Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [27]
"Barbie has introduced Midge to her boyfriend," the ad continues, "and the three of them go everywhere together." Terrific. Tagging along after Mr. and Miss High School. If plastic dolls could kill themselves, I'm sure Midge would have tried.
The following year things grew slightly more equitable; Mattel gave Midge a boyfriend (Allan) and dumped a younger sister (Skipper) on Barbie. Mattel's engineers also did something really hideous to Barbie's face, replacing her painted eyes with feline-shaped mechanical things that blinked. Now called "Miss Barbie," she looked like the offspring of an interspecies union, a cousin of Nastassia Kinski in Cat People.
Not surprisingly, as Barbie racked up other doll friends she also gathered competitors. Rival toymakers could scarcely witness Mattel's triumph without hatching plots to exploit it. Barbie's major challengers were Tammy, brought out by the Ideal Toy & Novelty Corporation in 1962, Tressy, brought out by the American Character Doll Company in 1963, and the Littlechap Family, introduced by Remco in 1964.
Named for an insipid movie character portrayed by Debbie Reynolds, Tammy looked as if she could have given Barbie a run for her money; but in hindsight it's clear that she never had a chance. Barbie may have appeared as if she belonged in the fifties, but her ethos was pure sixties; she was a swinging single with a house, a boyfriend, and no parents. Tammy, by contrast, came with Mom and Dad. She didn't have a boyfriend, she had a brother. "Basically, Tammy was a baby doll," explains vintage Barbie dealer Joe Blitman. Boring, sexless, and shackled to the moribund nuclear family, Tammy bit the dust in the mid-sixties when the divorce rate took off.
I must confess to feeling chills the first time I saw Tammy. There is something creepy about a doll with the body of an eight-year-old and the car, clothes, and trappings of a grown-up. If, as some psychoanalysts contend, anorexia is a perverse strategy to thwart the development of female secondary sex characteristics, Tammy is the model for such a weird infant-adult. At least Barbie embraced womanhood, however cartoonish her interpretation; she wasn't a female Peter Pan demanding car keys and the right to vote while shirking the burden of sexual development.
Tressy was possibly even more physically bizarre than Tammy; she had a tuft of hair in the middle of her head that could be yanked out and screwed back in, like a tape measure. When beehive hairdos went the way of the Hula Hoop, so did Tressy.
Like Tammy, Remco's Littlechap Family was cursed by its links to what McCalVs in 1954 termed the "togetherness" movement, in which, as Betty Friedan put it in The Feminine Mystique, a woman "exists only for and through her husband and children." Daughter Judy Littlechap bore a striking resemblance to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, which, when the doll was on the drawing board, no doubt seemed like a good idea. When it was released, however, after JFK's assassination, the doll's looks worked against it; they were a ghoulish reminder of a national tragedy.
Barbie's thorniest competitor in the sixties may have been Louis Marx &Co.'s Miss Seventeen—not because she was captivating, but because she didn't fight fair. Smarting from the Handlers' ascension, Marx dug out Barbie's Teutonic origins, acquired rights to the Lilli doll, rechristened it Miss Seventeen and launched it in America. Then on March 24, 1961, Marx's lawyers marched into U.S. District Court in Los Angeles and slapped Mattel with a patent-infringement suit.
At issue was Letters Patent No. 2,925,684, which Miss Seventeen wore boldly etched on her backside. It referred to a leg joint that permitted the doll to sit down with its legs together instead of spread apart—a useful feature, for taste reasons, on a sexy adult doll.
Given Marx's reputation for getting rich off cheap versions of stolen ideas,