Battle to be the true Barbie: How two Barbaras lay declare to inspiring the doll Margot Robbie performs

Will the true Barbara Millicent Roberts – aka Barbie – please rise up.

She’s undoubtedly not the blonde, tall, and really leggy Margot Robbie, 35, who plays the real-life Barbie within the $100 million live-action “Barbie” film coming to theaters on July 21.

Relying on who a Barbie fan believes, nonetheless, the real, in-the-flesh Barbie who impressed the doll is both the late Barbie Ryan or the now 82-year-old Barbara Handler Segal.

The 2 origin tales couldn’t be extra completely different.

Both Barbie exists thanks to at least one man’s obsession with the “good girl” – or due to an apparently candy story revolving round a mom’s love for her two youngsters.

However each include far darker sides than the harmless little one’s toy would counsel, together with orgies, intercourse toys, embezzlement, AIDS, and suicide.

The battle over who actually impressed Barbie solely exploded into the open many years after the doll made her debut on the Worldwide Toy Honest in New York in 1959.

She was a right away hit: 11 inches tall, long-legged, slim-waisted, perky-breasted and both blonde or brunette, wearing a hand-made black and white swimsuit, and shortly after marketed on The Mickey Mouse Membership.

Now at 64 Barbie could be prepared for Social Safety, and ripe for retirement in a Boca Raton condominium, however as an alternative, she continues to make a fortune for Mattel: the corporate’s inventory value has soared in latest weeks because of huge hype over the film.

However the battle over who’s the true Barbie, and who was her creator, exploded into the open in 1994.

It was then that Ruth Handler printed her autobiography, “Dream Doll,” taking credit score for naming the doll after her daughter — and virtually solely ignoring the function of Jack Ryan, whose title is on the Barbie patent.

Handler’s Barbie creation story was carved in stone three years after Ryan put a bullet in his head, depressed and bodily sick over long-running monetary battles with Handler and Mattel, as he sued for what he noticed as his justifiable share of the Barbie tens of millions.

In Handler’s e-book, she basically claimed she was to Barbie what Walt Disney was to Mickey Mouse: the only creator.

Ryan, the sensible former Raytheon missile designer for the Pentagon who designed Barbie from head to toe as Mattel’s vice chairman of design, was virtually not talked about.

I first explored Mattel’s hidden historical past in my 2009 best-seller, “Toy Monster: The Huge, Unhealthy World of Mattel.”

Handler had co-founded Mattel together with her husband Elliot and their enterprise companion Harold “Matt” Matson — Mattel is a portmanteau of Matt and Elliot — and he or she claimed that watching her daughter, Barbara, born in 1941, play with dolls gave her the thought for a real-life wanting doll, and a reputation.

And over time, Barbara Handler Segal, now 82, has publicly claimed the title of being “the real-life Barbie.”

She as soon as made a visitor look on “Oprah” beneath that title however in interviews has claimed she was “embarrassed” when in comparison with the doll, particularly as an adolescent.

Web gossipers have claimed {that a} latest Barbie trailer for the film had a quick shot of an aged girl stated to be Barbara Handler chatting with Margot Robbie on a park bench.

However Handler’s breezy declare to have been the mom of Barbie had its personal darkish facet.

The doll she cited as inspiration was one referred to as “Lilli,” a German toy that was in reality primarily based on a cartoon within the German newspaper Bild a couple of prostitute.

Additionally within the film is Ryan Gosling, taking part in Ken, of Ken Doll fame. Handler stated Ken – it was at all times Barbie and Ken within the play world — was primarily based on her son.

It was later revealed the real-life Ken had a secret homosexual life and had died of AIDS.

After which in 1973, Handler got here beneath investigation for large-scale fraud at Mattel, and false reporting to the Securities and Trade Fee.

She resigned in shame and later pleaded no contest to a collection of expenses, incomes her a $57,000 fantastic and a couple of,500 hours of group service.

Her husband was additionally compelled out; Handler blamed breast most cancers for making her “unfocused.”

Her autobiography staked her declare to being Barbie’s creator, guaranteeing that obituaries when she died in 2002 at 85, would credit her for the doll, however to critics, it was an try to write down Ryan out of historical past.

His daughter, Ann Ryan, 68, who’s writing a memoir, “Dad, Barbie and Me,” in regards to the weird Barbie world through which she grew up, and has a podcast referred to as “Dream House, The Real Story of Jack Ryan,” advised The Publish that Barbie was named after — and primarily based on — her mom: Barbie Ryan.

“My father was at all times obsessive about the picture of the proper girl, after which he married one whose title occurred to be Barbie. The selection of the title for the Barbie doll was my father’s, completely, not Ruth Handler’s resolution,” Ann Ryan stated.

“However after he died” – Ryan dedicated suicide in 1991 at age 64 two years after a debilitating stroke – “Ruth determined to alter the story.

“My father was lifeless and wasn’t round to dispute something that Ruth had written in her e-book, and it was very irritating to me and different members of the Ryan household.  What she wrote was overwhelming and such a shock. It was all bulls–t.”

In line with Ann, her mom, Barbara “Barbie” Ryan was “very flattered” that Barbie had been named after her. 

“My mom was this glamorous girl who did some modeling whereas she was learning at Parsons Faculty of Design. She at all times appeared fabulous. Look was crucial to my household, and each my dad and mom at all times wished to undertaking a picture.”

However the storybook marriage led to divorce. Ryan had been a swinger who threw orgies in his fake citadel in Los Angeles.

He had quite a few affairs and wed 4 extra instances, together with with the “well-known for being well-known” Hungarian magnificence, Zsa Zsa Gabor, who in her prime additionally might have been a Barbie doll look-alike. 

“My father liked Zsa Zsa’s glamour and flamboyance,” Ann says and notes that a lot of the ladies her father was concerned with or chased, had been Barbie sorts.

“If you happen to have a look at the ladies he married and the ladies he had important relations with all of them had been modeled on Barbie.”

The press on the time of the short-lived Ryan-Gabor union even famous he had “married his personal Barbie doll.”

The wedding went publicly fallacious, with their honeymoon in Japan marred by Ryan hiring a good-looking escort to take Zsa Zsa round Tokyo – and sleep together with her, if she desired — whereas he did enterprise.

Gabor later wrote in her memoir “One Lifetime is Not Sufficient” that “removed from constructing a life with me, with one girl, Jack had each intention of constant his swinging life-style.”

Ruth Handler’s embarrassment in any respect the salacious Jack Ryan gossip was one of many causes she is claimed to have written her e-book after he died, sources have claimed.

Ann Ryan says she’s wanting ahead to the “Barbie” movie and believes her father could be, too.

“I feel Margot Robbie’s attractive, stunning, and I completely plan to see the film as a result of Barbie was the largest factor in my father’s life. 

“My father could be completely thrilled in regards to the movie, as a result of he was a really theatrical particular person, and I’m certain he would have wished to play an enormous half within the film’s making.”

As for her e-book, nonetheless in progress, “I don’t need it to be a Mommy Dearest. I need to have the ability to have a good time my father’s genius and creativity.”