Ruth Handler, the grandmotherly determine performed by Rhea Perlman within the new Barbie film, presents compassion and knowledge to Margot Robbie in a second when her blissful doll-come-to-life faces an existential disaster. Handler appears to know Barbie higher than she is aware of herself, as she ought to. It’s a second by which the doll actually meets her maker.
Perlman, finest generally known as the sarcastic waitress Carla from Cheers, seems within the Greta Gerwig–directed movie as Ruth Handler—a real-life legend within the toy enterprise who helped flip Mattel into a world powerhouse, largely because of Barbie, launched in 1959. The actual Handler died in 2002 on the age of 85, so her look within the film is extra whimsical than sensible. However the film does included a number of particulars which can be real. The total reality of her life, in lots of circumstances, is even stranger than even probably the most die-hard Barbie followers could notice.
Perlman’s character tells Barbie that she had a mastectomy. That’s true; Handler had breast most cancers within the Seventies. She additionally used the plastics know-how she’d gathered from years within the toy enterprise to plot prosthetic units for different girls like her and launched a wholly new enterprise, Almost Me, which nonetheless sells merchandise at this time.
The film model of Ruth Handler additionally bitterly alludes to her being pressured out of Mattel as a consequence of a conflict over monetary issues. That is performed for laughs, nevertheless it’s based mostly on reality as properly. The scandal engulfed not simply Handler however others who had been employed on the toy producer. “4 Ex‐Officers of Mattel Amongst 5 Indicted on Conspiracy Fees,” learn the 1978 headline in The New York Occasions.
The Occasions reported that Handler had been {accused} of falsifying “inside enterprise information regarding earnings and gross sales in 1971, 1972 and 1973 in order that they may affect the market value of Mattel inventory.”
Handler was a trailblazer in an period when society relegated most girls to the position of housewife, and her enterprise acumen made her a formidable government and strategist. But as Robin Gerber writes in her 2009 biography, Barbie and Ruth, “She had additionally allowed padding and different falsifying of the corporate books, and her protestations of innocence, her refusal to take duty, made the prosecution decided to push for a extreme sentence.”
Handler in the end dropped her resistance and pleaded no contest and was ordered to pay $57,000 in fines and 5 years of probation, with the decide mandating 500 hours of group service per yr. In Barbie and Ruth, Gerber writes that the decide informed Handler her actions had been “exploitive, parasitic, and disgraceful to something in society.” The writer additional characterizes the mixed 2,500 hours as “the longest public service sentence ever handed out.”
Handler might have gotten 41 years in jail, however she nonetheless discovered her comparatively mild sentence to be extreme. She needed to create a giveaway program of her Almost Me prosthetics for underprivileged most cancers sufferers who would possibly in any other case be unable to afford them, however the decide rejected that proposal. In accordance with Gerber, after taking part in scrupulously tabulated charity work that she discovered “humiliating,” Handler was ultimately assigned the duty of utilizing her enterprise know-how to present different convicts job coaching. This system was thought of a hit, and in 1982, the decide agreed to chop brief Handler’s sentence by a yr and a half.
Handler’s creation of Barbie isn’t carefully documented within the film, which takes a extra fanciful strategy to the toy universe. Varied Barbies and Kens exist in a separate dimension the place life is idyllic and the issues of the actual world seldom intrude.
In the actual world, Ruth married her husband, Elliot Handler, in 1938, they usually began a enterprise making residence items, typically using plastics. Within the Nineteen Forties, they entered a partnership with industrial designer Harold Matson to create a brand new enterprise manufacturing image frames, in line with the Los Angeles Occasions. Utilizing the identical supplies, they branched off into one other enterprise creating smaller furnishings—this time for dollhouses.
