Reproduced here is a fascinating biography which appears in the current issue of Ulster Magazine. Ulster is an upstate New York county in which the Tonner Doll Company is located. It's very worthwhile reading!
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| Robert Tonner is “one of the most influential doll designers of all
time,” says Pat Henry, publisher of Fashion Doll Quarterly magazine and a
book about Tonner |
Doll Doyen
Robert Tonner’s designs set the industry standard
By Steve Israel
Photos by Michael Bloom
ROBERT TONNER'S DESIGNS SET THE DOLLMAKER"S
LONG, improbable journey to Paris’ Louvre Museum and Hollywood’s “Harry
Potter” and “Twilight” films starts in the small Midwestern farming town
of Bluffton, Ind.
That’s where Kingston’s Robert Tonner was the
shy son of a mother who was so sick for so long – from encephalitis,
sleeping sickness and then cancer – she literally spent years in bed.
Tonner’s father, who designed truck bodies, had to pay so much for his
wife’s medicine – $125 per week on his $100-per-week salary – that he
would move his family from one home to another because he could never
afford the mortgage payments.
Robert Tonner escaped this bleak world of the
1950s and ’60s by doing the one thing he knew he could do since he was 3
years old: draw, especially the immaculately detailed, colorful
superheroes such as Superman, who took him further away from that gray
world.
“I would literally draw for hours and hours,”
he says in his wood-paneled office in Kingston, surrounded by
glass-encased shelves of the fruits of that drawing, his dolls, from his
world-renowned, multimillion-dollar Tonner Doll Co.
Robert Tonner would draw, design and sculpt his
way to become “one of the most influential doll designers of all time,”
according to Pat Henry, publisher of Fashion Doll Quarterly magazine
and a book about Tonner.
Not only have his dolls been displayed in the
Louvre – the home of the Mona Lisa – his exquisite, immaculately
proportioned designs have earned him the exclusive rights to bring Harry
Potter, Superman, Spider-Man and a slew of other film and comic book
characters to doll-like life around the world.
They’ve also earned him the praise of fellow doll designers who say he’s elevated doll making, and marketing, to an art.
“He’s like Steve Jobs; he has that innovative
spirit,” says Helen Kish, head of a doll-collector business, Denver’s
Kish and Co., who describes Tonner’s dolls as “objects of beauty.’
“He’s not only a fantastic sculptor and awesome
clothing designer, he’s also a great businessman. He has his pulse on
what people need, and he’s right there to give it to them, even if they
don’t know it yet.”
Tonner’s dolls, priced from about $60 to $400,
may bring the meticulously real world of glamour, fashion and fantasy to
millions, but the story of the man who dreams them, designs them, draws
them, sculpts them and sells them is grounded in a harsh reality.
So sure, as a chubby little boy who even put a
towel on his shoulders to make believe he could fly like Superman,
Tonner dreamed of superheroes with superpowers. But his own life often
seemed like the stuff of a bleak Dickens novel. Tonner was so poor that
the best childhood gift he ever received was a stack of blank newsprint
on which he could draw.
His other thrill seems old-fashioned in these
instant-gratification days when kids take to Twitter, Flickr and YouTube
as naturally as they once played with dolls. On those rare days when
Tonner’s mother was well enough to get out of bed, she showed Robert how
to use the family’s Singer sewing machine. It wasn’t long before he was
creating designs for clothes that again took him away from his grim
reality. He still marvels at his first design come true: an Easter dress
for his sister.
“It was a whole thing where you have nothing,
and then all of a sudden, you have something,” says Tonner, 61, who now
actually embraces Twitter, Flickr and YouTube to sell his dolls.
So it would seem logical that Tonner would use
his drawing, sewing and designing skills to escape Bluffton, especially
because the “painfully shy” boy discovered he was gay at a time and in a
place no one mentioned – let alone acknowledged – such a thing.
“You got the impression nothing was worse,” Tonner says. “You got the idea your core was flawed.”
But as for embarking on a life of art right after high school?
Who did that in Bluffton, Ind.?
Everyone there, says Tonner, had something to do with farming or the town’s hospital.
Besides, magazines that might have inspired
Tonner – such as Glamour or Vogue – were practically unheard of in
Bluffton in the ’60s.
“Just Corn (Corn and Soybean Digest) magazine and American Tractor,” he says.
So Tonner decided to study medicine, which he
did at colleges in Indiana, Louisiana and Colorado, even though his
heart wasn’t in it.
But when three friends moved to New York City
and invited him to join them, Tonner jumped at the idea, even though it
meant working in a factory in New Jersey, doing something far removed
from the fashion industry that would embrace him: stuffing garbage bags
into boxes.
Then, one summer’s day in 1973, he found
himself in Greenwich Village, walking past one of the great art schools
in the world: Parsons School of Design. Amazingly, its summer session
was offering a course in drawing and sewing, the prerequisite for
fashion design.
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| Hundreds of dolls are on display at Tonner’s retail store on Hurley Avenue in Kingston. | | |
Tonner was so good at what he’d already been doing that he won a scholarship for the fall semester.
By 1976, he ended up with one of the top fashion
designers in the world, Bill Blass, thanks to a model who suggested he
apply for a job. But he was still shy enough – “very, very, devilishly
shy,” says Kish – that when he met with Blass’ lawyer to draw up a
contract, he only managed to ask for the relatively paltry yearly salary
of $25,000 – still enough to pay for his $125-per-month five-floor
walk-up apartment between 21st and 22nd streets on the East Side of
Manhattan.
But this is how the withdrawn Midwestern kid began
to expose himself to the world. When Blass sent him to Paris and London
to check out the latest fashions and fabrics, Tonner, who says he’d
“barely stayed at Holiday Inns,” marveled at something as simple as a
hotel room mini bar.
“I took all the candy, all the peanuts, and then
they’d fill it up again,” he says, his voice still tinged with wonder,
even after some 30 years.
Not only was Tonner designing everything from
down jackets to women’s sportswear, but he was also learning to sculpt
his designs. And then, just as his life changed when he’d walked past
Parsons, it changed again when, in the early 1980s, he walked through
one of the world’s ultimate toy shops, FAO Schwarz.
He saw a display of European-designed Sasha
dolls, with their trademark mitt hands and bodies that were, he says “so
beautifully proportioned.”
When he decided to try his hand at sculpting his own dolls, he realized that “all my interests were coming together.”
He began collecting dolls, reading about the
history of dolls and experimenting with material and form to create his
own dolls – papier maché first, then dipped in peach-colored paint for a
real look. Every night, after working 12-hour days as a designer, he’d
work on those dolls.
“I was obsessive about it,” he says, “like drawing.”
Finally, frustrated that he couldn’t be creative
in the supposedly creative business of fashion design – not being able
to design a skirt in the perfect color because the buyer said it
wouldn’t sell – Tonner decided to give his all to doll making.
His career – and life – changed forever in the
late ’80s when he bought a house in the Hudson Valley spot where his
friends had a home: the postcard-pretty Ulster County hamlet of Stone
Ridge, where hipster stars such as Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz now
live.
That’s where, instead of the flat fields of
Indiana, there were trees, streams and a waterfall – in his backyard.
That’s also where he met the man who would become his husband, his
partner of 27 years, Realtor Harris Safier.
As Tonner grew comfortable with his new
surroundings, and himself, he also grew as a doll maker, experimenting
with material such as porcelain or plastic, and with the types of dolls
he would sculpt: fashion dolls such as Betsy McCall, who represented a
“change from the chubby infant to a thinner young girl,” Tonner says on
one of the many videos on his web site.
He also changed how the dolls were sold and
manufactured, at first enlisting his sister-in-law to sew the hip
fashions this former Bill Blass designer designed, then enlisting his
brother-in-law to create an assembly line. When he found an overseas
manufacturer who could produce his dolls at, say $12 per figure, instead
of the $23 it cost him for parts alone, Tonner Doll Co. really took
off. He grew so successful that in 2007 he was able to buy one of
America’s oldest doll companies, Effanbee, which made the porcelain
Little Orphan Annie, Patsy and Brenda Starr dolls. He not only won the
exclusive rights to make what Pat Henry calls his “ridiculously perfect”
dolls for Hollywood blockbusters such as the “Harry Potter” and
“Twilight” series, but he also acquired the right to design perennially
selling dolls for such timeless movies as “Gone With the Wind.” And as
every new media technology emerged – from YouTube to Twitter – Tonner
was always the first in the industry to use them to publicize and sell
his dolls.
But for all his success – enabling him to donate
to local causes such as Kingston hospitals and the LGBTQ Community
Center – he’s never lost that little shy boy obsession with creating
something from nothing. Even though he has a staff of about 20, Tonner
still retreats to a tiny 8-by-10-foot room in Tonner Doll headquarters
to sculpt his latest designs. It’s there, near an old Singer sewing
machine, that he was recently sculpting an anatomically perfect version
of a character that remains one of his all-time favorites: Superman.
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Article and Photographs
© 2013 Hudson Valley Media Group
40 Mulberry Street, Middletown, NY 10940
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