by Neal Gabler
Photo Insert 1
Flora and Elias Disney, circa 1913 in Kansas City. They had the weather-beaten faces of pioneers, which is what they were: the faces of American Gothic.
Uncle Robert Disney, the family dandy who provided an impossible standard for his brother, Elias, to meet even as he assisted him. He also provided a grubstake for his nephews Walt and Roy.
Marceline, Missouri: Walt Disney’s Eden and his archetype for small-town America. He spent a lifetime trying to recover its sense of comfort and security. Main Street, shown here, wasn’t paved at the time the Disneys arrived.
Walt (right) and Roy surveying their old Marceline farmhouse on a visit in 1956.
The two Walts: Disney (right) and Pfeiffer. Walt Disney called the Pfeiffer home, just down the street from his own, his “laughing place” where he could escape his father’s discipline.
The Bellefontaine house in Kansas City where Walt spent most of his adolescence. It was located just off the paper route to which the Disney family was tethered. In front of the house is Walt’s niece, Dorothy.
Walt in France in front of his truck on his Red Cross mission just after World War I: “doing something I very seldom do—‘work.’” He added: “every once and a while I make trips with this truck.” When he wasn’t chauffeuring visitors, he drew.
Walt, second from left in an eyeshade with a pipe, at the Kansas City Film Ad Co. where he first became interested in animation. Fred Harman, who joined Walt’s effort to start his own company, is at his table on the far left. Ub Iwerks, Walt’s onetime partner, is at the second table in the second seat.
On the roof of the McConahy Building where Laugh-O-Gram was headquatered: Walt (left) strangles a colleague while Ub Iwerks directs from his chair and business manager Adolph Kloepper runs the camera.
California: Walt (right), who came to Hollywood to make his name in motion pictures, and Roy, who came to California to convalesce from tuberculosis, in an orange grove.
Walt (left) and Ub Iwerks, the painfully shy “inside” man to Walt’s “outside” man and the cocreator of Mickey Mouse. Iwerks had one of the fastest pencils in the animation business.
Margaret Winkler, the tough-minded businesswoman who distributed the Alice comedies that Walt Disney produced. Winkler’s offer launched his career.
Walt (second from left) a few blocks from the Kingswell office on the lot in Hollywood where the Alice comedies were filmed. Virginia Davis is at the center, her father at the far left, and Roy at the right, manning the camera.
Walt and the Disney Bros. staff in front of the storefront on Kingswell Avenue in 1924. Left to right: Iwerks, Ham Hamilton, Walt, Thurston Harper, and Roy.
Edna Francis (left), Roy’s fiancée, and Lillian Bounds, the Idaho girl who would become Mrs. Walt Disney.
The wedding party of Walt and Lillian on July 13, 1925 at Lillian’s brother’s home in Lewiston, Idaho. Lillian’s sister is at the left, her mother to Lillian’s left and her brother Sidney, the local fire chief, at the far right. Lillian giggled nervously throughout the ceremony.
The house on Lyric Avenue in the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles. It was small and prefabricated and Roy had an identical one next door, but owning it was a sign of the Disneys’ rising status in animation.
Charles Mintz (middle) with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit after signing the contract with Universal Pictures vice president Robert H. Cochrane. Mintz would become Walt’s nemesis, and his betrayal would never cease to haunt Walt.
Pat A. Powers, one of the most legendarily belligerent figures in film history and the man in whom Walt naïvely placed his confidence. Powers would prove to be as nettlesome to Walt Disney as he had to his other partners.
Five
THE CULT
Walt Disney had been largely unaffected by the economic depression that slowly descended after the stock market crash in October 1929 and then squeezed the nation—a depression that put a quarter of the workforce on the street and caused untold pain. Though one might have thought of movie theaters as refuges from the suffering, the film industry was hardly immune to the downturn. The Disneys, however, were. While other studios saw their revenues dip precipitously—not so much because audiences declined, though they did, as because the studios had overextended themselves in a wild theater-buying spree in the 1920s, and the value of the property collapsed—the Disneys, without theaters or personal investments beyond the shares they owned in one of Uncle Robert’s get-rich-quick oil schemes and some plots of real estate, sailed along unscathed by the national trauma. Though they suffered financial wounds, most of them were self-inflicted, the result of Walt’s unwillingness to compromise the quality of his films. Rather than cutting costs, he kept increasing them. Even usually reserved Roy felt that he and Walt had somehow cheated the Depression by constantly reinvesting in their own studio rather than investing in the stock market. “Anything that we had saved up was all put into our business,” he wrote his parents in 1932. “We have been doing our own gambling. This past three years will be a very good lesson to the people at large,” meaning apparently that others would have to learn to invest in themselves as well.
But if the Depression did not affect Walt economically, it was in many ways replicated in his own emotional depression. Just as the nation could not escape the economic buffets, Walt could not secure his fantasy world against the assaults of the real world, could not, in fact, make it perfect enough or impregnable enough, which led to his breakdown. His first plan, when his doctor told him he had to leave the studio, was to take an ocean trip to Seattle and then visit his parents in Portland and Lillian’s relatives in Idaho. His second plan was to sail to Hawaii, and he booked passage for himself and Lillian on a cruise ship. In the event, though, he and Lillian acted impulsively, canceling the Hawaii trip and booking passage on a boat from Havana through the Panama Canal, then picking up traveler’s checks and hopping a train to St. Louis, where they hoped to catch a riverboat down the Mississippi River, just as Walt and his old friend Russell Maas had intended to do when Walt returned from France in 1919. From their disembarkation point they planned to get to Key West and rendezvous with the boat to Cuba. As it turned out, there were no longer riverboats on the Mississippi, only barges, so the couple improvised again, taking a train to Washington, D.C., staying three days at the Mayflower Hotel, visiting the monuments and strolling aimlessly through the parks, or just sitting on the benches feeding the pigeons. Then they trained to Key West and caught their tug to Havana, where they spent the next week lounging at the Hotel Nacional and taking excursions to the countryside before heading home via the canal, as planned. Their two New York visits having ended in disaster, it was their first real vacation in six years of marriage. Walt said that he and Lillian had the “time of our life” because he had reached the point where “I didn’t give a darn.” He felt he had been liberated from the burden of his own perfectionism.
He returned to the studio looking, according to George Morris, “very much rested,” but he was, he told Morris, “still nervous and sure would like to get away for a couple of weeks more.” Instead, he dove into a new regimen—outside the studio. The breakdown, he said, “woke me up to the fact that life is sweet and work is not everything.” So he took up sports, for which he had never had time even as a child—ice skating, swimming, horseback riding, and boxing. He even joined the Hollywood Athletic Club and wrestled there two or three times a week, though he admitted he didn’t like having to “get down there in somebody’s crotch and sweaty old sweatshirt.” For a while he took up golf, rising at four each morning so he could be on the course by five-thirty without intruding on studio time, playing five holes, then eating a hearty breakfast and heading for the studio, as he put it, “full of pep.” Lillian accompanied him in many of these pursuits, swimming at the club, horseback riding in Griffith Park, and even rising to join him for his early golf sessions, which were usually truncated. “Walt would fly into such a rage when he missed a stroke,” Lillian said,
“that I got helplessly hysterical watching him.” Walt claimed all this activity relaxed him now, made him better able to focus and cope.
But despite his tributes to his new exercise regimen and his professions that he had returned to the studio a “new man,” he was still restless and discontented. He had been back at the studio only a few weeks when he and Lillian left again, this time for a trip to Kansas City, where Walt received an award from DeMolay and addressed their convention, and on to New York for the first time as a tourist rather than as a petitioner. “Walt is feeling much better than he was before his vacation,” Roy wrote Elias and Flora shortly after Walt’s return, “but is not back to his old self. Confidentially, I am a little worried about Walt’s health, feeling there must be something basically wrong.” Walt was still tired and mopey. He continued visiting doctors in hopes of discovering what ailed him, and one found what he thought was an intestinal parasite that seemed to be sapping the patient’s strength. Roy was consoled by the fact that Walt was finally tending to himself after years of tending only to the studio, where, Roy now thought, things were going well enough that “it is much less of a nerve wracking job for him than before.”
Roy was correct that some of the financial pressure had abated. In January 1932 he concluded a revised agreement with United Artists, adding five new Silly Symphonies to the contract at an advance of $15,000 each and a 30 percent distribution fee. More important, Roy negotiated a loan of $195,000 to be used as Walt saw fit. Roy called it “our first good contract.” The only hitch was that the studio had fallen behind in its delivery of Mickey Mouse cartoons, and in order to catch up it had to divert the animators from the Symphonies for six months.
All of this should have made Walt happy, but if he was no longer besieged by financial difficulties, he was still in the grip of his own obsession with excellence, which made him compulsively dissatisfied, and he now had a new burden—the burden of expectations. Everyone seemed to recognize that Disney not only consistently produced the best animations but had begun to reinvent animation. He was transforming it from a crude, juvenile novelty to something that approached a naïve art. Indeed, this was the new Disney enterprise, a revolution really: to do whatever it took to elevate animation to an art form. “Practically every tool we use today was originated at the Disney studio,” Chuck Jones, a celebrated Warner Bros. animator and producer, would later observe, and he compared Disney to the great live-action director D. W. Griffith, who was similarly extolled for having brought art to the silent film. Disney’s own animators appreciated that they were pioneers. Les Clark claimed that animation developed “because of Walt’s insistence and supervision,” and animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston wrote that “The exhilaration of breaking through barriers to new frontiers was more than any of us could resist.”
But the most striking difference between the animations of Walt Disney and those of his forebears and competitors was, as always, less a matter of innovation than aspiration—the old Disney demand that one strive for the very best. “Walt would not—repeat would not—OK any animation that did not meet with this very high standard of acceptance,” one Disney employee wrote. In practice, this meant that everything one did had to be analyzed, endlessly analyzed, to make sure it worked, to make sure that it was up to standard, to make sure it could not be improved upon. As animator Dick Huemer put it, everyone at the studio found themselves “analyzing and reanalyzing…reanalyzing, discarding and starting all over again,” which was so contrary to the routine at rival animation studios, where, as another animator put it, “You were paid to bat out thirty or thirty-five feet a week, some good, some bad, but the only important thing was that the footage got done.”
The emphasis on analysis necessarily led to the development of new techniques that would facilitate it and that would soon become standard operating procedure in animation. Early on, animators at the Disney studio would make what they called “pencil tests” for their own use—shooting their rough drawings on inexpensive negative film so that they could see the outcome before finalizing the animation. By one account Tom Palmer, probably early in 1931, had shot a short pencil test and was feeding the film through the Moviola, a device with a small screen that enabled one to view the footage, when Walt happened by and asked what Palmer was doing. Impressed by the value of previewing the rough animation, he instituted it as a policy in the studio.
In short order, Walt installed a Moviola in a cramped, stifling, windowless closet that was soon dubbed the “sweatbox.” Hunched over the tiny screen, no more than four inches by four inches, Walt and the animator would view and analyze the action by the hour, over and over and over again, trying to determine what would make it right, make it funnier. “I think it is astounding that we were the first group of animators, so far as I can learn, who ever had the chance to study their own work and correct its errors before it reached the screen,” Walt would say a few years later. “In our little studio on Hyperion Street [sic], every foot of rough animation was projected on the screen for analysis, and every foot was drawn and redrawn until we could say, ‘This is the best that we can do.’” Eventually Wilfred Jackson began stringing the pencil tests together, along with still drawings for the scenes not yet animated, into longer sequences that he called “Leica reels,” after the Leica camera that was used to shoot them, so that the animators could see scenes in relation to one another. Walt encouraged them to add sound as well. In effect, then, Walt and the four or five animators who could squeeze into the “sweatbox” with him could preview the entire cartoon before the drawings were cleaned up and inked and painted on cels. This strengthening of his control seemed to energize Walt; he loved to pore over the Leica reels. But even then the process wasn’t foolproof. After a cartoon was finished and previewed, Walt often ordered the staff back into the sweatbox for improvements.
The effect of the pencil tests and Leica reels was not only to upgrade the quality of Disney cartoons; they altered the very nature of animation. Before the inauguration of pencil tests animators focused on making clean drawings and tight “in-betweens” that would require little revision. The result, however, was a certain inflexibility and rigidity. “Old animation was done from pose to pose without much thought,” said Dick Huemer. “It was almost like it was a flat design. Without any weight.” In those cartoons a character “would come to a complete stop and there he’d freeze. And his eyes would blink. Or his hair would stand up, or whatever. Or if his head did turn, the rest of him would be stuck there stiffly.” As Walt said of this sort of animation, “Your character goes dead and it looks like a drawing.”
Ub Iwerks had had a basic command of animation techniques and he could draw actions, but he could never give his characters a sense of mass or fluidity of movement. Still, Iwerks had been the exemplar at the studio, and Walt himself admitted, “The hardest job was to get the guys to quit fooling around with these individual drawings and to think of the group of drawings in an action.” With Iwerks no longer the guiding light and with the pencil tests to aid them, the animators were liberated to experiment, and they did. When Norm Ferguson animated Frolicking Fish in 1930, Walt commanded the other animators to study it because Ferguson had made certain that there was a constant flow of action. “Soon everybody started drawing looser,” another animator recalled. “This opened up more freedom of movement.” Already by 1931 characters in Disney cartoons no longer shunted from pose to pose. They moved smoothly between them, creating what came to be called “overlapping action,” in which action flowed. “Overlapping action was an invention of Disney’s,” Dick Huemer said. “That’s why Disney’s animation looked so different.”
Disney’s animations were narratively different too. All cartoons were predicated on the gag—a visual joke or brief comic situation. The gag was holy and inviolate, the reason for the cartoon’s existence, and most animation studios simply linked gags willy-nilly. Walt would send an outline to the staff and then ask them to “gag” it: “So let’s all hop to
it and have some good belly laughs ready by Tuesday night,” went a typical request. Walt would then award prizes for the gags he used—one or two dollars, occasionally as much as $3.50 in the early thirties, though the rate was soon standardized at $2.50. At Disney too the gag was the fundamental narrative component. It was the basis on which cartoons succeeded or failed. “You must sharpen your ability to get right at the basis of the gag, without mistaking the trimming for the meat of the action,” Walt once instructed Dick Huemer, while warning another employee that he seemed to lack an “understanding of the proper portrayal of gags.”
At other studios, where animators would either select or be assigned a basic situation and then animate as they desired, whether one animator’s gag really connected to another’s or not was irrelevant. Good gags were everything. Disney’s gags may not have been any better than those of his rivals, but, as animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston put it, “they were staged better, with more care taken to establish the situation. There was more concern for detail, for building comedy, for making the gag pay off.” “Our mistake was that we weren’t establishing anything first,” Dick Huemer observed of his pre-Disney days animating gags. “We were giving the payoff without the buildup…. Disney always very carefully planned things, so that everything was understandable, and one thing happened after another logically.” One animation historian cited the difference between the very early Disney cartoons and the cartoons of 1931 as a matter of “density.” In the later cartoons, each individual gag was more complicated, and the gags accumulated, each gag building on the one that preceded it.