Ruth Handler and the Gamble That Built Barbie

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. In the world of toys, there’s hardly anything more recognizable than Barbie. Glamorous, stylish, and endlessly versatile, she’s been everything from a fashion model to an astronaut. Here’s the story of the woman who dreamed up Barbie, a woman with all kinds of dreams and all kinds of ambitions. Here’s Robin Gerber to tell the story of Ruth Handler. Take it away, Robin.

00:00:44
Speaker 2: Well, Ruth Handler was the tenth and last child of Polish Jewish immigrants to our country. Came here, and family moved to Denver for more opportunity for her father to work. He was a very hard worker and showed horses in the old country in Poland, so he came here. He worked on the railroad. But her mother was quite sick when she had her, and so she gave Ruth to her oldest sister. The oldest sister ended up not being able to have children, so she raised Ruth. She saw her mother, but her mother mostly spoke Yiddish from the old country, so her real connection was with her sister, who ran a market in the Denver market. She ran a cafeteria in a little market space. So, from an early age, Ruth learned about business. She loved business. She was in a hurry to grow up. She brought that great energy that immigrants and their families bring to this country, of wanting to make it and take advantage of the openness and opportunity that America offered. She fell in love at sixteen with a boy from her neighborhood, child of immigrants, Elliot. And actually, his name was – they called him Izzy Handler. Izzy was his nickname, Itsuk. They met at a Jewish dance where it cost a nickel a dance, and he only had one nickel, and she said he had to go borrow something from his friends. But she said, “The minute he touched me, I knew.” She couldn’t describe that feeling. Elliott and her had the kind of marriage that we think marriage is for, like these were two people who somehow were so right for each other. When they got married and they drove to Los Angeles, there was so much antisemitism. This was in the nineteen-forties, and she was worried about them being attacked for being Jewish, and so she asked him to change his name to Elliot, so it wouldn’t be so obvious. So they came to Los Angeles, and Elliott went to art school and started to learn how to design and make things. All Ruth could think about was building a business. That’s really what she wanted to do. So Elliot would make little ashtrays and bookends and that kind of thing, and Ruth would pack them in a suitcase and go sell them. And she was a fantastic saleswoman. She describes selling the very first thing that Elliott made. She put them in an old suitcase. She went to The Fancies store on Wiltshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, and the man comes out – the owner. He looks at it and he says, “I want to buy these. You know, where’s your manufacturing plant? I’ll come and see you.” They were in an old Chinese laundry, but she walked out of there, and she describes feeling like she’d taken a drug. Making a sale made her high. And in pretty short order, they had a shop, and they were making toy furniture for dollhouses. But then Elliott started having ideas for actual toys. So as the company grew, Ruth really handled the business end. She never had an idea for a toy. In the early days, Elliott and his team of men came up with the toy ideas. And in the nineteen-fifties, they were coming up with guns and rockets and, you know, airplanes, and they weren’t going to make anything that was made by other toy companies. They always wanted to come up with something in a new way. So when they made a gun, it was absolutely – it was so realistic, their Winchester rifle, that when Ruth brought it to the offices of Winchester and met with the CEO and pulled the gun out, he ducked under the table. Guns were scarily realistic. In nineteen fifty-two, I believe it was, her PR rep came to her and said there was a new TV show coming on, and they wanted to do advertising differently. They wanted to do an ad every fifteen minutes, and you have to pay for the whole season in advance. It’ll cost half a million dollars, but we think it’s worth it. Mattel at that point was worth half a million dollars, and so she basically bet the whole company on going into television, which no one did. When you bought your toys for your kids at Christmas, you used the Sears catalog. Your parents handed you the catalog and said, “See what you’d like us to get you.” You did not watch television and come in and say, “I saw toy on TV.” There were no toys on TV. In the toy they were advertising. And that very first ad was called the Burp Gun.

00:05:49
Speaker 3: It’s broken the sound barrier! It’s the Mattel Thunderburp with the real vibrasonic sound chamber that’s loaded forever and ever! The Tommy Burp is two-fifty. The no-battery, no-cap Thunderburp is three dollars. Get both wherever toys are sold. And remember, you can tell it’s Mattel. It’s well, well, well.

00:06:09
Speaker 2: So she pays the money, she puts on the ads, and the TV show – the new TV show – is The Mickey Mouse Club.

00:06:16
Speaker 3: That’s right! It’s time for the Mouseketeers!

00:06:21
Speaker 2: And so, as you can imagine, they couldn’t keep up with the Burp Guns. President Eisenhower won and one for his grandson, and they had to go find one that was broken and repair it to get it to the president. But then she had an idea. She now had two children, a daughter named Barbara and a son named Ken. And Ruth had had this idea watching Barbara play with her friends that they really liked playing at being adults, and they could only do it with paper dolls because there were no adult actual doll dolls except ones that you put on the shelf, not that you played with. Girls were meant in the fifties to play with baby dolls and train themselves to be good mothers, but not to play with adult dolls. And so Ruth had had this idea in her head that little girls want to play being big girls. It was the mid-nineteen-fifties. By then, the family was doing quite well financially, although they were not the top toy company, and she had her eyes on being that. But they took a trip to Europe, and when they were there, they were in a toy store in Switzerland, and there was a doll that was a twelve-inch what we call a fashion doll. And it was dressed in beautiful clothes, and it’s clearly an adult woman. It has breasts and it’s got this figure. And then she sees this doll, and Barbara says, “I want one of those!” And Ruth says, “So do I!” And she actually bought three of them, brought them back to the States, and said to her person, “Did the manufacturing go to Japan, because we were making everything in Japan?” Then it was after World War Two, and Japan was rebuilding its economy doing manufacturing, and actually plastics were the new thing, and Japan was the best place to build anything out of plastics. They had the most sophisticated machinery, and this doll was going to require some very sophisticated molding for those little hands and feet. So a man named Jack Ryan took the doll to Japan and they started manufacturing it. Now, all of the men at Mattel – and it was all men in the design department – said to Ruth, “You are crazy. This is a stupid idea,” until she came back with the actual doll.

00:08:55
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Robin Gerber, author of Barbie and Ruth, till one heck of Aus. What a life! The tenth and last child of Polish immigrants. Her mother was sick, and the next thing you know, she’s raised by her sister, who ran a market, and that determined the rest of her life. She fell in love with business, met a man who loved business too, and loved his wife like his wife loved him. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of Ruth Handler and Barbie here on Our American Stories. And we’re back with Our American Stories and with Robin Gerber, author of Barbie and Ruth, telling the story of Ruth Handler, who came up with the idea of Barbie, went all the way to Japan despite the misgivings of the men at Mattel who thought she was crazy – that is, until she came back with a prototype. Let’s pick up where we last left off. Here’s Robin Gerber.

00:10:06
Speaker 2: So Ruth did a couple of things to kind of give herself a foundation. She hired a woman out of the best design school in L.A. to go live in Japan and make little clothes for this doll that would be beautiful and perfect and realistic, with little zippers and snaps and buttons and a whole wardrobe. Because in Switzerland, the doll that she bought, if you wanted new clothes for that doll, you had to buy another doll, and she thought that was stupid. She called it the razor-razor-blade theory. Make the doll and then create clothes, so the first Barbie had twenty-one outfits.

00:10:49
Speaker 3: And fund a body were something here there were not in style term which.

00:11:00
Speaker 2: And she did one word thing. She hired the most famous public relations person in America at the time. It used to be, if you bought a car, it was advertised has good steering and has good tires. This man named Ernest Dichter was a psychologist from Austria, and he came and he said, “You should be selling your products in a way that appeals to people psychologically.” So if you’re selling a car, you should have a beautiful woman sitting inside a convertible so that then, subliminally, men are thinking, “Oh, I really get the woman with the car.” No one had done this before Dichter came along, and lots of people were angry about it and said it was manipulation, but said the biggest corporations in the country were using. So she hired him to do a study of wood mothers by their daughter, an adult doll, and he ran the first focus groups ever in America. And he did focus groups on this, and he discovered the mothers absolutely would not buy such a talent, but their daughters went crazy for it. All toys were sold at Toy Fair, which happened once a year in March. By then Mattel was a big enough company. They had quite a big display area. She had this gorgeous display. So they come up with this song that very much presents the Dallas. If she’s a real girl and she’s got good grooming and all these pretty clothes, Barbie, you.

00:12:42
Speaker 1: Made my body. John is really weird. Barbie’s booth figure her dancing out, the ring from them and party. She works out a.

00:13:03
Speaker 3: And all the gadgets down a.

00:13:04
Speaker 1: Barbie dressed for swimming fun is only three dollars.

00:13:07
Speaker 3: Her lovely fashions range from one to five dollars.

00:13:10
Speaker 1: Look through Barbie wherever dolls are sold.

00:13:14
Speaker 2: And Dichter had said to her, “Here’s what my research shows. If you present this doll as a teenage fashion model and tell mothers that she will help their daughters with good grooming, then you can get over their difficulties with getting this style.”

00:13:34
Speaker 1: You can tell it. Tell, it’s swim.

00:13:37
Speaker 2: And the buyers come into Toy Fair, and they come in and they walk around and see the room with the doll, with Barbie, and they don’t put in any orders at all. They say, “You’re crazy, Ruth. No mother will buy their daughter a doll with breasts,” and off they go. And Elliot said it was the first time he ever saw her cry to their hotel room. She called Japan. She tried to stop production. She was devastated. But a few months later, in June, school let out. And while these little girls had been watching the Barbie television ad, they said to their mothers, “I want that doll!” They sold three hundred thousand dollars by the end of nineteen fifty-nine.

00:14:33
Speaker 1: May I help you, lady? We like, no, five class.

00:14:33
Speaker 1: Of course, Barbie, the famous teenage fashion model doll by Mattel. May I arrange a showing of her wardrobe?

00:14:40
Speaker 3: Oh?

00:14:40
Speaker 1: Yeah. None.

00:14:44
Speaker 2: So she and Elliot built this great company and really fulfilled their greatest dreams, which were not about money. They were extremely generous to their own family, to the community. They particularly supported civil rights causes. She did not discriminate at a time when there was tremendous discrimination, which ones would un… I think I’d lie all of that. You can tell the Mattel, if you own Mattel stock in the nineteen-sixties, you got double-digit returns every year. I mean, they were making a huge amount of money. They get to nineteen seventy, early seventies, and corporate America comes up with this great idea that the way to grow your company is to buy up other companies, and so she hires someone from Litton Industries who’s supposed to be an expert in this strategy, and she goes out and they buy Ringling Brothers Circus, and they buy a company that makes playground equipment, and they buy a movie company, they make the movie Sounder. And they’re buying all these companies with Mattel stock, because Mattel stock is through the roof, is just very valle. The only problem is, there are some problems within the company. So a factory has a fire in Mexico, and that quarter they actually lose money. But their deal to buy Ringling Brothers depends on the stock price being at a certain level, and if their quarterly report shows this loss, then the stock price might drop and that would devastate the deal. So Ruth engages in a practice that was not uncommon at all, which was called “bill and hold,” but it was wrong. It was fraudulent, saying that they had sold so many units and delivered them, and in fact they had. And companies did it because they believed they’d make up the money in the next quarter, and they always had it Mattel, but this time they didn’t, and there’s a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. By the late seventies, she was pushed out of the company by the board. She and Elliott, even though he wasn’t involved, were both pushed out of the company. They founded it, and as this is going on, Ruth suddenly has breast cancer, and she has a mastectomy. It was a terrible time. She thought about suicide. She started gambling a great deal, and then one day it hit her that if she wanted to find clothes as someone with a mastectomy, it was very, very difficult. She went into a store to buy address and the salespeople in a prosthetic to go with it. And the prosthetics were just like a ball of rubber, and the salespeople would throw them over the door of the dressing room because they didn’t want to look at her. She felt humiliated. So she had this idea that she could create a realistic prosthetic so women could feel good about their bodies again. She built a new company doing that, and that helped her find herself again. And even more than that, she started fitting women who needed the prosthetics, and in doing that, she made a connection that she had never made before with women because she pretty much didn’t work with women. She didn’t really have friends. So it really changed her life. She said she discovered a kind of happiness she hadn’t really known before. By then, there were Barbie collectors, so there was a big community that really wanted to meet her and knew who Ruth Handler was. And right around that time, a woman took over as CEO of Mattel, Jill Barad, and the Barbie brand was not doing too well. And Jill Barad said, “I need Ruth Handler back here,” and she brought her back into the company, and they went around the world together, you know, talking about Barbie. And Jill said she couldn’t keep up with Ruth Handler. She was at the forty-second anniversary of Barbie at the head table, back in the company, back of Mattel. I’ve talked to many, many Barbie owners over the years, and what they say is the Dow helped me realize my dreams. The Dow helped me pretend to be what I wanted to be and who could be anything. It’s exactly what Ruth said little girls wanted to play it being big girls. It’s one of the greatest high-concept ideas ever in America. She built a global icon from that idea.

00:19:46
Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Madison Derricott, and a special thanks to Robin Gerber, author of Barbie and Ruth. Pick it up wherever you buy your books. That’s Barbie and Ruth story. The idea of hiring a woman from the best design school in L.A. and designing a wardrobe for Barbie, sending her to Japan. How brilliant! And twenty-one outfits! What a story! The story of Ruth Handler here on Our American Stories.