Who’s Pulling the Strings?
Who’s Pulling the Strings?
Despite their plan to squeeze Jack out, Ruth and even Seymour Rosenberg can’t deny the man’s superior engineering skills. In rapid succession, Jack has been awarded patents for the hip and ankle joints for Living Barbie, the movable waist for Twist ’n Turn Barbie and of course the voice box for Talking Barbie. And there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.
Jack’s past winning streak has Barcus shaken up. “Got a second, Ruth?” he says one day, hovering in her doorway, beads of perspiration on his forehead.
“What is it?” She’s deep in concentration, reviewing the unprecedented number of orders for the new Living Barbie.
“Tell me what you think of this?” Barcus inches inside her office, holding a stack of mechanical drawings.
She sets her index finger on the line for Sears, marking her place while Barcus shows her his Blinking Barbie. “Look, you tilt her head this way and that and she blinks.”
“It’s been done before,” says Ruth.
“But—”
“Reminds me of baby dolls.”
The next week, Barcus is back with Flexing Barbie. “See,” he says, “her toes flex up and down.”
Ruth rolls her eyes. “And how does that add play value?”
With each rejection, Barcus’s desperation grows while Jack’s ego does the same. Striding about the office, Jack turns on the charm, endearing himself to members of the Barcus team. He examines their designs, offers suggestions for improvement, invites them to his upcoming parties.
One afternoon Barcus discovers that Jack has taken the entire Barcus team out to lunch. And at the Bistro in Beverly Hills, a restaurant none of them could afford to dine at. Barcus is livid. He storms up and down the hallway, checking his watch while looking at the empty workstations.
At half past two, unable to contain his rage, Barcus bursts into Ruth’s office. “They’re all gone.” He’s shifted from fury to full-blown panic. “My entire team is out doing God knows what with Jack Ryan.”
By the time the Barcus team returns, it’s nearly four o’clock and none of them are in any condition to work. Only Jack appears immune to the countless martinis. Barcus’s top engineer is already throwing up in his wastebasket; another is moments away from passing out at his drafting table.
—
“This is becoming a real problem with the two of them,” Ruth says to Rosenberg the next day. “Jack’s little luncheon cost us a day of productivity. Plus, he’s got Barcus spinning out of control. And”—she hands Rosenberg an inventory sheet—“have you seen the November orders for Living Barbie? Sales are exploding,” she says.
Rosenberg looks at the totals, and Ruth can tell by his expression that the numbers are even higher than he was expecting.
“The whole idea was to pay him less , not more ,” she says. “You were supposed to save me money in royalties, not pay Jack more and make him a hero to boot.”
—
Jack used to relish his bouts of insomnia. No more. Setting aside all his victories over Barcus and his success with Living Barbie, he lies awake at night, disarmed by the mounting pressures at work. He hates what’s happened between him and Ruth, how she won’t even look at him anymore. And he blames Rosenberg for that. He’s poisoned her against him.
Dr.Klemes has challenged him on this point, reminding Jack of the times he took credit for creating the doll, not to mention doing so on national television, first on the game show and then on The Merv Griffin Show . But Jack sees it differently. He thinks Ruth’s anger and mistrust are all coming from Rosenberg, and it has Jack agitated and paranoid. And despite all the pills and all the booze, Jack still can’t sleep.
The worst hours are after two a.m., when the parties wind down and all the sane people are in bed. That’s when his inner demons come out. When he’s surrounded by darkness, everything frightens him. His body is in a state of rot and decay. He worries that the scab on his arm isn’t healing fast enough and could be cancerous. He fears that Ruth or Rosenberg will slip poison into his coffee. He makes a mental note to have his car brakes checked in case they’ve been tampered with. He knows this is all absurd, but he can’t get a handle on his thoughts. The danger escalates, and by three or four in the morning, when he cannot take the solitude anymore, he wakes up his newest batch of UCLA boys. Word has gotten around campus, and now when one group graduates, another group moves into the Castle. The new guys—there are seve n of them at last count—are up for anything. They’ll join Jack at the pool for a late-night swim or sit in the gazebo and smoke grass until the sun comes up and it’s time for him to escape into work.
One morning, after three nights of insomnia, Jack gets called into Elliot’s office and finds that he’s walked into an ambush. Ruth is there. So is Rosenberg, slurping his coffee. And Barcus, perched on the window ledge like a pigeon.
“I didn’t know this was gonna be a party,” says Jack. He’s playing it cool, trying to keep his composure.
“I’m afraid we’ve got a problem,” says Elliot, massaging his hands together. “I just got off the phone with Sears. They’re saying customers are complaining about Talking Barbie.”
“Complaining? About what?”
“Looks like the speaking device is overheating,” says Elliot. “It’s melting the dolls.”
Jack shakes his head. “That’s bullshit.”
“You wanna tell that to Sears?” Rosenberg says, taking another slurp of coffee.
“It’s that new plastic you used,” Barcus says with glee. “The arms and legs are melting off, too.”
“This is going to have tremendous repercussions,” Rosenberg says, getting all wound up, making big sweeping arm gestures along with doing lots of headshaking. “It’s a complete disaster. And the timing stinks. We have our end of the year stockholder meeting in two months and this is not going to land well with them. At all.”
The last time Jack got a jolt like this was the ’68 earthquake, which knocked him out of bed. He feels his world falling out from under him and drops into a chair. Yes, he recently changed the plastic to something more cost-effective, but he tested it. Only now he’s questioning if he tested it enough. But he’s Jack Ryan—he doesn’t make mistakes like this. He’s embarrassed, mortified, but mostly he’s enraged that Ruth and Elliot didn’t come to him with this privately. Why are they putting him on display, trying to publicly humiliate him?
—
Knowing Ruth hates it when he talks to the press, Jack seeks his revenge by arranging an interview with Esquire magazine. Two journalists—a reporter and a photographer—come by the Castle to get the goods on the illustrious toymaker and party thrower.
John Riley, the writer, is focused on Jack’s social life, his cadre of beautiful women and his extravagant parties, but Jack’s modus operandi is to throw Ruth under the bus. And unfortunately, with Ruth, so too must go Elliot. Rosenberg, well, he was already dead to Jack. And Barcus is nothing more than an annoying gnat, not even worth mentioning.
The reporter writes in his pocket notebook, asking Jack why he has so many telephones, if he really throws up to twenty parties a month, if the rumors about the UCLA boys living there are true. He asks a lot of questions, while the photographer sets up his tripod, snapping off pictures, going from room to room, posing Jack in various settings.
Jack takes them out to his tree house. From the time he was a young boy he wanted a tree house, which his mother wouldn’t allow since it would ruin her home’s facade.
“That’s hardly what I’d call a tree house,” says the reporter.
“It is so,” Jack insists. “There’s a tree”—he points to the giant oak—“and there’s the house. Isn’t it peachy?” He leads them up a circular staircase that wraps around the giant trunk and opens into a spacious, elegant room. “Voilà!”
“This is more like an apartment that happens to be up in a tree,” says the photographer, taking pictures of the chandelier hanging above the dining room table.
“I had that designed in Florence,” says Jack.
The reporter jots this down in his notebook.
Eventually they end up back inside, in the library, which is just another prop in Jack’s Castle. He’s carefully staged his library to overcompensate for his word blindness. It gives the impression of Jack as a learned man who relaxes in a leather club chair before a roaring fireplace with a classic novel in his lap and a glass of wine in his hand. The books, once belonging to a true bibliophile, were purchased from an estate sale and are authentically worn with yellowing pages, cracked spines, even some forbidden dog-eared pages.
As they linger in the library, Jack keeps waiting for the interview to shift toward Mattel, but the conversation isn’t heading that way. When the reporter caps his pen and starts to close his notebook, Jack launches into a well-rehearsed tirade, referring to Ruth and Elliot only as “the Couple.”
“The Couple,” Jack says, “are tough folks to work for. Especially her. I don’t like to brag or be too boastful, but Mattel wouldn’t be what it is today without me. I invented Barbie, you know. That’s right, I sure did. She’s named after my wife, Barbara…”