Sex, Bombs and Burgers (14 page)

While this link between war and toys has always existed, it wasn’t until after the Second World War that military technology began to drive the development of toys and games. Just as military-refined technology created playthings for adults (like cameras that could be used to shoot sexual escapades), a host of entrepreneurial inventors followed the lead of companies like Raytheon, Hormel and DuPont in exploiting their wartime inventions for post-war commercial success. For some of these entrepreneurs, it was all about money. For others, the motivations were deeper. Turning their inventions into toys and games allowed them to show off their creations publicly, a welcome and sought-after escape from the secretive world they normally worked in. Still others sought to entertain and amuse, perhaps as penance for the horrific deeds that some of their other creations were responsible for. Taken together, their efforts have gradually changed our attitudes toward war. Today, the tide has turned completely—the development of toys and games now drives the military. Remote-control robots incorporate the same controllers used in PlayStation and Xbox consoles, while troops
familiarize themselves with combat zones by playing specially designed three-dimensional games that use the same technology as the
Call of Duty
and Tom Clancy titles found on the shelves of Walmart. In many ways, technology has turned war into a game.

Springs and Things

It started with simple inventions like the humble Slinky. In 1943 navy engineer Richard James was trying to figure out a way to stabilize sensitive instruments on board ships using springs. While tinkering in his home in Philadelphia, he accidentally knocked a steel torsion spring off a shelf. Rather than falling and landing in a heap, the spring—a coil with no compression or tension—“stepped” down from the shelf to a stack of books, then to a tabletop, then onto the floor, where it recoiled and stood upright. The engineer was even more astonished when he gently pushed the spring down a flight of stairs, only to see it gracefully “walk” down. His wife Betty was equally impressed by the spring’s eloquent movements and described them as “slinky,” which stuck as a name.

The couple thought they might have a hit toy on their hands so they formed a business, James Spring & Wire Company, and took out a loan, which Richard used to make a machine that wound Slinky units. They shopped the Slinky around to local department stores and found a taker in Gimbels Brothers, which set up a display—complete with an inclined plane to demonstrate the spring’s walking ability—in a downtown Philadelphia store during the 1945 Christmas season. The Jameses were flabbergasted when all four hundred units, which Richard had spent days winding, quickly sold out.
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The Slinky sensation was off and running.

The couple built a production factory in 1948 to cope with demand and eventually developed spinoff products such as the smaller Slinky Jr. and the Slinky Dog, plus non-spring toys like building kits. For the next decade, the Jameses watched the riches pour in. In 1960, however, Richard became unwound, so to speak. After suffering a nervous breakdown, he left Betty and their six children to join a religious cult in Bolivia. Betty was left to manage the company, which she renamed James Industries, as well as the large debts incurred by her husband’s religious donations. She recovered from the shocking turn of events and eventually took the Slinky to new heights, but it wasn’t easy. “He had given so much away that I was almost bankrupt. I sold the factory and decided to move from the Philadelphia area back to Altoona, where I grew up, with the business,” she later recalled.
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Betty helped create the toy’s memorable television ad campaign, which featured the catchy jingle that anyone born before the nineties is unlikely to forget: “It’s Slinky, it’s Slinky, for fun it’s a wonderful toy. It’s Slinky, it’s Slinky, it’s fun for a girl and a boy!” By its sixtieth anniversary in 2005 more than three hundred million Slinky toys had been sold.
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A few years earlier, on November 4, 2001, the General Assembly of Pennsylvania named the Slinky the Official State Toy of Philadelphia. Richard James, however, didn’t get to see his invention honoured—he died in Bolivia in 1974. The Slinky, meanwhile, went full circle with its military connection, when American soldiers in the Vietnam War found it could be used as an antenna for their mobile radios.

The Slinky sparked the imaginations of military minds and marketers alike, who realized that war technology might just be
an untapped gold mine of toy possibilities. Silly Putty came next. When the Japanese occupied the rubber-producing islands of the Pacific during the early forties, the Allies found themselves facing a potential shortage of vehicle tires and boot soles. Credit for the invention of Silly Putty is disputed; Earl Warrick, a scientist working for Dow Corning, claimed to have created it, but Crayola, the company that now owns the trademark, considers James Wright the proper inventor. Wright, a Scottish engineer working in General Electric’s labs in New Haven, Connecticut, came up with a potential solution to the rubber problem when he mixed boric acid and silicon oil in a test tube. The new substance had rubber-like qualities and a very high melting temperature, but it also bounced, stretched further and resisted mold. The putty-like goo, however, wasn’t solid enough to replace rubber, so it sat out the war. GE sent the substance to scientists and engineers around the world after the war, but eventually gave up and declared it had no practical use.
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(The Allied rubber problem, meanwhile, was solved in the late stages of the war when a number of companies, including tire makers Firestone and Goodrich, came up with a synthetic elastomer under a patent-sharing program overseen by the American government.)

Ultimately, GE’s substance didn’t have to travel far to find a use. Ruth Fallgetter, a toy store owner in New Haven, got her hands on one of the samples that were circulating and immediately saw its potential as a plaything. She brought in Peter Hodgson, a local marketing consultant, to help sell it.

Children immediately fell in love with the putty because of its pliability and ability to copy pictures and text when pressed against newspaper and comics pages. Packaged in a clear case
with a price tag of two dollars, the putty outsold just about everything in the store. But Fallgetter wasn’t convinced of its long-term viability, so she left it to her partner to take further. Eyeing the Slinky’s success, Hodgson bounced around potential names before trademarking one he thought represented the goo perfectly: Silly Putty. He bought production rights and a batch of the substance from GE, then packaged it in plastic eggs, since Easter was on the way. He introduced Silly Putty to potential distributors at the 1950 International Toy Fair in New York, but once again it flopped—nearly all of the toy marketers at the fair advised Hodgson to give up. The persistent entrepreneur didn’t listen, however, and eventually convinced department chain Neiman Marcus and bookseller Doubleday to sell the substance for $1 per egg in their stores. Hodgson was convinced Silly Putty was a great toy because it sparked children’s imaginations. “It really has a sort of personality,’’ he later said, “and it reflects your personality.... A lot of what makes it work is that the stuff in the egg is only the half of it.’’
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Silly Putty sold modestly until it made an appearance in
The New Yorker,
which quoted a Doubleday employee as saying it was the “most terrific item it has handled since
Forever Amber,”
a bestselling 1944 novel.
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More than a quarter million orders rolled in from stores around the country in the three days following the story’s publication.
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Hodgson and his goo weren’t out of the woods yet. The Korean War and the American government’s rationing of silicone, the main ingredient in Silly Putty, almost put him out of business in 1951. He had to scale back production, but when restrictions were lifted a year later, his business went straight to the moon, literally. American sales boomed throughout the fifties
and Silly Putty also became a hit in several European countries. But Hodgson scored his biggest publicity coup yet in 1968, when it was reported that astronauts on the Apollo 8 moon mission were using it to secure tools in zero gravity. The entrepreneur’s tenacity had finally paid off and he rode Silly Putty to riches. When he died in 1976 Hodgson left behind an estate worth $140 million. Crayola bought the rights to Silly Putty in 1977 and ten years later was selling more than two million eggs annually.
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Rocket Doll

As the sixties approached, toys started to become more complex, and so did the technology behind them. The all-time bestselling toy, the Barbie doll, was the product of space-age military thinking. It also had lascivious if not outright pornographic origins. The doll was inspired by Lilli, a cartoon character from the German tabloid newspaper
Bild Zeitung. Bild,
as it is now known, was founded in Hamburg in 1952 for people with poor reading skills. Like many tabloids, it made heavy use of photographs and featured news stories that were often sensationalistic and based on dubious facts. Lilli, a tall, statuesque character with platinum-blond hair created by artist Reinhard Beuthien, fit in well with the newspaper’s lowbrow editorial direction. She was unabashedly sexual, a gold digger, an exhibitionist and a floozy with “the body of a Vargas Girl, the brains of Pia Zadora and the morals of Xaviera Hollander,” in the words of one Barbie biographer.
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In her first cartoon, Lilli sat in a fortune teller’s tent and, after being told she’d meet a wealthy and good-looking suitor, asked, “Can’t you tell me the name and address of this rich and handsome man?” Another exploit found her naked in her female friend’s apartment concealing her vital parts with
a newspaper, saying, “We had a fight and he took back all the presents he gave me,” while yet another had a policeman warn her that her two-piece bathing suit was illegal. “Oh,” she replied, “and in your opinion, which part should I take off?”
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In 1955, looking to cash in on Lilli’s popularity, the newspaper commissioned German toy maker Greiner & Hauser to make an eleven-and-a-half-inch doll, complete with ponytail and removable outfits, aimed at adults. The curvy dolls were dressed in low-cut blouses, stiletto heels, skimpy skirts and shorts, and came bundled with innuendo-laced packaging and marketing. “Whether more or less naked, Lilli is always discreet,” read one promotional brochure; as a “mascot for your car,” Lilli promises a “swift ride,” read another. Her wardrobe made her “the star of every bar.”
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The doll sold well to German men as a gag gift, but Greiner & Hauser eventually toned down its overt sexuality to appeal to the larger children’s market.

Ruth Handler first discovered the Lilli doll while on vacation in Europe. The president of American toy maker Mattel had been thinking of introducing an adult doll after seeing her daughter Barbara playing with her own paper cutout creations. Barbara had not been imagining her paper dolls in childish situations, like playing in a sandbox or skipping rope with friends, but rather in much older scenarios, such as high school, college or an adult career. Handler believed there was a market in going against the conventional wisdom of the time, that young girls were only interested in playing with young dolls. Intrigued by Lilli, Handler bought three: one for herself and two for her daughter.

Mattel had been started in southern California in 1945 by Harold “Matt” Matson and Handler’s husband, Elliot;
the company name was a contraction of the founders’ names. Matson, however, decided against gambling his life savings on the company and sold out to his partner the following year, a move he surely rued after Mattel became a toy juggernaut. Ruth, a stenographer for Paramount Pictures in Hollywood, quit her job and came on board as president. Unlike Matson, the Handlers were every bit the entrepreneurs—and big believers in plastics and other futuristic technology. During the war, Elliot built furniture out of Plexiglas in his garage, then expanded to plastic jewellery, candleholders and other novelties. Mattel’s first hit toy was the Ukedoodle, a plastic ukulele, in 1947, followed in 1955 by its very own toy weapon, the Burp Gun. By the time Ruth discovered Lilli, Mattel was already a modest success, with a net worth of $500,000.
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Elliot’s passion for futurism was stoked when he was approached in the early fifties by Jack Ryan, a Yale-educated engineer working for Raytheon, with an idea for a toy transistor radio. Handler didn’t like the idea, but he was impressed with Ryan’s knowledge of transistors and electrical circuitry and believed the engineer had the “space-age savvy” to make his own high-tech fantasies real.
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The entrepreneurial Ryan, on the other hand, wasn’t content with his role at Raytheon, where he was working on a team designing the Hawk surface-to-air missile. Handler wooed Ryan away from Raytheon with a contract that promised royalties on every toy patent he came up with.

Ryan became better known for his colourful and extravagant sex life than his engineering skills.
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After he achieved success with Mattel, he spared no expense in building a hedonistic pleasure palace in California that would have made Hugh Hefner envious. On a five-acre estate in Bel Air that once belonged
to actor George Hamilton, the engineer constructed a cross between a castle and a theme park, a mansion complete with turrets, tapestries, eighteen bathrooms, seven kitchens and a tree house that could seat twelve for dinner. By dialling particular numbers on one of the 150 telephones around the mansion, Ryan could activate a waterfall, light up the tennis court, close the front gate, turn on the stereo system or order caviar for the tree house, which had its own chandelier and panoramic view of Los Angeles.

He threw frequent and lavish parties—182 in one year, or one every two days—complete with jugglers, fortune tellers, handwriting analysts, musicians, go-go dancers, minstrels and harpsichordists. Drunken guests bounced up and down on a trampoline or fed the ducks, geese and pony kept on the grounds. Ryan also housed the twelve UCLA students he had recruited to be part of his Mattel design team and courted numerous high-society and celebrity mistresses.
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In the basement, he put together a black-painted dungeon decked out in black fox fur, and cuddled with his numerous girlfriends under wolf-fur covers in a guest room bedecked with mirrored walls.