by Neal Gabler
If the evidence of Walt’s transformation was his conservatism and the lead-footed animations devoid of energy or menace, the change also registered in his image in the press. The young Walt Disney whom reporters had loved to extol as democratic, informal, unselfconscious, self-effacing, and even childish (though in reality he had long ceased being so) had been supplanted by another Walt Disney who almost seemed to be carved in granite like Washington or Lincoln. This Walt Disney was a symbol of a different side of postwar America from the one the Warners purveyed—not so much plucky and emancipated as mature, decent, genial, solid, self-confident, successful, responsible, and a bit complacent. He was a man without vices, passions, or peccadilloes—the very personification of square midwestern probity. In effect, just as Mickey Mouse’s success had converted Mickey from an imp to a logo of harmless happiness so that by the late 1940s he had traded his red shorts with their bright yellow buttons for a suburbanite’s shirts and slacks, Walt Disney’s seeming success had converted him from what he once jokingly called a “careless, temperamental artist” to the country’s favorite businessman. As one studio veteran put it, “The late forties was the time when Walt Disney discovered Walt Disney.” He had been subsumed by his studio. Now he was beginning to be subsumed by his new image.
Having succumbed to the change, it was almost as if he were searching for the Walt Disney within him, the old human Walt Disney, when he embarked in June 1947 on a visit to Goderich, Ontario, to which his grandfather had come from Ireland nearly a century earlier and in which his father had been born. Walt and Elias had often talked of making this trip together, but Walt had always been busy and Elias had died. Now Walt flew to New York with Lillian, Lillian’s sister Hazel, and Hazel’s husband, Bill Cottrell. In New York they picked up a car and drove unhurriedly through Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine before heading across the Canadian border to Montreal, Toronto, and then Goderich. With his father’s first cousin, Peter Cantelon, he visited the cemetery in nearby Holmesville where Disneys and Richardsons, Walt’s grandmother’s family, were buried and drove to a farm near Goderich where the ruins of his great-grandfather Robert Richardson’s log cabin survived. It was in that cabin, he was told, that Walt’s grandfather and grandmother had been married. (Walt eagerly snapped photographs, only to discover later that it was not the actual house; Lillian, who had reluctantly accompanied him, never let him forget his mistake.) Then he drove out to Potter Farm, where the Disneys had once lived. He even visited his father’s old schoolhouse. It was the sort of solemn, nostalgic pilgrimage that Walt Disney seldom made. But he needed the journey now. He was lost.
With the animations no longer holding his attention and the combination films only an expedient, Walt kept searching for something that might pique his interest and help spark the studio. During the war he had waxed enthusiastic over the educational potential of films and filmstrips. “It is not visionary or presumptuous for us to anticipate the use of our own medium in the curriculum of every schoolroom in the world,” he had told a national radio audience in 1943. Indeed, educators were clamoring for Disney, and as early as 1944 William Benton of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had entered into negotiations with Walt to make a series of educational films—anywhere from six to twelve annually. “Probably the worst student you ever had has now become connected with education!” Walt joked in a letter to his old teacher, Daisy Beck. The following spring the president of Stanford University, Donald B. Tresidder, invited Walt and Lillian to the campus in Palo Alto for a weekend to discuss educational films and models. Meanwhile Walt assigned Carl Nater, who had worked on the war films, to head an educational film division at the studio.
But as with most of his contemplated projects in this period, he was soon disillusioned when he discovered that the quality of the films would be severely compromised by the minimal return he could hope to get, so that had he made them, he would have been back in the same position as when the studio was producing the training films. His real objection, though, may have been psychological rather than financial. In making educational films, he would have been conceding that he was edging away from entertainment—a concession he was not yet ready to make. “He would make entertainment,” wrote Jimmy Johnson, who worked at the studio, “and if the educators discovered some educational value in his films, then that was fine with him.” Ben Sharpsteen said that Walt was blunter. “We can’t bore the public with these things,” he recalled Walt saying repeatedly. “We can’t be boring. We’ve got to be entertaining.” Eventually Nater left the studio for academe, and the division closed.
But Walt had not given up entirely on finding a way to be both entertaining and educational, particularly if he could do so inexpensively. During the war the coordinator for inter-American affairs had suggested a documentary on the Amazon Basin, which was made as The Amazon Awakens. At the same time the studio was inundated with requests from naturalists about the possibilities of collaborating on nature documentaries, and one of them, apparently at Walt’s request, had even laid out a program of shorts. Roy promptly quashed it, saying it would “certainly take a long time and a lot of film,” but Walt was not deterred. From his days on the farm in Marceline he had loved animals and was fascinated by them and thought others would be fascinated too. (One visitor to the studio remembered Walt gently plucking a worm from a tree and saying, “This is one of God’s creatures, and we don’t harm them.”) Late in 1944, even as the studio was deep into its war films, Carl Nater and Walt had visited with an official of the New York Zoological Society with a plan, as Nater described it, “to eventually make films on animals, bird life, fish life, and any other type of living creature around which there is a real story to tell.”
While Walt was considering subjects for the series, Ben Sharpsteen approached him in the hall one day, observed that returning veterans were beginning to homestead in Alaska, and suggested that there might be a story in it. Walt told him to pursue it. Inspired by a book written by a former Stanford University president named David Star Jordan, who had helped negotiate a treaty between Russia and Japan on seal hunting (the book was told from the seals’ point of view), Sharpsteen said he contacted a husband-and-wife photography team in Alaska, Alfred and Elma Milotte. In fact, Al Milotte had written Walt in 1940 offering pictures of animals on the Alaskan range, which Walt, who was in preproduction for Bambi, declined. But according to Milotte, it was Walt, not Sharpsteen, who contacted him sometime later about shooting film of Alaska—nothing specific, Milotte remembered, just Walt saying, “You know—mining, fishing, building roads, the development of Alaska.”
So the Milottes shot. They shot for months. They shot, in Milotte’s words, “everything that moved”: people cutting timber, catching salmon, building railroads, climbing Mount McKinley, hunting game—more than 100,000 feet of film. The idea, inchoate as it was, was that the film would tell a story about America’s last real frontier. Unfortunately, the footage was precisely what Walt said he had wanted to avoid: it was boring. “Too many mines. Too many roads. More animals. More Eskimos,” Walt had wired Al Milotte. To which Milotte wired back: “How about seals?” Walt okayed the couple going to the Pribilof Islands, which were the mating grounds for thousands of fur seals. The couple stayed for a year—much of the time in darkness, due to the shortened days at the Arctic Circle—filming the battles between young unattached males and older bulls, the matings, the births of the pups, and the seals’ winter migration to the Pacific Ocean. The only communication they said they received from Walt as they shipped back their footage was an occasional telegram with the same command: “More seals.”
Roy had been right about the nature documentaries. They did take a long time and a lot of film to produce. Walt had conferred with the Milottes at the studio shortly after the end of the war, and they visited again a year later with Sharpsteen in December 1946, while Walt was in Ireland, though Sharpsteen said it wasn’t until a few years later, as the project languished, that Walt decid
ed to cut the Eskimos altogether and focus exclusively on the seals. Walt professed not to care what these cuts did to shorten the film’s length. He told Sharpsteen, “[W]hatever it ran, it ran.” In August 1947, Walt visited Alaska himself, “to see some of the things first hand and get a little idea of Alaska to help him in making the picture,” Roy said, but also to spend some time with his eleven-year-old daughter Sharon, who accompanied him as he jumped around the territory. It would be yet another year before the Milottes’ footage would be edited into what would be called Seal Island.
Now that the film was finally finished after all these years, RKO, the Disneys’ distributor, was not interested. Without the Eskimos or the story of Alaskan homesteading, the film was only twenty-eight minutes long—too short for a second feature and too long for a short. RKO saw no way of distributing it. Then there was the subject matter. “They all say, ‘Who wants to watch seals playing house on a bare rock?’” Roy told Walt after returning from a sales trip to New York. Though the film had been made cheaply—for just over $100,000—Walt was not about to let it disappear. As he had done so many years before with The Skeleton Dance, when he convinced an exhibitor to preview the cartoon, he arranged to have the film shown at the Crown Theater in Pasadena the last week of December 1948. The audience was spellbound. “It knocks the people right in their bloody hat,” said Disney artist Harper Goff, who attended the first screening. But Walt wasn’t interested only in demonstrating the film’s audience appeal. By showing Seal Island for a week at the theater, Walt had qualified it for the Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject, which it won a few months later. Now it was salable. When Sharpsteen walked into Walt’s office the morning after the ceremony carrying the Oscar he had picked up for the studio, Walt ordered his secretary to take it to Roy’s office and “tell him to hit RKO over the head with it.”
It was the first of what Walt would call his True-Life Adventures, nature documentaries that brought Walt’s old narrative skills to natural events, and in its own way it would prove just as revolutionary as his first sound animation or Snow White. Seal Island would become the model not only for Disney documentaries but for nature documentaries generally: a strong plot, anthropomorphized animals with emotions imputed to them, and a musical track that Jim Algar, who directed Seal Island, compared to the music in the Disney animations, which made the documentaries into real-life cartoons. “[W]herever we saw a change we tried to take rhythmic natural action and edit in such a fashion that a musical score could accompany it,” leading some people to marvel, Algar said, at how they got the animals to perform to the music. On the other hand, while audiences marveled, these devices prompted purists to complain that Disney had falsified nature in the service of his postwar kitsch—a complaint that would dog him for the rest of his life.* But Walt for once seemed undisturbed. He had found a way to combine entertainment with education. He had won a small battle in what was becoming a long losing war.
IV
Besieged and miserable, Walt Disney knew who was responsible for his studio’s declining fortunes, knew that these people were “hoping it was the end” for him, as he later put it, and two months after he returned from Alaska, he headed to Washington to help vanquish them. The enemy wasn’t just the economics of animations or the bankers with their constraints or changing aesthetics or a new postwar mood that Walt couldn’t quite tap the way he had tapped the mood of the Depression. The enemy was Communism—Communism that had wracked the studio during the strike, Communism that had sneaked into Hollywood like a Trojan horse to promote values deleterious to democracy, Communism that was even now undermining the nation as it had undermined the motion picture industry. Walt Disney was going to fight Communism.
This was a rather unusual mission for him. Despite their father’s radicalism—Elias and apparently Flora as well had voted for the socialist presidential candidates, Eugene V. Debs and then Norman Thomas—neither Walt nor Roy had ever shown much interest in politics. Politics was the outside world, the world that Walt had built his studio to protect himself from, and anyone hunting for a consistent political subtext to the cartoons would have been baffled by the oscillation between the impertinent Mickey Mouse cartoons of the early 1930s and the Silly Symphonies like The Grasshopper and the Ants, The Tortoise and the Hare, and The Country Cousin that promoted traditional values like hard work, thrift, and discipline. The oscillation reflected the Disneys’ lack of political conviction. When writer Upton Sinclair won the Democratic gubernatorial primary in California in 1934 on a platform promising to end poverty with government programs and then was defeated in the general election by an influx of Hollywood money, Roy chided his parents for supporting Sinclair but admitted, “Many of the things he advocated are going to come around in some form or other. However, I don’t believe you can upset society overnight,” and he closed his letter, “I can hear Dad saying, ‘Now, since the boys have joined the capitalist class and the employers’ class, they sing a different tune.’ Well, of course, it is true.”
Walt would claim that he came to his political conservatism by another route. He told Maurice Rapf that when he was a boy in Kansas City, he had been attacked by a gang of Irish kids whose fathers worked for the Democratic political machine and who put hot tar on his scrotum because Elias was a socialist. Rapf never believed the story and Walt’s old benefactor Dr. John Cowles had been a large cog in the Democratic machine, but Walt insisted the episode had turned him into a “dyed-in-the-wool Republican.” More likely Walt’s politics were the result of his rebelliousness against Elias, but the fact was that Walt hadn’t really been a conservative or a Republican or much of anything else for the better part of his adult life. Rather, his politics had been marked by either confusion or neutrality. He had voted for Roosevelt in 1936, even as Roy had voted for Republican Alf Landon, and though he said he supported Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie in 1940—Willkie had visited the studio and discussed education with Walt—he declined a request from the Willkie campaign for an endorsement, writing, “[A] long time ago I found out that I knew nothing whatsoever about this game of politics and since then I’ve preferred to keep silent about the entire matter rather than see my name attached to any statement that was not my own.” As for his conservatism, he told another correspondent who was lobbying him to make a reel of flags with patriotic music that “I don’t go in for bill-board patriotism.” “He was very apolitical, believe me,” said Joe Grant, who accompanied Walt on several wartime visits to Washington.
Disney’s detractors, after the fact, would say that he had been an admirer of German chancellor Adolf Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and Art Babbitt in later years claimed to have actually seen Walt and Gunther Lessing at Bund meetings of Nazi sympathizers that Babbitt himself had attended out of curiosity; that was highly unlikely, not only because Walt had little enough time for his family, much less political meetings, but because he had no real political leanings at the time. Others would find evidence of pro-Nazi sentiment in Walt’s invitation to German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who had directed the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, to tour the studio. Riefenstahl did visit the studio on December 8, 1938, through an invitation solicited from Walt by a close friend of Riefenstahl’s and an acquaintance of Walt’s, Jay Stowitts, who had been a ballet dancer with Anna Pavlova, a star of the Folies Bergère, a painter, and an actor. Stowitts wrote Walt that Riefenstahl had slipped into California quietly and had asked to meet him because she considered him “the greatest personage in American films.” As Riefenstahl later described the meeting, she spent the entire day with Walt at the studio (Walt’s desk diary shows a sweatbox session for the “Claire de Lune” sequence of Fantasia at two o’clock) then offered to have a print of her film Olympia messengered over when Walt expressed interest in seeing it. But Walt, she said, suddenly hesitated, saying, “If I see your film then all of Hollywood will find out by tomorrow,” since his projectionists were unionized. He feared that he might
be boycotted. Three months later, Riefenstahl wrote, Walt disavowed her trip, claiming that he hadn’t known who she was when he issued the invitation.
Of course Walt had known who Riefenstahl was; to Stowitts’s original letter, someone, presumably a studio publicist, had attached an ad from Variety placed by the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League declaring that Riefenstahl was in Hollywood and calling for the industry to ostracize her. Still Walt, who was something of a political naïf, may not have known exactly what she represented, and he certainly would not have wanted to get embroiled in any political controversy at the time. As Europe churned in the mid-1930s, Walt had expressly told one reporter that America should “let ’em fight their own wars” and that he had “learned my lesson” from the last one. Once the war started, even after the 1941 strike, left-wing groups frequently asked for his contributions and support, in everything from helping to underwrite a series of lectures by Owen Lattimore (a left-leaning China expert who would later be condemned by Communist-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy) to serving as a patron for the Congress of American-Soviet Friendship, all of which suggested that Walt was not perceived as a hopeless reactionary. Walt sometimes agreed, sending his “heartfelt greetings to the gallant people of the Soviet Union” on that country’s twenty-fifth anniversary, appearing as guest of honor at a “Night of the Americas” sponsored by a group designated by the attorney general as subversive, and signing an ad in the Daily Worker along with Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Communist leader Earl Browder, and others for “A Tribute to the Memory of Art Young,” a left-wing cartoonist. (Though Walt would have a long association with the FBI, helping promote the bureau, his own file cited the “Night of the Americas” and the Young tribute as casting doubt on his patriotism.) At the same time, however, having been shaken by the strike, he was lauding Reader’s Digest for an anti-Soviet article by Max Eastman that Walt thought would counteract pro-Soviet Hollywood propaganda like the film Mission to Moscow, and he had joined staunch conservatives like actors Ginger Rogers, Robert Montgomery, and George Murphy in forming a Hollywood Republican Committee to counteract the more liberal Progressive Citizens of America.