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

by Robin Gerber

  By that time Elzac had more than three million dollars in annual sales, and Ruth estimated that Elliot’s share of the net worth was between seventy-five thousand and a hundred thousand. She also knew he could demand several times his share, but she said, “Will they give it to you now?” “Yes,” Elliot replied, “but…ten thousand dollars?” “Take the ten thousand dollars and run,” Ruth told her husband, knowing he would not want to fight for more. Ruth wanted them to work together again. “We’ll put the money in Mattel. We need you here full-time because we’ve got to design new products.”

  On October 16, 1944, Elliot signed the papers giving him $9,500 dollars in cash, $2,500 for a side business called Beverlycraft, $3,900 dollars in cancellation of debt, and permission for his partners to keep all of his designs. They may have thought that Elliot got the worse end of the deal, but a year later Elzac went out of business.

  Ruth achieved her goal of getting Elliot to Mattel, but nine months later his efforts to forestall military service finally failed. Elliot had stayed out of the army by claiming he did war work at home. In December 1943 he had written to the Selective Service Board that he was engaged in war-related design engineering work with the “Advance Plastic Engineering Company.” If this company was an offshoot or subsidiary of Elzac, there is no record of it. The army accepted the claim, however, and Elliot was not ordered for duty at Fort MacArthur until June 11, 1945. By then the allies had been victorious in Europe. Victory with Japan would come by the end of the summer. Elliot was sent to Camp Roberts, a few hours north near the California coast. He had no worry of being sent overseas, but he began writing anxious and, in his words, “whining” letters, anyway.

  The heat was terrific, Elliot wrote Ruth. The recruits were about to start seventeen weeks of basic training with full packs, rifles, and steel helmets. “Oy!” he moaned. The camp was rough. He missed her terribly. To forestall lovesickness, he let himself dream about her only two nights a week.

  The Handlers worked at keeping their business partnership intact. Elliot began to send Ruth sketches for new dollhouse furniture and, after basic training, could come home on weekends. These weekends gave them more time to work on the business, as well as time together. “Listen, toots,” he wrote, “if your redheaded cousin is hanging around when I get my next pass you tell her to get the hell out.” They were apart for their wedding anniversary. “Tomorrow will be seven years, darling,” Elliot wrote. “I would love very much to be in your arms.” After their next weekend together, a smitten Elliot wrote, “Our weekend sure was heaven! Those Saturday nights with you are something a guy doesn’t forget very easily. After I become a civilian…we should have weekends like that more often. I can dream, can’t I?”

  Elliot’s friend Seymour Green had enlisted four years earlier. He remembered Ruth picking him up at the station just after Elliot was sent away. “I was gone for four years of hell in the worst places in the world,” Green said. “All Ruth could talk about was how rough it was for Elliot, who was just a few miles from home, and how hard it was in basic training. I had to laugh. It was all right for me to get shot at, but Ruthie’s man was another matter. She really loved her Elliot.”

  By the end of 1945, Ruth wanted Elliot out of the army and working full-time at Mattel. Her hand is evident in the letter her accountant, Irving Feiger, sent on November 30, 1945, to the commanding officer of Company B, Eighty-seventh Battalion, at Camp Roberts. Elliot had an undisputed talent, but Mattel was hardly the powerhouse described, except perhaps in Ruth’s mind.

  “Prior to the time of induction of Private Elliot Handler into the Armed Forces, [Mattel] was rapidly expanding to a position of leadership in the field of plastic fabrications due in our opinion to the creative ability and imagination of Private Handler,” Feiger wrote. “The fact that Private Handler is not able to take an active part in the management and operations of the partnership and to give his ability in designing and creating new products is working a serious hardship on the business and threatens its future successful operations.” Once the letter was sent, Elliot began to push for a discharge hearing.

  Meanwhile, his dollhouse line had grown, but Ruth was dissatisfied with the distribution. A local jeweler had taken the pieces into some ladies’ clothing stores on consignment, but the sales were not good. In January 1946 Ruth decided they needed national distribution, and to get there she knew she would have to go to New York City, the toy center of the country.

  At the time, Barbara was three, and Ken was less than a year old. The Handlers had paid just under ten thousand dollars for a house in a lower-priced section of the tony Cheviot Hills neighborhood. Elliot was at his army post during the week, but the house was large enough for Ruth to have a live-in housekeeper. She also relied on her sister Sarah, who had moved to town with Louie, for help with the children.

  It seems Ruth felt little compunction about leaving the children for her trip to New York, even though during the week she and Elliot would both be gone. These early years managing the fledgling Mattel company would set a pattern for her family life. Despite later protestations that time was diligently set aside for the children, neither Ruth nor Elliot could have accomplished Mattel’s growth over the next decade without putting most of their time into the business. Ruth always claimed that being a mother and wife came before being a businesswoman, but her actions spoke otherwise. At times she admitted as much. “When it came to being a good mother, those things like knowing how to cook and keeping a good house and spending the time with my children and all that, I was not really a very good mother, because I had so much on my mind that it was hard to fit it all in.” She and Elliot did try to reserve the weekends and holidays as family time. Barbara has memories of going shopping with her mother on Saturdays, but also remembers that “She worked all the time. She was always doing something.” Ruth was following her passion, even if at times it took her far from home. Her daughter, more high-strung and volatile than her little brother, would increasingly resent her for it.

  Ruth set off for New York in February 1946. Everything was new and confusing. Her only previous travel had been between Denver and Los Angeles. She had never been east at all.

  Due to war restrictions, she could not get an airplane reservation. Train tickets were also scarce, and Ruth did not even know what to ask for. She stood at the ticket counter and asked to be put on the Union Pacific line to New York City, only to be told that there were multiple lines and she would have to change trains. She probably ended up on the Union Pacific’s City of Los Angeles for the forty-hour ride to Chicago. She slept on the bottom bunk of a double-decker sleeper car. In Chicago she changed trains, perhaps for New York Central’s Twentieth Century Limited and twenty more hours on the rails. When she arrived at New York’s Pennsylvania Station, Ruth did not even have a name to call. Paying what seemed an exorbitant fare, she took a cab to the Hotel Lexington. She spent the next day or two wandering around 200 Fifth Avenue, where toys were sold wholesale and where those working in the toy trade got together. Ruth was an attractive young woman alone in a building full of men, and as she told a colleague later, “I had a lot of offers but not to buy toys.”

  The Toy Building, as it was known, was a skyscraper devoted to the display and sale of toys. Ruth wandered the long corridors, which looked to her like a huge merchandise mart. She was not sure how to find the right place to sell Mattel’s dollhouse furniture. Then, as she approached the end of one hall, she saw a man standing outside one of the storefront-type offices, staring at her. Waving her to come closer, he asked whom she was looking for. As Ruth approached, she saw dollhouse furniture in his window. She thought the metal furniture looked sterile and unimaginative, but at least she had found a contact.

  Vic Goldberg took Ruth by the arm and pulled her into his office. After looking at her line of doll furniture, he told her he had a partner, Ben Senekoff, and that she should join them for dinner that night.

  Ruth met Goldberg and his girlfriend, Minyan, at a c
lub called the Latin Quarter. She remembered how amused she was that Minyan, whose name Ruth had never heard, had the typically Jewish last name of Goldstein. After Goldberg and his girlfriend drank a quart of Scotch, Minyan poured her heart out to Ruth about how poorly Goldberg treated her. He had told Minyan to meet them at the club, rather than pick her up, which Ruth thought rude. The couple had also been dating for fifteen years and were committed to each other, but did not live together. “I was not yet sophisticated,” Ruth said. “I was getting a whole new insight into a relationship.”

  Back at their office, Goldberg and Senekoff said they sold to Sears and to Firestone Tire, which also retailed toys, and they showed Ruth piles of invoices to prove it. Later, when she discovered that those were their only two clients, she felt conned. She had, however, contracted for Mattel’s first sales organization.

  Ruth was gone less than two weeks, but Elliot wrote her several letters. “The house is mighty lonesome without you,” he wrote. “Bobby [Barbara] was very blue the first day…Kenny calls for Mommy…he keeps expecting you to walk in the door. He’s been a good boy, except he just doesn’t want to go to sleep anymore.” He told her that Bobby had a cold, then shared some information about the business. After doing anything but allaying her concerns about the children, Elliot closed with, “Darling, don’t worry about things at home.” He wrote again two days later, fretting that she would catch a cold as she frequently did, and speculating that she was missing the kids. Elliot wanted her home.

  Ruth returned triumphant and full of plans for Mattel’s expansion. She was “thoroughly proud of herself,” as she wrote in her autobiography, where her trip is chronicled without any reference to how her family fared during her absence. Only later did she realize that her new distributors were more interested in selling their own line of dollhouse furniture than Mattel’s. Sales were still good, however, and the letter to the army led to Elliot’s discharge from his job as a supply clerk in March 1946.

  Ruth and Elliot were riding high. They expected 1946 to surpass the previous year, when they had made thirty thousand dollars on a hundred thousand dollars in sales of dollhouse furniture. They would do well in the future, but never in all their years of business together would they enjoy as high a return as in Mattel’s first full year.

  Chapter 6

  Uke-A-Doodles

  We learned through product how to run a business.

  When Elliot called from New York in March 1947, Ruth could hear the panic in his normally calm, soft-spoken voice. Due to the time difference, he caught her at home before she left for Mattel. As he told her what had happened, Ruth knew she would have to drop everything to help. Their first big toy was about to be stolen.

  Even though the children were still so young, Ruth had arranged her life so that she could be a full-time working woman. In later life, responding to an interviewer’s question about how to manage a career along with being a wife and mother, Ruth talked about her need to get out of the house and her gratitude for having work. “The urge was so strong in me that I got up early and did what had to be done. I took care of the children or anything else.” Elliot, unlike many men of his generation, offered some help around the house. He would not fry eggs, but he did make toast. He would not change a dirty diaper, but he would change a wet one. Still, Ruth recognized that she carried the bulk of responsibility at home. “I always said that if a woman is going to make it she has to work twice as hard, three times as hard, be available at all times to be a mother, wife, and to the business. It did not occur to me that work had to be divided more evenly.” She also did not believe that most women belonged in business. She did not believe they were willing to “give themselves totally” as she did the minute Elliot explained the crisis.

  Mattel had recently hired and quickly lost their sales representatives, the Caryl brothers, over the marketing of a unique toy, the Uke-A-Doodle. Elliot had created the toy design and the playful name. Like millions of Americans, he and Ruth loved to listen to Arthur Godfrey. In the years before television, when entertainment came through radio’s disembodied voices, Godfrey’s show had more listeners than all others. Elliot and Ruth rarely found time to listen to his daily show, but they loved his wildly popular weekly evening program, Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. Talent agents would bring performers to the show, including singers Tony Bennett and Patsy Cline, and the comedian Lenny Bruce. Godfrey, anticipating American Idol by more than half a century, used an “applause-meter” to pick the winner.

  Amiable and informal, Godfrey kept his studio audience laughing and applauding with his corny jokes. His loyal listeners made his show top-rated on radio and his name ubiquitous. Anything that evoked Godfrey had broad appeal, even his ukulele, which he played with abandon at unpredictable moments.

  Elliot saw the potential for a toy instrument and designed a miniature version of Godfrey’s ukulele. The blue-and-coral-colored toy came packaged with floral stickers for decoration; a small pick for the four strings; and an expensive, colorfully decorated specialty box. The suggested retail price was $1.49. The plastic strings were not melodic, but neither was Godfrey. Fans could pretend to be a radio star or a down-home string-plucker.

  A few months before Mattel began producing the toy, Ruth began thinking about distribution. Mattel was just two and a half years old. She had done most of the sales and distribution, starting with its dollhouse furniture. After the success of 1945, a company that made more detailed furniture at a cheaper price had overtaken Mattel. Shifting from dollhouse furniture, Mattel rushed a Birdy Bank and a Make-Believe Makeup Set to market. Working bruising hours and keeping to only five employees, they ended 1946 with a profit. Ruth realized that to grow would require a national sales organization. There was a baby boom in America, and after the war years the nation hungered for toys. After poring through toy trade magazines, she began to hire sales representatives around the country.

  In the Midwest, she settled on the Caryl brothers, who had offices in the crucial New York market. They were set to sell the Uke-A-Doodle, but Ruth decided she could also make some sales on her own. Three months before the March 1947 Toy Fair, without consulting her new distributors, Ruth took samples of the Uke-A-Doodle to Butler Brothers’ Los Angeles office. The wholesale giant, based in Chicago, franchised the chain of nearly three thousand Ben Franklin retail variety stores. They also acted as jobbers, or middlemen, buying large quantities of toys and then supplying different stores around the country.

  Ruth returned home elated. Butler Brothers’ headquarters had approved a huge order based on the enthusiasm Ruth had generated in the Los Angeles office. When she called the Caryl brothers, however, they were furious. How were they supposed to sell to the giant chain, based in their own hometown, now that Ruth had gone directly to Butler? And did she not realize that Butler was both a chain and a jobber? She had agreed to ship the toys at jobber prices to all the Butler stores. That was just stupid, they told her. Butler should have done the shipping, or Ruth should have charged for delivery. The Caryls quit on the spot.

  In her autobiography, Ruth claims she offered to pay the Caryls a commission on sales she had made that shipped into their territory, a tacit admission that she had overstepped in cutting her own deal. Butler Brothers was a major target for the sales force she had just hired, and her action no doubt undermined the Caryls’ faith in her. Although they might have negotiated a more lucrative deal with Butler, Ruth insisted she had done the right thing. “I think we were very wise. I think [the Butler order] got us going.” She never acknowledged that by cutting her own deal she was angling to keep the commission for herself. The incident was an early indication that Ruth loathed admitting mistakes and had a strong sense of her own rectitude. She was also protective of the bottom line. The Uke-A-Doodle set the stage for many of Mattel’s great toys and for Ruth’s emergence as the no-holds-barred guardian of the company’s finances.

  Without the Caryls to cover New York, Elliot made plans to go to Toy Fair to sco
ut for a new sales team. He arrived with a recommendation to meet Al Frank, whom he quickly hired, along with Frank’s sales organization. Frank showed Elliot around Toy Fair. As the two men evaluated the potential of the latest products, Elliot saw a display that shocked him and ran to a telephone to tell Ruth what he had seen.

  A competitor from Los Angeles, Leo White of Knickerbocker Plastics, was showing the Uke-A-Doodle in his sales office and was quoting lower prices. White had scraped the Mattel name off the sample, knowing that he could fill orders because the toy was easy to produce. The customers who were writing big orders to Mattel told Elliot that they could get a better price from White. A price war ensued as the two toy companies tried to underbid each other. Back in Los Angeles, Ruth was left to figure out how to reduce the cost of production. The pricing plan had called for a retail charge of $1.39. The wholesale price was half of retail. Mattel’s toy sat in a beautiful multicolored printed setup box that was expensive to produce, but the price kept falling, finally settling at $0.98.

  Back in Los Angeles, Ruth heard from Elliot every hour, his calls more furious and worried as the bidding grew hotter. He was getting a ton of orders, but he was getting them at a lower and lower price. Knickerbocker Plastics was a huge company compared to Mattel. Having seen the Uke-A-Doodle selling well in Ben Franklin stores, White had bought several to display and to give to his engineers so that they could begin tooling for production. Confident that Knickerbocker could make up in volume what they were sacrificing in price, White perhaps realized that the owners of the fledgling Mattel company were too naive to know that toy ideas were stolen by competitors all the time.

  Ruth was furious. She realized Mattel had to ramp up production and cut costs in a hurry. She had the jump on Knickerbocker, as her toy was already tooled. If she could flood the market, she hoped to keep the Knickerbocker ukulele off store shelves.