Disney

by Rees Quinn

  Disney told people at the studio how much he liked Snow White and wanted to make it into a full-length film. Colleagues marveled at how emotional Disney would get as he told them the story - and the powerful effect his descriptions had on them. Several said they were brought to tears as Disney explained the plot. Finally, one evening in early 1934, Disney rounded up some fifty employees, told them to grab some take-out dinner, and come back to the studio’s soundstage. Disney was alone under a spotlight when they arrived.

  Disney proceeded to act out the whole story of Snow White, giving each character a unique voice and personality. The bravura performance lasted three hours and ended with a round of enthusiastic applause.

  Disney’s version presented Snow White as a dark-haired, pale-skinned girl, with a melodic voice and a cheery disposition, who is forced to tend to grimy household chores. Her dreams of being swept away by a prince are dashed by the huntsman, who instead of killing her, sends her scurrying into a dark forest, where her fears and insecurities are played out in the shadows and howls of the wind. But even the forest and its creatures sympathize with the delicate princess, and bow to her beauty, becoming charming, cuddly companions who hope to protect her from the Queen’s wrath.

  The chipper squirrels, chipmunks, birds, turtles and deer usher Snow White to shelter in a hut, which upon her arrival is empty. The place is a mess, as might be expected of a home shared by seven men who are miners by trade. Snow White naturally cleans up, startling the dwarfs who return from a day’s work in the diamond mine to find their home transformed by an unsuspected intruder. Gruff, but timid, the dwarfs are reluctant to provide refuge to the evil Queen’s step-daughter. She wins them over with a gooseberry pie and her motherly instincts, insisting each of them wash their hands thoroughly before dessert.

  The Queen, informed by her magic mirror that Snow White still lives, becomes an old crone, cloaked in black, and concocts a poisoned apple, with which she tempts the trusting princess. Just one bite sends Snow White into a sleeping death, which can only be reversed by the kiss of true love. Too late, the forest creatures and dwarfs discover the plot, and chase the Queen up a mountain, where a thunderbolt sends her falling to her death. Mournfully, the dwarfs place Snow White in a glass coffin, until a prince passing through the forest discovers her and wakes her with a kiss.

  As news spread about Snow White, skeptics began to voice their opinions. Few people believed that audiences would tolerate a ninety-minute cartoon - or believe an animated love story. Disney, after all, was known for broad gags and funny animals. People in Hollywood started referring to the project as “Disney’s Folly.” Even Lillian Disney doubted the project, telling Walt, “I can’t stand the sight of dwarfs. I predict nobody will ever pay a dime to see a dwarf picture.”

  Because his contract with United Artists was only for short subjects, financing a feature film was a problem. Disney asked Roy to drum up financing from bankers. But, enthusiastic as he was, he had reservations. He told The New York Times that if the finished film didn’t meet his expectation, he would destroy it.

  In early 1935, Disney hired 300 more animators. On a family trip to Europe, he was delighted to find that theaters there routinely showed as many as a half-dozen Mickey Mouse cartoons in a row - proof that audiences had no problem staying in their seats for animation.

  By now, Disney was essentially a supervisor at his sprawling studio. “I do not draw, write music, or contribute most of the gags and ideas seen in our pictures today,” he said. But he had an abundance of creativity to draw on, and no shortage of new ideas coming from his team. While Mickey Mouse remained the Disney studio’s most-popular property, it was clear Disney could survive, even thrive, without the mouse.

  Disney animators began work on Snow White late in the summer of 1934. Walt and Roy Disney originally thought the film might take a year-and-a-half to make; instead, it took twice that long and cost $1.5 million, three times their initial estimate. Their critics likened the project to gambling on a sweepstakes ticket, which infuriated Roy, who responded, “We’ve bought the whole damned sweepstakes.” Other Disney properties felt the pinch of the rising costs: Mickey Mouse lost his tail in a cutback that made animating him take less time, and subsequently less money.

  Disney expected the finished Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to comprise between six and eight reels, with each reel consisting of 16,000 frames - a potential of 128,000 individual images. Because each frame was a composite made from multiple drawings, the actual number of drawings was staggering.

  The Disney Brothers Studio remained busy with animated shorts throughout the three years Snow White was in production. It made more than sixty cartoons, introduced Donald Duck, and won five Academy Awards. Disney used one of the shorts, The Goddess of Spring, based on the Greek myth of Persephone, a training vehicle for the animators who worked on Snow White.

  The studio now had close to 500 employees. Walt paid his animators well, even though Roy groused about it. One of their top artists earned $15,000 a year, an astonishing amount in the Great Depression. At the same time, the collaborative nature of the studio - which Walt valued above all else - made it seem almost communistic. For Disney, the studio had become the embodiment of an idealized vision - a “near-perfect world” he had created for himself to live in.

  Walt’s girls

  Life was less ideal at home. Lillian resented even more the long hours he spent at the studio. His fixation on work often set off furious arguments between the couple. A dark stain on the wall might appear the morning after a late-night tiff – evidence of a cup of coffee hurled by Lillian in Walt’s direction. As Lillian bonded with their daughter Diane, she and Walt grew apart. At one point, during production on Snow White, the couple considered divorce. Walt wanted more children, and they decided to try again. Then another miscarriage in 1936 brought them closer together. Walt and Lillian decided to adopt. On New Year’s Eve that same year, they welcomed a six-week-old daughter, Sharon Mae, home. A case of pneumonia sent the baby back to the hospital for a month.

  The Disneys made no distinction between their biological and adopted daughters. In fact, Walt preferred to keep the adoption a secret and bristled whenever anyone mentioned it. Walt was a loving and attentive father, and, as Diane would later say, “Daddy is a pushover.” Disney was adamant, however, about keeping his daughters out of the public eye. He had been horrified by the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s baby in 1932. Disney kept his private life private.

  Walt did not attend church, though his daughter Sharon later remembered him as “a very religious man.” She said, “He did not believe you had to go to church to be religious. He respected every religion. There wasn’t any that he ever criticized. He wouldn’t even tell religious jokes.” Lillian, for a few years, “dabbled” in Christian Science, Diane said. They attended the Christian Science Church, and Lillian enrolled Diane and Sharon in a small Christian Science school. But Sunday, Diane said, was “daddy’s day.” When the girls were old enough, Walt would drop them off for Sunday school, pick them up after, and take them to Griffith Park to ride the merry-go-round. “He’d see families in the park,” Diane remembered, “and say, ‘There’s nothing for the parents to do. . . . You’ve got to have a place where the whole family can have fun.’” Sometimes, they ended up at the studio – the girls romping through his office while Walt snuck in some work.

  As Diane and Sharon grew, their personalities emerged. Disney referred to Diane as “the family brain” and Sharon as “the family beauty.” School came naturally to Diane, while Sharon struggled academically. “She’d rather ride horses than study,” Walt wrote to his sister about Sharon. Diane was also more extroverted; Sharon was shy and timid until she discovered modeling.

  The Disney girls loved books and reading. As early as 1938, they discovered a book with a red cover about a stern, but magical English nanny named Mary Poppins. The book, a gift from publisher Eugene Reynal, had sat on a shelf in the Disney home since
its publication in 1934, and was inscribed: “To Walt Disney – Not another ‘Mickey’ but I think you should like our Mary.” Both daughters fell in love with the no-nonsense nanny who blows in, with her umbrella and carpetbag, on a strong east wind and transforms the lives of the children in her charge. Disney promised his daughters that he would make a film of Mary Poppins. He reached out to the book’s author, P.L. Travers, who was adamantly opposed to a film adaptation of her beloved character. Travers was protective of “her Mary” and determined that she would not be made into a cartoon, which was all that Walt Disney had made to date. But that wasn’t the end of it.

  “Heigh-ho”

  The Disney animation department moved at a frenetic pace. Dozens of artists worked on drawings that had to be matched up in multiple layers to create a single frame of film. Disney compared the operation to “a Ford factory,” only “our moving parts were more complex than cogs – human beings, each with his own temperament and values who must be weighted and fitted into his proper place.”

  After early sketches of Snow White were dismissed by Disney as too cartoonish, a young dancer named Marjorie Celeste Belcher, aka “Margie Bell,” was hired to model for the character. Supervising animator Hamilton Luske, whose job it was to make Snow White more lifelike, directed her in several live-action sequences, which were filmed and studied.

  For Snow White, Disney used a newly developed device called the multiplane camera, which looked down at several layers of animation cels stacked on top of one another from a fourteen-foot-high scaffold. The camera photographed each frame individually, so that the characters, the foreground, and the background appeared as a seamless image, achieving a sense of depth that hadn’t been seen in animation before. Exposing one frame at a time, it took on average two weeks to shoot 750 feet of film, which was the length of a typical Disney animated short. The camera cost $75,000 - an investment Disney never questioned. “It was always my ambition to own a swell camera,” Disney said, “and now, godammit, I got one. I get a kick just watching the boys operate it, and remembering how I used to have to make ‘em out of baling wire.”

  Perhaps the most-pressing business was naming Disney’s seven dwarfs, which Walt felt was essential to giving them personalities that would endear them to audiences. This process took months, during which the list of candidates grew to include: Scrappy, Cranky, Dirty, Awful, Blabby, Silly, Daffy, Flabby, Jaunty, Biggo Ego, Chesty, Jumpy, Baldy, Hickey, Gabby, Shorty, Nifty, Wheezy, Sniffy, Burpy, Lazy, Puffy, Dizzy, Stuffy, and Tubby. Eventually, Doc, Grumpy, Bashful, Sneezy, Happy, Sleepy, and Dopey made the cut.

  Finding the right voice for Snow White presented another challenge. Disney auditioned about 150 girls for the role, including thirteen-year-old actress Deanna Durbin. The role eventually went to twenty-year-old Adriana Caselotti, daughter of vocal music coach Guido Caselotti, who was called in as a consultant. Adriana, overhearing a phone conversation between her father and a Disney casting director, got on the line and demonstrated her shrill girlish voice. Guido shouted for his daughter to get off the phone, but she had already made an impression on the casting director, who invited her to audition. Disney hired her on the spot.

  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered at a star-studded event at the Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles on December 21, 1937. Charlie Chaplin and Cary Grant were seen choking back tears as the dwarfs mourn the seemingly lifeless Snow White before putting her into her glass coffin. As the lights came up, the audience stood and roared its approval.

  The film opened three weeks later in New York and Miami to acclaim. At Radio City Music Hall in the first week alone, Snow White grossed $108,000, and tickets from scalpers on the street cost as much as $5. People left theaters humming Snow White’s songs, including the seven dwarfs’ workday theme song, “Heigh-Ho,” which became as infectious as “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?” Audiences particularly fell in love with the boyish, big-eared Dopey, the only dwarf not sport a bushy beard.

  This was good news for the Disney studio, which had ballooned to 650 employees in the push to finish the film. Walt later joked that Roy had been “brave” about financing the film - until the tab exceeded $1 million. The critics were again silenced, and Mickey Mouse got his tail back.

  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the highest-grossing motion picture of 1938. Disney earned another honorary Academy Award for its “innovation” and for having “charmed millions.” Child star Shirley Temple presented Disney with the golden statue - along with seven miniature ones celebrating the dwarfs. The Disney Brothers Studio expected to make $2 million that year.

  Other honors followed. At the Forty-ninth Annual Tournament of Roses Parade that year, he was presented with a marble electric clock and received plaques from Radio Guide magazine “in appreciation of pleasure brought to radio listeners by Disney’s characters,” the National Broadcasting Company, and a collective of artists in Havana, Cuba.

  Though he never completed high school – “I’m a very uneducated man, a graduate of the school of hard knocks,” he told the New York Post - suddenly Disney was being hailed as an intellectual. Colleges clamored to award him honorary degrees. He received an honorary Master of Science degree from the University of Southern California, and Master of Arts degrees from both Yale and Harvard universities and turned down another honorary degree from Boston University. “Get me right, boys. I’m grateful for these honorary degrees and the distinction they confer,” Disney said in an interview for The American, a William Randolph Hearst newspaper. “But I’ll always wish I’d had the chance to go through college in the regular way and earn a plain bachelor of arts like the thousands of kids nobody ever heard of.”

  When Harvard President James B. Conant wrote to Disney to offer the honorary degree, Disney humbly accepted, writing back, “We’re selling corn, and I like corn. I try to entertain, not educate: an important part of education is stimulating an interest in things.” He later submitted measurements for a cap and gown - “I am five-feet-ten-inches tall and usually take size forty in wearing apparel” – and at the Harvard ceremony, was filmed playfully blowing his tassel out of his eyes as it dangled from the mortarboard. His degree included the citation: “A magician who has created a modern dwelling for the Muses.”

  Disney looked the part of a Hollywood mogul. He wore lounge coats, open-throated shirts, and expensive sweaters. He often twirled a lock of his dark brown hair around his finger as he spoke, and when discussing his projects, he became as animated as his beloved characters. But if the Disney studio had a special formula, Walt Disney had no idea what it was.

  Disney had again redefined film. The richer, more-lifelike animation of Snow White was a sign of greater things to come from the Disney studio. But Disney was largely dismissive of the praise and plaudits his latest creation attracted. “We just try to make a good picture,” he said. “And then the professors come along and tell us what we do.”

  After the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1938, Walt and Roy bought their parents a house in Los Angeles. Elias and Flora Disney were enjoying a retirement near their sons. Flora’s health was worrisome following several small strokes, but everyone was happy to be together again.

  The brothers hired a woman named Alma to keep house for their parents. One morning in November 1938, as Alma was in the kitchen fixing breakfast, she became dizzy. A faulty furnace had filled the house with carbon monoxide. When she ran upstairs to check on the elder Disney’s, Elias was unconscious and Flora was dead. Elias recovered, but he was never the same.

  Walt and Roy worked stoically and didn’t talk to anyone about what had happened. Around the studio, no one was allowed to speak of Flora’s death. Decades later, Walt still got tears in his eyes whenever his mother was mentioned.

  Not known for giving much consideration to family tragedy, theater owners pressed the Disneys for more animated features. Many wanted to see some sort of sequel to Snow White featuring the singing dwarfs Doc, Grumpy, Sleepy, Sneez
y, Happy, Bashful, and Dopey. Disney, however, wanted to move on.

  Snow White had grossed $8 million at the box office. Disney, always expansion-minded, invested a portion of that revenue into a large, state-of-the art studio in Burbank. In order to pay for the entire facility, Disney turned to his bankers. They agreed to advance Disney the money on one condition: The main building should be easily adaptable to other uses, should the studio fail. Because the area needed a hospital, Disney had his animation building designed with wide central corridors, which would allow easy passage for wheelchairs and gurneys. The hallways included recesses which could accommodate nurse stations; for the time being, they held snack and soda machines.

  Disney’s new studio featured lavish staff facilities, including a gym and a restaurant, and was surrounded by lush, park-like grounds. Disney had the principal streets surrounding the studio renamed Mickey Mouse Boulevard, Minnie Mouse Boulevard, Donald Duck Drive, Snow White Boulevard, and Dopey Drive.

  The Disney staff, however, was most pleased by the air conditioning. In the old studio, the heat from the projector made room unbearably hot. Animators joked that even in the new building the screening room was still sometimes a sweatbox because of Disney’s notoriously short temper.

  To his employees, Walt Disney sometimes seemed to be two different people. For the most part, he was a gracious, down-to-earth leader who spent little time in his modest office; he was more at home on the animation floor, looking at storyboards, working up gags, and watching footage in the screening room. Everyone called him Walt. He was known for his generosity and took an interest in his employees and seemed to know everyone’s spouse and children by name. Disney’s management style consisted of a single, overriding principle: Everything was a team effort. But, paradoxically, the layout of the new studio failed to foster that cooperative spirit. Production units were isolated from one another. A young woman was stationed at each to record the movements and motives of all who passed between them.