Marie Osmond — country and pop singer, movie and Broadway actress, dollmaker, author, businesswoman, TV and radio talk-show host, mom — has just settled into her room at the Comfort Suites in Aurora, Ill. She's on the phone, but she has to interrupt the conversation several times to talk to her children, who are bouncing off the walls.
"They love the hotels and the room service," she says. "But after 10 hours on a bus, they go crazy."
Aurora is the latest stop on Osmond's 15-city Christmas concert tour that began the day after Thanksgiving and will end with a finale in Salt Lake City's EnergySolutions Arena on Friday. The strain of the job is taking its toll on her voice. She excuses herself a couple of times to clear her throat and finally asks an aide for a throat lozenge. She eventually cuts short the phone conversation to preserve her voice and cancels the rest of the day's interviews.
"She's tired," says Chris Acton, her tour manager. "It's a lot of work. On Broadway, there's one show every night, but there's no travel. She performs, gets on a bus, makes the drive and gets up and does it again. You can hear it in her voice today."
This is another coming-out party of sorts for Osmond, who hasn't toured for 10 years, hasn't sung professionally for five years and has rarely appeared on stage during that time except for charity events. She has sat on the sidelines the past few years to raise her eight children and to tend to her dying mother.
In the interim, there have been marital separation and reconciliation, health issues for her and her husband, a fire that ravaged her Provo home, depression and the resulting flight from home, the death of her mother, and the growth of Osmond as a businesswoman.
Want to feel older? Marie Osmond is 47 years old. She grew up before our eyes, and here she is, middle-aged. When did this happen? There is a whole generation that doesn't even know her as the cute teen with the piano-key smile who cut hit records and hosted a TV show with her brother, Donny.
"A lot of kids only know me as the doll lady on TV," she says of her regular appearances on the home shopping network QVC, hawking her porcelain dolls.
Osmond and the rest of her "Magic of Christmas" concert entourage — musicians, her children, stagehands, etc. — have traveled from city to city on two buses. They began with four stops in Florida, then moved on to Raleigh, Louisville and, after inching along in snow and ice for 10 hours, arrived in Aurora.
They have performed mostly in theaters in front of sold-out crowds of 2,000 to 2,500 people, rather than cavernous basketball arenas like the one in which they will play in Salt Lake City.
"It's been standing ovations almost every night," says Acton. "She hasn't worked in 10 years, and it's almost like the crowd is accepting her as a classical pop artist rather than a country artist. She's attracting crowds who know her from Broadway rather than country music.
"We weren't expecting that. There's another crowd who knows her from the 'Sound of Music' and 'The King and I."'
What would drive Marie Osmond back onto the road? After all, she can't need the money.
"I've got eight kids to send to college, babe," she replies with a laugh — apparently kidding, since her 14-year-old collector-doll company alone is a multimillion-dollar business ($80 million in sales the first six years, according to the Wall Street Journal).
The idea for the tour began early this year when her arranger, Jerry Williams, asked her to sing a song titled "Consider Me" on an album he was recording.
"He played it for me," Osmond recalls.
"It's a beautiful song. It's inspiration to (think about) a loved one or a friend or God, whatever it means to you. It was a catalyst to do my own concert. I had planned on doing my own music again. I got in the studio and had so much fun. It had been a while."
Christmas shows aren't new to Osmond. From 1994 to 1996, "Marie Osmond's The Magic of Christmas" show toured major venues in the United States, mostly in the East, and in the early '90s she toured with the Oak Ridge Boys' Christmas shows.
She hosted a TV Christmas special in 1986 and also co-hosted a TV Christmas special with her family in 1980. She also co-starred in a TV Christmas movie, "The Gift of Love," with actor Timothy Bottoms
For this year's tour, she borrowed musicians from other acts — Barry Manilow's drummer, backup singers for Madonna, Stevie Nicks and k.d. lang, and a "bass player who has done every motion picture you can name," she says. Together, they produce a Christmas concert whose direction is open to spontaneity. Ask her what songs she will perform in Salt Lake City, and Osmond says she doesn't know.
"We get lots of requests," she says. "It's not just standing up and doing Christmas song after Christmas song.... We gear our show to the audience."
She also warns audiences to be in their seats 15 minutes before the concert begins to see a slide show that is a walk down memory lane with Marie Osmond and her four decades of performing.
"It's been so much fun, more than I thought it would be," she says of the tour. "Two nights ago, one of the concert promoters said he had never seen (the audience) stand at intermission. Three nights ago the guy said, 'We want the concert next year."'
William Morris, the agency representing her, "told him they don't know if I'm going to do it again, and the guy said, 'We'll put in our offer now."'
Osmond's children also perform in the show, meaning she has come full circle.
Six of her eight kids — Abigail, 4; Matthew, 7; Brianna, 9; Brandon, 10; Michael, 15; and Rachael, 17 — are making the tour (children Stephen and Jessica didn't make the trip because they are attending college, and husband Brian Blosil is home attending to his own work). They are accompanied by tutors, just as their mother once was.
"That's how we've always done it," she says. "We did it when I was doing 'The Sound of Music' for two years. Believe me, I know the routine."
Osmond's professional career began almost the day she was placed on the knee of singer Andy Williams during his nationally televised variety show, at the age of 3. She was part of the famous Osmond show-business family from Utah, the eighth of nine children born to George and Olive and the only daughter.
Her first concert performance was a sold-out gig at Madison Square Garden alongside The Osmond Brothers. She began touring with the brothers, forcing them to change the name of their act to "The Osmonds." On the road some 260 days a year, Marie grew up backstage and on buses, airplanes and hotels.
"I've always defined a bed as any surface that would allow me to put my head down," she once told Larry King on his radio show. "I've curled up on an instrument case, across a luggage rack of a Greyhound bus and next to a backstage costume rack with my head propped against a hoop skirt."
She became a star in her own right at the age of 13 with her release of "Paper Roses," which made her the youngest female ever to produce a No. 1 song on the country music charts. As a pop and country singer, she went on to make nine solo albums and seven more with Donny, and along the way she collected gold records, Grammy nominations and several No. 1 hits.
She sang with a who's who list of entertainers. Recently, in connection with her duties as a judge on the TV show "Celebrity Duets," she was asked to list the stars she has performed with over the years. She began typing the list and stopped when she reached 300. The list included Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Ethel Merman, Groucho Marx, Bernadette Peters, Lionel Richie, Manilow, Barry Gibbs.
"Singer" was just one of her incarnations during her career. Marie and Donny hosted a hit variety TV show from 1976 to 1979. They hosted a daytime talk show on Fox that ran from 1998 to 2000. Marie had her own TV show — "Marie" — on NBC in 1981.
She also took major acting roles in a handful of made-for-TV movies. She starred with Bottoms in the Christmas TV movie "The Gift of Love," based on storyteller O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi."
She played the role of her own mother in a TV movie about the Osmond family. She starred in another TV movie, "I Married Wyatt Earp." And she co-starred in a big-screen movie with Donny, "Goin' Cocoanuts."
About the same time, she turned down the lead role in "Grease" because the character — played by Olivia Newton John instead — turns "bad" to win over the boy at the end of the movie.
And she became a stage actress, on and off Broadway, playing the part of Anna in "The King and I" and Maria in "The Sound of Music."
And Osmond's career continued to morph — extending beyond the entertainment world.
She started her own line of "Marie Osmond Fine Porcelain Collector Dolls," a carryover from her lifelong hobby of collecting dolls from around the world during her travels. (She has 700 in her personal collection.) There are hundreds of models for sale, including a limited-edition model she says will be available only at the Christmas-tour venues.
She has written two books — one about her battles with postpartum depression and the other about beauty and health. She made a video of exercises for pregnant women. She co-founded the Children's Miracle Network charity, which has raised millions of dollars for sick and injured children. She hosted a short-lived radio talk show — "Marie and Friends" — from a studio within walking distance of her Provo home.
She also started her own line of embroidery machines, sewing machines and embroidery designs.
She has her own line of clothing patterns.
And, of course, she is mother and wife in a large family.
Osmond and Blosil are raising eight children, six of whom still live at home. They adopted five of the children (if you ask her how many were adopted, she will say she can't remember, her point being that she makes no such distinctions).
All of this in half of a lifetime?
"It's nuts, isn't it?" she says. "I love to be busy."
After learning to sing on stage — "It's a new way of singing," she says — she told her manager that she wanted to learn opera "whether I ever do it or not." She is going to take college courses, beginning next month, "to continue learning." One of them will be a course in geometry because "it's good for your brain and to help with kids' homework."
She shares domestic duties with Blosil, her husband of 20 years, and with a nanny. After alternating between homes in Provo and California for years, they now live year round in Provo.
"My husband and I rotate, depending if I was out late," she says of running the household. Maybe she is the thoroughly modern woman of the world, but she is domestic. She brings home the bacon and cooks it, too.
"I'd work 16 hours on 'Donny and Marie' and go home and my mom would say, 'OK, now we're going to make bread,"' she says. "I'm a domestic chick, too. I do have help (around the house) — when I work, I do. I have a nanny. QVC takes me away, and 'Celebrity Duets' takes me to California two days a week."
She has turned down a dozen Broadway offers and TV projects to stay at home in recent years, she claims, largely to raise her children and nurse her ailing mother. "I think that women can do it all; I just don't think you can do it all at once," she told King. "And I didn't want any regrets with my mother."
Osmond's life hasn't been all curtain calls and domestic bliss, as anyone with a newspaper or People magazine subscription can attest. Her first marriage to BYU basketball player Steve Craig ended in divorce after less than three years. She married Blosil, an award-winning producer, a year later, in 1986.
In 1999, five months after the birth of her third child, as has been chronicled repeatedly, she gave the credit cards and checkbook to her nanny, drove up the California coast and holed up in a small hotel, never intending to return to her family. Blosil reached her on a cell phone and drove up to be with her.
She was suffering from postpartum depression, which left her so inert that she had been unable to get out of bed or even decide what to wear. In the aftermath, Osmond and Blosil were separated for several months but reconciled.
Osmond was treated with anti-depressants and a regimented diet, among other things. She wrote a book on the subject — "Behind the Smile: My Journey Out of Postpartum Depression" — and became an unofficial spokeswoman to put postpartum depression in the public forum, appearing on radio and TV shows and at public-speaking engagements. In the book, she also revealed that she had been sexually abused (not by family members) during her years of touring as a child.
"I was the first celeb to talk about depression," she says now. "A lot have come out since, like Brooke (Shields). It was taboo to talk about, which is so stupid. It shed a lot of light on it.
"I still get e-mails about that book. I had four just last night."
Osmond reports that she is doing well on that front these days, but "once you've been through something like that, you're always on your guard to never go there again. I'm very cautious about what I eat and what is going on with my body."
Osmond has dealt with a number of other trials in recent years — her mother died in 2004 after a 2 1/2-year illness; her Provo house caught fire in 2005; she was hospitalized for a reaction to medication in 2006.
In recent years, Blosil has battled a brain tumor. Osmond says her husband is in good health and doing well — "We got some good news last week," she says — but she won't say any more than that — "He doesn't want me to talk about it," she says. "He's been very sick."
She is philosophical about the many trials she has faced.
"That's life. That's what everybody goes through. We've been through a lot of stuff. You can feel sorry for yourself or you can say, thank you, it was a wonderful learning experience that gave me compassion for people."
Osmond is weighing several offers for her next career move, depending on her health, but she turns reflective when she considers where she's been.
"It's been an amazing run, especially for a female," she says. "Women don't have long careers in this business."
Her Dec. 22 concert date will be a homecoming for her, a rare appearance on stage in her home state. As the conversation wound to a close, she wanted to talk again of her show in Salt Lake City.
"I'm looking forward to it," she says. "I hope people will come. Tell the people in Salt Lake that if they want to do something other than the mall, if they want to get away and have some fun, to come to the concert. I put my reputation on the line. You will walk away with the holiday spirit."
She also noted, "It will probably be a long time before I come back to Salt Lake City. We're going to pull the bus up to my house and get off."
E-mail: drob@desnews.com