by M. G. Lord
Tressy was possibly even more physically bizarre than Tammy; she had a tuft of hair in the middle of her head that could be yanked out and screwed back in, like a tape measure. When beehive hairdos went the way of the Hula Hoop, so did Tressy.
Like Tammy, Remco's Littlechap Family was cursed by its links to what McCalVs in 1954 termed the "togetherness" movement, in which, as Betty Friedan put it in The Feminine Mystique, a woman "exists only for and through her husband and children." Daughter Judy Littlechap bore a striking resemblance to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, which, when the doll was on the drawing board, no doubt seemed like a good idea. When it was released, however, after JFK's assassination, the doll's looks worked against it; they were a ghoulish reminder of a national tragedy.
Barbie's thorniest competitor in the sixties may have been Louis Marx &Co.'s Miss Seventeen—not because she was captivating, but because she didn't fight fair. Smarting from the Handlers' ascension, Marx dug out Barbie's Teutonic origins, acquired rights to the Lilli doll, rechristened it Miss Seventeen and launched it in America. Then on March 24, 1961, Marx's lawyers marched into U.S. District Court in Los Angeles and slapped Mattel with a patent-infringement suit.
At issue was Letters Patent No. 2,925,684, which Miss Seventeen wore boldly etched on her backside. It referred to a leg joint that permitted the doll to sit down with its legs together instead of spread apart—a useful feature, for taste reasons, on a sexy adult doll.
Given Marx's reputation for getting rich off cheap versions of stolen ideas, Miss Seventeen was the quintessential Marx product. If Barbie was tawdry, Miss Seventeen was downright mangy; as slutty as Lilli, but not nearly so healthy. Her plastic was jaundiced, and she seemed in need of a square meal—not because she was too thin but because she suffered from vitamin deficiencies. Her hair emerged from her head in irregular clumps; and while neither she nor Barbie could be said to have a penetrating gaze, her eyes were markedly out of focus, as if bleary from drugs. Miss Seventeen could easily pass for Miss Teen Runaway; if she were a person, she'd probably never make it to Miss Eighteen.
Marx alleged that Mattel had copied the "form, posture, facial expression and novel overall . . . appearance" of the Bild Lilli doll and "led the doll field and purchasing public to the belief that said 'Barbie' dolls were an original product . . . thereby perpetrating a fraud and a hoax upon the public."
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 Jeff
erson 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.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE WHITE GODDESS
Let 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. A
t 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.
