Boy Toy

Ken's sad and lonely life in Barbie's shadow.

The golden jubilee of a diamond-bright icon is upon us as the Barbie doll, introduced at the American International Toy Fair of 1959, passes a milestone on March 9. This presents an occasion to praise her timeless charms, to damn her anti-feminism, and, for those wired for negative capability, to hold both ideas in mind. Of the season's two books on the subject, Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World's Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her is the more sensible affair. Author Robin Gerber details the career of Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler—who named her celebrated toy after her only daughter—with the precision of a business-school case study. Rather less judicious, Toy Monster: The Big, Bad World of Mattel, eructed by renowned sleaze broker Jerry Oppenheimer, holds that Barbie's true creator was Mattel research-and-design executive Jack Ryan, who had a thing for dames of a Barbie-esque silhouette, one of whom appears, in the book's first sentence, as his accomplice in "yet another evening of compulsive sex."

Indeed, beyond matters of basic fact, the only quality that the two new Barbiographies share is the short shrift each gives the doll's love interest. Such is the eternal lot of unfortunate Ken Carson, Barbie's long-term beau and ever-ready escort. If history is any guide, Ken—an accessory, an ornament, a cold planet orbiting a hyper-giant star—will not quite be a VIP at this 50^th-birthday gala. But his role, however minor, will be critical: Barbie wouldn't be Barbie if she didn't have a steady date.

Watch a Slate V history of the Barbie television commercial:

In the late 1950s, Handler observed her daughter using paper dolls to imagine adult lives and saw an opportunity to "three-dimensionalize" the play pattern. Though Mattel modeled Barbie's physique on that of a German doll with a gold-digger Weltanschauung, she herself entered life as an independent woman. As noted in the definitive critical text on the subject, M.G. Lord's Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, Mattel's ad agency introduced the plastic figurine as a flesh-and-blood mannequin: "She was a teenage fashion model, and the world was her runway." Barbie never demanded a boyfriend, but the fantasies of the little girls consumed with her did. Ken made the scene in 1961, his namesake being Handler's son.

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Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.

Illustration by Rob Donnelly.

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