While it's indisputable that Handler invented Barbie in the 1950s, there are two origin stories regarding the doll that grew to be the center of a toy empire with countless iterations, friends, outfits and spinoffs surrounding her.
One version suggests that Handler’s inspiration for the doll came on a trip to Europe, where she saw a German Lilli doll that depicted an adult woman — so different from the baby dolls most girls played with at the time.
The second iteration of Handler’s inspiration stems from the fact that her own daughter Barbara — the namesake of the famous doll — didn’t play with baby dolls. Instead, she saw her daughter acting out scenes where her paper dolls went to college, performed cheer routines or had careers.
But both versions of the story end the same way: Handler created a doll that was an adult woman. “My own philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be,” Handler wrote in her 1994 autobiography Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story. “Barbie always represented the fact that a woman had choices.”
And Barbie has definitely had nearly every career imaginable. She graduated from college in 1963, became an astronaut in 1965 and a surgeon in 1973.
But before there was Barbie, there was Ruth, born in Denver in 1916 as Ruth Mosko. That last name was shortened from Moscowitz by immigration officials when her father, Jacob, immigrated from Warsaw in 1907; he was a blacksmith who worked in the railroad industry. Her mother, Ida, followed in 1908 with their then-six children. By the time Ruth was born, Ida was forty years old and ill, so Ruth was mainly raised by her sister Sarah, who was twenty with Ruth was born.
The family ran a drug store and soda fountain where Ruth often worked. Although she would go on to become one of the country’s most famous toymakers, she didn’t play much as a child. “It’s not that I never played,” Handler wrote in her autobiography. “I did have a few close girlfriends and I enjoyed hanging around with them. But I was basically a loner. I rarely had lengthy phone conversations or sleepovers like the other kids did.”
When she was sixteen, she met her future husband, Elliot Handler, at a dance in Denver. The pair moved to Los Angeles in 1938 after they married and started a furniture company named Mattel with business partner Harold Matson. But furniture sales fell during World War II, and after Matson left the company in 1945, Mattel shifted to making toy furniture and then became a toy company.
Enter Barbie. The doll debuted in 1959 at the American Toy Fair in New York City, and after Ruth came up with a novel advertising campaign, Mattel sold 351,000 dolls in her first year of existence.
“In 1960, the Handlers took Mattel public, with a valuation of $10 million ($60.3 million in 2003 dollars),” reported the PBS series Who Made America?
And now Barbie, the new movie directed by Greta Gerwig, promises to make hundreds of millions.
Star Margot Robbie paid homage to the original Barbie’s black-and-white swimsuit look in the first trailer for Barbie. She’s worn plenty of other iconic Barbie looks on the press tour, including the Totally Hair 25th Anniversary Barbie, Enchanted Evening Barbie and Pink & Fabulous Barbie.
Robbie’s co-star, Ryan Gosling, has made headlines with the “Ken-ergy” he channeled for his role as Barbie's male counterpart. The Handlers added Ken, named after their son, soon after Barbie became a smashing success.
Ruth Handler's innovative way to boost Barbie was to advertise directly to children by sponsoring the original Mickey Mouse Club in the 1950s. Almost fifty years later, in 1993, Gosling joined the cast of the show after its 1989 revival.
Barbie stars Margot Robbe and Ryan Gosling go on a quest for self-discovery in the real world.
Courtesy of Warner Bros.
Ruth Handler resigned from Mattel in 1974 after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigated the Handlers for fraudulent financial reporting; she claimed her cancer had made her unfocused.
Though Handler had left Denver before creating Barbie, she and her family regularly returned to the place where she was born, says John Quam, who today runs Howler Magazine International in Costa Rica. But when he lived in Denver, he worked at Fashion Bar, a clothing store operated by Hannah and Jack Levy.
"Ruth Handler came in for several meetings," Quam recalls. "We went out to lunch many times. I was pretty young and I didn't realize who she was and what she was or what she actually had created, but I knew enough to know that she was pretty powerful."
Quam would eventually meet the real-life Barbie and Ken, the Handler children. "They were just really super nice people," he says.
Perhaps because of the Handler connection, Colorado is more obsessed with Barbie than any other state. "In June alone," according to fountain.fm, "Colorado recorded 3,469 searches per 100,000 residents, which is 66 percent higher than the national average."
Real life-Barbara, daughter of the doll's creator, makes a cameo in the film, and Rhea Perlman plays Ruth in a couple of scenes. But Ruth Handler didn't get to see herself in Barbie; she passed away in 2002.
See our list of Colorado-inspired Barbies.
