Authors: M. G. Lord
KBK was not one big widget factory; it was a distributor for widgets that had been made by contractors and subcontractors
all over Japan, from Hokkaido in the extreme north to Fukuoka in the extreme south. "The network was like a spiderweb," Nakamura
said, "stretching two to three hundred miles in each direction."
KBK persuaded a dollmaker named Yamasaki to knock off Lilli, but that was only the beginning of the challenge. Lilli's body
was as hard as her look, made of rigid plastic that had been "injection-molded"—squeezed into its mold like toothpaste from
a tube. Mattel, however, wanted to make Barbie out of soft vinyl, and vinyl, when injection-molded, didn't always ooze into
the tiny crevices of a mold. To ensure that Barbie had fingers and toes, her arms and legs would have to be "rotation-molded"—turned
slowly in their molds while the vinyl hardened.
Yamasaki had never rotation-molded anything in his life. So in November, Mattel sent Seymour Adler, a Brooklyn-born engineer
with a background in tool design, to teach him how. Adler arrived with the latest plastic-industry journals detailing the
new process. Only one obstacle remained: Adler himself had never rotation-molded before either.
Back in California, Ryan was doing his best to make the doll look less like "a German streetwalker." He had befriended Bud
Westmore, the makeup czar at Universal Pictures, who gave Lilli a makeover. The first thing Westmore eliminated was what he
called her "bee-stung lips," the Maria Braunesque pout into which her tough little mouth had been formed. Next were her heavy
eyelashes and what Ryan termed the "weird widow's peak" on her forehead. A sculptor was brought in to refashion Lilli's face,
but, Adler told me, nobody at Mattel liked the results, so the head was cast, with slight modifications, from Lilli's.
Ryan also modified the joints that attached the arms and legs to the torso. Then he sent cast alloy masters of the freshly
sculpted body parts for the Japanese to electroplate and make into molds. Before a mold could be used to produce the doll,
Ryan had to approve six sample castings from it. Sometimes the castings had startling embellishments. "Each time I would get
a half dozen back, they would have nipples on the breasts," Ryan explained. "So I took my little fine Swiss file, which the
Swiss use for working on watches, and very daintily filed the nipples off and returned them."
After several rounds of emery-boarding, KBK got the message. "The Japanese are very obedient," Ryan said. "They'll always
do what you tell them."
KBK NOT ONLY MADE BARBIE, IT ALSO MADE HER CLOTHES. It didn't, however, design them. For Barbie's first wardrobe, the Handlers
turned to Charlotte Johnson, a fortyish veteran of Seventh Avenue who had been working in the garment industry since she was
seventeen. They found her at Los Angeles' Chouinard Institute, where she was teaching an evening course in fashion design.
Many say Charlotte created Barbie in her own image. "The shocker was that the doll looked like her," Ken Handler said of his
first meeting with the designer in the early sixties. "It had the same-shaped head and was wearing the same hair."
As often as the adjective "short" has been used to describe Jack Ryan, who stood about five feet seven, the terms "tall,"
"statuesque," and "imposing" have been applied by colleagues to Charlotte, who stands about five feet ten in heels. Her reputation
for tenacity evolved during the year she spent in Tokyo, in Frank Lloyd Wright's aptly named Imperial Hotel, making Barbie's
wardrobe. Six days a week, Charlotte met with a Japanese designer and two seamstresses, developing designs that minimized
the sewing process. "She was very, very fussy about the fit of the costume," Nakamura said.
She was also fussy about the fabric, which translated into a headache for him. He had to convince textile merchants to make
small batches of cloth to her specifications, and small batches were rarely profitable. After much haggling, he obtained the
black-and-white striped fabric for Barbie's first bathing suit. With still more haggling, he got minuscule snaps, buttons
less than an eighth of an inch in diameter, and yards of miniature zippers from zipper manufacturer Yoshida Kojko (YKK).
Charlotte was similarly fussy about foundation garments, which sent Nakamura scrambling for pastel-colored tricot. A doll
like Barbie couldn't wear couture clothing over bare plastic, after all. Among Barbie's first garments were two strapless
brassieres, one half-slip, one floral petticoat, and—God knows why—a girdle.
Unmarried and what people used to call a "career girl," Charlotte never suffered for male attention. "She was very resourceful,"
recalled Adler. "Before she would have dinner at the Imperial Hotel, she would survey the three dining rooms, and if she saw
an eligible male eating by himself, she would eat in that dining room." Eventually, Nakamura said, "She found a boyfriend
at the hotel. A Westerner—a gentleman from Germany or something."
Nevertheless, doing business was tough for a woman in Japan. Often Japanese men expressed their scorn by excluding women from
work-related socializing. But textile consultant Lawanna Adams, who worked with Charlotte in the Orient, remembers the exclusion
as a blessing. After a typical business dinner, the men "would go out to get bombed"; she and Charlotte, however, would be
dropped off at the hotel, free to get a good night's sleep.
WHILE CHARLOTTE BRAINSTORMED IN TOKYO, HOUSE- wives all over Japan made her ideas real. Eyes straining, needles flying, they
handstitched gold buttons onto Barbie's red "Sweater Girl" cardigan and attached flower appliques to her "Picnic Set" sunhat.
They added chestnut fur to her "Golden Splendor" jacket and tacked bows onto her "Cotton Casual" sundress. They trimmed her
"Barbie-Q" outfit with white lace. Then, after their handiwork had been vetted for flaws, they gave the garments to other
housewives who stitched them into cardboard display packages.
Called "homework people" because they toiled at home, they went blind so that Barbie could wear taffeta. They pricked their
fingers so that she could have a ski holiday. They hunched over and wrecked their backs so that she wouldn't have to sleep
in the nude. They were the original slaves of Barbie.
"I think Japan was the perfect place [to make the doll] because of the patience of the workers," said Joe Cannizzaro, the
Mattel efficiency expert who went to Japan in the sixties. "And their desire to do it right. I never saw any dresses—even
white wedding dresses—get soiled, though they were in the homes and on the tatami floors, because everything was so spotless,
so well taken care of. They were delivered by bike and by pickup truck. They were handled four, five, six times. And they
never got dirty. It's amazing, really. I don't think there's any other country where you could do that."
In factories, too, men sweated so that Barbie might dress. Machines pinged and clattered to make her clothes. One cut the
fabric for her dresses and another sewed up their seams. Unlike homeworkers, who were paid by the pieces they produced, factory
workers received a fixed wage. They lived in dormitories and were fed by factory owners. In August, however, everybody quit.
"It was rice harvesting time," Cannizzaro explained.
By 1958, dolls had begun to emerge from doll molds in Tokyo. Filaments of gold or brown Saran were machine-stitched along
their vinyl hairlines and pulled taut over their otherwise naked skulls. Ponytails were affixed. Eyes were painted with a
masklike template that became clogged about every twentieth doll. Their glance was sidelong, formed by eerie white irises
under ominous black lids. The dolls looked as if they had a history; as if they, in their Lilli incarnation, had seen the
smoldering ruins of postwar Germany and knew the horrors that preceded them. The dolls did not look either innocent or American.
It was Mattel's job to make them appear to be both.
AS STRATEGY SESSIONS BEGAN IN HAWTHORNE, THE Handlers made a brilliant tactical move. They commissioned a toy study from Ernest
Dichter, Ph.D., director of the Institute for Motivational Research in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. The study cost a staggering
$12,000 and took six months to complete, but when it was finished the charge seemed low. Dichter had masterminded a cunning
campaign to peddle Barbie.
Dichter was already a legend when the Handlers approached him. Quoted on nearly every page of Vance Packard's
The Hidden Persuaders,
a bestseller in 1957, Dichter was hailed as a marketing Einstein—an evil Einstein, but an Einstein nonetheless. He pioneered
what he called "motivational research," advertising's newest, hippest, and, in Packard's view, scariest trend—the manipulation
of deep-seated psychological cravings to sell merchandise.
Dichter's appeal to the Handlers was obvious. They had achieved their success through space-age materials and futuristic methodology.
Dichter's approach, filled with Freudian symbols and clinical jargon, had a scientific veneer. It promised control over an
otherwise chaotic marketplace. It seemed as daring in 1958 as advertising on television had been three years earlier.
Dichter also had much in common with Ruth. He was a Jewish immigrant, just as her father had been. Born in Vienna, Herr Doktor
Dichter studied psychology at the University of Vienna and trained as a lay analyst. When World War II broke out, he fled
to Paris; then in 1937, the same year that Ruth moved from Denver to Los Angeles, he tried to emigrate to New York. But because
he and his wife had neither $10,000 nor proof of a stateside job, they were turned away.
Enraged, he lashed out at Llewelyn Thompson, the American vice consul in Paris, who had stopped them. "All you care about
is having people come to the U.S. who have rich relatives," he said. If he were permitted to emigrate, he would revolutionize
commerce by applying the principles of psychology to the selling of products. Captivated, Thompson listened to Dichter's pitch.
Then he intervened in Washington to have the Dichters admitted.
Dichter seduced corporate America in equally record time. He sent off unsolicited letters to six big firms, explaining why
he thought they were in trouble and how his insights could help. Four responded, and the work he did for three—Ivory Soap,
Esquire
magazine, and the Chrysler Corporation—put him on the map.
Dichter didn't just compare brands for Ivory, he examined the role of cleanliness in American life. He didn't euphemize for
Esquire,
he confirmed what its editors "didn't dare" say—that "naked girls" sold the magazine. Sex also came up in his research for
Chrysler. Men viewed sedans like wives; they were "comfortable and safe." Convertibles were like mistresses; they were "youthful,"
beckoning to "the dreamer" within. Thus to lure men into showrooms, car dealers should use convertibles as "bait."
Dichter packaged himself as cleverly as he advised clients to package their products. He worked out of a twenty-six-room castle
on a Westchester mountaintop, the East Coast equivalent of Jack Ryan's fortress in Bel Air. There, he watched children play
with toys from behind a one-way mirror. He performed "depth interviews" on a "psycho-panel" of several hundred neighborhood
families. "He never asked a direct question," explained his wife, Hedy, because a confused interviewee was more honest.
For a man whom the Dale Carnegie Institute had retained as a consultant, Dichter was surprisingly adept at making enemies,
among them Betty Friedan, who filled a whole chapter of
The Feminine Mystique
with his sins. So great was her outrage that she rarely referred to him by name, calling him simply "the manipulator."
Dichter's research, she found, documented her thesis: that being a housewife made most women miserable. But Dichter saw nothing
wrong with their misery; rather, he sought to exploit it—by filling their anguished, barren lives with products. She paraphrases
him: "Properly manipulated (if you are not afraid of that word,' he said), American housewives can be given the sense of identity,
purpose, creativity, the self-realization, even the sexual joy they lack—by the buying of things."
Unmoved by Utopian sentimentality, Dichter strove to improve not the world but his clients' sales. If suffering made people
reach for their checkbooks, why alleviate it?
By 1958, Dichter was so besieged with work that he relegated much of it to his staff. The Mattel project, however, he kept
for himself. Toys were new to him, something no motivational researcher had ever investigated before. They were a pretext
to expound a whole philosophy of play. Its purpose, he felt, was to relieve tension, to maintain children's "psycho-economic
equilibrium" in the face of growing knowledge, growing bodies, and growing pressure from the adult world.
He investigated four types of toys—dolls, guns, holsters, and rockets— and based his findings on interviews with 23 fathers,
45 mothers, and 357 children plucked from a variety of social classes. The children included 191 girls and 166 boys. Dichter's
gun-related observations are fraught with Freudian overtones—big guns are like big penises—or in the case of three-to four-year-olds,
"The big long gun satisfies his need for power." But in an era characterized by exaggerated gender roles, he courageously
advocated androgynous play: "Adults frown upon doll play on the part of little boys as 'sissy' behavior. In actuality, this
type of play is emotionally as important for little boys as for little girls."
It is in his Barbie-doll inquiry, however, that his brilliance as a tactician comes forward. To read the Barbie study is to
understand why he took Madison Avenue by storm. He asks blunt questions, gets blunt answers, then hatches a devilish scheme
to make the bad news work to his client's advantage.
In his initial bid to Mattel, Dichter recommended probing Barbie's dark side to determine whether it should be played up or
down. Is Barbie "a nice kid, friendly and loved by everyone, or is she vain and selfish, maybe even cheap? Does she have good
taste or is she a little too flashy?" Could the doll be used to play out a child's rebellion against her parents, and if so,
"should the wardrobe be sophisticated, even wicked?" He also suggested studying "the gift psychology of the adult." Is Barbie
a conversation piece, a present "that will 'buy' the affection of the recipient?" Even more blunt, is Barbie a homewrecker?
"Are men afraid of their wives' taunts should they bring home a 'sexy' doll?"