Let’s Call Her Barbie

Peacocks on Parade

Peacocks on Parade

1960

Ruth removes the hard hat the contractor made her wear and pats her hair back into place before stepping inside her office. Despite the plastic sheeting tacked up everywhere, there’s a film of dust on her desk, and the air is so thick with plaster and sawdust, she can taste it. It’s noisy, too; the pounding and banging only let up when the construction crew take their lunch and coffee breaks. The expansion should be completed by the end of July—it’s January now—and with the way Mattel is growing, Ruth fears they’re still going to be packed in like sardines.

Having already abandoned her New Year’s resolution—not even making it a full day before she cracked—Ruth reaches for a cigarette. She’s bracing herself before checking the latest sales report, which landed on her desk while she was touring the new wing of their building. She worries that the past seven months have been a fluke, that this is the month when Barbie’s sales will slip.

As she looks at the numbers, a sense of relief spreads in her chest, like a pat of butter melting in a hot pan. It’s no fluke. They’ve sold 46,874 Barbies this past month, up over 11,000 units from December—and that included the Christmas season. She makes a note to have KBK ramp up production, suspecting they’ll go from shipping 60,000 Barbies a month to 100,000 by the end of the year.

Each time those sales numbers grow, her peacock feathers fan out and she wants to climb to the top of Mount Baldy and shout, “Look at us now!” She was right about Barbie all along, and if Ruth Handler was a risk-taker before, it’s nothing compared to the chances she’ll be willing to take in the future. She will leverage this win for years to come, reminding anyone who challenges her that the doll everyone rejected at Toy Fair is now an undisputed smash hit.

At times Barbie’s success is overwhelming for her, but it’s even more so for Elliot, who went from worrying if the doll would sell to now worrying about keeping up with the demand. For the first time in his life, Elliot’s having trouble sleeping. He’s up at three or four in the morning, staring out at the swimming pool or pacing the hallway. He’s already worried about finding a large enough venue for next year’s holiday party.

“Hey, Ruth.” Jack pokes his head into her office. “Our one o’clock is here.”

“Be right there.” She takes one last drag of her cigarette before stubbing it out.

To keep enough Barbies in the pipeline, Mattel is hiring like mad, both here and in Tokyo, where each Barbie undergoes a meticulous hair and makeup application process, all done by hand, from her eyeliner to her lipstick. Every fingernail and toenail is individually polished, every strand of hair is painstakingly rooted. All together this requires hundreds of artists, not to mention the hundreds of seamstresses who work on her wardrobe and accessories. Back home, Ruth and Jack are interviewing candidates to fill positions for engineers, developers, sample makers, production managers, sales reps, fashion estimators, even people who specialize in plastics.

With construction underway, they hold interviews in a trailer out in the parking lot. It’s a tight fit inside with a small metal desk and three chairs. A kitchenette, with a coffeemaker and a tiny icebox, is off to the side. One by one, Ruth and Jack meet with prospects, quickly weeding out the ones they deem NMM—Not Mattel Material. They’re looking for certain personality types—people who are entrepreneurial, competitive and driven. They’re looking for feisty individuals who have some fight in them and won’t back down from a challenge.

Today’s candidate, Bernard Loomis, fits the bill. He’s a big man, with lots of dark hair and the face of a bulldog, with heavy jowls and drooping eyes. He’s sharp and speaks with a thick New York accent.

“Call me Bernie,” he says, shaking both their hands. Bernie is interviewing for the position of vice president of sales and marketing, and after teasing them about their fancy offices, he shares a host of marketing ideas for Barbie. “Why not do a Barbie comic book? What about a Barbie radio show?” His ideas seem endless, and when he suggests creating a viewfinder reel with photos of Barbie in various outfits, they’re convinced they’ve found their man. His personality is gruff, but his business savvy is impeccable.

The next candidate, Steven Lewis, is also Mattel Material and will become their new head toy sculptor. For a man so tall and lanky, he is thick-skinned and unflappable. He’s not afraid of criticism and is unyielding when trying to make his point.

When all is said and done, Ruth and Jack will end up hiring two hundred new employees just to work on Barbie alone.

—

Thanks to Jack’s patent on Barbie’s construction and his royalty agreement with Mattel that pays him for every doll sold, he is now a rich man. Richer than he ever imagined. During his negotiations when he started at Mattel, he agreed to take a modest salary in exchange for a percentage of Mattel’s revenues on any products he helped develop. Now he’s reaping the rewards. He recently bought a dozen custom-made Mr.Guy suits; he’s bought art, favoring abstract expressionists like de Kooning and Rothko. His daughters are now in private school, and he bought three new cars, including the royal blue Corvette convertible he’s driving today.

“Where are we going?” his wife asks from the passenger’s seat.

“It’s a surprise.”

“I don’t like surprises,” Barbara tells him, knotting her silk Vera scarf beneath her chin. It’s a beautiful poppy-inspired orange, red and pink scarf that she designed herself when she worked for Vera Neumann back in New York, before Jack uprooted her world and moved them out to Los Angeles. “I mean it,” she says. “Just tell me where we’re going.”

“But that’ll spoil the surprise.”

“I don’t care. I don’t want to be surprised. Especially not by you.”

He fiddles with the radio, going from station to station.

She leans over and snaps it off. “How long are we going to be gone? I left chicken out on the counter to defrost. I don’t want it to spoil.”

“I’ll buy you a new chicken.” He smiles until he glances over at his wife. She’s all scrunched down in her seat, refusing to enjoy a ride in his new convertible. Any other woman would be tickled. “Okay, you want me to tell you what it is?”

“What? And ruin your big surprise?”

“You know what, it is a big surprise. It’s a big fucking surprise.” He turns the radio back on. Elvis is singing “It’s Now or Never.”

They’re both quiet, lost in their own thoughts. Jack is wondering when she got to be such a drag and Barbara is worrying about her chicken, thinking what else she can make for dinner if it goes bad.

After a long stretch of silence, they enter Bel Air, where the mansions grow larger by the block. Jack points out Howard Hughes’s place and where Jerry Lewis lives, along with a number of other movie stars.

Barbara gives him a few murmurs: “Uh-huh…Hmmm…Uh-huh…”

Moments later they pull into a long tree-flanked drive at 688 Nimes Road. It seems to go on forever until a three-story Tudor mansion comes into view.

“Well,” he says with a carnival barker’s flair, “here we are.”

“What’s this?” Barbara twists around in her seat, taking in the majestic sloping lawns, the fig and lemon trees, the giant palms and oak trees, the sheer magnitude of the property. “Where are we?”

“Surprise. I bought you a new house.”

Her mouth hangs open.

“Aren’t you gonna say something?”

“You bought a house— this house —without even showing it to me first?”

“Well, I’m showing it to you now.”

“What do you expect me to say, Jack?”

“How about ‘Gee, thank you, honey. I love it’?”

“You should have told me about this. You should have let me see it first.”

“I wanted to surprise you, for fuck’s sake.”

“Well, I’m surprised all right. Can we get out of it?”

“Don’t tell me you don’t like it. I shelled out $235,000 for this.”

The house, a mansion really, would have been out of reach before Barbie took off. But thanks to the deal he cut with Ruth and Elliot when they hired him, Jack could have bought half the homes on his block.

Jack gets out of the car, comes around to her side and opens her door. “C’mon, let me at least show you around before you tell me how much you hate it.”

—

Stevie’s new apartment isn’t quite as grandiose as Jack’s Bel Air mansion, but thanks to the generous raise she received for her work on Barbie, she can easily afford her own place now at Ogden Arms. It’s another dingbat structure, the color of sun-bleached salmon, but it’s more spacious than Casa Bella.

Along with her raise, Stevie’s discovered that she enjoys soaking in a hot bath, the water scented with pricey bath oils. She treated herself to a set of satiny percale bed linens and plush bath towels. Though she still shops at places like Zodys, she’s not afraid to splurge on something special at I. Magnin or Bullock’s. Her father warns her to start saving for a rainy day. “Remember to pay yourself first,” he likes to say. But the extra money in her paycheck is seductive and swirls about her like fresh cream added to a cup of black coffee.

A year ago, when Stevie thought Barbie was a no-go, she figured it was finally safe to show her parents and Vivian what she’d been secretly working on at Mattel.

“Is this what dolls look like nowadays?” her mother asked, holding Barbie.

“They’ve been paying you that kind of money to make clothes for that ?” her father said. “Do they know you don’t have a degree?”

But at least Vivian got it. She was impressed. “Wow,” she said, working the back zipper on Golden Girl from the 900 series. “My God, Stevie, these are spectacular.” She continued sorting through Barbie’s outfits. “So you designed this one, too?” she asked, her voice pitching an octave higher.

“Yeah, along with Charlotte.”

“And even the hat?” Vivian was enthralled. “These are incredible. Do you know what I do all day long at Rudi’s? Swimsuits. One-piece swimsuits. That’s all I’ve been working on for months and months. Every day it’s exactly the same.”

Stevie had never heard Vivian talk like that before. Usually she was so boastful about the fashion editors dropping by the shop, all the new fabrics she was working with, the great fashion shows she was attending. Her fancy lunches with Bob Mackie, Marta Krass and other classmates who no longer—not even now—invite Stevie along. In their eyes, she’s not a real designer, and yet Stevie’s done more actual design work with Barbie than any of them.