Last weekend Warner Bros.’ movie “Barbie” was a hit at the box office, raking in $155 million domestically. In 1991, Ruth Handler, creator of the Barbie doll and Mattel co-founder, visited San Diego and spoke to the Union’s Lisa Petrillo about the iconic doll and her own dynamic life and business career.
From The San Diego Union, Sunday, February 10, 1991:
Creator of the shapely Barbie doll now shaping prosthetics
By Lisa Petrillo, Staff Writer
You Barbie, that little blonde girl you grew up with? Well, her mother was just in town on business, and she says Barbie is divorced, but has a great new boyfriend and is living the good life, golf and horses mostly.
And that Ken, what a doll he was.
Well, folks, the crew cut is long gone. He’s got a wife, two kids, long hair and a beard, and he’s into renovating historic buildings in New York City’s Greenwich Village, bohemian central.
“They’re both very happy,” says Ruth Handler, proud mother of the real Barbie and Ken, as well as their toy namesakes.
Barbie, it seems, never liked being the inspiration for the most beloved piece of plastic on earth.
Handler, on the other hand, loves talking about her hand in shaping modern American womanhood. “Barbie was the first doll with breasts,” she says bluntly.
This tiny gray-haired mogul talks about the long bumpy ride from making Barbie to making prosthetic breasts.
“I went from breast to breast,” Handler says with a grin, clearly delighted at being able to say the word, breast, freely.
It wasn’t like that when she first crashed through the male gates of big business 52 years ago, and she and her husband, Elliot Handler, founded Mattel.
“We were both gutsy, and nothing was impossible,” she says.
They went from plastics to making picture frames, before hitting on the idea of turning frame scraps into toy furniture. After that, the husband and wife team branched into toys, making history and a fortune.
But Ruth Handler hit bottom in the 1970s, first losing a breast to cancer and then losing Mattel in a corporate shakeup.
“I felt like I was deformed. I had no self-confidence. …It was horrible,” she says, still shuddering slightly at the memory of the humilitating search for clothing and prosthetics.
This was a woman who knew plastics, who knew breasts, who knew manufacturing. So she went on to revolutionize the prosthetic breast industry because, as she says simply, “Nobody else was.”
With the help of sculptors and engineers, she shaped fake breasts, the left and right shaped differently just like on real women. Her prosthetics conformed to standard bra sizes. Her company, Nearly Me, now does sales in the millions of dollars.
Handler, at 73, still devotes herself to running her business full-time, worldwide. Yesterday, she spoke in San Diego at the second annual Woman’s Health Symposium for the Sharp Memorial Hospital Women’s Education Center.
“When I get tired, I wonder what I’m knocking myself out for,” says Handler, who lives in Los Angeles. “My husband thinks I’m not quite normal.”
Ruth Handler started out rebellious.
The youngest of 10 children, she landed in Southern California on a vacation at age 19 and never returned to Colorado.
In the mid-1950s, genius struck while she watched her daughter Barbie play. The girl ignored the pudgy baby dolls and loved only her grown-up paper dolls. Handler spent years trying to convince the men running her own company that a grown-up 3-D doll would work.
Barbie made her debut in 1959, and the world instantly fell in love with the 11 1/2 -inch blonde, her fingernails always painted and her outfits pink and frilly.
Even now Barbie is still the world’s prom queen; someone buys a Barbie every two minutes. She’s won herself a spotlight in the Toy Hall of Fame, the Smithsonian Institution and in the heart of baby boomers worldwide.
Is Barbie dangerous, as those people who worry about these things have declared? Does she set impossible standards for little girls with her vacant smile and bleach-blond hair, that centerfold figure that would measure 39-21-33 on a human scale?
Handler waves off big thinking about her little doll. Because of all the things Barbie has done in her 32 years, from disco dancing to running a dude ranch, that little doll has never submitted herself to Freudian analysis.
Certainly Barbie’s resume is solid, as much a reflection of popular culture as “People” magazine. She’s been a model, an astronaut, a ballerina, an executive, a pilot, a surgeon, a singer, a lifeguard and a diplomat. And she’s proved she can handle life in the fast lane with her Ferraris and pink Corvettes.
“Barbie helped little girls dream big dreams,” Handler says.
