The Paper Doll Club

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My name is David Wolfe.

I grew up in Ohio in the 1950s, in the Eisenhower era.

I remember

thinking that when I saw the Wizard of Oz movie, that that had been filmed in my own backyard with the scarecrow and the corn and the flowers and things.

And then as the developers came, evil men, they turned the whole thing into a black and white sepia-colored movie, just like in The Wizard of Oz before the tornado.

And we had plenty of tornadoes in Ohio, so I often got confused about reality and movies.

I'm still often confused.

I had a cousin, Lois, who was eight years older than I, and she had a superlative collection of paper dolls.

And whenever I would go visit her, which I did as often as possible, I would beg to play with the paper dolls.

And it was great, great fun to dress them up and prop them up against the furniture and stuff and pretend they were going shopping or to the movies.

I was a terribly odd little boy.

Could you have had like an actual doll?

I don't think I could have.

I wouldn't have dared to ask for one.

The only sissies had dolls.

Bad enough I had paper dolls.

Paper dolls could be a secret

in my chest of drawers in my bedroom, underneath my socks.

This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Plates TV critic Willa Paskin.

Every month, we take a cultural question, habit, or idea, crack it open, and try to figure out what it means and why it matters.

Paper dolls, the cutout figures that came with cutout clothing to dress them in, were a vital part of children's lives and fashion culture for generations.

They were meant to be instructive, to teach young women and girls how to look and behave.

But paper dolls have been used in all sorts of ways by all sorts of people they weren't necessarily intended for.

Today's story is about the relationship man still has with paper dolls, which may be old-fashioned, but are not as old-fashioned as you might think.

It's about the connection between paper dolls, fashion, creativity, nostalgia, and queerness.

Today, who still plays with paper dolls?

I'm in the studio right now with Benjamin Frisch, who is the producer of Decodering.

Hi, Ben.

Hey, Willa.

We're going to be telling today's episode together.

Ben's the one who got us interested in this topic in the first place.

Yeah, I was at a gay men's figure drawing group in Manhattan, and there was a guy there, and I saw him draw, and it just was clear to me that he knew exactly what he was doing.

He was so good.

He had sort of a closely cropped white beard and round glasses, and I guessed he was probably in his early mid-70s.

And I got to talking to him, and he told me immediately that he was an artist of paper dolls.

And

talking to him more, I became kind of obsessed with his story and the history and meaning of paper dolls and wanted to find out more.

The first paper doll that was similar to the paper doll as we know it was published in 1810 in London.

It was called The History of Little Fanny, and it was a morality play told in verse about Fanny, a vain, fashion-obsessed little girl.

She's robbed of her clothes and thus of her status and becomes a beggar.

The set came with a beggar outfit.

But she methodically makes her way back up the social ladder, one paper costume at a time.

The lesson of the book was supposed to be about the dangers of caring too much about clothes, about how obedience is the only thing standing between a woman and total ruin.

But playing with Fanny must have demonstrated the exact opposite of that.

It must have demonstrated the fun of fashion and frivolity, the fun of paper dolls.

By the early 1900s, millions of paper dolls were being sold each year by dozens of different publishers.

You could buy them for a few cents at the five and dime or cut them out of newspapers, comic books, magazines, and advertisements.

There were paper dolls of, among other things, little girls like the incredibly popular Betsy McCall, to brand mascots like Minnie Mouse, and movie stars, paper doll sets of classic film actors like Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, and Carmen Miranda, that were particularly popular in the 1930s into the 50s.

Because paper dolls were flat and printable, they were incredibly adaptable to all sorts of formats.

There was even a vinyl record, made for kids, where the sleeve featured paper dolls you could cut out and dress.

One of the songs on the record, The Paper Family, by Anne Lloyd and Michael Stewart from 1952, had lyrics that describe how an American family ought to behave as innocently and obediently as paper dolls.

Every morning he gives his his paper wife and his paper child a paper kiss and he goes to work in a paper factory.

The conformity represented by paper dolls was easy to subvert because it was so easy to ignore.

The virtue of simple toys is that it's simple to use them any way you please.

Paper dolls came with a lot of outfits, often eight to ten per figure.

And if you wanted more, you could just draw one yourself or cut them out of any old catalog.

With all these choices, you could mix everything up.

You could pair a gown with a bandana.

You could pair a nursing outfit with dungarees.

In this way, paper dolls were kind of like a Lego kit, a modular toy that came with highly optional instructions.

You could even experiment with cross-dressing your doll.

Anything you wanted to do, you could do.

And this playfulness, this freedom, this is what David Wolfe, who you heard at the beginning of the show, loved so much about paper dolls.

So make yourself a paper man and a paper wife and a paper boy and a paper girl and a paper dog and a paper cat, a paper family.

I had a mother who was very troubled.

We would simply

realize that she was bipolar if she were young today, but we didn't know then.

My dad was a movie fiend, and I think when my mother would be depressed or angry or hysterical, he would often take me to the movies.

Everything was beautiful, so the movies were like a band-aid that stopped the wounds.

So I allowed my paper dolls to come with me to the movies.

And the movie that I was most fascinated by, and I'm still fascinated by, is the 1941 MGM musical Siegfeld Girl with Judy Garland, Lana Turner, and Hedi Lamar, and the most beautiful costumes by Adrian imaginable.

And I used to dress them up in the costumes from the movie because have you ever seen the movie?

Where they come down the stairway.

So I would put them all on the stairway in their outfits and then sing to them the song from Siegfeld Girl.

Just pretend.

I was eight years old when my brother was born and I can remember when he was brought home from the hospital, my mother came over and handed him to me and said, here's your little brother.

You must always take care of him.

So I

He was a sickly child and he needed a lot of care and a lot of attention.

And

my parents weren't very good parents in that way.

So

I chose to take care of him more than I would have if he'd been a healthy child probably.

And so I taught him to draw and paint when he was very, very little.

And he was a very, very gifted artist.

I used to, every Christmas, give him a paper doll of the way my sister looked the previous year and pieces from her wardrobe.

They were his

favorite present always.

My sister was the family boy.

She played football beautifully while I was playing paper dolls,

much to the consternation of my father, of course.

I didn't fit the mold, and in 1950s, Ohio, if you didn't fit the mold, you might as well be dead.

I went as Carmen Miranda for Halloween six years in a row when I was five years old.

And nobody blinked.

Everybody just thought it was adorable that I wanted to be Carmen Miranda.

They never saw the hidden meaning.

Every potentially gay young person

was

beaten up and stuffed in lockers in my high school.

Nobody in Ohio discussed homosexuality.

They didn't even discuss straight sex.

when you're called a name and you don't even know what that name means, it becomes a very confusing issue.

How can you be something that doesn't exist?

Certainly, if there had been a gay nightclub, first of all, they would have burned it down and lynched the owners, but

I think maybe I might have had a hint.

When I first heard David's story, when he told me about having to hide his paper dolls, it just made me so sad, having to hide this thing that he loved most.

And he told me that it isn't an uncommon story.

In the world of paper doll publishing, there's several gay men with similar stories to David.

The most famous was Tom Tierney, who almost single-handedly kept paper dolls alive in the 1970s and 80s, a low point for the popularity of the form.

He created more than 400 paper doll books, including one of The Pope, and even some adult ones featuring drag queens, leather-clad bikers, not your typical paper doll fare.

But references to paper dolls show up in other parts of gay culture too.

The most fascinating connection I came across is also the most mysterious.

It's the paper doll, sometimes called the paper doll club, and it was a gay bar in San Francisco, or at least a kind of proto-gay bar, which was in operation by at least 1945, probably earlier than that, which is incredibly early for an openly gay space.

Unfortunately, there's so much we don't know about the paper doll, because like a lot of gay history, nobody wrote it down.

Supposedly, their Halloween parties were legendary.

Drag queens would come from as far away as New York to compete in the best costume contest.

And unlike a lot of other proto-gay spaces in San Francisco, it wasn't looking to attract tourists, so it ended up being a really important place where queer community was built.

So it was like this place that was like an incubator for queer entrepreneurialism.

I talked to Nan Alamia Boyd.

She's a professor of women and gender studies at San Francisco State University.

She's one of the few scholars who's done work trying to find out more about the paper doll.

Community-based thinking, community-based organizing, community-based activism, community-based entrepreneurialism, meaning, you know, how are these people who are like kind of shut out of their professions, you know, what, oh, what am I going to do with my life?

Oh, I'll open a gay bar.

I'll like sort of serve my people.

So, the sense of a people, I'll serve my people in this way.

So, a lot of that was kind of incubating as paper doll.

I tried really hard to find out why the paper doll was called the paper doll, and no one I spoke to could tell me why, and it isn't in any of the oral histories that I read.

But I have a theory that I think is pretty satisfying, and it has to do with another paper doll with another queer connection.

So, in the early 40s, there was a massively popular song.

It was called Paper Doll, written by Johnny S.

Black and performed by the Mills Brothers.

It's almost totally forgotten now, but it sold more than 11 million copies in its day.

To put that in perspective, that's about as many copies as The Macarena or Britney Spears' Hit Me Baby One More Time.

Paper Doll was a huge, huge hit.

I'm gonna buy a paper doll that I can call

my own.

A doll that other fellows cannot steal.

The song was released in 1942 and peaked at number one on the Billboard singles chart in 1943 into 1944.

And so it would have been everywhere right around the time the paper doll was opening.

It seems pretty likely to me that the song, at least in part, helped inspire the name of the club, because the song had some pretty obvious, unintentional, queer subtext.

Besides the oddness of a group of men singing about wanting a paper doll, there is this line in particular.

The song also shows up in other pieces of art, including in the script for Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire and in Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, where it's sung by a character repeatedly and suggests that he may be a closeted homosexual.

To call my own,

then I've

The fragility of the paper doll makes them a ready metaphor for gay people in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, and still for some people today.

Constantly in danger of being found out, losing their jobs, families, everything being ripped away from them.

But paper dolls also suggest something more hopeful, the possibility of transformation.

And that transformation means that they are also a potent symbol for code switching, how changing outfits can change how you are perceived and act in different groups and situations.

Out in the real world, you might wear the clothes of a lawyer or a sailor, but when you're around other gay people, say at the paper doll in San Francisco, you can take off that outfit and wear something more authentically yourself.

For David, paper dolls didn't just hint at transformation, though.

They were a means to it, a gateway to a real life.

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What is the connection between being a good fashion illustrator and paper dolls?

There is no difference.

Paper dolls are almost always illustrated.

In the 1950s and earlier, this was because printing photographs was expensive and laborious, which is why fashion magazines and advertisements during this era used illustrations too.

All the things David had learned drawing paper dolls for his brother translated directly to drawing fashion illustrations.

And so, as a young man, that's what he got a job doing, working as an illustrator at a local chain of department stores.

He loved it.

It seemed like he was settling in in Ohio.

He even got married.

Her name was Sheila, and she was British.

She was in Ashtabula, Ohio, because she came to America with the circus.

And when the circus played Astrabula, Ohio, she fell off an elephant and hurt her back.

So the circus moved on and left her behind.

They went to London on vacation, and at the end of the trip, his wife convinced David to show off his portfolio.

He met with a very high-powered fashion editor.

She asked me a question then that changed my life.

She said, can you go to Paris for me this afternoon?

And I still, the hair on my arms is standing up on end now because I still feel that thrill.

Of course I said yes.

So I went to Paris.

I went through the clothes and went back to Astrobula, Ohio, and on the kitchen table there of my mobile home, I did the first ad for

Vogue.

And we sold up everything and went to Europe on the old Queen Elizabeth I.

And I had a new life and an overnight success as a fashion illustrator.

Before he left, David boxed his paper dolls up in the attic of his parents' house.

They were eventually thrown away.

His parents didn't think he wanted them.

As the 50s turned into the 60s and the 70s, paper dolls faded in popularity more generally, thanks largely to Barbie.

Barbie, you're beautiful.

You make me fool.

Ruth Handler created the Barbie doll in 1959 after watching her own daughter playing with paper dolls and noticing that she would pretend they were adults.

Up until then, children's dolls, the three-dimensional kind anyway, were mostly baby dolls.

So Handler set out to make a more mature doll, who swiftly became far, far more popular than the paper dolls who had inspired her.

Barbie,

beautiful Barbie.

Coming to London, I immediately felt like I had stepped into an MGM Technicolor version of the movies and everything was beautiful and it was like color had come into my life at last.

I stopped being shy for one thing.

When I got to London, homosexuality was still a crime.

The world was

so full of gay men who were married.

And so there were dinner parties and things, all very, very much, you know,

well-behaved and English, you know.

But then after the dinner party,

the next day, you know, you might meet someone that you met at the dinner party and for tea for sexual fun and games.

Eventually, David became the highest-paid fashion illustrator in London, making $1,000 a figure.

But just as technology had come for paper dolls, it came for fashion illustration too, which was replaced by fashion photography as cheaper, better color printing became the norm.

So David began to use his considerable fashion knowledge, his eye, and his imagination to create reports predicting future trends, which he also illustrated.

It was insider information for designers, basically, part of the beginning of a brand new industry, trend forecasting.

I was very good about sensing the rhythm of fashion changes.

I could spot the things coming.

The attribute that made me so successful was the fact that I could illustrate things that didn't exist yet.

And I remember the first big successful trend thing I had, and it had to do with the economy.

I remember

getting a hold of the VHS of the grapes of wrath

and turning them into fashion images.

And

so I was the first person, I think, to sell the idea of worn-out denim.

And that alone would be enough to put me in the fashion history books, I think.

David eventually became the creative director of one of the first fashion forecasting firms, an industry he'd worked in for 25 years.

And he credits a great deal of his success to paper dolls.

With the paper dolls, you have the garments, each one separately drawn with little tabs, like a jacket and a skirt and a sweater, and then you put them all together.

And I think the reason that my career was successful is that as a kid, I trained my eye about what goes with with what and what's appropriate with what.

So

I was doing the same thing in real life that I had been doing with paper.

David had a very successful career, to put it modestly.

Meanwhile, David's brother's life was more troubled.

My brother, I saw him, you know, he came to England and vacationed with us a couple times.

He always had little jobs.

He was like a walking gay cliché.

He was a hairdresser.

He worked in the florist

and troubled.

He tried tried suicide a couple times.

He had a serious alcohol problem as well.

And then got mixed up with this therapist

who was leading the craze for bringing back memories.

And he convinced my brother that he'd been abused by my parents.

And I tried to convince him that he was wrong.

And he said that he had a scar on his forehead from where my mother had hit him with a baseball bat.

And I know the scar on his forehead came from falling down the porch steps when I was supposed to be watching him.

So it was something that

had made a big impression on me.

And

I knew that he was being conned.

So I was horrified.

And

so I didn't hear from him for 15 years, I think it was.

Eventually, David would separate from his wife and live more openly as gay and move back to the United States.

At some point, he began to think about retirement and paper dolls again.

He missed glamour and elegance and beauty, all the things that his paper dolls had had, and all the things that he thought contemporary fashion had lost.

Fashion was becoming grotesque.

I mean, it's no challenge to say, okay, I'm putting combat boots with a web bridal gown, you know, and calling it fashion.

In the 1970s and 80s, paper doll publishing had fallen on hard times.

The business picked up a bit in the 90s.

Disney, for example, had paper doll tie-ins for its early 90s animated movies.

But the most recognizable paper doll of the 90s wasn't really a paper doll at all.

It was a novelty item, the Dress Me Up David, a fridge magnet of Michelangelo's David that came with various magnetic outfits.

Heading into the aughts, the growth industry for paper dolls was less as toys for kids and more as collectibles for adults who were buying vintage sets or new sets created by paper doll artists to keep, pristine, and not to play with at all.

In 2005, David found himself in Chicago and by chance ended up at an auction with a friend.

To my great surprise, they said, All right, this afternoon we're going to sell the paper dolls.

And I couldn't believe what I was seeing because I was seeing my

childhood flash in front of my eyes.

You know, there was Carmen Miranda paper dolls, there was the Siegfeld Girl paper dolls and everything.

I literally bought everything that I remembered my cousin Lois owning.

This

is from 1942, I think.

Carmen Miranda Paper Dolls and Costumes.

And it cost 15 cents.

I think I paid several hundred for it.

But it's stunning.

And at that auction, I met paper doll collectors and artists.

And

it never occurred to me, you know, to see if paper dolls still existed.

David got involved in the small but very passionate paper doll community.

He started illustrating again, paper dolls this time.

And if you look at his paper dolls, they don't look like his fashion illustrations from the 60s or 70s.

They're lushly illustrated in gouache, an opaque watercolor you see in a lot of mid-century illustration, and soft-colored pencils.

They look just like the celebrity paper dolls he grew up with.

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After speaking with David, we really wanted to talk to people in the paper doll community, which is small, but more robust than you might imagine.

My memories are playing paper dolls with my grandma, and she played paper dolls when she was a girl.

Like with paper dolls, you were able to get like tons of different outfits as opposed to like a regular doll that would usually come with one or two outfits.

You had like a lot of different options.

Yeah, my sister and I did definitely as a little girl played with paper dolls.

When you first invited me here for the podcast, that's what I thought.

I was like, he wants to talk to me about paper dolls.

He doesn't have four hours.

There's a kind of artisanal boom going on right now in paper dolls, driven by artists, enthusiasts, enthusiasts, and collectors.

And you can see it on Pinterest pages and in Facebook groups and in all the paper dolls that are for sale on eBay.

There's a dedicated paper doll publisher, Paper Studio Press, that puts out 12 books a year and a magazine and is David's publisher.

And there are artists selling their work on their own websites and on Etsy.

But as you might expect, the people who are interested in paper dolls today skew a little bit older.

Who is the market for paper dolls right now?

Little old ladies who played with paper dolls when they were young and gay gentlemen who also played with paper dolls when they were young.

And we're having, we're, we're making a conscious effort to try to recruit some young people, but boy, it's very difficult.

There's a widespread fear among paper doll enthusiasts, not entirely unwarranted, that this may be the last generation that really loves and appreciates paper dolls.

The last generation that played with paper dolls as kids.

But there are some younger fans out there.

My name is Emmy Lotto.

I'm a weirdo.

I am a basically a five-year-old girl in a 30-something woman's body.

And

the things that I'm into reflect that I'm into old paper dolls, I'm into carousels, I'm into Disney princesses.

Emmy has an ongoing project where she takes photos of paper dolls in real places, marking them on Instagram with the hashtag paper doll postcard.

Her love for paper dolls comes not only from playing with them as a child, but in how she remembers playing with them made her feel.

It reminds me of

a time when I didn't have to adult yet, when everything was taken care of for me, and I had, I think, the freedom to explore these worlds without judgment, without anything being expected of me.

There was no,

okay, but how is this going to translate into your school life?

Or

is this something that the arc of your life will bend toward?

Despite only being in her 30s, Emmy is a nostalgist.

Needless to say, nostalgia is a big part of what holds the paper doll community together.

But paper dolls aren't just a throwback.

They're also vibrant.

This is the thing about a certain kind of nostalgia.

It can get so potent that it becomes a major part of your life, right now.

Being stuck in the past can become a way to connect in the present.

And that's something that's true for the people in the paper doll community and especially true for David.

Paper dolls helped him reconnect with his brother, who he hadn't heard from in 15 years.

One day the phone rang and it was his voice.

My brother,

he told me that he'd come to believe that I was right and

that he'd been wrong and he wanted to repair the rift.

He was HIV positive and had scarposi sarcoma.

And

he sent photographs of himself with the lesions.

So we talked about

what we were doing, and I was getting ready to go to a paper doll convention, and I said, do you still play with paper dolls?

And I'll never forget what he said.

He said, when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I ask myself is, what are my paper dolls going to wear today?

I told him about the conventions, and

we were making plans for him to come to the next convention as my guest.

And in that week, he was evidently drunk and fell down the steps of his apartment and died.

I spoke to the doctor in San Francisco.

I asked how his HIV medicine would help or hinder him.

And the doctor was bewildered and said

it is not HIV positive.

And it turned out that Pancho had been painting the lesions on

daily.

So I think he was still more troubled than I ever knew.

But meanwhile, he had put something in the mail for me, his paper doll of Elizabeth Taylor

that he made and his goal was to make every single dress that she or outfit she had ever worn in this book and it's it's an unfinished symphony.

It's my brother Pancho's Elizabeth Taylor book.

It's Braintree County, Suddenly Last Summer.

Cleopatra, who has real gold foil

and this one, Father of the Bride,

bridal gown with lace and pearls glued on

oh this one has real feathers this

sweet bird of youth oh god

isn't that great the chinchilla trim with a

brinestone heart you can tell this he was working on the book he got more and more carried away but his idea was he was going to do this entire book and present it to her

I was supposed to look at it and bring it to the meeting and give it back to him to work on some more.

It was really sad.

I took it to the next paper doll convention and it won a blue ribbon as the people's choice of

the best display.

So that's what I have to remember him by.

Paper doll nostalgia can look, like all nostalgia, retrograde, like a longing for a simpler time, for a time when we played with beautiful things we cut out with our own hands and weren't, you know, obsessed with our phones and technology and shiny ephemeral and disposable things.

Today, the most popular paper dolls aren't even made of paper.

They're digital, to be found in games like Kim Kardashian's Hollywood, where you pay to dress up an avatar of yourself and you give the Kardashians a cut.

And that can seem a little crass in comparison to the careful cutting and care required of traditional paper dolls.

It's easy to get nostalgic about something like that, to see it through rose-colored glasses.

But the heyday of the classic paper doll was also a time when a lot of people, women and men, were less free, more constrained, expected to behave in certain ways, and to hide who they really were.

For some paper doll lovers, paper dolls may really signify some imagined, idyllic past.

But for someone like David, it's not the past that's longed for.

It's the paper dolls, who helped him to slip into a happier, more generous, more glamorous world than the one he was really living in.

The golden age of paper dolls was an era where identities and consumer objects were much more fixed, where who and what you were seemed so much more locked in.

But now we live in an era of infinite customization.

The entire consumer landscape is designed to correspond to our sense of identities and aspirations, both in the real world and in virtual, more hidden spaces.

You can design your own t-shirt, get shoes in any combination of colors you want.

If I want to be like Audrey Hepburn, I don't have to imagine it via a paper doll.

I can go on Amazon and there are a dozen versions of the breakfast at Tiffany's dress waiting for me to purchase and adopt.

If I want to live in a fantasy world, I don't need a paper doll to help me tell that story.

I can just load up World of Warcraft and roleplay as a wizard or a knight.

I think that's part of the reason that paper dolls have fallen off, is because we don't need them in the same way anymore.

We have become our own paper dolls, using our bodies and virtual avatars to explore who we are and what we want to be.

But David, back in the 1950s, did need them.

Paper dolls structured his life and guided him down the career path he eventually took.

And in retrospect, it can all seem like an inevitability.

But I think it's also important to remember that a lot of other gay children played with paper dolls too.

David's brother, for one.

And for so many of those children, their lives weren't as glamorous, marked by discrimination, violence, and illness.

So, for queer people, paper dolls and their history are also a reminder of how fragile our place in the world is.

How not so long ago we had to hide ourselves and our interests away, like David's paper dolls in the sock drawer.

But they're also proof that things can change, that some things don't have to stay hidden hidden forever.

David is retired now.

He lives on the West Coast, spending his free time on personal projects.

I go to the gym every other day.

I spend a lot of time happily chatting with my husband.

I work on my paper doll projects about four or five hours a day.

It's just, I'm just having so much fun.

And I

really created a bubble that I've lived in my whole life.

And now it's more of a bubble than ever.

And I feel that every day when I'm painting paper dolls, I've gone to an imaginary place that I call paper dolly wood, where everything is beautiful and everyone is kind and gentle.

And

the world and fashion have charm and grace.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

And I'm Benjamin Frisch.

You can find me on Twitter at Willapaskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, rate our feed on Apple Podcasts or anywhere you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

This episode was written and edited by Willipaskin and Benjamin Frisch, who also produced the episode and does illustrations for every show.

Special thanks to Annie Chelsea, who helped us record this episode and provided additional reporting.

Thanks also to Jenny Taleodoros, Terry Taylor, Corey Jensen, Bev Smuha, Hannah Field, Katherine H.

Adams, John Sherlock, June Thomas, Sophie Worthen, Chris Beroube, Forrest Wickman, Ava Lubell, Andrew Kahn, Brian Lowder, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you next month.

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