Forever Barbie

by M. G. Lord

  Despite Barbie's constant triumphs in the marketplace, Spear stubbornly refused to place his faith in her. To attempt to reverse Mattel's fortunes, he launched new product lines—including Captain Power, a gimmicky electronic superhero that responded to cues in a Mattel-produced television cartoon program. In 1987, when Captain Power fizzled and Mattel reported a $113 million loss, John W. Ammerman, who had been in charge of its international division, replaced Spear as CEO.

  Ammerman began his tenure with a machete; he slashed the payroll by 22 percent and refinanced $110 million of costly junk-bond debt. Heads rolled both at home and abroad: he closed ten factories—including those in Taiwan, the Philippines, and Paramount, California, Mattel's last domestic plant—leaving open only nine, all in countries with the lowest labor costs. It was during this upheaval and the unstable years before—a time that broke or battered other Mattel executives—that Barad flourished. "The company was going to hell," one executive told Working Woman, and Barad "not only survived it, she rose up out of the ashes."

  Shackelford resigned in 1988. Rita Rao, who had left when Shackelford (and other people at Shackelford's and Rao's level) was made a vice president in 1978, returned. Until the dust settled, Barad removed herself from marketing to product development, a relative backwater. Then in 1988, she returned to lead the Barbie team. Supporters of Barad—and there are legions—suggest she made her way upward through a combination of brilliance and charm; detractors include guile as well.

  In 1988, under Ammerman's guidance, Mattel's financial course did, in fact, reverse. It reported $35.9 million in earnings. The growth continued in 1989 with earnings of $79.6 million, more than double that of the previous year. Some of this rise can be attributed to the introduction of Holiday Barbie in 1988, a doll that pushed Mattel's market segmentation strategy a step farther, testing the waters to see if the mass market would spend more money on a deluxe version of the doll. "My motivation in doing it was to see if we could break a price barrier," Rita Rao explains. "Barbie pretty much has always been a ten-dollar doll, and it was kind of deemed an unspoken rule that you couldn't go past that. And I felt that in the long term for the company we had to . . . break through that barrier. And . . . to do it in a big way." Not only was Holiday Barbie successful, but "it opened the door for us to do Birthday Barbies and Talking Barbies and other things that were at the higher price point."

  In 1989, Barad became president of the girls' and activities toys division; then, in 1990, president of Mattel USA. She was elected to the board of directors in 1991. Soon she began to be lionized in the press—for her achievements, her youth, her beauty. Male colleagues were awed by her fluency in the language of clothes. "Her sense of product was exquisite," Tom Kalinske told me. "I think she still thought like a little girl. She had this way of looking at a hundred different ideas and saying, 'This one won't work because . . .' or 'This one will—and why don't you put a little more hair on it? '"

  One year she told Kalinske, " 'We've got to put Barbie in an all-gold lame gown,' " he recalled. "And I said, 'It's a really expensive fabric. Why can't we just put her in pink again?' " She said, 'Because gold lame* is really the "in" fabric' Well, it wasn't at that particular moment, but by the time we brought the doll out, it was. Now how the hell do you know that?" Even Ruth Handler, who does not compliment idly, praises Barad. As she and I thumbed through snapshots of Barad and herself receiving an award at a United Jewish Appeal function that had taken place shortly before our interview, she called Barad "terrific" and "smart."

  Like She-Ra and the gang from Etheria, who had personal mythologies and wore talismans that represented their magical powers, Barad created a myth to explain her success and designated a piece of jewelry as its symbol. Each day, on her chic and impeccably accessorized ensembles, she pins a golden bee. "The bee is an oddity of nature," she explains in her official Mattel bio. "It shouldn't be able to fly but it does. Every time I see that bee out of the corner of my eye I am reminded to keep pushing for the impossible."

  Given Barad's schedule, booking an interview with her meant "pushing for the impossible." Things kept cropping up—like her being named, on July 23, 1992, Mattel's CEO, the second-highest-ranking officer in the $1.6 billion company. (She has since been named COO.) Consequently, in September, after having finally secured an appointment, I was not surprised when she canceled. Her reason, however, floored me: she had been stung by a bee and was suffering a severe allergic reaction.

  Happily, Barad rallied, and a few days later, with publicist Donna Gibbs adhering to my side like a Secret Service agent, I traversed the wide blue-carpeted halls of Mattel's executive enclave. Without relinquishing the trappings of corporate power—big desk, panoramic view—Barad had created a cozy atmosphere within her sprawling office. The place was thick with potted palms. Upscale collector baby dolls by artist Annette Himsteadt, whose company is owned by Mattel, were sprawled in eerily human positions on a couch. And refulgent in their sequins, the 1992 Empress Bride and Neptune's Fantasy Barbies—outfitted by Bob Mackie—twinkled on her desk.

  Barad directed me to a conference table whose legs were planted on a thick Chinese carpet. The deep red rug sat atop wall-to-wall carpeting, and I felt myself sink into it. If Barad had deliberately coded her office to create a sense of softness and femininity, she couldn't have been more effective. Radiant amid the fronds, she was clad in a yellow silk suit with bold color splashes that resembled, on closer inspection, jungle animals. She wore shiny yellow slippers that seemed too perfect to have touched pavement. Nor had she abandoned her trademark bee. I had, of course, seen photos of her, but that did not prepare me for the perfect hair, seamless manicure, and makeup striking enough for television. She made the Barbies look unkempt.

  As Andy Warhol's likeness of Barbie beamed down at us from the wall, Barad told how she had met the artist at a publicity party for She-Ra, and, after he revealed his fascination with Barbie, commissioned a portrait of the doll—a bold gesture, it struck me, in keeping with her philosophy of "pushing for the impossible." Inspired, I, too, decided to push, intrepidly asking if, as one of the country's top female executives, she defined herself as a feminist.

  "No," she said in a cool voice. "The fact is, I really don't know what that means. There are negative implications and positive implications. I'm very female. And I believe there are many dimensions to being a woman—and in my life I have been blessed with experiencing so many of those dimensions, whether it's being a mother, being a wife, being a friend, being an executive. Being so much. And I want kids to be able to realize all the different sides of being a woman too.

  "I've been able to do that through toys," she continued. "Baby dolls teaching mothering and nurturing—the soft tender moments. Barbie saying, 'What's it gonna be like when I grow up?' Or Princess saying, 'I'll protect you.' Or the Heart Family—the whole family situation. It was very much not just a belief in me—but in all the people here in girls' toys—that we were going to explore all the parts of being a girl."

  Barad shares with Ruth Handler the ability to disarm an interlocutor. I won't say our interview was exactly a pajama party, but something about that doll-packed room lent itself to girl talk. I found myself experiencing ancient feelings that I thought I had left behind in high school—a consciousness of myself as an owlish drudge dutifully recording, for the minutes of a club meeting, the wisdom of the homecoming queen. I was shaken by the terrible power of childhood archetypes. I felt like Midge.

  Soon we were agreeing passionately that Barbie was "forever," as an icon, anyway. But I wondered if her sales could sustain their phenomenal growth. Was there a saturation point? In 1992, the average American girl owned seven Barbies; would twenty soon be the norm?

  Barad likened a child's interest in Barbies to a woman's interest in clothes. "I don't know about you," she said, glancing at my outfit so disconcertingly that I checked to make sure I hadn't spilled something on it, "but I would imagine every year you buy something to put in you
r wardrobe that's new—that makes you feel like it's a fresh year, or it's the beginning of a season, or you have an event that you didn't have before." I nodded. Kids are the same, she feels. "They really do go on to what's the latest, what's new, what's exciting."

  I asked her if she viewed children as noble savages or beasts to be civilized. She rejected both extremes and talked about "magic . . . that keeps the child in all of us alive." I asked why no rival doll had ever successfully challenged Barbie—as if I, Midge, didn't know. "I think you've got heritage going," she explained. "We've got the marketing and product design talent. There really is no hole that somebody's going to come in and fill. And anytime someone comes after us frankly only makes us smarter and better. You've got to stay on your toes."

  I lumbered flat-footedly out of the interview, wallowing in my Midge-hood. Something Camille Paglia told me sprang to mind: "Barbie truly is one of the dominant sexual personae of our time." What did it mean, I wondered, to identify with the personae of the supporting cast? If Barbie were Ur-woman, did that make me Ur-sidekick?

  Barad has grumbled about accusations that she used her looks to advance herself—"I've seen very handsome men in business," she told the Los Angeles Times. "Does anyone ever say it's because he was so handsome that he got ahead?"—but after listening to her polished, diplomatic responses, I was sure that she hadn't. It did, however, cross my mind that she may have used her looks to camouflage her nonreliance on them—and, so briefly as to be almost unnoticeable, Day-to-Night Barbie flashed before my eyes.

  But even with her record sales, the Barbie of the late eighties was not the vibrant virago of the early eighties. "We Girls Can Do Anything" gave way to "We're into Barbie," a slogan that suggests turning inward, away from active engagement with the world. "The viewpoint of people changed," Barbara Lui explained, "and the 'mommy track' came on, and women didn't believe anymore that they could do anything. We're in an era—perhaps we're leaving it now—where people did not give themselves goals that were as tough."

  Lui did not get that idea out of the air; though whether it was true or not remains a subject of debate. "The supermom is fading fast—doomed by anger, guilt, and exhaustion," Newsweek reported in 1988. "A growing number of mothers" believe "that they can't have it all." Yet in her book Backlash, Susan Faludi points out that the survey on which Newsweek based the article revealed nothing of the sort. It found that 71 percent of mothers at home would prefer to work and 75 percent of the working mothers would go on working even if their financial needs could be otherwise met. Faludi also reports that Good Housekeeping's 1988 "New Traditionalist" ad campaign, which featured born-again housewives happily recovering from the horrors of the workplace, was based on neither hard facts nor even opinion polls. The two opinion studies by the Yankelovich organization, which had allegedly buttressed Good Housekeeping's position, had, in fact, showed no evidence that women were either leaving work or wanted to leave.

  This is not to cast Barbie as a New Traditionalist. Even in retrograde times, she has never stayed at home against her will. The jobs on her 1989 resume—physician, astronaut, veterinarian, fashion designer, executive, Olympic athlete—are impressive; a little girl could do worse than identify with such a doll. Her move away from demeaning stereotypes can also be documented. Compared with, say, the 1973 Barbie Friend Ship, in which Barbie is forced to play scullery maid to a painted-on pilot, the 1990 Flight Time Barbie, developed in 1989, is herself an aviatrix. But Flight Time Barbie is also a Day-to-Night doll, and her after-hours outfit, vastly more girlish than what she wore in 1985, undercuts her authority. In five years, her homeovestite behavior has intensified, suggesting that her achievements have left her fraught with anxiety.

  What Flight Time Barbie wears at night is a Christian Lacroix-inspired "pouf" skirt that barely covers her plastic derriere. Susan Faludi draws a convincing parallel between the juvenilizing bubble skirts that Lacroix introduced in 1987 ("for women who like to 'dress up like little girls,' " he says) and the New Look that Christian Dior fobbed off on women forty years earlier. Both were fussy, ruffly, waist-cinched fashions that exaggerated female curves to the point of caricature and looked goofy on all but the adolescent and acutely svelte. Both came after a period of relative sartorial sanity: the dull but practical "Dress for Success" formula John Molloy coded in the seventies, and the dress-for-comfort system women coded for themselves during World War II. Both also followed a time when women had enjoyed opportunities for professional realization—when male soldiers returned from the war, women who had taken the men's jobs gave them back; just as, when unemployment soared after the 1987 stock market crash, women were urged through "mommy-track" propaganda to relinquish limited spots in the workforce to men.

  Flight Time Barbie's Day-to-Night transformation parallels the fashion industry's late-eighties campaign to convince mature career women that it would be in their professional interest to dress like teenage cupcakes. The doll follows the established strategy of disguising her cross-gender strivings through exposure, except that she reveals more flesh than she did in 1985. It is as if the masculinizing necktie she wears in the cockpit is strangling her, and she must rip it off, the way that Mademoiselle in 1987 instructed fashion votaries to say "Bye-bye" to that relic of Molloyism, "the little bow tie." Or perhaps her excesses have another source: certainly the idea of a cockpit, where "cock" is a colloquialism for the penis, could have exacerbated her homeovestite panic, pushing her over the sartorial edge.

  To be sure, Barbie is a toy, and in market research sessions, as Barbie's first advertising copywriter Cy Schneider has pointed out, children, presented with choices that can be characterized as "tasteful, gaudy, gaudier, or gaudiest," invariably choose "gaudiest." But Barbie is also a reflection of her times—or a reflection of how market researchers and professional prognosticators interpret them. And perhaps therein lies the paradox. Mattel hangs on every prediction of such national surveys as the Yankelovich Youth Monitor, as well as its own market research. And it is not alone in this: few major companies make a move without consulting trained, high-tech prophets, even though futurists themselves acknowledge that the very act of anticipating the marketplace can influence it.

  "When I as a futurist share our assumptions with the wide bunch of CEOs who are our clients, it's halfway to a self-fulfilling prophecy," explains Laurel Cutler, worldwide director of marketing planning for Foote Cone Belding, Inc., and vice chairman of FCB Leber Katz, who has been spotting trends for corporations for the last twenty-five years. "Because if you get enough people in enough different places thinking along the same lines, they start reinforcing each other and giving each other the support to proceed along those lines. There's one company that makes a fortune from predicting what the 'in' colors will be—in fashion, paint, wallpaper, and so on. But if you say, 'red, orange, and russet' to enough people in enough places early on—well, you see what I mean by halfway to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Although women's sphere did contract in the late eighties, Barbie was not long bound by its constraints. Mattel had factories and branches all over the world, and by 1989, the world was on the verge of a radical change. When the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, Barbie, that coruscating cheerleader of consumption, gained a new mission. Capitalism had defeated its frumpy totalitarian foe. Czechs and Magyars, Poles and Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Romanians, Ukrainians—all the citizens of the former Soviet bloc—were starved for style. They craved a model of free-market femininity, and Mattel moved in 1991 to provide them with one. As twilight fell on the Reagan decade, Barbie's star rose in the East.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  PAPER DOLL

  Before Barbie strides bravely into her fourth decade, let us roll the film back to her first. We have been considering her as a toy, an object, a distillation of the feminine principle. But she is also an invented personality. In recent years, to Mattel's chagrin, novelists and poets have imagined all manner of dark, rich, textured lives for her. She has, however,
had a blander, authorized existence, too. With the 1961 debut of Barbie magazine, the Barbie Fan Club's official publication, Barbie took shape as a character in stories by Bette Lou Maybee and Cynthia Lawrence, two Carson/Roberts copywriters who were then in their thirties. Barbie also lent her name to Mattel's "Queen of the Prom: The Barbie Game," which, while not a narrative, can nonetheless be examined as an authorized text that sheds light on Barbie's world.

  The strange thing about the stories and the game is that the values of one contradict the values of the other. The stories and novels, which were published in book form by Random House between 1962 and 1965, were revolutionary: In them, Barbie doesn't model herself on Mom, a self-abnegating slave in financial thrall to Dad; she finds a female mentor who points the way to independence. The books also found large audiences. Issued simultaneously and packaged together, each of the first three books—Here's Barbie, Barbie's New York Summer, and Barbie's Fashion Success—sold about 80,000 copies (at $1.95 apiece) in their first year of publication. Here's Barbie sold best—88,656 copies as of June 1963. What is more, Barbie either kept pace with or outperformed other juvenile series. For an intraoffice presentation, Random House approximated that in 1962, one hundred thousand new Nancy Drew books were sold with 45,000 sales per new title, and 40,000 new Cherry Ames books were sold with 20,000 sales per new title.