Authors: M. G. Lord
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.
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.
38 "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.
39 "I'd call them 'daddy dolls' . . .": Ibid., p. 72.
40 "The face looks snobbish": Ibid., p. 50.
40 "I think they call these Barbies because they are so sharp": Ibid., p. 54.
40 "I would like her better if there was a little less eye makeup . . . But how else could she attract boy dolls?": Ibid.,
p. 50. (New York: Crown Publishers, 1987), p. 19.
40 The tomboy who held her "at some distance": Ibid., p. 50.
40 Doll's neck "too long . . . legs too thin": Ibid., p. 48.
40 Ginny clothes "cheesily-made": Ibid., p. 59.
40 "I like Revlon dolls the best . . . They are . . . fatter.": Ibid., p. 54.
40 "She's so well groomed, Mommy.": Ibid., p. 70.
40 Convince Mom that Barbie will make a "poised little lady" out of her . . .: Ibid., p. 74.
41 "The type of arguments which can be used successfully to overcome parental objection are in the area of the doll's function
in awakening in the child a concern with proper appearance": Ibid., p. 74.
41 "The child exerts a certain amount of pressure . . . The toy advertiser can help . . . by providing [the child] with arguments
. . .": Ibid., p. 11.
41 The commercials should depict "a variety of teen-age social activities": Ibid., p. 47.
CHAPTER THREE: SEX AND THE SINGLE DOLL
44 "problem that has no name": Friedan, op. cit., p. 15.
44 "Ruth works a full day . . .":
Los
Angeles Times,
September 29, 1959.
46 "If the growth Mattel has had . . .": Interview with Marvin Barab, Palos Verdes, California, May 1, 1993. (All subsequent
Barab quotations are from this interview.)
47 "Ruth and Elliot ate in the cafeteria every day . . .": Interview with Beverly Cannady, Sherman Oaks, California, September
16, 1992. (All Cannady quotations are from this interview.)
47 Steve Lewis's remarks: Telephone interviews with Steve Lewis, April 2, 1993, April 16, 1993, September 1, 1993. (All Lewis's
quotations are from these interviews.)
51 The Single Girl "supports herself: Helen Gurley Brown,
Sex and the
Single Girl
(New York: Bernard Geis, 1962), p. 5.
51 "Sturdy, colorful . . .":
Mattel 1963
Toy Catalogue
(Hawthorne, Calif: Mattel Toys, 1963), p. 34.
51 "If you are to be a glamorous . . .": Brown, Op. Cit., p. 119.
51 "When a man thinks of a single woman . . .": Ibid., p. 6.
51 ' The first spokeswoman for the revolution . . .": Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs,
Re-
Making Ijyve
(New York: Anchor Books, 1986), p. 56.
52 "Copycat a mentor . . .": Brown, op. cit., p. 193.
52 "time and often more money . . .": Ibid., p. 6.
52 "Men survey women before treating them . . .": John Berger,
Ways
of Seeing
(New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 46.
52 "an object of vision": Ibid., p. 47.
53 "Nothing is as transient, useless, or completely desirable as a suntan . . .": Gloria Steinem,
The Beach
Book
(New York: The Viking Press, 1963), p. 2.
53 "formative years were spent entirely in bathing suits": Ibid., dust jacket.
53 "I must . . . develop my bust": Ibid., p. 98.
53 "build" a bikini: Ibid., p. 101.
54 Steinem's failure to observe that Bunnies were exploited because of their gender: See Marcia Cohen,
The
Sisterhood: The True Story of the
Women Who Changed the World
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 114.
54 "It was interesting . . .": Ibid., p. 114.
54 "terrific good looks . . . If Gloria says it's otherwise . . .": Ibid., p. 114.
54 "There are many chic women in New York . . .": Cynthia Lawrence,
Barbie's New York Summer
(New York: Random House, 1962), p. 49.
54 Steinem's beach looks—"Ivy League," "Muscle Beach," "Pure Science": Steinem, op. cit., p. 111.
55 "One gets the sense talking to Gloria that she was born . . .": Leonard Levitt, "SHE: The Awesome Power of Gloria Steinem,"
Esquire,
October 1971, p. 208.
55 "With every office clerk able to afford a vacation . . .": Steinem, op. cit., p. 83.
55 "Feminism didn't come into my life . . .": Telephone interview with Gloria Steinem, May 20, 1994.
55 Midge "is thrilled with Barbie's career . . .": Carson/Roberts, Midge's debut ad—videotape provided by Mattel.