She had become the Maya Angelou of the doll world, as relentless an autobiographer as that other caged bird, her life the model for millions of young people—its humble beginnings, its years of struggle, its triumphant overcomings; and, O, her dauntlessness in the face of poverty and cruelty! O, her joy when Fate chose her to be one of its Elect!—among whom West Seventieth Street’s own empress of cool, Mila Milo, was proud to be numbered. (Her unlived life! Solanka thought. Her fictive history, part Dungeons & Dragons fairy tale, part dirt-poor ghetto saga, and all ghostwritten for her by anonymous persons of phantom talent! This was not the life he had imagined for her; this had nothing to do with the back-story he had dreamed up for his pride and joy. This L.B. was an impostor, with the wrong history, the wrong dialogue, the wrong personality, the wrong wardrobe, the wrong brain. Somewhere in medialand there was a Chateau d’If in which the real Little Brain was being held captive. Somewhere there was a Doll in an Iron Mask.)
The extraordinary thing about her fan base was its catholicity: boys dug her as much as girls, adults as much as children. She crossed all boundaries of language, race, and class. She became, variously, her admirers’ ideal lover or confidante or goal. Her first book of memoirs was originally placed by the Amazon people in the nonfiction lists. The decision to move it, and the subsequent volumes, across into the world of make-believe was resisted by both readers and staff. Little Brain, they argued, was no longer a simulacrum. She was a phenomenon. The fairy’s wand had touched her, and she was real.
All this Malik Solanka witnessed from a distance with growing horror. This creature of his own imagining, born of his best self and purest endeavor, was turning before his eyes into the kind of monster of tawdry celebrity he most profoundly abhorred. His original and now obliterated Little Brain had been genuinely smart, able to hold her own with Erasmus or Schopenhauer. She had been beautiful and sharp-tongued, but she had swum in the sea of ideas, living the life of the mind. This revised edition, over which he had long ago lost creative control, had the intellect of a slightly over-average chimpanzee. Day by day she became a creature of the entertainment microverse, her music videos—yes, she was a recording artist now!—out-raunching Madonna’s, her appearances at premieres out-Hurleying every starlet who ever trod the red carpet in a dangerous frock. She was a video game and a cover girl, and this, remember, in her personal appearance mode at least, was essentially a woman whose own head was completely concealed inside the iconic doll’s. Yet many aspirants to stardom vied for the role, even though the Little Brains Trust—which had become too big for the BBC to hold on to, and had broken away to become a booming independent business, projected to break the billion-dollar barrier someday soon-insisted on utter confidentiality; the names of the women who brought Little Brain to life were never revealed, though rumors abounded, and the paparazzi of Europe and America, bringing their own special expertise to bear, claimed to be able to identify this actress or that model by those other, non-facial attributes which Little Brain so proudly put on display.
Astonishingly, the glamour-puss transformation lost latex-headed Little Brain no fans, but brought her a new legion of adult male admirers. She had become unstoppable, giving press conferences at which she spoke of setting up her own film production company, launching her own magazine in which beauty hints, lifestyle advice, and cutting-edge contemporary culture would all receive the special Little Brain treatment, and even going nationwide, in the U.S.A., on cable television. There would be a Broadway show—she was in discussion with all the major players in the musical game, dear Tim and dear Elton and dear Cameron and of course dear, dear Andrew—and a new, big-budget movie was also planned. This would not repeat the corny teenybopper mistakes of the first but grow “organically” out of the zillion-selling memoirs. “Little Brain is not some plastic-fantastic Barbie Spice,” she told the world—she had started speaking of herself in the third person—“and the new film will be very human, and quality all the way. Marry, Bobby, Brad, Gwynnie, Meg, Julia, Tom and Nic are all interested; also Jenny, Puffy, Maddy, Robbie, Mick: I guess everybody these days wants a Little Brain.”
The ballooning triumph of Little Brain inevitably occasioned much comment and analysis. Her admirers were jeered at for their lowbrow obsession, but at once eminent theater folk came forward to speak of the ancient tradition of mask theater, its origins in Greece and Japan.
“The actor in the mask is liberated from her normality, her everydayness. Her body acquires remarkable new freedoms. The mask dictates all this. The mask acts.” Professor Solanka remained aloof, refusing all invitations to discuss his out-of-control creation. The money, however, he was unable to refuse. Royalties continued to pour into his bank account. He was compromised by greed, and the compromise sealed his lips. Contractually bound not to attack the goose that laid the golden eggs, he had to bottle up his thoughts and, in keeping his own counsel, filled up with the bitter bile of his many discontents. With every new media initiative spearheaded by the character he had once delineated with such sprightliness and care, his impotent fury grew.
In Hello! magazine, Little Brain—for a reported seven-figure fee allowed readers an intimate look at her beautiful country home, which was, apparently, an old Queen Anne pile not far from the Prince of Wales’s in Gloucestershire, and Malik Solanka, whose original inspiration had been the Rijksmuseum dollhouses, was thunderstruck by the effrontery of this latest inversion. So now the big houses would belong to these uppity dolls, while most of the human race still lived in cramped accommodation? The wrongness—in his view the moral bankruptcy—of this particular development alarmed him profoundly; still, far from bankrupted himself, he held his tongue and took the dirty money. For ten years, as “Art Garfunkel” might have said into his mouthpiece, he had backed up a whole heap of self-loathing and rage. Fury stood above him like a cresting Hokusai wave. Little Brain was his delinquent child grown into a rampaging giantess, who now stood for everything he despised and trampled beneath her giant feet all the high principles he had brought her into being to extol; including, evidently, his own.
The L.B. phenomenon had seen off the 1990s and showed no sign of running out of steam in the new millennium. Malik Solanka was forced to admit a terrible truth. He hated Little Brain.