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

by Robin Gerber

  The young couple also had a problem far more worrisome than cash flow. Ruth was pregnant with their first baby, and there were complications. She started hemorrhaging, and the business suffered from her need to rest. In February 1941 Elliot sent a letter to the state tax board explaining his failure to pay sales tax on time. Evidently, he had forgotten to put a stamp on his payment and pleaded not to be penalized. “Until recently,” he wrote, “my wife has taken complete charge of my books and office work. However, during the latter part of December she became very ill and has been in bed since that time.” He went on to explain that he had been busy moving the business and had been selling wholesale until the previous month, so he had no experience with sending sales tax reports. He begged his way out of interest and a penalty totaling $4.28. Either way, the Handlers’ balance sheet was running precariously close to the red.

  Entrepreneur Zachary Zemby, a Russian Jewish immigrant, noticed the pieces in several stores. Intrigued, he found out the name of the designer. One day in early 1941 he showed up unannounced at Elliot’s shop. He would end up to be a savior for the fledgling business owners.

  Zemby arrived at Elliot Handler Plastics just after Ruth had been confined to bed for two months, not even allowed to go to the bathroom. Sarah and Louie had moved to Los Angeles in time to help out, and Ruth had quit her job at Paramount. A financial success in jewelry, Zemby had the money and the financial backing to grow a new business. As soon as he met Elliot, he asked, “Would you like a partner?” Zemby took over the marketing, sales, and management where Ruth left off. As the country was preparing for possible entry into World War II, metal was in short supply. The new partners agreed to use ceramic, wood, and scrap Lucite for the jewelry they produced. With Ruth miserably sidelined to bed rest, the men agreed to call their business after their names: Elzac.

  On May 21, 1941, Ruth gave birth to a healthy baby girl she named Barbara Joyce. Elliot had to borrow sixty-five dollars to pay Dr. Paul Steinberg for the delivery and to get Ruth out of the hospital. The Handlers’ checking account had only $14.97 and a pending deposit of $84.75. Luckily, Zemby had thrown himself into the new business, and the partners were starting to make money. Elzac expanded to a new shop on Western Avenue, north of Slauson. Zemby brought in three partners, all immigrants like himself, to keep the capital flowing as the demand for costume jewelry boomed.

  Elzac grossed nine hundred thousand dollars in its first year. Zemby wrote cheery copy for retailers, selling frivolity to a country finding its stoicism in the days leading up to Pearl Harbor. “Two saucy penguins, papa and son. Two winged pigs, mother and daughter. Be sure your stock has these Elzac caprices.” The penguin pins sold for $2 retail, and $1.25 more for matching earrings. A bunny pin boasted “ears pricked up in green Lucite.” Elliot designed them all.

  After the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese on December 7, 1941, followed by the United States’ entry into World War II, Elliot decided against enlisting because of his growing family.

  He devoted himself to Elzac, which struggled to keep up production in the face of inductions, enlistments, and the demands of war plants. They developed a line production system so that unskilled labor could be used to work on a single component of the final product. Workers were allowed to sit down so that the elderly and handicapped could be hired. Since war plants required proof of citizenship, Mexican workers flooded Elzac, both men and women, who had not yet been legalized. The manufacturing plant took up four floors and the basement of two adjoining buildings. Wages were on the scale of war-related plants, and the partners used noncritical materials for tools and dies, carefully avoiding any criticism that they were interfering with the war effort.

  Machines churned away in the basement of Elzac, mixing clays that went into tile molds for delivery to electric and gas kilns. Upstairs, women hand-painted novelty figures and ceramic jewelry, while others attached leather, hair, or wood trims. By 1943 the company had three hundred employees. Elliot worked long hours, both designing new products and spending time on increasingly bitter intracompany disputes. His three new partners came from Russia, Hungary, and Romania. They brought not only conflicting tongues, but also differing ideas about running Elzac. To add to his stress, Elliot also had worries at home.

  Ruth tried to settle into her role as a first-time mother; then in 1942 she became pregnant again. This time, however, she miscarried. Determined to have a bigger family, she was again pregnant in the summer of 1943. She chafed, however, at being a stay-at-home mother with two-year-old Barbara. She did not like housework or cooking, and the meals she prepared were abominable. A can of cream of mushroom soup slathered over French toast, with canned peas and tuna on top served as dinner. Her traditional “matzo brei, matzo soaked in eggs and fried in a pan with slices of kosher salami and onion,” was one of Elliot’s few favorites. Ruth wanted to get back into business.

  Bored and tense, Ruth was also afraid to exercise, as she feared another hemorrhage. “I was fit to be tied with staying home,” Ruth said. “I hated it. I couldn’t stand it. It was awful.” She felt unattractive and uncomfortably distant from the business world she and Elliot had shared. When he seemed to be spending too much time with an attractive blond at Elzac, she complained, the only time in their marriage that Elliot remembered her voicing such an objection. In the evenings, Ruth listened in frustration as Elliot became more and more disgruntled about his job. She wanted to manage Elzac, but as pregnancy progressed she could barely crawl out of bed.

  On March 22, 1944, with her weight ballooned beyond endurance, Ruth took Barbara on a bus ride from Pico Boulevard and Motor Avenue to Manning Avenue and back. “We sort of went around in circles and the streets were very bumpy,” Ruth remembered. “That bus bounced so bad, and I kept saying, ‘Bumpy bus, bounce baby brother out,’ and Barbie would laugh and we had a good time.” That night Ruth’s son, Kenneth Robert, was born. He weighed more than ten pounds. Elliot was relieved and overjoyed. Elzac, with its two million dollars in sales and feuding owners, faded from his mind as he held his little boy for the first time.

  Despite his size, Ken was dehydrated and had a slight infection. The doctor recommended holding off on the bris, the traditional Jewish circumcision. The Handlers had planned to have the ceremony at the hospital two days after the birth since Ruth wanted her mother and father there. The Moskos, having just celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary, had come to Los Angeles to see their grandson. But Jacob, still headstrong and impatient, refused to wait for the baby to convalesce. With Ruth in the hospital, Elliot drove his in-laws to the train station for the ride back to Denver. As soon as they reached home, Jacob headed straight to an all-night poker game. In the middle of a hand, he dropped dead of a heart attack.

  All the family except Ruth, still too weak to travel, attended the funeral. A day later, Ruth’s brother Joe wrote her a long letter about the sad events. There was a large crowd and “Pa was fixed up beautifully,” he told her. In the traditional Jewish manner, the family entered a seven-day period of mourning, or shivah. Joe found it good to “sit around and talk,” although he confessed that the family’s davening, the recitation of prayers, was weak. He told her that their mother had received Ruth’s wire and understood why she could not come. “Ma was comforted,” he told her, that their father had seen Ruth’s new son. Joe closed with some good news in the family: another nephew had been born. But as Joe finished and posted his letter, another tragedy was unfolding. By the time Ruth received the mail from her brother, he called her with horrible, unbelievable news. Their mother was gone as well.

  The day after Jacob’s funeral, his children had been sitting discussing Ida’s future. She sat nearby, too deaf to understand what they were saying. As they argued over whom she should live with, Doris looked over at Ida. She told her she looked tired and suggested that Ida go upstairs and rest.

  As Joe told Ruth in another letter, Ma had been so upset at the funeral that it had taken six people to restrain her. When she
had gone upstairs to rest on the day she died, Joe had sat with her for an hour. “She kept talking about you and Babsie and your new son,” he wrote Ruth. “She was so glad that Elliot was doing so well and that you did not have to struggle. She told me how pretty your home was.” Ida also told Joe that if anything happened to her she wanted all of her money to go to their brother Muzzy, whom she felt needed the most help. “She was content when I told her that we would follow her wishes.” Joe went to lie down in the next room, but he did not go to sleep. No sound came from Ida’s room. A few hours later, when Joe checked on her, she had passed away. “I can’t describe the shock. We haven’t gotten over it,” he wrote. “So many tears were shed we can’t bring up any more.” Jacob and Ida were together fifty years, and now they were together for eternity, Joe assured Ruth.

  Ma had raised ten children, Joe said, including Ruth, even though she had been raised apart. “We must make a double effort to stick together. We must avoid petty differences and arguments.” He was reminding her of the strong Mosko bond, a bond that Ruth would never abandon.

  Just as Ruth missed the chance to be raised with her siblings, she was robbed of the chance to grieve with them. Whatever her feelings about the parents who had not parented her, a piece of her past had disappeared. It is unlikely, however, that Ruth engaged in introspection or prolonged remorse. She believed in moving on. Action was her antidote to despair. A few months after Ken’s birth, claiming to be fed up with being a stay-at-home mother, she went back to work. When she wrote her autobiography fifty years later, she left out any mention of the circumstances surrounding Jacob’s and Ida’s deaths. To her, it was as if they had simply disappeared.

  Harold Matson laid the groundwork for Ruth’s return to work. He was as unhappy at Elzac as Elliot. Matson had been running the factory and fending off the conflicting demands of the partners for several years, and he was tired. Elliot came home one day and told Ruth that Matson had quit. She said to Elliot, “Let’s go see him,” recalling later that it felt like “something hit my head.” Standing in Matt’s garage, Ruth asked him what he planned to do. He said that he wanted to make gift items and hoped to use some of Elliot’s designs if he could get permission. Elliot agreed, and Ruth offered to sell what he made, suggesting that he start with picture frames. She had noticed dozens of Austin Photography Studios all over the Los Angeles area and decided they were the perfect outlet for frames. “For some reason, I knew I could sell them picture frames,” Ruth remembered. “It seemed so natural to me that I did not hesitate for a moment in informing Matt what he was to make.” Ruth had no idea what marketing meant, but she had been paying attention to what was in the marketplace and what she thought was needed. She felt that this “compulsive intellectual process” formed her identity in the business world.

  Elliot helped decide which picture frame designs Matt would use. They also worked together on a name for the new company. They tried various combinations, finally settling on putting “Matt” together with “Elliot” to form “Mattel.” Ruth said she never thought of insisting that her name be included. She said her name was too hard to incorporate, and she did not mind being left out.

  Elliot went back to Elzac, and Matt began making the sample Lucite frames. Just as she had predicted, Ruth got her first big order of several thousand dollars from Austin Photography. Metal had been restricted because of the war, so the shop was delighted with Elliot’s Lucite designs. Mattel seemed to be off to a great start. Thrilled with the order and anxious to present it to Elliot and Matt, Ruth turned on the car radio to find some upbeat music to underscore her happy mood. That was when she heard that the president had ordered a freeze on the sale of all plastic materials for any use other than the war effort. Scrap materials were included.

  Sitting with Matt around the Handler table that night, Elliot came up with a new design using flocked wood for the frames. With Sarah tending the children, Ruth headed out the next morning to convince Austin’s buyer that the wood frames were even better than the plastic ones. She was also determined to put her housebound years behind her. She wanted to return to the adrenaline highs. She wanted to get back in the competition and the dizzying gamble of building something she owned. This time she had more experience. This time it would be bigger. This time she would not leave or let someone else take over her company.

  After showing the buyer the alternatives Elliot had developed, Ruth left the store with an order twice as large as the first. Mattel was in business. They moved from Matt’s garage to a larger space and began to expand production. “Yes, it was Elliot’s designs,” Ruth said later. “Yes, it was Elliot’s name. Yes, he was very much a part of it in my mind. But I actually started Mattel.”

  Chapter 5

  A Working Mother

  I’m the most independent person I know.

  The small sign over the door read, “Mattel Creations.” Austin Photography’s picture frame order had forced Matt and Ruth to move the company from Matt’s garage to rented space at 6058 South Western Avenue. Matt worked out of a converted garage on one side of the low-slung brick-and-stucco building, while at the other end a small office faced the street. Inside, the frameless windows broke the bare and dingy plane of the walls. White wide-slat venetian blinds were haphazardly drawn. If the little shop looked rough at the edges, its saleswoman/manager-in-chief did not.

  Only a few months after delivering Ken, Ruth had lost most of her pregnancy weight, as much from being on the move as from any diet. She liked trim-fitting suits that showed off her figure. She styled her hair carefully and favored siren red lipstick for her sales calls. With her lightning smile, direct gaze, and firm handshake, she represented Mattel as if it were a manufacturing concern with a thousand employees.

  The Austin order, however, showed that the new business was tenuous. Ruth, seasoned from her giftware experience at Elliot Handler Plastics, had done a careful estimate of unit costs and thought she had set a good price for the order. But renting the building and ordering materials had put her close to the red. She did not believe Matt could help with the finances and had left him to handle the manufacturing. She would have to be the one to figure out how to save some money.

  Elliot’s design called for intricately carved wood frames that could be made only with special equipment used by furniture manufacturers. Ruth went through the telephone book, finding a number of small companies that might have the equipment. Leaving Ken with a babysitter, she loaded Barbara in the car to look for the machines and skilled craftsmen she needed.

  She drove from one company to another, trying to keep her daughter cheerful as she dragged her in and out of the car. Ruth walked into one company where a large dog that was lying on the floor jumped up and attacked Barbara. She was not hurt, but it was a horrible experience for Ruth and her three-year-old. Her arduous searching, however, paid off. Matt got the equipment to make and assemble the frames, but they were bulky, which drove up delivery costs. With finances tight, delivery threatened to eliminate any profit. Once again, Ruth decided to handle the problem herself.

  A truck rental company was next door to Mattel. Although she had never driven a truck before, Ruth decided to rent one so she could deliver the frames herself. Besides her inexperience at driving the big truck, Ruth was only five feet two inches tall and weighed 104 pounds. Reaching the gears and brakes was a challenge, especially since the gears operated in the reverse from those of a car. The men at the rental agency looked stunned as she attempted, without initial success, to back out of their lot. Arriving downtown at Austin’s, she discovered that the delivery had to be made in a narrow alley. It was noon and a lunchtime audience of warehouse workers watched in amusement as Ruth struggled to align the truck with the loading dock. “I was frightened and determined and thoroughly embarrassed,” Ruth remembered, but she maneuvered the truck into place and convinced her bemused audience to unload it for her. “I felt like a stupid ass, but I got that goddamn truck. I was gutsy. I made it work,” she said.


  Ruth neglected to add that she drove the truck in a dress and heels, at a time when many women had not even learned to drive a car. She was back in her element, thriving on the high wire of a business start-up. Her husband, however, was miserable. His partners at Elzac had little creativity. They wanted to repeat the same designs, while Elliot longed for originality. He saw costume jewelry as a changing market where women wanted surprise with new and unexpected designs.

  Where Ruth looked at a product and thought about the customer and where to sell it, Elliot looked at material and thought of what product to create. He began to play around with the scrap wood and some plastic in Matt’s shop. Most people would not have seen a use for the small scraps, but Elliot decided to fashion dollhouse furniture. His first piece was a chair, its frame shaped by one piece of Plexiglas ingeniously turned and twisted to form the legs, sides, and back. A small piece of wood was glued on for a seat. “If he can make it, I can sell it,” Ruth said. Elliot followed her suggestion to design a full dollhouse line.

  By July 1944 Elliot was fed up with his partners. He called Ruth from work, and she could hear the tension in his voice. “Ruth, I gotta get out of this place. I’ve asked them to…” Elliot hesitated, but Ruth instantly knew what was going on. They had talked about it many times. “Did you ask them to buy you out?” Elliot was hesitant. “Yes, I did. They told me they’ll give me ten thousand dollars,” he said.