by M. G. Lord
Yellen's collection also suggests a strong psychic affinity with the doll. In one display case, nearly all of Barbie's first fashions—called the "900 series" because of its stock number—were displayed on vintage dolls, next to which were snapshots of Yellen, identically clad. She created dioramas with Hispanic Barbie sprawled provocatively in lingerie, while Ken, with a chilled bottle of champagne, looked on. Again, nearby, were matching photos of her. "I belonged to an Asian- American theater group here," she told me, explaining that the doll's clothes were replicas of costumes she had actually worn. One doll even held a miniature copy of Yellen's book.
Like Beverly Hills itself, Yellen's doll room teems with famous figures: James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Sonny Bono, the Man from U.N.C.L.E., and the Six Million Dollar Man. She even has a platoon of soldiers clustered around an austere photo of her father, the Filipino general. But perhaps her most startling mannequin is the life-size statue of herself, bedecked with rhinestone earrings, a tiara, and "exotic-vertical" eyeshadow. She owns two such effigies, one fashioned by a sculptor and one cast from life.
"Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter," Walter Benjamin wrote. But Evelyn Burkhalter's Barbie Hall of Fame in Palo Alto, California, seems to be the best of both worlds. She owns all seventeen thousand of its dolls—worth about two million dollars—but she lets the public look at them. And she has permitted TV crews from three continents to film them.
A fount of Mattel lore, Burkhalter begins her tour by showing museumgo-ers the Lilli doll and concludes with Mattel's newest products. In July 1992, I made the mistake of visiting her on a Saturday. And the gallery, about the size of a two-car garage, was packed: not with collectors but with children, who were transfixed—pressing their palms and noses against dozens of glass cases. Oblivious to the summer heat—Burkhalter feared that blasting the air conditioner would overload a circuit—the children squealed and gaped and jostled for better views, when they weren't tugging at Burkhalter, who, as a mother of four and grandmother of seven, appeared miraculously calm.
Founded in 1985, Burkhalter's museum is located above the office of her husband, a Stanford-educated audiologist. About twenty-five years ago, she said, her husband founded a school for hearing-impaired children between three and six years of age. Burkhalter's first contact with Barbie involved sewing doll clothes for school fund-raising events.
In the mid-eighties, fifteen years after Ruth Handler had had a mastectomy, Burkhalter also battled breast cancer. Assuming she and Handler would have much in common, she sought her out at a department-store promotion for Nearly Me. But to Burkhalter's disappointment, Handler took no interest in Burkhalter's museum. "She came out and said, 4Can I help you?' " Burkhalter told me. "I introduced myself and she said, T don't want to discuss Barbie with you or with anybody else. But if you want to talk to me about bras, I'd be happy to give you my time.' And I just turned around and walked out."
Nor did Burkhalter have the patience to deal with Billy Boy, a collector and jewelry-designer-turned-Mattel-consultant who appeared at her museum shortly after it opened. Boy, a New Yorker who now lives in Paris, was working on "The New Theater of Fashion," a collection of Barbie clothing by name designers loosely based on "Le Petit Theatre de la Mode," a post-World War II exhibition of real-life fashions displayed, for economic reasons, on dolls. He has since parted company with Mattel and Barbie, describing the doll on a recent BBC documentary as an "insulting image of women." Boy now manufactures his own doll, Mdvanii, named, some say, for the fortune hunter who married Barbara Hutton. It has greater detailing than Barbie—nipples and pubic hair—and a price well into the hundreds of dollars.
"The minute he downed Barbie, he killed his own business," Burkhalter told me. "I refused to buy one and I was telling everybody, 'Don't buy one; it's the only way you can stop the offensive things he's saying about something that you're collecting.' "
(Barbie is not the only figure whose relationship with Boy went sour. In his diaries, Andy Warhol reveals an initial fascination with the young man, which, by July 1986, had degenerated into contempt. He accuses Boy of "social climbing," and observes: "Billy Boy had a fight with the paparazzi . . . because he wanted to be in the pictures.")
Between her candor, knowledge, and willingness to display her rarities, Burkhalter is something of a rarity herself. Other major collectors are less generous. Glen Offield, whose five thousand dolls, including about two hundred one-of-a-kind prototypes, are valued at over a million dollars, is far from forthcoming (he refused me an interview), although he did allow Smithsonian magazine to photograph them for its cover in December 1989. He also permitted Mattel to shoot them for trading cards of Barbie's wardrobe through the years.
To be fair, however, Offield has recently received the kind of publicity that would make anyone want to avoid the press. On October 9, 1992, Offield's dolls were stolen from his San Diego house, and two fires were set to conceal the missing Barbies. "They meant everything to me," Offield told the Los Angeles Times. "I could do without eating. I don't know if I can live without them." He did not, however, have to try. Within two weeks, the dolls turned up, jammed into a rented storage closet under a freeway overpass. They had been shanghaied, the Associated Press reported, by Bruce Scott Sloggett, a male video pornographer for whom Offield once worked, and who died October 24, 1992, of a drug overdose.
Although he owns a vast, valuable hoard, New York-based collector Gene Foote has managed to maintain a sense of self-irony about his hobby. Foote's principal occupation is musical theater. He directed European productions of such shows as Sweet Charity, Annie Get Your Gun, Pal Joey, Little Shop of Horrors, and A Chorus Line. With his Barbies, he also stages production numbers—elaborate dioramas that he has been photographing for a book-in-progress called For the Love of a Doll. "It's literally the story of Barbie," he told me, "but I don't treat her as a product. I treat her as a human being. She's just a girl named Barbie; yet I give all of the Mattel facts."
Foote grew up in Washington County, Tennessee, in a house without electricity or running water. He still has a trace of a southern accent and a warm, courtly, old-fashioned manner—which includes referring to Barbie owners of my generation as "Barbie girls." As a boy, to entertain his younger female cousins, he made paper dolls from figures in the Sears Roebuck catalogue. "I'd cut out one of the women who had on the girdles or the underwear and glue her on cardboard. Then I would draw clothes for her and color them and cut them out," he explained. His cousins told him: "You made us Barbies before there were Barbies."
By far the strangest Barbie "collector" that I met was, in fact, an object in Foote's collection. As part of a 1965 ensemble called "Me 'N' My Doll," Mattel's Skipper doll was issued her own tiny Barbie—barely over an inch in height, with a painted red swimsuit and yellow hair. And I was struck by the total containment of Barbie's world. It wasn't enough for Skipper to receive Barbie's sisterly counsel; she, like every other girl, needed a Barbie totem—a thing onto which she could project her idealized future self—to internalize the Barbie ethos.
For Beauregard Houston-Montgomery, a New York City partygoer and wit-at-large in the style of Quentin Crisp, collecting Barbie isn't about closed universes or looking inward. It is about looking outward and upward to the heavens. Amassing the dolls, he said quite seriously, is a "way of dealing with alien abduction."
"People who have been kidnapped start collecting," he continued. "They have collecting manias. Some people collect dirt, like specimens. Other people collect plants." Or dolls that resemble their captors. To demonstrate this, he showed me his Barbie Fashion Queen, which, with its bulging eyes, nose defined by two dots, and insectoid face, did seem strikingly similar to the "aliens" described by alleged abductees. "I was about two, and I was visiting my grandmother on a farm in Missouri," he said. "And I remember waking up in the night and seeing this thing looking in the wi
ndow, this creature—looking in at me with huge eyes. It seemed to float—like, hover— and it kind of glowed. And I remember screaming and yelling for my parents until it finally disappeared."
Was he actually abducted? Did he plan a hypnotic session with Harvard psychologist John Maeh to find out?
"What do I need to remember being on a spaceship for?" he snapped. "People already think I'm insane; that would only verify it."
To convince me of his sanity, Houston-Montgomery telephoned his friend, illustrator Mel Odom. On a three-way conference call late one night, Odom told me that his painting of the 1964 Miss Barbie had a distinct otherworldly quality. "It's the most E.T. image ever made for children," he told me. "I had friends looking at it, asking, 'Who's the Martian?' "
Of course not all collectors accumulate dolls of investment quality. Robin Schwartz, a photographer whose work is in the permanent collection of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and whose recent book, Like Us, was a collection of primate images, put me in touch with a collector of a wholly other stripe: Dot Paolo, proprietor of the Rabbet Gallery in New Brunswick, New Jersey. If one anthropomorphizes Barbie, Paolo is the person who adopts the unadoptables—provides a foster home for the heartbreaking dolls that have been chewed or shorn or battered. Although she is a successful corporate art consultant, her "collecting" is more merciful than mercenary. "I don't have the dolls standing up with perfect clothes," she told me. "What I like is what the children have done to them, the way they cut their hair and drew on their faces."
Schwartz photographed Paolo's dolls—dozens of forlorn, damaged Barbies—with Paolo's dog, Starbuck, who is fifteen and deaf; Paolo's compassion does not extend only to plastic objects. It is not a comfortable photograph. Even though they are not human, there is something tragic about the flea-market Barbies; the sad, spent dolls cast away without so much as a glittering G-string. They will not be fought over at auction or cherished by grown men. But at least they are among their own kind, not condemned to the landfill, watching coffee grounds and banana peels disintegrate before their nonbiodegradable eyes.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
BARBIE FACES THE FUTURE
If Barbie were merely another global power brand like McDonald's or Coke, ending this book would be simple. One would focus on what Mattel has in mind for its billion-dollar damsel, as well as on the company's rapid growth. In 1993, it gobbled up Fisher-Price, a producer of preschool toys, and in 1994 it purchased Kransco, the maker of such classics as the Whamo Frisbee and the Hula Hoop. Today, it is as large as or larger than the industry's longtime Goliath, Hasbro.
But Barbie's story is, of course, far more than a tale of shareholders' meetings and annual reports. It is a saga of mothers and daughters, men and women, hope, despair, passion, and the striving after an impossible "American" ideal. Barbie is an emblem of "femininity," a concept quite different from biological femaleness. Barbie was invented by women for women, and the wrath brought to bear upon Barbie by some women is perhaps wrath deflected from themselves. For daughters are indoctrinated into "femininity" by mothers—not by a plastic object. "Even a generous mother," Simone de Beauvoir wrote, "who sincerely seeks her child's welfare, will as a rule think that it is wiser to make a 'true woman' of her, since society will more readily accept her if this is done." Barbie permits such "generous" mothers to wash their hands of the taint of "femininity," to blast Barbie as a "bimbo," even as their conflicting messages and ambivalences etch their way onto their daughters' evolving minds.
Barbie is also a space-age fertility icon, a totem of an ancient matriarchal power. In the dark, primal part of our brains where we process primitive archetypes, she is Ur-woman. As an icon, she has come to represent not merely "American" women or consumer capitalist women, but a female principle that defies national, ethnic, and regional boundaries.
Nor is Midge to be overlooked as an archetype. If Barbie is Ur-woman, Midge is Ur-sidekick. The entire female sex can, for the most part, be divided into Barbies and Midges. From Gilgamesh and Enkidu to Achilles and Patroclus to the Lone Ranger and Tonto, epic pairings have historically involved men. But by the mid-twentieth century, the convention broadened to include women. For every Lucy, there began to be an Ethel.
Because of Barbie's archetypal resonance, to mutilate a Barbie doll is not to vandalize a toy; it is to attack a woman. As evidence, one need merely cite the police investigation of the "Sandusky Slasher," who within six months between 1992 and 1993 cut the breasts and mutilated the crotches of two dozen Barbie dolls at three stores in Sandusky, Ohio—where, incidentally, Barbie Bazaar is published. (Sandusky is also the hometown of Sugar Kowalsky, Marilyn Monroe's character in Some Like It Hot.) In February 1993, Perkins Township police received an FBI profile of the suspected slasher—a white male between the ages of sixteen and thirty. He is "an organized and controlled individual who is probably dominated in a relationship with a woman, possibly his mother," reported the Chicago Tribune, and is "considered harmless by friends." The FBI appears to have treated the crime as if the doll were an actual woman; it has constructed a psychological profile reminiscent of Hitchcock's Norman Bates. But my hunch is that the assault—like so much of the art that involves Barbie mutilation—may have been upon Barbie as a construct of femininity rather than Barbie as an archetypal woman. And if so, the perpetrator might well be female. (I find myself wondering if Andrea Dworkin can account for her time when the attacks took place.)
Nor has Barbie merely been a crime victim. In one of the more lurid kidnappings of 1993, she was an accessory. Accused Long Island child abductor John Esposito required a powerful magnet to lure seven-year-old Katie Beers away from a shopping mall and into a dungeon beneath his house. What was his bait? The Barbie exercise video.
Then there is the "Barbie strategy": a way of gaining attention for one's ideas by linking them to Barbie. Shortly before the 1992 presidential election, pop culture analyst Greil Marcus wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times explaining Bill Clinton's "Elvis strategy"—how he grabbed press coverage by associating himself with the King. When President Bush accused him of promoting "Elvis Economics," Clinton raised a saxophone to his lips and belted out "Heartbreak Hotel" before the astonished eyes of Arsenio Hall and his television audience. "Slap Elvis on anything and you'll be noticed," Marcus wrote. "Elvis in a speech is a guaranteed soundbite on the evening news."
In 1992, the American Association of University Women demonstrated that Barbie was a guaranteed soundbite, too. When the group complained about a Barbie who said, "Math class is tough," the story made page one of The Washington Post. Like Clinton with Elvis, the AAUW used Barbie to direct attention to its own agenda—a 1991 study it had commissioned which showed that girls begin to lose their self-confidence at puberty. At age nine, the girls were assertive and academically self-assured; but by high school fewer than a third felt that way.
The upshot from the incident—a public discussion of how that age-old toxin "femininity" warps bright, androgynous minds—was, of course, a good thing. But I couldn't help feeling Barbie got a bum rap. After all, the doll didn't say, "Math class is tough/or girls," or "Math class is tough; let's study cosmetology." She simply said, "Math class is tough"—which struck me as a call to knuckle down and master the subject. Would a doll who said "Computers make homework fun" be likely to quake at the sight of an algebra problem? This underscores another pattern in Barbie's universe. People project fears and prejudices onto her; when a person talks at length about Barbie, one usually learns more about the speaker than about the doll.
Reinvention is a constant in Barbie's life, but at Mattel as in Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun. The 1993 Western Stampin' Barbie is a direct knockoff of the 1981 Western Barbie, except that the earlier model's eye winked. Similarly, Barbie has been pushing homeovestism—the masking of one's cross-gender strivings by decking oneself out like a parody of one's own gender—in slightly different guises for a decade. Modeled on the mid-eighties Day-to-Night Barbie,
the current "We Girls Can Do Anything" Career Collection dolls are packaged with implicitly "masculine" daytime work outfits and absurd caricatures of "feminine" evening dresses. The contrast, for instance, between the 1993 Police Officer Barbie's work garb—a natty indigo uniform with trousers, a necktie, and a long phallic flashlight—and her "glittery" evening frock—a gilded bustier with a gold-flecked tutu—is particularly striking. No one but a drag queen—or a homeovestite—would be caught dead in it.
In response to tough new environmental laws in Europe, however, Barbie's chemical composition, while still plastic, has changed. It is no longer exclusively polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which, when incinerated, produces hydrochloric acid, linked to acid rain. The doll's arms are made from ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA), its torso from acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS), and its bend-leg armature from polypropylene. Only its outer legs remain PVC—but this, too, is a different formula from that of the early dolls. In the late eighties, the German government passed a law restricting the amount of plasticizer (a softening agent) permitted in PVC. German consumer watchdogs worried that if a child accidentally swallowed a toy made of PVC, his or her stomach acid would extract its plasticizer, leaving behind a hard, dangerous object.
"We tried to argue with them by conducting tests where we had plasti-cized PVC Barbie shoes tied on a tether fed to pigs," explained Maki Papavasiliou, Mattel's vice president of corporate environmental affairs. "For weeks on end they would fish them out and weigh them to demonstrate that there was no weight loss—no plasticizer loss." But the Germans remained unconvinced, so Mattel complied with the law, making Barbie's legs less flexible than they used to be.