by Robin Gerber
Not all of Dichter’s girl interviewees felt the same. Some said Barbie looked “snobbish,” “sharp,” and “too glamorous,” but he had been hired to find a strategy for sales, not to remold the doll by committee or appeal to the minority view.
Everyone seemed to agree on Dichter’s brilliance, but not necessarily as Dichter packaged it. Marvin Barab, who took over Dichter’s contract when Mattel hired him in late 1959, remembered, “He was one of the most brilliant men in marketing. Notice I did not say psychology. As a researcher he stunk. He did not believe in real quantitative market research, like defining the scope of activity or determining the weight of preferences. But you wanted to pick his mind because he was so creative. He could take a minor point you overlooked and give a brilliant lecture on its importance to marketing.”
Dichter suggested enlarging Barbie’s breasts. He also encouraged Ruth to market her with a simple idea. Girls needed a way to convince their mothers that Barbie and her many outfits would teach them to be ladies—and well-groomed ladies at that. Barbie would be an educational tool for mothers. The sexual overtones of the doll would be downplayed by emphasizing the way her outfits could help girls learn to accessorize.
Armed with Dichter’s research, Carson/Roberts began to plan television commercials. “Watching children play with the doll, we concluded that little girls saw Barbie as the young woman they wanted to be someday,” wrote Cy Schneider, one of the ad men working on the television campaign. Ruth, of course, agreed. She had always believed that the doll’s play value rested in girls’ fantasies about growing up. Carson/Roberts brought that idea, literally, to life, creating a commercial that cast the doll as a real person. Every variation of the Barbie commercial was then tested on children. The result mesmerized girls.
Barbie debuted on television in March 1959, not as a doll but as if she were a teen fashion model. For toy advertising, this was uncharted territory. Only once in the sixty-second commercial was Barbie even called a doll. Instead, the plastic toy was simply Barbie, a girl who swims, dances, parties, and changes clothes. Carson/Roberts, who also represented Max Factor cosmetics at the time, treated the doll like a model. “No cosmetic or hair-grooming commercial ever put more attention to detail or was photographed with more style and flair,” wrote Schneider. “Special techniques were developed to make Barbie look glamorous under hot lights and through the eye of the camera. Filming a close-up of a beautiful woman has its own set of problems, but when the model’s head is the size of a quail’s egg, enormous difficulties arise.” Dolls were frozen overnight so they wouldn’t melt under the lights. Hair and fashion stylists stood at the ready to do touch-ups as the filming went on.
Carson/Roberts commissioned a special song in the style of Connie Francis’s rich-toned, lyrical pop tunes of the 1950s. The lyrics made the Mattel sales pitch clear: “Someday I’m going to be just like you, ’til then I know just what I’ll do…Barbie, beautiful Barbie, I’ll make believe that I am you.”
At every Toy Fair since 1955, when the Burp Gun launched, Mattel built on its successful entry into television. “Remember the Burp Gun” was the rallying cry in 1956. By 1959 Mattel had announced a million-dollar annual budget for advertising. In the weeks leading up to Toy Fair, Ruth announced that an extra $125,000 would be devoted to Barbie’s launch. But it was not enough to attract the buyers who still worried over Barbie’s breasts and overt sex appeal. Orders fell short. Ruth flew home after frantically cutting back production, even as the television ads blanketed the country. After all, if the dolls were not on store shelves, it was unlikely there would be much demand. Due to Ruth’s new methods for pinpointing sales, she knew the doll was languishing.
Competitors in the toy industry reveled in Mattel’s apparent failure with Barbie. One Mattel employee who joined a smaller company prior to Barbie’s debut remembered a conversation with the company president’s wife. “Can you believe what that crazy Mattel did? They went on TV and expected moms to buy whore-looking dolls for their kids.” Many people inside Mattel kept similar views to themselves.
For Ruth, the spring of 1959 was grim. The Barbie doll had failed to catch on the way Ruth had hoped, and the doll’s namesake, her daughter, Barbara, was determined to leave home prematurely. Only eighteen years old, Barbara announced her plans to marry Allen M. Segal after she graduated from high school. She had started dating him the previous year when she saw him at an insurance company where she worked. She knew him from Hamilton High School, where they both had been students, but he had gone into the navy and she had lost track of him. According to Barbara, he was “rough, tough, and very macho.” Ruth and Elliot were not happy that Barbara was marrying so young, but they went ahead with plans for a big August wedding. “He was very romantic looking in his sailor suit,” Ruth remembered, “but she needed him like she needed a hole in the head.” But Barbara was headstrong. “I used to wonder why they did not put up a bigger fight,” Barbara said, “but I guess they knew that if they did, I would have married him anyway.” Ruth was also distracted by Barbie’s fate after Toy Fair.
As schools began to close for the summer, however, Mattel got calls from buyers wanting Barbie dolls. For Ruth, it must have felt like the roller coaster of the Burp Gun all over again. After Toy Fair, she had remained conservative with the orders for Barbie dolls sent to her Japanese manufacturers. “In the toy business,” Ruth said, “you live or die with the quality of the projection you make. Your lead times are very long, and the commitments you make very early influence how many you make or ship and whether you get stuck with what you do.” She was trying not to get stuck with Barbies when suddenly she had the opposite problem. The demand skyrocketed as the effect of the television advertising, free time for summer play, and the novelty of the doll propelled girls to pester their parents for Barbie. “The industry was just going frantic with demand for Barbie,” Ruth remembered. The buyers who had been uninterested at Toy Fair were now clamoring to get the doll. Little girls wanted to play at being big girls, just as Ruth had guessed.
Barbie would become an international phenomenon, the best-selling doll in the world and one of the best-selling toys of all time. Worldwide sales would be counted in breathless increments. As one Fortune article in 2003 claimed, “A new Barbie doll is sold approximately every three seconds.” Girls in America would own not one Barbie, they would own two or three or ten or more, with many wardrobe changes for each of them. Sales would be counted in the billions. The doll’s one-word name recognition reached the heights of Chaplin or Kennedy.
Mattel would go public on Barbie’s tiny plastic triangular back, and her apparel market, if adult-size, would have made Mattel the fourth largest clothing manufacturer in America. Ruth predicted that Barbie would be a kind of Rorschach test for little girls’ imaginations, and she was right. By 1963 the New York Times wrote of “the revolutionary idea that little girls today are viewing their girl dolls increasingly as themselves and not as their babies.” But Barbie also became tinder in the fiery arguments over sexism, gender roles, and feminism that burst out in the second wave of the women’s movement in the 1960s. For better or worse, Ruth realized her own vision and created both a controversial icon and a money machine. Besting her doubters, she had given girls something she believed they wanted, maybe even needed, and they had proved her right.
Mattel would not catch up with demand for Barbie for three years. A glowing Los Angeles Times article in September 1959 began with a quote: “‘I’m a little lost in the home—I’m just not efficient,’ says Mrs. Elliot Handler.” The reporter seemed to think that Ruth was being apologetic, but that seems unlikely. She was stating what had been true since the day she got fed up with being a wife and mother in 1944. She left homemaking behind the day she told Harold Matson that she would sell the picture frames he made in his garage.
Fifteen years later she was executive vice president of Mattel, overseeing twelve hundred workers, twenty million dollars in sales, and the consolidation of five plant
s into one enormous 250,000-square-foot building in an area south of Los Angeles soon to be named Hawthorne. When pressed by the Los Angeles Times reporter for insight into her motivations as a businesswoman, Ruth said, “If I had to stay home I would be the most dreadful, mixed-up, unhappy woman in the world.” She had never been so candid or introspective in print before, but Ruth was riding high enough to be clear-eyed about her choices.
That fall, Barbie dolls were available in twenty-two varieties, and their ranks were expanding. New clothing lines were being planned. There was talk of other dolls, perhaps a male version, which girls were already writing to Mattel to request. With the doll’s success, Ruth could expound upon her original vision of Barbie, and no naysayers were left to contradict her. “Little girls dream of being curvaceous, dreamy, exciting. They want—some day—to have gorgeous clothes, be chic and look like movie stars,” she said. She saw nothing wrong with encouraging such fantasies. After all, she loved chic clothes and had been fascinated with Hollywood since her days at Paramount.
Ruth insisted that Mattel did not have an agenda. They were not setting trends but following them. Barbie’s figure simply reflected the idealized female of the 1950s, albeit a male ideal put forth by male-dominated media. But Ruth was not political or prone to dwell on the root of cultural standards. If girls were being told they should wish they were busty blonds, Mattel would profit from that message.
Although Ruth rejected sexist norms in her business life, she still felt the conflict of challenging conventional ideas about women. She might never have started working again after becoming a mother, or accomplished what she had, if Elliot had not given her permission. But when a friend asked what she would have done if he had said no, Ruth stopped and thought for a long time. Finally, she laughed and said, “I probably would have done it anyway.” Later, hearing that story, she changed her mind. “I’m not sure,” she said. “In those days I was brainwashed enough in my head through the world around me, if he had said ‘no’ I might not have done it. I might have been a very miserable person, and we might have lost our marriage eventually.”
For his part, Elliot had always followed a simple formula. “As long as she’s happy, I’m happy,” he said. Ruth was happy as a businesswoman and, more than that, as a business founder. She possessed the defining characteristics of successful capitalists who turn ideas into profitable businesses. Consumed with the struggle and challenges of building their business, they have time for little else, not family, not friends, not introspection. Ruth told one interviewer that her career took “a willingness and a capacity to try to slot your private life into your total existence so that it interferes as little as possible with your business life.”
Ruth had no interest, time, or patience for debates over the political or social impact of products such as the Barbie doll or toy guns. She had hired Ernest Dichter to tell her how to sell the most Barbie dolls, not how to make the doll a proxy for an emerging feminist vision of women. She had no desire to dictate the fantasies girls played out with Barbie. If the Dichter and Carson/Roberts focus groups and interviews showed that girls wanted to pretend the doll was going to parties or shopping, getting married and dressing up, that was fine with Ruth. She trusted that if she got the doll in girls’ hands, they would have a richer fantasy life. As tens of thousands of dolls were bought around the country, mothers began to reconcile themselves to the doll. “She was such a tomboy before,” one mother wrote. “Now I’ve been able to get her to wash her face and comb her hair.” Ruth’s controversial idea, Dichter’s unprecedented focus groups, and Carson/Roberts’s unique commercials had all been vindicated.
As Ruth made plans for the new decade, she knew she was sitting atop a behemoth that would require all her attention and still-developing business skills. Back in 1957, after the Mickey Mouse Club commercials had put Mattel on a trajectory to go from five million to fourteen million dollars in sales in three years, her general manager, Dave Menken, had a suggestion. He had grown concerned about the rapid rate of growth of Mattel, yet when he spoke to Ruth about his concerns she brushed him off. Elliot had been pushing to expand product lines, and Menken felt the company was not equipped to handle the expansion. Ruth did not seem to understand his worries over the coordination of divisions or the chain of supervision. He told Ruth that it would help her and the company if she got some formal business training. He suggested she take a course for business executives at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Ruth showed up on the first day of class to find fifty men as her fellow students—no women. They were presidents, executive vice presidents, and chairmen of large companies. As she took her seat, Ruth felt ill at ease, not sure that she belonged in a class where she was certain the other participants had obtained the formal business education that she lacked. “I was hiding a great big inferiority complex,” Ruth said, “and at first I had a tough time with it. I sat there with those men, listening to their educated discussions of all the subjects relating to business management, and I realized how little I knew.” Soon, however, as she read about organizational theory and the formal concepts underlying the work she had been doing instinctively, Ruth said she felt “like a person on a desert who found water.” She checked extra books out of the school library. She felt she could not get enough of this new world of business ideas.
Gradually her insecurities faded. She realized that while the other students had a great deal of education, they had far less business experience than she did. Most of them were not entrepreneurs, but executives who had been hired to run ongoing concerns. “They walked in with their classy education,” Ruth remembered, “and they did not really know what the real world was. Well, I knew what the real world was like because I had been there and I had done it.”
During one class, the professor talked about the challenges of managing employees. He presented a case study involving a woman who had worked in an office for ten or fifteen years. She had a great deal of institutional knowledge. She could be counted on to provide valuable background on clients and company history that was otherwise undocumented, and she knew where to find everything. Newer employees often came to her for help, but she was crusty and unfriendly. She frequently refused to follow her supervisor’s instructions or fulfill his requests, falling back on her standard retort that things had never been done the way he was suggesting. She was hard to manage and resisted change, the professor concluded, asking the class to tell him how they would handle such an employee.
As the professor went around the class asking each of the members to give his opinion, the answers focused on reforming the recalcitrant woman. Students said, “I’d talk to her about it,” or “I’d counsel her,” or “I’d have the personnel department work with her.” Finally, the professor said to Ruth, “Well, what would you have done?” Ruth had been growing increasingly impatient as she listened to the other students. Her reply was curt: “I’d have fired the son of a bitch forty-five minutes ago.” The story of the case study and Ruth’s answer became a legend within the program. Years later, recent graduates who met Ruth would tell her that it was still being repeated.
One night Ruth took home a book on organizational theory from her course and studied it at a desk in her living room. While Elliot slept, she sat up most of the night outlining the ideas that impressed her on a separate piece of paper for each chapter. It was a method for studying and remembering information that she used throughout her life. She focused on those ideas that would show her how to improve Mattel. She was struck by the idea that she could not reach her goals if someone was blocking her access to the people she needed to supervise. As she read, she understood how a resistant manager could prevent her entire operational plan from succeeding. Dave Menken, who insisted on having the personnel, financial, production, and engineering departments all report to him, was in Ruth’s way. She had only the marketing department and Menken reporting to her. “I realized I could not function with a ‘general manager’ reporting to me,” Rut
h said, “because I had to get to the various parts of the business myself.”
Ruth thought about taking some of the departments away from Menken, but the more she read the more she realized that she could not demote a man with that much power. He would protest. If he stayed he was not likely to be effective and would hurt the organization. Ruth laid out a new organizational chart for Mattel. On it, personnel/industrial relations, finance, production, marketing, and certain other departments reported to her. She laid out all the subfunctions reporting to each department. Research, design, and engineering reported to Elliot, and she created a dotted-line relationship connecting her to them. When she finished, there was no place for Menken. She decided that he had to go.
When Elliot woke up the next morning, Ruth pulled him to the table and made him sit down. She showed him her new organizational plan, announcing that they had no choice but to fire Menken. Elliot studied the paper for a few minutes before agreeing. Ruth said the decision was hard to make. “This was a good man,” she said, “a very talented man, a very loyal man, and a man that I liked very much who was doing a pretty good job. Yet it had to be done. So if people say I’m tough, I guess when I had to do it, I did it and it was the correct decision at the time.” Ruth was in full operational control of Mattel.
In December 1959, as Mattel readied to move into its giant new plant, Ruth was feeling expansive. She started a new charity program, agreeing to give toys to the police department in Los Angeles every year, which they would give away door-to-door in needy neighborhoods. The Los Angeles Examiner had agreed to follow the police and take pictures, and Ruth was delighted by the children’s faces when officers came to the door dressed as Santa Claus. Mattel gave Ruth other reasons to smile. After consolidating her control of the company, she had built a team of hard-driving vice presidents: Clifford Jacobs for marketing; Seymour Adler for operations; Robert Mitchell for industrial relations; Ted Horowitz as treasurer; and the flamboyant, brilliant, and quixotic Jack Ryan for research and design. Elliot still held the title, if not the function, of president, and Ruth had added an important outside role with the Toy Association in addition to her job as executive vice president.