The Real Story Behind Barbie: Chatham Author Chronicles Father’s Struggle In New Book

Author Ann P. Ryan of Chatham, the very first child to play with a Barbie doll back in the 1950s, has just released a fascinating book titled “Dad, Barbie & Me: An Insider Biography.”

 Ann’s late father Jack Ryan worked as a designer for Mattel. While there, he patented over 1,000 toys and products. He is credited with inventing Chatty Cathy and Hot Wheels. But he is most famously referred to as “the father of Barbie.”

 Since 1959, the year the iconic doll was introduced, over a billion Barbie dolls have been sold, according to Wikipedia. Today, it is estimated that more than 100 dolls are sold per minute. And let’s not forget the 2023 movie “Barbie,” billed as the first live-action Barbie film.

 Ann has lived in Chatham full-time since 2017. Prior to that, “my family summered here for generations,” she said in an email interview last week. “I feel as if Chatham chose me long before I chose it.” She currently serves on several town boards and committees.

 As well as a book about her father’s professional accomplishments, this is the story of a daughter growing up in the shadow of a charming, flamboyant and sometimes disturbed father. The 1960s setting in Los Angeles’ movie community adds further zest. While Ann’s mother — whose nickname was “Barbie” -— was Jack’s first wife, his second wife was Zsa Zsa Gabor. That marriage lasted for about a year and a half. Altogether Jack married five times.

 A 1950 Yale graduate with a degree in engineering, Jack went to work at Mattel in 1955, moving his family to Southern California. In 1962 the family of four — Jack, Barbie, Ann and her younger sister Diana — moved into what was known as the five-acre Warner Baxter Estate on Nimes Road in Bel Air. Immediately, Jack began radical and unending renovations to the enormous house that everyone referred to as “the castle.” The castle became the setting for every-other-night parties with Los Angeles luminaries and stars such as Debbie Reynolds and Tommy Smothers. Ann’s mother took tennis lessons on the house’s private court with Audrey Hepburn.

 “Everyone got to go along for this fantastic journey — and it was all fun and games, until it wasn’t,” Bradley Justice Yarbrough, an expert on Barbie, writes in his foreword to “Dad, Barbie & Me.” Glittery and manic as this life was, cracks developed, both personal and professional. Jack and his wife Barbie divorced in 1971. The year before that, in 1970, Jack had left Mattel, a company founded by Ruth and Elliot Handler. By the early 1970s, Ann writes, the Handlers were intent upon breaking Jack’s patents and “they were unwilling to continue paying the royalties he was generating” on Barbie and the many other toys he had invented. “They were stripping his name from the toys that had changed the world.”

Jack sued Mattel for $25 million in unpaid royalties. (That’s nearly $160 million today.) The suit dragged on for years, undermining Jack’s physical and mental health. He became paranoid and unpredictable. He drank too much. He hoarded guns.

The Handlers were forced to resign from Mattel in the mid-1970s. A federal SEC investigation found the company had committed securities fraud — “including manipulating the books specifically to avoid paying my father the royalties he was owed,” Ann writes.

Ruth Handler entered a no-contest plea on charges of conspiracy and mail fraud in 1978. “After she left Mattel in disgrace, she spent the rest of her life rebuilding her public image by positioning herself as the sole creative force behind Barbie.” That story wrote Jack out of the picture. (While Jack eventually received a payment of $25 million spread out over 10 years, many online sources still credit Ruth Handler with inventing Barbie.)

Sadly, on the day that Jack died, his TV was tuned to an interview with Ruth Handler. “She talked about Barbie and her legacy at length. She didn’t mention him once. [Jack’s] wife told me he was devastated.

 “There are many reasons I wrote this book,” Ann adds. “But putting him back in the record was certainly one of them.”

 “Dad, Barbie & Me” is Ann’s debut book, “though the story has been with me my entire life,” she says. She began writing the book about 14 years ago. But “the real turning point came in 2022 when I launched my podcast, ‘Dream House: The Real Story of Jack Ryan,’ which turned me from a daughter remembering into an investigator.” Podcast interviews with family members, colleagues and people who knew Jack as well as the family archive of her father’s letters and documents preserved by her sister Diana provided what she needed to tell the full story.

Ann collaborated in creating the book with Dawn Dinnan of Watermark Office Services. Dinnan edited and designed the book.

 Ann sums up her father as “brilliant, chaotic, and deeply human.”

 Ann Ryan will sign copies of “Dad, Barbie & Me: An Insider Biography” at Yellow Umbrella Books in Chatham on Saturday, May 23 from noon to 3 p.m.