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By Root 739 0

Miss Seventeen was the quintessential Marx product. If Barbie was tawdry, Miss Seventeen was downright mangy; as slutty as Lilli, but not nearly so healthy. Her plastic was jaundiced, and she seemed in need of a square meal—not because she was too thin but because she suffered from vitamin deficiencies. Her hair emerged from her head in irregular clumps; and while neither she nor Barbie could be said to have a penetrating gaze, her eyes were markedly out of focus, as if bleary from drugs. Miss Seventeen could easily pass for Miss Teen Runaway; if she were a person, she'd probably never make it to Miss Eighteen.

Marx alleged that Mattel had copied the "form, posture, facial expression and novel overall . . . appearance" of the Bild Lilli doll and "led the doll field and purchasing public to the belief that said 'Barbie' dolls were an original product . . . thereby perpetrating a fraud and a hoax upon the public."

Mattel countered by accusing Marx of conspiring with a bunch of Germans to compete unfairly by "marketing an inferior doll in the United States of confusingly similar appearance to" Barbie. It also accused Marx of knocking off Jack Ryan's Thunderburp cap gun mechanism, which also functioned as the guts of its Tommy Burst Detective gun.

What ensued was the toy world's Bleak House. Wily, indefatigable, both sides tossed accusations at each other like Molotov cocktails. Mattel, with mindboggling shamelessness, introduced as evidence a book of historic wooden dolls from the "collection of Miss Ruth Ellison, Springfield, Vermont" (cunningly unearthed by Jack Ryan's brother, Jim), and argued with conviction that Barbie, far from being knocked off from a German novelty item, had been inspired by Yankee folk art.

After two years of legal mudslinging, Judge Leon Yankwich dismissed both Marx's complaint and counterclaims and Mattel's counterclaims, "with prejudice as to all causes of action raised by said pleadings," and awarded no damages "or other affirmative relief . . . to any party, each party to bear its own costs and attorney's fees."

This is legal jargon for "A pox on both your houses." Neither company would be permitted to reintroduce the suit.

BETWEEN 1964 AND 1968, MATTEL GREW PRODIGIOUSLY, swallowing smaller companies like a whale ingesting plankton. By 1965, its sales exceeded $100 million—twice what they were in 1961. In 1967, it took over doll companies in West Germany and England and opened a plant in Mexico. In 1968, it gobbled up two toy companies in Italy and a toy distributor in Belgium, opened subsidiaries in Australia and Venezuela, and devoured Monogram Models, Inc., a domestic manufacturer of hobby kits. Its sales that year—including international sales—exceeded $200 million, double what they had been three years earlier.

But the United States to which Mattel sold toys in 1968 was very different from the one that had snapped up Barbie in 1959. It was no longer the tame, secure place it had been in the fifties. The rifts between young and old, black and white, Democrat and Republican grew larger and more painful. In four years, the civil rights movement made great strides through nonviolence, only to lose them all in the bloody assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Violence was a constant menace: a mugger on every urban street corner, a prowler in every suburban bedroom, a mean, gun-toting drifter in every rural Greyhound station. Sometimes the violence was random, like Charles Manson's 1969 attack on Sharon Tate. Sometimes it was focused, like Sirhan B. Sirhan's fatal assault on Robert F. Kennedy. And sometimes it just swept through a town, blind and angry, as it did through Watts in the summer of 1965.

Another liberation movement was also taking shape in the mid-sixties. In 1963, while Steinem was sunning herself on the beach, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, the groundbreaking book that identified the gender-based malaise afflicting millions of women. Naming the problem was the first step; on October 29, 1966, Friedan announced the formation of the National Organization