You've Come a Long Way, Barbie : If you're still blaming Barbie for your problems, or your daughter's, you've got a problem, girl : FOREVER BARBIE: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, <i> By M.G. Lord (Willam Morrow & Co.: $25; 256 pp.)</i>

By Leslie Savan

Dec. 11, 1994 12 AM PT

<i> Leslie Savan, advertising columnist for the Village Voice, is the author of the recently released essay collection, "The Sponsored Life: Ads, TV, and American Culture" (Temple University Press)</i>

In 1960, my father hauled the family from St. Louis to the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles to campaign for Sen. Stuart Symington. John F. Kennedy won the nomination, of course, but the only political drama I remember from the trip concerned my Barbie doll.

My cousin Jackie and I were playing with our vintage Barbies, whose heavy-lidded, haughty gaze--so different from today’s saucer-eyed stare--had first opened upon the world just one year before. I started to undo the strand of hair that held her blonde ponytail permanently in place. “Don’t do that!” cuz warned, “We’ll get in trouble!” But with the thrill of defying a power so big that it would know of my grooming felony, I undid it. Transgression turned into revelation: Miss Perfect Person’s crowning glory was stitched around an empty circle. Barbie was as bald behind as Nikita Krushchev.

“Put it back, put it back,” Jackie whispered, but I was so excited I was practically doing a St. Vitus’ dance: We were the first girls ever, I was sure, to discover that the doll that so mesmerized us with her sexy sophistication, her long-limbed elegance, her astounding wardrobe--a perfection that always eluded us--was a lie. (I grew up to make a living writing advertising criticism.)

M. G. Lord, author of “Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll” and a former New York Newsday columnist, has a different primal Barbie memory: cross-dressing Ken and Midge. But instead of running off with the Barbie Liberation Organization and switching the voice boxes of talking G.I. Joes and Barbies (He whines, “Will we ever have enough clothes?”; she grunts, “Vengeance is mine!”), she wrote this book. Itsmix of social history, psychoanalytical insights and the Mattel marketing schemes that invoke them, is told with wit, curiosity and wry photos by Sylvia Plachy.

No doubt Ms. B. wields enough social clout to warrant yet another book: according to Mattel, American girls own an average of eight each and worldwide two Barbies are sold every second. Even if these numbers were only half true, the doll’s impact would still be stunning. For many girls, “Barbie, with her shocking torpedo orbs, and Ken with his mysterious genital bulge,” Lord writes, “were the extent of our exposure to the secrets of adulthood.”

But the conclusion Lord draws from Ms. B. are quite different from, say, last year’s “Mondo Barbie,” an anthology of fiction and poetry inspired by more ambivalent, angrier memories of the doll. Coming on Barbie’s 35th birthday, “Forever” is part of a larger appreciation, a revisionist effort to clear Barbie on charges of aiding and abetting “bimboism,” consumerism and skeletal “supermodelism.” Lord is saying that Barbie is more complex than that, and if you’re still blaming Barbie for your problems--or your daughter’s--you gotta problem, girl.

However, so does the book. But before revealing “Forever Barbie’s” rather sizable bald spot, let’s play with the lush mane of story--the Mattel history that Lord doesn’t even have to tease into fullness.

Much like the Hollywood studio system discussed in Neal Gabler’s 1988 history “An Empire of Their Own,” Mattel was founded by outsiders who forged idealized images of Americans more American than most people could ever hope to be. Barbie was created by Ruth Handler, daughter of a Polish Jewish immigrant, who co-founded Mattel with her husband Elliot in 1945. Her seemingly all-American offspring was actually a direct steal from a postwar German doll named Lilli, a pornographic play-toy for men which itself was based on a gold-digging cartoon character that ran in the “Bild Zeitung.” Lilli’s hard-bitten, sluttish look shines through in the original, cat-eyed, unsmiling Barbie. Their 11 1/2-inch bodies are almost identical.

“Forever Barbie” moves from the marketing techniques that Mattel helped pioneer in order to sell a doll that most mothers sensed once walked the streets to Ruth’s 1974 plea of no contest to falsifying SEC information (she went on to found a company that made mastectomy prostheses). Lord traces Barbie’s many face-lifts--from Malibu Barbie to Madison Avenue Barbie--to today’s smiley, vacuous girl. Multicultural Barbies did not appear until after the Watts riots, when Mattel funded a black-run company that produced the Sindana doll. Later came Barbie’s black friends Christie and Julie, a black Barbie herself, and finally Shani, a doll with more authentic black features.

Lord also dives into the art world’s use and abuse of B (Barbie mutilation is nearly as common among artists as among children): Barbie fetishes among gay and straight men; the obsessive collectors; and the woman who’s endured more than 20 plastic surgery operations to model herself after the doll.

“Forever Barbie” is rarely uninteresting: after all, it divulges that Ken Handler, Ruth and Elliot’s 50ish son, considers his sister Barbara (yep, they’re the dolls’ namesakes), “a conform freak . . . she was Barbie.” But sometimes the book’s passion to catalogue every possible Barbie fact and meaning feels like more changes into more really cute outfits with more darling little accessories. Under it all, however, there is one recurring, if dicey, theme: it might be called Complex Barbie versus Women With Barbie Complexes. Lord maintains that Barbie is more manifold than her detractors are willing to understand: “an open-ended construct, not a patented plastic one.”

Lord’s argument, suggesting that Barbie is a would-be feminist who stricter feminists have scared into the closet, rests largely on three points: (1) Barbie doesn’t need a man, never did. Despite her many wedding gowns, officially Barbie is the consummate single girl and Ken the ultimate accessory; (2) Barbie throws herself not toward men, but into careers--astronaut, physician, Olympic athlete, President of the United States. Her incredible resume encourages children to believe, as a 1984 Barbie ad slogan went, “We girls can do anything”; (3) Barbie’s ultimate, secret career is as “space-age fertility icon”; she’s part of a great goddess cult that puts girls in touch with their own power.

There’s some truth to all of this, though it’s also probable that Mattel maintains Barbie’s single status in order not to thwart profitable audience fantasies. And Barbie’s careerism is one with that other marketing fantasy, the Cosmo Girl’s: We girls can do anything if--and only if--we acquire the right clothes, body, face, job and guy.

But while Barbie obviously doesn’t share the pearish body type of antiquity’s fertility goddesses, Lord finds at least one curious commonality: a lack of (usable) feet. Many “Venuses . . . taper into prongs at the ankles,” Lord writes. The prongs “must be plunged into the earth, an act that, as she is a representation of the Great Mother, completes her. . . . Barbie’s itty-bitty arched feet can be interpreted as vestigial prongs,” making her, in the collective unconscious anyway, “an archetype of something ancient, matriarchal, and profound.”

Be that as it may, each Barbie body part is tapped in this book as proof that the doll is not quite what we thought she was. I’m willing to entertain Barbie’s supernaturally long legs as masculine (and thus further evidence of complexity), as Camille Paglia has remarked. But I’m not a bit convinced that Barbie’s supernaturally tiny waist is merely the result of dressmaking constraints, as Lord insists. A Mattel designer told her, and she repeats with increasing ferocity, that “When you put human-scale fabric on an object that is one-sixth human size, a multilayered cloth waistband is going to protrude like a truck tire around a human tummy.” But Barbie’s clothes were always made with the thinnest of human-scale fabric, and the waistbands were no big deal, just cloth folded once (I’m looking at one of my early Barbie’s wool skirts). Anyway, even when hugged by those brutish waistbands, why does her waist still look so minuscule?

Although elsewhere Lord diligently records the corporation’s misdeeds, she never gets angry or even particularly irritated with Mattel, whose message regarding Barbie’s feminism she admits is “let ‘em take one step forward . . . as long as they take two steps back.” Perhaps she suffers the reporter’s version of the Stockholm Syndrome--in order to work closely with a corporation crucial to your story, you bend over so far backward to be fair that you end up siding with the company against its enemies. Whatever the reason, Lord saves her wrath, and it is considerable, for women she deems too PC to appreciate Barbie.

Watch out, Naomi Wolf, who once remarked that Barbie’s breast was “the official breast.” “Speak for yourself, lady,” Lord bites Wolf. Lord says Wolf’s words got her goat because as one of “millions of breast-cancer daughters (we) had had a very different experience.” Well, yes, but Wolf’s comment is as obviously true as it is innocent.

Watch out, little Happy to Be Me, the realistically proportioned doll introduced in 1991 to help combat self-loathing in girls who never felt thin enough. The doll didn’t survive, and Happy’s maker blamed Mattel’s “stranglehold on distribution channels,” which Lord concedes, “given the way it snuffed out competitors like Hasbro’s Jem,” may have some truth. But Lord seems to scorn Happy for even trying--like, who’s the little tuber trying out for sorority?

It’s here, on the question of Barbie’s influence on eating disorders, that the complexity Lord works so hard to weave starts to unravel. As she poses it, some feminists blame Barbie (along with other idealized, commercial images of women) for anorexia, while ignoring the real culprit--bad family dynamics, especially mom’s. It would indeed be stupid to believe that Barbie and skeletal super-models like Kate Moss are primarily responsible for girls starving themselves to death. But it’s perfectly reasonable to see the 5-foot-10-ish Barbie--whose scale was once set permanently at 110, whose advice book read “How to Lose Weight--Don’t Eat!” and who, Lord writes elsewhere, “colonizes the inner lives of children”--as at least contributing to this rising middle-class illness. Yet so eager is Lord to exculpate her heroine that she now declares, “Barbie doesn’t instigate but merely reflects society’s notion of beauty.” This kind of refrain is the one advertisers always sing when their products come under fire, but it’s just hopelessly one-way: All important cultural products both instigate and reflect, interacting with different individuals in different ways in a lifetime of endless feedback loops. This isn’t news. But Lord, who seems to feel compelled to mount the barricades for Barbie, sets up overly neat either/or-isms.

I do understand how you can get fed up over simplistic attacks on something that you know is really more complicated. But Lord’s ultimate solution is the one lesson that many of us, fat or thin, bimbo or brain surgeon, do learn from Barbie, the lesson that Mattel must be grinning over, unauthorized bio or no. At the end of “Forever,” Lord tells how she attended a lecture in which the speaker dissed her doll. In a snit, Lord and a friend stalk out of the New York Hilton, clutch their credit cards, and . . . go shopping, because, she says, “we accepted what we could not change: Barbie was us.”

BOOK MARK: For an excerpt from “Forever Barbie,” see the Opinion section.