Ryan, John William (“Jack”)

(b. 12 November 1926 in New York City; d. 13 August 1991 in Los Angeles, California), inventor of the technology for the Barbie doll, the best-selling toy of the twentieth century.

Ryan was the younger of two sons of James Ryan, a prosperous building contractor, and Lily Urquhart Croston. Ryan insisted early in life on being called Jack. In fact most who met him as an adult never knew his birth name. After graduating from the prestigious Barnard School in 1943 in Riverdale, New York, where he was called “professor” by his classmates, Ryan went to Yale College, where he was active in the Dramatic Association (“Dramat”), the Pistol Club, and the Naval Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. He served in the Pacific for a short time during World War II and in 1946 returned to Yale, where he was known as an “engineering genius.”

Upon receiving his engineering degree in 1948, Ryan moved to Los Angeles to work in the Missile and Radar Division of the Raytheon Company, a weapons manufacturer. He helped design the Hawk (surface-to-air) and the Sparrow (air-to-air) missiles for the Korean War.

In 1955 Ryan approached the Mattel Toy Company with an idea for a toy transistor radio. The owners were impressed with his knowledge of engineering and technology and tried to lure him to Mattel. A savvy businessman, Ryan refused until his contract gave him a percentage of every toy he invented, which eventually made him a multimillionaire. He joined Mattel in 1955 and remained there for nineteen years, becoming corporate research director in 1956. While the Barbie doll was not Ryan’s idea, he did invent the technology that allowed her to “twist-’n-turn” and to talk. The doll became the best-selling toy of the twentieth century. Ryan subsequently designed the technology for over thirty-five Mattel toys, including Chatty Cathy, Hot Wheels cars, the Thunderburp cap gun, and the Tommy Burst detective gun.

Ryan left Mattel in 1974 to form his own company for “interdisciplinary invention.” He continued as a consultant for Mattel, eventually holding over 1,000 patents worldwide with sales of $16 billion by 1988.

In 1962 Ryan bought a five-acre estate in wealthy Bel Air, a neighborhood of Los Angeles, that had been owned by the silent-screen star Warner Baxter. Ryan had the eighteen-bedroom Tudor house remodeled as a medieval castle, complete with a moat and a dungeon decorated in black fox fur. At any given time in the 1960s and 1970s the castle was occupied simultaneously by eighteen to twenty people, including his wife of the moment, daughters, mistresses, colleagues, and ten young men from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) who received room and board in return for maintaining the estate.

When Ryan married the actress Zsa Zsa Gabor in 1975 he had already been thrice-divorced. Gabor refused to live at the castle and remarked that “Jack’s sex life would have made the average Penthouse reader blanch with shock.” The marriage lasted seven months.

The short, barrel-chested Ryan was known to his friends as a generous and fun-loving if somewhat blunt and outspoken man who loved to entertain lavishly and to dress in fantasy costumes. He organized charity events for such organizations as the Thalians, a movie star organization that raises funds for emotionally disturbed children, and the Hollywood Motion Picture and Television Museum, of which Ryan was a director. He served on the Board of Scientific Advisors at the UCLA Crump Institute of Medical Engineering and was chairman of the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Alumni Association of Southern California.

In 1989 Ryan underwent bypass surgery before suffering a massive stroke from which he never recovered. He died at home of the stroke’s debilitating effects two years later and was buried in Los Angeles.

Ryan’s engineering and inventive technical skills ranged from missiles to toys and had a major impact on American society and abroad. Shortly after his death a London newspaper, the Independent, in describing Ryan’s influence on millions of children worldwide through the Barbie doll and the thirty-five other toys he developed, wrote, “He was responsible to some extent for the forming of their life-attitudes, their farthest-reaching ambitions and fantasies, and perhaps also their greatest fears and anxieties.”

Ryan’s personal life is mentioned in Zsa Zsa Gabor’s autobiography, One Lifetime Is Not Enough (1991), and M. G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll (1994), which includes considerable anecdotes regarding Ryan’s sojourn at Mattel. Obituaries are in the Los Angeles Times (19 Aug. 1991), the New York Times (21 Aug. 1991), Time (2 Sept. 1991), and Deborah Andrews, ed., The Annual Obituary 1991 (1992).

Elaine Mcmahon Good