Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [128]
Was he actually abducted? Did he plan a hypnotic session with Harvard psychologist John Maeh to find out?
"What do I need to remember being on a spaceship for?" he snapped. "People already think I'm insane; that would only verify it."
To convince me of his sanity, Houston-Montgomery telephoned his friend, illustrator Mel Odom. On a three-way conference call late one night, Odom told me that his painting of the 1964 Miss Barbie had a distinct otherworldly quality. "It's the most E.T. image ever made for children," he told me. "I had friends looking at it, asking, 'Who's the Martian?' "
Of course not all collectors accumulate dolls of investment quality. Robin Schwartz, a photographer whose work is in the permanent collection of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and whose recent book, Like Us, was a collection of primate images, put me in touch with a collector of a wholly other stripe: Dot Paolo, proprietor of the Rabbet Gallery in New Brunswick, New Jersey. If one anthropomorphizes Barbie, Paolo is the person who adopts the unadoptables—provides a foster home for the heartbreaking dolls that have been chewed or shorn or battered. Although she is a successful corporate art consultant, her "collecting" is more merciful than mercenary. "I don't have the dolls standing up with perfect clothes," she told me. "What I like is what the children have done to them, the way they cut their hair and drew on their faces."
Schwartz photographed Paolo's dolls—dozens of forlorn, damaged Barbies—with Paolo's dog, Starbuck, who is fifteen and deaf; Paolo's compassion does not extend only to plastic objects. It is not a comfortable photograph. Even though they are not human, there is something tragic about the flea-market Barbies; the sad, spent dolls cast away without so much as a glittering G-string. They will not be fought over at auction or cherished by grown men. But at least they are among their own kind, not condemned to the landfill, watching coffee grounds and banana peels disintegrate before their nonbiodegradable eyes.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
BARBIE FACES THE FUTURE
If Barbie were merely another global power brand like McDonald's or Coke, ending this book would be simple. One would focus on what Mattel has in mind for its billion-dollar damsel, as well as on the company's rapid growth. In 1993, it gobbled up Fisher-Price, a producer of preschool toys, and in 1994 it purchased Kransco, the maker of such classics as the Whamo Frisbee and the Hula Hoop. Today, it is as large as or larger than the industry's longtime Goliath, Hasbro.
But Barbie's story is, of course, far more than a tale of shareholders' meetings and annual reports. It is a saga of mothers and daughters, men and women, hope, despair, passion, and the striving after an impossible "American" ideal. Barbie is an emblem of "femininity," a concept quite different from biological femaleness. Barbie was invented by women for women, and the wrath brought to bear upon Barbie by some women is perhaps wrath deflected from themselves. For daughters are indoctrinated into "femininity" by mothers—not by a plastic object. "Even a generous mother," Simone de Beauvoir wrote, "who sincerely seeks her child's welfare, will as a rule think that it is wiser to make a 'true woman' of her, since society will more readily accept her if this is done." Barbie permits such "generous" mothers to wash their hands of the taint of "femininity," to blast Barbie as a "bimbo," even