In Manhattan, Keeping Up With the American Girl

NEW YORK -- A rented white limousine pulls up to Manhattan's plush InterContinental hotel on a recent Friday night. It drops off three women, four daughters and four American Girl dolls.

They check in on a special American Girl package -- rooms equipped with doll beds, doll brushes and doll jewelry. The goal is to spend the weekend in New York and buy dolls.

The holiday season is the zenith of the craze for American Girl, yet another of the seemingly endless line of marketing masterstrokes designed to separate American parents from their cash.

American Girl markets a line of historical dolls that hail from Colonial, pioneer and World War II periods, among others. Unlike sexy clotheshounds Barbie and Bratz, the American Girl is obsessed, in various incarnations, with horses, reading and friends -- not boys. If innocence can be purchased for $87 -- the price of the starter kit, a basic doll and introductory book -- parents are clearly willing to pay.

The brand, a subsidiary of Mattel, rang up sales of $436 million in 2005 by being marketed as a preserve of that innocence and as a place for female bonding and child-scale history. With only three stores in the country (the others are in Chicago and Los Angeles), American Girl is also a tourist destination.

On a recent Saturday outside American Girl Place on Fifth Avenue, a 40-minute line stretches to the end of a block on 49th Street. The "Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy" is piped over loudspeakers.

Security guards wave a trickle into the store -- "Step in, step in!" -- and as young girls cross the threshold, they emit a uniform squeal. Here rises a four-story, hearts-and-friendship world that seems to tap young girls' fantasies, and it's all for sale.

Inside, the place is jammed: girls in tutus, girls in velvet and patent leather; girls with snowflakes painted on their cheeks and doll heads peeking out of their backpacks; girls whispering requests into adult ears; and parents looking deep into their daughters' eyes.

Employees in the purple-walled emporium speak of it breathlessly as an "experience," not a store. And indeed it contains a doll hair salon, a cafe that serves high tea to girls and dolls, a small Broadway-quality theater with plays about dolls and a photo studio ready to immortalize the duo of doll and girl.

"You can't do the store in one day," says Sharon French, 44, a social worker from Boston -- though one day was enough for her to spend about $700. She was part of a group that arrived in four chartered buses, leaving before dawn on a day trip to visit the store.

The dolls have a chipmunk prettiness, with fat cheeks, two small front teeth, huge eyes, a tiny narrow nose and varying facial features and shades of skin and eyes.

Kit, for instance, lives during the Depression but still has a $58 bed and a $159 trunk. Addy is an African American girl who escaped from slavery at the time of the Civil War but keeps $20 accessories, including a gourd, a cowrie shell necklace and a $70 desk.

There are sequel storybooks, companion dolls, DVDs, accessories from the DVDs and lots and lots of clothes, sold in the store on doll-size hangers. Also on offer are a robe and fuzzy-wuzzies, a tap costume, powder-blue snow boots, satiny ballet slippers for flat feet, a hair-care set for $32, doll-size horses ($62), kayaks ($28) and sleighs ($150).

In the doll salon on the ground floor, for fees up to $20, seven stylists speed-spritz the hair of dolls strapped into mini-swiveling salon chairs, wielding tinfoil and a toothbrush to create ringlets, braids, ponytails, curls, straight locks and waves. Also available is the Pampering Plus package: For $5, a stylist washes the doll's vinyl face.

Static-haired Kennedi Wells, 5, sobs near the salon because she wanted a doll appointment but couldn't bear to leave her doll Marisol alone for the hours-long wait.

Alana Huggins, 9, has already waited a full three hours. "We had to browse around and shop," says her mother, Sonya Greene, 46, who sits exhausted on the floor nearby after spending $200.

In the cafe -- reservations recommended -- a doll can be affixed to the table in a clip-on chair with her own table setting. Tea, accompanied by a harpist, included crustless sandwiches stuck with toothpicks with American flags, and cinnamon buns, pink lemonade and citrus fruit rinds filled with Jell-O.

Strutting through an upper floor amid admiring stares, Julia Burzynski, 12, of Millburn, N.J., is dressed in an outfit identical to that of her doll Felicity. Her friend, Angelica Trindade, 10, is dressed like her doll, Josefina.

How many times have they been to the store?

"Oh my God," replies Julia, saying she has lost track. "Twenty?"

Her mother, Cynthia Burzynski, a civil engineer, estimates that she has spent $2,000 on American Girl gear. Julia, she says, has set up her playroom in historical periods.

As the day wears on, nerves in the store fray. Girls push near the escalators. Boys splay out on the floor. Grandmas slump on a couch. Girls cry. Parents say no. "It's rough," says a security guard into his headset, staring at the crowds.

The next day, four Boston girls get into a rented white limousine and head back home, playing with their new dolls and watching an American Girl DVD (Molly's movie) along the way. Their mothers each spent at least $1,750 on the weekend. But this first visit to an American Girl emporium has only whetted the girls' appetites.

"Going to the store made me want to get more of the American Girl stuff," Hannah Orcutt, a bright, straight-talking 10-year-old, fond of a red Patriots cap, says later. "It's hard to think what, 'cause there's so much there. I just wanted the whole store. "