The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  The power of Disney’s art was harnessed to commerce first by Disney himself and then by his successors. Transforming his best films into durable commercial properties has meant the loss of their emotional immediacy—thus the heavy-handed repetition of words like “happy” and “magic” in selling them, to make up for what is missing. Distinguishing what is genuine and valuable, among the many things that bear the Disney name, from what is flimsy and synthetic has been a task building since long before Disney’s death. That task is extraordinarily difficult now because so many people—whether they are critics or apologists—have acquired a vested interest in conflating everything “Disney.”

  Walt Disney has since his death become a sort of Disney character himself. In 1981, Walt Disney Productions exchanged $46.2 million in its stock for all the stock of Retlaw Enterprises, the family company that owned not just Disneyland’s narrow-gauge railroad and monorail but also the rights to Disney’s name.8 There was never any question about the use of Disney’s name in the name of the company itself, or on those films and TV shows that he produced, but Retlaw got a 5 percent share of Walt Disney Productions’ royalties on licensed products that bore Walt Disney’s name.

  Walt Disney, as a name and a person, is a far more visible part of his company’s activities than, say, Henry Ford is at the company that bears his name. “Disney” has not become as generic as “Ford,” or, for that matter, the names of many other company founders, and appropriately so, considering that Walt Disney’s presence in his company’s products is still so large. His name is routinely invoked in ways that would be unusual at other large corporations. Said CEO Michael Eisner in 2001: “You ask what is the soul of the company and what is our direction? I’m trying to be the bridge from what Walt Disney made and created to whoever will be the next person after me that maintains that same philosophy of ‘Let’s put on a show.’ Let’s be silly. We’re a silly company. Let’s never not be a silly company.”9

  Curiously, those repeated invocations of Walt Disney’s name, and incessant praise for his “dreams” and his “vision,” have made him seem less like a real person. “When I talk to school groups,” Michael Broggie said in 2003, “I’ll ask for a show of hands . . . who was Walt Disney? Was he real? Was he fictional? They answer overwhelmingly that he was a fictional character, and that he never really lived.”10 The Disney family, in voicing its loyalty to Walt Disney’s memory, has contributed to the sense that he is as much a fabrication as Betty Crocker. Disney’s surviving daughter, Diane Disney Miller, has sponsored a film, a book, a CD-ROM, and a Web site about her father that are occasionally illuminating but more often devotional; Roy Disney’s son, Roy Edward Disney, has glorified his uncle (“The Great One”) as one means of denigrating Walt’s successors at the head of the Disney company, including his cousin’s husband.*

  Disney seems no more real in the growing body of academic critiques of the man and the company that bears his name. Many of these critiques are vaguely if not specifically Marxist in their methodology, and they display the usual Marxist tendency to bulldoze the complexities of human behavior in the pursuit of an all-embracing interpretation of Disney’s life and work. What fatally cripples most academic writing about Walt Disney is simple failure to examine its supposed subject. Disney scholarship, like many other kinds of scholarship in today’s academy, feeds on itself. The common tendency is for scholars to rush past the facts of Disney’s life and career, frequently getting a lot of them wrong, in order to write about what really interests them, which is what other scholars have already written. It is this incestuous quality, even more than such commonly cited sins as a reliance on jargon, that makes so much academic writing, on Disney as on other subjects, claustrophobically difficult to read.

  Disney has attracted other writers whose unsupportable claims and speculations sometimes win approval of scholars all too eager to believe the worst of the man. The persistent accusations of anti-Semitism are only the mildest examples of an array whose cumulative effect is to portray a Disney who was, among other vile things, racist, misogynist, imperialist, sexually warped, a spy for J. Edgar Hoover, desperate to conceal his illegitimate Spanish birth, and so terrified of death that he had his body cryogenically frozen. Pathologies are undoubtedly at work here, none of them Disney’s.

  The real Disney may yet elude his most fervent admirers’ and detractors’ suffocating grasp. When he was young, he was a sort of human Brer Rabbit, constantly wriggling out of the snares set for him by the likes of Charles Mintz and Pat Powers (not to mention Laugh-O-gram’s creditors). He emerged finally, and unexpectedly, as the creator of a new art form, one whose potential has still scarcely been tapped, by him or anyone else. It is hard to imagine that man—the passionate young artist, the intense “coordinator,” the man who scrutinized every frame of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with a lover’s zeal—trapped forever in anyone’s briar patch.

  * Diane Disney Miller and Roy Edward Disney are the only surviving blood relatives who can claim to have known Walt Disney intimately. Lillian Disney married John L. Truyens in 1969, was widowed again in 1981, and died in 1997, at the age of ninety-eight. Sharon Disney Brown was widowed in 1967, remarried in 1969—her second husband was William Lund—divorced in 1975, and died in 1993, at the age of fifty-six.

  NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS

  Corporate Archives

  RKO: RKO Radio Pictures Corporate Archives, Turner Entertainment Company, Culver City, California (as of 1988)

  WDA: Walt Disney Archives, Burbank

  Court Cases

  Laugh-O-gram bankruptcy papers: Bankruptcy Case 4457, Laugh-O-Gram Films, Inc., filed October 4, 1923, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri, Kansas City. National Archives, Central Plains Region, Kansas City.

  Government Archives

  NLRB/Babbitt: In the Matter of Walt Disney Productions, Inc., and Arthur Babbitt; Office of the Executive Secretary, Transcripts, Briefs, and Exhibits 4712, 8 October 1942. Records of the National Labor Relations Board, Record Group 25, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Except as noted, all NLRB/Babbitt citations are to pages in the hearing transcript.

  References to published NLRB decisions are in standard legal form, e.g., 13 NLRB 873.

  Libraries

  AMPAS: Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills. Magazine and newspaper articles identified this way have been copied from the Herrick Library’s microfiche files, which typically do not include page numbers.

  Baker: Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Cambridge

  BU/RH: Richard G. Hubler Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University

  CSUN/SCG: Screen Cartoonists Guild Collection, Local 839, AFL-CIO, 1937–1951, Urban Archives Center, California State University, Northridge

  NYU/JC: John Canemaker Animation Collection, Fales Library/Special Collections in the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University

  RAC: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow. All references are to Nelson A. Rockefeller, Personal, Record Group 111, Series 4.

  Wisconsin/UA: United Artists Collection, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison

  Oral Histories

  Adamson/Freleng, Adamson/Huemer: These oral histories were conducted by Joe Adamson with Friz Freleng and Richard Huemer, respectively, for the University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Theater Arts in 1968–69 as part of “An Oral History of the Motion Picture in America.”

  Personal Papers

  AC author’s collection

  BS Ben Sharpsteen

  CGM Carman G. Maxwell

  DH David Hand

  FN Fred Niemann

  HH Hugh Harman

  RH Richard Huemer

  RI Rudolph Ising

  SB Stephen Bosustow

  Disney cost and box-office figures were provided by the Walt Disney Archives for films completed after 1947. Th
e figures cited as grosses include both domestic and foreign revenue and are the combined rentals received by the Disney studio and its distributors. The pre-1947 figures are, as noted, from a balance sheet prepared by the studio for negotiations with RKO and are the actual rentals that Disney itself received.

  Employment dates are also from the Walt Disney Archives.

  The Disney “meeting notes” are ordinarily—although not invariably—transcripts; the term “meeting notes” is one used at the Disney studio itself. Meeting notes were usually distributed as typescripts, in multiple carbon copies, or sometimes hectographed, although at the height of the studio’s prosperity, during the production of Pinocchio and Fantasia, notes were frequently mimeographed. The cited lecture transcripts and memoranda were also variously distributed in mimeographed or carbon copy form.

  Complete runs of the studio and union newsletters mentioned in these notes are rare or nonexistent. The Walt Disney Archives does not have a complete set of that studio’s Bulletin, for instance.

  Although it would be normal to identify the city where each interview occurred, that has not been done here, both to save the space that would otherwise be devoted to essentially redundant information—most of the interviews took place in the Los Angeles area—and, in a few cases, to protect the privacy of the people involved. Except as specified, all interviews were conducted by the author (in many cases with Milton Gray as a participant).

  My standard procedure was to make a transcript, or in some cases summary notes, of each interview, and to give the interviewee the opportunity to revise that transcript; usually, but not always, the interviewee took that opportunity. (A few people died before an interview was transcribed, or before they returned a transcript.) I have quoted from the revised transcript whenever there is one.

  PREFACE

  1. Diane Disney Miller, foreword to Inside the Dream: The Personal Story of Walt Disney, by Katherine Greene and Richard Greene (New York, 2001), 9–10. The Story of Walt Disney was reissued by Disney Editions in 2005, for sale at Disneyland as part of the observance of the park’s fiftieth anniversary, with a new introductory note by Miller and corrections of factual and typographical errors by David R. Smith of the Walt Disney Archives. In her note, Miller says that the Post offered Disney $150,000 for his autobiography and paid Miller and her sister, Sharon, half that amount. Curiously, the version of The Story of Walt Disney published in the Post differs from the version published as a book. Disney is “Dad” in the magazine—as he was to his daughters in real life—but he is “Father” in the book.

  2. Richard Hubler to author, July 29, 1969.

  INTRODUCTION “It’s All Me”

  1. Anthony Bower, “Snow White and the 1,200 Dwarfs,” Nation, May 10, 1941, 565.

  2. “ ‘Snow White’ Sets Mark with $6,740,000 Gross,” New York Times, May 2, 1939, 29.

  3. “Drive on Walt Disney by Cartoonists Guild,” Variety, January 15, 1941, 16.

  4. George Goepper to Walt Disney, memorandum, February 4, 1941, WDA.

  5. Adelquist exhibit 11, NLRB/Babbitt. A copy of the memorandum is also at CSUN/SCG.

  6. George Goepper, interview with Milton Gray, March 23, 1977.

  7. Disney’s speech exists in three versions. The version delivered on February 10, 1941, in manuscript and on discs at WDA, includes remarks directed specifically to the animators. The version of February 11, which is Lessing exhibit 29, NLRB/Babbitt, was delivered to lower-ranking employees at the studio, particularly the women who inked and painted the cels. An abbreviated version of the February 10 speech, with Disney’s profanity removed, is part of CSUN/SCG. Memos listing the departments summoned to each of the two speeches are also part of that collection.

  8. “Labor Fantasia,” Business Week, May 17, 1941, 50.

  CHAPTER 1 “The Pet in the Family”

  1. A “History of Marceline,” first published in the 1938 Golden Jubilee edition of the Marceline News, was reprinted in The Magic City, Marceline, Missouri, Diamond Jubilee Celebration, a program book published by the Marceline-based Walsworth Publishing Company for the celebration of Marceline’s seventy-fifth anniversary, June 29–July 4, 1963.

  2. Census records show only eight siblings, but all ten are listed in the most thoroughly researched genealogical examination of the Disney family, Edward Disney, A Story of Disneys: Some Myths Exploded (Bristol, England, 1997), 166.

  3. Elias Disney’s visit was reported in the Marceline Mirror, February 9, 1906 (this citation and other Marceline newspaper citations are from clippings compiled by May Bartee Couch). His sale of his Chicago house to Walter Chamberlain on February 10, 1906, is recorded in Torrens Book 221-A, p. 302, Cook County Recorder of Deeds.

  4. Marceline Mirror, December 1, 1905.

  5. From records of those transactions at the Linn County Abstract Company, Brookfield, Missouri.

  6. The house number was changed to 2156 in 1909 as part of a citywide rationalization of Chicago house numbers.

  7. 3515 Vernon Avenue is the address on the “Return of a Birth,” or birth certificate, for Raymond Arnold Disney (misidentified on the certificate as “Walter”) and in Elias Disney’s city directory listing.

  8. Elias Disney’s purchase of the lot from James E. McCabe is recorded in Torrens Book 221-A, p. 302. The 1892 date was assigned to the house during a Historic Resources Survey by the Chicago Landmarks Commission in 1983–95.

  9. On Hermosa, see the Encyclopedia of Chicago, online edition,

  www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/578/html.

  10. Roy Disney, interview with Richard Hubler, November 17, 1967, BU/RH. The incomplete transcript at Boston is a preliminary version of a complete transcript bearing that date at the Walt Disney Archives.

  11. Roy Disney, 1967 interview. Roy seems to say that Elias and the older boys left first, but Bob Thomas, Building a Company: Roy O. Disney and the Creation of an Entertainment Empire (New York, 1998), 18, says that Flora and the younger children moved to Marceline ahead of Elias and the two older boys, as Walt Disney’s memory of the event suggests.

  12. “Walt Disney Recalls Some Pleasant Childhood Memories,” Marceline News, October 13, 1960. The newspaper marked a Disney visit (to dedicate an elementary school named for him) by reprinting a letter he wrote more than twenty years earlier on the occasion of Marceline’s fiftieth anniversary.

  13. Roy Disney, 1967 interview.

  14. Walt Disney, interview with Pete Martin, May or June 1956. Except as noted otherwise, all quotations from Walt Disney throughout the book are from the Martin transcripts, copies of which are housed at both WDA and BU/RH. Lillian Disney and her two daughters, Diane and Sharon, were interviewed by Martin at intervals during the marathon taping sessions with Walt Disney when he was unavailable, and their comments are part of the Martin transcripts.

  15. A recording of Disney’s brief speech at Marceline is included on a compact disc accompanying Robert Tieman, Walt Disney Treasures (New York, 2003). He also spoke of being a “champion hog rider” in the 1956 Martin interview.

  16. Roy Disney, interview with Hubler, June 18, 1968, BU/RH.

  17. In the 1900 census, almost 46 million Americans lived in “rural” places with a population of fewer than 2,500; about 30 million lived in larger towns.

  18. The telephone directory was published in a newspaper, the Marceline Mirror for February 22, 1907.

  19. Lady and the Tramp meeting notes, May 15, 1952, WDA.

  20. Roy Disney, 1967 interview.

  21. Disney, Some Myths Exploded, 154.

  22. Disney, Some Myths Exploded, 169.

  23. The Chicago Historical Society maintains a database with information from building permits cited in American Contractor from 1898 to 1912. Elias is listed as the owner of four properties for which permits were issued between 1898 and 1901. Contractors were not listed on building permits at the time, so Elias could have been, and probably was, the contractor for many other properties he did not own.

 
24. Roy Disney, June 1968 interview.

  25. Saint Paul Congregational Church (Chicago) record books, now housed at Chicago Theological Seminary.

  26. Roy Disney, 1967 interview.

  27. Saint Paul record books. The name “Walter” was one that Elias and Flora had in mind for some time. When their second son, Raymond, was born in 1890, his birth certificate (filled out on January 8, 1891) showed his name as “Walter Disney.” There is also a birth certificate for Roy Disney, but none for either Walt Disney or his sister, Ruth, both of them also born in Chicago; there was no requirement that births be registered with the Cook County clerk until 1916. Walt’s birth date is noted, however, in the Saint Paul baptismal record.

  28. Roy Disney, June 1968 interview.

  29. Roy Disney, 1967 interview. Thomas, Building a Company, 24, says the trigger for the two boys’ break with their father was his insistence that they give him the money they had earned by farming land Elias leased from Robert Disney.

  30. Roy Disney, June 1968 interview.

  31. Roy Disney, June 1968 interview.

  32. Diane Disney Miller, Martin interview.

  33. Don Taylor, “The Disney Family as I Remember Them,” in Our Marceline Heritage, Part 1 (Marceline, 1974), 16.

  34. Roy Disney, June 1968 interview.

  35. Roy Disney, June 1968 interview.

  36. Mary Richardson Disney died on March 10, 1909, at Ellis, Kansas. Her husband had died in 1891.

  37. Roy Disney remembered Margaret Disney as “a wonderful character with an infectious laugh . . . and she was always enamored with Walt from the time he was a little fellow. She was the one used to bring him tablets and pencils, you remember the Big Chief Indian red tablet that we used to buy as kids? She used to keep him supplied with those.” June 1968 interview.