Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 8, 1993 TAG: 9307080034
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BRIAN TOMLIN Landmark News Service
DATELINE: KERNERSVILLE, N.C. LENGTH: Medium
But in 1953, when her commercial-artist father drew the original Little Miss Coppertone as she pranced around their Florida back yard, things were different.
Or so she's told.
"I try to think back about being in the back yard, about the kids laughing," said Barnett, who moved to Kernersville from Miami two years ago. "They tell me all this stuff. I don't remember any of it."
Forgive the lapse. The little blond-haired princess of suntan, eyes wide in surprise as a cocker spaniel tugs at her bathing-suit bottom, is now a 42-year-old secretary.
Over the years, her hair faded to a medium brown.
Even her claim to fame isn't what it once was.
At least four other women claim to be Little Miss Coppertone, and some of them can make a convincing case.
But when Barnett passes one of those bare-bottomed billboards, she sees the work her father, Pete Porter, did as a commercial artist - and she sees herself.
"Yeah, I do, more so than any of the other girls," she said. "But I'm 42 years old, you know? My eyes are starting to droop a little bit."
But they're still a pretty shade of bluish green. They're still bright.
And her father no doubt would still find her as inspiring as he did 40 years ago.
"As an illustrator, I used what was available to me," Porter said in an interview from his Hialeah, Fla., home. "Having Robyn at home and at the right age, I used her.
"They wanted a little girl who was so cute, so sweet and so innocent that nobody could possibly be offended by her bare bottom."
Still, some people were offended. But most went absolutely wild over the ad, and Coppertone sales took off.
So did the number of women claiming to be Little Miss Coppertone.
Porter concedes that two girls posed for the photographs that an advertising agency gave him to guide him in his work.
But it was his daughter, he says, who served as his live model.
That accounts for three Little Miss Coppertones - and that's only for the original ad. Slight changes made by another artist in the late 1950s spawned a new set of Little Miss Coppertone contenders.
"Don't get me wrong," Barnett said. "I'm proud that I'm a part of something my father did that's famous worldwide, but I don't dwell on it.
"I guess I'm just a simple person. It doesn't make me a different person. It doesn't make me a better person.
"It's not part of my identity. I don't want it to be."
by CNB