Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [66]
I asked Maybee, who is currently retired on the West Coast, if she and Lawrence had intended their stories to open windows for girls. "I was born in the wrong part of the century myself, and probably there was some ventilating," Maybee said. "I never fitted into the whatever-women-were-supposed-to-be kinds of roles. And ["Go Fly a Kite"] was probably out of one of my childhood experiences." The novels, I learned from Maybee, were produced under acute deadline pressure; she worries there may have been stylistic flaws because there wasn't enough time to rewrite. But the authors definitely did incorporate their experiences in their stories. Lawrence, who grew up in New York, wrote Barbie's New York Summer; Maybee, who was raised in Seattle and lived on the West Coast, wrote novels set in San Francisco and Hawaii. And while Paula Foxx, the mentor figure and swimsuit designer in Maybee's Barbie's Fashion Success, was not literally modeled on beachwear manufacturer Rose Marie Reid, there are elements of Reid in her personality—a reflection of Maybee's having written advertising copy for Reid's company. In Sex and the Single Girl, Helen Gurley Brown elevated Reid as a paradigm of female financial independence: a "swimsuit wizardess . . . off and running at the success steeplechase." If one accepts Brown's book as a progressive tome, this makes Reid an equally progressive role model.
After speaking with Maybee, I was baffled: How could Mattel—maker of the Barbie Game—place its imprimatur on these lively, seditious books? Further investigation, however, suggested a possibility: No one at Mattel had actually read them. Not one of the hundreds of letters exchanged between the toymaker and Random House—preserved in the Random House archive at Columbia University—alludes to the content of the books. There are dozens of memos about the correct placement of the trademark symbol on various title pages. There are multiple complaints from Ruth Handler that the books didn't have enough pictures. There is even a lengthy exchange about where the Handlers should stay when they visited Manhattan in August 1963; this includes a letter from the manager of the New York Hilton, who, presenting himself as a friend of Random House editor Robert Bernstein, recommends its Tower Suites, which then ran between $175 and $250 a day. There are royalty statements—and rejoinders from Mattel saying that the royalties are both insufficient and not reported often enough. But never do issues of plot or character or tone or appropriateness emerge in the correspondence.
This is not to say that such issues were not discussed by the executives on, say, the telephone. Lawrence, Maybee, and Random House editor Louise Bonino conferred about the content; Bonino required a "screen treatment" for each book, Maybee told me, "to psyche out whether we were Johnny One Note or we could actually write this novella." But Mattel seemed to view the books not as texts but as products—or vehicles for selling products. In December 1964, Mattel instructed Random House to have its illustrator depict Barbie in renderings of the doll's actual clothes, sending along its toy catalogue for reference. And while this may reflect excessive sentimentality on my part, I was shaken by the brutal way Mattel announced its phase-out of Midge. In a letter dated August 31, 1965, Mattel sales promotion manager Bernard L. Gottlieb ordered Robert Bernstein to purge her "from your thinking."
The later Barbie books—Barbie's Hawaiian Holiday, Barbie Solves a Mystery, Barbie and Ken, Barbie in Television, Barbie, Midge and Ken, Barbie and the Ghost Town Mystery, Barbie's Secret, and Barbie's Candy-Striped Summer—did not live up to the promise of the original three. Sales plummeted; the last three sold barely twenty thousand copies. Compiled