or a long, long time, it has seemed that Madame Alexander would be as immortal as her dolls.
Just last spring, at 93, the grande dame of the American dollmaking industry managed four large-scale public appearances, exiting the grandeur of her Palm Beach apartment to mingle with her thousands of fans. A huge birthday party in San Antonio. A convention of the 2,400-member Madame Alexander Doll Club at Disney World. A three-day toy fair in Toledo, Ohio.
Noblesse oblige knows no retirement: ”A thousand people for lunch, a thousand people for dinner three times, 145,000 people came out to greet me,” says Alexander. ”It was frightening.”
And for an appearance at a show of her dolls in April at the new F.A.O. Schwarz store in New York-if it meant cancelling another event or two to save her strength, she simply, and without excuses, would. F.A.O. Schwarz is an account dear to her heart. It was, after all, the first store to buy her dolls, 65 years ago.
It would have been a heavy schedule for a woman half her age, and when Madame Alexander returned home to Palm Beach, where she has lived for 17 years, she caught pneumonia. She hasn`t been the same since.
On a Thursday morning in November, 1987, Bea Alexander (She pronounced herself ”Madame” when marketing strategists told her her dolls needed a name.)stands silent, impassive beneath an enormous dome that was once the mezzanine of Palm Beach`s resplendent Biltmore Hotel; it is now the middle of her living room.
The ringing of the door bell has not so much heralded the arrival of a guest as the opportunity for Madame Alexander to put a newly-hired servant through her paces. Millie has opened the door properly enough and spoken with deference to the guest. But she has made a false step: She is leading her charge out of the foyer through the wrong, if more direct, passage.
Madame Alexander shakes her head. ”No, no, no. I told you, this way.”
The guest stands perplexed, her ”Hello” goes unanswered. Madame Alexander takes Millie`s arm, and with the guest obediently following, retraces her steps through another entranceway. And at last, to the guest, an
acknowledgment. ”How do you do?” she says, frowning.
Millie will not last long.
Madame Alexander is tiny, peach-cheeked, golden-skinned, dressed in a richly-hued jersey gown that falls to elegant slippers. Her company even sells a doll in her likeness, defying Alexander`s own superstitions about having a doll made of her while she is still alive, but it proves the point: It is as exquisite, as regal, as any.
And the story of inspiration is enchanting, like a children`s book: ”My father founded the first doll hospital in the United States,” she recites.
”I can still see the tearful faces of the children holding their broken dolls.
”Very, very often in the middle of the night, the bell would ring, and a hysterical father would come with a doll: `My child is sick,` he would say.
`She refuses to take her medicine, because the doll fell off the bed.` The dolls were porcelain then, and they would shatter and that would be the end of it. My father would stay up all night to repair that doll.”
But the tale and the woman telling it soon spiral from the sweetly ethereal to the material. ”I was very, very richly rewarded that the maternal instinct that was born in a child remains with the adult as long as she lives, and therefore we have tens of thousands of collectors throughout the world.” Tens of thousands of collectors, she mentions first. Not tens of thousands of little girls. This is a great concession for Madame Alexander, to allow her market to be dominated by collectors, who themselves profit from a self-contained market, who wildly inflate the traded dolls` prices to their own ultimate benefit. But, at the same time, they make the Madame Alexander doll a legendary toy that sells out every season with virtually no advertising and no marketing other than a single back page ad in an industry magazine.
”There was a time when Madame Alexander despised collectors,” says Jonathan Green, formerly of F.A.O. Schwarz who worked with Madame Alexander dolls for 10 years. ”But she is above all a businesswoman. She sees the reality that collectors are very important to her business.”
Madame Alexander`s dolls may be designed to be taken night-night, to be dragged by their sturdily-implanted, ”combable” hair down a grocery store aisle, to be bathed, to be dressed and undressed. But to Madame`s chagrin, by and large they are not; they end up in the clean and uncurious hands of collectors.
Instead, they are left in their wrappers with tags around their wrists, valued and traded by grown men and women, who subscribe to the Madame Alexander Doll Club newsletter, who go to annual conventions, who have been known to sell all their holdings in the stock market to reinvest in a less volatile commodity: Madame Alexander dolls.
To the experienced doll shopper, modern day Alexanders are unmistakable. They are classic-looking dolls with tiny features and delicate mouths, a tracing of eyebrows, high and innocent. They are dressed in clothes with a wholesome air even in the most elegant designs. Madame`s dolls are never sexy or alluring.
”Several months ago,” Alexander says, ”I received a letter, which is very precious. A woman wrote that she had no money to take care of her son`s college and so she prevailed on the idea of selling most of her collection and (then) she had enough money to pay for his tuition, to pay for his entire college.”
Yes, there are others motives at work here than to make a little girl a pretty dolly. It isn`t so much that the dolls are expensive-most good dolls these days are, and Alexander`s run the gamut from around $25 for Little Huggums, a cloth-bodied baby doll, to the fanciest at around $250. And historically, as dolls go, they are important. But what makes Alexander dolls enduring is that they are collectible; what makes them collectible is that there are only so many made. A prized Alexander can easily go for $2,400.
It is with great pride that Madame Alexander groans about the demand for new dolls outpacing the supply, and that is just how the collectors want it. Disney World is one of her biggest accounts: ”They have a sign: `Only two dolls per customer.` ”
And the reason there are only so many made is that they are made, largely by hand, in America. ” `Made in USA`-I was the first to start that,” she says. And with even-voiced immodesty: ”The world does not know the leadership I have given this country.”
Nor does the world know, nor could it imagine that this pretty little old lady who makes such sweet-faced little dolls could have such forceful, unbending positions on world affairs and politics, on economics and trade. But that, apparently, is what comes from being born in one century, spanning another and almost reaching a third, and having lived for the duration in the thick of things.
Madame Alexander is herself the daughter of immigrants. But recent U.S. policy on imports and immigration galls her no end. Years ago, it galled her when union ruffians chased off her good American girls, as she tells it, and the agencies started sending her immigrants. ”We had to employ substitutes for our American people. I had to accept reality.”
But at least those were, in her view, the good immigrants. ”Many times I get into a very, very sad mood,” she begins. ”Through the kindness of our country, they have stuck very, very much to the Constitution to allow everyone in the world to come. It was all right at the time when the Constitution was written, but to have a time in our history when we accept that Castro sends over people from insane asylums, and from jail, murderers allowed into our country. I can only think back when I was a very young child, and my parents had occasion to bring friends into this country. Do you know how they were inspected? If there was one little thing about the person that didn`t come up to the standard of the interviewer, he sent the person back.”
She also would prefer that foreigners not sell us their goods either.
”The situation that we have in Japan: We are paying a very big price for the affair at Hiroshima, and so we felt that we owed Japan a great deal. And by giving so much to Japan and making them so strong, I feel that we have made Japan stronger than what we are. It troubles me very much.”
Alexander Doll Company`s national sales manager, Jay Schwartz, sees the case more simply: It`s competition. ”A great percentage of dolls are coming from the Orient,” says Schwartz. ”Now, they may do handwork….But that`s the Orient,” he says with implicit scorn.
The problem then is to do it in America, but do it better. Do it as well as Madame wants it. And the problem with production is what Schwartz calls, with no elaboration, ”the American work ethic.” People just don`t work like they used to. They don`t work hard enough or fast enough or cheaply enough. And so there has to be a premium on buying American, if buying American means paying more for less produced.
With a factory in New York City with 650 workers in production 50 weeks a year, they still can`t make all the dolls they could sell. Just the way collectors like it, but not the way a business grows.
So the premium on buying American is, besides a patriotic support of the American economy, a standard of perfection. To Madame Alexander, ”Made in USA” means no loose threads, no people out of work, American money earned here, spent here.
Millie is earnestly shuttling tea cups and muffins in from the kitchen. Madame Alexander interrupts her tale to tell her that the spoon must be placed so and the napkin so, and she stiffens conspicuously at an accidental clatter when the china teeters on the table top.
She graciously accepts a compliment on the muffins she herself has made, and she starts to share a recipe for Czechoslovakian Apple Cake. But she changes gears again from old-fashioned homemaker to shockingly ambitious maverick.
In 1923, Madame Alexander threatened to divorce her husband when she was only six months into the business, unless he abandoned his own profession in corporate personnel and joined hers.
”I meant it,” she says serenely. ”He refused to give up his position, because he said we needed an income, and I said, `I`ll cross that bridge when I come to it.` And still he refused. So I said, `Then we will have to be divorced.` I put my things in storage and sent my little girl to his mother`s. That`s how imbued I was, and I can truthfully say that I gave birth to another child through my work. That was my replacement for children.”
Eventually her husband came around, and 20 years after his death, there is still no trace of shame in her voice as she tells the story.
Madame Alexander claims still to be the creator of the company`s dolls.
”That`s largely true,” hedges Jay Schwartz. ”She`s certainly the main corrector.” (If others` ideas did not suit her, she would be the first to let them know.)
Designs still come to her as always-personalities of history, of the arts, of literature, and she sees them as a way of inspiring children to learn more about the figures they represent.
”You take a pencil and paper, you make a sketch. The mechanical part is done in New York, after I send up my sketches and my remarks, and I say,
”Marie Antoinette-use the top of number so-and-so, sew the skirt of this and that and the other and that`s how they come about. Then sometimes the collectors may suggest something. They may write and say that if I change the gown, they will buy another Madame Alexander. So I just did a pale blue, with the silver lace over it, with roses.”
She does her sketches in a small studio off the sitting room of her apartment. Outside its door hangs a small gallery of photographs. There is a collection of pictures of the presidents` wives dolls, and some certificates honoring Madame Alexander. Those that stand out show her elegantly dressed and nobly smiling side by side with dignitaries, with Sen. Robert Dole (R., Kan.) and Sen. Bob Graham (D., Fla.) And her favorite, with Alexander Haig.
”Al Haig is charming. He`s a wonderful man. He`s brilliant, highly intellectual. He`s a man who knows-every branch of the government.” She wrings her hands over his bid for the presidency, which at that moment was on the verge of being shelved, and she blames its failure on his departure from the Reagan administration.
She looks expectantly at her guest, searching for agreement on her politics. Finding neutrality, she charges on, proselytizing now about the Republicans being more liberal to the working people than the Democrats, about the deficit and balancing the budget, and she is standing there in her long gown, expecting to be taken as very much of an authority, halfway between the muffins and the dressed-up dolls that perch like objets d`art on an antique chest here, on a Victorian child`s rocker there, on the floor, on the couch, on the table.
The morning is drawing to a close. Madame Alexander is tired, exasperated over a videotape of an interview of her with Barbara Walters. She blamed Millie, then Reggie, the handyman, then she remembered she loaned the tape to someone months ago. It was the first moment of confusion in close to three hours of conversation.
”I`m enjoying perfect health. I don`t feel my age and I`ve stopped counting my years. My grandfather lived to the age of 103 and he didn`t die a natural death. My mother admitted to 93 and she didn`t die a natural death.” She has never considered that she has earned the right to retire, or that she might someday soon have to stop making dolls. ”I don`t think about it,” she says with irritation.
November, 1988. Madame Alexander has just come out of intensive care and lies in the VIP room of Good Samaritan Hospital. She has suffered a heart attack. ”Another hour and she would have been dead,” her nurse, Helga Smith, states coldly. And so, what was supposed to be a luncheon date at the Breakers has ended up here instead.
A friend is spoon-feeding her. She and six other friends have slipped past Helga, to hear from the patient herself that Madame Alexander is feeling just fine, for heaven`s sake. ”Why am I here?,” she keeps asking them.
She is anxious to go home, to get back to business. But her business has changed. Madame Alexander no longer stands at the helm, exactly. She has been retained as a consultant, in a manner of speaking. But the family business that she started with her own fierce initiative, at a time in the `20s and
`30s when women were closed out of the toy industry, was sold to a group of financiers in February.
”From a relative distance (the new ownersl are running it now,” says Schwartz. ”But they have maintained the family image by having Alexander`s grandson, William Birnbaum, as president.” William Alexander Birnbaum.
Madame Alexander returned home from the hospital Nov. 7. The pacemaker implanted after the heart attack seems to be stabilizing, and her friends are hoping her current disorientation is a result of her medication and that it will clear up once the drugs are stopped.
”She still thinks she owns the business,” says her nurse of Alexander`s confusion. ”She`s 93 after all. We can`t live forever, you know.”
”Mint-wrist tag. Mint-boxed. Mint-no box.” Collectors register their dolls` immortality in price lists. And the dolls` chances of ever being played with, of having lives to act out, of being told secrets they will not tell are over.
Madame Alexander is old herself now, finally, but she is old having enjoyed a happier doll`s destiny than Mint-Boxed-Wrist Tag. In 93 years, she never has had to sit in perfection`s prison on some shelf. She has lived intensely, she has flared with contradictions and adjusted to the decades, and if she is at last worn ragged, still she is the rarest collectible.
There are only so many women made like her. Ever.
