Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [68]
Holway was equally attentive to details of clothing and real estate. In "Barbie Goes to Brazil," Barbie's glitzy record producer wore a tiny, non-Mattel-issue Rolex, and the "windows" of his office showed a real view from atop Rockefeller Center. Like Lawrence's and Maybee's stories, many of the photodramas dealt with Barbie's domestic life; but they also jump-started girls' imaginations: the tale that began in the record company office took Barbie to Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro—a swirl of dolls in wild costumes, including men in apparent drag. It even had captions in Portuguese.
Although Mattel never formally codified rules for the dramas, it had guidelines. No attempt was made to provide continuity with the original novels. George and Martha Roberts, that Friedan-era prototype of marital inequity, were erased forever. "We couldn't show Barbie's family except for Skipper," explained Karen Tina Harrison, Barbie editor until 1989. "She has no family. These stories are episodic. They have no background. Barbie has no biography to be passed on. Barbie simply is. No one knows where she came from or how she got there." As to the way she could be portrayed, drudgery—or even, say, seeing patients in her physician incarnation—was out. "Only glamour could befall Barbie," Harrison said.
Barbie's Italian counterpart was not, however, similarly constrained. Its photodramas were described by Welsh Publications editorial director Katy Dobbs as operatic. This meant that on one occasion, Barbie, in a fit of jealous rage, slugged a rival female doll with her handbag. Another time, Barbie and Ken were spelunking and a huge Styrofoam rock fell on Ken, leaving him covered with blood. "We can't do anything like that," she said. Inevitably, though, staging even a tame photodrama involves implicit carnage; in order for a doll to be photographed seated, its legs must be broken. Dobbs sighed: "You have to wipe out so many dolls to do a crowd scene."
Barbie also introduced little girls to real-life superstars—frequently on the eve of a scandal. Vanessa Williams squeaked into the magazine shortly before her lesbian porn shots were unearthed. Likewise Drew Barrymore, then about the same age as Barbie's readers, was portrayed as a wholesome preteen—not as the drug-addicted boozer she later declared herself to be. Nor has profiling celebrities always been fun. "We gave Drew this dress to wear and her mother took one look at it and snarled, 'Barrymores don't wear green,' " Harrison recalled. "So we convinced her it was teal, and the kid wore the dress. Of course we had to give [the kid] everything she touched, but that's standard."
After Harrison left, the magazine became less about whimsy and more about selling products. Current photodramas are not geared to whisking kids off on flights of fancy, but to showing them predictable scenarios that they can play out with Mattel-authorized miniatures. Dramas are set in Mattel-issue settings; the pictures function like illustrations in toy catalogues. From a marketing standpoint, this may be a more effective way to promote merchandise, and Barbie sales, in the 1990s, have certainly skyrocketed. But it seems dry and joyless, stultifying to children's imaginations—not what Barbie, in her most positive, door-opening sense, should be.
Maybe it was a reflection of the difference between West Coast and East Coast style—or between the styles of marketing and journalism—but Katy Dobbs, who is based in New York, was the first top-level Barbie person who leaped to define herself as a "feminist." "I take my daughter to marches,"
Dobbs told me. "We're pro-choice." Then she related feminism to the doll, which her six-year-old little girl has played with for years: "I think Barbie is about options—options in fantasy, options in play patterns, options in opportunities. . . . There's more to her than just the pink and the plastic. Because every little girl