Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  Achieving that quality was still extremely difficult, even with his new, more experienced staff. As early as November 1930 Walt was having a hard time meeting the Columbia release schedule and was trying to find a way to speed up production without sacrificing the values that had won him plaudits, but he also realized that making good pictures more quickly would cost more, eating up the Columbia advances. By March the production delays had become so severe that Columbia vice-president Joe Brandt came to the studio for what Roy described as a “showdown,” which was averted only because Walt suddenly instituted a new system, dividing his staff into three crews, which would be working simultaneously on three different cartoons. This, Roy hoped, would cut the production time for each cartoon from three weeks or more down to two weeks or less.

  But if the new system sped delivery, it did little to help the Disneys’ bottom line. Their contract with Columbia was what was called a “60/40, 40/60,” meaning that they received their advances against 40 percent of the grosses to Columbia as a distribution fee with the remaining 60 percent dedicated to repaying the advance plus the cost of prints and advertising. Once these costs were recovered, the Disneys received 60 percent of the profits and Columbia 40 percent. In effect, Columbia was secured with the first dollars it received while the Disneys were at the mercy of both the market and of Columbia, which not only raked in the money but also did the accounting. “It worked,” Roy griped, “into a very unfair situation.”

  From the beginning of their association, after his experiences with Mintz and Powers and the aborted collusion between the latter and Columbia itself, Walt had been deeply suspicious of his distributor. He shared Roy’s assessment, made the week of their agreement, that one had to be vigilant with Columbia because “they aren’t overburdened with ‘good intentions.’” Within months Walt felt that Columbia, seemingly content with the profits it was making on the Mickeys and the Sillies and with a fairly large collection of other shorts to distribute, was already sloughing off on its efforts to promote the Disney cartoons, not to mention shortchanging the Disneys on what it did collect. But this time Walt was determined not to be gulled or cheated. Instead, he began plotting a preemptive strike.

  That fall Sol Lesser, an acquaintance of Walt’s who was a longtime exhibitor and distributor, introduced Walt to Joseph Schenck, a leading figure in the industry who was himself a former producer and now the president of United Artists. Walt admitted that he was awed. Columbia was a small studio located on what was called “Poverty Row” in Hollywood. United Artists was the creation of four of the brightest luminaries in motion pictures: director D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, Fairbanks’s wife Mary Pickford, and Walt’s idol, Charlie Chaplin. Walt’s object in wangling the introduction to Schenck was simple: he wanted United Artists to distribute his cartoons when his Columbia contract expired in April. Walt and Gunther Lessing had gone to the United Artists lot in mid-November to discuss the possibility, only to be left waiting the entire day. To salve his ego, Walt made the excuse that the executives must have had an important meeting. When he and Lessing returned later that week, United Artists, working through Lesser, offered Disney what he said amounted to a $50,000 guarantee per picture for two years—a deal that, according to George Morris, the studio’s new business manager under Roy, would “more than double your present income.”* After a three-hour meeting at UA, Walt concurred that “if we can’t do that good or better with our present outlet,…a change might be better.” So the man who had so abhorred Mintz’s secret deal with the Disneys’ mutinous animators secretly concluded an agreement of his own that December. Young Walt Disney was now affiliated with the august United Artists.

  The Disneys could not let Columbia know about the agreement lest the distributor begin to stint further on its efforts for the Mickeys and Sillies, especially since, between Columbia’s assumption of the Powers contract and its own contract for the Sillies, there were still twenty-five cartoons to be released before UA took over. In fact, Roy continued negotiating with them as if a new Columbia contract were still a possibility, and to maintain the ruse he even met with Universal president Carl Laemmle, who had been pressing Roy to distribute the cartoons, as if there were still a competition. When, early in April 1931, Columbia executives finally learned of the UA agreement, they were incensed. Columbia vice-president Abe Schneider said he had been a “sucker” in negotiating with Roy, and the president, Jack Cohn, warned Roy ominously, “You are going to lose plenty as a result of this deal,” meaning presumably that Columbia would not promote the Disney cartoons that remained on its schedule as aggressively as it had, or account for them as accurately. Still, the Disneys seemed unrepentant, unbowed, and thrilled with their new association—payback for what they felt they had suffered. “We have been approached frequently on the matter of distributing short subjects,” Joe Schenck declared after the official announcement of the Disney contract on April 13, “but we have heretofore held to the theory that United Artists is an organization only for the biggest stars. Mickey Mouse, however, is different. Disney has created a character whose type has never been equaled in motion picture history.”

  It should have been a moment of triumph, and in many ways it was, but even with the success of the cartoons and even with the prospect of more revenue under the new contract, the joy was tempered by the Disneys’ endemic problem: they were still having trouble making ends meet while they continued to deliver what they owed to Columbia and while they waited the year for the new contract to take effect. “Very frankly, our business has been growing so fast and expanding in two or three directions, that we are still about as close run for money as ever,” Roy wrote his parents shortly after the UA announcement, citing the skyrocketing cost of the cartoons—Walt put the budget per cartoon now at $13,500—and the expenditures on the studio expansion. Already in May, Roy was seeking—and received—a $25,000 loan from the Bank of America to be paid off by the Columbia overages, hoping both to infuse new money into the cash-strapped studio and to force Columbia, which was also financed by the Bank of America, to be “very careful on their trickery” since “[Joe] Brandt will hesitate before trying to get funny if the Bank of America is there to call Columbia to time.” Roy agreed not to tell Walt “too much” about the loan for fear of his brother’s burning through the new funds.

  The sense of relief did not last long. By the end of June the Columbia remittances had declined, as Cohn predicted they would, leaving the studio in jeopardy of failing to meet its payroll, even though Schenck himself was pressing the distributor to treat the Disneys fairly. Roy tried to finesse the issue by simply shipping cartoons earlier than Columbia wanted them to, just as the Disneys had done with Mintz and Powers, and thus ending their commitment sooner, but Columbia refused to take delivery. By June the studio was paying out $27,000 in salaries each month, which was more than the $14,000 in advances they were receiving for two cartoons each month and the $9,000 in overages each month that Columbia was now remitting to the studio and that the studio was sending to the Bank of America to retire their loan. “[U]nless something very drastic in the way of a cut in our salary commitments is not made immediately,” George Morris memoed Walt, “we are going to find ourselves in a situation that is fraught with complications so serious that they will effect [sic] the whole structure of our organization…if we are going to survive.”

  Morris wasn’t crying wolf. Roy was already negotiating with Joe Schenck for a personal loan of $25,000, but the money wouldn’t be available until August, and in any case $14,000 would be dedicated to paying off previous commitments. So desperate was the situation that Morris and Lessing had even proposed the unthinkable: selling off an interest in the studio. “The business has become too big for Walt to cling to his faith that ‘Roy will raise the money some way,’” Lessing wrote Roy. “It is a beautiful idea to build up an ideal organization like Walt desires and make a product par excellence for future distribution hopes; but there is such a thing as running it into the g
round…. It is absolutely essential that you cheapen your product for the present.”

  But if Lessing expected Walt to acquiesce in cheapening his product, he had little understanding of what Walt Disney wanted or why Walt Disney was in the animation business to begin with. In Walt’s eyes, his studio was not to be subject to the pressures of the world; it was his refuge from them—a sacred place. And his animations could not be compromised; they had to be better than anyone else’s or he would not survive in the business; nor would he want to survive. Excellence was not only Walt’s business strategy, it was the reason he ran the studio and the force that kept his personal world intact. “If you want to know the real secret of Walt’s success,” longtime animator Ward Kimball would say, “it’s that he never tried to make money. He was always trying to make something that he could have fun with or be proud of.” Predictably, Walt called Morris to his office and insisted that he could not take on outside investors or ask his employees to take pay cuts or accelerate production or cut the staff since “that would mean cutting the quality of the pictures and a subsequent falling off of interest by the public in the Disney product.” Instead, Walt suggested—unrealistically, Morris felt—that they take a loan from UA against future profits, while Morris thought of trying to tap Schenck for another personal loan. In the end Walt, after exploding at Lessing and Morris and sputtering that everyone on the business side was “pretty rotten,” said he would attempt to produce five cartoons every two months rather than four, and the studio muddled through to the fall.

  The constant strain focused Walt, but even without the financial pressures he would have been a man obsessed. He had always lived for his studio. Bill Cottrell, who often worked at night at the studio on the camera, said that Walt never left at five or five-thirty when most of the rest of the staff did. He stayed until six or seven and then returned, often with Lillian. Walt himself admitted that he liked to wander the studio at night, visiting the animation tables or looking at the layout of scenes and adding or subtracting drawings. Even when he wasn’t at the studio, his mind wasn’t far from it. Ben Sharpsteen remembered when Walt, on his way to work, received a traffic ticket. Disney was less than amused when he told his staff about it that morning, but as he reenacted his exchange with the policeman—and Walt always acted out his stories—he began to see the humor in it, and, Sharpsteen said, Walt’s “attitude changed.” The episode quickly became the basis for Traffic Troubles. Another time Sharpsteen ran into Walt as Walt and Lillian were entering a diner and Sharpsteen was exiting. Walt immediately blocked the door, oblivious to other patrons attempting to enter or leave, and began telling a story he had just concocted for a new cartoon about a barnyard revue with an audience of cats. Lillian was growing impatient at having to wait, and when Walt reached his denouement—the cats jumping onto a privy roof, which then collapses—she sneered that she wouldn’t want to see that cartoon, but Walt didn’t seem to hear or care. “For the moment, Walt didn’t realize where he was or anything; all he knew was that he wanted to tell his story.” “His hobby is his work,” George Morris told a reporter profiling Walt, “as every moment of his time is given over to it.”

  But the obsessiveness took a far greater toll on Lillian than just having to wait for her husband or listen to his stories. She was lonely. To a Time reporter, she called herself a “mouse widow” and joked that she found her husband’s conversation “fascinating” because “it is entirely given to Mickey Mouse.” There was little time for anything else. The Disneys socialized only occasionally, usually at Roy’s house for a Sunday barbecue and a game of croquet, and they had few close friends. His best pal, Walt said, was Lillian, with his dog, Sunnee, “running a close second.” Most of his free time he spent with Lillian, her mother, and Sunnee, driving from theater to theater to watch cartoons—“He knew what time they would be playing,” Lillian said—while his entourage waited in the car. When he wasn’t on cartoon patrol, he and Lillian would be out for a ride and invariably Walt would say that he remembered something he wanted to do at the studio. “There wasn’t a night we didn’t end up at the studio,” Lillian recalled. So she would curl up on the davenport in his office and sleep while Walt worked, waking up at intervals to ask how late it was, to which, regardless of the time, Walt would answer, “Oh, it’s not late.” Walt admitted years later that he would turn back his office clock while Lillian slept so that she never knew how late he had worked. Even in bed, Lillian said, he would usually toss and turn, thinking of studio problems, then rise early and declare, “I think I’ve got it licked.”

  Already stressed by Walt’s obsession and the financial shortfall, the couple suffered another, more personal tragedy that summer. A child himself, Walt had always hoped for children of his own. “I want to have ten kids,” he once told his sister Ruth, “and let them do whatever they want,” in obvious compensation for the tribulations he endured during his own childhood. Despite her maternal feelings for Sunnee, Lillian, the youngest of ten, was more guarded about having children, saying that she had been discouraged at seeing how hard her mother and sisters had had to work. While Walt and Lillian pondered parenting, Roy and Edna had been attempting to have a child—even, by one account, agreeing to have intercourse in their doctor’s office so he could monitor them. Finally, on January 10, 1930, just before the confrontation with Powers and the departures of Iwerks and Stalling, Edna gave birth to Roy Edward Disney. “Walt and Lilly are both crazy about him,” Roy wrote his mother later that summer. “He seems somewhat afraid of Walt, but goes crazy over Lilly. Walt just doesn’t know how to play with him yet.”

  Lillian’s time with Roy Edward may have defused her reluctance to have a child of her own, while Walt got further encouragement that same year when Lillian’s sister Hazel filed for divorce and she and her thirteen-year-old daughter Marjorie moved into the Disneys’ Lyric Avenue home. Walt embraced the role of surrogate father and doted on Marjorie. “He used to wait up for me to come home,” she recalled. “He’d be at the top of the stairs when I came in at night, especially if I was very late.” When she went off to boarding school and came home only on weekends, Walt would get annoyed if she made plans, asking her, “Why’d you bother to come home? Why’d you bother if you’re not going to be here?”

  In the spring of 1931, a little over a year after Roy Edward’s birth and after a year of Walt’s oversight of Marjorie, Lillian was pregnant. Walt was overjoyed. He immediately began searching for a new homesite—one to three acres, he told realtors grandly. But on June 10 Lillian suffered a miscarriage. The couple were devastated. “It was very sad,” Marjorie remembered. Walt wrote his cousin Lena mordantly, “I am married and so far all I can boast of is a cute little wife and a dandy Chow dog.” Though studio business was obviously pressing and the financial situation desperate, Roy suggested Walt and Lillian take a trip for a few weeks, possibly to Honolulu.

  If the birth of Roy Edward had lightened the burden during the battle with Powers in 1930, Lillian’s miscarriage cast a pall during their struggle to survive that summer. Walt did not leave immediately on a vacation as Roy advised. He stayed, immersing himself—if possible, even more single-mindedly—in his work and becoming increasingly tense and irritable. Never content with the quality of what the studio produced—“No matter how good a picture we turn out, I can always see ways to improve it when I see the finished product,” he would later say—he was now even less satisfied than usual. He became distracted and forgetful. Even his health began to deteriorate, and late that June, just two weeks after the miscarriage, he was rushed to the hospital to have inflamed tonsils removed. “Frankly, I am worried about Walt,” Roy wrote Lessing and Morris. “He needs a good vacation and rest. We have both been hitting the ball too hard for a long time.” He also endorsed the idea of bringing in a new investor and business associate, apparently Schenck, to relieve them. “Of course, in no event, would we relinquish control, but there would be a devided [sic] responsibility in place of it being on just us two
. If for no other reason than to protect Walt’s health, strength and enthusiasm, and talent, I am strongly in favor of the idea.”

  Though Walt would have never agreed to share responsibility, he realized that his enthusiasm was waning even as his intensity increased, and that something was terribly wrong with him. “I guess I was working too hard and worrying too much,” he said later. “I was expecting more from my artists than they were giving me, and all I did all day long was pound, pound, pound. Costs were going up; each new picture we finished cost more to make than we had figured it would earn.” While he drove his staff mercilessly and became snappish again, as he had been in the bad Mintz days, he was emotionally fragile. When he talked on the phone, he would suddenly and unaccountably find himself weeping. At night he couldn’t sleep. At the studio he became physically ill looking at his latest cartoon and, unable to see anything but its flaws, claimed that he was sick of it—so sick of it that he never wanted to see it again. He became so concerned with his condition that he finally visited a doctor, who told him that he had to get away, ironically from the place that had provided refuge. As Walt himself described it, “I was in an emotional flap.”

  But it was more than an emotional flap. The years of fighting and losing and then having to fight back, the years of having to maintain a brave front like Mickey Mouse in the face of loss and betrayal, and the years of feeling compelled to produce cartoons so good that the Disneys would be unassailable in the industry, while struggling against oppressive, unrelenting financial constraints that barely allowed them to survive and that even now had not loosened, and then the setback in starting his own family for which he had longed—these had all accumulated until Walt, usually so willfully blithe and self-confident, cracked. Once again he could not keep the real world at bay or protect his imaginative world from it. Walt Disney, the new king of animation and the father of Mickey Mouse, had suffered a breakdown.