by Robin Gerber
The courtroom quieted as Judge Takasugi took the bench. He looked grave. After arranging some papers, he spoke directly to Ruth and Rosenberg, who was being sentenced at the same time. Your crimes, he told them, “are exploitive, parasitic, and disgraceful to anything in society.” He ordered that they pay the maximum fine, fifty-seven thousand dollars, and that it be used as reparation on a program of occupational rehabilitation for federal offenders. Then he ordered them placed on five years’ probation with a sentence of five hundred hours of community service each year.
Turning to Ruth, the judge said that her service must be with a charitable organization picked in consultation with the probation officer. Personal participation was required. A monetary contribution or efforts “utilized by reason of defendant’s wealth” were not acceptable. Finally, he struck the last blow. Any participation, he told Ruth, “promoting defendant’s business enterprises shall be carefully examined, screened, and avoided. The court, however, does not discourage Mrs. Ruth Handler’s donation of her company’s prostheses to indigent mastectomees.” Judge Takasugi used the word Ruth had coined, but not in the way she had hoped. He gave her the longest public service sentence ever handed out, and not a minute of it could be spent working at Ruthton.
Chapter 17
Forced Service
I decided to give in gracefully.
Ruth was sixty-two years old, a wife, mother, and grandmother; a business founder and entrepreneur; a mastectomee and a felon. During the years she ran Mattel she had been named Outstanding Business Woman of the year by the National Association of Accountants; received the Brotherhood Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews; been named Woman of the Year by the Western States Advertising Agencies Association; and been honored by the City of Hope, the Jewish Community Foundation, the American Cancer Society, and many smaller charities and organizations. She had been a presidential appointee, and served on the National Business Council for Consumer Affairs and the Advisory Committee on the Economic Role of Women. She had taught in the School of Management at UCLA, made innumerable speeches, and received thousands of fan letters for inventing Barbie as well as Nearly Me.
As Ruth considered where to turn for her court-ordered community service, however, she felt despair. She could not face going to people who knew her before she was labeled a criminal. Through her charitable work, Ruth knew many leaders in the philanthropic circles of LA, but she did not think she could bear the embarrassment and humiliation.
She tried to find public service efforts where she did not know anyone. Some of the work she found pleasant, but she could not reconcile herself to following orders and being monitored. “I had to have my hours signed off by each charity, each time. It was humiliating to go to somebody and describe what I’ve done and have them sign off.”
Ruth finally took a job at her temple, which she had helped found. A woman member assigned Ruth gofer tasks alphabetizing and filing. The woman kept careful track of Ruth’s hours on time cards. “We had donated hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Ruth said, “and here I am being told by this person how to do the filing, and she was talking down to me like I was a ten-year-old. Humiliating.” Ruth quit in short order. She haggled with her probation officer, insisting that travel time be counted toward her service. She complained that Ruthton took so much time, she had no time or energy for the service. She wanted to do meaningful work. “Don’t knock your brains out,” her probation officer told her. “Just get something close to your house. You walk home and do it slow and easy and just get your hours. Don’t try to prove anything. You won’t get any brownie points.” Ruth tried to follow his advice.
She found the parole system chaotic and frustrating. Just when she felt she had an understanding with her first parole officer about what activities counted as public service, he moved to another office. She started over, again having to argue about the eligibility of work she did, but this man left as well. Ruth found the changes traumatic. “I was fit to be tied,” she said. “I was ready to commit suicide. It was awful…another one, after I had gotten these other two so well trained.”
To her, Steve Wishny, the young man who took over her case had a “pie-in-the-sky face.” She thought of him as a dreamer and do-gooder full of idealism. He told her he had been watching her case. He had decided that the parole office had not been using her correctly. When he said that, Ruth burst into tears. “For Christ’s sake,” she said, “I don’t want to be used correctly.” Wishny was undeterred. He told Ruth that she was not the type for emptying bedpans or other menial work. He had bigger plans for her talents.
Wishny was working on a program to get white-collar probationers to help blue-collar probationers with job training and life planning. He connected Ruth with three men, also on probation: an accountant, a former plastics company owner, and a public relations executive. Together they began discussing a program. Steve explained that the idea stemmed from a recent case in which meatpacking executives were convicted of bribing Department of Agriculture inspectors. The job training program they established, placing young ex-offenders in the meat industry, was a great success.
Ruth grabbed on to the idea. She wanted to start planning; however, she found her fellow probationers were happy to hold discussions but reluctant to act. They frustrated her with months of talk about the problem but refusal to plan what they would do about it. They would not have gotten past the first interview at Mattel, Ruth thought in disgust. “I really thought the whole thing was a farce,” she said. Although she liked the idea, she gave up on making it happen. Instead, she turned her efforts to cutting short her probation. Her lawyer filed an application to end her obligatory service. She threw her energy into the scheme, angering the probation department. Wishny, who had been warm in his relations with Ruth, was furious when he received the application. His tirade caught her by surprise. “He tore into me something terrible,” Ruth said. “It was just awful.”
Besides the filing of an application to shorten her probation, Ruth’s doctor Elsie Giorgi sent a three-and-a-half-page letter to Stan Mortenson, her lawyer, in March 1979. Giorgi must have felt a close kinship to Ruth. She was the tenth child of Italian immigrants, and she worked in the office of a trucking company for twelve years to earn money for medical school. She was the moving force behind establishing a hospital in Watts where the ratio of doctors was 1 to 2,900 residents and the infant mortality rate was double the national rate. Like Ruth, she was a fighter, especially when it came to her patients.
Ruth, Giorgi said, was severely depressed and anxious. She suffered from low self-esteem. Ruth’s physical symptoms included high blood pressure, cold sweats, fatigue, and burning chest pains. All of her symptoms started after her sentencing, and the only place she felt any satisfaction or solace was at Ruthton. After a three-and-a-half-hour session with her patient, the doctor concluded that Ruth’s sentence was taking a detrimental physical and emotional toll. Giorgi feared a complete breakdown. She asked Mortenson to tell the court that Ruth’s work with Ruthton was service enough. The breast prosthetics company was losing money. Ruth did it only because of the good it did for women. Why should she be forced to do additional meaningless work? She assured Mortenson that Ruth had not asked her to write the letter, and offered to speak to the judge directly if that would help.
Giorgi was right about Ruth’s distress. She felt as though everyone was pulling at her—her probation officer, the women in her company, even Elliot. He was concerned about her health. He did not understand why she could not relax a bit, take some things off her overfull plate. He thought selling Ruthton would be a good idea, but Ruth could not even contemplate that. “Elliot’s saying ‘dump it, just take the whole loss and write it off on our taxes,’” Ruth said. “He wasn’t on the same wavelength as I after all these years if he can say that so easily.”
Giorgi’s letter and Ruth’s entreaties were not enough. Wishny depended on Ruth for his project. “Do you know how special you are?” he said to R
uth. “There’s no one in the whole world quite like you. You’re the kind of person who can fall in a pile of shit and come out with a bed of roses.” He offered to try to change her sentence, holding out the possibility that she might reduce her time based on the quality of her work rather than its quantity. Finally, Ruth gave in, with the caveat that she be allowed to work directly with Steve and his boss. She still hated the humiliation of having him sign off on her time card every day. Creating her own document, she insisted he sign off on her version of a time card. “I had done that deliberately,” she said, “to humiliate him the same way I have been humiliated.” He told her more than once that no one had ever asked him to sign a paper. “Now you know what it’s like,” Ruth shot back.
She began to warm to her role with Wishny. He did need her. When he asked for a recommendation for someone to head the citizens’ board of Foundation for People, the organization they were forming, she suggested Ed Sanders, a civic-minded lawyer who served on many prominent boards and would soon head to Washington, D.C., to work in President Carter’s administration. She arranged a lunch with Sanders and Wishny at the Hillcrest Country Club.
Sanders loved the idea of Foundation for People, but more important for Ruth, he gave her the affirmation she craved. “You know why this thing’s bound to succeed?” he said to Ruth. “Because you’re doing it. Do you know why I want in? Because you’re doing it.” Looking back, Sanders recalled Ruth as “an outstanding woman, smart as hell. I knew it was a tough time for her, and I was willing to help her in any way.” She had been trying to get out, but Sanders’s words helped to reconcile her to her sentence. She was amazed to hear that even the judge believed in her. Wishny told her that he had asked Judge Takasugi to allow Ruth to serve on the organization’s board. He had agreed. “He feels you can move mountains,” Wishny told her.
The board met at the Price Waterhouse offices in Century City, near Ruth’s apartment. She was named president. They voted to work together with a program called Boys Republic, to help troubled young men aged eighteen to twenty-one find work, stability, and direction. The Foundation for People renovated a building near the University of Southern California campus, a broken-down hotel that they turned into a residence with space for tutoring and a library.
Ruth felt proud of every phase of the program. She struggled to find meaning in the terrible events that had consumed the decade of the 1970s—her cancer, her fall from power, her criminal indictment, plea, and sentencing. In her autobiography she wrote, “In some ways, [the Foundation for People] also presented me with a reason for the ghastly sequence of events that had cost Elliot and me the control of a company we founded and loved, that had cost us millions of dollars, that had affected my health and my relationships, and that had drastically changed my life. At least now I could…see that my own misfortune had helped me turn around some lives for the better.”
Now with a program and purpose, Ruth became more comfortable using her contacts. One night, she and Elliot went to the Saloon restaurant. As they walked in, a man sitting at one of the tables began to wave at them and call Elliot’s name. Alex Green had met Elliot when they both paid five dollars for a ride from Denver to California in 1936, when Elliot had first come to join Ruth. They had not kept in close touch, but Ruth knew that Green was running a shoe business.
She asked Green how his business was doing. He told her he had five hundred employees and was the only shoe manufacturer in the United States, because the industry had moved overseas. Ruth told him that he might be just what she was looking for. She called him the next week, asking for a time to bring a team from the probation department to his factory. Green said he would love to have them.
Ruth was delighted when Wishny brought his boss, Dr. Jack Cox, on the factory tour. She realized how important the project was to the department. “In my wildest dreams,” she said, “I never thought [Cox] would want to go visit a shoe factory.”
Green’s factory was a model of production and efficiency. Like factories in Asia, his workers were packed into narrow aisles so tightly that they had little room to move. His small factory was turning out three thousand pairs of shoes a day.
Green delighted in showing Ruth and the probation staff his entire operation, praising her entrepreneurial acumen as he went. She felt as though he idolized her. “It was a thrill in itself,” Ruth said, “that he felt that way about me because I hadn’t known I had any friends.” Ruth was also proud of what Green had accomplished. He was two years older than Elliot, and like the Handlers, he had started from nothing.
Green brought his shop foreman over to talk to the group. The foreman ran an operation that had little room for downtime or error. He did not like the idea of a program that might slow down production. Ruth saw that she would have to persuade him to help or working with Green was doomed. “I set about turning him around,” she said. “Eventually, he got the point through his head that he has a responsibility to himself and his wife, if he doesn’t want some kid to knock him over the head and rob him or kill him, to cure some of the social ills that exist.”
The foreman came up with the perfect idea. He told Ruth and the others that there was a shortage of shoe repairmen. The makers of shoe repair equipment, he told them, would happily supply trainers and training equipment. The course took about eight weeks. There would be plenty of work, he assured them. Shoe repair was a dying art.
Ruth ran with the idea. As Wishny had predicted, her years of management experience were invaluable to the project. Ever curious, she enjoyed learning about and improving the lives of people she otherwise never would have known. She still hoped, however, to complete her service quickly. She found the shoe repair idea “terribly rewarding and very exciting,” but also, she said, “it made me all the more valuable to the probation department when I’m trying to get out of it.” She was right. Wishny and Cox saw how hard she worked to make the program a success.
In May 1982 they recommended to Robert Latta, the chief probation officer, that Ruth be allowed to finish her service early. Latta wrote to Judge Takasugi. Ruth had made “diligent efforts” in the Foundation for People program he said, recommending that her probation be terminated. On June 8, the judge signed the order that cut eighteen months off Ruth’s sentence and released her from probation. She was free of lawyers and lawsuits and courtrooms and judges. She was free to devote all her time to Ruthton. She was free to do nothing at all. She was free.
Chapter 18
Ken and a Time of Plague
I think the best people, the ones who have reached the highest plateaus as human beings, are those who have known a great deal of adversity and have dealt with it and then moved ahead.
Sometime in late 1991 or 1992, Ken and his wife, Suzie, went to Ruth and Elliot’s beach house in Malibu, bringing along Dr. Pamela Harris. Ruth’s son had come on a heartrending mission. Harris had offered to help.
Harris, a diminutive woman with sharp, intelligent blue eyes, was trained as a hematologist and oncologist. Her medical intuition put her at the cutting edge of unraveling the secret of a national scourge.
In 1978, before she met Ken, Harris was working around the clock. Her day job was at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and in the evenings she volunteered at a methadone clinic in Harlem. Gay men were coming in during the day with a mysterious and terrible illness. In the evening, she saw a similar disease in the drug addicts she was treating. At the time, doctors called it “gay lymph node syndrome” or just “the wasting disease,” for the toll it took on bodies over time. By the mid-eighties, Harris was on a quest. She had done a fellowship in Washington, D.C., and had seen a certain kind of anemia that went with the disease. Traveling to Miami, she observed the same symptoms that she had seen in New York in Haitian detainees. Around the same time, Dr. Anthony Gallo announced that he had found the virus responsible for the disease—HIV. Soon a new disease name would enter the national lexicon: acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS.
Harris moved home to Washington, D.C., and opened an oncology and AIDS practice in a condominium office she owned in the multicultural Adams Morgan section of the city. One day in 1990 Ken Handler walked into her office.
Ken had a sick look, but he was tall and stood straight and was fairly robust. He was still married to Suzie, but he believed he had contracted the disease from an intimate encounter with a young man. He had been desperate to heal himself, taking monthly trips to Ecuador, where he had found a man with a “cure” that used native plants. Ken was financing research on natural remedies in the South American country. He came to Harris for help with his symptoms and for her opinion as a researcher. She became his primary doctor and his friend.
Harris helped Ken break the devastating truth to Suzie. “She is the most loving human being,” Harris remembered, and Suzie stood by her husband even after learning his secret. “Their life was very rich. Suzie was a great Italian cook. When you saw Ken play the piano it was like watching something fantastic.” Harris remembered a time when she visited Ken’s house with her boyfriend and they had both been moved to tears by his piano playing. Ken had a Renaissance sensibility, and had grown up with the money to follow his artistic passions. He made three movies, staged plays, wrote and played music, and took endless photographs. In 1987, at the 4th Street Photo Gallery in New York City, he put on an exhibit of haunting photographs of gay men beset by AIDS. He called it A Time of Plague: New York City Under Siege.
Ken often voiced his resentment of the doll that bore his name. He hated the materialism promoted by Barbie and Ken dolls and the negative effect the toys had on children’s images of themselves. In a plaintive and sometimes incoherent letter to his parents in 1970, he argued that the dolls were, “cow-towing [sic] to those who can’t accept the issue of their own sexuality.” His parents knew nothing about his secret, but they had to be told. Ken did not have much longer to live.