Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [121]
Yet his work for the authorized project, while it has an abstract beauty, lacks bite. "There was in the contract that there would be some editorial review, and I think anyone could use their own good sense and realize that you would try and make the work more accessible and less confrontational," he told me. "I wasn't going with the idea of saying, 'Let's really challenge with what we've got here.' " And he didn't.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SLAVES OF BARBIE
Fiona Auld credits Elizabeth Taylor with introducing her to Barbie. In 1990, after correctly identifying Taylor's favorite color (purple), her first film (There s One Born Every Minute), her most famous jewel (the Krupp diamond, given to her by Richard Burton), Auld, from Paisley, Scotland, won first prize in a contest sponsored by Taylor's Passion Perfume.
Soon she and her husband, a computer programmer, were on an all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Hollywood. "I stayed at the Beverly Hilton; I had champagne; I had caviar; I was driven around in a limousine," she told me. But it was in Anaheim, California, that Auld's life changed. She visited a doll museum and became an almost instant convert to Barbie-collecting.
Auld began to amass dozens of dolls, virtually turning over her dining room to Mattel. Her five-year-old daughter was warned to steer clear of the treasures: "She has her own Barbies; she knows that she can look at but not touch mine." And when Auld placed an ad in Barbie Bazaar, requesting "BARBIE LOVING PENPALS FROM THE U.S.A.," there was no turning back. Thirty-five people responded, six of whom she met for the first time at the 1992 Barbie-doll collector's convention in Niagara Falls.
Auld did not conceal her heritage at the conference. Sporting a tartan and a tam-o'-shanter with a red pom-pom, she appeared in the life-size doll-clothing fashion show as Barbie in Scotland. Like the Native American Barbie, which doesn't replicate the costume of a particular tribe, Mattel's Scottish Barbie doesn't wear the tartan of a specific clan. Auld, however, personalized her costume by wearing the pattern of her own—MacLennen—clan.
Nor was Fiona the only non-American-born collector on the runway. Ex-beauty queen Corazon Ugalde Yellen, daughter of a Philippines air force general under Ferdinand Marcos, executed a few theatrical turns as Barbie in the Philippines. Unlike the other participants, for whom the show appeared to be a goof, Yellen strutted crisply and imperiously—hips tucked forward, shoulders thrust back—as if she were vamping down a Paris runway. Before moving to Beverly Hills, she was a professional model, having posed for Macy's and Western Airlines.
Next came Rebecca Taylor, a wispy young woman from Tyler, Texas, dressed as Casey, the Mod waif with a single earring whom Barbie befriended in 1968. With one ear tinted kelly green, Taylor elicited first a groan, then applause from the crowd. The earrings on most vintage dolls stain their lobes with an unsightly emerald-colored eczema that, because it cannot easily be scrubbed off, is the bane of many a collector's existence. Taylor was followed by Judy Roberts of Spokane, Washington, who persuaded her husband Gary to model "Business Appointment," an outfit from the days when Ken still shopped at Brooks Brothers.
No two collectors are identical. Some women started amassing the dolls when they were children; some women began when they had children; and others aren't women at all—roughly a third of the delegates in Niagara were men.
Nor can one generalize by disposition or demographics. Some are misers, who puff up when describing the financial