Forever Barbie (28 page)

Home is Downey, California—a grid of houses that resemble the Barbie doll's fold-up dwellings. As poignantly tacky as Karen's
songs, Downey's matchbox mansions are an emblem of the postwar prosperity that changed the relationship of middle-class consumers
to their food. After Haynes's camera has panned down a suburban block, it sweeps down a supermarket aisle—visually equating
prefab houses with packaged foods—while a voiceover explains how, after World War II, food became more convenient, varied,
and plentiful. But in defiance of this bounty, teenage girls began, in increasing numbers, to starve themselves.

Haynes makes an ironic connection between anorexia's symptoms and the content of the Carpenters' lyrics. After explaining
the "high" that some anorexics get from constant hunger, Haynes cuts to the voice of Karen singing, "I'm on the top of the
world looking down on creation . . . " And during Karen's short-lived marriage, the soundtrack plays "Lost in the Masquerade."

"These dolls are sold as representing a way of looking, a way of appearing, a way of dressing, and a way of living," Hanhardt
continued. And what Haynes does is rupture the seamlessness of that appearance. "He shows the complexity of the Carpenters
as people," Hanhardt said, "and how they had to remake themselves into these popular icons—these things to sell."

Psychotherapist Laura Kogel remembers that the movie gave her chills. "They had to do with Karen not being seen as a person,"
she said. "And consequently she didn't see herself that way. You come to see yourself as a person through the eyes of those
who raise you."

JAUNE QUICK-TO-SEE SMITH, "PAPER DOLLS FOR A POST-COLUMBIAN WORLD WITH ENSEMBLES CONTRIBUTED BY U.S. GOVERNMENT," 1991
COURTESY STEINBAUM KRAUSS GALLERY, prevalence of eating disorders among
M.Y.C.

Christine's remarks make one wonder about the Alt family. Sibling rivalry takes many forms, but sisters don't usually compete
to see who can lose the most weight without dying. As near as I could tell, the problem with these models was that they only
saw themselves as objects. True, by defin-ition, a model commodifies her body, but that commodification doesn't have to erase
the person inside.

Still gorgeous at fifty, Lauren Hutton is proof that models can retain a sense of themselves as subjects—which, for older
models, may make the difference between working or fading away. In an industry where "live dolls" used to be discarded when
they showed signs of age, Hutton has made the transition from beautiful "girl" to beautiful "woman." She seems more visible
as a model now than she was twenty-five years ago.

"When I first started modeling, I mostly worked for bad stylists in bad catalogue houses trying to get a break," Hutton told
me. "And it was amazing. People would treat you like this sort of anonymous doll. They would touch you and be talking to each
other—and I wasn't used to people touching me. I have dimples in my earlobes and I had a stylist try to smack a pair of pierced
earrings through my dimples. She had her head turned talking. And I just went straight into the air because there were no
holes there.

"The reason you become a successful model is because you learn how to make people see you as a person," she continued. "Not
anonymous. You find a way of making contact. Of course, once I became famous, people were terrified of touching me in any
way. But that's a whole other category."

Significantly, Hutton has refused offers from toy companies to make a doll in her image. The first request came at the beginning
of her career; the second in the late eighties, about the time Matchbox Toys issued its "Real Model Collection" with likenesses
of Christie Brinkley, Cheryl Tiegs, and Beverly ("I ate nothing. I mean nothing") Johnson. "I had this instant repulsion at
the idea," Hutton said. "And it was a weird feeling because I was flattered and repulsed at the same time."

In part, this had to do with her childhood distaste for baby dolls. "They looked larval," she told me. "What I really liked
to do was to take their heads off and try to figure out how their eyes opened and shut. I never found out, because once you
have the head off, you can't ever get the eyeballs back in. But with each doll, I convinced myself that this time, I would
find out their secrets. So I decapitated many."

After some reflection, however, she discerned what really bothered her. "Giving little girls anything that makes them want
to emulate a totem or an individual—rather than a generic idea of girlhood or womanhood—seems to be very unhealthy," she said.
"It's like bad karma. If the greatest destiny is to find your own unique path, then one of the worst things you can do is
suggest that people follow your way. I am not a totem. I have three younger sisters that I helped to raise, and when I started
modeling, I wouldn't let my mother put my pictures up anywhere in the house."

Hutton was sixteen when Mattel brought out Barbie, a doll that didn't exactly win her heart. "I thought it was even creepier
than the larvae I had beheaded," she said. "But when Brigitte Bardot came out, I remember thinking that she and the doll were
sort of similar. You could say the first great international icon was Bardot. She was always pictured in a bouffant gingham
skirt—spaghetti straps, big bouffant, and a tiny, tiny waist. She had that long fine neck and these long, long bones. And
she'd be up on real high heels. And we were all trying to look like that."

Yet when Hutton herself matured, she understood the resentment. "It took me about seven years to turn forty," she said. "I
went from thirty-eight to forty-five and it was so horrible and so painful. I had been a celebrated 'girl,' and suddenly I
was a woman and there was no place for women in our society— unless they had made some incredible mark, usually by imitating
a man, in a business way. When I was turning forty, sometimes I would see a beautiful young girl and I would get so confused
I'd want to hide. I suddenly understood what a lot of the feelings toward me had been about. And I had real sympathy. I would
feel jealousy deep inside—and I would be very ashamed of myself because I've always loathed that in me, at any time about
anything. I was seeing someone young and beautiful and I didn't feel that I was young and beautiful. And in fact, I wasn't:
I was no longer a girl."

"But you were still beautiful," I couldn't help blurting.

"The beauty of women was not accepted or celebrated," Hutton explained. "It had no credentials, was not certified, was not
allowed, did not exist in our society. It's a brand-new idea and it's just happening now in America."

If Hutton is right, this could mean a new challenge for Mattel: Mature Barbie. Not Crone Barbie or Decrepit Barbie, but a
Barbie who's been around the block, and looks better for the wear.

"I'm registered with the British Internal Revenue as the Bionic Woman," she explained. "I run my cosmetic surgery bureau as
a firsthand experience, so all my operations are tax-deductible. . . . The BBC even paid for my boob job." But no longer is
she satisfied merely remaking herself. Her mission, which evolved while assisting other women through Barbie-izations, is
to create "a bionic army."

In Barbie's early years, Mattel struggled to make its doll look like a real-life movie star. Today, however, real-life celebrities—as
well as common folk—are emulating her. The postsurgical Dolly Parton looks like the post-surgical Ivana Trump looks like the
postsurgical Michael Jackson looks like the postsurgical Joan Rivers looks like . . . Barbie. This chapter will not deal with
body image, ethnic identification, or self-esteem. It is about nuts and bolts—Mary Shelley—scalpels, silicone, and sutures.
Cindy has earned a section of her own.

When we met at Sfuzzi, a restaurant on Manhattan's Upper West Side, for dinner in 1993, Cindy's lower lip was the only part
of her body that had not been modified—and she had spent the afternoon talking to a Park Avenue doctor about enlarging it.
She also wanted a fat transplant in her cheeks. "I have dents here which need filling in," she explained. "See my cheek here
is flat—but I have dents underneath."

"I can't see them," I said.

"But they're there," she assured, craning forward so I could get a better view. Then she scrutinized me. "You don't need your
eyes done," she said. I had discussed my drooping lids—and fear of pain—in a phone conversation months earlier. "Everybody's
eyes will sag after a certain point." My jawline, however, was another story. "You might do a little liposuction there. But
I wouldn't say it's an emergency case. Work on keeping your chin up a little."

As we studied a picture of her post-op face, bruised and looking troublingly like the eggplant appetizer on an adjacent table,
she told me, "I want patients to understand that it's major surgery. It's not like going to the beauty shop. There are real
dangers—complications that happen, rarely, but they do happen."

Then she moved on to her philosophy. "Men are really drawn to women for their looks," she said. "They can't stand a sick woman,
much less a sick, ugly, swollen woman. Besides, I think men worry that you're going to die on the operating table and there'll
be nobody there to make their dinner."

As if on cue, our dinner arrived. Avoiding animal products is the extent of Cindy's health regimen; she keeps "fit" through
surgery. "It's not me to go to a gym and exercise . . . I don't know that it's really good for you. You go to the gym and
you have to keep going. I'm careful who I sweat with, too. I don't like to go in those places and do all those things. Especially
now— people expect me to be perfect." She told me about her plans to have the loose flesh removed from her upper arms, an
operation in which the scarring itself causes the muscles to appear taut. Thinking of the hours I had logged on the Gravitron
to vanquish my own vexatious jiggle, the operation seemed almost a good idea. Then my eyes returned to Cindy's "in-between"
photo. Cowardice, I concluded, was the better part of valor.

She scowled. "I didn't grow up to be Barbie to be victimized like that. When I do the shows, I get to go home—I get a free
trip, that's why I do it." "Home" now for Cindy is outside Chicago, where her sister lives. She is deliberately vague about
the location because her sister, a married executive, frowns on her surgical way of life; she won't even have her ears pierced.
"She has the perfect life and I have the perfect face and body," Cindy said.

Cindy does not have fond memories of her childhood in Fremont, where, as a teenager, she worked in a ketchup factory. There
was the indignity of catalogue-shopping—tracing the outline of her feet to order shoes that pinched, like the pennies that
were expended to buy them. But even amid the meanness, hope effervesced: in the form of a stylish doll with a bubble cut and
curvilinear shoes that hugged its curvilinear insteps. Barbie didn't have a husband or babies; Barbie had careers . . . and
options.

"I watched my mother give her life to be overrun by a man—my father," Cindy told me. "And not to fulfill her potential because
of men and children. If I didn't have that freedom, I wouldn't have that husband or partner." Cindy's boyfriend, an audio
engineer she met while performing in a rock band, is, she told me, very Ken-like—and to her, male good looks are as important
as female ones. Like Barbie, however, she seems to prefer freedom to marriage.

Even though they have no financial relationship—Cindy considers surgery consultants in the pay of physicians to be unethical—one
compatriot on her surgical crusade is Dr. Edward Latimer-Sayer, an English plastic surgeon. "Although Cindy has always talked
about this Barbie-doll image, in England at any rate, the Barbie doll is associated with stupidity— a sort of nice body, vacant
brain sort of thing," Latimer-Sayer told me. "And Cindy is anything but that." Although she dropped out of art school before
moving to London to work as a photographer, she is well spoken and well read. She is also a member of Mensa.

Latimer-Sayer urged Jackson to get greater firsthand knowledge of surgical procedures. "He kept inviting me to operations
and I finally went," she said. "I can see I'm going to be a regular fixture in the operating room."

Most of Latimer-Sayer's patients are not like Cindy—who, because of her consumer watchdog organization, gets celebrity treatment.
"I think I'd starve to death waiting for the models and actresses to show up," he told me. "The majority of my patients are
housewives, nurses, hairdressers, secretaries. Ordinary people. They don't want to be out of the ordinary, but they just feel
that one particular part lets them down. An attractive young girl with a big hooky nose doesn't feel normal."

Significantly, Latimer-Sayer's patients don't choose their doctor; he chooses them. A satisfied patient, he believes, is one
with realistic expectations. When, for instance, I told him about my fear of pain, he suggested I might be a poor candidate
for surgery. Some procedures require greater screening than others. "Liposuction is an operation where you really have to
choose your patients well," he said. "You get a bulky patient and you try and get the fat off them, it simply doesn't work.
You end up with lumpy, irregular areas and the skin hanging in folds.

"I identify with the patient what the aims of each particular operation are," he told me. "I mean, I don't mind patients having
lots of operations. After all, I've got children to send through university." Latimer-Sayer also believes in using his time
efficiently—especially with things like breast implants. "Some people fiddle about for hours—one wonders what they're doing.
. . . But once you've done a few hundred, you ought to know where to cut the pocket and what size fits the pocket. In the
main, operations take less time this side of the Atlantic than they do in America. Because American surgeons are looking over
their shoulder for the lawyers all the time."

In talking with Latimer-Sayer, I got the sense that the hows of surgery were more important than the whys. Decisions to, say,
westernize Asian eyelids should rest with the patient, not the surgeon. "If you have the double fold—what they call the European
eyelid—you are considered more trustworthy, higher class, and you're more likely to do well in life," he told me. "If you
have the Oriental eyelid with the thick upper lid with no fold, it's like being a second-class citizen. . . . Now if there's
a little simple cosmetic operation to make somebody go from a second-class citizen on appearance to a first-class citizen
on appearance, no wonder it's popular.

"If for instance, someone had developed a technique to make black people white . . . they would have been swamped, wouldn't
they? Not because there's anything wrong with being black, but it's nicer to be white in a white society."

There is, however, one process he wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole: penis enlargement. "A lot of men seem to want it,"
he said. "You take a bit of fat from somewhere where there's a bit to spare and put it in the penis and it's fatter. But the
trouble is that fat doesn't stay there; it tends to absorb, and sometimes you can get all sorts of other troubles with it.
It can generally turn into a horrible mess."

Cindy concurred: "As far as I'm concerned, with men who aren't very well endowed, it's cheaper to buy a Porsche and probably
more safe."

Latimer-Sayer did not install Cindy's breast implants; they were put in as part of a BBC documentary on the process. And they
have begun to cause trouble. They were supposed to have been placed behind the chest muscle, but one migrated; it has also
hardened, a process known as capsular con-tracture. "I'm not happy with the encapsulation of my own implants," she told me.
"I'm having them out." And yet, she said, pausing, "it's better to have had them and liked them than never to have had them
at all."

One thing, however, is certain: there are already a lot of bionic women out there. "I don't even think I want to walk down
the street in California," Cindy told me. "They've all done what I've done. Over there I'm just another Barbie doll."