Why the Woman Behind Barbie Will Always Be My Business Model

She may be turning 65 in March, but Barbie is far from retiring. The hardworking doll generated one-and-a-half billion dollars in revenue last year, still the bestselling toy in U.S. history. While her namesake movie, the only billion-dollar film directed by a woman, is nominated for eight Academy Awards including Best Adapted Screenplay, fans are outraged that Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie aren’t also up for best director and actress. Yet Barbie’s late creator Ruth Handler (played by Rhea Pearlman) most fascinated me.

(The Book That Broke My Heart.)

Growing up in a big Midwest clan of boys, I was Mattel’s fantasy customer, with 58 dolls, the Dream House, and convertible. After college, moving to Manhattan to earn a graduate poetry degree, I had my personal Barbieland shipped to my small studio. In a 1994 New York Times Magazine humor piece “My Mentor Barbie,” I was the first to call Barbie a feminist, detailing, tongue-in-cheek, what I’d learned from the popular plaything. Turned out that was prescient. As a freelancer moonlighting as a writing prof, I’ll never earn anywhere near Ruth Handler’s $100 million fortune, but I’ve followed many lessons she shared in her memoir Dream Doll.

When she conceived of an adult toy that would help girls envision futures possibilities, male executives deemed it too expensive to mass produce, insisting no woman would buy their kid a doll with breasts. Five years later, shopping on a European vacation, Handler spotted Bild Lilli, based on a German good-time-girl cartoon. Buying a few, she pushed her company’s designers to try one. Despite doubts and criticism, Handler had faith in her vision. Barbie’s intro at the 1959 New York Toy Fair was disappointing. But after Handler ran ads during The Mickey Mouse Club that enchanted little girls, sales numbers soared to three million.

In my Jewish Michigan family (like Handler’s in Denver), females were trained to be wives and mothers. But I rejected Chatty Cathy, Betsy Wetsy, or Tiny Tears renditions of babies indoctrinating girls into caretaking. After high school, Ruth had worked at Paramount Pictures, sharing a pad with a girlfriend, driving herself to work with freedom she recreated in her doll world. As she suspected, based on watching her daughter, a girl’s imagination could be ignited by grown-up dolls. Upstairs in my pink room, I played with my red-headed Barbie, GI-Joe the army doctor (like my physician dad), and Francie (my fellow brunette.) In the 60s, when my (red-headed) mother couldn’t get a credit card without her husband or father’s signature, my plastic counterpart had a career, convertible, and Dream House in her name.

Ruth herself wore many hats over the years as a secretary, designer, saleswoman, public relations executive, and president of two L.A. companies, embracing change when needed. She loved having a big career, along with dressing up, men and her marriage, embracing different identities. No wonder that, at different stages, Barbie was a ballerina, torch singer, equestrienne, stewardess, nurse, doctor, fashion model, and astronaut with pink space pants outfit (on the moon four years before Neil Armstrong.) I followed in her heels, working as a waitress, receptionist, poet, secretary, paperback book critic, and part-time teacher. Like Handler, I endured skepticism for any provocative, out-of-the-box ideas that challenged the status quo in ways deemed unladylike (swearing, showing anger, revealing too much).

Some of Shapiro’s Barbie collection

Long before I’d read Ruth’s biography, Barbie’s many roles (never including wife or mother) encouraged the idea of female independence, making it seem cool to have multiple professions. Later, it became a matter of survival. If I lost one job, I’d get another to pay the bills.

Unafraid to take chances, Ruth flopped with Pregnant Midge (who popped a plastic baby from her stomach), Oreo Fun Barbie (with its inadvertently racist name), Growing up Skipper (whose breasts grew with an arm lift), Barbie’s pooping dog (recalled since the little poop magnets raised safety concerns), and Video Barbie which came with an insider camera (that the FBI warned could be used by pedophiles). Despite problems, she kept challenging herself and her business. Half a century before “career reinvention” were buzzwords, she experimented, expanding into different formats from Barbie planes, boats, and furniture to magazines, booklets, cartoons, and collectibles. Following Ruth’s trajectory, I never gave up, nor did I glue myself to one job, format, or genre.

A poetry mentor found my poems had “too many words, not enough music,” so I tried a novel. It didn’t sell. Book reviewing was tons of work, little pay. Taking the advice I gave my students to “write about your obsessions,” I chronicled my sordid past with Barbie. Yet piecemeal newspaper clips didn’t cover my bills. I pitched publishers many manuscripts that didn’t fly. Taking strength in Ruth’s unlikely rise put negative feedback in perspective. I endured 30 rejections from book editors and 30 from agents before I finally sold a hardcover memoir. It was optioned by Ruth’s old employer Paramount Pictures, but alas never made.

Ruth ingeniously ensured Barbie was affordable to the masses at $3 (and you can still get a Barbie doll for $5 at Walmart, though one collectible went for $300,000 at auction last year). I couldn’t control the price of my debut hardcover. Yet I obtained permission to share the early computer version with students who couldn’t afford it. Interestingly, my book didn’t sell well until the publisher offered it as a $2.99 special, then it became a bestseller.

Shapiro’s Nemesis NY Writer Barbie

Ruth took political stands when it wasn’t convenient, like putting out the first Black Barbie in 1968 during the U.S. race riots. Speaking out against leftwing prejudice and fighting for low-income and disabled students to audit my classes free made me unpopular at my workplace. But my goal wasn’t to find popularity, it was longevity like Ruth.

With no luck in fiction for decades, I finally landed a two-novel deal as I was turning 50. My editor also loved book number three. When she left her job abruptly, the paperback reprint was canceled, the third book contract evaporated. Low sales numbers meant nobody else was interested. I felt demoralized.

The lowest chapter in Ruth’s life dwarfed any obstacles I’d faced. In her 50s, Handler battled breast cancer. As a result of a double mastectomy she couldn’t find a suitable bra, feeling “de-womanized.” Then, in 1978, she and other Mattel executives were indicted for stock fraud. Taking the fall, she lamented she’d “die of shame.” Instead, she turned her medical trauma into a new venture, Nearly Me, making custom-designed prostheses. Joking “I keep going from breast to breast,” she made light of her trauma and helped other women. Defying ageism as well as sexism, Nearly Me—a company she launched in her 60s—was another ongoing success.

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If Ruth made a comeback after all that, I felt I could too. I switched tacks, like she did. When my stories were rejected, I coauthored books by others; one became a bestseller. But several bombed. I gave myself credit for trying, adjuncting at three universities by night to pay bills. During the pandemic’s chaos, I launched private online classes. Remembering Ruth’s philanthropy, I invited low-income students to Zoom in for free and volunteered at nonprofits.

A younger fellow female United Jewish Appeals member Jill Barad (who’d risen to CEO of Mattel) had invited Ruth back to promote Barbie after years of being shunned by her own company. Ruth ignored her pride and rushed back. Because of Barad, when Ruth died in 2002, obituaries restored her well-deserved fame. Struggling through a rough work phase, I also jumped at a new opportunity offered by a former student Joanna Douglas, now an executive editor at a top pop culture webzine. In a generous show of girl power, she highly recommended me to Mattel to do a Barbie coffee table book. She was the first to receive a signed copy.

Barbie, by Susan Shapiro (Assouline)

Ruth trusted her instincts, followed her heart and visionary passion, which is why her invention and legacy endure. She risked failure and was willing to compromise to conquer setbacks, an evolution that continues to inspire me, though I hope I don’t have to wait 65 years to hit the big screen.