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

by Robin Gerber

  It took Ruth three years to ready Barbie for sale, and then she charged into the doll’s marketing. “We were so pumped up by Ruth’s enthusiasm, we became believers,” said one of the sales representatives who was at the 1959 Toy Fair. “The doll was radically different, but Ruth’s logic made sense to us. We thought kids who liked paper dolls would like this.” Mattel called the doll Barbie Teenage Fashion Model, trying to downplay her sexuality and to play up, for parents, the idea that many girls would want to be as well groomed as a model. But no amount of ad copy could disguise Barbie’s proportions, estimated at 39–21–33 in an adult woman.

  In addition, the fashion dolls that Ruth hated glutted the market. Stores were loaded with them and their costumes, unable to sell their inventory and unwilling to add more to their stock. If they were inclined to buy, they were not likely to want a doll that they believed would horrify mothers because of its breasts and sexuality.

  As she stood in the Barbie showroom at Toy Fair, Ruth exuded her characteristic confidence. “One of my strengths is that I do have the courage of my convictions and the guts to take a position,” Ruth told an interviewer. “I can be very persuasive in getting others to see the light.” But her bravado began to seep away as one buyer after another made a cursory tour of the room and took off, leaving few if any orders. “For the most part, the doll was hated,” a Mattel sales rep remembered. “The male buyers thought we were out of our minds because of the breasts, and it was a male-dominated business.” By the time Lou Kieso, the buyer from Sears, walked into the smoky room Ruth had no idea what to expect.

  Ruth gave Kieso her most dazzling smile, shaking his hand and looking him straight in the eye. Showing him around, Ruth emphasized the professional market research Mattel had done for the doll and the television advertising that was planned. Kieso was unimpressed. He refused to take a sample of the doll back to the Sears headquarters in Chicago. He left without placing a single order, as did half the buyers that came through the Barbie display.

  Ruth realized that her production projections were a disaster. Twenty thousand dolls a week had been ordered for delivery over the next six months, which seemed reasonable because of the distance of the Japanese plants. She also had planned on selling three or four costumes per doll. Ruth wanted to avoid inventory delays, but now she faced warehouses full of unsold inventory. Panicked, she wired Japan to cut production by 40 percent.

  That night, in her room at the New Yorker, Ruth broke down in tears. “She was very upset,” Elliot remembered. “I didn’t think it would be successful, but she did. This was her dream. She put so much effort into pushing it. She did not cry often, but she cried because she had that heart,” he said, pointing to his own. “The doll was like a piece of art for her that held a piece of her heart.”

  Only Elliot could have understood how much of herself Ruth had poured into the Barbie doll. While he may not have believed in Barbie as a marketable toy, he understood why Ruth did. Over and over, with fierce confidence, Ruth had told those who doubted her idea that little girls just wanted to be bigger girls. She was sure, impassioned, and unshakable because she was not talking about just any little girls. Ruth was talking about one, the girl who, before she married Elliot, had been known as Ruthie Mosko.

  Chapter 2

  The Tenth Child

  I idolized my sister.

  Jacob Moskowicz, Ruth’s father, was a burly six-foot ox of a man. In 1907 he strode off the boat that brought him across the Atlantic from Warsaw, Poland. Processed through immigration at Ellis Island, he was told to head for Denver, Colorado, where his blacksmithing skills could be used on the burgeoning Union Pacific Railroad. Not liking what he had seen of New York City, Jacob went west.

  Jacob left a Jewish community in Warsaw rivaled in size only by that of Manhattan. Warsaw’s Jews were bedeviled by the anti-Semitic whims of their Russian overseers, and Jacob had become a target for conscription into the Russian army, where the number of Jewish soldiers far outweighed their proportion in the general population.

  Nicholas I started the draft of Jews in 1827 in a scheme to force assimilation and stamp out Judaism, a campaign augmented in the next century by vicious attacks on Jewish communities. Anti-Semitic army regulations made life increasingly harsh for Jews already forced into service and generally impoverished. Jacob fled his army unit while en route to Turkey, and managed to board a ship to America.

  Jacob had left a family back in Warsaw and a mountain of gambling debt he could not repay. As he crossed the Atlantic, his thoughts and worries no doubt dwelled as much on his wife, Ida, and the seven children left behind as on what lay ahead in America. Would his eldest children, twelve-year-old Sarah and eleven-year-old Reuben, help their mother enough with the younger ones, Lillian, Louis, Doris, and especially the toddlers, Max and Joseph? And how soon would he be able to bring them all to America?

  Jacob journeyed west with a new name, probably given to him at immigration, although some family members say he shortened it to make it easier to understand in a country where he did not speak the language. The thriving and diverse Jewish community in Denver would know him as Jacob Mosko, a tough and enterprising man.

  Within two years, first by shoeing horses and then by building carriages and truck bodies, Jacob saved enough money to send for his family. Ida and the children made the crossing in steerage, part of the great mass of eastern European immigrants who flooded into America in the first decade of the twentieth century.

  Jacob soon started his own company, supplying truck bodies for the Cohen family who owned the Denver Chicago Trucking Company, destined to be one of the largest moving companies in the country. Jacob’s business grew as the Cohens’ business expanded. Customers liked Jacob and he had good business sense. He had his own shop, and he moved his family into a modest one-bathroom house at 21st and Gilpen streets. The growing Mosko clan often filled the big park near their house that marked the eastern edge of Denver. By 1915 the Moskos had become a household of nine children with the birth of Aaron and Maurice.

  Jacob’s strength and temper were legendary. His son Aaron remembered him as “the strongest man I ever saw. I saw him lift people up by the shirt, two people at the same time. He’d pick up one end of a truck body while all of us were on the other end, lifting. I saw him lift a car out of a snowbank.” According to another story, Jacob once ran his car into a streetcar. In a fury, he lifted the streetcar right off its track. He was proud of his work and a tough taskmaster for his sons who worked with him. They grew up with the threat of getting the back of his hand if they misbehaved.

  Unfortunately for the family finances, Jacob sometimes worked as hard at poker as at his business. Sometimes other players came to his house. Other times he disappeared for days at a time. He had a regular game at a Turkish bathhouse, where players brought schnapps, rye bread, and herring, and settled in to gamble, drink, and eat for a whole weekend. Jacob’s compulsion for gambling would be carried on in the family. All of his children became gamblers, some more in control than others, but all influenced by his example.

  Jacob’s gambling losses burdened his family. Ruth’s older brothers and sisters left school to work, to provide support for their mother and the younger ones. Sarah, the eldest, left school at fourteen to work at Golden Eagle Dry Goods, a discount store.

  Ida ran the household, cooking, baking, cleaning, and watching over her children and the passel of neighborhood children who played with them. She had a warm nature, but the strain of her pregnancies and life in Denver made her increasingly frail. In the summer of 1916, Sarah married Louis Greenwald at Marble Hall in Denver. Ida stood nearby, pregnant at forty years of age with Ruth, her tenth and last child.

  Six months after Ruth was born, Ida went into the hospital for gallbladder surgery. Sarah, the twenty-year-old newlywed, took her baby sister to live with her while Ida recovered. But when Ida came home, the baby stayed with Sarah. Weeks stretched into months, and Ruth never lived in her mother’s house again.r />
  There is no record or account indicating that Ida tried to take Ruth back to her house. It seems reasonable that Ida saw the charity and utility in leaving her youngest daughter with her oldest. They were all family, after all, and Jacob Mosko’s household had often been on the financial brink. Sarah and Louie, as he was called, were comfortable financially. The baby would be better off, Ida no doubt reasoned, but the arrangement would leave its mark on the one person who had no say in it.

  Ruth vehemently denied that she felt rejected by her mother or that her upbringing led her to always feel that she had to prove herself. She argued that she always knew who her parents were. Elliot remembered that “Sarah and Louie were her parents. They raised her.” While Ruth called Sarah and Louie by name, she called Ida and Jacob “Ma” and “Pa,” and she thought of them as “loving, indulgent” grandparents. But even when she saw them, they could barely talk to one another. Ida and Jacob spoke Yiddish. Their English was poor and heavily accented, and Ida was hard of hearing. While the children who lived with them had learned enough Yiddish to be understood, Ruth grew up in an English-speaking household. As much as she tried to speak slowly and clearly, she admitted that it was difficult to communicate with her parents.

  Ruth’s denials and explanations about her biological parents are telling. Ida, her mother, had ten children, yet only one was not raised by her. Only one lived apart from most of her siblings, more than a mile from her parents’ house, worshipping at a different synagogue, not playing at the family house, and attending different schools. Sarah, Louie, and Ruth went to the Moskos’ for Friday night dinner and holidays, like any relatives, but Sarah rarely hosted her family at her house.

  By all accounts, Sarah Greenwald adored her baby sister. She was an uncommonly beautiful child. Ruth would later laugh as she told the story of a woman who approached her when she was in her twenties and said, “Aren’t you Ruth Mosko?” When Ruth said she was, the woman said, “But you were such a cute little girl.” As Ruth’s brother Aaron remembered, “Sarah was just trying to relieve pressure on my mother, but she became attached to Ruth and no way she’d give her back.” Sarah also learned, shortly after taking Ruth in, that she could not have children.

  The Greenwalds were a family of three, more modern and more affluent than the Moskos. Ruth had a much more comfortable childhood than her siblings, although she resisted being spoiled. “I’m extraordinarily uncomfortable with dependency on anyone,” she said in her later years. “I guess I’ve had this overwhelming compulsion to prove myself all my life.” She seemed to be proving herself to the parents who had given her away, the parents who became loving relatives but who would choose not to keep her close.

  At the Greenwald house at 855 Garfield in Denver, Ruth was “treated like a queen,” according to Aaron. Ruth agreed that she never wanted for anything, but also said, “They never made me feel like I was getting something for nothing.” For Ruth, the idea of freeloading would always be intolerable. She looked for the chance to begin working, rushing through childhood as if she owed someone an incalculable debt.

  The Greenwalds’ one-story house had a small sloped front lawn and was located just blocks from the drugstore that Louie and Sarah started when Ruth was about eight years old. One of the first in Denver, their pharmacy was across the street from Denver General Hospital, in a thriving area of town. The Greenwalds were astute businesspeople, and Sarah worked as hard as her husband. When she was ten, Ruth begged to work at the store. She adored Sarah and wanted to be closer to her, and she began to resent Louie for not treating Sarah as well as Ruth thought he should. Like his father-in-law, Louie was a hotshot at the poker table and often left Sarah to run the business while he went off to gamble. Only Sarah’s strong hand kept him from putting the Greenwalds in the same cash-strapped position as the Moskos.

  Ruth’s school was not far from the pharmacy, so she would come to work as soon as school let out. “I used to love it. I used to wait on trade. I worked the cash register. They had a small soda fountain where I became a ‘soda jerk,’” she remembered. She preferred her job to playing with other children and although she had friends she never felt close to them. Later she would recall that she never had the kind of lifelong relationships that many people build. Ruth was often bored by the things that the other children found interesting. She thought many other girls were “sissies,” and that girl talk was stupid. She saw herself as a tomboy who preferred the athletic games of the boys. “Boys loved me, and I loved boys,” she said. Girls excluded her from their intimate girl-talk sessions, and when she was included she felt awkward.

  Ruth also carried a fierce need for Sarah’s approval. She tacitly acknowledged Sarah as her mother in this comment from Dream Doll, her autobiography: “[Sarah] seemed to thrive on working, so I grew up with the idea that a woman—a mother—with a job was neither strange nor unnatural.” For Ruth, the idea of having a job was consuming and exhilarating. Through work she could be closer to Sarah and feel she was paying a debt she felt she owed, even if none was demanded.

  In 1933 the Greenwalds expanded their business. They closed the pharmacy and opened a new venture in the Home Public Market, a cavernous stone building with domed skylights and tall windows that extended along California Street in Denver for a whole city block. People streamed inside all day, grabbing wicker baskets and buying fresh meat at the Public Meat Company; fish at Fagan’s; and poultry, vegetables, canned goods, and the local brand of Pollyanna breads at the open stands. Sarah ran a lunch counter inside called Greenwald’s Soda Fountain.

  Despite the Depression that had accelerated since the stock market crash of 1929, hope abounded. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just been elected president. One of his first acts was to begin the repeal of Prohibition. Seeing an opportunity, Louie opened a liquor store as soon as alcohol was legal, piling bottles high in a front window of the market that jutted into the street.

  For Ruth, there was new excitement at the bustling market and an unexpected opportunity for more responsibilities. She wanted to grow up fast, and work was, she said, “what made me grow up. What made me as I am.”

  Louie excelled at liquor sales, and Sarah’s Greenwald’s Soda Fountain with its long counter offered the only place to get a sit-down meal inside the bustling market. Ruth got her chance to take over the lunch counter in the summer of 1934. Louie had won a prize from a major distillery for having sold the most bottles of their liquor. The prize was a free trip to Europe. Louie had no desire to go, but Sarah did. She was old enough when she had come to the United States to remember family back in Poland. Ruth was left to run Sarah’s business, balancing the money, making bank deposits, ordering food and supplies, and organizing the schedule for employees. “I was busier than a cockroach,” Ruth remembered. She loved the work and the dignity of getting paid for it, but one job was not enough. Her brother Joe opened a law practice, but he had worked his way through law school and had no money for a secretary. Ruth had learned typing and shorthand in junior high school and offered to help Joe get started. She went to his office after school every day, keeping her lunch counter job on Saturdays. One summer she added an office job at Frankel Carbon Company. As she put it, she was “busy, busy, busy.”

  Working with her brother, Ruth started to think about becoming a lawyer. When she graduated from high school she enrolled at the University of Denver, keeping up her work schedule along with studying for her college courses. Another facet of her life was also consuming a lot of time and a great deal of emotion. She was serious about a young man she had started dating in high school, and Sarah did not approve.

  Chapter 3

  Love at a Nickel a Dance

  The chemistry was beyond belief.

  Ruth’s work and school commitments did not leave her much time for socializing, but she was not oblivious to boys. Her great rendezvous with love happened on Welton Street in 1932 during an unusually warm November. Just turned sixteen, Ruth was cruising downtown Denver behind the wheel of
her birthday present from Sarah and Louie: a brand-new three-window Ford coupe. Replacing the Model A, the coupe had elegant styling, with bug-eye headlights on either side of the long vertical front grille, and to Ruth’s delight, a pop-up rumble seat in a trunklike compartment just behind the rear window. The “little deuce coupe” was destined to become a hot-rodding legend. The coupe ignited Ruth’s passion for cars, perhaps because she was behind its wheel when she saw the man who became her lifelong love.

  Ruth was driving past the Home Public Market when she spotted Leonard Phillips, a young man she did not much like, walking with a friend down Glenarm Street. Leonard’s mother played cards with Sarah, which was how Ruth knew him. She did not know the tall boy with the massive head of black ringlets who was walking alongside Leonard, but she wished she did. Honking the horn, Ruth tried to attract the boys’ attention, but her ploy failed and traffic forced her to move on. After driving around the block, she tried again, waving at Leonard so she could get a look at his friend. “I had to see this guy. I really had to see this guy who was with Leonard,” Ruth remembered. She got her look and drove away thinking that she was unlikely to see the cute stranger again.

  A week or two later, Ruth’s sister Doris invited her to a B’nai B’rith affair on East Colfax Avenue. The Jewish humanitarian organization’s fund-raising event was billed as a carnival. When the two young women got there they found simple games on the first floor of the commercial building that had been acquired by the Denver Lodge only a few years earlier. For pennies, nickels, or quarters, Ruth and Doris threw balls at bottles and tried to throw hoops onto rings. As they wandered among the booths they were surprised by Chuck Newman. He was a good-looking young man and, Ruth knew, a good dancer. With Doris’s approval she accepted his invitation to go to the second floor for a dance.