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UNITED STATES.- While Warner Brothers is preparing to release the highly publicized film “Barbie“, directed by Greta Gerwig starring margot robbiewhich will be released this summer, the real-life saga of the creator of the iconic doll is more of a horror story than a Hollywood fairy tale.
The creator of a host of popular toys other than Barbie, including Hot Wheels and chatty cathythe vice president of mattel, jack ryanonce threatened the life of one of his own daughters during a confrontation paranoid, crazed by the weapons and fed by the cocaine with the LAPD SWAT unit.
This and other shocking revelations about the brilliant but seriously troubled Ryan come from his eldest daughter, Ann Ryanwho has a podcast, “Dreamhouse”about her life growing up in the shadow of Barbie and her father.
My father was drinking and doing drugs, cocaine, and he was paranoid,” Ann, 68, said in a revealing exclusive interview with the NY Post about the terrifying police confrontation. “He thought that people were after him, that they were listening to him electronically. He believed that people were eavesdropping on him and, in a particularly delusional moment, he claimed that they were ‘moving the walls’. It wasn’t right.”
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A strange fake castle
In the spring of 1977, Jack left Mattel, then the world’s largest toy company, as chief designer.
I was in a fierce legal battlehaving sued to recover millions of dollars in toy royalties that Mattel had stopped paying him (Mattel Films is one of the producers of the upcoming $100 million “Barbie” movie).
According to Ann, her sister Dianathen 20, was taking time off from college to stay with her father in his bizarre fake castle, complete with drawbridge and moat, in the exclusive Bel Air section of Los Angeles, she told the NY Post.
My sister had this idea that she would become some kind of savior for dad and help him turn his life around,” Ann said. “They had a confrontation and I suspect he thought she was the enemy. By then, the castle resembled post-World War II Dresden.”
Being a playboy and swingers who married five women, including actress Zsa Zsa GaborJack designed and built the castle where organized infamous sexual orgieseven while living there with her two daughters and her mother, Jack’s first wife, Barbie.
a nightmare night
Ann was 22 years old when she received a call from one of her father’s colleagues who worked at the castle.
“He did not give further details. He just said that something horrible was going on with my father and that he had to go to the castle immediately,” he said.
The incident began when Diana entered a small kitchen adjacent to her father’s third-floor bedroom and discovered that one of the burners had turned on and was heating up a pan of shotgun shells.
Thinking that his father was planning”blow up the castleDiana called the police.
When I got there, there were tons of police cars outside the gate and SWAT team vehicles. I was stunned. I didn’t know what was going on,” Ann recalled. “Her colleague of hers ran out and said, ‘You have to go inside. Your father is holding Diana hostage.’ The police thought that maybe they could talk my father to some sense. They didn’t know what else to do.”
Instead, she was just driven into madness.
He had his own daughter hostage with a gun to her head.
“He dragged me into the house, to the breakfast room, and the policemen made me get under the table. That room faced the hallway where my father and Diana were at the top of the stairs,” Ann told the NYP. “Dad was pointing a gun at Diana’s head, and there were cops pointing his gun at him.”
“Diana was shaking and crying. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She had seen him act before, but nothing so extreme and dangerous. I felt powerless. When the SWAT guy encouraged me to say something to my father, I could barely form the words, like in a dream when you want to scream, but you can’t make any sound. It was an out of body experience.”
Eventually he found his words and he begged his father to retirementioned the NY Post.
“I said, ‘Dad, dad, it’s okay. Everything will be fine. Let Diana go… I don’t remember anything specific after that, except that at some point he put his gun down and cops came out from everywhere and grabbed him and grabbed my sister. I think I passed out emotionally.”
They gave him psychiatric treatment
Jack was arrested and soon admitted to Olive View-UCLA Medical Center for psychiatric evaluation and treatment. From there, Ann said, she entered a detoxification program at a private hospital in Santa Monica.
According to Ann, the frightening incidents with weapons were not unusual when his father, who kept a cache of weapons under his bed, was high on cocaine: he shot out some of his bedroom’s leaded glass windows and punched holes in the ceiling, thinking the people chasing him were in the attic and on the roof.
One night, when one of his girlfriends was living in the castle, Jack came into her room, woke her up, and told her “they were in the attic,” Ann said. She “was naked and with a shotgun, and he insisted that I go up to the attic with him. She followed him, but no ghosts were found and she finally calmed down.
Crazy about guns?
Ann said she wouldn’t characterize her father as a “gun nut,” but when she was 19 and had moved into her first apartment in Beverly Hills, he gave her a shotgun as a housewarming gift.
If someone you don’t know knocks on your door, just put the gun away, that’ll make them run,” Ann recalls her father telling her.
When the famous toy maker learned that policemen were often shot with their own weapons and taken away by the perpetrators, he reportedly invented a ring that communicated electronically with the gun so that only the policeman wearing the ring could shoot.
His arrival at Mattel
with a title of Yale and having studied in harvardJack worked for one of America’s leading defense contractors, raytheonduring the Cold War, helping design the Hawk surface-to-air missile and the Sparrow III air-to-air missileboth ordered by the Pentagon.
Creative and inventive, he saw a lucrative future in toy design and joined the startup Mattel, which had been founded by the married couple. Ruth and Elliott Handler.
Mattel would become huge and rich as a result of Jack’s patented inventions, Barbie in particular.
In the late 1970s, Ruth forced Jack to leave the companyas she despised her lifestyle and had launched a campaign claiming that Barbie was her idea, without giving Jack credit for its creation.
How was Barbie born?
The inspiration for Barbie, the America’s first truly female toy dollwas based on an X-rated adult novelty doll called bild-lillia popular German cartoon character.
Ruth saw it in a store window while on vacation in Europe, took it home, gave it to Jack, and told him to use his engineering magic to fix it. turn it into a money making machine.
Despite Jack and Mattel’s financial success with Barbie, Ruth resented him, despised his debauched lifestyle and was reportedly jealous of the acclaim he received for his many toy designs, the New York outlet reports.
In the late 1970s, Ruth forced Jack out of the company and stopped millions of dollars in royalties owed to him by Mattel, leading to him having serious financial difficulties and health problems.
Ironically, Ruth herself would be forced to leave Mattel in 1975 after pleading not guilty to the crime of falsify company books and was sentenced to 2,500 hours of community service and a $57,000 fine.
A tragic ending to your horror movie
Depressed by his dealings with Mattel and his own deteriorating health problems, the 1991 Jack committed suicide at the age of 64 with a gunshot. After that, Handler published a book described by Ann as egotistical, “dream doll“, in which claimed all the credit for the creation and success of Barbie and barely mentioned Jack.
She died in 2002, at the age of 85, without having set the record straight.
My father put his heart and soul into everything he did for Mattel, which continues to benefit from his contributions to this day, but he never got the credit he deserves,” Ann said. “They broke my father’s heart.”
Despite her father’s frightening issues, Ann said in the exclusive interview with NYP: “I want to be able to celebrate the genius and creativity of my father. I have made peace with him. I am sad that during his life I was not able to appreciate him and have the kind of relationship that I wish I had ”.
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