Barbie’s Still a Babe

Everyone knew you didn’t ask questions about fire sales on Chicago’s Maxwell Street. If a toy factory went up in flames one day, you’d simply be shopping for cheap, toasty toys at an instant flea market the next.

Author Sandra Cisneros remembers being 10 when that happened in her old neighborhood. And she remembers having eyes for only the smoky Barbie dolls.

“The street was smoldering when I went from being Barbie poor to Barbie wealthy,” Cisneros says. “Suddenly we had the whole cast of Barbie friends and suddenly it was no longer special.”

Cisneros’ disillusionment, once she realized her Barbie-fixated material dreams, evolved into the stuff of literature. “Barbie Q” is one of the pieces in her recent book, “Women Hollering Creek & Other Stories.” And at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Barbies stand for suburban ennui in the current photography exhibit, “Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort.” Barbie even takes a bow in Mark Morris’ “The Hard Nut,” the avant-garde choreographer’s hot-ticket retooling of “The Nutcracker” that ran in New York over Christmas.

Sure, Barbie mania has been around virtually since she was “born” a Leo in 1959. But her grasp on the national imagination has gradually infiltrated far beyond Barbie’s dream house.

Indeed, Barbie’s claim to a piece of the Zeitgeist extends even beyond the rarefied realm of art. In a world of kids with notoriously short attention spans, Barbie’s lure is more compelling than ever, even as she looks into the jaws of early middle age. (Barbie sales were estimated at $1 billion in 1992, a watershed even for the most popular toy in history.)

Now that Barbie is a ripe 33, the baby boomers who grew up with her are making Barbie art, collecting vintage Barbies--hoping they’re not getting counterfeits--and buying an average of seven Barbies for their typical American girls. Indeed, now that the boomers have inherited the Earth, with one of their own headed for the White House, it’s only fitting that the symbol of their rose-colored youth has become a cultural icon.

“Barbie never grows old, she never gains weight,” sighs collector Mark Ouellette, 41, chairman of this year’s Barbie convention in Baltimore. “It would be very easy to transfer your hopes and dreams to this perfect 11 1/2-inch world she lives in because it is perfect.”

Barbie might no longer be unbendable but she certainly seems unstoppable. In November, she got her own 1,500-square-foot boutique at New York’s F.A.O. Schwarz: The opening of Barbie on Madison was heralded with the arrival of more than 100 journalists, Kathie Lee Gifford and Madison Avenue Barbie, who with her upswept blond ‘do, dark glasses, Chanel-inspired suit and ubiquitous shopping bag resembles another famous New Yorker.

“We didn’t consciously set out to say Ivana Trump is popular and she’s associated with New York so let’s design a doll like her,” Mattel spokeswoman Donna Gibbs says coyly, but “we don’t mind the comparison.”

But the belle of the ball is Totally Hair Barbie, who pushed the envelope on a basic Barbie principle--what Mattel calls the hair-brushing “play pattern.” Totally Hair’s monster ankle-length hairdo swept her sales to an estimated $100 million last year. Along with her controversial buddy, the math-hating Teen Talk Barbie, Barbie has recently had newspaper columnists around the country scratching their collective pate.

“What were you expecting, Kierkegaard Barbie?” mused Washington Post columnist Tony Kornheiser. “Barbie is a bimbo. Always was. Totally Hair Barbie! (As opposed to Klaus Barbie, the Totally Herr Barbie.)”

Like it or not, Allyson Booth, an English professor at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., thinks Barbie gets so much ink because she stands for all women--bimboid and otherwise.

“I’ve wondered if recently the attention to Barbie has become a way of people wanting to take the temperature of attitudes toward women because everyone talks about her,” Booth says.

The Barbie boom stems in part from her position as the Zelig of the toy world, able to assume the traits people project on her.

“She was the first doll that looked like a young woman, and I think a lot of people really put their personality into the doll when they were playing with it,” says Ouellette. “The phenomenon of Barbie having the whole world built around her, with homes and cars and vacation vehicles and a whole series of books, gave her a personality that had never existed for another doll. That was the genesis of people having this kind of emotional tie with the doll, and I think it was a very smart, carefully planned personality developed for her by Mattel toys.”

Consider her face. Mattel has re-sculpted it over the years in response to market research. Her first fashion-model face, hoity-toity with arching eyebrows and a slight sneer, was scratched in 1960 because she was perceived as too sophisticated. Mattel added a smile in 1977, widened it in 1989, and little girls now perceive her as “a very friendly, approachable, independent friend” who would never show her bellybutton in public, even if she had one, says Gibbs.

Even adults pine after Barbie’s supposedly chaste world because it’s “very like a safe haven, a nice place to escape for a while,” says Ouellette.

Ouellette will helm the celebration of “35 Years of Barbie Magic” at August’s “You’ve Come a Long Way, Barbie” convention. There, putative adults will dress up like Barbie and Ken and trade vintage dolls that go for more than $4,000 for a mint-condition early 1959 Barbie in the box she came in, called a No. 1. Of course, with figures like that collectors have to be on the lookout for counterfeits. Re-rooting a doll’s hair so it appears to have a rare 1965 side part is the Barbie equivalent of rolling back the odometer.

But that nostalgic thrill sends shivers down the spine of designer BillyBoy*, who is horrified by Barbie’s success--which he aided and abetted with his 1987 book, “Barbie: Her Life & Times.”

“I’ve created a monster,” he sniffs. “I have one of the largest collections in the world. But I’m not proud of it, and I think it’s really neurotic for people to aspire to such a ghastly thing.

“It makes perfect sense that people would identify with Barbie. The ‘60s were incredibly comfortable for baby-boom children. Now they’re adults and you can have it all again--your nice, comfortable middle-class childhood. I frankly think there’s something really unhealthy about it.”

The doll’s ability to be many things to many people has also made her subject to another disturbing phenomenon--literal Barbie-bashing. Booth described such an incident in “Barbie Dolls as Monsters,” an academic paper she presented at a recent pop culture conference. When “a young male hamburger flipper” was rejected by a female colleague during a McDonald’s Barbie promotion, a doll bore the brunt of his rage.

“Later that night--apparently in retaliation--the rejected young man thus proceeded to perform a series of operations on one of the Happy Meal Barbie dolls . . . the cutting open of Barbie’s legs and the surgical removal of Barbie’s breasts,” Booth wrote. “She was then grilled, decorated with condiments and wrapped in a burrito.”

Booth says Barbie belting still puzzles her. “I don’t know if it’s that we have this love/hate relationship with how we think women’s bodies are supposed to look,” she says, “but it seems striking that it happens to Barbies.”

Similarly, in art, Barbie’s symbolic safe haven comes under the microscope.

“The dolls were a way for some artists to get at cultural myths that they were interested in exploring and critiquing,” says Peter Galassi, the Museum of Modern Art photography curator who assembled the “Pleasures and Terrors” show. “She represents a kind of female role that isn’t one that most young women now would like to aspire to--a bimbo, blond hair, large breasts, totally skinny body. The doll is a boiled-down artifact that embodies a set of cultural values.”

Mattel has tried to counter the bimbo factor by giving Barbie great jobs like, well, President. But the seemliness of those cultural values remain in the eye of the beholder. On one end, there is the Barbie imperative to buy, buy, buy so that a child can have multiple Barbies in her complete Barbie world. That means that Mattel must export American consumerism to maximize sales in the 100 countries that bring in about half of Barbie’s income. In Japan, where little girls display their dolls, Mattel runs ads to teach them how to play with Barbies.

And in Europe, says BillyBoy*, who lives in Paris, some adults who admire American culture buy Barbies for their children, but she’s also facing a backlash.

“Barbie’s very poorly looked upon in Europe,” he says. “Barbie is such an incredible symbol of consumerism, which is such a sick thing. . . . Barbie is a symbol, yes, but is she a good symbol? She’s homogenizing beauty. She’s homogenizing everything.”

But there’s some comfort in that for people like Evelyn Burkhalter, who runs the Barbie Hall of Fame in Palo Alto and revels in the middle-class pleasures of Barbie worship.

“The average person never has much said about them, but this doll has,” says Burkhalter, whose Barbie-from-birth collection is “99.9% complete.”

“And it was small enough for me to start and it doesn’t take much room. I have a small museum, but then I have small people.”