Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  When she met Walt Disney that January, there was no attraction, much less romance. At most, even though she lived within walking distance of the studio, Walt would drive her and a coworker home. Yet Lillian observed that he always dropped off the other girl first and then stopped near but never in front of Lillian’s sister’s house—because, Lillian thought, he was probably embarrassed by his somewhat ragged appearance. Despite his threadbare clothes, Lillian admitted that it was during these rides home that “I began to look at him like he was a somebody.” Walt had begun taking notice of her too. One night as he was letting her out, he asked whether he could see her socially if he got a new suit. Lillian assented, so he and Roy went to Foreman & Clark’s, a downtown haberdashery, and bought themselves each a two-pant suit, which was a significant expense for them. (Roy had set a thirty-five dollar limit, but Walt exceeded it.) When Walt arrived to pick her up for their date—he had gotten tickets for No, No, Nanette—he stood up, proudly displayed his new gray-green double-breasted suit, and with no self-consciousness whatsoever asked her sister, brother-in-law, and niece how they liked his wardrobe. His naïveté, Lillian said, charmed them. Yet for all his winsomeness and attractiveness, Lillian made it seem as if they were dating by default. “I didn’t have any other dates,” she said, “and neither did he.”

  Even after they began dating regularly, it often seemed less a love match than a matter of companionship. Walt visited Lillian frequently—“All of a sudden Walt was at our house an awful lot,” recalled Lillian’s niece, Marjorie—yet even the Sewells could not figure out whether Walt was there because of Lilly or because Hazel was an excellent cook. Walt would go there in the evenings, roust Marjorie from the sofa where she slept, and send her off to Lillian’s room so that he and Lillian could have privacy. Then, before he left, he would carry Marjorie back to the sofa and gently tuck her in. After he bought his Moon roadster with its light on the radiator—he had previously borrowed Virginia Davis’s father’s Ford for the rides home—he and Lillian would go for long drives through the orange groves east to Pomona and Riverside and even north to Santa Barbara. Other times they would go to Hollywood tearooms for dinner. Frequently they would go to the movies. On these drives and on these dates, Walt would be talking, incessantly talking, but he would talk not so much about their future as about his—about his work and plans and what he hoped to accomplish in animation. “He never thought of anything, I think,” Edna Francis Disney recalled, more expansively than Lillian herself ever did, “except his work and Lilly…. [H]e just thought about her and his work.”

  After a courtship that lasted at least a year, the decision to get married, like the decision to date, also seemed to come by default—fulfilling an obligation. Even decades later Walt was less than sentimental about the betrothal. “How do you know it’s not just a need for companionship?” he would ask his daughter about marriage. Roy suspected that Walt appreciated Lillian’s compliant nature. “Walt was a dominating person. And she was the kind that just went along with him and what he did,” he would later say. “She worshiped him, and anything he wanted to do was all right with her.” Walt himself agreed that Lillian was a “good listener. I’d talk to her about what I’d hope to do, and she’d listen.” By the time he began thinking about proposing, Lillian had advanced from inking cels to helping Roy manage the studio’s business office, and even she later joked that she made so many mistakes while she was taking dictation that Walt said he had to marry her to relieve the studio of her, though at another time she said that Walt had decided to marry her because he was in debt to her for the paychecks he had asked her not to cash when the studio’s coffers were empty. As Walt told it, he proposed indirectly—by asking Lillian to choose between their pitching in to buy a new car or a ring, as he had once asked Bea Conover whether he should buy a canoe or a camera. Lillian said the ring, so Roy and Walt found a wholesale diamond dealer who for seventy-five dollars sold them a ¾ carat diamond mounted on a thin platinum band and surrounded by blue sapphires. “It looked like a locomotive headlight to me,” Walt said.

  The couple’s plan was to wait, but after Roy had married and left Walt the apartment, Lillian said they moved up the schedule because “Walt didn’t like to be alone.” Early that July they took a steamer to Seattle, then the train to Lewiston—in preparation Walt had taken $150 in cash from the studio and unilaterally increased his salary to $75 a week, $25 more than Roy’s—where they were married at Lillian’s brother’s house in a small ceremony on July 13, 1925, with Lillian, in a lavender gown, giggling nervously throughout. They spent their honeymoon at Mount Rainier National Park and then in Seattle and its environs before stopping in Portland on their way home so that they could visit Elias and Flora, who had not been able to attend the wedding. But as Walt remembered it, even his wedding night, in keeping with his courtship, was less than romantic, possibly because he was just too timorous to make it so. He said he had a toothache so painful that he could not sleep and spent the evening helping the porter shine shoes until morning, when he found a dentist and had his tooth pulled.

  III

  When Walt returned to the studio in August, he was riding a wave. The trade reviews of the Alice comedies that summer and fall were positive, occasionally bordering on enthusiastic: “Here is a clever cartoon novelty…and should lend an acceptable variety to your program” (Film Daily); “Capital entertainment is furnished by the first of the new series of the ‘Alice comedies’” which show “plenty of invention by their creator” (Motion Picture News); “Each one of these Walt Disney cartoons…appears to be more imaginative and clever than the preceding [one]” (Motion Picture World). It was a measure of the Alices’ success that Virginia Davis had begun making personal appearances, and George Winkler informed Walt that he was talking to publishers about a book tie-in for Christmas. In fact, the Disneys themselves were feeling confident enough about the future that a week before Walt and Lillian’s nuptials the brothers placed a $400 deposit on a plot of land with an office building on Hyperion Avenue near Griffith Park, in the Silver Lake district just east of Los Angeles and close to Kingswell—Walt had let Roy make the choice between that plot and one in Westwood—where they intended to erect a larger studio than the Kingswell storefront.

  But if Walt began to feel as if he were finally secure that summer, the feeling didn’t last, and by the fall there were renewed tensions with Mintz. Ostensibly the main problem again was money. With the new contract in January, Mintz had accelerated the schedule, but Walt was so desirous of getting the money from Mintz even more quickly, especially now that he was married and contemplating the new studio, that he was delivering the films faster than the contract stipulated, one every sixteen days instead of every three weeks, and Mintz, just as desirous of holding on to his money, ordered Walt to desist. Walt answered that so long as he did not deliver pictures at intervals any greater than three weeks, he could ship them as frequently as he liked and threatened to seek another distributor if Mintz failed to remit the money due. The threat, almost certainly a bluff, prompted Mintz to send a long and angry letter that October decrying Walt’s ingratitude (“had any of the first seven pictures that you made, [sic] been given to any other Distributor in the whole world…they would have thrown them out bodily”), his ineptitude (“the only reason you are making pictures today is because we sent our George Winkler out and, at our expense, taught you what it was necessary to know to produce the kind of pictures you are now making”), and his greed (“we have not made one single dollar on any picture that we have ever gotten from you”).

  Technically, Walt was right. He could deliver when he pleased. But as a twenty-three-year-old animation tyro, he did not have the clout to take on his distributor, and in any case the dispute was complicated by the fact that even as he and Mintz were trading charges, Mintz was also negotiating a deal with a big national distributor, the Film Booking Office, to pick up his entire product—the Krazy Kats, which he was now producing instead of Felix, and
the Alices. Mintz had been distributing the films on what was called a “states’ rights” basis, meaning that he sold them state by state to local theater circuits, but independent distribution was rapidly giving way to larger organizations selling to larger territories. Obviously knowing that Walt was ambitious and hoping that he would regard national distribution as a new opportunity to advance his career, Mintz suggested they put their differences aside and agree on a new contract on the same terms as the old contract—$1,500 per film, with $900 payable on delivery of the negative and $600 within ninety days after that, with a fifty-fifty split of all receipts above $3,000—and that Walt come to New York as soon as possible to conclude the deal. “I intend to make your product the leading subject of its kind in the entire world,” Mintz wrote in obvious conciliation, echoing his wife’s early promises.

  As always, Walt needed money to maintain his operation, and he was barely breaking even despite what he believed was the growing popularity of the series. But once again money was not his only or perhaps even greatest consideration. Walt harbored two impulses that often warred: the go-getting impulse to succeed, which could be certified by money and recognition, and the deeper psychological impulse to control, which could be satisfied only by making his films exactly as he wanted to make them without interference. While finally prodding Mintz into sweetening the contract terms slightly—in addition to the $1,500, Walt was now to receive $350 for each film of gross receipts over $4,000 and a fifty-fifty split after that, just as the current contract had stipulated—he added a new clause of his own that indicated just how much he had been chafing at Mintz’s aesthetic demands and criticisms and just how much the flare-up with Mintz may have been about power all along: that “all matters regarding making of comedies are to be left to me.” Walt may have been bluffing over the money, trying to force Mintz’s hand, but was not bluffing about control. There was little sense in creating an alternative world to escape to if one did not shape and command that world. When Mintz derisively rejected this demand, Walt broke off their negotiations and expressed his regrets that their partnership would soon end.

  Meanwhile Walt found himself in another quarrel—this one with the Davises. To cut costs that summer, Walt had proposed that he pay Virginia only for the time that she was actually used—at a rate of twenty-five dollars per day. Since she had worked only roughly eighteen days the previous year, this would have amounted to a tremendous saving for the Disneys and a tremendous loss for the Davises. Understandably the Davises erupted at the suggestion, ripping Walt and accusing George Winkler of having angled to get rid of Virginia all along so that he could sign the daughter of a friend. Walt did not want to jettison Virginia now that she was so closely identified with the series, but the focus was increasingly on the animation, not on Alice, and financial pressures and pressures from Mintz forced him to sign another girl, Dawn O’Day, who appeared in only one film, and then four-year-old Margie Gay, both at the twenty-five-dollar-a-day rate. Gay, who had a short dark pageboy where Virginia had long golden curls, and a round baby face where Virginia’s face was preternaturally mature, brought a different quality to the series. “Virginia Davis had had something of a post-Victorian image—her appeal was that of a juvenile Lillian Gish,” wrote one animation historian, “—whereas Margie Gay was more of the flapper type.” But Virginia Davis had a different interpretation of what distinguished her from Gay. She later sniped, “Margie was cute in her little Clara Bow haircut, but all she really had to do was clap her hands, put her hands on her hips and jump up and down,” which, whether Davis knew it or not, was an implicit acknowledgment that Alice had become incidental to her own films.

  In the midst of the Sturm und Drang with Mintz and the Davises, Walt had one respite: the Disneys moved the studio that February from the two rooms on Kingswell to their new quarters on Hyperion Avenue. It was not a particularly prepossessing place, situated among wild oats and abutting a pipe organ factory and a gas station. One employee described it as about the size of a grocery store—just a single sixteen-hundred-square-foot stucco bungalow into which the Disneys had poured about $3,000 for renovations. Walt later described it as a “little green and white structure with a red tile roof, and a nice little plot of grass in front of us.” Still, it represented not only the company’s growth and aspirations but also Walt’s self-aggrandizement and even pomposity in the face of his modest success. This was his studio now. “One evening when Walt and I were discussing our move,” Roy once told an associate, “Walt said to me, ‘Roy, when we move to Hyperion, I’m going to have a large neon sign erected, reading “Walt Disney Studios.”…He looked at me as if expecting an argument. I said, ‘If that’s the way you want it.’ And Walt said, ‘That’s the way I want it and that’s the way it will be!’ And that’s the way it was.” The Disney Bros. studio had become the Walt Disney studio.

  This was considerable bravado for someone who had reached an impasse with his distributor and was facing the end of his contract. But Walt wasn’t going to succumb to Mintz without a fight. He was scheming. Just before moving to Hyperion, in an apparent attempt to break the stalemate, he had written Film Booking Office chief Joseph Schnitzer directly, complaining about Mintz. Schnitzer had notified Mintz, who fired off a letter to Walt saying he was “extremely disappointed” in him. When Schnitzer offered to mediate, Mintz refused, saying that he owned the rights to Alice and did not need Walt. Now Walt blinked, wiring Mintz on February 8 with yet another set of terms: a $500 payment after the first $4,000 gross, then $500 to Mintz and then a fifty-fifty split. Walt also asked to retain the rights to the films. Though Mintz agreed in principle, he continued to haggle, even coming out to Los Angeles to discuss the contract. When it was finally concluded, Walt realized the diminished advance would likely compromise the films. “I want you to understand that it is almost a physical impossibility to make each picture a knockout,” Walt wrote Mintz during the final negotiations in what must have been a difficult concession for someone who wanted so badly to excel, “and I only hope that you will be fair enough to let me know when I have a good picture, as well as to tell me about the poor ones.” As for the rights, Mintz retained them.

  Thus Walt resolved the crisis with Mintz, but he had not resolved the deeper financial crisis or the crisis of status. Even with the new contract he was still scrambling for money and looking for ways to supplement what little he was making on the Alice films. Throughout his time in California he had been soliciting work from Dr. McCrum, the dentist for whom he had made Tommy Tucker’s Tooth in Kansas City, though he knew any profits would be negligible. He had also offered to produce song films for Carl Stalling, for whom he had made Martha. In the meantime he had subcontracted with another company to draw the titles for a serial. By summer 1926 he had finally gotten Dr. McCrum to commit to a new dental hygiene film, Clara Cleans Her Teeth, in which Walt starred Lillian’s niece, Marjorie Sewell, as a ragamuffin who is ostracized by other children because her teeth have gone rotten.

  After his showdown with Mintz, it was clearly humbling to have to make a film on dental hygiene, especially as Walt was trying so manfully to maintain the fiction of his success, even to his own staff. “Walt’s office looks like a bank president’s loafing room,” one of his employees wrote his family of Hyperion. But throughout 1926 the man with the large office was making no more than $300 profit per picture on the Alices, sliding to $100 as he neared the end of the year and of the contract, and plummeting further to a loss of $61.25 on the last of the series. When Mintz asked him to contribute to a fund to fight John Randolph Bray, who was accusing animators of copyright infringement, Walt begged off, saying he could not afford it: “I have borrowed to my capacity and have to squeeze very hard to make things come out right.”

  And if it was difficult to play the young mogul at the studio, it was impossible to do so at home. He and Lillian had returned from their honeymoon to a tiny apartment on Melbourne Avenue near the Kingswell studio that faced out on an alley. “I
remember I was so unhappy because I had never lived in an apartment before,” Lillian said. “I was used to homes in Idaho where you could step out of your front door and be in the open.” Though Walt received a monthly allowance from the company for his car, it was not until the next year, when the couple moved several blocks south to an apartment on Commonwealth Avenue off Sunset Boulevard, that they were able to buy furniture of their own.

  If the humiliations and scrimping weren’t enough, yet another new tension arose—one that in its way was even more significant than the problems with Mintz, though it flowed directly from them. While Walt struggled with his finances and with Mintz, he was also, for the first time, beginning to struggle with his staff, which throughout 1926 still numbered fewer than ten, including the janitor. Walt had always been fun-loving, collaborative, and informal—a big kid. According to one employee, the crew would gather in the office or in Walt’s apartment and bruit about gags. “Walt would have an idea,” he recalled, “—well, let’s let Alice be a fireman in this one, or let’s let Alice go fishing, or whatever it was. And then we’d work up whatever the type of thing was, fire gags or fishing gags. And then Walt would put them all together to tell the story. He’d try to come up with an idea of continuity.” When animating, they would sit in one room, side by side, a group of comrades, with Walt supervising and timing the scenes. Off the job, the group frequently socialized together, spending New Year’s 1926 driving down to Tijuana in Walt’s Moon roadster and Roy’s Oakland.

  But that winter the atmosphere at the studio suddenly sobered and soured. The pressures from Mintz, the financial stranglehold, and Walt’s own obsession with improving the animations had changed him from a reckless young man to a martinet, pushing, prodding, provoking. Having always to appease Mintz, he now made the staff appease him. Everyone seemed to notice the change in temperament—the change from jovial to tense and snappish. Several cited a “clash of personalities.” “I made mistakes,” remembered Isadore “Friz” Freleng, a veteran of the Film Ad Co. who joined the studio early in 1927 at Walt’s urging, “and Walt—even though he expressed patience in his letters prior to my joining him—didn’t show any. He became abusive and harassed me.” (Freleng had replaced Ham Hamilton, who had left, Freleng said, because he “couldn’t bear the abuse that Walt heaped upon him.”) Walt would “make insulting remarks to me,” Freleng said, and Freleng would then fire back. “Walt could make you feel real bad when he wanted to,” said another early employee. “He was that way,” Hugh Harman concurred. “Unless you were 100% for Walt, unless you were doing for him, working for him, he thought you were double-crossing him.”