Forever Barbie (7 page)

Eight- to thirteen-year-olds, however, were instantly hooked, though some had reservations. "The face looks snobbish," said
one. "I think they call these Barbie because they are so sharp," said another. And a third used Barbie to reveal her ambivalence
about the role of feminine artifice in snaring a mate: "I would like her better if there was a little less eye makeup . .
. if she was a little less glamorous. But how else could she attract boy dolls?" The one girl who wanted no part of the doll,
"who held her in her hand at some distance," was dismissed as a hopeless tomboy. All that interested her, the report says
dismissively, were "sport clothes."

Although some girls said the doll's neck was "too long, and her figure and legs too thin," Barbie's body nevertheless gave
her an edge over her rivals. Ginny, a potbellied, pug-nosed, flat-chested, eight-inch fashion doll that had been made in hard
plastic by Vogue Dolls, Inc., since 1950, was as good as dead; her owners were eager to dump her and her "cheesily-made" clothes
for Barbie. But Miss Revlon, a doll made in two sizes by Ideal Toy &Novelty Corporation, would be harder to defeat. She had
incipient breasts, feet poised for high heels, and a less threatening body. "I like Revlon dolls the best," one girl explained.
"They are . . . fatter."

Dichter also made marketing suggestions, which Mattel followed to the letter. He urged the company to package each outfit
with a catalog of available clothing and with coupons to obtain other outfits at a reduced price. (In 1967, the doll itself
became a coupon; girls traded in their original Barbies for a price break on the revamped Twist 'N Turn model.)

A lesser manipulator might have been daunted by the mothers' unvarnished loathing of the doll, but not Dichter. He swiftly
located their Achilles' heel and formulated a plan to exploit it. One woman, who had found Barbie way too racy, changed her
mind when she heard her eight-year-old daughter comment, "She's so well groomed, Mommy." Out of this came Dichter's strategy:
Convince Mom that Barbie will make a "poised little lady" out of her raffish, unkempt, possibly boyish child. Underscore the
outfits' detailing, and the way it might teach a roughneck to accessorize. Remind Mom what she believes deep down but dares
not express: Better her daughter should appeal in a sleazy way to a man than be unable to attract one at all.

"The type of arguments which can be used successfully to overcome parental objection are in the area of the doll's function
in awakening in the child a concern with proper appearance," the report says. And, as with all controversial toys, a well-coached
child is the doll's best salesperson.

"The child exerts a certain amount of pressure, the effectiveness of which depends on his [or her] ability to argue sensibly
with an adult," the report explains. "The toy advertiser can help the child by providing him [or her] with arguments which
will satisfy mother."

Draft arguments to sway parents: Carson/Roberts had its marching orders; its campaign, in fact, was already under way. No
stranger to hawking glamour— Hollywood makeup legend Max Factor was its other big client—it decided to introduce Barbie as
a fashion model. Agency cofounder Jack Roberts, who made the sets for her first commercials, and copywriter Cy Schneider,
who wrote them, strategically ignored the fact that Barbie was a thing; they imaged her as a living teenager and invented
a life for her that was as glamorous and American as Lilli's had been tawdry and foreign. "The positioning from the very first
commercial was that she was a person," said Schneider. "We never mentioned the fact that she was a doll."

Unhampered by current guidelines that force advertisers to show toys realistically, Schneider and Roberts animated Barbie.
Head tilting, arms moving, she glided into outfit after outfit—from beach dates to high state occasions. Never mind that Ken
wasn't even on the drawing board, the early spots showed Barbie's wedding dress, a celestial vision in white flocked tulle.
Barbie didn't mince, as one might expect on her tiny feet. She floated. She was a teenage fashion model, and the world was
her runway.

"Our findings suggest the desirability of advertising [that features] a variety of teen-age social activities," prescribed
Dichter, and the ads fit his bill. In agency tests, girls gave them high marks, embracing Barbie as a real person, one they
might even want to spruce up and emulate.

"We haven't superimposed a culture on the kids," Schneider explained. "The kids have dictated what their own culture should
be. Every commercial was tested with children. And anything that didn't get through the barbed wire on the test never got
on the air."

But Mattel was not yet out of the woods. "Advertising can make a good product better," Schneider said. "It can make a mediocre
product slightly better. But the fastest way to kill a bad product is to advertise it. Because then more people find out that
it's lousy. The kids tell each other. If they're disappointed, the product disappears."

MATTEL'S FIRST BIG PROMOTIONAL EFFORT, HOWEVER, was not to children but to toy buyers. If stores didn't stock the dolls, all
the ads in the world wouldn't sell them. So in the dead of winter, 1959, Barbie made her debut at the American Toy Fair, the
industry's annual trade show in New York City.

Toy Fair, old-timers say, has not changed much in thirty-five years; it has always had the trappings of Mardi Gras. For decades,
people in costume— bunnies, pirates, spacemen—have passed out toy promos in front of the Toy Building at 200 Fifth Avenue.
Inside, spies have combed showrooms, searching for ideas to knock off. And for seven long days, business lunches have merged
into business dinners that have merged into hangover breakfasts.

It was into this chaos that Barbie strode, unseasonably bare in her black-and-white swimsuit. Voluptuous, half-naked, she
curiously didn't make much of a splash. Perhaps this was because male buyers had human distractions; most toy companies hired
breathtaking models to demonstrate their wares. But even when buyers glimpsed her, it was far from love at first sight. Condemning
her sexiness, Sears buyer Lowthar Kieso, toy tastemaker for the catalogue empire that had been one of Mattel's biggest customers,
rejected her—an odd bit of prudery at a trade show where, to make sales, models batted their eyelashes and stuck out their
chests. Other buyers agreed to stock her: not, however, legions.

The Handlers returned to California. Was it possible that Ruth's daring, Elliot's vision, Charlotte's chicness, Nakamura's
persistence, Adler's resourcefulness, Ryan's inventiveness, Dichter's insight, and Carson/ Roberts's imagination had spawned
a turkey?

Carson/Roberts began its commercial blitz in March, but still nothing happened. Spring came, then summer—meaningless seasons
on the temperate West Coast. But it is doubtful that in Hawthorne the summer of '59 went unnoticed.

"When school was out, that doll just disappeared from the stock of the shops," said Charlotte. "Kids had to have the Barbie
doll. . . . It just took off and went wild."

The team at Carson/Roberts was also thriving, filled with a happiness so great it burst onto their lapels. If the agency didn't
actually invent the smile-face button, it certainly popularized it. Long before such badges infected the lapels of the general
public, Carson/Roberts used them for in-house promotions.

Mattel, however, was in turmoil, having begun a period of swift expansion that was not without growing pains. In 1960, the
company went public, and by 1963 its common stock was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Between 1959 and 1962, it had
added 180,000 square feet to its Hawthorne headquarters and begun hiring people to fill it. Still, space was tight: in 1964,
the company acquired a new plant east of Los Angeles in the City of Industry and built a three-story office building in Hawthorne,
designed with reinforced foundations so that three more stories could be added later.

Asked to graph Mattel's expansion for a speech Ruth was preparing, Marvin Barab, who in 1960 established Mattel's first market
research department, drew a line shooting up and off the chart. "If the growth Mattel has had . . . continues at the same
rate," he told Ruth, "by 1980-something, the total volume of the company will exceed the Gross National Product." It was as
if the Handlers had hitched their chariot to a puppy and now had to deal with a giant dog.

They did not always deal with grace. Seymour Adler, who had spearheaded rotation molding in Tokyo, found himself skewered
back home. "I complained bitterly to Ruth that the data processing department was incompetent, which it was," Adler says.
The incompetence caused a crisis after the 1963 Toy Show, when records lost during a change from one computer to another prevented
Mattel from shipping goods for three months. Exasperated, Ruth said, "Seymour, you run the goddam department," Adler told
me. And although he knew nothing about computers, he agreed.

Adler's new job may not have changed the balance of power in management, but it seemed that way to Jack Ryan, who was not
one to keep his perceptions to himself. "Ruth became very unhappy because Jack was needling her about my having too much control
in the company," Adler said. Tensions heightened, reaching a point where Ryan, who had caused the rift, curiously tried to
heal it. He hoped to reconcile Ruth and Seymour through the equivalent of executive marriage counseling—a cutting-edge idea
at the time. "People would get together and air all their problems," Adler explained. "It was very much like group therapy.
But Ruth wouldn't attend the sessions. So they fired me."

Three years later Ruth had second thoughts. Mattel "had been having terrible problems," Adler said. "They had a walking doll
that would not stay walking and they were getting returns at a rate of about eight percent. They wanted me back to solve problems
like that—and to have the confidence that they would be solved."

As ever, what Ruth wanted, Ruth got; but Mattel had to buy the toy company Adler had founded during his absence.

Many employees say that during the Handler years, Mattel felt more like a family than a corporation. "Ruth and Elliot ate
in the cafeteria every day and they walked through the factory and knew all the factory workers," said Beverly Cannady, who
worked in promotion. "Those were the people who had the least turnover and who stayed until they retired. Ruth and Elliot
knew the old ones, the original ones, and they'd stop and say, 4Hi Hattie, how's your granddaughter?' That kind of thing."

For some, however, Mattel was a dysfunctional family. Marvin Barab, who left market research to join Ryan's group, had terrible
run-ins with his boss. Things reached a nadir when Ryan, during a party at his Bel Air house, ordered Barab, on penalty of
dismissal, to dive into his pool and race him. This would have been annoying under any circumstances—Barab wasn't much of
a swimmer—but it was especially nettlesome since Barab was wearing a business suit at the time. More successful at dealing
with Ryan was another key hire in the early sixties, Steve Lewis, an artist who had taught sculpture at Temple University
and who (thanks to his diplomacy, he says) would eventually become a vice president in charge of doll design.

OBLIVIOUS TO THE UPHEAVALS, BARBIE KEPT AMASSING clothes. In 1960, Mattel eliminated "Gay Parisienne," "Roman Holiday," and
"Easter Parade" from her wardrobe. In their place, Charlotte Johnson concocted "Silken Flame," a knee-length white satin skirt
with a red velvet bodice, "Enchanted Evening," a pale-pink floor-length gown with a rabbit fur stole, and "Solo in the Spotlight,"
a strapless black sequined dress with a tutu at the ankles.

Further evidence that Charlotte invented Barbie in her own image was "Busy Gal," a red linen suit that came with a sketch-filled
portfolio labeled "Barbie Fashion Designer." Because neither Ruth nor Charlotte was a housewife. Barbie, from the outset,
worked—at both dream and humdrum jobs. She served drinks to thankless travelers as an American Airlines stewardess and emptied
bedpans as a registered nurse.

There was only one accessory Barbie lacked—a steady boyfriend. Consumer demand, however, overcame Mattel's reluctance to make
a male doll, and in 1961 it brought out Ken.

Like Barbie, Ken was purchased in a bathing suit. His other essentials— a letter sweater, a tuxedo, and, because this was
the era of Sloan Wilson, a gray flannel suit—were sold separately. Ken's blazers and trousers were intricately tailored; they
looked like the fine, handmade suits that businessmen bought in the Orient for a fraction of what they would have cost on
Savile Row. And, in fact, they were: the Japanese tailor who made Frank Nakamura's suits had a hand in designing them.

Making Ken's clothing was, however, far less of a problem than making Ken. At Mattel, a storm raged over his genitalia. Ruth
and Charlotte, who wanted what Ruth termed "a bulge" in his groin, squabbled with the male executives, who didn't.

"None of us wanted a doll with a penis showing," Ruth amplified. "If the child took off the swimsuit, we felt it would be
inappropriate with an adult boy to show the penis—so we all reached a conclusion that he should have a permanent swimsuit."

All except Charlotte, that is. She said: "Do you know what every little girl in this country is going to do? They are going
to sit there and scratch that paint off to see what's under it. What else would they do?" Reluctantly, the men agreed. Ken
got his "bump," but in a version modified to fit under trousers. "I had to work with the sculptor a little bit," Charlotte
said, "because I realized when we were putting zippers in the fly—and the zipper on top of that bump—it got bigger and bigger."

Nevertheless, somebody at Mattel was disquieted by Ken's absent genital and tried to help him compensate. Barbie's clothes
were usually accessorized with a matching purse, and purses—boxlike containers—are recognized by Freudians as symbols for
female genitalia. Ken's first garments, by contrast, came with long, thin accessories—symbols for the penis he lacked. A long
stick with a school pennant accompanied his "Campus Hero" outfit; an electric shaver with a dangling cord accompanied his
bathrobe; and his weekend "Casuals," khakis and a T-shirt, came with car keys. (A key is, of course, a male symbol, penetrating
a female lock.)

Barbie's cookout set had featured a spatula, a knife, a rolling pin, and a spoon. She never, ever had either a fork or a weenie.
True, her "Suburban Shopper" outfit had been accessorized with vaguely phallic bananas, but they were popping out of her purse—a
merging that subliminally suggests heterosexual intercourse. Similarly, her "Picnic Set" included a fishing rod, but its hook
had pierced a plastic fish—a vulgar symbol for the female genitals— again evoking heterosexual penetration. The seeming deliberateness
of these symbols makes it hard to interpret Ken's sad, solitary sausage as innocent. Likewise, the message on his apron—"Come
and get it"—seems a bitter taunt about the genital he will never possess.

In 1963, Barbie also moved into her "sturdy, colorful chipboard" Dream House, a modest yet well-appointed dwelling, perfect
for a Single Girl. "If you are to be a glamorous, sophisticated woman that exciting things happen to, you need an apartment
and you need to live in it alone!" Brown orders. Roommates won't do, nor will living at home; but you don't have to take up
residence in Versailles, either.