by M. G. Lord
No one disputes that from a young age boys and girls behave differently, but the jury is still out on why. Is such behavior rooted in biology or social conditioning? I think it's possible to look at femininity as a performance— or "womanliness as a masquerade," to borrow from Joan Riviere, a female Freudian who labeled the phenomenon in 1929—without chucking the possibility of biological differences.
Indeed, some of Barbie's most ardent imitators are probably not what Carole King had in mind when she wrote "Natural Woman." Many drag queens proudly cite Barbie's influence; as a child, singer Ru-Paul not only collected Barbies but cut off their breasts. Barbie has, in fact, a drag queen's body: broad shoulders and narrow hips, which are quintessentially male, and exaggerated breasts, which aren't. Then there are biological women whose emulation of Barbie has relied heavily on artifice: the Barbi Twins, identical Playboy covergirls who maintain their wasp waists through a diet of Beech-Nut strained veal; and Cindy Jackson, the London-based cosmetic surgery maven who has had more than twenty operations to make her resemble the doll.
When Ella King Torrey, a friend of mine and consultant on this book, began researching Barbie at Yale University in 1979, her work was considered cutting-edge and controversial. But these days everybody's deconstructing the doll. Barbie has been the subject of papers presented at the Modern Language Association's 1992 convention and the Ninth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women; rarely does a pop culture conference pass without some mention of the postmodern female fetish figure. Gilles Brougere, a French sociologist, has conducted an exhaustive study of French women and children to determine how different age groups perceive the doll. When scholars deal with Barbie, however, they often take a single aspect of the doll and construct an argument around it. I have resisted that approach. What fascinates me is the whole, ragged, contradictory story—its intrigues, its inconsistencies, and the personalities of its players.
I've tried to pin down exactly what happened in Barbie's first years. Mattel's focus on the future, which may be the secret of its success, has been at the expense of its past. The company has no archive. This may help conceal its embarrassments, but it has also buried its achievements—such as subsidizing Shindana Toys in response to the 1965 Watts riots. The African-American-run, South Central Los Angeles—based company produced ethnically correct playthings long before they were fashionable.
Although Barbie's sales have never substantially flagged, Mattel has been a financial roller coaster. It nearly went broke in 1974, when the imaginative accounting practices of Ruth Handler and some of her top executives led to indictments against them for falsifying SEC information, and again in 1984, when the company shifted its focus from toys to electronic games that nobody wanted to buy. The second time, Michael Milken galloped to the rescue. "I believed in Barbie," Milken told Barbara Walters in 1993. "I called up the head of Mattel and I told him that I personally would be willing to invest two hundred million dollars in his company. There's more Barbie dolls in this country than there are people."
The Barbie story is filled with loose ends and loose screws, but unfortunately very few loose lips. In a world as small as the toy industry, people are discreet about former colleagues because they may have to work with them again. As for welcoming outsiders, the company has much in common with the Kremlin at the height of the Cold War. To a degree, secrecy is vital in the toy business: if a rival learns in August of a clever new toy, he or she can steal the idea and have a knock-off in the stores by Christmas.
Nor am I what Mattel had in mind as its Boswell. Inspired perhaps by Quindlen and Goodman, or, more likely, by fear and a deadline, I had owned up in my weekly Newsday column to having cross-dressed Ken because of antipathy toward his girlfriend. This was years before I gave serious thought to Barbie's iconic import, but it was not sufficiently far in the past to have escaped the attention of Mattel publicist Donna Gibbs, who, when I first called her, did not treat me warmly. Miraculously, after a few months, Donna and her colleagues became gracious, charming, and remarkably accommodating. I was baffled, but took it as a sign to keep—like the entity I was studying—on my toes. Still, it was hard not to be seduced by the company, especially by its elves—the designers and sculptors, the "rooters and groomers," as the hair people are called—who really did seem to have a great time playing with their eleven-and-a-half-inch pals.
Toys have always said a lot about the culture that produced them, and especially about how that culture viewed its children. The ancient Greeks, for instance, left behind few playthings. Their custom of exposing weak babies on mountainsides to die does not suggest a concern for the very young. Ghoulish though it may sound, until the eighteenth century, childhood didn't count for much because few people survived it. Children were even dressed like little adults. Although in 1959, much fuss was made over Mattel's "adult" doll, the fact was that until 1820 all dolls were adults. Baby dolls came into existence in the early decades of the nineteenth century along with, significantly, special clothing for children.
Published in 1762, Rousseau's Emile, a treatise on education, began to focus attention on the concerns of youngsters, but the cult of childhood didn't take root until Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837. "Childhood was invented in the eighteenth century in response to dehumanizing trends of the industrial revolution," psychoanalyst Louise J. Kaplan has observed. "By the nineteenth century, when artists began to see themselves as alienated beings trapped in a dehumanizing social world, the child became the savior of mankind, the symbol of free imagination and natural goodness."
The child was also a consumer of toys, the making of which, by the late nineteenth century, had become an industry. Until World War I, Germany dominated the marketplace; but when German troops began shooting at U.S. soldiers, Americans lost their taste for enemy playthings. This burst of patriotism gave the U.S. toy industry its first rapid growth spurt; its second came after World War II, with the revolution in plastics.
Just as children were "discovered" in the eighteenth century, they were again "discovered" in post-World War II America—this time by marketers. The evolution of the child-as-consumer was indispensable to Barbie's success. Mattel not only pioneered advertising on television, but through that Medium it pitched Barbie directly to kids.
It is with an eye toward using objects to understand ourselves that I beg Barbie's knee-jerk defenders and knee-jerk revilers to cease temporarily their defending and reviling. Barbie is too complicated for either an encomium or an indictment. But we will not refrain from looking under rocks.
For women under forty, the implications of such an investigation are obvious. Barbie is a direct reflection of the cultural impulses that formed us. Barbie is our reality. And unsettling though the concept may be, I don't think it's hyperbolic to say: Barbie is us.
CHAPTER TWO
A TOY IS BORN
It is hard to imagine Mattel Toys headquartered anywhere but in southern California. A short drive from Disneyland, minutes from the beach, it is in a place where people come to make their fortunes, or so the mythology goes, where beautiful women are "discovered" in drugstores, and a man can turn a mouse into an empire. Barbie could not have been conceived in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where Hasbro is located, or Cincinnati, Ohio, where Kenner makes its home. Barbie needed the sun to incubate her or, at the very least, to lighten her hair. This is not to say that Hawthorne, where Mattel had its offices until 1991, is anything but a dump—a gritty industrial district that cries out for trees. But it is a dump with a glamour-queen precedent: In 1926, Marilyn Monroe was born there.
Of course it's inaccurate to say Barbie was "born" anywhere. The dolls were originally cast in Japan, making, I suppose, Barbie's birthplace Tokyo. But Barbie's "parents," Ruth and Elliot Handler, are very much southern Californians—of the fortune-making variety—who fled their native Denver, Colorado, in 1937.
California was a different place back then: neither stippled with television antennas nor linked with concrete cloverle
af. The McDonald brothers wouldn't raise their Golden Arches for another fifteen years. Thanks to the Depression, the Golden State had lost some of its glister. Okies and Arkies poured in from the ravaged Dust Bowl; and for many, the land of sunshine and promise was just as gray and bleak as the place they had left.
Not so for the Handlers. Just twenty-one when they uprooted, they were optimists; and because they believed in the future they were willing to take risks. The youngest of ten children, Ruth was a stenographer at Paramount Pictures; Elliot, the second of four brothers, was a light-fixture designer and art student; and their first gamble was to chuck their jobs and start their own business, peddling the Plexiglas furniture that Elliot had been building part-time in their garage. The wager paid off: In the first years of World War II, they expanded into a former Chinese laundry and hired about a hundred workers. They made jewelry, candleholders, even a clear-plastic Art Deco airplane with a clock in it.
Wartime shortages derailed that venture, but the Handlers remained on track. In 1945, they started "Mattel Creations" with their onetime foreman, Harold Matson, whose name was fused with Elliot's to form Mattel. Matson, however, did not love gambling with his life savings; he sold out in 1946, making him the sort of asterisk to toy history that short-term Beatle Pete Best was to the history of popular music.
Elliot not only believed in the future, he believed in futuristic materials— Plexiglas, Lucite, plastic. He set up Mattel to manufacture plastic picture frames, which, because of wartime rationing, ironically ended up being made of wood. When the war ended, however, it was the Ukedoodle, a plastic ukelele, that secured Mattel's niche in the toy world. A popular jack-inthe-box followed, and by 1955, the company was worth $500,000.
Although Barbie wouldn't be introduced for another four years, Mattel, in 1955, paved the way for the sort of advertising that would make her possible. It was a big year for child culture: Disneyland had opened in July and Walt Disney, who seemed to have a golden touch with the under-twelve set, was preparing to launch a TV series, The Mickey Mouse Club. No toy company had ever sponsored a series before, and ABC, Disney's network, wanted to give Mattel the chance. There was just one catch: ABC demanded a year-long contract that would cost Mattel its entire net worth.
Ralph Carson, cofounder of Carson/Roberts, Mattel's advertising agency, thought the Handlers would be hesitant. He brought Vincent Francis, ABC's airtime salesman, to Elliot's office to make the pitch. What he failed to consider, however, was the Handlers' willingness to gamble.
The presentation "took fifteen or twenty minutes," Ruth recalls, and she and Elliot were "ready to jump out of our skins with excitement." But before they said yes, they consulted their comptroller, Yasuo Yoshida.
"Yas," Ruth recalls having said, "what would happen if we didn't bring much out of this? Would we go broke? And Yas's answer was: 'Not broke— but badly bent.' "
"Okay," Elliot remembers telling him, "we'll try the bent."
In Mattel's commercial, a little boy stalked an elephant with a toy called the Burp Gun; when the child fired, the film of the animal ran backward, causing it to appear to retreat. Kids loved the ad, and by Christmas the gun had sold out.
The Handlers' move, however, did more than create record sales for a single product in a single year. Before advertisers could pitch directly to kids, selling toys had been a mom-and-pop business with a seasonal focus on Christmas. But once kids could actually see toys on television, selling them became not only big business but one that took place year-round.
Ironically, in December 1955, Time magazine ran a photo of Louis Marx, founder of Louis Marx & Company, Inc., on its cover. He was king of the old-time toy industry—an industry that Mattel and Carson/Roberts were well on their way to making obsolete. Marx sneered at advertising. Although his company had had sales of $50 million in 1955, it spent a meager $312 on publicity. Mattel, by contrast, which had sales of $6 million, spent $500,000; it also pioneered marketing techniques that would send Marx and his ilk the way of the dinosaurs.
IN 1993, RUTH AND ELLIOT SHARED SOME REMINISCENCES with me in their Century City penthouse. With its gray marble floor, white pile carpet, grand piano, and vast semicircular wet bar, the dwelling is a far cry from the furnished one-room apartment they shared when they were married in 1938. Their daughter, Barbara, after whom the doll was named, was born in 1941; their son Ken, who also gave his name to a doll, in 1944, during Elliot's year-long hitch in the U.S. Army.
Together since they were sixteen, they have weathered things that might have daunted a lesser couple: Ruth's radical mastectomy in 1970; her indictment in 1978 by a federal grand jury for mail fraud, conspiracy, and making false statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission; and, after having pleaded no contest to the charges, her conviction, leading to a forty-one-month suspended sentence, a $57,000 suspended fine and 2,500 hours of community service, which she has completed. In 1975, they survived expulsion from the company they built. Theirs is the sort of romance that seems to happen only in the movies—or used to happen, before the fashion for verisimilitude precluded not only "happily ever after" but "ever after."
They have not grown to resemble each other, as many couples do. Ruth is compact and gregarious. She marches into a room with a combination of authority and bounce, rather like Napoleon in pump-up, air-sole Nikes. And indeed, on the two occasions I met her, once at home and once at Beverly Hills' Hillcrest Country Club, she was wearing sneakers and a stylish warm-up suit. Her hair is short and steely. She can be irresistibly charming; she's cultivated the ability to listen as if you were the most fascinating conversationalist in the world. But if your talk takes a turn she doesn't like, she can wither you with a glance.
"When she walks, the earth shakes," said her son Ken, a philanthropist, entrepreneur, and father of three who lives in New York's West Village. "She's a little woman, seventy-six years old, and the earth shakes."
Elliot is tall, lanky, and laconic. He lets his wife do most of the talking, occasionally interrupting with a sardonic aside. He dresses as casually as Ruth, wearing short-sleeve polo shirts on the two occasions I met him. Very little, I suspect, gets by him: he strikes me as a keen observer.
Elliot's paintings hang on nearly every wall of the apartment. One composition depicts an orchid on a mirrored table; in the foreground, blue and white jewels spill opulently from a case. Another shows voluptuous red and green apples in front of a city scape. Yet another has as its principal element a giant pigeon. Often, these forms are displayed against a flat cerulean sky with clouds—a sky that recalls Magritte's and that, as the objects are painted many times larger than life and in intense Day-Glo colors, heightens their surreality.
There was a time, a little less than ten years ago, when the room was a museum, housing the Handlers' multimillion-dollar collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings. A wintry Norwegian landscape by Claude Monet contrasted with brighter, sunnier spots by Camille Pissarro, Fernand Leger, and Andre Derain. Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Baigneuse and Picasso's Baigneuse au Bord de la Mer shared wallspace with Amedeo Modigliani's Tete de Jeune Fille. But considering whose success made the collection possible, perhaps the most intriguing canvas was Moise Kisling's La Jeune Femme Blonde: a standing female nude, slightly stouter than Barbie, with her hair pulled back in a Barbie-esque ponytail.
In 1985, however, at the height of the art market, the Handlers put their paintings on the block at Sotheby's in New York. "One day I said, 'This place is no good for an art collection'—too much glass, too much window, too much daylight," Elliot explained with a smile. "We had to keep the drapes closed. So I said, 4Aw, to hell with it, I'm painting now.' "
If one were to believe in astrology, as many Californians do, one would suspect something strange and powerful was going on in the heavens over Hawthorne in 1955. Not only had Mattel caused an earthquake in the toy business, but the company hired Jack Ryan, a wildly eccentric, Yale-educated electrical engineer whose sexual indiscretions, extrava
gant parties, and sometimes autocratic management style would shake the company from within.
For Elliot Handler, hiring Jack was a great triumph. Elliot had initially met him when he pitched Mattel an idea for a toy transistor radio. Children's toys were not, however, Ryan's forte; a member of the Raytheon team designing the Sparrow and Hawk missiles, he made playthings for the Pentagon. But Elliot sensed that Jack had what Elliot needed: Jack knew about torques and transistors; he understood electricity and the behavior of molecules; he had the space-age savvy to make Elliot's high-tech fantasies real. Elliot courted Ryan for several years, sweetening his offer until Ryan had a remarkable contract: one that permitted him a royalty on every patent his design group originated; one that swiftly transformed him into a multimillionaire.
Ryan "had a funny little body, very compact, and a kind of bird puffy chest—like he had just puffed himself up," recalled novelist Gwen Davis, who had met him through his fourth wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor. His hair appeared "painted on, like Reagan's, and he had a very peculiar tan that looked as if it might have been makeup." At his parties, he wore clothing that was very non-Brooks Brothers—khaki jackets with golden epaulets, imaginary uniforms, fantasy costumes for his fantasy life.
The setting for this strange life was the castle he built in Bel Air, on the site of the five-acre, eighteen-bathroom, seven-kitchen estate that had belonged to silent-screen star Warner Baxter. In Jack's mind, "residence" was a synonym for "theme park." He gave dinner parties in a tree house with a glittering crystal chandelier and occasionally forced his guests to down victuals without utensils in a tapestry-ridden, vaguely medieval curiosity that he called the Tom Jones Room. "He ruined a perfectly good English Tudor house by putting turrets on the end of it," chided Norma Greene, the retired liaison between Ryan's design group and Mattel's patent department.