Forever Barbie Read Online Free PDF Page B

company they built. Theirs is the sort of romance that seems to happen only in the movies—or used
     to happen, before the fashion for verisimilitude precluded not only "happily ever after" but "ever after."
    They have not grown to resemble each other, as many couples do. Ruth is compact and gregarious. She marches into a room with
     a combination of authority and bounce, rather like Napoleon in pump-up, air-sole Nikes. And indeed, on the two occasions I
     met her, once at home and once at Beverly Hills' Hillcrest Country Club, she was wearing sneakers and a stylish warm-up suit.
     Her hair is short and steely. She can be irresistibly charming; she's cultivated the ability to listen as if you were the
     most fascinating conversationalist in the world. But if your talk takes a turn she doesn't like, she can wither you with a
     glance.
    "When she walks, the earth shakes," said her son Ken, a philanthropist, entrepreneur, and father of three who lives in New
     York's West Village. "She's a little woman, seventy-six years old, and the earth shakes."
    Elliot is tall, lanky, and laconic. He lets his wife do most of the talking, occasionally interrupting with a sardonic aside.
     He dresses as casually as Ruth, wearing short-sleeve polo shirts on the two occasions I met him. Very little, I suspect, gets
     by him: he strikes me as a keen observer.
    Elliot's paintings hang on nearly every wall of the apartment. One composition depicts an orchid on a mirrored table; in the
     foreground, blue and white jewels spill opulently from a case. Another shows voluptuous red and green apples in front of a
     city scape. Yet another has as its principal element a giant pigeon. Often, these forms are displayed against a flat cerulean
     sky with clouds—a sky that recalls Magritte's and that, as the objects are painted many times larger than life and in intense
     Day-Glo colors, heightens their surreality.
    There was a time, a little less than ten years ago, when the room was a museum, housing the Handlers' multimillion-dollar
     collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings. A wintry Norwegian landscape by Claude Monet contrasted with
     brighter, sunnier spots by Camille Pissarro, Fernand Leger, and Andre Derain. Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Baigneuse and Picasso's Baigneuse au Bord de la Mer shared wallspace with Amedeo Modigliani's Tete de Jeune Fille. But considering whose success made the collection possible, perhaps the most intriguing canvas was Moise Kisling's La Jeune Femme Blonde: a standing female nude, slightly stouter than Barbie, with her hair pulled back in a Barbie-esque ponytail.
    In 1985, however, at the height of the art market, the Handlers put their paintings on the block at Sotheby's in New York.
     "One day I said, 'This place is no good for an art collection'—too much glass, too much window, too much daylight," Elliot
     explained with a smile. "We had to keep the drapes closed. So I said, 4Aw, to hell with it, I'm painting now.' "
    If one were to believe in astrology, as many Californians do, one would suspect something strange and powerful was going on
     in the heavens over Hawthorne in 1955. Not only had Mattel caused an earthquake in the toy business, but the company hired
     Jack Ryan, a wildly eccentric, Yale-educated electrical engineer whose sexual indiscretions, extravagant parties, and sometimes
     autocratic management style would shake the company from within.
    For Elliot Handler, hiring Jack was a great triumph. Elliot had initially met him when he pitched Mattel an idea for a toy
     transistor radio. Children's toys were not, however, Ryan's forte; a member of the Raytheon team designing the Sparrow and
     Hawk missiles, he made playthings for the Pentagon. But Elliot sensed that Jack had what Elliot needed: Jack knew about torques
     and transistors; he understood electricity and the behavior of molecules; he had the space-age savvy to make Elliot's high-tech
     fantasies real. Elliot courted Ryan for