Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [69]
Dobbs's chaotic Madison Avenue office was the antithesis of Jill Barad's plush inner sanctum, yet Dobbs appeared unrattled by the turmoil. There were, not surprisingly, Barbie and Muppet images everywhere, but also a plastic Mickey Mouse atop her desk and a Mickey video playing on a TV monitor—to which, because of a temporary child-care crisis, her toddler son was glued. He soon developed an interest in the interview, however, and plopped himself on his mother's lap, where he assiduously applied himself to unbuttoning her sweater.
As Dobbs continued her narrative—deftly closing the buttons her son had opened—I was struck by the total un-Mattel-ness of the operation. Except for Dobbs, most of the staff appeared to be in their twenties, and the office felt like that of a campus newspaper. When Barbie magazine was started, Dobbs, too, was virtually fresh out of school, after having spent a deracinated childhood as a military brat whose father was from Alabama and whose mother was from Zagreb, Croatia. She feels her career is representative of her baby-boom contemporaries. "When I first came to New York, all I did was go to book parties—eat shrimp—and hang out at Studio [54]," Dobbs said, "because I was at Conde Nast covering entertainment. Then I got married and had kids and now I'm doing this."
But even with its deliberate turning away from seamy reality, putting out the magazine has its somber moments. Beverly Cannady, whose first job at Mattel in the sixties was answering Barbie's mail, observed a poignant pattern to the way kids related to the doll. The magazine has always existed to promote Barbie as a commercial product; but kids look to her as an oracle— a vivid, godlike presence in the landscape of childhood. And sometimes, with aching candor, they'd beg Barbie to help stabilize their parents' rocky marriages or mitigate tragedies in their lives.
Many letters to Barbie, in fact, have such a Miss Lonelyhearts quality that they are too gloomy to print. To ask kids to send in their three wishes is to invite heartbreak. "It's like when you blow out your birthday candles, you go: 'Wait. Should I go personal or global here? Should I go for me or for world peace?' " Dobbs told me. "So a lot of them start out with 'Clean up the world, make peace, [then they'll add] my mommy and daddy not get divorced.' " Karen Tina Harrison was so touched by some of the unpunishable letters that she saved them and occasionally responded to them. One note that accompanied a strangely anguished self-portrait simply said: "My name is Tequila. I am 8 years old. With brown eyes. Black long hair. Brown skin."
Although many big-time models like Christy Turlington currently sport navel rings, body modification has been banned from the magazine; even showing a model with pierced ears enrages some mothers. I wanted to press Dobbs about other forbidden topics, but she had an excellent pretext to avoid my question. Her son's diaper had become, well, noisome, requiring her immediate attention.
As I left her office, Bret Mirsky, the magazine's editor in 1992, presented me with a set of back issues that, except for their graphics, were virtually identical to the those of the sixties. True, there were small differences: In 1963, 1968, and 1970, the magazine featured articles on becoming an airline hostess; by 1990, Barbie was the pilot of the plane. And in the old magazines, pages with educational material—articles on history and geography—seemed to outnumber pages with ads. But even the child-star drug scandals had counterparts in the past. Drew Barrymore's prepubescent coke addiction paled next to the fate of Anissa Jones—"Buffy" on CBS's Family Affair—who, in 1969 and 1971, was profiled in both Barbie and Barbie Talk. Jones died at eighteen in 1976 from