Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  If anything, with Walt distracted by the park and often absent, the tension at the studio, which had been steadily rising since before the strike more than ten years earlier, only intensified. The staff lived in fear—total abject fear. Richard Fleischer, a film director and the son of Walt’s old rival Max Fleischer, came to the studio to make 20,000 Leagues and was surprised at what he found: “There was a general feeling of nervousness and insecurity about the place, which was attributed to the frequent mass firings that seemed to take place capriciously,” he would write. Fleischer said he dismissed the theory until Walt confirmed it. “‘You know,’ he said to me, ‘every once in a while I just fire everybody, then I hire them back in a couple of weeks. That way they don’t get too complacent. It keeps them on their toes.’” Another employee said that Walt’s staff greeted him “with the total respect peasants usually show to their king,” and remarked how they “would fervently agree even if he said 2 plus 2 was 22.” A young writer who was being considered for a biographical television special on Beethoven observed how cautious the staff was lest they make a decision that might upset Walt, even though some of them had been at the studio for decades. “Fear, in fact, seemed to be their normal state—one that I would soon learn was warranted,” she wrote. “They had witnessed the summary firing of others who had disagreed just once with Disney. They liked their work; they valued their careers; they knew better than to cross their tyrannical boss.” Ben Sharpsteen, who had been at the studio since 1929, often in the role of Walt’s whipping boy, developed a nervous condition that required him to take frequent leaves from the studio. “These seem to be occurring oftener and for longer durations,” he wrote Walt.

  An associate described Walt as “steel springs inside a silk pillow,” but the springs kept poking through. He was often cold and baleful now. “[A]ll the dead wood is going to be weeded out,” he wrote Gunther Lessing after being reelected as chairman of the board just as Disneyland was ramping up, and he saw dead wood everywhere. After ordering Bill Anderson halfway through the first season to fire one member of the staff of The Mickey Mouse Club—“I feel he is still on our payroll, but I do not know why”—Walt added: “Also check on everybody in the Mouseketeer Group who has been carried over. I believe that outside of the 9 Mouseketeers, Jimmy [sic] Dodd and Roy Williams, we should start from scratch…. Let’s make a thorough check on the setup of the Mouseketeers and see that we are not carrying people who are not needed”—this after the staff had practically broken themselves to rush the program to the air. Similarly A. G. Keener, who had been the paymaster at the studio for fifteen years, was dismissed and given a reference letter more appropriate to a short-term employee: “Because of world market conditions, our organization has been compelled to undergo a drastic reduction in personnel. And in line with this cut, Mr. Keener’s Department has been absorbed by the general Accounting Department.” Norm Ferguson, once the premier animator, was terminated because he had become “dead wood.” Fred Moore had been reinstated, then terminated again—still dead wood. (He would die a short time later in an automobile accident; Walt did not attend the funeral.) Fred Leahy was finally fired (Walt insisted he had resigned), and Hal Adelquist, after two decades of performing some of the most thankless tasks at the studio, decided to leave too. When Adelquist obsequiously petitioned Walt to return not long thereafter—“I’m not particular about the kind of work involved”—Walt refused. Jack Kinney, who had been at the studio since 1931, first as an animator, then as a director of sequences in Pinocchio and Dumbo, and then as director of most of the Goofy cartoons, was laid off and later left the studio. The wife of another former Disney sketch artist sent Walt a silver Madonna in the hope that he might buy it to finance a cataract operation that the artist needed to save the sight in his only good eye. Walt offered to buy it for $100. “I do not believe we are justified, in view of the market, to make the price any higher,” he wrote her.

  The man who had once been so collaborative now brooked no dissent at the studio. When the young writer of the Beethoven film suggested an approach that differed from Walt’s, he gave her a chilling look, then slammed his fist on the desk, sending books and papers to the floor. “In the ominous silence, Disney’s face hardened,” she later wrote. “He said coldly that the conference was over.” Even a longtime employee like storyman Bill Peet felt Walt’s lash—not because Peet was out of phase with Walt but, Ward Kimball thought, because he was too closely in phase with him. Peet would make a presentation, according to Kimball, and then Walt would “pick away at little details.” So Peet would change the material, and two weeks later Walt would return to Peet’s room to say, “I don’t think it should be this way,” and then “outline exactly word for word the way Bill had it originally.” But, said Kimball, the “unwritten law was that you couldn’t point this out to Walt…. That’s like putting your head in the tiger’s mouth. This went on all the time.” Peet himself said he had been warned early on, “Once you get in Walt’s doghouse, you may never get out,” as Peet discovered when he refused to redo a sequence in the new Sleeping Beauty and Walt exiled him to animate a Peter Pan Peanut Butter commercial.

  Walt’s eruptions at the studio now were more frequent, his temper more easily lost. When Harper Goff forgot to make a medallion for the seal in 20,000 Leagues, Walt, according to director Richard Fleischer, “blasted him up one side and down the other,” and Goff ran off “like a scalded cat” to remedy the mistake. On the same film Walt had assigned the matte artist Peter Ellenshaw to work with a veteran special effects man. Ellenshaw asked to be reassigned. Walt insisted he stay. When Ellenshaw remonstrated, Walt barked, “I’m talking. You shut up.” As Ellenshaw put it, “He cut me down as if he had had a scythe in his hand.” “You have to have a humble attitude, don’t argue,” Harry Tytle wrote his wife from Europe after Walt had snapped at another longtime employee, Gerry Geronomi, over dinner there. And as always he was mercurial. “You were being patted on the head by this kindly old uncle who wanted you to be happy and have a nice warm lunch when you suddenly realized you were talking to Attila the Hun,” said producer Bill Walsh.

  Such behavior may have been caused by a still-simmering desire for revenge for the strike, or frustration at a studio that could no longer produce films of which Disney could be proud, or hostility at having to deal with the studio at all when Disneyland clearly claimed his attention. Bill Cottrell thought that after the initial emotional rush of the park, Walt was seized by a deeper sense of responsibility for the construction of Disneyland. “As time went on, Walt grew more serious,” Cottrell said, adding, “I don’t think Walt was having as much fun as he should have had.” Animator Eric Larson noticed it too. Walt, who had always hated the thought of money, now began to talk about it and worry about it “because they brought in people from the outside who talked him into the value of money.” But whatever it was, to those at the studio, Walt Disney, who had long been a distant and a terrifying presence, had become even more distant and even more terrifying.

  VI

  Walt’s image was that of a “lovable genius,” as columnist Louella Parsons called him. The image was that even if he had necessarily become more corporate as the company had grown, he had not become more “Hollywood.” He and Lillian were, in Parsons’s words, “two of the really happily married people in our town.” Lillian herself seemed to endorse that view. Near the end of her life she told one interviewer that she wouldn’t have traded a minute of “our wonderful life together” and said that she “adored him.” In truth, however, their marriage had tensions—serious ones, persistent ones. Though Lillian loved being Mrs. Walt Disney and was willing to subordinate herself to her husband—when asked for an autograph, she would sign on the flourish of the y in Walt’s “Disney”—and though she knew she had to share him with his public, she was not particularly happy about having to do either. Once, at the Calgary Stampede in Canada, where Walt was invited as a special guest, Lillian had to wait, sitting on a barrel, for two hour
s. “[S]he used to be provoked at being left alone like that,” Roy said, and quoted her as remarking that Walt “thought more of the public and the press than he did of her.” Even Diane admitted that her mother was “possessive” of Walt and “jealous of other people that were fond of him,” while Lillian herself was aloof with the public, haughty to them.

  She didn’t share his enthusiasms or his childlike effusions—not his animations or his miniatures or his trains or even Disneyland. Ward Kimball claimed to have seen Lillian at the opening of the park—actually she did not attend—and to have asked what she thought of it. “Well, it keeps Walt from playing around with other women,” she told him flatly, though Walt never played around with other women or even seemed to notice them. (His midlife crisis was his model trains.) On another occasion, at a July 4 company picnic, the artist T. Hee, who raised goats as a hobby, gave Walt and the girls a kid with a red ribbon and a bell as a pet. Walt packed the kid in the car to leave, but Lillian insisted that the goat was not going with them. Just as persistent, Walt said it was a gift and began driving off, but Lillian sobbed “furious tears,” Diane said, so Walt let them out at home, turned around with the kid still in the car, and spent the night at the studio. “That situation all but caused a divorce in the Disney household,” Walt wrote Hee.

  To Lillian, Walt was capricious. She told one interviewer that being married to him was like being “attached to one of those flying saucers they talk about,” and that she never knew “when Walt’s imagination is going to take off into the wild blue yonder and everything will explode.” That was exciting, she said, but she focused less on the excitement than on the uncertainty. “I’ve always been worried. I’ve never felt secure,” she told another interviewer, “but it got beyond the point where I could do anything about it. I just thought, ‘That’s it. He’s going to do it and that’s all there is to it.’” (For his part, Walt once told an animator who asked for a raise after the man’s wife had said they needed more money, “You listen to your wife, huh? I’d hate to tell you where I’d be if I had listened to my wife.”) Still, Lillian had never been one to accept Walt’s decisions meekly or his status unquestioningly, and she admitted that he was always telling people “how henpecked he is.” “Heavens, Mother had quarrels with him!” Diane recalled. “Good healthy ones. Nothing was ever under the surface in our family. If there were any irritations felt, there was an explosion.” And Lillian was usually the one to explode.

  She was unimpressed by him. Speaking of a negative magazine profile of himself, Walt told Hedda Hopper that Lillian didn’t care what reporters said about him. “In fact, she usually agrees with anybody who writes things like that,” he continued. “I keep reporters away from her. She’d give them the lowdown.” When Harry Tytle’s wife mentioned to Lillian that Walt was a genius, she cracked, “But how would you like being married to one?” “She was sort of unconscious, oblivious,” Diane said. “She moved in her own circle of beauty parlor appointments, reducing exercises, dressmaker appointments, and occasional shopping sprees…. Always had to redecorate the corner of some room. That was her life.” Walt called her “Madam Queen.”

  Walt was proud of her, proud of the way she dressed and the way she managed the household with so little help, only a cook and, when the girls were younger, Grace Papineau, Lillian’s sister, who lived with them and cared for the girls when Walt and Lillian were occupied or when the couple traveled, though Diane thought that having interlopers in the house, first Lillian’s sister Hazel and Hazel’s daughter Marjorie, and then Grace, contributed to family tensions. And he was physically affectionate with Lillian as he was with his daughters, whether she invited his attentions or not. He “always had his arm around her,” Diane said. She thought of them as “romantic.” He also tried to pacify her, if only to keep the domestic peace. He took rumba or mambo lessons so he could dance with her when they attended functions, and animator Frank Thomas remembered seeing him intently practicing steps behind a palm tree at one of them. And though he grumbled about Lillian’s spending—as he seldom grumbled about expenses at the studio or at Disneyland—he indulged her, albeit without being particularly thoughtful about it. One year, Lillian said, he handed her a catalog of fur coats and said, “Here’s your Christmas present.” Similarly, when Lillian asked for a radio, Walt had a large box of radios delivered to the office. Another year he gave her a petrified log as a present, which was promptly relocated to Disneyland. And another year, for their anniversary, he presented her with a necklace hung with miniature gold replicas of all the Oscars he had won—a tribute not to the marriage but to Walt.

  In the end, the new house that was intended to bring him closer to his family didn’t, if only because in the first few years, with the construction of Disneyland, he wasn’t at Carolwood any more than he had been at Woking Way. According to his secretary, he would usually arrive at the studio in the morning, then immediately go out for a meeting in one of the animation rooms or take a meeting in his office with the staff. If he was off roaming the studio or, more likely, looking in at WED, he often wouldn’t return to the office until noon. Then he would read his mail, drink a V-8 vegetable cocktail, eat a light lunch either in the office or at the commissary—“he had a theory,” his secretary said, “that too much food made you think confusedly”—and then conduct more meetings through the afternoon until closing time at five o’clock. Then he would return calls and sign letters and, of course, meet with nurse Hazel George for his end-of-the-day diathermy treatment, his wind-down, and his drink—a Scotch Mist with water. And then he would head home for dinner.

  But at home he was usually either drafting plans for Disneyland or puttering about in his workshop or playing with his train—at least until he retired his beloved Carolwood Railroad after the opening of the park. On one of its runs the train derailed, breaking its whistle and emitting a hiss of steam. A curious young passenger hopped off to look and was slightly scalded. By one account, Walt took the train to the studio machine shop and lodged it under the drafting table of one of the Imagineers, Bob Gurr, where he would occasionally visit it. “He would always touch it in a special way,” Gurr said, “making sure it was all right.” Sharon had another version. Though he stopped running the train after that incident, she said, he kept it at the house and one Sunday afternoon decided to run it himself with a remote control from his work barn. But in a scene out of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the train, as Sharon described it, “ran full tilt into the side of the garage. Daddy took a lot of pictures of it and stashed it for good in a cubby at Disneyland. He was through with toy trains.” Walt told it differently. He said he got tired of seeing everyone else riding the train and enjoying themselves while “I was wearing myself out stoking coal all day.”

  In any case, even if Disneyland hadn’t intervened, after Duchess died he was less inclined to spend time in the workshop tooling items for his train. She had had gallstones, and rather than operate on her, the veterinarian wanted to put her down. Walt refused and stayed with her. “I feel you take them and you owe it to them,” he said. She actually seemed to be recovering and was being given a bath at the vet’s office when she suddenly expired. Perhaps nothing spoke more forcefully of the nature of Walt and Lillian’s relationship than the fact that Walt suspected Lillian had countermanded him and told the vet to have Duchess euthanized. “He was furious,” Diane recalled, and demanded that an autopsy be performed. “That was the only way he could believe she hadn’t done anything behind his back.” Even after Duchess was gone, he kept her blanket undisturbed in his workshop.

  If the house didn’t provide a retreat from the studio and bring him closer to the family, it didn’t keep the girls at home either, as he had hoped. In the fall of 1951 Diane, always a good student, entered the University of Southern California, located in central Los Angeles, from which she could come home on weekends. Walt welcomed the visits, even though he continued to complain that she was “always on the go” and “I don’t get to see much of
her these days.” But he noticed a change in her since her years of attending private girls’ schools. “Heretofore with the association of only girls and more girls,” he wrote his aunt Jessie, “the matter of her appearance didn’t seem to be too important, but it’s an entirely different situation now with the boys on hand.”

  Diane had fallen in love with a tall, strapping, handsome end on the USC football team named Ron Miller, though it was her father who suggested she marry him because Miller was about to go into the armed forces, and Walt was worried Diane might marry “Mr. Wrong” while Miller was gone. (Inviting his brother Herbert to the wedding, Walt called Miller a “wonderful boy—a big six-foot athlete whom we all love.”) They were married on May 9, 1954, in the ivy-clad All Saints by the Sea Episcopal Church in Montecito, California, up the coast from Los Angeles, in what was described as a “football” ceremony. The minister who officiated was a former football player and coach, and the five-tier cake was topped not with figurines of a bride and groom but with two football players—one male, one female.

  They wasted little time in starting a family. Diane gave birth to Christopher Disney Miller on December 10, seven months and one day after the wedding. Except for the name, Walt was ecstatic. “Diane pulled a name out of the blue,” he wrote an associate, obviously wounded. “She seemed determined no son of hers was going to be tagged with my name. She had a particular aversion to the ‘Elias’ part of it.” Actually, Diane had thought of calling the child Walter, then decided that he was “a new person” and needed a new name. She said later that she regretted it. Still, Walt doted on him as he had doted on his daughters. He would introduce Diane now as the “custodian of his grandson.”