by M. G. Lord
As I left her office, Bret Mirsky, the magazine's editor in 1992, presented me with a set of back issues that, except for their graphics, were virtually identical to the those of the sixties. True, there were small differences: In 1963, 1968, and 1970, the magazine featured articles on becoming an airline hostess; by 1990, Barbie was the pilot of the plane. And in the old magazines, pages with educational material—articles on history and geography—seemed to outnumber pages with ads. But even the child-star drug scandals had counterparts in the past. Drew Barrymore's prepubescent coke addiction paled next to the fate of Anissa Jones—"Buffy" on CBS's Family Affair—who, in 1969 and 1971, was profiled in both Barbie and Barbie Talk. Jones died at eighteen in 1976 from an overdose of cocaine, Quaaludes, and barbiturates that Oceanside, California, coroner Robert Creason called "the largest drug combination of any case I have ever encountered."
The similarity between Barbie then and Barbie now was startling. It suggested that the transformations allegedly wrought by feminism had been either merely cosmetic or nonexistent. It was even more uncanny to learn that Western Publishing had resurrected "Queen of the Prom: The Barbie Game" and issued it with two new board games—"Barbie's Dream Date" and "We Girls Can Do Anything."
Although one six-year-old I browbeat into playing We Girls Can Do Anything with me described the game as "BOOOOR-ing," I enjoyed it. Players make "career moves" and endure "career setbacks" to become musicians, actresses, pilots, fashion designers, physicians, or ballerinas. The game's bright fuschia graphics and lurid photos of actual dolls, however, are somewhat garish; grown-ups may require sunglasses to stare at the board. Unlike the Mattel games from the sixties, which featured stylish line drawings of Barbie and her crowd, the new ones are illustrated exclusively with photographs. This no doubt helps young children recognize products, but it does not enhance nascent taste.
Nor is the revised Queen of the Prom identical to the original. Like the new Barbie magazine, the game is aimed at younger consumers—ages five and up. So the odious "Surprise" cards, which had to be read, are gone. Gone, too, are references to school or school clubs. Girls compete based on cars, clothes, looks, and boys. The collecting of female friends, although possible, slows a player down; a boyfriend is the only human trophy required to win. This suggests a certain prescience on the part of the game's makers: long before Thelma and Louise flickered subversively in a studio screening room, they sensed that female bonding was dangerous—and, consequently, to be quashed.
But compared with Barbie's Dream Date, the revised Queen of the Prom might have been written by the editors of Ms. This game isn't merely about winning approbation based on looks, it's about piling up expensive gifts from men. So similar is players' behavior to that of a call girl that it might more aptly be termed "The Hooker Game." Barbie's Dream Date is a race against time; each player's mission is to make Ken spend as much money as possible on her before the clock strikes twelve. When time runs out, players tally up their date and gift cards, and the one with the most cards wins. "If there is a tie, players with the same number of cards count their date cards only," the directions instruct. Like the floozy with the fullest Rolodex, "the girl with the most date cards wins."
Even in the vast contradictory morass that is Barbie history, the idea of We Girls Can Do Anything and the Hooker Game occupying adjacent shelf space is dumbfounding. Yet the more I inquired about the "We Girls" campaign, the more I learned that many male executives loathed it. "I can remember sitting in meetings with just people from the agency—and I won't name names—but the men were very resistant to the 'We Girls' ads," said Barbara Charlebois, who wrote for the original Barbie magazine and remained with Ogilvy & Mather after it acquired Carson /Roberts. "They really thought they were very offensive—well, you know how men are. Anything that's feminist or that says we girls can do anything or anything that says we girls are as good as you boys is very . . . " she trailed off, but I got the picture.
This perception, which, other sources confirm, extended to Mattel itself, made the contradictory threesome—We Girls Can Do Anything, Queen of the Prom, and the Hooker Game—comprehensible. Let 'em take one step forward, the message seemed to be, as long as they take two steps back.
I could end this chapter here, with Barbie sold into virtual white slavery for a dinner, a ski trip, and some bottles of perfume. But there is more to Barbie than that. Little girls know it; I have yet to watch kids play "Let's Fleece Ken" with real dolls—and I have watched a lot of kids at play. But because Barbie does, in fact, reflect the authentic condition of women, what shimmers in her rose-colored mirror is not always what one wants to see. Forget the new professions on Barbie's resume; in this game, she practices the oldest one.
In December 1990, however, Marvel Comics rescued Barbie by providing an alternative to her sordid board-game identity. It began Barbie and Barbie Fashion comic books, which, written by Lisa Trusiani and Barbara Slate, and edited by Hildy Mesnik, are sharp, sly, and very much in the tradition of Maybee's and Lawrence's novels. Even Diana Huss Green, the fierce Massachusetts-based watchdog of children's culture, gave them her blessing: In 1992, Parent's Choice, the organization she founded in 1978, singled the books out as reading material of quality.
Perhaps the most redeeming thing about the comic books is that they are hand-drawn. Although brand recognition may be one of their by-products, they do not exist to promote specific dolls. The constraining effect of photographs on children's imaginations has been overcome. Barbie exists as an open-ended construct, not a patented plastic one.
The uninitiated might dismiss Barbie Fashion as a pretext for Barbie to change clothes. But as conceived by Barbara Slate, the comics have dealt with such sophisticated concepts as divorce, homelessness, euthanasia of a dying pet, and the philosophy underlying pop art. Slate's comic "We Girls Can Do Anything," from June 1991, actually conveys the message of its title. While out driving, Barbie and Skipper pass a group of construction workers, one of whom is female; they watch two female police officers ticket a speeding motorist; and, when they get a flat tire, they actually fix it themselves. Nor is Barbie's comic-book persona so addicted to work that she treats people shabbily. In "Aunt Rose Comes First" (June 1992), Barbie's modeling agent, Eileen Plymouth (a crafty wordplay on Eileen Ford), gets Barbie a modeling job in Tahiti. When Barbie, who has a commitment to visit her aunt, won't go, Plymouth snarls: "This is business and business always comes first." But Barbie doesn't see it that way—and Barbie's contrarian vision is vindicated at the end.
In "The Volunteers" (February 1993), Skipper spends a winter holiday serving dinner at a homeless shelter. (To avoid pigeonholing the characters by religion, the holiday is unspecific.) Her experience has a sanitized quality; she encounters no unregenerate crack smokers or teenage mothers of six. But the idea of making homelessness visible—not erasing it through omission—is noteworthy. Skipper and Barbie interact not just with fashion dolls of color, but with people.
Given Barbie's universality—she can live anywhere or have any job— you'd think that writing for her would be a cinch. But there is one drawback: Mattel insists that she be infallible. Fortunately, Skipper and Ken are permitted to make mistakes, so at least someone's problems can be solved over the course of a story. "I have Ken being a feminist—being very considerate," Slate told me, "and I like to have him traveling, being the man-about-town. Because there's a reason why this guy is going out with the most fantastic girl in the world—he can't be stupid."
Slate's own background as a comic artist has always been controversial and, she says, feminist. She gained recognition in the seventies with a character called Ms. Liz, a wisecracking "liberated" woman who appeared in greeting cards, Cosmopolitan, and spots on the Today show. Ms. Liz flaunted her sexual emancipation and lampooned men whose sense of self derived from "supporting" the women in their lives. "Darling, of course I can live on your salary," Ms. Liz says on one greeting card, "but what will you live on?"
By 1986 Slate had
a new female character—Angel Love, a young woman whose dealings with "drugs, sex and rock 'n' roll" were not G-rated. Nor were they morally simple. Featured in an eponymous DC comic book for twelve- to fourteen-year-old girls, Angel had a boyfriend who was doing "blow," a father who was suspected of child molestation, and an unmarried pregnant friend who was considering an abortion. The comic book was, however, short-lived—DC got tired of defending its volatile content.
Of course Barbie Fashion is considerably tamer than Angel Love. Barbie has not yet had to counsel Midge through the anguish of an abortion or coax Ken into rehab before his septum collapses. But Slate feels that the benefits of Barbie's name recognition dramatically outweigh the occasional drawbacks of writing for a character who cannot make mistakes. This is because girls aren't encouraged to read comic books. Given the traditional maleness of the comic-book market, the real wonder of Wonder Woman is that a female superhero has had any success at all. Without a brand-name attraction like Barbie, comic artists might as well write off reaching girls. "If they can't do it with Barbie, they can't do it with anybody," Slate said.
To be sure, the Barbie comic books have only a fraction of Barbie magazine's 600,000 subscribers, but girls are buying them. They are also being distributed in untraditional outlets, such as the Barbie section of FAO Schwarz. This is not a bad thing. Ever since Art Spiegelman's Maus, which dealt in pictures with the Holocaust, critics have taken a fresh look at comic books and started calling the ones they like "graphic novels." Which leads to another paradox in Barbie's ever contradictory career: Barbie, who epitomizes all that is stereotypically "feminine," is helping to masculinize—or, in any event, androgynize—the reading habits of young women.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BARBIE LIKE ME
The teenage doll that Ruth Handler invented had a lot in common with the teenage "dolls" created by the movie industry. But when people said the original Barbie looked like a star, they didn't mean Anna Magnani in The Rose Tattoo or Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. They meant Donna Reed or Sandra Dee—actresses from whom conspicuous ethnicity had been purged; who weren't even Presbyterian or Methodist, but generic Protestant; who embodied a phantasmic, impossible "American" ideal.
In An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, Neal Gabler tells how the studio moguls—all immigrants and outsiders—created an "America" that was more "American" than the country ever could be. They formed a "cluster of images and ideas—so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American imagination." And Americans, aping those images, ultimately became them. "As a result, the paradox—that the movies were quintessentially American while the men who made them were not— doubled back on itself," Gabler writes. "By creating their idealized America on the screen, the Jews reinvented the country in the image of their fiction."
To look at Mattel as a relative of the Hollywood studios is to make sense of some of its contradictions. The daughter of a Polish Jewish immigrant, Ruth Handler coded with her fashion dolls the same sort of phantasmic "America" that Louis B. Mayer had coded in his movies. Barbie was, in fact, better suited than a human actress to exemplify an impossible ideal. There was no tribal taint in her plastic flesh, no baggage to betray an immigrant past. She had no navel; no parents; no heritage.
Yet even as Mattel grew rich off play sets that reflected white, middle-class values, its management was far from backward-thinking about race. This incongruity between public products and private politics is not without precedent in Hollywood. True, the studio moguls rejected Democratic politics in favor of a bland Republicanism that harmonized with their invented "America," but most screenwriters didn't. And Elliot Handler, who headed not only Mattel but also its creative team, can be said to have had a screenwriter's social conscience.
As early as the 1940s, Mattel integrated its assembly line and hired a black foreman. "It was unheard of in those days to put a black production worker next to a white production worker and have them all share toilet facilities," Ruth Handler told me. And in recognition of its policies, Mattel was honored by the Urban League. But Mattel's most startling project, little known outside the toy world, began in 1968, when, as a response to the Watts riots, it helped set up Shindana Toys—the name means "competitor" in Swahili—a black-run, South Central Los Angeles-based company that manufactured multicultural playthings before they wrere trendy.
By 1969, Mattel shared its Toy Fair showrooms with the likes of Shindana's Baby Nancy, a doll with authentic black features and a kinky "natural," and later with Talking Tamu, who said eighteen different "now" things like "Cool it, baby," and "Can you dig it?" Mattel ceded toy store space to Shindana rag dolls Sis, Coochy, Wilky, and Natra. And it watched Shindana score its first million-dollar hit with a stuffed talking doll that featured Flip Wilson on one side and Geraldine Jones, his female alter ego, on the other. Pull the doll's cord and it squealed, "The devil made me buy this dress!"
The world of Shindana—of top Mattel brass working side by side with the founders of Operation Bootstrap, the Watts-based job training program under whose auspices the toy company was formed—was a far cry from the way the thirtieth-anniversary issue of Barbie magazine depicted Barbie's world in 1966. "Our inner cities burned but the pot roast couldn't," the caption says under a picture of Barbie at a Tupperware party. "Mom and Dad and the leaders they elected tried to keep a lid on things." As I said in this book's opening chapter, studying Barbie sometimes requires the ability to hold contradictory ideas in one's head at the same time. When it comes to Mattel and representations of racial diversity, this is especially true.
Although the Handlers have not been part of Mattel for twenty years, the company can still be viewed as a cousin to the Hollywood studios. Mattel actually did get into the movie business in the seventies, when its Radnitz Productions produced the Academy Award-winning Sounder, another multicultural product that predated the multicultural vogue. Securities analysts consider toys part of the entertainment industry7, and corporate toymakers, like corporate moviemakers, keep their eye on trends. Beginning in the seventies, when nonwhite Americans became more visible in movies and on television, they became more visible as dolls. In 1980, Mattel issued Black Barbie and Hispanic Barbie—which, however imperfect, were still the first mainstream leading ladies (as opposed to supporting actresses) of color. Corporations also keep their eye on their bottom line. By the mid-eighties, businesses woke up to the fact that there was an audience for multicultural merchandise. Between 1980 and 1990, gross income among African-American and Hispanic households had increased 155 percent. And according to data from the 1990 U.S. census, these groups combined had a gross income just under $500 billion.
Traditionally, the needs of ethnically diverse consumers had been met by smaller companies—the equivalent, in movie terms, of independent filmmakers. In the seventies, Shindana introduced two Barbie-like fashion dolls: Malaika, taller and stouter than Barbie; and Career Girl Wanda, about three-quarters as tall as Barbie and as proportionately svelte. But in 1991, when Mattel brought out its "Shani" line—three Barbie-sized African-American dolls available with mahogany, tawny, or beige complexions— there could be no doubt that "politically correct" was profitable.
"For six years, I had been preaching these demographics—showing pie charts of black kids under ten representing eighteen percent of the under-ten population and Hispanic kids representing sixteen percent—and nobody was interested," said Yla Eason, an African-American graduate of Harvard Business School who in 1985 founded Olmec Corporation, which makes dolls and action figures of color. "But when Mattel came out with those same demographics and said, 'Ethnically correct is the way,' it legitimatized our business."
Some say that the toy industry's idea of "ethnically correct" doesn't go far enough, however. Ann duCille, chairman of the African-American Studies Program and an associate professor of English at Wesleyan University, is a severe critic. After studying representations of race in fashion dolls for over a year, she feels that the dolls r
eflect a sort of "easy pluralism." "I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say I'd rather see no black dolls than see something like Shani or Black Barbie," she told me, "but I would hope for something more—which is not about to happen." Nor is she wholly enamored of Imani and Melenik, Olmec's equivalent of Barbie and Ken. "Supposedly these are dolls for black kids to play with that look like them, when in fact they don't look like them. That's a problematic statement, of course, because there's no 'generic black kid.' But those dolls look too like Barbie for me. They have the same body type, the same long, straight hair—and I think it sends a problematic message to kids. It's about marketing, about business—so don't try to pass it off as being about the welfare of black children."
Lisa Jones, an African-American writer who chronicled the introduction of Mattel's Shani dolls for the Village Voice, is less harsh. Too old to have played with Christie—Barbie's black friend, born in 1968—Jones recalls as a child having expressed annoyance with her white classmates by ripping the heads and arms off her two white Barbie dolls. Any fashion doll of color, she thinks, would have been better for her than those blondes. "Having been a little girl who grew up without the images," she told me, "I realize that however they fail to reach the Utopian mark, they're still useful."
People who accuse Mattel of having lacked a multicultural vision may not know about its relationship to Shindana Toys—a failed yet prescient experiment. To appreciate why Shindana was a breakthrough, one has to look at the history of American toys, which since the nineteenth century have been used to caricature immigrants. One shoo-in for the Toymakers' Hall of Shame is a common late-nineteenth-century bank called the "reclining Chinaman." It depicted a Chinese man with playing cards sprawled against a log. At the log's base was a rat—alleged to be a staple in the Chinese diet—and a lever which, when pulled, caused a coin to fall from the man's hip into the bank while his hands moved to reveal that the cards were all aces. The toy promulgated the notion that Chinese people were shifty and— because they accepted jobs at lower wages than less-recent immigrants— stole money from "American" workers.