January 29, 2025 • 27 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, her parents were poor Jewish immigrants and she was raised by her sister—spending her most developmental years behind a deli counter. Eventually, she'd marry a toy designer, change his name, and bet all of her company's money on an idea: that little girls just wanted to play with big girls. Robin Gerber, author of Barbie and Ruth tells the story of Ruth Handler—the creator of the Barbie Doll.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
And we feel pretty confident in saying that only one
woman in the world has been an Olympic athlete, an astronaut,
a news anchor, a nurse, the president, an aerobics instructor,
and a computer engineer all within one lifetime. Her name Barbie.
(00:33):
That's right, Barbie the Doll. But perhaps the most interesting
thing about Barbie, beyond her numerous occupations and staying power,
is the woman who created her, Ruth Handler. Here to
tell the story of Ruth is Robin Gerber, author of
Barbie and Ruth. We'd like to thank the Library of
Congress for allowing us to access this audio taken back
(00:55):
at a book talk in twenty ten.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
She could have been my mother, Joseph Moscow. Her father
lived in Poland and was conscripted, as many Jews were,
into the Russian army, and it was a way of
assimilating Jews and also of course beefing up the Tzar's army,
and many of them did what Joseph did.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
He went awall.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
He was also a great gambler and from what we
can tell he had quite a large amount of gambling debts,
and so he got out of Poland rather as quickly
as he could, got on a ship to the United
States and left behind Ida, who had their first six children.
When he got to Ellis Island, he didn't like New
York very much. He had shoot horses in the old country,
and so they said, well, you'd be perfect to help
(01:42):
build the railroad out west, and so they sent him
off to Denver. It took three years before Ida joined him,
and once she got to Denver along with him, living
in what was really a Jewish ghetto in the city,
they had four more children, the tenth and last, and
by the time she came along, Ida was pretty tired
(02:04):
and rather sick. She needed an operation shortly after Ruth
was born, and so she said to her oldest child, Sarah,
who had just gotten married, would you take the baby
for a little while. And so Sarah took Ruth and
never gave her back. In fact, Sarah became Ruth's mother,
and in a twist of fate or God's will, Sarah
(02:25):
herself never could have children, so Ruth became the only
beloved child of her sister, and her sister and her husband,
Louis Greenwald, were entrepreneurs. Louis owned a liquor store during
prohibition and after he did quite well, and Sarah ran
(02:46):
a deli counter in a big public market in Denver,
one of these places that took up a whole city
block and people would come in.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
There are lots of vendors.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Inside, and she had the only place where you could
go to eat well. By the time she was ten
years old, all Ruth was wanted to do was work
at the delhi with Sarah. She said later, I didn't
really like hanging out with the other little girls. What
they did didn't really interest me. I wanted to work
with my sister, who she always called her her sister. Interestingly,
(03:14):
they did, of course have contact with Ruth's biological parents,
but they never spoke English, and Ruth, because she wasn't
raised in the house, didn't learn to speak Yiddish, so
she couldn't actually communicate.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Very well with her own parents.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Sarah and Louie's household also was a bit more prosperous,
so they lived in a better part of town, so
she had quite a different upbringing than her other siblings.
The big Moscow clan well Ruth was working in the
Delhi when she was a teenager. I actually found a
wonderful picture of this when a young man came in
who she thought was really cute. Later she saw him
(03:49):
walking down the street with a friend. His name was
Elliot Handler, very similar background to hers. And a few
weeks later she went to a bene Breath dance where
you could dance with partner for a nickel a dance,
and this very cute boy spotted her and asked her
to dance. He had a ripped t shirt, but he
had great black curly hair, and after the first dance
(04:11):
he said to her stay right there, don't move because
he only had one nickel, and he ran back to
his friends and asked to borrow some more.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
And they danced all night.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
And that began a sixty more than sixty year marriage
and business partnership that I think is really unparalleled in
American history in terms of marriages. That really worked because
Elliott Elliott Handler was a great artist. He was a
wonderful designer and artist and a terribly, terribly shy person.
(04:44):
It was all he could do to get Ruth dancing
at this dance. She said later he couldn't.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Even order his own food in a restaurant. She of course,
was totally out.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
There and ready to do anything and be anything well
over great protests of her sister Sarah, and they did
get married. They were only about twenty years old at
the time. Sarah thought that Elliot wasn't going to amount
to anything.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
He was just an artist.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
She'd end up living in a garrett for the rest
of her life. How wrong can one person be? And
so after they got married in Denver, Ruth said to Elliott,
let's go to Los Angeles.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
I went there for summer. I love it there. Weather's
a lot better than here.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Let's go to LA And as they're driving across the
desert these newly weeds, she turns to him and she says,
I want.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
You to do something for me.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Elliott, at that time and all through his childhood, had
been known as Itsac Izzy Itsuck was his real name.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
Izzy was his nickname.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Ruth had a brother that they called Muzzy. That was
his nickname, and when she was a young teenager, she
and Muzzy got stopped by the police in Denver, and
when the police heard his name, they started making anti
Semitic comments and really bullying them in a way that
was quite.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Frightening to Ruth.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
So she turned to Elliot Izzy as they're driving across
the desert, and she said, I want you to do
this for me. I want you to change your name
when we get to Los Angeles. I want you to
use your middle name, Elliot.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
And so he did.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Of course, he did whatever Ruth said for quite a
long time. But I think it's a great emploignant moment
in their story because it is that very clear moment
of assimilation where Ruth is saying, we're going to be
Americans first as we go forward in our life, and
(06:36):
I don't want to have to suffer this kind of
anti semitism in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
And we've been listening to the story of Ruth Handler,
the woman who would go on to create Barbie, and
her husband as well. They were partners, as we learned
from this story, and partners for sixty years. And my goodness,
the husband was an introvert. She was an extrovert. And
as they're driving to Los Angeles, at her suggestion, she
decides and chooses her husband's name, and of course what
(07:08):
her older sister did was well, give her a shot
and give her an identity away from the family and
my goodness, she didn't want to be with her peers.
She wanted to work at that deli with her sister.
It unleashed her imagination and more than likely changed her
life in a radical way. When we come back, more
of the story of Ruth Handler here on our American Stories,
(07:35):
Lee hbib Here again. Our American Stories tries to tell
the stories of America's past and present to Americans, and
we want to hear your stories too. There's some of
our favorites. Send them to us. Go to Ouramericanstories dot
com and click the your stories tab. Again, please go
to Ouramerican Stories dot com and click the your Stories tab,
(08:09):
and we returned to our American Stories and the story
of Ruth Handler. The creator of the Barbie Doll. Telling
this story is Robin Gerber, the author of Barbie and Ruth.
When we last left off, Ruth and her husband Elliott,
had decided to move to la Let's continue with the story.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Ruth is working at Paramount Pictures as a secretary. Elliot's
making some designs. Going to art school. He makes some
little knickknacks like Ashtray's bookends, this kind of thing, and
Ruth looks at him and says, they're brilliant, They're wonderful.
Everything Elliott did for the next sixty.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
Years was brilliant and wonderful, and much of it was.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
And she throws it into an old battered suitcase, takes
time off at lunchtime or her job, picks out the
most expensive store in Wilshire, Bulevard that sells gifts, marches
in and says you want to buy this, and they do.
She gets her first order, and it is as if
Ruth had started taking drugs because she walks out of
(09:10):
there and she describes this feeling of immense elation and thrill.
She loved the game, she loved the competition. And one thing,
we have to remember what I said about Joseph. He
was a great gambler her father, so were all of the.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Clan of the Moscows.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
And Ruth herself was a gambler, and so was this
was her gamble.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Well it paid off.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Of course, Elliet started making toys. Ruth discovered she could
sell those as well. They started a little business, mostly
with the knickknacks, a little bit with the toys, and
then she of course did what women at that time.
Did she had a baby, her first daughter nineteen forty three,
she named Barbara, and shortly after that she had a
(09:56):
little boy named Ken. Yes, and she was, as she
later said, the most miserable mother you can imagine. She
couldn't stand being out of the business. She was dying
to get back to work. And finally she said to Elliott,
I can't stand it. I've got to get back in
the business. You keep selling the nickknacks. By then he
had partners and was doing pretty well. I'm going to
(10:18):
start this other company selling the toy designs that you have.
Elliott was working with a foreman from his knickknack company
to help Ruth get started. And that man's name was
Matt Matson, and so the men got together and decided
they'd call it Mattel. And Ruth said, later, what was
I thinking? I founded that company? How could I not
(10:41):
have my name in it? But she got Metel off
the ground with Elliot's designs, with her marketing skill, she
found representatives. They started to sell toys. Nineteen forty five.
Of course, the war, Second World War has ended. Soldiers
are coming back, starting families, and what are they looking for?
What isn't very readily available, what hasn't been made for
(11:03):
years in any big numbers toys, So it was a
great time to start a toy company. Elliott was extremely
innovative in the toys that he made, and Ruth catered
to him and that innovation and this is what I
mean by that most toy companies would have the machinery
to make one type of toy. Ruth realized that Elliott
(11:24):
had such a flexible imagination she wanted him to be
able to make anything, so she early on contracted out
for the manufacture. So if he wanted to use one material,
he could, but if he wanted to switch.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
He could do that too. And so they made the
jack in.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
The box wind up mechanism some people might remember a
few of us well. That was then used in many
other toys. And so this was Mittel's model to take
one mechanism that Alia came up with and put it
in many toys. They started to grow and they were
doing pretty well. Nineteen fifties come and toys started to
be advertised on television. But the big giant of toys
(12:04):
at the time, the biggest toy company in the world,
Marx Toys, well Lewis Mark said toys will never be
successfully sold on television. Ruth didn't believe this. Ruth understood
that there was a different way of marketing. And so
when this new show was about to start something called
The Mickey Mouse Club, and her PR company came to
(12:27):
her and said, Ruth, they're starting this new show Disney,
and everyone knew Disney by then, and they want to
advertise in a new way. Every fifteen minutes, they're going
to have a little block of ads, and so you'll
get four ads in the hour, but you have to
commit upfront to a half million dollars for the year.
You have to commit to advertise for the whole year,
(12:48):
not just before Christmas like most toy companies did well.
Half million dollars was the total net worth at that
time of Mattel, and Ruth hesitated about thirty seconds and said,
I'll do it. Advertising on The Mickey Mouse Club led
Mattel into really reaching into homes. And the other thing
(13:10):
that Ruth understood was that toys needed to be sold
to children. After when I'm gonna tell you next, you're
going to really hate her, because up till this time,
if you wanted to buy a toy for your child,
you looked in the catalog, you went to the toy store,
you disgusted with the owner of the toy store, and
all the adults decided the toys the kids would get.
(13:32):
But Ruth, she geared her ads directly at children. Now,
of course that's all there is, but at that time
it was revolutionary. The toy stores were furious about it. Parents,
once they caught on, were really quite upset about it,
but it drove sales and all through the fifties. Ruth
(13:52):
had this idea. She believed that little girls wanted to
play being big girls, and the only toys they had
for doll type toys were baby dolls, and to play
being big girls, they had to use paper dolls.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
And for those of you, some of you who use
paper dolls, like.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
Me, it was a very frustrating experience because the little
paper dresses, the tabs, the doyce tear off, and you know,
if you weren't real corny, it just wasn't very good.
And she watched her daughter playing with paper dolls and
her friends realized that they wanted this adult experience, and
so she started saying to her designers. The all male
design team we want. I want to make this adult doll, Ruth.
(14:35):
They said, mothers will never buy their daughters a doll
with breasts. Well, she kept pushing, she kept pushing, kept
getting pushed back. Even Elliott told her it was the
craziest idea.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Forget it.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
But then in the summer of fifty seven, the family
went on the Grand European Tour, Ruth and the Elliot,
the two children, and in Luzerne, Switzerland, in a famous
toy store, Franz Bader Toy Shop, they see a doll
hanging in the window that you and I would think
is a Barbie dollar, very very close. It was, in
fact called the Lily Doll, taken from a cartoon character
(15:10):
in a tabloid newspaper called Bild Lily and Lily in
this cartoon was actually a prostitute. She took things from
men in exchange for her favors, and she was so
wildly popular that the cartoon has decided a doll would
be a fun gag for men. Europe's a little less
(15:33):
uptight than we are here.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Little girl saw it, said we'd like to play with it,
and it made its way into toy shops.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
But Ruth didn't know all that. All she knew was
this was the toy dolls she was trying to get her.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Designers to make.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
So Barbara says to her, I want that doll, and
Ruth says, yes, so do I. She buys three of
these dolls, takes them back handsome to her designer says,
go to Japan, figure out how to make this doll.
And while he's doing that, and they taught. By the way,
ton down a bit. If you look, Lily's eyes were
a little sharper and her mouth was a little harder looking,
(16:07):
and also the plastic was very hard. Ruth used a
better plastic, but by and large, Barbie was copied from Lily.
And Ruth then hired a wonderful designer center to Japan
for a year to make these perfect little clothes with.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
The tiny zippers and buttons.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
And she also hired the greatest branding expert of the time,
maybe the first real branding expert in America, man named
Ernest Dickter, a psychologist who'd come from Vienna. He studied
with Freud, came here decided he wasn't going to do
well enough just counseling people, and so he started a
business counseling companies how to sell products in a psychological way.
(16:50):
A car isn't a car, after all, it's a way
for men to feel. It's a sexual prowess.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
When you've been listening to Robin Gerber, author of Barbie
and Ruth, telling this story of Ruth Handler, and my goodness,
her father was a compulsive gambler. Well, she wasn't wasting
your money on card games or jacks, but she was
a gambler. And my goodness, what a decision to make
the entire net worth of the company she puts down
(17:20):
on the line, betting that the Mickey Mouse Club will
change Mattel. Without this decision, we don't get Barbie or
anything else, because if it went bad, the company's wiped out,
and it most certainly didn't. Her insight sell to the children,
not to the adults. And that television, that television was
going to change the world. When we come back more
(17:43):
of the story of this visionary entrepreneur and marketing genius,
Ruth Handler, when we continue here on our American stories,
(18:08):
and we return to our American stories and the final
portion of our story on Ruth Handler, the creator of
the Barbie doll, telling the story is Robin Gerber, author
of Barbie and Ruth. When we last left off, Ruth
had decided to put her money where her mouth was
and test out her theory that girls wanted to play
with dolls of big girls, not babies and children. So
(18:31):
she hired a psychologist who had worked with Sigmund Freud.
Let's return to the story.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Ruth hires are in a sticktor to focus groups with
women and their daughters and figure out how to market
this style. And so what she discovers is, sure enough,
mothers hate a doll with breasts, daughters love it, and
Dictor says, markt this style as a teenage fashion model.
Then you can tell the mothers that she'll be teaching
(19:00):
their daughter's good groomy and the daughters won't really care.
And so all this is put together, and on March eleventh,
nineteen fifty nine, Ruth unveils Barbie at the Barbie Doll
Course named for her daughter, at Toy Fair, which is
where all new toys even today are unveiled to the
(19:22):
buyers from the big companies. And she is very nervous.
She's ordered a huge supply of these dolls and clothes.
She has no idea, how it's going to be taken.
The biggest buyer walks into the room. Sears was the
big buyer at the times their catalogs. And he walks
around and Ruth is walking next to him, and she's
she looked like a Barbie doll because she wasn't tall
(19:44):
and skinny, but she was certainly well in doubt, and
she dressed in beautiful coat to her clothes, and she
smoked like a chimney. And she's walking around with this
man and she's saying, look, this is what we have planned.
We have TV ads, We've done all this research. Girls
are gonna love it. You walk around the room and
he says, no, it's not going to work, and he
doesn't put in a single order, and she is in
(20:07):
complete panic. Rushes to the phones, trying to get on
the phone to Japan, tell him to cut.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
Back on the orders. Goes back to her hotel room.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
And Elliott told me I did interview him that she
actually cried, which she said was not like Ruth. Not
much was happening with Barbie those first few months, but
then school let out and all those little girls wanted
their Barbie dolls. Three hundred thousand were sold that first year.
Of course, the rest is history. Very quickly within the
(20:37):
after about a year.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
During the first year, she started getting.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Letters Barbie needs a boyfriend.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
And so they came up with the Ken doll. And
of course the big debate was whether he should be
endowed or not.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
And you might recall he was not, and Ruth felt
he should be at least to some extent, because she
was quite worried about her son and his feeling. I
don't know why she didn't just change the name. In fact,
both children hated the fact that the doll dolls were
named after them, just hated it, and Ken did get
teased rather roundly. Mattel leaped forward as a company, was
(21:16):
fourteen million dollars and fifty nine one hundred million the
next year on the stock market. Throughout the sixties, you
would have had double digit returns if you'd bought Mattel stock.
It flew up on the basis of Barbie and then
later hot wheels, which Elliott also designed. And Ruth and
Elliott were sitting on a b myth and so they
started buying up some little companies. One made playground equipment,
(21:39):
one made real to reel recordings, for kids. They bought
a movie company and made the movie Sounder. They bought
Ringling Brothers Circus, but these purchases were not such a
good idea, and the man she brought in to oversee
it was someone whose ethics were at best questionable, and
when they had a bad quarter, suggested that they do
(22:01):
a scheme called bill and Hold, which falsified the books.
Ruth went along with this. Eventually it was discovered she
was pushed out of the company. She was pleaded no
contest sec fraud, and at the same time that all
this was happening, the lumps that had been in her
breast for many years one of them turned cancers and
she had a massedectomy. It's hard to describe the low.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Point that she was at. By nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
She contemplated many things, including suicide, including becoming a gambler
for the rest of her life. Elliet wanted her to retire.
They were still fabulously wealthy, but she couldn't do that.
She couldn't turn it off. Remember what I said turned
around that very first time. It was the competition, It
(22:51):
was being in the game. It was that drive that
she couldn't shut off, and so she did something that
actually deemed her. And as I say in the book,
I don't think I could have written the book if
she hadn't found this path to her own redemption when
she got the breast cancer and lost her breast. At
(23:12):
that time, it was nineteen seventy one, reconstruction was not
done commonly, so you had to use a prosthetic you
put inside the brow looked like a kind of like
an egg, like a lumpy, awful egg. And when Ruth
went to get fitted for one, she felt like the
sales women were doing everything they could to stay away
(23:32):
from her. Who drew the short straw to have to
sell to her, And she said, they literally dangled these
things over the doors. No one wanted to look at
her this kind of thing, and she felt totally humiliated.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
And the prosthetic was horrible. She looked terrible. She who had.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
Worn these form fitting clothes was now wearing essentially sacks.
And so she had this idea of creating wonderful sculpted prosthetics,
as she said, with a left and or right, and
in different sizes. And she built a company and the
only people she hired were women who'd also had maths tectomies,
(24:11):
and once she designed this product called nearly Me in
a company called Ruthton, which she admitted was a horrible
name for a company, but she was going to have
her name in this company. She went on television on
the MERV Griffin Show, and when he asked if these
(24:31):
prosthetics were really any good, she opened her blouse and said,
see if you can tell the difference. She went out
to the big stores and even Marcus Bloomingdale's. She insisted
they create special salons where women who had had mass
tectomies could come and be fitted with dignity and respect.
She went out and fitted women personally, and when they'd
(24:53):
come out of these out of the dressing room and
look at themselves, and they would hug her and start
crying and thank her for giving them their life back.
She started to discover a different part of herself. She
started also to connect, for the first time in her
life very closely with other women, something.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
She had never done.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
She was absolutely intrepid, and this brought her back. And
then in the nineties, when Jill Barad took over Mattel,
some of you might remember she was the next the
first woman CEO after Ruth. She brought Ruth back into
the company, invited her back in. She said, we're going
to revive the Barbie brand, which was flagging in the nineties,
(25:35):
with your original idea. Little girls just want to play
it being big girls. And Jill told me that Ruth
absolutely drove her under the table. She was such a
hard worker, even at this point in her life. She
was in her seventies, of course, had been quite sick.
They traveled overseas together. Jill said, I could barely keep
(25:57):
up with her, and she said she was a.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
Rock star wherever she went.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
She died in two thousand and two from further complications
of cancer. But I think it is a remarkable life
and a life that reminds us that there are great
heroes who without fatal flaws, but there are also great
people like Ruth Handler who lose track and lose their
(26:24):
way and find their way back.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
And a terrific job on the production editing and storytelling
by our own Monte Montgomery, and a special thanks to
Robin Gerber, author of Barbie and Ruth. The biggest buyer
in the world, the equivalent of Walmart in its day.
Sears doesn't buy one, but then comes summertime, and those
little girls wanted to play with the big girl toys.
(26:48):
She was right. Then would come massive growth, then problems,
of course, because of her. In the end, her fatal flaw,
which is gambling. Big risk taking made the company, and
big mistaking also cost her a whole lot. But she's
redeemed with her work in the area of prosthetics, and
then truly redeemed when she finds her way back to Mattel.
(27:11):
A twentieth century story of marketing genius, meeting entertainment, and
meeting the world of television. The story of Ruth Handler
here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
And we feel pretty confident in saying that only one
woman in the world has been an Olympic athlete, an astronaut,
a news anchor, a nurse, the president, an aerobics instructor,
and a computer engineer all within one lifetime. Her name Barbie.
(00:33):
That's right, Barbie the Doll. But perhaps the most interesting
thing about Barbie, beyond her numerous occupations and staying power,
is the woman who created her, Ruth Handler. Here to
tell the story of Ruth is Robin Gerber, author of
Barbie and Ruth. We'd like to thank the Library of
Congress for allowing us to access this audio taken back
(00:55):
at a book talk in twenty ten.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
She could have been my mother, Joseph Moscow. Her father
lived in Poland and was conscripted, as many Jews were,
into the Russian army, and it was a way of
assimilating Jews and also of course beefing up the Tzar's army,
and many of them did what Joseph did.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
He went awall.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
He was also a great gambler and from what we
can tell he had quite a large amount of gambling debts,
and so he got out of Poland rather as quickly
as he could, got on a ship to the United
States and left behind Ida, who had their first six children.
When he got to Ellis Island, he didn't like New
York very much. He had shoot horses in the old country,
and so they said, well, you'd be perfect to help
(01:42):
build the railroad out west, and so they sent him
off to Denver. It took three years before Ida joined him,
and once she got to Denver along with him, living
in what was really a Jewish ghetto in the city,
they had four more children, the tenth and last, and
by the time she came along, Ida was pretty tired
(02:04):
and rather sick. She needed an operation shortly after Ruth
was born, and so she said to her oldest child, Sarah,
who had just gotten married, would you take the baby
for a little while. And so Sarah took Ruth and
never gave her back. In fact, Sarah became Ruth's mother,
and in a twist of fate or God's will, Sarah
(02:25):
herself never could have children, so Ruth became the only
beloved child of her sister, and her sister and her husband,
Louis Greenwald, were entrepreneurs. Louis owned a liquor store during
prohibition and after he did quite well, and Sarah ran
(02:46):
a deli counter in a big public market in Denver,
one of these places that took up a whole city
block and people would come in.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
There are lots of vendors.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Inside, and she had the only place where you could
go to eat well. By the time she was ten
years old, all Ruth was wanted to do was work
at the delhi with Sarah. She said later, I didn't
really like hanging out with the other little girls. What
they did didn't really interest me. I wanted to work
with my sister, who she always called her her sister. Interestingly,
(03:14):
they did, of course have contact with Ruth's biological parents,
but they never spoke English, and Ruth, because she wasn't
raised in the house, didn't learn to speak Yiddish, so
she couldn't actually communicate.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Very well with her own parents.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Sarah and Louie's household also was a bit more prosperous,
so they lived in a better part of town, so
she had quite a different upbringing than her other siblings.
The big Moscow clan well Ruth was working in the
Delhi when she was a teenager. I actually found a
wonderful picture of this when a young man came in
who she thought was really cute. Later she saw him
(03:49):
walking down the street with a friend. His name was
Elliot Handler, very similar background to hers. And a few
weeks later she went to a bene Breath dance where
you could dance with partner for a nickel a dance,
and this very cute boy spotted her and asked her
to dance. He had a ripped t shirt, but he
had great black curly hair, and after the first dance
(04:11):
he said to her stay right there, don't move because
he only had one nickel, and he ran back to
his friends and asked to borrow some more.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
And they danced all night.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
And that began a sixty more than sixty year marriage
and business partnership that I think is really unparalleled in
American history in terms of marriages. That really worked because
Elliott Elliott Handler was a great artist. He was a
wonderful designer and artist and a terribly, terribly shy person.
(04:44):
It was all he could do to get Ruth dancing
at this dance. She said later he couldn't.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Even order his own food in a restaurant. She of course,
was totally out.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
There and ready to do anything and be anything well
over great protests of her sister Sarah, and they did
get married. They were only about twenty years old at
the time. Sarah thought that Elliot wasn't going to amount
to anything.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
He was just an artist.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
She'd end up living in a garrett for the rest
of her life. How wrong can one person be? And
so after they got married in Denver, Ruth said to Elliott,
let's go to Los Angeles.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
I went there for summer. I love it there. Weather's
a lot better than here.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Let's go to LA And as they're driving across the
desert these newly weeds, she turns to him and she says,
I want.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
You to do something for me.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Elliott, at that time and all through his childhood, had
been known as Itsac Izzy Itsuck was his real name.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
Izzy was his nickname.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Ruth had a brother that they called Muzzy. That was
his nickname, and when she was a young teenager, she
and Muzzy got stopped by the police in Denver, and
when the police heard his name, they started making anti
Semitic comments and really bullying them in a way that
was quite.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Frightening to Ruth.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
So she turned to Elliot Izzy as they're driving across
the desert, and she said, I want you to do
this for me. I want you to change your name
when we get to Los Angeles. I want you to
use your middle name, Elliot.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
And so he did.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Of course, he did whatever Ruth said for quite a
long time. But I think it's a great emploignant moment
in their story because it is that very clear moment
of assimilation where Ruth is saying, we're going to be
Americans first as we go forward in our life, and
(06:36):
I don't want to have to suffer this kind of
anti semitism in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
And we've been listening to the story of Ruth Handler,
the woman who would go on to create Barbie, and
her husband as well. They were partners, as we learned
from this story, and partners for sixty years. And my goodness,
the husband was an introvert. She was an extrovert. And
as they're driving to Los Angeles, at her suggestion, she
decides and chooses her husband's name, and of course what
(07:08):
her older sister did was well, give her a shot
and give her an identity away from the family and
my goodness, she didn't want to be with her peers.
She wanted to work at that deli with her sister.
It unleashed her imagination and more than likely changed her
life in a radical way. When we come back, more
of the story of Ruth Handler here on our American Stories,
(07:35):
Lee hbib Here again. Our American Stories tries to tell
the stories of America's past and present to Americans, and
we want to hear your stories too. There's some of
our favorites. Send them to us. Go to Ouramericanstories dot
com and click the your stories tab. Again, please go
to Ouramerican Stories dot com and click the your Stories tab,
(08:09):
and we returned to our American Stories and the story
of Ruth Handler. The creator of the Barbie Doll. Telling
this story is Robin Gerber, the author of Barbie and Ruth.
When we last left off, Ruth and her husband Elliott,
had decided to move to la Let's continue with the story.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Ruth is working at Paramount Pictures as a secretary. Elliot's
making some designs. Going to art school. He makes some
little knickknacks like Ashtray's bookends, this kind of thing, and
Ruth looks at him and says, they're brilliant, They're wonderful.
Everything Elliott did for the next sixty.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
Years was brilliant and wonderful, and much of it was.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
And she throws it into an old battered suitcase, takes
time off at lunchtime or her job, picks out the
most expensive store in Wilshire, Bulevard that sells gifts, marches
in and says you want to buy this, and they do.
She gets her first order, and it is as if
Ruth had started taking drugs because she walks out of
(09:10):
there and she describes this feeling of immense elation and thrill.
She loved the game, she loved the competition. And one thing,
we have to remember what I said about Joseph. He
was a great gambler her father, so were all of the.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Clan of the Moscows.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
And Ruth herself was a gambler, and so was this
was her gamble.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Well it paid off.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Of course, Elliet started making toys. Ruth discovered she could
sell those as well. They started a little business, mostly
with the knickknacks, a little bit with the toys, and
then she of course did what women at that time.
Did she had a baby, her first daughter nineteen forty three,
she named Barbara, and shortly after that she had a
(09:56):
little boy named Ken. Yes, and she was, as she
later said, the most miserable mother you can imagine. She
couldn't stand being out of the business. She was dying
to get back to work. And finally she said to Elliott,
I can't stand it. I've got to get back in
the business. You keep selling the nickknacks. By then he
had partners and was doing pretty well. I'm going to
(10:18):
start this other company selling the toy designs that you have.
Elliott was working with a foreman from his knickknack company
to help Ruth get started. And that man's name was
Matt Matson, and so the men got together and decided
they'd call it Mattel. And Ruth said, later, what was
I thinking? I founded that company? How could I not
(10:41):
have my name in it? But she got Metel off
the ground with Elliot's designs, with her marketing skill, she
found representatives. They started to sell toys. Nineteen forty five.
Of course, the war, Second World War has ended. Soldiers
are coming back, starting families, and what are they looking for?
What isn't very readily available, what hasn't been made for
(11:03):
years in any big numbers toys, So it was a
great time to start a toy company. Elliott was extremely
innovative in the toys that he made, and Ruth catered
to him and that innovation and this is what I
mean by that most toy companies would have the machinery
to make one type of toy. Ruth realized that Elliott
(11:24):
had such a flexible imagination she wanted him to be
able to make anything, so she early on contracted out
for the manufacture. So if he wanted to use one material,
he could, but if he wanted to switch.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
He could do that too. And so they made the
jack in.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
The box wind up mechanism some people might remember a
few of us well. That was then used in many
other toys. And so this was Mittel's model to take
one mechanism that Alia came up with and put it
in many toys. They started to grow and they were
doing pretty well. Nineteen fifties come and toys started to
be advertised on television. But the big giant of toys
(12:04):
at the time, the biggest toy company in the world,
Marx Toys, well Lewis Mark said toys will never be
successfully sold on television. Ruth didn't believe this. Ruth understood
that there was a different way of marketing. And so
when this new show was about to start something called
The Mickey Mouse Club, and her PR company came to
(12:27):
her and said, Ruth, they're starting this new show Disney,
and everyone knew Disney by then, and they want to
advertise in a new way. Every fifteen minutes, they're going
to have a little block of ads, and so you'll
get four ads in the hour, but you have to
commit upfront to a half million dollars for the year.
You have to commit to advertise for the whole year,
(12:48):
not just before Christmas like most toy companies did well.
Half million dollars was the total net worth at that
time of Mattel, and Ruth hesitated about thirty seconds and said,
I'll do it. Advertising on The Mickey Mouse Club led
Mattel into really reaching into homes. And the other thing
(13:10):
that Ruth understood was that toys needed to be sold
to children. After when I'm gonna tell you next, you're
going to really hate her, because up till this time,
if you wanted to buy a toy for your child,
you looked in the catalog, you went to the toy store,
you disgusted with the owner of the toy store, and
all the adults decided the toys the kids would get.
(13:32):
But Ruth, she geared her ads directly at children. Now,
of course that's all there is, but at that time
it was revolutionary. The toy stores were furious about it. Parents,
once they caught on, were really quite upset about it,
but it drove sales and all through the fifties. Ruth
(13:52):
had this idea. She believed that little girls wanted to
play being big girls, and the only toys they had
for doll type toys were baby dolls, and to play
being big girls, they had to use paper dolls.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
And for those of you, some of you who use
paper dolls, like.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
Me, it was a very frustrating experience because the little
paper dresses, the tabs, the doyce tear off, and you know,
if you weren't real corny, it just wasn't very good.
And she watched her daughter playing with paper dolls and
her friends realized that they wanted this adult experience, and
so she started saying to her designers. The all male
design team we want. I want to make this adult doll, Ruth.
(14:35):
They said, mothers will never buy their daughters a doll
with breasts. Well, she kept pushing, she kept pushing, kept
getting pushed back. Even Elliott told her it was the
craziest idea.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Forget it.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
But then in the summer of fifty seven, the family
went on the Grand European Tour, Ruth and the Elliot,
the two children, and in Luzerne, Switzerland, in a famous
toy store, Franz Bader Toy Shop, they see a doll
hanging in the window that you and I would think
is a Barbie dollar, very very close. It was, in
fact called the Lily Doll, taken from a cartoon character
(15:10):
in a tabloid newspaper called Bild Lily and Lily in
this cartoon was actually a prostitute. She took things from
men in exchange for her favors, and she was so
wildly popular that the cartoon has decided a doll would
be a fun gag for men. Europe's a little less
(15:33):
uptight than we are here.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Little girl saw it, said we'd like to play with it,
and it made its way into toy shops.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
But Ruth didn't know all that. All she knew was
this was the toy dolls she was trying to get her.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Designers to make.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
So Barbara says to her, I want that doll, and
Ruth says, yes, so do I. She buys three of
these dolls, takes them back handsome to her designer says,
go to Japan, figure out how to make this doll.
And while he's doing that, and they taught. By the way,
ton down a bit. If you look, Lily's eyes were
a little sharper and her mouth was a little harder looking,
(16:07):
and also the plastic was very hard. Ruth used a
better plastic, but by and large, Barbie was copied from Lily.
And Ruth then hired a wonderful designer center to Japan
for a year to make these perfect little clothes with.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
The tiny zippers and buttons.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
And she also hired the greatest branding expert of the time,
maybe the first real branding expert in America, man named
Ernest Dickter, a psychologist who'd come from Vienna. He studied
with Freud, came here decided he wasn't going to do
well enough just counseling people, and so he started a
business counseling companies how to sell products in a psychological way.
(16:50):
A car isn't a car, after all, it's a way
for men to feel. It's a sexual prowess.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
When you've been listening to Robin Gerber, author of Barbie
and Ruth, telling this story of Ruth Handler, and my goodness,
her father was a compulsive gambler. Well, she wasn't wasting
your money on card games or jacks, but she was
a gambler. And my goodness, what a decision to make
the entire net worth of the company she puts down
(17:20):
on the line, betting that the Mickey Mouse Club will
change Mattel. Without this decision, we don't get Barbie or
anything else, because if it went bad, the company's wiped out,
and it most certainly didn't. Her insight sell to the children,
not to the adults. And that television, that television was
going to change the world. When we come back more
(17:43):
of the story of this visionary entrepreneur and marketing genius,
Ruth Handler, when we continue here on our American stories,
(18:08):
and we return to our American stories and the final
portion of our story on Ruth Handler, the creator of
the Barbie doll, telling the story is Robin Gerber, author
of Barbie and Ruth. When we last left off, Ruth
had decided to put her money where her mouth was
and test out her theory that girls wanted to play
with dolls of big girls, not babies and children. So
(18:31):
she hired a psychologist who had worked with Sigmund Freud.
Let's return to the story.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Ruth hires are in a sticktor to focus groups with
women and their daughters and figure out how to market
this style. And so what she discovers is, sure enough,
mothers hate a doll with breasts, daughters love it, and
Dictor says, markt this style as a teenage fashion model.
Then you can tell the mothers that she'll be teaching
(19:00):
their daughter's good groomy and the daughters won't really care.
And so all this is put together, and on March eleventh,
nineteen fifty nine, Ruth unveils Barbie at the Barbie Doll
Course named for her daughter, at Toy Fair, which is
where all new toys even today are unveiled to the
(19:22):
buyers from the big companies. And she is very nervous.
She's ordered a huge supply of these dolls and clothes.
She has no idea, how it's going to be taken.
The biggest buyer walks into the room. Sears was the
big buyer at the times their catalogs. And he walks
around and Ruth is walking next to him, and she's
she looked like a Barbie doll because she wasn't tall
(19:44):
and skinny, but she was certainly well in doubt, and
she dressed in beautiful coat to her clothes, and she
smoked like a chimney. And she's walking around with this
man and she's saying, look, this is what we have planned.
We have TV ads, We've done all this research. Girls
are gonna love it. You walk around the room and
he says, no, it's not going to work, and he
doesn't put in a single order, and she is in
(20:07):
complete panic. Rushes to the phones, trying to get on
the phone to Japan, tell him to cut.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
Back on the orders. Goes back to her hotel room.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
And Elliott told me I did interview him that she
actually cried, which she said was not like Ruth. Not
much was happening with Barbie those first few months, but
then school let out and all those little girls wanted
their Barbie dolls. Three hundred thousand were sold that first year.
Of course, the rest is history. Very quickly within the
(20:37):
after about a year.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
During the first year, she started getting.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Letters Barbie needs a boyfriend.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
And so they came up with the Ken doll. And
of course the big debate was whether he should be
endowed or not.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
And you might recall he was not, and Ruth felt
he should be at least to some extent, because she
was quite worried about her son and his feeling. I
don't know why she didn't just change the name. In fact,
both children hated the fact that the doll dolls were
named after them, just hated it, and Ken did get
teased rather roundly. Mattel leaped forward as a company, was
(21:16):
fourteen million dollars and fifty nine one hundred million the
next year on the stock market. Throughout the sixties, you
would have had double digit returns if you'd bought Mattel stock.
It flew up on the basis of Barbie and then
later hot wheels, which Elliott also designed. And Ruth and
Elliott were sitting on a b myth and so they
started buying up some little companies. One made playground equipment,
(21:39):
one made real to reel recordings, for kids. They bought
a movie company and made the movie Sounder. They bought
Ringling Brothers Circus, but these purchases were not such a
good idea, and the man she brought in to oversee
it was someone whose ethics were at best questionable, and
when they had a bad quarter, suggested that they do
(22:01):
a scheme called bill and Hold, which falsified the books.
Ruth went along with this. Eventually it was discovered she
was pushed out of the company. She was pleaded no
contest sec fraud, and at the same time that all
this was happening, the lumps that had been in her
breast for many years one of them turned cancers and
she had a massedectomy. It's hard to describe the low.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Point that she was at. By nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
She contemplated many things, including suicide, including becoming a gambler
for the rest of her life. Elliet wanted her to retire.
They were still fabulously wealthy, but she couldn't do that.
She couldn't turn it off. Remember what I said turned
around that very first time. It was the competition, It
(22:51):
was being in the game. It was that drive that
she couldn't shut off, and so she did something that
actually deemed her. And as I say in the book,
I don't think I could have written the book if
she hadn't found this path to her own redemption when
she got the breast cancer and lost her breast. At
(23:12):
that time, it was nineteen seventy one, reconstruction was not
done commonly, so you had to use a prosthetic you
put inside the brow looked like a kind of like
an egg, like a lumpy, awful egg. And when Ruth
went to get fitted for one, she felt like the
sales women were doing everything they could to stay away
(23:32):
from her. Who drew the short straw to have to
sell to her, And she said, they literally dangled these
things over the doors. No one wanted to look at
her this kind of thing, and she felt totally humiliated.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
And the prosthetic was horrible. She looked terrible. She who had.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
Worn these form fitting clothes was now wearing essentially sacks.
And so she had this idea of creating wonderful sculpted prosthetics,
as she said, with a left and or right, and
in different sizes. And she built a company and the
only people she hired were women who'd also had maths tectomies,
(24:11):
and once she designed this product called nearly Me in
a company called Ruthton, which she admitted was a horrible
name for a company, but she was going to have
her name in this company. She went on television on
the MERV Griffin Show, and when he asked if these
(24:31):
prosthetics were really any good, she opened her blouse and said,
see if you can tell the difference. She went out
to the big stores and even Marcus Bloomingdale's. She insisted
they create special salons where women who had had mass
tectomies could come and be fitted with dignity and respect.
She went out and fitted women personally, and when they'd
(24:53):
come out of these out of the dressing room and
look at themselves, and they would hug her and start
crying and thank her for giving them their life back.
She started to discover a different part of herself. She
started also to connect, for the first time in her
life very closely with other women, something.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
She had never done.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
She was absolutely intrepid, and this brought her back. And
then in the nineties, when Jill Barad took over Mattel,
some of you might remember she was the next the
first woman CEO after Ruth. She brought Ruth back into
the company, invited her back in. She said, we're going
to revive the Barbie brand, which was flagging in the nineties,
(25:35):
with your original idea. Little girls just want to play
it being big girls. And Jill told me that Ruth
absolutely drove her under the table. She was such a
hard worker, even at this point in her life. She
was in her seventies, of course, had been quite sick.
They traveled overseas together. Jill said, I could barely keep
(25:57):
up with her, and she said she was a.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
Rock star wherever she went.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
She died in two thousand and two from further complications
of cancer. But I think it is a remarkable life
and a life that reminds us that there are great
heroes who without fatal flaws, but there are also great
people like Ruth Handler who lose track and lose their
(26:24):
way and find their way back.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
And a terrific job on the production editing and storytelling
by our own Monte Montgomery, and a special thanks to
Robin Gerber, author of Barbie and Ruth. The biggest buyer
in the world, the equivalent of Walmart in its day.
Sears doesn't buy one, but then comes summertime, and those
little girls wanted to play with the big girl toys.
(26:48):
She was right. Then would come massive growth, then problems,
of course, because of her. In the end, her fatal flaw,
which is gambling. Big risk taking made the company, and
big mistaking also cost her a whole lot. But she's
redeemed with her work in the area of prosthetics, and
then truly redeemed when she finds her way back to Mattel.
(27:11):
A twentieth century story of marketing genius, meeting entertainment, and
meeting the world of television. The story of Ruth Handler
here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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