Forever Barbie (18 page)
Authors: M. G. Lord
This is not to say that such issues were not discussed by the executives on, say, the telephone. Lawrence, Maybee, and Random
House editor Louise Bonino conferred about the content; Bonino required a "screen treatment" for each book, Maybee told me,
"to psyche out whether we were Johnny One Note or we could actually write this novella." But Mattel seemed to view the books
not as texts but as products—or vehicles for selling products. In December 1964, Mattel instructed Random House to have its
illustrator depict Barbie in renderings of the doll's actual clothes, sending along its toy catalogue for reference. And while
this may reflect excessive sentimentality on my part, I was shaken by the brutal way Mattel announced its phase-out of Midge.
In a letter dated August 31, 1965, Mattel sales promotion manager Bernard L. Gottlieb ordered Robert Bernstein to purge her
"from your thinking."
The later Barbie books—
Barbie's Hawaiian Holiday, Barbie Solves a
Mystery, Barbie and Ken, Barbie in Television, Barbie, Midge and Ken,
Barbie and the Ghost Town Mystery, Barbie's Secret,
and
Barbie's Candy-
Striped Summer
—did not live up to the promise of the original three. Sales plummeted; the last three sold barely twenty thousand copies.
Compiled by Lawrence in 1964,
Barbie's Easy as Pie Cookbook
—which includes recipes for "Pineapple Egg Nog," "Crispy Liver Steaks," and "Swedish Prune Pudding"—did, however, find a following
and is still popular with collectors; it was issued in a modified version to delegates at the 1992 Barbie-doll collector's
convention.
One reason for the demise of the Barbie series was that just as Midge had been scrapped, so were Lawrence and Maybee. Recorded
in correspondence from July 1963, the decision to retire them came after Bernstein lunched with them in Los Angeles and Lawrence
had the temerity to suggest that they might get an agent. Why would they want to give away ten percent of their royalties,
Bernstein countered, when the publisher was paying them the most money that it possibly could? Rather than wait for an answer,
Random House brought in new authors—seemingly without bothering to ascertain if they could write. So sloppy is the language
in Eleanor Woolvin's 1965 opus,
Barbie and the Ghost Town Mystery,
that one wonders if anyone even proofread it. In a scene that cries out for a translator, Barbie, Skipper, and two male consorts
follow a stray donkey through an abandoned desert town. Woolvin writes, "With the donkey's
noisesome
[italics mine] voice to guide them, it was not too difficult." Does that mean the donkey had bad breath?
With Woolvin's byline on the title page of the last three books, it's not surprising that the series bit the dust. Even children,
I think, know when quality has fallen off. But edited by Gloria Tinkley, Cy Schneider's secretary, and written by Carson/Roberts
copywriters Vel Rankin, Barbara Charlebois, and Nancy Joffe,
Barbie
magazine soldiered on through the sixties. In addition to fashion pieces and promotions for the doll, it featured educational
articles on foreign countries and on famous women in history— predictable characters like Florence Nightingale and Helen Keller,
surprises like Mary McLeod Bethune, an African-American educator. Redesigned in 1970, it limped into the Me Decade with a
new name—
Barbie
Talk
—but did not make it through the seventies alive.
Barbie's fictional persona, however, transcended the death of the magazine. In 1983, while the "We Girls Can Do Anything"
campaign took shape on the West Coast, Mattel approached
Muppet Magazine
publisher Donald E. Welsh and editor Katy Dobbs to create a fresh fanzine for the doll. By the winter of 1984,
Barbie, The Magazine for Girls
—thirty-two glossy full-color pages of fashion, hair care, recipes, and gift ideas—was born.
It was not, however, an easy delivery. Because the new magazine's target audience was younger than the original's—six- to
seven-year-olds instead of eight- to eleven-year-olds—it couldn't feature long stories about Barbie; kids that age couldn't
read them. Instead, Barbie's life unfolded in a "photodrama," a narrative made from pictures of real dolls over which comic-strip-style
talk balloons had been superimposed. Integrating images and text would seem simple enough, but for the writer and photographer
of the original drama, it wasn't. The feature came out so disastrously that Mattel had to pulp its half-million-dollar maiden
printing and try again. (Highlights of the aborted drama: Barbie giggles while trying to run over Ken in her pink Corvette
and lunches in the snow at an outdoor McDonald's—the photograph of which has been printed backward so that the menu looks
as if it were written in Russian.)
Within months, though, the photodrama, written by the editors and realized by photographer Donal Holway, became a cult sensation.
When in 1986, the magazine spent $1,500 for miniatures of original furniture by designers associated with the then-chic "Memphis"
style—Ettore Sottsass, Flavio Albanese, Saporiti and Felice Rossi—
House & Garden
took note in a piece called "Barbie Goes Milano." A kitschy, self-conscious send-up of 1950s suburbanism that defined itself
in opposition to modernism, "Memphis" was well suited to the campy tone of the photodrama. Sottsass originally intended the
style as "an ironic gesture," Stephen Bayley observed in
Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things,
but through overexposure in magazines like
House & Garden
it became "just another style of rich man's chic."
Holway was equally attentive to details of clothing and real estate. In "Barbie Goes to Brazil," Barbie's glitzy record producer
wore a tiny, non-Mattel-issue Rolex, and the "windows" of his office showed a real view from atop Rockefeller Center. Like
Lawrence's and Maybee's stories, many of the photodramas dealt with Barbie's domestic life; but they also jump-started girls'
imaginations: the tale that began in the record company office took Barbie to Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro—a swirl of dolls
in wild costumes, including men in apparent drag. It even had captions in Portuguese.
Although Mattel never formally codified rules for the dramas, it had guidelines. No attempt was made to provide continuity
with the original novels. George and Martha Roberts, that Friedan-era prototype of marital inequity, were erased forever.
"We couldn't show Barbie's family except for Skipper," explained Karen Tina Harrison,
Barbie
editor until 1989. "She has no family. These stories are episodic. They have no background. Barbie has no biography to be
passed on. Barbie simply is. No one knows where she came from or how she got there." As to the way she could be portrayed,
drudgery—or even, say, seeing patients in her physician incarnation—was out. "Only glamour could befall Barbie," Harrison
said.
Barbie's
Italian counterpart was not, however, similarly constrained. Its photodramas were described by Welsh Publications editorial
director Katy Dobbs as operatic. This meant that on one occasion, Barbie, in a fit of jealous rage, slugged a rival female
doll with her handbag. Another time, Barbie and Ken were spelunking and a huge Styrofoam rock fell on Ken, leaving him covered
with blood. "We can't do anything like that," she said. Inevitably, though, staging even a tame photodrama involves implicit
carnage; in order for a doll to be photographed seated, its legs must be broken. Dobbs sighed: "You have to wipe out so many
dolls to do a crowd scene."
Barbie
also introduced little girls to real-life superstars—frequently on the eve of a scandal. Vanessa Williams squeaked into the
magazine shortly before her lesbian porn shots were unearthed. Likewise Drew Barrymore, then about the same age as
Barbie's
readers, was portrayed as a wholesome preteen—not as the drug-addicted boozer she later declared herself to be. Nor has profiling
celebrities always been fun. "We gave Drew this dress to wear and her mother took one look at it and snarled, 'Barrymores
don't wear green,' " Harrison recalled. "So we convinced her it was teal, and the kid wore the dress. Of course we had to
give [the kid] everything she touched, but that's standard."
After Harrison left, the magazine became less about whimsy and more about selling products. Current photodramas are not geared
to whisking kids off on flights of fancy, but to showing them predictable scenarios that they can play out with Mattel-authorized
miniatures. Dramas are set in Mattel-issue settings; the pictures function like illustrations in toy catalogues. From a marketing
standpoint, this may be a more effective way to promote merchandise, and Barbie sales, in the 1990s, have certainly skyrocketed.
But it seems dry and joyless, stultifying to children's imaginations—not what Barbie, in her most positive, door-opening sense,
should be.
Maybe it was a reflection of the difference between West Coast and East Coast style—or between the styles of marketing and
journalism—but Katy Dobbs, who is based in New York, was the first top-level Barbie person who leaped to define herself as
a "feminist." "I take my daughter to marches,"
Dobbs told me. "We're pro-choice." Then she related feminism to the doll, which her six-year-old little girl has played with
for years: "I think Barbie is about options—options in fantasy, options in play patterns, options in opportunities. . . .
There's more to her than just the pink and the plastic. Because every little girl brings to her a different orientation and
[to attack her] is sort of taking away the individuality of what each little girl brings. I think Mattel does a really good
job of offering her in many different ways for different kinds of girls. I mean, somebody's going to buy Marine Corps Barbie—not
me."
Dobbs's chaotic Madison Avenue office was the antithesis of Jill Barad's plush inner sanctum, yet Dobbs appeared unrattled
by the turmoil. There were, not surprisingly, Barbie and Muppet images everywhere, but also a plastic Mickey Mouse atop her
desk and a Mickey video playing on a TV monitor—to which, because of a temporary child-care crisis, her toddler son was glued.
He soon developed an interest in the interview, however, and plopped himself on his mother's lap, where he assiduously applied
himself to unbuttoning her sweater.
As Dobbs continued her narrative—deftly closing the buttons her son had opened—I was struck by the total un-Mattel-ness of
the operation. Except for Dobbs, most of the staff appeared to be in their twenties, and the office felt like that of a campus
newspaper. When
Barbie
magazine was started, Dobbs, too, was virtually fresh out of school, after having spent a deracinated childhood as a military
brat whose father was from Alabama and whose mother was from Zagreb, Croatia. She feels her career is representative of her
baby-boom contemporaries. "When I first came to New York, all I did was go to book parties—eat shrimp—and hang out at Studio
[54]," Dobbs said, "because I was at Conde Nast covering entertainment. Then I got married and had kids and now I'm doing
this."
But even with its deliberate turning away from seamy reality, putting out the magazine has its somber moments. Beverly Cannady,
whose first job at Mattel in the sixties was answering Barbie's mail, observed a poignant pattern to the way kids related
to the doll. The magazine has always existed to promote Barbie as a commercial product; but kids look to her as an oracle—
a vivid, godlike presence in the landscape of childhood. And sometimes, with aching candor, they'd beg Barbie to help stabilize
their parents' rocky marriages or mitigate tragedies in their lives.
Many letters to Barbie, in fact, have such a Miss Lonelyhearts quality that they are too gloomy to print. To ask kids to send
in their three wishes is to invite heartbreak. "It's like when you blow out your birthday candles, you go: 'Wait. Should I
go personal or global here? Should I go for me or for world peace?' " Dobbs told me. "So a lot of them start out with 'Clean
up the world, make peace, [then they'll add] my mommy and daddy not get divorced.' " Karen Tina Harrison was so touched by
some of the unpunishable letters that she saved them and occasionally responded to them. One note that accompanied a strangely
anguished self-portrait simply said: "My name is Tequila. I am 8 years old. With brown eyes. Black long hair. Brown skin."
Although many big-time models like Christy Turlington currently sport navel rings, body modification has been banned from
the magazine; even showing a model with pierced ears enrages some mothers. I wanted to press Dobbs about other forbidden topics,
but she had an excellent pretext to avoid my question. Her son's diaper had become, well, noisome, requiring her immediate
attention.
As I left her office, Bret Mirsky, the magazine's editor in 1992, presented me with a set of back issues that, except for
their graphics, were virtually identical to the those of the sixties. True, there were small differences: In 1963, 1968, and
1970, the magazine featured articles on becoming an airline hostess; by 1990, Barbie was the pilot of the plane. And in the
old magazines, pages with educational material—articles on history and geography—seemed to outnumber pages with ads. But even
the child-star drug scandals had counterparts in the past. Drew Barrymore's prepubescent coke addiction paled next to the
fate of Anissa Jones—"Buffy" on CBS's
Family Affair
—who, in 1969 and 1971, was profiled in both
Barbie
and
Barbie Talk.
Jones died at eighteen in 1976 from an overdose of cocaine, Quaaludes, and barbiturates that Oceanside, California, coroner
Robert Creason called "the largest drug combination of any case I have ever encountered."
The similarity between
Barbie
then and
Barbie
now was startling. It suggested that the transformations allegedly wrought by feminism had been either merely cosmetic or
nonexistent. It was even more uncanny to learn that Western Publishing had resurrected "Queen of the Prom: The Barbie Game"
and issued it with two new board games—"Barbie's Dream Date" and "We Girls Can Do Anything."