Forever Barbie

by M. G. Lord

  Dichter's appeal to the Handlers was obvious. They had achieved their success through space-age materials and futuristic methodology. Dichter's approach, filled with Freudian symbols and clinical jargon, had a scientific veneer. It promised control over an otherwise chaotic marketplace. It seemed as daring in 1958 as advertising on television had been three years earlier.

  Dichter also had much in common with Ruth. He was a Jewish immigrant, just as her father had been. Born in Vienna, Herr Doktor Dichter studied psychology at the University of Vienna and trained as a lay analyst. When World War II broke out, he fled to Paris; then in 1937, the same year that Ruth moved from Denver to Los Angeles, he tried to emigrate to New York. But because he and his wife had neither $10,000 nor proof of a stateside job, they were turned away.

  Enraged, he lashed out at Llewelyn Thompson, the American vice consul in Paris, who had stopped them. "All you care about is having people come to the U.S. who have rich relatives," he said. If he were permitted to emigrate, he would revolutionize commerce by applying the principles of psychology to the selling of products. Captivated, Thompson listened to Dichter's pitch. Then he intervened in Washington to have the Dichters admitted.

  Dichter seduced corporate America in equally record time. He sent off unsolicited letters to six big firms, explaining why he thought they were in trouble and how his insights could help. Four responded, and the work he did for three—Ivory Soap, Esquire magazine, and the Chrysler Corporation—put him on the map.

  Dichter didn't just compare brands for Ivory, he examined the role of cleanliness in American life. He didn't euphemize for Esquire, he confirmed what its editors "didn't dare" say—that "naked girls" sold the magazine. Sex also came up in his research for Chrysler. Men viewed sedans like wives; they were "comfortable and safe." Convertibles were like mistresses; they were "youthful," beckoning to "the dreamer" within. Thus to lure men into showrooms, car dealers should use convertibles as "bait."

  Dichter packaged himself as cleverly as he advised clients to package their products. He worked out of a twenty-six-room castle on a Westchester mountaintop, the East Coast equivalent of Jack Ryan's fortress in Bel Air. There, he watched children play with toys from behind a one-way mirror. He performed "depth interviews" on a "psycho-panel" of several hundred neighborhood families. "He never asked a direct question," explained his wife, Hedy, because a confused interviewee was more honest.

  For a man whom the Dale Carnegie Institute had retained as a consultant, Dichter was surprisingly adept at making enemies, among them Betty Friedan, who filled a whole chapter of The Feminine Mystique with his sins. So great was her outrage that she rarely referred to him by name, calling him simply "the manipulator."

  Dichter's research, she found, documented her thesis: that being a housewife made most women miserable. But Dichter saw nothing wrong with their misery; rather, he sought to exploit it—by filling their anguished, barren lives with products. She paraphrases him: "Properly manipulated (if you are not afraid of that word,' he said), American housewives can be given the sense of identity, purpose, creativity, the self-realization, even the sexual joy they lack—by the buying of things."

  Unmoved by Utopian sentimentality, Dichter strove to improve not the world but his clients' sales. If suffering made people reach for their checkbooks, why alleviate it?

  By 1958, Dichter was so besieged with work that he relegated much of it to his staff. The Mattel project, however, he kept for himself. Toys were new to him, something no motivational researcher had ever investigated before. They were a pretext to expound a whole philosophy of play. Its purpose, he felt, was to relieve tension, to maintain children's "psycho-economic equilibrium" in the face of growing knowledge, growing bodies, and growing pressure from the adult world.

  He investigated four types of toys—dolls, guns, holsters, and rockets— and based his findings on interviews with 23 fathers, 45 mothers, and 357 children plucked from a variety of social classes. The children included 191 girls and 166 boys. Dichter's gun-related observations are fraught with Freudian overtones—big guns are like big penises—or in the case of three-to four-year-olds, "The big long gun satisfies his need for power." But in an era characterized by exaggerated gender roles, he courageously advocated androgynous play: "Adults frown upon doll play on the part of little boys as 'sissy' behavior. In actuality, this type of play is emotionally as important for little boys as for little girls."

  It is in his Barbie-doll inquiry, however, that his brilliance as a tactician comes forward. To read the Barbie study is to understand why he took Madison Avenue by storm. He asks blunt questions, gets blunt answers, then hatches a devilish scheme to make the bad news work to his client's advantage.

  In his initial bid to Mattel, Dichter recommended probing Barbie's dark side to determine whether it should be played up or down. Is Barbie "a nice kid, friendly and loved by everyone, or is she vain and selfish, maybe even cheap? Does she have good taste or is she a little too flashy?" Could the doll be used to play out a child's rebellion against her parents, and if so, "should the wardrobe be sophisticated, even wicked?" He also suggested studying "the gift psychology of the adult." Is Barbie a conversation piece, a present "that will 'buy' the affection of the recipient?" Even more blunt, is Barbie a homewrecker? "Are men afraid of their wives' taunts should they bring home a 'sexy' doll?"

  Dichter's answers told Mattel what it had perhaps suspected already. Barbie probably would "buy" the affection of a child; kids loved her. Mothers, by contrast, hated her. The report quotes a housewife and mother of three:

  I know little girls want dolls with high heels but I object to that sexy costume. (POINTING TO SHEER PINK NEGLIGEE) I wouldn't walk around the house like that. I don't like that influence on my little girl. If only they would let children remain young a little longer . . . It's hard enough to raise a lady these days without undue moral pressures.

  SAID THE MOTHER OF AN EIGHT-YEAR-OLD:

  (MRS. B. SEEMED VERY MUCH EMBARASSED WHEN SHE LOOKED AT THE DOLL, ACTUALLY BLUSHING) One thing . . . my daughter would be fascinated. She loves dolls with figures. I don't think I would buy this for that reason. It has too much of a figure. (SHE STARED AT THE DOLL FOR A LONG TIME.) . . . I'm sure would like to have one, but I wouldn't buy it. All these kids talk about is how the teachers jiggle. I think that would be all she would observe . . . . Maybe the bride doll is O.K., but not the one with the sweater.

  ADDED THE FIRST MOTHER:

  I'd call them "daddy dolls"—they are so sexy. They could be a cute decoration for a mans bar.

  Eight- to thirteen-year-olds, however, were instantly hooked, though some had reservations. "The face looks snobbish," said one. "I think they call these Barbie because they are so sharp," said another. And a third used Barbie to reveal her ambivalence about the role of feminine artifice in snaring a mate: "I would like her better if there was a little less eye makeup . . . if she was a little less glamorous. But how else could she attract boy dolls?" The one girl who wanted no part of the doll, "who held her in her hand at some distance," was dismissed as a hopeless tomboy. All that interested her, the report says dismissively, were "sport clothes."

  Although some girls said the doll's neck was "too long, and her figure and legs too thin," Barbie's body nevertheless gave her an edge over her rivals. Ginny, a potbellied, pug-nosed, flat-chested, eight-inch fashion doll that had been made in hard plastic by Vogue Dolls, Inc., since 1950, was as good as dead; her owners were eager to dump her and her "cheesily-made" clothes for Barbie. But Miss Revlon, a doll made in two sizes by Ideal Toy &Novelty Corporation, would be harder to defeat. She had incipient breasts, feet poised for high heels, and a less threatening body. "I like Revlon dolls the best," one girl explained. "They are . . . fatter."

  Dichter also made marketing suggestions, which Mattel followed to the letter. He urged the company to package each outfit with a catalog of available clothing and with coupons to obtain other outfits at a reduced price. (In 1967, the doll itsel
f became a coupon; girls traded in their original Barbies for a price break on the revamped Twist 'N Turn model.)

  A lesser manipulator might have been daunted by the mothers' unvarnished loathing of the doll, but not Dichter. He swiftly located their Achilles' heel and formulated a plan to exploit it. One woman, who had found Barbie way too racy, changed her mind when she heard her eight-year-old daughter comment, "She's so well groomed, Mommy." Out of this came Dichter's strategy: Convince Mom that Barbie will make a "poised little lady" out of her raffish, unkempt, possibly boyish child. Underscore the outfits' detailing, and the way it might teach a roughneck to accessorize. Remind Mom what she believes deep down but dares not express: Better her daughter should appeal in a sleazy way to a man than be unable to attract one at all.

  "The type of arguments which can be used successfully to overcome parental objection are in the area of the doll's function in awakening in the child a concern with proper appearance," the report says. And, as with all controversial toys, a well-coached child is the doll's best salesperson.

  "The child exerts a certain amount of pressure, the effectiveness of which depends on his [or her] ability to argue sensibly with an adult," the report explains. "The toy advertiser can help the child by providing him [or her] with arguments which will satisfy mother."

  Draft arguments to sway parents: Carson/Roberts had its marching orders; its campaign, in fact, was already under way. No stranger to hawking glamour— Hollywood makeup legend Max Factor was its other big client—it decided to introduce Barbie as a fashion model. Agency cofounder Jack Roberts, who made the sets for her first commercials, and copywriter Cy Schneider, who wrote them, strategically ignored the fact that Barbie was a thing; they imaged her as a living teenager and invented a life for her that was as glamorous and American as Lilli's had been tawdry and foreign. "The positioning from the very first commercial was that she was a person," said Schneider. "We never mentioned the fact that she was a doll."

  Unhampered by current guidelines that force advertisers to show toys realistically, Schneider and Roberts animated Barbie. Head tilting, arms moving, she glided into outfit after outfit—from beach dates to high state occasions. Never mind that Ken wasn't even on the drawing board, the early spots showed Barbie's wedding dress, a celestial vision in white flocked tulle. Barbie didn't mince, as one might expect on her tiny feet. She floated. She was a teenage fashion model, and the world was her runway.

  "Our findings suggest the desirability of advertising [that features] a variety of teen-age social activities," prescribed Dichter, and the ads fit his bill. In agency tests, girls gave them high marks, embracing Barbie as a real person, one they might even want to spruce up and emulate.

  "We haven't superimposed a culture on the kids," Schneider explained. "The kids have dictated what their own culture should be. Every commercial was tested with children. And anything that didn't get through the barbed wire on the test never got on the air."

  But Mattel was not yet out of the woods. "Advertising can make a good product better," Schneider said. "It can make a mediocre product slightly better. But the fastest way to kill a bad product is to advertise it. Because then more people find out that it's lousy. The kids tell each other. If they're disappointed, the product disappears."

  MATTEL'S FIRST BIG PROMOTIONAL EFFORT, HOWEVER, was not to children but to toy buyers. If stores didn't stock the dolls, all the ads in the world wouldn't sell them. So in the dead of winter, 1959, Barbie made her debut at the American Toy Fair, the industry's annual trade show in New York City.

  Toy Fair, old-timers say, has not changed much in thirty-five years; it has always had the trappings of Mardi Gras. For decades, people in costume— bunnies, pirates, spacemen—have passed out toy promos in front of the Toy Building at 200 Fifth Avenue. Inside, spies have combed showrooms, searching for ideas to knock off. And for seven long days, business lunches have merged into business dinners that have merged into hangover breakfasts.

  It was into this chaos that Barbie strode, unseasonably bare in her black-and-white swimsuit. Voluptuous, half-naked, she curiously didn't make much of a splash. Perhaps this was because male buyers had human distractions; most toy companies hired breathtaking models to demonstrate their wares. But even when buyers glimpsed her, it was far from love at first sight. Condemning her sexiness, Sears buyer Lowthar Kieso, toy tastemaker for the catalogue empire that had been one of Mattel's biggest customers, rejected her—an odd bit of prudery at a trade show where, to make sales, models batted their eyelashes and stuck out their chests. Other buyers agreed to stock her: not, however, legions.

  The Handlers returned to California. Was it possible that Ruth's daring, Elliot's vision, Charlotte's chicness, Nakamura's persistence, Adler's resourcefulness, Ryan's inventiveness, Dichter's insight, and Carson/ Roberts's imagination had spawned a turkey?

  Carson/Roberts began its commercial blitz in March, but still nothing happened. Spring came, then summer—meaningless seasons on the temperate West Coast. But it is doubtful that in Hawthorne the summer of '59 went unnoticed.

  "When school was out, that doll just disappeared from the stock of the shops," said Charlotte. "Kids had to have the Barbie doll. . . . It just took off and went wild."

  For boomers, it was one of those watershed moments, like Elvis's return from the army or the arrival of the Beatles in 1964. Barbie was a handheld piece of the one true Hollywood; scary and sleazy and spellbinding. Even her brunette version was golden. She was grown-up, contemptuous; yet we possessed her; she was forever susceptible to our rough little fingers. "Barbara"—the name means "foreigner," from the same root as "barbarian," and Barbie still had enough of Lilli in her to elude the dreariness of the homegrown. She was sunshine, Tomorrowland, the future made plastic. Not all that she promised was good, but we didn't know that at the time.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SEX AND THE SINGLE DOLL

  Eight months after Barbie's launch, Ruth was riding high. While most of her cogenerationists languished from the "problem that has no name," she was running a half-million-dollar business. "Ruth works a full day, driving away in a pink Thunderbird at 8:15 A.M. every day with her husband, leaving a gorgeous $75,000 home in Beverly Wood," the Los Angeles Times wrote in September 1959. "That's something not every woman would do. But Ruth wouldn't have it any other way. Tf I had to stay home I would be the most dreadful, mixed-up, unhappy woman in the world,' she cries."

  The team at Carson/Roberts was also thriving, filled with a happiness so great it burst onto their lapels. If the agency didn't actually invent the smile-face button, it certainly popularized it. Long before such badges infected the lapels of the general public, Carson/Roberts used them for in-house promotions.

  Mattel, however, was in turmoil, having begun a period of swift expansion that was not without growing pains. In 1960, the company went public, and by 1963 its common stock was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Between 1959 and 1962, it had added 180,000 square feet to its Hawthorne headquarters and begun hiring people to fill it. Still, space was tight: in 1964, the company acquired a new plant east of Los Angeles in the City of Industry and built a three-story office building in Hawthorne, designed with reinforced foundations so that three more stories could be added later.

  Asked to graph Mattel's expansion for a speech Ruth was preparing, Marvin Barab, who in 1960 established Mattel's first market research department, drew a line shooting up and off the chart. "If the growth Mattel has had . . . continues at the same rate," he told Ruth, "by 1980-something, the total volume of the company will exceed the Gross National Product." It was as if the Handlers had hitched their chariot to a puppy and now had to deal with a giant dog.

  They did not always deal with grace. Seymour Adler, who had spearheaded rotation molding in Tokyo, found himself skewered back home. "I complained bitterly to Ruth that the data processing department was incompetent, which it was," Adler says. The incompetence caused a crisis after the 1963 Toy Show, when records lost du
ring a change from one computer to another prevented Mattel from shipping goods for three months. Exasperated, Ruth said, "Seymour, you run the goddam department," Adler told me. And although he knew nothing about computers, he agreed.

  Adler's new job may not have changed the balance of power in management, but it seemed that way to Jack Ryan, who was not one to keep his perceptions to himself. "Ruth became very unhappy because Jack was needling her about my having too much control in the company," Adler said. Tensions heightened, reaching a point where Ryan, who had caused the rift, curiously tried to heal it. He hoped to reconcile Ruth and Seymour through the equivalent of executive marriage counseling—a cutting-edge idea at the time. "People would get together and air all their problems," Adler explained. "It was very much like group therapy. But Ruth wouldn't attend the sessions. So they fired me."

  Three years later Ruth had second thoughts. Mattel "had been having terrible problems," Adler said. "They had a walking doll that would not stay walking and they were getting returns at a rate of about eight percent. They wanted me back to solve problems like that—and to have the confidence that they would be solved."

  As ever, what Ruth wanted, Ruth got; but Mattel had to buy the toy company Adler had founded during his absence.

  Many employees say that during the Handler years, Mattel felt more like a family than a corporation. "Ruth and Elliot ate in the cafeteria every day and they walked through the factory and knew all the factory workers," said Beverly Cannady, who worked in promotion. "Those were the people who had the least turnover and who stayed until they retired. Ruth and Elliot knew the old ones, the original ones, and they'd stop and say, 4Hi Hattie, how's your granddaughter?' That kind of thing."