Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  Only to those who had known him before his celebrity—his family and boyhood friends and even his earliest employees—was he gracious and loyal, apparently feeling that they had been loyal to him when they hadn’t needed to be.* That was no doubt one of the reasons he lured Walt Pfeiffer to the studio and then kept giving him new assignments even as he failed at the old ones, and one of the reasons he hired his old McKinley High School classmate Bianca Majolie in the story department. Walt took one guard with him from Hyperion to Burbank to patrol the front gate even though the man was often inebriated, because, one employee speculated, “[h]e’d stuck with Disney during some hard times and Walt would never fire him.”

  Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of his regard for the ghosts of his past was his treatment of the man who had committed what was, in Walt’s mind, one of the worst betrayals: his old partner, Ub Iwerks. After leaving the studio abruptly in 1930, lured by the blandishments of Pat Powers, Iwerks had fallen on hard times. His own studio had failed, forcing him to subcontract with Warner Bros. and then Columbia, but these arrangements were ultimately terminated too. “He was one of the first—if not the first—to give his characters depth and roundness,” animator Chuck Jones explained. “But he didn’t have any story capacity, and I don’t think he knew very much about humor; he wasn’t a funny man at all.” In 1940 he was teaching animation at a local vocational school and had gotten up the nerve to write Walt that July about the possibility of opening a school of his own, presumably to help train Disney animators. Walt referred the letter to Vern Caldwell in personnel, who dismissed the suggestion. Meanwhile Ben Sharpsteen, hearing about Iwerks’s plight, phoned him, said that starting a school would be “belittling,” and offered him a job checking animation, which Iwerks gratefully accepted. Sharpsteen was obviously trying to broker a rapprochement between Iwerks and Walt, and when he told Walt that he had asked Iwerks back, Walt said it was Sharpsteen’s prerogative to hire whomever he liked. But on August 9 Walt and Iwerks had lunch at the studio, over which, as Iwerks later told it, Walt asked him what he really wanted to do there. Iwerks, always more interested in technology than animation, said he answered, “Prowl around.” Overlooking their past dispute, Walt assigned him to help develop a new optical camera for special effects, illustrating both Walt’s commitment to anything that would help his studio regardless of his personal feelings and his attachment to his old colleagues now that he presided over an increasingly impersonal bureaucracy.

  But he displayed no hint of sentiment when it came to newer employees, especially as his dream of utopia faded under the glare of economic realities. Walt saw them purely in instrumental terms: what could they contribute to realizing his vision? Even a longtimer like Ben Sharpsteen would say, “I always knew that he was only intimate with me up to a purpose where he thought it could be worthwhile.” Walt thought nothing of firing someone who he felt had outlived his usefulness, calling it “weeding out marginal people” or getting rid of “deadwood.” No one was safe, not even members of his own family. When his sister-in-law Hazel Sewell suffered a nervous breakdown and he docked her pay, Sewell—who had been at the studio for eleven years, eventually heading up the ink and paint department—tendered her resignation, arguing that her economies had saved the studio tens of thousands of dollars. Walt was brusque: “Personally, I am greatly shocked by your unwarranted attitude. However, if I were in your place and felt the way you do about the organization where I worked, I would probably do the same thing.” Another longtime employee complained that he was never promoted. “The reason that you have not been put at the Head of your Department,” Walt wrote him coldly, “is that we do not feel that you are capable of giving us the standard of work that we must have…. If you will consider the quality of your work, I believe you will understand why you have not advanced further.” When Clarence Nash, Donald Duck’s voice, requested a raise, Walt talked to him “like a Dutch uncle in order to whittle him down to his proper size,” and when Pinto Colvig, who did the voices for Goofy and two of the dwarfs, complained that he was being underpaid, Walt ordered him dismissed. “He is just a clown and not at all the type of fellow we need to keep production moving,” Walt wrote Roy. “He’s been crying to me ever since he’s been here.” One storyman was even fired when, during a conference, he announced that it was noon and they should break for lunch.

  Despite his distance and icy dismissiveness, many of the employees still revered Walt, who, though only thirty-nine in 1941, was nevertheless significantly older than his animators, whose average age was now twenty-seven, and who was one of America’s most famous cultural icons. But after years of slavishly obeying his commands and after years of gladly subscribing to his cult, some had begun to resent him too, and director Jack Kinney observed a growing division in the staff between those who continued to worship him and those who didn’t.

  Many of the apostates had begun to question what they saw as Walt’s paternalism, which they thought was expressed by his habitually calling his staff “my boys” whenever he spoke of them. Some saw paternalism too in Walt’s bonuses, which disgruntled animators viewed as arbitrarily dispensed. They felt they were being manipulated, not only by the bonuses but also by Walt’s general approach to them. (Walt proudly admitted that he had read a psychology book and tried applying its precepts to his relations with his staff.) Others had begun to chafe at the fact that for all the talk of collaboration, Walt was an autocrat whose word was the only word. “Usually each of us felt, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’” Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston wrote of the respect for Walt’s ideas while acknowledging a new rebelliousness, “but every so often we secretly would feel, ‘My way is better!’” They all knew that Walt entertained only those ideas that comported with his own. “God help you if you took his idea and ran it in the wrong direction,” a writer at the studio commented. “If you did, one eyebrow would rise and the other would descend, and he’d say, ‘You don’t seem to get it at all.’” When Bill Cottrell suggested a scene in Pinocchio and Walt vetoed it, Cottrell protested, “But if we don’t try it my way, we’ll never know whether or not it would have worked.” To which Walt replied, “No, we won’t.” Ward Kimball noted, “You learned early on never to argue with him or to cross him.” Indeed, during sweatbox sessions everyone would sit silently and nervously while Walt watched, pondered, and issued his verdict. Only then would the others express their opinions—always parroting Walt’s. As one employee put it, “Everybody with any sense waited on Walt.”

  Along with the distance and the autocracy, the staff now began to voice another raw grievance: Walt never gave them credit. “No one person can take credit for the success of a motion picture,” he had once said. “It’s strictly a team effort.” Nevertheless Walt had always made certain that his name was the most prominent, even if he claimed that this was essentially a marketing decision. It was, according to Dave Hand, an edict at the studio: “don’t mention anybody but that one person, Walt.” On the shorts the storymen and animators seldom cared. But the features, on which many of them had labored for years, were a different matter. Not getting credit hurt and generated deep hostility. “Being left off the credits made me realize I was still just another sketch man, just one of the mob, and I was depressed for weeks afterward,” Bill Peet remarked when he attended a preview of Pinocchio and didn’t see his name on the screen. When one animator approached Walt with the idea of giving awards for the best animation, Walt told him, “If there’s going to be any awards made, I’m going to get them.” Indeed, it was Walt who often expressed resentment at his animators for what he saw as their haughtiness and self-regard, calling them “touch-me-nots” and “holy cows.” In return, where they had once celebrated Walt for orchestrating the team, one of them would later gripe, “He’s a genius at using someone else’s genius.”

  And the rift wasn’t only between Walt and the staff but among members of the staff themselves now that Walt wasn’t there to deflect the discontent and now that
the sense of mission was being compromised by economic woes. In-betweeners and cleanup men, most of whom made less than $20 a week, began to resent the animators, who made anywhere from $75 a week (Don Lusk and John Lounsbery) to $300 a week (Norm Ferguson and Freddie Moore). Since many of these underpaid employees worked on a trial basis for months and even then didn’t advance up the studio ranks, they became, in Ben Sharpsteen’s word, “soreheads,” and since Walt seldom fired these underlings, their resentments festered. But even among the key animators there was dissension. West Coast animators resented the artists Walt had hired from the East, often at higher salaries, especially since the West Coasters felt they had to train the Easterners, and Walt’s vaunted bonus system created tensions not only between Walt and the animators but between animators who felt they were doing essentially the same work but getting paid lower salaries and those who were receiving the higher salaries. “If I gave one person a bonus then they could never figure out why someone else didn’t get a bonus, and they hadn’t earned it, but they couldn’t understand that,” Walt later observed. The system was so complicated no one ever fully understood it.

  Over and above the bonuses, some employees burned over what they believed was the favorable treatment given to other employees. To help foster a sense of community, Walt permitted Ward Kimball to organize a jazz band that Kimball called the “Huggajeedy 8,” but it had the opposite effect. “Their practicing could be heard all over the studio during business hours and their sounds weren’t always pleasurable to the ears,” one animator later commented. “Such goings-on spread discontent among those who didn’t believe in such and those who were just plain jealous.” Others blamed the new studio for underscoring class distinctions. At the Penthouse Club, for example, membership was restricted to employees making two hundred dollars a week or more, cleaving the best-paid staff members from everyone else. “I don’t think any of us knew about unions,” Ken Peterson, an in-betweener at the time, said. “But we were all feeling sort of left out.”

  Left out and angry—a condition that made them ripe for an incipient rebellion. For years, as part of a general mobilization within the film industry, organizers had been attempting to unionize animation studios and the animation departments of major studios. At the old Iwerks studio, several animators decided to unionize after one of their colleagues died of a heart attack, but the studio called for overtime to prevent the employees from attending a membership meeting, and the effort expired. Animators made more headway at the Fleischer studio in New York, which was struck in May 1937, shortly after the Fleischers fired fifteen employees who had joined the union to protest working conditions. The strike lasted six months—picketers carried signs declaring “I’m Popeye the Union Man” after the Fleischers’ most popular character—until an election was finally held and the union was certified. (Max Fleischer countered by moving the studio to Florida and dissolving the union.) Next Herbert Sorrell, the head of the Conference of Studio Unions into which the Screen Cartoonists Guild was incorporated, targeted the cartoon department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, largely because it was so small he knew the studio wouldn’t risk a strike for it; then he aimed at Warner Bros., where, under animation head Leon Schlesinger, the animators were earning 50 percent less than the animators had at MGM. Schlesinger scoffed at Sorrell’s threats, insisting that his animators loved him and that whenever they needed money, he loaned it to them. A strike ensued, during which Schlesinger posted a sign on his door saying he was off on his yacht. Within a short time he called Sorrell to make a deal, then asked him, “Now, what about Disney?”

  That was the question ringing in animation circles. In fact, after the Fleischers settled in 1937, an assistant animator named Dave Hilberman told key animator Art Babbitt that the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), a rival union to Sorrell’s, was launching a new campaign to unionize the film industry, apparently including the Disney studio. IATSE was headed by two notorious thugs, George Browne and Willie Bioff, who had been associated with the Al Capone crime family in Chicago, and Babbitt was frightened. That same day he ran into Bill Garity, then head of production control, and when Babbitt mentioned his concerns, Garity told him that IATSE had already sent a delegation to the studio, and if Babbitt didn’t like it, he should act. Babbitt met with Roy Disney, who shunted him off to attorney Gunther Lessing. Lessing, eager to head off IATSE, advised Babbitt to form what Lessing called “some sort of an organization, preferably a social organization,” and offered his help. Early in December 1937 Babbitt, forty employees, and Lessing met in sweatbox 1 at the Hyperion studio to create a federation to represent the studio’s employees in its relations with management. The group held a general membership meeting at the American Legion Hall in Hollywood on January 25, 1938, at which Babbitt was elected president, and the organization, now called the Cartoonists Federation, applied for certification from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which granted it in July 1939. By this time IATSE had been rebuffed, forestalling any interest in a union. But with the certification the leaders of the federation were inspired to draw up a list of contract demands. Roy was astonished, saying he had “no use for any unions” and wouldn’t negotiate. It indicated how thoroughly Walt had won their allegiance, despite their grievances, that the board decided to disband the federation rather than fight.

  But in October 1940, after Sorrell had negotiated his truce with MGM, Dave Hilberman, the animation assistant who had originally warned Babbitt about IATSE, decided to begin organizing the Disney studio on behalf of Sorrell’s Screen Cartoonists Guild (SCG). On December 5 the SCG informed the company that it had collected cards from a majority of Disney’s employees and would ask for recognition. Walt was frantic. The very next morning he called Babbitt to a meeting in his office, showed Babbitt a letter from the SCG’s attorney announcing its claim, and ordered Babbitt to reconvene the federation so “we can stop this thing.” When Babbitt declined, saying he would be ridiculed after the company had refused to bargain with him, Walt cracked, “Well, where would I be if I couldn’t stand a little ridicule?” Walt insisted he would never bargain with unions. “You know how I am, boys,” he told them, “if I can’t have my own way…if somebody tries to tell me to do something, I will do just the opposite, and if necessary I will close down this studio.” Walt’s idea was to sign a closed-shop agreement with the federation to freeze out any other union. The next day the studio sent out application slips to employees through the department supervisors.

  Most of those who reflected on the union fracas would lay the federation plan at the feet of Gunther Lessing, the Disneys’ legal counsel. As a young attorney in El Paso, Texas, Lessing had gotten entangled in defending a number of Mexican revolutionaries and had ridden into Mexico City with Francisco Madero when Madero took over the government. After Madero’s assassination, Lessing would go on to represent the bandit-revolutionary Pancho Villa. Lessing called himself an “idealist.” By the time he joined the Disneys in the early 1930s, however, his idealism had given way to a truculent conservatism that made him a pariah among most of the studio’s employees, including those who shared his politics. Even Roy said that after Snow White everyone took to calling the bald-pated Lessing “Dopey.”

  Whatever Lessing’s influence, the Disneys themselves had never looked kindly on unions. For all his alleged socialism, Elias Disney had told his children a story about being attacked by union organizers when he was working on a construction site; and Walt certainly hated the idea of anyone trying to intimidate him, especially his own employees. But whatever antagonism the Disneys may have felt was further fueled by Lessing, whom they had appointed to advise Babbitt back in 1937 on the formation of the federation. “A more unwise choice could not have been made,” animator Shamus Culhane would write. “During the preliminary seminars about unionism, Lessing’s approach was too slick, too facile, and too arrogant. When some employee had the temerity to get up and ask a question, Lessing, while listening, would roll his ey
es up toward heaven, in the age-old gesture of weary patience with blatant stupidity.” As Culhane saw it, Lessing only fomented hostility to the very company union he was charged with organizing.

  Over the next month Babbitt defected and joined Hilberman in helping organize the animators under the Cartoonists Guild. (He said he was moved to do so when one of the inkers at the studio fainted because she couldn’t afford to buy lunch.) At an organizing meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel, Sorrell delivered an impassioned speech, promising to “[s]queeze Disney’s balls ’til he screams.” Meanwhile the old federation, with Walt and Lessing’s blessings, held an open meeting on January 28, 1941, at the Abraham Lincoln School, three blocks north of the studio, to discuss a plan under which it would serve as the bargaining agent for the workers, using an impartial chairman with an advisory board composed of two representatives each from labor and management to settle disputes. (Exactly how the chairman was to be selected wasn’t specified.) A few days later the SCG charged the studio with sponsoring a company union. Walt retaliated by posting a bulletin on February 6 forbidding employees to engage in union activity on company time or on company property.

  But Herbert Sorrell was not a man to be easily deterred. He was coarse-looking, compact, with round sloping shoulders, a high forehead and square chin, and a nose flattened perhaps by too many punches from his days as a prizefighter. He was also, at forty-four, every bit as tough as he looked. The son of a peripatetic drunkard, Sorrell went to work at the age of twelve in a sewer pipe plant in Oakland, where he was beaten mercilessly by his fellow workers until he whacked one with a shovel and sent him to the hospital. He later sold pipe, worked as a riveter, was drafted into the service during World War I, and returned to become a professional prizefighter, then moved to Los Angeles to work as a painter at the studios. The seminal moment in his life, he said, was when a supervisor at Universal asked him whether he was a union member and, when he answered that he was, summarily fired him. That radicalized him. It was during a strike at Paramount in 1937, however, that Sorrell became a power to be reckoned with. He called sixteen “scab” laborers, said they were needed immediately at the studio, and offered to pick them up. “We came and got them,” he later reminisced drily, “and Monday there were sixteen broken right arms.” In forming the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), a bloc of ten motion picture unions, and assuming its presidency, Sorrell became the most powerful organizer in Hollywood—one to be taken seriously. Now, as Walt later told it, Sorrell threatened to turn the Disney studio into a “dust bowl” if the Disneys didn’t recognize the SCG.