What A Doll!

The doctor's face is the picture of cheerful benevolence, a shiny stethescope dangling from her ears. The late-night grind of medical school, the long hours in the emergency room, and the struggle to assert herself in a male-dominated profession have left no trace on her clear, smooth features.

Dr. Barbie doesn't have a hair out of place, in fact, and as 5-year-old Danica Patrick thumps the doll's pink case, she offers her diagnosis.

"Cute, Mom. Lookit."

Ah, Barbie. For 35 years she's been a dazzler, a long riff in the raff of fashion. Love or hate her three-inch waist, decry her as bimbo or feminist, the svelte plastic yardstick of American girlhood is still going strong.

The old girl's ubiquitous. She's even available on-line, for gosh sakes.

According to Mattel Inc., Barbie's maker, the typical American girl owns an average of eight Barbie dolls throughout her childhood. Since her creation, the company has sold more than 800 million Barbie and Barbie-related dolls, such as her longstanding beau, Ken. Not to mention a billion tiny pairs of shoes.

"Barbie is very, very popular," agrees Toys R Us regional inventory manager Kent Barber, noting that Seattle-area stores sell more than 100,000 Barbie dolls annually.

She has become a collector's item and an art icon - as well as the subject of three new books. "Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story," by Handler with Jacqueline Shannon (Longmeadow, $19.95), is the memoir by the woman who groomed Barbie for an American audience, while M.G. Lord's "Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll" (Morrow, $25) is a cultural history of the entire Barbie phenomenon.

Finally, there is "The Art of Barbie: Artists Celebrate the World's Favorite Doll" (Workman, $19.95), a colorful paperback compendium edited by Craig Yoe that presents art work inspired by the perky plastic muse.

As Handler recounts in her book, Barbie began in 1956, when she encountered the doll of her dreams in a small shop in Lucerne, Switzerland. The Mattel co-founder had long wanted to produce a dressable doll with a grown-up figure, and she found her model in Lilli, a German doll based on a cartoon character of a gold-digging call girl.

German children didn't play with Lilli; she was a gag gift for middle-aged men. Her American counterpart, on the other hand, had to be suitable for children.

"I didn't want her to be racy. I didn't know she was presumed to be racy over there," said Handler in a recent phone conversation. Mattel sculptors reshaped Lilli's face and cut out some bosom to "Americanize" her, and the company even sent a fashion designer who looked uncannily like the early Barbie to Japan to oversee clothing designs.

Named after Handler's daughter, Barbie hit the stores in 1959; boyfriend Ken, named after Handler's son, was released two years later. A decision to advertise on the old "Mickey Mouse Club" television show paid off, and Mattel sold 351,000 Barbies the first year. The doll has continued to be a strong seller, accumulating cultural clout far beyond her creators' expectations.

What an irony

Ironically, says Handler, she never played with dolls growing up, and Barbie's influence completely surprised her. She was overwhelmed by the gratitude she felt during Mattel's recent fall convention in Orlando, which was attended by 1,600 Barbie collectors.

"Those people are into Barbie in such depth I am awestruck. They live Barbie; they live for Barbie," said Handler. "Barbie is not just a doll. (She) is a prop through which people dream their dreams."

The doll's popularity was evident one recent Saturday at the Southcenter Toys R Us. Every few seconds, another knee-high shopper would gravitate to the pink, 40-foot-long Barbie aisle.

"They have nice clothes, and they have pretty hair," observed 5-year-old Annelese Kellogg of Auburn.

A dark-haired 7-year-old from Seattle, Kathleen Nguyen, said she likes the blond Barbies best because they are the prettiest. But ask her if she wants blond hair herself, and Kathleen's face wrinkles up in disgust: "No way."

"Barbie's too complex for an encomium or an indictment," explained "Forever Barbie" author M.G. Lord in a telephone interview. "People project certain kinds of fears of femininity on that doll."

Lord, a cultural critic and investigative journalist, embraces the contradictory nature of Barbie as Icon and explores the mixed messages. For example, she praises the doll's ethnic incarnations - there are black, Asian and Latina Barbies - as examples of Mattel's progressive thinking, but she can still make fun of the stereotypical execution.

Lord's book also discusses Barbie in the context of "homeovestism," the situation when a person dresses as a caricature of his or her gender to compensate for having qualities "inappropriate" to that gender. Such as the bimbo question.

"She's not a bimbo," said Lord. "She's an executive who conceals her power by looking like a bimbo." At any rate, she added, mothers have far more influence on their daughters' self-images than Barbie does.

Don't blame Barbie

Others are less hesitant to blame the doll. Two years ago, Mattel altered its Talking Barbie in response to outcry from the American Association of University Women. From a conversational repertoire that includes "Let's go shopping for dresses" and "I'm so glad we're friends," Talking Barbie's confession, "Math class is tough," has been excised.

And last Christmas season, a group calling itself the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO) protested gender stereotyping with "Operation Newspeak" - they illicitly swapped the voice components of hundreds of GI Joes and Talking Barbies. Puzzled consumers found their military dolls itching to go shopping, while their stylish Barbies grunted about war and vengeance.

In a recent statement released over the Internet, a BLO spokesperson said Operation Newspeak would continue this holiday season, and the group is selling a video about their doll-swapping adventures.

"Now, I am not saying that Barbie or GI Joe are the causes of all random violence, gender pay scale inequality or anything else," wrote the anonymous spokesperson. "(W)hat I am saying is that these toys are part of a larger societal problem that we are facing. Because they are children's playthings, they seem like a good place to start attacking these problems."

Handler pooh-poohs the notion that Barbies are anything but harmless vehicles for children's imagination.

"Children don't know about bimbos unless it's put in their mind," she said. "They play at being grown up."

Some children, however, won't get to play the Barbie way. Each year, Toys for Tots, the nonprofit holiday charity run by the Marine Corps Reserve, receives about 1,000 requests for the doll in the Seattle area, and each year it falls short. Master Sgt. Bob Huffman said this season they have only about 150 to 200 Barbies to give to disadvantaged children in King and Snohomish counties.

So how has Barbie, intended by Handler to be bland enough for children to project their own personalities onto the doll, generated all this fuss?

Like McDonald's

"I think Barbie is sort of like McDonald's," said Barry Sturgill, a Seattle collector and Barbie photographer. "No matter how you try to shield them from it, they come genetically programmed to want that thing."

For children, part of the fun is manipulating an adult figure, theorized Sturgill, while for adults it is nostalgia.

"It's so scary now, (and) Barbie represents a safe little thing - she's nonviolent," said Sturgill, who first began photographing the doll in 1988 and continued because the portraits never fail to get a reaction. His work appears in Barbie Bazaar, a collector's publication, as well as Lord's book and editor Craig Yoe's "The Art of Barbie," a pictorial book which ranges from satire to reverence to whimsy. The book includes Calvin Klein and Andy Warhol creations - even the magic moment when Beavis and Butthead put Barbie's head on GI Joe's body.

Oddly, haircutting, limb-switching and other mutilations are a common theme in adult reminiscences of Barbie. Meredith Hughes, a 25-year-old graduate student at the University of Washington, remembers roasting one of her dolls in a fit of prepubescent angst. After that, she called it Barbie-Q.

"It made me feel really bad because I wasn't tall and blond, and I had nipples," confessed Hughes. "But now, all I have is love in my heart for Barbie. I have a large collection of dolls I didn't mutilate."

Being identified with Ken can also be traumatic. One blond, 23-year-old UW undergraduate, actually named Ken - and who asked that his last name not be used - said he was always teased about resembling Barbie's escort. In high school his friends even fixed him up with a girl who looked like Barbie.

Leslie Sena, a Kirkland collector, says it's environment, not the doll, that causes the problem.

"If you raise your child to be an idiot, then that's how she'll play with Barbie . . . There's nothing amazing about that," said Sena, 30.

An avid collector since she was 14, Sena says she owns 150 to 250 dolls. Some are "carcass dolls," good for parts, while others stay safely wrapped in their original boxes. Her collection encompasses several of Barbie's family members, including the memorable 1975 sibling, Growing Up Skipper, whose breasts grew when the doll was manipulated.

Barbie has blossomed

Barbie collecting has gone from a grassroots hobby to an official Mattel-recognized sport. Nowadays, an original "No. 1" - that is, the first Barbie put out by Mattel - can fetch up to $4,500. And Mattel has started to market to the collectors, producing a 35th-anniversary Barbie and other higher-end collectibles.

"You could put Barbie's face on anything and it would become collectible," said Marleen Price, a member of the 15-year-old Pacific Northwest Barbie Collectors' Club. The Seattle-based organization puts on two doll shows and sales each year, donating the proceeds to charity.

Price said her club's members, predominantly women, vary in their approach to the doll. Some only buy the newer Mattel-sanctioned collectibles, while one dresses her black Barbies in traditional African garb and another painstakingly crochets tiny clothing for her dolls. And in a wild collision of media cultures, two other women dress their Barbies in Star Trek uniforms.

Price's grown daughter also collects and owns upward of 1,000 Barbies. Attempts to inventory the dolls - which are kept in a separate room of the house - stopped at about $10,000, said Price.

One side effect of increased interest in collecting is that prices go up, and greed enters an arena where fun once prevailed. One Seattle collector declined to be interviewed because she feared theft; another said she has seen people lose friendships in squabbles over collectibles.

There are about 2,000 vintage collectors in the Northwest, according to Ralph Brenner, co-owner of Those Swell Doll Guys, a vintage Barbie mail-order dealership. Brenner and partner Bruce Zue have also produced a videocassette that includes an interview with Barbara Miller, who publishes a Barbie price guide in Spokane, and tips for identifying Barbie paraphernalia and a demonstration of how to refurbish a limp ponytail.

Barbie network

It doesn't stop there. Those Swell Doll Guys aim to become construction workers on the pink lane of the Information Superhighway: Five months ago they set up Collector's Net, whose 1,500 on-line subscribers are predominantly interested in Barbie. In December, Brenner and Zue expect to have a page on the Internet's World Wide Web.

A hot tip from one subscriber has already helped several collectors order a Gold Jubilee Barbie from JC Penney even before the catalog was printed. Other Barbie computer products are being developed in collaboration with Mattel, said Brenner.

"Mattel has been able to reinvent Barbie again and again," he said. "She's not just an old toy."