Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [6]
Significantly, the Barbie doll was invented by a woman, Mattel cofounder Ruth Handler, who later established and ran "Nearly Me," a firm that designed and marketed mastectomy prostheses. (As she herself has put it, "My life has been spent going from breasts to breasts.") After Ruth and her husband Elliot, with whom she founded Mattel, left the company in 1975, women have continued to be the key decision makers on the Barbie line; the company's current COO, a fortyish ex-cosmetics marketer given to wearing Chanel suits, has been so involved with the doll that the Los Angeles Times dubbed her "Barbie's Doting Sister." In many ways, this makes Barbie a toy designed by women for women to teach women what—for better or worse— is expected of them by society.
Through the efforts of an overzealous publicist, Mattel engineer Jack Ryan, a former husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor, received credit for Barbie in his obituary. Actually, he merely held patents on the waist and knee joints in a later version of the doll; he had little to do with the original. If anyone should share recognition for inventing Barbie it is Charlotte Johnson, Barbie's first dress designer, whom Handler plucked from a teaching job and installed in Tokyo for a year to supervise the production of the doll's original twenty-two outfits.
Handler tries to downplay Barbie's resemblance to Lilli, but I think she should flaunt it. Physically the two are virtually identical; in terms of ethos, they couldn't be more dissimilar. In creating Barbie, Handler credits herself with having fleshed out a two-dimensional paper doll. This does not, however, do justice to her genius. She took Lilli, whom Ryan described as a "hooker or an actress between performances," and recast her as the whole-some all-American girl. Handler knew her market; if any one character trait distinguishes the American middle class, both today and in 1959, it is an obsession with respectability. This is not to say the middle class is indifferent to sex, but that it defines itself in contrast to the classes below it by its display of public propriety. Pornography targeted to the middle class, for example, must have a vaneer of artistic or literary pretense--hence Playboy, the picture book men can also buy "for the articles."
Barbie and Lilli symbolize the link between the Old World and the New. America is a nation colonized by riffraff; the Mayflower was filled with petty criminals and the down-and-out. When Moll Flanders, to cite an emblematic floozy, took off for our shores, she was running from the law. Consequently, what could be more American than being an unimpeachable citizen with a sordid, embarrassing forebear in Europe?
TO FIRST-GENERATION BARBIE OWNERS, OF WHICH I WAS one, Barbie was a revelation. She didn't teach us to nurture, like our clinging, dependent Betsy Wetsys and Chatty Cathys. She taught us independence. Barbie was her own woman. She could invent herself with a costume change: sing a solo in the spotlight one minute, pilot a starship the next. She was Grace Slick and Sally Ride, Marie Osmond and Marie Curie. She was all that we could be and—if you calculate what at human scale would translate to a thirty-nine-inch bust—more than we could be. And certainly more than we were . . . at six and seven and eight when she appeared and sank her jungle-red talons into our inner lives.
Or into my inner life, anyway. After I begged my mother for a Barbie, she reluctantly gave me a Midge—Barbie's ugly sidekick, who was named for an insect and had blemishes painted on her face. When I complained, she compounded the error by simultaneously giving me a Barbie and a Ken. I still remember Midge's anguish—her sense of isolation—at having to tag along after a couple. In my subsequent doll play, Ken rejected Barbie and forged a tight platonic bond with