Forever Barbie (20 page)

Jacobs concluded that the violence in Watts wasn't just a response to police mistreatment. It expressed the community's frustration
at being excluded by poverty from the consumer culture. He writes: "To buy a house in the Valley, spend a weekend at Lake
Arrowhead, have babies who grow up to become teenagers attending the senior prom, visit Hawaii . . . shop downtown before
going to the PTA fashion show, learn to ski at Sun Valley, take scuba diving lessons . . . these, the life patterns of middle-class
Los Angeles . . . are unknown to these generations of unemployed, underemployed and low-paid workers." He might as well have
said "these, the life patterns of Barbie"—so close were his examples to the situations for which she had outfits. He also
blamed television advertising—of the sort Mattel had pioneered—for heightening black frustration. The ads, he said, ensured
that the economically disenfranchised were intimately familiar with all the products they could never afford. Jacobs's undisguised
distaste for Barbie's "America" made him an unlikely mediator between Bootstrap and Mattel; yet he not only introduced them,
he helped keep their marriage together.

By 1967, Bootstrap had opened a student-staffed car repair shop and a factory where apprentice seamstresses made clothes.
It held classes in typing, keypunch, English, and business math. And it ran "Kiwanda," a pricey boutique in Pacific Palisades
that sold student-made dashikis to upper-middle-class white people.

If Smith and Hall were intrigued by the idea of going into the toy business, they didn't initially show it. "We went down
into some little ramshackle place that was being used as a training center," Handler told me. "And we sat down and I explained
to these people—Lou and the guys around him—what I wanted to do. And they didn't believe me. They said, 'Are you serious?'
Ts this some kind of a deal?' 'What's going on?' So we had to talk for quite a while and through Paul's help we finally convinced
them we wanted to do something."

"I think what Lou and Robert were feeling was not so much skepticism as: Are they really going to live up to what they are
telling us?" said Marva Smith, the widow of Lou Smith, who died in 1976. (Hall is also no longer alive.) "We need their assistance
in every area. This is all new to us. Will they be there in the long run?"

A Philadelphia-born civil rights activist who came to L.A. to be the West Coast director for the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE), Smith's dream for Shindana was to make dolls that looked black, dressed black, and talked black—"Brother and Sister
dolls made by brothers and sisters," as a 1971 Shindana promotional flyer put it. He wanted games that taught history from
an African-American perspective. And he wanted to make enough money from the toys to support other Bootstrap projects, like
its day-care arm, the Honeycomb Child Development Center.

Yet even with Mattel's help, this wasn't easy. Articulate, charismatic, and fiercely Afrocentric, Smith didn't change his
style to court white investors. "He'd meet with presidents of banks, universities, or large corporations in his dashiki and
his jeans," Marva Smith told me. And he was so distrustful of government agencies that he refused to apply for a Small Business
Administration loan. Rather than change Smith's mind, Mattel donated $150,000 to set up a toy factory on Central Avenue.

The plant's opening ceremonies in October 1968 attracted national attention. Ironically, Mayor Sam Yorty, Paul Jacobs's avowed
enemy, presided at the festivities, which Jacobs also attended. Hatchets were seemingly buried—or at least shelved. "I know
you don't agree with a great many of the positions in which I believe and sometimes with the way in which I express them,"
Jacobs wrote to the Handlers in a letter dated shortly after the opening, "but in this case we seem to have a common understanding."

The optimism continued at Toy Fair, when buyers, introduced to Shindana by Mattel's sales force, responded positively to Baby
Nancy, who, with her molasses complexion and kinky Afro, was very unlike the cafe-au-lait, Caucasian-featured "black" dolls
that had been put forth by mainstream toy-makers. Her appearance was so radical, in fact, that creating it posed a technical
challenge. To make her Saran hair look "natural," James Edwards, Shindana's head designer, told me, "You'd sew it into the
doll's head, then stick it into the oven and it would crinkle up."

Nor did Shindana produce only dolls. It licensed images of the Jackson Five for a card game, and issued "The Black Experience
American History Game," in which players, to quote the catalogue, "begin their existence as slaves and work their way . .
. to the present." Today, the Jackson Five cards are avidly sought by collectors because they feature a Michael who still
looks black.

Mattel had agreed to support Shindana for its first two years, after which, ideally, it would be self-sufficient. In an internal
memo dated eleven months after the plant's opening, Mattel marketing director Cliff Jacobs expressed optimism, as well as
concern that the trust, which had been hard to establish, not break down. "Black people were suspicious and did not want to
be 'put down' by the 'con,' " he wrote. So it fell to Mattel to provide the "best trainers" possible—"not second-rate people
who can be spared from their regular jobs," but people who " 'talk the language' and are in complete sympathy with the project."

The "best trainers" meant Jacobs himself, who led a weekly marketing seminar at Shindana. It also meant senior engineer Adolph
"Dolph" Lee and Art Spear, vice president for manufacturing, who would later head Mattel. Spear never allowed Mattel's burgeoning
financial problems to interfere with his commitment to Shindana. "Art was the kind of person who was at my disposal twenty-four
hours a day," said Robert Bobo, who joined Shindana in 1974 as its president. "If I needed him for anything, he was a phone
call away." And on one occasion, Spear did, in fact, save the day. Shindana had unexpectedly run out of the plastic it needed
to make a certain doll, and Spear immediately found a source at Mattel. If a company the size of Mattel had been undersupplied,
Spear reasoned, it would endure. But the shortage could have wiped out Shindana.

Then there was Shindana's outrageous cast of characters. Smith and Hall were militant, civil-rights types, Edwards said. "Other
blacks were at the other end of the spectrum—where if you talked to them, you thought they were white. Then you'd have another
guy with a 'street' kind of personality." And if this olla podrida weren't spicy enough, there were Shindana's assorted investors—not
just Mattel, its initial backer, but "the president of Chase Manhattan bank, here in South Central, talking to all these personalities."

Ironically, the largest purchasers of Shindana products weren't African-American. December is the key sales month for toys,
but because black parents tended to do their Christmas shopping later than white parents, Shindana's merchandise was often
sold out by the time they went into the stores. Nor did toy buyers—almost entirely white and male at the time— take Shindana
seriously enough to reorder. Because of its relationship to Mattel, Bobo said, "There was a lot of token buying." But no real
commitment to the toys: "Nobody took them on as a real product that they could make money on," Edwards told me. "You'd go
in there and they'd say, 'What do you jungle bunnies want? We gave last year.' "

By the mid-seventies, domestic production had become so expensive that Shindana was forced to move most of its manufacturing
to the Orient. "We had little places called Shindanatown in Hong Kong and Taiwan," Edwards told me. But the move was not uncontested.
"I can't even begin to tell you how much arguing there was against that," Shindana plant manager Ralph Riggins said. "One
of the things Bootstrap wanted to do—and did—was put the unemployable to work," Bobo told me. But financial realities left
Shindana no choice: either build overseas or go broke.

The deemphasis on Shindana's local factory depressed company morale, as did the death in 1976 of Smith and his school-age
daughter in a car accident while they were on vacation. Shindana's optimism and hope began to be poisoned by cynicism and
distrust, reflected in a board game that it brought out in 1980: "Manipulation: The Mammoth Corporation Game." A sort of "Monopoly"
for minority businessmen, it details not only "the mechanics of borrowing money from a bank for business purposes," but also
how to stay out of jail if you can't pay it back.

"Well, you know, they didn't have much use for the white man's 'manipulation,' " Cliff Jacobs told me. " 'Anybody can run
a business; you guys are trying to keep it a big secret'—I can just hear them telling us. Of course when it came to planning
for themselves, this was not one of their great strengths."

And so, in the early eighties, Shindana sputtered out. By 1979, Edwards, Bobo, and Riggins had left. Only Herman Thompson,
who headed its sales force, and Earl Coss, who replaced Bobo, remained. Like Moses, who expired before entering the Promised
Land, Shindana blazed the trail to the modern multicultural marketplace, only to perish on its outskirts. Over its dead form,
the next generation of companies—Olmec Corporation, Golden Ribbon Merchants, Cultural Exchange Corporation—strode through
the gates.

ROGER WILKINS, A CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST AND ASSISTANT Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson, is probably not the
first person one thinks to contact when one is doing a book about Barbie. But I ran into him in the greenroom at Cable News
Network in December 1993, and, because I tend to be single-minded about my research, our conversation turned to Barbie. Wilkins
told me that his sister, who is in her early forties, had been opposed to Barbie dolls because they coded European standards
of beauty. Moreover, to encourage her daughter to take pride in her heritage, she had given the girl a Swahili name. But when
Mattel came out with its Shani line, his sister did an about-face. Shani, which means "marvelous" in Swahili, was, in fact,
her daughter's name. And the child now has several of the dolls.

"We are living in a moment where 'the other' has a certain kind of commercial value," Ann duCille dryly observes. One reason
is, of course, that racial and ethnic minorities have significant disposable income. But other forces had an influence, too.

In 1985, Dr. Darlene Powell Hopson and Dr. Derek S. Hopson, two married psychologists, duplicated Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark's
experiments using dolls to explore black children's self-esteem. Their results were shocking: they suggested that in the forty
years since the Clarks did their research—despite landmark legal decisions, acts of Congress, and the civil rights movement—little
had changed. Sixty-five percent of the black children they interviewed preferred white dolls, and 76 percent said the black
dolls "looked bad" to them. "It was so disheartening," Darlene Powell Hopson told me. "I remember sitting at McDonald's—of
all places—in Harlem, crying, saying, T don't want to do this. I can change my topic. I can do something different.' " She
had begun collecting the data for her dissertation in psychology at Hofstra University. But her husband, who had already earned
his Ph.D., urged her to forge on, which she did.