by Neal Gabler
But as he waited, he was distracted and disconsolate. Ollie Johnston, who was classified 4-F due to an ulcer, remembered meeting Walt in the hallways and he would begin to converse, then stop suddenly and lean against the wall for several minutes without saying a word. “And I didn’t want to walk away,” Johnston said, “because I knew he wanted somebody there. He was down because there just wasn’t anything he really could get involved in.” Though the shorts—the Donald Ducks, the Goofys, and the Plutos—continued to move through the studio to fulfill the contractual obligations to RKO, the market was oversaturated, and in any case Walt had long since ceased to care. After Victory he tried to interest Roy in the possibility of combining The Wind in the Willows, which was still slowly snaking its way through production, and the Mickey Mouse featurette on Jack and the Beanstalk into a single film, or even combining Willows with Gremlins, but Roy wasn’t encouraging. If they were to get any return, the budget couldn’t exceed $450,000—even Dumbo had cost $200,000 more than that—and the best Walt could do, after cutting and slashing, was $523,000. Even at that, Roy said single-subject features were still more promising, despite the fact that the studio couldn’t currently produce them, and if it did, the business office had set a maximum budget for new productions far below that of Snow White, Pinocchio, or Fantasia. Walt’s only option was to keep going to Washington to toady to the officials there in hopes of keeping the government pump primed.
He had no harbor. If the studio’s mission suffered during the war years, so did Walt Disney’s family. Even before the war had placed such heavy demands on him, Lillian and the girls had always been subordinated to the studio. Walt made attempts to mollify them. Lillian often accompanied him on his trips east and even to Mexico, and he was as attentive a parent as he could possibly be under the circumstances, still taking the girls to the studio on weekends, where they followed him from room to room, or to the airport to see the planes take off and land, or to the train station where he would put his ear to the track and listen for the train the way he had when he was a boy in Marceline. And he bought them a cocker spaniel puppy, Taffy, that he admitted he and Lillian seemed to appreciate more than the girls. When he was feeling self-important, it was the girls, he said, especially serious ten-year-old Diane, who could give him a look that “brings me off my high horse.” But despite his very real devotion, the press of business and the need to decompress from it made it difficult now for him to be as engaged a father as he would have liked. “Last Sunday was the first time in months I didn’t listen to the radio,” he wrote Deems Taylor early in 1944. “For a change I took my oldest daughter horseback riding and later on played a hot game of tag with the both of them in the yard.”
The best times now were the vacations at the Sugar Bowl ski area or at the Lake Arrowhead resort ninety miles east of Los Angeles—or better still at the Smoke Tree resort in Palm Springs, where even before the war he would spend several weeks with the family each spring, usually shuttling back and forth to the studio every few days, and where he typically spent Thanksgiving with Lillian and the girls during the war. Lillian said he loved the “openness” of Palm Springs, but it clearly wasn’t only the physical openness of the hot, flat expanse of desert with the purple mountains in the distance that he appreciated. It was, no doubt, the absence of feeling suffocated by the studio and the overwhelming government work there. It was the freedom from having to tend to a thousand details about which he didn’t really care but for which he knew he would be held responsible.
By 1944 the workload hadn’t lifted, but Walt’s sense of commitment had. He had become so cavalier that when Dave Hand, who had been Walt’s primary production associate for years, tendered his resignation, Walt, rather than urge Hand to stay, coolly called Roy and told him to cancel Hand’s contract—an admission that the resumption of feature animation was not imminent. Walt spent much of the year traveling, back and forth between Los Angeles and Washington, or to New York—he took a month-long trip there with Lillian late that May—and then went on another long trip that August that was scheduled to take them to Mexico, Cuba, Williamsburg, Virginia, and then New York again, though the Cuban leg was later canceled. (It was Walt’s first visit to the colonial recreation at Williamsburg, and it left a deep impression.) The main order of business, besides just keeping the studio running, was the sequel to Saludos Amigos, which had been titled The Three Caballeros after its three cartoon protagonists—Donald Duck, a parrot named José Carioca, and a gun-toting rooster named Panchito. As early as March, Roy had shown Nelson Rockefeller storyboards and played him recordings, but the studio missed its June deadline, and in mid-July, Walt wired Vern Caldwell that he couldn’t give any definite date when the film would be completed. A large part of the delay could be attributed to the studio experimenting with new techniques to combine a live actor with an animated character in the same frame—just as Walt had done with far less sophistication in the old Alice comedies.
The film wasn’t completed until November, though when it was, Walt seemed pleased by the technological advances of the combined live-action/animation and by the film’s manic modernist energy, telegraphing Rockefeller that “IT MOVES WITH THE TEMPO OF AN EXPRESS TRAIN.” Ward Kimball, who had animated a song in the film in which, as he recalled it, Donald Duck races frantically all over the screen and sometimes right past the edges, later called it the “one bit of animation that I’m proud of.” Director Gerry Geronomi disagreed. He didn’t even want to show the sequence to Walt, because, Kimball said, Donald would run off the frame on one side, only to reemerge through the top of the frame—a violation of the old Disney principle of realism.* Kimball told him to “[s]tuff it up your ass,” because the film was already overdue and because Walt now demanded to see all the footage. As Kimball related it, Walt saw the scene and “howled.” “He just thought it was so great. He said, ‘Jesus, this is it.’” Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas believed that the scene, along with another that Kimball later animated for the short Pecos Bill, initiated a “whole wave of preposterous actions and brittle timing throughout the industry,” which meant that the Disney studio, which had spearheaded realism, was now spearheading the self-reflexive movement away from it.
But not everyone was enamored of this new direction. James Agee detected a “streak of cruelty” in Caballeros, a streak he thought had been gathering force for years in Disney’s films, perhaps as Walt’s retribution for the tribulations he felt he had suffered. Barbara Deming, writing in Partisan Review, also believed that Disney had “wrought something monstrous,” but she thought that in doing so he had made a telling commentary on the times. As Deming saw it, Disney’s “gift” was “to be able to accept wholeheartedly the outlook of the hour, and to improvise with it, whatever it might be,” which was how Mickey Mouse could express the aggressive rebelliousness of the Depression and Pinocchio the new moral commitment required by the coming war. In Caballeros, by making the entire film into a phantasmagoria in which characters and shapes keep morphing into other characters and shapes, in which the object of one’s desire seems to be attained only to disappear, and in which both the characters and the audience keep losing their bearings, Walt Disney had managed to find the perfect metaphor for a world spinning in the vortex of war. “Nothing holds its shape,” Deming observed, concluding that Donald Duck in Caballeros “could be likened in his adventures here, his confusions and translations, to most major characters now passing across our screens” and presumably to Americans generally: lost.
None of these reactions made its commercial prospects any more favorable, and Kay Kamen had overheard an RKO representative grumbling that he was going to have a hard time selling the film. As it turned out, the chaos of Caballeros was more appealing than either the tender solemnity of Bambi or the tendentiousness of Victory Through Air Power. It accrued $900,000 in billings in just 11 weeks, compared to 31 weeks for Bambi and 48 for Dumbo. In South America it was wildly popular. The Mexican magazine Tiempo lauded Walt as “one of t
he greatest creators in the motion picture world” and said he had brought a “world of friendship and understanding to the people of all countries.” A Brazilian newspaper, A Noite, went even further, calling it the “best thing Disney has made so far.”
Financially if not artistically speaking, it was shaping up to be a good year. Thanks to the quantity of product generated by the war and by the release of $141,000 in funds that had been impounded in Britain as well as the suspension of dividends after April 1941 on the stock it had issued, the studio had managed to reduce its debt to the Bank of America to just under $1 million and had working capital of $3 million. Now that the company was beginning to post profits again, however, the Bank of America warned Walt and Roy that stockholders were unlikely to be as patient as they had been and suggested that the company convert its preferred stock into debentures and common stock, which would give the Disneys even more working capital and eliminate a large “sinking fund” they had had to maintain as a hedge for the preferred stockholders.
This wasn’t just a matter of economics—it was a matter of control. “Do we want to maintain 100% control and operation of a company burdened with debt and confronted with big possibilities, hoping for a windfall, such as a big grossing picture or television, to let us keep going?” Roy asked Walt. “Or, shall we reconstruct our whole stock set-up in some way that is more secure and more sure, and have a lesser interest—but nevertheless a controlling interest—of a company that is sound and, therefore more safe and more able to meet the future properly?” Roy left no doubt where he stood, especially since, as he warned Walt, should any of the Disneys die, they would have to sell some of their stock to pay the inheritance tax anyway, and as for letting their employees hold the stock, he adduced Carl Stalling and Ub Iwerks as examples of ordinary stockholders who had lacked the foresight to understand the value of what they had actually been granted. After the strike Walt may have given up his grandiose idea of the studio as a workers’ community—he complained that his employees had sold their stock when the value plummeted because they “lost faith in me”—and he had already surrendered power to the executive committee instituted by the Bank of America, but he had always wanted to retain as much control as he could; it was a part of his redoubt against the world. Now, with the studio foundering aimlessly, he conceded to Roy. He chose stability over authority, the money over the risk.
Yet the studio gained another source of income that year in addition to the refinancing, and it reminded Walt of what the studio had been before the war. While coming back on the train from one of his Washington trips early in 1942, he had met Nate Blumberg, the head of Universal Pictures, who told Walt how Universal had mined its old film library for pictures they could reissue and advised that the Disney studio do the same. Walt had prodded Roy on the matter, asking him to consider re-releasing Snow White and possibly some of the other features in time for Christmas in 1943. Roy finally agreed on Snow White, though the company missed the holiday season and opened it instead in February 1944. It was the first time in years that RKO seemed energized by the prospect of selling a Disney film, even if it was an old one, and Vern Caldwell wrote Walt that they expected an “exceptional gross.” In fact, its success had become so important to the studio that Roy, citing “your production problems,” urged Walt to attend the Cincinnati premiere, which he did. When it opened in New York early in April, Walt bragged that in all of its return engagements to that point Snow White had equaled the gross of the average A feature and exceeded the grosses of the most recent Disney films.* Even Roy crowed to Walt that “SNOW WHITE really seems hot.”
Meanwhile, as American troops invaded the Normandy beaches in France that June—at Allied headquarters the code name for the operation was “Mickey Mouse”—and the war began its long slog to a conclusion, Walt was supervising the training films and South American pictures for the coordinator. When the European phase of the war ended in May 1945 and the Japanese phase four months later, the studio closed for three days in celebration. Though he had shown surprisingly little interest in the war itself outside of Victory, Walt Disney had made significant contributions to the American success. Among the smaller contributions, he had provided twelve-hundred designs for military insignia, and the Treasury Department credited him with helping to sell more than $50 million worth of savings bonds. Among the larger ones were the government movies—by one estimate (inexact because the records were inexact), he had made between 150 and 300 hours of them in just over four years, though Walt couldn’t have been more ecstatic now that the production of them was over. “For Christ’s sake, Marc,” he told animator Marc Davis shortly after the war, “I never want to do another training film as long as I live!”
As important as the training films were, Walt may have left an even greater mark with the films he had produced for the coordinator. The movies on health and literacy had had a deep effect on people’s lives, and Jack Cutting, who headed the studio’s foreign department, wrote Walt early in 1945 that The Winged Scourge, the film on mosquito control, “created a greater sensation than ‘Gone With the Wind’” in a small Cuban village where mosquito infestation was rampant. Writing a year after the war’s end, Nelson Rockefeller called Walt’s South American trip and his films that flowed from it the “most effective work in inter-American relations” and said “they did more than anything else to bring the people of the Americas closer together.”
Now that work was over. And Walt Disney could look forward once again to doing what he had always wanted to do: make great films that would entertain audiences and demonstrate his own power to create life. At least, that was what he thought he would do.
Nine
ADRIFT
For nearly four years Walt Disney had waited—waited to reclaim command of the studio from the soldiers and bankers who had taken over, waited to put his beloved features back into production so that he could be a filmmaker again, waited to restore his imaginative world, waited to blaze new trails. “I am now hoping that we can get out two or three features a year now,” he wrote his sister Ruth that December, “and are preparing stories for nearly five years ahead.” He already had in the hopper not only The Wind in the Willows but Alice in Wonderland; Peter Pan; the Mickey Mouse feature; a new set of Mickey Mouse shorts based on the stories of Horatio Alger; the Sinclair Lewis story “Bongo”; a biography of Hans Christian Andersen with animated sequences that he had been discussing as a joint production with producer Samuel Goldwyn throughout the war; Andersen’s story “The Emperor and the Nightingale”; a package of musical shorts; an Irish fairy story titled “The Little People”; Sterling North’s best-selling children’s novel Midnight and Jeremiah; an adaptation of Don Quixote; a series on American folk heroes; the Uncle Remus film that he had been preparing since 1940; and at least a half-dozen other projects he had acquired before the war in the glow of Snow White’s success. At the same time he told columnist Hedda Hopper that he planned to increase shorts production and, with his war experience, move into educational and industrial films, if only, he admitted, to keep his staff active. He was even investigating a Disney radio program again.
The war had boosted audiences and generated profits for the film business generally, if not for Walt, and though Walt believed that once the war was over the “motion picture business was gonna be really hit in the jaw,” he was nevertheless practically manic at the prospect of making real movies again.* “I think we have a great future ahead of us,” he wrote Lee Blair, who had worked at the studio with his wife, Mary, before Blair joined the service, “and we have some marvelous plans with some good stuff in work that will be out during the coming year…. [T]here’s no doubt in my mind that when better cartoons are made, you know where they’ll be made!” To another correspondent he said that he was devoting his facilities “100% toward building up our inventory so we can get the company on a profit basis,” adding, “with the old profits rolling in, you’re in a position to experiment and do the thing you want.”
> After the four years just past, doing what he had been doing before the war wasn’t enough. If only to demonstrate that he was not passé, Walt wanted, needed, to do something new, something different, something unusual. Sometime early in 1944, he had seen a book of surrealist paintings by the Spanish-born artist Salvador Dali lying on animator Marc Davis’s desk, and he asked Davis if he could take it home. That February Walt wrote Dali requesting an autograph on a copy of his own and suggesting a collaboration. It was an incongruous combination—the plainspoken, down-to-earth midwesterner and the eccentric Dali—and Walt’s brush mustache versus Dali’s thin, lacquered, loopy one was a visual representation of that incongruity. But Dali, who happened to be in southern California at the time of Walt’s note, responded enthusiastically, calling a possible joint venture “unique, of ‘the never seen’!” They didn’t meet until June, when Dali visited the studio and lunched with Walt, and they didn’t close a deal until November, but by this time they had been meeting and corresponding frequently. Dali said he was finishing a synopsis of a short based on a Mexican folksong that Walt had had scored called “Destino,” about how destiny shapes the lives of two lovers and expressing “NEW FRESH POSSIBILITIES OF VISUALIZATION.” “We await with great hope the new world that will be born from our collaboration,” Dali wired Walt that December.
So did Walt Disney. The criticisms of Bambi had especially hurt. Though he had sought realism from the first as the best means of creating an alternative universe, he knew that even if he could continue the march toward realism (which he couldn’t), he was now increasingly regarded by intellectuals as an aesthetic troglodyte and that he had lost the cachet he had once enjoyed as a folk artist. “The thing I resent most is people who try to keep me in well-worn grooves,” he said to a reporter after embarking on his partnership with Dali. “We have to keep breaking new trails,” citing Fantasia as an example of a pathbreaking film that was “panned” at its release but that had continued to build an audience. And he said that he kept a slogan pasted inside his porkpie hat from the time he had been urged to make a sequel to Three Little Pigs: “You can’t top pigs with pigs!”