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If Barbie was supposed to be putting on airs, she was doing it ineptly. She bought a lot of things, but they were things whose selection required no connoisseurship. Barbie is a consumer, not a climber. Except for her body, which is slimmer than the average woman's, Barbie is the great American common denominator. She is rich, but not top-out-of-sight; smart but not cultivated; pretty but not beautiful. Far from embodying an impossible standard, she represents one that is wholly achievable. Even the destitute and bottom-out-of-sight can use her as a template for their daydreams.

OF COURSE WHEN I SAY BARBIE'S STATUS IS WITHIN THE grasp of most Americans, I mean North Americans. In Latin America, where blond Barbie outsells all other dolls, Barbie leads a life that few of her young owners will ever replicate. Like Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald, Barbie is a pop cultural colonist, a "global power brand," as Mattel vice president Astrid Autolitano puts it.

Because of import restrictions, Mattel has had only two affiliates in Latin America—Mexico and Chile—but the North American Free Trade Agreement will probably change that. Other countries—Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, and Colombia—have been served by local licensees. Rather than hindering Barbie's market penetration, however, this simply led to a new dimension in her class mutability. In markets with limited buying power, Mattel or its licensees introduced dolls at lower prices. "Those lower-price dolls basically offer us an opportunity to reach the lower classes, which we call in our jargon, 'Class D'—so as not to say 'lower classes,' " Autolitano told me. On the positive side, this makes Barbie a less-exclusionary product; girls of negligible means can dip their toe in the chlorinated swimming pool of North American consumption. On the negative side . . . well, Ken Handler—after whom the male doll was named—has a few thoughts.

Now entering his sixth decade, Ken Handler is no stranger to South America. He spends half the year there, slogging through swamps, consulting with shamans, stalking indigenous herbs. While on the board of directors of Bronx AIDS services several years ago, he became interested in antioxidant drugs, which many believe can inhibit the cell mutagenesis that causes cancer. The strongest antioxidants, he says, are harvested near the Equator, where they have been toughened by exposure to intense ultraviolet light. When I spoke with him in the winter of 1993, he was raising $7 million to build a laboratory in Ecuador to refine these drugs, and working with a team of physicians to get FDA approval for them.

Handler does not look like his plastic namesake. He is soft-spoken and erudite, with a high forehead, shoulder-length gray hair, and a shaggy gray beard, resembling a mature self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci. Perhaps as a reaction against his parents, he has embraced archaism with a vengeance. He restores eighteenth- and nineteenth-century town houses in Greenwich Village, and lives in one of them. He plays the harpsichord, specializing in music from the seventeenth century. He spent years on the board of New York's Metropolitan Opera. He admires his parents—"They provided a home with a lot of love," he insists—but he cannot bear the dolls they invented.

To his parents' bewilderment, Ken, as a child, had no interest in toys. He spent his free time reading, playing the piano, or listening to jazz or classical music, which led to his majoring in music at the University of California at Los Angeles. He remembers his youth as a long struggle with his sister, Barbara, who did not go to college. Even something as innocuous as a family drive frequently exploded into a battle for control of the car radio. Ken wanted to listen to opera; his sister Barbara demanded rock 'n' roll. "Every time I got my choice, which wasn't very often, she would have a fit," he said. "God, she knew how to pull the strings on Mom and Dad.

"My sister