The politics of ‘Rosie’ and ‘Josie’

REALLY ROSIE? It's not like Rosie O’Donnell to hold back; that's why it’s disconcerting when her new magazine sometimes does.

By JANET K. KEELER

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 10, 2001

If the Broadway-show-tune-singing, Tom-Cruise-loving comic rubs you wrong, Rosie will strike you as just another publication with a celebrity's face out front. And like Martha Stewart Living and O, as in Oprah, it won't see the inside of your shopping cart.

The causes O'Donnell champions on her daytime chit-chat show get generous coverage in the first issue of Rosie, fresh out in the grocery stores. There is more between these slick covers about homelessness, adoption, gun control (Remember her famous tiff with actor Tom Selleck after the Columbine shootings?), children's rights and cancer than you're likely to see in a year's worth of Family Circle, Redbook and Ladies' Home Journal.

Rosie is the reincarnated McCall's, which died in March at 125 years old. Despite a circulation of 3.6-million, McCall's had been on life support for the last decade, fighting to distinguish itself among the multitude of women's magazines on the market.

When McCall's was a young adult it published pieces by George Bernard Shaw, Zane Grey and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the 1940s, it printed the memoirs of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and after that she wrote a monthly column.

Gloria Steinem and author Joseph Heller (Catch-22) each worked there for a time. Then the magazine began to drift into the abyss of fashion, food and family.

Rosie is more distinctive than the modern-day McCall's, but it suffers from a personality disorder. In its effort to satisfy the money folk, Rosie is tentative. Innocuous humor (a parody of the calendars in Martha Stewart and O doesn't go far enough), run-of-the-mill beauty tips (choosing lipstick!) and recipes (strawberry shortcake) feel like filler among the more visceral pieces (actor Fran Drescher's cancer fight and a woman's crusade to help her brain-damaged child).

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein (The Heidi Chronicles) interviews actor Uma Thurman about motherhood and her involvement in a New York City organization that helps needy parents raise their children. Fine topic; a waste of writing talent and edgy perspective. It would have been more impressive to excerpt one of Wasserstein's new works or commission one. Any professional writer could have handled this story.

According to the New York Times, O'Donnell and Gruner & Jahr, the company that folded McCall's to make way for Rosie, had difficulties agreeing on tone. O'Donnell, who claims a "dark" side that she doesn't much show the public, was rebuffed on several personal essays she wrote. Rosie editor Cathy Cavender told the New York Times that some of them were "not appropriate at this time."

In the essay that made the first issue, "My New Daughter," a self-questioning O'Donnell writes eloquently and passionately about her foster child, a 3-year-old girl who has already been in a dozen foster homes. (O'Donnell has three adopted children.) O'Donnell, who lost her mother to breast cancer when she was 10, is fierce in her dedication to the troubled girl.

She needs to be fierce for Rosie, too. Her opening letter to readers is so soft and clueless (she looked to a 1974 issue of Tiger Beat for inspiration) that it belies the meaty magazine to come.

Gruner & Jahr sends Rosie to McCall's subscribers, and the company doesn't want a major shift in editorial content to drive away those readers.

What a weird world publishing is. McCall's circulation was artificially high because of cheap subscription prices. It wasn't selling well on the newsstands, and advertisers were getting harder to find and/or retain. How much harm could a content change cause? Golly, it seems that might help.

Rosie cracks the women's magazine mold ever so slightly; perhaps future issues will bust it wide open. Yes, there are the obligatory crafts and home arts stories, but a piece about warriors on opposite sides of the gun-control issue is weightier. The Columbine shootings turned one victim's father into an activist for gun control, while the daughter of a couple killed in the 1991 massacre at Luby's in Killeen, Texas, regrets she wasn't a little closer to the handgun tucked in her purse. That's not something regular readers of McCall's would have seen in recent years.

The first half of the magazine is full of short takes on topics such as women with big feet, gambling addiction and a review by one "loving" couple of four sex manuals. Male-female dynamics don't get much attention otherwise.

If Rosie is into relationships at all, it's those between mothers and children. Each month, "A-List Kids" will highlight children available for adoption. They tug at the heart, and it's likely that through Rosie these kids will find homes.

Whether Rosie can survive the overcrowded magazine world will hinge on O'Donnell's ability to fight the powers. Craft ideas and recipes are as plentiful as Bjork jokes after the Academy Awards. Stories about mothers who think are not.

O'Donnell should, and the editors and owners need to let her, project more darkness, if that's what she calls shedding light on big, ugly issues. Heaven knows we've got enough fluffy magazines already.

- Information from the New York Times and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was used in this story.

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