Even in bed, where he spends many evenings with one or more real-life beautiful dolls, most possessing the attributes of his fantasy doll, Barbie—the long-legged, slim-waisted, pointy-breasted, 11½ inch plastic one that is making him a fortune—the Father of Barbie can always conjure up new ideas; the corny romantic bedroom sunroof is just one. He usually talks his ideas into a tape recorder he carries, or jots them down on a pad he keeps next to his toilet.

While Barbie and other iconic Mattel playthings he’s developed—Chatty Cathy, Ken, Hot Wheels, not to mention the Optigan music-maker, among others—are earning him millions in royalties, his very favorite toy is The Castle. This private kingdom, on more than four acres of expensive turf, underscores the Father of Barbie’s hyperactive narcissism and singular quirkiness and eccentricity.

Literally following the old adage that “a man’s home is his castle,” Ryan transformed what had once been Bel-Air’s second oldest stately home, the staid (by Hollywood standards) 16,000-square-foot manse and grounds of silent-to-talkies Oscar winner Warner Baxter (who underwent a lobotomy to “cure” his arthritis and died not long after), into the Father of Barbie’s own private “once-upon-a-time” theme park.

There’s the high Greek Revival Moorish archway. There’s the wood bridge over the moat that protects the entrance. There are battlements. There are the massive arches guarded by knights in armor. There are the giant stone fireplaces, the leaded glass windows, and the rich wood paneling. There is the massive ballroom with marble floors. There’s the scallop-edged swimming pool with cabanas, and the open dance pavilion with a gazebo top. There’s the tennis court and tennis house (which often is home to one or more ladies of the moment). There’s the circular staircase leading to the tree house, which can serve eight under a chandelier, where the likes of CBS chairman William Paley often enjoys a repast.

The Tom Jones Room, in the lower level of the main house, is reserved for intimate Thursday-night no-utensils dinner bacchanals at which the Father of Barbie presides from an enormous throne that once belonged to the Prince of Parma. (Ryan had originally bought the throne to cover the toilet where he jots his ideas, but it was disappointingly too big for the loo.) His Queen, a different beauty chosen each week, wears the crown used in commercials for Imperial Margarine.

Curiously, many of the adornments in the immense house are fake, like a movie set, because Ryan tends to not finish many of the numerous renovation projects he starts. The pillars supporting the temporary roof of the dance pavilion are made of plywood and are hollow and house playful gofers; the drapes in the main house are made of inexpensive canvas, but painted with ornate gold trimming to give the appearance of being costly; at the end of one room is a big faux fireplace that is skillfully dummied up to look authentic; and some of the asphalt drive-way is painted in such a way as to give the look of stone. On some projects, he had the assistance of a Disneyland designer. “The idea that something was finished would mean that he wouldn’t be able to do anything more with it,” observes a close friend Annie Constantinesco. “So many things were a mockup, and if it went further than that, it stopped being interesting to him because he could always improve on a mockup.”

At one point during the never-ending renovation, the Father of Barbie had ordered expensive oak paneling from the estate of William Randolph Hearst, and had delivered to The Castle spectacular limestone blocks imported from a 15th-century French abbey, but never got around to installing any of it.

Because of the immense size of The Castle, the Father of Barbie has the help of about a dozen bright, handsome students from the nearby campus of UCLA. These unpaid interns, known as “Ryan’s Boys,” receive free room and board in exchange for sundry services, such as keeping the grounds and house in tip-top shape and offering security and valet services for the huge parties the Father of Barbie throws. Look magazine wrote a feature about the intriguing setup, headlined, “The Butler Goes to College.”

Since Ryan is in constant and often-frenzied communication with colleagues and friends, he installed 144 telephones throughout The Castle and grounds. Some of the phones are even in trees, and for those he changed the ring tones to sound like the chirping of birds.The entire phone system is switched through a highly sophisticated communications system that he bought as surplus from a U.S. Navy destroyer and reengineered.

A car buff, he has some 18 autos in various states of customization, and even owns a mint-condition 1935 Reo fire engine. It’s not unheard of for Ryan to invite a group of revelers to jump aboard and, with siren wailing, race from The Castle through the gold-paved streets of Beverly Hills to party at the latest “in” disco.

For first-time guests, awe-inspired by the mind-boggling layout, Ryan put together a guidebook of his playground, appropriately entitled, It’s a Party.

During his lifetime, the Father of Barbie had his name on more than a thousand patents, and was a man of seemingly as many personas—inventor, designer, and serial Casanova, to name just a few. The Los Angeles Times once characterized him as “a strange mixture of the new technologist and the old playboy.” Zsa Zsa Gabor, the second of his five wives (he was the sixth of her nine husbands), had a somewhat different view. She described the Father of Barbie this way:“[M]y knight in shining armor, the inhabitant of a fairy-tale castle, Jack my new husband . . . was a full-blown seventies-style swinger into wife-swapping and sundry sexual pursuits as a way of life.” Most of her assessment was accurate, except for the wife-swapping part, unless she meant he swapped one old wife for one new one with rings and weddings, like she did with her mates.

Except for a small circle of confidantes, few knew that the Father of Barbie was a mass of treatable and untreatable emotional problems and addictions, including what later became known as hypersexuality, a manic need for sexual gratification, which was one of the symptoms of his bipolar disorder—a well-kept secret and an illness that explained his compulsive womanizing.

Barbie has quite an untold heritage.

As Barbie’s 50th anniversary on March 9, 2009 loomed, the first Voice of Barbie reminisces nostalgically about her relationship with the Father of Barbie—one she says “was just a brief fling as far as bed was concerned.”

Observes Gwen Florea: “Jack was fun-crazy. That night when he wanted to cut a hole in the ceiling so that he could see the starlight, I had to talk him out of it, or he would have done it. He’d do things like that on the spur of the moment.”

They were an oddly matched twosome, but so was the Father of Barbie with all of his other women—the ones he knew biblically, and those he courted and charmed socially.

While most playboys used their proverbial Little Black Books to list the vital statistics and other intimate details about their women, the Father of Barbie’s method was far more advanced. He adopted the McBee Keysort System, used by librarians before the advent of small computers, to list the Barbie-like physical attributes and sometimes sexual interests and appetites of the women he knew. Most of that data was gathered at Hollywood parties and Beverly Hills society and charity functions. It was entered into the system by his coterie of beautiful social secretaries, such as statuesque Gun Sundberg, a former Miss Scandinavia, and Swedish Tanning Secrets TV commercial knockout.

Along with gathering all the details, his secretaries photographed certain guests and attached the prints to the data cards. The information in Ryan’s eight address books was also added to the mix. If the Father of Barbie required a statuesque Barbie doll lookalike with certain kinks for one of the Castle revels, or if he needed 60 chic couples for one of his enormous celebrity parties, his beautiful assistants had no problem gathering the precise card sort.

Whereas the Voice of Barbie was six-foot-one in heels, the Father of Barbie was a diminutive five-foot-eight—and that was in his custom-made elevator shoes imported from Church’s of London, which gave him at least three more inches. “My being taller than him was always something that he loved, like a real-life Barbie doll,” relates the Voice of Barbie. “He once said to me he loved me being tall so he could stick his nose in my boobs when he hugged me.”

Derek Gable, a star designer and executive at Mattel for 16 years who was part of the company’s “brain drain” from the United Kingdom, says Ryan fancied himself a sort of funny-looking Hugh Hefner. Hefner had his own Barbie doll-like Barbi (no e on the end). Benton, the Playboy founder’s longtime playmate who, with a singing career in mind, once recorded a dud called “Barbi Doll.”

Recalls Gable: “The first time I ever heard of Jack Ryan was in a newspaper back in England, one of the scandal ones, probably, and the headline said, “Jack and His Dolly Birds,” with a picture of him having dinner under a chandelier in his tree house on his estate, and the story was about this whacked-out guy who has all these dolly birds.”

Despite his success in bedding a chorus line of beauties, the Father of Barbie was no handsome Ken (the boy doll developed by Ryan and his crack team of Mattel designers and engineers that was brilliantly promoted as Barbie’s main squeeze). Besides Jack Ryan’s height, or lack thereof, his hair was cut and dyed an odd orange-red by famed “stylist to the stars” Jay Sebring (who, along with actress Sharon Tate, was one of cult leader Charles Manson’s victims); his speaking voice sounded as if he had inhaled laughing gas; his forehead was overly large and alien-like; he had a Humpty Dumpty build—his chest puffed out like a rooster in heat and he had skinny arms and spindly legs; and his complexion was a Bela Lugosi-like pale because of his genetic Irish-American pallor as well as the fact that he rarely ventured into the southern California sun.

A dandy of sorts, he sported custom-tailored suits from Mr. Guy in Beverly Hills, wore safari jackets with a silk ascot, and often arrived at a party wearing a full-length fur coat. Many considered him a blast, while others thought he was Napoleonic—in size and demeanor. His IQ was in the genius range.

The Father of Barbie was also considered a sensuous lover.

“Jack was very good in bed,” Gwen Florea attests years later. “He was very, very considerate. But it was the whole aura of his personality that was so attractive.”

As with so many others in Jack Ryan’s orbit, ranging from the creative geniuses at Mattel to Hollywood’s celebrity A-list, she was referring to his charm, brilliance, inventiveness, eccentricity, and life-style. However, those are some of the same characteristics that have relegated Ryan to virtual anonymity in the long and storied history of Mattel and the mythology surrounding the Barbie doll as she entered her second half-century.

The press courted the Father of Barbie and praised his intellect and talent. “Under his supervision, the Barbie Doll and all her friends and wardrobe demands were born,” declared the Los Angeles Times. “He is an inventor who has already patented . . . the most successful toys ever sold.”

While the media extolled Ryan’s intellectual and creative virtues, a far more powerful figure in the Father of Barbie’s life criticized, begrudged, and denied them—especially when it came to who actually conceived, or invented, or devised the biggest-selling, most-iconic doll in the universe.

Her name is Ruth Handler, Mattel’s driven, ambitious, and cutthroat co-founder. After Ryan’s death in 1991, and before her own passing in 2002, she publicly waged what many in Ryan’s circle believe was a deliberate campaign to diminish, if not altogether erase, his role as the Father of Barbie, and take full credit as the billion-dollar doll’s inventor and as “Mother of Barbie.”

Privately, within the hallowed halls of Mattel, the two had been at each other’s throats for almost two decades. It was a backroom and boardroom drama that eventually exploded into what one high-powered Beverly Hills lawyer describes as “a scorched-earth legal battle,” as in Ryan v. Mattel.

“Ruth Handler came in after Jack died and started a whole PR campaign about her being the creator of Barbie,” maintains Stephen Gnass, founder of a serious, prestigious seminar program for inventors called Invention Convention, and a close friend of Ryan’s. “Enough propaganda, enough promotion and you can make anybody believe anything. Ruth Handler really marginalized anything that Jack had to do with Mattel. She was making her case after he was dead and he was in no position to defend his legacy.”

To Gnass, Ryan seemed possessed by Barbie.

“When Jack talked about creating Barbie, or improving Barbie, he would light up and describe the breasts and the legs and how tall she needed to be. He was intrigued by that,” recalls Gnass. “When he talked about Barbie it was like listening to somebody talk about a sexual episode, almost like listening to a sexual pervert talk about creating this doll. He got a little glow, was animated, had a twinkle in his eye. Barbie was the number-one toy at Mattel that he would talk about creating. I often think about the expression on his face when he described the doll’s voluptuousness.”

An expert at media spin and self-promotion, and once described in the New York Times as a “one-woman sales-merchandising-promotion-administrative force, a sort of industrial Orson Welles,” Ruth Handler was enormously successful at getting her story across—and her rendition of Barbie’s birth became an integral part of the Barbie myth and phenomenon.

As she once stated bluntly, “One of my strengths is that I do have the courage of my convictions and the guts to take a position, stand up for it, and make it happen. I can be very persuasive in getting others to see the light.”

Hints of the Handler-Ryan feud became public on rare occasions, such as when the New York Times, in a profile of the toy company in 1968, described Ryan as “Mattel’s real secret weapon,” and noted that Ruth and her husband and Mattel co-founder, Elliot Handler, were “reluctant to credit any single person with the invention of new toy ‘principles.’ ” The story pointed out that early publicity about Mattel that had credited Ryan with the development of Barbie had “caused a top-level chasm” between him and the Handlers, especially Ruth, whose vendetta only intensified.

When the Times ran a caption-sized feature item in 1994 about Barbie’s 35th anniversary, and named the then-deceased Jack Ryan as “Barbie’s creator,” Ruth Handler went as ballistic as the realistic toy missiles that were designed for Mattel by Ryan, which sold in the millions, and were even featured in Life magazine. Ryan had helped design real missiles for use by the military before he joined Mattel. In a letter to the Times, Handler stated that the story “contained an inaccuracy. The late Jack Ryan was not Barbie’s creator. My husband Elliot, and I were the founders of Mattel Toys, and I was the creator of the Barbie doll. Jack Ryan, in his role as head of the research-and-development department, managed some of the design work relating to the doll and her accessories.”

Mattel was Ruth’s show, they were her toys, and no one else was going to get credit.Those in the creative end were thought of as “technicians,” literally and figuratively.

Ruth was considered “ruthless, a real hatchet man who was completely oblivious to design,” asserts Fred Adickes, who came from designing tailfins at General Motors to serve as chief industrial designer at Mattel under Ryan. Adickes helped spearhead the development of Hot Wheels and worked on the “World of Barbie,” which included the doll’s first car, a Corvette, and her home and furnishings. The project was Ryan and the Handlers’ way of expanding Barbie beyond just clothing and fashion accessories.

“Ruth and Elliot’s word was law,” says Adickes, years later. “They were exalted.They were Mattel’s God and Holy Spirit—and they had a competitive, adversarial relationship with Jack Ryan. In the end, Ruth was designated as the inventor of Barbie. This was done not only for ego, but probably for good business reasons. It wouldn’t be good business to identify anyone else who contributed.”

Adickes notes that after he left Mattel, unhappy with the politics and culture, Elliot Handler began taking credit for Hot Wheels. As Adickes observes, “It wouldn’t be good business for the Handlers to say, ‘Well, the man who actually came up with the idea for Hot Wheels was an automotive designer who left the company.’ ”

Salaried Mattel designers such as Adickes who were big producers sometimes received bonuses and stock options, but were barely compensated for their lucrative ideas. After signing a mandatory document turning over all patent rights to a toy that might generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for Mattel, he says they received in return a crisp one-dollar bill.“Sometimes I got it,” notes Adickes,“sometimes not.”

Because the world-famous Barbie brand has been the most significant product in Mattel’s extraordinary lifetime, the unvarnished story of the doll’s conception and implementation offers a candid snapshot of Mattel’s founders and their complex relationship with their employees, and of the company’s curious corporate culture. It underscores how Mattel became an international juggernaut—the biggest, baddest toy company in the world.

Placing Barbie’s plastic DNA under a microscope, one finds contradictions in Ruth Handler’s story of Barbie’s conception. It also reveals the very private war the Handlers were waging against Jack Ryan, which subsequently so debilitated him emotionally and physically that at the age of 64 he had a tragic end. His manner of death has long been kept secret.

Written with the help of Jacqueline Shannon, a journalist (who declined to be interviewed for this book), Dream Doll, published by Longmeadow Press (a small, long-defunct house), and widely reviewed at the time, mentions Jack Ryan only briefly, with little more than a dozen short references in the 227-page book, and gives him little or no credit for his lucrative and creative role. Her one concession to Ryan was his development of the “Twist ’n’ Turn Barbie,” a major breakthrough, that gave the doll natural movement by allowing little girls to bend her at the waist and legs, and twist her at the hips—with no visible joints.

But Handler went on to complain: “Because these technological innovations were among the few Barbie features we were able to patent, Jack Ryan would later tell people that he was the inventor of the Barbie doll. You can imagine how annoying this was.”

She may have been annoyed, but, in fact, Ryan held the only U.S. patents related to the Barbie doll, while the Handlers, neither of whom were engineers, had none involving Barbie, a key fact to which Ruth didn’t fess up in Dream Doll, among many other things. Ryan’s first patent, filed seven months before Barbie’s debut at the 1959 International Toy Fair in New York, was for doll construction; his second was for doll construction, natural movements, and positions; his third was for a doll having an angular adjustable line; and the fourth was for natural movements and positions—the breakthrough involving the Twist ‘n’ Turn development.

Ryan was also involved in designing the tiny mechanisms that permitted Barbie, Chatty Cathy, and Larry the Lion, among other Mattel classics, to speak. For about two years, leggy Gwen Florea had been recording Barbie’s voice, two-second sound bites, on records smaller than a quarter that fit inside under the doll’s breasts. Among the first words Barbie spoke were,“I love being a fashion model.”When a more sophisticated voice unit was in development by Ryan and his team, Florea interviewed and recorded dozens of actresses to become the potential new voice. But when she made the final presentation to Jack Ryan and the Handlers they wanted only her voice. “I was told that they did not want anybody on the outside to know who the voice was, that it would be counterproductive to have an actual human in competition with Barbie.”

According to retired chief designer of Barbie Collector Dolls & Collectibles, Carol Spencer, a 36-year Mattel veteran, and an internationally known Barbie expert and author, the Handlers changed the design of Ryan’s last patent to avoid paying him royalties. “Jack Ryan had the patent for the twist waist,” says Spencer. “After Jack left Mattel, the Handlers broke his patent. They merely stopped using features that Jack had patented, which is an easy way to ‘break’ a patent. Mattel went from his angular twist waist to a horizontal twist waist.”

Ryan’s defenders assert that Ruth Handler ordered the changes as part of a campaign to disparage and denigrate him. And Mattel would eventually stop payment on all of Ryan’s royalties, leading to a legal battle royal.

“Jack got the short end of the stick,” declares Annie Constantinesco, a Masters graduate at the Sorbonne and a Fulbright scholar who became an integral part of Jack Ryan’s world in the late 1960s and remained a lifelong close confidante.

The Barbie doll introduced to the world in March 1959, sheathed in a tight black-and-white-striped bathing suit, fit Ryan’s profile of the perfect fantasy woman; her real-life vital dimensions were a Pamela Andersonesque 39-18-34.

The Women’s Review of Books, billed as a “serious, informed discussion of new writing by and about women,” then published by the Wellesley Centers for Women, an organization closely tied to Wellesley College, severely panned Dream Doll. “Handler’s autobiography,” wrote the critic, “is nakedly self-serving, an attempt at auto-canonization. . . . Sadly, Handler’s real achievement—as a woman who started an enormously important company—is obscured by her own account.”

The review pointed out Handler’s unrelenting boasts, such as describing herself as “a fiercely independent woman, one who has always felt the need to prove myself,” and the critic noted that Handler ends Dream Doll with an appendix titled “Awards and Honors,” but “leaves out her rap sheet,” a reference to Handler’s white-collar crimes in the 1970s that forced her (along with her husband) from Mattel, and almost landed her in prison.

The shocking case of how she and a few colleagues finagled Mattel’s books and cashed in on insider information (detailed later in this book) demonstrated Ruth Handler’s ability to twist facts and dodge the truth. If she prevaricated with hard-nosed investigators from the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors, as she did, is it difficult to make the leap that she’d take full credit for Barbie over Jack Ryan, whom she deeply resented, and who wasn’t around to defend himself?

Mattel, and how he and his wife were forced out more than three decades earlier, are subjects he’s loath to discuss. However, he acknowledges that Jack Ryan “was a talented designer, a talented engineer who created a good engineering and design department for us. We brought him in working for us and we gave him a small royalty to go along with the product that he worked with.” He concedes that there was an ongoing feud between Ryan and Ruth. “They had arguments on a number of things. He and Ruth did not get along too well. It was just personality. Ruth had a strong ego and so did Jack. If you put two people with big egos together they bounce around a little bit.”

Still, he defended Ruth against Ryan when it came to the subject of Barbie. “The doll was completely Ruth Handler’s idea,” Elliot declares. “She always wanted a teenage doll, and this thing kind of came together. Jack Ryan had nothing to do with the original creativity of the doll. His work had to do with the mechanical things.”

According to Ruth’s book, the Barbie doll was her concept from start to finish.

She stated that in the early 1950s, she had watched her daughter, Barbara, then approaching adolescence, and her friends, playing with cutout dolls—paper renditions of young career women, nurses, secretaries, all very feminine and sexualized. She saw how the girls dressed them and fantasized about their make-believe lives. As Handler saw it, “They were using these dolls to project their dreams. . . . So one day it hit me: Wouldn’t it be great if we could take that play pattern and three-dimensionalize it so little girls could do their dreaming and role-playing with real dolls and real clothes instead of the flimsy paper or cardboard ones?”

Handler believed that a more adult-looking doll, one with breasts, could be a huge seller for her and Elliot’s growing company. But when she presented the concept within Mattel, none of the men could see it, she bemoaned.

In 1956, the Handlers, already reaping substantial profits from their decade-old Mattel (thanks in part to being one of the first toy companies to shrewdly gamble advertising dollars on TV commercials), took a month-and-a-half European vacation. In Lucerne, just a few days before leaving for home, Ruth spotted a plastic doll in a shop window that was “the embodiment” of the adult-looking doll she had been unsuccessfully advocating back at headquarters. She stood “transfixed” with 15-year-old daughter Barbara at her side, gazing at the 11½-inch plastic rendition dressed in a tight miniature ski outfit.

“I was gripped,” Ruth Handler recalled.

Called Bild-Lilli, the doll had everything she claimed she had been envisioning for a marketable, money-making product—long legs, thin waist, perky breasts—the same female attributes that Jack Ryan fantasized about, lusted after, and eventually engineered into Barbie. Over the years, that supermodel-like body in doll form would be one of the few things on which Ruth Handler and Jack Ryan ever agreed.

Bild-Lilli had the look of an erotic Deutschland dominatrix with arched eyebrows and a tightly pulled-back ponytail rather than the Doris Day, girl-next-door image that Ruth had envisioned. In the latter part of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Lilli’s real-life counterpart might be the pinup and burlesque entertainer Dita von Teese. Lilli was based on a sexy, popular cartoon character whose floozy lifestyle was depicted in a hugely popular strip in Bild Zeitung, a garish German tabloid. Because of Lilli’s immense popularity, the newspaper had commissioned a well-known German doll designer, Max Weissbrodt, to turn her into an adult novelty, a doll that men hung from their rearview mirrors or gave as suggestive gifts to their women.

Ruth snapped up Lilli and brought her back home. With a makeover, she believed Mattel could sell millions to America’s Baby Boomerettes. Jack Ryan was just the man to handle the project.

Born in New York City, November 12, 1926, the future Father of Barbie grew up in elegant surroundings in a sprawling house filled with antiques and beautiful hand-carved furniture in the Manhattan commuter-suburb of Yonkers. He was the second son of James J. Ryan, an Irish immigrant from a farming family, who became a fashionable Manhattan contractor to the rich and famous, specializing in opulent store facades, and the paneled interiors of fancy homes for the likes of Katherine Hepburn, Helen Hayes, June Havoc, and hoi polloi like the Hearsts. Annually, he was commissioned to do the Bride’s House for House Beautiful, and when the World’s Fair came to New York in 1939, he designed model homes for the great exhibition. He was a drinker, sportsman, and dapper dresser who wintered in Florida two months out of the year and, like his son, was a roué. Even in his last years he liked to pinch and rub up against the beauties who populated The Castle.

Lily Urqhart Croston Ryan, his wife, who brought James Ryan Jr. into the world seven years before his famous brother, Jack, worked for a time in Life magazine’s art department and, according to Ryan family lore, was with her English pedigree the proprietor of a fancy tearoom across the street from Radio City Music Hall.

As a mother, however, Lily was an odd duck, with child-rearing ideas that would never pass Dr. Spock’s muster—such as refusing to allow Jack to have any friends. That alone would have a devastating psychological impact on his adult life, and on virtually everyone around him.

“When my father was growing up, his mother didn’t let him play with other children because she felt they weren’t good enough to play with him, and others weren’t good enough to come to the Ryan home, and when the Ryan boys were invited to other people’s homes, well, those people weren’t good enough, either,” recounts Diana Ryan, the second of Jack Ryan’s two daughters. “My father’s mother didn’t want other kids to come to the Ryan home because she felt like her home, while beautiful, wasn’t ready, wasn’t finished. So it was both ‘they’re not good enough,’ and ‘we’re not good enough.’ So that was my grandmother’s issue.”

Emotionally crippled by the memory of his lonely childhood, the Father of Barbie as an adult required constant attention, crowds of people, nightly parties, innumerable lovers, and a succession of wives. But he claimed loneliness was never a problem for him, although he acknowledged he had “a tendency to be sensitive in that direction. To like to be with people is important to me, to be part of a group, accepted, liked, respected and to share in the mutual feelings people have. Human feelings are important to me. I’m sensitive to them.”

Because of his mother’s fears and phobias, Jack Ryan’s only playmate, pal, and mentor growing up was his big brother, Jim, which might have been a blessing in disguise. “My father and Jim got a little ingrown,” observes Diana Ryan, a divorcee with two sons. A committed Christian, she started a business to help people organize their lives “to have time for the people they love.”

Besides barring Jack from having friends, Lily Ryan was also blind to the fact that her youngest son had a major but undiagnosed learning disability. The future Father of Barbie—the much-hailed inventor and intellectual—was severely dyslexic. He could not read, but was able shrewdly to hide his infirmity, one of a number of serious emotional problems—ranging from being bipolar to suicidal, alcoholic, and cocaine-addicted—that would surface over the years.

“My Uncle Jim was the bookworm and so when they were growing up he would do the reading and then Dad would debrief him,” says Diana Ryan. “My dad was introduced to high school work when he was in elementary school, and college work when he was in high school. Jim taught my father most of his high school stuff because they were very close and always together, and my father just absorbed things like a sponge from Jim. In those days there weren’t people who could diagnose learning disorders, but my dad figured out on his own what these days would be called a learning disorder.”

When Jack was seven, for instance, Jim taught him high school German. When Jack was in high school at the exclusive Barnard School, in the fancy enclave of Riverdale in the Bronx, he was permitted to skip biology in order to teach physics, which his brother had taught him—without Jack having once read a book on the subject. It was during the early years of World War II, and all of the regular physics instructors were in uniform.

Jack was a junior mad scientist with a seriously dangerous mischievous streak. The future Father of Barbie boasted that he made dynamite in the Ryan’s basement, and detonated the charges to frighten the neighbors. On a tamer note, when he spotted neighborhood boys riding three-speed bikes, Jack designed and built a nine-speed. Often bored at school, he built a crystal radio set and customized it so it was hidden in his desk, with the earphones stashed in the inkwell. A born entrepreneur, he sold more than a dozen to classmates.

He taught himself how to take apart and put together an automobile engine, and later, when he was earning millions at Mattel, he had dozens of cars, many he redesigned, such as grafting Mercedes-Benz grills on to old Studebakers, or slicing new Rolls Royces in half and putting another make’s body in the middle—the first unofficial stretch limousines. So it was not a great leap for him to become a key figure in the design and implementation of another of Mattel’s iconic huge sellers, Hot Wheels, which is for boys what Barbie is for girls.

In his senior year of high school, he was elected class president, and was so advanced in his studies that he was allowed to attend classes just one day a week, spending the rest working in an electronics laboratory for a disciple of the famed inventor and industrialist Vincent Hugo Bendix, where Ryan devised a better way to test radio crystals—and won a $25 war bond for his breakthrough.

After graduating from high school, with the war still on, Ryan was easily accepted at Yale, and enlisted in the university’s Naval officer training program, serving from July 1944 to July 1946, at the New Haven campus and in the Pacific, where he was assigned to an ammunition ship.

Still, he couldn’t handle reading books, so he found a way around the problem.

“When Dad went to Yale he told me that he put together a study group for each of his classes, and appointed himself moderator of each of the study groups,” says Diana Ryan. “He doled out the reading assignments and then he’d have people read the chapters and report back to him, all of which he absorbed. Since he was the moderator, he didn’t assign chapters to himself, so he got through Yale pretty much without having to do any reading.”

While majoring in electrical engineering and industrial administration, he undertook an extra term of independent research work in personnel psychology with the E. Wight Bakke Foundation at the Institute of Human Relations at Yale. He was also active on campus as a sharp-shooting member of the Yale pistol team; he’d have a lifetime fascination with guns, developing successful toy guns and rifles for Mattel.

He joined Dramat,Yale’s dramatic society, where he was known as an outgoing, attention-getting exhibitionist. Rather than act, he volunteered for the less glamorous job of production manager after he discovered that the Dramat’s musical, “In the Clover,” was scheduled to tour women’s colleges—women were always his favorite form of recreation. Throughout his lifetime he believed that the female brain, not just the body, was superior to that of the male.

Even before graduation, he got a job as a technical consultant at a White Plains, New York, plastics company, which was invaluable experience when he got to Mattel, where plastic ruled.

He graduated with a BS degree from Yale’s School of Engineering in 1948, announcing plans to assist his brother, Jim, in the development of electronic inventions. However, his first job out of school was managing the Square Root Manufacturing Company for a friend, J.J. Root, who was producing TV antennas for postwar-American couch potatoes. Ryan also took some graduate courses at Harvard.

While there, the future Father of Barbie fell in love, or so it seemed. Her name was Barbara Harris, a pretty, stiff-lipped Brahmin, the daughter of a Texas Company executive and a concert violinist and teacher. A Parsons School of Design graduate, the future Mrs. Jack Ryan worked as a designer of chic scarves for the Vera brand—a company formed by Vera Neumann, an artist who became a noted textile designer whose popular scarves were signed VERA in small print.

Jack and Barbara dated for a year or two and got married in August 1950, in what would become an ill-fated, unconventional union after Ryan joined Mattel.

“Because Dad was in a hurry, and Mom was too shy to have a big wedding, they eloped,” says Diana Ryan. “They were married in a friend’s living room in New Rochelle, New York—just with friends and the minister—and that was it.”

For the next two years, they lived with Jack’s parents and brother in his boyhood home in Yonkers, a decision in which the bride had no say. Through the years she’d have little input in anything her dominant and controlling husband decided. The reason he moved back home was his lifelong issue of loneliness. He felt more comfortable with lots of people around. For Barbara Ryan, it would get much worse.

It was during this time that Jack was offered a plum job with a high security clearance at one of America’s premier defense contractors (and inventor of the microwave oven), Raytheon (which means “light from the gods”). It was 1952: General Dwight David Eisenhower was elected President; U.S. troops were battling the Communist North Koreans; French soldiers were fighting the Communist Viet Minh in Vietnam; and the United States dedicated the Nautilus, the world’s first atomic submarine, to fight the Reds, if needed. And in Waltham, Massachusetts, 26-year-old Jack Ryan was doing his part for America’s so-called military-industrial complex.

He was assigned to work on preliminary design for the ground-to-air Hawk missile, and was performing reliability studies for the air-to-air Sparrow III missile, both of which were ordered by the Cold War Pentagon. “I was in charge of the work of seven-hundred engineers and scientists developing the Hawk system—I wasn’t their boss but I was the young guy who ran it,” Ryan revealed years later.

It was during missile test-firing trips to the Point Magu Naval Air Missile Test Center, just north of Los Angeles, that the future Father of Barbie heard about a prosperous, up-and-coming toy company called Mattel.

Jack returned to Boston and told Barbara, who had recently given birth to their first child, Anne, that he’d found nirvana in southern California. Once again he gave her no options. The Ryans were L.A.-bound.

Ryan joined the Handlers around 1955, just as Mattel, with annual sales of $6 million, was about to skyrocket. Earlier that year, the Handlers were made an offer they couldn’t refuse, courtesy of Walt Disney, ABC-TV, and a mouse named Mickey. At the time, the Handlers had retained their first advertising agency, Carson/Roberts, and had a $150,000-a-year advertising budget, which was considered high for the toy industry back then. The money went for newspaper, magazine, and chain-store catalog ads, which was the way companies hawked their products in the golden age of toys, with most of the hype beginning around Thanksgiving and culminating at Christmas.

But now, the Handlers were being offered a different opportunity to get their message across to kids and tap their parents’ pocketbooks. If the Handlers were willing to put up $500,000, their entire current net worth, and sign a contract for 52 weeks, they could be the sole sponsor of a 15-minute segment on a new, untested show called the Mickey Mouse Club.The Handlers considered their fate, and took the risk.

“Ruth was always a gambler,” notes Derek Gable. “She loved Vegas.” The Handlers figured that with Disney connected to the program, they couldn’t lose. They decided to advertise a new product brought to them by an outside inventor, called the Burp Gun.Toy guns and replica rifles like the Winchester were lucrative for Mattel’s boys’ toys line through the 1950s and the very early 1960s, thanks to the popularity of TV shows featuring Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and The Lone Ranger.The Handlers’ gamble paid off.They sold a million Burp Guns, and forever changed the way the toy industry advertised.

Toy commercials in those days were often incredibly deceptive—the products made to look or sound far different from what they actually were in order to mislead kids and their parents. In the early 1960s, the National Association of Broadcasters introduced tough guidelines for toy advertising in response to public criticism about misleading commercials by Mattel and others. For instance, Mattel was ordered by the Federal Communications Commission to pull a Hot Wheels commercial from the air because it misrepresented the toy.

Jack Ryan watched the Handlers’ successes and how they operated and was even more impressed. As he stated later, “Ruth has a mind like a steel trap and Elliot has a sensitivity of product that is uncanny.”

The Handlers had never publicly revealed their financial arrangement with Ryan, but in mid-2008, the surviving co-founder agreed to divulge aspects of their agreement. “We needed someone to help come up with new products,” says Elliot Handler. “Ryan came to us highly recommended as a very good designer, and we made a deal with him. We put him in charge of design. We gave him a small percentage of products that he was involved with, like a royalty.”

Ryan was overjoyed. He initially asked for $25,000 a year, which he knew the Handlers, who were tight with money, wouldn’t pay. Instead, haggling back and forth, he made a far better deal.

Marvin Barab, Mattel’s first marketing director, who worked under Ryan and considered him “one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met—and he thought so, too,” says the Handlers gave Ryan such a lucrative deal because they had not expected the kind of growth Mattel suddenly experienced, most of it attributable to Barbie. As a result, the Handlers were forced to pay Ryan huge royalty fees, which drove them crazy. Barab, who was hired several months before Barbie’s debut at the toy fair, notes that when he came aboard Ryan was “in the hierarchy” at Mattel, one of the key decision makers.

According to a number of Ryan colleagues, the amount of his royalty was a whopping 1.5 percent, soon generating him sometimes more than $1 million a year, which he spent as fast as it came in on his high living style.

“The Handlers did some crazy things in the early days involving Jack because they thought he walked on water, and they were scared to death of a competitor getting a contract with him, so they were ridiculously generous in the deal they struck with Jack, who was excellent at selling himself,” observes Denis V. Bosley, a former Mattel engineer and vice president, who was recruited by Ryan in London.

“The Handlers were still bootstrapping it when suddenly along comes this Raytheon engineer who’s obviously brilliant, who says, ‘I know you can’t afford my salary, so I’ll be generous; just pay me a small percentage,’ ” adds Fred Adickes, who was hired at Mattel by Ryan and remained a lifelong friend and colleague.

But Adickes doesn’t think that Ryan hoodwinked the very shrewd Handlers, who had never gone much beyond high school, but were self-taught, street-smart businesspeople. “It wasn’t a conning, one way or the other,” he says.