American Girl dolls from all eras are on display in the American Girl store in New York.
Lanna Apisukh for NPR
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Lanna Apisukh for NPR
Meet Samantha Parkington. She is a 9-year-old orphan living with her wealthy grandmother in the fictional town of Mount Bedford, New York, in 1904.
And his hair is messy.
Emily Friedrichsen, a stylist at American Girl salon in New York, straps Samantha into a doll-sized magenta-colored salon chair, secures a pink cape around her neck, tilts her back and gets to work.
“Before brushing your doll’s hair, always make sure to spray it with water,” says Amanda Holder, another stylist. “No water in your eyes, okay? And then we start brushing the hair from the bottom, the middle then the top.”
High: Caley Aristy adjusts a doll in the living room. LEFT: Emily Friedrichsen cuts the bangs of a doll belonging to NPR’s Samantha Balaban. RIGHT: Hairbrushes for dolls are for sale in the American Girl store.
Lanna Apisukh for NPR
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Lanna Apisukh for NPR
Samantha Parkington is, of course, both a children’s book character and a doll — one of the most popular American Girl dolls sold in the 1990s. My Samantha doll arrived on my birthday wearing a plaid taffeta dress with a velvety pink purse, a pair of black Mary Jane shoes, a gold locket, and a big bow in her shiny brown synthetic hair.
NPR’s Samantha Balaban holds her Samantha doll.
By Samantha Balaban
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By Samantha Balaban
After declaring her tangle-free, Friedrichsen turns to Samantha’s bangs, which, after many years of brushing, have become a bit stretched out. “She can’t really see at the moment,” Friedrichsen laughs. “Then let’s take care of this.” Friedrichsen takes scissors: “Do you mind if we give him a little bangs? Is that okay?”
In the living room chair next to my Samantha doll is another, newer, Samantha, with her hair done up in clips. Holder uses a tail comb to curl her hair – “or you can use a pencil or pencil” – before braiding and styling it in a twist.
The Other Samantha belongs to author Fiona Davis, who was asked to write an adult historical fiction book about Samantha Parkton to mark the 40th anniversary of American Girl. It’s called Samantha: the next chapter. “I got my doll shortly after I got the job,” Davis says. “She was watching over my shoulder while I typed.” Davis is the author of several other novels set in New York, including The Stolen Queen And Lions of Fifth Avenue.
“In (Samantha’s) book, she’s 25 years old in 1920 and she learns that her grandmother’s inheritance has been stolen,” Davis says. “She goes from socialite to saleswoman overnight. And in her quest to find out what happened to her, it takes her to these glamorous nightclubs and the headquarters of criminal empires.”
In the coffee shop downstairs from the living room, Davis, 59, says that although she didn’t grow up with an American Girl doll, she knew of the character from her niece.
Author Fiona Davis sits with her book Samantha: the next chapter and her doll Samantha at the American Girl café.
Lanna Apisukh for NPR
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Lanna Apisukh for NPR
“She explained to me that because the doll came with these stories, when you had a doll, it wasn’t just about playing with the doll. You became the doll,” Davis says. “(My niece) talked about how she was very shy when she was little and that as she became Samantha, who is a very stubborn young girl in all of these stories, she was able to adopt those characteristics as well.” Plus, Davis said, it made her niece a big history buff, “which of course I appreciate.” To write Samantha’s next chapter, Davis did what she does with all her books – and dove headfirst into Samantha’s story.
A marketing machine
Pleasant Rowland started Pleasant Company with three dolls – Samantha, Molly and Kirsten – in 1986. Her vision was a series of books and dolls “for girls and about girls.” It became an empire: a catalog, a magazine, a book on puberty called The care and custody of youas well as stores and movies. Today, about one American Girl doll is sold every minute, according to the company.
Dolls are on display at the American Girl cafe. Hundreds of dolls are sold every day, according to the company.
Lanna Apisukh for NPR
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Lanna Apisukh for NPR
“Pleasant Rowland is beyond brilliant,” says Amanda FitzSimons, author of the new nonfiction book. An American Girl: How a Billion-Dollar Doll and Its Unlikely Founder Changed Childhood Forever. She says Rowland understood something that almost no one else in the toy industry understood, “which is that girls ages 7 to 12 want to feel important and feel cared for, and there wasn’t much out there doing that.” In fact, FitzSimons says, at that time, many marketers were trying to make girls feel older. Rowland, she adds, “met them exactly where they were.”
Each doll came with a story, which unfolded in six middle-grade picture books. “The idea was, you know, I look at this girl and she’s going through a lot of the same things I’m going through,” FitzSimons says, “and if this girl is interesting enough to write and learn, then so am I.”
Maxine Rose Schur wrote one of these original chapters – Samantha’s Surprise: A Christmas Story. “I did a lot of research at the time about Victorian Christmas: how people decorated their homes, how they celebrated it,” Schur says. She got an outline of the characters from Rowland but said it was up to her to add the details.
The Balaban collection of books about Samantha.
Samantha Balaban/NPR
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Samantha Balaban/NPR
“At that time in my life I was watching the BBC show Up, down“, explains Schur. “There’s a very grumpy cook – I think her name was Mrs. Bridges – I kind of fashioned the cook into Samantha’s surprise a little after Mrs. Bridges. So, I had a lot of fun with that.”
There was also a “look back” or “story overview” at the end of each book. Readers of Samantha’s series, for example, might learn about the suffragist movement, the role of servants in 1904, or then-President Theodore Roosevelt’s work adding land to America’s national forests.
The first Pleasant Company catalog was launched on September 15, 1986. Two months later, FitzSimons writes in his book, the first printing of 110,000 copies of the chapters was sold out. Two years later, the company’s annual revenue was $17 million. Part of the American Girl brand’s early success was due to timing—in 1987, Congress declared March Women’s History Month—but Rowland was also the daughter of an advertising executive, and she knew what she was doing.
LEFT: Amanda Holder styles the Samantha doll owned by author Fiona Davis. RIGHT: Aristy brushes a doll’s hair at the salon.
Lanna Apisukh for NPR
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Lanna Apisukh for NPR
“Pleasant wanted to create small toys and ancillary materials that could be sold to supplement the sale of the book and doll,” says Schur, who remembers intentionally writing ideas for accessories into Samantha’s surprise. “A certain type of…
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