Let’s Call Her Barbie

The Wisdom of Razor Blades

The Wisdom of Razor Blades

Jack is on a Pan Am flight—window seat—his gaze alternating between his view of the Pacific Ocean and the stewardess’s legs each time she walks up and down the aisle or stops to refill his wineglass. Such are the hardships of first-class travel. But it’s a nice perk. Especially after spending three weeks in Tokyo knocking on doors. Joined at the hip with his translator, Jack repeatedly tried to convey the idea of reproducing Bild Lilli, whom the Japanese businessmen deemed indecent. Just when he was about to give up, he found Kokusai Boeki Kaisha, the only manufacturer willing to take on such a risqué project —their words according to his translator, not Jack’s.

He had returned to his hotel room that night after a little celebrating. It was midnight his time, eight o’clock the previous day back home. He knew Ruth would already be in the office. When he’d placed that telephone call and told her the good news, he’d heard her clap all the way from Los Angeles. They kept the call short since it was $12 for just the first three minutes, but after he hung up, he heard Ruth’s voice over and over again: “You did it, Jack. I knew you could. Hurry home. We’ve got work to do.”

Though Ruth’s only forty, just ten years older than Jack, he tends to think of her as a mother figure. Sure, he challenges her from time to time, but still, he seeks her praise and approval as if hoping to fill the void where his own mother—his father, too—remain silent and withholding. Not long ago, Jack had devised a preprogrammed player harmonica that Elliot said was too similar to the toy saxophone he’d been developing. But Ruth had called it brilliant, making Jack beam and grow taller on the spot.

After his call with her that night, he’d hardly slept, which was nothing new for him. He actually cherishes his bouts of insomnia. They make him feel powerful compared to lesser men who can barely function on anything under eight hours. He’s at his best when running on four hours a night, or better yet, three. Long after the national anthem has been sung and all that’s left is the TV test pattern, Jack comes alive. His creativity is at its full strength. His best ideas have always been hatched just before dawn. Or after a nap, which doesn’t count as sleeping in his book.

That night in his hotel room, he’d thought about all he’d accomplished in Japan. He’d found someone to make the doll and now all he had to do was design her. Ideas were already coming faster than he could sketch them on the Imperial Hotel stationery. After that initial inspired burst, he’d called the front desk asking for more paper and a bourbon. The bar was closed for the night, and he could have bought a case of booze for what he spent on a bottle, not including the extra 50 yen for the bellboy who delivered it to his room. But it didn’t matter. He happily sipped his drink and sketched and dreamed.

“More wine, Mr.Ryan?” The stewardess bats her long lashes.

Women are naturally drawn to him. They say he looks like Dean Martin. He has that same dark hair, but Jack’s face is more diamond shaped, with a wide forehead and pointy chin that grows even more pronounced when he smiles, as he is doing right now.

“Peachy,” he says, as she leans over and refills his glass once more.

—

While Jack is getting the stewardess’s telephone number, Ruth is back in Los Angeles with Charlotte Johnson, the only fashion designer in L.A. willing to meet with her. Ruth spoke on the telephone with seven other designers, but at the first mention of making doll clothes, they said they weren’t interested. In a last-ditch effort to find someone, Ruth went to the Chouinard Art Institute. Charlotte is an instructor there, but unlike the old saying Those who can’t do, teach , Charlotte is quite accomplished. Attractive, tall and slender, she’s a former runway model turned Seventh Avenue hotshot with her own label. It was only after relocating to Los Angeles that she started teaching while trying to establish a new roster of West Coast clients. But Charlotte is soon to be divorced and she needs the extra income, which is the only reason she’s even entertaining the idea of moonlighting for Mattel.

Ruth now sits in Charlotte’s tiny kitchen at a green Formica table with two mismatched chairs. There’s a seashell ashtray between them, and two sweating glasses of lemonade.

“Before we get started,” Ruth says, retrieving a stack of papers from her briefcase, “I’ll need you to sign these.”

“What exactly am I signing?” Charlotte asks. She has a soft, high-pitched voice that makes her sound like she’s always standing on her tiptoes.

“Just some Do Not Compete forms. Confidentiality forms, a Nondisclosure Agreement,” says Ruth.

Charlotte grabs a pair of glasses and fogs the lenses with her breath before wiping them clean. She shuffles through the forms, thinking these precautions are ridiculous. Who is she going to tell? If anything, she doesn’t want her colleagues knowing she’s desperate enough to make doll clothes.

But Ruth has her reasons. Louis Marx, “the Toy King,” owns one of the largest toy companies in the country, but that’s partly because he steals his best ideas from Mattel and everyone else. He goes to Toy Fair—the big annual trade show in New York—just to see what the competition is up to so he can make knockoffs to sell at a lower price. Marx has even sent his spies into Mattel to snoop around under the guise of applying for a job, so they can’t be too careful.

After Charlotte signs the forms, Ruth double-checks the signature lines. Satisfied that she’s protected the doll’s secrecy, she reaches into her briefcase for Bild Lilli. Since Jack took her doll to Japan, Ruth has borrowed her daughter’s, and with a “Ta-dah” she presents Bild Lilli.

“Oh, my.” Charlotte takes the doll and adjusts her glasses for a closer look. “This is not what I was expecting.”

Her reaction is not what Ruth was expecting, either. She thought Charlotte—another woman—would be wowed by this doll. Instead, she seems as skeptical as all the men at Mattel. Ruth takes a sip of lemonade and notices the kitchen wall clock indicating she’s running late for her daughter’s play, but she can’t leave yet. She has to sell Charlotte on this first. She’s running out of options and she needs someone to design clothes for this doll. She tells Charlotte about discovering Bild Lilli and how Jack has just secured a manufacturer in Japan. “Of course, we’re going to redesign and reengineer the doll and make her our own, but this gives you the general idea we’re going for. Now we just need to figure out how to dress her.”

“So I’d be designing clothes? For this ?”

“Yes, but I don’t want ordinary doll clothes. I’m looking for real stylish outfits—high-end designs.”

Charlotte sits with this for a moment. “So you’re looking to turn this into a fashion doll. Sort of like a paper doll—”

“Exactly!” Ruth feels like she’s finally getting somewhere. At least Charlotte gets the concept. “As a matter of fact, I based the whole idea of an adult fashion doll on paper dolls. My daughter used to play with paper dolls all the time.”

“ I used to play with them. They’ve been around forever.”

“So you know all about those flimsy tabs.”

“Just awful,” she says. “They never hold the clothes in place. And they always tear.”

“And the cardboard cutouts”—Ruth shakes her head—“they’re about as much fun as a stick. But just imagine playing with a doll that has real clothes. Made from the finest fabrics, with real buttons, real zippers, real —”

“Wait—” Charlotte stops her with a laugh, revealing a slight gap between her front teeth. “Buttons? Zippers? There are no buttons or zippers small enough for this kind of design. They don’t exist.”

“Then we’ll create them.” She owns a company full of inventors. If they can create cap guns, why not zippers? “You design them, and Jack will figure out how to make them. Trust me, he’s a genius. A pain in the ass sometimes, but still a genius.”

Charlotte sits back, folds her arms, fingers drumming along the sleeve of her blouse. “This sounds like an awful lot of work.”

“I know.” Ruth looks around Charlotte’s tiny bungalow with its chipped Mexican tiled foyer and secondhand furniture. “But I’ll make it worth your while.”

Charlotte considers this. For months now she’s been struggling, skimping on groceries, worried about keeping the electricity on and gas in her car. Depending on what Ruth’s willing to pay, this could allow her to breathe a little easier, allow her to sleep at night.

While Charlotte examines Bild Lilli again, Ruth packs up her things, thinking that if traffic isn’t too heavy, she can still make the opening curtain.

“Just exactly how worth my while were you thinking?” asks Charlotte.

“I don’t know—how’s $5 an hour sound?”

“How about $6?”

“Done.”

Charlotte looks at Ruth and smiles. “Why, this doll’s just a marvelous little thing, isn’t she?”

—

By the time Ruth enters the high school auditorium, the curtain is up and they’re already halfway through the first act of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn . The room is dark, with dust mites stirring in the spotlights near the stage. Ruth and another guilty parent, a father clutching his fedora, inch down the center aisle looking at the backs of heads. She finally sees Elliot and her son, Ken, in the center of the third row. After sidestepping her way to the vacant spot next to Elliot, she calls even more attention to herself with the squeaking hinges on her seat. But at least she’s in place to applaud when Barbara, in the role of Katie Nolan, finishes singing “Look Who’s Dancing.”

“I got here as fast as I could,” she whispers to Elliot before the applause dies down. “My meeting ran late, and traffic was murder.” Barbara sees her and smiles as Ruth blows her a kiss.

“You tell that to your daughter,” he says, keeping his eyes on the stage.

She wants to say, At least I’m here. That’s more than my mother would have done.

Her mother already had nine children by the time Ruth was born, and a husband who spent most of his time at the gambling tables. At forty, the last thing Ida Mosko needed was another baby. After six months Ida had had enough. That’s how old Ruth was when her mother handed her infant to her eldest daughter, Sarah, and said, Here, you take her. You raise her . Sarah was a newlywed, old enough to have been Ruth’s mother, and while Ruth loved her sister, that didn’t change the fact that her own mother hadn’t wanted her.

It wasn’t until Ruth held Barbara for the first time that she realized what her mother had given away. Barbara was beautiful and magical, and she was hers. The feel of her baby in her arms evoked such mixed emotions, elation and despair. It left Ruth wondering how you could carry a child for nine months, shield and protect them inside you, only to take one look and say, No thank you. Send that one back .

Aside from pure, unwavering love, nothing about motherhood had come naturally to Ruth. How could it have? She was raised by her sister, a woman who worked every bit as hard as Ruth works now. Sarah ran a drugstore in Denver with a soda fountain in back and was far too busy to play with and nurture her baby sister. From a young age Ruth never wanted to be a bother or a burden, lest Sarah give her away, too. Ruth did chores without having to be asked. She bagged garbage and hauled it to the street, cleaned the litter box for a reclusive tabby that rarely came out from hiding. In the winter she shoveled the drive and walkways, in the summer she mowed the lawn, in the fall she raked leaves and in the spring she planted flowers. At ten she was already stocking shelves and unpacking deliveries at Sarah’s store. For as long as she could remember, Ruth has equated being useful and productive with being lovable, or at least keepable.

When Ruth had Barbara, she was starting from scratch. She made herself blow those raspberries on her tiny belly, had to remind herself to bounce Barbara on her knee, to speak baby talk though it made her feel ridiculous. A grown woman saying goo-goo and gah-gah , playing peekaboo and patty-cake.

But none of that meant she didn’t love Barbara, and showing up late for her play isn’t a measure of how much she loves her now. Ruth may not be a model mother herself, but she would have sooner given away an arm than one of her children.

—

After the play they celebrate at Punch & Judy, Barbara’s favorite ice cream parlor. Elliot and Ken are on one side of the booth, Ruth and Barbara on the other. Ruth glances at the menu and suggests they get a Moron’s Ecstasy for the table—eight scoops of ice cream, eight different toppings: hot fudge, butterscotch, caramel, raspberry syrup, marshmallow fluff, cherries, nuts, and whipped cream.

“You kids know why they call it a Moron’s Ecstasy, don’t you?” says Elliot. “Because only a moron would eat the whole thing by themself.”

They have a laugh over this, and when the monstrosity arrives, they each grab their spoons. Ken holds his like a sword. “En garde,” he says, digging in only to let out a high-pitched “Ooh” a moment later when the ice cream goes straight to his head.

After Ken’s recovered, Elliot taps his spoon to his water glass. “And now, ladies and gentlemen”—he holds the napkin dispenser up like a statuette—“the Oscar for Best Actress in a High School Musical goes to”—he pauses while Ken drums the tabletop—“Miss Barbara Joyce Handler.”

Barbara giggles while they applaud and shyly buries her face in Ruth’s shoulder.

“Take your bow, Miss Handler,” Ruth says, kissing the crown of her head. “You were wonderful, darling. Just wonderful.” With her lips still pressed to Barbara’s hair, Ruth breathes in the scent of her daughter’s shampoo and then breathes in the full moment before her—everyone is in a good mood, no one is sulking, no one’s fighting. What a rarity. Since Barbara turned thirteen and thought she was all grown up and knew better than her mother, Ruth hasn’t been able to do anything right by her. The slightest thing can set her off. It’s like throwing a match into dried kindling. But for now, Ruth’s sweet little girl is back, and when she looks at her family, all she sees are perfect little pods of contentment.

—

Later that night, as Ruth and Elliot are getting ready for bed, she tells him about her meeting with Charlotte. “At one point I thought she was going to turn me down,” she says, turning around so he can unclasp her pearls. “But then—thank God—we started talking money…”

While she’s recapping her negotiations and brushing her hair, Elliot changes into his pajamas and sets his alarm clock. He’s listening because he always listens to what she says, although right now he’s troubled by what he’s hearing.

“…and then Charlotte finally agreed to do it. Isn’t that terrific?” When he doesn’t respond, she pauses her hairbrush mid-stroke. “You’re not still upset with me for being late to the play, are you?” Barbara isn’t angry with her—why should he be?

“No, no.” He shakes his head. “Are you kidding me? Tonight was wonderful. I haven’t seen the kids so happy in ages.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

“I’m just surprised you’re already consulting with this Charlotte woman. Jack hasn’t even designed the doll. You don’t even have a name for it yet. Don’t you think it’s premature to be worrying about doll clothes?”

She smiles and goes to his side, sitting next to him on the bed. “I have a gut feeling about this, Elliot. Call it intuition or a marketing hunch, but you have to trust me. I know this doll is going to be a huge hit.” She’s crunched the numbers, has analyzed the market every which way possible. She knows what she’s doing. “Don’t you see? The clothes are like razor blades.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Think about it. Where does Gillette make most of their money? Got news for you, it ain’t on the razors. It’s on the blades. Trust me, the real money is not in the doll. It’s going to be in her wardrobe.”