Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [11]
California was a different place back then: neither stippled with television antennas nor linked with concrete cloverleaf. The McDonald brothers wouldn't raise their Golden Arches for another fifteen years. Thanks to the Depression, the Golden State had lost some of its glister. Okies and Arkies poured in from the ravaged Dust Bowl; and for many, the land of sunshine and promise was just as gray and bleak as the place they had left.
Not so for the Handlers. Just twenty-one when they uprooted, they were optimists; and because they believed in the future they were willing to take risks. The youngest of ten children, Ruth was a stenographer at Paramount Pictures; Elliot, the second of four brothers, was a light-fixture designer and art student; and their first gamble was to chuck their jobs and start their own business, peddling the Plexiglas furniture that Elliot had been building part-time in their garage. The wager paid off: In the first years of World War II, they expanded into a former Chinese laundry and hired about a hundred workers. They made jewelry, candleholders, even a clear-plastic Art Deco airplane with a clock in it.
Wartime shortages derailed that venture, but the Handlers remained on track. In 1945, they started "Mattel Creations" with their onetime foreman, Harold Matson, whose name was fused with Elliot's to form Mattel. Matson, however, did not love gambling with his life savings; he sold out in 1946, making him the sort of asterisk to toy history that short-term Beatle Pete Best was to the history of popular music.
Elliot not only believed in the future, he believed in futuristic materials— Plexiglas, Lucite, plastic. He set up Mattel to manufacture plastic picture frames, which, because of wartime rationing, ironically ended up being made of wood. When the war ended, however, it was the Ukedoodle, a plastic ukelele, that secured Mattel's niche in the toy world. A popular jack-inthe-box followed, and by 1955, the company was worth $500,000.
Although Barbie wouldn't be introduced for another four years, Mattel, in 1955, paved the way for the sort of advertising that would make her possible. It was a big year for child culture: Disneyland had opened in July and Walt Disney, who seemed to have a golden touch with the under-twelve set, was preparing to launch a TV series, The Mickey Mouse Club. No toy company had ever sponsored a series before, and ABC, Disney's network, wanted to give Mattel the chance. There was just one catch: ABC demanded a year-long contract that would cost Mattel its entire net worth.
Ralph Carson, cofounder of Carson/Roberts, Mattel's advertising agency, thought the Handlers would be hesitant. He brought Vincent Francis, ABC's airtime salesman, to Elliot's office to make the pitch. What he failed to consider, however, was the Handlers' willingness to gamble.
The presentation "took fifteen or twenty minutes," Ruth recalls, and she and Elliot were "ready to jump out of our skins with excitement." But before they said yes, they consulted their comptroller, Yasuo Yoshida.
"Yas," Ruth recalls having said, "what would happen if we didn't bring much out of this? Would we go broke? And Yas's answer was: 'Not broke— but badly bent.' "
"Okay," Elliot remembers telling him, "we'll try the bent."
In Mattel's commercial, a little boy stalked an elephant with a toy called the Burp Gun; when the child fired, the film of the animal ran backward, causing it to appear to retreat. Kids loved the ad, and by Christmas the gun had sold out.
The Handlers' move, however, did more than create record sales for a single product in a single year. Before advertisers could pitch directly to kids, selling toys had been a mom-and-pop business with a seasonal focus on Christmas. But once kids could actually see toys on television, selling them became not only big business but one that took place year-round.
Ironically, in December 1955,