Just as every little girl wonders about the secret life of her dolls -- teddy bear picnics and dolly tea parties when Mommie is not at home -- so we adults wonder about the lives of the authors who have brought us our favorite childhood books. They must have been beautiful princesses, we surmise, or else lonely old maids whose lives were lived through their characters. Dare Wright was an odd combination of the two -- a beautiful child/woman, who was primped and shaped by her mother, Edie, a well-known, well-respected portrait painter of her time, though a devastatingly domineering mother -- but who, after her mother died, indeed became a lonely old maid, bereft of any family ties.
Jean Nathan's "The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright" strips away the pink and white gingham cover facade of the Lonely Doll books to show us the bizarre, unconventional life of Dare Wright, a model/photographer/and author of the books, and her mother, a two-for-one pair all-but conjoined throughout Dare's life.
When first introduced to a child, the adventures of the lonely doll, Edith, and her companions, Mr. Bear and Little Bear, are enchanting. The lonely doll seems to be living in a swanky New York City apartment, but there are no scenes of a little girl's room, or even any evidence that a child lived in that home at all. In fact, Edith doesn't seem to belong to anyone; does she live alone? Is that her apartment? Whose dressing room and jewel box do Edith and Little Bear pillage and plunder? And how exactly did the Bears come to show up on the lonely doll's doorstep?
Reading Jean Nathan's book, it is quite clear to the arm-chair psychoanalyst that Mr. Bear and Little Bear are substitutes for the father and big brother that Edie callusly cast out of her life and her daughter's. For many years, Edie pretended that she had never had a son, while Dare tried to make sense of her buried memories of a family of four people that she could not clearly picture in her conscious mind.
There are parts of the book that don't seem right, and as a doll collector (and owner of a very old cloth doll) I wished had been explored more carefully: the doll in the picture book series is made of fabric (by the Italian doll company Lenci), but doesn't photograph as a 20+year-old doll; the fabric looks immaculate, and shows no signs of wear. In later books, the doll keeps getting makeovers, but somehow the cloth's integrity is sturdy enough to keep up with changing fashions. And I have long been fascinated by the photo of Edith and Little Bear, standing with their backs to the camera, on the totally deserted Brooklyn Bridge. The mechanics of managing that location shoot must have entailed months of paperwork and permits and I would have liked to have just a few details of the artist's creative processes, and the actual task of wrangling those dolls (who truly seemed to have minds of their own) into such perfect poses.
"The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll" is a book for grown-ups; once you have read it, you can never again look at the series of Lonely Doll books with child-like wonder. But for the adult reader it fills in the missing pieces of the books; the lonely Dare Wright created for herself a mother-less universe, with a father and brother who promised to never leave her, and together the three of them would live happily ever after.
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