Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World's Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her

by Robin Gerber

  Ruth and Elliot had been considering getting into the doll business, but they wanted to find a unique point of entry. “We never entered any business the same way other people entered. We never copied people, ever,” Ruth recalled. But when Ruth suggested her idea for an adult doll to Elliot, he balked. “Ruth, no mother is going to buy her daughter a doll with breasts,” he told her, despite his usual support for his wife’s ideas. “She was devastated by his reaction,” Ruth’s friend Fern Field said. The rest of the all-male team agreed with Elliot. They were comfortable with toy guns and rockets, musical instruments and pop-up toys, but the doll Ruth described defied their imagination. They told her that mothers would be horrified by a sexual-looking doll. What she was proposing was much too curvaceous. Parents would object. Boys and girls did not just play with different toys; they grew up to be men and women who created different toys.

  Further, a small plastic doll with the detail Ruth wanted could not be made, they told her. Besides, even if it could be made, it would be too expensive to sell. Ruth wanted realistic clothing, with zippers, darts, and hemlines. She wanted eyeliner and rouge on the tiny face and colored polish on the fingers. The costs for engineering the molds and machinery, not to mention postwar wages, made Ruth’s vision a very expensive experiment. “Why doesn’t she stick to management and marketing,” the designers muttered.

  But nothing fueled Ruth’s drive like being told something could not be done. She pushed back, and the impasse dragged on as Barbara entered her teen years still playing with paper dolls. Then, in 1956, on a Handler family vacation in Europe, Ruth found exactly what she needed to change the minds of her designers.

  The Handlers had arranged for a six-week grand tour of Europe from mid-July to early September. With their two children, they sailed on the Queen Mary from New York to England, where they stayed a week in London, and then went on to Paris. From there, a private car drove them into the Alps to the Grand Hotel National, overlooking the lake in Lucerne, Switzerland. The first day they rode the railway to the top of Mount Pilatus and later did a grand alpine tour, seeing the spot where the Rhine and Rhône rivers rushed from glaciers. Before they left for Venice, they had a free day in Lucerne to shop and tour the picture-perfect Swiss town. As they wandered the cobbled streets, they found a toy shop, likely the Franz Carl Weber shop, named for the famous toymaker. Ruth’s son, Ken, who was twelve years old, wanted to go right in, but Ruth and fifteen-year-old Barbara stood outside, transfixed by a display in the window. Wooden dolls hung next to a hard plastic doll. That doll was named Lilli.

  The Lilli dolls looked elongated and cartoonish and were dressed in gorgeous costumes. One was in a ski outfit; another had a distinctly European costume. Ruth and Barbara had never seen dolls like these before, and Ruth offered to buy one for Barbara to put on display in her room since she had passed the age for playing with dolls. Barbara was delighted, but she had a hard time choosing among the dolls with their distinct outfits. Ruth wanted to buy the clothes separately but was told that they were not sold that way. If a customer wanted a different costume, she had to buy the doll that went with it.

  Later in the trip, in Vienna, Ruth and Barbara saw more Lilli dolls in a local store, packaged in clear round plastic cases, with different outfits that Barbara loved. Ruth was certain the Lilli doll manufacturers had made a mistake by not offering separate costumes. Ruth bought several dolls to bring back to Mattel, as well as another for Barbara.

  The plastic Lilli dolls were just under a foot tall, all with the same face of an adult woman, narrow eyebrows sloping up in a sharp inverted V, eyes glancing to the side, and red lips provocatively puckered. They had long, shapely legs; well-endowed breasts; and tiny waists.

  “Bild-Lilli,” as the doll was called, was not primarily a child’s toy in Europe. She started life as a sex toy. She originated in a comic strip in a tawdry gossip-sheet newspaper called Bild-Zeitung. Lilli pursued rich men by striking provocative poses in revealing clothes and spouting comic-strip bubbles of suggestive dialogue. In one cartoon, as she holds a newspaper over her naked body, Lilli tells a friend, “We had a fight and he took back all the presents he gave me.” She was naive and clever at the same time, with her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail and one large curl coming down over her forehead.

  Lilli had been born as a doll only four years before Ruth’s trip to Europe when Reinhard Beuthien, her cartoonist, teamed up with designer Max Weissbrodt. The two saw the potential in taking Lilli off the page and making her a lascivious three-dimensional toy. Weissbrodt worked for the Hamburg-based company O & M Hausser, famous since 1904 for its molded figures made of Elastolin and by the 1950s for its innovative work with molded plastic. Lilli, her long legs ending in a molded black shoe, was a high heel away from being a prostitute, which in Hamburg was a job licensed and allowed by the government.

  Lilli dolls could be bought in tobacco shops, bars, and adult-themed toy stores. Men got Lilli dolls as gag gifts at bachelor parties, put them on their car dashboard, dangled them from the rearview mirror, or gave them to girlfriends as a suggestive keepsake. Lilli was also a marketing tool for the Bild newspaper. Over time, the unusual doll with her wardrobe and accessories became a children’s toy as well. But Ruth knew nothing of Lilli’s past and did not care. She finally had the model for a doll she was certain would be a hit. Back in California, dolls in hand, she went to work.

  Jack Ryan, head of Mattel’s research and design team, was about to fly to Japan on a project. Ruth stuck a Lilli doll in his suitcase. “While you’re over there,” she said, “see if you can find someone who could make a doll of this size. We’ll sculpt our own face and body and design a line of clothes, but see if you can find a manufacturer.”

  In a rare admission of her own vulnerability, Ruth later said that the doll could have been made in the United States “if someone had had the will and the motivation, but we did not have anyone that had that strong motivation during that period, and even I was not that secure.” She wanted to soften the brittle hard plastic of the German doll, but softer plastics were a recent innovation and suppliers were scarce. Then there was the problem of casting the new material to get the detail Ruth envisioned in the doll’s face and body. And finding workers to mass-produce the doll and its tiny, realistic clothes at wages that would keep the toy affordable was daunting. Ruth believed Ryan would find a manufacturer in Japan, known for its workers’ skill with detailed design. But Ryan would find problems in Japan, too. The Mattel designers had been right about the difficulty of producing the doll Ruth wanted.

  When Jack Ryan and Frank Nakamura, a young product designer Ryan took with him to Japan, showed Lilli to Japanese manufacturers, they reacted with distaste. “They thought she looked kind of mean—sharp eyebrows and eye shadow,” Nakamura, who spoke Japanese, explained. Finally, Ryan found Kokusai Boeki, a small company that distributed toys and other items in Japan. Their rotocasting equipment, used to make low-cost dolls, was very crude, and they were accustomed to working with hard plastic. They melted hard granular polymer material that formed the plastic into a liquid and squeezed it into a mold, filling its cavities. The plastic was then chilled to its original hard state, shrinking during the process, and thus easily removed from the mold. But softer vinyl did not always fill the tiny indentations during this injection molding process. If Mattel wanted Kokusai Boeki to make the odd-looking doll, the Japanese told Ryan and Nakamura, a better material and molding method would have to be found.

  Back in the States, Ruth started the plastics search and soon learned about a malleable form of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC. In 1926, Waldo Semon, an organic chemist for B. F. Goodrich, was attempting to bind rubber to metal. As he experimented with the polymer vinyl chloride, he discovered that he could turn it into the jellylike plastic we now know as vinyl. He tried his new material out, making golf balls and shoe heels. Semon later found that vinyl was inexpensive, durable, fire resistant, and easily molded, but it was not until the late 1930s tha
t this plasticized PVC was commercialized for tubing and gaskets. World War II boosted the industry through military-funded PVC plants for the vinyl-coated wire used aboard U.S. military ships. By war’s end, B. F. Goodrich dominated the market, producing more than ten million pounds of PVC a year. Polyvinyl chloride was used for everything from pipes to beach balls, squeezable toys, syringe bulbs, soft-sided bottles, air-filled cushions, and upholstered couches.

  For all its advantages, however, the new vinyl still required a special casting method called “rotational molding” in order to get the fine detail of the doll Ruth wanted. This technique required near constant turning of the hollow metal mold over an open flame, and the process was slow and inconsistent. But early in the 1950s, Goodrich discovered a form of powdered PVC that worked particularly well in rotation molding, and the process itself was revolutionized by a new type of hot air oven. With more control over the heating, the special grade of plastic powder could be coaxed into the tiny channels of the mold as it was rotated during the heating and cooling process.

  While the process was faster and produced more predictable results, the advances were so new that neither the doll makers in Japan, nor Seymour Adler, head of production and engineering, whom Mattel sent from the United States to help, had ever tried the new method. “They had to basically figure it out,” explained a Mattel designer. “They had to create the manufacturing process and to work perfectly with the Japanese to do that. They had trouble working out the molding. When they took the hand out the fingers would break off…there were bubbles on the nose.” Adler landed in Japan clutching the latest plastics industry journals, but he and his Japanese colleagues had to make up the process as they went along.

  As the Japanese team worked on perfecting the mold process, simple castings from the electroplated molds were sent back to Mattel for approval. The doll looked too much like a prostitute for the company’s taste, so she was being put through a makeover. Mattel hired Bud Westmore, who had been a makeup artist since the 1930s and worked on dozens of movies as well as the television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents, to do the doll’s face. Lilli’s widow’s peak curved like the top half of a heart, accenting a high forehead. Her hairline was altered to make it more conventional. Designers relaxed Lilli’s exaggerated puckered lips, although they were still bright red. Her arched eyebrows sank into a straighter line, and her face became less pointy, while her hair was rooted so it could be brushed and styled. The changes were subtle, but Ruth wanted them anyway. In the end, Lilli and her new sister were barely distinguishable except to the new doll’s creator.

  Each change in the mold required at least six sample castings. Language and cultural barriers led to mistakes. The Japanese did not understand American taste or quality standards, and their factory was fairly crude. Mattel felt that the first shipment of dolls had eyes that were too slanted. Then the doll’s breasts were made with nipples, despite Jack Ryan’s repeated requests that they be smooth. Finally, he abandoned words and picked up a doll. “I took my little fine Swiss file,” Ryan said, “and very daintily filed the nipples off.”

  Ruth treated her creation like a child, naming it early in the design process for the doll’s inspiration—her daughter, Barbara. She wanted to use her daughter’s nickname of Babs, but that name was copyrighted, as was the name “Barbara.” But “Barbie” was available, so she took it. Consumed with the doll’s manufacturing, Ruth sometimes called her daughter by the doll’s name, a mistake the teenage Barbara did not appreciate.

  As Barbie’s manufacturing moved ahead, Elliot made a trip to Japan to check on the doll’s progress and to start the production of dollhouse furniture he had designed. Ruth loved the new doll furniture, which was modern and made from wood. She saw the possibility of using Elliot’s idea as an accessory for her new doll, but Elliot would have to make his furniture Barbie-size. As Ruth explained later, however, when she tried to talk to him about it, Elliot’s bias against the doll came out. He insisted that his furniture was “something totally different,” although he could not explain why. Ruth felt that they were not communicating, and she was certain he was making a mistake. She sensed that he was going along with Barbie but did not really believe in the doll. Faced with the many production and marketing problems that Barbie created, Ruth gave up trying to convince him.

  Ruth did succeed in getting her doll a couture wardrobe. She had started gathering ideas by contacting Obletter Spielwaren, the German toy retailer, in November and ordered more Lilli dolls. Although the Lilli doll clothing could not be bought separately at toy stores, Ruth convinced the company to send her individual outfits. She ordered six dolls in different costumes, including a light blue dress and a carnival costume. She also picked out nine other outfits, including a blue evening dress, a woman’s blouse, and a dirndl dress with a short yolk and belt. The next month she ordered twelve more Lilli dolls from the Franz Carl Weber stores.

  Armed with her trove of Lilli doll models and clothing, Ruth searched for a dress designer. Elliot suggested calling Los Angeles’s Chouinard School of Art. There they found Charlotte Buettenback Johnson, an American fashion designer who had worked in the New York City garment industry from the time she was seventeen. Divorced with no children, Johnson had moved to California, where she had a business designing and sewing children’s clothes. She was also teaching a fashion design class at Chouinard. Ruth asked her to become the personal clothing designer for a new doll, telling her, “I want American clothes, and I want play situations which teenage girls would go through. I want things like prom dresses, wedding dresses, and career-office dresses. I want her to be able to dress up, and I want slacks.” Interchangeable outfits, Ruth decided, would be the key to enhancing the doll’s play value. Clothes also had the potential to be the most profitable part of the new project.

  Johnson influenced every part of the design process, and some people said the final doll had the same shape head and hair as the statuesque designer. At first, Ruth brought dolls to Johnson’s apartment once or twice a week at night, and together they decided on the outfits. Johnson found a Japanese woman in her neighborhood to sew the tiny samples. But as the line developed, Ruth’s production staff told her that all the zippers, snaps, buttons, darts, and hemlines made the clothes far too detailed to be manufactured cost effectively in the United States.

  Johnson quit her jobs and spent the next two years in Japan working with local suppliers to design a wardrobe appropriate for an adult woman or a teenager, in accord with Ruth’s sense of little girls’ desires. She searched for fabrics that had the right weight and small enough designs for the proportions of the clothes she planned, all fashioned with tiny snaps, buttons measuring less than an eighth of an inch in diameter, and miniature zippers.

  Born a year after Ruth and raised in Omaha, Johnson was tenacious. She also held strong opinions about fashion and design, which served her well in her new job. In Tokyo, living at the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Imperial Hotel, she made unrelenting demands on the Japanese designer and two seamstresses she met with six days a week. She convinced textile merchants to make cloth to her specifications in small, and therefore costly, batches. She insisted on pastel-colored tricot for the undergarments. Her early designs included two strapless brassieres, one half-slip, one floral petticoat, and a girdle. No detail escaped her attention.

  Ruth emphasized that detail was the key for making this doll unique and marketable. She believed mothers and their daughters would appreciate the care that went into the clothes. In later years, Ruth said that her competitors never successfully copied Barbie because they did not create the quality product that she insisted on.

  Barbie’s assembly was done by Japanese workers who worked either in factories or their homes. Part of what made the doll feasible to manufacture in Japan was the country’s low cost of labor, combined with the diligence and care of its workers. Much of the doll’s wardrobe was stitched together by “homework people,” so named because their homes were their worksho
ps. Like immigrant workers in the early part of the century in America, they worked quickly as they were paid by piece. Mattel’s efficiency expert, Joe Cannizzaro, marveled at the patience and cleanliness of these seamstresses. “I never saw any dresses—even white wedding dresses—get soiled,” he said, “though they were in the homes and on the tatami floors, because everything was so spotless…. They were delivered by bike and by pickup truck. They were handled four, five, six times. And they never got dirty.” For Mattel, these diligent low-cost workers were well worth the 35 percent import tariff.

  The factory workers who assembled the doll came in from the Japanese countryside, willing to work for low wages until harvest time. They lived in company-run dormitories and ate at company cafeterias. In August they quit en masse to harvest rice. They machine-stitched blond or brown plastic Saran strands onto the dolls’ skulls and trained them into topknot ponytails and tightly curled bangs. A template covered the doll’s face so her pouting lips could be painted, as well as her eyes with their sideways glance and snow white irises. Limbs reengineered by Jack Ryan were fitted to her sockets, and, as Charlotte Johnson had so carefully planned, her clothing slipped on easily.

  Dressed in her first outfit, a zebra-striped bathing suit, the new doll seemed to beg for the rest of her wardrobe. For that, Johnson worked with Ruth to create the clothes of girls’ daydreams in 1950s America. Besides the wedding dress that would be on dramatic show at Toy Fair, the doll had outfits for attending a football game, playing tennis, and dancing as a ballerina. There was also a puff sleeve negligee and a ball gown with a pure white faux-fur wrap. The Donna Reed television show had premiered the previous fall. Ruth’s new doll would feed the fantasies of girls who imagined themselves, like Reed, happily married mothers and wives.