Authors: M. G. Lord
Forever Barbie (9 page)
Mattel countered by accusing Marx of conspiring with a bunch of Germans to compete unfairly by "marketing an inferior doll
in the United States of confusingly similar appearance to" Barbie. It also accused Marx of knocking off Jack Ryan's Thunderburp
cap gun mechanism, which also functioned as the guts of its Tommy Burst Detective gun.
What ensued was the toy world's
Bleak House.
Wily, indefatigable, both sides tossed accusations at each other like Molotov cocktails. Mattel, with mindboggling shamelessness,
introduced as evidence a book of historic wooden dolls from the "collection of Miss Ruth Ellison, Springfield, Vermont" (cunningly
unearthed by Jack Ryan's brother, Jim), and argued with conviction that Barbie, far from being knocked off from a German novelty
item, had been inspired by Yankee folk art.
After two years of legal mudslinging, Judge Leon Yankwich dismissed both Marx's complaint and counterclaims and Mattel's counterclaims,
"with prejudice as to all causes of action raised by said pleadings," and awarded no damages "or other affirmative relief
. . . to any party, each party to bear its own costs and attorney's fees."
This is legal jargon for "A pox on both your houses." Neither company would be permitted to reintroduce the suit.
BETWEEN 1964 AND 1968, MATTEL GREW PRODIGIOUSLY, swallowing smaller companies like a whale ingesting plankton. By 1965, its
sales exceeded $100 million—twice what they were in 1961. In 1967, it took over doll companies in West Germany and England
and opened a plant in Mexico. In 1968, it gobbled up two toy companies in Italy and a toy distributor in Belgium, opened subsidiaries
in Australia and Venezuela, and devoured Monogram Models, Inc., a domestic manufacturer of hobby kits. Its sales that year—including
international sales—exceeded $200 million, double what they had been three years earlier.
But the United States to which Mattel sold toys in 1968 was very different from the one that had snapped up Barbie in 1959.
It was no longer the tame, secure place it had been in the fifties. The rifts between young and old, black and white, Democrat
and Republican grew larger and more painful. In four years, the civil rights movement made great strides through nonviolence,
only to lose them all in the bloody assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Violence was a constant menace: a mugger
on every urban street corner, a prowler in every suburban bedroom, a mean, gun-toting drifter in every rural Greyhound station.
Sometimes the violence was random, like Charles Manson's 1969 attack on Sharon Tate. Sometimes it was focused, like Sirhan
B. Sirhan's fatal assault on Robert F. Kennedy. And sometimes it just swept through a town, blind and angry, as it did through
Watts in the summer of 1965.
Another liberation movement was also taking shape in the mid-sixties. In 1963, while Steinem was sunning herself on the beach,
Betty Friedan published
The Feminine Mystique,
the groundbreaking book that identified the gender-based malaise afflicting millions of women. Naming the problem was the
first step; on October 29, 1966, Friedan announced the formation of the National Organization for Women to combat it. Initially,
the women's movement kept a low profile, but that changed in September 1968 when a group of demonstrators, led by activist
Robin Morgan, stormed the Miss America Pageant. They threw bras, girdles, false eyelashes, and other objects beloved by drag
queens into a "Freedom Trash Can" and crowned a live sheep outside the auditorium. In what must be construed as a dig at Barbie,
some carried placards that read: "I Am . . . Not a Toy, a Pet or a Mascot."
That skirmish, however, was minor compared to the escalating controversy over the Vietnam War. By the summer of 1968, the
friction between Americans who supported it and those who did not could no longer be ignored. Outside of the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago, police clobbered and bloodied a crowd of antiwar demonstrators. And they did it in front of dozens
of TV cameras.
The war tore popular culture apart.
Laugh-In,
which premiered in 1968, assaulted viewers with political realities; but other popular programs—
The
Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.
—were so rooted in a fantasy of rural innocence that they remained vehicles of escape. "The typical George Wallace voter and
the Bob Dylan fan lived in different worlds," Jim Miller wrote about 1968 in
The New York Times.
There was no common ground, no safe imaginary landscape in which to set the American Dream. This posed a particular dilemma
for Mattel: you couldn't theme and miniaturize a center that wasn't holding.
Between 1964 and 1968, Mattel used various strategies to shield Barbie from the crossfire. She began by aping Jackie Kennedy,
who initially seemed a risk-free role model. At first, all she copied were Jackie's clothes, beginning in 1962 with "Red Flare,"
a knock-off of the first lady's Inauguration outfit. Soon Jackie had an influence on Barbie's class pretensions. In 1966,
Barbie lost interest in sock hops and the senior prom and collected outfits for tonier functions—"Debutante Ball" and "Benefit
Performance." In her English riding outfit, she affected Anglophilia and a love of tweed. But in 1968, Mattel dropped Jackie
as swiftly as it had embraced her. She had married Aristotle Onassis, and Mattel was not about to link its Golden Girl to
some stubby, shriveled Mediterranean type with alleged links to international organized crime.
As real life grew more politically polarized, Barbie turned away from it, retreating into a self-contained fantasy world.
The titles of her clothes became almost completely self-referential. Where initially outfits had been named for activities—"Goin'
Fishin'," "Friday Night Date," "Sorority Meeting," and "Garden Party"—they were now named for their fabric or pattern—"Knit
Hit," "Swirly Cue," "Snug Fuzz," and "Bouncy-Flouncy." It was as if Mattel didn't dare admit where a real college student
might wear such clothes—to march in Washington against the war, to drop acid at a Jefferson Airplane concert, or to light
up a joint while occupying the president's office at Columbia University.
The doll's activities also ceased to be grounded in reality. This pattern began in 1966 with "Color Magic" Barbie, a doll
whose hair and clothing changed color when a "magic" solution was applied to it. It is plausible to tint hair with a chemical;
millions of women do it. It is also plausible to dye one's clothes. But only in fantasy would a woman change the color of
her dress
while she was wearing it.
Perhaps sensing the degree to which Barbie was out-of-it, Mattel gave her vaguely with-it relatives and friends. Francie,
a cousin, appeared in 1966, followed by Casey and Twiggy (based on the real-life model) in 1967. In 1969, Barbie also got
black friends—Christie and Julia (the latter based on a TV character played by Diahann Carroll).
Meanwhile, Barbie's original pals were whisked off the market. Midge vanished in 1967; and, after a humiliating 1966 incarnation
as "Ken a Go Go," which required him to wear a fright wig and play a ukelele, Ken disappeared, returning with a new face in
1969. Mattel designer Steve Lewis said Ken vanished because he wasn't selling. But a few Ken dolls were, during those years,
still on sale in Canada; collectors speculate that his draft status figured in his departure.
As for Barbie's new friends, their principal distinction was their body type; more boyish than bovine, they could wear the
trendy, so-called Mod clothes imported from London. "Mod" was not arbitrary, but a systematic effort to throw off the codified
fashions of the 1950s—fashions that had made Barbie's name. It parodied historical styles, mixed blazing colors and metallic
textures, and reflected, often with wit, the disapproval that its young adherents felt for the established culture. It was,
say fashion historians Arian and Michael Batterberry, "a sort of ecstatic vision of Imperial Rome and Byzantium conceived
by Moreau and Bakst and brashly adapted to the beat of rock-and-roll."
It also had an element of androgyny. Boys wore velvet and had long hair; girls wore bell-bottoms and didn't. Nor could Mod
have happened without the canonization of those girlish guys from Liverpool, the Beatles. John, George, Paul, and Ringo offered
"a vision of sexuality freed from the shadow of gender inequality because the group mocked the gender distinctions that bifurcated
the American landscape into 'his' and 'hers,' " say Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs in
Re-Making Love.
"To Americans that believed fervently that sexuality hinged on
la difference,
the Beatlemaniacs said, No, blur the lines and expand the possibilities."
Barbie's body, which we will examine more carefully in a later chapter, did not blur anything; it was
la difference
incarnate. It was the body of Dior's New Look—cinched waist, accentuated breasts—that had hit the market in 1947. By the mid-sixties,
it had begun to look as stuffy and dated as Jackie Kennedy's pillbox hat.
The reason, one suspects, for the gender-blurring was the increasing popularity of the birth control pill, which had been
approved for sale in 1960. Once women had the option of turning off their fertility, they could behave as rakishly as men.
In the age of the pill, sex did not automatically lead to marriage and babies; it generally led to more sex. So in 1966, the
Barbie team made a decision. The times they were a-changin'. And Barbie, to some degree, would have to change with them.
L
et us leave Barbie poised for metamorphosis and shift the narrative to a living room in La Jolla, California—a modest, middle-class
room with nubby green wall-to-wall carpeting, a nut-brown sectional and a black-and-white television in the corner. There
is a large picture window through which one can make out a hazy strip of Pacific Ocean. The year is 1963 and I—a milk-white,
painfully thin only child with long, anemic braids—am sitting alone on the carpet surrounded by my Barbie paraphernalia.
Almost invariably, when I told women my age that I was writing about Barbie, they said: "Why
you? I
should be writing that book. I own twenty thousand Barbies." Or, "I threw up after dinner for a year because of Barbie." Or,
"I am a model or a stylist or a fiction writer or a you-fill-inthe-blank because of Barbie."
And they are, of course, right. Barbie left a personal impression on many members of my generation. But like my friends I
have a story to tell, and this seems to be the right moment to tell it.
At thirty-seven, I am a five-foot-six, 123-pound, tolerably fit woman whose knees and elbows are considerably more prominent
than her breasts. At the same age, my mother was, by most people's definitions, a beauty: five feet ten, 132 pounds, and possessed
of breasts that in their size and shape resembled Barbie's. They didn't droop or sag; nor did their size—38-C— interfere with
her ability to win at sports. Even in her forties she could swim faster and hit a Softball harder than people half her age.
No doubt you assume that I will write about how her perfection placed me in competition with her and, by extension, all women;
how I ached to have 38-C breasts; and how every month when
Vogue
arrived I pored over pictures of Verushka begging, "Dear God, please make me look like her." Nothing, however, could be further
from the truth.
When I was eight years old and my mother was forty-six, she had a mastectomy. Her experience with cancer did not have the
happy ending that Ruth Handler's did. It was a prelude to chemotherapy, more operations, and, six years later, death. This
was before the age of reconstructive surgery, political activism, and the life-affirming defiance that one sees among breast
cancer patients today. The illness was shrouded in secrecy, almost shame.
As her health deteriorated, her remaining breast mocked her. It hovered there—flawless—next to her indignant red scar. What
it said to me was: You do not want Barbie's breasts; the last thing on earth you want are Barbie's breasts. I associated them
with nausea, hair loss, pain, and decay. I associated them with annihilation. I believed myself blessed when nature didn't
provide them.
True, at sixteen, when I had my first serious beau, I felt vaguely shabby that his gropings were so meanly rewarded; but the
shabby feeling quickly passed. I was alive and hoped to remain so. In my mind, small breasts would make this possible; they
seemed somehow less vulnerable. Of course not every little girl's mother has a mastectomy, but many do. Since 1980, 450,000
women have died of breast cancer. In the decade of the nineties, an estimated 1.5 million women will be diagnosed with the
disease, and one-third of them will die.
These grim statistics suggest that daughters of breast-cancer patients are far from an insignificant minority. But I suspect,
as a consequence of the disease's historical invisibility, the experiences of breast-cancer daughters have often been ignored
by so-called body image experts. When I heard
Beauty Myth
author Naomi Wolf say on National Public Radio, "We were all raised on a very explicit idea of what a sexually successful
woman was supposed to look like," I wanted to shout that another "we"—millions of breast-cancer daughters—had had a very different
experience. When Wolf said "the official breast" was "Barbie's breast," I muttered aloud, "Speak for yourself, lady." Not
all women respond in a crazed, competitive, Pavlov-ian fashion to pictures of models or the body of a doll. And it's demeaning
to suggest that they do.
My Barbie play was as idiosyncratic as my childhood. I remembered nothing about it until four years ago when my father got
my dolls out of storage and shipped them to me. Tucked away since 1968, the vinyl cases seemed innocuous, yet I kept finding
reasons not to open them.
I wonder if archeologists hesitate, mid-dig, before making their discoveries, if they falter outside tombs the way I fumbled
with the clasp of Ken's mildewed sarcophagus. When, after several tugs, the latch finally gave, I dropped the case, bouncing
Ken onto the floor. I reached for him, then froze. He was wearing Barbie's low-cut, sequined "Solo in the Spotlight."
Nonchalant, he gazed at me, radiating what Susan Sontag has called the "androgynous vacancy" behind Greta Garbo's "perfect
beauty." If Mattel had intended to model him on the Swedish actress, it couldn't have done a better job.
My Midge, by contrast, was laid out spartanly in her original carton; a mere sidekick, she didn't have a fancy case. At least
she looked comfortable, wearing what I would have worn for twenty years in storage—Ken's khaki trousers, navy blazer, and
dress shirt.
Then there was Barbie—blond ponytail Barbie—wearing tennis whites and a sweatshirt in her glossy red valise. Her cruel mouth,
still haughty, brought back memories. I remembered a fight after which my mother grudgingly bought me fat-cheeked, blotchy
Midge. I remembered a second fight after which she bought me perfect Barbie and Ken. And I remembered Midge's ordeal. Midge
didn't seduce Ken—that would have been too obvious. She became his platonic pal, introducing him to a new pastime: looking
more Barbie-like than Barbie.
I was tempted to slam the cases, to squelch the memories, but I rummaged farther. My dolls had not been cross-dressed in a
vacuum. It had happened during the years of my mother's illness; years of uncertainty, of sleepovers at friends' houses when
she was in the hospital; years which, until I opened the boxes, I had forgotten. But as I picked through the miniatures, why
I did what I did became less of a mystery.
My Barbie paraphernalia was a museum of my mother's values. Arrayed together, the objects were a nonverbal vocabulary, the
sort of language in which John Berger urged women to express themselves. Except for "Solo," which a friend had given me, the
language was hers.
A chemist who fled graduate school long before completing a Ph.D., my mother was a casualty of the Feminine Mystique. She
had stopped work to become a fifties housewife and hated every minute of it. She didn't tell me, "Housework is thralldom,"
but she refused to buy Barbie cooking utensils. She didn't say, "Marriage is jail," but she refused to buy Barbie a wedding
dress. What she did say often, though, was "Education is power." And in case I missed the point, she bought graduation outfits
for each of my dolls.
Nor did she complain about her mastectomy. I sensed the scar embarrassed her, but I never knew how much. Then I unearthed
Barbie's bathing suit—a stretched-out maillot onto which my mother had sewn two clumsy straps to keep the top from falling
down.
That sad piece of handiwork spoke to me in a way she never had. It spoke not of priggishness or prudery, but of the anguish
she had felt poolside and why she rarely ventured into the water. It spoke of how she felt herself watched—how all women feel
themselves watched—turning male heads before the operation and fearing male scrutiny after it. It spoke of pain and stoicism
and quiet forbearance. It broke her silence and my heart.
When things of aesthetic power—say, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial— have emotional resonance, the resonance feels right. But
I cannot tell you how strange it was to ache with grief over a bunch of doll clothes. Or to find in a Barbie case a reliquary
of my mother.
I forced myself to study Ken masquerading as Steichen's portrait of Garbo; Midge looking like a refugee from a boys' boarding
school; even Barbie looking more Martina than Chrissy. (Barbie wore a tiny tennis skirt, but it was under
Ken's
sweatshirt.) I concluded that I'd been one messed-up kid.
But as I explored the mess, I came to realize that, given my environment, it would have been far flakier not to have cross-dressed
the dolls. It wasn't just my mother's message that a woman's traditional role was loathsome; it was all the weirdness and
fear floating around the idea of breasts. I don't think Midge's sartorial inspiration was Una Lady Troubridge or Radclyffe
Hall. I think it was terror. Femaleness, in my eight-year-old cosmos, equaled disease; I disguised Midge in men's clothes
to protect her. If her breasts were invisible, maybe the disease would pass over them. Maybe she'd survive. I even shielded
Barbie, permitting her to show her legs but armoring her chest. Only Ken was allowed the luxury of feminine display; he had
no breasts to make him vulnerable.
Seeing Barbie ignited a brushfire of ancient emotions; no longer could I dismiss the doll as trivial. Freud, of course, understood
that dolls weren't trivial; in his essay on "The Uncanny," he writes about the creepy or "uncanny" feeling dolls or automata
provoke in people when such dolls are too lifelike. He also understood that if commonplace or familiar things— like, say,
Barbies—trigger the recollection of a repressed memory, they can send shivers down one's spine.
In German, "the uncanny" is
das Unheimliche
—that which is weird or foreign. The word is the opposite of
das Heimliche
—that which is familiar, native, of the home. Once "homely" objects, my dolls had become uncanny: they preserved, as if in
amber, the forgotten terrors of my childhood. Freud explains: "If psycho-analytic theory is correct in maintaining that every
affect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then among
instances of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed
which
recurs."
He calls this class of scary things "the uncanny." Consequently, Freud writes, "we can understand why linguistic usage has
extended
das Heimliche
['homely'] into its opposite
das Unheimliche,
for this uncanny is really nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which
has become alienated from it only through the process of repression."
In his essay, Freud pushes the idea of the uncanny much farther than I do. He describes the fantasy of being mistakenly buried
alive as "the most uncanny thing of all"—remarking that psychoanalysis has revealed that fantasy to be a transformation of
another, originally nonterrifying fantasy qualified "by a certain lasciviousness"—that of intrauterine existence.
Thus the womb, "the former
Heim
[home] of all human beings," is the ultimate
unheimlich
place. This might also suggest why, while not literally a return to the womb, my profound reconnection with my mother—experienced
as an adult through my childhood dolls—seemed uncanny.
I was eight when I got my Barbies, well past the age of appropriating them as what psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott termed "transitional
objects." But Mattel's research shows that today kids get Barbies earlier, usually about age three. Thus, Barbies, in the
psyches of toddlers, can function as transitional objects—which warrants a closer look at Winnicott's concept.
During the months following birth, a baby doesn't grasp that its mother is separate from itself. Embodied by her ever-nurturing
breast, the mother is an extension of the child; she can be magically conjured up by the child whenever the child wants—or
so the child believes. As the child develops, however, it must face the fact that this just isn't so—not, for the child, a
happy idea. It isn't just the physical weaning, having to give up a stress-free means of satisfying hunger. It's also the
trauma of becoming independent, of losing the blissful, boundariless connection to Mom.