Ken Annakin was ultimately undone, as a Disney director, by the same sort of warm social relationship with Disney.
After directing Third Man on the Mountain, Annakin directed Swiss Family Robinson, a difficult and, for Disney, unusually expensive film (shot entirely on the Caribbean island of Tobago, at a cost of $4.5 million) that was extremely popular when it was released just before Christmas 1960. Although Annakin worked on the script and storyboards with Disney at Burbank before shooting began early in 1959, Disney never visited Tobago during filming, and the film’s most distinctive characteristics are clearly Annakin’s. As different as the film’s actors are in accents and acting styles, it is possible to believe they are a family, thanks to the way they respond to one another. There is real tenderness between John Mills and Dorothy McGuire, as the parents, and the sibling rivalry between James MacArthur and Tommy Kirk is strong but never overplayed. Because these characters form a believable family, Swiss Family’s knockabout qualities—this is a film about a family stranded on a desert island and besieged by pirates—never quite get out of hand.
Not long after Swiss Family’s release, on one of Walt and Lillian’s visits to London in the early 1960s—the date is uncertain—they had dinner with Annakin and his wife, Pauline, at their London apartment. Disney and Annakin talked warmly about a new project, a film based on the life of Sir Francis Drake. “Over dinner,” Annakin wrote in his autobiography, “Pauline talked mainly to Lillian, whose glass I seemed to be refilling more often than usual.” (Pauline, who had met Lillian during the filming of Third Man on the Mountain, described her as “pleasant” but “tricky” compared with Walt, meaning that she was not as forthright; in Pauline’s eyes, Lillian lacked Walt’s openness and enthusiasm.)39
When the Disneys’ limousine arrived at the end of the evening, Ken Annakin wrote, Lillian “began descending the six stone steps onto Onslow Square, teetered and fell, sprawling on the ground. I rushed down to help her and was raising her to her feet when Walt took over. Brusquely, he pushed me aside and led her limping to the car. As we waved them away and closed the door, Pauline said, ‘You’ll never work for Walt, again.”40
Such was the case. Annakin said in 2005: “I’d made Walt four very successful pictures, and I never heard from him again.”41 The Annakins had known the Disneys for years, but given the limited importance that Disney assigned to a director’s part in making his films, there was no way that a record as successful as Annakin’s could outweigh a moment of embarrassment, a lapse in control.
Even as Disney’s grip weakened on each film as a whole, his intimidating awareness of details did not. Dee Vaughan, who helped ensure consistency from shot to shot, as an “assistant continuity,” remembered a Disney visit to the set when In Search of the Castaways (starring Hayley Mills) was made in London in the last half of 1961. He was “charming, absolutely sweet. Shook all of our hands and spoke to us, and watched us while we were working.” Disney “let us come to rushes, which was exceptional, really, because he could have had a private screening himself, couldn’t he? But he came when we all went. We were sitting in the theater watching rushes, and . . . he turned to Robert [Stevenson, the director] and he said there was a line missing in the dialogue. He was absolutely right. Robert had changed it, because somebody had difficulty saying it or something. [Disney] picked up on it immediately. He was not unpleasant, just matter-of-fact. He let us know that the finger was totally on the pulse. Afterward, I said to [Stevenson], ‘How many pictures has he got on the floor at the moment?’ ‘Oh, about five.’ One line!”42
The same was true in Burbank. Floyd Norman remembered watching the rushes for the live-action films in a screening room there. “I probably wasn’t supposed to be there, but it didn’t matter, because it was a screening room, and it’s dark, and they can’t see you. . . . It gave me the opportunity to see how Walt was handling his producers and directors. As they would be showing the previous day’s filming, the rushes, Walt would be making comments, like, ‘Why wasn’t that lit better?’ or ‘Why didn’t that work?’ or ‘Why is that monkey doing that?’ And, of course, the poor director is making excuses—you know, ‘Well, we had trouble, Walt, we couldn’t get the animal to sit still,’ and this happened and that happened, we’re sorry, we’ll do better.”43 Disney was not cruel, but to be subject constantly to such scrutiny could not have been pleasant.
For years, Disney walked the studio lot, looking into every corner, but in the 1960s, with the lot busier and Disney himself older, he began riding from place to place in an electric cart. Card Walker remembered that Disney toured the lot every day after lunch, going “from one shop to another. And if you ever made those trips with him, it was fantastic. He really knew what was going on.” If a set was under construction, Walker said, he would check it carefully to make sure he approved of it. “The guy was just that interested in every damn detail of production.”44
(There was something of the small businessman in those tours of the lot, too. Frank Thomas remembered a time when Disney entered a sound stage and found nothing going on, then said, “Look at everybody standing around with their hands in my pocket.”)45
By the 1960s, scorn for Disney’s live-action films was a reflex among most critics, and for good reason. In Search of the Castaways, the studio’s big Christmas release for 1962, is shockingly bad, not just because its special effects are cheesy but because the characters behave in such arbitrary fashion, doing whatever is required to move the plot from point A to point B, with scant regard for plausibility. Disney would have countenanced nothing so crude when he was making his best animated features. For all the Oscars he had won—more than any other filmmaker, mostly for animated and documentary short subjects—he was not taken seriously as a live-action filmmaker, in Hollywood or elsewhere. None of his live-action features had ever been nominated as best picture; none of the actors in those films had ever been nominated for anything (although Hayley Mills did receive an honorary Oscar).
As he had ten years earlier, when he made the uncharacteristically lavish 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to establish his live-action bona fides, Disney now invested far more money and effort in a film than he usually did. The film was Mary Poppins. He had pursued the rights to the P. L. Travers stories for almost twenty years before finally persuading the author to sell them in 1960, and he was deeply involved in the writing of the script and the negotiations with the lead actors—Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke—for the next two years. (Andrews was a Broadway star, Van Dyke a television star. Disney signed no true Hollywood film stars like those in 20,000 Leagues.)
Although set in London, Poppins was a defiantly old-fashioned musical filmed entirely on Disney soundstages. It was exceptional mostly in its extensive combination of animation and live action, which was in its effect, if not in the technology used to achieve it, all but identical with the combination work in Song of the South, almost twenty years earlier. The filming occupied much of 1963, but by all accounts it went smoothly, and by the time of the premiere—an extravagant affair at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, on August 27, 1964—there was little question but that Poppins would be a great success. The film ultimately grossed around forty-four million dollars and won five Academy Awards (20,000 Leagues received two, for art direction and special effects). It lost the Oscar for best picture to My Fair Lady, but Julie Andrews’s Oscar for best actress amounted almost to a sharing of that award because Andrews, who had played Eliza Doolittle on the stage, was so conspicuously denied the opportunity to play the same part in the film version of Fair Lady.
Given the attention that Walt Disney himself lavished on Mary Poppins, it should have been his triumph, and it certainly was such as measured by the box office. Beneath its bright surface and cheerful songs, however, there was lurking a failure that was Disney’s in his once strong role as story editor. Poppins had no story apart from the transformation of Mister Banks, the father of the children whom Mary Poppins, the magical nanny, takes under her c
are; but David Tomlinson, who played the role, was a supporting actor, nothing more, too clearly confined by mannerisms and temperament to roles calling for a stuffy, easily ruffled Englishman. Disney wanted Mary Poppins herself at the center of the film, and so putting a strong actor—much less a difficult actor, someone like Rex Harrison—in Tomlinson’s place was unthinkable; but without such an actor, the film could be only a succession of musical numbers held together by a very slim narrative thread. Mister Banks’s transformation has no weight, a fact underlined by the very casual (and wholly unbelievable) manner in which he regains his job at a bank after he has been liberated by losing it. A centerpiece dance number on the rooftops has no strong dancer leading it; Dick Van Dyke hardly fills that role.
Everywhere that Disney’s hand is most evident, as in some of the casting and incidental “business,” Mary Poppins suffers from debilitating weaknesses. At the least, a question mark hangs over the casting of Van Dyke as Bert the chimney sweep—the role would have benefited from an actor such as Tommy Steele, who, like Andrews, had roots in British music-hall comedy. Bob Thomas told how Disney “made a habit of ‘walking through’ the sets after they had been built, searching for ways to use them. Bill Walsh [the film’s principal writer and co-producer] described a visit by Walt to the Bankses’ living room in search of reaction to the firing of Admiral Boom’s cannon: ‘Walt got vibes off the props. As he walked around the set he said, ‘How about having the vase fall off and the maid catches it with her toe?’ or, ‘Let’s have the grand piano roll across the room and the mother catches it as she straightens the picture frame.’ ”46 But the havoc supposedly caused by Admiral Boom’s cannon—on a regular schedule!—is simply ridiculous. There is no reason to believe it would be tolerated in a well-ordered London neighborhood. Here, as elsewhere, Poppins is the sort of shallow fantasy that undermines its own premises.
Although Mary Poppins received better press than most Disney films—some critics were skeptical, but many more were genuinely enthusiastic—Disney enjoyed no more than a truce in his long-running war with reviewers. He was in return often belligerent and defensive, dismissing his critics as “smarty-pants, wisecracking guys.”47 In an interview published early in 1964, he said: “I am not a literary person. As far as realism is concerned, you can find dirt anyplace you look for it. I’m one of those optimists. There’s always a rainbow. The great masses like happy endings. If you can pull a tear out of them, they’ll remember your picture. That little bit of pathos was Chaplin’s secret. Some directors in Hollywood are embarrassed by sentimentality. As for me, I like a good cry.”48 He sounded the same theme in other interviews published later that year, in the wake of Poppins’s success. “I like perfection, but I also like corn,” he said. “I don’t make pictures for sophisticates. Styles may change on the surface, but at bottom the big audience taste doesn’t change. They like sympathetic characters and life-like action. And that’s what I like, too, whether it’s cartoons, live action or all those creatures at Disneyland.”49
One problem was that the Disney who did not make pictures for sophisticates had become in many respects a sophisticate himself. After he went into television and opened Disneyland, his daughter Diane said, “Dad had a tremendous amount of growth. . . . I think this happens to people—as you become a figure of some prominence and all that, you find yourself a bit. You feel the weight, the importance of your public image.”50 Disney’s simplicity and directness, so important to the success of the shorts of the 1930s and Snow White, could not be maintained in the same form in later years without falsification. Bill Davidson, interviewing Disney for TV Guide in 1961, was struck by this incongruity:
“While the public thinks of Disney as playing with trains and exchanging pleasantries with juvenile alumni of the now-defunct Mickey Mouse Club, he actually is one of the most widely read, most widely traveled, most articulate men in Hollywood. I became acutely aware of this when I spoke with him recently at lunch in the private dining room of his . . . studio. While he devoured a dietetic meal of lean hamburger and sliced tomatoes he spouted rustic witticisms with the aplomb of a modern-day Bob Burns. But every once in a while his eyes would narrow, the rural twang would disappear from his voice and he’d discuss financial projections for 1962, the modern art of Picasso and Diego Rivera, and Freudian psychiatry. In a few moments, however, he’d catch himself” and revert to homespun stories.51
By the early 1960s, Disney had lived in Los Angeles and been part of its film industry for forty years. The industry and Los Angeles itself had changed dramatically in those years. The industry and its attendant glamour and cynicism were far more dominant in the city’s culture than in the 1920s, when Disney’s journey from Kansas City to Los Angeles was in effect a move from one midwestern city to another, the California version distinguished mainly by its better climate. To the extent that Disney had real friends in the 1960s, they held high places in the film industry or in industries that were in some ways comparable to it, like architecture (he and Lillian traveled with the celebrity architect Welton Becket and his wife, who were neighbors in Holmby Hills). Disney could have remained a “country boy” under such circumstances only through a calculated exercise of the will in itself hard to reconcile with warmth and spontaneity. Repeatedly, the magazine writers who spoke with Disney in the 1960s found him a different man than they expected, or thought they had seen on television, and so they observed him intently. They may have borrowed from one another to some extent, but for the most part their descriptions seem drawn from life.
“Before I met him,” Aubrey Menen wrote in Holiday in 1963, “every effort was made by his aides to impress me that Walt Disney was, in fact, avuncular. He was open and affable, they said, and easy to talk to. Instead I met a tall, somber man who appeared to be under the lash of some private demon. Mr. Disney’s face and figure are familiar to all the world. In private he smiles less—I remember him smiling only once—and he is not at ease. He speaks in short sentences with pauses in which he looks at, or rather through, his listener. . . . Mr. Disney’s hands move restlessly all the while he talks, picking up things from his desk or the restaurant table, playing with them and casting them aside with a sharp gesture, as though they had failed to come up to his standards.”52
In 1964, Stephen Birmingham, writing for McCall’s, described Disney in similar terms, as “a haggard, driven-looking man with a long, mournful face and dark, heavy-lidded eyes. The man who is almost always photographed grinning actually grins seldom, and when he does grin, it is with an almost bitter curl of the lip. Sometimes his eyes seem to withdraw and to focus on remote, secret places. ‘You can always tell when Walt’s bored or dissatisfied with something,’ an associate says. ‘He gets that glassy look, as though he’s just noticed something very small and ugly at the back of your skull.’ His big hands move restlessly and incessantly, as though his body, even in repose, knew no peace—pawing at the package of French Gitanes cigarettes that is never far from his reach or, at a dinner table, playing noisily and endlessly with the silverware. Sometimes his fingers begin to rap out a sharp staccato rhythm on the desk top or chair arm—a storm warning, almost invariably. . . . His dress is casual, to put it mildly. Usually, his clothes have a look of having been tossed on in great haste that morning from the chair where they were hurled the night before. Despite the benign Southern California sunshine, Disney tends to bundle up—in a shapeless cardigan, a baggy tweed coat, or a wind-breaker.”53 The natty young dresser of the early 1930s had disappeared along with the enthusiastic young cartoon maker.
“He is shy with reporters,” Edith Efron wrote for TV Guide in 1965. “His eyes are dull and preoccupied, his affability mechanical and heavy-handed. He gabs away slowly and randomly in inarticulate, Midwestern speech that would be appropriate to a rural general store. His shirt is open, his tie crooked. One almost expects to see over-all straps on his shoulders and wisps of hay in his hair. . . . If one has the patience to persist, however, tossing questions like yello
w flares into the folksy fog, the fog lifts, a remote twinkle appears in the preoccupied eyes, and the man emerges.”
Here again, as in other interviews from the 1960s, Disney permitted himself to sound bitter and resentful when he said anything of substance: “These avant-garde artists are adolescents. It’s only a little noisy element that’s going that way, that’s creating this sick art. . . . There is no cynicism in me and there is none allowed in our work. . . . I don’t like snobs. You find some of intelligentsia, they become snobs. They think they’re above everybody else. They’re not. More education doesn’t mean more common sense. These ideas they have about art are crazy. . . . I don’t care about critics. Critics take themselves too seriously. They think the only way to be noticed and to be the smart guy is to pick and find fault with things. It’s the public I’m making pictures for.”54
It is at this point in his life that anecdotes about Disney’s drinking become more numerous. No one ever suggests that he was an alcoholic, but his consumption—perhaps stimulated by his increasing physical discomfort, from his old polo injury and nagging sinus trouble—was undoubtedly higher than average. One of Disney’s luncheon companions in the early 1960s remembered him, in a hurry, start their meal by telling the waiter, “We’ll have two martinis each and bring them both at the same time.” More drinks followed.55
The Animated Man Page 42