Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  III

  It was a burden. The demands not only in producing the animations but in reeducating the animators and reinventing the entire process would have been enormous even if Walt hadn’t been the workaholic he was. To stave off another breakdown, he tried to maintain his new exercise schedule, continuing to ride on horseback with Lillian, occasionally returning early from the studio to do so, and to swim and ice skate. At one point he even took dancing lessons with Lillian (“in spite of all your work, I’m still a lousy dancer,” he wrote his instructor self-deprecatingly years later) and at another point boxing lessons. Yet these were concessions, wrung grudgingly from him. Once gregarious and outgoing, he now channeled his enthusiasm into the studio and was virtually withdrawn outside it. He socialized even less than before, claiming that it “took too much of one’s energy” and saying that he preferred to get a “good night’s sleep as it leaves me in better condition in the morning to carry on the work.” Sometimes he would invite a few of the animators—Fred Moore, Ham Luske, Norm Ferguson—to the house on Lyric Avenue for a backyard game of badminton, but these occasions were rare and gradually petered out, one attendee said, because Walt became too important to mingle socially with his staff; Walt claimed it was because Lillian preferred privacy and the “house belongs to the woman.” Walt even stopped attending studio parties because, Lillian said, the animators’ wives would sometimes get tipsy and reproach him for some imagined slight to their husbands. “That’s a part of them I don’t want to see,” Walt said. Though he made another business trip to New York in July 1933 and stopped in Chicago on the way back to see the Century of Progress Fair there, taking his first plane ride on the final leg from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, he seldom traveled either and admitted that he would rather spend a vacation at home.

  But he did have one new recreational passion, one activity outside the studio that seemed to excite him: polo. Polo, oddly enough, had become something of a fad in Hollywood in the 1930s, where it was regarded as a way for those who had been previously marginalized, many of them Jewish immigrants, to raise their status by aping the manners of the wellborn. “From Poland to polo,” went the quip about Hollywood moguls. As Walt told it, he was becoming frustrated with his morning golf games when sometime in the spring of 1932 humorist Will Rogers and film executive Darryl F. Zanuck, both of whom were polo enthusiasts, suggested that he take up polo instead. After watching a few matches at their invitation, Walt decided that “it was golf on horseback” and bought a few ponies. Of course it was not in Walt Disney’s nature to do anything casually. He immediately began recruiting staff from the studio, including Roy, and hired a polo champion named Gil Proctor to lecture them in the studio conference room on the fine points of the game. At six every morning throughout the spring and summer eight players would gather at the DuBrock Riding Academy in the San Fernando Valley, where they would break into teams and practice. Walt eventually installed a polo cage at the studio so players could swat balls during their lunch break, and he put a dummy horse in his backyard and spent mornings even before heading to DuBrock sitting there knocking balls. On Sunday mornings the crew would often congregate at Will Rogers’s ranch for impromptu matches. During the games Rogers would gibe Walt, calling him “Mickey” or “Mickey Mouse.”

  By the spring of 1933, dressed in a tweed jacket, jodhpurs, and high boots, Walt was ready to play matches at the more rigorous Riviera Country Club in posh Brentwood, where the movie stars and studio executives like Zanuck played—an indication of how Walt’s status if not his polo skills had risen. Calling themselves the Mickey Mouse team, Walt joined with Roy and other studio personnel like Norm Ferguson, Dick Lundy, and Gunther Lessing, but he also played with, among others, Will Rogers, producer Walter Wanger, and actors Johnny Mack Brown, James Gleason, Leslie Howard, and Spencer Tracy, who became one of the “very few people outside the immediate family ever invited into the Disney home,” according to fellow polo player Bill Cottrell, who was courting Lillian’s divorced sister Hazel at the time and thus was almost part of the Disney family himself. Cottrell believed that Tracy was “for a while [the man] whom Walt considered his best friend,” though he was basically a polo friend, which testified to how few real attachments Walt had.

  Most Sundays now Walt and Lillian would drive out to Riviera, stopping to buy a big bag of popcorn on the way, which Lillian would munch while she watched the matches. By the end of the year, even though he was only a middling player—his best handicap was a one-goal rating out of a possible ten—he was recruiting ringers to play with him and had begun venturing throughout California and even Mexico for matches. At the time he had six ponies of his own and would soon buy a stable of four ponies for Roy, eventually supplying horses for those who could not afford them. “[I]t’s my only sin,” he wrote his mother that December. “I don’t gamble or go out and spend my money on other people’s wives or anything like that, so I guess it’s okay. Anyway, the wife approves of it.”

  Walt’s sudden exuberance over polo, and his athletic regimen generally, had not only been a way to keep his mood buoyant and his health sound. The doctors had advised both Walt and Lillian that they would have a better chance of conceiving a child if they exercised more vigorously, and this was a powerful incentive. Happily, it seemed to have its desired effect. In the summer of 1932 Lillian got pregnant again, setting off another wave of euphoria. Walt immediately bought one and a half acres on Woking Way, a narrow, quiet street near the studio in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles that snaked up into the Hollywood hills, and began constructing a $50,000, twelve-room French Norman–style home there. “We had been living in a little place where I couldn’t turn around,” Walt told an interviewer, “so I made the architect add three or four yards to every room in the house.” Walt admitted it was a rush job, roughly two months from start to finish—obviously racing against the baby’s birth.

  And then Lillian suffered another miscarriage. When, late in the spring of 1933, with the Disneys in their new and spacious home, they learned that Lillian was pregnant yet again, their mood was cautious. Only gradually as summer wore on did they allow themselves some elation. “Lilly has been feeling fine and having no trouble at all,” Walt wrote his mother that September. “In fact she is so healthy that she has been worried about it.” Lillian wanted a girl, Walt said, because “she seems to feel that she could get more pleasure out of dressing a little girl than boy. Personally, I don’t care, just as long as we do not get disappointed again.” As the expected December birth date approached, Walt prepared. He had fixed up a large nursery with a bassinet and pink and blue decorations, “tinies” he called them, bought a horse for the child in anticipation, and now just awaited the arrival. “Really, it’s quite a strange atmosphere for me,” he wrote Flora again. “I can’t conceive of anything belonging to us. It seems all right for somebody else to have those things around, but not for us. I presume I’ll get used to it, and I suppose I’ll be as bad a parent as anybody else. I’ve made a lot of vows that my kid won’t be spoiled, but I doubt it—it may turn out to be the most spoiled brat in the country.”

  After the kidnapping and murder of aviator Charles Lindbergh’s infant son the year before, Walt hoped to keep the birth as quiet as possible. It didn’t work out that way. He was in the act of receiving an award from Parents magazine for Mickey Mouse at a luncheon at the studio on December 18 before seventy-five members of the press, when someone interrupted and whispered to him. “Thank you,” he told the magazine’s representative. “This is the biggest moment of my life. You’ll pardon, I hope, if I hurry away and show this beautiful award to my wife and…” Before finishing, Walt grabbed his coat and bolted, leaving the toastmaster, Dr. Rufus von KleinSmid, president of the University of Southern California, to explain to the befuddled guests, “I’m afraid I’ll have to accept the award for Mr. Disney myself. His wife is going to present him with another kind of award. He is on his way to become a parent and thus become a fully qualified reade
r of the magazine which is honoring him today.” Walt arrived at the hospital just before the delivery. Lillian said she knew he had arrived when she heard his distinctive hacking cough. “AM PROUD FATHER OF BABY GIRL LILLIE AND BABY DOING FINE,” he wired Roy, who was on a train bound for home after fighting a copyright infringement suit in New York. The Disneys now had a new eight-pound-two-ounce daughter: Diane Marie Disney.

  As for Walt’s animated offspring, Mickey Mouse, he was still thriving, even as Walt’s attention had been diverted to the Silly Symphony cartoons. The three little pigs, Walt admitted, had overshadowed Mickey, and Walt told one reporter that he was disappointed, but added, “I’ll think of something that will bring Mickey back bigger than ever.” In fact, though the pigs had swept the nation, Mickey continued over the following two years to enjoy a popularity that rivaled that of Chaplin in his heyday. The Mickey Mouse Clubs thrived, and Walt boasted, with a heavy dose of hyperbole, that the membership had swelled to fifty million by the fall of 1933. Less hyperbolically, Literary Digest reported that Mickey played before nearly 500 million paid admissions in 1935. He also continued to receive accolades from nearly every quarter. Gilbert Seldes, writing in Esquire, gushed of Mickey’s first color cartoon, The Band Concert, that none of “dozens of works produced in America at the same time in all the other arts can stand comparison with this one,” and The Nation extolled Mickey as the “supreme artistic achievement of the moving picture.” Even First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt once commented that her husband “loved Mickey Mouse, and he always had to have that cartoon in the White House,” though perhaps the highest compliment paid to Mickey was by a patient in a New York City convalescent home who was so overcome during a Mickey Mouse screening that he forgot his crutches and walked out of the theater unassisted.

  Mickey was no less popular or lauded overseas. Fortune noted that he was an “international hero, better known than Roosevelt or Hitler, a part of the folklore of the world.” By one account Queen Mary of England once arrived late for a tea rather than miss the end of a charity screening of Mickey’s Nightmare. Orchestra conductor Arturo Toscanini saw The Band Concert, in which Mickey leads a band with disastrous results, six times and was so smitten by it that he extended an invitation to Walt to visit him in Italy. When a program of Disney cartoons featuring Mickey as well as the Symphonies was shown in Moscow, The New York Times reported that “[n]ot since the days of the food shortage have the streets of Moscow witnessed such queues as those waiting to buy tickets for the American movies.” Russian director Sergei Eisenstein requested permission to publish several of the scenarios in a book.

  By this time Mickey’s burgeoning cottage industries had begun to eclipse his screen success. Late in 1930 the Disneys had renewed their contract with George Borgfeldt to license Mickey Mouse products, though they decided to restrict his representation to toys. At the same time a seamstress named Charlotte Clark had sewn a Mickey Mouse doll, which Roy raced to have ready for Christmas. Even though the company’s strained financial situation limited the production and even though each was hand-made, the studio sold more than twenty-five gross in just five weeks. Within months Roy, who had been lobbying publishers for a Mickey Mouse book just a year earlier, was now besieged by offers and, taking a page from Walt, was insisting on a “real high-class book.” That spring, with Borgfeldt boasting to Roy that “we are building up a big Mickey Mouse business with many of the leading distributors,” the studio opened a New York office to handle the merchandise that Borgfeldt did not represent.

  But Walt and Roy, who were trying to raise money for the color conversion at the time, were impatient and dissatisfied. Roy said that the Borgfeldt royalty statement for 1930 arrived in “longhand like some bunch of farmers” and that the return amounted to only $63, while the Charlotte Clark dolls alone, which Roy handled himself, netted the studio $350. “They are great hands to do lots of talking,” he groused about Borgfeldt. Moreover, the quality control was terrible—Disney products were often shoddy, which angered both Walt and Roy—and the interval from the conception of a product to its marketing was often interminably long. Despairing that the Borgfeldt company insufficiently exploited the character but yet being locked into the contract, the Disneys had even enlisted Harry Woodin of the Mickey Mouse Clubs and Irving Lesser, the brother of producer Sol Lesser, to troll for marketing opportunities that Borgfeldt seemed disinclined to find.

  And then into this morass strode Herman Kamen, known to everyone—and Kamen did seem to know everyone—as “Kay.” Kamen was, one acquaintance said, “one of the homeliest men I had ever seen.” He was a large, shapeless, ungainly man with a spatulate nose and thick pop-bottle-bottomed glasses, and he parted his black hair unfashionably down the middle of his scalp, only adding to the impression of his gaucheness. Yet this look was partly by design. One associate said that Kamen was proud of his homeliness and used it to ingratiate himself with customers in his chosen profession, at which he was a master. Kay Kamen was born to sell.

  He had come from a Jewish family in Baltimore, quit school to become a hat salesman, and after years on the road, where he became an expert pinochle player, joined a department store promotional firm in Kansas City. He and a colleague there, an advertising man named Streeter Blair, left to form their own company, Kamen-Blair, also headquartered in Kansas City, which, like the one they had departed, specialized in creating displays and campaigns for department stores. One of those displays, for a store in Los Angeles, apparently caught Walt Disney’s eye early in 1932, when he was burning over Borgfeldt’s dereliction, and he wired Kamen to gauge his interest in promoting Mickey Mouse. Kamen, then in New York on business, left for California that very day.

  When he arrived at the studio, as Roy remembered it, Kamen walked into Roy’s office and said, “I don’t know how much business you’re doing, but I’ll guarantee you that much business and give you fifty percent of everything I do over.” It was a sign both of his salesmanship and of the rather offhanded way the company conducted business that they signed a contract with him that July, after the Borgfeldt agreement had expired. Under its terms the studio was to receive 60 percent of the first $100,000 in royalties, with the fifty-fifty split thereafter, and Kamen was to foot all expenses including his staff, the New York office, and a showroom and hotel suite in Chicago.

  Now Kamen set out to do for Walt Disney Enterprises, the new merchandise arm of the studio, what Walt had been doing for Walt Disney Productions, its filmmaking arm. He was going to reinvent it—transform it into a sleek, quality-controlled, revenue-producing operation that would in time have the added effect of making Mickey Mouse even more popular as a brand than he was as a movie star. Believing that Disney should be affiliated with only the finest manufacturers, Kamen quickly canceled contracts with less prestigious and aggressive companies and signed up with bigger and better ones—National Dairy Products, Ingersoll watches, General Foods (which would shortly pay a million dollars for the right to put Mickey Mouse and his friends on Post Toasties cereal boxes), and even Cartier jewelers, which was soon marketing a diamond Mickey Mouse bracelet. (However, his greatest achievement, Kamen said, was “Getting the Three Little Pigs up in lights in New York’s strictly kosher Ghetto, and making them like it.”) Kamen was a whirlwind. Within a year there were forty licensees for Mickey Mouse products. A year after that, in 1934, Kamen, with a staff numbering fifteen in New York alone, had helped orchestrate $35 million of sales in Disney merchandise in the United States and an equal amount overseas, and he had opened branches across Europe and even in Australia.

  Thanks largely to Kamen’s efforts, the image of Mickey Mouse was ubiquitous and unavoidable. “Shoppers carry Mickey Mouse satchels and briefcases,” reported The New York Times in tribute to the marketing phenomenon, “bursting with Mickey Mouse soap, candy, playing cards, bridge favors, hairbrushes, chinaware, alarm clocks and hot water bottles wrapped in Mickey Mouse paper tied with Mickey Mouse ribbon and paid for out of Mickey Mouse purses with sav
ings hoarded in Mickey Mouse banks.” Children, it continued, lived in a new Mickey Mouse world:

  They wear Mickey Mouse caps, waists, socks, shoes, slippers, garters, mittens, aprons, bibs and underthings, and beneath Mickey Mouse rain capes and umbrellas. They go to school where Mickey Mouse desk outfits turn lessons into pleasure.

  They play with Mickey Mouse velocipedes, footballs, baseballs, bounce balls, bats, catching gloves, boxing gloves, doll houses, doll dishes, tops, blocks, drums, puzzles, games.

  Paint sets, sewing sets, drawing sets, stamping sets, jack sets, bubble sets, pull toys, push toys, animated toys, tents, camp stools, sand pails, masks, blackboards and balloons.

  And even that list did not begin to exhaust the number of Mickey Mouse products.

  Just as Mickey on film had come to be regarded as a tonic antidote to the Depression, so did Mickey’s image on merchandise. Round, colorful, appealing Mickey Mouse had become the graphic representation of indomitable happiness even in the face of national despair. “Wherever he scampers, here or overseas,” the Times observed, “the sun of prosperity breaks through the clouds.” When Ingersoll issued a Mickey Mouse watch, it proved so popular that the company had to cancel its advertising campaign because it had already sold out its factory’s capacity for months to come. (Even Roy bought a dozen for his personal use.) The Lionel Corporation, manufacturers of toy electric trains, had been in receivership in 1934 when it licensed a Mickey and Minnie handcar. The company sold 253,000 units at Christmas, making it profitable once again and allowing it to discharge its equity receivers. “There is no case that I remember where more success was met with than in this case,” the bankruptcy judge commented.

  The mouse as merchandiser had roughly the same effect on his own studio. In his first four years Kamen had increased the licensing 10,000 percent to just under $200,000 in royalties a year, and as early as 1934 Walt was claiming that he made more money from the ancillary rights to Mickey than from Mickey’s cartoons. Thus Disney became the first studio to recognize what would become a standard business practice in Hollywood forty years later—that one could harvest enormous profits from film-related toys, games, clothing, and other products. Indeed, as Literary Digest reported, “[I]t is no exaggeration to state that Walt Disney Enterprises has become the tail that wags the mouse.”