Girl for the Ages
So Barbie is--gasp!--turning 40. But doing so, of course, with nary a crow’s foot, nary a gray hair, neither squiggle of cellulite nor hint of a double chin.
And to think that the quintessential material girl even may be lying about her age! After all, she was a teenage model when she entered our lives, back in March 1959--a babe, not a baby doll, an 11 1/2-inch-tall sex symbol with big hair and big breasts (though neither navel nor nipples).
Who knew that within four decades she would become not only the biggest-selling toy of all time, and one of the enduring icons of American pop culture, but also part of the language? Maybe you can’t look her up in your Funk & Wagnalls, but “Barbie doll” has become synonymous with blond, beautiful and not too bright.
In her unauthorized biography, “Forever Barbie” (William Morrow, 1994), M.G. Lord pointed out that Barbie has an advantage over other icons such as Valentino, Monroe, Dietrich and Elvis, who survive mainly as caricatures of themselves. Barbie, Lord writes, “can never bloat. She has no children to betray her. Nor can she rot, wrinkle, overdose. . . .”
Still, with her preposterous measurements (36-18-33), her little arched feet, her expensive houses and cars and her designer wardrobe, Barbie has been at the center of a sociological war of words between those who adore her and those who see her as evil incarnate, bent on turning preschoolers into veritable Lolitas.
Dr. Carole Lieberman, a psychiatrist in Beverly Hills, thinks Barbie ought to be sold with a warning label: “This doll may be dangerous to a child’s self-esteem.” Lieberman--whose says her patients have included the Barbie-impaired--thinks “Barbie is the No. 1 destroyer of self-esteem and self-confidence and good feelings about yourself that has ever existed.”
When women buy the dolls for their daughters, Lieberman is convinced there is poison in the message: Unless you look like Barbie, you’re not going to be loved, you’re not going to find a Ken.
“I’ll bet Hillary Clinton [who, in her college years, was less than glamorous] was affected by Barbie [and] was incredibly flattered when Bill Clinton--who was a compulsive flirt, even then--was attracted to her. Maybe that’s the reason she stays with him,” Lieberman says.
“Wait a minute!” say Barbie’s devoted followers. OK, so she debuted as a fashion model, but that doesn’t make her a ditz. Through the years she has reinvented herself (with the help of the marketing folks at Mattel Inc.) as an astronaut, an aerobics instructor, an Army medic, an Olympic athlete, a lead singer in a rock band, an airline pilot, a briefcase-toting power executive, a NASCAR race driver, even a candidate for president.
Well, yes, counter the Barbie-bashers, but she did it with every strand of her Kanekalon hair in place, and without a chip on her manicured red nails.
Says Lieberman, “It’s as though it’s OK to be an astronaut or a businesswoman if you also have a perfect figure and face.”
Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler, now 82, says she never dreamed of what was ahead for Barbie when she persuaded husband Elliot and the company to take a chance on the plastic doll.
“No toy in our experience had lasted over a few years,” she says. “To this day I marvel” at Barbie’s staying power.
Handler attributes it to Barbie’s “play value,” her continual updating and her appeal to little girls and adult collectors alike.
Meanwhile, the critics continue to blame Barbie for everything from encouraging overspending to sexism to single-handedly causing an epidemic of anorexia and other eating disorders.
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When Handler first proposed that Mattel make the doll, the company’s designers balked.
“They felt adult women wouldn’t want their children to have a doll with breasts,” Handler says. “Our guys all said, ‘Naw, no good.’ I tried more than once and nobody was interested, and I gave up.”
Then, on a European vacation in 1956, she saw a German doll, Lilli, a somewhat tarty number sold as a boy toy. Handler brought home three and sent Mattel designers off to Japan with one, telling them to “find us a manufacturer.” The first year, 351,000 Barbies sold at $3 apiece retail. (Today, a basic Barbie starts at $5, with special editions commanding up to $300.)
As everyone who hasn’t been living in Barbie’s fantasy world probably knows, Barbie was named for Handler’s teenage daughter.
“I would have named her Babs or Babsie [her daughter’s nickname], but Babs had already been copyrighted.” Babs doll?
Growing up as the real-life Barbie was “very hard” on Barbara, Handler acknowledges. “It embarrassed her. Now it’s OK . . . I think she kind of likes it.”
(Now Barbara Segal, the divorced mother of two lives in Los Angeles. Her brother Ken, for whom Barbie’s boyfriend was named, died of brain cancer in 1994.)
Although retailers last year cut back on Barbie orders for the first time in a decade, the toy still reigns as queen of the Mattel lot in El Segundo, accounting for $2 billion of the company’s $4.8 billion in annual sales. More than a billion Barbies have been sold in 150 countries, says Mattel, noting that the typical American girl between 3 and 11 now owns 10 Barbie dolls.
Her imitators--Tammy, Tressy, Dawn and the rest--just never measured up. And the Happy to Be Me doll, introduced in 1991 by High Self Esteem Toys in Minnesota as a more zaftig representation of womanhood, fizzled after three years. Girls just don’t fantasize about being plump.
There are Barbie clubs, Barbie conventions, Barbie magazines and newsletters. As Barbara Rausch, who drew Barbie comics, once said: “Barbies are like potato chips. You can’t have just one.”
Of course, not only girls love Barbie. Joe Blitman, 49, an ex-screenwriter who says he “fled into Barbie’s arms” when Hollywood wanted to murder one of his scripts, is now in the Barbie doll business with partner Kevin Mulligan in Los Feliz, where they claim to sell more vintage Barbies (1959-72) than anyone.
Like most boys, Blitman collected model cars, not Barbies, as a kid. “Men may have wanted Barbie,” he says, “but they certainly didn’t get it.” They got GI Joe, a doll masquerading as an action figure. Today, Blitman estimates, 20% of Barbie collectors are men, predominantly gay men.
He dismisses the notion that Barbie has created body angst for two generations of women.
“Quite honestly, little girls don’t think that Barbie is what women look like. . . . But adults have sort of fastened on the doll as the she-devil in vinyl.”
Angel or devil, Barbie is a survivor. She’s been skewered by feminists, imitated by drag queens, spoofed by writers and desecrated by artists. In December 1993, Barbies appeared on store shelves in 43 states bellowing “Eat lead, cobra!” while GI Joes chirped “Let’s go shopping!” The Barbie Liberation Army, organized by a UC San Diego grad student, had switched voice boxes on hundreds of the dolls.
And not everything Barbie has touched has turned to gold. A Mattel publicist was baffled when asked what ever happened to Breakfast With Barbie, a cereal product in a Barbie pink box.
But Barbie knows what becomes a legend most--and it isn’t just marabou, sequins and gold lame. It’s success.
Should anyone dare to usurp Barbie’s name without permission, Mattel lawyers pounce. Mark Napier of Los Angeles learned this the hard way when the Barbie patrol fixed its sights on his irreverent Web site, the Distorted Barbie. Napier, a 37-year-old who designs software for the finance industry, had to change the name of the site to $arbie.
“Mainly what I want to do with the site”--which presents Barbie with “digitally morphed improvements”--”is to show that this icon is such a powerful influence on us.” In Napier’s view, that influence has not been totally negative. “There was a time when Barbie had a very positive influence,” he says. “Barbie presented this image of an independent young woman, employed.”
But “in the end,” he notes, “a doll is a doll. We have to remind ourselves of that.”
Napier says he focused on Barbie because she is “the most ready symbol of how it all works”--advertising and marketing and “how images are presented to us and create beliefs in our culture, how these icons are so pervasive. Barbie’s right up there with religious icons in terms of the recognition she has all over this planet.”
Regrettably, Napier says, not everyone visiting his Web site gets the message. “I get people who are looking for collectible Barbies.”
Of course, Barbie has an official Web site, where, for about $40, girls can create a customized Barbie with their choices of hair and eye color, skin tone, wardrobe and personality. And, for about $35 each, there are Barbie CD-ROMs such as Detective Barbie and the Barbie Adventure Riding Club.
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Since stepping out in her high heels and zebra-striped swimsuit in 1959, Barbie has been exhibited at the Smithsonian, painted by Andy Warhol and dissected by scholars. She has had plastic surgery and breast reduction. She weathered the turbulent ‘60s, when young women wore granny dresses and peace symbols, and emerged triumphant as disco Barbie in the ‘70s and Holiday Barbie in the me-too ‘80s.
Always politically correct, Mattel has introduced black Barbies and Asian Barbies and Latina Barbies and, in Share a Smile Becky, a Barbie friend in a wheelchair. (Unfortunately, the chair didn’t fit into the elevator of Barbie’s $200 dream house, creating another stir.)
Barbie has a staff of hairdressers at Mattel who “root” her hair in just-so circles, making certain that each head of hair weighs precisely so many grams--before it gets the pull test (the first thing a young Barbie owner is apt to do with her doll is strip off her clothes and yank at her hair).
The all-time bestselling Barbie was the aptly named Totally Hair Barbie (a miniskirted version from 1992 who redefined “big hair” with her ankle-grazing tresses). Collectors know that a mint-condition vintage Barbie NRFB (that’s Never Removed From Box) may command $4,000 to $7,000. And that’s with only one change of clothes.
“I never even had a wedding dress, but I paid $800 for a Barbie wedding dress,” admits collector Annette Givens of Winnetka.
Givens, 39, became hooked when her sister, a collector, bought her a Barbie in 1994 to replace her childhood Barbie.
Today, she is the unofficial organizer of an online collectors’ club, CyBarbia (“like suburbia”).
She was also a supporter of Pink Anger, a monthlong boycott of Barbie dolls in 1997 by collectors irate over a Poodle Parade Barbie with hair that looked as though it had been cut with a rusty saw, and ill-fitting shoes for Barbie’s friend Francie. Mattel responded by offering to replace the Poodle Barbie’s heads and Francie’s shoes.
For Givens, the Barbie mystique is about “recapturing your lost childhood. . . . I’m getting all that stuff I couldn’t afford as a kid. I didn’t have $2.99 back then, but now I have $299 to buy the same outfit.”
Givens, who estimates that she has invested $10,000 to $15,000 in her collection, keeps most of her dolls in a glass case but also has a “Barbie room” for Barbie dioramas.
Pink Anger and the 1st Amendment aside, she has little patience with Barbie-bashing. “I think she encouraged a lot of people, myself included, to be whatever they wanted to be.” The science teacher is on her way toward a master’s in marine biology.
“It’s not like people who collect Barbies sit around and have no brain,” she says.
What will happen to Barbie in the next 40 years? How will she look? Will she marry, have kids?
“She could,” Ruth Handler thinks, “but then, I don’t know. . . . I think she will look like whatever society looks like in 40 years, hopefully continue to be the reflection of the better part of the world as it is.”
Coming in May: a new line of Generation Girl Barbies, targeting older girls and young teens and--it is rumored--sporting nose rings and tattoos.
You’ve come a long way, Barbie.
