It's been a big week for Ken and Barbie. First, they made a porno together, one that warmed our frozen-ass hearts in brutal New York; next up, confirmation that the guy who created Barbie was a total sleazebag...
The sex-starved mainstream media has been running excerpts from Jerry Oppenheimer's new book about Mattel, maker of the dreaded dolls, which include such nuggets as:
Jack Ryan, the Yale-educated designer who popularized Barbie, was a "full-blown seventies-style swinger" with "a manic need for sexual gratification."
Staging orgies at his Bel-Air mansion, Ryan, whose wives included Zsa Zsa Gabor, surrounded himself with busty Barbie clones, including Gwen Florea, who was the "voice of Barbie" in a line of talking dolls. The book quotes her: "He once said to me he loved me being tall so he could stick his nose in my boobs when he hugged me."
Ryan's friend, Stephen Gnass, confides to the author: "When Jack talked about creating Barbie . . . it was like listening to somebody talk about a sexual episode, almost like listening to a sexual pervert . . ." Ryan took calls at Mattel from a madam and patronized "high-class call girls to streetwalkers," including a "very thin and child-like" hooker. The book claims that Ryan "somehow rationalized that he was the only man in her life" until he was diagnosed with gonorrhea.
Yes, all this is entirely predictable. So what about the real debate-- what's up with "Ken"? According to IMDB, Barbie was named after Ryan's daughter Barbara, while Ken was based on... Ken, his son with Ruth Handler.
Despite marrying and having three kids, Ken was a closeted gay, Oppenheimer says. "To all those who knew him Ken Handler was a wonderful father, a loving husband . . . But there was another side to Ken. And in 1990 he was formally diagnosed with AIDS. His parents and wife were shocked." He died in 1994 in Greenwich Village, but obits didn't mention the disease.
The Post doesn't mention who Oppenheimer learned this information, so we can't say for sure it'll check out when the book appears, but... good Lord-- Ken was gay after all!
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