Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [44]
But, she continued, "I had to come home to this other life of fighting the lawyers. . . . So one day I said, 'Do something. Get it changed. . . . There's got to be another way.' "
Her lawyers suggested that she plead nolo contendere, but warned that it was the equivalent of pleading guilty, except that it couldn't be used against her in subsequent civil suits. "I won't plead guilty," she told them, "I'd like to plead nolo contendere. . . . I'll accept [the court's] version of guilty, but I want to say when I plead that I'm innocent." You can't do that, one lawyer said, but a second thought it was possible. "And sure enough they looked it up and there was a precedent," Ruth said. "I could plead nolo and at the same time protest that I'm innocent and get away with it." Which she did.
Ruth's biography is so much larger than life that over the course of our interviews, I felt as if I were in a TV movie—some sort of courtroom drama, or HBO's Barbarians at the Gate. The tone and direction, however, changed from scene to scene. Ruth was a sentimental Frank Capra heroine one minute, a John Waters character the next. Part Leona Helmsley, part Joan of Arc, Ruth is an almost impossible blend of acquisitiveness and idealism.
Words often came to Ruth in the form of slogans and catchy product names, which gave our talks the flavor of a TV commercial. She is proud of her three best-selling prostheses—the "Nearly Me Three," her "classic best breast"; the "So-Soft," an all-silicone breast for "women who need the softer, more hanging look"; and the "Rest Breast," an all-foam breast that can be worn while swimming. Nor did she manufacture breasts merely as a service; as early as 1977, Nearly Me, a privately held company (no messy filing with the SEC), which she sold to Kimberly-Clark Corporation in 1991, did a million dollars' worth of business.
"There are breasts and there are breasts," she told me between bites of an egg salad sandwich at Beverly Hills' Hillcrest Country Club in 1992. "Some breasts are much softer and some breasts are much firmer. Some have a tendency to lift up and be full; others have a tendency to lift up and hang down. It depends on the muscles and the age and the construction and the body."
Ruth tends not to look at the whys of things; but she misses no detail when it comes to the hows. She figured out what male prosthesis makers had overlooked: breasts, like feet, come in "rights" and "lefts," as must prostheses. To implement her discovery, Ruth formed Ruthton, the precursor of Nearly Me, with Peyton Massey, a Santa Monica-based prosthesis maker. "After he gave me all the reasons why it wouldn't work, he agreed that he would do it," she told me. "We cleared out an old storeroom at his place . . . and he sculpted the breasts and I did all the other stuff to make it happen."
Ruth was unhappy with Massey's materials—the early prostheses had "a very peculiar odor," she recalled—so she brought in a half-dozen retired Mattel toy and doll designers to revise them. She wanted the breasts to be "lightweight" and to have "a swoop on the top and a fullness on the bottom." She also wanted "some kind of a 'skin' to wrap around—to hold all of this together." Within a couple of hours, the toymakers determined that Ruth's needs could be met by a model with a foam back, a silicone front, and a polyurethane "skin."
"Thirty years of working at Mattel had trained me to know what is needed if you want to design a product," she explained. It also taught her how to sell one. In January 1977, she arranged her first department store promotion at Neiman Marcus in Dallas. Her goal was to get out of Los Angeles and see how the breasts played