Forever Barbie (14 page)
Authors: M. G. Lord
Perhaps even more than Shackelford, Jill Elikann Barad, who joined Mattel in 1981 and was made its CEO in 1992, understands
the value of appearance—and how to create a look that sells. While still an undergraduate at New York's Queens College, she
traveled around the East Coast as a beauty consultant for Love Cosmetics. A drama major who graduated in 1973, she briefly
flirted with an acting career, landing a nonspeaking part as Miss Italian America in
Barbarella
producer Dino De Laurentiis's film
Crazy Joe;
but she renounced greasepaint for Coty Cosmetics—ascending, in a record three years, from a lowly trainer of department store
demonstrators to brand manager of its entire line. Nor did marriage to Paramount executive Thomas Barad detour her rise. When
she relocated to Los Angeles in 1978, the Wells, Rich, Greene ad agency put her in charge of its Max Factor account. Even
her application to Mattel—made after taking time off to have a baby—stressed her beauty know-how: she approached the company
with a plan to sell cosmetics to children.
Barad was not, however, permitted to realize her vision immediately. Slime was still an important product at Mattel, and Barad's
first assignment was to sell it in its then-current incarnation, A Bad Case of Worms, which featured, besides the popular
green glop, brown vinyl crawlers. The modified Slime also functioned as an activity toy. If you threw it against a wall, it
would stick and wriggle down. Barad rose to the occasion but ultimately confronted her boss, Tom Kalinske, and asked for greater
responsibility on an aspect of girls' toys. He assigned her to work with Shackelford on Barbie. While she was pregnant with
her second child she was promoted to marketing director, and what can be described as the doll's golden era began.
A chief element in positioning the new Barbie was her promotion. In 1984, after a campaign that featured "Hey There, Barbie
Girl" sung to the tune of "Georgy Girl," Mattel launched a startling series of ads that toyed with female empowerment. Its
slogan was "We Girls Can Do Anything," and its launch commercial, driven by an irresistibly upbeat soundtrack, was a sort
of feminist
Chariots of Fire.
Responding to the increased number of women with jobs, the ad opens at the end of a workday with a little girl rushing to
meet her business-suited mother and carrying her mother's briefcase into the house. A female voice says, "You know it, and
so does your little girl." Then a chorus sings, "We girls can do anything."
The ad plays with the possibility of unconventional gender roles. A rough-looking Little Leaguer of uncertain gender swaggers
onscreen. She yanks off her baseball cap, her long hair tumbles down, and—sigh of relief—she grabs a particularly frilly Barbie
doll. (The message: Barbie is an amulet to prevent athletic girls from growing up into hulking, masculine women.) There are
images of gymnasts executing complicated stunts and a toddler learning to tie her shoelaces. (The message: Even seemingly
minor achievements are still achievements.) But the shot with the most radical message takes place in a laboratory where a
frizzy-haired, myopic brunette peers into a microscope. Since the seventies, Barbie commercials had featured little girls
of different races and hair colors, but they were always pretty. Of her days in acting school, Tracy Ullman remarked in
TV Guide
that she was the "ugly kid with the brown hair and the big nose who didn't get [cast in] the Barbie commercials." With "We
Girls," however, Barbie extends her tiny hand to bookish ugly ducklings; no longer a snooty sorority rush chairman, she is
"big-tent" Barbie.
Although the ad, and, by extension, the whole career Barbie series, is not without problematic and contradictory content,
it is such a departure from the doll's fatuous, disco positioning in the seventies that one's jaw tends to drop. And one wonders:
How on earth did it happen?
One factor was the Barbie group at Ogilvy & Mather, the ad agency that had, in the seventies, acquired Carson/Roberts. By
1984—a year after Sally Ride's landmark space flight, the same year as Geraldine Ferraro's historic bid for the U.S. vice
presidency—Mattel urged O&M creative director Elaine Haller and writer Barbara Lui to, in Lui's words, "express where women
were and where they wanted their daughters to be at the time." Upon hearing that, Lui told me last year, she remembered her
own childhood on Manhattan's Upper West Side. "My mother's words came to me," she said. "My name is Barbara—I was called Bobbie
at home—and my mother used to say, 'Bobbie, you can do anything,' " which, with a few revisions, became the doll's new slogan:
"We girls can do anything, right, Barbie?"
And in 1985, it seemed "we girls" actually could. For the first time since the sixties, Barbie, in her Day-to-Night incarnation,
was positioned
as
a career woman
by
career women who knew what it took to achieve in the business world. (Not in an idealized world, but in the one that really
existed.)
What they came up with was Day-to-Night Barbie, a yuppie princess, equipped to charge, network, and follow the market. Her
attache case contains a credit card, a business card, a newspaper, and a calculator. Although her suit is baby-blanket pink
rather than boardroom blue, it is tastefully cut and covers her knees. Her outfit, however, does more than look good during
the day. Turn it inside out, and it is a fussy, glittery evening dress.
To decode the meaning of Day-to-Night Barbie, one must turn to the work of Joan Riviere, a female Freudian psychoanalyst,
who in 1929 published an essay about a pattern she had begun to notice among her professionally accomplished female analysands.
Many powerful women, Riviere discovered, were uncomfortable with their masculine strivings; to conceal them, they overcompensated,
decking themselves out like caricatures of women. One woman, after giving a successful lecture, flirted idiotically and inappropriately;
she also delivered her presentation in cartoonishly feminine clothes. Others exaggerated different aspects of femininity,
and one even dreamt that she had been saved from a precipitous fall by wearing a mask. "Womanliness therefore could be assumed
and worn as a mask," Riviere wrote, "both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if [a
woman] was found to possess it—much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove he has not the stolen
goods."
In her book
Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary,
psychoanalyst Louise J. Kaplan uses the term
homeovestism
for this strategy of cloaking one's cross-gender strivings by disguising oneself as a parody of one's own sex. It is the reverse
of transvestism, in which one acts out one's cross-gender impulses by wearing the clothes of the opposite sex. Nor is homeovestism
practiced exclusively by women. A male homeovestite, for instance, might mask his feminine urges by dressing up like Norman
Schwarzkopf. In literature, Scarlett O'Hara seems a convincing example of a female homeovestite. She is as aggressive and
tenacious as any biological male, but she conceals it behind fluttering eyelashes and an affected fragility. Of course, the
only people who know they are homeovestites are the homeovestites themselves. It is, I suppose, possible for a woman to tart
up like a Gabor sister and not know she is a caricature. But if a high-powered female executive wears enough makeup for a
Kabuki performance, negotiates in a purr, tosses her hair coquettishly, unbuttons more than two buttons on her clinging silk
blouse, and generally vamps around the conference table, she may well be a homeovestite.
Day-to-Night Barbie strikes me as a teaching implement for homeovestism. Clearly, the doll is meant to be a serious professional;
her case contains the tools for executive achievement, where the idea of possessing a "tool," a colloquialism for the penis,
implies a sort of phallic empowerment. Her nighttime outfit, however, is about hiding those "tools." Like the thief who turns
out his pockets, the doll disguises herself by exposing herself. Her shoulders are bare; her toes are uncovered; her translucent
skirt flutters around her legs. She is fluffy, girlish, vulnerable. By day, a virago; by night, Little Bo Peep.
Mattel issued Day-to-Night ensembles for other vocations as well. By rearranging her costume, any female achiever—teacher,
dress designer, TV news reporter—can masquerade as Maria Maples or Donna Rice. Ken also has a Day-to-Night incarnation, but
his seems to reflect cross-class rather than cross-gender strivings. By day, a TV sports reporter; by night, a Wayne Newton
impersonator.
Although Kaplan categorizes homeovestism as a "perverse strategy," it strikes me as both cynical and pragmatic. Masculine
business clothing has always been power-coded; something as subtle as the width of a pinstripe can signal an executive's status.
But for women, the coding is less easy to decipher. Whether one likes it or not, there is a strong power-pulchritude nexus
in business; making it to the top in a fashion or entertainment field involves not just the bottom line, but the hemline,
neckline, hairline, etc. Of course too much glamour can be as bad as not enough. It interferes with a woman's ability to be
taken seriously. But if one has to err, Barbie teaches, better soignee than sorry.
Barbie's 1986 astronaut incarnation certainly weighs in on the side of glamour. When Barbie first blasted off in 1965, she
wore a baggy gray spacesuit. By 1986, you wouldn't catch her in that kind of
shmatte.
She comes with a hot pink miniskirt, a clear plastic helmet, sleek pink bodysuit, even silver space lingerie. "I thought Barbie
would
dress
if she were on the moon," said Carol Spencer, the outfit's designer.
She-Ra, Princess of Power, is another Mattel toy from this period that explores the link between female strength and female
beauty. Promoted with the slogan, "The fate of the world is in the hands of one beautiful girl," She-Ra, a five-and-a-half-inch
action figure, was introduced as the sister of Mattel's He-Man in 1985, the same year as Day-to-Night Barbie. He-Man by then
required no introduction. On the market since 1982, he and his fellow Masters of the Universe, based on a popular children's
television show, were by 1984 second in sales only to Barbie.
She-Ra inhabits a world called Etheria, a curious mix of Middle Earth and Rodeo Drive. From what the catalogue terms its "plush
rug and free-standing fireplace" to its "clothes tree for shields, swords and capes," She-Ra's Crystal Castle is a sort of
Valhalla 90210, populated by sturdy, breast-plated females reminiscent of the biker Valkyries in Charles Ludlum's Wagnerian
satire,
Der Ring Gott Farblonjet.
There is a villain named Catra ("Jealous Beauty!" the catalogue calls her), a secret agent named Double Trouble (who literally
has two faces), a boyfriend named Bow, and several assorted allies including Castaspella, an "enchantress who hypnotizes."
Because of their long, combable hair and their sparkling outfits the figures were introduced as "fashion dolls," but this
group doesn't just change its clothes. Children can use the dolls to act out a struggle between females for the title of "most
powerful woman in the Universe."
Although She-Ra is not outfitted for the boardroom, the doll, perhaps even more than Day-to-Night Barbie, seems to be an instructional
tool for corporate achievement. She-Ra's state of nature is a state of perpetual war. All the inhabitants are armed, and some
of them are dangerous. Women are designated as jealous, manipulative (spell-casting), and Janus-faced. And of all the weapons
each doll possesses, perhaps the most potent is her beauty.
While She-Ra was not a flop—in the first of her two years on the market, she generated about $65 million in domestic sales—she
never approached Barbie. Some say this is because the dolls were too robust. "They looked like lady wrestlers," observed collector
Beauregard Houston-Montgomery. But I suspect She-Ra's short life was predicated on metaphor. No matter what she wears, Barbie
is a female fertility archetype. She-Ra, by contrast, lacked Barbie's pronglike feet; she and her pals could not plunge their
toes into the earth, they merely stood solidly upon it. They had no totemic link to the power of the Great Mother. Their abundant
hair and radioactive eye makeup are not enough. If Barbie is pure physical yin, they are, alas, rather yang.
Barad was inspired to create She-Ra and her world after a conversation with her sister, who had disparaged toymakers for inflicting
silly, frilly playthings on American daughters. "It seemed time to offer little girls a role model who also had strength and
power," Barad told
Working Woman
in 1990. And to play out the other early-eighties fantasy—"having it all," where "all" referred to children and a career—Barad
invented the Heart Family, a Barbie-sized couple that, unlike Barbie and Ken, were married and had a brood of plastic children.
The She-Ra state of war, however, far more than the Heart household's domesticity, reflected the atmosphere at Mattel during
the dolls' development. By 1984, CEO Arthur Spear's diversification strategy had proved disastrous. Mattel was on the brink
of bankruptcy. It had begun the year burdened by a staggering $394 million loss from the previous year. Like the executives
at Warner Communications' Atari division, Spear had been seduced by the seeming boundlessness of the home video game market.
To him, the country's craving for the likes of Pac-Man and Space Invaders looked insatiable. Inspired by Atari's gargantuan
profits—from 1979 to 1980 Atari's sales increased from $238.1 million to $512.7 million—Mattel in 1980 introduced Intellivision,
a competitor to Atari's home video system that in 1981 did, in fact, initially do well. The company's electronics division
was also at work on a line of home computers.