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Part of the problem was Lilli herself; she didn't exactly capture the hearts of the Japanese. "The Lilli doll looked kind of mean—sharp eyebrow and eyeshadow and so forth," Nakamura said. "And Japanese people didn't like it at all." But Frank pressed on, and by the time Elliot joined him early August, Kokusai Boeki m Kaisha (KBK), a Tokyo-based novelty maker, was ready to cut a deal.

KBK was not one big widget factory; it was a distributor for widgets that had been made by contractors and subcontractors all over Japan, from Hokkaido in the extreme north to Fukuoka in the extreme south. "The network was like a spiderweb," Nakamura said, "stretching two to three hundred miles in each direction."

KBK persuaded a dollmaker named Yamasaki to knock off Lilli, but that was only the beginning of the challenge. Lilli's body was as hard as her look, made of rigid plastic that had been "injection-molded"—squeezed into its mold like toothpaste from a tube. Mattel, however, wanted to make Barbie out of soft vinyl, and vinyl, when injection-molded, didn't always ooze into the tiny crevices of a mold. To ensure that Barbie had fingers and toes, her arms and legs would have to be "rotation-molded"—turned slowly in their molds while the vinyl hardened.

Yamasaki had never rotation-molded anything in his life. So in November, Mattel sent Seymour Adler, a Brooklyn-born engineer with a background in tool design, to teach him how. Adler arrived with the latest plastic-industry journals detailing the new process. Only one obstacle remained: Adler himself had never rotation-molded before either.

Back in California, Ryan was doing his best to make the doll look less like "a German streetwalker." He had befriended Bud Westmore, the makeup czar at Universal Pictures, who gave Lilli a makeover. The first thing Westmore eliminated was what he called her "bee-stung lips," the Maria Braunesque pout into which her tough little mouth had been formed. Next were her heavy eyelashes and what Ryan termed the "weird widow's peak" on her forehead. A sculptor was brought in to refashion Lilli's face, but, Adler told me, nobody at Mattel liked the results, so the head was cast, with slight modifications, from Lilli's.

Ryan also modified the joints that attached the arms and legs to the torso. Then he sent cast alloy masters of the freshly sculpted body parts for the Japanese to electroplate and make into molds. Before a mold could be used to produce the doll, Ryan had to approve six sample castings from it. Sometimes the castings had startling embellishments. "Each time I would get a half dozen back, they would have nipples on the breasts," Ryan explained. "So I took my little fine Swiss file, which the Swiss use for working on watches, and very daintily filed the nipples off and returned them."

After several rounds of emery-boarding, KBK got the message. "The Japanese are very obedient," Ryan said. "They'll always do what you tell them."

KBK NOT ONLY MADE BARBIE, IT ALSO MADE HER CLOTHES. It didn't, however, design them. For Barbie's first wardrobe, the Handlers turned to Charlotte Johnson, a fortyish veteran of Seventh Avenue who had been working in the garment industry since she was seventeen. They found her at Los Angeles' Chouinard Institute, where she was teaching an evening course in fashion design. Many say Charlotte created Barbie in her own image. "The shocker was that the doll looked like her," Ken Handler said of his first meeting with the designer in the early sixties. "It had the same-shaped head and was wearing the same hair."

As often as the adjective "short" has been used to describe Jack Ryan, who stood about five feet seven, the terms "tall," "statuesque," and "imposing" have been applied by colleagues to Charlotte, who stands about five feet ten in heels. Her reputation for tenacity evolved during the year she spent in Tokyo, in Frank Lloyd Wright's aptly named Imperial Hotel, making Barbie's wardrobe. Six days a week, Charlotte met with a Japanese designer and two seamstresses, developing designs that minimized the sewing process.