Handler, Ruth 1916–2002

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HANDLER, Ruth 1916–2002

(Mrs. Elliot Handler)

PERSONAL: Born November 4, 1916, in Denver, CO; died of complications from colon surgery, April 27, 2002, in Los Angeles, CA; daughter of Jacob Joseph and Ida M. Mosko; married Elliot Handler (a furniture designer and toy manufacturer), June 26, 1938; children: Kenneth Robert, Barbara Joyce. Education: Attended the University of Denver, 1935–36.

CAREER: Paramount Studios, Hollywood, CA, secretary, c. 1936–38; Mattel, Inc. (toy manufacturer), Hawthorne, CA, cofounder, 1945, executive vice president, 1945–67, president, 1967–73; co-chair of board, 1973–74; founder of Nearly Me/Ruthon, Inc. (prosthetic manufacturing firm), 1974–91. Member, White House Conference on Children and Youth business advisory council, 1970, Center Theater Group board of directors, 1971, Council of Economic Advisors advisory committee on the economic role of women, 1972, and Vista Del Mar Child Care Service board of directors; member of executive committee and chair of subcouncil on product safety, President's National Business Council for Consumer Affairs, 1971–74.

MEMBER: Los Angeles Music Center (founding member, 1965), Association of the University of Southern California.

AWARDS, HONORS: Outstanding Businesswoman, National Association of Accountants, 1961; (with husband Elliot Handler) Couple of the Year, City Hope, 1963; Woman of the Year in Business, Los Angeles Times, 1968; Outstanding Woman, Ladies' Home Journal, 1971; Advertising Woman of the Year, Western States Advertising Agencies Association, 1972; Brotherhood Award, Southern California Region of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, 1972.

WRITINGS:

(With Jacqueline Shannon) Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story, Longmeadow Press (Stanford, CT), 1994.

SIDELIGHTS: Ruth Handler is best known as the inventor of the phenomenally successful Barbie doll. Since being introduced in 1959, Barbie and her companions have been manufactured and sold in the millions, and half a century later the willowy mold-injected plastic doll is still a must-have play item for many young girls. Handler chronicles the doll's inven-tion and success, as well as her many years of juggling motherhood and a career as a high-powered executive, in Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story.

Handler grew up in Denver, but as a young adult she moved to southern California. There she and Elliot Handler, who had been her childhood sweetheart before eventually becoming her husband, founded their first company. Elliot had long enjoyed making his own home decor, even furnishing the couple's apartment largely with pieces he designed. At Ruth's urging, he bought the necessary equipment to produce the pieces commercially, and in less than a decade the company they created was selling $2 million worth of furniture a year. Elliot soon sold his share of this business and moved on, creating a new firm, Mattel Creations, which started out producing picture frames. Then, with scraps of wood and plastic left over from the picture frame—making process, Elliot began making furniture for doll-houses. Ruth, by this time a member of the Mattel corporation, was intimately involved in the business side of the operation, even overseeing the company's sales organization. Under her leadership their doll-house line flourished, with profits of $30,000 a year. They soon branched out into other toys, making plastic ukuleles, pianos, and music boxes in the late 1940s.

Mattel's most successful toy, the Barbie doll, was conceived during an European vacation the Handlers took with their children, Barbie and Ken, in 1956. In Switzerland and Austria they saw the "Lilly" doll, which was based on a semi-pornographic European cartoon character. Handler's daughter was at this point too old to play with baby dolls, but Handler had noticed that she enjoyed playing with dolls modeling teenagers and adults. At that time the only adult dolls available in the United States were two-dimensional paper dolls, and Handler realized that she had found a niche market. Having an adult doll "gives a little girl the ability to dream about her future," Handler explained in a 1994 interview with Lilith contributor Susan Weidman Schneider. "A girl can interpret the adult world around her with this doll as a prop." Mattel introduced its own adult doll, Barbie, in 1959, and the company's sales quickly skyrocketed.

However, the good times at Mattel did not last forever, and within a decade the company's position began to weaken. When typical cycles of growth and loss began affecting the company, the Handlers and other members of the Mattel board tried to disguise this information in corporate financial reports. When the truth came to light, the company's stock price plummeted to $2 a share and the Handlers were indicted for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission. By 1974 they had been forced to leave the business they founded. At the same time Handler was struggling with breast cancer, and she mused in Dream Doll that perhaps the stress of her 1970 mastectomy affected her judgment during those years.

Frustrated with the prosthetic breasts that were available to her after her surgery, Handler decided to create better ones, leading her to found the company Nearly Me. This same scrappy attitude comes through in Dream Doll, according to some critics. Women's Review of Books contributor Mel McCombie wrote that Handler's "description of slights, hostility and prejudice against her gender in the workplace makes one respect her aggressive pursuit," while New York Times Book Review critic Amy M. Spindler noted that, despite all the setbacks in her life, Handler's tone "is unrelentingly optimistic, dotted with exclamation points and affirmative statements about herself. If Barbie could write … one imagines she would sound a bit like Ruth Handler."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Business Leader Profiles for Students, Volume 1, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Handler, Ruth, and Jacqueline Shannon, Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story, Longmeadow Press (Stanford, CT), 1994.

Newsmakers, Issue 3, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2003.

PERIODICALS

Chief Executive, January-February, 2003, p. 11.

Jet, p. 14.

Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, February 19, 1993, Suzan Berns, "Mattel Exec Uses Cancer Experience to Help Others," p. 19.

Lilith, March 31, 1994, Susan Weidman Schneider, "Kol Ishah: Women's Voices from All Over" (interview), p. 4.

New York Jewish Week, July 10, 1998, Susan Josephs, "Barbie's Jewish Roots," p. 30.

New York Times Book Review, February 5, 1995, Amy M. Spindler, "Bless Her Pointy Little Feet," review of Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story, p. 22.

Publishers Weekly, October 17, 1994, review of Dream Doll, p. 75.

Washington Post Book World, December 8, 1994, Grace Lichtenstein, "A Success beyond Ken," review of Dream Doll, p. 8.

Women's Review of Books, June, 1995, Mel McCombie, review of Dream Doll, p. 10.