Oh, You Beautiful Doll

The largest doll manufacturer on the West Coast is a copper-haired, blue-eyed, thirtyish San Franciscan named Nancy Ann Abbott, who had intended to be a movie star. Last week Miss Abbott sat in unaccustomed peace in her blue-carpeted studio-office: by her orders all the telephone lines that connect Nancy Ann Dressed Dolls Inc. with the world had been disconnected. Her reason: "When that phone rings it means trouble."

The trouble has plagued her ever since 1937: too many orders. Though Nancy Ann has not taken on a new account since August 1942, her backlog of orders (about 1,500,000 dolls) is enough to use up all her present capacity until the end of 1944.

The Sales.

It all began when Miss Abbott left Hollywood -- where she had moved up from bit dancing parts to leads in a few horse operas -- to look after her ailing mother. A shameless doll lover, she dressed up a small bisque (ceramic) baby doll for a friend who worked at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. Next day she had 450 orders from admiring Met employes. Of her original "Hush-a-bye Baby" model she now says, "it became so popular we had to drop it." It gave her no time for her main idea: to make collections of "storybook dolls" illustrating nursery tales and jingles.

Pretty soon, all the likely characters from well-known rhymes had been used, so Nancy began making up her own rhymes. They were so good that people wrote her letters saying "I remember that from my childhood."

When she ran out of her own rhymes, Miss Abbott went on to the "American Girl series," the "Dolls of the Day series" (Wednesday's child: a blues singer), etc. Her files now bulge with letters about little girls collecting her dolls the way boys fill in a stamp book. She has had word from Harrods of London that Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose are among the collectors. The current collection adds up to 125 different models. Since she went into business. Nancy Ann has sold almost 5,000,000 dolls.

The Production.

As early as 1939, Miss Abbott decided that the "made in Japan" label on the dolls she dressed was bad business. So she opened the first bisque doll pottery in the U.S., in Berkeley. This year she took over a bankrupt pottery in Stockton, Calif. But she had to take on a war order: a $500,000 contract for bisque cups, platters and dishes for Navy hospitals. The contract fitted in: bisque tableware turned out to have the same firing temperature, and besides the doll figure can be used--and is--in place of fire bricks to regulate furnace drafts. But the dishes hold down her doll production to a mere 4,500 a day. When the contract is finished, the Berkeley and Stockton plants combined will turn out 10,000 a day--with room to spare in the Stockton furnaces for a byproduct: nests of bisque kitchen bowls.

The nude white dolls are turned into storybook characters in a 40,000-sq.-ft. factory in San Francisco, where most of the work runs like Chevrolet's prize production line. The dolls move in a steady stream from spray-painting (a healthy suntan), through face-painting, hair-cementing (British mohair--blond, gold, auburn or brunette) etc., to a score of high-school girls who specialize, after school hours, in putting on panties, and then to the final dresses. But the sewing room is not so easy to manage. Even though Nancy Ann rotates sewing jobs so that every worker has at least four different models a week and never repeats on a given dress more than once every five weeks, the delicate, eye-straining stitching (on electric sewing machines) is still apt to bring on hysterics.

The Profits?

Nancy Ann Abbott leaves statistics to her business manager and partner, A. L. Rowland. She is usually incredulous when she hears her doll production translated into 180,000 yards of cloth, 3,000 gallons of paint, 1,500,000 yards of baby ribbon a year. But both partners clam up when they are asked about profits. All Partner Rowland will say about the net income on 1943's $1,000,000 gross is: "We ain't complainin'."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.