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

by Robin Gerber

  Ruth remembered how proud Abe Swedlin of the Gund toy company acted as he gave her the news that she was being named as the first woman on the Toy Association board of directors. The following year he proudly told her that she was being named the first woman vice president of the board. For the first time in the association’s history, however, a second vice president, who was male, had been appointed. By tradition, the vice president succeeded to the presidency. “They did not dare let me become president,” Ruth said. “They didn’t have the guts.” She admitted being both annoyed by the slight, as well as proud to be an officer and the first woman. She found the board meetings fun and stimulating, quickly growing comfortable in the all-male milieu but aware of the gender discrimination she encountered. “[For women] it was not a glass ceiling in those days,” Ruth said. “It was concrete. The ceiling was there, and the walls were there. I had instance after instance in which it was made known to me that I was a fluke or a quirk. It gave me a lot of self-doubt. I had all kinds of mixed feelings. It also gave me a feeling of power, strangely enough.”

  Ruth’s rise in a corporate world dominated by men made her a target. Behind her back, they called her loudmouthed and profane. They resented her grandiose pronouncements, such as her claim that Barbie was “the greatest phenomenon that ever hit the toy business.” Although Ruth was arguably right, they found it hard to forgive a woman who lacked modesty and self-effacement.

  An attractive woman who liked to dress for men’s admiration, Ruth also freely spouted the most indelicate expletives. She strode into rooms as if she expected to take over. Most of the men she worked with had never seen a woman like her. She had been running Mattel for fifteen years, and her ambition was still manifest. She believed in her instinctive marketing talent, her originality, and her willingness to operate outside the norm. She saw herself as a leader, one who related to people in a special way. “I can motivate people in a way that is superior to just about anyone else,” Ruth said. “We got our people so highly motivated, Elliot with his great ideas and his sweetness and warm personality, and me with the power of my own convictions and my ambitious drive and warmth toward people.” Ruth believed that she, Elliot, and their executive team were poised to build the company by tens of millions of dollars.

  At times, Ruth referred to Mattel’s meteoric rise from its origins in a seedy garage as a happenstance, saying, “We didn’t know what the hell we were doing.” But after 1960 there could be no denying that every decision was intentional, planned, vetted, scrutinized, and approved by Ruth.

  Chapter 10

  Soaring in the Sixties

  Life changed the minute we went public.

  Just before the 1964 Toy Fair, Mattel executives squeezed into a small company conference room to look over the toy a rival company hoped would compete with the Barbie doll. The Hassenfeld brothers, whose toy company would later be renamed Hasbro, were serious competitors for Mattel. The solvency of Hasbro was riding on the muscular physique of an eleven-and-a-half-inch toy that executives swore never to call a doll.

  G.I. Joe, “America’s Movable Fighting Man,” had twenty-one movable parts with which to throw grenades, wield a flamethrower, or storm the barricades of Mattel’s success. His face was an artist’s composite taken from the pictures of twenty Medal of Honor winners, or so the advertising falsely claimed. No matter—the martyred President Kennedy had been a war hero, and millions of veterans were also fathers of little boys who wanted to play soldier. Doll toys for boys had never worked, and so Joe was advertised, to the music of “The Army Goes Rolling Along,” as a “soldier,” a “frogman,” and a “fighting man,” never as a doll. Joe came with costume changes and fighting accessories. The lesson of Barbie and her wardrobe had not been lost on the Hassenfeld brothers. Elliot called it the razor/razorblade theory. Once customers bought a razor, they had to keep buying more blades.

  Executives at Mattel had been hearing rumors about the supposed blockbuster toy for weeks. They hovered around the table where the doll had been placed, and Jack Ryan, head of the design team, slowly took off each piece of Joe’s clothing. Ruth was the only woman in the room.

  G.I. Joe had mannequin-like joints. Unlike the sleek but relatively immovable Barbie doll, Joe had a rotational joint at his shoulder, upper arm, elbow, and a ball-like wrist joint. His heavily muscled upper body was divided from his hips by a large stomach ball joint. Each leg was jointed at the hip, and even his ankles were flexible. His head swiveled on a thick neck, and his look was impassive, if not stern.

  Ryan made a big show of taking off the doll’s cap and dog tag. Then his camouflage jacket. Then his combat boots. No one said anything. The doll’s engineering was impressive. Joe’s clothes showed the detail that Mattel’s Japanese seamstresses had perfected with Barbie’s tiny snaps and stitches. Hasbro had, for the first time, gone to Japan for the manufacture of Joe’s clothes. Everyone could see that a military-themed doll would appeal to the boys’ market.

  Finally, Ryan tugged off Joe’s pants. The molded hip piece, separately jointed from just below the stomach to the legs, had a nondescript U-shaped crease in the front, and a vertical crease suggesting buttocks from the rear. Not a word came from the Mattel team as it evaluated the strange-looking nude doll. Breaking the silence, Ruth barked out a laugh. With a dismissive wave of her hand that flashed her large emerald-cut diamond ring, she declared, “Why, he ain’t got no balls!” There was a breathless pause in the room before everyone started laughing. It was “hearty, good-natured, confident laughter,” recalled Joe Whittaker. “As it finally subsided, I noticed a few pairs of eyes locking, quiet smiles, a nod or two of the head.”

  Whittaker was new to Mattel, but he knew its culture was unique. He had been hired into product planning at a time when Ruth was focused on building professional systems in an industry that operated fast and loose. Toys, like fashion or movies, needed constant innovation. It was a fad business, where designers often guessed wrong about the next big thing. People might buy the same brand of soap year after year, but every Christmas they expected new and better ideas in toys.

  Ruth sent her hypercharged team into an animated discussion of G.I. Joe’s chances in the marketplace. Joe Whittaker sensed the change that Ruth’s brash comment about the doll’s anatomy had made. In a tribute to her at an awards ceremony years later he said, “Was it really a transcendent moment? Probably just in the imagination of a kid straight out of B-school, but I first sensed at that moment what they already knew: and that is that it was we, we at Mattel, we in that room, we had the balls, and the will and the force of corporate personality to mold and shape and positively remake an entire industry in our own image…. That is exactly what we did for the entire decade of the sixties. We were golden and what we touched turned to gold.”

  The decade started with Mattel going public, selling 350,000 shares over the counter at ten dollars each. Ruth would use the money to expand operations, mostly in the United States and Japan. She and Elliot spent months doing due diligence meetings to prepare for the stock offering.

  Ruth acted as spokesperson and did all of the talking after Elliot made a brief introduction. One of these meetings was in Chicago. A day or two before the big event, which the stock market analysts were going to attend, the venue was suddenly changed. Ruth was told that women were not allowed at the original location. On another occasion, Ruth and Elliot met two men from a Wall Street firm who were to escort them into a New York club. They went up in an elevator as a group, but when they got off, one of the men took Elliot’s arm and led him in a different direction from Ruth. Ruth was taken through the kitchen and garbage area and down some back halls, finally arriving at the meeting room, where about twenty men were waiting. Even though she was the key speaker to this group of stock analysts, she had to be sneaked in because women were not allowed on that floor of the club.

  Despite the indignities, Ruth found it a heady experience to be the only female operating in a world of men. She felt it was
a form of power and that she was ascending business heights she had never envisioned. She said she got her “kicks” and a great deal of satisfaction from being the only woman. “It gave me power over them,” Ruth recalled. “It gave me a feeling of self, and I don’t know if the word was ‘pride’? I think so.”

  Rather than be intimidated by the treatment given her because of her gender, Ruth coped sometimes by embracing it, sometimes by letting it roll off. Discrimination, she told a woman manager at Mattel, “was the price you paid for being ahead of your group.” As with so many other parts of her life, she tried to turn the negative into a positive. Some men felt she used her sexuality, turning on a big smile and calling them honey. Men who tried to make her feel powerless only succeeded in making her feel more powerful. She had done everything they had and more, and she had done it against the odds that said women could not succeed.

  As for other women, Ruth was willing to give them a fair shot. “She was not particularly mentoring of women,” remembered Sandy Danon, who started in management as a fashion cost estimator in 1968. “She was ruthless and saw herself as one of the guys, [but once you were hired] you had the opportunity to reach higher than you ever could. She wanted you to be entrepreneurial, be at the forefront before anyone else. We were thinking two to three years ahead. We did not know the meaning of ‘it can’t be done.’”

  Discrimination did exist. When Danon discovered pay differentials between women and men, she protested and won increases of 25–30 percent. Ruth believed that most women did not want business success as much as men did. Where a male executive was catered to when he came home, a professional woman still had to do the catering and not act, as Ruth put it, “like she’s doing her family a big fat favor.” Yet if women wanted the opportunity, Ruth would not stand in their way. By the late 1960s, Mattel had more women executives than any other toy company.

  Ruth recognized her unique place in the business world, speaking of her life as “a woman’s story,” but she had little interest in what her rise to power meant for other women. Any feminist tilt to her rhetoric was tempered by her insistence that she always had her husband by her side. She credited Elliot with tolerating the sexist treatment she sometimes received so that they could achieve their business goals, although it often sounded like he was simply oblivious. She claimed that neither of them was trying to “cure the evils of the world.” Ruth was just following her instincts. “She would have made a great trial lawyer,” Josh Denham, an executive who was close with her, remembers. “She asked very penetrating questions. She had a female instinct for when you were putting her on, and she wouldn’t tolerate b.s. She’d just stop listening. She had the most perceptive, gut feelings of what would work or not of anyone I’d known.” Ruth used a joke about her success that was all the more humorous because no one who knew her would give it any credence. “I got here by sleeping with the boss,” Ruth liked to say.

  For business practices, Mattel looked to Procter & Gamble, considered a model for its superior way of developing new products and marketing them. Ruth aimed to create generalists who could manage product lines by being at the center of a wheel-shaped organizational model. These leaders were charged with understanding Mattel’s markets and their consumers so that they could quickly respond as new products were ready for distribution.

  To find the best and the brightest, Ruth recruited from the top business schools. New employees from Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, Harvard, and Columbia were given written tests. Thirty engineers might be brought in for a weeklong interview process in which they were pitted against other hopefuls. No other toy company had such an aggressive recruitment process.

  Candidates would arrive at the big, gray industrial building in Hawthorne, with trailers set on the outside to expand the space. A river of water flowed out of the production area. The headquarters of the building was tiny. A new headquarters was not built until the mid-sixties. Most offices were cramped cubicles, and prospective employees would encounter a charged atmosphere in every department. To an outsider, Mattel must have looked like a classroom without a teacher. Pat Schauer, who worked in sales, remembered, “It was racy. People were throwing around lots of sexual double entendres. There was lots of joking, throwing things over the cubicle walls, playing games.”

  Depending on their job interest, prospective employees might be given design projects to complete or a marketing package to prepare. They were given the Activity Vector Analysis test to see if they were “creative and volatile enough,” in Ruth’s words. This test became known as the Mattel V or claw, because the points of a V were used to plot “achievement,” “power,” and “affiliation,” meaning feelings and collaborative style. Successful applicants scored high on achievement and power, which were the top two points of the V, and much lower on affiliation, which was the bottom point. “It was a measure of how aggressive you were,” remembered Frank Sesto, who became chief tool engineer. “They wanted hard-charging people.”

  What Ruth wanted were people like her—candid, competitive, uncompromising, and tough. “You did not just go through a wall,” executive Josh Denham explained. “You were expected to knock it down.” Ruth was willing to let her team try new things. Boyd Browne, who started in 1959 as a manager for safety and security, had ten jobs in sixteen years at Mattel. “I came from RCA, where everything was by the book. At one level you had one pen, one desk. At another level you got a shared office, then an office with a half wall. At the top you got an enclosed room. Mattel was the opposite. Whatever had to be done, you did it.”

  Browne remembered doing an experiment to test security. He went to the docks, loaded four boxes of toys into his car, and drove away. After seeing how easily inventory could be stolen, he wanted to issue badges for everyone and secure the gates. “I went to Ruth, but I was scared to death, and I told her the story. ‘Yes?’ she said. ‘What’s your point? If you think it’s the right thing to do, then go do it.’” At that moment, Browne understood that Ruth was telling him that his job was his responsibility. “If you wanted to do something that was good for the company, go do it, but you had responsibility and would be out if it was not good. You could take risks and move up the ladder.” In Ruth’s company, you were more likely to get fired for under-spending than overspending.

  Sandy Danon, who started as a fashion cost estimator, remembered that “People were scared of her. She’d rip them apart. She’d say things like ‘I’ll cut your balls off’ if they did not perform as she expected.” But Ruth also encouraged Danon, advising her to let slights roll off her as she herself had learned to do. Those, like Danon, who made it at Mattel, felt like they were in a company army. “We were Mattel brats, and we were in it for life,” Danon said.

  The high energy and pressure made Mattel a stressful place to work. People were surprised when Tom Kalinske, who would eventually become CEO, got married. Few people in marketing were married. “The place was so exciting,” Danon said, “home was boring, the divorce rate was high.” There were a lot of affairs going on in the company and a lot of partying. People were competitive even when they were supposed to be relaxing. Working in Ruth’s shadow, they did not relax. “Her approval was always on our minds,” said Lou Miraula, who worked in marketing. He remembered one of her early pieces of advice: “Lou, when you see another salesperson working, you watch and see how you can do it better.”

  In the mid-sixties Miraula went to Ruth’s office with a huge order from Kresge, one of Mattel’s top customers. He expected her to compliment him, but instead she said, “They did not buy this toy or this one,” pointing to the list. She did not want stores to cherry-pick Mattel’s line, buying only the best-selling toys. She wanted shelf space, and at every sales meeting, Cliff Jacobs, who headed the department, would remind his team of Ruth’s expectations. She expected every order to be comprehensive. She wanted salesmen to sell every item Mattel had. “She kept the pressure on,” Miraula said, adding that he felt wary of her power. He never felt she cared about em
ployees personally. But other employees felt quite different. Several referred to Ruth and Elliot as “parents.” “They were my second set of parents in the business world. They were my role models. Ruth always asked about my personal life with real kindness in her tone,” Joe Whittaker remembered.

  Even as she expected top performance inside the company, Ruth supported outside entrepreneurship. Fred Held, working in operations strategy, had a real estate business that Ruth encouraged. Marvin Barab had a business publishing family campground directories. It had just started to take off when he had his interview for Mattel. He told Ruth about it. “Will it interfere with toys?” she asked. When he said it would not, she told him it was not a problem. Sometime later, when Barab was having lunch with her, Ruth asked how the publishing business was going. “It’s going too well,” Barab replied. “I’m up against the wall because all my value is in accounts receivable and I need money for more printing.” He explained that Sears and Montgomery Ward owed him fifty thousand dollars, and Rand McNally would not print more directories for the upcoming season unless he came up with twenty-five thousand dollars. Ruth told him to meet her back at her office. When he got there she called her contact at the Englewood Bank of America. “Jules,” she said, “I have an executive who has another business and he’s cash short, and I want you to help.” Barab kept his publishing company and, after six years at Mattel, he left to run it full-time.