Sex toys, financial crimes and the origin of Barbie: The toymaker’s actual history was not all fun and games

“Half of our buyers really didn’t like it,” Ruth Handler told the BBC in a 1997 interview. “The men felt that women would not buy a doll with a woman’s body—with breasts and narrow waistlines and narrow ankles, this adult sexy-looking doll. Men felt that their wives would not want it and that it wouldn’t be right for a child to have that. They were wrong. Women, on the other hand, instantly flipped for that doll. The dolls no sooner landed on the counter than they were snatched up by the women buying them for their daughters.”

German manufacturer Greiner & Hausser and rival toymakers Louis Marx and Company also apparently flipped. Louis Marx held the “Lilli” license and noticed the similarities to their doll, resulting in a 1961 lawsuit against Mattel. That suit was settled in 1963, and a year later Mattel purchased the “Lilli” license from original German manufacturer Greiner & Hausser “for three lump-sum payments totalling 85,000 Deutschmarks (worth at that time approximately $21,600),” according to court records.

As a result, Mattel agreed not to market any dolls under the “Lilli” name, and G&H agreed not to make any dolls similar in appearance to Barbie.

Despite inspiring her name, Handler’s daughter Barbara had complicated feelings about being linked to the doll. “It was just very odd,” Barbara told the BBC in the same 1997 interview. “People were coming up to me, asking me for my autograph. When people came up and say to me, ‘Oh, you’re the real Barbie,’ I couldn’t understand it because that’s just a name that was given to the doll. A lot of people thought that they modelled it after me and they made it look like me, and that I was supposed to be it. That’s not true.”

The truth about Barbie’s origin is in dispute, however, with another woman claiming credit belongs to her own father.

Ann Ryan, the daughter of Jack Ryan, who was then vice president of research and design at Mattel, has a podcast called Dream House: The Real Story of Jack Ryan, in which she claims that her late father was wrongly stripped of credit for his role in devising the doll. She notes that her mother, Barbara, went by the nickname “Barbie.”

Mattel’s patent for Barbie, filed July 24, 1959, even has J.W. Ryan’s name listed on the document.

“My father was always obsessed with the image of the perfect woman, and then he married one whose name happened to be Barbie. The choice of the name for the Barbie doll was my father’s, absolutely, not Ruth Handler’s decision,” Ann Ryan recently told the New York Post.

Jack Ryan actually had five wives during his life, including a marriage to the socialite celebrity Zsa Zsa Gabor. He died by suicide in 1991 after suffering from a severe stroke. Three years after his death, Ruth Handler published her 1994 autobiography, Dream Doll, in which she told her version of the Barbie doll creation story.

“My father was dead and wasn’t around to dispute anything that Ruth had written in her book, and it was very frustrating to me and other members of the Ryan family,” Ann told the New York Post. “What she wrote was overwhelming and such a shock. It was all bullshit.”

None of this is addressed by the Barbie movie, by the way. But clearly there’s enough drama for a behind-the-scenes tell-all that stands alone.

This article originally appeared on Vanity Fair.