Will the actual Barbara Millicent Roberts — aka Barbie — please get up.
She’s definitely not the blonde, tall, and really leggy Margot Robbie, 35, who plays the real-life Barbie within the $100 million live-action “Barbie” movie coming to theaters on July 21.
Depending on who a Barbie fan believes, nevertheless, the real, in-the-flesh Barbie who inspired the doll is either the late Barbie Ryan or the now 82-year-old Barbara Handler Segal.
The 2 origin stories couldn’t be more different.
Either Barbie exists thanks to 1 man’s obsession with the “perfect woman” — or due to an apparently sweet story revolving around a mother’s love for her two children.
But each include far darker sides than the innocent child’s toy would suggest, including orgies, sex toys, embezzlement, AIDS, and suicide.
The battle over who really inspired Barbie only exploded into the open a long time after the doll made her debut on the International Toy Fair in Latest York in 1959.
She was a right away hit: 11 inches tall, long-legged, slim-waisted, perky-breasted and either blonde or brunette, wearing a hand-made black and white swimsuit, and shortly after advertised on The Mickey Mouse Club.
Now at 64 Barbie is likely to be ready for Social Security, and ripe for retirement in a Boca Raton condo, but as an alternative, she continues to make a fortune for Mattel: the corporate’s stock price has soared in recent weeks because of massive hype over the movie.
However the battle over who’s the actual Barbie, and who was her creator, exploded into the open in 1994.
It was then that Ruth Handler published her autobiography, “Dream Doll,” taking credit for naming the doll after her daughter — and almost entirely ignoring the role of Jack Ryan, whose name is on the Barbie patent.
Handler’s Barbie creation story was carved in stone three years after Ryan put a bullet in his head, depressed and physically unwell over long-running financial battles with Handler and Mattel, as he sued for what he saw as his justifiable share of the Barbie thousands and thousands.
In Handler’s book, she essentially claimed she was to Barbie what Walt Disney was to Mickey Mouse: the only real creator.
Ryan, the good former Raytheon missile designer for the Pentagon who designed Barbie from head to toe as Mattel’s vp of design, was practically not mentioned.
I first explored Mattel’s hidden history in my 2009 best-seller, “Toy Monster: The Big, Bad World of Mattel.”
Handler had co-founded Mattel along with her husband Elliot and their business partner Harold “Matt” Matson — Mattel is a portmanteau of Matt and Elliot — and he or she claimed that watching her daughter, Barbara, born in 1941, play with dolls gave her the thought for a real-life looking doll, and a reputation.
And over time, Barbara Handler Segal, now 82, has publicly claimed the title of being “the real-life Barbie.”
She once made a guest appearance on “Oprah” under that title but in interviews has claimed she was “embarrassed” when put next to the doll, especially as a youngster.
Web gossipers have claimed that a recent Barbie trailer for the movie had a transient shot of an elderly woman said to be Barbara Handler chatting with Margot Robbie on a park bench.
But Handler’s breezy claim to have been the mother of Barbie had its own dark side.
The doll she cited as inspiration was one called “Lilli,” a German toy that was the truth is based on a cartoon within the German newspaper Bild a couple of prostitute.
Also within the movie is Ryan Gosling, playing Ken, of Ken Doll fame. Handler said Ken — it was all the time Barbie and Ken within the play world — was based on her son.
It was later revealed the real-life Ken had a secret gay life and had died of AIDS.
After which in 1973, Handler got here under investigation for large-scale fraud at Mattel, and false reporting to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
She resigned in disgrace and later pleaded no contest to a series of charges, earning her a $57,000 tremendous and a couple of,500 hours of community service.
Her husband was also forced out; Handler blamed breast cancer for making her “unfocused.”
Her autobiography staked her claim to being Barbie’s creator, guaranteeing that obituaries when she died in 2002 at 85, would credit her for the doll, but to critics, it was an attempt to jot down Ryan out of history.
His daughter, Ann Ryan, 68, who’s writing a memoir, “Dad, Barbie and Me,” concerning the bizarre Barbie world during which she grew up, and has a podcast called “Dream House, The Real Story of Jack Ryan,” told The Post that Barbie was named after — and based on — her mother: Barbie Ryan.
“My father was all the time obsessive about the image of the right woman, after which he married one whose name happened to be Barbie. The selection of the name for the Barbie doll was my father’s, absolutely, not Ruth Handler’s decision,” Ann Ryan said.
“But after he died” – Ryan committed suicide in 1991 at age 64 two years after a debilitating stroke – “Ruth decided to vary the story.
“My father was dead and wasn’t around to dispute anything that Ruth had written in her book, and it was very frustrating to me and other members of the Ryan family. What she wrote was overwhelming and such a shock. It was all bulls–t.”
In keeping with Ann, her mother, Barbara “Barbie” Ryan was “very flattered” that Barbie had been named after her.
“My mother was this glamorous woman who did some modeling while she was studying at Parsons School of Design. She all the time looked fabulous. Appearance was very necessary to my family, and each my parents all the time desired to project a picture.”
However the storybook marriage resulted in divorce. Ryan had been a swinger who threw orgies in his faux castle in Los Angeles.
He had quite a few affairs and wed 4 more times, including with the “famous for being famous” Hungarian beauty, Zsa Zsa Gabor, who in her prime also might have been a Barbie doll look-alike.
“My father loved Zsa Zsa’s glamour and flamboyance,” Ann says and notes that almost all of the ladies her father was involved with or chased, were Barbie types.
“If you happen to take a look at the ladies he married and the ladies he had significant relations with all of them were modeled on Barbie.”
The press on the time of the short-lived Ryan-Gabor union even noted he had “married his own Barbie doll.”
The wedding went publicly improper, with their honeymoon in Japan marred by Ryan hiring a handsome escort to take Zsa Zsa around Tokyo – and sleep along with her, if she desired — while he did business.
Gabor later wrote in her memoir “One Lifetime is Not Enough” that “removed from constructing a life with me, with one woman, Jack had every intention of continuous his swinging lifestyle.”
Ruth Handler’s embarrassment in any respect the salacious Jack Ryan gossip was one in all the explanations she is claimed to have written her book after he died, sources have claimed.
Ann Ryan says she’s looking forward to the “Barbie” film and believes her father could be, too.
“I feel Margot Robbie’s gorgeous, beautiful, and I absolutely plan to see the movie because Barbie was the largest thing in my father’s life.
“My father could be absolutely thrilled concerning the film, because he was a really theatrical person, and I’m sure he would have desired to play a giant part within the movie’s making.”
As for her book, still in progress, “I don’t want it to be a Mommy Dearest. I need to have the option to have fun my father’s genius and creativity.”
