But in these early days, the crowning burst of animate ingenuity comes when Walt gets the studio composer Oliver Wallace to write him a burlesque tune which his artists turn into an animated nightmare where Donald Duck finds himself forced to work in a Nazi munitions factory. Der Führer’s Face, performed by the musician/comedian Spike Jones, instantly becomes one of the era’s runaway hits:
When der Führer says, “We is the Master Race,”
We Heil! (phhht) Heil! (phhht) right in DER FÜHRER’S FACE.
The song is a Bavarian beer-hall polka done in phony accents, a bit of impudent silliness in the face of the terminally horrible, only conceivable in America. Punctuating the “Heils” with raspberries is so enchantingly insulting, such a triumph of the average, irreverent schmuck over the titanic forces behind the crucible of history, that the ditty takes the world by storm. The lyrics are translated into a dozen languages, and a film print is smuggled onto the Continent through the underground, where it contributes to the ground-swell support of the resistance. Der Führer’s Face wins the Disney studios 1942’s Academy Award for best animated short subject. It’s in the record books. Mrs. Miniver, with Greer Garson hiding in the cellar from the London Blitz, wins for best feature, and it’s not clear which is the more naturalistic presentation of this unthinkable war.
Disney and company achieve an admirable wartime production record, and their enormously popular films become indispensable. In their own small way, the animators help win the war Over Here. But Walt, tireless overachiever, wonders if his effort has gone anywhere far enough. The daily papers show us pitched in an apocalyptic battle, Manichaean Ultimate Good against ultimate Evil. For the first time, Disney considers just what we are up against. Cartoons may not be enough to win it. Even feature-length, big-budget, narrative animations—the art form Disney almost single-handedly invented—may be of only limited effectiveness in democracy’s arsenal.
One night, as Disney strolls down Hollywood Boulevard’s blacked-out Walk of Fame, it comes to him: the studio, the country, the cause of freedom, need something more. Disney’s team must initiate a venture far beyond any yet undertaken, one that will motivate by words and pictures, appealing at once to heart and head. Disney must create a film falling both squarely in this world and far, far outside it, a tough-as-steel fairy tale that will, for the first time, bring home to the GI and the Rosie Riveters and the Joint Chiefs as well as the shiftless teenagers in suburban Jersey just where they are in Time, just how urgent, critical, real, and present the present is, just how central each of them is to the larger picture. Only one person in 1942 is capable of bringing moonlight into a chamber, of enchanting history, taming it, and leading it up the front stoop of America. That person is Disney.
Like a V-1 going off inside his head, the title for this extraordinary venture comes to him: You Are the War. But that’s as far as he gets. For the first time in his creative life, inspiration fails him. He knows what the story must be, but he cannot form the storyboard. Walt spends a restless, long night. The next morning, he convenes an emergency wartime meeting of the Disney brain trust.
This is the band of geniuses who set tutued hippos dancing to Ponchielli, who created a wicked witch so terrifying that Radio City Music Hall had to reupholster all its dampened seats after Snow White’s record-breaking run. These are the artists who made Mickey’s exploits the most famous ongoing narrative of modern times. Disney strides into the boardroom where his crew sits. But before he can make his pitch and tell his creative henchmen about his brief glimmer, their need to find a way to reunite little and big, he notices something wrong.
“Where are Tom and Ralph?” he asks, irritated at being held up by the two empty spots. The rest of the board look down at the table top. They give no answer.
Disney thinks for a minute that the truants might have been drafted, but all his personnel have been returned at Department of War insistence. He would certainly know if they’d enlisted. Disney has a fleeting vision, cartoon-style, of the two men suffering the long-feared first strike of Japanese aerial bombardment. And then: the Japanese. All at once the father of the single-cel technique and the multiplane camera comes back to the here in all this here, suddenly understanding where Ralph Sato and Tom Ishi have disappeared to. The Chicken Little syndrome is not restricted to the enemy, the other side. You are the war.
He looks up, startled. Momentarily, around the table, his brain trust shimmers and dissolves into the animated characters that are the studio’s bread and butter. They segue into a cartoon tribunal, a jury of peers. To his right, Mickey folds his white kid-gloved hands pensively in front of him, Minnie taps her tail tip on the table. Smoke comes out of Donald’s ears. The dumb dawg Goofy just looks plain heartbroken. The scene fades and Disney once more finds himself looking at his idea people, in the same despondent postures.
“Why are you looking at me?” Disney shouts. “I didn’t give the order.” Nobody accuses anybody, but Disney, feeling their palpable helplessness, gets up and storms out of the room. He goes straight to his office and locks himself in, refusing to answer knocks or intercom buzzes. He does not come out that entire day, and he is still locked inside when the last of the staff leaves late that evening.
His door is still closed when they come back the following day. A worried junior executive—a new hire whose task is simply to look after the boss and attend to his needs—puts his eye to the keyhole but sees nothing. He puts his ear to the door and hears a truly remarkable sound. Disney is there, all right. But speaking German.
It might be nothing, but the aide realizes it might also be the war’s most nefarious act of defection since Quisling. His boss could be in that locked room with a wireless, relaying secret morale information to the Nazis. He can go to no one at the studio to relate his findings, as anyone might be in on the ring. Realizing without a second thought that his duty to country far outweighs any oath of fealty to employer, the aide goes straight to the CO of the antiaircraft unit still quartered at the studio.
Two GIs proceed directly to Disney’s office and knock down the door. Disney looks up from behind his desk, for all the world the identical picture that had appeared in Fortune a few years before. He is talking into a black horned dictaphone, in the language of Göring and Goebbels. The soldiers confiscate the machine and take Disney under custody. Their CO listens to the tape. There is nothing on the machine except the same line, repeated over and over again a hundred times:
gleich im Rücken der Planke, gleich dahinter, ists wirklich.
Decent Americans, no one in the AA unit speaks a word of Kraut. Repeated over and over like this, the German phrase does take on the tone of a traitorous Mayday. Disney laughs, and asks to be escorted back to his study. There, still under guard, he produces an en face edition of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. “But just in back of the billboard, just behind it, everything is real.”
He explains that he gets his best ideas by extended meditations on such lines of poetry. Everybody has a good laugh. The soldiers apologize. Disney takes the aide out to dinner, rewards him for his unmeditated patriotism with some Series E bonds, and fires him.
For he has had a remarkable idea while in his intensive seclusion. One of his best. He has had the first inklings of a way not only to produce You Are the War—the apotheosis of the art of live action and animation—but also to free his imprisoned men and as many other compatriots as he can bring out. It occurs to Disney during his bout with the dictaphone that victory at that price is no victory. If, after the war, in a world finally made free, he is praised as the maker of Der Führer’s Face and Victory Through Air Power, it will count as nothing if he is also remembered as the private citizen who looked the other way at the crucial moment, who did not see his countrymen disappearing.
Walt Disney gets on the horn and rings Washington. He makes an appointment with the secretary of war. He has an idea to run past Stimson, an idea on how to bring history into the American living room. An idea that will bring home,
at least to one singing waiter, the war, the terrible urgency of the present, just behind the board. Bring it home forever.
8
The next morning, Artie sat alone on the front porch, on his traditional chair next to the empty kapok bed, filling it in his mind. A handful of minutes after ten in the morning, the sun was so weak, the air so pastel, they compelled one to look after oneself. Artie did exactly that.
He looked out on the lawn, at the once-startling oranges and ambers that had become chilled, drab brown in just hours. He thought, quietly and hidden, that something was about to happen, something important, the denouement of things long in the works. He felt that a secret, unexpected compartment in an old and favorite toy was about to spring open at his press. He wondered how people could live with dim anticipations of life-shaking events and not be destroyed by them. But before he could get an answer, a voice from behind him interrupted his thoughts. “There’s more to any of us . . .”
Artie, unable to help himself, completed the tag to one of Dad’s favorite maxims, “Than any of us suspects.” But he did not turn around to face his father. He knew, coming out here to think, that eventually the man would follow. He had expected the aphorism; he had already thought it to himself several times that morning without being aware of it. He did not know what the saying meant. Like the man and all his sayings, it was always expected but never fully delivered.
Dad slid into the horizontal on the bed in front of Artie, as if no time at all had passed since they had sat here two evenings before. Eddie Sr. had been doing his Sunday morning reading. He recited for Artie’s benefit an old Eastern seaboard tongue twister, the “Drunken Saylor,” which he had just found in a dictionary of American folklore.
Amidst the mists and coldest frosts,
With barest wrists and stoutest boasts,
He thrusts his fists against the posts
And still insists he sees the ghosts.
Father challenged son to a speed match. They tossed the twisty syllables back and forth until they fell. Artie couldn’t say the quatrain as fast as Dad, who had obviously practiced before dropping in.
9
At Sunday lunch, Dad forced the family to agree to two conditions before he would be checked out by a legitimate physician. The first was that the hospital be Hines, the enormous Veterans Administration facility near Maywood in Chicago. “The Old Soldiers’ Home,” as Eddie Sr. fondly called it, was the only place he would surrender to without a fight. Dad’s two-year tour of duty toward the war’s end, although confined to the continental U.S., qualified him for VA medical coverage. “I consider it ignominious for our nation’s ex-servicemen to deteriorate in any hospital except one designed, built, and run by government agency,” he announced over sandwiches while no one listened. Truth was, after losing his latest teaching job he had no other insurance.
Second, Pop stipulated that the family not commit him until after Thanksgiving. He insisted they spend the holiday at home, as usual. Before they made him check in, the family had to give him one last afternoon in downtown Chicago, to see the Christmas windows on State Street. Granted, the midwestern display never matched that of Fifth Avenue, on which Eddie had been raised, a working-class Jersey kid whipped into a frenzy by deeply imprinted four-part hymn tunes, intoxicated by the end-of-year stink of pine tar, wet woolies, and smoky paraffin, and thrilled by the ruinously expensive, ice-cold taxi ride over the George Washington Bridge at dawn. “I’m not expecting much from Second City, but it’s No Go without Christmas windows.”
If the holiday dioramas at Field’s and Carson’s weren’t as magnificent or carried fewer moving porcelain parts as those On The Avenue, if they were less successful in revealing, from out of the folds of mundane activity, that buried, ancient order of another time—the announcement of a miraculous birth just at our hour’s crisis, a globe of angels pouring from the sky to announce the news—if Chicago’s Christmas getup lacked magical transcendence, an afternoon in the Loop during the post-Thanksgiving, shopping rush still offered a whiff of the ineffable. Just being downtown, taking in the miniature living displays, steeping in the annual imprint of capacitance-triggered frost-blue point lights synaptically blinker-linked to that passage, as familiar as breathing, beginning, “And it came to pass,” anticipating that brilliant tenor suspension against the three moving lines of the Glorias in “Angels We Have Heard On High,” might be enough to call up the old, street-wise gratias tibi, to shed mental habits as first virgin snow once again redeemed the city curb-soot that would soon deflower it.
Pop talked of flying everybody to New York for a window-hopping weekend, but funds wouldn’t permit it, even if he had been working. Practical impediment had not stopped his chattering about the pipe dream, however. Lily had. As he carried on about the superiority of Fifth Avenue’s windows to those of State Street, Lily simply reminded him of the story he had often told them of how his mother, with her very last breath, lamented that the art of making the ice cream she had enjoyed as a girl had been forever lost. Lily repeated, with perverse enjoyment, Pop’s own conclusion. “It wasn’t the flavor, but Grandma’s taste buds that were buried in time.” Dad smiled wanly at being brought into line. Swearing he would not go to his end ignobly, he said State Street would do for his last outing at liberty.
Thus constrained, Dad’s momentous concession to medical science meant that life on the home front, until after Thanksgiving, would remain Illness As Usual. None of the five ancillary Hobsons cared for these two conditions, but they had to accept them. Pop had them over a barrel. They could play on his terms or not at all.
For her part, Lily did not protest the imposed delay. She had long ago saturated her heart with the boom-and-bust cycle of hope she foolishly held for her father’s perpetual battle with phantoms. She met Pop’s promise to undergo tests with a pretense of cynical pessimism, one that would allow her to keep the next few weeks on a fairly even keel. But after the meal broke up, she hid out with a calendar and counted the days. Rach shrugged at the announcement and its conditions. After lunch, she sneaked up on the fat man as he reclined on his trademark kapok mattress on the now-freezing front porch and put him in a headlock. She threatened, “Ok, buddski. You get any thoughts a backin’ outta dis, and weese pincha you earlobes off.”
Eddie Jr., hearing Pop’s invented postponements, breathed deeply, swallowed hard, and then “shook it off,” as his father had taught him to do since boyhood. He promptly spent the afternoon exchanging sports scores over the telephone with a dozen friends. Artie, skeptical, still intent on a diagnosis, alarmed himself and aggravated the situation unduly by discovering that Dad showed a “positive Romberg’s sign,” meaning the man collapsed spontaneously when asked to stand, look straight forward, and close both eyes. How long the condition had existed or just what if anything it meant neither Artie nor anyone else in the family had the slightest idea. Ailene, who after her first breakthrough had thought he would be in the hospital and partly cured by the following week, was quietly decimated by her husband’s delays. But she agreed to them without outward sign.
That evening before departure, Rachel made the family rounds, smacking everybody good-bye. “Back to the old nosebleed,” she said, as always at the end of a visit, alluding to her upper-altitude office in the Standard Oil building on the Lakeshore. She was about to pull the same joke on her mother when stopped short by the Mayday in the woman’s face. Rach sobered and, in the tone reserved for private times between the two, said, “It goes without saying . . .” Unable to complete the sentence without contradiction, she laughed. “I’ll be back in, at least for T-Day, Mrs. I’ve got the full four days then.” Anything else would be brutal, pointless, or untrue, so Rach consoled her mother with actuarial figures on hospital recoveries and hit her up for a favorite Christmas cookie recipe.
Artie spent the evening convincing himself that he could not hang around any longer either. He, on the other hand, did not make the long rounds of good-bye. Instead, he waited until the
last moment and then asked Rach for a lift back. “If I leave with you tonight, I won’t have to deal with The Dog. Bus exhaust always nauseates me.” Rach checked the bottom of his shoes and only then cleared him for boarding.
To kill the minutes before departure, Art and Eddie Jr. played a last round of chucking the pigskin. “I can’t believe you’re leaving,” Eddie said, good-naturedly. Artie knew his brother meant the line as a harmless rib. But the insinuation so infuriated him that, overcompensating, he underthrew his brother’s perfect buttonhook.
“School, Eddie-boy.” He squeezed his vocal cords into joviality. “Got to pass de ol’ Bar X-am so I’ll be able to get you off all those DWIs you will doubtless rack up.” His brother returned a weak smile, as technically convincing as a film performance by one of those countless, interchangeable jocks-turned-celluloid stars. Artie’s anger, which he had for days managed to spread in a thin residue over the neighborhood, reversed directions and concentrated until he could appease it only with a preemptive strike against Eddie; either Eddie. Artie was sorry that he had attempted to leave the boy an escape through affected cheer.
“What the hell do you expect?” he asked, keeping his voice hidden below the first rose-tints of rage. “If I hang around any longer I’ll flunk out. What would I accomplish by staying here? What do you propose I do? Help you drag him up to bed every night?” Working this outlash to the surface, Artie felt his fury just as suddenly shut off like an overheated thermostat. He saw a delicious irony in his inability to raise anything more than a politely underplayed anger. After all, he, of all the children, had been the only dish breaker as a kid.
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