by M. G. Lord
SLAVES OF BARBIE
Fiona Auld credits Elizabeth Taylor with introducing her to Barbie. In 1990, after correctly identifying Taylor's favorite color (purple), her first film (There s One Born Every Minute), her most famous jewel (the Krupp diamond, given to her by Richard Burton), Auld, from Paisley, Scotland, won first prize in a contest sponsored by Taylor's Passion Perfume.
Soon she and her husband, a computer programmer, were on an all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Hollywood. "I stayed at the Beverly Hilton; I had champagne; I had caviar; I was driven around in a limousine," she told me. But it was in Anaheim, California, that Auld's life changed. She visited a doll museum and became an almost instant convert to Barbie-collecting.
Auld began to amass dozens of dolls, virtually turning over her dining room to Mattel. Her five-year-old daughter was warned to steer clear of the treasures: "She has her own Barbies; she knows that she can look at but not touch mine." And when Auld placed an ad in Barbie Bazaar, requesting "BARBIE LOVING PENPALS FROM THE U.S.A.," there was no turning back. Thirty-five people responded, six of whom she met for the first time at the 1992 Barbie-doll collector's convention in Niagara Falls.
Auld did not conceal her heritage at the conference. Sporting a tartan and a tam-o'-shanter with a red pom-pom, she appeared in the life-size doll-clothing fashion show as Barbie in Scotland. Like the Native American Barbie, which doesn't replicate the costume of a particular tribe, Mattel's Scottish Barbie doesn't wear the tartan of a specific clan. Auld, however, personalized her costume by wearing the pattern of her own—MacLennen—clan.
Nor was Fiona the only non-American-born collector on the runway. Ex-beauty queen Corazon Ugalde Yellen, daughter of a Philippines air force general under Ferdinand Marcos, executed a few theatrical turns as Barbie in the Philippines. Unlike the other participants, for whom the show appeared to be a goof, Yellen strutted crisply and imperiously—hips tucked forward, shoulders thrust back—as if she were vamping down a Paris runway. Before moving to Beverly Hills, she was a professional model, having posed for Macy's and Western Airlines.
Next came Rebecca Taylor, a wispy young woman from Tyler, Texas, dressed as Casey, the Mod waif with a single earring whom Barbie befriended in 1968. With one ear tinted kelly green, Taylor elicited first a groan, then applause from the crowd. The earrings on most vintage dolls stain their lobes with an unsightly emerald-colored eczema that, because it cannot easily be scrubbed off, is the bane of many a collector's existence. Taylor was followed by Judy Roberts of Spokane, Washington, who persuaded her husband Gary to model "Business Appointment," an outfit from the days when Ken still shopped at Brooks Brothers.
No two collectors are identical. Some women started amassing the dolls when they were children; some women began when they had children; and others aren't women at all—roughly a third of the delegates in Niagara were men.
Nor can one generalize by disposition or demographics. Some are misers, who puff up when describing the financial worth of their collections; some are innocents, who do not see the dolls as constructs of class or gender but as awe-inspiring miniatures; and some are sophisticates, who see the doll and her paraphernalia as campy artifacts of middle-class life—or "life," since camp sensibility requires a certain sardonic detachment. There are celebrity collectors like Danielle Steele, Roseanne Arnold, Demi Moore, and Norris Church. Many, however, seem to be like Auld—for whom Barbie is not an end in herself, but a pretext for making friends around the globe.
At the 1992 convention, I felt as if I were on a theme-park ride. I ate lunch the first day at a table hosted by an African-American collector, who lured me to her room for a peek at a prized possession—an issue of Hustler from July 1976 that featured a photo spread entitled "Vulva of the Dolls." I do not recall the images clearly, but in my notebook I jotted: "Bugs Bunny violates Francie with plastic carrot." Also at my table were Bob Young and Richard Nathans from Tempe, Arizona. Long before Mattel issued Dance!Workout with Barbie, Young had been animating the doll, frame by frame, manipulating Barbie in an aerobics routine with his grammar-school-age niece.
The convention food seemed straight out of childhood: red Jell-0 with fruit and, at the Saturday night banquet, pineapple-glazed ham. Mattel's presentations also had a grade-school quality, like filmstrips for social studies class. The most surreal was a slide show, narrated by designer Carol Spencer, that traced the evolution of her Classique Collection from its inception (she designed the outfits while watching Murder She Wrote) to its production in Mattel's two plants in China. "The bicycle is the most common transportation means in China," Spencer recited as slides of Chinese peasants and bicycle racks appeared on the screen. "It's my understanding that they're not allowed to own automobiles." Next came shots inside the factory: Asians peering at tiny objects in front of large machines. "This is the heat setting of the rhinestones on the tights of Hollywood Premiere Fashion," Spencer said. "They're placing the rhinestones with tweezers onto a special fixture, and positioning the fabric over the rhinestones, and then the press goes down and heat actually sets the rhinestones onto the garments."
Other processes included face-painting and eyelash-rooting ("an extremely difficult operation . . . the operator was trained for two months"). The crowd applauded wildly when Spencer's Benefit Ball Barbie—the Georgette Mosbacher look-alike—had her eyelashes installed and clipped.
The convention had one redemptive moment. Doll authority Sarah Sink Eames had been rumored to have information about a prototype for "Colored Skipper"—Barbie's African-American sister, who antedated Black Barbie by several years. Eames not only confirmed that such an object existed, but that it was in her collection.
Many collectors told me that the 1993 convention in Baltimore, hosted by doll artist, illustrator, and former window-dresser Mark Ouellette, was a splashier production than the one in Niagara. It had six hundred participants and a waiting list of three thousand. But such extravaganzas are a recent phenomenon. The first Barbie conclave, held in October 1980, attracted under two hundred people. It took place in Queens, New York, at the Travelodge International Hotel, not far from Kennedy Airport.
Sybil de Wein, who, with Joan Ashabraner, published The Collector's Encyclopedia of Barbie Dolls and Collectibles in 1977, was another key figure in the first wave of collectors. Referred to by Cronk as "our Barbie Dean," De Wein floated through the 1992 convention like a sort of dowager empress. Even with a broken elbow, the doughty widow from Clarksville, Tennessee, managed to comport herself with the dignity one expects from a Southern Lady. She graciously signed copies of her book when new collectors came to pay court.
Although doll aficionados had probably been stockpiling Barbies since 1959, they didn't get organized until the seventies. Back then, camaraderie took precedence over commerce. Collector Ann Nawricki "got us started on the right foot by reminding us that no matter how we love dolls they are still inanimate objects and are never as important as people (and friendship)," Cronk, editor of the Barbie collectors' bimonthly newsletter, wrote to its six hundred subscribers in September 1979.
By January 1980, Cronk's bulletin, The Noname Newsletter, had a fancy new title—The International Barbie Doll Collectors Gazette—and a stylish logo with drawings by artist/collector Candy Barr. Cronk, however, maintained an unprepossessing tone, often telling stories in an Erma Bombeck voice about her own Barbie-related mishaps. At one point, a network TV crew asked her to demonstrate her dolls, including the 1979 Kissing Barbie. "They had me holding her at a very difficult angle," Cronk wrote, "and in the process of struggling to hold her still and press the plate, I pulled her bodice down, leaving her topless on CBS's film." Then there was the time she tried to conserve money for Barbieana by making her children purchase the family's shampoo. "Before leaving for Girl Scout camp, I found myself shampooing with something called strawberry Earth Born Shampoo," she writes. "The following day I was pursued by about 1,000 bees, all trying to pollinate me! The next time Scott's
turn rolls around to buy shampoo I just pray it doesn't turn out to be Banana or I will make sure I avoid the zoo!"
Cronk also offered her opinions on new products. "The thing that really rings my chimes," she wrote in February 1980, "is the new commode. . . . We can truthfully say Barbie has everything now as her pink commode has real 'flushing' action! It is pink and there is no mistaking who it belongs to as her name is on the tank! Part of the dream furniture grouping, it comes with a small chest with towels (what, no toilet paper?). Another new item is a round bathtub with continental shower. . . . Where does the water go? Hmm, come to think of it, where does the water go in the toilet?"
But for Cronk, the highlight of 1980 was meeting Charlotte Johnson at Barbie's twenty-first birthday party during Toy Fair on February 11. Johnson, who had just retired, regaled Gazette editors with war stories, including the trials of designing a Barbie-sized mink coat for Sears. The Gazette ran her photo in front of a revolving display of historical Barbies. It was among her last public appearances; felled by Alzheimer's disease, Johnson is currently in a nursing home.
Collecting has changed a lot in the fourteen years since that first convention, however. "There used to be a preponderance of older women whose children had Barbie and they wanted it," said doll dealer Joe Blitman. "Now it's different. There's a new guard of people in their late twenties to early forties—probably two to one, female to male. And it's a more urban group."
Whether they amass Barbies or bric-a-brac, Kens or incunabula, Francies or Faberg6 eggs, collectors frequently share certain personality traits— acquisitiveness, obsession, and an intense connection to objects, sometimes at the expense of people. In Collecting: An Unruly Passion, psychoanalyst Werner Muensterberger locates the beginning of the collecting impulse in early childhood—"in the objects that are always there when the child's need for comfort... is not immediately met; when the child does not have a mother's breast, or a loving pair of arms to allay frustration." For many grown-up collectors, to pile up treasures is to stave off childhood feelings of abandonment, to erect a tangible (yet frangible) hedge against ancient anxiety. The urge begins with a child's first "not-me" objects—Winnicott's transitional objects—a category into which, as we have seen earlier, Barbie sometimes falls. But even when objects are not intended as playthings they often function that way within their collector's psyche. "What else are collectibles but toys grown-ups take seriously?" Muensterberger asks.
Sometimes the lust to amass new and snazzier objects can dominate a collector's life, just as betting dominates the life of a gambler. It can even supersede work and family, Muensterberger says. "It's an addiction," explained Jan Fennick of J'aime Collectibles, an antique-doll dealership on Long Island. "There are a lot of layaways. They'd sooner buy Barbie clothes than buy clothes for themselves. They see something they want at the prices they want, they figure they won't be able to find it again. The shoes can wait; or the house can wait; or the car can wait. . . . Nobody's starving or homeless because of Barbie, but people joke about it."
"There are tens of thousands of collectors—everything from casual to passionate to obsessive," Blitman said. "Some people . . . have their job, whatever they do, and the rest of their life is Barbie."
"Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects," Walter Benjamin writes in "Unpacking My Library," his essay on book-collecting. The relationship reflects not merely a nostalgia attached to the things, but to their period, their workmanship, and their previous owners. "A lot of people are drawn to the hobby because they like to sew for the dolls," said Blitman. Other Barbie aficionados customize the doll's look. "They paint the face; they reroot the hair; they spend hours and weeks and months, sometimes," doll expert and Barbie Bazaar contributing editor A. Glenn Mandeville told me. "People today are taking Barbie and really making it a mannequin that they drape their own dreams on."
To collect artifacts from the past is to own the past—and sometimes, to imagine a better past than the one that actually existed. The baby boomers' fascination with the sitcoms of their childhood—what nostalgia network Nickelodeon terms "classic television"—has a lot to do with a longing for an idealized past. Many of the male Barbie collectors did not fit seamlessly into their heterosexist nuclear families. As a child, one male collector, who now has several hundred dolls, took an after-school job to buy Barbies and hid them under a loose board in the basement, until his mother discovered them. "I've given those dolls to an orphanage," she told him. "And we're not going to tell your father."
By manipulating early Barbies and Kens, collectors can both control and fit into that lost world—or, through parody, deflect the sting of its rejection. Barbie and her props lend themselves to the playing out of revised scenarios. With their fold-away walls and sketchy details, her houses resemble a TV soundstage.
Because Barbie is an emblem of female glamour, acquiring her can mean something different to a female collector from what it does to a male. "A lot of women are buying Barbie because they can't be Barbie, and they live out this dream of being slender and pretty and popular and all that through the doll," Mandeville said.
Historically, Mandeville added, doll-collecting has not been the unique domain of women; "a lot of so-called manly men have been interested in dolls." John Wayne's collection of kachina figures, for example, is currently on display at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. But it takes a tough man to challenge a gender convention, which is what buying Barbie involves. "There are a lot of men that I sell to who have P.O. boxes—who whisper on the phone," Blitman told me. "Some collect with their wives, although you get the feeling that the husband is more the collector than the wife. They start out collecting Ken, then they get one Barbie because it will look good next to the tuxedo. And suddenly they're into the first seven years—if not more—of Barbie."
"A lot of gay men are into Barbie," said Jan Fennick. "She's as much of an icon as Madonna or Marilyn or Judy Garland. . . . To me, the ultimate male bonding is when you know forty-year-old men who play with Barbie dolls on the kitchen table together. And I have friends who do this—they play with the Color Magic—sticking the heads under water to see whether the colors change." In fact, so substantial is Barbie's gay following that The Advocate devoted an extensive article to the phenomenon, alleging that the prose in Barbie Bazaar, the bimonthly collector's bible that debuted in 1988, "seems to swish off the page."
A glossy, four-color, ninety-page magazine, Barbie Bazaar bears little resemblance to Cronk's black-and-white, ten-page Gazette. Between its sophisticated design and professional artwork, doll expert and former Details editor Beauregard Houston-Montgomery calls it "the only fashion magazine I can bear to read." Although its founders, Karen Caviale and Marlene Mura, are at the vanguard of collecting's second wave, they have tried not to abandon first-wave values, including the relationships formed over dolls. "We're not totally object-oriented because the collectors have their own network of people that they become very good friends with," Mura told me.
Caviale added: "Some Barbie collectors are very competitive. If they know of something good, they won't share that information. But the majority of collectors are very helpful."
Although Caviale, a first-generation Barbie owner, has been collecting since 1980, Barbie Bazaar seems to have sprung mostly from its founders' longing to go into business for themselves. Mura, an insurance agent, met Caviale through Caviale's boss at the Girl Scouts, where Caviale was a public relations director, and in 1986, they began investigating the feasibility of a collector's newsletter. "Because of desktop publishing, the cost of producing a magazine was a little less out of our reach," Caviale told me, but that didn't mean it was without risk. To borrow money for start-up costs, they had to put up their own property as collateral.
Barbie Bazaar's first year was rough; it began as a monthly with only about five hundred subscribers. Collectors responded cautiously to its ads in Dolls and Doll Reader; they weren't sure Mura and Caviale cou
ld deliver what they promised. But after the first few issues, circulation grew. Mura and Caviale also cut costs in 1989 by bringing out the magazine every other month. Today, Barbie Bazaar has a circulation of twenty thousand and an 85 percent renewal rate.
The magazine was conceived during the doll's "We Girls Can Do Anything" years—which had, for Mura, particular resonance. Unlike Caviale, who came of age in the seventies, Mura went to college in the fifties, when, in order to be allowed to study business administration, she had to major in "secretarial science." "I'm a feminist," Mura told me, "and I have to say that the fifties made me support women and appreciate women. It was a battle to be who you wanted to be. You couldn't accomplish it in the fifties. In the nineties, you can." Or Mura and Caviale can, anyway. By 1992, the magazine was sufficiently profitable for them to kiss their day jobs good-bye.
The collectors are such a diverse group that it would take an entire book to do justice to them. But I did spend time with a few—and all they seemed to have in common was Barbie. At the Niagara convention, Corazon Yellen invited me to come see her four thousand dolls, a thousand of which are Barbies. So a few months later, when I was in Beverly Hills, I took her up on her offer. She buzzed me through the fortified gateway of her Benedict Canyon house and greeted me in a low-cut minidress and cowboy boots. Even without a Stetson, she could have passed for Western Stampin' Barbie.
The wife of a Los Angeles building contractor, Yellen is a collector of many things: antique furniture, bibelots, nineteenth-century porcelain dolls, French fashion dolls, Madame Alexander dolls, and, with her husband, classic cars. She is also the author of Total Beauty and Life, a how-to book dealing with a broad range of topics, from buying furs to building pectoral muscles. Before escorting me through her Barbie trove, she encouraged me to have a seat in her living room and peruse the book. I learned about "exotic-vertical" and "sultry-horizontal" eyeshadow techniques, and how to use "deep blue, blazing amethysts" to create "Spellbinding Eyes"— the sort of tips Barbie herself might impart.