One morning in 1960, amid the euphoria of Barbie’s first year, Mattel co-founders Ruth and Elliot Handler held a kind of debate. They brought in the toy marketing team. And the ad guys, Cy Schneider and his cohort from Carson/Roberts, thought they were there mostly to listen. The real presence was the exuberant doctor with a shrinking halo of red hair. Ernest Dichter, the self-styled Freudian marketer who claimed to plumb the psyches of the American consumer, was visiting from New York. On this particular day, as Schneider later remembered, the Handlers called him in to discuss a controversy that had been tearing the office apart, dividing old allies and forging unlikely alliances, and which so far seemed to have little prayer for resolution. The hope was that the Freud of Madison Avenue could bring some much-needed clarity to the question of Ken’s penis.
The company had gone public in April, and almost on cue, the Handlers found themselves contending with the public more directly than ever before. It wasn’t just their shareholders; it was the fact that they were big enough to have shareholders, that Mattel had transitioned from a West Coast startup to a national entity with millions of customers, millions of fans, and millions of opinions on what they should do. In a way, Mattel’s problem was its own popularity. The early Barbies had come with a pamphlet, encouraging girls to write to their new doll at her very own address. But few could have predicted how many kids followed through. Letters arrived in such volume that Mattel hired a secretary just to handle the doll’s mail. The outpouring was so intense it seemed to steer Ruth’s decisionmaking. The pamphlet had promised periodic responses, so Mattel began issuing a newsletter, which only compounded the problem—the reaction was “enormous.” The newsletter evolved into a magazine, then a club. “We formed a Barbie Fan Club almost from the pressure,” she said. It became the second-largest girls organization in the world, after the Girl Scouts. These avid Barbie fans were cacophonous, but some cries were louder than others. As Ruth remembered: “There were a tremendous amount of requests for a boy doll.”