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

by Robin Gerber

  Dream Doll was less about telling her life story than justifying it. There were still scores to be settled, although those who wronged her are referenced rather than named. The book has the cautious quality of someone conscious of the problem of lawsuits but determined to tell her side. Ruth had help from Jacqueline Shannon, her collaborator. “I was a very enthusiastic Barbie player, and that was very important to Ruth,” Shannon said. “But Ruth was an activist with the book.”

  Ruth retold the story of her ouster from Mattel, her criminal indictment, her plea, all the while protesting her innocence. The book has many villains, some demons, and little evidence of the self-reflection and recognition of responsibility that occasionally found its way into Ruth’s taped interviews. “Eventually,” she writes, “the man who had been put in place by the banks to replace Elliot and me was eased out of the business very quietly with no bad publicity even as the company nearly collapsed.” She was talking about Art Spear, who escaped indictment and, to Ruth’s mind, the public humiliation that he deserved and she endured. Asked about whether she had let go of her resentments over her ouster, Josh Denham, one of the unindicted former division heads who was close with Ruth, said, “She never put it behind her—ever.” A better answer is that she managed to put her shame and anger behind her gradually, but never completely.

  In Dream Doll, Ruth praises the new management of Mattel brought in after Spear, while noting that the company depended on her legacy. She was right. Barbie, her clothes and accessories, and Hot Wheels, were the company’s biggest sellers at the time the book came out. Barbie went through nearly eighty careers, including the army Barbie, a medic with the rank of sergeant serving in Desert Storm, which was made in 1992. President Barbie made her debut the same year. Barbie dolls could be bought in more than 150 countries. Mattel flaunted the staggering statistic that three Barbie dolls were sold somewhere in the world every second. By 1998 the doll accounted for $1.9 billion in sales for Mattel.

  The company even had a CEO who some people said looked like the doll. Jill Barad, thirty-five years younger than Ruth, had the narrow face, dazzling smile, and model-perfect body of a Barbie come to life. She enjoyed posing with the dozens of Barbies she kept in her office, but like the other woman who ran Mattel, she was driven and competitive. She was also known as a marketing genius. When she was put in charge of the Barbie line in 1983, she reasoned that Barbie sales were flagging because of criticism that the doll was sexist. She started a campaign to market Barbie as a professional role model, coming up with the tag line “We Girls Can Do Anything.”

  Resurrecting Ruth as a company spokesperson fit Barad’s theme and served as a counter to the argument that Barbie objectified women. “I brought Ruth back to Mattel after years of exclusion, and it was a great moment for the company,” Barad recalled. Ruth spoke with a creator’s authority, telling audiences that Barbie was made so girls could be free to imagine themselves as anything they wanted to be. Barad was the first Mattel executive to recognize the importance of Ruth’s legacy.

  The United Jewish Appeal had a group called Women of Distinction, and Ruth was invited to join. Barad was a member and attended Ruth’s first meeting with the group in New York City. Ruth loved the idea of getting to know accomplished Jewish women from all over the United States. She saw them as true achievers. Many of them were well-known.

  About thirty or forty women sat in the opulent Fifth Avenue apartment of philanthropist Mona Riklis. They started the meeting by standing up and introducing themselves. When it was Barad’s turn she said, “I’m Jill Barad. I’m president of Mattel, and I have my job only because such a woman as Ruth Handler existed before me and created the company that I now work in.” Ruth, sitting in the back of the room, was touched, and the two women became friends.

  After that meeting, UJA made Ruth their first Women of Distinction honoree, an award she coveted, and Jill Barad made the presentation. As more groups chose to honor Ruth, she would often ask Barad to introduce her. Ruth was still a demanding perfectionist, and Barad laughs as she remembers, “She’d yell at me for getting some fact about her wrong.” At the time she met Ruth, Barad was president of girl dolls, while a man was the president of boy dolls. Ruth told her, “You can’t do that. You need to have the title for yourself.” By 1997 Barad had taken more than the title of president. She became chairman and chief executive of Mattel. Giving Ruth credit for her rise, Barad said, “She had great respect for me and she was a mentor.”

  Ruth’s faith in Mattel began to return. After having sold all her shares, she began to buy back in. “A year or two after we left Mattel we sold all of our stock. Everything. But starting [in 1992] I personally started to buy a little stock, and I have a few thousand shares along with a portfolio of other shares. I treat it as I would any other stock, as an investment.” Buying the stock at all contradicts Ruth’s claims of dispassion. She never emotionally let go of the company she had founded. As Barad brought her back into the company as a kind of emeritus marketing star, she felt comfortable being enmeshed again, however tangentially, in the company’s fortunes.

  Barad was building the Barbie line overseas and invited Ruth to join her on a trip to Germany, where Barbie was popular. There were grand plans for a series of events for the doll’s twenty-fifth anniversary in that country. The Berlin wall, dividing Communist-controlled East Berlin from West Berlin, had come down in 1989. A picture in the New York Times of a little girl climbing over the cement and twisted metal carrying a Barbie doll captured the poignancy of the moment of freedom for those in the East. “We had a warm feeling for the people there,” Barad remembered.

  Ruth and Barad attended a huge event in East Berlin for the reopening of a museum that had been shuttered since the end of World War II. Barad brought Ruth up onstage, and the audience gave her a standing ovation. “She was wearing this gorgeous dress and heels,” Barad remembered, “and she just jumped in the air and clicked her heels, you know the way people turn their legs to the side and tap their heels, and she was about eighty years old!” Ruth had not lost her exuberance for life, for an audience, or for telling stories. Her energy on the Germany trip left Barad exhausted.

  Ruth personified her own ideal for Barbie, a woman who defied convention and culture to realize her dreams. She referred to her legal transgressions as “when I resigned from the company” or “when I was forced to resign from the company,” without reference to her plea and time in probation. Whether people judged her innocent or guilty, she had atoned in her own way and she did not dwell on the past.

  Barad ordered up even more glamour and glitz for Barbie’s fortieth birthday in 1999 than she had for the thirty-fifth. At a black-tie event at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York, movie stars entered the anniversary gala on a pink carpet. With Dick Clark as master of ceremonies, the popular singer Brandy performed. There was a time-travel fashion show of Barbie clothes with Barbie-faced models strutting down the runway. Annie Leibovitz unveiled her Barbie doll artwork, and Mattel introduced the Ambassadors of Dreams. They were described as “women of achievement” who helped teach girls that they could be anything they wanted to be. There was Muriel Siebert, the first woman to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange; Emmy-winning talk show host Rosie O’Donnell; the president of People magazine, Ann Moore; the great track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee; and entertainment executive Geraldine Laybourne. For Ruth, who sat in a place of honor as the original Ambassador of Dreams, there must have been huge relief in this grand recognition. She had never understood or agreed with the criticism of Barbie as somehow damaging to girls’ image of themselves. When Brandy sang the song from the new Barbie ad campaign, Ruth must have felt vindicated. It was called, “Be Anything.”

  One thing Barbie was not, unlike Ruth, was a wife and mother. While Mattel marketed a number of wedding-themed Barbie and Ken outfits and accessories, Barbie’s marital state was always inconclusive. For Ruth, her marriage was the one immutable and transcendent fact of her life. In 1998 s
he and Elliot marked their sixtieth wedding anniversary with a celebration attended by family and friends. “And we went together five years before we were married,” Ruth reminded everyone. Derek Gable, who stayed close to the couple after they left Mattel, remembered, “They did not get old. They were very connected with the real world. Ruth talked about new ventures where she was adviser, consultant, or lecturing.” Elliot continued to paint, delighted with and ever trusting of his wife’s course. “She could do anything,” he liked to say.

  The conventional view holds that couples who work together create problems in their marriage. For Ruth the opposite applied. In her mind, the key to her marriage’s longevity rested on the Handlers’ collaboration in the workplace. When asked the secret to their marriage she said, “It has to do with respect. Sure, we had love, but more important, I don’t think we could ever have survived the life we had without mutual respect. He respected me and my talents enough to let me do my thing, and I respected his talents enough to not only let him do his thing, but to take what he did and run with it and be enthusiastic about it and try to make something of it. Without that there is no way we could have lived the life we lived.”

  With Ken gone, Ruth grew closer to Barbara. She, Elliot, and Barbara had traveled to the Far East just before Ken’s death. The perspective of time had given Ruth a greater appreciation of the toll her work life had taken on the children. She understood that it must have been difficult growing up as the Handler children. “We tried very hard to give them enough time and enough attention,” she said, “but we were very preoccupied with the business, we were consumed by the business.” She and Elliot loved the children and felt loved in return, but she knew the children were confused by having famous parents who traveled and were unlike other parents. She also knew that naming the dolls after them had added to their confusion and anger. After years of strained relations, however, she and Barbara found friendship. “Both of us decided,” Barbara said, “that we weren’t going to get at each other anymore.”

  For her extended family, Ruth became the matriarch. Her nephew Ron Loeb, who became a lawyer, remembered, “When Sarah died, I think Ruth really took her place in the family structure. Everyone seemed to go to Ruth after that. Ruth was always a very concerned person, deeply concerned with all her relatives and their children and people outside of the family. She was interested in the children’s development, and she was always interested in my career and my grades, and from time to time helped me financially. Ruth was never short on advice, even if sometimes that advice was not always welcome, but she was ever willing to lend an ear when there was a problem to discuss.”

  Half a century earlier, after the deaths of Jacob and Ida, Ruth’s brother Joe had reminded her that the family had to support one another as their mother and father would have wanted. At the beginning of a new century, Joe was gone, as were all Ruth’s siblings except Aaron, but Joe’s words still resonated. “Everybody in the family admired Ruth,” Aaron said. “She was the best-hearted person. She’d help any of us; no one was jealous. She’d break her neck to help you.”

  Ruth liked to joke that she had “lived my life from breast to breast,” but no humor could be found in the toll that cancer and a lifetime of illness took on her body. In 2001 she kept a daily log of her health for her doctor at the pain clinic at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. On November 20, her rating, with ten being the most pain, was seven or more. She woke up at three in the morning, again at four, again at five, tried to read, tried to sleep again. She managed to bathe and dress and get in an hour of work from nine until ten before receiving an injection to stop the pain. Afterward she was dizzy with shooting pain, forcing her to lie down. She managed to drive three miles for an hour of bridge, her pain logged at a seven, but she grew dizzy and drove home to lie down. She watched television, the pain radiating from the side of her head to the top, the level rising. She tried to sleep but managed only two hours for the night. In the margin at the end of the log she wrote, “The shot made my pain much worse. For hours I was dizzy and sometimes slightly nauseous. Please, no more shots!”

  Always at her side, Elliot wanted Ruth at home and not in the hospital, but in January 2002, she was lying down in the bedroom when blood seeped out onto the sheets. Elliot rushed her to the hospital. After operating on her colon, her doctors could not agree on the cause of the bleeding. She came home, but her problems persisted as a bacterial infection invaded her stomach and recurred despite medication. By April she was again hospitalized. Elliot kept a vigil at her bedside. Barbara came every day. On April 27, as Elliot went to kiss her good night, Ruth did not respond but stared off into the distance. He knew she was gone. “Perhaps the fight’s the thing,” Ruth had said, and she had fought as hard as anyone could right up to the end.

  A traditional Jewish prayer reads, “So long as we live, they too shall live, for they are now a part of us.” For Ruth, this held true not only for those who knew and loved her, but for a much broader part of humanity. She created Barbie in all her molded-plastic outsize glory, in reality simply a doll, but for Ruth, and those who understood her vision, a statement about women and life and a belief in limitless possibilities.

  It had taken a long time and much heartache for Ruth to imagine her life as her own. Once she did, she found what she had been seeking since little Ruthie Mosko rushed toward her future: dignity, approval, and acceptance. In her last decade, she liked to sum up her life for adoring audiences by describing a simple yet powerful chronology:

  “I feel like I have lived three lives. In my first life we did it our way. In my second life, we did it their way, and in my third life, I did it my way.”

  Author’s Note

  I first read about Ruth Handler in Enterprising Women: 250 Years of American Business, by Virginia G. Drachman. I had no idea that the Barbie doll was conceived by a woman or, even more astonishing given the sexism of the era, that Mattel, Inc., was founded and built by a woman. When I discovered that there was no previous biography of Ruth, I realized that once again, to paraphrase Arthur Schlesinger, history’s greatest casualties are women’s stories.

  Ruth could have been my mother, a child born in the 1910s to Polish Jewish immigrants who spoke little English and labored for their claim to the life America offered. In this way, Ruth’s story is not only one of corporate success, hubris, and redemption, but of the American dream. In one generation the Handlers went from poverty, fear, and repression to unimaginable wealth, comfort, and security. In my family as well, and in many of those I grew up with in Skokie, Illinois, immigrants saw their children become doctors, lawyers, and successful entrepreneurs.

  Ruth’s spectacular ascent as a capitalist coupled with her disregard for legal and ethical boundaries is also part of America’s recurring story. The popular novels of Horatio Alger in the nineteenth century told only the bright side of stories with darker facets. History is full of Ruth Handlers, magnificent entrepreneurs who disregarded or felt above the rules. They continue to make news, although an untold number will never be caught or suffer the retribution that Ruth endured. There is nothing to her credit in being among the scoundrels of American business, but there is much to admire about her redemption. Without it, I would not have chosen to write her story.

  Three women recognized the importance of Ruth Handler’s story and preserved critical primary source material, which I used for this book. Fern Field, a television producer, approached Ruth in the 1980s about making a movie of her life. To prepare for that project, Field conducted hours of interviews with Ruth over a period of a decade, and generously provided me the transcripts. Unless otherwise noted, all of the quotations attributed to Ruth are drawn from these documents.

  In 1999 Barbara Haber, then curator of books at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, began discussions with Ruth about bequeathing her papers to the library. Jane Knowles, Radcliffe College archivist, work
ed to acquire and archive the thirty-five boxes, first available in 2004. These materials provided an invaluable window into Ruth’s personal and business life. I am particularly grateful to Elliot Handler for giving me permission to access the boxes of otherwise restricted family correspondence. Thankfully, Ruth saved everything, from early invoices, bills, check stubs, receipts, and bank statements to family correspondence, fan letters, appointment calendars, and her own copious notes, which were extensive during the years she was investigated and indicted by the federal government. The Schlesinger collection also contains photographs and a number of videos of Ruth speaking at various events, which helped me discern her style, speech, and manner later in her life.

  Former Mattel employees, besides providing invaluable insight through interviews, also gave me a number of useful documents. Sandy Danon provided forecasting documentation modeled on Ruth’s W reports. Joe Whittaker provided a copy of his marvelous and illuminating Mattel Alumni Association speech from 1991. Tom Kalinske gave me videos of Ruth and early Mattel toy commercials, as well as valuable documentation.

  In addition, the materials listed in the bibliography were used for reference, background, and citation.

  Bibliography

  Books

  Allison, Jay, and Dan Gediman, eds. This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women. New York: Holt, 2007.

  Amerman, John W. The Story of Mattel, Inc: Fifty Years of Innovation. New York: Newcomen Society of the U.S., 1995.

  Bailey, Beth, and David Farber, consultants. The Fifties Chronicle. Lincolnwood, IL: Publications International, 2006.