Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  But even as they moved forward, they were slogging—trapped between the tight, compressed narrative of Snow White and the loose poeticism of The Concert Feature, between the cartoon exaggerations that they had already mastered and the more painterly abstract effects of Wong that were far more difficult to achieve. Still disappointed, Walt at one point reassigned Ham Luske to work on shorts while the Bambi script was revised. Meanwhile the rest of the staff, though happy to be out from under Walt’s gaze, was growing discontented. Thomas and Johnston said that they were never confident they would succeed in capturing the story’s emotional power, and they eventually began to wonder whether the film would ever be made at all—a dread intensified by the fact that, as they put it, “Walt never came.”

  Now, as the studio was laboring on Bambi, Pinocchio, and The Concert Feature, a labor that had ended Walt’s respite, there came an event that would end the ebullient times for Walt Disney altogether. Ever since they had received the fiftieth-anniversary promise of a new home, Elias and Flora Disney had been living in a rented apartment on Commonwealth Street while they and Roy hunted for a suitable residence. They finally found one that September—a brand-new home at 4605 Placedia in the Hidden Village section of North Hollywood on a 75-by-125-foot lot whose owner had suddenly died, leaving his widow to dispose of it for $8,300. It had three bedrooms, two baths, a living room, and a double garage, but, Roy wrote Walt, “more important it has a good heating system”—a central gas heater with forced circulation. The brothers put down $2,300 and spent between $2,500 and $3,000 to furnish the house, and their parents moved in shortly thereafter.

  But as soon as Elias and Flora moved in, the much vaunted heating system began to malfunction. “We better get this furnace fixed or else some morning we’ll wake up and find ourselves dead,” Flora was said to have told her housekeeper, Alma Smith. Roy and Walt dispatched a workman from the studio to repair it. On the morning of November 26, 1938, Flora went to the bathroom adjoining her bedroom. When she didn’t return, Elias got up to investigate and found her collapsed on the bathroom floor. Feeling overcome himself, he staggered out into the hallway and fainted. Downstairs in the courtyard Alma Smith was emptying a dustpan of oatmeal that she had spilled when she felt herself getting woozy and realized that something was amiss. She rushed back into the house and raced up the stairs, found Elias on the floor, called a neighbor, and then phoned Roy. Meanwhile she tried to open the window, but it was stuck. Then she and the neighbor dragged Flora and Elias down the stairs and outside, and the neighbor administered artificial respiration. Elias revived. Flora did not. She died of carbon monoxide poisoning from the defective heater; a lid on the air intake had slipped, recirculating the exhaust into the house.

  It may have been the most shattering moment of Walt Disney’s life. Though he seldom exhibited emotion outside the studio, he was inconsolable—a misery deepened no doubt by the fact that she had died in the new home Walt had given her, and by the culpability of his own workmen. (A report on the furnace ordered by Roy determined that the “installation of the furnace showed either a complete lack of knowledge of the requirements of the furnace or a flagrant disregard of these conditions if they were known.”) When his parents had arrived in Los Angeles, they had only wanted to see the vast Forest Lawn Cemetery, so Walt had let them off at the gate in the morning and returned later in the day to pick them up. Now Walt and Roy decided to bury their mother there. “You should have seen those two brothers,” recalled the Reverend Glenn Puder, the husband of Herbert’s daughter Dorothy and the man who officiated at the funeral. In the following months they regularly visited their mother’s gravesite, but Walt never spoke of her death to anyone thereafter. When, years later, Sharon asked him where her grandparents were buried, Walt snapped, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  III

  He didn’t have time to be immobilized by grief. With the Bambi crew crawling ahead at Seward Street, that fall Walt began to refocus on Pinocchio—once again analyzing scenes, assigning animation, recording voices, reviewing Leica reels, and most of all, constructing a new story arc. To solve the problem of Pinocchio’s moral aimlessness, the emphasis and identification had shifted to the cricket—“Jiminy,” as he was now named—as a moral agent and conscience. During the hiatus that spring and summer Jiminy’s role had been substantially expanded, and the singer-comedian Cliff Edwards had been hired to voice him.* Unlike for Bambi, Walt generally attended the story meetings and made suggestions—everything from the kind of music best suited for the undersea sequence (“vibra harps, soft temple blocks”), to Pinocchio’s reaction to his transformation into a donkey (“His little laugh goes into a hee-haw as he tests it. He swallows. It’s him!”) to the seriousness with which Jiminy Cricket should accept his assignment as Pinocchio’s conscience. By December, Walt declared himself pleased. “[T]he general outline seems pretty good to me now,” he told the story staff. “In other words, I think we can safely go ahead. We have tried it every way and I feel that it’s safe.” In reality, given the schedule and the need for a feature, he had no choice but to approve the material.

  Walt made, however, one last fix. That January he met with Bill Cottrell, and Jaxon, and Ted Sears, Dorothy Blank, and Dick Creedon of the story department, to discuss the possibility of Jiminy Cricket becoming not only the moral center of the film but also its narrator. “I kind of like that where he starts to tell a story in this little prologue affair some way,” Walt said, then proceeded to describe Jiminy’s new entrance as the camera tracks through the village and into Geppetto’s window while Jiminy sings “When You Wish Upon a Star,” stopping to tell his story. This tracking scene would, in the final film, be one of the most striking uses of the multiplane camera, and it wound up costing nearly $50,000.

  Centralizing Jiminy Cricket in this way and unifying the film around him seemed to have solved the film’s major problem, but it created another. While the cricket had now been thoroughly conceptualized in narrative terms, no one seemed to know how he ought to look. Ham Luske suggested that Walt talk to Ward Kimball. Kimball had been stewing ever since Walt had cut his scenes from Snow White, and he had decided to quit. He was in Walt’s office to tender his resignation when Walt began his sales pitch, talking about Jiminy and how he reminded him of his own beloved addled uncle Ed. Then he asked Kimball if he would take control of him. “God, he did such a wonderful job,” Kimball remembered, “that I walked out very happily and said: What a wonderful place this is!” Kimball set about designing a “sort of halfway thing” with bulging eyes, a top hat, teeth, feelers, arms, and an elongated body with thick legs. Walt was unimpressed. “We can’t have a character like that. He’s gotta be cute,” he said, issuing the same injunction he had used for the new Mickey Mouse. “That’s too gross.” So Kimball went back to his drawing board and converted him into a little man with an oversize head. Though Jiminy now bore no resemblance to a cricket, Walt was pleased. As Kimball put it, “[H]e was a cricket because we called him a cricket.”

  That still left Pinocchio and the ongoing debate about whether he was more a wooden puppet or a little boy. The wooden concept made sense—he was a puppet who later became a boy—but Walt had seen the footage that Fred Moore had animated and, as Ollie Johnston remembered, “felt the character needed to be more appealing,” just like Jiminy. Milt Kahl had been critical of the character, thinking that he didn’t move well, so Luske, who had recommended Kimball for Jiminy, recommended that Kahl take a crack at Pinocchio himself and make him essentially a boy with wooden joints. Kahl accepted the challenge, animated the scene of Pinocchio undersea knocking on an oyster shell, and then showed it to Walt, who, Johnston said, “flipped.” Even Fred Moore was impressed, though the redesign knocked him from his perch as the most favored animator in the studio. From that point on, Kahl was in charge of animating Pinocchio, assisted by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, while Moore animated Lampwick, Pinocchio’s dissolute guide on Pleasure Island, a character with more than a p
assing resemblance to Moore himself.

  But even having resolved the narrative problems and having settled on Jiminy and a more boylike Pinocchio, Walt was concerned. He knew that Pinocchio was more conventional than Bambi or The Concert Feature; that was precisely why he felt he could hasten it into production. But he didn’t want it to be just another cartoon—a Snow White knockoff. It was imperative that it be bigger, grander, and more realistically animated. Otherwise there was no aesthetic reason to make it. Indeed, one of the reasons Walt was so intent on an underwater sequence was that, as he wrote Otto Englander, “[i]t all gives us a chance for something very fantastic.” Though virtually the entire film was already being shot in live action for rotoscoping, Walt had asked artist Joe Grant, who was an excellent caricaturist, how they might improve their technique. Grant suggested a model department where they could fashion little statues of the characters so that the animators could study them from different angles. (He had, in fact, fashioned just such a statue for the crone in Snow White.) Walt agreed and then put Grant in charge. Eventually they built models not only of the characters but of inanimate objects, like the cage into which Pinocchio is thrown, then filmed it swinging so they could trace the photostats. Walt also wanted even more dimensionality to the backgrounds and characters than he had had in Snow White, so he devised yet another system of application of paint called a “blend” that combined dry brushing and airbrushing to create roundness, especially on cheeks. It was an extremely expensive process—by one account there were twenty women in the airbrush department alone—and Walt advised they use it sparingly (“We must keep from going broke on this picture”), but he nevertheless insisted upon it as a way of bettering the look of Snow White. Jiminy Cricket alone had twenty-seven parts and twenty-seven different colors. As Frank Thomas later told an interviewer, “[T]his was an era when he wanted things to be real. He wanted it to be round, solid, reaching for perfection.”

  But Pinocchio had become a chore, an obligation. Walt’s real obsession now was The Concert Feature. He would tell the animators that, as Ollie Johnston put it, it would “change the history of motion pictures.” The Concert Feature would be entirely different from anything he had done. “I don’t think it will be common,” he told his staff. “We’ve always wanted to do this sort of thing, but couldn’t risk it—between a newsreel and a feature.” Now, because Snow White had given him the aesthetic capital to do so, they could. All that summer, even as he was hard at work on Pinocchio, he was edgy waiting for Stokowski to return from Europe, where the conductor was visiting composers’ relatives—among them Debussy’s widow and Ravel’s brother—to secure releases for possible musical selections, even writing to Walt in code for fear that he would be found out and coopted. When Stokowski arrived back in Los Angeles in September 1938, along with the critic Deems Taylor, Walt couldn’t wait to start listening to and selecting music. The three of them spent virtually the entire month in Room 232 listening to records of classical pieces, dozens of them, and pondering possible visualizations: Paganini’s “Moto Perpetuo” or Mosolov’s “Iron Foundry” (“We could do something good with machinery,” Walt said); Stravinsky’s The Firebird, “Renard,” or Petrouchka; Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges; Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette;” Mussorgsky’s “Song of a Flea” (with opera star Lawrence Tibbett scratching himself during the performance); Berlioz’s Roman Carnival; a work of Debussy’s that Walt called “Fate”; Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen (which, one staff member suggested, might be used for a new children’s story called The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien); and even a symphonic rendering of “Pop Goes the Weasel.” They debated whether to introduce a single pianist for a piece (Walt wanted Rachmaninoff and thought of having a Russian scene with snow falling, and the snow turning into crystal formations) and whether to include American pieces. (Walt decided that “Americans wouldn’t feel insulted if you left the American music out,” while Stokowski declared, “Disney is a genius who is going into new things. To go back to Swanee River and that sentimental stuff—it isn’t for this picture I don’t think.”) For all the deliberate, intense scrutiny of each score, Walt could barely contain his enthusiasm. After dragging along on Bambi and Pinocchio, hitting roadblock after roadblock, he told Stokowski that he was going to assign a number of units to The Concert Feature and thought he could rough out a story in two to three weeks—once they settled on the compositions. That way, when Stokowski returned to the studio in January, they could actually begin the orchestrations and record the music by the spring.

  They made an odd pair—the epitome of the classical artist and the epitome of the commercial artist—which may have been part of the personal attraction, just as it was part of the artistic partnership. Stokowski seemed to love the free-spiritedness of the Disney studio. Walt seemed to love the highbrow legitimization that Stokowski bestowed. At times they could sit together, usually with Deems Taylor, and listen to music for hours. At other times, as one animator described it, Stokowski would be “swooping through the halls followed by Disney and a retinue of writers and story sketch men, all struggling to keep pace.” At meetings Walt was deferential to his partner. As informal as he was, he always called his associate “Mr. Stokowski,” never “Leopold” or “Stoki,” which was his nickname, and he always privileged Stokowski’s opinions, rarely contradicting him.

  But for all the comity and real friendship between them, sometimes the cultures clashed. At one session Walt kept turning up the volume when the music was soft and turning it down when the music was loud, prompting Stokowski to explode, “What is loud should be loud and what is soft should be soft!” And if Stokowski could reprimand Walt, Walt wasn’t above poking fun at his esteemed partner. At a recording session he remarked to a colleague that Stokowski with his long hair looked like the comedian Harpo Marx. Still, despite their different places in the cultural constellation, the two did share a sense of entertainment and bombast. Discussing one especially loud section of music, Walt compared it to “blowing the top off the mountain,” adding, “Stokowski loves to do it. He would blow the top off the speakers on this.” Of course, so would Walt.

  After two months of labor Walt, Stokowski, and Taylor had winnowed the compositions to roughly a dozen, and on the evening of September 29, 1938, Walt convened fifty to sixty of his artists on the soundstage for a two-and-a-half-hour piano concert while he provided a running commentary on what the audience would be seeing in the feature. He also showed them a rough of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which, according to one attendee, had them cheering and applauding “until all hands were red.” As this observer saw it, “It seemed indeed as if Walt and his boys had crossed a threshold into a truly new art form.” Clearly inspired, Walt, Stokowski, and Taylor, in a postmortem the next morning, promptly lopped off an overture, the piano solo, “Moto Perpetuo,” and, with startling confidence, selected the final compositions: Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” Pierné’s Cydalise and the Goat-Foot, Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker Suite,” Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain,” Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours,” Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and of course Dukas’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” for a total running time of just over two hours. “I don’t know what more the audience would want for their money, do you?” Walt beamed to his collaborators. He was already setting crews to work on each sequence, ending what may have been the most productive month of his life.

  Walt was happy, and the story meetings on The Concert Feature that fall were smaller and much more playful and freewheeling than the meetings on Bambi or Pinocchio. In part, it was because this time Walt wasn’t carrying the entire burden; since he clearly didn’t know as much about music as his collaborators, he was sharing the burden with Stokowski and Taylor. Another reason was that Walt didn’t feel he had to have the entire movie in his head; since this was not a densely plotted film, he could brainstorm and experiment. “We’re searching here,
trying to get away from the cut-and-dried handling of things all the way through everything,” he told his story crew with what seemed a sense of relief, “and the only way to do it is to leave things open until we have completely explored every bit of it.” In fact, his concerns were less aesthetic than cultural. Though he would later be accused of bowdlerizing the compositions, Walt was nearly reverential toward the scores, fearing to make any cuts and worrying what the reaction would be if he departed from the composer’s stated idea for a piece of program music. It was Stokowski who assured him that cutting a score was perfectly acceptable (“It is like pruning a tree. It sometimes grows stronger from pruning”), and that providing one’s own visual interpretation of the music was fine “if the spirit of the music is with us.”

  But the main reason Walt was so enthusiastic about The Concert Feature was that he felt he was blazing trails again. The effect was liberating. Having already expressed his antagonism toward gags, he was now expressing antagonism toward the idea of narrative itself. Not everything had to connect, he instructed his storymen. Not everything had to be worked out in story terms. “I know everybody has the tendency to have story,” he told a meeting on The Concert Feature, “but I keep telling myself that this is different—we’re presenting music,” which meant that the score wouldn’t just embellish the visuals but would be absolutely coequal to them. “I would like to have this thing kind of weave itself together and complete itself, but not have a plot.” At another meeting, describing admiringly a recent package of eight unrelated shorts that the studio was releasing that September as a kind of test run for The Concert Feature, he told his story crew that the “story annoys you.”