Even during LA’s decadent Sixties and Seventies, few people threw parties like Jack Ryan, who hosted weekly “medieval banquets” at his vast mock castle banquets at his vast mock castle.
With his wife and young family banished to another wing of the mansion, the sex-mad Ryan would crown one of his glamorous female guests his “queen” for the night before the revelries descended into an orgy.
And if his queens often looked like Barbie dolls — with long legs, tiny waists and pointy breasts — that was hardly a coincidence.
For he was the eccentric genius who designed Barbie and who, having made a fortune from the royalties of one of the most popular toys ever created, then spent his life pursuing real-life versions.
When he couldn’t find them, he’d create them, persuading various women to have cosmetic surgery so they more closely resembled his plastic doll.
Next month sees the heavily hyped release of Barbie, a glossy $100 million comedy starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and boyfriend Ken.
The first live-action Barbie movie, directed by Greta Gerwig, is a collaboration with Mattel, the U.S. toy giant that since the doll appeared in 1959 has turned Barbie into a multi-billion dollar empire.
But while the film has the approval of Mattel, Jack Ryan — who in later life became hooked on cocaine and prostitutes as he fought a bitter battle with his employers over Barbie royalties — is unable to give his verdict.
In 1991, just before his 65th birthday, having sunk into depression and substance abuse, as well as being left in a wheelchair by a stroke, he shot himself dead.
His lurid life and monstrous sexual appetite were, after all, utterly at odds with the world’s favourite doll and the saccharine-sweet world that Mattel created for her.
Perhaps it’s no surprise then that, although Ryan was Mattel’s chief designer and held the only warrants covering the doll, hardbitten Mattel founder Ruth Handler and her successors have largely written him out of the Barbie story.
Zsa Zsa Gabor, second of his five wives, described him as her “knight in shining armour, the inhabitant of a fairytale castle”.
Only, she added in the same breath, he was also “a full-blown Seventies-style swinger into wife-swapping and sundry sexual pursuits as a way of life”.
Gabor “just couldn’t cope” with an endlessly philandering husband who she claims even built a sex dungeon, its walls painted black and lined with fox fur, in a grotto at his Bel Air hilltop estate.
She divorced him just a year after they married in 1975.
Asked why Barbie should have such an unlikely “father”, Ryan’s daughter, Ann, told the Mail this week that the brilliant but troubled inventor had been a “genius, a highly intelligent person with an engineering background” who was also “very creative”.
She added: “Sometimes, when you have all those things mixed together, it can make for some peculiar personalities”.
Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, he was prescribed lithium but often stopped taking it, leading to manic episodes which sparked more wild partying and womanising.
Educated at Yale and Harvard, Ryan started out designing guided missiles for the U.S. military.
Mattel, which Handler founded with husband Elliot and partner Harold ‘Matt’ Matson in 1945, hired Ryan a decade later for his ‘space-age savvy’, making him the company’s head of research and development.
In 1956, Handler returned from a holiday in Switzerland with a German doll, called Bild Lilli.
Based on a comic strip in Playboy magazine, the sultry Lilli was intended for adult doll collectors.
Ryan was instructed to make a more wholesome American version for teenage girls. (He later described how he personally ‘filed the nipples off the mould’ to make Barbie less anatomically correct.)
He and Handler both had overweening egos and would ferociously dispute who played the greater role in creating Barbie.
They even fought over the doll’s name: Handler claimed Barbie was named after her daughter Barbara but Ryan insisted the name came from his first wife, Barbara.
But as friends and ex-colleagues of Ryan told writer Jerry Oppenheimer, who chronicled Mattel’s turbulent history in Toy Monster: The Big, Bad World of Mattel, Barbie was not only clearly a man’s creation but Ryan’s ‘fantasy woman’.
The doll was an instant hit.
Within months, a Japanese factory was churning out 100,000 Barbies a week but still struggling to keep up with demand, as the doll received more fan mail than Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn combined.
More than a billion have since been sold.
The Handlers soon came to regret having agreed to pay Ryan 1.5 per cent of the company’s gross sales instead of a salary.
He became very wealthy, soon earning more than $1 million a year (equivalent to some $10 million today). And while he designed a string of successful toys, including Hot Wheels cars, his excitement over Barbie was so great that some felt it amounted to sexual arousal.
“I often think about the expression on his face when he described the doll’s voluptuousness,’”said close friend Stephen Gnass.
“When he talked about Barbie it was like listening to somebody talk about a sexual episode, almost like listening to a sexual pervert.”
Ryan’s new found wealth allowed him to take that sexual interest further by pursuing women who reminded him of his creation.
And Los Angeles, heaving with aspiring actresses and models, provided an almost limitless supply.
Gnomelike — barely 5ft 8in even in platform heels, with orange-dyed hair, a big nose and squeaky voice — he was hardly Barbie’s Ken made flesh.
But while Ryan could be an abrasive bully, many women found his generosity, wit and unbridled energy hard to resist.
Having grown up as the lonely child of well-heeled but remote parents in New York , he adored being surrounded by people, especially women, and hated being alone, daughter Ann told the Mail.
He threw endless parties — as many as 300 a year, sometimes for up to 1,000 guests — and, true to Los Angeles during those years, they invariably involved a lot of sex, leading Ruth Handler to dub him “the world’s greatest swinger”.
He found the perfect setting for these almost nightly bacchanals in the early 1960s when he bought a huge mock Tudor mansion in ritzy Bel Air with his Barbie royalties.
Although it was already one of the neighbourhood’s biggest homes, he turned it into a pastiche of a 15th-century castle, importing old stone from France, ancient panelling from Scotland and adding battlements, a moat and a drawbridge.
Every Thursday, in the huge dining room, Ryan would hold his medieval banquets, sitting on a throne that had once belonged to a 17th-century Italian prince as jugglers and minstrels entertained guests chosen for their glamour and told to wear medieval costumes.
They would have to eat with their hands rather than utensils as their host believed it broke down their inhibitions.
Seated beside Ryan each night would be a new Barbie-like beauty who would wear an elaborate crown that had been previously used in margarine commercials.
The merrymaking would end with the priapic host taking her to bed and his sozzled guests often coupling off, too.
And all of this while Ryan’s first wife, Barbara, and their two daughters, Ann and Diana, were living under the same roof, tucked away in a wing of the mansion known as the Personal Quarters and out of bounds to marauding guests.
(Ann insists that while her mother knew what was happening, their marriage had long since disintegrated and they only stayed together to not upset Ryan’s devoutly Catholic father.)
The sex-obsessed Ryan livened up some of his parties by hanging an obscene ‘dial’ over the entrance which was numbered from 1 to 10.
When a woman entered the room, an assistant would pull a string that moved the phallic dial to ‘rate’ how sexy she was.
Ryan kept a record of all the women he met.
The list was so extensive that he used the McBee Keysort System employed by U.S. librarians to catalogue all the names.
He even added photos and details of sexual interests or appetites if known.
His reign of relentless fornication continued at work where Mattel’s R&D department was decorated with Barbie dolls contorted into erotic poses.
Ryan hired a small army of attractive young women as secretaries or clothing designers in the Barbie fashion department.
After work, staff often trooped down to the local beach for “pot, wine and sex parties”.
Derek Gable, a senior designer lured to work for Mattel from the UK, summed it up as “free love before Aids,” with rampant partner-swapping.
“People hooked up. It was outrageous for me coming from stuffy old England and seeing all this going on,” he told biographer Oppenheimer.
“It was considered the thing to do. If you weren’t doing it, you weren’t in the in-crowd.”
Many of the women who worked for Ryan became his lovers.
These included Gwen Florea, an aspiring actress he first spotted dancing raunchily on a nightclub bar top.
She later provided the voice of the first talking Barbie dolls.
“I love being a fashion model,” the doll gushed.
Florea, who was 6 ft 1 in, said Ryan loved her height because “he could stick his nose in my boobs when he hugged me”.
His first wife, Barbara, finally divorced him in 1971 after a 21-year marriage.
Four years later, he married Gabor, a neighbour, when she was 55 and he 48.
She admitted in her memoir that “far from building a life with me, with one woman, Jack had every intention of continuing his swinging lifestyle”.
She added: “All in all, Jack’s sex life would have made the average Penthouse reader blanch.”
Ryan apparently had hoped she’d “swing”, too.
Gabor claimed that during their honeymoon in Japan, he had to leave her for a day for business so arranged for a male guide to show her around Tokyo.
When they returned to the hotel she was horrified when he informed her: “Miss Gabor, your husband has paid me to go to bed with you.”
At least Gabor escaped Ryan’s insistence on remodelling his lovers to look more like his creation.
His third wife, his former secretary Linda Henson, was an “extraordinary beauty” but Ryan had strict criteria for his women and one of them was that they have “long, shapely legs like Barbie”, said close friend Nancy Hudson.
Ryan sent the hapless Henson off for thrice-weekly sessions with a Hollywood fitness trainer to develop her calf muscles.
Devastated by his infidelity, she started drinking heavily and putting on weight, prompting a disgusted Ryan to divorce her.
Desperate to win him back, she became anorexic and died of a heart attack in her 30s.
He pressured other women to become Barbie-skinny by taking diet pills which contained the addictive drug amphetamine.
One girlfriend had a far more radical makeover: Ryan paid for her to have facial reconstruction, breast augmentation and even a vaginaplasty, then presented her to friends who felt like he was showing off a new doll.
Ryan was a cosmetic-surgery aficionado — a favourite pastime was sitting at a Beverly Hills cafe and trying to work out which surgeon had “worked” on passing women.
He wed twice more: first to actress Gari Hardy Lansing in 1981 then Magda Orzechowski, a Polish immigrant who spoke little English, in 1985.
She claims she only had a nose job.
By then, his fortune had long been in steep decline, along with his health.
The strait-laced Handlers had grown embarrassed by his behaviour and eventually tired of paying him so much as the company’s fortunes faltered.
In 1974, he sued them for $29.8 million over non-payment in royalties, leaving Mattel three years later.
(In 1978, Mattel was embroiled in further scandal when Ruth Handler was convicted of cooking the company books.)
Devastated to be spurned by the company he loved, Ryan started drinking heavily and became addicted to cocaine.
Daughter Ann said he became so paranoid and deranged that he once grabbed a shotgun and took hostage her sister, Diana, then 20, leading to a stand-off with police.
Ryan escaped charges but was sent to a detox programme.
After he sold his castle at an enormous loss to pay for his protracted legal battle with Mattel, the company finally agreed to give him an $11 million settlement in 1980 on the eve of the case coming to court.
In 1989, Ryan suffered a stroke which left him semi-paralysed and unable to speak.
Two years later, he killed himself, shortly after watching a Barbie documentary in which Ruth Handler yet again failed to give him credit.
“It was so upsetting for Jack because only he would make a doll like that with the boobs and the legs,” said his last wife Magda.
Jack Ryan would no doubt have regarded that as the greatest of compliments.
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