Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [1]
A lot has also happened at Mattel. Former chief executive officer Jill Barad, who could do no wrong in 1994, was not doing very much right in 2000, when she resigned. In the 1980s, when Barad joined the Barbie team, the doll was realizing about $250 million in annual business. By the time she left, due in large part to her efforts, Barbie's sales had reached $1.7 billion. Mattel's pushing, pushing, pushing to reach that plateau, however, left many resentful—especially in 1997, when collectors, in what the press called the "Holiday Barbie" scandal, shelled out full price for "limited edition" seasonal dolls, only to discover that Mattel had overproduced them and by January was dumping them with discounters and cable-TV networks.
Under Barad, Mattel eliminated rival toymakers by buying them, regardless of the cost. It ingested Pleasant Company in 1998 and by 2003 had thoroughly Barbie-ized its tony American Girl dolls. The original dolls, accessorized to reflect periods in American history, came with bookstraps and school desks; the Mattel version has a glitter guitar, a bikini, and a boogie board. Mattel's big mistake, however, occurred in the spring of 1999, when Barad acquired the Learning Company for more than what many experts believed it to be worth. That fall, when the Learning Company delivered a $105 million loss, Mattel's stock declined by seventy percent of its value. Four months later Barad was out, though not exactly in the cold. Her severance package was more than $40 million.
Such management upheavals, however, are not new at Mattel. In the 1970s, Barbie inventor Ruth Handler was thrown out of the company she founded before pleading no contest to conspiracy, mail fraud, and falsifying SEC information. With time, however, the world ceased to care that she was a felon. From the middle 1980s until her death from cancer in 2002, she signed autographs and accepted adulation at all major events celebrating the doll.
Mattel's profits have also risen and fallen cyclically. Barbie's sales tanked in the seventies, but soared in the eighties and early nineties, when the baby boomers had their children. When the boomer's children have children, I predict sales will peak again.
At age forty-five, despite that body, Barbie has become a traditional toy— not a bad girl, but "Mrs. Smarty-pants," as one nine-year-old recently called her. I watched this girl and her friends play with the 2003 Christmas season's must-have dolls, a street-smart bunch called Bratz, not made by Mattel. But as soon as there was trouble—one of the Bratz got sick—Dr. Barbie was summoned. She was a professional, an authority figure; the girls gave her an English accent. Because of Barbie's mutability, I doubt any new doll will ever eclipse her. Even at the peak of her sales, Barbie was the salutatorian, not valedictorian, of the toy market—coming in second at the holidays to the latest flash in the pan.
This business of graciously coming in second—of not being pushy or grabby—is a component of femininity, right up there with good grooming. A set of coded behaviors that has nothing to do with biological femaleness, femininity existed long before Barbie, and it is something mothers tend to teach their daughters, even though they themselves may feel ambivalent about it. When it comes to parental ill will toward Barbie, I believe femininity is the toxin; Barbie is the scapegoat.
In 2002 Dr. Barbie took on a new role—obstetrician for her best friend Midge. This pregnancy was not without precedent. In response to consumer demand, Mattel has tried for decades to accessorize Barbie with a baby without making her a mother. (The first solution was "Barbie Baby-Sits" in 1963.) The "Happy Family" Midge came with a child, a husband, and a bulging plastic abdomen attached to its torso with magnets. In terms of ickiness, it rivaled Growing Up Skipper, a version of Barbie's little sister that