Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [111]
Before I met Cindy, I watched her on Maury Povich, stoically enduring the taunts of audience members who suggested that her money might have been better spent on psychotherapy. She was quick with snappy rejoinders— a skill essential for tabloid television. "Jenny Jones was my worst experience," she recalled. "They put me on with Queer Donna, who's a 360-pound gay man who parodies Madonna and worships her. Also with Frank Marino, a guy who had surgery to look like Joan Rivers, and a Cher look-alike who was also a man." Then a "plant" in the audience commented, "Everybody knows Barbie doesn't wear any underwear. Are you wearing underwear?" "Yes," Cindy snarled, "are you?"
She scowled. "I didn't grow up to be Barbie to be victimized like that. When I do the shows, I get to go home—I get a free trip, that's why I do it." "Home" now for Cindy is outside Chicago, where her sister lives. She is deliberately vague about the location because her sister, a married executive, frowns on her surgical way of life; she won't even have her ears pierced. "She has the perfect life and I have the perfect face and body," Cindy said.
Cindy does not have fond memories of her childhood in Fremont, where, as a teenager, she worked in a ketchup factory. There was the indignity of catalogue-shopping—tracing the outline of her feet to order shoes that pinched, like the pennies that were expended to buy them. But even amid the meanness, hope effervesced: in the form of a stylish doll with a bubble cut and curvilinear shoes that hugged its curvilinear insteps. Barbie didn't have a husband or babies; Barbie had careers . . . and options.
"I watched my mother give her life to be overrun by a man—my father," Cindy told me. "And not to fulfill her potential because of men and children. If I didn't have that freedom, I wouldn't have that husband or partner." Cindy's boyfriend, an audio engineer she met while performing in a rock band, is, she told me, very Ken-like—and to her, male good looks are as important as female ones. Like Barbie, however, she seems to prefer freedom to marriage.
Even though they have no financial relationship—Cindy considers surgery consultants in the pay of physicians to be unethical—one compatriot on her surgical crusade is Dr. Edward Latimer-Sayer, an English plastic surgeon. "Although Cindy has always talked about this Barbie-doll image, in England at any rate, the Barbie doll is associated with stupidity— a sort of nice body, vacant brain sort of thing," Latimer-Sayer told me. "And Cindy is anything but that." Although she dropped out of art school before moving to London to work as a photographer, she is well spoken and well read. She is also a member of Mensa.
Latimer-Sayer urged Jackson to get greater firsthand knowledge of surgical procedures. "He kept inviting me to operations and I finally went," she said. "I can see I'm going to be a regular fixture in the operating room."
Most of Latimer-Sayer's patients are not like Cindy—who, because of her consumer watchdog organization, gets celebrity treatment. "I think I'd starve to death waiting for the models and actresses to show up," he told me. "The majority of my patients are housewives, nurses, hairdressers, secretaries. Ordinary people. They don't want to be out of the ordinary, but they just feel that one particular part lets them down. An attractive young girl with a big hooky nose doesn't feel normal."
Significantly,