Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [9]
Indeed, some of Barbie's most ardent imitators are probably not what Carole King had in mind when she wrote "Natural Woman." Many drag queens proudly cite Barbie's influence; as a child, singer Ru-Paul not only collected Barbies but cut off their breasts. Barbie has, in fact, a drag queen's body: broad shoulders and narrow hips, which are quintessentially male, and exaggerated breasts, which aren't. Then there are biological women whose emulation of Barbie has relied heavily on artifice: the Barbi Twins, identical Playboy covergirls who maintain their wasp waists through a diet of Beech-Nut strained veal; and Cindy Jackson, the London-based cosmetic surgery maven who has had more than twenty operations to make her resemble the doll.
When Ella King Torrey, a friend of mine and consultant on this book, began researching Barbie at Yale University in 1979, her work was considered cutting-edge and controversial. But these days everybody's deconstructing the doll. Barbie has been the subject of papers presented at the Modern Language Association's 1992 convention and the Ninth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women; rarely does a pop culture conference pass without some mention of the postmodern female fetish figure. Gilles Brougere, a French sociologist, has conducted an exhaustive study of French women and children to determine how different age groups perceive the doll. When scholars deal with Barbie, however, they often take a single aspect of the doll and construct an argument around it. I have resisted that approach. What fascinates me is the whole, ragged, contradictory story—its intrigues, its inconsistencies, and the personalities of its players.
I've tried to pin down exactly what happened in Barbie's first years. Mattel's focus on the future, which may be the secret of its success, has been at the expense of its past. The company has no archive. This may help conceal its embarrassments, but it has also buried its achievements—such as subsidizing Shindana Toys in response to the 1965 Watts riots. The African-American-run, South Central Los Angeles—based company produced ethnically correct playthings long before they were fashionable.
Although Barbie's sales have never substantially flagged, Mattel has been a financial roller coaster. It nearly went broke in 1974, when the imaginative accounting practices of Ruth Handler and some of her top executives led to indictments against them for falsifying SEC information, and again in 1984, when the company shifted its focus from toys to electronic games that nobody wanted to buy. The second time, Michael Milken galloped to the rescue. "I believed in Barbie," Milken told Barbara Walters in 1993. "I called up the head of Mattel and I told him that I personally would be willing to invest two hundred million dollars in his company. There's more Barbie dolls in this country than there are people."
The Barbie story is filled with loose ends and loose screws, but unfortunately very few loose lips. In a world as small as the toy industry, people are discreet about former colleagues because they may have to work with them again. As for welcoming outsiders, the company has much in common with the Kremlin at the height of the Cold War. To a degree, secrecy is vital in the toy business: if a rival learns in August of a clever new toy, he or she can steal the idea and have a knock-off in the stores by Christmas.
Nor am I what Mattel had in mind as its Boswell. Inspired perhaps by Quindlen and Goodman, or, more likely, by fear and a deadline, I had owned up in my weekly Newsday column to having cross-dressed Ken because of antipathy toward his girlfriend. This was years before I gave serious thought to Barbie's iconic import, but it was not sufficiently far in the past to have escaped the attention of Mattel publicist Donna Gibbs, who, when