Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World's Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her
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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 WeeklyJust 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.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction vii1 The Doll Nobody Wanted 12 The Tenth Child 213 Love at a Nickel a Dance 294 Ruth and Elliot and Matt 435 A Working Mother 616 Uke-A-Doodles 717 Music Makers and Sour Notes 798 Gambling Everything on Mickey Mouse 919 The Woman and the Doll 10310 Soaring in the Sixties 11911 Toys, Money, and Power 13512 Hot Wheels and Hot Deals 14713 The Cancer Within 16514 The Plot Unravels 18515 Nearly Me 19716 The Wages of Fraud 21317 Forced Service 22518 Ken and a Time of Plague 23319 Her Way 245Author's Note 255Bibliography 258Acknowledgments 267Index 269
