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

by Robin Gerber

  After their dance, Chuck escorted Ruth off the floor and over to a group of his friends that he wanted her to meet. Ruth remembered having a moment of shock: “I saw this guy with this oversized head of black curly ringlets, and I looked at him and our eyes locked. It really was that way. I knew who it was instantly. This was the guy I had gone around the block to see.” Years later she remembered he was wearing a white T-shirt with a tear in the shoulder seam. Smiling at her, the young man asked her to dance. Ruth recalled that as they twirled around the floor she felt like she was “floating on air.” She felt an unmistakable chemistry between them. “It was magic,” she said. “I had gone with other guys…but I did not have that feeling. No one turned me on like that.”

  The young man who had caught Ruth’s eye was Isadore Elliot Handler, though friends called him Izzy. He came from the Jewish neighborhood on the west side of town, an area less affluent and considered rougher than the east side, where Ruth lived. Elliot belonged to a gang of sorts called the Gigolos, mostly Jewish friends and a few Italians. Despite their ethnic diversity, the Gigolos had a good-natured camaraderie. Having played football for North High School, Elliot recalled intercepting a pass and running down the field as his Italian friends cheered, yelling, “Go, schnoz!” Elliot even earned a letter in football, although his father had too little money to buy his son the jacket to go with it.

  Elliot’s parents were Jews from the town of Matziv in Ukraine. Like Ruth’s parents, the Handlers spoke mostly Yiddish. They initially settled in Chicago, but Elliot’s father, Samuel, contracted tuberculosis and took his family west to a sanatorium. Denver had clear, thin air that was the only known treatment for consumptives, and Jews from all over the country had been sent there since 1904, when the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society was founded. The sanatorium, started by a group of immigrant Jewish men from eastern Europe, was free, and though it was nonsectarian, most of the patients were Jewish. Because of the number of tuberculosis patients in Denver, spitting in the streets in the 1920s was forbidden. Elliot remembered his father carrying a handkerchief at all times to spit into. Samuel was thirty-eight years old when he checked into the JCRS, listing his occupation as “painter.” He was in the sanatorium only ten days, from May 19 to May 29, 1926, but he and his family never left the city.

  The Handlers were part of a small group of Matziv Jews who worshipped at a temple in the back of a building off Main Street, on a creek that fed into the Platte River. Elliot’s paternal grandfather in Ukraine had been a rabbi, and he wanted the same for his son. But Samuel Handler was a religious rebel who attended temple reluctantly. On the Jewish High Holidays his wife would plead, “It’s a shonda for the neighbors for you not to go to shul.” Elliot celebrated his bar mitzvah, but he shared his father’s religious detachment.

  Elliot’s passion lay in the arts, and he dreamed of being a cartoonist. He sent cartoons off to newspapers and piled up rejections while he was still in high school. He took the only design job he could find, at a lighting design company. There he had the chance to create detailed drawings for his first original designs. They were not cartoons, but they were creative. Offered an arts scholarship at the Denver Art Institute, he dropped off the football and track teams in his senior year. To make up for the gap between the scholarship and the tuition costs, Samuel Handler volunteered his labor to paint the school.

  Elliot remembered being instantly smitten by Ruth’s looks even before he met her. She did not know that a couple of weeks before the B’nai B’rith dance he had been at the Mosko house for a crap game organized by her brother Maurice, whose nickname was Muzzy. Elliot and his friends were excited to be with Muzzy, who was an all-city football star and local Jewish hero. When Elliot walked into the house, he noticed Ruth’s picture on the mantel and said to one of his friends, “Boy, what a cute-looking sister he has.” When Chuck Newman brought Ruth over after dancing with her at the B’nai B’rith event, Elliot recognized her as the girl in the photograph.

  Elliot was at the dance with three friends, “all hoodlums,” as he later put it, and all standing around in sloppy T-shirts. He did not give them a chance to get near Ruth. Dancers were charged a nickel for charity to enter the roped-off dance floor. Elliot quickly paid for the first dance and took Ruth out on the floor. There was a small band, and as they did the fox-trot Elliot thought, “She’s a real cute little gal.” Everything seemed perfect to Elliot, but as the first dance ended he realized he did not have any more nickels. He told Ruth to wait on the dance floor for a minute, and frantically borrowed enough change from his friends to keep her by his side for the rest of the night. “We fell in love at a nickel a dance,” he said later.

  Elliot started driving his father’s 1934 Chevy sedan across town to pick Ruth up for dates. They gave the car the ironic name Blue Streak. If it was snowing outside, Elliot would have to stop, jump out, and pull the wipers across the windshield so he could see. When he could not get his father’s car, Elliot would hitch a ride on the viaduct that ran from the west to the east side. Then Ruth would let him drive her coupe. In those early days, they could hardly bear to be separated.

  Occasionally they had enough money to go to the swank Brown Palace Hotel for dinner, “a fancy joint,” as Elliot called it. But it was the worst year of the Depression, and while Sarah and Louie ran steady businesses, Elliot’s father was struggling. Elliot worked at the Shockett Lighting Fixture Company, making blueprints and sketching fixtures, but he was also helping out with expenses at home. Happily for him, his job was around the corner from the Home Public Market. He went there frequently for lunch, and though Ruth did not give him free meals, she would serve him twice as much food as she charged him for.

  The young couple enjoyed Lakeside Amusement Park, where they could dance at the El Patio ballroom to the Dorsey brothers or Louis Armstrong. There was a lot to do for not much money, including the bumper cars, a Ferris wheel, the Whistling Tom miniature steam train, and the Velvet Coaster, a looping, dipping thrill ride that Elliot enjoyed but not Ruth. Elitch Gardens was another favorite spot. There was a zoo, the Trocadero Ballroom, and another roller coaster for Elliot: the Wildcat. Despite financial hardship, Americans still spent money at the movies in the 1930s. Elliot and Ruth frequented a small movie theater on the west side that charged a quarter to get in and a nickel for popcorn. Gary Cooper starred in A Farewell to Arms in 1932, but by 1933, the most popular movie was the ensemble comedy with Danny Kaye and Ben Turpin, Chasing Those Depression Blues.

  Elliot and Ruth were too love-besotted to be blue. Ruth said that she never felt the same feeling toward another man that she felt toward Elliot; he had a “magnetic” quality that sent shivers through her. “It was an unbelievable experience to just touch him,” she remembered, “and I guess he must have had the same reaction because we just couldn’t get enough of each other.” Despite their strong physical attraction, however, they tried to do what they felt was the right thing. Guided by conscience, they held off being intimate despite how serious they were. Ruth said that more than three years went by before they “went the full route” as lovers. By then they were certain they would be married.

  Sarah, however, had other plans. As strongly as Ruth was drawn to Elliot, Sarah was trying to pull her away. She thought Elliot was a poor prospect for a husband. He showed up to see Ruth in the same torn white T-shirt he had worn to the B’nai B’rith dance. Sarah would tease Ruth about it, but there was a serious undercurrent to her jibes. “Doesn’t he have anything but that white T-shirt? Is that the only clothes he’s got?” She would ask. Sarah worried about Elliot being poor. His father was a house painter who made little money. The Handler household had none of the luxuries found at the Greenwalds’. Sarah did not want Ruth ending up with someone who could not support her. She wanted her surrogate daughter to marry a doctor or lawyer or other professional. Sarah’s worries grew when she found out that Elliot aspired to be an artist. She imagined Ruth starving to death in a garret.

  Sa
rah’s relentless criticism of Elliot took its toll on Ruth. Sarah told Ruth she was special, and Ruth agreed. Although she was not sure what her future would bring, Ruth knew that she did not aspire to an impoverished life with a struggling artist. After their first year together, Ruth convinced Elliot that they should try to pull apart, that they did not have a future. Sarah sent Ruth to Long Beach, California, where she spent the end of her junior year of high school and part of her senior year living with her sister Lillian and her husband.

  The ploy failed. As soon as Ruth returned, she and Elliot were together again. They kept trying to separate, and sometimes they even dated other people. On the second New Year’s Eve of their relationship, Ruth passed Elliot on the street and saw another girl on his arm. Her hurt and anger ran deep. Years later she could still remember how jealousy had gripped her. A short time later, she and Elliot were back together again. They could never stay apart more than two or three weeks, and Sarah grew ever more worried.

  After her high school graduation in 1934, Ruth enrolled at the University of Denver, announcing her unconventional plan to become a lawyer. She continued to work for Sarah and Louie, but when President Franklin Roosevelt signed the National Youth Administration Act in 1935, providing money to employ young people, she got a job in the chancellor’s office as a stenographer. Elliot continued at Shockett Lighting and at the local art school, although he knew his education was mediocre compared to what he would find at the Art Institute of Chicago or the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. He dreamed of saving enough money to go to one of those great schools.

  The summer after her second year of college, Ruth ran into a girl named Jenny Cohen at a party on the west side. They had met before and Ruth did not consider the girl “her type,” but when Jenny told Ruth she was going to Los Angeles for vacation the following week, Ruth was interested. She and Elliot were at another point of trying to separate, and Ruth had enjoyed her time in Southern California. Ruth told Jenny that she would like to go along, and Jenny offered to let Ruth stay with her at her relatives’ house. Sarah, of course, was all for the trip. “Maybe now she’ll meet a doctor or lawyer and get Elliot out of her system,” she told her sister Doris. Doris had lived in Los Angeles when she was in her twenties, and gave Ruth the name of a woman she had shared an apartment with named Evelyn Lee. “She’s a swell gal, you’ll like her. She works at Paramount Studios,” Doris told Ruth.

  Los Angeles in 1936 was a city of two and a half million people and just beginning to sprawl. Six years earlier, the sons of the famed planner of Central Park in New York, Frederick Law Olmsted, approached city officials with a plan for hundreds of square miles of parkland. They warned that the people pouring into Los Angeles would bring pressure to pave over the city’s natural beauty. Their pleas were ignored.

  Instead, the need for Depression-era jobs, the westward march of people displaced by the midwestern drought, and the lack of housing led to desperate choices. The city began deporting Mexicans, some of them American citizens, to the south and sending police to the California-Nevada state line in a futile attempt to stop unemployed hitchhikers from pouring in. Meanwhile, the motion picture industry kept growing. New plants, like the airplane manufacturing facility by the airport, were under construction. Housing tracts were placed in far-flung suburban neighborhoods. To get workers back into the city for their jobs, freeways had to be built. For Ruth, the sleepy mountain town of Denver was galaxies away from the pace and the exotic, exciting character of Los Angeles.

  Ruth wasted no time in contacting Evelyn Lee and arranging lunch with her in the commissary at Paramount. MGM Studios had the largest stable of movie stars, but Paramount was exciting enough for Ruth. When the bulbous-nosed comedian W. C. Fields walked by, she froze. Evelyn assured her that stargazing was easy at a place that employed Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, Fredric March, Claudette Colbert, Mae West, the Marx brothers, Bob Hope, and Bing Crosby.

  More out of curiosity than desire, Ruth asked how someone could get a job at Paramount. Evelyn was dismissive. Everybody wanted to work in Hollywood. You needed high-level connections, otherwise getting a job was impossible. “Those jobs are so precious and so hard to get,” Evelyn told her, “you just can’t get a studio job.” But telling Ruth she could not do something was a guarantee she would try. Even though she had had no intention of working in the film industry when she arrived in Los Angeles, Ruth insisted that Evelyn take her to Personnel and let her apply. “I don’t remember the application process,” Ruth said, “but I remember walking out of the personnel office and I had a job.” Ruth became a stenographer at twenty-five dollars a week and a lot of overtime. She had never earned that much money before.

  Sarah could not have been happier. For Sarah, Ruth’s going to college or on to law school was not nearly as important as her finding the right husband. She would miss her surrogate daughter, but Sarah felt certain that the distance from Elliot would end the attachment. Surely Ruth would meet some eligible new men in Hollywood. Sarah, however, underestimated the sweet, shy young man who still pined for Ruth. He had tried to find a job in graphic design in Denver but, failing that, was working on light fixtures and trying to save enough for art school. “I was very unhappy without her,” Elliot remembered, “and I thought, ‘the weather’s better in California than in Chicago,’ where the Art Institute was, so I went to LA.”

  Elliot found a ride-share for five dollars and arrived a month after Ruth. He knocked on her door, telling her he had changed his mind about Chicago and had come to Los Angeles for the weather. She hid a knowing smile, surprised and delighted to see him. Elliot moved into a long-term room at the Colonial Hotel, near her apartment.

  Ruth and Elliot spent an idyllic year in Los Angeles. Two of Ruth’s brothers had a car dealership and had given her a repossessed convertible coupe. The young lovers spent weekends touring the coastline or seeing movies at the two-thousand-seat Orpheum Theatre. In the evenings after work Elliot would come to the apartment that Ruth shared with Evelyn. They would walk about six blocks to Thrifty Drug Store at Wilshire and Western, where they ordered the twenty-nine-cent blue plate special for dinner. On rare occasions they splurged for the thirty-nine-cent special deluxe dinner.

  One evening Elliot arrived at the apartment upset and depressed. He had just been laid off from his lighting fixture design job. As usual, he and Ruth started their walk to Thrifty’s, but depression smothered their usual high spirits. As they stepped off the first curb, Elliot kicked something. He stooped to pick it up and discovered it was a nickel. Neither of them was superstitious, but this time they felt they had received a powerful omen. Ruth said, “That’s for good luck. Keep it and you’ll get a new job right away.” Elliot put the nickel into his wallet, and suddenly his good spirits seemed to return. The next day he got a new and better job at another lighting fixture company. Decades later, he still had that same nickel in his wallet.

  Ruth and Elliot’s unique partnership established many of its patterns in those early days. She had an optimistic view no matter the situation and kept Elliot’s spirits up. She had a boisterous adventurism that pulled him along, and he had a quiet, steady, unwavering love for her. At the end of their workdays, there was much to talk, share, and dream about.

  Elliot’s work as a lighting designer paid only eighteen dollars a week, seven dollars less than Ruth was earning. Despite the lower pay, he had the satisfaction of seeing one of his designs go from drawings to reality. Because his company was doing work for Union Station, the railway terminal being built in Los Angeles, Elliot had his first opportunity to prominently place one of his designs. Union Station was the last of the great railway stations to be built, and Elliot’s giant chandelier-like fixtures still hang in the side halls.

  Ruth loved working at Paramount, particularly the occasional chance to see some of the stars. She was able to sneak Elliot onto the set of Thanks for the Memory, where they heard Bob Hope and Shirley Ross sing the rom
antic “Two Sleepy People.” She became a devoted fan of Lucille Ball after delivering phone messages from her to director Alexander Hall. Ruth also got her first taste of working inside a large company, and she was a sharp critic. She was “appalled at the waste of money and poor management,” not only in her department, but companywide. People who worked for movie studios, she decided, would make bad employees since they had such abysmal work habits.

  Back in Denver, Sarah worried about Ruth. She had heard about all the time Ruth was spending with Elliot, and she decided it had to stop. Showing up in Los Angeles, she convinced the twenty-one-year-old that she was headed for a miserable life with a man who would end up a starving artist.

  Ruth’s sense of duty overwhelmed her love for Elliot. She struggled to say no to Sarah but failed. Admitting that Sarah was right, she said a difficult good-bye to Elliot, sold her car, quit her job, and returned to Denver. Once again she worked at the Home Public Market and served as secretary to her brother Joe, the lawyer. She did not even reenroll at college. Instead, she pined for Elliot, making frequent telephone calls to him and longing for her old life in Los Angeles.

  As Elliot’s birthday approached in the spring, Ruth decided to spend an extravagant thirty-five dollars on a beautiful watch for him. In the thank-you letter he wrote wistfully, “I wish we could get married.” Ruth, however, did not waste time on wishing. She wrote, “Why don’t we?” He wrote back, “Why not?”