Floridian: A real doll house

A real doll house

It's a doll's world, Melissa Mince just lives in it. And not just any doll. It's all about Chatty Cathy.

By JACQUIN SANDERS

SEMINOLE -- Chatty Cathy is getting on for 40 but still doesn't look a day over 5.

The famous talking doll of the early 1960s is being reissued by Mattel, the fickle dollmaker who loved Chatty Cathy well but not long. By 1966, Mattel had tired of Cathy's toddlerish good looks and limited conversation and became dazzled by Barbie's overblown charms and huge sales. So the cruel company lopped off Cathy's plump little head.

Poor doll-child -- in kindergarten and already a has-been. Yet her memory survived, and so, due to the near-indestructibility of plastic, did her person. America's fortysomethings and many others have made her one of the most heavily collected dolls in history.

New Cathy is already available from some small dealers, F.A.O. Schwarz in Tampa and the JCPenney holiday catalog for $99.99. The old one went for $9.99, though toward the end of her brief first career, she was remaindered for $2 to $3.

Sadly, Cathy's older sister, Charmin' Chatty, is not being reissued, although her collectors are many and avid.

"Mattel got mad at Charmin' back in 1963," says Melissa Mince, president of the national Chatty Cathy Collectors Club. "She had a wonderful start, lots of advertising, even the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, two weeks before Christmas.

"But the poor thing didn't sell, and at the end of the year Mattel took her off the market. Even now the company doesn't like to talk about her."

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In real life Mince is a practicing attorney, wife of a GTE executive and mother of one child, 15-year-old son Sean, who doesn't care for dolls. She herself was a Chatty Cathy child who played happily with other members of the family, Chatty Baby and Chatty Brother, although Cathy's older sister, Charmin' Chatty, didn't ring her bell at the time.

"She was a dork," Mince says. "I absolutely love her now, hated her then. Little girls need someone they can identify with. We didn't want to be friends with poor Charmin'. We certainly didn't want to look like her."

At age 8, Charmin' Chatty wears round plastic spectacles, looks a little tall for her age, has straight hair, bangs and an expression that a new generation of children might like better and call "attitude."

Charmin's head is cocked. She glances upward, perhaps at some adult whose thought processes she finds wanting. A small smile, quizzical and scornful plays over her face -- and puts a spell on certain grown-ups, including some who have never sat down on the floor and had a long discussion with a doll.

Mince has some of Charmin' Chatty's quizzical look. "How did I get into this?" she asks, looking about the collection room in her house in Seminole.

The room contains more than a hundred Chatties -- and it isn't even a very big room. They sit crowded together on a longish table in the middle of the room. Other dolls sit or stand around the sides of the room, on shelves, in bookcases.

These are only the dolls Mince displays; others are packed away in trunks. Sometimes she shakes her head, feeling helpless but not at all displeased with her obsession.

"Why do I know so much about dolls?" she wonders. "That's what we ask ourselves at collectors club meetings, "Why do we do this? Why do we care?' And we laugh at ourselves and go out and work all the harder at our collections."

Mixed in among the dolls are little herds of plastic horses, about 500 of them. They were all made by the Breyer Co. (not the ice cream people), and the main thing you can say about them is that they look, well, horsey. Yet the footlong Breyer horses have become important collectibles.

Like dolls, they come out of factory molds and -- unless someone dropped his lunchtime sandwich into the molten plastic -- have no way of standing out individually. Their value is determined by their condition and color and accouterments.

Some horses have lost their shine, some dolls have diminished pinkness in their plastic cheeks and knees. Mark them down.

As in life, the well-dressed doll has an advantage over a plainly clothed neighbor. The original outfits the dolls wore in the '60s are the most desired by collectors. Certain garments are particularly admired: the Red Peppermint Stripe Dress and the Dark Blue Party Dress.

The odds and ends of Chatty wardrobes are eagerly sought: tie tacks, shoe horns, a little purse, a passport carried by the doll called Chatty Travel 'Round the World. The tiny but official-looking booklet describes its owner in unlabored bureaucratese: "Hair -- blond, Eyes -- blue, Height -- two feet."

One of Mince's prizes is a doll house-size chifforobe. Inside is a really rare piece -- a sachet, pill-shaped, less than an inch in diameter. After nearly 40 years, the sachet no longer freshens the air in the cabinet. But even in odor-free condition, it would be eagerly sought if put up for sale.

Study is necessary in the collecting game. There are serious books about the dolls, a Web site and a collectors club with its own newspaper. (For club information and to locate a Chatty doll evaluator, call (727) 398-7792).

Doll-collecting is expensive -- and dicey. Some Chatty dolls can cost $500 or more. Doll clothes are expensively collectible, too. The rarest and best old costumes can reach $200 and beyond depending on their condition.

It is a grim fact of life that some doll collectors do not maintain the innocence of childhood. Buyers must learn to recognize original clothing on a doll and not accept substitutes. People even try to counterfeit eyes.

Chatty dolls were well-spoken for their time. On many, you pulled a string on the doll's back and a voice came from within, from a spring-activated mechanism. Her chatter was simple, mainly greetings: "I love you," or "Merry Christmas," and some that left listeners wondering ("Let's have a party").

Charmin' was fancier; she had a tiny record player in her stomach and you could change records through a slot in her side. Her repertoire included phrases that make you understand why little girls didn't take to her, such as "Some people say I'm precocious."

These Chatty voices had a star, a voice-over advertising veteran named June Foray. She has been brought back to do the reissue of Cathy, and after decades, her voice still sounds like it did in the originals: scratchy, raspy and a little hard to understand.

Sometimes it is difficult to figure out just what was going on during Mattel Co. planning sessions. A meeting of the Chatty Collectors club was much amused when one member brought in an original petticoat from a Chatty doll. The embroidery was carefully done, with no vulgar coloring -- only row after row of neatly spaced marijuana plants.

"The Mattel people were not above doing a little cross-marketing," Mince says. "One of those little records asks, "Shall we buy a Barbie?' And the next message says, "I hope you bring a lot of money.'

"Even my older sister played with Barbie," Mince says. "I never liked that doll. I wouldn't know what to do with her."

Collecting is a never-ending quest and can drive non-collecting loved ones to the brink. One Sunday Mince, her husband, Dewey Mince, and son, Sean, drove into the country and passed an antique shop they hadn't seen before. Mince ran inside "for a quick look," to see if there were any Chatty dolls or Breyer horses.

A few minutes later, according to Mince (an hour later, according to her husband and son), they were tugging her arm, saying there were two Breyer horses near the front door.

"I didn't believe them," Mince says. "I thought they would grab me, throw me in the car and drive away."

Still she went -- and found the horses real and, if you like plastic animals, quite wonderful. They would sell for $200 each, she thought, and asked if they were for sale.

"Sure." The owner shrugged, not much interested. She asked how much.

"What they're marked," he said. "Eight dollars."

Shocked at the ridiculous price, Mince hesitated. The owner misinterpreted her shock, said, "All right, you can have them both for $8."

She bought the horses and got out quickly.

"Collectors are always telling about the fabulous bargains they find, and that was mine," Mince says. "I never found (a bargain like that) before or since. But it was the kind of Sunday that keeps a collector forever full of hope."

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Mince and her Chatties will be featured on WXPX Pax TV's Treasures in Your Home, tentatively scheduled Oct. 21 or Oct. 27 at 7 p.m.