Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World's Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her »

Robin Gerber is the author of several books, including Leadership the Eleanor Roosevelt Way, Katharine Graham, and the novel Eleanor vs. Ike. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

This is the entwined tale of two exceptional women. One was a voluptuous eleven-inch-tall beauty who debuted at the 1959 Toy Fair in New York City and quickly became the treasure of 9 out of 10 American girls and their counterparts in 150 countries. She went on to compete as an Olympic athlete, serve as an air force pilot, work as a boutique owner, run as a presidential candidate, and ignite a cultural firestorm. The other was Ruth Handler, the tenth child of Polish Jewish immigrants. A brilliant, creative, ruthless, and passionately competitive visionary, she was a mother and wife who wanted it all-a masterful entrepreneur who, together with her curvaceous plastic creation, changed American business and culture forever.

Barbie and Ruth is the incredible, inspiring, tragic, and ultimately redeeming true story of how one extraordinary woman built the largest toy company in the world and created an enduring international icon.

Publishers Weekly

Just in time for the 50th anniversary of Barbie is this behind-the-scenes look at her eccentric, determined inventor. Ruth Handler (1916-2002)was the ambitious and entrepreneurial 10th child of poor Polish immigrants. Disappointed with the unsophisticated dolls of the time, Ruth envisioned a doll that would allow young girls to act out their fantasies of the stylish young women they wanted to become. She modeled her creation on the Swiss doll "Bild-Lilli," a curvaceous plastic bombshell originally sold as a sex toy/gag gift and named her after her daughter Barbara. Handler fought indefatigably to establish herself in a male-dominated field, and history was made: 50 years later, Mattel is the biggest toy company in the world, and Barbie is sold at a rate of three dolls per second, worldwide. But Handler's rising star was short-lived; battered by breast cancer and convicted of shady business dealings in 1978, she wrenched her attentions away from Mattel and devoted herself to creating realistic, affordable prosthetic breasts for women who had lost one to a mastectomy. This stirring biography is a fine study of success and resilience. (Feb.)

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Introduction vii

1 The Doll Nobody Wanted 1

2 The Tenth Child 21

3 Love at a Nickel a Dance 29

4 Ruth and Elliot and Matt 43

5 A Working Mother 61

6 Uke-A-Doodles 71

7 Music Makers and Sour Notes 79

8 Gambling Everything on Mickey Mouse 91

9 The Woman and the Doll 103

10 Soaring in the Sixties 119

11 Toys, Money, and Power 135

12 Hot Wheels and Hot Deals 147

13 The Cancer Within 165

14 The Plot Unravels 185

15 Nearly Me 197

16 The Wages of Fraud 213

17 Forced Service 225

18 Ken and a Time of Plague 233

19 Her Way 245

Author's Note 255

Bibliography 258

Acknowledgments 267

Index 269