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

by Robin Gerber

  The report, accompanied by an audit by Price Waterhouse, detailed the method used for the fraud: bill-and-hold “sales” of about fourteen million dollars that were never shipped or paid for, understating the amount of excess inventory by about seven million dollars, deferring several millions of dollars in tooling costs, and overlooking a billing error that added nearly five million dollars to the 1972 first quarter report.

  Ruth tried to keep her mind on her new business. When she was asked about the special counsel’s report, she offered a stock answer, “I worry about it, but there’s nothing I can do. Whatever will be, will be.” But she had a good idea of what would be. Hufstedler’s report was being used to prepare a federal criminal case against her and others at Mattel.

  In between endless meetings with lawyers in which Ruth took copious notes, she moved forward with producing Nearly Me. She also named her new company Ruthton, an awkward combination of “Ruth” and “Peyton.” While she did not think it was a great company name, it did relieve one of her long-held resentments. Ruth explained that it was she who “really started Mattel” with Matt Matson, but when a name was chosen that combined Elliot’s and Matt’s first names, Ruth was left out. The same had been true for Elzac, which combined Elliot’s and Zachary Zemby’s names. “I was extremely active in the business,” Ruth said, “but somehow Elzac came out.” She admitted, “Ruthton really is a shitty name, but I couldn’t figure out a name that worked. Really what I was declaring in the name was that this was something that I was going to do my way.”

  Ruthton started in a storage room behind Massey’s office and laboratory. The space was “dirty and junky,” according to Ruth, but Elliot and some friends cleaned it out and painted it. Ruth got an old tin desk and bought tools from Sears. She would park her Rolls-Royce in the alley, which had the only entrance to the storeroom, and go into work, often laughing at the incongruity.

  Ruth told her team that she wanted the “world’s first breakthrough design,” a prosthesis that resembled a real human breast, not just a blob to plop in a bra cup. She could always spot a woman with a prosthesis, as its weight made one shoulder lower than the other. Her breast would have its own chest wall, so it would sit more naturally on the body. The core of sculptured foam was surrounded by sealed compartments of silicone fluid, not gel, because it was more “living feeling.” The foam was similar to that used for Mattel’s Tender Love dolls. The breast was encased in a nonstick polyurethane outer skin. It was relatively light and odor free. Ruth made forty lefts and forty rights, tapered at the top and sides and sized, like bras, from 32 to 42 and from A to DD cups. They cost a reasonable $98 to $130, depending on size, and could be worn against the body, with a cover that was included or with a pocketed bra. Hating the expensive and ugly surgical bras that were pushed on mastectomees, Ruth tested dozens of bras already on the market and then recommended which over-the-counter brand fit best with Nearly Me.

  Once the breasts were constructed, Ruth needed a corps of women to test them. She went to the office of a leading Beverly Hills breast specialist for an examination, hoping to get names of other women who would try Nearly Me breasts. After her exam she showed the doctor her prosthetic. He refused to give her names of any of his patients, no doubt out of ethical concerns, and his nurse suggested another doctor.

  Ruth took a sample breast up to that doctor’s office. He and his nurse were sympathetic and excited about the product. Ruth explained that she did not intend to sell the prosthetics to the women, but needed them to try on the inserts. The doctor agreed to give Ruth names of his mastectomy patients. Ruth, resentful that the other doctor had refused to help her, transferred her care.

  By April 1976 Ruth began selling the breasts from a store attached to a 5,000-square-foot factory in West Los Angeles. She was not sure how to market the breast. She thought about opening her own stores, wanting to be sure that the fitting was done right. She worked on brochures, advertising Nearly Me with the slogan, “The best man-made breasts are made by a woman.” In the past, she had used her gender subtly. With Ruthton, and the tragedy that spurred it, she saw her gender as a marketing tool, but Ruth had discovered something more.

  The previous summer she had spoken at the inaugural event for the new Women at Mattel group. Despite her mounting problems and the rumors that raced through the company, the women embraced her. In a note that Ruth saved, one woman wrote, “You inspired us. You help us to recognize our weaknesses without self-imposed guilt, but most of all to maximize our strengths. You set the example for us to find our own unique dimension.” On a collage of pictures from the event, which show Ruth laughing and relaxed, she wrote, “Women were finally starting to organize at Mattel.” In one of her files from the period labeled, “Notes on Women,” she kept a letter from Gloria Steinem promoting Ms. and a feminist essay by Cynthia Fuchs Epstein. Both pieces were frank discussions of sexism, workplace discrimination, and the need for women’s activism. Ruth, who had never sought or sustained close friendships with women, was beginning to understand the power of sisterhood.

  By that summer she had joined a Los Angeles group called Women in Business. The group met once a month and had occasional outings. Ruth signed up for a trip to Tecate, Mexico, that fall to stay at Rancho La Puerta, a rustic resort and spa on three thousand acres with a gorgeous mountain view and emphasis on wellness and healthy food. About twenty women drove down, sleeping two to three in each of the simple casitas dotting the property.

  A few women from Mattel were in the group. Rita Rao remembered that they went out to the big Jacuzzi after dinner. “There was a lot of drinking and Ruth got ripped.” The women took off their clothes and sank into the water, but Ruth held back. These women were young. None had been disfigured like her. “She had never shown her scar to anyone but Elliot,” Rao explained. But that night, with the other women urging her to join them, Ruth finally pulled off her jeans and sweater and climbed in. No one seemed to notice. “We were yelling and being so rowdy,” Rao said. “Eventually, management came and threw us out, and we went to someone’s room and Ruth just kept telling us stories.” Pat Schauer, another Mattel employee, remembered, “Ruth could hold her audience pretty well. She was always the center of attention. It soon became Ruth’s hot tub.”

  Something happened for Ruth in that evening of camaraderie with those fun-loving, bright, ambitious women. Years later Ruth would say, recalling the evening in the Jacuzzi, “I find that I enjoy women better than I enjoy men. My world has changed. I think I may have felt victimized by men.” Her transformation may have started at Tecate, but it did not end there. The little girl who had not liked other little girls, the woman who enjoyed her power among men and their attention, was discovering what she had missed. Women would restore her confidence and her hope, and make her their hero. “I was trying to rebuild my self-esteem,” Ruth said. “I seemed to find friends with strangers and, strangely, with women. I had never made friends with women, and suddenly I found women were becoming my friends. I never sought them out. I found a whole new breed of women seeking me out. Young women, career women, professional women sought me out as a role model, and they sought me out as someone who could help them understand how they could achieve.”

  Ruth enjoyed her new role. She felt that these women were being honest with her, and she was honest with them. Although she was older than they and had done more in the business world, her loneliness pushed her to ignore their differences. She let them pull her into their circle, and they helped end her isolation.

  When Ruth returned from Tecate and went to her factory in Los Angeles, she sought out Alex Laird. Laird was moving up in management at Mattel when Ruth brought her in as a marketing specialist at Ruthton. Ruth was building a woman-run company, and like all of Ruth’s hires for the new company, Alex had had a mastectomy. That morning Ruth apologized to Alex for not paying more attention to her when she was trying to move up at Mattel. The trip had made her realize that she could not hold Ruthton back anymore. She was
ready to market Nearly Me, not in her own stores but in high-end retail department stores. She wanted to start with Neiman Marcus in Dallas.

  Even as she was building her new business, Ruth’s legal problems required her attention. She was accused of criminal activities and felt as though she was constantly being called to her lawyers’ office. Her legal obligations came more in conflict with her business in January 1977, when she started traveling all over the United States, promoting the Nearly Me prosthetic. Her first promotion, as she had hoped, was at Neiman Marcus in Dallas. Her second was at Woolf Brothers in Kansas City, after which she traveled to Neiman Marcus stores in other cities. A crew of women traveled with her, helping to train sales ladies as well as fitting customers. Ruth felt the marketing was working better than she had expected. She was full of plans for growing the business and creating new product lines, but when she came home, she would have another lawyers’ meeting. “The meetings,” Ruth said, “put me down to the ground. It was just an awful experience. I couldn’t wait to get out of town and go back to get into the fitting rooms and fit women with breasts.”

  Nearly two million women had lost one or both breasts by 1977. Ruth had done her research. She knew that eighty-three thousand women had breast cancer in 1975 and the incidence was likely to grow by forty thousand in a decade. “The market is not expanding but exploding. Breast cancer strikes one out of every fourteen women in the United States,” Ruth said in an interview. “There’s no way we can cover the United States, but we’re expanding as rapidly as possible.”

  Ruth knew that surgery could destroy these women’s self-images. She also knew that “personalized service and understanding are the way to a customer’s heart and pocketbook.” She built a team of women like herself: positive, no-nonsense women who had also had the surgery. Many of them were her original customers. “I am possessive and I have put in too much blood and sweat to entrust anything about Nearly Me to the uncaring,” she told a reporter. She encouraged husbands to come to the fittings. “They go through their own kind of hell when their wives have mastectomies,” she said. “They’re brought up in a breast-conscious society, and they need to have this brought out of the closet as much as women.” She was speaking from her own experience, knowing the toll her illness had taken on Elliot.

  They were still in love, but she felt more distance from him as she built a business alone. Elliot was a member of the Ruthton board and managed all their personal affairs, but it was much lonelier founding a business without him. “I can’t share intimate experiences with Elliot, can’t share in a deep sense,” Ruth said wistfully. Elliot seemed to understand. “She loved to put a breast on someone,” he remembered, “and see them smile, and it made her happy and opened up her life…it brought her back to life. I just did not want to go back into business. Ruthton did not make much money, but she loved traveling and she loved it.”

  Ruth traveled four out of every six weeks. “My calendar looks like a racetrack. I’ve never worked so hard in my life nor enjoyed it so much.” She went to Bonwit Teller, Bloomingdale’s, and Marshall Field. She sold in home health stores for women who found the upscale stores too intimidating. Some of the stores were reluctant at first, but soon Bonwit’s was creating a special store within the store, just for Nearly Me. Store management announced that they were rejecting the idea that women who had mastectomies were bad people. “She’s lost a part of her body,” their spokesman explained, “she hasn’t committed a crime.” Bloomingdale’s opened a Nearly Me boutique.

  Ruth found that being in the fitting room with strangers that she would never see again and whose names she would not remember gave her great emotional satisfaction. “To take a woman who comes in, and I will work on her and very often she will be quite hostile or confused or uptight or all so unsure of herself. I take that woman, take her through a fitting, have a happy experience where at the end she’s laughing and joking and sticking her chest out and showing off what she’s wearing. Half the place is enjoying it with her, and she walks out and she gives me that look and a hug and a kiss. I never see her again [but] that’s my high.” Even though the traveling took Ruth away from Elliot, she was enjoying her hands-on work too much to stop.

  Ruth was planning for a 25,000-square-foot factory in the latter part of 1977. The department store employee training and fittings and attendant public relations had been wildly successful. On television shows she was funny and loose and joyful. She still strode around like a dynamo, her white hair cut in a close cap, brown eyes full of sparkle, and skin that belied her age and any ravage from her illness. She still found time to keep her nails and makeup perfect. She would drop her famous one-liners, flashing a broad ruby-red smile and arch her left eyebrow. “I’m surrounded by boobs. Just call me the booby hatch, or the booby hatcher,” Ruth told one interviewer. She was often asked about the Barbie doll, and she came up with a standard response: “I’ve come full cycle from the first doll with a real breast to answering a real woman’s need for a breast.” Interviewed by Jane Pauley on the Today show, Ruth said she wanted to make it so “women could stick their tits out.” On another television show, she discovered that she did not have a sample prosthesis with her, so she pulled one out of her bra and handed it to the shocked host. The ploy worked so well that she began using it to “liven things up,” as she put it. “We were getting lots of publicity,” Ruth said, “and I was turning on again to life. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience to stand there toe to toe with women and fit them with this prosthesis, which I had designed and made. I was really thrilled. It became my salvation.” In April People magazine ran a story on Nearly Me with a picture of Ruth, her blouse pulled wide open and a broad smile on her face. She was her best advertisement.

  To the women she fitted, Ruth was their salvation. She received letters, heartrending and heartfelt. From Detroit, a woman wrote, “I had to walk the road of acceptance alone…being raised in an orphanage and foster homes, I had to face this nightmare alone. The pain, the fear, the ugliness of the scar…being a secretary, I couldn’t return to work…. I thank God for the inner strength and guidance and I thank you for allowing me to look ‘Nearly Me.’” From Honolulu, another woman penned her gratitude, “After my radical surgery twenty years ago I was never without pain. Even at night my right side and upper arm ached. I was fitted and walked out of the shop. When I went to bed I lay there in peace with no pain for the first time in twenty years.” A woman in Czechoslovakia carefully inscribed a letter, “I wear it and call it my comforter because during the most critical period it helped me to overcome my complexes and regain my self-confidence. I treat it with great care because I shan’t be able to purchase a new Nearly Me here.”

  There was one letter Ruth made sure to keep in her file. She had driven to Rancho Mirage, California, to fit former first lady Betty Ford. She wrote to thank Ruth both for fitting her and for sending an alternate insert for her to try.

  NBC correspondent Betty Rollin helped bring to light the courage of women like Ruth, Ford, and Marvella Bayh, Senator Birch Bayh’s wife, who had revealed their surgery. Rollin wrote the book First, You Cry in 1976 about her own breast cancer and mastectomy. “Part of that coming out,” Rollin said, “is that the women are wanting to make the best adjustment possible. It’s the beginning of recovering when you want to do things about it, when you want to look as well as you can. It’s happened to so many of us we have to deal with it.”

  Ruth had her own take on putting her life back together. “When and if life isn’t beautiful to some degree you’ve got to take stock of yourself and figure out what you are doing to destroy its beauty. You can’t really accept life until you accept yourself.” She had found the way to accept herself as a cancer survivor, but another role awaited her that would again make her feel horrified and demeaned.

  On January 10, 1978, Ruth met with her new criminal attorney, Stan Mortenson, in preparation for the ordeal of the following day. She was going to appear before the federal grand jury, a
nd he told her that an indictment would likely follow. He was right. Just after her meeting with Betty Ford, on February 17, 1978, Ruth Handler was indicted on ten counts of mail fraud, making false statements to the SEC, and making false statements both in her Registration Statement and to federally insured banks. She faced a fifty-seven-thousand-dollar fine, the maximum allowed by law, and forty-one years in federal prison.

  Chapter 16

  The Wages of Fraud

  I learned a long time ago that when something starts to go bad, get the hell out of it, don’t hang in, because in most cases if it ain’t going right, it ain’t going to go right.

  In the late afternoon of Tuesday, September 5, 1978, Judge Robert Takasugi’s courtroom in the Federal District Courthouse in Los Angeles was packed with reporters. Word was out that Ruth Handler would make a plea to the raft of felony charges against her. Ruth was big news in Los Angeles, where Mattel had been a major employer and generous charitable contributor for more than two decades. Her fall from power as one of the few top corporate women in America had national interest as well.

  She had the dubious distinction of being part of the most high-profile corporate scandal of the 1970s. Junk bond dealer Michael Milken had yet to be investigated by the SEC. The scandals of Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom were more than a decade away. Martha Stewart was just beginning to build her empire, years away from the felony charges that would send her to federal prison for five months. The white-haired grandmother who had given little girls their beloved Barbie dolls was an irresistible magnet for the reporters who lined the courtroom.