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PAPER DOLL

Before Barbie strides bravely into her fourth decade, let us roll the film back to her first. We have been considering her as a toy, an object, a distillation of the feminine principle. But she is also an invented personality. In recent years, to Mattel's chagrin, novelists and poets have imagined all manner of dark, rich, textured lives for her. She has, however, had a blander, authorized existence, too. With the 1961 debut of Barbie magazine, the Barbie Fan Club's official publication, Barbie took shape as a character in stories by Bette Lou Maybee and Cynthia Lawrence, two Carson/Roberts copywriters who were then in their thirties. Barbie also lent her name to Mattel's "Queen of the Prom: The Barbie Game," which, while not a narrative, can nonetheless be examined as an authorized text that sheds light on Barbie's world.

The strange thing about the stories and the game is that the values of one contradict the values of the other. The stories and novels, which were published in book form by Random House between 1962 and 1965, were revolutionary: In them, Barbie doesn't model herself on Mom, a self-abnegating slave in financial thrall to Dad; she finds a female mentor who points the way to independence. The books also found large audiences. Issued simultaneously and packaged together, each of the first three books—Here's Barbie, Barbie's New York Summer, and Barbie's Fashion Success—sold about 80,000 copies (at $1.95 apiece) in their first year of publication. Here's Barbie sold best—88,656 copies as of June 1963. What is more, Barbie either kept pace with or outperformed other juvenile series. For an intraoffice presentation, Random House approximated that in 1962, one hundred thousand new Nancy Drew books were sold with 45,000 sales per new title, and 40,000 new Cherry Ames books were sold with 20,000 sales per new title.

Then there was the best-selling Barbie Game, which promoted a different agenda—exploiting men for financial gain and competing for them based on physical appearance. To appreciate why the Barbie novels were, for many girls, windows onto a wider world, one must reexperience the claustrophobia, cosseting, corseting, girdling, and cantilevering that underwired women in the late fifties. One must, in other words, roll the dice and plunge oneself into the mindset of the Barbie Game.

My friend Helen—I am not so pitiless as to call her by her real name— claims to have been horribly scarred by the game. She cannot forget the time that, in two hours of play, she was unable to get a boyfriend—not even Poindexter, the dud, the nerd, the untouchable. Helen had achieved almost everything she needed to win. She was "popular"; the Drama Club had elected her its president. She had a formal dress—indeed, the game's most expensive one, Enchanted Evening, a regal pink gown with a rabbit fur wrap. She had earned more money than the other players. But without a boyfriend, Helen was a washout. She couldn't even attend the prom, much less be crowned queen.

This cruel moment did not occur in 1961 when Helen was seven and Mattel first issued the game. This happened last summer, at one of the gatherings I convened to observe various adult female friends playing the game—just as I had been watching children play it. My purpose was not, as one sore loser accused, "to relive the worst moments in a girl's life," but to see whether women who grew up reading Ms. and discussing "sisterhood" could devolve into back-stabbing, predatory, cartoon mantraps out of Clare Boothe Luce's The Women. (They could.) I was also curious whether contestants' careers would influence their style of play. Would, say, lawyers and doctors compete more ruthlessly than painters and novelists?

Careers, I discovered, had little impact. After the first bottle of champagne (and the first groans over such instructions as "You are not ready when he calls. Miss 1 turn.") nearly everyone got a sort of crazed glint in her eye. An odd coincidence, however, was that although success in the game relied primarily on luck, people's real-life achievements