In the Barbie movie, there is a very poignant moment when Barbie, beautifully portrayed by Margot Robbie, wanders into an old-fashioned kitchen and Rhea Perlman, an old lady sitting there, is working at her breakfast table.

They talk a bit, and the woman says, “I am Ruth.” To the audience, that name meant zero. Just an old woman and an old lady name.

It spoke volumes to me. I knew exactly who it was, as revealed toward the film’s conclusion. It was none other than Ruth Handler, the inventor of the Barbie doll, and wife of Elliot Handler, the El in Mattel (Matt-El). Ruth Handler wasn’t just a name to me. She was like a ‘regular mum,’ as John Lennon once described the Queen.  I am probably among the few people in this city who knew her, and met her in person, apart from some toy business veterans who may still be around.

This came about because my family’s PR firm, Harshe-Rotman & Druck, Inc. had a number of successes, and one was representing the Academy Awards and the other was landing the Mattel account in LA. One of the tasks was organizing the Barbie Fan Club, where little girls would send in dollars for their memberships and a staffer would put them in a wheelbarrow and bring them down to the bank below.

My dad, Morris B. Rotman, the firm’s co-founder and CEO, and a PR Pioneer, got to know Ruth and Elliot Handler very well. We stayed in their house once; I think I slept in Ken’s bedroom (they named the dolls after their children).

At the Toy Fair in New York (still held there and starting on Sept. 30), when I was about 10 or 11, Mr. Handler, also responsible for Chatty Cathy, the first talking doll, and Hot Wheels,  swept his hand across a big room containing his entire product line and said I could have anything there I wanted. Talk about a tough decision! I froze.

“Anything?”

“Yes.”

I chose the Fanner .50 cap gun and holster with plastic bullets that ingeniously were shot out of the toy pistol when the cap went off and miraculously did not kill or maim playmates.

Not something that would be on the market today. Refusing to go out to dinner with my dad who had taken me to New York, something of a family tradition, I stayed in the Plaza Hotel room and shot the pistol all evening. Too bad I didn’t link up with Kevin of Home Alone fame.

To me, Ruth, though ‘ruthless in business,’ and president of Mattel 1945-75, was always kind and friendly, opening up her home and acting like anyone else’s nice mom, asking me about school and stuff. It never occurred to me that her doll would become an international icon, standing for a physically exaggerated model of the ideal American female – and that there would be a $1 billion box office movie about her invention.

Later in life, Handler in 1970, like my mother Sylvia Rotman, was diagnosed with breast cancer, and had a radical double mastectomy, the state of the art at the time. But being the entrepreneurial spirit, she had a brainstorm. Due to difficulties in finding a good breast prosthesis, Handler decided to make her own. With the help of new business partner Handler, manufactured a more realistic version of a woman, called “Nearly Me.”

This invention became quite popular, and then U.S. First Lady Betty Ford, after having “the press conference that changed oncology,”  was personally fitted for one.

Our PR firm was again retained to promote the garment and we’d arrange for Ruth to go meet journalists and she’d say, “Ever seen one of these?” And most said no so she’d tear open her blouse and show them the bra. She had a lot of courage.

She comes clean at the end of the Barbie movie too, when she reveals her breast cancer surgery and owns up to her financial and income tax problems. Remarkably, the Handlers were ousted as cochairs of Mattel’s board and later resigned as directors in October 1975. A 10-count indictment charged Handler with falsifying internal business records about earnings and sales from 1971 to 1973 so that they could influence Mattel’s stock price.

There is more to the story, as Harshe-Rotman was the PR firm at the time. My father, whose name was on the door, swore up and down that we had nothing to do with the fake earnings stories, citing our absence in the voluminous Securities & Exchange Commission report, covering the misdeeds, which a judge called “explosive, parasitic and I think disgraceful to anything decent in this society.” So she wasn’t all Barbie pink and sugar and spice yet she was always nice to me. And the movie was at least honest about her. I never quite understood why they took such a chance with the law and ended up losing their creation.