Barbie and Ken had their own dirty little secrets

Just because the holidays are over doesn't mean there isn't any toy news. Jerry Oppenheimer's book Toy Monster: The Big, Bad World of Mattel, due out next month, reveals that Barbie champion Jack Ryan was a "full-blown seventies-style swinger" with "a manic need for sexual gratification," the New York Post's Page Six says.

The books says he often had orgies at his Bel-Air manse, inviting all sorts of ladies eerily similar to his ill-proportioned creation, such as Gwen Florea. The "voice of Barbie," who was once featured in a line of talking dolls, tells Oppenheimer that Ryan "once said to me he loved me being tall so he could stick his nose in my boobs when he hugged me." We don't remember Barbie ever saying that.

Besides being married to Zsa Zsa Gabor and having a fondness for "high-class call girls" and "streetwalkers," Ryan apparently took a shine to a "very thin and child-like" hooker -- until he came down with gonorrhea.

"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's pal Stephen Gnass says in the book. Nice to know all of America's daughters played with those things, right?

Quick trivia: Barbie and Ken were named after the kids of Mattel founders Ruth and Elliot Handler, but Ken didn't seem to like being named after "an anatomically incorrect boy doll," as he was teased mercilessly.

The book also says Ken was a closeted gay, which was likely a disappointment to his wife, and died of AIDS in 1994 in Greenwich Village, despite the disease not being mentioned in obituaries. It wasn't all sports cars and beach houses after all.

[Photo: Getty Images]

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Comments

[Robin Gerber]

Ruth Handler, the founder of Mattel toys, actually created Barbie. Ryan was her head of Research and Design and she had him take a prototype doll (a German sex toy called "Lilli") to Japan to manufacture the first Barbies.
Read more Handler, who became a convicted felon in the 1970's and the inventor of a prosthetic breast after her own bout with breast cancer, in "BARBIE AND RUTH" (Harper/Collins) the first biography of Handler coming out next month!

[becca]

Sorry. That's Commercial Free Childhood.

[becca]

They came out when I was a kid. A few of my friends had these dolls, but they always creeped me out.

Never owned one, never bought one for any of the girls in our family.

Girls need to be protected from Madison Avenue. Check out the Commercial Free Childhoos website for more on how advertising targets a young girl's body image.