Entertainment, Books - Army Times

Visionary mom sold America on Barbie

Seems like only yesterday the little girls of the Baby Boom were playing with their Barbies, collecting her clothes and accessories, imagining their futures. But this year, Barbie turns 50 — half a century! Which means all those little girls are well, you know.

Barbie, however, looks as voluptuous as ever — 11 inches tall, pointy breasts, wasp waist, looong legs. Although sales fell 21 percent in the last quarter of 2008, Barbie remains the world’s 0best-selling doll: more than 1 billion sold since 1959.

Almost as many words have been written about Barbie since then, exploring her influence on the Boomers and her status as toy-biz-success-turned-cultural-icon. (She was hit at Fashion Week in New York this year.)

“Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her” (Collins Business, $24.95) by Robin Gerber is the biography of the woman who conceived Barbie, Ruth Handler, whose story is even more compelling and amazing than that of the doll she willed into existence and then marketed to a fare-thee-well.

“Ruth Handler could sell anything,” Gerber declares at the start. In an era when most women really did stay in the kitchen, this 10th child of Polish-Jewish immigrants, who had no business education, turned herself into a toy tycoon.

Mattel, which she co-founded with her designer-genius husband, Elliot Handler, and a partner, Harold “Matt” Matson, in 1945, combined the men’s names — but Ruth was Mattel.

When she introduced Barbie at the 1959 Toy Fair in New York, no one, not even Elliot, thought Ruth could persuade American moms to buy their little girls a doll with “breasts.” But Ruth had watched daughter Barbara (for whom the doll was named, as the Ken doll was named for her son) and her friends play with paper dolls and saw that girls imagined themselves as adults through the dolls.

“How much richer would the girls’ play be, Ruth wondered, if instead of flimsy paper dolls, they had a real grown-up doll?” Gerber writes.

This crystal insight about what children really want is ironic, given that she had difficult relationships with her children, who resented her for not being there for them growing up.

Handler had a spectacular fall in a business-fraud scandal.

In later years, she used her bouts with breast cancer to start another business that helped millions of women cope. When she died in 2002 at 85, Handler was lionized as a pioneer and a humanitarian.