Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [76]
Yet even with Mattel's help, this wasn't easy. Articulate, charismatic, and fiercely Afrocentric, Smith didn't change his style to court white investors. "He'd meet with presidents of banks, universities, or large corporations in his dashiki and his jeans," Marva Smith told me. And he was so distrustful of government agencies that he refused to apply for a Small Business Administration loan. Rather than change Smith's mind, Mattel donated $150,000 to set up a toy factory on Central Avenue.
The plant's opening ceremonies in October 1968 attracted national attention. Ironically, Mayor Sam Yorty, Paul Jacobs's avowed enemy, presided at the festivities, which Jacobs also attended. Hatchets were seemingly buried—or at least shelved. "I know you don't agree with a great many of the positions in which I believe and sometimes with the way in which I express them," Jacobs wrote to the Handlers in a letter dated shortly after the opening, "but in this case we seem to have a common understanding."
The optimism continued at Toy Fair, when buyers, introduced to Shindana by Mattel's sales force, responded positively to Baby Nancy, who, with her molasses complexion and kinky Afro, was very unlike the cafe-au-lait, Caucasian-featured "black" dolls that had been put forth by mainstream toy-makers. Her appearance was so radical, in fact, that creating it posed a technical challenge. To make her Saran hair look "natural," James Edwards, Shindana's head designer, told me, "You'd sew it into the doll's head, then stick it into the oven and it would crinkle up."
Nor did Shindana produce only dolls. It licensed images of the Jackson Five for a card game, and issued "The Black Experience American History Game," in which players, to quote the catalogue, "begin their existence as slaves and work their way . . . to the present." Today, the Jackson Five cards are avidly sought by collectors because they feature a Michael who still looks black.
African-American celebrities seemed eager to hop on the Shindana bandwagon. Besides its Flip Wilson doll, Shindana made talking, stuffed versions of Redd Foxx and J. J. Evans, the lanky son from TV's Good Times. It issued a Maria Gibbs fashion doll and a football action figure based on O. J. Simpson, who, as he was married to Shindana designer James Edwards's cousin, found the offer hard to refuse. When supercool detective Shaft appeared in the movies, Shindana introduced Slade, a black crime-fighter with a nubby Vandyke, a canary leather pants suit, and a briefcase full of "ransom money." Intended as a role model, Slade had street smarts and a sheepskin. "He grew up in the ghetto where he learned to survive," the catalogue says. "He went to war and was taught to fight. Now, after college, he puts it all together as a tough secret agent."
Mattel had agreed to support Shindana for its first two years, after which, ideally, it would be self-sufficient. In an internal memo dated eleven months after the plant's opening, Mattel marketing director Cliff Jacobs expressed optimism, as well as concern that the trust, which had been hard to establish, not break down. "Black people were suspicious and did not want to be 'put down' by the 'con,' " he wrote. So it fell to Mattel to provide the "best trainers" possible—"not second-rate people who can be spared from their regular jobs," but people who " 'talk the language' and are in complete sympathy with the project."
The "best trainers" meant Jacobs himself, who led a weekly marketing seminar at Shindana. It also meant senior engineer Adolph "Dolph" Lee and Art Spear, vice president for manufacturing, who would later head Mattel. Spear never allowed