by Neal Gabler
The Mickey Mouse Club in front of the Grand Theater at Yoakum, Texas. The brainchild of a young California theater manager named Harry Woodin, the clubs attracted hundreds of thousands of members (Roy would say millions) for Saturday matinees and helped establish Mickey Mouse as the leading animation character in the 1930s before the idea petered out in the mid-1930s.
Walt with Herman “Kay” Kamen, the homely merchandising genius who took over the licensing of Disney products and parlayed them into a fortune for himself and the Disney brothers.
Walt with Mickey Mouse merchandise. Already by the early 1930s, Mickey had become a cottage industry.
Walt surveying the view from his home on Woking Way in the Los Feliz hills above Los Angeles. He had built the home hurriedly in preparation for a new baby, but Lillian miscarried.
Walt in polo gear. He took up the sport for relaxation after his breakdown, buying ponies, instituting a studio team, and practicing each morning; he disengaged when an opponent died from injuries sustained during a match.
Walt watching two men dance, no doubt animators preparing a scene. Though Walt demanded perfection, there was a camaraderie and playfulness at the studio that made it the envy of the animation world. Ben Sharpsteen is at the rear to Walt’s right, and Norm Ferguson is looking in a mirror.
Walt and his multiplane camera, designed in the service of realism to bring a sense of three-dimensionality to animation. First used in the short The Old Mill, it became a valuable if expensive tool in Snow White, Pinocchio, and Fantasia.
Norm Ferguson studying himself for an animation. Ferguson was regarded as the pioneer of psychological animation in which one felt that the animated character was actually thinking.
Fred Moore, the incorrigible young animator who was as responsible as anyone for the soft, cute Disney style. Moore designed the pigs for Three Little Pigs.
Bill Tytla, who looked like Stalin and who brought a highly dramatic, emotional element to Disney animation. Here he is with a model of the devil from “Night on Bald Mountain” in Fantasia.
Walt with Lillian at the Snow White premiere on December 21, 1937, at the Carthay Circle Theater in Hollywood, where he had managed to get The Skeleton Dance shown eight years earlier. He had scaled the heights.
Walt looking out at the water tower on the construction site of the Burbank studio, one of the fruits of Snow White’s success. Walt found the site and essentially designed the art moderne studio himself: a state-of-the-art animation facility.
Walt standing in front of the Animation Building, where he and Roy both had their offices and which was the hub of Disney production. The new studio resembled a college campus. Note the slatted awnings that were designed to regulate light for the animators.
Walt acting out for his staff what he wanted. Though he was often personally reserved, at story sessions he was animated and transformed himself into the characters, so that his performances became the basis for the Disney oeuvre.
The Fantasia triumvirate: Walt (left) with critic/moderator Deems Taylor (center) and conductor Leopold Stokowski (right) in front of storyboards for The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
Don Graham instructing animators. Graham’s studio school improved the quality of animation and symbolized Walt’s commitment to animation as an art.
Disney animators preparing for Bambi under the instruction of artist Rico Lebrun. During the golden age of Disney in the late 1930s and early 1940s, animation was not only a profession at the studio; it was a way of life.
Seven
PARNASSUS
The nine months after Snow White debuted may have been the best months of Walt Disney’s adult life. The picture was an astounding success. In its first week at the Carthay Circle, it grossed $19,000, in its second $20,000, and by the time it finished its ten-week run, it had grossed just under $180,000. At the Radio City Music Hall in New York, where the lines often stretched down the block, it grossed just over $500,000. After it went into general release in February, and after Walt had reanimated his shimmying Prince, it grossed $3.5 million in the United States and Canada alone and returned over $1 million to the studio. By May 1939, with $6.7 million in receipts, it would become the highest-grossing American film to that point, eventually surpassing the previous record-holder, The Singing Fool with Al Jolson, by nearly $2 million. Because of the low ticket prices at the time and because children, who were a significant segment of the film’s audience, paid even less, Walt always maintained that Snow White had been seen by more people in this country than any other motion picture.
Europe was equally rapturous. The film played for twenty-eight weeks in London, grossing over $500,000 at one theater alone, and when it was released to the seaside towns that summer, the theaters were forced to take reservations three weeks in advance, eventually instituting special morning performances to satisfy the demand. “They came in their hundreds,” reported The New York Times, “little girls with spades and pails, little boys in bathing trunks, mothers with the family shopping, young sophisticates with wind-blown sets and the newest shade in sun tan.” It grossed $155,000 at one first-run theater in Paris and over $1 million when it had completed its second run in the city. In twenty-one weeks at one Sydney, Australia, theater, it took in $132,000. When censors in Holland forbade children under fourteen from seeing it because they thought it too gruesome, the youngsters staged an impromptu nationwide boycott of a Dutch Snow White chocolate bar, and the censors relented. By the time it finished its runs in 1939, it had played in forty-nine countries and had been dubbed into ten languages.
But the phenomenon didn’t stop at the theater door. There were, by one account, 2,183 different Snow White products, and 16.5 million drinking glasses alone were sold. Walt launched a Snow White comic strip and commissioned a play based on the movie, though it was finally decided that theater owners might object to the competition, and the play was scotched. Prompted in part by the success of Snow White, the studio inaugurated a national radio program in January that was quickly canceled because, Walt said, “if I listen in and the thing isn’t right I’m all upset and worried.” Walt even collected $15,000 by selling original cels from the film at the Courvoisier Art Gallery in San Francisco. When Kay Kamen reported as early as May 1938 that $2 million worth of Snow White toys had been sold and another $2 million worth of Snow White handkerchiefs, The New York Times merrily editorialized that animation might be a way out of the Depression.
Then there were the accolades. Already in January, Walt was investigating whether Snow White might qualify for an Academy Award and was told that “it is quite within the bounds of probability that the Award Committee might consider it for special honors.” It had already been named one of the outstanding pictures of the year by the National Board of Review and had won a special citation from the New York Film Critics. When the Oscars were awarded in February 1939, Walt did receive a special acknowledgment for his achievement: one large Oscar statuette and seven smaller ones. “Isn’t it bright and shiny?” ten-year-old actress Shirley Temple chirped as she presented the award. “Oh, it’s beautiful,” Walt said. “Aren’t you proud of it?” she asked. “I’m so proud of it I think I’ll bust,” Walt beamed. To which Temple rejoined, “Oh, don’t do that, Mr. Disney!” The exchange, one guest said, “brought down the house.”
The sense of jubilation swept through the entire Disney family. Just two weeks after the Los Angeles premiere of Snow White, the Disneys—all but Ruth, who remained in Portland—gathered at the Ivar House restaurant in Hollywood to celebrate Elias and Flora’s fiftieth wedding anniversary and to put an end to what had been a difficult decade for the couple, even as Roy and Walt’s status had been steadily rising. The Depression was not a particularly good time to be landlords, which was how Elias and Flora earned their living. “Conditions for us have not improved,” Elias wrote Walt in a typical letter late in 1933, “in fact, they are harder, as prices are harder. We have not rented and very few people are looking for apartments.” With Roy
and Walt plowing their profits back into the studio, they were unable to contribute much to alleviate their parents’ plight, mainly giving them magazine subscriptions, periodic vacations to Los Angeles to visit, a new Sears Coldspot refrigerator, and in 1934 a trip to Florida via Kansas City and Chicago to see friends and relatives. Though it may have seemed niggardly considering that the Disney brothers were now national figures, Elias didn’t think so. He wrote Ray that “Roy is very generous and I sometimes think too much so, but he don’t seem to loose [sic] anything by it.” Elias made no such claim about Walt’s generosity. When Walt was asked to endorse a DeSoto automobile in exchange for a car, Walt objected, saying he didn’t drive a DeSoto and wasn’t going to say he did, but when Flora suggested that he give the car to them, he relented, posed for the ad, and presented them with the DeSoto.
In addition to their economic hardships, there were health problems. Flora suffered a succession of small strokes, and the doctor ordered her to rest every afternoon for ninety minutes to lower her high blood pressure. Elias’s health had been failing too, and by 1937 he was nearly blind. His doctor proposed that Roy and Walt provide their father a loan of $2,000 to pay his medical bills, but Roy declined. “We have a tremendous load to carry at the studio and we need the strength of all our resources,” he wrote, citing an episode in which he had cosigned a note for a friend six months earlier and the friend defaulted.
Flora and Elias were also lonely. They heard infrequently from Roy, and Walt wrote them only once a year. Herbert, his wife Louise, and their daughter Dorothy, whom Elias and Flora had followed to Portland, visited them every Sunday for dinner, but in July 1930 Herbert requested and was granted another transfer by the postal service, this time to Los Angeles, where he felt the climate would be better for Dorothy’s persistent bronchitis. When Ruth married a local contractor named Ted Beecher and moved into Herbert’s old house, Elias and Flora were left by themselves. Their house was adorned with Disney paraphernalia—a picture of Mickey Mouse stood beside a photo of Walt on the piano and Flora kept a scrapbook of Walt’s exploits—but it only reminded them of how much they missed their boys. “We wish we could sell out here and move to L.A. so we could all be together,” Flora wrote one of her nieces as early as 1931. “This depression will have to clear away before there is any chance of that.”
Now, thanks to Snow White, the Depression had cleared away for the Disneys. For an anniversary present the brothers chipped in to buy their parents a house of their own choosing in California. “I think it’s a great day in my life,” Elias wrote his cousin Peter Cantelon. “I don’t expect to have another like it.”
Snow White had had a salutary effect on Walt’s immediate family too. His years of obsession with the film, the days and nights and weekends spent at the studio, had taken their toll on his relationship with Lillian, who had never been especially interested in Walt’s work to begin with and who once called herself her husband’s “Severest Critic” because “I always look on the dark side.” (She was one of the few in Walt’s inner circle who failed to appreciate the prospects of Snow White, saying, “I can’t stand the sight of dwarfs,” and “I predict nobody’ll ever pay a dime to see a dwarf picture.”) When Walt was at the studio, which was most of the time, the two seldom communicated, though Lillian did say she made certain to be home by five o’clock or five-thirty every afternoon, Walt’s dinnertime, to serve him. “He demanded a lot of everyone around him,” she said as a way of explaining her schedule. “He always kept everybody in turmoil.” It was turmoil that Lillian didn’t always appreciate. By one account, around the time of Snow White the couple had even discussed divorce.
One problem was that as surely as Walt was focused on the studio, Lillian was focused on her family. “He was very close to Lilly until Diane was born,” his secretary Dolores Voght told an interviewer years later. “[A]fter Diane came along, Lilly grew more interested in her, so she pulled away from studio affairs and concentrated on the home.” It was, no doubt, her way to find herself while Walt was fixated on Snow White. Lillian certainly seemed to resent her husband’s preoccupation with work and the avalanche of attention he received, but she was no silent, long-suffering helpmate. Lillian would erupt. Diane remembered coming down for breakfast one morning and seeing a large brown stain on the wall. She later learned that her mother had hurled a cup of coffee at Walt. “Mother was a well contained, poised person who never lost her temper with us children,” Diane would say, “but also she would not let herself be put upon. She stood up for her rights.”
Though Walt’s deepest devotion seemed reserved for his daughter, his studio, and his pets—his chow, Sunnee, and a black cat, Manxie, who later disappeared when he went to sleep in the gardener’s car and then leaped out in traffic—things seemed to improve with Lillian after she suffered her third miscarriage and the couple, at Walt’s instigation, decided to adopt. On December 31, 1936, just as Snow White was reaching its most manic stage, Walt and Lillian received their new six-week-old daughter, Sharon Mae, though a bout of pneumonia sent her back to the hospital for a month’s recuperation. Both parents were devoted to her. They made no distinction between her and Diane, and Walt would always bristle at any mention of her being adopted. Indeed, Walt and Lillian were so secretive about the adoption that he had his gardener, Diane’s nurse, and Marjorie Sewell pick Sharon up from the hospital lest someone recognize the Disneys. When the fact of the adoption was cited nearly twenty years later in a profile of Walt for Look magazine, he wrote the editor fuming, “I do not care what you say about me, but deeply resent your reference to my daughter Sharon’s adoption.” (Look stopped the presses and deleted the line.) In any case, their mutual love of Sharon seemed to begin a rapprochement between Walt and Lilly, and shortly after Snow White’s release they may have been investigating a second adoption, which, for whatever reason, never came to fruition.
His family became more important to him as his social activities continued to diminish. Throughout Snow White’s long production Walt had been tense and frequently ill, even after the trip to Europe that had temporarily reinvigorated him. Various doctors visited him at the studio several times each week, sometimes daily, to provide everything from hair loss treatments (despite his abundant and wild shock) to chiropractic sessions for a polo injury that would bother him for the rest of his life, forcing him to hunch over to relieve the pain when he sat and stabbing him awake at night. Though during the production he continued to play polo, which had also diverted time from Lillian, his interest had waned after an accident at the Riviera Country Club on October 28, 1935. During a match there between MGM and the Disney studio, the horse of a thirty-one-year-old contract player at MGM named Gordon Westcott apparently collided with Walt’s, and Westcott fell; by one account, Walt’s horse then toppled onto the young man. He died three days later without ever having regained consciousness. A month later Roy informed Walt that he had decided to quit polo and was disposing of his ponies. Walt reduced his playing time until in May 1938 he wrote Riviera that the “studio demands so much of my time that I am going to have to give up polo entirely.” He requested that the club field offers for ten of his twelve ponies—two he was having brought to Griffith Park so he and Lillian could ride there—and, failing a sale, he said he would turn them out to pasture. From this point on, his primary athletic activity would be badminton.
Less time for polo meant more time for Lillian, and a month after notifying Riviera that he was divesting himself of his ponies, he and Lillian left for a vacation in New York. But the end of polo also meant the end of his polo relationships, which were among the few friendships he maintained. He had never enjoyed much of a social life—he had never had time for one—and what little he had had been largely ruined by Snow White. In the studio’s early days, when Walt fraternized primarily with his employees, his work life and his social life usually converged. But by the time he began producing Snow White, he had withdrawn from them socially. As animator Marc Davis put it, “[W]hen
the Studio began to become really something, a few of these men weren’t growing to the same degree that he was. So pretty soon his associations were mostly with people away from the Studio and his private life became divorced from the Studio. Many of these men could never understand that Walt had outgrown them—he had changed.”
Yet even as he disengaged socially from his employees, Walt did not plunge into the Hollywood scene. Though he and Lillian socialized throughout the 1930s with the Spencer Tracys, inviting them to the new house on Woking Way for an afternoon of swimming and badminton, these invitations were occasional and were tendered via a telegram or a letter rather than by phone. Similarly, even after he managed to lure his childhood friend Walt Pfeiffer to the studio to work in the story department, the two were surprisingly distant and formal—employer and employee rather than pals. Most of his associates felt that he was close to no one. “Walt was a hard guy to get close to,” animator Ward Kimball said. “He was a workaholic. His career was his whole life. I think I was as good a friend as he ever had.” Another employee described Walt as “friendly, but a man who didn’t appear to accept close friendships.” Lillian agreed. Asked by an interviewer to name Walt’s closest friends, she said, “[H]e really didn’t have time to make friends…. Walt had too much to do. He had to have a clear mind for work the next day.” No one, not even Lillian, could crack him. He was so self-absorbed, so fully within his own mind and ideas, that he emerged only to share them and to have them executed.