Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [67]
One reason for the demise of the Barbie series was that just as Midge had been scrapped, so were Lawrence and Maybee. Recorded in correspondence from July 1963, the decision to retire them came after Bernstein lunched with them in Los Angeles and Lawrence had the temerity to suggest that they might get an agent. Why would they want to give away ten percent of their royalties, Bernstein countered, when the publisher was paying them the most money that it possibly could? Rather than wait for an answer, Random House brought in new authors—seemingly without bothering to ascertain if they could write. So sloppy is the language in Eleanor Woolvin's 1965 opus, Barbie and the Ghost Town Mystery, that one wonders if anyone even proofread it. In a scene that cries out for a translator, Barbie, Skipper, and two male consorts follow a stray donkey through an abandoned desert town. Woolvin writes, "With the donkey's noisesome [italics mine] voice to guide them, it was not too difficult." Does that mean the donkey had bad breath?
With Woolvin's byline on the title page of the last three books, it's not surprising that the series bit the dust. Even children, I think, know when quality has fallen off. But edited by Gloria Tinkley, Cy Schneider's secretary, and written by Carson/Roberts copywriters Vel Rankin, Barbara Charlebois, and Nancy Joffe, Barbie magazine soldiered on through the sixties. In addition to fashion pieces and promotions for the doll, it featured educational articles on foreign countries and on famous women in history— predictable characters like Florence Nightingale and Helen Keller, surprises like Mary McLeod Bethune, an African-American educator. Redesigned in 1970, it limped into the Me Decade with a new name—Barbie Talk—but did not make it through the seventies alive.
Barbie's fictional persona, however, transcended the death of the magazine. In 1983, while the "We Girls Can Do Anything" campaign took shape on the West Coast, Mattel approached Muppet Magazine publisher Donald E. Welsh and editor Katy Dobbs to create a fresh fanzine for the doll. By the winter of 1984, Barbie, The Magazine for Girls—thirty-two glossy full-color pages of fashion, hair care, recipes, and gift ideas—was born.
It was not, however, an easy delivery. Because the new magazine's target audience was younger than the original's—six- to seven-year-olds instead of eight- to eleven-year-olds—it couldn't feature long stories about Barbie; kids that age couldn't read them. Instead, Barbie's life unfolded in a "photodrama," a narrative made from pictures of real dolls over which comic-strip-style talk balloons had been superimposed. Integrating images and text would seem simple enough, but for the writer and photographer of the original drama, it wasn't. The feature came out so disastrously that Mattel had to pulp its half-million-dollar maiden printing and try again. (Highlights of the aborted drama: Barbie giggles while trying to run over Ken in her pink Corvette and lunches in the snow at an outdoor McDonald's—the photograph of which has been printed backward so that the menu looks as if it were written in Russian.)
Within months, though, the photodrama, written by the editors and realized by photographer Donal Holway, became a cult sensation. When in 1986, the magazine spent $1,500 for miniatures of original furniture by designers associated with the then-chic "Memphis" style—Ettore Sottsass, Flavio Albanese, Saporiti and Felice Rossi—House & Garden took note in a piece called "Barbie Goes Milano." A kitschy, self-conscious send-up of 1950s suburbanism that defined itself in opposition to modernism, "Memphis" was well suited to the campy tone of the photodrama. Sottsass originally intended the style as "an ironic gesture," Stephen