Let’s Call Her Barbie

Huge but Not Gigundous

Huge but Not Gigundous

Elliot still isn’t sold on the doll, but now that Ruth has Charlotte on board and Jack has secured KBK for manufacturing, they can get down to business. She hopes Elliot will eventually come around, but for now, it’s just the three of them.

Mostly they work in the evenings, after Charlotte finishes at Chouinard and Ruth and Jack have taken care of their regular workloads, which haven’t eased up and won’t. Ruth goes from meeting to meeting, and in between there are mountains of paperwork, sales calls and a host of financial matters to deal with. Jack barely has time for lunch and is busy overseeing more than 200 engineers and developers, tweaking their designs, troubleshooting malfunctions and keeping the pipeline full of new toys.

The doll is different, though. They’re not even sure yet why that is. Maybe because the risks are so high and the potential rewards so unfathomable. If this doll works, she’ll line all their pockets. But for now, they’re just burning money and man-hours on a concept whose intricate design has never been done before. Sure, they have Bild Lilli as an example, but she’s only a jumping-off point.

The three of them speak their own distinctive languages. Jack is the technical guy, Charlotte more the aesthetics and Ruth is all business, though she tries to contribute creatively. Both Jack and Charlotte are talented artists and can express their thoughts in drawings, which puts Ruth at a disadvantage. One night, already punch-drunk from hours of work, they howl-laughed over Ruth’s attempt to sketch the doll’s foot.

“That looks like somebody ran over it with a truck,” said Jack, clutching his sides.

“How is that possibly a foot?” said Charlotte, holding her chest.

“It’s got toes,” said Ruth, dabbing at her eyes, barely able to get the words out.

Other times they’re serious, locked in passionate debates over things like hair and eye color. They can go hours over shades of fingernail and toenail polish, the kind of plastic to use and how many points of articulation their doll should have. They bat around names— Miss Fashion Plate , Fancy Fashion Franny , Little Miss Model …But by far, the biggest discussion is about the doll’s anatomy.

“Oh, c’mon, Jack,” Ruth laughs when he shows her his drawing, “you gotta make those tits smaller.”

“Okay, all right.” Jack flips his sketchpad back around and makes some modifications.

“Smaller,” she says after glancing at his revised sketch. “I mean it, Jack. They’re still too big.”

“You’re no fun,” he says and takes yet another stab at it.

Soon dinner arrives and there’s a sea of Chinese take-out cartons with chopsticks jutting out, and packets of soy sauce are strewn across the conference room table. Night after night, they order pizzas, deli sandwiches, hamburgers or Chinese. While they’re eating, Elliot comes in to see how much longer Ruth will be.

“I’m almost done,” she says.

“That means another hour or two,” he says, not unkindly but because he knows his wife and how easy it is for her to lose track of time when she’s working.

“Hey, Elliot,” says Jack, “while you’re here, I could use a man’s opinion. Ruth thinks these tits are too big.”

Elliot laughs as he looks at Jack’s rendering, both front and side views. “They’re huge, but not gigundous.”

“See,” says Jack. “They’re not too big.”

After Elliot leaves, Charlotte, who has been lost in concentration, looks up from Jack’s mechanical drawings. Her brow is furrowed. “Guys, we got a bigger problem than her boobs. I’m looking at the doll’s dimensions. You’ve given her the equivalent of a twenty-four-inch waist.”

“Because we want her to have an hourglass figure, right? Isn’t that the whole idea?” Jack’s loosely basing this doll on a real woman, a beauty from his past who stood five foot nine and weighed a svelte 110 pounds but was still curvaceous.

“Okay, but look at this.” She turns the sketchpad around to show them both. “You’ve got her at eleven and a half inches tall, a half inch shorter than Bild Lilli. She’s one-sixth the scale of a real woman, but you’re forgetting there’s no such thing as one-sixth scale in the thickness of fabric. Fabric is fabric. In order to make anything with a waistband, it’s going to require the bulk of the fabric plus whatever fastener we’re going to use. That means you have to make her waistline smaller than normal just to compensate for the thickness of the fabric. Otherwise, it’ll make her look bulky, stocky.”

“Why didn’t you say something sooner?” he asks.

“I didn’t think about it until just now. I’ve never worked on something this size.”

None of them have. It’s all trial and error. And lately, it’s been more about errors. Every detail on the doll has been a challenge. Jack almost pulled his own hair out trying to invent the doll’s hair. Every monofilament he tried failed in testing—some deteriorated in the rooting process, some attracted moisture and grew moldy, some wouldn’t hold the color dye. Finally, Jack consulted a team of Dow chemists who had devised a special polyvinylidene chloride substance called Saran, and that finally worked. The next hurdle was sourcing the right kind of plastic for the doll’s head, the torso, the arms and legs. Everything was either too hard or too soft, and they tinkered for months, heating and then cooling polyvinyl chloride, trying to figure out the right combination of plasticizers for this doll. And even now they’re not convinced they’ve gotten it right. Despite what Greiner & Hausser, the makers of Bild Lilli, were able to do, Ruth, Jack and Charlotte are going to take their doll many steps further.

—

Jack hasn’t slept in thirty-three hours. He isn’t tired. Not in the least. He’s exhilarated and hyperaware of his senses. It’s like he can hear a baby crying five miles away, can see beyond the walls of his office to the cars zooming by on Century Boulevard. There’s a sharp, frenetic crackling reverberating inside him that doesn’t let up and would make anyone else want to jump out of their skin. But this is Jack.

This is how he gets when he’s fully engrossed in a project. And he cherishes it, riding the wave for as long as it lasts. Because he knows this surge will be followed by the bottomless crash, where the current suddenly shuts off and he’s left feeling listless and hollowed out. It’s a worthless kind of emptiness that negates whatever achievements might have preceded it. And that’s when he enters the long black tunnel, and it can take him days, weeks or even months to find his way out.

But for now, he is fully alive, and he’s done the work of five men. The walls of his office are papered with mechanical drawings of legs, arms, necks. He’s prepared side views of the torso in elevation, in vertical cross-section views, in perspective views. He’s defining points of articulation. He’s tinkering with the longitudinal bores placed inside the legs that interact telescopically with a set of pins in the base of her feet, allowing the doll to balance in various positions with the help of a stand. There are a million decisions to be made, and they come down to him. He feels a little mad, like Dr.Frankenstein creating his monster. But this doll is no monster. No, when he’s done with her, she will be a goddess.

There’s a knock on the door. It’s Ginger, his secretary. She’s tall with a prominent and ever so slightly hooked nose, thick brown hair and an even thicker waistline. Jack does not find Ginger attractive, which is why he hired her, a conciliatory gesture for his wife, Barbara, after getting into trouble with his secretary at Raytheon.

If only Ginger were the answer to Jack’s troubled marriage. He appreciates how hard it is for his wife to stay married to him. He’s sure she’d be better off without him, and he’d leave her if it weren’t for their two young daughters and his father. James J. Ryan, despite his own countless affairs, believes divorce is a mortal sin that will send his son straight to hell. Jack worships his father, forever seeking his approval, so divorce—at least in his father’s lifetime—is out of the question.

“This just came in from legal,” Ginger says, holding up a stack of papers. “It’s about the licensing agreement with Greiner and Hausser.”

Jack ruffles his hair and sighs. “Okay, let’s hear it.”

Ginger begins to read the two-page memo advising Jack and Ruth to secure a licensing agreement with G&H for the rights to base the doll off Bild Lilli. Jack doodles more legs on his sketchpad while listening to her read, taking in every word:

“…therefore, regarding patent infringement surrounding the marketing of this particular doll…”

Ginger is a godsend—his personal gatekeeper and the keeper of a secret she knows nothing about. Innocently she takes copious notes in meetings and reads them back to him, along with every long-winded interoffice memo, every newspaper article of note, every patent registration form he has to complete. And it’s not that Jack can’t read. He’s not illiterate. At a young age he was diagnosed with word blindness, meaning that he can read a menu, road signs, even simple phrases, but when strung together in sentences and paragraphs, words make no sense to him. He gets tangled up in anything too long. Everything turns to double vision, as if his eyes have been dilated. Other times the sentences form wave patterns, or individual letters will appear more like symbols. He’s never read a book cover to cover and would never have graduated from Yale had he not cleverly organized study groups wherein other students did the reading and reported back to him. He inherently understood everything that they themselves were struggling to comprehend. Even as a child, he had the ability to see things three-dimensionally. A born engineer, he’s always interpreted the world in terms of interconnected systems and structures. This keeps him just a few steps ahead of everyone else.

“…and based on my preliminary investigation,” Ginger continues, “there are substantial similarities between the G and H product and the proposed product for which we are…”

Throughout his life, Jack’s kept his secret and found ways to work around this obstacle. Doctors’ excuses claiming vision problems allowed him to take exams orally, and now Ginger seamlessly and unknowingly fills in all the blanks for him here at Mattel.

She’s never questioned why her boss insists she read to him. She’ll do anything for him, anything at all. He’s the first man who’s ever made her feel important, and after a lifetime of being invisible to men, that does more for her than he’ll ever know. Unlike her father, Jack remembers her birthday and even sends her flowers. And last year on Valentine’s Day he gave her a heart-shaped box of chocolates. Of course, he did that for all the other women in the office, too, but still…

“However,” Ginger continues, “there are concerns about the prior art, and therefore, I would strongly recommend…”

After she finishes reading to him, Ginger observes him already leaning over his drafting table, eager to get back to work. “You really love working on this doll, don’t you?” she says.

“You kidding me? I’m in heaven.” He laughs. “I’m creating the world’s most perfect woman.”

“So you really think she’s perfect, huh?”

“She will be when I’m finished with her.”

Even before Ginger’s closed his office door, Jack is back at work, examining and reexamining his calculations. To achieve the look of an hourglass figure and get past the added bulk of the fabric, Jack’s had to trick the eye, create an optical illusion. On paper, the doll’s measurements are absurd: 39?-18?-33?. The same is true for the doll’s feet. What grown woman wears a size three shoe? But anything larger will look clown-like. The littlest details have tripped him up, like the doll’s hands. After Jack consulted with a sculptor to get them just right, Charlotte so astutely pointed out that they wouldn’t work with the clothes.

“You’ll never be able to fit her hands through the sleeves. You can’t have her fingers spread out. They have to be together and narrow, like this.” She demonstrated.

“Wait,” said Jack. “Don’t move. Hold that pose.” Charlotte’s hands were exquisite. How had he not noticed before just how long and tapered and elegant her fingers were? He reached for a Polaroid, capturing her hands from every conceivable angle before regrouping with the sculptor and saying, “Those are the hands. That’s what I want.”

Jack is now lost in thought when Ruth enters his office without bothering to knock. “I had a thought on the name. What about Lady? The Lady Doll.” She smiles, shoulders thrown back. “It’s simple, and to the point.”

“Lady?” he laughs, tucking a pencil behind his ear. “As in Lady and the Tramp ?”

“Oh, shit.” Her posture sags. Why are all the good names already taken and why is this so hard? She’s been grinding her brain, going over every alliteration, every imaginable combination. Nothing feels right. Ruth glances down at Jack’s drafting table. “Let me see what you’re working on there.”

“Just trying to finalize the features for her face.”

She leans in closer. Whereas Bild Lilli has a severe expression, a cunning, playfully naughty look about her, Jack is designing a beauty queen.

“She’s too pretty,” says Ruth.

“There’s no such thing as too pretty.”

“She can’t be that pretty,” Ruth says. “She has to be attractive, yes, but she can’t be so beautiful that little girls can’t relate to her. They have to be able to see themselves in this doll. That’s the whole point of her. Little girls have to look at this doll and be able to picture their own futures.”

“But the nose,” says Jack, “now, that’s a beautiful nose.”

“That’s the problem. It’s too beautiful.”

“I suppose you think her lips are too pouty,” says Jack.

“As a matter of fact, I do. And those cheekbones are way too high.”

“Anything else you’d like to ruin?”

“Yeah. While you’re at it, tone down her eyelashes. They’re too fluttery.”

“Too fluttery my ass.”

But he ends up doing as she says, because they both recognize that when it comes to collaboration there’s always a little give-and-take. They push and nudge their ideas forward, each hoping the other will see their brilliance. It’s a dance, and they don’t mind stepping on each other’s toes. They have an uncanny ability to work in unison, to harmonize and build on each other’s ideas. When Jack says the doll should be freestanding, she suggests they create a base for her, and he designs one that is virtually invisible. When Jack wants to give her long hair, Ruth wants it in a topknot ponytail. Each one lays down a rung on their ladder that ultimately results in a race to the top, for Ruth Handler and Jack Ryan are nothing if not competitive.