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woman's body—sitting on a rope swing," Ruth told me,
     though she has in other interviews placed this epiphany in Zurich and Vienna. Her daughter Barbara, in her mid-teens and well
     past the age for dolls, wanted Lilli as "a decorative item" for her room. Ruth bought three—two for Barbara, one for herself.

    "I didn't then know who Lilli was or even that its name was Lilli," Ruth said. "I only saw an adult-shape body that I had
     been trying to describe for years, and our guys said couldn't be done."
    "Our guys" were the male designers at Mattel. Since Barbara was a child, Ruth had tried to get them to develop a doll with
     a woman's body. She got the idea watching Barbara play with paper dolls who were "never the playmate or baby type," but rather
     "the teenage, high-school, college, or adult-career type."
    "Through their play," Ruth said, Barbara and her friends "were imagining their lives as adults. They were using the dolls
     to reflect the adult world around them. They would sit and carry on conversations, making the dolls real people. I used to
     watch that over and over and think: If only we could take this play pattern and three-dimensionalize it, we would have something
     very special."
    Special was not how the male designers saw it. It was costly. In America, they told Ruth, it would be impossible to make what she
     wanted —a woman doll with painted nails " Othing" that had "zippers and darts and hemlines"— for an affordable price.

    "Frankly," Ruth recalled, "I thought they were all horrified by the thought they were of wanting to make a doll with breasts."
    But just because the dolls couldn't be made in America didn't mean they couldn't be made. In July 1957, Jack Ryan took off
     for Tokyo to find a manufacturer for some electronic gadgets he had designed. "Just as I was leaving," he said, "Ruth stuck
     this doll into my attache* case and said: 'See if you can get this copied.' " The doll, of course, was Lilli.
    Jack was accompanied on the trip by Frank Nakamura, a recent graduate of Los Angeles' Art Center School whom Mattel had hired
     as a product designer in April. A United States citizen, Nakamura was also fluent in Japanese; during the war, he taught the
     language in a school run by the U.S. Military Intelligence Service at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. When the war
     ended, he was sent to Japan to debrief Japanese soldiers on their battle experiences and report their stories to General MacArthur.
    Frank "knew his way around Japan very well," Jack said. "And in Japan, it's more important to know your way around and to
     be able to make connections than it is here. Here you walk into any office and you're doing business right away on face value.
     It's not so in Japan."
    The trip did not begin auspiciously. Ryan, Frank recalled, became edgy when the plane took off. He had an odd phobia for an
     aerospace engineer: He was afraid to fly. Nor did things go smoothly on the ground. Frank contacted numerous manufacturers,
     none of whom was equipped to make vinyl dolls. After three weeks, Ryan returned to California.
    Part of the problem was Lilli herself; she didn't exactly capture the hearts of the Japanese. "The Lilli doll looked kind
     of mean—sharp eyebrow and eyeshadow and so forth," Naka­mura said. "And Japanese people didn't like it at all." But Frank
     pressed on, and by the time Elliot joined him early August, Kokusai Boeki m Kaisha (KBK), a Tokyo-based novelty maker, was
     ready to cut a deal.

    KBK was not one big widget factory; it was a distributor for widgets that had been made by contractors and subcontractors
     all over Japan, from Hokkaido in the extreme north to Fukuoka in the extreme south. "The network was like a spiderweb," Nakamura
     said, "stretching two to three hundred miles in each direction."
    KBK persuaded a dollmaker named Yamasaki to knock off Lilli, but that was only the beginning of the challenge. Lilli's body
     was as hard as her look, made of rigid plastic