Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [22]
The team at Carson/Roberts was also thriving, filled with a happiness so great it burst onto their lapels. If the agency didn't actually invent the smile-face button, it certainly popularized it. Long before such badges infected the lapels of the general public, Carson/Roberts used them for in-house promotions.
Mattel, however, was in turmoil, having begun a period of swift expansion that was not without growing pains. In 1960, the company went public, and by 1963 its common stock was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Between 1959 and 1962, it had added 180,000 square feet to its Hawthorne headquarters and begun hiring people to fill it. Still, space was tight: in 1964, the company acquired a new plant east of Los Angeles in the City of Industry and built a three-story office building in Hawthorne, designed with reinforced foundations so that three more stories could be added later.
Asked to graph Mattel's expansion for a speech Ruth was preparing, Marvin Barab, who in 1960 established Mattel's first market research department, drew a line shooting up and off the chart. "If the growth Mattel has had . . . continues at the same rate," he told Ruth, "by 1980-something, the total volume of the company will exceed the Gross National Product." It was as if the Handlers had hitched their chariot to a puppy and now had to deal with a giant dog.
They did not always deal with grace. Seymour Adler, who had spearheaded rotation molding in Tokyo, found himself skewered back home. "I complained bitterly to Ruth that the data processing department was incompetent, which it was," Adler says. The incompetence caused a crisis after the 1963 Toy Show, when records lost during a change from one computer to another prevented Mattel from shipping goods for three months. Exasperated, Ruth said, "Seymour, you run the goddam department," Adler told me. And although he knew nothing about computers, he agreed.
Adler's new job may not have changed the balance of power in management, but it seemed that way to Jack Ryan, who was not one to keep his perceptions to himself. "Ruth became very unhappy because Jack was needling her about my having too much control in the company," Adler said. Tensions heightened, reaching a point where Ryan, who had caused the rift, curiously tried to heal it. He hoped to reconcile Ruth and Seymour through the equivalent of executive marriage counseling—a cutting-edge idea at the time. "People would get together and air all their problems," Adler explained. "It was very much like group therapy. But Ruth wouldn't attend the sessions. So they fired me."
Three years later Ruth had second thoughts. Mattel "had been having terrible problems," Adler said. "They had a walking doll that would not stay walking and they were getting returns at a rate of about eight percent. They wanted me back to solve problems like that—and to have the confidence that they would be solved."
As ever, what Ruth wanted, Ruth got; but Mattel had to buy the toy company Adler had founded during his absence.
Many employees say that during the Handler years, Mattel felt more like a family than a corporation. "Ruth and Elliot ate in the cafeteria every day and they walked through the factory and knew all the factory workers," said Beverly Cannady, who worked in promotion. "Those were the people who had the least turnover and who stayed until they retired. Ruth and Elliot knew the old ones, the original ones, and they'd stop and say, 4Hi Hattie, how's your granddaughter?' That kind of thing."
For some, however, Mattel was a dysfunctional family. Marvin Barab, who left market research to join Ryan's group, had terrible run-ins with his boss. Things reached a nadir when Ryan, during a party at his Bel Air house, ordered Barab, on penalty of dismissal, to dive into his pool and race him. This would have been annoying under any circumstances—Barab wasn't much of a swimmer