Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  The one-day return to Benton was triumphant. Accompanied by a Works Progress Administration orchestra, eight hundred students, parents, and teachers serenaded him at an assembly where he showed the New Spirit and another cartoon and then had Clarence Nash perform as Donald Duck. He was also awarded the silver loving cup that the school’s seventy-pound relay team had won in 1917 when Daisy Beck had convinced Walt to compete. At a luncheon in his honor at a cafeteria on Troost Street near his old Laugh-O-Gram studio, Walt introduced Arthur Verne Cauger, his boss at the Film Ad Co., and the woman whose baby films had financed his trip to California back in 1923. Afterward he visited Bert Hudson’s barbershop, where his drawings had first been displayed. He ended the stopover having dinner with Daisy Beck at a local home—which, like the other events of the day, showed where he had come from and just how far he had traveled since.

  The studio needed work. In the short term, while Walt waited for his government solicitations to bear more fruit, the South American films were his lifeline. Even late in the afternoon on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, a Sunday, he was at the studio discussing how to enliven these cartoons. His intention, he told The New Yorker, was not to repeat the mistakes of his more imposing and financially unsuccessful features, which he now apparently felt had been too carefully tended. “I’m going to make these South American pictures simple and not arty,” he said in a complete reversal of his usual working arrangements. “The best way is to work off-the-cuff. Don’t have any script but just go along and nobody knows what’s going to happen until it’s happened.”

  The original plan had been to make a series of South American–themed shorts, twelve in all, that would nevertheless be released on the world market with, Roy told their distributor RKO, “just as broad appeal as our present subjects.” RKO was unconvinced. Already in January the producer David O. Selznick, who had also gotten involved with the Coordinator’s Office through an organization called the Motion Picture Society for the Americas, was lobbying Walt and Jock Whitney to package the shorts as features, which he thought would give them both greater visibility and greater salability, and Walt began to warm to the idea as a way of stretching his staff artistically and fulfilling their Silly Symphony commitments. “If the 12 South American Shorts can be put into Packages of 4 each, making 3 in all, to be released during this year,” he wrote Roy, “I think we could enlarge our Shorts Program which would give us a chance to include some Silly Symphony ideas that are now in various stages of production in the plant.” To tie these disparate shorts together under the larger rubric of South America, however, Walt had to use 16mm film footage that he had personally shot during his trip, apologizing to Selznick for “my bad photography and nervous hand.”

  Now came the deluge. On his trip to Washington the previous December, Walt had been encouraged by Jock Whitney to see if he could help convince government officials there to centralize all film production in Hollywood, with a special unit to be established at the Disney studio. “Maybe the development above will be the answer to our problem,” Walt wrote Kay Kamen hopefully. As it turned out, the officials guarded their power too jealously to cede any authority to a central organization, but with Kay Kamen aggressively soliciting government agencies and defense contractors for films, the Disney studio found itself at the vortex of government activity. Within weeks after Pearl Harbor the films for the navy on warship identification were in production; the Department of Agriculture had contracted for a film promoting the Lend Lease program; the Council of National Defense had commissioned a series of posters for a campaign cautioning Americans not to divulge sensitive information; and the director Frank Capra, who had been appointed a major in the Army Signal Corps for the purpose of expediting production, met with Walt to convince him to join the Signal Corps. Walt declined, saying that if Capra needed him, he had only to make a request for the studio’s services. Capra did, and Walt provided animation for Capra’s Why We Fight series that explained why America had gone to war. At the same time that Walt was wading through these offers, the coordinator’s office was pressing the studio to produce a new series of educational films on health and agriculture and yet another series that would, as Whitney put it, “deal directly with the Axis menace to freedom in Latin America.” Moreover the studio was inundated by requests from military squadrons for insignia, which it did its best to satisfy by setting up a five-man crew, even though there was no remuneration for the service.

  Nor did it stop there. Walt had personally lobbied with Lieutenant J. C. Hutchinson, who headed the naval film program, and wound up with contracts for films that spring on aerology, meteorological conditions, aircraft carrier landing signals, carrier approaches and qualifications, aviation forming methods, fixed gunnery, and finally one called Rules of the Nautical Road. Meanwhile, under pressure to diversify from the Bank of America and Kidder, Peabody, which had issued the Disney stock, Walt was meeting with executives from the aircraft manufacturers Curtiss-Wright, Lockheed, Beech, and Aeronca about the possibility of making training films for them. “There is nothing at the moment more important than getting a start in this industrial field,” Fred Moore of Kidder, Peabody wrote Walt, adding a vague threat that “so long as you do not reach outside for broadening your field, your future outlook is not what we had hoped.” The best part, Roy enthused to Walt after meeting with Curtiss-Wright representatives, was that these companies, unlike the government, could afford to pay more than cost. The studio could actually make the profit it so desperately needed.

  Of course, if the best part to this work was the potential profits, the worst part was that the Disney studio was no longer the Disney studio. It was now an educational and industrial film facility, an arm of the government, with Walt and Roy virtually commuting from Los Angeles to Washington. And though Walt clearly recognized how imperative it was to do business with the government if the studio was to survive, he, who had lived only to produce great films, was frustrated. For one thing he was frustrated by the nickel-and-diming of the government bureaucrats. The navy, for one, had vetoed the idea of the studio adding a fixed percentage to its contracts for overhead and profit. An official suggested instead that the studio set a fixed price. If the actual production costs were lower than the budget, the navy would demand an adjustment; if the costs exceeded the budget, the studio would have to absorb the loss. He was also frustrated by minor bureaucrats reviewing storyboards and issuing warnings and orders where he had been the ultimate power just a few months before. When the navy’s J. C. Hutchinson threatened Walt that he would either deliver the film on approach and landing promptly or bear the criticism “which can be heard in the halls re Disney,” Walt wrote back indignantly that he was disturbed by the comment. But in truth he could do nothing about it because he needed to maintain good relations with the department. “Walt more or less lost control,” recalled Joe Grant, “because we had so many of the army brass there at the studio, and all of them considered themselves producers.”

  Finally, he was frustrated over the kinds of films he was now forced to make. He had bristled at the idea of having to produce largely unimaginative training and educational films with primitive animation, but he understood the economic and patriotic necessity of doing so. He was less amenable when he was approached by both the Treasury Department and the Coordinator’s Office to produce overt propaganda, films that were designed to influence opinion rather than educate. “Disney is fearful of being labeled as a propagandist in the public mind, with consequent damage to his reputation as a whimsical, non-political artist,” Wallace Deuel, the coordinator for information, told a Treasury Department official before Walt was to visit the department that March to discuss another set of films. “He is bothered by a few abusive letters he has had about the New Spirit, charging him with various political, racial and other affiliations,” and Walt apparently recalled a question that Lowell Mellett, the head of the Office of War Information, had asked him over dinner at Secretary Morgenthau’s house during Walt’s
earlier visit: “Aren’t you afraid that you will hurt your reputation by this sort of thing?”

  The propaganda films that Morgenthau and Jock Whitney were both pressing him to make, with the lure of their providing joint financing, were a series that would directly attack the Nazis and their way of life. That February Reader’s Digest had published a story titled “Education for Death” that described and lamented the Nazi indoctrination of children. The next month, after his trip to Washington, Walt had gone to Pleasantville, New York, the headquarters of the Digest, to discuss a film series that might be sponsored by the magazine, and the editors quickly pushed the idea of a film based on “Education for Death.” Jock Whitney took up the cause, and Morgenthau did too, though there was disagreement on whether the government should underwrite the films (in which case Walt felt that exhibitors would refuse to show them) or whether Reader’s Digest should underwrite them (in which case exhibitors would be more likely to show them but the coordinator and the Treasury Department would lose control over the content). The rights to “Education for Death” had already been sold to Paramount, but Whitney was certain he could retrieve them.

  Reluctantly Walt Disney crossed the line into propaganda. With financing from the coordinator “in the background,” as Roy put it, the studio put Education for Death into production that June. Later that summer, at the recommendation of producer Walter Wanger, who headed up the Motion Picture Society for the Americas, Walt began preparing to animate a short entitled Reason and Emotion from a book called War Politics and Emotion that showed how the latter had overwhelmed rationality in Nazi Germany. Still later he put into production a short called Donald in Nutzi Land that used Donald Duck to ridicule German leader Adolf Hitler. Both films were apparently made with financing from Reader’s Digest and the Coordinator’s Office. Walt commissioned studio composer Oliver Wallace to write a song for the latter, which Wallace said he banged out in an hour, incorporating a “razz” at Hitler in the chorus. When Spike Jones (then a trombonist in John Scott Trotter’s orchestra and the leader of his own comical band called the City Slickers) selected the song, “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” complete with the razz, as the B-side of a new record, it became an instant hit, prompting the studio to change the film’s title to the song’s title. Jones’s version sold 1.5 million copies and provided an anthem for the war just as “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” had provided an anthem for the Depression. Finally, again at the urging of the coordinator, Walt prepared a Nazi-themed version of Chicken Little in which Foxey Loxey gains access to the chicken coop by deploying Nazi tactics.

  But these were small propagandistic forays, buttressing the popular mood by attacking Nazism and the Nazi leader. They didn’t change public opinion; they reinforced it. Now Walt aimed higher. If he was going to make propaganda, he wanted to lead a crusade, not follow one. He wanted to help change the course of the war, and, perhaps more important after the hiatus on the features, he wanted to make a film that actually mattered to him. Still angling to make a compact with the Disneys, Reader’s Digest had excerpted and then sent Walt the galleys of a new book by a former Russian air commander with the imperious name of Major Alexander P. de Seversky, who had lost his right leg at the age of twenty-two in an airplane crash during World War I but was so good a pilot that he had received special dispensation to return to his post and then shot down thirteen more planes before coming to the United States as an assistant naval attaché to the Russian embassy and, after the Russian Revolution, a consultant to the U.S. Air Service. In America, where he became a citizen, he developed the first automated bombsight and the first turbo-charged, air-cooled engine for fighter planes.

  It was not only his name that was imperious. So was the man. Seversky was the son of an opera singer who was the first Russian to own and operate his own private plane. At forty-eight, the major made a dramatic impression himself with heavy-lidded, deep-set green eyes, an aquiline nose, full lips, and dark hair tinged with gray that swept back from a thick widow’s peak. He had an office on the thirty-fourth floor of Rockefeller Center, where the only signed photograph among the memorabilia was one of General Billy Mitchell, the champion of American air power. He also owned a townhouse on Central Park and a beachhouse in Northport, Long Island. Supremely confident, Seversky, like his friend Billy Mitchell, didn’t hesitate to take on the military establishment, which was exactly what he was doing now. His book, titled Victory Through Air Power, propounded the thesis that, as he put it, “[o]nly air power can carry an offensive war to the enemy, and only the offensive can win the war.” In essence both the army infantry and the navy battleships were irrelevant. He further proposed that air power now made it possible “to reduce an enemy nation to helplessness without the time-honored preliminaries of invasion and mile-by-mile conquest.” And he maintained that the best way to achieve this objective was with long-range bombers with heavy payloads attacking our enemies’ nerve centers rather than through small aircraft flying from carriers.

  When the book was published in late April 1942, it became an immediate best seller—it would wind up the fifth best-selling book of the year—but it also stirred controversy and rebuttals. The Philadelphia Record thought Seversky discounted the cooperation between the services that was needed for victory. The Washington Post said he relegated “all other weapons to a class with the javelin and crossbow.” The New York Daily News complained that it would take until 1945 to have enough long-range bombers to fulfill Seversky’s mission, and The New York Times opined that if Seversky could guarantee where the theater of war would be in two years and what kind of aircraft would be needed, the “military and naval authorities will receive the information with delight.”

  But if the critics—and most of the military—were skeptical, Walt Disney was enchanted. Walt loved technology generally, and he believed fervently in the airplane specifically. “The thing that I felt just went right along with our century, you see,” Walt would later tell an interviewer. “I just felt, well, gee, if they’re going to go out and try to use battleships and all those other things, I just didn’t believe it would ever work.” In May, even before he had read the book, he had sent out feelers to Seversky about the possibility of adapting it for the screen, though he warned his contact to “definitely eliminate my name from all inquiries made.” By July, Walt had closed the deal.

  He knew that making the film wouldn’t be easy. The navy, which gave him much of his government business, feared that long-range land-based bombers would obviate the need for aircraft carriers, was adamantly opposed to Seversky’s theory, and even called Walt into a staff meeting during one of his frequent Washington visits to dissuade him from making the film. “The whole point with Seversky, Walt, is not that anybody quarrels with him upon the value of air power,” one navy official wrote him tactfully, “but that he believes in the application of air power by long-range, land-based bombers which, to carry out his ideas, would have to carry impossible bomb loads and go impossible distances.” (Later the navy went so far as to promise the studio enough business that it wouldn’t be able to produce any other films.) Others, like Commander John S. Thatch, a decorated flier who had served as the technical adviser on the fixed gunnery and fighter tactics series, told Walt that Seversky’s ideas were unrealistic and that short-range missions were preferable; he even challenged Seversky to an aerial dogfight—Seversky in his big, long-range bomber, Thatch in his fighter plane.

  But Walt could not be dissuaded. Excited by the prospect of a Victory film that could use animation to show how long-range bombers could win the war, he felt his old passion rising again. He began to feel engaged. He had discovered something that could occupy him throughout the summer, something important, while the rest of the studio churned out its routine training and educational films. Animator Marc Davis said that Walt was “sold completely. Dedicated to it.” And once he had committed, Walt boasted that the studio “became a sort of Mecca for visiting airmen” who agreed with Seversky and delivered the
latest intelligence to him, so that Walt was now part of a small movement. Seversky himself may have had a reputation for being arrogant, tough-minded, and cantankerous, but Roy had met him that July and was impressed, calling him “refreshing and interesting,” and—what was important to Roy—not out to squeeze the studio for additional money. For Seversky as for Walt, this was all about patriotism, all about promoting a new way to win the war—what Seversky felt was the only way to win the war.

  Now, pressed to convince the public of the theory as soon as possible so that he could make a difference, Walt began yet another push. (He felt another pressure too: a preliminary survey conducted for the studio showed that the public was tiring of war films, so that, as the pollster put it, “the sooner VICTORY THROUGH AIR POWER can be released, the better.”) Walt met Seversky for the first time on July 28 at the studio, already armed with storyboards and surrounded by his staff, including Dave Hand, Bill Cottrell, and Perce Pearce. As he had been with Leopold Stokowski, Walt was deferential, recognizing that this was Seversky’s project and that Walt was really just the facilitator. Layout artist Ken Anderson remembered one rainy weekend that August when he and fellow artist Herb Ryman were essentially locked into the studio and forced to come up with a final storyboard. “Seversky would come in and encourage us,” Anderson said, “and Walt would give us threatening looks like, ‘You guys better do a good job because I’m counting on you,’” by which Anderson thought he meant that the country was counting on them.