The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Nathalia Holt

  Cover design by Lauren Harms

  Cover photograph courtesy of Ben Worcester

  Author photograph by Steph Stevens

  Cover © Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

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  First ebook edition: October 2019

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  ISBN 978-0-316-43916-9

  E3-20190905-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Timeline

  Chapter 1: One Day When We Were Young

  Chapter 2: Whistle While You Work

  Chapter 3: When You Wish Upon a Star

  Chapter 4: Waltz of the Flowers

  Chapter 5: Little April Shower

  Chapter 6: Baby Mine

  Chapter 7: Aquarela do Brasil

  Chapter 8: You’re in the Army Now

  Chapter 9: Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah

  Chapter 10: So This Is Love

  Chapter 11: In a World of My Own

  Chapter 12: You Can Fly!

  Chapter 13: Once Upon a Dream

  Chapter 14: Dalmatian Plantation

  Chapter 15: It’s a Small World

  Chapter 16: Up, Down, Touch the Ground

  Chapter 17: Part of Your World

  Chapter 18: I’ll Make a Man Out of You

  Chapter 19: For the First Time in Forever

  Epilogue: Happily Ever After

  Photos

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Notes

  About the Author

  Also by Nathalia Holt

  For my happily ever after:

  Larkin, Eleanor, and Philippa

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  The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

  —Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose

  The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all.

  —Mulan

  Preface

  When you are six years old and Cinderella arrives at the ball, you might put on a tutu and a tiara. You might dress up your baby sister in elbow-length satin gloves, their feathered ends frayed from constant use, grab her hands, slippery now that they’re encased in the flimsy pink material, and twirl around the room. You won’t keep time with the music but instead wade in a childhood bliss seemingly designed for moments such as this one. At least that’s what it was like at my house while I was researching this book.

  There is a scene in Walt Disney’s 1950 animated classic where a long, blue curtain opens, the prince sees Cinderella, and the two begin waltzing under the stars. It is the dance my daughters yearn for, accompanied by a song as familiar as any lullaby, in a film that has become part of the very DNA of their childhood.

  A passion for Cinderella is not something I expected from or even sought out for them. I would never have thought a movie made more than fifty years before my children were born would provide such entertainment. Perhaps this is because I have never been a Disney fanatic. Until I began writing this book, I viewed the Disney princesses, with their fluffy dresses and vulnerable demeanors, warily, suspicious that they had been dropped into my life by unknown misogynistic forces that were bent on turning my daughters into boy-crazy women.

  Princesses were mostly absent from my childhood. When I was a kid, my dad and I would walk from our apartment on Eighty-Sixth Street and Broadway in Manhattan to the Thalia Theater, a straight shot all the way up to West Ninety-Fifth Street. Every step of that walk was pure delight to me. My toes felt so light, it was as though they were flying over the pavement. Not so with my dad. As a jazz trombonist he had often worked late the night before and so he would stumble, half awake, my hand dragging him as I urged, “Walk faster, Daddy.” The entrance to the theater was shadowed by the buildings surrounding it, with the name Thalia, all lowercase, prominent above its marquee. I knew nothing about Greek muses, and it would be years before a teacher explained to me the lighthearted appeal of Thalia, the goddess of comedy. Yet as the word formed a portion of my own name, it seemed that the theater was a part of me.

  The moment you walked in under swelling art moderne arches, you could feel the dark, cool air surround you like a cocoon. We never sat up front in the aging building but instead headed toward the back. Because of the theater’s odd dipping floor, a reverse parabolic design, my dad said the view was better there. As the room became dark and the projector hummed its happy working song, I could feel the excitement building in me. In the summers, the Thalia Theater played cartoon marathons, hours of Walter Lantz, Ub Iwerks, Tex Avery, and Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng’s Warner Brothers classics, Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony shorts, and even some silent black-and-white Felix the Cat shorts from the 1920s.

  They were all made many decades before I or even my dad was born. Yet I never considered their age, as the humor they contained was timeless. All I knew was that I loved Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and, especially, my dad, who occasionally would doze off next to me, his chest rising and falling in an easy, slow rhythm as the antics of Wile E. Coyote continued on-screen. I might not have loved princesses when I was little or sung along with Ariel, Belle, or Pocahontas, but cartoons meant the world to me.

  My dad and I always stayed for the credits. It was a point of pride for him, a refusal to be rushed and a simple act of acknowledgment to the artists who made the movies. For those early cartoons, the credits were brief, so I happily watched the names scroll down the screen. One point quickly became clear: men, and men alone, made the cartoons I loved. I hunted for feminine-sounding names, but they were completely absent.

  Years later, while I was researching one of my books, a woman I interviewed told me about a place she used to work in the 1930s and 1940s. The environment, she said, was electric. The artists there cared little for money or fame. Instead they wanted to create something beautiful, something the world had never seen before. The place she was referring to was the Walt Disney Studios. In her memories of this exciting time, I noted one strange fact—there were many women in her stories.

  When historians talk about the early contributions of women at the Walt Disney Studios, they often cite the employees of the Ink and Paint department. This female-led group traced the animators’ sketches in ink directly onto sheets of plastic that were destined for the camera lens and then colored them in with bright hues. The position required an inherent artistry, and it wasn�
��t the only role women occupied at the famed studio. Before my interview in 2013, I’d had no idea that women were responsible for so many of the classic Walt Disney films I love or that their influence had been largely forgotten.

  I wanted to learn more and so I turned to one of the numerous biographies of Walt Disney that have been written over the years. In my eagerness, I tore through the pages, waiting for the names that I had so recently learned—Bianca, Grace, Sylvia, Retta, and Mary—to show up. They didn’t. I turned to another biography in which two of these women’s names were briefly mentioned, but their accomplishments were not. Worse, the women were referred to in patronizing terms. A famed artist who worked as an art director at the studio for decades was introduced merely in the context of her husband, as “his wife, Mary.” There was no indication of the magnitude of her influence at the studio. I kept hunting for traces of these artists, but despite the multitude of official histories that document the rise of Walt Disney, the contributions of the women he worked with remained unacknowledged. Dejected, I began searching out the women themselves, eager to hear firsthand the experiences that so many biographies had failed to capture.

  By 2015, I worried that I had started my search too late. While I had found a few artists who could remember in sparkling detail their lives at the studio, the vast majority of the women I sought had passed away. Had the stories of their experiences and accomplishments died along with them? As I began to pack my notebooks and research materials away, I considered who holds on to our memories after we leave this earth. The answer was suddenly clear: If I wanted answers about these women, I would have to find those they had loved. Tracking down their families and friends was sometimes easier than I expected and sometimes quite challenging, but almost all of those I contacted generously shared with me tender memories, whispered over the phone or in person, along with letters, diaries, love notes, and photographs. The histories I documented represent just a small fraction of the total number of women who worked for the Walt Disney Studios, and yet, because their memories were preserved, I was able to reconstruct their narratives in detail. At last, a story began to take shape, one far more enchanting and yet more heartrending than I had ever expected.

  Now when my daughters dance blissfully to the song “So This Is Love,” I can tell them how its sweet refrain and the lush imagery on the screen came to be and how many female artists, though left out of the on-screen credits, worked to create the magical scene they adore. The artistry contained within this classic piece of cinema has lived on for decades and will continue to be passed from one generation to the next, but the stories of the women responsible for it, and their profound struggles, are only now revealed.

  Timeline

  Grace Huntington

  Bianca Majolie

  Retta Scott

  Mary Blair

  Sylvia Holland

  Chapter 1

  One Day When We Were Young

  When Bianca Majolie stood up at the front of the room, the blood immediately drained from her face, her palms started to sweat, and she could feel her heart pounding. Bianca took a deep breath and opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out. Her mouth felt dry and gritty, as if her saliva had given up and left to hide in the pit of her stomach. It was January 25, 1937, and Bianca wished she could hide too. She had worked for the Walt Disney Studios for two years and she dreaded nothing more than the story department meetings where the writers pitched their ideas in front of the group. It was not due to a lack of talent on her part. Bianca’s characters and lively plots were destined for the silver screen. Nor was it her shy personality. When necessary, her soft-spoken tone gave way to the loud, booming voice of one passionate about her work. The problem stemmed from the fact that she was born a woman in a world that wanted men.

  She skipped as many of the meetings as she could, her excuses ranging from mundane claims of illness to fantastic tales of car accidents complete with shattered glass sprinkled across the highway and the smell of burned rubber. Her alibis were mostly unnecessary—there was no obligation to attend a meeting unless you were the one pitching. When it was her turn to share her ideas with the group, she approached the matter as she would swimming in the chilly Pacific Ocean: better to just get it over with, plunge into the waves headfirst, and let the cold water numb your body.

  On this January day, however, the room felt colder than the Arctic. Everyone knew that Snow White was Walt’s darling, and the hapless writer who suggested changes to one of its scenes, even if necessary, was certain to incur the wrath of the room. As Bianca stood there in silence, she could hear lighthearted laughter outside the windows, and for a moment, she imagined she was one of the women on the other side of the glass, relaxing on the lawn without a care in the world. I could be like them, she thought. All I have to do is leave.

  At the Walt Disney Studios, it was not enough to simply have an idea or even write a script. In the story department, you had to stand up in front of your colleagues and act it out. As much as Bianca hated dramatizing her ideas at the meeting, she loved watching the other writers perform their material. Dick Lundy could mimic the voice of Donald Duck flawlessly as he pretended to walk across the street, then slip and fall right in front of her seat, his body twisting in contortions worthy of the Three Stooges, before he tittered in Minnie Mouse’s falsetto: “Oh, Donald, have a nice trip? Tee-hee-hee.” The room would roar with laughter, Bianca joining in until tears ran down her face. Sometimes they would don costumes; once, the men applied rouge and lipstick and performed an elaborate cancan, kicking their knobby-kneed legs as high as they could while they belted out tunes. The atmosphere could be boisterous, full of pure joy and childish antics, and it made Bianca proud to be one of them.

  But other times it could be terrible. The men would yell obscenities and throw wads of balled-up paper at the presenter when they considered an idea unworthy of development. At these moments, Bianca could feel her colleagues’ aggression, the room becoming a pressure cooker for the unlucky person whose only crime was sharing his or her work. Too often, it seemed that the ugliest responses, the ones that could shake the confidence of even the most talented writers, were directed at her. At these moments, Bianca wished she had some special ability to distract her colleagues from her flaws. If only she were a great beauty or could sing or dance or even, more humbly, mimic the happy squeak of Mickey Mouse. Sometimes what she wanted most was to be a man, if only for the few hours a week she spent at story meetings.

  Bianca thought about this now as she stood trembling before her peers and resolved to appear confident. With a deep breath, she shoved her natural shyness aside and placed her storyboards—corkboards filled with artwork pinned in sequence—on the wooden easels facing the group. Her sketches showed dancing flowers and animals. Voices of dissent started rising almost immediately and Bianca found herself shouting, trying to get her ideas heard, but her soft voice was drowned out. In the midst of the fray, Walt Disney quietly walked up to the easels and yanked Bianca’s sketches from the corkboards, sending pushpins flying. With hardly a word, he ripped the papers in half. The room went silent as the scraps of Bianca’s work fell to the floor, a smiling flower peeking out from under one page.

  The moment represented Bianca’s worst fears realized, and like Snow White scrambling through the forest to escape the huntsman, she instantly fled. She could hear the group of men running after her, the pounding of their feet growing louder as they continued to taunt her. She had never been so thankful to have a private office. She ran into it, turned the lock, then covered her face with her hands and let the tears of embarrassment and shame she had been holding back flow. As she caught her breath she could hear shouts on the other side of the door and then her colleagues’ insistent knocking. The voice of one of the men, “Big Roy” Williams, a firebrand with a famously short temper, suddenly rose clearly from the crowd as he yelled, “This won’t do!” The rapping seemed suddenly to grow angrier. Bianca cowered in the corner, her heart beating
wildly, and her panicky gasps for air becoming high-pitched. She felt helpless. It wasn’t enough to have her work rejected by Walt, whom she respected and who was frequently her champion. She knew that the team wanted her to be thoroughly humiliated. Her tears fueled their cruelty.

  The wooden door frame began bending now, the plywood and nails no match for the pressure of so many men on the other side. With a loud craack, the wood splintered, the door gave way, and a crowd of men tumbled into Bianca’s sanctuary. She buried her head in her arms, covering her ears to try to block their shouts, but it was no use. She would have to take it like a man. “This is why we can’t use women,” Walt said of the incident, “they can’t take a little criticism.”

  Bianca was an awkward seventeen-year-old when she first met Walter Elias Disney. They both attended McKinley High School in Chicago, Illinois. When she saw Walt dressed in the drab fatigues of the American Red Cross ambulance service, she shyly approached and handed him her yearbook. Walt was sixteen but pretending to be seventeen in order to join the war effort; he’d even lied about his birth date on the Red Cross application. He desperately wanted to be like his three older brothers, who would come home on leave looking handsome in their navy uniforms, their sailor caps jauntily tilted on their heads. (Instead, he would find himself in the last days of World War I driving an ambulance through Europe, occasionally doodling on the vehicle’s canvas flaps.) But that day in high school, he scribbled cartoons in Bianca’s yearbook, smiled, and walked away. It was a moment that meant little to either of them at the time, being but the briefest of encounters, yet the memory of the interaction would linger, destined to sway both of their futures.

  Bianca was born Bianca Maggioli in Rome on September 13, 1900, and immigrated to Chicago with her family in 1914. Her high-school French teacher soon Americanized her name to Blanche Majolie. She never felt like a Blanche, though. It was the name of a stranger, and it was Walt who, two decades later, ultimately insisted she shake it off.