Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [75]
Elliot Handler hooked up with Bootstrap in March 1968. "I thought it would be a good idea to get something started in the black neighborhood to see if we could train some people and turn them into entrepreneurs," he told me. But he had no connections—until he met the late Paul Jacobs, a left-wing writer, former union organizer, and brother of Cliff Jacobs, Mattel vice president in charge of market planning.
A staff member at the Santa Barbara-based Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Paul Jacobs had become friendly with Lou Smith while researching his 1967 book, Prelude to Riot: A View of Urban America from the Bottom. Prelude is a bitter book; the cover of its paperback edition shows an American flag and some crumbling buildings sticking out of a battered garbage can. To understand what Michael Harrington had termed "The Other America," Jacobs immersed himself in it. He didn't just debrief a handful of black leaders, he interviewed dozens of families in their homes— often having to overcome their skittishness and distrust. He also probed abuses of authority in the Los Angeles Police Department, producing a document so damning that L.A. Mayor Sam Yorty said Jacobs "ought to be investigated" for having written it.
Jacobs concluded that the violence in Watts wasn't just a response to police mistreatment. It expressed the community's frustration at being excluded by poverty from the consumer culture. He writes: "To buy a house in the Valley, spend a weekend at Lake Arrowhead, have babies who grow up to become teenagers attending the senior prom, visit Hawaii . . . shop downtown before going to the PTA fashion show, learn to ski at Sun Valley, take scuba diving lessons . . . these, the life patterns of middle-class Los Angeles . . . are unknown to these generations of unemployed, underemployed and low-paid workers." He might as well have said "these, the life patterns of Barbie"—so close were his examples to the situations for which she had outfits. He also blamed television advertising—of the sort Mattel had pioneered—for heightening black frustration. The ads, he said, ensured that the economically disenfranchised were intimately familiar with all the products they could never afford. Jacobs's undisguised distaste for Barbie's "America" made him an unlikely mediator between Bootstrap and Mattel; yet he not only introduced them, he helped keep their marriage together.
By 1967, Bootstrap had opened a student-staffed car repair shop and a factory where apprentice seamstresses made clothes. It held classes in typing, keypunch, English, and business math. And it ran "Kiwanda," a pricey boutique in Pacific Palisades that sold student-made dashikis to upper-middle-class white people.
If Smith and Hall were intrigued by the idea of going into the toy business, they didn't initially show it. "We went down into some little ramshackle place that was being used as a training center," Handler told me. "And we sat down and I explained to these people—Lou and the guys around him—what I wanted to do. And they didn't believe me. They said, 'Are you serious?' Ts this some kind of a deal?' 'What's going on?' So we had to talk for quite a while and through Paul's help we finally convinced them we wanted to do something."
"I think what Lou and Robert were feeling was not so much skepticism as: Are they really going to live up to what they are telling us?" said Marva Smith, the widow of Lou Smith, who died in 1976. (Hall is also no longer alive.) "We need their assistance in every area. This is all new to us. Will they be there in the long run?"
A Philadelphia-born civil rights activist who came to L.A. to be the West Coast director for the Congress of Racial Equality