That nothing symbolises America in quite the way Barbie does is obvious in many ways: the obsession with the perfect body, the diet pills, the plastic surgery, anorexia, and the psychotic behaviour that accompanies the need to look just-so at all points in time, the list goes on. What Toy Monster does is to brilliantly bring out other facets of Barbie’s life that make it even more quintessentially American. This includes patent theft and the ensuing legal battles, class action suits, earnings fraud and restating of accounts, fat CEO salaries that are completely out of line with earnings, boardroom battles, Hugh Hefner-style bunnies and mansions, brilliant marketing (give the printer free, pay for the cartridges), the military-industrial complex if you please and, among many others, acrimonious divorce suits… . When it comes to Americanness, Barbie gives American Pie a run for its money.
And no, the book isn’t a preachy moralistic tome on the moral decadence of America and stuff like that. Written by one of the more prolific American biographers — Oppenheimer’s written top biographies like those on Martha Stewart and Barbara Walters and even the Clintons — the book is a racy read, with enough research and quotes to make readers feel they’re right in there with Jack Ryan’s (the founder, after a sort, of Barbie) five wives, including the luscious Zsa Zsa Gabor (she, of Moulin Rouge fame, was the second of Ryan’s five wives and he the sixth of her nine husbands) for whom Ryan had workers construct a third floor in his castle that was a replica of Moulin Rouge; in the parties where Ryan installed a large phallus-shaped dial over the entrance with the numbers 1 to 10 — when a woman entered the room, Ryan had an assistant pull a chord that moved the dial up to the rating Ryan gave her (the Peter Meter, he called it). In scenes that looked like replicas right out of the Playboy Mansion, Ryan’s parties had four-poster bed races where women undressed down to luscious lingerie while under the sheets.
That was the gracious Ryan, the one who enjoyed sitting at a Beverly Hills café, his daughter told Oppenheimer, examining the faces and bodies of glamorous female passers-by “so he would try and guess the name of the plastic surgeon who had done work on different women who walked by. Each surgeon had sort of a signature look, and Dad got to know the look and he would ask women, ‘Was it doctor so-and-so who did your nose?’” The nasty Ryan, when the marriage to Zsa Zsa Gabor lost some of its rouge, so to speak, refused to live up to his promises — Zsa Zsa’s Rolls which was sliced into two to convert into a stretch limo was never completed, he left her with the two halves.
While this got Zsa Zsa mad and encouraged her to try and nail Ryan in the divorce proceedings, it wasn’t all roses for Ryan either. The owners of Mattel, for instance, did their utmost to deny Ryan credit for the work he did on Barbie — the patent for the twist-waist, the two-second soundbites on records smaller than a quarter dollar that fit under Barbie’s breasts and helped her say “I love being a fashion model” and so on. Perhaps understandable at one level, given that the original Barbie was itself a rip-off from a German doll that Mattel’s owner Ruth Handler first saw in a German store — later, when the German company sold the rights to a firm in the US, this became the subject of a lawsuit that was eventually settled out of court. Ryan, by the way, wasn’t your run-of-the-mill employee, he first began work at one of America’s plum defence contractors, Raytheon, and, according to Oppenheimer, was assigned to work on the preliminary design for the ground-to-air Hawk missile. In the understated manner most had come to associate Ryan with, he said of the 700 engineers and scientists working on the Hawk, “I wasn’t their boss but I was the young guy who ran it.”
Somewhere in between all this, Mattel was accused of cooking its books — customers were encouraged to book orders that could later be cancelled but were put on the books. Class action suits followed the spree of bill-and-hold sales and in December 1978, long before the restating of accounts became more the trend than the exception, Handler was sentenced to five years probation and ordered to perform 2,500 hours of community service.
Mattel’s brush with cooked books didn’t end here. In 1998, a 32-year-old MBA from the University of Southern California alleged that sales orders and production numbers were being overstated. Her letter to her boss about this — she resigned and sued the company for wrongful dismissal and harassment, but didn’t win her case — got her into the same BusinessWeek cover story on the “Year of the Whistleblower” along with the legendary Sherron Watkin (think Enron).
If this part of Mattel’s story made you think Enron, another part made you think Google (in the days before it decided to take on the government in China). When toys made by Mattel in China had to be recalled for excessive lead content in the paint and then tiny magnets that came out and could be ingested by children, Mattel blamed Chinese suppliers. When the government there was furious with Mattel putting the blame on Chinese suppliers (the country’s quality watchdog’s head said that 85 per cent of Mattel’s recalls were due to defects in the company’s designs and contrasted these with the rise in China’s toy exports), Mattel followed up with a public apology!
Whether you will buy another Barbie doll after reading this amazingly riveting book is difficult to say, but it’s interesting to note that Ken (the Ken doll was named after the Handlers’ son, the brother of Barbara or Barbie) was so disturbed by the impact the Barbie doll had on some young girls, he refused to have the dolls in his house or to allow his two sons and daughters to play with them.
TOY MONSTER
Jerry Oppenheimer
Wiley
280 pages; $14.95