Forever Barbie (32 page)
Authors: M. G. Lord
"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 could 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.
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.