Adams—a wit herself. Sophistication lay rouge-deep upon the personalities of her cover girls; beneath lay reassuring testimonials to health and wholesomeness," wrote James Gray, author of Business Without Boundary: The Story of General Mills. In 1943, McMein collaborated with Alicia Patterson Guggenheim to create a comic strip, called "Deathless Deer." The strip starred a "deathless" Egyptian princess who awakens in modern New York City. McMein, while talented, was unfamiliar with comic strip drafting and conventions, and Guggenheim's writing suffered with the format. The strip was a commercial and critical failure; it was discontinued in 1943. In April 1938, McCall's Magazine did not renew McMein's contract to produce illustrations for the magazine. By then, magazines could cost-effectively publish color photographs using four-color machines. McMein entered the field of portraiture, at first using pastels to depict Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Helen Hayes. She painted portraits of presidents Herbert Hoover and Warren G. Harding, author Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and actors Charlie Chaplin and Beatrice Lillie. McMein also painted Katharine Cornell, Kay Francis, Janet Flanner, Dorothy Thompson, Anatole France, Charles Evans Hughes and Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. She mentored photographer Lee Miller. Personal life Her father died in 1918 while McMein was overseas entertaining the troops. She moved her mother Belle from Quincy, Illinois to live with her in New York. She was an "ardent supporter" of women's political, sexual, and economic rights. By 1920, McMein had walked in suffrage parades, traveled overseas extensively, and had ridden in Count Zeppelin's dirigible. She rode across an Arab desert with a woman journalist and friend and was proposed to by an Arab sheik in Algiers. McMein, who was a talented musician, had written an opera by that time, too. In 1921, McMein was among the first to join the Lucy Stone League, an organization that fought for women to preserve their birth names after marriage in the manner of Lucy Stone. McMein—described as a tall, athletic, grave, and beautiful red-head—became a regular member of the Algonquin Round Table set, formed after the end of the war. Her West 57th Street studio in New York City became an "outpost" to the Algonquin Hotel, which appealed to the "Bohemian" nature of its members, which included Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Edna Ferber, Irving Berlin, Robert Sherwood, Franklin Pierce Adams, Robert Benchley, Alice Duer Miller, Harpo Marx, and Jascha Heifetz. She was prone to working in her