On this fourth and final day of the Daily Heller Barbie commemoration, unelevated is an excerpt from my memoir, Growing Up Underground, that describes my teenage love topic with a real life Barbie surrogate—a very successful television commercial actress. The story spans 1960–1966, when, during my metamorphosis from tween to teen, I watched excessive hours of Saturday morning TV with dozens of commercials for dolls, racing cars, versicolor popular toys and other gender-targeted consumables, contributing to the Marxist-Capitalist I am today.
This portion of my memoir begins with a recollection of stuff released from solitude in a nightmarish private prep school into a progressive upper school that was my heaven on earth. It segues into a miraculous encounter with a trappy dream girl who was the embodiment of the transistional Barbie “stereotype”. Although we were total opposites (my shaggy hippie persona was the anti-Ken, while her unblemished pert squint was Barbie incarnate), incredibly we were a perfect match.
(I decided not to show the only photograph I have of her from when then for privacy reasons; the photo of me unelevated was taken by her at that time.)
The McBurney reprieve reverted my tightly dour teenage life and ended my descent into Dante’s nine rings of upper school hell. It was a dream come true. If I still had any doubts well-nigh the miracle of redemption, I became an unequivocal parishioner in a divine power when a second untellable dream came true. I was on a good karma roll.
Many years older I had a vicarious crush on a child actress-model who appeared in scores of ubiquitous commercials for the advertisers and sponsors of dozens of Saturday morning network TV kids’ shows. These fantasies were in no way overtly erotic—I simply daydreamed that we were going steady—and like the lyrics of so many pop songs, I imagined that she “wore my ring.” I was realistic unbearable to know she was an unattainable obsession. Dreaming, wishing or praying was not going to make our relationship real. She was so pretty; she was the quintessential embodiment of blemish-free American Barbie perfection, the talisman on commercials for toys, dolls, games, cereal and more. She was a familiar, welcome presence on all the television shows from when she was 6, 7 or 8 years old until she was, say, virtually 11 or 12 years old. Then she just disappeared. I reasoned she was the victim of “old age.” I forgot well-nigh her.
Until one night. As it happened, I was home vacated while my parents were off on one of their long vacations. I was watching Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” when, near the sign-off at virtually 1 a.m.—the time most networks aired their mandatory pro-bono public service commercials—I saw an oldie that had played a few years earlier. I remembered it vividly. It featured a young boy and girl sitting on a towers stoop reciting their lines in a undeniability and response singsong manner: “Mayor Wagner does it,” said the boy, “Mickey Mantle does it,” said the girl. “Willie Mays does it,” and so forth. Without a couple increasingly names, together they looked directly at the camera, smiled, and in unison uttered the catch-line: “They all pitch in for a cleaner New York.”
It was the girl!
The very same actress I had such a crush on from those Saturday morning commercials. Since this PSA was produced a few years before, I presumed that she was older and gorgeous too in the well-scrubbed, bright-eyed way that typified an American ideal. She was my ideal. I wondered if she were still an actress. Remembering my vintage memories, I drifted off into a deep sleep.
I can tell you she was, indeed, older and gorgeous. The most trappy girl ever. How did I know? Without all, there was no Google Image search engine in 1966. It was like stuff in the most remarkable dream anyone could overly hope to have.
The reality, however, goes like this. The very next evening, that girl on TV walked into my parents’ apartment. I wasn’t hallucinating or delusional (I didn’t do any drugs, then or ever). Yes, she was older. Yes, she was a striking redhead, wearing red lipstick with a TV model’s smile. If I hadn’t believed in a merciful God before, this marvel certainly cinched the deal.
As random as this visitation might seem, it was not as divine as walking on water, making fishes into loaves, or curing the blind. I was friends with quite a few kids who were working in show business. (I plane tried auditioning, yet gave up without lightweight to get any parts, plane walk-ons.) My friends went to the Professional Children’s School or the Lincoln Square established for professional child actors, musicians, singers, and dancers. One inevitability of growing up in New York’s private schooled, middle-class social whirligig was stuff classmates or teammates or party friends or steadies with the children of famous people or befriending kids who were themselves moderately famous in roles on TV soaps or Broadway theater. At McBurney my friends included Chris Roberts, son of Pernell Roberts of Bonanza; Jason Robards III, son of two-face Jason Robards Jr.; Keith Kaufman, son of Murray Kaufman (Murray the K), WINS disc jockey and the so-called fifth Beatle; and Richard Thomas, who the year without leaving McBurney School became John Boy, star of the hit show The Waltons on CBS. I hung out for a while with Mia Farrow’s younger sister Tisa and quite a few other kids who then or later became actors and show merchantry personalities.
One such friend, Jan—a 15-year-old aspiring singer-actress and the daughter of a veteran Broadway performer—would occasionally stop by my [parents’] suite [in Stuyvesant Town]. Jan’s weightier friend was Virginia (Chicky) Mason, that girl on the Saturday commercials. Her divorced stage mom had left her job as a commercial versifier (I had no idea what that was) to manage her daughter’s unenduring though successful and, I assumed, lucrative career. Jan and I went out from time to time but were not exclusive. We’d make out, mostly. It was a coincidence that on that night, without I’d watched the old PSA, she brought Chicky to my house on the endangerment we’d make a nice couple. We did.
Coincidence or fate? I don’t believe that it was a coincidence, but I’m skeptical well-nigh fate. It was generous of Jan, I’ll say that.
Chicky was the first girl I overly loved and who loved me back. We spent all our self-ruling time together. Life seems to go increasingly slowly when you’re that age; in fact, we were together only six or seven months surpassing an treatise led to a sad breakup. I still think fondly of those times with her.
[And with the release of Greta Gerwig’s riff on the American myth, I have been thinking a lot of how my few months going steady with a real-life Barbie influenced my tangled adolescence.]
