Forever Barbie (13 page)

Although there were complaints about Growing Up Skipper, they were, for the most part, drowned out by the furor over another
1975 product, Baby Brother Tenderlove, an anatomically correct male doll. In Louisville, Kentucky, a group of women stormed
into a toy store and castrated the dolls; in response, some retailers placed stickers over the penis in the doll's photo on
the box. The National Organization for Women, former Mattel publicist Beverly Cannady recalls, applauded Baby Brother Tenderlove;
but columnist Ellen Goodman didn't, and Cannady wound up debating her on the Phil Donahue show. Other detractors were even
more direct: Tom Kalinske received death threats.

Perhaps in recognition of her increased stature, Mattel, in 1977, issued an eighteen-inch version of the Barbie doll. The
larger edition was not, however, her most dramatic change. Mattel resculpted the face on both large and small models and anointed
Barbie a "SuperStar." It also equipped her with the trappings of stardom—a hot pink Star 'Vette, a Star Traveler Motorhome,
and a "salon of the stars" Beauty Boutique.

Barbie's new face, fashioned by doll sculptor Joyce Clark, was the face of disco. The doll appears in the 1977 catalogue against
a black background, as if on the edge of a cavernous dance floor. Light glints off her glossy magenta boa, her burnished gold
hair, her luminous diamondlike ring. Gone is the haughty smirk of her early years. Seemingly stupefied by the disco beat,
SuperStar Barbie's mouth is set in a broad smile.

The revamped Barbie changed the relationship between the doll and the little girl who owned it. Barbie could still function
as an object onto which the child projected her future self; but because the doll had the trappings of celebrity, the girl's
imagined future had to involve being rich and famous.

Nor did the doll's paraphernalia indicate how she came to hobnob with the stars. Did she earn her money as an actress or a
model? Did she inherit it? Or was she running some nefarious business and being paid off the books? (Did Hollywood madam Heidi
Fleiss play with this doll?)

In 1978, Mattel established Barbie's persona as a cover girl with a mechanical contraption called Fashion Photo Barbie. This
play set came with a toy camera and a Barbie doll that struck fashion poses when the child "focused" the camera. The brainchild
of Derek Gable, a British engineer who had been recruited to join Ryan's team in 1968, Fashion Photo Barbie is very much a
boys' action toy masquerading as a girls' play set. Like Growing Up Skipper, it reflects a masculine understanding of the
female experience; a little boy could take the role of fashion "photographer" as easily as a little girl could. But when a
girl operates the toy, she can pretend to be either the model or the photographer; thus the toy encourages her to internalize
a sense of herself-as-object; to split herself, in John Berger's words, into "the surveyor" and "the surveyed."

Fashion Photo Barbie comes with preprinted "photographs" of Barbie in various fashion poses that the child can remove from
the camera when the "photo session" is over. These teach—for children willing to be taught—a code of feminine erotic styling,
of "to-be-looked-at-ness." They define what looks are acceptable, just as—for women who are willing to accept such definitions—
photos of models in magazines do.

But Fashion Photo Barbie is not just about passivity. Little girls are not required to project themselves onto Barbie; they
can view the doll as wholly other. Nor do they have to play with the "acceptable" photographs. Fashion Photo Barbie offers
a girl power not only over an image of an adult, but over an adult celebrity. When the child adjusts the lens, Barbie responds
instantly; her body pivots and her head snaps to the side. Peering through the viewfinder, the girl can interiorize the "male
gaze." She is Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Deborah Turberville. She can play at controlling— and therefore defining—feminine
erotic style. She can also explore less socially approved themes in her fashion photo-play: voyeurism and the erotization
of her own gender.

Barbie's SuperStar status also had an impact on the company she kept. She didn't drop Ken or Skipper, but she did start hanging
out with Mattel versions of real-life celebrities. They included Debby Boone, Charlie's Angels Cheryl Ladd and Kate Jackson,
and, in clothes befitting a male hoodlum, Kristy McNichol. Missing Angel Farrah Fawcett evidently declined to be cast in plastic,
but that didn't stop Barbie from stealing her hairdo in 1981.

Barbie was also seen with Donnie, Jimmy, and Marie Osmond. Not exactly the Laura Mars type, Marie was a Mormon, and her mother
demanded that Mattel engineer the doll's outfits so that Mormon "garments"—sacred, baggy, one-piece underwear—could be worn
beneath them. Traditionally emblazoned with religious symbols over each breast and a slit in the crotch, the "garments," however,
were not issued with the doll. Marie's mother also forced Mattel to bring out a thirty-inch Marie doll with dress patterns.
A rabid advocate of home sewing, she hoped such a doll would inspire girls to use a needle and thread.

Although Barbie helped reverse Mattel's losses in the late seventies, she was never the darling of its top management. Arthur
Spear, who became chairman of the board in 1978, was committed to reducing the company's involvement with toys. In 1979, it
acquired Western Publishing, the producer of Golden Books, for $120 million. With its Ringling Bros, subsidiary, it expanded
Circus World, a theme park near Orlando, Florida. It entered the electronics business with Intellivision, a $300 home video
game system, and dumped its unprofitable acquisitions, such as Metaframe.

When the Reagans moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they brought their Veblenesque appetites with them. Like Barbie, they
were Californians, and their tastes bore the stamp of sun and surf and celluloid. Never had Barbie been more West Coast—her
"Sun Lovin' " Malibu incarnation actually had tan lines—or more in tune with the times. "She's got the billion dollar look,"
said Mattel's 1981 catalogue about its "Golden Dream" Barbie. She was even prepared for escalating tension between haves and
have-nots; in 1979, Mattel issued a Barbie "Fur & Jewels Safe" complete with security alarm.

Barbie finally reflected, in a slightly skewed looking glass, the progress racial and ethnic minorities had made during the
seventies. Styled by Kitty Black Perkins, an African-American designer whom Mattel hired in 1975, Black Barbie made her debut
in 1980. Barbie had had black friends since the late sixties, but by 1979, Mattel determined that America was ready for the
dream girl herself to be of color. Because the new doll was likely to be scrutinized, Mattel fashioned her with sensitivity:
her hair is short and realistically textured; her face, if not aggressively non-Caucasian, is at least different from blond
Barbie's; and her dress, while corporate, is livened up with jewelry evocative of African sculpture.

"Little Hispanic girls can now play with their very own Barbie," the catalogue reads, and the contrast between the company's
noble intentions—the box was printed in English and Spanish—and its actual product is puzzling. Unlike Mattel's international
Barbies, aimed at adult collectors for whom authenticity is not a high priority, this doll was meant for real children, whose
parents must, to a degree, have felt patronized by it.

The complexities of marketing dolls of color—as well as the way mainstream toy companies have interpreted ethnicity over time—will
be examined later. But even in their imperfect executions, the mere existence of Black Barbie and Hispanic Barbie in 1980
was a landmark. Like the coronation of Vanessa Williams as Miss America in 1983, the dolls commented on the evolution of popular
taste. Slowly (with the speed of a glacier, critics might say), standards of so-called beauty were changing.

Besides the country's collective twist to the right, Barbie benefited from another trend. Baby boomers who had played with
the original doll were beginning to breed, and those who had once enjoyed Barbie gave her to their daughters, often when they
were as young as two years old. This led to the invention in 1981 of My First Barbie, which was intended to be easier to dress.
It had straight arms and rounded hands—some collectors refer to them scornfully as "fins"—since the doll's original sharp
fingers could stab out a toddler's eye.

By 1983, the titles of Barbie's outfits began to lose the self-refer-entiality that had characterized them since the late
sixties. It was safe to name them for activities again: "Holiday Hostess," "Horseback ridin'," "Ski party!" There was no danger
Barbie would wear these to, say, demonstrate for the Equal Rights Amendment, which, by 1980, had failed. Shoppers who had
used their charge cards surreptitiously in the seventies came out of the closet; far from requiring a place to hide, they
needed the storage space. It was deja vu time at Mattel. The company produced a Dream Store reminiscent of Barbie's 1963 Fashion
Shop and a Barbie Loves McDonald's plastic hamburger stand, which, among other things, heightened brand recognition among
preschoolers.

Eating was a key part of the eighties ethos; the decade's emblematic fauna—young urban professionals—lived to consume. True,
fast-food rarely passed between their lips. They preferred pricy, affected fare—white truffles, sun-dried tomatoes, the uncooked
bellies of tuna. But their children, who had not yet learned to distinguish sashimi from a dead pet guppy, cheerfully chowed
down beneath the Golden Arches.

So it's not surprising that Barbie Loves McDonald's was followed in 1984 by Great Shape Barbie, a doll that came with a leotard,
leg warmers, exercise shoes, and (presumably) a health club membership. Of course Barbie didn't need to take an aerobics class;
she already had the consummate eighties body. It had "definition," the goal toward which every gym rat sweated, and, metaphorically,
the essence of the eighties persona. "To achieve definition was to present a hard outline to the world," Ehrenreich writes,
"a projection of self that was not sensitive and receptive—as therapies in the seventies had aimed at—but tough and contained."
Few projections of self could be harder than Barbie's—her "skin" is, in fact, a carapace. In the eighties, it wasn't just
Barbie's curves that women sought to emulate, it was the toughness of her vinyl. During Barbie's first years, Bud Westmore,
Universal Studio's makeup wizard, modeled Barbie on real-life actresses; her blond hair, for instance, was matched to Kim
Novak's. By the eighties, however, the tables had turned: real-life women were modeling themselves on the doll.

But transforming flesh—a pliant, yielding, organic substance—into plastic is not easy. The formula for this conversion—"No
pain, no gain"—seems to have inspired the Great Shape dolls; indeed, their description in Mattel's catalogue reads like an
instruction manual for a dominatrix. Under a picture of a contorted Barbie is the directive: "Make her do scissor lifts."
Under Ken, who is frozen, doglike, on all fours: "Make him do push-ups." And over Skipper, who appears to be trying to drag
herself across the floor with a broken leg: "Make her do back extensions." The dolls are even packaged with a booklet of diagrams
to make sure they do their "exercises" correctly.

In projecting her future persona onto a Great Shape Barbie, a little girl can learn to split herself not only into "the surveyor"
and "the surveyed," but into "the trainer" and "the trainee." By internalizing the sadism of an aerobics instructor, a little
girl can, in her own exercise regimen, turn that sadism upon herself. But let us not rush to blame Barbie for making children
obsessed with exercise. Not until 1992 did Barbie come out with her own workout video. Let us place the onus where it belongs—on
drill sergeant and recovering Barbarella Jane Fonda. Besides, slothful children, of the sort that I once was, could happily—perhaps
even sadistically—move Great Shape Barbie through her miniature workout without feeling the faintest urge to perform one of
their own.

Significantly, the Great Shape dolls contained no mechanism to cause them to exercise by themselves. This was a breakthrough.
Led by Judy Shackelford, who had joined Mattel in 1976 and was named its first female vice president in 1978, the Barbie marketing
team let the doll go back to being a doll. Although her 1981 Western incarnation winked, Barbie had finally ceased to be an
action toy. Girls, Shackelford observed, didn't want gimmicky doll bodies engineered for dynamic obsolescence; they preferred
inert figures with fancy clothes and combable hair. Girls "didn't care if Barbie winked or not," Shackelford told me. "Guys
cared. They said, 'God, look at that doll wink.' " Of Western Barbie, she confided: "It was the ugliest Barbie doll we ever
did."

Instead of reworking the doll, Shackelford implemented a market "segmentation strategy," which she thinks helped Barbie achieve
record sales.

She did this by "segmenting the market," introducing dolls with different themes and then "creating whole worlds around them."
Beginning about 1980, Mattel issued separate dolls for each of the major play patterns. There was a "hairplay" doll that came
with styling paraphernalia; a "lifestyle" doll that came with sporting equipment; and a "glamour" doll that came with a gaudy
dress. The strategy benefited Mattel in two major ways: because the costumes were sold on dolls, Mattel could charge more
for them, and the variety encouraged girls to own more than one doll.

Shackelford got into the toy and novelty business as an entrepreneur, where her unusual combination of talents—Ruth Handler's
business sense and Elliot Handler's art background—served her well. After graduating from Southern Illinois University with
a degree in art, she moved to New York and taught grade school. "I was in this smock going from room to room with my paintbrushes—not
my idea of a career," she said. So she took one of her art lessons, turned it into a toy, and sold the idea to a toy company,
which led to more ideas for more companies. Later she went into manufacturing, inventing and producing an inflatable boot-tree
designed to hold the knee-high footwear worn with miniskirts. But when hemlines fell, sales slowed, and to recoup her $100,000
investment, she wound up loading the trees into a truck and selling them herself across the country.

Shackelford learned the toy business from industry veterans, but not in a formal seminar. "When I started designing toys,
I was twenty-four years old, and the only way I could get an appointment was to get one at four o'clock for cocktails," she
said. "It was me and my partner—who was very voluptuous, like Barbie." When they showed a design, they'd ask for criticism,
and the male executives would share what they had learned on the job. "I got stories from back in the 1940s. People were telling
me what toys worked, why they didn't work," she explained. "And I was like a sponge. You pick all this stuff up. And suddenly
you begin to perceive what 'market niching' is—you don't know the right words for it, but you begin to see." Working at Mattel
was, for her, the culmination of this apprenticeship; she felt she "knew how to drive" but had finally gotten into "a really
good car—one that didn't shake and you were sure wasn't going to run out of gas halfway there."