American History Hit - Barbie: German Sex Doll to American Icon

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

She's an icon, a polymath, a fashionista, and she's absolutely everywhere right now.Where did Barbie come from? What has she represented to the many who have bought and played with her? And what makes her an American doll?In this episode, M.G. Lord joins Don to introduce us to Barbie, her friends and her creators. M.G. is the author of Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll. She is also the host of the podcast LA Made: The Barbie Tapes from LAist Studios, So Cal Public Radio.Edited and produced by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribeYou can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. All right, let's see here. Sorting through the toy box.

We have a fluffy, cuddly dog with torn off ears. Check. Wooden sailboat, minus the rudder. Check. Train cars with passengers intact. Sort of. A baby doll, of course. Complete with nappy and bottle.

Here it is. Hmm, right. Check, check, check. Hold on. What's this? A glamorous, fabulously clad blonde, looker with pert lips and a button nose who's wearing, well, hold on here, that's interesting, a whole wardrobe filled with costumes, astronaut, army officer, rock star, doctor,

and of course plain old trusty fashion model. She's beautiful, she's brainy, she's even a bit buxom, she's Barbie, and she belongs to American girls everywhere. And apparently that has made a big difference. Welcome to American History Hit here in the midst of a hot, hot summer. We hope you're finding some cool, calm piece wherever you are. I'm Don Wildman. Thanks for listening. Ordinarily, it is coarse and impolite to inquire about a woman's age, but the lady we speak of today is no ordinary woman. She was born on March 9, 1959, which makes her about 64 years old. Nonetheless, she somehow possesses a face of eternal youth, not to mention her ageless hair and physique. She is narrow, in broad.

carriage, but mighty in her impact upon the world. While she herself can't really be bothered to manage her money, she has generated billions in revenue for those who do. She is eclectically fashionable and cosmopolitan, cheerfully ambitious, multi-talented, multiracial, and international. But never mind her upbringing or her worldwide reputation, she has legs for days. And oh, I didn't mention her own blockbuster movie starring Margot Robbie, who, though a glamorously beautiful actress, can only pretend at being anywhere close to the real thing. She is Barbara Millicent Roberts, better known by her brand name, Barbie. And today, we have with us a writer who wrote the book on Barbie, her rise, her fall,

her resurrection over generations of doll-owning youngsters. M.G. Lord. Welcome to the show. Hi, great to be here. Your book is entitled Forever Barbie, the unauthorized biography of a real doll, which I like that title, published a number of years ago, but there have been many iterations of it. But big week for you, for all of us, this new movie coming out, tons of press. My goodness, The New York Times wrote three articles on Barbie in the Arts and Leisure section.

Why so much excitement and coverage this time around? I think Barbie's having a moment, and a lot of it has to do with nostalgia. My book came out in the early 1990s when the first generation of Barbie owners, the ones who'd gotten the doll, the people who were young in the early 60s, were about Greta Gerwig's age in the early 1990s. And the look of this movie is very much the look of the Barbies from the 1990s. That pink color didn't really exist as a Barbie thing when the doll first came out. But, I mean, looking at the clothing in the movie and just the look of the movie is the look of the dolls of Gerwig's childhood

and the look of the dolls of her contemporaries who also are in a position now of deciding whether or not this hunk of plastic is going to be a traditional toy in their family. And this whole tension between traditional toy and revolutionary toy, initially Barbie was a revolutionary toy, this little hot number with those breasts. I know, right? Let's talk about all of that. It's not like there haven't been movies, TV shows, animation, streaming comics,

you name it. Barbie has been out there for a very long time, as you say. But I'm told you are a first-generation Barbie owner. That was the reason for your book, I suppose. Can you take us back to those early days with your doll? Do you remember your reaction to the doll and why you wanted her or did you? Or did you? Was this a gift from your parents? I was aghast at that thing from the get-go.

I really think someone who adores Barbie couldn't possibly write this book. My mother tried to head off the whole Barbie phenomenon by giving me a mid. Midge was sort of Barbie's not-so-attractive sidekick. I see. Interesting. He was like, you know, peppermin. patty with that body. But I never liked Midge either. And I had several Ken dolls because in the early days he had very elegant clothing and the Barbies looked great in Ken's clothes. To my horror, my father had put my dolls into storage about the time that I was 10 years old. So flat forward to

the early 30s, I was a child in La Jolla, California, you know, beach community, Barbie community, maybe a little more Republican than Barbie community. So all those years later, the dolls get shipped to me in Manhattan, where I was then living and working as a columnist and cartoonist at Newsday. And I didn't open them right away. He was sending other bizarre things out of storage as he cleaned out his storage. Then I opened them, and they were absolutely baroquely cross-dressed. Ken was wearing solo in the spotlight, Barbie's slinky black,

shimmering outfit with a ruffle at the ankle on her and it fell mid-calf on him. And the girls were wearing what I would have worn for all those years in storage. Tacky trousers, tens, man's oversized white shirt. And both of them had natty little navy blazers with a crest. You know, they looked very New England boys boarding school. It's interesting. That's kind of what makes this doll so interesting is that it becomes kind of a projection screen. for the psychology of each one of these owners of these dolls.

I mean, it's a Rorschach's test you even mentioned. Absolutely. And in my instance, it wasn't because I had massive gender confusion. It was because my mother was dying of breast cancer, and I had to hide the breasts with the navy blue blazer and the shirt. But Ken, who wasn't vulnerable in the same way, could stride around in that slinky, low-cut dress. And that actually was one of the reasons why I did the book at that time.

I knew it was a great business story. story. You know, Ruth Handler invents the doll, has to leave her company because of accusations of conspiracy, mail fraud, and falsifying SEC information, then goes on to make a second fortune after the devastation of being, you know, essentially pushed out of your own company. She makes a second fortune designing mastectomy prostheses. Wow. Seriously. So great business story, but also it's more than just some emblem of international consumer capitalism. You know, it's something that lives in the inner lives of children and I think continues to and probably lived or lives in the inner life of Greta Gerwig.

Sure. I was surprised reading this stuff. I mean, I'm of your generation and so, I was a boy at that time. And so generally speaking, we weren't hanging out with our Barbies very much. But circling back to it from this perspective is really interesting because Barbie meant so much more. than I understood, or I understand now. There was a certain female empowerment to her, you know, at the time. We're talking about 1959, 1960.

We'll talk about the business story more in a moment. But she represented certain ideals that were beginning to emerge very strongly on the American landscape. Female empowerment, as I say, an all-girl world, which is fascinating. There's not a lot of men, but for Ken, in this universe of hers. And she demonstrates through all of her various outfits and career choices, eventually, this independence and free will. These are aspects of American femininity that were just coming of age. There's so many aspects of this story, so many storylines. You really have to start at the beginning, as you already have, by talking about the first Barbies.

This was really a story that begins with a German doll just after World War II, isn't it? Yeah, well, a German doll that had a personality that was very dissimilar to the one that was invented for Barbie, the Lily doll, based on a comic character in the Pilt-Saitung, kind of a downscale. German newspaper. And her whole thing, her whole raison d'et, was taking money from men for sexual favors. She was kind of this emblem of this German woman who may have starved and suffered during the war, but as long as there were men with checkbooks, she would not starve and suffer again. And the doll wasn't intended as a doll for children. I mean, in post-war Germany, they weren't quite that. I don't know if progressive would even be the right word, maybe twisted. It was like a three-dimensional pin-up, a gag gift for men, like a playboy thing, only three-dimensional.

And was it a West Berlin kind of thing or West Germany? Well, it was the built Tsai Tung was published in Hamburg, the newspaper where the cartoon ran. But Lus Handler, who founded the company, alleges that she encountered the doll in, I believe, Lucerne. Anyway, in a German-speaking country other than Germany since after World War II, many Jews made it a policy of not giving their tourist dollars to Germany. And, well, I guess she didn't read German because the ads for the doll did not suggest a wholesome personality. My favorite is one of like two lily dolls and they're sort of holding hands and one's wearing like a negligee and one's wearing like sort of a pair of tight capris. and the caption is whether more or less naked Lily is always discreet. That was not the message of Barbie.

But this fits into her idea of what is necessary or needed or a good opportunity at this time in America. She had seen her daughter, whose name is Barbara and therefore will become the name of the doll, playing with paper dolls, as I understand, and doing this sort of interchangeable thing that kids do with dressing them up with different outfits and so forth. And I guess Ruth Handler has the idea that this is a, a good opportunity to create a 3D doll that would have the same chance for a kid to have that kind of fun. Right. Well, it's a big difference from dolls. Well, in the past, there were baby dolls, you know, which certainly allowed little girls to play at nurturing. And the Barbie wasn't about nurturing.

It was about an aspirational way of being. And interestingly, the doll was also about that period in a woman's life, where she had really no relationships of responsibility. There are no parents in the Barbie place. set and Mrs. Handler was adamant that Barbie would not have a baby to the point where consumers and kids and moms, you know, they started pouring in mail first to get a boyfriend doll. Because in 1960, a woman without a man was a failure. And after Ken was around for a couple of years, they were clamoring for a baby and Mrs. Handler dug in her heels, you know, like Barbie is not going to have any baby. That's, you know, we're not, but she was able, you know, the light bulb at one point went off over her head and she was able to figure out a way to get the consumers what they wanted a baby doll

by creating Barbie babysits, you know, explicit on her little, I don't remember apron. It said Barbie babysits. Like, God damn it, that's not my kid. Let's give a little context of these names. I'm fascinated by these business stories. Tell me, about the company Mattel, which was brand new in those days. It goes on to become the largest toy company in the world as we speak. But how was it formed and who are the individuals involved? Well, I guess the two key players are Ruth and Elliott Handler, who were high school sweethearts. They grew up in Denver. Ruth was the 10th child of Polish Jewish immigrants. And in high school, she fell in love with Elliot Handler. And they married and moved to Southern California, where Ruth was a

secretary at Paramount. And Elliot, who was really the creative part of the duo, began working on plastic light fixtures. He was very interested in plastics. Their elder daughter, Barbara, after whom the doll would be named, I believe was born in 1941. And their son Ken, after whom the other doll would be named, was born during the war. And Elliot was drafted into the army. and as Ruth tells the story in my podcast, the Barbie tapes, Ruth and Harold Mattson, a third colleague, started Mattel. Right, it's a portmanteau. I love that word. It's the first part of Mattson and the first part of Elliot, I guess,

and you end up with Mattel. Who knew? And they very quickly got Mattson out of there. Exactly. They took over the company. In a way, this is a very good story of female business executives entering the marketplace by way of their company, which is in this case. case, amazing. At a time when women really had no role, I mean, women couldn't even open checking accounts without the sponsorship of their husband or father. It was hard for women to acquire property. It was a very retrograde time here in America. And Ruth is a very impressive woman,

I think. You've already mentioned this, but I want to underscore it that the fact is most dolls in those days did what society was expecting of little girls to understand caregiving. and nursing and becoming a mother and a wife. And it was part of those traditional roles that were being, you know, expected of girls. Along comes Ruth, who sees a different kind of world ahead, I guess, right? And therefore, a doll representing that would be very exciting. Was there a subversive aspect of Barbie for Ruth at all? Well, I think Barbie from the get-go was a really revolutionary doll.

I mean, the men at the company were, like, aghast. You know, they were uncomfortable with the idea. First, they told her you can't make a doll with breasts. Then she found this German object and got Jack Ryan, a Yale-educated engineer who had worked on the Sparrow and Hawk missiles at Raytheon and been hired by Mattel to do sophisticated engineering for toys. She got Jack to knock off the Lily doll. Many toys conceived in the United States were manufactured in Japan at the end of the war. made in Japan was a thing, since you're my co-generationist. You'll recognize that. Right.

Everything about the doll was really radical. And initially with no boyfriend, I mean, early on, the first set of clothes, she had paraphernalia for a career, not Lily's career, a different kind of career, a portfolio of fashion sketches. I mean, I would even argue that wordlessly spoken with objects, Barbie, who had that barbie, who had that bar, that bar, no husband and a self-supporting job gave the same message in objects to the message that the little girl's older sisters were getting from a very popular book in 1962, which would be Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl, which was pretty much an anti-marriage manifesto in an argument for women's financial and sexual autonomy. Yes, it was all happening. I'm the youngest. I've

mentioned this many times on the podcast, the youngest of five and all my older siblings were sisters. And so I saw that whole thing happening in the 60s and was especially attuned to it because the TV was always watching these sorts of things. All the protests that came in the 70s, that was a big part of my life. So Barbie, ironically, because I didn't play with dolls, I wasn't aware of Barbie's role in this, but indeed that's what you're suggesting that she plays a big part in this for those young girls growing up. On Gone Medieval from History Hit, we set out to solve the biggest mysteries of medieval age. So many of these travellers who went out looking for Presta John, what did they think they were hearing? Using science to identify our buried ancestors. Genetic signatures found in present

day Ashkenazi Jewish populations were shared by the genetic ancestries we found in these individuals. And reveal the answers to centuries-old riddles. I stand up straight in a bed, I'm hairy at my base and I make the ladies cry. The solution is an onion. I'm Matt Lewis and every Tuesday and Friday, you can join me to travel the medieval world in search of the stories you haven't heard and to get under the skins of the ones you have. Gone medieval from history hit, twice a week, every week. Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. It was a big hit when it came out. It was sold in great numbers right off with that, 350,000 in a year. Is that a lot or not? Yeah, but the interesting fact about that was in March of 1959, when the handlers first showed

little Barbie in her zebra-stripe bathing suit at toy fair. The male buyers for the big stores like Sears were just a gas. That little thing had breasts. They weren't going to put it, you know, they envisioned mass protests, but some stores stocked them. And then the other genius of the Mattel Company began. Some toy companies before 1955 had experimented with advertising directly to children on television. But Mattel made a big commitment to that. In 195, it risked its entire net worth, about $500,000 in $955 to buy advertising on the then hugely popular Mickey Mouse Club program. And they weren't selling Barbie, because Barbie didn't exist then. They were selling a burp gun, which was a very realistic and kind of scary toy. I'm glad.

Glad they weren't, you know, it wasn't a Western gun with children shooting children. The ad had the child with the burp gun shooting wild animals, which I guess is less unsettling than shooting other humans. Anyway, this business of advertising directly to children was a Mattel thing, and it really worked with Barbie, because the toy buyers at Toy Fair didn't fall in love with the doll. That was March Toy Fair, but school, ed. they've got time to watch TV, the girls, and that's when they started clamoring for it. And that's when that 300,000 units of doll sales took off. We should explain anybody who knows New York knows that there is literally an intersection in the town.

Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street. That's the center of the toy universe. To this day, it's incredible. I mean, you talk about New York districts. That's the specific district having to do with toys. I've been there. You go up into those hallways. I actually pitched a, after my dad passed away, I pitched a game that he invented in one of those offices.

I can't even remember how I ended up at a desk of somebody. But they looked at that thing. They said it wasn't going to sell. Thanks a lot for coming in. We had that whole conversation. And that's what happened all the time in that world. And what you were referring to, the toy fair, still happens in those buildings at that time. In March of every year, the buyers and the products.

Yeah, it still happens. It's amazing. It's one of those reassuring aspects of life that keeps on going. In the 70s, there were many protests of Barbie, you know, at Toy Fair in 71 and 72 because second-wave feminists perceived her as, you know, not a wholesome influence. They didn't see the career paraphernalia. They just saw that impossible body. She gets it from both sides, I guess, eventually,

because on one hand, you have the mothers who might have thought their daughter should be more traditionally playing with. little baby dolls or whatever, and worried about that. But they kind of liked, in the end, Barbie, because she at least projected the demeanor of a proper woman, right? She held herself well and she dressed well, and those are good lessons to be teaching a kid. You mean, she didn't look like the German sex worker that she started out as? That's right. But then as time develops, and this is the big story with Barbie, is that it's 60 years we're talking about in America where things change very frequently. The whole society

alters and morphs around in a way around this doll for the purposes of our conversation. So the pressures come from both sides. It's amazing that this doll succeeds and persists. Well, I think it's what we discussed earlier about how Barbie is a roar shock test. People project their fears and prejudices on her. And sometimes they project their love. What's so great is, the doll is open-ended. Children can project their aspirations on her. children who are uncomfortable with ideas around femininity from that period can hack off her hair and give her a few felt marker tattoos and express their anger at a kind of femininity that they're being taught to embrace by taking it out on Barbie. I mean, I don't think that these girls grew up to be

serial killers and mutilators of women. I think it's more expressing frustration with an idea about being a woman. Femininity is the problem. Barbie is the scapegoat. And Barbie's the avatar in a way. That's the kind of neat part of it. As a concept, she's a blank canvas. Tell me how Mattel innovates Barbie to adapt to these times. They never abandoned the traditional white blonde Barbie, but there's a laundry list of new and socially representative inclusive Barbies that become a big part of the experience. Well, you know, Barbie was not entirely indifferent to the, despite the anger of feminists around her physical appearance as second wave feminism began to take off in the late 1960s. The National Organization for Women was formed in 1966.

Barbie was very conscious of civil rights, which is significant. She had friends of color from 1968 on, Christy, who had the same body as Barbie. And also in the late 1960s, Barbie had friends who weren't so voluptuous because the trendy clothing the Carnaby Street, English kind of clothes Twiggy would wear you couldn't wear when you were built like Barbie. So she had some friends more suited to that. And one of those friends was Francie, who was a black doll. I mean, the facial molds were the same. And certainly later on, Mattel would have dolls with features that more accurately represented the ethnic groups that they were seeking to represent. But Francie was packaged with the unfortunate.

name of colored francy. But still, you know, I mean, they were making some progress in that area. And the first black Barbie comes out in 1980, right? Yeah, 1980. The phrase, I mean, her motto is, she's black, she's beautiful, she's dynamite. But a lot of thought went into that and the clothing for the doll, a lot of which was designed by a clothing designer at Mattel, Kitty Black Perkins, who was, in fact, an African-American designer. I think Mattel, realizing that the first black Barbie would receive a lot of scrutiny. They were very careful about the decisions that they made for that doll. And the unusual amount of care is reflected in the fact that it's not nearly as egregious as one might have expected it to be. Astro Barbie,

18 years before Sally Ride, Barbie for president in 1992, that was a telling thing, wasn't it? There's a Barbie who used a wheelchair in 1997, a hijab wearing Barbie 2017. Just this year, a Barbie with Down syndrome. Wow, that's a long way from Malibu, isn't it? It also reflects two big aspects of, you know, feminism has all of these various waves. Second wave feminism was the Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan variety that we associate often with feminism. But in the 90s, there was a different kind of feminism, one that was more focused. on women's experiences. I write about this in this op-ed I just published for the LA Times,

because I hadn't really thought about the waves of feminism, you know, and I'm buttressing, more like pummeling Barbie surfboard out there in the waves of Malibu. Third wave feminism was almost about enshrining a woman's right to sexual autonomy to doing what was necessary for her. You could even say her right to pleasure, and it was kind of interesting because it recognized that perhaps some women actually found it pleasurable to dress the way that a Barbie doll did, and that that was okay, even though feminists from another era or with other beliefs might view that kind of dressing as retrograde or submissive to patriarchy. Finally, around 2012, it's all sort of loose but fourth wave feminism that emphasized intersectionality.

That's one of those annoying, academic words. But it's like recognizing that oppression can come from all kinds of places, not just gender, but also race, class, sexual orientation. And the big one was body positivity, the idea that there is no one perfect body. And maybe in 2016, in response to this, that was when Mattel decided that they're, you know, that gold mine of a body they were finally going to make some adjustments to. So the breasts were slightly minimized. The hips were a little wider.

I mean, we're dealing in very teeny measurements, but still. You know, the math doesn't work out for this body. I mean, when you do the calculations, there's no proportional truth to it. Well, it's based on a cartoon, but the fashionista Barbies that started coming out in 2016 had flat feet different bodies and, you know, Barbie's still selling very briskly. Sure. It's interesting to consider the makers or both Jewish Americans. the handlers, and yet they create this sort of blonde sheiksa ideal.

That's even spoken of as a subconscious aspect of Ruth's motivation. Did she talk about this on her on your podcast? I'm curious. She didn't, but I mean, what this whole concept brought up for me was a marvelous book by Neil Gabler that came out in the early 90s called An Empire of Their Own, how the Jews invented Hollywood, how the guys who ran studios were almost all, Jewish immigrants, and they created, and the films they created, invented an extreme reality about, quote, Gentile American life. That was so extreme, it was implausible, and yet their inventions

colonized the imaginations of all the many people who went to the movies. And I think you see the same thing with Barbie, you know, those play sets of impossible life here in Malibu. They were kind of an idealized vision. And then, you know, people across America idealized the same things because of the way that the toy company or the studio was a purveyor of that vision. The physicality, let's get back to that for a moment, it became this kind of, like I said, avatar and ability to sort of investigate things that you're curious about in those days, especially for boys. You're looking under the clothes and seeing what that's all about. But somehow they did a really good job. The whole point is they did a very good.

good job of sort of neutralizing the danger aspect of the body. I don't know how they came up with that, but it sort of worked because immediately I remember it was just not a subject of any kind of desire or strange impulses. Oh, you might want to read Am Holmes' story from the late 80s or early 90s called a real doll. I mean, certainly that particular short story enshrines the way that children often use these dolls to explore aspects of their sexuality. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah.

I'm not going there on this podcast, MG. There have been a lot of Barbie moments, good and bad, over the past 60 years, but we're definitely in a big one now, I mean, with this release of the movie and all. You expect that this is going to last for a full century? Oh, I think so. I mean, unless people stop playing with physical toys altogether, I don't think we're going to get that digital. And even then, I mean, you know, one of the popular Barbie things in the 90s was a CD-ROM game. So I think Mattel is not indifferent to the digital identity of its very

lucrative product, offspring, whatever. Well, that about wraps up. Oh, wait a minute. There's Ken. What was I thinking? Oh, who cares? Ken? We don't want to talk about Ken anyway. A gnat, a fly, a slave of Barbie, a eunuch priest, and a goddess called. As he should be. Yeah. M.G., you do a podcast series that I want to let people know about because this is cool stuff. What's the name of it and who's involved? It's called L.A. Made the Barbie Tapes. It's from L.A.S. Studios, which is part of Southern California Public Radio.

And what we did is we digitize some of my old recordings with the creators of the doll who are no longer alive, like Ruth Handler or like Jack Ryan. Oh, my God. Jack Ryan tells an amazing story. He actually supervised the production of the first physical models of the doll that were copied from the German gag gift. And he's got a fabulous story about using his little Swiss file to file off the nipples on the early prototypes that were showing up. And also the decisions around Ken, we haven't talked much about Ken, but Ken's genitalia was very controversial. The male executives were very upset. But Ruth Handler felt that, you know, if you're going to have a doll with breasts, a male doll has to be at least slightly different in the crotch area to reflect the fact that there was a difference.

So I have the internal debate at the company around that in the words of the people who actually participated in the debate. It's a really fun podcast, L.A. made, the Barbie tapes. I'm squirming with a little discomfort about this whole Ken Genitalia thing. But I recommend people listen to it. Boy, after you see the movie, how interesting to listen to that. Forever Barbie. An unauthorized biography is The Book. The podcast featuring M.G. Lord is L.A. Made, the Barbie tapes from L.A.st Studios.

Have you seen the movie yet, M.G.? I'm going to be seeing it tomorrow night, so. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me, Don. Take care. Enjoy Malibu. Thank you. Thank you for joining us on another episode of American History Hit.

Please hit like and subscribe wherever get your podcast. leave a nice review there. And if you'd like to make suggestions on any future subject matter, send us an email at a HH at historyhit.com. Thanks a lot. We'll see you on the next new episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday. Bye for now.