MISCHKE: Barbieland

Summary

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Garage Logic — MISCHKE: Barbieland

Host: Tommy Mischke
Guest: Tarpley Hitt (Author of Barbieland: The Unauthorized History)
Date: January 15, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the bizarre, ruthless, and lucrative universe of Barbie and the toy industry at large. Host Tommy Mischke interviews journalist and author Tarpley Hitt about her book "Barbieland: The Unauthorized History," exploring not only the biography of Barbie but also the cutthroat capitalism, eccentric personalities, and cultural ramifications swirling around the iconic doll. Barbie is revealed as both a symbol and a product: a plastic lottery ticket that spawned dollar-bill blizzards and provoked decades of heated debate about gender, marketing, and American society.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Wild World Behind Barbie

• Not Just a Toy:

  • Barbie isn't just a doll; her history reveals an adult world filled with secrecy, theft, corporate espionage, and staggering sums of money.
  • "There are so many truly hilarious and vaguely sinister stories where Barbie's at the center of them." — Tarpley Hitt [06:29]

• Barbie as Symbol:

  • Her story reflects themes of gender, persuasion, unbridled capitalism, and American peculiarity.
  • "This book...was about, to varying degrees, America, human nature, ruthless drive, unbridled capitalism. It was about gender, it was about sexuality, it was about persuasion, it was about marketing... and yeah, there’s a doll in there somewhere." — Tommy Mischke [05:50]

2. The Ruthless Origins of the Toy Industry

• Louis Marx: The Toy King

  • Early American toys were often copied and cheaply mass-produced, with figures like Louis Marx dominating via imitation and minimal advertising.
  • "Five foot four, Louis Marx could make himself seem much larger. He was considered America’s Toy King...In 1955, his company grossed 50 million. He spent $312 on ads." — Tommy Mischke [09:43]

• US Toy Industry’s Growth:

  • WWI embargo on German toys created a market gap, allowing entrepreneurs like Marx to thrive.
  • Intellectual property protection was lax, fueling a culture of theft and imitation.

3. Mattel and Ruth Handler: Ideals vs. Reality

• Founding of Mattel:

  • Ruth Handler and her husband started Mattel in a repurposed laundry for $50, aspiring to originality after their own products were copied.
  • Paranoia around IP theft led to secretive, fortress-like company culture.
  • Mattel’s headquarters literally surrounded by defense contractors, reinforcing the espionage vibes.
  • "Literally on three sides, it’s like Raytheon, Lockheed and then Mattel in the middle." — Tarpley Hitt [14:42]

• Barbie’s Creation:

  • Barbie was directly inspired by Germany’s Bild Lilli doll, yet Handler constructed a narrative of originality, likely to protect commercial interests.
  • "If you look at the two dolls side by side, these look like basically identical dolls. She pretends that she came up with this exclusively on her own." — Tarpley Hitt [22:48]

• Mattel as a Corporate Fortress:

  • Ruth Handler’s cutthroat style was both a product of and response to her environment—one of few women in a male-dominated, aggressive field.
  • "She says that openly. She: ‘I thought women were boring. I always preferred to be around men. I liked being the only woman at the table.’" — Tarpley Hitt [35:15]

4. The Business Model: Endless Profits by Design

• The “Gillette Rule”:

  • Sell the initial doll cheap, then profit off endless accessories—mirroring how razors are sold at cost and blades at a premium.
  • "No girl has one Barbie. Thirty Barbies." — Tarpley Hitt [26:21]

• Barbie as Perpetual Revenue:

  • Internally dubbed “Our Lady of Perpetual Income.”
  • Carefully marketed with an array of alter egos (wedding Barbie, career Barbie, etc.) to appeal to every “type” of girl or parent.

5. Market Domination and Legal Warfare

• Competitors' Failures:

  • A legion of imitators (Mitzi, Tammy, Misty, Babette, Annette, and more) never made a dent in Barbie’s dominance—thanks in no small part to Mattel’s aggressive legal team and unmatched budget for defending IP.
  • "They are bringing constant cases against various Barbie rivals... They just break other people." — Tarpley Hitt [32:11]

• Corporate Espionage:

  • Mattel’s Market Intelligence Department regularly used spies, fake personas, and corporate subterfuge to stay ahead of rivals.

6. Cultural Impact and Backlash

• Evolving Meanings:

  • Barbie was never intended as a feminist icon; Handler herself opposed feminist policy initiatives. Yet cultural tides eventually forced Mattel to reshape Barbie’s image and physicality to match shifting norms.
  • Fierce backlash centered on Barbie’s physical proportions and the values she seemed to promote.
  • "Mattel had sold Barbie too well... Now that she was established and influential, customers were wondering how good her influence was." — Tommy Mischke, quoting Hitt [40:34]

• Barbie as Cultural Canvas:

  • Barbie’s blankness allowed her to reflect and amplify nearly every American trend or controversy; she became a lightning rod for debates on gender, consumerism, and sexuality.

7. The Bratz Challenge—Barbie’s Near-Defeat

• Rise of Bratz:
  • Bratz dolls in the early 2000s posed a major threat, outselling Barbie and sending Mattel into “House on Fire” mode.
  • Mattel unleashed its legal arsenal, resulting in a decades-long lawsuit focused on allegations of idea theft—while also exposing Mattel’s covert intelligence division.
  • "Internally at Mattel are freaking out. They refer to the rise of Bratz as a quote, rival led genocide, Barbie genocide." — Tarpley Hitt [46:19]

8. Barbie's Reinventions and Lasting Influence

• Modernization & Collector Culture:

  • Barbie’s body and branding have shifted to reflect new social realities, including more diverse skin tones, disabilities, and body types.
  • Adult collectors now comprise a lucrative market segment, with exclusive dolls fetching high prices.
  • "The adult market is massive... You can sell dolls at a way higher price point than you could sell to a six year old." — Tarpley Hitt [50:13]

• Enduring Legacy:

  • Only a handful of toys—Slinky, rubber balls, and Barbie—have so thoroughly endured.
  • "$36 billion and counting. The gift that keeps giving: Barbie." — Tommy Mischke [50:59]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Quote | Speaker | |-------------|-------|---------| | 05:50 | "This book...was about, to varying degrees, America, human nature, ruthless drive, unbridled capitalism. It was about gender, it was about sexuality, it was about persuasion, it was about marketing. It was about how weird people are." | Tommy Mischke | | 06:29 | "There’s just so many truly hilarious and vaguely sinister stories where Barbie’s at the center." | Tarpley Hitt | | 14:42 | "Literally on three sides, it’s like Raytheon, Lockheed and then Mattel in the middle." | Tarpley Hitt | | 22:48 | "If you look at the two dolls side by side, these look like basically identical dolls. She pretends that she came up with this exclusively on her own." | Tarpley Hitt | | 24:25 | "Our Lady of Perpetual Income." (Mattel’s internal nickname for Barbie) | Tarpley Hitt | | 29:41 | "[Ernest Dichter's pitch to parents:] Tell mothers and fathers that this doll will teach your daughters how to be sexy." | Tarpley Hitt | | 32:11 | "[Mattel is] bringing constant cases against various Barbie rivals...They just break other people." | Tarpley Hitt | | 35:15 | "[Ruth Handler:] 'I thought women were boring. I always preferred to be around men. I liked being the only woman at the table.'" | Tarpley Hitt | | 41:01 | "Mattel had sold Barbie too well... Now that she was established and influential, customers were wondering how good her influence was." | Tommy Mischke (reading Hitt) | | 46:19 | "Internally at Mattel are freaking out. They refer to the rise of Bratz as a quote, 'rival led genocide, Barbie genocide.'" | Tarpley Hitt | | 50:13 | "The adult market is massive... You can sell dolls at a way higher price point than you could sell to a six year old." | Tarpley Hitt | | 50:59 | "$36 billion and counting. The gift that keeps giving: Barbie." | Tommy Mischke |

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Barbie as business/cultural phenomenon: [01:59]–[06:54]
• Origins & rise of the toy industry/Louis Marx: [06:54]–[13:03]
• Ruth Handler, Mattel, and corporate espionage: [13:08]–[16:23]
• Bild Lilli origins & Mattel’s “originality” myth: [16:23]–[19:04]
• The “Gillette Rule” & perpetual income: [24:25]–[26:21]
• Barbie’s marketing genius and adaptability: [26:21]–[27:51]
• Competitors trying (and failing) to take on Barbie: [29:41]–[34:17]
• Ruth Handler’s leadership, politics, and feminism: [34:17]–[36:32]; [38:49]–[41:01]
• Backlash over Barbie’s image & symbolism: [41:01]–[44:21]
• Bratz and the closest “Barbie-killer”: [46:19]–[48:42]
• Barbie’s endless reinventions and collector market: [49:26]–[50:59]

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Tone and Style

The episode is irreverent, often humorous, and deeply skeptical about the corporate world—while also marveling at human ingenuity and the oddities of American capitalism. Mischke’s voice is both wry and curious, and Hitt brings journalistic rigor mixed with wit and a slight cynicism about her subject.

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Final Takeaway

Barbie’s real legacy is less about playtime and more about the zany, high-stakes arena of American capitalism—where a plastic doll can become a battleground for profits, culture wars, gender politics, and personal obsessions. Through the lens of Barbie, this episode uncovers a world stranger and more cutthroat than any child’s imagination.

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Transcript

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[Tommy Mischke]

Want in?

[Bernie Lauer]

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[Tommy Mischke]

Lets kickstart this thing. When did you first fall in love with the bass Lenny Lenny, I asked you a question. They call me Rumpelstilts.

[Tarpley Hitt]

Sam.

[Tommy Mischke]

I never played with Barbie dolls when I was a kid. I know that's going to surprise many of you, but there weren't any Barbie dolls in our house when I was growing up. Had there been, I might have enjoyed playing with them probably by employing fireworks, seeing for instance what an M80 might do if it were strapped onto Barbie's back. I did that with GI Joe and it sure wasn't pretty. But my sisters did not have any Barbie dolls. I grew up oblivious to Barbie world and apparently I missed something because there are many, many multi millionaires out there who wish they could have made a fraction of the cash Barbie made. Some people Barbie. This piece of plastic made it rain dollar bills, rain dollar bills for decades, storm dollar bills, billions of dollar bills. There were dollar bill blizzards for decades because of this piece of plastic. Barbie was a money machine, a money making phenomenon beyond any doll, beyond almost any toy ever imagined in the history of the planet. Very little in this world has brought in anything close to what Barbie brought in in the way of cash. This piece of plastic was an absolute phenomenon and I went through my life oblivious. My children, the ones I have fathered, are boys. I never experienced having a daughter and so Barbies have never been in my house when The Barbie movie came out, I did not watch it. Why? Because I had zero interest in Barbie. 0. It was not part of my world. But when Tarplee hit wrote a book called Barbieland the Unauthorized History, I finally got a little curious. I read a review of her book in the New York Times just recently and that really piqued my interest. So I got the book and I read it and my eyes opened up to a wild, untamed, surreal, bizarre world. Barbie Land is what I'm going to talk about today. Barbie Land. Mishki's going to talk about Barbie Land. But in talking about it, I want you to think about what is really being talked about here. All the crazy, unfathomable things that make this world seem so wondrously strange. This book is about so many things. Most of it makes a man shake his head. Life is a zany mystery, people. All one can do is marvel. Anyway, I want to bring you the world of Barbieland through this book and through an interview with its author. Tarplee Hitt is a New York based journalist. She's editor at Drift magazine. She's known for her cultural reporting on money, on media, on society, for various publications including the New Yorker, the Daily Beast, Gawker, the New York Times. She worked for the Daily Beast and Gawker, covering culture and finance. And she has been published in the Guardian Book Forum, Paris Review. I, however, am here to talk to her about her first book, Barbie Land, the Unauthorized. Tarpley Hitt, glad to have you here.

[Tarpley Hitt]

Thanks so much for having me.

[Tommy Mischke]

I want to start by asking you what you think this book is about, because I think Barbie is almost a peripheral figure in this book. To me, this book was about, to varying degrees, America, human nature, ruthless drive, unbridled capitalism. It was about gender, it was about sexuality, it was about persuasion, it was about marketing. It was about how weird people are, how absolutely bizarre in a hundred different ways. And yeah, there's a doll in there somewhere.

[Tarpley Hitt]

I'm glad you felt that way. That's definitely what I was going for. I mean, it's hard to write the biography of an inanimate object, so it was going to inevitably go in other directions. But there's just so many truly hilarious and vaguely sinister stories where Barbie's at the center of them. So it's sort of about that. But yeah, there's a lot of sort of zany personalities who show up.

[Tommy Mischke]

One thing your book is not about really, it's not about children. There are children in it, on the periphery and without kids. This Wild story never gets told. But this is a very adult book about adult things. And you have to endlessly remind yourself as you read it that we're talking about toys here, that this book is about a toy, a silly toy. So much of the time that seems impossible to believe. It matches the kind of things you would read about if you were reading about Defense Department stuff.

[Tarpley Hitt]

Totally. I mean, that's one of the things that really cracks me up about the toy industry is that from the outside it seems like this really cheery, innocent world of play. But in reality, it's the same as so many other industries where there's insane backstabbing and drug filled, crazy, insane parties. But instead of talking about their portfolio, they're still talking about a portfolio, but it's a portfolio of like tiny trucks.

[Tommy Mischke]

You set it up early as a topic that is going to be for some of these people, life and death, certainly financial life and death, career life and death. You set it up early that way by bringing in the original Toy King prior to Ruth Handler, who is the dominant figure in Barbieland, the creator of Barbie and this force. Throughout the book, I got to a point where I had to go to YouTube and just see her. I ended up watching her on the Merv Griffin show from long, long ago. A lot of people probably don't even remember the Merv Griffin show, but I had to see her being interviewed. I think it was 79 because there were times reading about Ruth Handler that I thought, this sounds like a Citizen Kane type figure. This doesn't sound like a mother and a wife. At times she didn't sound female because of her disregard for other females, her disdain for other females. But prior to her was this other guy. Speaking of Citizen Kane, like figures, when you start the book, you start out talking about America's Toy king, a guy named Lewis Marx. Before we ever get to Barbie and Mattel and how that company is run, I'm just enamored with this Louis Marx guy. You call him the Henry Ford of the toy industry. He specialized in small tin playsets and toy soldiers. He made novelty figures of famous and infamous men. Eisenhower, MacArthur, Robert E. Lee. Five foot four, Lewis Marx could make himself seem much larger. He was an imposing figure, one friend recalled. When you were with him, you felt his vibration. He was considered America's Toy king. He lived in a Georgian mansion, a white pillared estate, nine fireplaces, 14 baths, 16 dogs, tennis court, caretakers, cottage. In the fall, he would drain his swimming pool, fill it with lawn furniture and host meetings at the deep End. He never believed in advertising. This is the toy king of the 30s, 40s, 50s. In 1955, his company grossed 50 million. He spent $312 on ads. I read that and I thought, that's impossible. I would have argued in America, it is impossible to gross $50 million in retail and not advertise.

[Tarpley Hitt]

The American toy industry before the 20th century wasn't really industrialized. It hadn't really caught up with toy industries elsewhere. There were mom and pop and regional businesses, but there weren't toy empires the way there were in Germany and France. And so a lot of toys in America were imported. And then World War I breaks out. German imports are embargoed. Now there's this market gap. And all of these industrial toy men pop up and start to organize and they form the first trade association. And so Louis Marx at that time, he's in his early 20s, and he realizes that you could just sort of make a toy that's already pretty popular, but make it more cheaply and then sell it more cheaply, and people are going to buy that product instead. Throughout his career, you can see him taking someone else's idea and making it more cheaply and then making more money off of it. So part of the lack of advertising, I suspect, is just that people were kind of familiar with the ideas of his toys because they were seeing them other places.

[Tommy Mischke]

When you did that, when you took a toy, copied it and made it cheaper, weren't there patent infringement issues?

[Tarpley Hitt]

There definitely were, and he litigated a lot of things like that, but a lot of toys weren't. It was harder to bring a copyright case against about a toy. In the early 20th century, a lot of courts didn't side in favor of patent holders. It was actually pretty hard to say. The features of this miniature truck are specific to my miniature truck. The judge is saying that just looks like a truck.

[Tommy Mischke]

10% of all toys sold in the entire United States at one point were his toys. And there are a lot of kids buying toys in America. And he's this incredibly wealthy toy maker without seemingly a creative bone in his body.

[Tarpley Hitt]

He's also, he's immensely powerful. He is close to the levers of power in a way that is really insane. He basically runs Eisenhower's presidential campaign and is one of the head fundraisers. And he's friends with all these five star generals. The head of the CIA, Beatles Smith is one of his best friends. All of his kids are named for five star generals.

[Tommy Mischke]

Ruth Handler comes along. It's her and her husband Right. Together start Mattel.

[Tarpley Hitt]

Yeah.

[Tommy Mischke]

And they start out in a garage.

[Tarpley Hitt]

Yeah. They start off in an old laundry. They get it for 50 bucks. They establish themselves as sort of a regional toy shop. They have a little miniature piano that does well. And then one of their big hits is a ukulele that they called the UKA Doodle. But then that's where they sort of learn that in the toy industry, theft is the main strategy. They show it, bring it out to market, and then when they get to Toy Fair, which is the big expo where everyone's sort of showing off their new ideas for the next year, this other company, Knickerbocker Toys, has just straight up copied their ukulele and is charging way less for it. And that really steals the handlers against theft. They become sort of champions of the idea of originality. Their rules are like, the idea must be new. The idea cannot be taken from somewhere else. They have these informal bylaws and they patent everything. And they become extremely paranoid about IP theft.

[Tommy Mischke]

When they do have success, they watch people steal it. And of course, the king, the toy king, Louis Marx, has stolen all his life. So they became not only interested in creating their own ideas and not stealing, but as you say, becoming so secretive. And the book starts out there. The book starts out with this secretive world that is in California, surrounded by other extremely secretive corporations and companies that are tied into the U.S. military.

[Tarpley Hitt]

Yeah. I mean, when I went to visit the headquarters, which is the opening scene of the book, is me getting kicked out of Mattel hq. I'm looking around and literally on three sides, it's like Raytheon, Lockheed and then Metalla in the middle of all these.

[Tommy Mischke]

Defense contractors, as seemingly walled off, as seemingly secure. It's a fortress. Yeah, there's nothing pretty about it. It has kind of this concrete, militaristic sort of appearance. Is that a fact?

[Tarpley Hitt]

Yeah. I mean, it's a very bleak landscape over there. If you've ever been to El Segundo, it's very bleak.

[Tommy Mischke]

There are times when you're talking about Mattel, I think you're talking about a CIA operation or MI6. This is where you have to remind yourself time and time again, reading Barbieland, that we're talking about a toy here. The stakes endlessly seem high. The secretive ways of operating, the espionage, the leaks, the attempts to stop leaks, the security, the lawyers involved. It's high stakes stuff with this silly little doll because billions of dollars are at stake. Barbie comes along when 1960, 1959. 59 is Marx King in 59.

[Tarpley Hitt]

He's on the COVID of Time magazine declared the Toy King in 1955. And so he's still doing really well when Barbie comes along. But Barbie's success he is aware of and not thrilled by. And he knows that Barbie is based on this German toy. He has a lot of contacts in Germany.

[Tommy Mischke]

For people who don't know, Germany is the toy manufacturing capital.

[Tarpley Hitt]

For hundreds of years, they industrialized way before the US which is why we were buying all their toys. So the German doll that Barbie is based on, Bill Lilly, is basically like the Mickey Mouse of post war Europe. She's a doll, but she's also a mascot. And on all this merchandise and she's sort of the face of this right wing tabloid called Bild Zeitung, which is sort of the German equivalent of like the Daily Mail or the New York Post. It's pretty conservative, it's pretty sensational. And they have this sort of bodacious blond cartoon character who, you know, there's a new comic every day. But she's also on all the news kiosks saying, like, buy the paper, you know, and she gets a movie. She. She gets a movie. They hold a national contest to find the woman who looks most like this cartoon character. So she's a really big deal when Barbie comes out. And so Marx is familiar with this, and so he teams up with the Germans, the German makers of. Of Bil. Lily, and says, give me a license for this doll, bring it to the US and we'll take down Barbie. And so he starts making reproductions of the original doll in the US under different names. And so you have this sort of like market war between all these dolls that look pretty much exactly alike.

[Tommy Mischke]

Here's what I don't understand. This invention in Germany, this Lily is or is not an actual figure you can hold in your hand.

[Tarpley Hitt]

Oh, she's a very physical doll. So she starts as a cartoon character and then she becomes so popular she starts getting fan mail. They start thinking like, wouldn't it be nice if we had something physical that we could give people a personal advertisement for the paper that would also be a fun tchotchke. So they make these dolls and they're pretty expensive. Most of the people who are buying these dolls are adults at first. They're sort of like novelty gifts. She's kind of like a Betty Boop figure. So guys, a lot of guys buy this doll or there's a car mirror dangling version.

[Tommy Mischke]

It's almost like if in the United States someone had made a doll of Marilyn Monroe.

[Tarpley Hitt]

Exactly, exactly. It's just like that. But then eventually she becomes so popular that anyone buys her and she spreads all across Europe. They're selling her in toy stores, at the airport, at news kiosks. And so this is like a very recognizable, literal doll and cartoon. And then she gets all this other merchandise. There's Lily perfume and Lily champagne, and there's a pop song written about her called the Lily Boogie.

[Tommy Mischke]

There it was, folks, the big money making phenomenon. Build Lily. Before Barbie made a dime, Lily was making lots and lots and lots of dimes for lots of people. Ruth Handler created Mattel with the ethos, let's not steal, let's be original and promptly stole. And just what did that theft bring? Hold on to your hats, campers. Back after this. You're lying awake at three in the morning not because something's wrong, because you don't know if something's wrong. Your 401k, your IRA. You're not sure if you should be doing something about it all or doing nothing. And every article you read contradicts the last one. You're thinking about money and your future. This is where most financial advisors tell you, don't worry, I'll handle it. Trust me. Josh Arnold has spent 40 years doing something else. He explains it until that 3am panic becomes 3pm clarity. Josh Arnold doesn't manage your confusion, he eliminates it. Call him for a 48 minute free consultation over the phone. No obligation whatsoever. 952-925-5608.

[Bernie Lauer]

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[Tommy Mischke]

Grandpa sold cars in the 1920s. Ford's Concord Street, South St. Paul. His son, who worked with him in the 20s, opened up his own dealership when JFK was president. 1963. The son's name was Red. Now it's the grandkids running four different dealerships, Tommy and Jimmy. In South St. Paul and Stillwater, you can find a brand new Dodge Chrysler Jeep in Waconia, a brand new Ford in Forest Lake, brand new Buick or gmc. And used cars of every make and model at all of those locations. What they're most proud of is customer satisfaction ratings second to no one else. They're also proud of the fact that families have purchased cars from them in multiple generations. This isn't corporate ownership. This isn't private equity. This is a family that's been earning trust since before your grandparents bought their first car. Generations of proof. Learn all about [e-mail]. You did a lot of research, a lot of research, and you uncovered a lot of information that makes it pretty obvious that the story that Ruth Handler wanted to pitch, that she came up with Barbie wasn't close to accurate. And she more or less gets caught running into learning about this Bill Lily realizing the popularity of it, looking at it, analyzing it, thinking about it. It would have been very easy for her to say she got the idea from Build Lilly. It wouldn't be that weird because you could still argue that she was going in a different direction with it. She was going solely in the direction of a kid's toy, a kid's doll.

[Tarpley Hitt]

And she could have at least made the doll look a little different, right? Like if you look at the two dolls side by side, these look like basically identical dolls. So if she wanted to say, oh, I was inspired by this doll and then I took it in another direction, she could, I don't know, maybe change things up a tad more. But instead she pretends that she came up with this exclusively on her own.

[Tommy Mischke]

She was so much about creating this false narrative about Mattel about the doll. Once she did have this Barbie thing going, she must have realized that there was nothing else she was going to come up with that was the bank account this doll represented. So the energy and effort and secrecy and litigation that was going to be involved with this was going to all be necessary because this was her life's big cash in. This was the one. Mattel would do many other things, but Barbie clearly became the thing that could just keep giving because there were so many ways to stretch out the marketing with this. Multiple Barbies, multiple wardrobes, multiple themes, the multiple, multiple, multiple that didn't exist in other toys. A toy in 1957, generally it was a one off. There weren't versions of it endlessly, year after year, Barbie was the gift that kept giving. I assume it became obvious that this might have no end. This particular toy internally they called her.

[Tarpley Hitt]

Our lady of Perpetual Income.

[Tommy Mischke]

You talk about this in the book the Gillette Rule. Why was it called that?

[Tarpley Hitt]

The guy who founded Gillette Razors, amazing name. His name is King Camp Gillette. He is a really interesting guy because he's basically this inventor who's a door to door salesman. He's always making something or other. But he's also a progressive reformer type who writes a lot of pretty ambitious books about how to fix wealth inequality. His big book that he's writing at the beginning of the 20th century is called the human drift. And he says a lot of things people would agree with today, which is like, it's vile to concentrate all the wealth in the hand of a small elite few. And we've got to figure out a way to organize society where everyone gets enough money to have food and shelter. But his solution for that is that everyone will move to a giant mega city powered by Niagara Falls. And that will be like perfectly geometrical. All the buildings will be hexagons. It's a really zany, zany book. There's at one point, at the end, he writes like a seven page long verse from the point of view of Satan about how he invented capitalism to keep alight the fires of hell.

[Tommy Mischke]

This is the inventor of the disposable razor.

[Tarpley Hitt]

Yes. So he writes this book about how we're going to destroy capitalism by all moving to Niagara Falls. And then in the middle of that, he comes up with a patent for the first disposable razor blade. A business model that is attributed to him is this idea that you sell the razor handle for relatively cheap, but then everyone has to come back and buy blades. So you mark up the blades, give them the razor, sell them the blades.

[Tommy Mischke]

And with Barbie, what you can take from that is sell them the doll and, and then sell them endless wardrobes.

[Tarpley Hitt]

Endless new outfits, accessories, new jobs, new houses. No one has just one Barbie. No girl has one Barbie. 30 Barbies.

[Tommy Mischke]

Up until Barbie comes along, a doll in America is a Raggedy Ann or a small baby doll or a teddy bear. There certainly wasn't anything like an adult woman. Does Ruth Handler get credit for realizing kids would love this? Does she at least get credit for that?

[Tarpley Hitt]

I think what Ruth really understood was you could sort of project onto it any personality you wanted, any context you wanted, and then selling the accessories that fit any of those contexts.

[Bernie Lauer]

Right.

[Tarpley Hitt]

So, like it's 1959. We have these sort of competing ideas of womanhood at the time. There's this sort of Donna Reed housewifey person, and then there's this more career girl type trope that's emerging. And in the first year of Barbie, there were outfits that sort of appealed to every kind of outlook. So there's one that comes in a wedding dress. So if you're sort of a more traditional Donna Reed type customer, you get that one. But there's also a Barbie who goes to college, and there's also, you know, Barbies who have jobs and elegant Barbies and sort of more girl next door high school Barbies. So she was sort of Girl creating a vision of what an every woman might be that people could tailor to their particular interest.

[Tommy Mischke]

At what point is Barbie a wild success for mattel, invented in 1959? When is it a cash cow?

[Tarpley Hitt]

She debuts at Toy Fair in March of 1959, and then no one buys it. And so Ruth is kind of bummed out. She actually cries. She pinned all of her hopes and dreams on this one doll. Doesn't seem like it's going to work. They bring in this crazy marketer. Ernest Dichter. Sells himself as a Freudian protege. I mean, and there's reasons for that. He was, you know, trained as a psychoanalyst in Austria. But his idea is he's going to sort of bring Freud into the market research. So he does a study on Barbie, and they're worried that Barbie is too sexy and that parents aren't going to buy this doll. And Dichter, because of his own personal inclinations, and also Freud, he thinks every underlying impulse is guided by sex drive. He thinks soap. He does a research report on soap, and he concludes that soap is all about caressing yourself. And it's the only time the American male gets to caress himself, right? So he sees Barbie, this sexy doll, and he basically thinks, like, it's not a problem. What you need is a new marketing pitch. And you should tell mothers and fathers that this doll will teach your daughters how to be sexy. Basically, that there's like this material benefit being well groomed and attractive. And all these tomboys will learn how to wear heels from buying this doll. So over that summer, Barbie sales start to pick up, and then they can't even keep up with demand, and they just start selling and selling and selling. Just insane growth, constant once it's taking off.

[Tommy Mischke]

We started out talking about the toy business being about stealing and copying. Clearly, other people say, no big deal. We'll just come up with our own and we'll get into the market just like they are. They're not going to own this thing. And here's the most surprising part of the book to me is you go through a lot of decades, you go through a lot of stories of people trying to take on Barbie. It just never seems to work. Marx would have argued, that's the way I built my whole career. You just copy the damn thing, find a way to make it less expensive, and you take her out. Was it Ruth who gets credit for fending off these battalions coming at her from all directions by being ruthlessly shrewd? Because it doesn't seem like it should have been that hard to come up with another Barbie type doll and at least get a third of the market. This is from your book. Marx wasn't the only toy maker who tried to replicate Barbie's success. Ideal toy companies. Mitzi turned into Tammy, who spawned Misty, Pepper and Samantha. There was Babette. There was Annette. There was Janie. There was a doll. Bonnie. There was Wendy. There were Lily clones being put out. Nothing seems to catch. What is everybody getting wrong? Is it the litigation? Is it the lawyers who come out and stop it? Or are people missing what is working for Barbie?

[Tarpley Hitt]

It's all of the above. So Mattel is certainly one of the most aggressive copyright litigants in the 20th century. They are bringing constant cases against various Barbie rivals. So that's part of it. Then also, whenever a competitor puts out a Barbie rival, they can just make a Barbie that's the same as that competitor. One of the examples in the book is in the 80s, Hasbro, who makes GI Joe, has been trying to come up with a Barbie competitor for years. And they spend years working on this doll called Gem Gem Jem and the holograms. People who grew up in the 80s will remember her. She is a rocker and she has this girl band. And Mattel gets wind of this story before the doll comes out, and they marshal all of their resources to coming up with a rocker Barbie and beating Jem to market. So by the time Jem launches, Rocker Barbie is already there too.

[Tommy Mischke]

So what's going on there is they've got their spies out everywhere. This is a big part of the book, too. Just the secrecy and the spying and the leaking and this clandestine world of beating the other guy to the next idea and learning about his or her idea. The amount of money they can afford to spend to go after somebody, given how much Barbie produces in revenue, it just breaks other people. They don't have the stomach for fighting as hard because they've just got this fledgling thing they're trying to market. They can't spend the kind of money Mattel can fight, fighting to keep this thing around.

[Tarpley Hitt]

Totally. I mean, there's one, a former Mattel executive who had been up at the top of the food chain at Mattel, went and became president of this company called Kenner, which was a smaller toy company at the time. And he wanted to get into the Barbie fashion doll business. And so he tried to outsmart them. He tried to think of something that Mattel can't copy. And so what he did was he licensed the Miss America pageant. And he thought, if I have the rights to the Miss America pageant. Barbie can't just get the rights to the Miss America pageant. I have the exclusive license. So he makes a bunch of Miss America dolls. But the fact that he has the license does not stop Mattel. They get all of his imported dolls seized at the border and sue him for copyright infringement, and it just breaks him. He eventually wins, but it doesn't matter because he's missed the launch date. All of the press about these dolls had sort of petered off because they never materialized because they were literally in prison at the border.

[Tommy Mischke]

When you think of this level of defense and commercial warfare, you have to tell yourself we are talking about the most successful toy concept in history.

[Tarpley Hitt]

I think Lego eclipsed Barbie a couple years ago. But, you know, is there any toy symbol that is as familiar and ubiquitous? I mean, she's like the McDonald's golden arches or like Coca Cola.

[Tommy Mischke]

The other unique thing here is when Fortune surveyed the thousands and thousands of executives at America's top companies, 6,500 companies. Ruth Handler was one of only 11 women. So the other thing that just screams in this book is how rare it is in this warfare, in this incredible world of espionage and this world of the stakes being such that people act so cutthroat to one another. She's in the trenches with a bunch of ruthless guys and she holds her own. I sometimes wonder if she just decides to adopt the worst of masculine traits because she gets to a point where she doesn't even seem to like women. She's not interested in women that much. She almost works against their best interests totally.

[Tarpley Hitt]

To be an executive in 1945, a woman executive in 1945, and then President of the company a decade later at the top of the executive world. I mean, it requires a certain amount of being crass, being a ball buster to sort of break into this all male field. And I think a lot of her qualities come from sort of things she had to adopt to get her foot in the door. But then you're totally right, she doesn't like women. She says that openly. She I thought women were boring. I always preferred to be around men. I liked being the only woman at the table. You know, it made me feel special and unique. And so when she's at the top and she has the opportunity to sort of hold out a hand and help other people in the door, she does not take it. She advises a Nixon council to make a policy recommendation that the private sector should not adopt maternity leave. Nixon was going to say private sector companies should treat maternity leave like any other Disability. And Ruth Handler single handedly says, no, don't do that. So yeah, she really, she wasn't an ally until she got a mastectomy and was pushed out of her company. And then the only people who would hang out with her were women.

[Tommy Mischke]

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[Bernie Lauer]

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[Tommy Mischke]

That's a rough part of the book. She goes in for a biopsy and she wakes up in a tremendous amount of pain and they've taken one of her breasts and then some back then the surgery was far more brutal and crude than today. That was the moment in the book where I shifted to feeling terribly, terribly sorry for her. After, at times just thinking I would never want to meet this woman, that's why I finally had to go look on YouTube, just to see her, I had such a strange feeling about her and about this whole world. Here's just a line from your book that I read. This was in a section of your book talking about how Ruth Handler was not a feminist and was not interested in the feminist movement. And there was no idea that Barbie was there to empower young girls. That wasn't what this was about. And there were a lot of people who got upset, a lot of women who got upset with this crazy, unreachable ideal of a grown woman that Barbie represented and how absurd it was to have this as a model. And then at one point in your book here, there's this sentence. Not all of Barbie's critics were feminists in the press. One father described his almost pathological hatred for the doll that he called that bitch. What the hell's that about? So men were turning on Barbie. She was craven, pornographic, lascivious, Another parent told the Wall Street Journal. The archetype of everything that's wrong with American culture. In a sense, you write, Mattel had sold Barbie too well. They had pitched this doll as a good influence on girls. Now that she was established and influential, customers were wondering how good her influence was. And she got so big that it moved beyond a doll. Suddenly Mattel had to take on the world of politics, morality, culture. The subject gets bigger than the doll, and it ends up just being about gender and ideals and representation and money, money, money, money.

[Tarpley Hitt]

Barbie, just by virtue of being this sort of blank canvas where they were trying to appeal to as many people as possible, winds up absorbing all these cultural trends in America in the 20th century and spitting them back out at people.

[Tommy Mischke]

I'm reading again from your book about Hasbro. Poor Hasbro. Endlessly trying to figure out this Barbie game, win this damn thing, or at least make inroads. They spent decades trying to find some rival to Barbie. They had a super fashion model named Leggy. I think I would have gone with a different name myself. They had a line of Charlie's Angels figurines. They had a collection of hippie dolls called the World of Love. The dolls names, Love, Peace, Flower, Soul, and Adam.

[Tarpley Hitt]

That killed me. What is Adam doing?

[Tommy Mischke]

What's he doing in there? They just figured we got to get a guy in there somewhere. Actually, I was Always intrigued. At one point, Barbie gets a best friend. And who's her best friend? Midge. Barbie's best friend had to have a name that didn't sound like she'd be a rival of Barbie's, that there wouldn't be any kind of jealousy. And there was this thing in the name Midge that made her sound like, here's the best comparison I can give you. When Mary Tyler Moore needed a best friend, she got Rhoda. There's something about the difference between the name Mary and Rhoda that is the same as between Barbie and Midge. They're not going to be really feminine rivals. They're not going to be beauty rivals. They're kind of going to be just best buddies. And so they're gonna have names like Rhoda and Midge.

[Tarpley Hitt]

Right. It sounds like a little old lady Midge. Rhoda.

[Tommy Mischke]

And I do sometimes wonder if a man would have ever come up with Barbie.

[Tarpley Hitt]

Well, one of my favorite characters in the book is this guy, Jack Ryan. He used to design missiles for Raytheon.

[Tommy Mischke]

The Defense Department connections are so strange to me.

[Tarpley Hitt]

And there is kind of a revolving door between Mattel and various defense contractors. So he patents Barbie, the first Mattel patent of Barbie. His name's on it. And so his heirs have been arguing for years that he was the true inventor of Barbie. Him and Ruth were always squabbling over this. I mean, Jack Ryan's story actually gets quite sad. I mean, he's a very zany character, throws 150 parties a year, has a bajillion wives and girlfriends. He's married to Zsa Gabor at one point. But it all goes downhill and he kills himself. He shoots himself in the head. And right after he dies, a Times article refers to him as Barbie's inventor. And Ruth Handler, at this time in her 90s, writes in and says, he's not the inventor of Barbie. I am. I did it. He's not very original.

[Tommy Mischke]

Wouldn't it be fair to say that the idea for Barbie was Ruth's, obviously stolen from the Germans. But again, the Germans with Bill Lilly didn't have a kid's doll, so she wants a kid's doll and comes up with the idea of an adult woman, A woman with adult features. And then Ryan is assigned the task of coming up with what it's going to look like. Right? Right.

[Tarpley Hitt]

Yeah. He's the one who goes to Japan and finds all the manufacturers to the extent that anyone, quote, unquote, invented this doll that was very much explicitly stolen. From a German doll. I'm more sympathetic to Ruth's claim, but.

[Tommy Mischke]

You mentioned he was married to Zsa Zsa Gabor and I heard you say, I think it was in an interview that he gets married to Zsa Zsa Gabor and on his wedding night he wants to go out partying. So he gets a fill in for her.

[Tarpley Hitt]

Yeah, he hires a local gigolo.

[Tommy Mischke]

Please tell me that's a one off on planet Earth that that has never ever happened anywhere else on one's wedding night. By 1995, Barbie's likeness was everywhere. Her name inserted into more songs than could fill a trunk load of cassettes. David Bowie had dropped her name in Young Americans. Joni Mitchell crooned about perfect airbrushed angel like a Barbie doll. The lunatics imagined the doll balding, post mastectomy. Rick Monroe gave her a drug habit. Mattel had made the doll easy to adapt, a template that could be altered for any scenario. Thus fat and ugly Barbie appeared Big Dyke Barbie appeared mentally challenged Barbie appeared HIV positive Barbie suicide bomber Barbie Exorcist Barbie. A group called the Barbie Disinformation Organization stamped home printed stickers on boxes across the Northeast, transforming Barbie's style and salon into Barbie's lesbian barbershop, which gave the doll a mullet. Just endless mirroring of our strange culture. We're winding down, but I want to get to something that was, in my view, based on your book, the one solid run at Barbie and that was the campaign involving the Bratz dolls. Can you talk about that?

[Tarpley Hitt]

In the 90s, Barbie was going gangbusters, doing super well and then her sales peak in 1997 and she's on this decline. And there's this sense that Barbie is not cool and she's losing her cachet with kids. And when Bratz hits the scene in 2001, it is a nightmare for Mattel. Many listeners will remember the Bratz dolls. They were those girls with low slung pants and giant heads and they were a little edgier than Barbie and they sold super well right away. I mean, they eclipsed Barbie as the number one fashion doll. And people internally at Mattel are freaking out. They refer to the rise of Bratz as a quote, rival led genocide, Barbie genocide. And there's a memo that becomes a big piece of evidence in the Bratz legal battle called the House on Fire memo, where literally Mattel executives are saying like, our house is on fire. Barbie is in dustbins nationwide and Bratz is conquering her beneath her giant feet. And so they get an anonymous Letter saying, look into the guy who designed Bratz and I think you'll find something interesting. And they do some digging and they find out that the designer of Bratz had been employed by Mattel a week before he started working for the company that makes Bratz, which is mga. And so they sue him, alleging that he breached his contract and that he was, you know, consorting with the enemy on Mattel's dime. And what starts off as a simple, seemingly simple contract dispute, which is like, did he come up with this Bratz idea at Mattel or did he come up with it at MGA, turns into a 20 year long legal battle with two trials and literally millions and millions and millions of pages of evidence. And it's in the course of that lawsuit a lot of dirt comes out on Mattel, including that they do have this sort of CIA like entity called the Market Intelligence Department where they have spies who pretend to be toy buyers and come up with fake toy companies that they work for and fake business cards and fake receipts and fake tax returns and sneak into rival companies private exhibitions to like see what their ideas are.

[Tommy Mischke]

Again, the amount of money that's on the line, the amount of money that can be made if you can take Barbie out. The amount of money that can be made if you can save Barbie. And we are talking about billions. But I think at one point, didn't Mattel actually have a press conference where they said she's breaking up with Ken?

[Tarpley Hitt]

Yeah, they did, they did. And it was right around that same time with the Bratz stuff. They were desperately trying to sort of like gin up press attention for Barbie.

[Tommy Mischke]

We're just talking about a bunch of plastic, but the story you can tell around that plastic. And there were attempts with Barbie actually to alter her body over time, right? Actually change her body into something akin to what would be more what a normal person would look like.

[Tarpley Hitt]

Yeah, well, because there's huge backlash about her body from both sides. I mean, some people think she's too sexy and some people think it's like too PC to change her body or whatever. So they first start messing around with her body size in the 90s. But it's not until 2016 when after the Bratz battle has sort of left them depleted and Barbie's stock is down like crazy and nobody's buying it, they decide to sort of rebrand the doll to appeal to millennial parents. They start to give her all these different body shapes and different hair colors and different eye colors and you can get an amputee Barbie or A wheelchair Barbie or so that she represents more of a broad spectrum of what bodies can look like today.

[Tommy Mischke]

Tons and tons of adults now. Adults collect Barbies, definitely.

[Tarpley Hitt]

The adult market is massive. And the thing about the collector market is you can sell dolls at a way higher price point than you could sell to a six year old. No parent's gonna buy a $170 Barbie for their six year old.

[Tommy Mischke]

Right.

[Tarpley Hitt]

But a 45 year old woman might.

[Tommy Mischke]

The number of lives this doll has, we're talking now about 65 years ago. What other toy can touch that? I sometimes wonder if there are at business schools, entire semester college courses studying this as a retail phenomenon.

[Tarpley Hitt]

There absolutely are. I mean, if you go to the toy store and you try to look for something that was available in 1959, it's like the Slinky, the rubber ball and Barbie. And that's it.

[Tommy Mischke]

$36 billion and counting. The gift that keeps giving Barbie. The book is Barbie Land. The Unauthorized History Tarpley hit is the author. Thank you so much for your time. I've enjoyed the conversation.

[Tarpley Hitt]

Awesome. Thank you. That was so fun.

[Tommy Mischke]

You know what they don't have at the Wellshire Memory Care Center? They don't have soft, maudlin piano music in their commercials. They don't have stock photos of people holding hands at sunset. No one there at the Wellshire calls it a journey. They're on a journey. Here's what they do have at the Wellshire. A memory care center that actually earned its reputation. And instead of buying it with cliches, they have a staff who've been there for years because they want to be, because it's such rewarding work. And they have families who have chosen the Wellshire more than once with loved ones because their experience was so rich, so heartwarming. Most memory care ads sound identical because most memory care facilities are identical. They hire the same consultants, use the same language, make the same promises, and fall short in the same ways. The Wellshire doesn't fit the mold. You need to see it for yourself, discover it for yourself. Tour the Wellshire Memory Care center in Bloomington or Medina. Years ago, I was talking to a woman at a bus stop who didn't seem to be terribly well. Something was a little off with her anyway. She had a Barbie doll in her hand and she said to me, barbie dolls promote unrealistic expectations of women's bodies. Women's heads are much harder to put back on in real life. I learned later that Barbie humor is a genre. There are people who spend quite a bit of time just coming up with Barbie jokes. Like the father coming home from work who wanted to buy a Barbie for his daughter because it was her birthday. Salesman says, we have workout Barbie for 1995, Beach Barbie 1995, Disco Barbie 1995, and divorced Barbie 192 bucks. The guy said, why is divorced Barbie so expensive? And the sales guy says, she got all Ken's accessories. One day, a mother saw her daughter playing with Barbie and GI Joe together. The mom was perplexed. She said, I thought Barbie came with Ken. And the daughter said, no, Barbie comes with GI Joe. She fakes it with Ken. I've heard there's a Barbie comedy club where you can hear nothing but these Barbie jokes from Barbie stand up comedians, all of whom are making one hell of a lot of money. Thanks for listening, everyone. I'll talk to you again next time.