Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [127]
(Barbie is not the only figure whose relationship with Boy went sour. In his diaries, Andy Warhol reveals an initial fascination with the young man, which, by July 1986, had degenerated into contempt. He accuses Boy of "social climbing," and observes: "Billy Boy had a fight with the paparazzi . . . because he wanted to be in the pictures.")
Between her candor, knowledge, and willingness to display her rarities, Burkhalter is something of a rarity herself. Other major collectors are less generous. Glen Offield, whose five thousand dolls, including about two hundred one-of-a-kind prototypes, are valued at over a million dollars, is far from forthcoming (he refused me an interview), although he did allow Smithsonian magazine to photograph them for its cover in December 1989. He also permitted Mattel to shoot them for trading cards of Barbie's wardrobe through the years.
To be fair, however, Offield has recently received the kind of publicity that would make anyone want to avoid the press. On October 9, 1992, Offield's dolls were stolen from his San Diego house, and two fires were set to conceal the missing Barbies. "They meant everything to me," Offield told the Los Angeles Times. "I could do without eating. I don't know if I can live without them." He did not, however, have to try. Within two weeks, the dolls turned up, jammed into a rented storage closet under a freeway overpass. They had been shanghaied, the Associated Press reported, by Bruce Scott Sloggett, a male video pornographer for whom Offield once worked, and who died October 24, 1992, of a drug overdose.
Although he owns a vast, valuable hoard, New York-based collector Gene Foote has managed to maintain a sense of self-irony about his hobby. Foote's principal occupation is musical theater. He directed European productions of such shows as Sweet Charity, Annie Get Your Gun, Pal Joey, Little Shop of Horrors, and A Chorus Line. With his Barbies, he also stages production numbers—elaborate dioramas that he has been photographing for a book-in-progress called For the Love of a Doll. "It's literally the story of Barbie," he told me, "but I don't treat her as a product. I treat her as a human being. She's just a girl named Barbie; yet I give all of the Mattel facts."
Foote grew up in Washington County, Tennessee, in a house without electricity or running water. He still has a trace of a southern accent and a warm, courtly, old-fashioned manner—which includes referring to Barbie owners of my generation as "Barbie girls." As a boy, to entertain his younger female cousins, he made paper dolls from figures in the Sears Roebuck catalogue. "I'd cut out one of the women who had on the girdles or the underwear and glue her on cardboard. Then I would draw clothes for her and color them and cut them out," he explained. His cousins told him: "You made us Barbies before there were Barbies."
By far the strangest Barbie "collector" that I met was, in fact, an object in Foote's collection. As part of a 1965 ensemble called "Me 'N' My Doll," Mattel's Skipper doll was issued her own tiny Barbie—barely over an inch in height, with a painted red swimsuit and yellow hair. And I was struck by the total containment of Barbie's world. It wasn't enough for Skipper to receive Barbie's sisterly counsel; she, like every other girl, needed a Barbie totem—a thing onto which she could project her idealized future self—to internalize the Barbie ethos.
For Beauregard Houston-Montgomery, a New York City partygoer and wit-at-large in the style of Quentin Crisp, collecting Barbie isn't about closed universes or looking inward. It is about looking outward and upward to the heavens. Amassing the dolls, he said quite seriously, is a "way of dealing with alien abduction."
"People who have been kidnapped start collecting," he continued. "They have collecting manias. Some people collect dirt, like specimens. Other people