The doll’s implicit audience was not children but adults. She was too expensive, initially, for most kids. Lilli was sold at newsstands and tobacco shops, an advertising gimmick that became a raunchy gift for girlfriends or bachelor parties. A car ornament model proved especially popular with men. “She was an irresistible gag,” one buyer told the eccentric Andy Warhol muse and Barbie collector BillyBoy* (he spells his name with an asterisk). “Imagine, a doll with big tits and long legs! Nothing like her existed before, and she was such a clever joke. We’d have such laughs over this gadget, especially on Saturday nights when we’d all drive around cruising for girls and having beers at local pubs.”
But Lilli was not, as many have claimed, an “escort” or “call girl” or, per one outlet, “a fictional prostitute” who would “do anything with sweaty clients, provided the money was right.” She was not even a “sex doll,” at least not in the modern sense. She was an adult doll, and sex was always her subtext. “The prudery of the Nazi era was still rife in Germany in those years,” Bild editor Hans Bluhm recalled. She was about as pornographic as Betty Boop. “Lilli was a sex ingredient of a saucy but harmless kind.” Rolf Hausser agreed. “This is most important: No one could say she wasn’t a virgin.” The doll was “not intended for men more than for women,” he insisted. Eventually, she became ubiquitous enough that children became her customers too, as Lilli moved to airport lobbies, then toy stores. “Product for all,” one ad read, “from child to grandpa.”
Above all things, Lilli was a marketing strategy, an extension of the Springer brand and its most effective ad. When the company hired models to dress as the doll for a cross-country press tour, Germans lined up for autographs and the occasional kiss. Lilli was more than Bild’s public face, she was a symbol of the consumer society the publisher had endeavored to bring about. (As Springer ramped up his support for reunification, an internal memo noted that a commercial about Lilli would be used for “propagandistic activity” across West Germany.)
