Walt Disney

by Bob Thomas

  Walt grew better-looking as he matured. By the time he reached fifty, his five-foot-ten-inch frame had filled out, and his face seemed more distinguished. His hair remained as thick as ever, assuming an edge of gray. The mustache, which had given him a dapper appearance in his earlier years, looked appropriate now. (Oddly, he didn’t like actors with mustaches in his movies; he thought they looked like “city slickers.”) His taste in clothes grew more conservative; he no longer wore the sporty outfits of his early Hollywood days. He insisted that his clothes be comfortable, and he rarely wore a necktie at the studio, preferring Western-style neckerchiefs with the Smoke Tree Ranch insignia, of which he had dozens. His wife and daughters found it impossible to buy clothes for him, except for sweaters and handkerchiefs. He preferred to choose his own outfits, and every two years he went to Bullock’s Wilshire in Los Angeles and bought a supply. Whenever his jackets were sent to the cleaners, the pockets had to be emptied of the crackers and nuts he carried for snacks while he was working.

  Walt dressed and undressed swiftly. One evening Sharon commented that he hadn’t changed his clothes for a friend’s party that was beginning in a few minutes. “It’ll only take me a couple of minutes to dress,” Walt replied. “Besides, it doesn’t matter if I’m late. All they do is stand around and drink.”

  The Disneys spent Easter, Thanksgiving and between Christmas and New Year’s at Smoke Tree Ranch, a Palm Springs development where families maintained vacation houses, taking meals in a communal dining room. The girls were growing up. In 1951, Diane entered the University of Southern California, and Sharon was a sophomore at Westlake High School. Walt attended parents’ night at Sharon’s school—sometimes complaining about too much homework for his daughter—and went to the Dads’ Dinner at Diane’s sorority. He was convinced that Sharon, whose grades were sometimes mediocre, was the beauty of the family and Diane was the brain. He encouraged Diane to write, explaining that women had been successful in contributing scripts at the studio. He showed copies of her humorous poems to visitors to his office and sent her short stories to the Story Department for analysis.

  He enjoyed watching his daughters mature, but he resented the passing of their childhood. Once when he was visiting friends, a little girl sat on his lap. Memories of the younger Diane and Sharon returned, and he told the girl, “I think you’d better get down, dear, or you’re going to see your Uncle Walt cry.” He cried easily, at his daughters’ graduations, over scripts, sometimes at the same movie scene he saw over and over. Since he was stinting with praise, his animators considered it a triumph if Walt cried at a scene they had created.

  He was growing more conservative. By 1940 he no longer supported Franklin Roosevelt, and he voted for Wendell Willkie. His politics remained Republican thereafter. In the late 1940s he took an active role in the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, formed by industry leaders who were concerned about the Communist influence in Hollywood. Communist support of the strike against his studio remained a bitter memory for Walt Disney.

  He had become disillusioned in his role as employer, explaining, “It went way back to the time when I had this little studio with kitchen chairs and old benches to sit on and the drawing boards that I had made myself. I used to sit in that chair all day long myself, and I knew how hard it could get. So I got some old cushions and pillows to sit on. We got all these ragtag pillows all around. Every guy’d have a different one. So one day we got a little money and I talked Roy into letting me buy some new rubber foam cushions. I gave each guy a cushion for his chair, and gosh, they were happy and grateful. One of the guys got his own cushion and now he had two cushions on his chair. The next thing I knew, all of these fellows were demanding two cushions. I said, ‘Gosh, that’s the limit. They were happy with no cushions; I give ‘em a cushion and they want two!’”

  At times when Walt and Roy could not afford cash bonuses, they gave their workers payments in common stock. From a par value of $5 in 1945, the price climbed to $15 in 1946, then tumbled as the company underwent its postwar adjustment. Many employees sold their stock, and Walt considered it an act of disloyalty and lack of faith in the company.

  Walt himself was convinced that the studio would revive, and he bought stock at its low ebb. The stock was his principal asset, and although he lived well, by Hollywood standards he was not a rich man. When a doctor friend asked to borrow $5,000 in 1951, Walt wrote him: “I know my answer to your request will sound funny but I haven’t got the money. I am strapped myself and have borrowed to the hilt on my insurance and on personal notes—am close to fifty thousand dollars in debt, which is the limit of my personal borrowing ability. The new house cost much more than I anticipated and consequently I’m really up to my neck. So I can only say that I’m sorry that I’m unable to comply with your request.”

  He was unconcerned about amassing money for himself, but he worried about his family’s future in the event of his death. He paid little heed to his personal bank account, which his secretary, Dolores Voght Scott, supervised. Roy often asked her: “How are Walt’s finances? Don’t let him get involved in some crazy scheme.”

  Walt’s daily routine began with meetings at eight and eight-thirty. He reviewed storyboards in other offices or held conferences around a low square table in his own office. When he had no visitors for lunch, he ate at his desk, his favorite meal being chili and beans. He was a connoisseur, preferring to combine a can of Gebhardt’s, which had much meat and few beans, with a can of Dennison’s, which had less meat and more beans. The dish was preceded by a glass of V-8 juice and accompanied by soda crackers. If visitors were coming to lunch, they were ushered into Walt’s conference room at noon. He served them an aperitif of V-8 juice, a ritual that puzzled European visitors, who were accustomed to something stronger. Walt discoursed for half an hour and then led his visitors to the Coral Room of the commissary, where the table in the northeast corner was reserved for him. Walt often used the lunches for press interviews. He realized the value of publicity in the selling of motion pictures, and he made himself available for all requests that his publicity director, Joseph Reddy, considered to be of value. Walt seemed to enjoy interviews, not merely for the ego satisfaction. He liked to sum up the activities of his company, to reflect on its problems and triumphs, to try out a new story idea on an outsider. The Disney interview was an unstructured affair. Walt usually began expounding on the matters that had occupied him that morning. He continued talking about the many projects of the studio, responding occasionally to an interjected question.

  After lunch, Walt liked to climb in a golf cart and show the visitor what was happening on the studio stages and in the shops. More meetings were scheduled in the afternoon, and he often left the office to inspect projects in the shops. At five in the afternoon, he quit work for his stretching exercise, a drink of Scotch and a rubdown.

  By the end of the day Walt was in considerable pain from the old polo injury to his neck. One day in 1951 he complained about it to Floyd Odlum, the industrialist who had long been promoting research in treatment of arthritis. Walt wrote Odlum about a specialist Odlum had recommended: “…He diagnosed my case as a form of arthritis, but not the usual variety. It seems I have a calcium deposit that continues building up in my neck which is probably caused by a polo injury I received some years ago when I took a spill from my horse. He thinks he can relieve this condition somewhat, but he has also convinced me that I will probably have to live with it the rest of my life. My heart and other vital organs, along with the history of my ancestry, all indicated that I am going to live a long life, so I am going to have to learn to live with this condition and make the best of it….”

  Hazel George, the studio nurse, applied the treatment. It consisted of hot packs and intermittent traction. She tried a prone position which would allow the heat and traction to be applied at the same time. Walt declined because he couldn’t sip his drink at the same time. “I’ll give you a straw,” Hazel suggested. The t
reatment was administered in a room next to Walt’s office, and he called it his “laughing place,” as in the Uncle Remus stories. It was where he could gain a perspective on the day’s activities, exchange gossip with Hazel, confide his plans. Walt, who had received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale and the University of California, once remarked to Hazel, “I’d trade all my degrees for your real one.” She advised him it would be a bad idea—“It would ruin you; your work would lose its originality, its spontaneity.”

  One evening in a mellow mood, Walt reflected to Hazel: “You know, I finally found out who I am.”

  “Who are you?” Hazel asked.

  “I’m the last of the benevolent monarchs.”

  She thought about it and replied: “That’s good. Now I know what I am.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The last of the court jesters.”

  The conversations with Hazel sometimes grew philosophical, and once she and Walt were discussing various kinds of love—parents for children, human beings for pets, etc. As sometimes happened, Walt tired of the conversation and ended it with a summation: “Well, Hazel, let’s face it—love is like everything else; if you don’t have it, you can’t give it.”

  The heat treatment and traction lasted forty-five minutes, and Walt felt relaxed and refreshed, eager to return to work. Hazel tried to discourage him, but she was not always successful. He sometimes called a story meeting that lasted into the evening. Dinner was kept waiting for him at home. He ate heartily and sometimes had to cut down his consumption when his weight pushed over 185 pounds. When research connected animal fats with the occurrence of heart disease, he asked a doctor, “Does that mean eating fats could make you old before your time?” He was told it did, and Walt went on a diet to cut down on fats.

  But he wouldn’t quit smoking. He admitted that he was wrong in smoking. One day he mused to Hazel: “You’re right about one thing: Smoking and drinking are sins. Because you are one of God’s creatures and if you don’t take care of the body He gave you, you are committing a sin.” He still smoked.

  On rare occasions, Walt went out in the evening to banquets and civic dinners. He disliked such affairs, but he agreed to attend out of duty. When a formal speech was expected, he agonized over it. He detested the stilted speeches that were written for him—“I don’t use all those big words; make it sound like me!” Walt was most effective when he had no written speech, but merely talked to the audience as he would in normal conversation. He could evoke as many laughs as a standup comedian.

  Walt never told jokes, either before an audience or in conversation. Employees learned not to try to tell him jokes, since he hadn’t the patience to listen to them. Telling a dirty joke to Walt could evoke a stony silence. Not that he was prudish. Like any farm boy, he had learned about sex at an early age. To him, sex was not a ludicrous subject, nor did it hold any great mystery. Above all, he believed that sex was a private matter, and that is the way he preferred to leave it.

  He refused to be treated as a special person because of his position as head of an ever-growing enterprise. He allowed no one to light his cigarettes, help him on with his coat, or hold doors open for him. Sycophantic employees lasted a brief time around Walt. When he visited a movie set or walked down a hall, he didn’t like to be accosted; his time was limited, and he wanted to choose the persons he talked to, whether it was a producer or a prop man. He especially disliked being burdened with others’ personal problems. As the studio grew, it became more and more difficult for Walt to remember the names of his workers. To assist his memory, he had the personnel department supply his office with a complete file so he could match names and photographs of those he encountered in his daily rounds.

  Disney workers, even those with longtime service at the studio, were perplexed over how to react in casual encounters with the boss. They realized that he could be concentrating on an important company matter and would not want to be disturbed; but those who did not greet him were sometimes given a gruff “Whassamatter, you mad at me?” A secretary faced the dilemma one afternoon as she found herself walking toward Walt in the long, lonely corridor of the Animation Building’s third floor. He seemed to be immersed in thought, and she decided her best plan was to pass him without a greeting. As she did so, she heard a voice, almost disembodied, like a ventriloquist’s say, “Hi, good-lookin’.” She was puzzled. After she had gone ten paces, she turned to look at the retreating figure. At that moment Walt swung around, pointed a finger and exclaimed an impish “Hah!” Then he continued on his way.

  AFTER a quarter-century as a producer of animated cartoons, Walt Disney in the early 1950s demonstrated his versatility with a wide variety of films. He applied the same principles he had used as a cartoon maker: Prepare the stories thoroughly. Create interesting characters. Above all, make it “read”—nothing ambiguous, nothing uncertain. Walt even carried over the methods of animation; all of the live-action films were prepared on storyboards, with each scene, each camera angle sketched on paper before anything was put on film. Thus Walt could perceive the pacing of the movie, juxtaposing action sequences with exposition to maintain audience interest while furthering the plot.

  Walt’s modus operandi had changed little from the days when he had only cartoon shorts to supervise. He once described his function in a homely story: “My role? I was stumped one day when a little boy asked, ‘Do you draw Mickey Mouse?’ I had to admit that I do not draw any more. ‘Then do you think up all the jokes and ideas?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t do that.’ Finally he looked at me and said, ‘Mr. Disney, just what do you do?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘sometimes I think of myself as a little bee. I go from one area of the studio to another and gather pollen and sort of stimulate everybody. I guess that’s the job I do.’”

  He continued his phantom tours of the studio on weekends. “I go over and just float around at my leisure when I have no pressure on me,” he said. “I sit down and look at story sketches and things. The boys know that I do that. And the boys pull all kinds of tricks to find out whether I’ve been there, you know. They arrange papers in a certain way on the chairs, and when they arrive in the morning, they say, ‘Well, Walt wasn’t in this weekend.’ But they don’t know that I put the papers right back where they were.”

  There was no waste motion in Walt’s operations. He rarely indulged in small talk before a conference; when he strode into the room, discussion began immediately. When the meeting was over, he left as swiftly as he had entered, without goodbyes. Since he dealt so often with intangibles, his instructions in story meetings could be imprecise, and veteran studio hands endeavored to fathom Walt’s thinking. Said Wilfred Jackson: “In a conference he’d make a passing remark about something, and I’d forget about it. Later, when we looked at the material in the sweatbox, he’d complain, ‘Why wasn’t that in? We discussed it, didn’t we?’ The big part of my career was to decide when Walt meant it and when he didn’t mean it. I could never tell when he was just trying to get me to think. ‘Don’t do something just because I told you,’ he’d say.”

  Once Walt had described a fight sequence for a Mickey Mouse short, acting out all the parts. Jackson was confident that he could capture what Walt wanted. But when Walt saw the animation, he complained, “You’ve got the tail all wrong. Look—Mickey’s mad all over. His tail is tense, not a limp thing hanging there. What’s the matter, Jack—didn’t we talk this over?”

  Walt’s contributions to the live-action scripts took a different form. He no longer needed to propound the appearance and action of each character; the actors would supply their own appearances and actions. He concerned himself primarily with story construction, dialogue and the staging of scenes.

  At the beginning of a story conference, producers and writers recognized they had failed when Walt handed over the script with the comment “Well, I’ve read this thing,” then turned to another topic of conversation. More often he sat down at the low, square table in his conference room and began analyz
ing the script’s merits and defects. He had usually done his homework the night before, marking changes and suggestions in a red or blue pencil. Sometimes his contributions were specific; he would compose two or three pages of dialogue to improve the timing and sense of a scene. Often he suggested general things: “This scene isn’t playing; I believe in leaving something to the audience’s imagination, but you’re making them play every climax off-camera; the picture starts too slowly; jump to page four and begin there.” His suggestions were not final; he was willing to listen to argument from the producer and writer. But there were two things he disliked: being interrupted when he was in the midst of interpreting a scene; and having someone argue a point that he had rejected at a previous meeting.

  Walt had an instinct for recognizing when a film project was not going well. Sometimes there were stories that defied solution, and he simply dropped them. Months, perhaps years later, he picked up the project and started all over again. By this time, his creative subconscious may have provided a solution. Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan were examples of films with long histories. A Hiawatha feature was another. It metamorphosed over a period of twenty years, and when a story man lacked an assignment, Walt instructed, “Put him on Hiawatha.” But, despite all the efforts, Hiawatha was never produced.

  Lady and the Tramp dated back to 1937, when Walt started work on a story about a sedate cocker spaniel. Then he read a short story, “Happy Dan, the Whistling Dog,” by Ward Greene, an editor for King Features, distributor for the Disney comic strips. Happy Dan was a free soul, a mutt with loyalty to no man. Walt told Greene, “Your dog and my dog have got to get together.” Greene agreed, and in 1943 he wrote a story called “Happy Dan, the Whistling Dog, and Miss Patsy, the Beautiful Spaniel.” Walt started developing a script, then dropped the project, reviving it almost a decade later. He insisted on calling it Lady and the Tramp, over the opposition of Greene and RKO salesmen. “That’s what it’s about—a lady and a tramp,” Walt declared.