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

by Robin Gerber

  Sarah’s strategy had backfired. She realized that there was no breaking Ruth and Elliot apart, and finally she gave in. By the time Elliot returned to Denver, an extravagant wedding was being planned. If Sarah’s surrogate daughter was getting married, Sarah and Louie would spare no expense.

  Ruth and Elliot married on June 26, 1938, at the posh Park Lane Hotel just outside the center of Denver. One hundred and forty guests came to the hotel, which overlooked Washington Park and provided a spectacular view of the Rocky Mountains from the glass-enclosed ballroom on the top floor. After the ceremony, guests were treated to an elaborate dinner with dancing.

  Ruth walked down the aisle carrying a white Bible and gardenias. She had borrowed her dress from her friend Charlotte, who had recently married Chuck Newman, the young man who first danced with Ruth at the B’nai B’rith fair where she met Elliot. The white satin gown had long sleeves, a simple round collar, and a full skirt that swept the floor. Ruth wore a white halo hat to hold a long, plain white tulle veil. The dress fit her perfectly, accenting her figure, as curvaceous as a Hollywood starlet’s. Elliot looked happy, if uncomfortable, in a rented tuxedo, his thick dark hair combed straight back in the style of the day.

  For the ceremony, Ruth wore a tin wedding ring given to her by her brother Max and his wife, Lillian. Jewish custom dictated that she not use a ring with jewels. Soon after the marriage, Elliot bought Ruth a simple gold wedding band, which they both agreed looked better than the tin one. Elliot took the tin ring and put it in his wallet, where it stayed.

  In the wedding photo, Jacob and Ida flank the newly married couple. Ruth’s parents wear restrained smiles, but Sarah, Ruth’s matron of honor, sitting next to her father, looks ecstatic. She had put her doubts aside to stage the perfect wedding, and nothing would ruin the day for her. Samuel and Freida Handler, Elliot’s parents, may not have been as pleased. The two families, Jews from different parts of the old country, never got along.

  After the wedding, Ruth and Elliot drove away in a new Chevy coupe, bought by her siblings. The newlyweds felt they had outgrown Denver and were heading back to start married life in Los Angeles, where they had been so happy. Even though they had both given up their jobs in LA, Elliot had no doubts about their plan. “I just loved that little girl,” he remembered, “and everything we did was just right.”

  Chapter 4

  Ruth and Elliot and Matt

  So-called impulsive decisions are very often the ones that turn your life.

  Now that Ruth and Elliot had formalized their relationship, Ruth lost no time in testing its bounds. As they drove across the Arizona desert, she asked Elliot to change his name.

  Ruth had been introduced to Izzy Handler, only later learning that his middle name was Elliot. Secretly, she hated the name Izzy. Long before she met Elliot, Ruth’s older brother Maurice, nicknamed Muzzy, had come to pick her up from Sarah’s house to drive her to their parents’ house. As they arrived, two police officers pulled up behind them and accused Muzzy of a driving violation. Ruth remembered the officers being “quite nasty” as they questioned her brother. When Muzzy told them his name, one officer asked snidely, “What was that…Izzy?”

  Given the atmosphere of the time, the officer’s comment was not surprising. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s a rising tide of American anti-Semitism washed over the country. Even as Jews became more upwardly mobile, their admission to universities, professional schools, and the upper reaches of corporate America was restricted. Henry Ford used the Dearborn Independent, a weekly Michigan newspaper he’d bought, to spread anti-Semitic propaganda. Ford claimed that German Jewish banking interests fomented World War I. The Ku Klux Klan had reached the pinnacle of its power in the late 1920s. From 1924 to 1928 the Klan’s leadership took over the Colorado state government, further fanning anti-Jewish fervor. Governor Clarence Morley, elected in 1924, and many local elected officials were Klan members. By 1930, when Ruth turned fourteen, Jews were scapegoated for bank failures that set off the Great Depression. As jobs became scarce, anti-Jewish restrictions in job advertisements became commonplace.

  In Denver’s close-knit Jewish community, Ruth was aware of anti-Semitism but had not experienced it. She had been shocked and frightened by the police officer’s threatening tone with her brother. As she and Elliot drove through the dry, brown landscape toward Los Angeles, she told Elliot that his nickname reminded her of the hateful incident. His middle name was “beautiful,” she said, proposing that he become Elliot Handler. He was surprised but compliant. “She felt pretty strongly that it was too Jewish,” Elliot remembered. “She liked my middle name, and I did not like ‘Izzy’ either.” They were immigrants’ children, still somehow strangers in their own land, still trying to find their place. Unconsciously, they were moving away from their roots and edging closer to assimilation, heading toward a storybook realization of the American dream.

  Back in Los Angeles, the young couple stayed in the William Penn Hotel on Melrose Avenue until they could find an apartment. Ruth returned to her job at Paramount. Elliot went back to Beranek and Erwin Lighting Fixture Company, and began classes at the Art Center College of Design. Eventually, they found a tiny, sweltering, roach-infested but affordable studio on Melrose.

  Months later, on a Sunday drive, Ruth spotted a new building and told Elliot to stop, even though she thought it looked out of their price range. The apartment at 5142½ Clinton Avenue in Hollywood seemed huge by comparison to where they were living. Half of a two-car garage was included in the $37.50 monthly rent. Even though the rent was 30 percent more than they were paying and they would have to buy furniture, they took the apartment on the spot.

  Later in her life, Ruth read a great deal of meaning into taking the new apartment, as well as other milestones she identified in her life. She believed in “predestination,” focusing particularly on her most impulsive decisions as evidence that “there’s some kind of plan for each of us.” It was just as true that Ruth was a person of action from a very young age. She spent far less time deliberating than deciding and moving forward. If mistakes were made, she quickly grasped her errors, corrected them, and moved on. This pattern would repeat itself throughout the early years of building her business. Her penchant, even impatience, for action would lead to her greatest successes, but it would also lay the trap for her most devastating failure.

  Settled into their new apartment, Elliot had a new dream. The Art Center had opened the possibilities of industrial design to him. At the time, new materials were being discovered, presenting unique opportunities to design products. Prior to 1931, the only man-made molded plastics were Bakelite and Catalin, used to design and manufacture casings for clocks, radios, telephones, and colorful jewelry. But then two different companies discovered a polyacrylic that was water-resistant, crystal clear, and shatter resistant. DuPont called this product Lucite, while its competitor Rohm and Haas dubbed its Plexiglas.

  In 1936 the Army Air Corps decreed that Plexiglas was the only plastic sheet material approved for use in military planes. Ninety percent of the material was being sold for aviation, destined as a replacement for glass in windshields, gun turrets, and radar domes of airplanes used in World War II. Elliot’s teacher at the Art Center had a different idea, assigning the class the job of designing consumer items from the new material.

  Elliot was full of ideas for Plexiglas, which was not only clear, but could be buffed to a high shine. As Elliot looked around the young couple’s apartment he imagined everything from furniture and lamps to small items such as ashtrays and bowls made from the material. He began sketching. When Ruth looked at his ideas she began to plan. If Elliot made samples, she told him, she would find a way to sell them. He was willing, but there was a problem. He needed equipment that was available only at school. With other students in line, Elliot did not have enough time to complete his schoolwork and produce his own projects. Ruth had an answer for that too. “Let’s buy our own equipment,” she told her husband.

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sp; If there is an entrepreneurial gene, Ruth had it, but she also had something more concrete: her memories of Sarah. “Sarah was my role model,” Ruth told an interviewer years later. “She was the responsible person in that marriage. She held things together, made the decisions, took care of the money. I guess that’s why I never thought it strange for a woman to take the business lead in a marriage.” Ruth had an ethnic-based rationale for her assertiveness in business as well. Jews from Poland, like her family, had suffered from anti-Semitism and life in a ghetto. Men and women had to work together to make a living. Ruth believed that was why she and Elliot did not see anything unusual about women working and running things.

  Ruth took charge of providing Elliot what he would need to make the first products that she would sell. It was the beginning of a stunning partnership of creativity and commercial acumen.

  The Handlers bought the necessary equipment on an installment plan from Sears for two hundred dollars, and set up shop in their half of the garage. Elliot sanded and shaped the wood molds for the Plexiglas sheets. When they were smooth enough to produce the surface he wanted, he heated the plastic in the kitchen stove and then rushed it out to the garage to press into the molds. The garage, already cluttered with his drill press, sander, and saw, was soon littered with wood shavings, plastic bits, and wood dust. The tenant whose car shared the space grew annoyed and complained to the landlord. He gave Ruth and Elliot an ultimatum: move their shop or move out of the apartment.

  The young couple still owed money on the equipment, which they would soon have no place to house. While their worldly wealth was a bit of savings and a car, they had the irrepressible optimism of two people barely out of their teenage years. Elliot offered to quit school, but Ruth pushed the gamble much further. Elliot would quit his job, collect unemployment, and make his designs in a shop she would find and outfit with a new oven. In her grand vision, she would then sell all that he made.

  In her biography, Ruth professes absolute confidence in Elliot’s talent. His fertile creativity and consumer-oriented imagination were evident, but he was often too introverted to order dinner in a restaurant. “I’ve always been the shy, stay-in-the-background type,” he said. All of Elliot’s brilliant work would have gathered dust in his shop save for Ruth’s belief that she could sell it, even though she had no sales experience. She had been a store clerk and an office assistant, and she intended to keep her job at Paramount. But she was as creative as Elliot was in his design work and full of ideas for marketing.

  They found a former Chinese laundry to rent with about 200 square feet of space. It cost fifty dollars for six months. They were so broke that Elliot’s friend Seymour Green remembered going by in the morning to drop off eight dollars to get them through the day. He helped Elliot paint the new space, but they had to water down the blue calcimine powder so much that it ended up being nearly white.

  Elliot asked Harold “Matt” Matson, a tall, strong Swede who had worked with him at the lighting company, to build an oven for the new shop. It weighed about four hundred pounds and sat on narrow steel legs. Seymour and Elliot’s brother Al rented a truck to bring it to the shop, but as they unloaded it the oven slipped and one leg scraped Seymour’s ankles, leaving him screaming in pain. Ignoring his distress, Ruth yelled, “What the hell are you doing? You bent one of the oven legs.” She later apologized, but it was not the last time Seymour was the focus of her anger, even though he was volunteering his time. Tensions ran high as the Handlers launched their new business.

  In her off-hours Ruth schemed about which shops to cold-call with Elliot’s designs. She was eager to take on a challenge Elliot would not consider. She said, “I soon realized that I would have to do the selling. My husband is a brilliant artist and creator, but he’s also shy and introverted…I am just the opposite.” Their differences seemed to prove the old axiom “Opposites attract,” but there was much more to their relationship than that. In a time when society expected women to be subservient to their husbands, Elliot was willing to give Ruth absolute freedom to satisfy an almost innate entrepreneurial drive. “We made the jump. I quit and she kept working. She liked Paramount all right, but she stopped talking about movie stars. Being a secretary was not enough for her.”

  Ruth had her target store picked out: a swanky Danish modern gift shop on Wilshire Boulevard called Zacho’s. Ruth loaded a beat-up suitcase with Elliot’s bookends, trays, cigarette boxes, hand mirrors, and candleholders made from a combination of wood and Plexiglas. Cutting out from work one afternoon during her lunch hour, she marched into the store’s quiet, intimidating luxury. With her thick, shoulder-length brown hair swept off her forehead and a starlet’s figure, she forced a broad, nervous smile as she approached the haughty salesclerk.

  The woman insisted on inspecting the items before calling the owner, Mr. Zacho. After having a look, he told Ruth in heavily accented English that he wanted to meet Elliot and see their workshop. Panicked, she imagined this elderly man walking into the dilapidated Chinese laundry they had converted into a shop. “If he sees the crummy place…we’ll lose him forever,” she thought. Zacho saw her reaction and reassured her that, coming from Europe, he had seen many small, nondescript workshops. Still, Ruth was nervous. She told him to come on Saturday, not wanting Elliot to be alone when Zacho rejected them, as she felt certain he would.

  On Saturday, Zacho arrived at the small storefront in the 4000 block of Olympic Boulevard near Normandie Avenue, which they had named Elliot Handler Plastics. Zacho shook Elliot’s hand, took a quick look around, and said he wanted to place an order. Ruth and Elliot were stunned. Elliot realized he did not even have a paper or pencil. Tearing a corner off some brown packing paper, he scratched out the details, his shaking hand grasping a pencil stub. For Zacho, the $500 order was trivial, but for Ruth and Elliot it represented the incalculable affirmation of their dream. After Zacho left, they shouted and hugged. They had made their first sale.

  Ruth worried, however, about their revenue and expenses. She was beginning her learn-by-doing business apprenticeship. If they bought polyacrylic sheets at retail they might not make a profit, so they tried to buy wholesale from the suppliers. DuPont did not return their calls. The representative they contacted at Rohm and Haas, Jerry Young, said they were too small for a wholesale deal. He did not, however, forget them. A few weeks after he met Ruth, he called to give her a lead at Douglas Aircraft, a big customer for his company.

  Douglas had asked Young to recommend a company that could design a promotional gift product. The company wanted a novelty item to give to helpful officials and special customers, and to reward employees. It had die-cast a handsome miniature of the DC–3 airplane and it wanted it incorporated into the design. The finished product was meant to be displayed in an office or home library.

  Before proceeding, Douglas wanted to have a meeting to discuss what it was looking for. While Elliot would have been the best one to talk about its design ideas, Ruth knew he would be too intimidated to trust with such a large potential customer. She could not rely on him to make the pitch for what could be a huge account. Instead, she took an afternoon off work and met with three male executives at Douglas in a large corner office. She listened carefully, trying to hide her ignorance of design, as they described what they wanted. Exhilarated, Ruth walked out with a deal. Just as she was sure that she had done a good job handling the meeting, she was also certain that Elliot would come up with something to satisfy their new customer.

  Elliot decided on a simple, elegant clock, notably modernist at a time when Picasso and Braque were large influences. He turned a sheet of Plexiglas about ten inches high on its side, and bent it around, stopping a few inches before the ends met. The sheet was wider in the front and narrowed as it curved to the back. On the front face, he placed airplane rivets in a circle for the clock numbers. On the back edge, he balanced and attached the model DC–3, its nose facing forward, its wings spread wide as if it were going to fly past the clock face.

>   Elliot’s clock and a simpler bookcase design were immediate hits with Douglas. Now Ruth had a large enough order to get wholesale prices on Plexiglas from Rohm and Haas. Filling the Douglas order became a family affair. Elliot’s brother Al, home from the army, helped. Ruth borrowed fifteen hundred dollars from Sarah for materials, which she paid back as soon as the revenue from their second big sale came in. The profit went toward renting another, bigger space at 4916 South Western Avenue. Meanwhile, Elliot was increasing his production of giftware, and Matt Matson came to work with him on fabrication. The business’s stationery read, “Elliot Handler, designer and fabricator in Lucite and Plexiglas.”

  Elliot needed the new space. Infected with sales fever, Ruth frequently skipped out of her job at Paramount to land new clients like RKO Studios and a company called Enka. Al Handler went back to Denver, where he made suggestions for products and secured orders from a local company, Daniels and Fisher.

  Elliot showed a special ability to spot trends. Costume jewelry was the rage in the late 1930s, and Elliot began designing a few pieces. In 1940 he made a tiny woman’s hand clasping a vial that could hold some water and a flower bud and could be pinned on a woman’s blouse or blazer. It was a hit, and he began producing distinctive pieces from Plexiglas, including pins in the shapes of cuckoo clocks, sabers, hearts, and scissors. Ruth’s distribution expanded as well, and Elliot’s jewelry soon appeared in stores all over Los Angeles.

  Ruth struggled to get bank credit to buy materials. They had expanded to make fruit bowls, powder boxes, coffee tables, breakfast trays, coat hangers, and special order furniture. Their cash flow continually lagged behind delivery, and they had to borrow from Sarah and some of their friends, especially Seymour Green, Elliot’s old roommate and best friend. Louie Greenwald had lent them a hundred dollars in September 1940. In October they had borrowed three hundred dollars to buy a car. In November Sarah gave them a loan of five hundred dollars, paid off two months later when Douglas made a payment of $1,399.77. Their finances were either up or down but never stable.