Ten Fingers and Ten Toes
Ten Fingers and Ten Toes
1958
Ruth is sitting at the conference room table beneath a cigarette cloud of her own making, watching Jack bounce a rubber ball off the wall— thump, thump, thump . Thump, thump, thump .
“Do you mind?” she says, pressing her fingertips to her skull.
“Mind what?” Thump, thump, thump.
“Jesus, Jack.” She gets up and rips the ball from his grip.
“Well, then give me a cigarette or something. I gotta do something with my hands.”
“Fine.” She slides the pack to him.
They are awaiting the arrival of the next round of prototypes from Tokyo. Someone from the loading dock telephoned reception to say they’d arrived, and they had better be right this time. They’ve been working on Barbie for two years now. They wanted to launch her at this year’s Toy Fair, the granddaddy of trade shows for their industry. It’s held every March in New York City, but Barbie wasn’t ready in time, so now she’ll debut at next year’s show—if they’re lucky. At least they don’t have to worry about the Miss Revlon Doll anymore. She scared the hell out of them until they saw what she looked like: an oversized head, a ridiculously high waist, a pancake of a bosom. She was just a glorified baby doll with lipstick and clunky high heels. Miss Revlon isn’t even in the same league as their Barbie doll.
Charlotte tumbles into the conference room, her arms loaded down with fabric swatches, a measuring tape looped about her neck. Ruth has recently hired her full-time and at a premium salary of $15,000 a year.
“I want to run these by you both,” says Charlotte, dumping her wares on the table. “Take a look and tell me what you think.”
Splayed out before them are squares of cotton, velvet, rayon, taffeta and silk, some with tiny bees, tiny flower petals, wee itty-bitty plaids, stripes and houndstooth patterns. It’s been impossible to find patterned fabrics small enough to work with Barbie’s scale, so Charlotte’s been creating her own step-and-repeat designs from scratch.
“Ooh, I like the polka dots,” says Jack, reaching for the swatch, running it through his fingers. “They’re peachy.”
“Yeah,” Ruth agrees, as she picks up another fabric square. “They’re sweet. I like this pink-and-white-striped one, too.”
“We can do some mixing and matching, too,” Charlotte says, pulling out a chair and dropping into it.
Ruth looks at the dark circles beneath Charlotte’s eyes, the lingering cough from that cold she can’t seem to get rid of. The woman is exhausted, and Ruth feels responsible. She recently sent Charlotte to Japan so she could prepare the team of seamstresses who will eventually be mass-producing Barbie’s clothes. Before that, Charlotte was in Paris for the fashion shows, seeking inspiration for Barbie from Balenciaga, Givenchy and Schiaparelli. Ruth knows she’s asking a lot of Charlotte and frequently issues bonuses and other perks, like a company car, to pacify her and keep her from leaving.
Not that Charlotte has any such plans. Quite the contrary. If it weren’t for Mattel, she’s not sure what she’d do with herself. Charlotte’s a night owl and often brings work home just so she has something to do in the evenings. She’s tried dating, but men have funny ideas about divorced women and she’s not looking for a roll in the sack.
After Charlotte collects her fabric swatches and heads back to her office, Ruth smokes another cigarette, wondering where the hell those dolls are. She’s anxious because last month another disastrous shipment arrived from Tokyo. The doll’s nose and cheeks were blistered up; half her fingers and toes were missing.
Jack had cursed and chucked the doll back into the box. He explained that the roto casting hadn’t worked and that they were going to need people on-site to physically rotate the molds so the vinyl would spread out evenly, all the way to her fingers and toes.
“And what’s that going to cost?” she’d asked.
“I don’t know. And don’t give me that look. I’ve been telling you all along that making a doll this size, with this degree of detail, has never been done before.”
“If the Germans figured out how to do it, why can’t you?”
“Jesus, Ruth, we’ve been through this a hundred times. Nobody’s ever used this kind of plastic—not even the Germans. Bild Lilli’s hard as a rock. And unless you want to pay the licensing fee to Greiner and Hausser, you need to back off and let me work this out.”
There’s a knock on the door and Ruth comes back to the moment just as Jack’s secretary enters the conference room, carrying a large box. Ginger is a good three inches taller than Jack, and it’s no secret that she has a devastating crush on her boss. She dotes on him and would probably feed him grapes while he lounges on his bearskin rug.
Jack takes the box from Ginger and sets it on the table. Pulling out his knife, he carefully slices through the Japanese lettering on the packing label. Ruth’s shoulders stiffen; her gut feels like she’s swallowed a fist. What if it didn’t work? Again? They’ve poured so much money into this project: Jack’s travel to Japan, Charlotte’s, too, the KBK contract, Charlotte’s salary, the lawyers, plus the sheer man-hours it’s taken them to get this far.
And it’s not just what it’s cost the company. What about the price for her emotionally? Because of Barbie there is tension at home—arguments with Elliot, resentment from Barbara and sheer apathy from Ken, who’s so used to his mother’s absence, he no longer asks when she’s coming home. Her entire family has made sacrifices on Barbie’s behalf, and what if KBK can’t get the doll right? Does she have the wherewithal to go back for another round? Ruth’s frustrated and growing increasingly nervous about her ability to pull this off. And yet, giving up is not an option. She isn’t one to fail. When things aren’t going her way, she backs up and barrels ahead faster and harder than the time before. Don’t force it means Give it all you got . She has a way of breaking things down, making people, circumstances and objects yield to her. Now she needs eleven and a half inches of plastic to do the same.
Jack cuts through the last of the tape, digs through the packing material and pulls out a doll, holding her up to the light for inspection. Ruth can’t read his face. His expression hasn’t budged.
“Well?” she asks.
“You tell me.” He hands her the doll. She looks and looks and looks some more. There’s not a single plastic bubble on her cheeks or forehead. Her hairline is evenly rooted. Her arms and legs move. She bends at the waist like she’s supposed to. Like the mother of a newborn, she checks the doll, examining her closely. She has ten fingers, ten toes.
Ruth isn’t one to squeal, but just then that’s exactly what she’s doing. It’s reflexive and comes leaping out of her. The tension in her body is already unwinding like a spool of thread. She’s on her feet now and standing so close to Jack it seems like they should hug or do something to commemorate this moment, but that would be too awkward. She’s not one of his admirers, and yet she can’t stop herself from pulling him to her. He lifts her off her feet and whirls her around, and the two laugh so hard their eyes leak tears of happiness and relief.
They’re still recovering, still basking in their victory, when Henry Pursell, Mattel’s general counsel, comes into the conference room.
“Look,” says Jack, holding up Barbie. “Isn’t she terrific?”
“That’s, ah, that’s great,” says Pursell. “But what about the licensing agreement with Greiner and Hausser? I haven’t seen anything yet.”
“Don’t worry about it,” says Jack.
“Well, somebody around here has to worry about it. Before you two invest any more time and money into this Barbie project, you better make sure you’ve got the rights to transform Bild Lilli into your own doll.”
“We’ll take care of it,” says Ruth. Eventually. Or not. Jack’s confident that he’s found a way to work around the patents, so they won’t even need to enter into an expensive licensing agreement. Besides, they don’t have time to deal with something like that. They need to keep things moving. And she knows how Jack operates. Just because they have this new prototype doesn’t mean he’s done tinkering. No, he’s going to be looking for more ways to refine the design. In his mind nothing is ever finished. Everything can be improved upon whether that improvement is visible to the naked eye or not.
She looks again at the doll. There’s both a sense of calm and a surge of power churning inside Ruth because they’ve made it this far and now she knows this is going to work.