salt Lake City, and its rule is that money stays where it is raised: every dollar supports the children's hospital in the community that gave it. By the doll launch in 1991 the Deseret News put the running total at nearly $500 million; the organisation now says more than $9 billion, distributed to 170 hospitals in the United States and Canada, with more than 80 corporate partners including Walmart, which passed $1 billion raised on its own in 2019, and Costco, IHOP and Delta Air Lines. In 2022 alone more than $98 million went to patient care services and over $54 million to charitable care. Osmond still takes part in the annual broadcast and, by her own count, has met hundreds of the families. In March 2020 she said she intends to leave her fortune to charity rather than to her children, on the grounds that they need to make their own money; she has not said which charity, and the obvious guess is only a guess.

In 2007 Osmond weighed 165 pounds and wore a size 14, and her mother, after a stroke, had told her not to repeat her own mistakes. She went on Nutrisystem, lost 50 pounds and dropped to a size four, then signed on as the company's spokesperson. The contract has outlasted most of her recording deals: Fox News counted fifteen years in January 2023, by which time she had helped design a Nutrisystem plan for women over 55. Her line on it is simple. "Food is not my enemy anymore." The company lists her among its success stories, which is what a spokesperson is for.

Food is not my enemy anymore.

The one she turned down is the more telling number. At some point she was offered $5 million to appear in Playboy and declined, saying later that she could have used the money but would not want her mother to see it. The choice fits a career built on being the girl next door, the phrase the press has used about her for fifty years, and on a family the Washington Post once called squeaky-clean members of the Church. Her other lines of business, briefly:

• Books: Behind the Smile (2001), Might as Well Laugh About It Now (2009) and The Key Is Love (2013) all made the New York Times list; a sewing and quilting book followed in 2010
• Radio: Marie and Friends, a five-hour weekday show, 2004
• Television: the Hallmark talk show Marie, 2012-2013; forty guest slots on The Talk before one season as co-host, 2019-2020
• Records: Music Is Medicine (2016) reached number ten on the country chart; Unexpected (2021) went to number one on the classical crossover chart

After Dancing with the Stars in 2007, where she finished third, she and Donny did a week at the MGM Grand in July 2008 and then a six-week run at the Flamingo starting that September. The six weeks became eleven years. The Flamingo renamed its showroom for them from 2013 to 2019, the show won three Best of Las Vegas awards in 2012, and the final performance on November 16, 2019 was the 1,730th, which the hotel called the most of any singing act in Las Vegas history. Tickets in the last year ran from $95 to $262. In December 2009, a year into the residency, she split with Karl Engemann, the manager who had handled the Osmond children since 1976, and her lawyers accused him of unauthorised commitments and of seeking money outside the management agreement. Since Las Vegas she has made Lifetime Christmas films in 2019, 2020 and 2021 and put out a classical album with the Prague Symphony Orchestra. She was born on her father's 42nd birthday, October 13, 1959, in Ogden, and first appeared on television at four. Sixty-two years later she is still under contract to someone.