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

by Robin Gerber

  After settling in at the beach house, Ken said he was going to take a walk. He had already agreed with Suzie and Harris that he would leave so that they could tell his parents the sad news. Sitting in the glass-fronted room that faced the ocean, the two women explained as gently as possible about Ken’s condition. Tears filled Elliot’s eyes. “So that explains why he’s going to Ecuador all the time,” Elliot said. He got up, walked over to Ken’s bar mitzvah picture, and stared at it as if “it was the most important thing in the world,” according to Harris. Ruth sat, repeating, “Oh my God.” And then she said simply and forcefully, “OK, we have to deal with this.” Harris went outside to find Ken on the beach, and within minutes Ruth had caught up with them. “We’re going to deal with this,” she assured her son. Harris was moved by Ruth’s reaction. “At that point in time,” Harris said, “I couldn’t believe how awful some parents were to their kids. But Ruth and Elliot were very loving.”

  Ruth may have thought that she had suffered enough grief and tragedy for a lifetime. She was not, however, a person who engaged in self-pity. She threw herself into finding some way to help Ken, in the same way she had pulled herself together after her mastectomy and the way she had assailed her legal battles. She fought down her fear, she marshaled her resources, and she pushed ahead.

  Ruth had spent the previous decade reordering her life after probation. She wanted to keep her focus on her new business, although at times she still struggled to quell resentments over Mattel. She also had to confront continuing, serious health issues. Before she learned about Ken’s diagnosis, she had been completely immersed in Ruthton’s growing product lines, as well as taking feelers about selling the company.

  In 1982, as if flaunting her newly won freedom from probation, Ruth was the swimsuit model in advertising for Nearly Me’s Wear Your Own Bra swimsuits in the 1980s. In the ads she smiles at the camera in different poses for the Malibu Swimwear collection. A handsome white-haired woman with doe eyes and a shapely body, not thin but solid, she wears the maillot with a “sunburst neckline” and another with the V neckline available in teal, lilac, raspberry, and turquoise blue. The tagline reads: “Because looking good is only the beginning.” Lengthy brochures showed the materials and various products, along with fitting instructions and questions and answers for women to shop at home. There were various “silicone gel equalizers” for women to choose from, depending on size and comfort. Ruth also created ubiquitous spreadsheets for factory workers’ salaries, for office workers’ salaries, for promotions and tours, and for manufacturing, sales, and marketing. Once again, she was in control. She was also in demand.

  Fern Field was a television producer and director for such hit shows as Maude and A Different Approach. After seeing a magazine story about Ruth’s life, she called Ruth about turning her story into a television movie. Ruth wanted editorial approval and the project never came off, but Ruth agreed to hours of taped interviews with Field, starting in 1981 and spanning more than a decade. Ruth spoke frankly, often passionately. The two women, both groundbreakers, became close friends, going out as couples and traveling to Israel together.

  Organizations sent a steady stream of requests to speak about being a woman in business, despite Ruth’s legal problems. She was still the mother of Barbie, the founder of a company that grew from a garage to a toy industry behemoth, a woman who had succeeded while surrounded by men. Whatever her transgressions, other women wanted to know what it had been like and what advice she could offer. Who was this woman whose life had taken such dramatic turns? Ruth accepted a limited number of requests for such talks. She kept her focus on Ruthton, on the women who needed her, the women who, like her, were suffering.

  Despite the pace she kept, Ruth’s health was poor. As a result of her first surgery, she had near constant nerve pain and occasional muscle spasms on the left side of her chest where her breast had been removed. She felt extreme burning when she swallowed food and suffered a variety of gastrointestinal problems, combined with fatigue and shortness of breath. Her right hip started to hurt, and doctors were inconclusive about whether she was diabetic.

  For the nerve pain in her chest, the doctors tried putting a neurostimulator under her skin, but it did not help. She found some relief in biofeedback relaxation techniques. For her shortness of breath, the doctor recommended brisk walking to build up her cardiovascular capability, though he must not have realized that Ruth was already a brisk walker. She went to UCLA for an evaluation in late 1982. The doctors recommended various techniques, including acupuncture, trigger-point injections, and self-hypnosis. The staff psychologist found Ruth to be “quite depressed.”

  The wound of her ouster from Mattel and public humiliation was as painful at times as her physical maladies. Mattel had recovered, but she had not. By 1980 Mattel was again a prosperous company. Art Spear steered it back into the black within a year of pushing Ruth out, although in 1986 he would leave Mattel after a restructuring caused by massive losses incurred on his watch. Ringling Bros. and Monogram Models turned out to be moneymaking acquisitions. “Mattel had a life of its own. There were such good people and processes in place, when they left it hardly made a ripple in the business,” recalled Sandy Danon. Ruth and Elliot had sold their about $18.5 million of stock, about 12 percent of Mattel, after leaving the company, but shares were spread out across their family and given as stock options to many employees they considered friends. They could not help feeling invested in Mattel’s success, no matter their feelings about how they had been treated.

  Ruth decided that sexism was responsible for her unfair treatment by Mattel executives and government lawyers. “A great deal of what went on,” she said, “was colored by the fact that I was a woman.” She felt that her attackers were trying to build their reputations, and she provided a good target. She was famous and controversial because of her gender. “To bring down a woman,” she said, “a famous woman who had had the nerve to get up there, just think of the reputations that could be made on bringing her down.”

  Still protesting her innocence, Ruth developed a philosophical response that made sense of her ordeal. She would tell various television, newspaper, and radio interviewers, “I’m not sure I would have grown much had I not lived through such grief. I think there’s nothing like adversity to make one grow.” She contrasted her old and new selves as she spoke of a world not of haves and have-nots, but of the carefree and the careworn. “I think people who have not known adversity, who are lucky enough to have a self-image that enables them to be successful and powerful and move forward with total confidence…are not as complete underneath as those of us who have experienced some real suffering.”

  She had learned. She had grown. She had found meaning in her misfortune. By the end of the 1980s Ruth no longer blamed the debacle at Mattel on her breast cancer. Instead she chose to see it as part of a larger plan. She saw a mysterious universe where individuals have to choose to find meaning. What happened to her at Mattel had to happen, she reasoned, for her to create Nearly Me. She suffered, but that was the price of doing so much good in the world and finding her own peace. “Making money doesn’t necessarily mean one is moving ahead,” she said in an interview. “Making peace with yourself is what I’m talking about. I think sometimes, at least for me anyway, it is much harder to grow as a human being than it is to make lots of money.”

  In February 1987 Ruth and Elliot were at a breakfast at New York’s 200 Fifth Avenue Club to receive the Doll Reader magazine Lifetime Achievement Award. To the audience’s delight, Ken and Suzie and their children attended, despite Ken’s misgivings about the dolls. He was still his mother’s adoring son. Ruth had received other industry honors, but the most prestigious did not come until 1989. That year she and Elliot were inducted into the Toy Industry Hall of Fame. Ruth’s reemergence as a respected leader in the industry and among her peers had been gradual but steady. Her hardest reconciliation was with those people she had left behind at Mattel.

  The Matt
el employees Ruth had hired and worked with were in many ways her family. Before 401(k) plans, she and Elliot had pioneered a profit-sharing plan that had made many employees rich. Yet Ruth was certain that everyone from the company was “mad at her,” as Derek Gable remembered. Gable, who had worked in R & D, tried to stay in touch. “We loved them,” he said. In the late 1980s, some of the longtime Mattel employees like Gable organized the Mattel Alumni Association, a group for networking and philanthropic work. They started a two-year class in business called Life Skills, which empowered inner-city young people to run companies and allowed them to keep half the profits. “I called Ruth up,” Gable said, “and told her we wanted her to be involved. She was guarded and reluctant. She was nervous, not bubbly or connected like she used to be.” Ruth agreed to come to a meeting at a local Denny’s restaurant. The Mattel employees greeted her warmly. She told them that she thought everyone was disappointed in her and did not like her or Elliot anymore. They assured her she was wrong, that her leaving had been a big loss for them. “By the end of the meeting, you could see the spark come back into her eyes,” Gable said.

  The boost Ruth got from awards and recognition, from the growth of Ruthton, and from her rediscovered friends in the Mattel Alumni Association helped her face a problem that was wearing down her body and mind.

  In 1986 her right breast started feeling lumpy again. She had a surgical biopsy, and her surgeon assured her that the result was fine. A few days later, however, he called to say that he had found a precancerous condition after conducting more tests on the specimen. Ruth asked him what the result meant, and he told her that they would keep the breast under observation. Nothing needed to be done immediately.

  For several years after that biopsy, Ruth went to her doctor for regular mammograms and checkups. She got the same cautious advice that her breast was fine but needed to be watched. “One day,” she said, “I got disgusted with ‘just watching it.’ I was tired of talking to that doctor and those people. I was going to go to someone new and get it over with.”

  After years of fitting women for breast prostheses, Ruth was familiar with the various types of breast surgeries. She could recognize a particular surgeon’s work by looking at a woman’s scars. She called a surgeon whose work she admired and made an appointment.

  Ruth walked into the doctor’s office, and when he asked what he could do for her, she told him she wanted to remove her right breast. He looked at her and laughed, saying that it was the first time anyone had said that to him. She invited him to look at her records, X-rays, and lab reports. After he did, he told her that he agreed with her. It would be a good idea to remove her other breast.

  Ruth gave the surgeon instructions. She told him that she did not want big clumps of flesh in the back of the underarm like she had seen on many women. When she came out of surgery, however, she found a clump of flesh not behind but in front of her underarm. The doctor claimed it was there before and she had not seen it. She was not sure he was right, but she was relieved that the operation was over.

  After the surgery, Ruth’s doctor told her that the precancerous condition had not spread or moved, but she did not regret her decision. She tried to believe that she had put her years of fear and the endless doctors visits and treatment for cancer behind her.

  Trying to find outlets for her energy, Ruth took up bridge and spent more time with her grandchildren. Barbara’s son, Todd Segal, sent her an invitation to his Whispering Maples Bed and Breakfast in rural Massachusetts to attend a workshop on macrobiotic holiday cooking. “Hope you can come, only 3,000 miles from LA!” he wrote. He had written her about his interest in macrobiotics, concerned about her health. Todd’s sister, Cheryl, still in Los Angeles, was particularly close to her grandmother. Ruth had saved a letter from an official at Pepperdine University letting Ruth know that Cheryl had been accepted in 1983. Writing to Cheryl eleven years later, Ruth said how proud she was of her granddaughter, who had also gone to law school. “Keep your self-confidence high and keep plugging,” Ruth wrote.

  Even as she attended meetings with new doctors to learn about possible help for Ken, Ruth tried to keep the family together and on track. Ruth received an invitation to go with the United Jewish Appeal on the organization’s President’s Mission to Budapest and Israel. She wrote Ken, Suzie, and their daughter Samantha, who already had a trip to Israel planned, encouraging them to join her. She was, as always, hopeful, but Ken’s condition was deteriorating.

  Thanks to Pamela Harris, they had access to the latest information and the work of the top researchers in the field. Once again, Ruth took extensive notes at every meeting. “Virus is so complex…immune response of human system should be pumped up…skin lesions get better with expensive drug….” Ken was experiencing dementia. High doses of the drug AZT seemed to help, but he refused to take it, preferring his natural remedies. By spring 1994 he was critically ill. His daughter Stacey was planning to be married that summer.

  The end came in June. Ruth and Elliot were there to help, and everyone took turns at Ken’s bedside. Dr. Harris was alone with him at the moment he died. She came downstairs where Ken’s family sat talking quietly. “It’s over,” Harris told them, knowing that there was some relief after the suffering Ken had endured. Only a moment went by before Ruth popped up out of her chair and announced, “I’m going to make some corned beef sandwiches.” Suzie went to the kitchen to help. They all sat around a table laden with chopped liver and corned beef sandwiches, fussing over Harris, telling her she had to eat.

  Ken’s daughter Stacey’s wedding was scheduled for the next day. Although in Jewish tradition a funeral is supposed to be held as soon as possible, it was acceptable to wait a day for the wedding to take place. Elliot led Stacey down the aisle. As Ruth told her, life had to go on.

  Ruth was finishing the manuscript for her autobiography. She rewrote the sections about Ken, saying only that he “remained happily married to Suzie, his childhood sweetheart for thirty years…until his untimely death.” She omitted his cause of death, but she told of his many trips to the Amazon. She recounted his theory that the plants in that region were more powerful because they were closer to the equator, where the sun was more intense. She acknowledged his work to find a cure for HIV and AIDS, among other diseases. If she did not give a full account, she also did not lie. There were family members to protect, after all. But perhaps Ruth understood that, like her, Ken had suffered from a disease that carried fear and shame with it. Like women who lost breasts to cancer in 1970, his disease was closeted. Ruth helped change the need for women to hide their mastectomies, but she could do little about the public revulsion toward AIDS sufferers.

  The subtle cloaking of Ken’s story, however, was never corrected. Various versions of his cause of death circulated—that he died of a disease he picked up in his exotic travels, that he died of encephalitis or of a brain tumor, as was reported in Ruth’s obituary in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times eight years after his death. Meanwhile, the Ken doll had become a gay icon with Mattel’s production of Earring Magic Ken in 1993. The doll was a response to children’s requests for a hipper Ken, but the lilac mesh shirt, diamond earring, and black lace-up dance oxfords he wore had more than a child-centered appeal. For the gay community, still closeted and discriminated against, there was affirmation in the idea that the Ken doll could be straight or gay.

  In a letter to Dr. Harris written weeks after Ken died, Ruth offered her heartfelt gratitude in a way that had often been difficult for her to express. “Pam, you were the only one Kenny trusted and you understood him so well. In the end you came when you knew we all needed you…the work you do and the heart you give to your patients is so wonderful. I’ve never known anybody like you…keep on trying, maybe one day it will get easier. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Love, Ruth.”

  Three years earlier Ruth had sold Ruthton to Spenco Medical Corporation, then a division of Kimberly-Clark. She wanted to devote as much time as needed to Ken’s health.
Now he was gone, and his absence left a terrible, aching void.

  Chapter 19

  Her Way

  Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices.

  In spring 1994 Bernie Kivowitz, who had been an East Coast sales representative for Mattel back in 1967, saw Ruth at a celebration for Barbie’s thirty-fifth anniversary. Ruth had been brought back into the Mattel fold after twenty years of exile. She was asked to make appearances around the country, including a signing on Barbie’s “birthday,” March 9, at FAO Schwarz. The store had an entire section devoted to the doll, called Barbie on Fifth Avenue. Ruth told a reporter, “So many people stood in line for hours for my autograph that I did not have the heart to go to lunch, even to go to the bathroom. Realizing that I made a product that meant so much to people…was an amazing experience.” For many women, Nearly Me had made Ruth a saint, but Barbie had made her a star.

  Kivowitz made plans to meet her later in the summer at a Toys “R” Us flagship store in New York, where she would be signing her newly published autobiography, Dream Doll. He called her the night before the event and learned that Ken had died just weeks before. When he asked how she could go through with the signing, Ruth said, “You have no choice but to go on.”

  More than a thousand people lined up in a driving rain for Ruth to sign their books or their Barbie dolls, still in their original boxes, or any piece of memorabilia where they wanted to have a remembrance of the woman they thought of as Barbie’s mother. “Ruth sat there all day,” Kivowitz remembered. “Sometimes she teared up, but she talked to everyone and signed until the line was gone.” She was seventy-eight years old and still struggling with a myriad health problems.