By Robin Gerber
On the afternoon of December 11, 1978, a woman in her sixties with well-coiffed, snow white hair climbed the steps of the Federal Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, her husband at her side. Looming over the couple, the eighteen story building’s rectangular tower sat encased by smaller buildings all clad in pale pink terra cotta. As the workplace for government and law, the complex boasted an ordered geometry. Identical seals of the United States soared fifty feet over the two entrances, their great bronze eagle medallions visible as Ruth and Elliot Handler entered.
Following Ruth’s lawyers, the couple entered Judge Takasugi’s cavernous courtroom on the second floor. Elliot sat in the audience as Ruth took her place at the defense table. The handsome young Assistant U.S. Attorney John Vandevelde, from the Special Prosecutions section, had settled himself at the prosecution table when the bailiff called the courtroom to order. Ruth’s sentencing hearing was about to begin.
Ruth was not the first celebrity defendant to carry a worried frown into this Los Angeles courthouse. Clark Gable and Charlie Chaplin had both argued paternity cases there in the 1940’s. Betty Davis had forced Warner Brothers to defend themselves over a breach of contract suit in the second floor courtrooms. Only a few years earlier, the federal government prosecuted Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst for the RAND Corporation, for leaking the Pentagon Papers. But there had never been a felon like Ruth.
She founded Mattel, the biggest toy company in the world; created Barbie, the world-famous iconic doll, and helped build the modern toy industry. At a time when few women had any corporate power, she was at the top ranks. She got there not through ascendancy or heredity, but by creation of a company that she controlled. She had also allowed padding and other falsifying of the company books, and her protestations of innocence, her refusal to take responsibility, made the prosecution determined to push for a severe sentence.
Ruth had been well represented, but she still sat in anxious silence. Herbert “Jack” Miller, a powerhouse lawyer from Washington, D.C. headed her defense team. He had served four years as Assistant Attorney General in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice under Attorney General Robert Kennedy. There he helped convict Teamsters Union boss Jimmy Hoffa and later represented President Nixon in the Watergate tapes case. That day, Miller, as always, wore the PT109 tie clasp given to him by President Kennedy.
Two months earlier, after various legal skirmishes had failed to defeat the charges, Ruth had pleaded nolo contendere, or no contest, to federal fraud charges involving Mattel Toys. She knew the charges could land her in jail, a fate she hoped to forestall with her plea. The Justice Department, however, had other ideas. To them she was a criminal; a woman who lied and defrauded people. Beloved by fiercely loyal employees, and the woman who had given children countless hours of fun, she had also eased the pain and embarrassment of hundreds of breast cancer survivors with the prosthetics she manufactured after her own mastectomy. For prosecutors, however, she had committed a federal crime. That crime was all the prosecution, or the shareholders who had lost millions of dollars, cared about.
Ruth anxiously watched Judge Takasugi, hoping the unreadable jurist would be lenient. Before him sat a wife and grandmother beset by illness, beaten down by years of litigation and terrified she would be incarcerated.
How had it come to this moment? She and Elliot had celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary that summer. How had she gone from that time of hope and promise so many years before to this moment of fear and despair? She had conquered so many challenges. She had controlled her destiny, fought for it, gambled with it, but always she had won—until now. Try as she might, she could not find anything in her vast arsenal of talent or charm or brains or guts that could help her.
The courtroom fell into a cold, expectant silence. Judge Takasugi was ready to announce Ruth’s fate.
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An excerpt from Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her, reprinted with permission from HarperCollins.
Robin Gerber is the author of Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her and Leadership the Eleanor Roosevelt Way: Timeless Strategies from the First Lady of Courage.
