by M. G. Lord
Mattel has also adapted its packaging to comply with European regulations. The display windows in Barbie's European boxes are no longer made of PVC, and the company has made a commitment to use more recycled materials. The floor, in fact, in Barbie's three-story town house is liiade of postconsumer recycled ABS.
Although Barbie wasn't sold in Europe until the early sixties, Germany and France are now among Mattel's most important markets. Likewise, Mattel has recently begun selling Barbies in Japan, instead of issuing Barbie-like teen fashion dolls through a Japanese franchise. Barbie kicked off her new internationalism in 1990 with the "Barbie Summit," a kiddie United Nations that took place at New York's Waldorf-Astoria. Its slogan, in English, was "One Child/One World," which was emblazoned in several languages on the official Summit doll's carton. But one had to question Mattel's phrasing. The translations were not always literal—the German version, for instance, was "Fine Welt fur alle Kinder"—literally "One world for all the children." Yet the Italian translation needlessly preserved the English construction. Thus "Un bimbo/un mondo" was boldly displayed on the box.
Despite its economic problems, Eastern Europe is a new frontier for Barbie. Children in Moscow clamor for the doll, and often have to settle for stout Russian knock-offs with large feet, smudged makeup, and fright-wig hair. Families who can afford an authentic Barbie often cannot afford authentic clothes; they must sew outfits for the doll. To relieve the shortage, some American Barbie collectors organized a shipment of dolls to Russia, and even Cher, no fan of Barbie, brought dozens of them on her recent trip to Armenia, whence her family originated. "I always hated you, Barbie," Cher told People magazine, "I always thought you were a blond bimbo, but now I see that you have your uses."
Not all members of the former Soviet empire are welcoming Barbie with glee. In a full-page 1993 article in Sobesednik, a Russian pop cultural journal that had, until 1990, been a supplement to the Communist Youth Party newspaper, two waggish writers joked about Barbie's anatomical deficiencies and high cost—so steep, in fact, that in order to afford her, three families had to share her: "For a week the American girl will live with Masha; for a week with Dasha; for a week with Kolya." They describe Barbie as "the plaything of the century" and—racy pun intended—as "the most popular woman for sale in all the world."
One could end here, with Barbie's Eastern exodus, a path obliquely reminiscent of Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. But having opened this book with an emblematic spectacle, I had hoped to close with one—perhaps a snapshot of Teflon felon Ruth Handler restored to her rightful glory, autographing thirty-fifth-anniversary products for hundreds of fans in the Barbie boutique at Manhattan's FAO Schwarz. Yet the essence of Barbie—what makes her more than a global power brand—has to do with the way she colonizes the inner lives of children. Thus to des, ribe an official corporate function would have been to slight Barbie's grass-roots identity.
I was about to abandon the anecdotal approach when I learned that the College Art Association's 1994 meeting was scheduled to take place at the New York Hilton the same week as the American International Toy Fair. A little over thirty blocks from the showrooms where Mattel would be hawking its latest Barbies, Erica Rand, a Bates College art historian, was slated to make a very different Barbie presentation. Rand wasn't interested in the doll per se, but in how it could be subverted for women's pleasure. Her work had been inspired, she told Lingua Franca magazine, by a 1989 photo spread in On Our Backs, a lesbian pornographic journal, that featured a Barbie-like doll used as a dildo. Presented as part of a panel cosponsored by the Gay and Lesbian Caucus, her paper was entitled "The Biggest Closet Ever Sold: Barbie's."
I soon found myself on the phone with artists, scholars, and other contributors to this book, urging them to hear Rand's talk with me. Many were interested; two academics, with whom I had talked through some applications of feminist and psychoanalytic theory, had planned to attend even before my call. A. M. Homes, author of "A Real Doll," agreed to come, as did my college pal Ella King Torrey, a grants officer for a foundation she prefers not to name, who had debriefed Charlotte Johnson and Jack Ryan. I had hoped that Donna Gibbs, the Mattel publicist I had grown to admire for her ability to translate deep distaste into remarkable courtesy, might leave Toy Fair and hear the talk, but she was needed on the display floor.
Likewise, Maggie Robbins, the artist who makes "Barbie Fetishes" by hammering rusty nails into the doll, canceled at the last minute. Things were busy at McCall's and she couldn't get away.
As serendipity would have it, however, the admission pass I had obtained for Gibbs did not go to waste. Cindy Jackson, the woman who had been surgically remade into Barbie, was in town from London and called to say hello. Although it would cut into the time she had allotted to visit department stores, she agreed to show up, and materialized at the Hilton with an enormous shopping bag filled with L'eggs pantyhose. (She can't buy them on her side of the Atlantic.)
The panel—which also included papers titled "Warhol's Closet: Homosexuality, the Collection and the Articulation of Identity," "Is It Different Yet?," "Closet Ain't Nothin' but a Dark and Private Place," and "Heroic Swooners: The Androgyne and Homoerotic Impulse in Early French Romantic Painting"—was convened in an upstairs ballroom, that, fifteen minutes before the session began, was already packed. People stood two deep around the room's periphery and greedily eyed the seats I was saving. So large was the crowd that A. M. Homes and I missed each other; she wound up sitting across the room, invisible in an ocean of black leather and tweed.
The program did not start promptly. Jackson glanced at her watch; precious shopping time was ticking away. Rand's talk was scheduled first, but when the lights dimmed, slide after slide of provocatively sprawled youths flashed on screen—the heroic swooners. The friend seated beside me passed a note: "If Rand isn't next, I'm out of here."
As if in response, the androgyne apologist stepped down and Rand took the microphone. She was a reedy, dark-haired woman, and in her I thought I recognized a fellow Midge. But when she opened her mouth, the feelings of solidarity vanished. Rand's talk was an exercise in the "Barbie Strategy"—advancing one's political agenda by lashing it to Barbie. After what must have been the twentieth time she used the word "subversion," I began to be cross. Rand said Mattel had bought the patent to the Lilli doll, which it hadn't. She characterized the Random House Barbie novels, written by young female loose cannons at Mattel's advertising agency, as if they had been produced under tight corporate scrutiny. I don't often passionately identify myself as a journalist, someone who unearths facts and verifies them, but as Rand spoke, I embraced that tedious, literal-minded persona.
WHEN RAND FINISHED, I WALKED OUT OF THE HILTON with Ella King Torrey. (Stalked out might be more accurate.) An inveterate Barbie scholar, Ella, too, had caught factual errors, but they didn't seem to bother her. "Relax," she told me. "Rand's point didn't have anything to do with Barbie. It was about the politics of sexual identity. She could have just as easily been talking about toasters."
Ella is a tall woman with abundant blond hair who, in the muted February light, might have passed for an early-sixties executive Barbie—Busy Gal or Career Girl. She was not literally decked out in one of those outfits, but she wore the nineties equivalent—an expensive black silk pantsuit exquisitely offset with silver jewelry and a diaphanous scarf. Even in the seventies, when clothes were so ugly one could hardly bear to look at them, Ella had managed to accessorize. Her scarves always fell the way they were supposed to fall, and even when she wore whimsical jewelry, it looked drop-dead chic.
Ella, it is fair to say, brings out the Midge in me, as she has since we were undergraduates. So I was docile when she prescribed a shopping trip to ease my irritation, and steered us toward Takashimaya, the very grand Japanese department store one block east on Fifth Avenue. In the Random House novels, Midge never questioned Barbie; she trusted that Barbie knew best. And I liked the idea of visiting a store with
ties to Tokyo. It harked back to those original Japanese Barbies with their hard mouths and seductive stares who had so beguiled us in our youth.
A doorman pulled open the portal to a vast, clean, perfect atrium that made us feel almost doll-like in scale. There was, I would like to say, a whiff of cherry blossoms, but, in fact, the smell was more like that of thirty-five-year-old vinyl. We stepped into the elevator and were transported.
The afternoon was young. We had credit cards. And somewhere deep in our intuitive intelligences, we accepted what we could not change: Barbie was us.
NOTES
All interviews for this book were tape-recorded.
CHAPTER ONE: WHO IS BARBIE, ANYWAY?
6 Impermanence of Warhol's icons: See Arthur C. Danto, "Warhol," Encounters and Reflections (New York: The Noondav Press, 1991), pp. 286-293.
7 The dark side of Dietrich: See Dietrich's cruelest biographer, Maria Riva, Dietrich (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).
7 Statistics on Mattel's sales furnished by the company.
8 "My life has been spent . . .": From 60065 in Toyland, a BBC TV production in association with Lionheart Television International, Inc., 1991. (Shown on the Discovery Channel in 1993 as Dolls in Playland.)
8 Nancy Rivera Brooks, "Barbie's Doting Sister," in the Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1990.
9 A "hooker or actress between performances": Interview with Jack Ryan by Ella King Torrey, Los Angeles, December 1979. (All Ryan quotations from this interview.)
10 F. Scott Fitzgerald's remarks on contradictory ideas: "The Crack-up," Esquire, February 1936, pp. 41, 164.
10 Quindlen and Goodman on Barbie: According to my informal scoring, Quindlen has chalked up the largest number of gratuitous assaults. For further thoughts on disparagement of Barbie as "simplistic, good-hearted feminism," see Mim Udovich, "Our Barbies, Ourselves," The Village Voice, June 15, 1993, p. 20. Udovich discusses the folly of an objective ideological corollary for the term feminist. "Anna Quindlen reviles Barbie (i had never wanted American girls to have a role model whose feet were perpetually frozen in the high heel position,' she writes in her latest anthology, Thinking Out Loud),"Udovich observes, (and) "this brand of simplistic, good-hearted feminism has seemingly come to be regarded as an objective ideological corollary."
10 "rough housework": Interview with Charlotte Johnson by Ella King Torrey, Hawthorne, California, December 1979. (All Johnson quotations from this interview.)
10 Vicarious leisure: See Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 72.
11 "man shortage": See Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1991).
12 "dynamic obsolesence": Harley Earl quoted by David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard Books, 1993), p. 127.
13 "Gender is a kind of imitation . . . impersonation and approximation": Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," in Diana Fuss, ed., Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 29.
13 "womanliness as a masquerade": Joan Riviere, "Womanliness as a Masquerade," in Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan, eds., Formations of Fantasy (New York: Routledge, 1986), pp. 35-44.
14 Ru-Paul's Barbie mastectomies: See Ru-Paul's BBC documentary short on the introduction of the Shani doll, 1991.
14 The Barbi Twins diet: See Linda Stasi, Doug Vaughan, and Anthony Scaduto, "Inside New York," New York Newsday, January 11, 1993, p. 13.
15 "I believed in Barbie. . . . There's more Barbie dolls in this country than there are people": Michael Milken quoted on ABC News's 20/20, June 4, 1993.
16 Babv dolls came into existence in 1820: See Antonia Fraser, A History of Toys (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966), p. 160.
17 "Childhood was invented in the eighteenth century . . . the child became the savior of mankind, the symbol of free imagination and natural goodness": Louise J. Kaplan, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary (New York: Anchor Books, 1991), p. 411.
17 Americans lost their taste for German toys: See Fraser, .op. cit., p. 206.
CHAPTER TWO: A TOY IS BORN
18 Marilyn Monroe's birth and childhood: See Norman Mailer, Marilyn (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, Inc., 1973).
18 Handler biographical information: Interviews with Ruth Handler, Los Angeles, July 7, 1992; Ruth and Elliot Handler, Los Angeles, April 26, 1993. (All Ruth Handler and Elliot Handler quotations, unless otherwise attributed in the text, are from these two interviews.)
21 Marx Toys' advertising budget: See Sydney Stern and Ted Schoenhaus, Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1990,) pp. 35-37.
23 "When she walks . . . the earth shakes": Interview writh Ken Handler, New York, January 22, 1993. (All Ken Handler quotations are from this interview.)
23 The Handlers' art collection described in Sotheby's catalogue, November 14, 1985.
24 Ryan "had a funny little body . . .": Interview with Gwen Davis, New York City, January 13, 1993.
24 Details of Ryan house: See Richard Warren Lewis, "Jack Ryan and Zsa Zsa: A Millionaire Inventor and His Hungarian Barbie Doll," People, July 14, 1975, pp. 60-63. Also, interview with Bill Smedley (one of the engineers who briefly lived in Jack's castle), San Bernadino County, California, Mav 2, 1993.
25 "He ruined a perfectly good . . .": Interview with Nonna Greene, Bel-Air, California, October 30, 1992.
25 "torture chamber," "Jack's sex life would have made the average Penthouse reader blanch with shock": Zsa Zsa Gabor, One Lifetime Is Not Enough (New York: Delacorte Press, 1991), p. 235.
25 The birth of the Bild Lilli doll: See Billy Boy, Barbie, Her Life and Times Motivated (New York: Crown Publishers, 1987), p. 19.
26 "We had a fight . . ." ("Wir hatten Streit miteinander, und da hat er mir alle Geschenke wieder abgenommen.,T): Lilli, Bild Zeitung, June 26, 1952.
26 ". . . and in your opinion what should I take off?" {"Und welchen Ted soil ich dann Ihrer Meinung nach ausziehen?'): Lilli, Bild Zeitung, July 26, 1953.
26 "Can't you give me the name . . ." ("Konnen Sie mir nicht Namen und Adresse dieses grossen, schbnen, reichen Mannes sagen?"): Lilli, Bild Zeitung, June 24, 1952.
26 Sculpted by Max Weissbrot: Billy Boy, op. cit., p. 19. 26 Images from Lilli promotional brochure, 1955.
27 "I saw it once in a guy's car . . . They were lifting up her skirts and pulling down her pants and stuff": Interview with Cy Schneider, NewYork City, June 26, 1992. (All Schneider quotations are from this interview.)
31 "The Lilli doll looked kind of mean. . . And Japanese people didn't like it at all.": Interview with Frank Nakamura, Santa Monica, California, September 19, 1992. (All Nakamura quotations are from this interview.)
34 "She was very resourceful . . .":Interview with Seymour Adler, Los Angeles, September 16, 1992; telephone interview, July 28, 1993. (All Adler quotations are from these interviews.)
34 The men "would go out to get bombed . . ." and other Japanese business practices: Telephone interview with Lawanna Adams, October 7, 1992.
35 "I think Japan was the perfect place . . .": Interview with Joe Cannizzaro, El Segundo, California, September 21, 1992. (All Cannizzaro quotations are from this interview.)
36 Ernest Dichter and motivational research: See Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: PocketBooks, 1981). (Dichter appears throughout the book; his research methods are discussed on page 29.)
36 "All you care about is having people come to the U.S. who have rich relatives": Ernest Dichter, Getting Motivated (New York: Pergamon Press,1979), p. 29.
37 "didn't dare" say . . . "naked girls" sold the magazine: Ibid., p. 34. (All references to Dichter's marketing strategy and psychoanalytic take on merchandise are from this book.)
37 Dichter's "depth interviews": Packard, op. cit., p. 29.
37 "He never asked a direct question": Interview with Hedy Dichter, Croton-on-Hudson, New York, August 10, 1993.
3
8 "Properly manipulated . . . American housewives can be given a sense of identity . . . by the buying of things": Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell Publishing, 1984), p. 208. (Dichter referred to as "The manipulator," p. 211.)
38 Size of toy study control group: See Ernest Dichter, ed., A Motivational Research Study in the Field of Toys for Mattel Toys, Inc. Unpublished study prepared by the Institute for Motivational Research, Inc., Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., June 1959. p. 5.
38 "The big long gun satisfies his need for power": Ibid., p. 122.
38 "Adults frown upon doll play on the part of little boys . . .": Ibid., p. 23.
39 Is Barbie "a nice kid . . . or a little too flashy?": Ibid., p. 7.
39 "should the wardrobe be sophisticated, even wicked?": Ibid., p. 6.
39 "the gift psychology of the adult . . . Are men afraid of their wives" taunts should they bring home a 'sexy' doll?": Ibid., p. 7.
39 "I know little girls want dolls with high heels . . . undue moral pressures": Ibid., p. 71.
39 (MRS. B. SEEMED VERY MUCH EMBARRASSED . . . "Maybe the bride doll is O.K., but not the one with the sweater": Ibid., p. 73.