The curse of Barbie: How the world's most famous toy destroyed the sordid lives of her two creators

The curse of Barbie: How the world's most famous toy destroyed the sordid lives of her two creators

By GEOFFREY WANSELL
Last updated at 9:49 AM on 10th March 2009


American ideal: Barbie has a dark history

With her saccharine-sweet smile and impossibly long legs, Barbie is the most famous doll in history.

More than a billion Barbies have been sold since the foot-tall plastic pin-up was first revealed to the world at the New York Toy Fair in March 1959, wearing a black-and-white, striped bathing suit.

In the half-century since, Barbie has become synonymous with the American ideal of a woman, a blonde beauty whose waist is ridiculously small, and whose bust - if it were to be found on a real woman - would cause her to topple over.

And she made a fortune for her creator, the giant American Mattel Corporation.

But there is a dark side to this epitome of a wholesome childhood.

For behind Barbie's squeaky clean, girl-next-door image lies a string of lurid details about Mattel, which have come to light in a new book, Toy Monster: The Big, Bad World Of Mattel, by New York Times best-selling author Jerry Oppenheimer, published to coincide with Barbie's 50th birthday this month.

The truth is that far from being the 'all-American girl' that she appeared to the millions of little girls who played with her, Barbie owed her conception to two business partners whose sordid lives were a world away from the cosy world of 'Mom's apple-pie' that she was created to represent.

It is a story of greed, debauchery and excess - and one that might horrify the millions of parents who bought a Barbie for their daughters.

Barbie was the creation of Jack Ryan, a five-times-married engineer with a passion for parties, prostitutes and cocaine, and Ruth Handler, the entrepreneurial daughter of Polish immigrants, who stumbled across the Barbie blueprint - an adult, almost pornographic doll called Bild-Lilli - during a holiday in Europe in 1956.

Ryan, Mattel's chief designer, modelled Barbie on that sexy German doll, which he described as 'looking like a hooker between performances', but he knew American Barbie couldn't be so provocative.

When the original production mould arrived in his office, Ryan filed the nipples off. But if Barbie's birth was unorthodox, it was nothing compared with the misery that stalked her early years. Within the first decade of the doll's life, her 'parents' had fallen out over money and the ownership of the patent to their 'baby', and launched into a bitter 'divorce'.

Years later, Ryan would take his own life against a background of undying enmity from Handler.

To fully understand exactly how the world's favourite doll emerged from such dysfunctional parenting, however, we need to travel back more than half a century to the days when wide-eyed Barbie, complete with her bendy waist and insatiable appetite for new clothes and underwear, first came into the world.


Ruth Handler tried to persuade the world she alone was the creator of Barbie

Barbie's story begins in 1945 when Handler, the pushy 39-year-old daughter of Polish immigrants - who 'didn't like dolls and never played with them' as a child - founded a toy company in California with her husband, Elliot, and a family friend called Harold 'Matt' Matson. They called it Mattel by melding the two men's names.

The gentle Matson didn't last long with the ambitious Handler, however, and by 1955 he had been replaced by Ryan, a former weapons designer barely 5ft 8in tall, with orange-red hair and a protruding nose.

Forever cautious with their money, the Handlers didn't offer Ryan a salary, preferring to give him one-and-a-half per cent of Mattel's gross sales.

It was a decision they would rapidly come to regret - for within three years it brought Ryan more than £750,000 a year, as a result of the company's success: and the arrival of Barbie.

Almost from the moment of the doll's conception, Handler and Ryan argued bitterly over who was responsible for creating her.

Handler insisted that Barbie had been her idea after she'd watched her daughter playing with paper dolls which she dressed up in different clothes, while Ryan maintained that he'd come up with the notion that girls didn't want a doll 'with a dopey figure', but one that looked real.

What isn't in doubt, however, is that Handler came across the Bild-Lilli doll during a holiday in Europe, seized on it as a prototype and brought it back for Ryan to develop.

But it was Ryan who came up with the technology that allowed the doll to move so flexibly, and who settled on her size and dimensions - inventions which he patented for himself in his role as 'independent consultant'.

By 1959 Mattel was ready to launch Barbie - although by then Handler and Ryan were also squabbling about who had come up with her name. Handler insisted the doll was called after her daughter, Barbara, while Ryan maintained it was named after his wife, also called Barbara.


A Barbie doll at the FAO Schwartz toy store in New York in celebration of the toy's 50th birthday

Former Mattel marketing man Marvin Barab said that both Handler and Ryan had enormous egos. 'Ruth's was less diseased,' he said. 'Her obnoxiousness was in an acceptable form, and Jack's wasn't. But they were both pretty obnoxious,' he recalled

Bitter though the internal rows at Mattel may have been, to the outside world the company was a triumph - especially after the launch of Barbie.

By the spring of 1960, Mattel could not keep up with demand and shopkeepers were having to limit the number they sold to their most treasured clients. The Japanese factory was producing 100,000 dolls a week, but couldn't keep up with the orders.

Barbie fan clubs were launched, and one Hollywood columnist reported that the doll was getting more fan mail than Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn combined.

And with huge royalty cheques flooding into his bank account, Ryan soon began to indulge his ferocious passion for sex in all its forms, including orgies.

To help him do so, in 1965 the engineer bought a faux Tudor mansion on a hilltop in Bel Air. It had once been owned by movie star Warner Baxter - the original Cisco Kid - and Ryan called it The Castle.

Complete with four acres of grounds, a wooden bridge over the moat that surrounded the house, mock battlements, giant stone fireplaces and massive arches guarded by suits of armour, it was a Hollywood landmark.

Frightened of being out of touch with his business, however, Ryan also installed 144 phones throughout the house and its grounds - even placing some of them in trees which he programmed to sound like birds chirping instead of ring tones.

The Castle was the house Barbie bought - and Ryan proceeded to fill it with the doll's real-life equivalents. Every Thursday evening, he would invite dozens of people to dinner.

Ryan would preside over the soiree, sitting on a throne that had once belonged to the Prince of Parma in Italy, while by his side would be a different woman every week - even though he was married.


Over the years, Barbie has embodied many different styles and faces

Ryan's wife and their two daughters were confined to what were known as the ' Personal Quarters' at The Castle - never to participate in the Bacchanalian orgies that he began to host ever more frequently. In the early Seventies, he held no fewer than 182 parties in a single year - and hired a firm of publicists to promote them.

There were jugglers and fortunetellers, acrobats and dancers, but the primary purpose was a sexual free-for-all and, inevitably, that drove his wife to demand a divorce.

Handler herself was no angel. As Ryan partied relentlessly, a furious Handler cut his royalties to the bone, resulting in him suing Mattel for millions.

The Barbie wars continued unabated: and they were to take their toll on Handler. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1970, and had a radical mastectomy. But the skulduggery and bitterness behind America's new doll sweetheart eventually began to leak out into the world.

By the end of 1973, Mattel's banks were beginning to lose confidence in the toy company's financial reports - and its future - and the share price began to plummet, from more than £66 a share to just £1.

There were rumours of a scandal, and in 1975 Handler and her husband were forced to resign from the company's board and sever their ties with the company they'd created.

Worse still, in February 1978 Handler was charged with conspiracy and making false statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission (America's leading financial regulator).

Initially, she denied the charges, only to change her plea after seven months and plead no contest - the equivalent of guilty - after agreeing with the prosecutors that if she did so she wouldn't go to jail. Instead, she was sentenced to 2,500 hours of community service and fined £40,000.

Throughout the financial crisis that gripped Mattel, Ryan saw his royalty cheques decrease, and in 1974 he sued - arguing that the company had short-changed him by £16 million.

That legal action, coupled with his dwindling income, led Ryan to drown his sorrows in alcohol and keep his depression at bay with the drug lithium.

Then, suddenly, he decided to wed actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, who was his neighbour in Bel-Air.

A close friend of Ryan's said he became Gabor's sixth husband because 'marrying a celebrity got him excited and out of his depression for a minute'.

The union was a disaster, not least because Ryan refused to give up his promiscuous lifestyle.

'I just couldn't cope,' Gabor was to say later. 'There was also the matter of Jack's dungeon, a torture chamber painted a sinister black and decorated with black fox fur.

'My knight in shining armour, the inhabitant of a fairytale castle ... was a full-blown Seventies-style swinger, into wife-swapping and sundry sexual pursuits as a way of life.'

The couple divorced after little more than a year, and Ryan confessed to a friend: 'That marriage cost me £260,000 a bang.'

Soon afterwards, however, he married for a third time, to a woman named Linda Henson whom, a friend observed, he tried to turn into a ' perfect replica' of Barbie, 'because Barbie was Jack's fantasy woman'. But that marriage, too, failed.

Determined to sustain his image as a playboy, Ryan got hitched again, this time to actress Gari Hardy Lansing, but that didn't last either, and he started a relationship with Barbara Kerr, a journalist.

Nothing he did could alleviate his depression at the decline in his fame and fortune. With Kerr at his side, Ryan descended into a haze of drugs - mostly cocaine - and prostitutes.

Meanwhile, still obsessed with his battle with Mattel over his royalties, Ryan put his beloved house up for sale to finance his legal case. It went for just £1.35million - a fraction of its value.

Mattel prolonged the case, costing Ryan ever more in legal fees and mental strain until, in 1979, he had a heart attack.

Then, in 1980, just before the trial itself was due to start, Mattel granted him a settlement of £6 million, much less than the £16 million he had demanded.

Still desperate for companionship after splitting from Kerr, Ryan married for a fifth time in August 1984, choosing a Polish immigrant called Magda, who spoke little English.

Ryan encouraged her to have her nose redone, but he did not survive to enjoy the results. In 1989 he suffered a stroke, which left him confined to a wheelchair and unable to speak.

Unwilling to live with his condition, he shot himself on August 13, 1991 - leaving the message 'I love you' written on a mirror with his wife's lipstick. He was 64.

Even after his death, the rivalry with Handler continued. When the New York Times described him as 'inventor of the Barbie doll', she wrote to dismiss him as merely 'someone who had done some of the design work'.

Indeed, for the next 11 years, until her death in 2002 at the age of 85, Handler conducted a concerted campaign to persuade the world that she alone had given birth to that plastic personification of American sweetness: a doll that brought pleasure to millions, but only greed and heartache to her 'parents'.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1160823/The-curse-Barbie-How-worlds-famous-toy-destroyed-sordid-lives-creators.html