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

by Robin Gerber

  Mattel was testing the line the Federal Communications Commission had set regarding the amount of commercial matter in any given children’s show. Another toy company complained about the idea of a show built around and named for a toy. Mattel was told to stop the program, but nothing could stop sales of Hot Wheels. The candy-colored toys became so popular that an entire plant was built to handle their production. If Hot Wheels had been its own company, it would have been the second largest toy company in the world next to Mattel.

  Company profits were so great in 1969 that Mattel jumped into a charity program called Operation Bootstrap, set up to help minority-owned businesses by sharing expertise and making loans. Mattel financed Shindana Toy Company, an African American–owned business in South Central Los Angeles that made ethnically correct multicultural dolls.

  Still operating on the “everything turns to gold” model, Ruth threw herself behind another Elliot brainstorm. In 1968, just as Hot Wheels was coming out, he had turned his attention to his Uke-A-Doodle roots, setting Ryan the task of creating a musical toy he called Optigan. As usual, Elliot was ahead of his time. His idea was to make a small piano-organ that could synthesize sounds by optically reading graphic images of waveforms off LP-size disks. Light beams shot through the transparent disks and were picked up on the other side by a photoelectric cell. Variance in the beams changed the voltage, which was amplified and passed through speakers as the sound of real instruments and a keyboard.

  The name Optigan came from this optical organ idea. As the advertising proclaimed, “With the Optigan you actually play the real sounds of pianos, banjos, guitars, marimbas, drums and dozens more.”

  Elliot loved his new creation, which had the casing of a tabletop piano. As development went on, he decided it was not a toy at all, but a kind of instrument that adults could enjoy. A separate corporation was formed to market the novelty instrument. Elliot unveiled it at the company’s annual meeting in May 1971. He tinkled the keys as shareholders waited, but there was silence. If Elliot had known the future, he would have seen the glitch as a sign, but then someone plugged Optigan into the wall and the show went on. No one thought it remarkable that once again Mattel was straying from its toy-centered roots.

  Meanwhile, Rosenberg stepped up the pace of acquisitions, using Mattel stock to pay for companies instead of cash. When he came on board, Mattel stock had just climbed out of a severe slump from two years before. Shares were back on a steady rise, which Rosenberg counted on. A higher stock price meant less stock was needed for acquisition deals.

  In February 1969 Mattel bought three European toy companies for undisclosed amounts: a doll maker, Ratti e Vallenzasca, and a miniature die-cast car company, Mebetoys, both of Milan; and Ebiex in Brussels, a toy marketing company. In June Mattel bought Metaframe, a pet products company with stock valued at about twenty-seven million dollars. Recording a new high on Wall Street in January 1970, Mattel purchased Turco Manufacturing, a playground equipment manufacturer; Audio Magnetics Corporation, a blank cassette and reel-to-reel tape pioneer; H&H Plastics, a plastic molding company; and Monogram Models, a producer of plastic hobby kits.

  In the early months of 1970, Ruth was expansive about her role as president. She toured factories around the world, hobbling on crutches from a minor accident but still thrilled at Mattel’s worldwide reach. She admitted it was difficult to go from being “where the action is” to trying “not to stifle the creativity of others.” She had sixteen vice presidents reporting to her. She told a reporter that it was becoming increasingly difficult to stay in contact with all of them. “For us, the change was traumatic,” she said, referring to Mattel’s growth, “but you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” She was becoming reconciled to her new role atop the toy company that was twice as large as its nearest competitor. She was also getting noticed. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco asked her to sit on the board of the Los Angeles branch, making her the first woman to be given a seat.

  Ruth began expanding Mattel in new directions. She announced new educational television programming for CBS, called In the News, consisting of mini-documentaries for school-age children, and a show on NBC called Hot Dog, which would explain the “who, what, when, where and why of things.” But she was most proud of “the world of the young,” as she called Mattel’s conglomerate of acquired companies and related ventures. The latest entry was meant to challenge Disney’s supremacy in children’s movies. Ruth struck a deal with film producer Robert Radnitz, who made such highly acclaimed children’s movies as A Dog of Flanders, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and Misty. Mattel would finance movies Radnitz produced and share in the profits. Its first success was the family drama Sounder.

  Ruth also set in motion a deal to buy Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus. She and Elliot had started a discussion about the merger at a dinner in the Houston Astrodome, where the legendary Roy Hofheinz held court.

  Hofheinz was a major stockholder of the circus and owner of the Houston Astrodome Company and baseball team. He lived a large life, creating the Celestial Suite at the Astroworld Hotel, which rented for $2,500 per night. It had eight bedrooms, a mini nightclub, stocked bar and kitchen, and an eight-foot-by-eight-foot bed. He thought nothing of spending ten thousand dollars in overweight baggage charges when he traveled with his steamer trunks, footlockers, and assorted luggage. In Athens he settled his 250-pound frame into a pharaoh’s chair and was carried to the Parthenon by four Greeks and two Houstonians. Most people called him Judge because as a young man he had sat on the Harris County, Texas, bench. He could have been called Mayor, too, for his time running the city of Houston before he ventured into business. Ever loyal and enthusiastic about his projects, he had coat buttons fashioned from gold-plated Ringling Bros. commemorative medals. As one reporter put it, Hofheinz was “a Texas capitalist and proud of it.” Richard Blum, an investment banker at the time for Sutro Investment Partners, recalled Hofheinz as “the reincarnation of P. T. Barnum.”

  Ruth had never heard of Hofheinz when he called her during Toy Fair in February 1970, but her sales staff had. They encouraged her to fly to Houston to talk about an amusement park deal that he was proposing. Meeting her and Elliot with his usual flair, Hofheinz took them to the top of the Astrodome later that night. As they sat having cocktails, looking out at the empty stadium, the giant light board suddenly blazed with the greeting, “Welcome Ruth and Elliot Handler.” They were suitably dazzled.

  At dinner in the Astrodome restaurant, they were joined by Irvin Feld, who had bought Ringling Bros. circus just two years earlier, and Richard Blum, whose company also owned part of the circus. They were looking for ways to expand and modernize. Blum had the idea of introducing Feld to the Handlers for the purpose of getting Mattel to license Ringling-themed toys. He had no intention of talking about a merger deal, but Ruth hit on the idea right away.

  Ruth and Elliot were not interested in Hofheinz’s proposal for an amusement park in Houston, but bringing the circus into the Mattel family seemed perfect. They knew their grandchildren would love it, and from a business perspective, they always needed new ways to reach children, especially because some of their television programs were coming under fire. An activist organization called Action for Children’s Television, founded by Peggy Charren in 1968, was growing stronger. Charren and the other mothers who founded the group demanded more quality educational television for children and petitioned the FCC to require it. Ruth had created new television shows partially in response to Charren, but she was also looking to mediums outside of television to protect her ability to sell Mattel’s products. The circus seemed a perfect fit, the kind of magic that complemented Mattel’s “world of the young.”

  Mattel was twenty-five years old and, as its own advertising proclaimed, more than a toy company. According to Ruth, Mattel filled “the educational and recreational needs of young people.” The future promised even more fun and innovation than the past—or so Ruth and Elliot thought.

  C
hapter 13

  The Cancer Within

  Everything rolled downhill faster and faster, and there was no way I could stop it.

  Starting around 1955, Ruth felt lumps in her breasts. She had a distinct memory of the first time she stood in the shower, lifting her arm to rub soap under it and over her breast, and suddenly feeling something unusual. She stood soaping and probing the lump for several minutes until she felt certain that a doctor should examine her. When she went to his office, he quickly detected what she had felt, but reassured Ruth that he did not think the lump was malignant. He told her he wanted to do a surgical biopsy, however, to be sure.

  After that, every two or three years, doctors had been concerned enough about the lumps Ruth found to do surgical biopsies to rule out cancer. She had two on each breast and a number of less invasive needle biopsies. Her breasts were cystic, which meant that benign lumps developed often. All the procedures showed that she was cancer free, but every biopsy was a trial. “In those days they always made a big fuss over those biopsies. They would take you to the hospital. They would keep you there for a few days, and I had scars on the sides of my breasts. They used the same scars over and over on each breast.” Ruth found the procedures nerve-wracking, each time waking up from the anesthesia not knowing what she would be told.

  After one of her biopsies, Al Frank, a New York representative for Mattel, was waiting in the hall outside Ruth’s room. He had grown close to the Handlers over the years and was a warm, sweet man. As Ruth was awakening from the anesthetic, she heard a man crying and sobbing in the hall. She thought he must be wailing over her because the doctors had found cancer and taken her breast. Her breasts were bound so tightly with so many bandages that she had no way to know if her breast was there or not. She recognized Al Frank’s voice talking to someone else. In moments, he was in her room, hugging Ruth and telling her that the biopsy was benign. Frank had been crying for joy.

  It was at a family wedding in Denver in the 1960s that Ruth discovered a new, more worrisome lump. She was taking a shower before getting dressed for the ceremony and doing her usual soapy check of her breasts when she felt a lump larger than any she had discovered before. It seemed to come out of nowhere. Her cousin Dr. Joel Mosko was at the wedding, and she told him about it. He asked her to come to his office the next morning, and when he felt her breast he told her to see a doctor in Los Angeles immediately. Ruth called Dr. Paul Rekers, a Los Angeles surgeon, and said that she was coming home and wanted him to check her right into the hospital for a biopsy. He told her that it would be easier to come to his office, but she insisted that she did not want to wait. “That was typical of me,” Ruth said. “That’s how I did those things. If I was going to have to face the bad music, I did not want to have to screw around with it. I just wanted to get it done.” Ruth planned to go to the hospital straight from the airport, and she expected the doctor to be waiting.

  At the hospital that night, Dr. Rekers performed a needle aspiration of fluid from Ruth’s breast, but because she was already in the hospital he decided to do a surgical biopsy as well. Ruth was scared, but once again the results were benign.

  In 1970, however, Ruth felt something in her breast that was in a different place, a lump that for the first time had her doctor expressing concern. Leaving his office and walking toward her car in Beverly Hills, she burst out in tears. She was sobbing uncontrollably when a man passed her on the sidewalk. Looking at Ruth, he said, “Lady, it can’t be all that bad.” She turned away and thought, “You should only know.”

  Ruth set up another biopsy. The lump was not malignant, but since the doctor had opened her up he explored more deeply. Underneath the lump he discovered early signs of cancer. That morning, Ruth’s breast was removed.

  It was June 16, 1970, and nothing in Ruth’s personal or business life would ever be the same. After years of living with the fear of cancer from numerous benign lumps, she had the disease and she was terrified. Would the cancer spread? Had the cancer already spread? She had lost her left breast. Would she find a malignant lump in her other breast, and what about the fibroids that doctors suspected in her uterus? Since the early 1960s she’d been diagnosed with mild diabetes, chronic tension, and diverticulitis. Would the cancer kill her or would something else?

  Ruth could not help thinking about her sister Sarah, who had raised her. Sarah had died of ovarian cancer in 1950, after several years of extraordinary measures to save her. Ruth took charge of Sarah’s care, not able to accept the initial postsurgery diagnosis that gave her sister six months to live. In her own words, she “embarked on a campaign” to find the best care in an era before chemotherapy.

  During World War II, doctors had discovered that people exposed to mustard gas experienced a reduction in white blood cell count. Starting in the 1940s, doctors began experimenting with mustard gas in patients with cancers that had spread through the growth of white blood cells. Ruth found a doctor in Los Angeles using this experimental treatment. Sarah received the mustard gas through her veins, and though the treatment was painful, her tumors shrank enough to allow a second surgery to remove the cancer. She lived three more years, long enough for Ruth to treat her to a dream trip to Hawaii, where Sarah had always wanted to go. When Sarah returned, she needed another surgery, but this time she did not recover. Ruth, who had paced anxiously in the hospital hallway during Sarah’s ordeal, never liked Sarah’s husband, Louie, but she would never forgive him for “being out gallivanting” as Sarah lay dying.

  As soon as she woke up from surgery, Ruth looked at her tightly taped chest and asked Elliot, “Will you still love me without this?” Her fears and insecurities overwhelmed her. She convalesced at the beach house in Malibu Colony that she had bought only two years before. The Malibu Beach Motion Picture Colony had been started in 1926 with cottages and leased beachfront marketed to Hollywood stars and executives. Four decades later, the colony was a gated, guarded, and exclusive beach retreat for the movie industry and business millionaires. Ruth bought the house of singer Frankie Laine on impulse after seeing how much her granddaughter loved the beach. The house, right on the beach, was a cherished retreat for Ruth and her family, but after the surgery it felt lonely and depressing.

  Ruth’s thoughts were dark. At times she just wanted to die. She remembered a story her mother had told her when she was a child about a friend’s daughter who had lost a breast to cancer. Her mother whispered the terrible news in Ruth’s ear. Perhaps Ruth had seen the story about the previous month’s conference of cancer researchers, all agreeing that any cure was years away. She was angry with the doctor who had scarred her, and ashamed. No one, not even her family, would talk about the ordeal, and there were no support groups at that time. For women in 1970, having a mastectomy was a secret, unspeakable brutality. Adding to Ruth’s worries, Barbara came to the beach house to tell her mother that she was getting a divorce after eleven years of marriage.

  Ruth returned to work five weeks after her surgery. She found it impossible to sit around doing nothing, but she was deeply shaken by the physical and emotional toll of the cancer. “I was unable to speak with authority,” she wrote later. “I lost the courage of my convictions.” Once proud of her body, she felt disfigured, unattractive, unwomanly. She was fifty-four years old. Deep new lines scored her face, which had grown fleshier. Bags showed under her eyes. Her clothes were chaste, buttoned to the neck and full enough to hide the inconsistent shape of her chest. She lost her broad, dazzling smile. Her shoulders slumped. She wore her gray hair in a flat, severe cut.

  Ruth’s modified radical mastectomy, in which her breast, chest muscles, and lymph nodes in her armpits were removed, left permanent muscle and nerve damage. The pain would linger for the rest of her life.

  Tensions at Mattel had grown more disruptive as the division heads competed to bring in the most revenue. They also struggled against top management. Yas Yoshida, the controller, had wanted the top finance job, and he resented Rosenberg for getting it. Ruth, rely
ing on hard numbers, was fighting with Bernie Loomis in the Wheels division, believing that he wanted to overproduce a new gift set of the Sizzlers cars, a motorized version of Hot Wheels.

  Darrell Peters had become the in-house master of sales data. He did extensive analysis of years of sales information and constructed a model that showed current demand, rather than future orders or past sales. As this model was refined, it became the single best predictor of the year-end quota for any toy. Mattel employees actually went to selected stores to count backroom inventory and items stocked on store shelves. Mattel could distinguish between those toys with early buys and those without, between new products and continuing items, between those with television advertising and those without. “It was a forecasting system and a W report [Weekly Sales and Shipping Report] as sophisticated as any in American industry for a comparably dynamic product line,” remembered Joe Whittaker. Ruth believed in the Peters model, and at a planning meeting she fought openly with Loomis over his projected sales. Finally, he told Ruth to leave him alone.

  Ruth felt out of control personally and at work. The corporate staff she had counted on to oversee the divisions was not working as she had planned. The death of her trusted executive, Herb Holland, which had come at the launch of divisionalization, had been a terrible blow. She tried to return to normal and put on a brave face, despite the continued pain from her surgery. Josh Denham, a division head who worked with her every day, remembers a social dinner where “she was doing her best to be the old Ruth, but perspiration was coming off her forehead and she looked like she was in pain.” She felt even more vulnerable to the arrogant and bullying Rosenberg, who acted more and more like a former Litton superstar looking for a company to run.