by M. G. Lord
Yet the struggle to become independent and separate from one's mother is not a problem unique to Barbie; it is, for all girls, a core aspect of prepubescent development. In The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Nancy Chodorow, building upon observations of psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, describes detachment strategies that could have been inspired by the Barbie novels: "A girl . . . tries to resolve her ambivalent dependence and sense of oneness [with her mother] by projection and by splitting the good and bad aspects of objects; her mother and home represent bad, the extrafamilial world, good. Alternately, she may try in every way to be unlike her mother. (She may idealize a woman teacher, another adult woman or older girl, or characters in books or films and contrast them to her mother.) In this case her solution again involves defensive splitting along with projection, introjection, and the creation of arbitrary boundaries by negative identification (I am what she is not)."
Of course there is no way Cynthia Lawrence, who published Barbie's Neiv York Summer in 1962, could have been literally influenced by the The Bell Jar; it was published pseudonymously in England in 1963 and did not appear in America until 1971—having been delayed by Plath's mother's vigorous campaign to suppress it. Yet within the circumscriptions of its genre, Barbie's New York Summer actually does address the problems of a talented young girl learning to define and achieve her goals. It is also filled with sophisticated jokes, including an interior monologue in which Barbie, while modeling for a photographer, expresses outrage at being treated like a doll or mannequin. "I felt like a piece of merchandise," she grumbles. Lawrence also slyly freezes Barbie in sexy stills from popular culture—such as this image inspired by Marilyn Monroe standing over a subway grate in The Seven Year Itch: "A sudden gust of wind caught [Barbie's] full skirt and made it flutter like a flag. She clamped it down with her palms as Pablo laughed."
Nor do Barbie's Boswells interpret her character identically. What stands out in the fiction of Bette Lou Maybee—whose family, she told me, immigrated to America before the Revolution—is Barbie's fierce democratic tendencies. Life is portrayed as a meritocracy: Rich kids who exploit their parents' wealth or social position do not get ahead, they get their comeuppance. In Barbie's Hawaiian Holiday, a novel unfortunately dated by its phonetic renderings of Chinese-accented English, Maybee rages against monarchism and the evils of an inflexible class system. In one scene, the woman with whom Barbie and her family are staying rhapsodizes about how King Kamehameha and his troops united Hawaii by driving a rival chieftain's army off a steep bluff. "It was probably Clara's British background that made her think so highly of monarchies," Maybee writes in Barbie's voice. "Even when these were achieved at the cost of pushing people off cliffs."
Barbie, Midge and Ken (1964), Lawrence and Maybee's last anthology, contains their most openly subversive stories. "She's a Jolly Good and "Go Fly a Kite" are about girls whose opportunities have been limited because of their gender. In "She's a Jolly Good Fellow," Willows High School's first female class president—who ascends from the vice presidency when the male president abdicates—overcomes gender-based prejudice. And in "Go Fly a Kite," Skipper and a female friend defiantly enter a boys' kite-making contest. They don't win, but they don't embarrass themselves either. Instead, Maybee introduces a young boy who actually helps Skipper construct her kite—an underage avatar of the seventies "Sensitive Male."
I asked Maybee, who is currently retired on the West Coast, if she and Lawrence had intended their stories to open windows for girls. "I was born in the wrong part of the century myself, and probably there was some ventilating," Maybee said. "I never fitted into the whatever-women-were-supposed-to-be kinds of roles. And ["Go Fly a Kite"] was probably out of one of my childhood experiences." The novels, I learned from Maybee, were produced under acute deadline pressure; she worries there may have been stylistic flaws because there wasn't enough time to rewrite. But the authors definitely did incorporate their experiences in their stories. Lawrence, who grew up in New York, wrote Barbie's New York Summer; Maybee, who was raised in Seattle and lived on the West Coast, wrote novels set in San Francisco and Hawaii. And while Paula Foxx, the mentor figure and swimsuit designer in Maybee's Barbie's Fashion Success, was not literally modeled on beachwear manufacturer Rose Marie Reid, there are elements of Reid in her personality—a reflection of Maybee's having written advertising copy for Reid's company. In Sex and the Single Girl, Helen Gurley Brown elevated Reid as a paradigm of female financial independence: a "swimsuit wizardess . . . off and running at the success steeplechase." If one accepts Brown's book as a progressive tome, this makes Reid an equally progressive role model.
After speaking with Maybee, I was baffled: How could Mattel—maker of the Barbie Game—place its imprimatur on these lively, seditious books? Further investigation, however, suggested a possibility: No one at Mattel had actually read them. Not one of the hundreds of letters exchanged between the toymaker and Random House—preserved in the Random House archive at Columbia University—alludes to the content of the books. There are dozens of memos about the correct placement of the trademark symbol on various title pages. There are multiple complaints from Ruth Handler that the books didn't have enough pictures. There is even a lengthy exchange about where the Handlers should stay when they visited Manhattan in August 1963; this includes a letter from the manager of the New York Hilton, who, presenting himself as a friend of Random House editor Robert Bernstein, recommends its Tower Suites, which then ran between $175 and $250 a day. There are royalty statements—and rejoinders from Mattel saying that the royalties are both insufficient and not reported often enough. But never do issues of plot or character or tone or appropriateness emerge in the correspondence.
This is not to say that such issues were not discussed by the executives on, say, the telephone. Lawrence, Maybee, and Random House editor Louise Bonino conferred about the content; Bonino required a "screen treatment" for each book, Maybee told me, "to psyche out whether we were Johnny One Note or we could actually write this novella." But Mattel seemed to view the books not as texts but as products—or vehicles for selling products. In December 1964, Mattel instructed Random House to have its illustrator depict Barbie in renderings of the doll's actual clothes, sending along its toy catalogue for reference. And while this may reflect excessive sentimentality on my part, I was shaken by the brutal way Mattel announced its phase-out of Midge. In a letter dated August 31, 1965, Mattel sales promotion manager Bernard L. Gottlieb ordered Robert Bernstein to purge her "from your thinking."
The later Barbie books—Barbie's Hawaiian Holiday, Barbie Solves a Mystery, Barbie and Ken, Barbie in Television, Barbie, Midge and Ken, Barbie and the Ghost Town Mystery, Barbie's Secret, and Barbie's Candy-Striped Summer—did not live up to the promise of the original three. Sales plummeted; the last three sold barely twenty thousand copies. Compiled by Lawrence in 1964, Barbie's Easy as Pie Cookbook—which includes recipes for "Pineapple Egg Nog," "Crispy Liver Steaks," and "Swedish Prune Pudding"—did, however, find a following and is still popular with collectors; it was issued in a modified version to delegates at the 1992 Barbie-doll collector's convention.
One reason for the demise of the Barbie series was that just as Midge had been scrapped, so were Lawrence and Maybee. Recorded in correspondence from July 1963, the decision to retire them came after Bernstein lunched with them in Los Angeles and Lawrence had the temerity to suggest that they might get an agent. Why would they want to give away ten percent of their royalties, Bernstein countered, when the publisher was paying them the most money that it possibly could? Rather than wait for an answer, Random House brought in new authors—seemingly without bothering to ascertain if they could write. So sloppy is the language in Eleanor Woolvin's 1965 opus, Barbie and the Ghost Town Mystery, that one wonders if anyone even proofread it. In a scene that cries out for a translator, Barbie, Skipper, and two male consorts follow a stray donkey through an abandoned desert town. Woolvin writes, "With the donkey'
s noisesome [italics mine] voice to guide them, it was not too difficult." Does that mean the donkey had bad breath?
With Woolvin's byline on the title page of the last three books, it's not surprising that the series bit the dust. Even children, I think, know when quality has fallen off. But edited by Gloria Tinkley, Cy Schneider's secretary, and written by Carson/Roberts copywriters Vel Rankin, Barbara Charlebois, and Nancy Joffe, Barbie magazine soldiered on through the sixties. In addition to fashion pieces and promotions for the doll, it featured educational articles on foreign countries and on famous women in history— predictable characters like Florence Nightingale and Helen Keller, surprises like Mary McLeod Bethune, an African-American educator. Redesigned in 1970, it limped into the Me Decade with a new name—Barbie Talk—but did not make it through the seventies alive.
Barbie's fictional persona, however, transcended the death of the magazine. In 1983, while the "We Girls Can Do Anything" campaign took shape on the West Coast, Mattel approached Muppet Magazine publisher Donald E. Welsh and editor Katy Dobbs to create a fresh fanzine for the doll. By the winter of 1984, Barbie, The Magazine for Girls—thirty-two glossy full-color pages of fashion, hair care, recipes, and gift ideas—was born.
It was not, however, an easy delivery. Because the new magazine's target audience was younger than the original's—six- to seven-year-olds instead of eight- to eleven-year-olds—it couldn't feature long stories about Barbie; kids that age couldn't read them. Instead, Barbie's life unfolded in a "photodrama," a narrative made from pictures of real dolls over which comic-strip-style talk balloons had been superimposed. Integrating images and text would seem simple enough, but for the writer and photographer of the original drama, it wasn't. The feature came out so disastrously that Mattel had to pulp its half-million-dollar maiden printing and try again. (Highlights of the aborted drama: Barbie giggles while trying to run over Ken in her pink Corvette and lunches in the snow at an outdoor McDonald's—the photograph of which has been printed backward so that the menu looks as if it were written in Russian.)
Within months, though, the photodrama, written by the editors and realized by photographer Donal Holway, became a cult sensation. When in 1986, the magazine spent $1,500 for miniatures of original furniture by designers associated with the then-chic "Memphis" style—Ettore Sottsass, Flavio Albanese, Saporiti and Felice Rossi—House & Garden took note in a piece called "Barbie Goes Milano." A kitschy, self-conscious send-up of 1950s suburbanism that defined itself in opposition to modernism, "Memphis" was well suited to the campy tone of the photodrama. Sottsass originally intended the style as "an ironic gesture," Stephen Bayley observed in Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things, but through overexposure in magazines like House & Garden it became "just another style of rich man's chic."
Holway was equally attentive to details of clothing and real estate. In "Barbie Goes to Brazil," Barbie's glitzy record producer wore a tiny, non-Mattel-issue Rolex, and the "windows" of his office showed a real view from atop Rockefeller Center. Like Lawrence's and Maybee's stories, many of the photodramas dealt with Barbie's domestic life; but they also jump-started girls' imaginations: the tale that began in the record company office took Barbie to Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro—a swirl of dolls in wild costumes, including men in apparent drag. It even had captions in Portuguese.
Although Mattel never formally codified rules for the dramas, it had guidelines. No attempt was made to provide continuity with the original novels. George and Martha Roberts, that Friedan-era prototype of marital inequity, were erased forever. "We couldn't show Barbie's family except for Skipper," explained Karen Tina Harrison, Barbie editor until 1989. "She has no family. These stories are episodic. They have no background. Barbie has no biography to be passed on. Barbie simply is. No one knows where she came from or how she got there." As to the way she could be portrayed, drudgery—or even, say, seeing patients in her physician incarnation—was out. "Only glamour could befall Barbie," Harrison said.
Barbie's Italian counterpart was not, however, similarly constrained. Its photodramas were described by Welsh Publications editorial director Katy Dobbs as operatic. This meant that on one occasion, Barbie, in a fit of jealous rage, slugged a rival female doll with her handbag. Another time, Barbie and Ken were spelunking and a huge Styrofoam rock fell on Ken, leaving him covered with blood. "We can't do anything like that," she said. Inevitably, though, staging even a tame photodrama involves implicit carnage; in order for a doll to be photographed seated, its legs must be broken. Dobbs sighed: "You have to wipe out so many dolls to do a crowd scene."
Barbie also introduced little girls to real-life superstars—frequently on the eve of a scandal. Vanessa Williams squeaked into the magazine shortly before her lesbian porn shots were unearthed. Likewise Drew Barrymore, then about the same age as Barbie's readers, was portrayed as a wholesome preteen—not as the drug-addicted boozer she later declared herself to be. Nor has profiling celebrities always been fun. "We gave Drew this dress to wear and her mother took one look at it and snarled, 'Barrymores don't wear green,' " Harrison recalled. "So we convinced her it was teal, and the kid wore the dress. Of course we had to give [the kid] everything she touched, but that's standard."
After Harrison left, the magazine became less about whimsy and more about selling products. Current photodramas are not geared to whisking kids off on flights of fancy, but to showing them predictable scenarios that they can play out with Mattel-authorized miniatures. Dramas are set in Mattel-issue settings; the pictures function like illustrations in toy catalogues. From a marketing standpoint, this may be a more effective way to promote merchandise, and Barbie sales, in the 1990s, have certainly skyrocketed. But it seems dry and joyless, stultifying to children's imaginations—not what Barbie, in her most positive, door-opening sense, should be.
Maybe it was a reflection of the difference between West Coast and East Coast style—or between the styles of marketing and journalism—but Katy Dobbs, who is based in New York, was the first top-level Barbie person who leaped to define herself as a "feminist." "I take my daughter to marches,"
Dobbs told me. "We're pro-choice." Then she related feminism to the doll, which her six-year-old little girl has played with for years: "I think Barbie is about options—options in fantasy, options in play patterns, options in opportunities. . . . There's more to her than just the pink and the plastic. Because every little girl brings to her a different orientation and [to attack her] is sort of taking away the individuality of what each little girl brings. I think Mattel does a really good job of offering her in many different ways for different kinds of girls. I mean, somebody's going to buy Marine Corps Barbie—not me."
Dobbs's chaotic Madison Avenue office was the antithesis of Jill Barad's plush inner sanctum, yet Dobbs appeared unrattled by the turmoil. There were, not surprisingly, Barbie and Muppet images everywhere, but also a plastic Mickey Mouse atop her desk and a Mickey video playing on a TV monitor—to which, because of a temporary child-care crisis, her toddler son was glued. He soon developed an interest in the interview, however, and plopped himself on his mother's lap, where he assiduously applied himself to unbuttoning her sweater.
As Dobbs continued her narrative—deftly closing the buttons her son had opened—I was struck by the total un-Mattel-ness of the operation. Except for Dobbs, most of the staff appeared to be in their twenties, and the office felt like that of a campus newspaper. When Barbie magazine was started, Dobbs, too, was virtually fresh out of school, after having spent a deracinated childhood as a military brat whose father was from Alabama and whose mother was from Zagreb, Croatia. She feels her career is representative of her baby-boom contemporaries. "When I first came to New York, all I did was go to book parties—eat shrimp—and hang out at Studio [54]," Dobbs said, "because I was at Conde Nast covering entertainment. Then I got married and had kids and now I'm doing this."
But even with its deliberate turning away from seamy reality, putting out the magazine has its somber moments. Beverl
y Cannady, whose first job at Mattel in the sixties was answering Barbie's mail, observed a poignant pattern to the way kids related to the doll. The magazine has always existed to promote Barbie as a commercial product; but kids look to her as an oracle— a vivid, godlike presence in the landscape of childhood. And sometimes, with aching candor, they'd beg Barbie to help stabilize their parents' rocky marriages or mitigate tragedies in their lives.
Many letters to Barbie, in fact, have such a Miss Lonelyhearts quality that they are too gloomy to print. To ask kids to send in their three wishes is to invite heartbreak. "It's like when you blow out your birthday candles, you go: 'Wait. Should I go personal or global here? Should I go for me or for world peace?' " Dobbs told me. "So a lot of them start out with 'Clean up the world, make peace, [then they'll add] my mommy and daddy not get divorced.' " Karen Tina Harrison was so touched by some of the unpunishable letters that she saved them and occasionally responded to them. One note that accompanied a strangely anguished self-portrait simply said: "My name is Tequila. I am 8 years old. With brown eyes. Black long hair. Brown skin."
Although many big-time models like Christy Turlington currently sport navel rings, body modification has been banned from the magazine; even showing a model with pierced ears enrages some mothers. I wanted to press Dobbs about other forbidden topics, but she had an excellent pretext to avoid my question. Her son's diaper had become, well, noisome, requiring her immediate attention.