Inside deviant sex life of Barbie creator Jack Ryan who bedded 100s of doll clones in orgies that offended famous wife
JACK RYAN would have loved watching actress Margot Robbie in the new Barbie movie.
The playboy — who made a fortune from inventing the famous doll — had a creepy infatuation with gorgeous blondes who resembled his plastic creation.
And while the toys delighted young girls across the globe, they ignited in Ryan a sex-crazed obsession to turn every woman in his life into a human replica he could romp with.
His story is so incredible, it’s worthy of its own Hollywood treatment — with an 18 rating, of course.
Ryan, toy maker Mattel’s chief designer, held a staggering 300 champagne and drug-fuelled parties a year at his California mansion — a lifestyle which was a million miles from Barbie’s wholesome image.
There, he bedded hundreds of tall, blonde beauties with tiny waists and perky breasts who looked just like his beloved doll.
He even made some of his conquests have plastic surgery so they looked more like his invention.
Ryan claimed the top-selling figurine was named after his first wife Barbara.
And he referred to his second wife — the late Hollywood film star Zsa Zsa Gabor — as “my big Barbie”.
But their marriage collapsed after a year as the actress claimed he “lived in a fantasy world”.
She once said: “Jack’s sex life would have made the average Penthouse reader blanch with shock.”
In the new $100million Barbie movie — made with Mattel and released on July 21 — Barbie is played by Margot, 32, with Ryan Gosling, 42, starring as her boyfriend Ken.
The plot centres on the couple leaving Barbie Land to live in the real world.
But the shocking story of the doll’s creation and how it drove her inventor to madness began more than 60 years ago.
Mattel’s owners, Ruth Handler and husband Elliot, had bought a doll that looked like a cartoon character from Germany’s biggest-selling tabloid newspaper while they were on holiday there in 1956.
With its dark hair, made-up face and sexy curves, Bild-Lilli was an 11-and-a-half inch tall version of burlesque queen Dita Von Teese, aimed at an adult audience.
Back in California, the Handlers immediately gave Ryan the job of producing a doll for young girls to collect — and dress in clothes they would sell.
Delving into his wildest fantasy, the former missile engineer filed off Barbie’s nipples and made her legs extra-long.
And he took out all the patents for the doll, including her twisting waist.
Ryan outsourced production of Barbie to Japan that same year.
His pal, Stephen Gnass, said: “I often think about the expression on his face when he described the doll’s voluptuousness.
“When he talked about Barbie it was like listening to somebody talk about a sexual episode, almost like listening to a sexual pervert.”
Barbie made her debut in March 1959 at the New York Toy Fair, wearing a black and white striped swimsuit and with her hair in her signature ponytail.
Within months, the dolls were flying off the shelves.
In fact the fictional character got more fan mail than legendary actresses Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn combined.
Instead of pocketing a wage, Ryan had a deal that Mattel would give him 1.5 per cent of all the money Barbie earned — an astonishing $10million a year at today’s prices.
His fortune from the doll and Mattel’s other huge seller, Hot Wheels cars, helped to fund Ryan’s wild ways.
The royalties paid for a huge mock Tudor Bel Air mansion set in five acres, which he transformed into a Middle Ages castle by adding battlements and a drawbridge.
It looked like a medieval version of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion, where he could indulge his passion for orgies and drugs.
Ryan hosted hundreds of parties with jugglers, fortune tellers, calypso musicians, go-go dancers, rhyming minstrels and drunken guests.
He even hung a crude, phallic dial numbered one to 10 over the entrance.
When a woman stepped inside, an assistant would pull a string to display her sexiness rating.
Ryan kept a record of all his conquests, cataloguing their names, with photos and details of sexual interests and appetites.
In the days before mobiles, he installed 144 telephones around the castle and its grounds so he could stay in touch with work colleagues and girlfriends.
Every Thursday, Ryan hosted a bawdy medieval banquet, sitting on a throne as jugglers and minstrels entertained guests hand-picked for their glamorous looks.
Each week, a new Barbie lookalike would be seated beside Ryan, a crown worn in margarine TV ads perched on her head.
Festivities ended with Ryan — who was 5ft 8ins tall and looked nothing like fictional Ken — taking her to bed while some drunken guests had sex.
Others bounced on his daughter’s trampoline and offered martinis to her pony, as well as geese and ducks that roamed the grounds.
Barbara and their two daughters — Ann and Diana — lived in a separate wing of the mansion known as the personal quarters, away from the cavorting guests.
Meanwhile, an army of attractive young women were employed as secretaries and designers in the Barbie fashion department.
Mattel’s research and development hub was decorated with naked versions of the dolls twisted into erotic poses.
After work, staff often went to the beach for “pot, wine and sex parties”.
Many of female staff became Ryan’s sexual partner.
Budding actress Gwen Florea, who he spotted dancing raunchily on a nightclub bar, was the voice of the first talking Barbie, which would gush, “I love being a fashion model”.
The 6ft 1in beauty said Ryan loved to “stick his nose in my boobs when he hugged me”.
With her brown eyes and voluptuous curves, Gwen was his idea of perfection.
She ran Mattel’s recording studios and once revealed: “Jack was very good in bed.
“He was very, very considerate.
“But it was the whole aura of his personality that was so attractive.”
Brit Derek Gable, a senior designer for Mattel, said: “People hooked up.
“It was considered the thing to do.
“If you weren’t doing it, you weren’t in the in-crowd.”
Barbara divorced Ryan in 1971 after 21 years of marriage.
He then got hitched to neighbour Zsa Zsa in 1975, becoming the sixth of her nine husbands.
But she quickly tired of him trying to make her reshape her legs like Barbie’s.
The final straw came on honeymoon in Japan, where Ryan went to a business meeting at the factory that manufactured Barbie.
He arranged for his wife to be shown around the city while he was away.
But when she got back to the hotel, the escort told her, “Miss Gabor, your husband has paid me to go to bed with you”.
Zsa Zsa sued for divorce, insisting: “My new husband was a full-blown seventies-style swinger, into wife-swapping and sundry sexual pursuits as a way of life.”
Ryan sent his third wife, his former secretary Linda Henson, to a Hollywood fitness trainer three times a week to develop long, shapely pins like Barbie.
She died of a heart attack after becoming anorexic.
He pressured other women to become as skinny as his dream doll by taking diet pills which contained the addictive drug amphetamine.
And he even paid for one girlfriend to have facial reconstruction and breast augmentation.
Horrified at Ryan’s debauched lifestyle, Mattel’s owners axed his royalty payments and even denied his part in the creation of Barbie.
He sued for £17million over non-payment, but settled for £6million and was forced to sell his beloved castle to pay his legal bills.
Following the court battle, Ryan had a heart attack and a stroke.
In August 1991, after watching a TV documentary in which Ruth Handler failed to acknowledge his part in Barbie’s story, he shot himself aged 65.
Ryan’s daughter Ann, now 68, said: “My father put his heart and soul into everything he did for Mattel, which continues to benefit from his contributions.
“He never received the credit he deserved. They broke my father’s heart.”
Shame of real life Ken
MATTEL’S co-founder Ruth Handler, who died in 2002, always said that Barbie was called after her own daughter Barbara.
But there is no doubt that the doll’s fictional boyfriend Ken – played in the movie by Ryan Gosling, 42 – was named after Ruth’s son, Kenneth.
Jerry Oppenheimer revealed in his book Toy Monster: “Ken grew up embarrassed and humiliated by having an anatomically incorrect boy doll named after him.
“Unlike Barbie, who had breasts, Ken had no hint of genitalia.
“As he grew older, real-life Ken also was self-conscious about the fame and riches the Barbie and Ken dolls had brought to the family.
“He was particularly disturbed about the negative impact Barbie had on some young girls.
“So much so that he refused as an adult to have the dolls in his home or to allow his two daughters and son to play with them.”
The real-life Ken died of Aids, age 50, in June 1994 – the day before his daughter Stacey was to be married.
- Barbie, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, in cinemas from July 21.
