by Neal Gabler
All of these things were more or less true. Walt did believe he had overcome childhood hardships. He was informal and eschewed the Hollywood scene and celebrity, his polo fetish notwithstanding. He was not an intellectual and never pretended to be one. He did reinvest most of his money in the company. And he was driven to produce great cartoons both as a business proposition and as a psychological one. Still, Walt was also deeply aware of the value of disseminating and displaying these things publicly, even if it was only during his own personal appearances. In the studio he could often be brusque. In public he was typically accessible and generous, whether it was to a fan complimenting him on a cartoon or to a waiter serving him. Jack Kinney believed that Walt had studied Will Rogers and imitated his down-home mannerisms, belying the fact, Kinney said, that “he could swear like a trooper, and he had a terrific ego.” Ward Kimball concurred that there was a certain deliberation in the construction of Walt’s image. Walt, he said, “played the role of a bashful tycoon who was embarrassed in public,” but “he knew exactly what he was doing at all times.” In effect, Walt Disney was beginning to assume the role of himself. It was a role he would play with variations for the rest of his life.
But while Walt Disney had become an international figure, the father of Mickey and now Donald, confusion reigned over exactly what he did at his own studio. To many if not most outside the studio, he was thought to do the actual drawing—an impression he did little to discourage. In truth, Walt did no drawing whatsoever anymore, though he took credit for the productions and demanded it, no doubt in part because he was still wounded by the discourtesy shown him by Charlie Mintz and Pat Powers, who had seemed to dismiss him as nothing more than a glorified supervisor. “There’s just one thing we’re selling here,” he told Ken Anderson, when the young animator joined the studio, “and that’s the name ‘Walt Disney.’ If you can buy that and be happy to work for it, you’re my man. But if you’ve got any ideas of selling the name ‘Ken Anderson,’ it’s best for you to leave right now.” It was expected for Disney employees to share credit. When Pinto Colvig was introduced as the lyricist of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” at a dinner honoring Walt, he immediately stood up and credited others. “Well he knew,” Colvig wrote a colleague, speaking of himself, “that such a breach in the code of ‘Disney Ethics’ would forever be a nasty stain upon his otherwise faultless character.”
If Walt no longer drew the animations, it had also been a long while since he had written the scenarios or directed the cartoons or done any of the tasks now assigned to his extensive staff. In 1933, when Burt Gillett defected after Pigs to the Van Beuren studio, Walt was so incensed that he decided he was going to direct the next cartoon himself, apparently to show just how expendable Gillett was. The film was a Silly Symphony titled The Golden Touch depicting the story of King Midas. “This was a very hush hush operation with just two animators [Norm Ferguson and Freddie Moore], who were sworn to secrecy,” recalled Jack Kinney. When, a year after its inception, the cartoon was previewed at the Alexander Theater in Glendale, the reception was unenthusiastic. Walt had failed, and word of the failure quickly spread through the studio, becoming a needle whenever an aggrieved employee felt the need to deflate the boss. During one argument with Jaxon where The Golden Touch was tossed in Walt’s face, Walt stormed off, then returned, warning, “Never, never mention that picture again.”
And yet even though Walt could neither animate, nor write, nor direct, he was the undisputed power at the studio, not only in the sense that he was the boss but also in the more important sense that his sensibility governed everything the studio produced. At first blush he was an unlikely dictator. He was young, though many of his employees now were even younger. He was unprepossessing. “He looked like just a nice, young American man, good looking, but in a healthy rather than a handsome way,” said one animator, while another described him as exceptionally thin—he was five feet ten inches tall and weighed 150 pounds—and “rodent-faced.” He didn’t naturally exude power or charisma and didn’t seem to mind. Unlike other movie moguls he never arrogated power to himself for the sake of seeming powerful, and he sometimes vividly recalled a haunting childhood incident from Marceline where he caught an owl and, when it resisted him, inexplicably threw it to the ground, killing it—an incident, he said, that triggered nightmares and seemed to indicate ambivalent feelings about his own controlling impulses.
Still, the studio bent to his will and his alone. His moods, which were more changeable since the breakdown and under the increasing pressure, determined the mood of Hyperion, and some employees joked that Walt would stop in the basement each morning to change into his “mood costume” for the day, while others advised that one had to call the security guard at the gate to see which Walt had arrived. If Walt was in his “bear suit,” as employees described his foulest mood, he could be cruel—“apt to rip a storyboard apart for no apparent reason,” Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston wrote. Similarly, the entire studio had to be attuned to his ideas and desires, making it the primary objective of every person in his employ to determine what it was Walt wanted.
The problem was that, for all the rationalization of the animation process, Walt operated almost entirely by instinct—a problem compounded by the fact that he had a difficult time conveying what his instinct told him, especially since he no longer drew well enough to show the animators, and because he was so instinctive he changed his mind as often as he changed his moods. “The big part of my career was to decide when Walt meant it and when he didn’t mean it,” Jaxon said. “Usually I tried to inform Walt what I had in mind by sending him a memo. In the note I’d tell him how I intended to spend his money. I’d send the memo up in the afternoon, and he usually read it at night at home. If the phone was ringing when I walked in, I knew it was a good thing I checked.” Others said that sussing out Walt Disney was a matter of osmosis. You watched him in the story meetings and the sweatbox sessions and at the previews and tried to guess what he was thinking.
Despite the occasional griping and resentment that Walt was overbearing, mercurial, ungrateful, and impossible to please, all of which he was, no one at the studio doubted the overriding importance of his contribution, though everyone seemed to have a different opinion of what that contribution was. One thing on which everyone did agree was that he was a superb storyteller, and Walt himself seemed to think it was his primary attribute. “Of all the things I’ve ever done,” he once told an interviewer, “I’d like to be remembered as a storyteller.” From the earliest days he had a knack for constructing gags. Dick Huemer believed Walt had the “best gag mind I ever ran across.” But as the stories became more elaborate, linking the gags organically and situating them in the idiosyncrasies of character, Walt really shone. Veteran director Ken Annakin, who worked with Walt years later, said, “Of all the studio chiefs I have ever worked with I have never known anyone who operated at [story] conferences so magnificently as Walt. You would go into a story session with him, full of great ideas, and he would scratch his nose and say, ‘This is just from the top of my head, but I think we should do this and this….’ And it would usually be like listening to a new fairy tale, and we would break up the session happy and amazed that the solution to your story problems should be so simple and different.”
Though the stories no longer originated with Walt, every story still ultimately had to meet with his approval before it was put into production. The storymen “would do a rough outline and send the idea up to Walt…and he’d either say, ‘Go ahead with it’ or ‘No, you guys get over on that other thing. I think it has more possibilities,’” recalled Ward Kimball. But even after he granted his initial approval and the storymen provided a rough storyboard for him to critique and they incorporated his criticisms into a final storyboard, Walt would always return to the plot and gags at what were, typically, lengthy story sessions, looking for ways to improve them. “And he would be the leader in all those story meetings,” Kimball attested. Indeed, some
even said that Walt was the one who really wrote all the dialogue.
Of course, first there was that dreaded silence when Walt would listen and stare fixedly and inscrutably. “Walt was always very preoccupied in story meetings, thinking up new ideas for stories and characters,” Ollie Johnston remembered. “One eyebrow would be raised, and he’d have that intent expression. Sometimes his gaze would settle on you, and you’d think he was preparing to pounce on you for something you’d said. Actually it was his tremendous powers of concentration at work, and I doubt that he knew who he was looking at most of the time.” Eric Larson claimed that Walt wasn’t really even listening—that as the storyman began running through the boards, he was already looking at the final sketches, which Larson interpreted to mean that Walt had visited the studio the night before and gone over the boards himself so that he would be fully prepared. (Some storymen swore they found Walt’s Chesterfield cigarette butts in their ashtrays.) Then would come his analysis, which wasn’t a suggestion but a directive. “He could be brutal,” animator and later director Jack Hannah said. “[H]e’d start the idea for a sequence of gags and we’d say, ‘That’s great, Walt!’ and suddenly his whole mood would change and he’d reply, ‘Nah, we aren’t going to do that.’” On one occasion a demonstrative storyman named Homer Brightman presented the boards for a Donald Duck cartoon and got the entire room laughing with his performance. When Brightman finished, Walt turned curtly to his stenographer and asked her if she had been laughing at Brightman or at the story. “At Homer,” she said, after which Walt launched into his critique.
But it wasn’t Walt’s analysis that imprinted itself on the cartoons as much as his uncanny ability to inhabit the character and enter the situation. Walt thought like Mickey or Donald or Pluto. “If Walt said to me, ‘Mickey wouldn’t think this way,’” said storyman Leo Salkin, “who knows how Mickey would think? But in Walt’s mind, this is what Mickey would think or feel, and it was valid.” Layout artist John Hench said that Walt would go into a “kind of trance” when he listened to a presentation. “In his mind he could see the whole story so well and bend forward unconsciously and become like an old owl—hunched up, and his bill would clack a little bit. When he’d come out of it, he’d say, ‘You know what we ought to do is…’ and then he’d leap up and begin acting out the scene with all new dialogue and business.”
Everyone at the studio marveled at his acting—how Walt, who was usually fairly reserved now, would get up at the story meetings, enter his trance, and suddenly transform himself uninhibitedly into Mickey or Donald or an owl or an old hunting dog. “Y’know this old guy would come snufin’ along like a vacuum cleaner, his muzzle spread all over the ground,” Walt would say as he recalled a dog from his childhood in Marceline and turned himself into that dog. “And as Walt acted it out, it became funnier and funnier,” Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston wrote. Then, as his audience began to respond, Walt would dive deeper into the character, finding more comic possibilities. “He would imitate the expressions of the dog, and look from one side to the other, and raise first one [eye]brow and then the other as he tried to figure things out.” And by doing that he demonstrated to the storymen and the animators in the room, in Thomas and Johnston’s words, “what was funny about the character itself,” inspiring the animators to draw what Walt had performed for them. This became his chief means of communicating his ideas and the foundation for the studio’s cartoons. “You’d have the feeling of the whole thing,” Dick Huemer noted. “You’d know exactly what he wanted.”
After the agreement on Walt’s contributions as a storyteller, opinions diverged over how one would prioritize his other most important talents. Ward Kimball thought Walt was a “supersalesman” who believed so devoutly in his studio and its cartoons that he could convince anyone, even the stodgiest banker, of their value. Eric Larson credited him with having a unique sensitivity to knowing what the public wanted. Art Babbitt cited his unparalleled judgment: “He oftentimes didn’t know what he was going after, but he could spot something that was wrong in a piece of work.” His instincts were so keen that at one point Walt set up a table in the middle of the animators’ room, had the animators bring him their drawings and then summarily told them what worked and what didn’t. Sharpsteen believed that Walt’s “forte was the supervision of his business—every bit of it—and in the feeling that everything that was done, every drawing that was made, was the result of his guidance.” Others, not always with appreciation, adduced Walt’s utter devotion to the studio with setting a tone of obsessiveness that affected everyone who worked there. “A lot of the guys I worked with at Disney couldn’t stand him because of that,” said writer Maurice Rapf. “He stuck his nose into everything.”
Still others were awed by Walt’s grasp of detail. He noticed “little things that would make a big difference,” Jaxon said. Earl Colgrove, a cameraman, remembered Walt summoning him to a sweatbox session for a Silly Symphony titled The Country Mouse to view some scenes, including one in which the mouse sees his reflection in a plate of Jell-O. Walt asked if Colgrove noticed anything different about the scene, and when Colgrove answered that it “looked pretty good,” Walt had the scene run again and stopped on a single blurred frame where the animation cel had apparently been placed under the camera backward. “After a brief silence Walt turned the lights up and said: ‘Around here we try to be proud of every bit of work we do.’” Another time he noticed that Mickey’s tail was missing in the comic strip and ordered it reinstated. “People don’t realize the importance he had—down to deciding whether a character should look left or right or roll his eyes,” Ward Kimball said. “Walt was the final editor of every damned scene.”
Others cited Walt as an inspiration, setting standards, expecting perfection, drumming up enthusiasm, buoying spirits. “I think the outstanding thing about Walt,” Jaxon said, “was his ability to make people feel that what he wanted done was a terribly important thing to get done.” Another called Walt’s “greatest gift” his knack for “making you come up with things you didn’t know were in you and that you’d have sworn you couldn’t possibly do.” Walt was also a great cheerleader, exhorting his employees to think boldly. “I don’t want just another picture,” he would tell them. “It’s got to be a new experience, a new theatrical experience.” When he was enthused, as he usually was, he got others enthused too. “He was very excited about everything he was doing,” John Hench observed, citing a quality Walt had had even as a boy. “And he lived and breathed it and finally it rubbed off on you.”
Finally, and perhaps most important, there was Walt’s ability not just to supervise but to coordinate the entire studio apparatus. Walt himself compared the cartoons to a symphony, with him as the conductor who took all the employees—the storymen, the animators, the composers and musicians, the voice artists, the ink and paint girls—and got them to “produce one whole thing which is beautiful.” To another interviewer he dashed purposefully about a hotel room and imitated a bee as a way of demonstrating what he did at the studio. “I’ve got to know whether an idea goes here,” he said, dumping “pollen” on a chair, “or here,” racing to the interviewer and dumping the invisible pollen on the man’s knees. Almost everyone at the studio admired how Walt, in either conducting them or flitting among them, forged them into a unit. “We all had egos,” Eric Larson admitted, “but Walt had a way of taking those egos and making them work together as a team.” “He could disarm people by using the word ‘we’ instead of ‘I,’” Ben Sharpsteen said. “Obviously everything was based on what Walt Disney did, what he wanted to do and what he expected to do, but he would invariably say ‘we.’” Bob Broughton, who worked in the camera department at the time, said, “That was what Walt’s main talent was, I think…. He made you feel part of a family.” Walt seemed to agree. Though he had said that he wanted to be remembered as a storyteller, he told his daughter Diane: “Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is coordinating those who work for us and aiming their
efforts at a certain goal.”*
Among his employees, the sum total of all these attributes evoked unbounded adulation for the young man who possessed them. Many, including Walt, had previously observed the similarity between the animator and God. At the Disney studio this similarity was manifest in the attitude of the employees toward their leader, who was spoken of in quasi-religious terms. “When he’d come into a room, the hair would stand up on the back of your neck figuratively,” Dick Huemer remembered. “He’d have that effect on you. You’d feel the presence. It was spooky.” Director Jack Hannah claimed that Walt elicited “awe.” “You just felt it if he was in the same wing of the building you were in. I know it sounds weird but you never got over that awe of him.” “He had an overwhelming power over people and the voice of a prophet,” said animator Joe Grant. “You always had the feeling he knew what you were going to say and he seemed to know things before they happened. That sort of omnipotence held a mental control over you.” “You talk as if he were God,” gagman Roy Williams’s sister-in-law, who was married to a minister, scolded him when Williams spoke reverently of Walt. To which Williams snapped, “He is.”
If it had been a deliberate tactic to rally his staff, it couldn’t have been more successful. Just about everyone was desperate to please Walt Disney. “I couldn’t understand it,” a discontented writer at the studio confessed. “But you’d do anything to get his approval. You’d work like a dog, like a little kid saying, ‘Hey, look at me. I’m doing something pretty terrific.’ You’d do anything for a smile, even though the next day you might be fired.” Some admitted that the tension of having to please him, needing to please him, was almost unbearable. The effect was that the Disney studio did not operate like any other studio in Hollywood with a tyrannical boss lording over a group of disaffected employees who complained of being thwarted. In fact, it didn’t operate like a commercial institution at all, where talk of products and profits predominate. By the mid-1930s the Disney studio operated like a cult, with a messianic figure inspiring a group of devoted, sometimes frenzied acolytes. At Hyperion the employees were not just making cartoons to divert or entertain the public. They were disciples on a mission.