Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [56]
Shackelford resigned in 1988. Rita Rao, who had left when Shackelford (and other people at Shackelford's and Rao's level) was made a vice president in 1978, returned. Until the dust settled, Barad removed herself from marketing to product development, a relative backwater. Then in 1988, she returned to lead the Barbie team. Supporters of Barad—and there are legions—suggest she made her way upward through a combination of brilliance and charm; detractors include guile as well.
In 1988, under Ammerman's guidance, Mattel's financial course did, in fact, reverse. It reported $35.9 million in earnings. The growth continued in 1989 with earnings of $79.6 million, more than double that of the previous year. Some of this rise can be attributed to the introduction of Holiday Barbie in 1988, a doll that pushed Mattel's market segmentation strategy a step farther, testing the waters to see if the mass market would spend more money on a deluxe version of the doll. "My motivation in doing it was to see if we could break a price barrier," Rita Rao explains. "Barbie pretty much has always been a ten-dollar doll, and it was kind of deemed an unspoken rule that you couldn't go past that. And I felt that in the long term for the company we had to . . . break through that barrier. And . . . to do it in a big way." Not only was Holiday Barbie successful, but "it opened the door for us to do Birthday Barbies and Talking Barbies and other things that were at the higher price point."
In 1989, Barad became president of the girls' and activities toys division; then, in 1990, president of Mattel USA. She was elected to the board of directors in 1991. Soon she began to be lionized in the press—for her achievements, her youth, her beauty. Male colleagues were awed by her fluency in the language of clothes. "Her sense of product was exquisite," Tom Kalinske told me. "I think she still thought like a little girl. She had this way of looking at a hundred different ideas and saying, 'This one won't work because . . .' or 'This one will—and why don't you put a little more hair on it? '"
One year she told Kalinske, " 'We've got to put Barbie in an all-gold lame gown,' " he recalled. "And I said, 'It's a really expensive fabric. Why can't we just put her in pink again?' " She said, 'Because gold lame* is really the "in" fabric' Well, it wasn't at that particular moment, but by the time we brought the doll out, it was. Now how the hell do you know that?" Even Ruth Handler, who does not compliment idly, praises Barad. As she and I thumbed through snapshots of Barad and herself receiving an award at a United Jewish Appeal function that had taken place shortly before our interview, she called Barad "terrific" and "smart."
Like She-Ra and the gang from Etheria, who had personal mythologies and wore talismans that represented their magical powers, Barad created a myth to explain her success and designated a piece of jewelry as its symbol. Each day, on her chic and impeccably accessorized ensembles, she pins a golden bee. "The bee is an oddity of nature," she explains in her official Mattel bio. "It shouldn't be able to fly but it does. Every time I see that bee out of the corner of my eye I am reminded to keep pushing for the impossible."
Given Barad's schedule, booking an interview with her meant "pushing for the impossible." Things kept cropping up—like her being named, on July 23, 1992, Mattel's CEO, the second-highest-ranking officer in the $1.6 billion company. (She has since been named COO.) Consequently, in September, after having finally secured an appointment,