Forever Barbie (19 page)
Authors: M. G. Lord
Although one six-year-old I browbeat into playing We Girls Can Do Anything with me described the game as "BOOOOR-ing," I enjoyed
it. Players make "career moves" and endure "career setbacks" to become musicians, actresses, pilots, fashion designers, physicians,
or ballerinas. The game's bright fuschia graphics and lurid photos of actual dolls, however, are somewhat garish; grown-ups
may require sunglasses to stare at the board. Unlike the Mattel games from the sixties, which featured stylish line drawings
of Barbie and her crowd, the new ones are illustrated exclusively with photographs. This no doubt helps young children recognize
products, but it does not enhance nascent taste.
Nor is the revised Queen of the Prom identical to the original. Like the new
Barbie
magazine, the game is aimed at younger consumers—ages five and up. So the odious "Surprise" cards, which had to be read, are
gone. Gone, too, are references to school or school clubs. Girls compete based on cars, clothes, looks, and boys. The collecting
of female friends, although possible, slows a player down; a boyfriend is the only human trophy required to win. This suggests
a certain prescience on the part of the game's makers: long before Thelma and Louise flickered subversively in a studio screening
room, they sensed that female bonding was dangerous—and, consequently, to be quashed.
But compared with Barbie's Dream Date, the revised Queen of the Prom might have been written by the editors of
Ms.
This game isn't merely about winning approbation based on looks, it's about piling up expensive gifts from men. So similar
is players' behavior to that of a call girl that it might more aptly be termed "The Hooker Game." Barbie's Dream Date is a
race against time; each player's mission is to make Ken spend as much money as possible on her before the clock strikes twelve.
When time runs out, players tally up their date and gift cards, and the one with the most cards wins. "If there is a tie,
players with the same number of cards count their
date cards only,"
the directions instruct. Like the floozy with the fullest Rolodex, "the girl with the most date cards wins."
Even in the vast contradictory morass that is Barbie history, the idea of We Girls Can Do Anything and the Hooker Game occupying
adjacent shelf space is dumbfounding. Yet the more I inquired about the "We Girls" campaign, the more I learned that many
male executives loathed it. "I can remember sitting in meetings with just people from the agency—and I won't name names—but
the men were very resistant to the 'We Girls' ads," said Barbara Charlebois, who wrote for the original
Barbie
magazine and remained with Ogilvy & Mather after it acquired Carson /Roberts. "They really thought they were very offensive—well,
you know how men are. Anything that's feminist or that says we girls can do anything or anything that says we girls are as
good as you boys is very . . . " she trailed off, but I got the picture.
This perception, which, other sources confirm, extended to Mattel itself, made the contradictory threesome—We Girls Can Do
Anything, Queen of the Prom, and the Hooker Game—comprehensible. Let 'em take one step forward, the message seemed to be,
as long as they take two steps back.
I could end this chapter here, with Barbie sold into virtual white slavery for a dinner, a ski trip, and some bottles of perfume.
But there is more to Barbie than that. Little girls know it; I have yet to watch kids play "Let's Fleece Ken" with real dolls—and
I have watched a lot of kids at play. But because Barbie does, in fact, reflect the authentic condition of women, what shimmers
in her rose-colored mirror is not always what one wants to see. Forget the new professions on Barbie's resume; in this game,
she practices the oldest one.
In December 1990, however, Marvel Comics rescued Barbie by providing an alternative to her sordid board-game identity. It
began
Barbie
and
Barbie
Fashion
comic books, which, written by Lisa Trusiani and Barbara Slate, and edited by Hildy Mesnik, are sharp, sly, and very much
in the tradition of Maybee's and Lawrence's novels. Even Diana Huss Green, the fierce Massachusetts-based watchdog of children's
culture, gave them her blessing: In 1992, Parent's Choice, the organization she founded in 1978, singled the books out as
reading material of quality.
Perhaps the most redeeming thing about the comic books is that they are hand-drawn. Although brand recognition may be one
of their by-products, they do not exist to promote specific dolls. The constraining effect of photographs on children's imaginations
has been overcome. Barbie exists as an open-ended construct, not a patented plastic one.
The uninitiated might dismiss
Barbie Fashion
as a pretext for Barbie to change clothes. But as conceived by Barbara Slate, the comics have dealt with such sophisticated
concepts as divorce, homelessness, euthanasia of a dying pet, and the philosophy underlying pop art. Slate's comic "We Girls
Can Do Anything," from June 1991, actually conveys the message of its title. While out driving, Barbie and Skipper pass a
group of construction workers, one of whom is female; they watch two female police officers ticket a speeding motorist; and,
when they get a flat tire, they actually fix it themselves. Nor is Barbie's comic-book persona so addicted to work that she
treats people shabbily. In "Aunt Rose Comes First" (June 1992), Barbie's modeling agent, Eileen Plymouth (a crafty wordplay
on Eileen Ford), gets Barbie a modeling job in Tahiti. When Barbie, who has a commitment to visit her aunt, won't go, Plymouth
snarls: "This is business and business always comes first." But Barbie doesn't see it that way—and Barbie's contrarian vision
is vindicated at the end.
In "The Volunteers" (February 1993), Skipper spends a winter holiday serving dinner at a homeless shelter. (To avoid pigeonholing
the characters by religion, the holiday is unspecific.) Her experience has a sanitized quality; she encounters no unregenerate
crack smokers or teenage mothers of six. But the idea of making homelessness visible—not erasing it through omission—is noteworthy.
Skipper and Barbie interact not just with fashion dolls of color, but with people.
Given Barbie's universality—she can live anywhere or have any job— you'd think that writing for her would be a cinch. But
there is one drawback: Mattel insists that she be infallible. Fortunately, Skipper and Ken are permitted to make mistakes,
so at least someone's problems can be solved over the course of a story. "I have Ken being a feminist—being very considerate,"
Slate told me, "and I like to have him traveling, being the man-about-town. Because there's a reason why this guy is going
out with the most fantastic girl in the world—he can't be stupid."
Slate's own background as a comic artist has always been controversial and, she says, feminist. She gained recognition in
the seventies with a character called Ms. Liz, a wisecracking "liberated" woman who appeared in greeting cards,
Cosmopolitan,
and spots on the
Today
show. Ms. Liz flaunted her sexual emancipation and lampooned men whose sense of self derived from "supporting" the women in
their lives. "Darling, of course I can live on your salary," Ms. Liz says on one greeting card, "but what will you live on?"
By 1986 Slate had a new female character—Angel Love, a young woman whose dealings with "drugs, sex and rock 'n' roll" were
not G-rated. Nor were they morally simple. Featured in an eponymous DC comic book for twelve- to fourteen-year-old girls,
Angel had a boyfriend who was doing "blow," a father who was suspected of child molestation, and an unmarried pregnant friend
who was considering an abortion. The comic book was, however, short-lived—DC got tired of defending its volatile content.
Of course
Barbie Fashion
is considerably tamer than
Angel Love.
Barbie has not yet had to counsel Midge through the anguish of an abortion or coax Ken into rehab before his septum collapses.
But Slate feels that the benefits of Barbie's name recognition dramatically outweigh the occasional drawbacks of writing for
a character who cannot make mistakes. This is because girls aren't encouraged to read comic books. Given the traditional maleness
of the comic-book market, the real wonder of Wonder Woman is that a female superhero has had any success at all. Without a
brand-name attraction like Barbie, comic artists might as well write off reaching girls. "If they can't do it with Barbie,
they can't do it with anybody," Slate said.
To be sure, the Barbie comic books have only a fraction of
Barbie
magazine's 600,000 subscribers, but girls
are
buying them. They are also being distributed in untraditional outlets, such as the Barbie section of FAO Schwarz. This is
not a bad thing. Ever since Art Spiegelman's
Maus,
which dealt in pictures with the Holocaust, critics have taken a fresh look at comic books and started calling the ones they
like "graphic novels." Which leads to another paradox in Barbie's ever contradictory career: Barbie, who epitomizes all that
is stereotypically "feminine," is helping to masculinize—or, in any event, androgynize—the reading habits of young women.
T
he teenage doll that Ruth Handler invented had a lot in common with the teenage "dolls" created by the movie industry. But
when people said the original Barbie looked like a star, they didn't mean Anna Magnani in
The
Rose Tattoo
or Barbra Streisand in
Funny Girl.
They meant Donna Reed or Sandra Dee—actresses from whom conspicuous ethnicity had been purged; who weren't even Presbyterian
or Methodist, but generic Protestant; who embodied a phantasmic, impossible "American" ideal.
In
An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,
Neal Gabler tells how the studio moguls—all immigrants and outsiders—created an "America" that was more "American" than the
country ever could be. They formed a "cluster of images and ideas—so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American
imagination." And Americans, aping those images, ultimately became them. "As a result, the paradox—that the movies were quintessentially
American while the men who made them were not— doubled back on itself," Gabler writes. "By creating their idealized America
on the screen, the Jews reinvented the country in the image of their fiction."
To look at Mattel as a relative of the Hollywood studios is to make sense of some of its contradictions. The daughter of a
Polish Jewish immigrant, Ruth Handler coded with her fashion dolls the same sort of phantasmic "America" that Louis B. Mayer
had coded in his movies. Barbie was, in fact, better suited than a human actress to exemplify an impossible ideal. There was
no tribal taint in her plastic flesh, no baggage to betray an immigrant past. She had no navel; no parents; no heritage.
Yet even as Mattel grew rich off play sets that reflected white, middle-class values, its management was far from backward-thinking
about race. This incongruity between public products and private politics is not without precedent in Hollywood. True, the
studio moguls rejected Democratic politics in favor of a bland Republicanism that harmonized with their invented "America,"
but most screenwriters didn't. And Elliot Handler, who headed not only Mattel but also its creative team, can be said to have
had a screenwriter's social conscience.
As early as the 1940s, Mattel integrated its assembly line and hired a black foreman. "It was unheard of in those days to
put a black production worker next to a white production worker and have them all share toilet facilities," Ruth Handler told
me. And in recognition of its policies, Mattel was honored by the Urban League. But Mattel's most startling project, little
known outside the toy world, began in 1968, when, as a response to the Watts riots, it helped set up Shindana Toys—the name
means "competitor" in Swahili—a black-run, South Central Los Angeles-based company that manufactured multicultural playthings
before they wrere trendy.
By 1969, Mattel shared its Toy Fair showrooms with the likes of Shindana's Baby Nancy, a doll with authentic black features
and a kinky "natural," and later with Talking Tamu, who said eighteen different "now" things like "Cool it, baby," and "Can
you dig it?" Mattel ceded toy store space to Shindana rag dolls Sis, Coochy, Wilky, and Natra. And it watched Shindana score
its first million-dollar hit with a stuffed talking doll that featured Flip Wilson on one side and Geraldine Jones, his female
alter ego, on the other. Pull the doll's cord and it squealed, "The devil made me buy this dress!"
The world of Shindana—of top Mattel brass working side by side with the founders of Operation Bootstrap, the Watts-based job
training program under whose auspices the toy company was formed—was a far cry from the way the thirtieth-anniversary issue
of
Barbie
magazine depicted Barbie's world in 1966. "Our inner cities burned but the pot roast couldn't," the caption says under a picture
of Barbie at a Tupperware party. "Mom and Dad and the leaders they elected tried to keep a lid on things." As I said in this
book's opening chapter, studying Barbie sometimes requires the ability to hold contradictory ideas in one's head at the same
time. When it comes to Mattel and representations of racial diversity, this is especially true.
Although the Handlers have not been part of Mattel for twenty years, the company can still be viewed as a cousin to the Hollywood
studios. Mattel actually did get into the movie business in the seventies, when its Radnitz Productions produced the Academy
Award-winning
Sounder,
another multicultural product that predated the multicultural vogue. Securities analysts consider toys part of the entertainment
industry7, and corporate toymakers, like corporate moviemakers, keep their eye on trends. Beginning in the seventies, when
nonwhite Americans became more visible in movies and on television, they became more visible as dolls. In 1980, Mattel issued
Black Barbie and Hispanic Barbie—which, however imperfect, were still the first mainstream leading ladies (as opposed to supporting
actresses) of color. Corporations also keep their eye on their bottom line. By the mid-eighties, businesses woke up to the
fact that there was an audience for multicultural merchandise. Between 1980 and 1990, gross income among African-American
and Hispanic households had increased 155 percent. And according to data from the 1990 U.S. census, these groups combined
had a gross income just under $500 billion.
Traditionally, the needs of ethnically diverse consumers had been met by smaller companies—the equivalent, in movie terms,
of independent filmmakers. In the seventies, Shindana introduced two Barbie-like fashion dolls: Malaika, taller and stouter
than Barbie; and Career Girl Wanda, about three-quarters as tall as Barbie and as proportionately svelte. But in 1991, when
Mattel brought out its "Shani" line—three Barbie-sized African-American dolls available with mahogany, tawny, or beige complexions—
there could be no doubt that "politically correct" was profitable.
"For six years, I had been preaching these demographics—showing pie charts of black kids under ten representing eighteen percent
of the under-ten population and Hispanic kids representing sixteen percent—and nobody was interested," said Yla Eason, an
African-American graduate of Harvard Business School who in 1985 founded Olmec Corporation, which makes dolls and action figures
of color. "But when Mattel came out with those same demographics and said, 'Ethnically correct is the way,' it legitimatized
our business."
Some say that the toy industry's idea of "ethnically correct" doesn't go far enough, however. Ann duCille, chairman of the
African-American Studies Program and an associate professor of English at Wesleyan University, is a severe critic. After studying
representations of race in fashion dolls for over a year, she feels that the dolls reflect a sort of "easy pluralism." "I'm
not sure I'd go so far as to say I'd rather see no black dolls than see something like Shani or Black Barbie," she told me,
"but I would hope for something more—which is not about to happen." Nor is she wholly enamored of Imani and Melenik, Olmec's
equivalent of Barbie and Ken. "Supposedly these are dolls for black kids to play with that look like them, when in fact they
don't look like them. That's a problematic statement, of course, because there's no 'generic black kid.' But those dolls look
too like Barbie for me. They have the same body type, the same long, straight hair—and I think it sends a problematic message
to kids. It's about marketing, about business—so don't try to pass it off as being about the welfare of black children."
Lisa Jones, an African-American writer who chronicled the introduction of Mattel's Shani dolls for the
Village Voice,
is less harsh. Too old to have played with Christie—Barbie's black friend, born in 1968—Jones recalls as a child having expressed
annoyance with her white classmates by ripping the heads and arms off her two white Barbie dolls. Any fashion doll of color,
she thinks, would have been better for her than those blondes. "Having been a little girl who grew up without the images,"
she told me, "I realize that however they fail to reach the Utopian mark, they're still useful."
People who accuse Mattel of having lacked a multicultural vision may not know about its relationship to Shindana Toys—a failed
yet prescient experiment. To appreciate why Shindana was a breakthrough, one has to look at the history of American toys,
which since the nineteenth century have been used to caricature immigrants. One shoo-in for the Toymakers' Hall of Shame is
a common late-nineteenth-century bank called the "reclining Chinaman." It depicted a Chinese man with playing cards sprawled
against a log. At the log's base was a rat—alleged to be a staple in the Chinese diet—and a lever which, when pulled, caused
a coin to fall from the man's hip into the bank while his hands moved to reveal that the cards were all aces. The toy promulgated
the notion that Chinese people were shifty and— because they accepted jobs at lower wages than less-recent immigrants— stole
money from "American" workers.
The 1924 "Chicken Snatcher" is another stunningly awful plaything. This wind-up toy, which, according its advertisement, "will
delight the kiddies," featured a "scared Negro" who "shuffles along with a chicken dangling in his hand and a dog hanging
on the seat of his pants." But even when toys weren't poking malicious fun at unassimilated foreigners or African Americans,
they were erasing them through omission. Until the civil rights movement of the 1960s, dolls were predominantly white; black
children couldn't play with little effigies of themselves. The effect of this invisibility was quantified in the late 1930s
and early 1940s, when two African-American social scientists, Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, did a study using dolls to investigate
black children's self-esteem. Given a choice between a white doll or a black doll, 67 percent of the black children they surveyed
preferred the white doll. They dismissed the black dolls as ugly and bad.
The Clarks' troubling findings were not without impact. In 1954, Thurgood Marshall, arguing for the plaintiff in the landmark
case
Brown
v.
Board of
Education of Topeka, Kansas,
used the Clarks' testimony to document the psychological damage that had been suffered by blacks because of segregation. Marshall
won the case, which resulted in the Supreme Court decision to integrate public schools.
To set the scene for Shindana's launch, we must return to the 1965 Watts riots, which broke out in midsummer after a Los Angeles
coroner's jury excused as "justifiable homicide" the police killing of an unarmed black teenager carrying a baby—a verdict
eerily similar to the one in the 1992 trial of the officers accused of beating Rodney King. In August, when the embers were
far from metaphorically cool, Lou Smith and Robert Hall formed Operation Bootstrap. They wanted to take the community's anger
and channel it constructively. In reaction to "Burn, baby, burn," their motto was "Learn, baby, learn."
Elliot Handler hooked up with Bootstrap in March 1968. "I thought it would be a good idea to get something started in the
black neighborhood to see if we could train some people and turn them into entrepreneurs," he told me. But he had no connections—until
he met the late Paul Jacobs, a left-wing writer, former union organizer, and brother of Cliff Jacobs, Mattel vice president
in charge of market planning.
A staff member at the Santa Barbara-based Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Paul Jacobs had become friendly
with Lou Smith while researching his 1967 book,
Prelude to Riot: A View of Urban America
from the Bottom. Prelude
is a bitter book; the cover of its paperback edition shows an American flag and some crumbling buildings sticking out of a
battered garbage can. To understand what Michael Harrington had termed "The Other America," Jacobs immersed himself in it.
He didn't just debrief a handful of black leaders, he interviewed dozens of families in their homes— often having to overcome
their skittishness and distrust. He also probed abuses of authority in the Los Angeles Police Department, producing a document
so damning that L.A. Mayor Sam Yorty said Jacobs "ought to be investigated" for having written it.