Happy Birthday, Barbie! In case you didn't know, 2009 marks the blond bimbo's 50th. But wait, Barbie isn't a bimbo. Sure, her lady lumps are so disproportionate that as an actual human, she'd be unable to stand up. That doesn't take away from her many achievements—I doubt that by age 50 I'll have been a doctor, a rocker, a dentist, a Spanish teacher, a Mountie, a Marine, a McDonald's cashier and a figure skater.

To mark the multitasking doll's half-century, celebrity biographer Jerry Oppenheimer has just published Toy Monster: The Big Bad World of Mattel. Little did I know it when playing with my Dream Glow Barbie in the halycon ’80s (my girl also had a Yves St. Laurent dress—beat that), but the world of Mattel was a hotbed of sex, lies and intrigue from the very day our Barbie was born. The toy company's original trifecta consisted of Ruth and Elliott Handler (parents of two children named Barbara and Ken) and Jack Ryan (husband of a wife named Barbara).

In the early golden days, Ruth handled business and administration, Elliott came up with the concepts and Jack engineered such amazing details as Barbie's moveable limbs and Growing Up Skipper's sprouting breasts. But as soon as it became evident that the sexpot doll was a gazillion dollar jackpot, the Handlers and Ryan were at each other's throats about everything, from profits to credit for the original Barbie concept (was it Barbara Handler or Barbara Ryan that gave her the name?).

Oppenheimer is a fantastic researcher, so despite his penchant for writing paragraph-long sentences, the book is rife with good gossip. Though he looked like a bug-headed troll doll, Jack Ryan was a serious player, constantly cheating on his Catholic wife with a string of curvy, Barbie-esque gold-diggers. His Bel Air mansion was done up to resemble a castle, and Ryan lounged on a throne during all night parties that were the height of ’60s and ’70s free love hedonism.

A hotness meter that rated incomers' fuckability on a scale of one to 10 was hung up above the main entrance: the dial hand was a giant penis. Ryan made his way through five wives (including Zsa Zsa Gabor) and often had his girl toys surgically altered to better resemble his long-legged plastic goddess.

Even if you're not a Barbie fan, Toy Monster has loads of juicy info on the origins of Hot Wheels, He-Man and other classic toys, plus breakdowns of horrific toy recalls and the billion-dollar lawsuits that Mattel execs were always slapping on each other. These days, Barbie is losing ground to the extra-slutty Bratz. It was all so much simpler back in the day, eyes wide with wonder at Barbie and the revelation that curling irons made her hair melt.