Forever Barbie

by M. G. Lord

  Although there were complaints about Growing Up Skipper, they were, for the most part, drowned out by the furor over another 1975 product, Baby Brother Tenderlove, an anatomically correct male doll. In Louisville, Kentucky, a group of women stormed into a toy store and castrated the dolls; in response, some retailers placed stickers over the penis in the doll's photo on the box. The National Organization for Women, former Mattel publicist Beverly Cannady recalls, applauded Baby Brother Tenderlove; but columnist Ellen Goodman didn't, and Cannady wound up debating her on the Phil Donahue show. Other detractors were even more direct: Tom Kalinske received death threats.

  Nineteen seventy-six was a more benign year for Barbie, as were the rest of the seventies. The world was no longer the raw, politicized place it had been a decade earlier. Young people who had turned away from plastic again embraced it. Infected with a sickness called "Saturday Night Fever," they left their homes at sunset, glistening with the brave unnatural shimmer of polyester. Physically energized, mentally narcotized, they spun on Lucite dance floors that exploded in brilliantly colored light. Their hearts beat, their limbs shook, their eyes slit to the throb of plastic disco records: "Get down. Boogy oogy oogy." "I'd love to love you, baby." They were transported, hypnotized, borne aloft, their dreary daytime lives checked like an overcoat at the door. It was a narcissistic opiate; any zhlub could be a star.

  Although the idea of disco was democratic—a sound system and lights were all one needed to experience it—big-city discotheques maintained their mystique through exclusivity. Poor, ugly, and obscure people rarely mixed with the voluptuaries at Manhattan's Studio 54; an imperious blond doorman kept the masses at bay. In Interview, a magazine he founded in 1969, Studio 54 habitue Andy Warhol recorded the dull chat of his fellow habitues—Liza, Truman, Bianca, Halston. Celebrity became a cult, with stars its priests, boring conversation its liturgy, and the guarded discotheque its temple.

  By 1977, Barbie had earned a place in that temple. Ruth intended the doll to represent Everygirl; and for a while, she did. But after eighteen years in the public eye, she was as famous as the wraiths who haunted the notorious Fifty-fourth Street botte de nuit. No matter that she stood less than a foot tall, Barbie, like Ruth, had become bigger than life.

  Perhaps in recognition of her increased stature, Mattel, in 1977, issued an eighteen-inch version of the Barbie doll. The larger edition was not, however, her most dramatic change. Mattel resculpted the face on both large and small models and anointed Barbie a "SuperStar." It also equipped her with the trappings of stardom—a hot pink Star 'Vette, a Star Traveler Motorhome, and a "salon of the stars" Beauty Boutique.

  Barbie's new face, fashioned by doll sculptor Joyce Clark, was the face of disco. The doll appears in the 1977 catalogue against a black background, as if on the edge of a cavernous dance floor. Light glints off her glossy magenta boa, her burnished gold hair, her luminous diamondlike ring. Gone is the haughty smirk of her early years. Seemingly stupefied by the disco beat, SuperStar Barbie's mouth is set in a broad smile.

  The revamped Barbie changed the relationship between the doll and the little girl who owned it. Barbie could still function as an object onto which the child projected her future self; but because the doll had the trappings of celebrity, the girl's imagined future had to involve being rich and famous.

  Nor did the doll's paraphernalia indicate how she came to hobnob with the stars. Did she earn her money as an actress or a model? Did she inherit it? Or was she running some nefarious business and being paid off the books? (Did Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss play with this doll?)

  In 1978, Mattel established Barbie's persona as a cover girl with a mechanical contraption called Fashion Photo Barbie. This play set came with a toy camera and a Barbie doll that struck fashion poses when the child "focused" the camera. The brainchild of Derek Gable, a British engineer who had been recruited to join Ryan's team in 1968, Fashion Photo Barbie is very much a boys' action toy masquerading as a girls' play set. Like Growing Up Skipper, it reflects a masculine understanding of the female experience; a little boy could take the role of fashion "photographer" as easily as a little girl could. But when a girl operates the toy, she can pretend to be either the model or the photographer; thus the toy encourages her to internalize a sense of herself-as-object; to split herself, in John Berger's words, into "the surveyor" and "the surveyed."

  In the middle-seventies, feminist film theory began to focus on the "male gaze"; mainstream cinema, the argument went, presumed a male spectator and objectified women accordingly. "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female," Laura Mulvey wrote in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," a 1975 essay that has generated mountains of scholarly rebuttal, qualification, and elaboration. "The determining gaze projects fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness."

  Fashion Photo Barbie comes with preprinted "photographs" of Barbie in various fashion poses that the child can remove from the camera when the "photo session" is over. These teach—for children willing to be taught—a code of feminine erotic styling, of "to-be-looked-at-ness." They define what looks are acceptable, just as—for women who are willing to accept such definitions— photos of models in magazines do.

  But Fashion Photo Barbie is not just about passivity. Little girls are not required to project themselves onto Barbie; they can view the doll as wholly other. Nor do they have to play with the "acceptable" photographs. Fashion Photo Barbie offers a girl power not only over an image of an adult, but over an adult celebrity. When the child adjusts the lens, Barbie responds instantly; her body pivots and her head snaps to the side. Peering through the viewfinder, the girl can interiorize the "male gaze." She is Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Deborah Turberville. She can play at controlling— and therefore defining—feminine erotic style. She can also explore less socially approved themes in her fashion photo-play: voyeurism and the erotization of her own gender.

  Curiously, Fashion Photo Barbie came out the same year as The Eyes of Laura Mars, a movie starring Faye Dunaway as a female fashion photographer who has premonitions of horrible homicides. Mars's photos sell clothing through staged sex and violence; the shots used in the film were, in fact, taken by Helmut Newton. Set in a sort of disco inferno—its soundtrack pounds like a migraine—the movie credibly depicts the decadent, druggy inhabitants of the seventies fashion scene, many of whom wind up dead. This is not to imply that Fashion Photo Barbie sucked children into that scene; but it does make one wonder: Just how did kids play with that toy?

  Barbie's SuperStar status also had an impact on the company she kept. She didn't drop Ken or Skipper, but she did start hanging out with Mattel versions of real-life celebrities. They included Debby Boone, Charlie's Angels Cheryl Ladd and Kate Jackson, and, in clothes befitting a male hoodlum, Kristy McNichol. Missing Angel Farrah Fawcett evidently declined to be cast in plastic, but that didn't stop Barbie from stealing her hairdo in 1981.

  Barbie was also seen with Donnie, Jimmy, and Marie Osmond. Not exactly the Laura Mars type, Marie was a Mormon, and her mother demanded that Mattel engineer the doll's outfits so that Mormon "garments"—sacred, baggy, one-piece underwear—could be worn beneath them. Traditionally emblazoned with religious symbols over each breast and a slit in the crotch, the "garments," however, were not issued with the doll. Marie's mother also forced Mattel to bring out a thirty-inch Marie doll with dress patterns. A rabid advocate of home sewing, she hoped such a doll would inspire girls to use a needle and thread.

  Although Barbie helped reverse Mattel's losses in the late seventies, she was never the darling of its top management. Arthur Spear, who became chairman of the board in 1978, was committed to reducing the company's involvement with toys. In 1979, it acquired Western Publishing, the pr
oducer of Golden Books, for $120 million. With its Ringling Bros, subsidiary, it expanded Circus World, a theme park near Orlando, Florida. It entered the electronics business with Intellivision, a $300 home video game system, and dumped its unprofitable acquisitions, such as Metaframe.

  The press, for the most part, applauded Spear. "Under Mr. Spear, Mattel has pulled out of its earnings slump [and] reduced its long term debt from $118 million to about $20 million at the end of the 1979 fiscal year," The New York Times wrote. "His austere, no-nonsense style of management has brought a measure of order to a company that was run haphazardly for years," Fortune said, noting that Spear was a teetotaling nonsmoker who worked out daily on an exercise bicycle.

  But Business Week remained skeptical. After "years of murky legal and financial battles," Mattel's hottest new toy, the magazine insinuated, had a certain appropriateness. The toy was "Slime"—green, runny glop that came with its own plastic garbage can.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SOME LIKE IT BARBIE

  In 1980, Americans banished Jimmy Carter from the White House. They had had enough of greasy peanuts and off-the-rack suits. They craved chintz and glitter, Galanos and glen plaid. It was time to chuck the Birkenstocks and sell the six-year-old Toyota. There was Armani to be worn and a new BMW to be driven. Owing a trillion dollars hadn't slowed the country. Debt was good; greed was good; Barbie was good.

  When the Reagans moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they brought their Veblenesque appetites with them. Like Barbie, they were Californians, and their tastes bore the stamp of sun and surf and celluloid. Never had Barbie been more West Coast—her "Sun Lovin' " Malibu incarnation actually had tan lines—or more in tune with the times. "She's got the billion dollar look," said Mattel's 1981 catalogue about its "Golden Dream" Barbie. She was even prepared for escalating tension between haves and have-nots; in 1979, Mattel issued a Barbie "Fur & Jewels Safe" complete with security alarm.

  In her 1979 "Kissing" version, Barbie—head tilted, lips puckered— waited as if in the wings of a theater to make her comeback. And when, at the 1981 Inaugural youth gala, the Beach Boys sang, "I wish they all could be California girls," it was as if they had beckoned her onstage. In the eighties, Mattel's talented female managers contributed to Barbie's revival, but she also got a boost from the Zeitgeist.

  Barbie finally reflected, in a slightly skewed looking glass, the progress racial and ethnic minorities had made during the seventies. Styled by Kitty Black Perkins, an African-American designer whom Mattel hired in 1975, Black Barbie made her debut in 1980. Barbie had had black friends since the late sixties, but by 1979, Mattel determined that America was ready for the dream girl herself to be of color. Because the new doll was likely to be scrutinized, Mattel fashioned her with sensitivity: her hair is short and realistically textured; her face, if not aggressively non-Caucasian, is at least different from blond Barbie's; and her dress, while corporate, is livened up with jewelry evocative of African sculpture.

  Hispanic Barbie, who appeared the same year, is another story. Decked out in a peasant blouse, a two-tiered skirt, and a mantilla, the doll looks like a refugee from an amateur production of Carmen; she even has a rose pinned at her neck. Mattel's designers could hardly be unacquainted with Hispanics: there are millions in southern California, and some even work for the company. Yet rather than dress her in an authentic folk costume or normal clothes, Mattel clad her in what it labeled "fiesta-style"—an adjective one expects to find imprinted on a plastic bag of tortilla chips.

  "Little Hispanic girls can now play with their very own Barbie," the catalogue reads, and the contrast between the company's noble intentions—the box was printed in English and Spanish—and its actual product is puzzling. Unlike Mattel's international Barbies, aimed at adult collectors for whom authenticity is not a high priority, this doll was meant for real children, whose parents must, to a degree, have felt patronized by it.

  The complexities of marketing dolls of color—as well as the way mainstream toy companies have interpreted ethnicity over time—will be examined later. But even in their imperfect executions, the mere existence of Black Barbie and Hispanic Barbie in 1980 was a landmark. Like the coronation of Vanessa Williams as Miss America in 1983, the dolls commented on the evolution of popular taste. Slowly (with the speed of a glacier, critics might say), standards of so-called beauty were changing.

  Besides the country's collective twist to the right, Barbie benefited from another trend. Baby boomers who had played with the original doll were beginning to breed, and those who had once enjoyed Barbie gave her to their daughters, often when they were as young as two years old. This led to the invention in 1981 of My First Barbie, which was intended to be easier to dress. It had straight arms and rounded hands—some collectors refer to them scornfully as "fins"—since the doll's original sharp fingers could stab out a toddler's eye.

  By 1983, the titles of Barbie's outfits began to lose the self-refer-entiality that had characterized them since the late sixties. It was safe to name them for activities again: "Holiday Hostess," "Horseback ridin'," "Ski party!" There was no danger Barbie would wear these to, say, demonstrate for the Equal Rights Amendment, which, by 1980, had failed. Shoppers who had used their charge cards surreptitiously in the seventies came out of the closet; far from requiring a place to hide, they needed the storage space. It was deja vu time at Mattel. The company produced a Dream Store reminiscent of Barbie's 1963 Fashion Shop and a Barbie Loves McDonald's plastic hamburger stand, which, among other things, heightened brand recognition among preschoolers.

  Eating was a key part of the eighties ethos; the decade's emblematic fauna—young urban professionals—lived to consume. True, fast-food rarely passed between their lips. They preferred pricy, affected fare—white truffles, sun-dried tomatoes, the uncooked bellies of tuna. But their children, who had not yet learned to distinguish sashimi from a dead pet guppy, cheerfully chowed down beneath the Golden Arches.

  In contrast to the fad diets they had embraced in the seventies—Pritikin, Scarsdale, Beverly Hills—people in the eighties trained their bodies to burn fat instead of cutting calories. Being fit meant being able to eat conspicuously. "The only way to keep ahead—to eat significantly, impressively, competitively— was to keep in shape," Barbara Ehrenreich observed about the decade in Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. "In a very real sense, eating was what one got in shape for."

  So it's not surprising that Barbie Loves McDonald's was followed in 1984 by Great Shape Barbie, a doll that came with a leotard, leg warmers, exercise shoes, and (presumably) a health club membership. Of course Barbie didn't need to take an aerobics class; she already had the consummate eighties body. It had "definition," the goal toward which every gym rat sweated, and, metaphorically, the essence of the eighties persona. "To achieve definition was to present a hard outline to the world," Ehrenreich writes, "a projection of self that was not sensitive and receptive—as therapies in the seventies had aimed at—but tough and contained." Few projections of self could be harder than Barbie's—her "skin" is, in fact, a carapace. In the eighties, it wasn't just Barbie's curves that women sought to emulate, it was the toughness of her vinyl. During Barbie's first years, Bud Westmore, Universal Studio's makeup wizard, modeled Barbie on real-life actresses; her blond hair, for instance, was matched to Kim Novak's. By the eighties, however, the tables had turned: real-life women were modeling themselves on the doll.

  But transforming flesh—a pliant, yielding, organic substance—into plastic is not easy. The formula for this conversion—"No pain, no gain"—seems to have inspired the Great Shape dolls; indeed, their description in Mattel's catalogue reads like an instruction manual for a dominatrix. Under a picture of a contorted Barbie is the directive: "Make her do scissor lifts." Under Ken, who is frozen, doglike, on all fours: "Make him do push-ups." And over Skipper, who appears to be trying to drag herself across the floor with a broken leg: "Make her do back extensions." The dolls are even packaged with a bo
oklet of diagrams to make sure they do their "exercises" correctly.

  In projecting her future persona onto a Great Shape Barbie, a little girl can learn to split herself not only into "the surveyor" and "the surveyed," but into "the trainer" and "the trainee." By internalizing the sadism of an aerobics instructor, a little girl can, in her own exercise regimen, turn that sadism upon herself. But let us not rush to blame Barbie for making children obsessed with exercise. Not until 1992 did Barbie come out with her own workout video. Let us place the onus where it belongs—on drill sergeant and recovering Barbarella Jane Fonda. Besides, slothful children, of the sort that I once was, could happily—perhaps even sadistically—move Great Shape Barbie through her miniature workout without feeling the faintest urge to perform one of their own.

  Significantly, the Great Shape dolls contained no mechanism to cause them to exercise by themselves. This was a breakthrough. Led by Judy Shackelford, who had joined Mattel in 1976 and was named its first female vice president in 1978, the Barbie marketing team let the doll go back to being a doll. Although her 1981 Western incarnation winked, Barbie had finally ceased to be an action toy. Girls, Shackelford observed, didn't want gimmicky doll bodies engineered for dynamic obsolescence; they preferred inert figures with fancy clothes and combable hair. Girls "didn't care if Barbie winked or not," Shackelford told me. "Guys cared. They said, 'God, look at that doll wink.' " Of Western Barbie, she confided: "It was the ugliest Barbie doll we ever did."