Barbie the Bitch

Steve Harville perches on a black midcentury Modern chair with his companion, Studley, on his lap. Gourmet food, posh resorts, handsome men and sexy women glide across his television screen. It's the Style channel.

"That's kind of the Barbie channel," says Steve.

He and Studley, a frisky Boston terrier, enjoy lives of fine decor, fashion, travel and glamour. But Steve's life hasn't always been so charmed.

As Studley hops down and romps around the room, panting and humping everything in sight ("We're getting that taken care of next week"), Steve gets a faraway look. He recalls a rainy afternoon visiting an aunt and uncle when he was eight years old. Steve retreated to the basement to play with his girl cousins' toys. He found Barbie in a wooden chest, atop a fabulous wardrobe.

"It was the most beautiful Barbie in the world," he recalls. Steve didn't want to pull her head off with his rowdy friends. He didn't want to hang her upside down. All those clothes and sparkles, he says, stirred something deep.

Steve's fascination was private, a secret kept to himself whenever he stole away to his aunt's basement to play. He spent hours scooting Barbie's red Ferrari across the tile floor, imaginary wind whipping her perfect hair. He slipped dainty stockings on and off her curvaceous legs. The boy zipped and unzipped her designer dresses, which fit perfectly around her tiny waist and generous bosom. All the while, he listened for creaking footsteps on the stairs.

"I always had a feeling of guilt when I played with her," Steve recalls. "She was a forbidden pleasure."

Steve eventually moved away from Osawatomie, Kansas -- "I was a small-town boy who wanted big-city ways," Steve sighs -- and settled in Kansas City. He came out as gay and bought a yellow Corvette. One spring afternoon, when Steve was 38, he chatted with a friend who owned a black Porsche.

"We've got Barbie cars -- like Barbie had," his friend quipped. The following week, Steve and his friend cruised in their sports cars, each with a fashionable Barbie posed in the passenger seat. "We did it as a gag," Steve says, "but it put Barbie back on my mind."

The doll that gazed vacantly out the passenger window of Steve's Corvette was pretty, but there was no chemistry. She was glamorous, but in a shallow way. Her clothes were fashionable but second-rate. Steve longed for the lined coats and dainty stockings he had tenderly arranged on that forbidden Barbie of boyhood days.

"I wanted to find one like my cousin had, the one with a blond ponytail," says Steve, now fifty. His quest began. He rose early on Sunday mornings to be first at the flea market, where he met other collectors huddled around battered Barbies on dusty tables. A Barbie club was forming in Kansas City, they told him. Would he want to join? More experienced collectors guided Steve through Barbie's complex world.

Beware the wrong Barbie head on the wrong Barbie body, they advised. If the doll has "made in China" stamped on the butt, don't bother. Sniff the legs as you press them together. Are they squishy? Good. Do they possess the distinctive trait of the early dolls, a crayonlike odor? Even better.

Steve perused Barbie Bazaar, a magazine for collectors, and eventually found the doll he longed to possess, known as "Barbie number three." Steve put $800 on his credit card, and soon Barbie arrived, boxed and beautiful, from California.

"It was like Christmas," he recalls. Steve displayed her in his living room for a while. Then he propped the doll up in the spare bedroom. His friends, he recalls, were "both envious and amazed."

"I thought that getting that would satisfy my appetite for childhood experiences I couldn't have," he says. "But it didn't." Like Barbie, Steve wanted to have it all.

By collecting Barbie, Steve says, he fed a psychological yearning for childhood experiences he could have only in secret. "As an adult, I didn't care what anyone thought; I could have what I wanted," says Steve.

"As a boy, I liked putting on her stockings; it was a psychosexual thing," he says. "It wasn't like I wanted a doll or to be like a girl." Steve was attracted to fashion as a child, and with Barbie, fashion was at his fingertips.

The best dolls, he says, came from women who had never played with them -- little girls who opened the box at Christmas, held the doll up for inspection and then tossed her aside for thirty years. When grown women haul those neglected Barbies out of closets decades later, some exchange them for enough cash to make down payments on dream houses of their own.

"Some of the best Barbies come from lesbians who never played with them while growing up," says Steve. Lesbian sisters can be particularly rich sources for pristine dolls. "The jackpot is when those Barbies belonged to twins."

When Barbie hit the market in 1959, girls' and boys' life options were as different as the toys they received. Boys got BB guns, and girls got Betsy Wetsy. Boys got Hot Wheels. Girls got Barbie. No surprise, then, that a style-conscious boy might carry unfulfilled childhood desires into adulthood. Unleashed, those desires ruled Steve's life.