THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA (9 page)

There has never been a scarcity of black dolls on the market, but most are just white dolls dipped in pigment. Black community leaders have often expressed contempt for brown dolls with pug or aquiline noses and cornsilk hair. A few firms, such as Remco and Mattel, have tried to fashion “ethnically correct” dolls with separate molds, but the effort in terms of the entire industry has not been significant.

Shindana Toys’ attempt to market ethnically correct black dolls was launched through Operation Bootstrap, a Los Angeles-based, privately funded organization which, with the help of Mattel executives, formed the company. Mattel receives none of Shindana’s profits, however; appropriately, Shindana means “competitor” in Swahili.

Shindana’s first doll was Baby Nancy who was produced with two hair styles, Afro or twin ponytail. Instead of skin “dipped in Hershey syrup,” Shindana mixed her pigment right in with the plastic. The company has a motto: “The more they peel, the blacker they get.”

Shindana’s first year in business was pretty rough. Its employees, recruited from the ghetto, had to be trained from scratch. Management lacked business sophistication. But as time passed, the staff grew more confident and profited from its early mistakes. By its second year. Shindana sales grew 100 percent, and the following year promised to show increases of 200 percent.

New products were added to the line, including a Flip Wilson doll which, when reversed, turned into his alter ego, Geraldine. By early 1972, the firm was selling twenty-two products—baby dolls, rag dolls, and fashion figures such as airline stewardesses, nurses, and ballerinas—and was making considerable headway in bringing genuine black dolls to ghetto children. The presence of both the fashion figure and the baby doll in the Shindana line shows that the company recognizes the child’s need for both kinds of plaything.

Contrary to popular belief, the baby doll is not a truly traditional toy. Before this century, most dolls in history were adult figures dressed in miniature versions of the latest fashions. Mattel’s Barbie was not so much an innovation as a repopularization of an old custom in dolls.

Barbie was first conceived in 1959, when Ruth Handler, now president of Mattel, began to observe the way her daughter played with dolls. She noted that the child “invariably passed over the dolls in her own age bracket and would favor, instead, teenage dolls with fashions and accessories. She evidently loved to project herself into the dreams and aspirations of such dolls as they assumed the roles of nurse, or flight stewardess, or queen of the prom.”

Most of the teenage dolls then on the market were paper cutouts. Ruth Handler suggested to her husband, Elliot (cofounder of the firm and now chairman), that a fashion-model doll might make a good addition to the line. He agreed, and the Handlers decided to give Barbie—named after their daughter—a complete line of clothes and accessories. The designers went to work with great precision of detail. Tiny zippers and buttons and fine fabric linings were carefully worked into Barbie’s two-and-a-half-inch fitted jackets.

Soon projected expenses became so formidable that the Handlers went to Japan to investigate overseas production. No one there knew how to make such a tiny doll, and the Mattel executives had to teach the Japanese workers. At last, Barbie was ready for Toy Fair.

Some buyers said the Handlers were out of their minds, that a buxom fashion doll never would sell. “Baby dolls are what people buy!”

But the dubious buyers were wrong. The eleven-and-a-half-inch doll, strongly aided by TV ad support, went on to make more money than almost any other toy in American history. In the first eight years of Barbie’s production, better than $500 million worth of dolls and accessories were sold. Dozens of official Barbie Fan Clubs sprang up in the United States and now number about 1.5 million members; another quarter of a million girls belong to Barbie clubs in Europe.

One of the reasons Barbie has brought so much revenue to Mattel is her accessory line, a devastating array of wardrobes, play houses, patios, campers, tents, a host of friends and family—Skipper, Ken (named after the Handlers’ son), Stacey, Midge, Francie—and even spinoff toys like the Barbie Beauty Center a model head with settable hair and a complexion that can be made up with cosmetics.

Barbie’s construction has also altered with the years. At first she was somewhat chesty and stiff with a long dress. As she grew older. Barbie became more pneumatic, increasingly flamboyant in garb, and easier to manipulate. Her legs were made bendable in 1964, and three years later, her hips gained the ability to twist and turn.

The proliferation of Barbie products has led to some criticism of Mattel for supposedly encouraging little girls to buy huge quantities of clothing and appliances—first for Barbie; then, by extension, for themselves.

A Mattel designer defended the broad line of Barbie products this way: “Certainly we make a wide range of things for Barbie and her friends and family, but we never expect any single child to collect them all. It’s a little like Max Factor making forty or more shades of lipstick. No woman buys them all; she purchases those suiting her taste, temperament, and complexion. We expect a similar buying pattern with Barbie merchandise.”

Despite the popularity of Barbie and other fashion dolls, the baby doll is still flourishing. For a few years in the nineteen-sixties, so-called traditional dolls were on the decline—not because of the fashion figure as much as the gimmicky, high-priced “performing” dolls that danced, talked, wrote, walked, and grew hair. As their novelty began to wear off in the early seventies, there was a corresponding resurgence of the baby doll.

In early 1972, the Ideal Toy Corp. brought back Tiny Tears, one of the most popular baby dolls a generation ago, in her black and white versions. The catalog copy describes the company’s attitude toward the doll: “If you’re going to appeal to a little girl’s maternal instincts, nothing does it like Tiny Tears. Lay her down and she begins to cry real tears, which seem to flow naturally right out of her baby blue eyes. Pick her up and cuddle her against Mama’s breast and she stops crying. Her head turns and her chubby little arms and legs are flexible. Even takes a bottle . . . which Mama gets along with one extra Pamper. Irresistible.”

Once made by the now-defunct American Character Co., Tiny Tears was bought by Ideal and moderately updated. The original crying mechanism, a squeeze-me type, was altered; the new doll cries when laid down. However, Tiny’s appeal chiefly rests in her old-fashioned quality. “We are seeing a return to the basics,” said Ideal’s Herb Sand. “Women’s lib may feel that we are stereotyping the child, but we are just respecting the wishes of the consumer. There is a definite trend toward simplicity in dolls, and that is why we brought back Tiny Tears at this time.”

This trend toward simplicity has also benefited rag dolls. Raggedy Ann, easily the most popular of American rag dolls, probably stands second only to the teddy bear in the line-up of classic twentieth-century dolls. She was first manufactured for the express purpose of promoting Johnny Gruelle’s Raggedy Ann stories, which began in 1918.

According to the Knickerbocker Toy Co., Gruelle was a cartoonist who created Raggedy Ann to amuse his daughter, Marcella. While rummaging through the attic of the Gruelle home in Silvermine, Connecticut, young Marcella had found a tattered old rag doll with a face worn away by time. Her father refurbished the doll for her and named it Raggedy Ann, a combination of two poems (“The Raggedy Man” and “Little Orphant Annie”) by his friend James Whitcomb Riley.

The doll became Marcella’s favorite toy, and her love for it inspired her father to write the books which led to the popularity of the doll. Gruelle’s stories feature Marcella as a central character and avoid any glorification of mischief or malice; he wanted to tell tales that would not instill fear or condone cruelty in children. Raggedy Ann and her companion, Andy, who came along a few years later, captured the imagination of millions of children.

The look of the rag doll has remained almost the same over the years: friendly smile, loops of red yarn hair, shoe-button eyes, ruffled apron and pantaloons, and a heart on the breast bearing the words “I love you.” Though Gruelle is now dead, the ownership of the Raggedy Ann character still resides with his family, and Knickerbocker produces the toy under license—which probably makes Raggedy Ann the oldest licensed character doll still sold in American toy stores.

Many celebrities have publicized their love for Raggedy Ann dolls: Shirley Temple, Lady Bird Johnson, John F. Kennedy. The United States government chose the doll for the American pavilion at Canada’s Expo as “the classic American folk doll.” There are scores of Raggedy Ann products, in addition to the dolls: songs (written by Gruelle); clothing; hair styles; foods; and gardeners even developed a Raggedy Ann azalea-mum. The Knickerbocker dolls themselves are made in seven sizes, ranging from seven to forty-five inches, and are in demand on four continents.

One would expect the passage of so many years to have dimmed interest in Raggedy Ann and Andy, but the manufacturer estimated that perhaps fifty million of the dolls have been bought since they were first put on toy counters, and there is no sign that interest is flagging. In 1971 alone, Knickerbocker required close to a million yards of cloth, over 150 tons of stuffing, and about half a million yards of yarn to make 2.5 million dolls—in retail sales, more than $10 million.

Raggedy Ann recently played an especially poignant role in Vietnam, where many of the toys were sent to homeless children. Even older boys—some of them involved in robbery and black marketeering—gladly and earnestly hugged gift dolls to their breasts. One journalist summed up the attraction these soft, smiling doll friends must have had for Vietnamese waifs: “[She] is very much a part of something they have lost—for a moment regained.”

This seems to be the key to justifying the baby doll for little girls—and boys—to play with. The baby doll enables the child to imitate the care shown by Mother and Father by passing it on to a “model.” While the doll also permits the child to exercise the “will to power,” this does not preclude love. In the classic baby-doll play situation the child returns the same degree of love and protection he or she has received.

On the other hand, fashion dolls also provide a necessary play activity: that of projecting the child into a grown-up role. Barbie and her kin are miniature wishes for a personal maturity and the freedom supposed to go with it. Fashion dolls enable preteen girls to fantasize roles and life-styles which they may fulfill later in life.

There is a significant difference, of course, in the kinds of play which baby and fashion dolls allow. For while baby dolls encourage other-directed behavior, the fashion doll is an ego-centered device (which is not in itself bad). According to Mattel, the little girl never treats Barbie as, say, an older sister. She imagines she is Barbie herself.

The potential objections to baby dolls and fashion figures should not be based on these basic play patterns themselves. There is a need for a diversity of doll roles within every child’s toy box. The danger comes only when those play situations are circumscribed and limited.

For instance, the baby doll may give the nod to motherhood as a proper role for woman. But, in the words of toy designer Judy Shackelford, “The trouble is not in sanctioning motherhood itself, which must always be a proper institution—but in restricting woman’s roles
only
to motherhood. The baby doll is a fine toy, as long as it is not the be-all and end-all of a girl’s play life.”

The fashion figure, on the other hand, may be restrictive to the extent that its accessories and attendant values are equated with the sum total of adult life. It is not merely a question of accumulating clothing and gadgetry, but of sanctioning uniforms. Are square-cut suits “square”? Are dresses “ickier” than Levi’s? At what length does hair become unpatriotic? Such concerns are no deeper than the minds which consider them.

In a typical
Barbie Talk
fan magazine, Barbie and Ken are shown holding hands, dressed in swim togs. Ken’s expression is strong and silent (and a bit smug), while Barbie is purely alluring, and more than a little vacuous. Behind them is the sea; the entire scene is bathed in a cloying crimson wash of fading sunlight.

Inside the magazine is also a collection of house ads, syrupy short stories, craft projects, letters and puzzles, nature facts, and lists of pen pals and fashion-design contest winners.

When considered along with Barbie’s line of prom, party, patio, and outdoor sports accessories, the magazine underscores certain imbalances in American life. For Barbie is the queen of the body-beautiful worshipers. Skiing, surfing, dates, dances—the pastimes of today’s Cinderella—are glorified to the detriment of any cultural achievement. Barbie in a library? Never!

Barbie’s world is like an echo of one of W. S. Gilbert’s more sardonic love scenes: “I am prepared to give up all I have, my home . . . for thee; thou to surrender riches, honor, life, to please the fleeting fancies of my will. And why? Because we’re comely specimens—not of our own, but Nature’s industry.”

If the Handlers were to take issue with any of these points, they would be more than justified in saying, “What do you want us to do? Make plain-looking dolls? Put Barbie in a library? Fine—why don’t you make it and lose
your
shirt? Who would buy such a toy?”

Who indeed?

There’s an old poker story about the newcomer who gets ready to collect a winning pot, only to be told that his cards are outranked by a house hand called an Old Cat: nothing matching. Later in the evening, when the stranger tries to rake in the pot with a similar quintet of worthless cards, he finds out that an Old Cat is good only once a night.

The plight of that luckless gambler is something like the position the toy industry found itself in a few years ago when the public outcry against war toys knocked the stuffing out of the toy gun business. Older toymen, raised in the belief that toy weapons would always sell, must have felt that the rules had been changed in midgame to ring in an Old Cat.