It’s a Barbie world and we’re all just living in it: A conversation with the world’s most famous doll

Open this photo in gallery:

Greta Gerwig’s highly anticipated movie, Barbie, is in theatres on July 21, starring Margot Robbie in the titular role and Canada’s Ryan Gosling as Ken. (Tagline: “She’s everything. He’s just Ken.”) As Barbie-mania heats up, The Globe and Mail brings you this archived article by Ian Brown, written to mark the event of the doll’s fictional 40th birthday. This “interview” was first published on Saturday March 6, 1999 – but as everyone knows, Barbie is timeless.

Open this photo in gallery:

She is pert – perennially so – and seems sharper than her reputation, which is famously bubble-headed. Then there’s the boilerplate mouth, the trowelled-on eye shadow, and the hair that asks to be ignited. Otherwise, she just stands there in pearls and an orange satin strapless sheath dress and matching short-sleeved jacket in gold-and-rayon honeycomb, the most popular woman in the world.

Barbara Millicent Roberts – Barbie to her legions of fans – is the world’s pre-eminent female icon, the real doll of permanent zest and youth.

But now the unthinkable has happened: On March 9, as traders on Wall Street don pink jackets to salute her, as the United States Postal Service readies a stamp in her honour, as horticulturists prepare to unveil the Barbie Rose – on March 9, in the middle of all that, Barbie turns 40.

Forty. Middle age, the beginning of the end. And if you figure that she was already 17, a Teen Fashion Model, on March 9, 1959, when she popped out of her warehouse womb in Hawthorne, Calif. (the mall-to-mall suburb of Los Angeles where Marilyn Monroe was also born), then Barbie is actually 57 and lying about her age.

In an unprecedented departure from what has been an unspeakable silence, Barbie recently talked to The Globe and Mail. The interview took place, modestly enough, in the bedroom of journalist Ian Brown’s six-year-old daughter, on the set of a tiny plastic veterinarian’s office. The famous dolly stood throughout the conversation, as is her habit, arms held out from her sides as if she were about to catch a large ball. She did not blink, and never once stopped smiling.

G&M: May I call you Barbie?

Barbie: Sweetheart, I’ve been called that more than a billion times. Three Barbies are sold every second. The average girl owns 10, and she calls them all Barbie. So what are you, chopped liver?

G&M: (Pause.) To my surprise, you sound like Mel Brooks.

Barbie: Hey baby, I’m Barbie, the ultimate fantasy doll. I’ll be whoever you want me to be. That’s the secret of my appeal, in a doll-sized nutshell.

G&M: Incidentally, I like your hair.

Barbie: Oh, thanks. My second hairdo, the famous Bubble Cut of 1961. Larry Germaine of Universal Studios created it especially for me. Way more sophisticated than that first ponytail with the frizzed-curl bangs.

G&M: Still – 40. How do you feel?

Open this photo in gallery:

Barbie: I don’t feel any different than I did as Barbie Number One, in that incredibly itchy strapless black and white striped bathing suit. But why would I? I’m vinyl.

What is amazing is that I actually look younger than when I started. Back in 1959, I used even more eye shadow. And who was plucking my eyebrows? Eero Saarinen? Plus my hair was the colour of an induction coil. Nowadays, my eyebrows are more natural, I use less makeup, have a lighter complexion and a more teenaged figure – my breasts, get this, are actually smaller. Plus I have a tattoo, and there’s talk of a nose ring.

G&M: Get out!

Barbie: Mmm-hmmm. See, sales are down about 14 per cent this year. Girls are growing up faster, and therefore playing with me at a younger age. So Mattel has to make Barbie younger. Course, I still come in a more sophisticated collectible edition, as Barbara Millicent Roberts, for adults. Did you know 20 per cent of Barbie collectors are men?

G&M: Yes I did. Tell me about your mother and father.

Barbie: Sure! I’m the oldest daughter of Robert and Margaret Roberts, of Willows, Wisconsin. I attended Willows High School.

G&M: I mean the real story.

Barbie: Oh, her. The Mother of Barbie, Ruth Handler. Mother Mattel, because she married a guy named Elliot who had a partner called Harold Matson. (Matt + El = Mattel.) They made doll furniture at first.

G&M: And Ruth?

Barbie: Ruth was more carnivorous. Big, jutting commercial instincts. She had two kids, Barbara and Ken, and she watched them. They cut pictures out of fashion magazines and pasted them on paper dolls. Ruth noticed how much they fantasized about being adults, imagining this life they didn’t have access to. So Ruth figured there was a need for a doll with adult features, and an adult lifestyle.

A couple of years later, in 1956, they were on holiday in Lucerne, Switzerland. One afternoon passing a toy store Ruth saw a doll named Lilli: 11-and-a-half inches tall, like me; made of plastic, like me; and shapely, with a Bardot body, like me. Lilli was actually a sex fetish doll for men, based on a cartoon character – whatever a fetish is.

G&M: It’s a –

Barbie: I know, I know. I was just playing innocent. I do have a college degree. I was a graduate way back in ‘63.

Open this photo in gallery:

G&M: Can we get back to Lilli?

Barbie: Ruth Handler bought the rights to Lilli and sent me to be redesigned in Japan, where they filed off my nipples and wiped out my navel. They hired a young stylist named Charlotte Johnson to design some outfits. Bingo, I debuted at the American Toy Fair in New York City, as both a blonde and a brunette.

They sold 135,000 Barbies that year. Not bad, but not brisk. People were initially shocked by my body. My breasts were just too out there. But people came around. They always do, where breasts are concerned.

G&M: Well, some feminists still say you promote an unrealistic body image to young girls.

Barbie: My measurements would be 38-18-33, if I was human scale.

G&M: Those are the measurements of a woman with no internal organs.

Barbie: But my body had to be bare and hyperreal to get kids interested. Ruth Handler said she “designed Barbie with a blank face, so that the child could project her own dreams of the future on Barbie.” Little girls love being able to tell an adult with breasts what to do. I think that’s why some mothers resist Barbie. They’re intimidated. Maybe even jealous.

G&M: Oh, come on.

Barbie: Well, it’s possible. And a lot of little girls don’t think much about my body. It’s what they can turn it into that matters. Your own daughter told me just the other day that the only part of my body she wants is my makeup. Anyway, can a billion customers be totally wrong-headed? They like the overblown ideal. I mean, look what happened to that plumper, more ‘realistic’ Happy To Be Me doll, put out by High Self Esteem Toys of Minnesota. Big fat fizzle.

G&M: You’re actually more intellectually sophisticated that I thought you’d be. For a doll, I mean.

Barbie: As I say, I’m what you want me to be – even if you’re a feminist looking for a fight.

G&M: They also say you’re just a clothes horse.

Barbie: Absolutely, but some of my clothes have been soooo beautiful! I mean, just look at them. Look at that dress I had in 1959, Gay Parisienne: A Givenchy balloon-line dress – ridiculous, yes, but also Givenchy, okay? – in navy with swiss dots, and bows front and back. A silk-lined white-rabbitstole, elbow-length white gloves, a veil of tulle, velvet clasp purse, pearl necklace and earrings. Those are the details that teach young girls that details matter. And all for four dollars, which was a buck more than I cost.

G&M: Why is so much of your stuff pink? And a God-awful pink it is, too.

Barbie: That’s Barbie Pink, buster, and it’s a registered trademark.

G&M: It hurts my eyes.

Barbie: Really? I like to think of pink as the colour of the unconscious when it comes to the surface. (Pause.) Hey, that wasn’t bad.

G&M: But you are kind of spoiled.

Barbie: I know it looks that way: the townhouse with the elevator, the Winnebago, the airplane, 120 new outfits a year. I own 17 dogs and 11 horses, for God’s sake. But money was never my main object. I was more interested in being contemporary and reflecting the real world back to little girls. I mean, in the sixties, I had a black girlfriend named Christie, not long after I had bendable arms and legs. Now I have a friend in a wheelchair – which actually won’t fit in my mansion, which is, like, hello, slightly embarrassing. I’ve gone from pampered haute-couture model to independent career girl to self-involved disco queen to ambitious aerobics instructor to caring, tattooed veterinarian.

G&M: Yes, you’ve had a lot of careers. Don’t you feel a little scattered?

Barbie: Yeah, but what woman doesn’t? I’ve been everything: a stewardess, a downhill kkier, a rock star, a firefighter, a dentist. I’ve been an astronaut three times, starting in 1965, twenty years before Sally Ride. In 1992, I was even a presidential candidate – not a presidential intern, please note.

G&M: Speaking of which: How’s Ken?

Barbie: Kenneth Starr? Or Finkleman?

G&M: No, silly. Ken, your boyfriend since 1961.

Open this photo in gallery:

Barbie: Oh. (Sighs.) Well, what can you say about Ken? He was named after Ruth’s boy, who later died of brain cancer. Ken is Ken. He has plastic hair, and he can’t dance. He’s a guy – and in Barbie’s world, guys are not the main event. I notice girls are where the action is these days in the real world, too. I was the harbinger of that.

G&M: Anything’s possible.

Barbie: Anyway, Ken sells, but next to me he’s always seemed a bit of a dud, for all his scuba tanks and action gear. An original NRFB – that’s Not Removed From Box – Barbie is worth up to £5,000 in Britain. Ken fetches £200, maybe. Between you and me, I always preferred his best friend, Allen. Or even Midge, my best friend.

G&M: Well, how’s the sex between you and Ken?

Barbie: Sex? What’s sex?

G&M: Are you being coy again?

Barbie: Not this time. Ruth Handler wanted Ken to be anatomically correct but it was vetoed.

G&M: Were you disappointed?

Barbie: This being the age of Girl Power, I should say yes. But I am no position to complain, anatomically. And anyway, for my main audience, little girls, sex simply stands in the way. They have bigger fish to fry, bigger plots to imagine. I guess that’s why I have so many wedding gowns: I’ve been engaged dozens of times, but I never marry. That would, um, limit the fantasy possibilities.

G&M: Don’t your feet hurt, from being arched like that all the time?

Barbie: Omigod, yes! It’s from all those high heels, none of which really fit, and which are always getting lost for years and years among the sofa cushions. The one weak spot in the whole production. I have more than a billion pairs, you know.

G&M: Why don’t you wear underwear?

Barbie: Excellent question. I don’t know. It seems rather risqué not to. You used to be able to buy Lovely Lingerie Paks for me, sweet little tricot half-slips with flounces and matching panties, all for a dollar. Lots of strapless bras, too. Now they just stamp this weird floral pattern right onto my butt. I suspect it’s supposed to desexualize me a bit.

G&M: One last question. You keep describing yourself as a blank slate, an open body upon which young girls can drape their fantasies about being adult. But being a blank slate is a political stance itself. There must be one thing you’d like to do for the world?

Barbie: Oh, you mean like the beauty queen contestant, “I just want world peace.” Puh-leeze. I’ll be content with having given millions of little girls a little happiness and something to think about, thank-you very much. I mean, don’t you find it interesting that in the century when women finally achieved some equality, the most successful toy of all time was a single, independent, looks-conscious woman who was willing to be anything you made her?

G&M: Is that the soul of Barbie? Or the soul of modern women?

Barbie: Either way, sounds good to me, pal. I’ve been the existentialist doll for girls. My motto is: You are what you appear to be. The surface we presented to the world is mostly who we are, in the end.

G&M: You sound like you should be teaching Advanced Phenomenology at the Sorbonne.

Barbie: Oh, I will be eventually, you can count on that. Until then, let’s have world peace.

Barbie and Me

We asked famous Canadians to share their Barbie memories. Here’s what they told us in 1999:

ANN-MARIE MacDONALD

Author of Fayne, Fall on Your Knees

“It was 1963, and this brunette Barbie was a gift from my mother and aunt. It was the only time my parents ever used bribery – I was four and they wanted me to stop sucking my thumb. I felt so sorry for them thinking I wanted a Barbie, that when presented with her as an inducement I stopped sucking my thumb just so they wouldn’t know how gravely mistaken they’d been. I took out the clothes and looked at them all and laid her there stiff-legged and I just didn’t get it. She came in this pink and white coffin, well, this carrying case – I treasure it now, it’s just upstairs – in her wedding dress. The only time I remotely saw the charm was when I went over to play with a friend, my mom called her a “bad” friend, and she would have Ken and Barbie making out with Midge watching. Midge, of course, I identified with because she was the sexually-ambiguous girlfriend with the shortish hair. Barbie and I are the same age, so mine was one of the first, with high-heel feet and knees and arms that didn’t bend. I feel claustrophobic and even panicky when I think of Barbie, totally immobile in that carrying case in her wedding dress. She has this totemic significance. I never played with these dolls but I’ve thought about them a lot.”

WENDY MESLEY

Journalist

“I wasn’t much of a Barbie girl – my mother was quite progressive, and not pro-Barbie. I did have a hand-me-down Tammy doll [a less-busty faux Barbie]. I was more of a Tammy person, she was the young, rebellious sporty one, not as preoccupied with her appearance as Barbie. She had one extra dress, it was turquoise and green, and it went with her personality, because of course at that time you didn’t “wear blue and green without something else in between.” I didn’t have the home, car or kitchen – there wasn’t much for her to do. Will I let my daughter have a Barbie? Well, I don’t see holding out as long as I would against dating. I don’t think you’re even aware as a little girl that this is the perfectly drawn up woman – it’s ads that get to you later. I don’t blame my neuroses on Barbie.”

LYNN CROSBIE

Poet and novelist

“I used to play Barbies as a kid in the late 1960s with Lynne Stopkewich [Kissed filmmaker]. I dressed mine in Kleenex and she had every accessory from G-strings to French poodles. I insisted Ken and Barbie meet nude for dates (which wasn’t as weird as my other friend who played Barbie Bondage and Discipline with twine and a giant eraser) and her mom threw me out. That’s the closest I ever got to the sexual revolution. I think too much has been written about this fetish doll: I bought my goddaughter Sophy an Angel Barbie. My boyfriend was frightened, he called it Dead Barbie, and that sums up how I feel about Mattel feminism these days. I did love those tiny white go-go boots, but I can’t hack the analysis any more.”

MARK TEWKSBURY

1992 Olympic Gold Medalist

“I used to love my Barbie. My sister never played with hers, so she often ended up in my room. It was the hair, just that silly hair. Well, and obviously there were some things going on in my own life. Not that I’m condoning that figure for women to aspire to, God knows I never made it. There was just something about her, she was a great size, to hold in your hands. And of course she was glamorous. I never liked Ken – that plastic hair. My nightmare Barbie story: I often got in trouble playing with Barbie because I wasn’t supposed to be doing that. So once I was drying her hair at the gas fireplace and I got a little too close to the glass plate at the front and – urgh. Hair stuck all over it. I was devastated on every front: I was busted, and Barbie was destroyed.”

JEANNE BEKER

Former host of Fashion Television

“I was a total Barbie freak but Barbie was too expensive, so my mother talked me into getting Mitzi, the knock-off made by the Reliable Toy Co. She had sleazier eyeshadow application and thinner lips, she was made of cheaper plastic, with this mean look on her face. The next year my mother felt she could afford to spring for a real Ken doll, but he was much better quality than Mitzi and she looked really inferior next to him, it was a mixed marriage. My mom made me a ton of fabulous clothes, Mitzieven had a Persian lamb coat made from an old coat collar. I still have her in my drawer, but my mother gave away all her clothes, so I have naked Mitzi, what could be worse? When I was 10 I got a book, Barbie’s Fashion Adventure or something, where she went to Miami or New York to be a swimsuit designer. That must have planted all these ideas in my head, I knew I wanted a glamorous career. Mitzi as Barbie wannabe – ultimately, I relate to Mitzi more, she’s a metaphor for my own life.”