Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [126]
Like Beverly Hills itself, Yellen's doll room teems with famous figures: James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Sonny Bono, the Man from U.N.C.L.E., and the Six Million Dollar Man. She even has a platoon of soldiers clustered around an austere photo of her father, the Filipino general. But perhaps her most startling mannequin is the life-size statue of herself, bedecked with rhinestone earrings, a tiara, and "exotic-vertical" eyeshadow. She owns two such effigies, one fashioned by a sculptor and one cast from life.
"Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter," Walter Benjamin wrote. But Evelyn Burkhalter's Barbie Hall of Fame in Palo Alto, California, seems to be the best of both worlds. She owns all seventeen thousand of its dolls—worth about two million dollars—but she lets the public look at them. And she has permitted TV crews from three continents to film them.
A fount of Mattel lore, Burkhalter begins her tour by showing museumgo-ers the Lilli doll and concludes with Mattel's newest products. In July 1992, I made the mistake of visiting her on a Saturday. And the gallery, about the size of a two-car garage, was packed: not with collectors but with children, who were transfixed—pressing their palms and noses against dozens of glass cases. Oblivious to the summer heat—Burkhalter feared that blasting the air conditioner would overload a circuit—the children squealed and gaped and jostled for better views, when they weren't tugging at Burkhalter, who, as a mother of four and grandmother of seven, appeared miraculously calm.
Founded in 1985, Burkhalter's museum is located above the office of her husband, a Stanford-educated audiologist. About twenty-five years ago, she said, her husband founded a school for hearing-impaired children between three and six years of age. Burkhalter's first contact with Barbie involved sewing doll clothes for school fund-raising events.
In the mid-eighties, fifteen years after Ruth Handler had had a mastectomy, Burkhalter also battled breast cancer. Assuming she and Handler would have much in common, she sought her out at a department-store promotion for Nearly Me. But to Burkhalter's disappointment, Handler took no interest in Burkhalter's museum. "She came out and said, 4Can I help you?' " Burkhalter told me. "I introduced myself and she said, T don't want to discuss Barbie with you or with anybody else. But if you want to talk to me about bras, I'd be happy to give you my time.' And I just turned around and walked out."
Nor did Burkhalter have the patience to deal with Billy Boy, a collector and jewelry-designer-turned-Mattel-consultant who appeared at her museum shortly after it opened. Boy, a New Yorker who now lives in Paris, was working on "The New Theater of Fashion," a collection of Barbie clothing by name designers loosely based on "Le Petit Theatre de la Mode," a post-World War II exhibition of real-life fashions displayed, for economic reasons, on dolls. He has since parted company with Mattel and Barbie, describing the doll on a recent BBC documentary as an "insulting image of women." Boy now manufactures his own doll, Mdvanii, named, some say, for the fortune hunter who married Barbara Hutton. It has greater detailing than Barbie—nipples and pubic hair—and a price well into the hundreds of dollars.
"The minute he downed Barbie, he killed his own business," Burkhalter