Cold Open

It’s June 1960, outside a private men’s club in New York City.

43-year-old businesswoman Ruth Handler steps out of the club’s grand doorway, a look of puzzled irritation painted on her face. She only arrived at this prestigious club a few moments ago—but she’s already been shown the door.

Ruth has been invited here today to address some of Wall Street’s most powerful brokers. Her company, Mattel, is about to go public, and she hopes to raise three and a half million dollars from wealthy investors. But as a woman, she’s just been told she’s not allowed in the building’s public spaces. If she wants to speak to the businessmen, she’ll have to come in through the side entrance.

One of the club's stewards follows Ruth outside and guides her down a narrow alley. She squeezes past foul-smelling trash cans, lifting her pastel-pink skirt just enough to keep it out of the grime.

The steward then opens a side door. Ruth’s high heels clatter against bare concrete as she follows him up a back staircase and along a hallway. Paint is peeling off the walls, and the lights flicker overhead.

At the end of the hall, the steward opens another door, and Ruth suddenly finds herself in a warm, wood-paneled room filled with cigar smoke and low voices. Men in dark suits lounge with brandy glasses in hand.

Ruth glances back and realizes she just entered through a hidden door—the kind normally used only by serving staff. Her mouth tightens with embarrassment. Still, she can’t allow herself to be rattled by the club’s bad manners.

She sets her handbag on a table and then smooths her jacket. Then she lifts her chin, flashes a dazzling smile, and does what she does best: selling.

Ruth Handler is no stranger to being patronized or humiliated in the male-dominated business world. But she’s still convinced that women like her belong here. And she’ll prove it again and again over her long career—never more so than when she launches her most iconic product, Barbie, on March 9th, 1959.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham, and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is March 9th, 1959: The First Barbie.

Act One

It’s the early 1950s in Los Angeles, California, almost a decade before Mattel goes public.

In the kitchen of her family home, Ruth Handler chops potatoes, drops them into a pan, and then takes the potato peels to the trash. Just before she scrapes them in, though, a flash of color in the can catches her eye. Looking closer, she recognizes it as one of her daughter Barbara’s favorite paper dolls.

Barbara has never shown interest in the traditional baby dolls that Ruth had when she was a child. Instead, Barbara chooses to play with the paper dolls of fashion models that are printed on the pages of comic books. These cut-outs come with different outfits that children can attach to the dolls using folding tabs. Barbara uses them to role-play adult characters, each with their own imagined lives and jobs.

Ruth fishes the paper doll out of the trash and then sees why Barbara threw it away—it’s ripped in several places. These paper dolls never last very long. The outfits and figures tear at the slightest mishandling. And even if the clothes stay on, the dolls never really look like they’re wearing them.

It's in this moment that Ruth has a flash of inspiration. What Barbara needs is a sturdier, three-dimensional adult woman doll, one she can dress up and play make-believe with. But no toy manufacturer makes plastic dolls of grown-up women. Luckily, Ruth is in a position to change that.

Ruth is a businesswoman. In 1945, she co-founded plastic manufacturer Mattel with her husband, Elliot, and another business partner. Initially, the company specialized in picture frames, but it soon moved into making dollhouse furniture and other toys. Now, Mattel is one of America’s fastest-growing toy companies. Ruth's husband, Elliot, oversees production, while she focuses on marketing and sales.

And although Ruth usually leaves product design to her husband, she’s convinced her idea for a grown-up doll has merit. She pitches it to Elliot, but he immediately pushes back, explaining that toy companies only make baby dolls because that’s what most girls like—they want to pretend to be mothers. Admittedly, their daughter Barbara is different, but that doesn’t mean there’s a wider market for grown-up dolls.

With Elliot’s stinging verdict, Ruth shelves the idea and focuses instead on marketing and selling Mattel's existing toy lines. But she never forgets the concept. And several years later, in 1956, Ruth is inspired to return to it. Ruth and her husband are on a six-week tour of Europe when she spots a plastic doll in a toy store window. This doll isn’t a baby, though. It’s a woman—tall and thin, with a large bust and pinched waist. It’s exactly what Ruth envisioned her doll to be.

Inside the shop, she learns that these Lilli dolls originated in a German comic strip. Four years ago, a toy company licensed the character, betting that children would want to play with them. And they were right. Lilli dolls have become wildly popular across Central Europe.

This proof of concept is enough to get Elliot to finally agree to an American version. So, Ruth buys several of the Lilli dolls and packs them in her suitcase.

Back home, she spends the next three years working with Mattel's designers on the idea. Ruth finds a Japanese manufacturer able to replicate the fine detail of the Lilli dolls. But she breaks from the European model in one crucial way.

Each Lilli doll comes with just one outfit, and there’s no way to buy any more. But Ruth wants her dolls to have an entire wardrobe—a wide selection of clothing and accessories, all sold separately. She reasons that customers will keep coming back for more clothes long after they’ve bought their first doll, and that will generate new revenue for Mattel. So, Ruth employs fashion designers to create a miniature clothing line, each with detailed needlework and stitching.

With the designs finalized, Ruth has one last thing to decide—what to call the doll. She wants to name it after her own daughter, but she soon discovers that Barbara is already trademarked. So too is the nickname Babs. But Barbie is available, so Ruth chooses that.

And by the spring of 1959, everything will be in place. Ruth will then travel to the American International Toy Fair in New York City for Barbie’s grand unveiling. She hopes young girls across the country will fall in love with the toy—but first, she will have to persuade skeptical retailers to take a chance on her radical new doll.

Act Two

It’s March 9th, 1959, at the American International Toy Fair in New York City, three years after Mattel began developing the Barbie doll.

Ruth Handler walks briskly down a hotel hallway beside a toy buyer for Sears. Ruth has carefully cultivated a relationship with this buyer—Sears is America’s largest toy retailer, and Mattel has supplied them with a string of hits, from ukuleles and xylophones to the push-along Corn Popper. But today, Ruth has promised the buyer something different—something unprecedented.

She opens the door to a dimly lit meeting room. The drapes have been pulled closed, and an array of lamps have been set up to illuminate a striking display of plastic dolls.

Ruth guides the buyer into the room and introduces Mattel's newest product—Barbie. She presents one doll at a time. There are 20 in total, each with a different outfit. There’s a Barbie in a sundress and matching hat, a Barbie wearing a zebra-striped bathing suit and tiny sunglasses, and a Barbie in a white tennis dress. The centerpiece is a doll-sized spiral staircase. And two steps from the top is another Barbie, this one wearing a wedding gown.

Ruth explains the market research that Mattel's team has carried out. Their surveys clearly show that American girls will love playing with grown-up dolls like these. But the buyer isn’t listening. Instead, he picks up one of the dolls and begins undressing it. His fingers fumble with the tiny clasps, but eventually, he manages to remove the clothes. He then stares at the doll’s molded breasts. And after a moment, he places it roughly back on the display and shakes his head.

Sears certainly will not be stocking Barbie—and they’re not alone. More than half of the buyers who visit Mattel's showroom reject Ruth’s new toy line. And their objections are almost all identical. Barbie is too adult, too suggestive. And no mother would buy one for her daughter.

But that leaves Ruth with a major problem. She’s already committed to buying 20,000 dolls a week from the factory in Japan—and now, she has no one to sell them. But Ruth doesn’t panic. She simply switches strategy. If she can’t persuade the retailers herself, she’ll just have to recruit some help.

As Mattel's head of marketing, she devotes an extra $125,000 to Barbie’s launch. She spends most of it on television ads that screen during ABC’s popular Mickey Mouse Club.

Barbie, you’re beautiful. You make me feel, my Barbie doll is really real.

In this 60-second ad, Barbie is only called a doll once. Instead, the plastic toy is simply Barbie, a girl who swims, dances, attends parties, and most importantly, has a selection of outfits in her wardrobe.

And whenever this ad airs, it captivates its audience. American girls immediately understand what the male toy buyers do not. They don’t want to play along at being mothers. They want to play with dolls that look like aspirational versions of themselves. But when they try to buy Barbie at their local toy stores, they can’t find it.

So soon, the phones begin to ring at Mattel headquarters. The retailers who turned down Barbie have changed their minds. They want the doll—and they want it now. Soon, the Japanese factory can’t make Barbies quickly enough. And one year after the Toy Fair launch, Mattel has sold 350,000 of them, and that number would have been greater if they’d been able to keep up with demand.

With Barbie powering sales like never before, Mattel goes public in 1960. The following year, Barbie gets a boyfriend. And like Barbie herself, Ken is named after one of Ruth’s children. Over the next few years, the doll couple are joined by more friends, family members, and countless new outfits.

So that by the end of the 1960s, Barbie is the world’s bestselling doll and has made Mattel America’s biggest toy company. But just as Ruth reaches the pinnacle of her career, her life is abruptly upended. She discovers a lump in her breast, and in June 1970, she undergoes the standard treatment of the era: a modified radical mastectomy, the complete removal of her breast.

Recovery from this operation takes months, during which time Ruth is absent from the office. Around the same time, Mattel's sales begin to slip, but the decline is masked by some creative accounting. As far as investors are concerned, Mattel is continuing to grow rapidly. But the truth will soon come out. Ruth will be blamed, and the creator of Barbie will be forced out of the company she founded.

Act Three

It’s October 1975 in Los Angeles, California, five years after Ruth Handler’s mastectomy.

Now 58 years old, Ruth paces the foyer of Mattel's head office, her high heels striking sharply against the tiled floor. She avoids the eyes of any employees hurrying past. She’s determined not to let them see her tears. Instead, she fixes her gaze on the door, waiting for her driver.

Last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation into financial wrongdoing at Mattel. The company’s books had been manipulated to disguise sliding sales, and the auditors quickly homed in on Ruth herself. She blamed her illness for her decisions. But her position at the company was untenable. And a few minutes ago, a board meeting made it official. Ruth has been ejected from the company she built from the ground up.

During the car ride home, Ruth breaks down and cries on her husband’s shoulder. But she doesn’t wallow in self-pity for too long. The very next day, she’s back on the phone, calling an acquaintance. She wants them to start a business together that will focus on a new mission: revolutionizing breast prostheses.

Ever since she underwent surgery, Ruth has struggled to find a false breast that she can live with. Every prosthesis she’s tried has been heavy and unrealistic. None are designed to fit a woman’s body properly—they’re not even shaped to fit a specific side. And now that she has time on her hands, Ruth thinks she can do better. With the help of her new business partner, she forms a company to manufacture a more realistic version of a woman's breast. They call it Nearly Me.

And as the SEC case against her drags slowly through the courts, Ruth throws herself into this new venture. She travels across the country, personally demonstrating her product to women’s groups, doctors, and retailers. The response is overwhelmingly positive. Her prostheses come in a variety of sizes and are tailored to a woman’s particular needs. Even former First Lady Betty Ford becomes a customer.

Eventually, Ruth reaches a settlement in the SEC fraud case. Though she refuses to admit any wrongdoing, she does agree to five years of probation and community service. This deal frees her from all the stress and worry over the case and allows her to focus on her new calling.

With her full attention on Nearly Me, the business thrives. During the 1980s, its sales exceed $1 million a year, and Ruth continues to lead the company until 1991, when she finally retires.

During her working life, Ruth Handler launched two groundbreaking products. Medical prostheses and dolls don’t have a lot in common. But in both industries, she took products that had been designed largely by men and transformed them into what their female customers actually wanted—a skill she first proved to the world with the launch of Barbie on March 9th, 1959.

Outro

Next on History Daily. March 10th, 1969. Small-time criminal James Earl Ray pleads guilty to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Mollie Baack.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Scott Reeves.

Edited by William Simpson.

Managing producer, Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.