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

by Robin Gerber

  Swiss music boxes sold for five dollars or more, putting them in the luxury toy category. Duncan’s idea was a low-priced, durable box that would play continuously as it was cranked. Duncan had tried to interest a number of companies in his idea without success. Ruth and Elliot were the first to see the potential. Elliot designed the toys that would hold the music box mechanism, starting with an organ-grinder’s hurdy-gurdy music box and then a jack-in-the-box, one of Ruth’s few toy ideas. They asked Duncan to work with a trusted foreman in the factory, Paul Blair, on the toy’s engineering and mass production.

  Paul Blair was a black man who had found a tolerant workplace at Mattel. Where other factory floors were segregated by race, Mattel’s production line not only employed mostly women, but included many ethnicities. Blacks, whites, Asians, and Mexicans worked side by side in close quarters. Ruth claimed that she never thought about the racial makeup of her workforce, but she knew the sting of anti-Semitism, and that may have played some part in her attitude. “We hired black and brown people; it did not matter to us,” Elliot remembered. “Our families weren’t racist. One of my first managers was a black guy, a very capable mechanic. We were very liberal. We were Democrats.” Others took notice of Mattel’s unconventional factory floor. “A tour of your plant is like walking through the United Nations,” read a letter from the Los Angeles Conference on Community Relations. “People of different races, various religious faiths, handicapped people, elderly people, all working as a unit. You have set an example that might well be followed by business people everywhere.” In 1951 actress Loretta Young gave the Handlers the annual Urban League award for their nondiscriminatory practices.

  Ruth and Elliot recognized Blair’s talent as a manager and an engineer. They trusted him to find the best approach to producing the small box that Duncan had conceived. They were confident that the product would be a success, and they were pouring money into development, but it was not enough. The toy required a major investment in equipment and tooling, and Ruth could not get the bank to lend the money she needed. She and Elliot flew to Denver to ask her sister and brother-in-law Doris and Harry Paul for a loan. They had already borrowed another twenty thousand dollars from Sarah and Louis Greenwald. The Pauls agreed to lend fifteen thousand dollars. Ruth told Harry, “If something happens and we don’t make it, we’ll work the rest of our lives to pay it back.” He said he knew that.

  But the toy had problems from the start. Duncan and Blair were at odds about how to make the music box, and the Handlers had to choose between the two. When they sided with their employee, Duncan was incensed.

  Duncan not only sued the Handlers, he spent his own money to order materials and tried to prove that Blair’s manufacturing scheme was wrong. Ruth claimed that after spending thousands of dollars, he failed, but she shaded the truth. While Mattel’s music box would be many times more successful, Duncan, who held the patents, perfected his own idea. The Duncan Voice Box was used in four million toys in the four years after Duncan introduced it at the 1954 Toy Fair. Due to the settlement of his lawsuit, he also collected a hundred thousand dollars a year in royalties from Mattel. Ruth claimed not to “begrudge” the money, but she felt Duncan had betrayed her. Ruth believed that not only had he fought for control of the product, he had lied about whom he had shown the idea to before the Handlers.

  Duncan had peddled the music box to Mattel’s archrival, Knickerbocker Plastics. Leo White, the same man who had stolen the Uke-A-Doodle idea, had encouraged Knickerbocker to work on producing Duncan’s music box for months before Mattel’s jack-in-the-box launched. When it did, Knickerbocker made a knockoff. But this time Ruth decided to fight. Mattel sued Knickerbocker, winning a judgment that forced their rival to destroy all inventory, cease manufacturing, and pay Mattel fifty thousand dollars. Ruth’s legal fees totaled as much as the fine. She did not care, she claimed, just as she claimed that she wished the relationship with Duncan had worked out better. But she was not given to forgiving and forgetting. She had put the toy industry on notice that Mattel would fight for its products. She never spoke to Ted Duncan again.

  The music box was a hit. Children created music at their own pace by turning the crank. If they stopped turning, the music stopped, unlike the Swiss music boxes over which a child had no control. Ruth and Elliot coined the term “play value” to describe the amount of involvement a child had with a toy. They considered the music box to have superior play value compared to other toys, and the toys that were built around the mechanism brought a steady stream of revenue for years. “We were developing a principle with the music box that we tried to stick with for the rest of our toy career,” Ruth explained. “If you develop a basic mechanism or a basic concept, you develop one or two or three items around that concept at the initial introduction, and then year after year you add new products around the initial concept.”

  Elliot continued to dream up new ideas for the adaptable music box mechanism. It was placed in eighteen different toys including a revamped Uke-A-Doodle, the chuck wagon pull-toy that played “Oh! Susanna,” the Musical Merry-Go-Round that played “Farmer in the Dell,” and a variety of musical books. Almost overnight Mattel had become the largest manufacturer of music box toys in America.

  The Handlers had staked everything, including borrowed funds from family and employees, on the music box. The gamble paid off. Nearly seven million dollars’ worth of music boxes were sold at retail that first year, and two million dollars more the next. In 1952 the Saturday Evening Post called it “the million-dollar music box.” Kiplinger’s magazine, calling Ruth and Elliot “The newcomers to the toy business,” noted that they had built a brand-new 60,000-square-foot factory in the Los Angeles airport tract and employed six hundred female factory workers. In 1949 the Handlers started holding annual company picnics, and by July 1952 they were treating seven hundred employees to ice cream every time another million toys rolled off the production line.

  Ruth was proud of the relationship she and Elliot had with their employees. As owners they were relaxed and informal with everyone, from the maintenance staff to designers and engineers. They spent time on the production floor, sometimes pitching in on one of the lines. Everyone called them by their first names. If an employee was more formal, Ruth thought something was wrong. “We knew every single person,” Ruth remembered. “We knew their names and they knew us. We had a lot of group events and we had a lot of fun.”

  At Mattel, Ruth minded community and public relations. She invited the press for lunch and factory tours. She tried to buy materials from local businesses, gave thousands and then tens of thousands of toys away to sick and needy children every year, and made sizable charitable contributions. She sent Blinko the Clown, with his trademark two-and-a-half-inch eyelashes and whiteface, to Santa Monica Hospital to entertain kids confined to wheelchairs or bed. He played songs from the Mattel Musical Library, using a music box called the Lullaby Crib. The local paper ran a picture of smiling, delighted children. At the Handler home, by contrast, Barbara and Ken had grown blasé about new toys, so much so that Elliot could no longer use them as a built-in test market.

  “We work twenty-four hours a day,” Elliot told a magazine interviewer, adding, “We worry twenty-four hours a day.” In the same article, Elliot is described as “the brains behind the creative end of the business, while his lovely wife, as in so many families, sees to it that the bacon gets into the Handler ice box.” Ruth did take care of the household, but she did it with hired help. Elliot needed her to run the business as much as she needed to run it. He was still taciturn and shy, in “his dream world” as Ruth would often say. “He can sit in a crowd with everyone talking and hear nothing, until all of a sudden he snaps out of it with an idea,” an assistant said. Ruth, by contrast, never seemed to stop moving or voicing her excitement and plans for their next business move.

  In later years, Ruth and Elliot would both portray themselves as having a balanced home and work life. Work, they would say, was never disc
ussed at home, and every weekend was reserved for the children. These recollections were somewhat revisionist. As with so many company founders, the business became the Handlers’ most demanding child. Owing money to family added an emotional element to the business stress. Ruth and Elliot owed money to the Pauls and the Greenwalds. Ruth had promised to pay Harry Paul back within a year. Once the music box was launched, about a year after Harry Paul gave the loan, Ruth called him. She told him the toy was doing well and she offered him a choice. She told him she could send him a check with interest for the money or he could buy a fourth of Mattel. He asked her what she would do. “I’d buy into the business,” Ruth replied. Harry agreed. Mattel stayed in the family. The Pauls and the Greenwalds owned 25 percent each, and Ruth and Elliot owned the rest.

  Harry Paul was wise to follow his sister-in-law’s advice. In 1949 she had not been able to get the financing she needed to build the company. Three years later, net sales were $4.2 million, and earnings before taxes were a modest but respectable $238,000. Ruth was thirty-four and poised to make the biggest business deal of her life.

  Chapter 8

  Gambling Everything on Mickey Mouse

  In true Handler fashion, we went for it.

  At the moment Ruth was entertaining dreams of building the biggest toy company in America, Walt Disney offered her the chance. In 1955 the ABC television network started seeking advertisers for a new program called The Mickey Mouse Club.

  The Mickey Mouse character, which made its first appearance in a cartoon called Steamboat Willie in 1928, was conceived by Walt Disney. Disney turned the scrawny, wide-eyed anthropomorphized mouse into a franchise. By the mid-fifties, the internationally recognizable Mickey had starred in cartoon strips and motion pictures, and his image appeared on myriad pieces of merchandise. In 1929 a local movie theater in Ocean Park, California, started a club for kids on Saturday mornings where they watched Mickey Mouse cartoons and played games. Soon, thousands of such clubs around the country bore Mickey’s name.

  In 1950 Disney ventured into television programming. His first hit was the program Disneyland, which started on ABC in October 1954. By then, the age of television had arrived, with national broadcasts and color televisions coming onto the market. Disney’s show, an extended advertisement for the Disney theme park, was the first ABC series to hit the top ten in ratings, beating out Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. Within six weeks, Walt Disney began developing a second show, this one highlighting the popular Mickey Mouse Clubs.

  Robert E. Kintner, president of ABC, was known as a tough, uncompromising competitor in his industry. When he thought he had a winner he went all out, and he was high on Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club idea. Kintner wrote Disney that he had talked with advertisers and advertising agencies about the pricing and the character of the new show. He felt they were enthusiastic. “They expressed the belief that the program could be outstanding in television program structure,” he wrote Disney. “That it could enable advertisers to expand to the children’s group without the criticism of using ‘guns and killings’ and that with your touch it should be the outstanding daytime programming on all television.”

  Kintner was right. Media historians often argue that The Mickey Mouse Club marked the modern era of children’s television. For the first time, networks recognized that a children’s market existed. Children’s programming became more than just a tool to get a family to buy a television. Kintner’s vision, however, had one big problem. To produce the children’s show he and Disney wanted would be enormously expensive. Advertisers were hard to find for children’s shows, which was why most programs were reruns of old cartoons or movies like Hopalong Cassidy.

  ABC was also in a weak financial position. To put on a show five days a week with music, songs, cartoons, children’s news features, adventure serials, guest celebrities, and a young cast called the Mouseketeers was unprecedented. Disney would have to find twenty advertisers to pay a minimum of five hundred thousand dollars to advertise in the first year of the show. Kintner proposed an entirely new advertising scheme with four fifteen-minute segments in each hour-long show, with each sponsor getting three minutes in each segment. The plan would yield fifty thousand dollars per week in revenue, but Kintner was not willing to take just anyone’s money. “Advertisers would be limited to those which appeal directly to children; primarily, cereals, candy, soft drinks, toothpaste, and similar products.” Not surprisingly, Kintner left toys off the list. No toy manufacturer had ever advertised year-round. Even cereal companies, who spent more on advertising, had been slow to move from radio to television.

  Up to that time, toy companies, including Mattel, bought television time only for the ten or twelve weeks leading up to Christmas. Wholesalers and nationwide stores like Sears were the main advertising target, and trade journals were used to reach them. Toy companies also targeted parents with catalog advertising aimed at the Christmas market. Television was seen as an advertising frill that might give the final push for parents to buy toys that were already stocked on store shelves.

  Television advertising was pricey. Ads targeted audiences who could afford television sets. Most advertisements were for cigarettes or cleaning aids. The first toy ad on television was for Hasbro’s Mr. Potato Head. The ad went up in 1952, when two-thirds of American TVs were owned by families with children under twelve. The toy grossed a healthy four million dollars in its first year. But most toy companies kept their television budgets small. Mattel spent more than most, a little over a third of their $150,000 advertising budget for the year. Concentrated in big city local markets, the advertisements by toy companies consisted of the local children’s program host enthusiastically demonstrating a company’s toy and telling kids how much they should want one. Did this style of advertising work? No one knew.

  At the same time Disney was working on the Mickey Mouse Club shows, Elliot was looking beyond music boxes for Mattel’s next big toy. He loved the idea of the old West. For several years, the family had been vacationing at a dude ranch outside Tucson, Arizona. Elliot would don a cowboy hat, plaid shirt, and cowboy boots and ride into the desert to chase coyotes. The Roy Rogers Show, starring the amiable “King of the Cowboys,” was a so-called kids’ western, but Elliot loved it. Within a few years, the adult westerns Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Wagon Train, and Maverick would be filling the nation’s television screens.

  As Elliot cast about for the right toy, an inventor named Ken Frye came to Mattel with a replica of a paratrooper’s machine gun. With one pull of the trigger, a child could fire fifty shots, the sound punctuated by the bursting of Mattel’s Greenie Stik-M-Caps. The rapid firing reminded the toymakers of an extended burping sound, and so the gun was christened the Burp Gun. Interestingly, a lightweight portable submachine gun used by the Chinese during the Korean War, which had ended only a few years before, had the same name.

  The Burp Gun that showed up at Toy Fair in 1955 after a year of development was true to Elliot’s love of realistic toys. His ability to reduce an adult product to a child-size replica had inspired his unique baby grand piano. His later guns, the Fanner 50 pistol, a Colt .45, and the Winchester rifle were accurate reproductions. The Fanner 50, true to its name, could be drawn with one hand and its hammer fanned with the other hand as cowboys did in the movies. Its handle looked like bone, and the holster and belt were made of real leather, since Elliot felt that the plastic of the time was too cheap looking. Ruth discovered how realistic the guns were on a trip to New Haven, Connecticut, to get permission from the Winchester Repeating Arms Company to use its name on the toy rifle. Picking up the replica to demonstrate, she pointed the rifle at the head of one of the vice presidents. He hit the floor in panic. Mattel was given the rights.

  The Burp Gun made the later Winchester rifle look tame, and the Handlers were aware of objections to violent toys. Elliot said, “Our guns are the type the kids see on TV. If they can’t buy one, they’re going to put it together out of pieces of wood or coat hangers or something.�
� Ruth had a more detached response: “People make wars; we don’t.” Her world had a narrow focus. Events were good or bad relative to their effect on Mattel or her immediate family. If Elliot wanted to make guns, Ruth would defend his ideas and figure out how to make them work. “My husband is a very gentle man, and has no cruelty or meanness in him,” she said. “He felt that if children did not have toy guns they would use sticks anyway. He saw nothing wrong with them playing like they were soldiers and cowboys and Indians.”

  As marketing plans were being made for Elliot’s Burp Guns, Ralph Carson from Ruth’s advertising agency came to see her. His firm, Carson/Roberts, had only six employees, and Mattel’s budget, though small by most standards, was important to the up-and-coming agency. Carson thought the advertising he was about to propose would be beyond Mattel’s reach, but he also knew Ruth could be bold. He turned the meeting over to Vince Francis, a West Coast sales representative for ABC. Well dressed and charming, Francis explained ABC’s unprecedented move into a new Disney children’s show. ABC planned to run the show in a time slot normally reserved for local stations. They believed the Disney brand was strong enough to guarantee that 90 percent of homes with televisions would carry it. The Mickey Mouse Club would reach almost every child in America five days a week, Francis declared.

  Francis then got to the bottom line. Disney was asking for an unheard-of commitment: payment that could not be canceled for a full year of advertising. Toy manufacturers had always considered year-round advertising wasteful. The toy industry was cyclical and heavily dependent on Christmas, when 80 percent of sales were made. Factory downtime was an industry hazard, so much so that some companies often used their excess production capacity for non-toy-related products.