Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [125]
A glossy, four-color, ninety-page magazine, Barbie Bazaar bears little resemblance to Cronk's black-and-white, ten-page Gazette. Between its sophisticated design and professional artwork, doll expert and former Details editor Beauregard Houston-Montgomery calls it "the only fashion magazine I can bear to read." Although its founders, Karen Caviale and Marlene Mura, are at the vanguard of collecting's second wave, they have tried not to abandon first-wave values, including the relationships formed over dolls. "We're not totally object-oriented because the collectors have their own network of people that they become very good friends with," Mura told me.
Caviale added: "Some Barbie collectors are very competitive. If they know of something good, they won't share that information. But the majority of collectors are very helpful."
Although Caviale, a first-generation Barbie owner, has been collecting since 1980, Barbie Bazaar seems to have sprung mostly from its founders' longing to go into business for themselves. Mura, an insurance agent, met Caviale through Caviale's boss at the Girl Scouts, where Caviale was a public relations director, and in 1986, they began investigating the feasibility of a collector's newsletter. "Because of desktop publishing, the cost of producing a magazine was a little less out of our reach," Caviale told me, but that didn't mean it was without risk. To borrow money for start-up costs, they had to put up their own property as collateral.
Barbie Bazaar's first year was rough; it began as a monthly with only about five hundred subscribers. Collectors responded cautiously to its ads in Dolls and Doll Reader; they weren't sure Mura and Caviale could deliver what they promised. But after the first few issues, circulation grew. Mura and Caviale also cut costs in 1989 by bringing out the magazine every other month. Today, Barbie Bazaar has a circulation of twenty thousand and an 85 percent renewal rate.
The magazine was conceived during the doll's "We Girls Can Do Anything" years—which had, for Mura, particular resonance. Unlike Caviale, who came of age in the seventies, Mura went to college in the fifties, when, in order to be allowed to study business administration, she had to major in "secretarial science." "I'm a feminist," Mura told me, "and I have to say that the fifties made me support women and appreciate women. It was a battle to be who you wanted to be. You couldn't accomplish it in the fifties. In the nineties, you can." Or Mura and Caviale can, anyway. By 1992, the magazine was sufficiently profitable for them to kiss their day jobs good-bye.
The collectors are such a diverse group that it would take an entire book to do justice to them. But I did spend time with a few—and all they seemed to have in common was Barbie. At the Niagara convention, Corazon Yellen invited me to come see her four thousand dolls, a thousand of which are Barbies. So a few months later, when I was in Beverly Hills, I took her up on her offer. She buzzed me through the fortified gateway of her Benedict Canyon house and greeted me in a low-cut minidress and cowboy boots. Even without a Stetson, she could have passed for Western Stampin' Barbie.
The wife of a Los Angeles building contractor, Yellen is a collector of many things: antique furniture, bibelots, nineteenth-century porcelain dolls, French fashion dolls, Madame Alexander dolls, and, with her husband, classic cars. She is also the author of Total Beauty and Life, a how-to book dealing with a broad range of topics, from buying furs to building pectoral muscles. Before escorting me through her Barbie trove, she encouraged me to have a seat in her living room and peruse the book. I learned about "exotic-vertical" and "sultry-horizontal" eyeshadow techniques, and how to use "deep blue, blazing amethysts" to create "Spellbinding Eyes"— the sort of tips Barbie herself might impart.
Yellen's collection also suggests a strong psychic