by M. G. Lord
For some, however, Mattel was a dysfunctional family. Marvin Barab, who left market research to join Ryan's group, had terrible run-ins with his boss. Things reached a nadir when Ryan, during a party at his Bel Air house, ordered Barab, on penalty of dismissal, to dive into his pool and race him. This would have been annoying under any circumstances—Barab wasn't much of a swimmer—but it was especially nettlesome since Barab was wearing a business suit at the time. More successful at dealing with Ryan was another key hire in the early sixties, Steve Lewis, an artist who had taught sculpture at Temple University and who (thanks to his diplomacy, he says) would eventually become a vice president in charge of doll design.
OBLIVIOUS TO THE UPHEAVALS, BARBIE KEPT AMASSING clothes. In 1960, Mattel eliminated "Gay Parisienne," "Roman Holiday," and "Easter Parade" from her wardrobe. In their place, Charlotte Johnson concocted "Silken Flame," a knee-length white satin skirt with a red velvet bodice, "Enchanted Evening," a pale-pink floor-length gown with a rabbit fur stole, and "Solo in the Spotlight," a strapless black sequined dress with a tutu at the ankles.
Packaged with a rose and a miniature microphone, "Solo" was not the sort of thing one wore to a school dance. Its look was very Dietrich, evocative of the chanteuse she portrayed in Billy Wilder's Foreign Affair. One could imagine the Lilli doll wearing it, rasping out "Falling in Love Again" in some smoky Berlin cabaret. Patterned, Johnson said, on the outfit worn by a nightclub singer named Hildegarde, "Solo" hinted at Barbie's tainted genealogy, her emergence from the depths of an Axis-power cocktail lounge. As a counter to its sophistication, Johnson designed "Friday Night Date"— an outfit Pollyanna might wear to a church social—a blue corduroy jumper with a birdhouse applique that came with two aggressively wholesome glasses of milk.
Further evidence that Charlotte invented Barbie in her own image was "Busy Gal," a red linen suit that came with a sketch-filled portfolio labeled "Barbie Fashion Designer." Because neither Ruth nor Charlotte was a housewife. Barbie, from the outset, worked—at both dream and humdrum jobs. She served drinks to thankless travelers as an American Airlines stewardess and emptied bedpans as a registered nurse.
There was only one accessory Barbie lacked—a steady boyfriend. Consumer demand, however, overcame Mattel's reluctance to make a male doll, and in 1961 it brought out Ken.
Like Barbie, Ken was purchased in a bathing suit. His other essentials— a letter sweater, a tuxedo, and, because this was the era of Sloan Wilson, a gray flannel suit—were sold separately. Ken's blazers and trousers were intricately tailored; they looked like the fine, handmade suits that businessmen bought in the Orient for a fraction of what they would have cost on Savile Row. And, in fact, they were: the Japanese tailor who made Frank Nakamura's suits had a hand in designing them.
Making Ken's clothing was, however, far less of a problem than making Ken. At Mattel, a storm raged over his genitalia. Ruth and Charlotte, who wanted what Ruth termed "a bulge" in his groin, squabbled with the male executives, who didn't.
After the women vetoed a male doll that resembled Barbie in the crotch, three new versions were sculpted, with three degrees of what Charlotte called "bumps." "One was—you couldn't even see it," she said. "The next one was a little bit rounded, and the next one really was. So the men—especially one of the vice presidents—were terribly embarrassed. And he was a middle-aged man, you know—nothing to get so embarassed about. So Mrs. Handler and I picked the middle one as being the one that was nice-looking. And he said he would never have it in the toy line unless we painted Jockey shorts over it."
"None of us wanted a doll with a penis showing," Ruth amplified. "If the child took off the swimsuit, we felt it would be inappropriate with an adult boy to show the penis—so we all reached a conclusion that he should have a permanent swimsuit."
All except Charlotte, that is. She said: "Do you know what every little girl in this country is going to do? They are going to sit there and scratch that paint off to see what's under it. What else would they do?" Reluctantly, the men agreed. Ken got his "bump," but in a version modified to fit under trousers. "I had to work with the sculptor a little bit," Charlotte said, "because I realized when we were putting zippers in the fly—and the zipper on top of that bump—it got bigger and bigger."
Nevertheless, somebody at Mattel was disquieted by Ken's absent genital and tried to help him compensate. Barbie's clothes were usually accessorized with a matching purse, and purses—boxlike containers—are recognized by Freudians as symbols for female genitalia. Ken's first garments, by contrast, came with long, thin accessories—symbols for the penis he lacked. A long stick with a school pennant accompanied his "Campus Hero" outfit; an electric shaver with a dangling cord accompanied his bathrobe; and his weekend "Casuals," khakis and a T-shirt, came with car keys. (A key is, of course, a male symbol, penetrating a female lock.)
By 1963, Ken's phallic props had become outrageous. He had a hunting outfit with an enormous rifle, a baseball outfit with a very long bat, and a doctor outfit with a pendulous stethoscope. He didn't motor around in a roadster like Barbie, he drove a hot rod. The crudest comment on his genital deficiency, however, came in 1964, with "Cheerful Chef," a backyard barbecue costume that included a long fork skewering a pink plastic weenie.
Barbie's cookout set had featured a spatula, a knife, a rolling pin, and a spoon. She never, ever had either a fork or a weenie. True, her "Suburban Shopper" outfit had been accessorized with vaguely phallic bananas, but they were popping out of her purse—a merging that subliminally suggests heterosexual intercourse. Similarly, her "Picnic Set" included a fishing rod, but its hook had pierced a plastic fish—a vulgar symbol for the female genitals— again evoking heterosexual penetration. The seeming deliberateness of these symbols makes it hard to interpret Ken's sad, solitary sausage as innocent. Likewise, the message on his apron—"Come and get it"—seems a bitter taunt about the genital he will never possess.
After Mattel issued wedding clothes for Barbie and Ken, children clamored for Barbie to have a baby. That, however, was where Ruth drew the line. Pregnancy would never mar Barbie's physique nor progeny compromise her freedom. Just as she does not depend on parents, she would have no offspring dependent on her. Still, Ruth reasoned, if buyers wanted a baby, there must be some way to sell them one. She eventually came up with "Barbie Baby-Sits," an ensemble containing an infant, its paraphernalia, and an apron clearly marked BABYSITTER. The set also came with books: How to Get a Raise, How to Lose Weight, and How to Travel.
"Barbie Baby-Sits" appeared in 1963, a year after the publication of Helen Gurley Brown's best-selling Sex and the Single Girl. And whether it was Brown's influence or an effect of synchronicity, Barbie began to resemble Brown's happily unmarried woman. Ruth refused to give Barbie the trappings of postnuptial life; the doll would be forever independent, subservient to no one.
If Barbie wasn't already Brown's paradigm, her self-help books suggest that becoming it was her goal. The Single Girl, Brown wrote, "supports herself." She also keeps fit and roams the earth on her own; it's fun to meet men in new places. Hence Barbie's reading: How to Get a Raise, How to Lose Weight, and How to Travel—titles reminiscent of Brown's chapter headings—" Nine to Five," "The Shape You're In," and "The Rich, Full Life."
In 1963, Barbie also moved into her "sturdy, colorful chipboard" Dream House, a modest yet well-appointed dwelling, perfect for a Single Girl. "If you are to be a glamorous, sophisticated woman that exciting things happen to, you need an apartment and you need to live in it alone!" Brown orders. Roommates won't do, nor will living at home; but you don't have to take up residence in Versailles, either.
One can't help wondering whether Charlotte read Sex and the Single Girl while she was designing Barbie's 1963 wardrobe. "When a man thinks of a single woman," Brown writes, "he pictures her alone in her apartment, smooth legs sheathed in beige silk pants, lying tantalizingly among dozens of satin cushions, trying to read but not very successfully, for he is in that room—filling her
thoughts, her dreams, her life." Sounds like Brown imagines him picturing Barbie—lying tantalizingly among the printed cushions on her pasteboard divan, smooth legs sheathed in the apricot silk pants that came with "Dinner at Eight," an outfit Charlotte introduced in 1963.
Barbie's similarity to Brown's brave, new, vaguely selfish and decidedly subversive heroine has more than whimsical ramifications. It makes Barbie an undercover radical. Brown was "the first spokeswoman for the revolution," say Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs in Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex, even though today Brown is "a woman whom many feminists would be loath to claim as one of their own." Long before feminism was a part of the American political vocabulary, they point out, droves of women bought Brown's book—an antimarriage manifesto and plea for women's financial liberation and sexual autonomy disguised as a breezy volume of self-help.
In choosing clothes, Brown urges: "Copycat a mentor with better taste than yours." And while Barbie didn't literally choose Charlotte, the designer certainly imposed her taste upon the doll. More significantly, the doll, to whom children looked up, was a sort of mentor to them. Just as Sex and the Single Girl spread Brown's gospel to adult women, Barbie and her paraphernalia conveyed it to their younger sisters.
In Brown's protofeminist philosophy, preoccupation with appearance was a pragmatic necessity, not a narcissistic luxury. Men desired a single woman because she had "time and often more money to spend on herself . . . the extra twenty minutes to exercise every day, an hour to make-up her face for their date." Brown's Single Girl did not live in the world of ideas, where a looker like Robert Browning would fall for a lump like Elizabeth Barrett; she lived in the material world, where beauty was the decisive weapon in the everlasting battle for men. The Single Girl was not an intellectual; introspection, Brown makes clear, was a waste of energy. But the Girl was encouraged to have a sort of cunning—a nonverbal sagacity; she expressed herself through a vocabulary of objects rather than words.
"Men survey women before treating them," John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing. "Consequently, how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated. To acquire some control over the process, women must contain it and interiorize it." A woman must cultivate the habit of simultaneously acting and watching herself act; she must split herself into two selves: the observer and the observed. She must turn herself, Berger says, into an "object of vision."
Brown's book taught women how to turn themselves into such an object. Sex and the Single Girl is a Berlitz phrase book to the vernacular of clothing and style, a guide to help women manipulate men by manipulating how they appear to men.
For some girls, Barbie no doubt functioned that way too. Not for all, but for many, I suspect. The relationship of the observed self to the observing self is much like that of a Barbie doll to its owner. When a girl projects herself onto a doll, she learns to split in two. She learns to manipulate an image of herself outside of herself. She learns what Brown and Berger would consider a survival skill.
Another developing feminist who understood the importance of a woman's appearance was Gloria Steinem. In 1963, the Viking Press published The Beach Book, her massive volume devoted not to gender inequalities but to looking good in a bathing suit. "Nothing is as transient, useless, or completely desirable as a suntan," she observed. "What a tan will do is make you look good, and that justifies anything."
Steinem, whose dust-jacket profile reveals that her "formative years were spent almost entirely in bathing suits," seems to have been in a particularly Barbie-esque stage of evolution in 1963. Decades before Jane Fonda, Maria Maples, and Barbie made exercise videos, Steinem prescribed a workout for her female readers—twenty arm pulls daily, executed while chanting: "I must . . . I must . . . I must develop my . . . Bust." The purpose of this regimen is revealed three pages later, in a diagram that teaches the reader how to "build" a bikini.
I doubt, however, that some of her exercises would pass muster with fitness experts. This one is particularly suspect: "Suck against the heel of your hand. This makes thin lips full, full lips firm, and fat cheeks lean."
Steinem had less need of arm pulls than many women. That was another thing she had in common with Barbie: her looks were good enough to land her a job as a Playboy Bunny. After weeks of wobbling around on spike heels, stuffing her bra with dry cleaner bags, and having her cottontail yanked by customers, she penned a behind-the-scenes expose for Show magazine on the sordid, brutalizing, anything-but-glamorous working conditions at the Hefner hutch.
Significantly, Steinem's article, as Marcia Cohen has noted in The Sisterhood: The True Story of the Women Who Changed the World, "made the point that Playboy Bunnies were exploited, though it did not make the point that they were exploited because they were women"—an oversight Steinem acknowledges. "It was interesting," Steinem told Cohen, "that I could understand that much and still not make the connection."
Perhaps it was difficult for a woman whose looks had opened doors to realize that there were problems to having them opened that way. The Beach Book has an introduction by economist John Kenneth Galbraith, whom Gloria met in the Hamptons and who was captivated by her "terrific good looks." "If Gloria says it's otherwise," Galbraith told Cohen, "she's wrong." Galbraith's remarks make me think of Barbie's New York Summer, a young adult novel with Barbie as a character that Random House published in 1962. In it, Barbie's clever writing earns her a job at a magazine; she goes to Manhattan and is fawned over by rich, powerful men. "There are many chic women in New York," one tells her, "but . . . you are young and fresh and perfectly enchanting."
Galbraith strikes me as an apt introducer for The Beach Book, which is in large part about economics. The young Gloria—like the newly minted Barbie—was not unfamiliar with defining a lifestyle through things. She explains how one can change roles by changing outfits, very much the way Barbie does. Some beach looks include the "Ivy League" ("Women must wear tank suits and single strands of pearls"), "Muscle Beach" ("Alternate the coconut oil with the application of mascara . . . Chew gum"), and "Pure Science" (Carry "moss-filled Mason jars, a notebook, and a long-handled net"). If you're not going to wear high-status garments, though, you'd better be able to pass for a model; the Pure Science look "works only if you are very beautiful."
Steinem's book not only catalogues the status value attached to objects, it offers suggestions for condescending to the less fortunate. This seems odd for a woman who claims to have grown up in poverty. "One gets the sense talking to Gloria that she was born in the Toledo equivalent of the manger," Leonard Levitt once wrote in Esquire. But she has thought a great deal about the class implications of sun-altered skin tone and offers this hope to those who cannot tan: "With every office clerk able to afford a vacation at the shore, you may be able to make white skin worth more in status than a tan."
Well versed in the art of sunbathing, Barbie, in 1963, had not yet had her feminist consciousness raised—though, like Steinem's political awareness, it would evolve with time. ("Feminism didn't come into my life at all until 1968 or 1969," Steinem told me when I asked her about The Beach Book.) In Barbie's defense, however, she could hardly have pondered the condition of "women," having been for four years the only adult female doll on the market. This, however, changed when Mattel introduced her so-called best friend Midge.
Freckled of face, bulging of eye, Midge was from the outset a sorry Avis to Barbie's Hertz. Her debut commercial was a catalogue of tortures endured by homely teenage girls. Midge, the ad alleged, "is thrilled with Barbie's career as a teenage fashion model." But anyone who has ever been sixteen and female knows she was probably rent with feelings of inferiority.
"Barbie has introduced Midge to her boyfriend," the ad continues, "and the three of them go everywhere together." Terrific. Tagging along after Mr. and Miss High School. If plastic dolls could kill themselves, I'm sure Midge would have tried.
The following year things grew slightly more equitable; Mattel gave Midge a boyf
riend (Allan) and dumped a younger sister (Skipper) on Barbie. Mattel's engineers also did something really hideous to Barbie's face, replacing her painted eyes with feline-shaped mechanical things that blinked. Now called "Miss Barbie," she looked like the offspring of an interspecies union, a cousin of Nastassia Kinski in Cat People.
Not surprisingly, as Barbie racked up other doll friends she also gathered competitors. Rival toymakers could scarcely witness Mattel's triumph without hatching plots to exploit it. Barbie's major challengers were Tammy, brought out by the Ideal Toy & Novelty Corporation in 1962, Tressy, brought out by the American Character Doll Company in 1963, and the Littlechap Family, introduced by Remco in 1964.
Named for an insipid movie character portrayed by Debbie Reynolds, Tammy looked as if she could have given Barbie a run for her money; but in hindsight it's clear that she never had a chance. Barbie may have appeared as if she belonged in the fifties, but her ethos was pure sixties; she was a swinging single with a house, a boyfriend, and no parents. Tammy, by contrast, came with Mom and Dad. She didn't have a boyfriend, she had a brother. "Basically, Tammy was a baby doll," explains vintage Barbie dealer Joe Blitman. Boring, sexless, and shackled to the moribund nuclear family, Tammy bit the dust in the mid-sixties when the divorce rate took off.
I must confess to feeling chills the first time I saw Tammy. There is something creepy about a doll with the body of an eight-year-old and the car, clothes, and trappings of a grown-up. If, as some psychoanalysts contend, anorexia is a perverse strategy to thwart the development of female secondary sex characteristics, Tammy is the model for such a weird infant-adult. At least Barbie embraced womanhood, however cartoonish her interpretation; she wasn't a female Peter Pan demanding car keys and the right to vote while shirking the burden of sexual development.