Battle to be the real Barbie: Toy boss’ daughter vs sex-crazed genius’ ideal woman

Will the real Barbara Millicent Roberts — aka Barbie — please stand up.

She’s definitely not the blonde, tall, and very leggy Margot Robbie, 35, who plays the real-life Barbie in the $100 million live-action “Barbie” movie coming to theaters on July 21.

Depending on who a Barbie fan believes, however, the genuine, in-the-flesh Barbie who inspired the doll is either the late Barbie Ryan or the now 82-year-old Barbara Handler Segal.

The two origin stories could not be more different.

Either Barbie exists thanks to one man’s obsession with the “perfect woman” — or because of an apparently sweet story revolving around a mother’s love for her two children.

But both come with far darker sides than the innocent child’s toy would suggest, including orgies, sex toys, embezzlement, AIDS, and suicide.

22

22

The battle over who really inspired Barbie only exploded into the open decades after the doll made her debut at the International Toy Fair in New York in 1959.

She was an immediate hit: 11 inches tall, long-legged, slim-waisted, perky-breasted and either blonde or brunette, dressed in a hand-made black and white swimsuit, and soon after advertised on The Mickey Mouse Club.

Now at 64 Barbie might be ready for Social Security, and ripe for retirement in a Boca Raton condo, but instead, she continues to make a fortune for Mattel: the company’s stock price has soared in recent weeks thanks to massive hype over the movie.

22

22

But the battle over who is the real 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 ill over long-running financial battles with Handler and Mattel, as he sued for what he saw as his fair share of the Barbie millions.

22

22

In Handler’s book, she essentially claimed she was to Barbie what Walt Disney was to Mickey Mouse: the sole creator.

Ryan, the brilliant former Raytheon missile designer for the Pentagon who designed Barbie from head to toe as Mattel’s vice president 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 with her husband Elliot and their business partner Harold “Matt” Matson — Mattel is a portmanteau of Matt and Elliot — and she claimed that watching her daughter, Barbara, born in 1941, play with dolls gave her the idea for a real-life looking doll, and a name.

22

22

And over the years, 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 compared to the doll, especially as a teenager.

Internet gossipers have claimed that a recent Barbie trailer for the movie had a brief 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 in fact based on a cartoon in the German newspaper Bild about a prostitute.

22

22

Also in the movie is Ryan Gosling, playing Ken, of Ken Doll fame. Handler said Ken — it was always Barbie and Ken in 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.

And then in 1973, Handler came 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 fine and 2,500 hours of community service.

Her husband was also forced out; Handler blamed breast cancer for making her “unfocused.”

22

22

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 write Ryan out of history.

His daughter, Ann Ryan, 68, who’s writing a memoir, “Dad, Barbie and Me,” about the bizarre Barbie world in 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 always obsessed with the image of the perfect woman, and then he married one whose name happened to be Barbie. The choice of the name for the Barbie doll was my father’s, absolutely, not Ruth Handler’s decision,” Ann Ryan said.

22

22

“But after he died” – Ryan committed suicide in 1991 at age 64 two years after a debilitating stroke – “Ruth decided to change 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.”

According to Ann, her mother, Barbara “Barbie” Ryan was “very flattered” that Barbie had been named after her. 

22

22

“My mother was this glamorous woman who did some modeling while she was studying at Parsons School of Design. She always looked fabulous. Appearance was very important to my family, and both my parents always wanted to project an image.”

But the storybook marriage ended in divorce. Ryan had been a swinger who threw orgies in his faux castle in Los Angeles.

He had numerous affairs and wed four more times, including with the “famous for being famous” Hungarian beauty, Zsa Zsa Gabor, who in her prime also could have been a Barbie doll look-alike. 

“My father loved Zsa Zsa’s glamour and flamboyance,” Ann says and notes that most of the women her father was involved with or chased, were Barbie types.

22

22

22

“If you look at the women he married and the women he had significant relations with they all were modeled on Barbie.”

The press at the time of the short-lived Ryan-Gabor union even noted he had “married his own Barbie doll.”

The marriage went publicly wrong, with their honeymoon in Japan marred by Ryan hiring a handsome escort to take Zsa Zsa around Tokyo – and sleep with her, if she desired — while he did business.

Gabor later wrote in her memoir “One Lifetime is Not Enough” that “far from building a life with me, with one woman, Jack had every intention of continuing his swinging lifestyle.”

22

22

Ruth Handler’s embarrassment at all the salacious Jack Ryan gossip was one of the reasons she is said 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 would be, too.

“I think Margot Robbie’s gorgeous, beautiful, and I absolutely plan to see the movie because Barbie was the biggest thing in my father’s life. 

“My father would be absolutely thrilled about the film, because he was a very theatrical person, and I’m sure he would have wanted to play a big part in the movie’s making.”

As for her book, still in progress, “I don’t want it to be a Mommy Dearest. I want to be able to celebrate my father’s genius and creativity.”