Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [132]
The program did not start promptly. Jackson glanced at her watch; precious shopping time was ticking away. Rand's talk was scheduled first, but when the lights dimmed, slide after slide of provocatively sprawled youths flashed on screen—the heroic swooners. The friend seated beside me passed a note: "If Rand isn't next, I'm out of here."
As if in response, the androgyne apologist stepped down and Rand took the microphone. She was a reedy, dark-haired woman, and in her I thought I recognized a fellow Midge. But when she opened her mouth, the feelings of solidarity vanished. Rand's talk was an exercise in the "Barbie Strategy"—advancing one's political agenda by lashing it to Barbie. After what must have been the twentieth time she used the word "subversion," I began to be cross. Rand said Mattel had bought the patent to the Lilli doll, which it hadn't. She characterized the Random House Barbie novels, written by young female loose cannons at Mattel's advertising agency, as if they had been produced under tight corporate scrutiny. I don't often passionately identify myself as a journalist, someone who unearths facts and verifies them, but as Rand spoke, I embraced that tedious, literal-minded persona.
WHEN RAND FINISHED, I WALKED OUT OF THE HILTON with Ella King Torrey. (Stalked out might be more accurate.) An inveterate Barbie scholar, Ella, too, had caught factual errors, but they didn't seem to bother her. "Relax," she told me. "Rand's point didn't have anything to do with Barbie. It was about the politics of sexual identity. She could have just as easily been talking about toasters."
Ella is a tall woman with abundant blond hair who, in the muted February light, might have passed for an early-sixties executive Barbie—Busy Gal or Career Girl. She was not literally decked out in one of those outfits, but she wore the nineties equivalent—an expensive black silk pantsuit exquisitely offset with silver jewelry and a diaphanous scarf. Even in the seventies, when clothes were so ugly one could hardly bear to look at them, Ella had managed to accessorize. Her scarves always fell the way they were supposed to fall, and even when she wore whimsical jewelry, it looked drop-dead chic.
Ella, it is fair to say, brings out the Midge in me, as she has since we were undergraduates. So I was docile when she prescribed a shopping trip to ease my irritation, and steered us toward Takashimaya, the very grand Japanese department store one block east on Fifth Avenue. In the Random House novels, Midge never questioned Barbie; she trusted that Barbie knew best. And I liked the idea of visiting a store with ties to Tokyo. It harked back to those original Japanese Barbies with their hard mouths and seductive stares who had so beguiled us in our youth.
A doorman pulled open the portal to a vast, clean, perfect atrium that made us feel almost doll-like in scale. There was, I would like to say, a whiff of cherry blossoms, but, in fact, the smell was more like that of thirty-five-year-old vinyl. We stepped into the elevator and were transported.
The afternoon was young. We had credit cards. And somewhere deep in our intuitive intelligences, we accepted what we could not change: Barbie was us.
NOTES
All interviews for this book were tape-recorded.
CHAPTER ONE: WHO IS BARBIE, ANYWAY?
6 Impermanence of Warhol's icons: See Arthur C. Danto, "Warhol," Encounters and Reflections (New York: The Noondav Press, 1991), pp. 286-293.
7 The dark side of Dietrich: See