Forever Barbie

by M. G. Lord

  But the castle was not all lighthearted fun and games. It also had a dungeon— Zsa Zsa described it as a "torture chamber"—painted an ominous black and adorned with black fox fur. Over the years the castle housed, often simultaneously, his first wife Barbara, his two daughters, his brother Jim, multiple mistresses, one or two fellow engineers, and a group Zsa Zsa called "Ryan's Boys," twelve UCLA students who did work around the place in exchange for room and board.

  Zsa Zsa never moved in with Jack; but even with her own house as a refuge, she could only endure seven months of marriage. "Jack's sex life would have made the average Penthouse reader blanch with shock," she observed in her autobiography, One Lifetime Is Not Enough.

  Meanwhile, in Hamburg, Germany, around the world from Mattel, 1955 was a key year for another designer who had a major influence on Barbie. Reinhard Beuthien, a cartoonist, had created the comic character Lilli for the Bild Zeitung; on August 12 of that year, Lilli acquired a third dimension. The Bavaria-based firm of Greiner & Hauser GmbH issued her as an eleven-and-a-half-inch, platinum-ponytailed, Nefertiti-eyed, fleshtone-plastic doll.

  Lilli's cartoon antics fit right in with the Bild Zeitung's sordid, sensational stories. A golddigger, exhibitionist, and floozy, she had the body of a Vargas Girl, the brains of Pia Zadora, and the morals of Xaviera Hollander. Beuthien's jokes usually hinged on Lilli taking money from men and involved situations in which she wore very few clothes. Male wealth was of far greater interest to Lilli than male looks; she flung herself repeatedly at balding, jowly fat cats.

  In one typical cartoon, Lilli appears in a female friend's apartment concealing her naked body with a newspaper. The caption: "We had a fight and he took back all the presents he gave me." In another, a policeman warns that her two-piece bathing suit is illegal on the boardwalk. "Oh," she replies, "and in your opinion which part should I take off?" In yet another, she shouts her phone number to a female friend on the street, hop-ing the rich-looking man nearby will overhear.

  Her debut cartoon, which ran on July 24, 1952, set the tone for the others. It shows her with a gypsy fortune-teller begging, "Can't you give me the name and address of this tall, handsome, rich man?"

  Even people inured to the peculiarities of Barbie's body might cringe at the sight of the doll based on Lilli. Unlike Barbie, Lilli doesn't have an arched foot with itty-bitty toes. She doesn't even have a foot. The end of her leg is cast in the shape of a stiletto-heeled pump and painted a glossy black. Never mind that her leg is a fetishistic caricature; never mind that she is hobbled, easily pushed into a horizontal position; that she might want to play tennis sometime or walk on the beach. Poor Lilli can never take the monstrous slipper off.

  Sculpted by doll designer Max Weissbrodt, Lilli was never intended for children: She was a pornographic caricature, a gag gift for men, or even more curious, for men to give to their girlfriends in lieu of, say, flowers. "Die hochsten Herm haben Lilli gem" —"Gentlemen prefer Lilli," says a brochure promoting her wardrobe, over a picture of the doll in a short skirt that has blown up above her waist. It adds: "Whether more or less naked, Lilli is always discreet." ("Ob mehr oder minder nackt Lilli bewahrt immer Tackt.")

  Like Barbie, Lilli has an outfit for every occasion, but they aren't the sort of occasions in which nice girls find themselves. In a dress with a low-cut back, Lilli can be "the star of every bar"; in a tarty lace one, she can rendezvous for a five o'clock tea—either in a cafe* or (wink) in private. Lilli isn't just a symbol of sex, she is a symbol of illicit sex.

  "You should take Lilli with you everywhere," the brochure advises men. As a "mascot for your car," Lilli promises a "swift ride" ("beschwingte Fahrt"). The nature of this "swift ride" is suggested by Lilli's photo. In a tight sweater and microscopic shorts, she sits on a swing, her outstretched legs slightly splayed—a pornographic recasting of Fragonard's erotic The Swing. The brochure mentions that "children swoon" over Lilli; but the very notion of "swooning"—the way one "swoons" over a rock star—has a weird carnal ifinuendo, implicitly sexualizing kids.

  Just what did German men do with the doll? "I saw it once in a guy's car where he had it up on the dashboard," said Cy Schneider, the former Carson/Roberts copywriter who wrote Barbie's first TV commercials. "I saw a couple of guys joking about it in a bar. They were lifting up her skirts and pulling down her pants and stuff."

  Lilli is more, however, than a male wet dream; she is a Teutonic fantasy. And her Germanness is a critical part of her identity. Lilli reminds me of Maria Braun in The Marriage of Maria Braun, Rainer Werner Fass-binder's allegorical 1979 film about the relationship between the two parts of then-divided Germany. Not only does Hanna Schygulla, the relentlessly Aryan actress who portrays Maria, closely resemble Lilli; for much of the movie she wears the same hairstyle—a flaxen ponytail with poodle bangs. One gets the sense that Lilli, like Maria, has endured great privation during the war, and that even if it means using men, she will not starve again. Although Fassbinder is not around to clear up the mystery, one has to believe he was familiar with the Lilli cartoon character—so similar to Lilli's are Maria's clothes, makeup, and behavior.

  In Fassbinder's movie, the parallel between Maria and the Federal Republic is clearly defined: Maria kills a black American G.I.; her German husband takes the fall, and she remains loyal to him while he is in jail—a situation analogous to the prisonlike condition of East Germany before 1989. Her loyalty, however, does not preclude exchanging sexual favors for cigarettes, silk stockings, and ultimately, corporate perks. Lilli first appeared in 1952, when the so-called German economic miracle was under way, though far from fully realized. And while Lilli doesn't bear the metaphorical burden of a marriage to the East, it's hard not to view her pursuit of wealth as similar to that of West Germany. She is the vanquished Aryan, golddigging her way back to prosperity.

  Ruth Handler first encountered the Lilli doll when she was shopping in Switzerland on a family vacation. "We were walking down the street in Lucerne and there was a doll—an adult doll with a woman's body—sitting on a rope swing," Ruth told me, though she has in other interviews placed this epiphany in Zurich and Vienna. Her daughter Barbara, in her mid-teens and well past the age for dolls, wanted Lilli as "a decorative item" for her room. Ruth bought three—two for Barbara, one for herself.

  "I didn't then know who Lilli was or even that its name was Lilli," Ruth said. "I only saw an adult-shape body that I had been trying to describe for years, and our guys said couldn't be done."

  "Our guys" were the male designers at Mattel. Since Barbara was a child, Ruth had tried to get them to develop a doll with a woman's body. She got the idea watching Barbara play with paper dolls who were "never the playmate or baby type," but rather "the teenage, high-school, college, or adult-career type."

  "Through their play," Ruth said, Barbara and her friends "were imagining their lives as adults. They were using the dolls to reflect the adult world around them. They would sit and carry on conversations, making the dolls real people. I used to watch that over and over and think: If only we could take this play pattern and three-dimensionalize it, we would have something very special."

  Special was not how the male designers saw it. It was costly. In America, they told Ruth, it would be impossible to make what she wanted —a woman doll with painted nails " Othing" that had "zippers and darts and hemlines"— for an affordable price.

  "Frankly," Ruth recalled, "I thought they were all horrified by the thought they were of wanting to make a doll with breasts."

  But just because the dolls couldn't be made in America didn't mean they couldn't be made. In July 1957, Jack Ryan took off for Tokyo to find a manufacturer for some electronic gadgets he had designed. "Just as I was leaving," he said, "Ruth stuck this doll into my attache* case and said: 'See if you can get this copied.' " The doll, of course, was Lilli.

  Jack was accompanied on the trip by Frank Nakamura, a recent graduate of Los Angeles' Art Center School whom Mattel had hired as a product designer in Apri
l. A United States citizen, Nakamura was also fluent in Japanese; during the war, he taught the language in a school run by the U.S. Military Intelligence Service at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. When the war ended, he was sent to Japan to debrief Japanese soldiers on their battle experiences and report their stories to General MacArthur.

  Frank "knew his way around Japan very well," Jack said. "And in Japan, it's more important to know your way around and to be able to make connections than it is here. Here you walk into any office and you're doing business right away on face value. It's not so in Japan."

  The trip did not begin auspiciously. Ryan, Frank recalled, became edgy when the plane took off. He had an odd phobia for an aerospace engineer: He was afraid to fly. Nor did things go smoothly on the ground. Frank contacted numerous manufacturers, none of whom was equipped to make vinyl dolls. After three weeks, Ryan returned to California.

  Part of the problem was Lilli herself; she didn't exactly capture the hearts of the Japanese. "The Lilli doll looked kind of mean—sharp eyebrow and eyeshadow and so forth," Naka­mura said. "And Japanese people didn't like it at all." But Frank pressed on, and by the time Elliot joined him early August, Kokusai Boeki m Kaisha (KBK), a Tokyo-based novelty maker, was ready to cut a deal.

  KBK was not one big widget factory; it was a distributor for widgets that had been made by contractors and subcontractors all over Japan, from Hokkaido in the extreme north to Fukuoka in the extreme south. "The network was like a spiderweb," Nakamura said, "stretching two to three hundred miles in each direction."

  KBK persuaded a dollmaker named Yamasaki to knock off Lilli, but that was only the beginning of the challenge. Lilli's body was as hard as her look, made of rigid plastic that had been "injection-molded"—squeezed into its mold like toothpaste from a tube. Mattel, however, wanted to make Barbie out of soft vinyl, and vinyl, when injection-molded, didn't always ooze into the tiny crevices of a mold. To ensure that Barbie had fingers and toes, her arms and legs would have to be "rotation-molded"—turned slowly in their molds while the vinyl hardened.

  Yamasaki had never rotation-molded anything in his life. So in November, Mattel sent Seymour Adler, a Brooklyn-born engineer with a background in tool design, to teach him how. Adler arrived with the latest plastic-industry journals detailing the new process. Only one obstacle remained: Adler himself had never rotation-molded before either.

  Back in California, Ryan was doing his best to make the doll look less like "a German streetwalker." He had befriended Bud Westmore, the makeup czar at Universal Pictures, who gave Lilli a makeover. The first thing Westmore eliminated was what he called her "bee-stung lips," the Maria Braunesque pout into which her tough little mouth had been formed. Next were her heavy eyelashes and what Ryan termed the "weird widow's peak" on her forehead. A sculptor was brought in to refashion Lilli's face, but, Adler told me, nobody at Mattel liked the results, so the head was cast, with slight modifications, from Lilli's.

  Ryan also modified the joints that attached the arms and legs to the torso. Then he sent cast alloy masters of the freshly sculpted body parts for the Japanese to electroplate and make into molds. Before a mold could be used to produce the doll, Ryan had to approve six sample castings from it. Sometimes the castings had startling embellishments. "Each time I would get a half dozen back, they would have nipples on the breasts," Ryan explained. "So I took my little fine Swiss file, which the Swiss use for working on watches, and very daintily filed the nipples off and returned them."

  After several rounds of emery-boarding, KBK got the message. "The Japanese are very obedient," Ryan said. "They'll always do what you tell them."

  KBK NOT ONLY MADE BARBIE, IT ALSO MADE HER CLOTHES. It didn't, however, design them. For Barbie's first wardrobe, the Handlers turned to Charlotte Johnson, a fortyish veteran of Seventh Avenue who had been working in the garment industry since she was seventeen. They found her at Los Angeles' Chouinard Institute, where she was teaching an evening course in fashion design. Many say Charlotte created Barbie in her own image. "The shocker was that the doll looked like her," Ken Handler said of his first meeting with the designer in the early sixties. "It had the same-shaped head and was wearing the same hair."

  As often as the adjective "short" has been used to describe Jack Ryan, who stood about five feet seven, the terms "tall," "statuesque," and "imposing" have been applied by colleagues to Charlotte, who stands about five feet ten in heels. Her reputation for tenacity evolved during the year she spent in Tokyo, in Frank Lloyd Wright's aptly named Imperial Hotel, making Barbie's wardrobe. Six days a week, Charlotte met with a Japanese designer and two seamstresses, developing designs that minimized the sewing process. "She was very, very fussy about the fit of the costume," Nakamura said.

  She was also fussy about the fabric, which translated into a headache for him. He had to convince textile merchants to make small batches of cloth to her specifications, and small batches were rarely profitable. After much haggling, he obtained the black-and-white striped fabric for Barbie's first bathing suit. With still more haggling, he got minuscule snaps, buttons less than an eighth of an inch in diameter, and yards of miniature zippers from zipper manufacturer Yoshida Kojko (YKK).

  Charlotte was similarly fussy about foundation garments, which sent Nakamura scrambling for pastel-colored tricot. A doll like Barbie couldn't wear couture clothing over bare plastic, after all. Among Barbie's first garments were two strapless brassieres, one half-slip, one floral petticoat, and—God knows why—a girdle.

  Unmarried and what people used to call a "career girl," Charlotte never suffered for male attention. "She was very resourceful," recalled Adler. "Before she would have dinner at the Imperial Hotel, she would survey the three dining rooms, and if she saw an eligible male eating by himself, she would eat in that dining room." Eventually, Nakamura said, "She found a boyfriend at the hotel. A Westerner—a gentleman from Germany or something."

  Nevertheless, doing business was tough for a woman in Japan. Often Japanese men expressed their scorn by excluding women from work-related socializing. But textile consultant Lawanna Adams, who worked with Charlotte in the Orient, remembers the exclusion as a blessing. After a typical business dinner, the men "would go out to get bombed"; she and Charlotte, however, would be dropped off at the hotel, free to get a good night's sleep.

  WHILE CHARLOTTE BRAINSTORMED IN TOKYO, HOUSE- wives all over Japan made her ideas real. Eyes straining, needles flying, they handstitched gold buttons onto Barbie's red "Sweater Girl" cardigan and attached flower appliques to her "Picnic Set" sunhat. They added chestnut fur to her "Golden Splendor" jacket and tacked bows onto her "Cotton Casual" sundress. They trimmed her "Barbie-Q" outfit with white lace. Then, after their handiwork had been vetted for flaws, they gave the garments to other housewives who stitched them into cardboard display packages.

  Called "homework people" because they toiled at home, they went blind so that Barbie could wear taffeta. They pricked their fingers so that she could have a ski holiday. They hunched over and wrecked their backs so that she wouldn't have to sleep in the nude. They were the original slaves of Barbie.

  "I think Japan was the perfect place [to make the doll] because of the patience of the workers," said Joe Cannizzaro, the Mattel efficiency expert who went to Japan in the sixties. "And their desire to do it right. I never saw any dresses—even white wedding dresses—get soiled, though they were in the homes and on the tatami floors, because everything was so spotless, so well taken care of. They were delivered by bike and by pickup truck. They were handled four, five, six times. And they never got dirty. It's amazing, really. I don't think there's any other country where you could do that."

  In factories, too, men sweated so that Barbie might dress. Machines pinged and clattered to make her clothes. One cut the fabric for her dresses and another sewed up their seams. Unlike homeworkers, who were paid by the pieces they produced, factory workers received a fixed wage. They lived in dormitories and were fed by factory owners. In Aug
ust, however, everybody quit. "It was rice harvesting time," Cannizzaro explained.

  By 1958, dolls had begun to emerge from doll molds in Tokyo. Filaments of gold or brown Saran were machine-stitched along their vinyl hairlines and pulled taut over their otherwise naked skulls. Ponytails were affixed. Eyes were painted with a masklike template that became clogged about every twentieth doll. Their glance was sidelong, formed by eerie white irises under ominous black lids. The dolls looked as if they had a history; as if they, in their Lilli incarnation, had seen the smoldering ruins of postwar Germany and knew the horrors that preceded them. The dolls did not look either innocent or American. It was Mattel's job to make them appear to be both.

  AS STRATEGY SESSIONS BEGAN IN HAWTHORNE, THE Handlers made a brilliant tactical move. They commissioned a toy study from Ernest Dichter, Ph.D., director of the Institute for Motivational Research in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. The study cost a staggering $12,000 and took six months to complete, but when it was finished the charge seemed low. Dichter had masterminded a cunning campaign to peddle Barbie.

  Dichter was already a legend when the Handlers approached him. Quoted on nearly every page of Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, a bestseller in 1957, Dichter was hailed as a marketing Einstein—an evil Einstein, but an Einstein nonetheless. He pioneered what he called "motivational research," advertising's newest, hippest, and, in Packard's view, scariest trend—the manipulation of deep-seated psychological cravings to sell merchandise.