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

by Robin Gerber

  She started with Art Sugarman, the manufacturer at Peerless Plastics. He ran an injection molding shop and had extended her credit to produce the first ukuleles. He agreed to up the volume and give her a price break, but it was not enough. If she could not cut the toy price further, she would go for the packaging. Ruth begged the box company to switch from the expensive two-piece box to a one-piece fold-over. They were not interested, reminding her that her small company already owed them money. Ruth grabbed the phone book and began calling every box company listed. After tense hours of waiting, only one young man, Eddie Myers, showed up at the company door.

  Ruth told Myers the truth. She told him that Mattel had to get the price way down and that they did not have credit or money, but they did have a lot of big orders coming in. According to Ruth, “he got very thrilled with the whole thing” and agreed to get the boxes. Years later, Myers told her that when he returned to his factory they wanted to know about Mattel’s credit. He told them that he would personally pay for the account if Mattel did not. Ruth never forgot his generosity and faith in Mattel. “As our company grew,” she said, “our loyalty to Eddie remained firm. The larger we grew the more we bought, the more Eddie got. He eventually ended up owning that box company.”

  Ruth won Myers over with the instinctive, dynamic sales style that she had used to build the company to that point, and that would save her, financially and emotionally, time and again. Just as characteristic was her fierce loyalty to those who supported her in the early years, though it would be weighted by a less attractive style that demonized those who thwarted her. There would be a fair number of each in a life of dramatic highs and lows.

  By the time Elliot returned from New York, Ruth had everything in place to put out a cheaper version of the toy. She had pressed everyone linked to the company into service. Sam Zukerman, who with the Handlers had founded their local synagogue, Temple Isaiah, helped set up their books and establish their business plan. He agreed to take dozens of Uke-A-Doodles into his garage, pressing his children into service to pack them for shipping.

  Orders still poured in, but Ruth could not be sure the company would make any profit. She was operating off loans both from family and from her new bank, Bank of America. After bringing a suitcase crammed with orders to Union Bank and finding resistance to her business plans, she switched banks. She told the bank officer that she expected to do about a million and a half dollars in volume. He looked at her in astonishment and told her there was no way she could make that happen. Even though he ended up giving Ruth a third of what she had asked for, she did meet her goals. The next time she needed money, the loan officers at Bank of America responded more positively. She was on an aggressive quest for cash, the biggest problem she faced in building Mattel.

  Supervising five paid employees, Matt raced to fill orders, all the while worried about the ten thousand dollars he had invested in the business. He had left Elzac because of the stress, and Mattel was turning out to be even more stressful. He had been a workingman his whole life; he could not afford to lose his investment. He also did not have complete faith in Ruth, and she had little respect for him. She still resented his attitude when she had taken it upon herself to drive the truck to deliver the Austin Photography frame order. He had been certain she would fail.

  Ruth thought Matt was stupid. She also believed he was trying to test her, a feeling she had had about other people as well. She thought people egged her on and enjoyed watching her attempt something that seemed impossible to do. Believing others were anticipating her failure, Ruth felt the need to prove herself.

  Ruth was showing the chip on her shoulder, but her assessment of Matt hastened his departure from Mattel. He had been in the right place at the right time to help her back into the business world, but he could never survive in any company she ran. Her hiring would be marked by searches for the best, the brightest, the most aggressive and resilient people in every part of the company. When she found Matt at his desk, with his head buried in his arms, she did not work hard to dissuade him from giving up his share of the business. Sarah and Louie had recently sold their businesses in Denver and moved to the Westwood section of Los Angeles. Ruth suggested to Matt that they might be interested in buying out his share of Mattel. Matt jumped, according to Ruth. Louie bought Matson out for fifteen thousand dollars, five thousand more than Matson had invested. There is no record of the transaction. According to Ruth, neither she nor Elliot ever heard from Matt again.

  Over the next decade Mattel would sell eleven million Uke-A-Doodles. The toy had yielded not only twenty-eight thousand dollars in profits its first year, but also some crucial business lessons and some casualties. Harold Matson was gone. Sam Zukerman, the public accountant who helped Ruth with the books and early business plan, felt taken. Ruth had promised him that he would be a partner, and in exchange he had worked for several years at a reduced fee. In 1948, when Ruth was ready to incorporate, Zukerman drew up the papers for her and included his name as they had agreed. But Ruth had changed her mind and his name was struck off. “My father was the kind of man that if he shook your hand that was it,” Zukerman’s daughter remembered. Zukerman never worked for Mattel again.

  On the marketing side, Ruth learned that she had been foolish to bring the Uke-A-Doodle out in advance of Toy Fair. By selling it to Butler Brothers she had made it easy for competitors to get one of her toys and copy it, a practice she learned was common in a business that relied on a constant stream of new ideas. She would never ignore Toy Fair again. Instead, she set about conquering it.

  Chapter 7

  Music Makers and Sour Notes

  In the toy business we found that you constantly have to create new products.

  “Why can’t you be like other mothers?” Barbara screamed at Ruth before storming off once again from the dinner table. The Handlers made dinner together a priority, but they could not mandate the mood. In the modernist house that Elliot had designed on Duxbury Circle in Beverlywood, tensions between work and family often ran high.

  In 1951 the Handlers had moved into the upscale enclave, not quite as posh as Beverly Hills, but a far cry from their first Murphy-bedded apartment. Elliot’s artistic sensibilities played out in every room. A grand piano sat on one side of the living room for Ken. Nearby, a handmade cone-shaped corrugated flue was suspended over the round fireplace, its copper surface the focal point of the room. A wall of plate glass windows overlooked the swimming pool and garden-enclosed patio. The downstairs playroom had a soda fountain for the children. A real sycamore tree with chirping mechanical birds rose up two stories, growing inside the curved stairwell that led to the expansive second floor. The house was featured in magazine spreads. Guests found it astonishing, a livable work of art, but for Barbara it was another expression of what was wrong with her young life. She told Ruth that she wished she could live in the plain middle-class house of a nearby relative. In a way Barbara could never understand, the middle-class home she longed for was part of her problem. Those homes were filling up with Mattel toys, making her parents rich and making Barbara feel ever more different from her peers.

  Mattel grew phenomenally in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Ruth and Elliot made five moves to bigger and bigger facilities. Ruth took the title of executive vice president in 1948, always careful not to encroach on the male dominance expected at the time. Elliot was president, at least in name. As Ruth said later, “You know, I always acted as president from the day we started.” As Elliot created brilliant results with new products, Ruth handled everything else.

  The business increasingly claimed Ruth’s time, and Barbara’s protests grew louder. “Oh, how I hated my mother being in business when I was young,” she recalled, “and even when I was a teenager. Remember, this was at a time that women only worked if they absolutely had to work. I used to think my mother was loud, talked like a man, and was homely. All of my friends’ mothers were home most of the time. I kept wondering why we were so different. I did not want
my mother to be different.” Barbara’s complaints and accusations often left Ruth in tears as she tried to go to sleep. She felt rejected by her daughter and helpless to change.

  Ruth was different from other women of her era, and her attitude toward family was a large part of what set her apart. She saw herself as an outsider, often describing herself as a loner and someone who did not have many friends. “I loved being unique. The very thing that my daughter fought in me was the thing that I prized. I did not seek to be unique in my appearance, in the way I carried myself, but I was. Everybody knew me; I knew nobody.”

  Ruth took pride in acting outside the norm. She worked with many men, a reason she believed she was a source of gossip for other women. She said she did not care if people talked about her. If they resented her power and ability, that was their problem. She did not feel she had anything in common with the women who stayed home to be mothers. They talked about babies, babysitters, clothes, and hairdressers. For Ruth, “that was the world’s biggest bore. I couldn’t talk business to them, and I was living, eating, and breathing business. I never was very good at talking about my kids, and I can’t stand people who talk about their kids.”

  Occasionally, Ruth allowed intimacy. She admitted needing friends once in a while and missing having someone to talk to. But she chose people who were also unusual in their own way and served her purpose at the time. When the children were young, Ruth had only one friend, a woman named Trudy, whom others shunned. “Trudy was everything wrong,” Ruth recalled, “and I approve of people who are less than righteous. I like people who are not perfect, who’re just full of faults. I can get very close to those kinds of people.” Trudy held Ruth’s interest because she flirted, swore, and never censored what she said. “She really did not give a shit about anything,” Ruth said. With Trudy, Ruth felt that she could be herself.

  Ruth’s maverick spirit fueled her drive and her risk taking in the early years of Mattel. If she was not like other women, she was free to be anything she wanted, and what she wanted was the ever-greater thrill she was getting as she propelled Mattel’s growth.

  With the company on the financial ledge and Elliot insisting on creative freedom, Ruth devised an unorthodox manufacturing approach. She lacked the capital to buy equipment for making toys from all the different materials Elliot wanted to use, but she was determined to bring his ideas to market. She recognized his ability to know what toys would appeal to children. “He was, unquestionably, the best toy designer in the entire world. I mean that without any reservations,” Ruth said. Elliot would sketch his idea, and then work with the engineers, toolmakers, and manufacturing people. To support him, Ruth developed a corps of subcontractors who manufactured in metal, plastic, rubber, paper, cardboard, and any other material Elliot wanted to use. This unorthodox method was the first of many decisions that would set Mattel apart from the competition. Other toy companies were confined by the expensive equipment they owned to making only plastic toys or to rotocasting for making dolls. With the subcontractors, Mattel did not have to invest any money in equipment, and they realized the added benefit of flexibility to meet the industry’s demand for new products.

  Elliot had been right about the popularity of the Uke-A-Doodle. Building on the musical toy theme, his next big idea seemed even more perfectly timed. He designed a tabletop baby grand piano with seventeen keys. Unlike any made at the time, it had raised black keys for sharps and flats, and allowed children to play a reasonable imitation of a scale. Red with yellow legs and priced low at three dollars, the piano taxed all of the Handlers’ growing design and manufacturing skills.

  Ruth was proud of this second major toy from Mattel, and the response at the 1948 Toy Fair was enthusiastic. The toy industry “went nuts over it,” according to Ruth. Orders were strong. Then the buyer for Sears, Roebuck at the time, Ralph Leonardson, came into the Mattel showroom.

  Ruth called Leonardson “Mr. God himself” and said he frightened her for years. Sears was the biggest buyer and could make or break a toy. Ruth expected Leonardson to be as enthusiastic as the other buyers when he inspected Mattel’s toy piano, but instead he refused to place an order. Ruth pressed him for a reason. He explained that they had made a mistake by combining incompatible materials. They were going to have numerous problems with breakage in shipping, and he did not want to be bothered with it. “You’re never going to solve your quality problems on this one,” he told them.

  Ruth was confident about Mattel’s testing. They had already thickened some areas of the piano where the steel bars were fastened, and she tried, without success, to convince Leonardson that he was wrong. Ruth soon discovered, however, that Leonardson knew his business. “We shipped over a half million,” Ruth recalled, “and for our little ‘cockamamie’ company, that was a bunch. We figured out that we lost about $75,000 on the ones we shipped. We lost about a dime a piano because of breakage, and we learned an important lesson.”

  Ruth admitted mistakes rarely. Setbacks were lessons. Bad judgments always had a kernel of good judgment in them. Her belief in herself—despite her lack of education, training, or experience—seemed boundless, except when it came to her personal life.

  Barbara, now in grade school, was growing up increasingly belligerent and spoiled. One babysitter remembers her as a “brat,” who was hard to get to sleep and whose mother was cold and imperious. “I got along very well with adults, but I did not like going there. Ruth was nasty. She acted like she was so important. Elliot was the opposite and very henpecked.” Once, Barbara put a cat under the sheets of the Handlers’ friend Seymour Green when he was sleeping at their house. “He chased me down the street. I was really a brat,” Barbara remembered. “But then I don’t really think children are ever brats; I think I was angry.”

  In her papers, Ruth kept a torn scrap with a little girl’s careful script on it. “If you were a nice mommy you would make up and tuck me into bed, that’s if you were a nice mommy.” Barbara wanted something Ruth could not give. Focused and driven, Ruth struggled to show the gentle, loving demeanor that Barbara craved. As a result, every decision became a battleground. The aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby had been kidnapped and killed in 1932, and the notorious tragedy still haunted Americans, especially the wealthy. When Ruth insisted that their chauffeur take Barbara to school, the young girl erupted. She wanted to walk with her friends. She longed for a sense of normalcy, for a life like her peers.

  Ruth struggled to cope with Barbara’s resentment, at sea about how to respond. Leaving the business was out of the question, so she shouldered her guilt. There were other stresses that roiled the household however, especially between the siblings. Barbara’s brother, Ken, had a calmer spirit and more unconventional tastes than his big sister. He had a tense relationship with Barbara and was closer with Ruth.

  Ken showed an early love for movies and music. He had the gift of perfect pitch and a beautiful ear for language. On a trip to Hawaii when he was six, he sat down at the piano in the hotel lounge and played the “Tennessee Waltz” even though he had never had a piano lesson. But while Barbara liked all the latest trends, Ken seemed trapped in a time warp. He gravitated to opera and music from the early part of the century and avoided rock and roll, the new music emerging in the late 1940s. He was writing movie scripts before he was ten and going to movies with subtitles. Creating a list of old movie theaters in Los Angeles that had closed, he used Cue magazine to write in the movie that he thought would be playing if the theater were still open. He studied theaters in New York City, seeing what movies they were running and creating a fantasy movie run for a similar theater on his Los Angeles list.

  Ken saw his parents and sister as living in the mainstream, while he, as he put it, “dribbled along some obscure tributary.” Barbara had a sharper assessment, reflecting lingering resentments. “I’ve never been close to my brother, Ken. When we were growing up he hated my music, and I couldn’t believe a kid his age was listening to opera. My brother is eccentric and he t
hinks my mother is God. My brother never likes the restaurants other people like or the places other people like. He always has to like something different.” So it seemed to a conventional person, but Ken was possessed of his father’s fertile and creative mind. He was a nonconformist by nature and well aware of how the rest of the world viewed him. “I was a nerd, a real nerd. All the girls thought I was a jerk.” He took a dim view of his sister’s interests. “My sister was a conform freak,” he told the author of Forever Barbie.

  Tensions at home and the pressures of family life contrasted with the fulfillment Ruth found at work. Business “turned her on” more than anything else. “Every time we had a major success in the business it was a new high and a new experience,” she said. “This experience of power had to be the most exciting of all the experiences.” And as the business grew, so did Ruth’s power.

  The financial debacle of the toy piano unexpectedly opened the door to Mattel’s next huge success. In 1949 a man named Ted Duncan came to see the Handlers to show them a modernized music box he had spent three years creating in his garage. A former musician and music arranger for some Hollywood studios, Duncan was also a part-time tinkerer. He collected Swiss music boxes, but he was often frustrated that his children broke their delicate mechanisms. He wanted to create a more durable music box and had devised a two-inch rubber belt with pinhead-size knobs. He spaced the knobs so that as the belt was turned, their tips would pluck a dozen stiff piano wires mounted on a metal comb. This “chime bar” made from a zinc plate was small enough to fit inside a variety of toys.