United Kingdom, both of which wanted to continue recruiting high-school graduates. In January 2000, the United States finally dropped its opposition: the Pentagon retained the right to recruit seventeen-year-olds but agreed to keep them out of direct combat until age eighteen.
4 Interview in Komsomolskaya Pravda , the Moscow newspaper, quoted in the Daily Telegraph (London), June 25, 1999.
5 Named after the former child star Jackie Coogan, who, after a lucrative movie career, grew up into poverty, then sued his parents for misuse of monies he had never seen.
6 Education or the lack of it plays a central role in a child performerâs chances of surviving into a sane adulthood. I think itâs no coincidence that two child actors whose adult lives seem to be conducted with dignity and purpose have had decent educations: Jodie Foster, who manages to act in, direct, and produce films with quiet integrity; and Sheila Kuehl, formerly of the TV sitcom Dobie Gillis , now a member of the California State Assembly (D., Santa Monica), sponsoring progressive legislation for womenâs, childrenâs, and lesbian/gay rights.
THREE
On Air
Show me my face before I was born .
âZ EN KOAN
Itâs a rare little girl who gets to play with a doll of herself.
There was a Robin Morgan doll. There also was a Dagmar doll, named after the character I played for seven years on TV. The Dagmar doll was a large, cloth-stuffed-with-cotton, floppy, genial creature, attired in 1910-era period clothes, the navy-blue âsailor suitâ middy blouse and skirt with long black stockings that constituted Dagmarâs costume (wardrobe permitted me variations for festive occasions). Her yarn hair was done up in the braids Iâd made famous at the cost of a scalp so tight I had a permanent, mild headache I no longer noticed.
Sent off with Aunt Sally on a ten-city tour to hype the Dagmar dollâs sales in department-store toy areas, I cheerfully sat in costume, signing photographs for tongue-tied kids and their gushing mothers, all of us surrounded by eerie, smiling, life-size, stuffed versions of myself.
But the Robin Morgan doll was even spookier. It was manufactured in a limited number, as an elite dollâthat strange commercial category known as âa collectorâs itemââalthough I was allowed to keep one for promotion purposes. A plaster cast was made of my six-year-old faceâaclaustrophobic experience where you breathe through straws placed in your nostrilsâand then the cast was re-created in hard rubber. This doll also wore her hair in pigtails, but the wig was from human hair almost identical in color to my own, and she had tiny eyelashes fashioned of fine gold wire. Her fifteen-inch-tall body was also made of hard rubber. Her clothing could be taken offâreal buttons and buttonholes, real hooks and eyes on real patent-leather shoesâand she even had a petticoat and underpants that came on and off, showing a smooth sexless body (which I examined the second I was alone with her) with hinged limbs and detailed hands complete with fingers and nails. Itâs just as well I hadnât yet heard of voodoo, or I mightâve felt even uneasier gazing at this creature than I already did.
She lost her limbs one by one over time. Finally, a few years ago, burrowing through Scrabble boxes and chess sets gathering dust on a closet shelf, I came across her headâdisembodied but smiling brightly, the wire eyelashes only a bit tarnished and bent out of shape. I think I must have saved her (or at least her head) less out of fondness than some inchoate self-preservative impulse that was discomfited at the possibility of such a graven image falling into anyone elseâs hands.
But then there was the Doll Collection.
The doll collection began well enough, in the for-play category. But it wound up in the good-peg-for-press-interview category. Over a period of years, the doll population grew
4 Interview in Komsomolskaya Pravda , the Moscow newspaper, quoted in the Daily Telegraph (London), June 25, 1999.
5 Named after the former child star Jackie Coogan, who, after a lucrative movie career, grew up into poverty, then sued his parents for misuse of monies he had never seen.
6 Education or the lack of it plays a central role in a child performerâs chances of surviving into a sane adulthood. I think itâs no coincidence that two child actors whose adult lives seem to be conducted with dignity and purpose have had decent educations: Jodie Foster, who manages to act in, direct, and produce films with quiet integrity; and Sheila Kuehl, formerly of the TV sitcom Dobie Gillis , now a member of the California State Assembly (D., Santa Monica), sponsoring progressive legislation for womenâs, childrenâs, and lesbian/gay rights.
THREE
On Air
Show me my face before I was born .
âZ EN KOAN
Itâs a rare little girl who gets to play with a doll of herself.
There was a Robin Morgan doll. There also was a Dagmar doll, named after the character I played for seven years on TV. The Dagmar doll was a large, cloth-stuffed-with-cotton, floppy, genial creature, attired in 1910-era period clothes, the navy-blue âsailor suitâ middy blouse and skirt with long black stockings that constituted Dagmarâs costume (wardrobe permitted me variations for festive occasions). Her yarn hair was done up in the braids Iâd made famous at the cost of a scalp so tight I had a permanent, mild headache I no longer noticed.
Sent off with Aunt Sally on a ten-city tour to hype the Dagmar dollâs sales in department-store toy areas, I cheerfully sat in costume, signing photographs for tongue-tied kids and their gushing mothers, all of us surrounded by eerie, smiling, life-size, stuffed versions of myself.
But the Robin Morgan doll was even spookier. It was manufactured in a limited number, as an elite dollâthat strange commercial category known as âa collectorâs itemââalthough I was allowed to keep one for promotion purposes. A plaster cast was made of my six-year-old faceâaclaustrophobic experience where you breathe through straws placed in your nostrilsâand then the cast was re-created in hard rubber. This doll also wore her hair in pigtails, but the wig was from human hair almost identical in color to my own, and she had tiny eyelashes fashioned of fine gold wire. Her fifteen-inch-tall body was also made of hard rubber. Her clothing could be taken offâreal buttons and buttonholes, real hooks and eyes on real patent-leather shoesâand she even had a petticoat and underpants that came on and off, showing a smooth sexless body (which I examined the second I was alone with her) with hinged limbs and detailed hands complete with fingers and nails. Itâs just as well I hadnât yet heard of voodoo, or I mightâve felt even uneasier gazing at this creature than I already did.
She lost her limbs one by one over time. Finally, a few years ago, burrowing through Scrabble boxes and chess sets gathering dust on a closet shelf, I came across her headâdisembodied but smiling brightly, the wire eyelashes only a bit tarnished and bent out of shape. I think I must have saved her (or at least her head) less out of fondness than some inchoate self-preservative impulse that was discomfited at the possibility of such a graven image falling into anyone elseâs hands.
But then there was the Doll Collection.
The doll collection began well enough, in the for-play category. But it wound up in the good-peg-for-press-interview category. Over a period of years, the doll population grew
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