Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [45]
"I don't want all the stores," Ruth told the merchandise manager. "Pick the one in your most affluent Jewish neighborhood, because there's a high degree of breast cancer among Jewish people . . . and get me some publicity."
"Some publicity" quickly turned into appearances on talk shows across the country. While her staff sent handwritten invitations to mastectomy victims near each host store, she stripped off her shirt for People magazine and invited a New York Times reporter to feel her breasts. Nearly Me became a phenomenon. Although some mastectomy patients in the mid-eighties chose to have their breasts surgically remade, their numbers weren't large enough to affect her business. "I was negative as hell on breast reconstruction at the beginning," she explained. "Because they reminded me of the early prostheses. They didn't match the other side. Women showed me . . . their own breast down here and the artificial breast up here—hard as a rock up here." She gestured to a spot near her shoulder. "I saw hundreds of those. Out of place. Crazy locations. If when you put a brassiere on, the two sides don't match, what the hell have you got?"
For most of the sixteen years that Ruth ran Nearly Me, she traveled two weeks out of every four. During the five years after her sentencing, however, she had to give community service at home—taking poor kids to her beach house in Malibu and setting up the Foundation for People, an agency that enabled white-collar felons to help blue-collar felons learn skills and get jobs.
"After I got the swing of it, I turned that into a positive thing and we formed a positive group," she said. "We rented a floor in an old rundown hotel and I got my personal decorator to do the whole floor for free. . . . I think white-collar offenders in most cases have been punished enough by the time they get to the sentencing. The humiliation is worse than going to jail. And the comedown from where they've been is so great—it's like you've already shot the guy, now stab him. What you need to do to help society take care of itself is say, 'Okay, buddy, it's your turn now to turn society around—to devote your money to it and help it.' "
Ruth's foundation enjoyed great success in the early eighties but was later disbanded. When Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky were sentenced, public sentiment turned against the idea of permitting white-collar criminals to elude jail.
WHILE RUTH REHABILITATED FELONS AND CANCER PA-tients, the plastic doll she invented helped Mattel recover from its near collapse. If Barbie was distraught during Ruth's run-in with the law, she didn't show it. There was no Day-in-Court Barbie or Barbie-for-the-Defense. She kept active; her "Busy" incarnation had clawlike hands; she could pick up such leisure-time paraphernalia as a phone, a TV, a record player, a serving tray, and a suitcase. She kept fit; her "Live Action" and "Walk Lively" versions twitched and strutted. And in an incarnation that featured the Twist 'N Turn face with a dead-on stare, she celebrated her sixteenth birthday.
Mattel also kept up its jibes at the women's movement. In 1968, feminists protested the Miss America Pageant; in 1972, the company introduced an official Miss America doll. A year later, it came out with "Barbie's Friend Ship," a plastic airplane-cum-carrying case that featured—lest girls get any inflated ideas about taking the controls—a painted-on male pilot. A similar plane was issued with "Big Jim," a boys' line of Schwarzenegger-bodied, flannel-shirted, fire-fighting, construction-working, alligator-wrestling male dolls, so cartoonlike in their virility that they resembled the Village People, the ultramasculine gay disco recording artists. The cockpit of Big Jim's plane, however, was designed to hold Big Jim.
Then, in 1975, Skipper grew up, or, in any event, sprouted breasts. Growing Up Skipper, as the pre- and post-pubescent doll was called,