by Neal Gabler
Even as his condition continued to worsen, the family wouldn’t accept that he would succumb. On December 14 Diane went Christmas shopping, buying him fleece slippers because he complained that his feet were always cold in the hospital. “Somehow that would make him not die,” she later said. That evening Lillian phoned her to say that Walt had seemed improved that day. When he put his arms around her to kiss her goodbye, she said, she could feel his strength. “I know he’s going to get better,” she told Diane. Roy visited that night, and the two brothers talked for hours as Walt traced his EPCOT plans with his fingers, using the ceiling tiles as a grid. Sharon’s husband, Bob Brown, had also visited and told Lillian that Walt did indeed look as if he had rallied.
The next morning Lillian and Diane got a call from Tommie Wilck that Walt had taken a turn for the worse. Diane drove to the old Encino house to pick up her mother, but Lillian was still dressing, putting on her earrings with great deliberation and staving off the hospital visit, and Diane recalled that everything seemed to be occurring now in slow motion, as if she might be able to arrest time and delay the inevitable. When they arrived at the hospital and got off the elevator, Diane saw her husband enter her father’s room, then suddenly back out as if someone had shoved him. In fact he was recoiling from the shock of seeing his father-in-law’s lifeless body. Inside, Walt’s hands were folded on his chest. “Uncle Roy was standing at the foot of his bed, massaging one of Dad’s feet,” Diane later recalled. “Just kind of caressing it. And he was talking to him. It sounded something like, ‘Well, kid, this is the end I guess.’” Sharon and Bob Brown arrived shortly afterward, and Brown asked Diane if she would accompany Sharon into the room. Diane took Sharon’s hand and placed it on Walt’s. “Now Daddy, now you won’t hurt anymore,” Sharon whispered. Walt had died at 9:35 a.m. on December 15 of “Cardiac arrest due to Bronchogenic ca[rcinoma].” “I took care of Walt in his final days,” a nurse wrote the family, “and just want you to know that the poor man was so fearful.”
Word trickled back to the studio across the street, even before the announcement was made to each department over the public address system. The studio was to close and everyone was to be sent home, but most, stunned, couldn’t leave, preferring to stay and talk to one another for consolation. Many couldn’t talk. Many wept. Many, in utter disbelief, went to Hazel George seeking confirmation or, more hopefully, refutation. “I knew that he was very sick,” said Lucille Martin, one of his secretaries, “but I had such faith that they would fly in some super doctor and save him.”
“The death of Walt Disney is a loss to all the people of the world,” Roy said in a statement issued by the studio. “There is no way to replace Walt Disney. He was an extraordinary man. Perhaps there will never be another like him.” But, Roy promised, “We will continue to operate Walt’s company in the way that he had established and guided it. All of the plans for the future that Walt had begun will continue to move ahead.” This was not entirely to happen. Just before entering the hospital for his operation, Walt, clearly feeling the press of time, had scolded General Potter and Marvin Davis for not expediting EPCOT. “Why are you dragging your feet?” he asked them. “Is it because of the money? Have you been talking to Roy? Roy thinks EPCOT is a loser, but don’t take any notice of him. Disney World will make all the profits we need for this operation.” He had come to fear that EPCOT would not be built if anything happened to him, and he had cried to Hazel George over what his legacy would be if it weren’t. “Fancy being remembered around the world for the invention of a mouse!” he lamented. A few months after Walt’s death Marvin Davis presented the Imagineers’ EPCOT plans to Roy. “Marvin, Walt’s dead,” Roy said.* And so was EPCOT.
The nation mourned him. “All of it, everything Walt Disney put his hand to, conjures up a sense of innocent, skipping gaiety and childlike curiosity; his achievements epitomize what is called ‘good, clean, American fun’ that need be neither dull nor dour,” The New York Times editorialized. “That is what Walt Disney gave to us and the world, and it is all summed up in that friendly engaging mouse named Mickey. It was not a small bequest.” The Los Angeles Times eulogized him as an “Aesop with a magic brush, [Hans Christian] Andersen with a color camera, Barrie, Carroll, Grahame, Prokofieff, Harris—with a genius touch that brought to life the creations they had invented.” “One wonders how a greater legacy will ever be accumulated by one person,” it closed. Citing the throngs still going through Disneyland and lining up outside the Radio City Music Hall to see Follow Me, Boys!, Time in a full-page obituary opined that “Disney was dead, but not his vision of innocence, not the dreams he made.” In Los Angeles county supervisors ordered flags to be flown at half-staff.
He had changed the world. He had created a new art form and then produced several indisputable classics within it—films that, even when they had not found an audience or been profitable on first release, had, as Walt predicted, become profitable upon reissue. He had provided escape from the Depression, strength during war, and reassurance afterward, and he had shown generations of children how to accept responsibility while at the same time allowing them to vent vicariously their antagonisms toward the adult world they would soon enter. He had refined traditional values and sharpened American myths and archetypes, even if, as his detractors said, he may have also gutted them. And from another vantage point, he had reinforced American iconoclasm, communitarianism, and tolerance and helped mold a countercultural generation. He had advanced color films and then color television. He had reimagined the amusement park, and in doing so he had altered American consciousness, for better or worse, so that his countrymen would prefer wish fulfillment to reality, the faux to the authentic. He had encouraged and popularized conservation, space exploration, atomic energy, urban planning, and a deeper historical awareness. He had built one of the most powerful empires in the entertainment world—one that would, despite his fears, long survive him. And because his films were so popular overseas, he had helped establish American popular culture as the dominant culture in the world. He had founded a school of the arts, and nearly forty years after his death his name would adorn a concert hall in downtown Los Angeles financed largely with Disney family money. Yet all of these accumulated contributions paled before a larger one: he demonstrated how one could assert one’s will on the world at the very time when everything seemed to be growing beyond control and beyond comprehension. In sum, Walt Disney had been not so much a master of fun or irreverence or innocence or even wholesomeness. He had been a master of order.
The master of order had been so terrified of death that he hadn’t left instructions for his interment. He had told Lillian only that he wanted to be cremated and that he wanted the ceremony to be small and private because he desperately wanted to avoid the undignified public displays he had seen at other celebrity funerals. It was his sons-in-law who chose the Little Church of the Flowers at Forest Lawn in Glendale for the funeral service, which was held at five o’clock the day after his death. Only the family attended, and even then Ruth didn’t appear for fear that she might be hounded by the media on her way from Portland to California. At Lillian’s request the Episcopal minister from Diane’s church in Encino officiated. Bob Brown had suggested that “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which Walt had loved, be played at the close of the service, and as the song concluded Lillian slowly made her way to the front of the church where the coffin was, placed her hands on it and keened, “I loved you so much. I loved you so much.” No one spoke publicly about the funeral afterward.
For nearly a year after the cremation, Walt Disney’s ashes remained at Forest Lawn uninterred, the family resisting making a decision on a final resting place. It was only after Bob Brown, Sharon’s husband, was suddenly felled by cancer less than a year after Walt’s death that Sharon, having decided her father and her husband should be interred together, moved to take action on burying her father’s ashes. She and Diane chose an inconspicuous plot outside the Freedom Mausoleum at Forest Lawn, de
dicated as a “sacred memorial to the freedom bequeathed to us through the courage, the wisdom and the faith of our forefathers,” located at a remote corner of the three-hundred-acre cemetery where their father, resting with Bob Brown, would not be alone in death as he had so often been alone in life.
A plain, rectangular bronze plaque now adorns the white brick wall of the mausoleum that encloses a small garden to mark the burial place of his ashes. It bears only the name “Walter Elias Disney.” It was here, guarded by a hedge of orange olivias and red azaleas, and hidden behind a holly tree and behind a white statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid gazing contemplatively at invisible water, that Walt Disney seemed to have fulfilled his family’s destiny. He had escaped. And it was here that he fulfilled his own destiny, too, for which he had striven so mightily and restlessly all his life. He had passed beyond the afflictions of this world. Walt Disney had at last attained perfection.
*In 1909 the address was changed to 2156 North Tripp Avenue in a citywide renumbering.
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*One stubborn fabrication, traced to a Spanish magazine, Primer Plano, reported that Walt had actually been born in Mojacar, Spain, and that his parents had emigrated to the United States and gone to work for Elias, who adopted the boy. See Edmundo Lassalle to Walt, Jul. 12, 1945; Walt to Lassalle, May 3, 1945, L Folder, Walt Disney Corr., 1945–1946, L-P, A 1535. Walt: “I assure you it was with utter amazement that I learned that I was born in Spain, which is certainly stretching the point by 5,000 miles.”
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*Months later a woman fingered her estranged husband, a member of the Black Hand organized-crime gang, for having arranged to have his brother send the bomb through the mail. New York Times, Dec. 24, 1918.
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*Hurd patented his invention in June 1915. When he went to work for Bray that same year, Hurd wound up pooling his patents with Bray’s. The two then launched a war against their competitors that lasted for years as courts attempted to determine whether Hurd and Bray had a monopoly on cel animation.
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*Though Walt Disney later claimed that Red Riding Hood was the first in the series of fairy tales, and though animation historians Russell Merritt and J. B. Kaufman also assert that it was his first production, it is likely that The Four Musicians of Bremen, a spoof of “The Musicians of Brementown,” was actually the inaugural offering since that film and not Red Riding Hood is listed among Walt’s assets in May 1922. See Articles of Association, Laugh-O-Gram Films, Inc., May 18, 1922.
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*Years later Mrs. Kathleen Viley would claim that she and her husband, Dr. Leland Viley, had helped bankroll Walt at Laugh-O-Gram with $ 6,000 and then, after he photographed their six-month-old daughter that July, gave him another $ 3,000 to go to California. Walt acknowledged photographing the Vileys’ baby and earning enough to go to California, but there is no evidence whatsoever that the Vileys staked Walt in any other way. W.J. Viley to Walt, Sept. 8, 1958, V file, Walt Disney Corr., 1958, Q–Z, A 1572, WDA; Kathleen Viley Cayot to Walt (Oct. 1962), C file, Walt Disney Corr., 1962, A-Christmas, A 1590.
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*Even so Walt left behind a mess and left the hapless Iwwerks, who, probably at Walt’s behest, filed the bankruptcy petition, and others to sort it out. The petition was granted in October, but it would be years before all the claims would be resolved—years during which Pictorial was finally successfully pressured for the remaining $ 11,000 on its contract plus an additional $ 1,000, years during which Schmeltz’s priority from his chattel mortgage would be challenged, and years during which the court would approve a settlement of roughly forty-five cents on the dollar.
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*In one interview Harman said that he had nursed resentments against Walt since Walt had promised him and Ising a stake in the studio to get them to come out, then reneged. Will Friedwald, “Hugh Harman, 1903–1982,” Graffiti (Spring 1984).
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*Hamilton, after leaving the studio in December 1926 in a dispute with Walt, had returned in May 1927.
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*It is difficult to determine exactly when this showing was held. Iwerks placed it at the beginning of June, but an entry in the General Expense Account designates an unspecified “preview” on July 29, which may very well have been the first Willie showing.
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*As significant a date as this would be in the studio’s history, Walt seemed to have difficulty remembering it. He variously cited the premiere as July 19, which may have been the date of the studio experiment (Autobiography, 1939, 4th installment, p. 9), September 19 (Autobiography, 1934), and September 28 (“Mickey Mouse is Eight Years Old,” Literary Digest, Oct. 3, 1936, p. 18).
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*An account more sympathetic to Powers absolved him because he discovered that larger distributors had frozen him out of the market in certain territories, forcing him to sublet the cartoons to Columbia. More, by this version Powers refused to give the Disneys an accounting because he wanted a legal contract rather than the letters of agreement under which he and the Disneys had been operating. Arthur Mann, “Mickey Mouse’s Financial Career,” Harper’s 168 (May 1934), p. 716.
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*In fact, it was difficult to tell exactly for whom Giegerich was dealing. Though he worked for Powers, he had contacted the Van Beuren studio offering them the contracts of Iwerks and Carl Stalling, who hadn’t even signed with him, and telling Van Beuren that “most publicity on Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies…was on the name of Ubbe Iwwerks [ sic ], with very little, if any, mention of Walt Disney.” Roy to Walt, Feb. 1, 1930, Walt & Roy Disney Corr., 1929–1930, Walt Disney Early Corr., WDA.
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*The final agreement called for UA to receive a 40 percent distribution fee from the first dollar with an additional $ 1,000 to UA at $ 60,000 gross and another $ 2,500 at $ 75,000 and a sixty-forty split in Disney’s favor for the gross over $ 60,000. As Roy explained it, “Our thought in the matter was to get our money out of the lower brackets, and the sooner and quicker money.” Roy to Irving Lesser, Apr. 15, 1931, Irving Lesser File, Roy O. Disney Corr., G-Lo (1930–1941), A 2996, WDA.
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*According to animator Shamus Culhane, Sears had actually devised the storyboard in May 1930 for the Fleischers, just before leaving, as an expedient to help young animators get a better sense of sequence since most of the Fleischers’ better animators had decamped to the West Coast and Disney. Culhane, Talking Animals, p. 36
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*Hearing rumors of the financial troubles, Pat Powers, incorrigible as ever, wrote Walt—“This letter will, no doubt, surprise you. However, don’t have heart failure”—to offer his assistance. Powers to Walt, April 3, 1933, Powers Cinephone Equipment Corp., Corr., 1930–1936, WDA.
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*In the end Walt claimed to have made $ 4,000 on the film on gross rentals of $ 125,000. New York Herald Tribune, March 12, 1934; Disney, “Growing Pains,” p. 139.
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*As Walt later described the process, “What we do is this…all of the fellows, that is, the directors, the story men and all those concerned with story select the material to be made into short subjects and then I approve of their selections.” Memo, Walt to Chuck Clark, Apr. 4, 1944, C Folder, Walt Disney Corr., Inter-Office, 1938–1944, C, A 1626, WDA.
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*Maurice Rapf, who later worked as a writer at the studio, thought that Walt, by dividing responsibilities among employees as he did while retaining the coordinating authority himself, was able to maintain his power without having to worry about disgruntled or ambitious underlings. Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 296.
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*In Walt Disney’s Snow White and the S
even Dwarfs, authors Martin Krause and Linda Witkowski dispute the date because animators Marc Davis and Ollie Johnston claimed to have been at this meeting, and they didn’t join the studio until later (pp. 25–26). But Walt retold the story so many times and in so many situations that it is likely Anderson is right, and in any case the time frame is plausible.
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*It is difficult to say exactly when animation on Snow White began. Walt had handed out assignments by late 1935 and was sweatboxing roughs and experimenting with action at least as early as February 1936, but the final model sheets for the characters weren’t finished until September 28, 1936, which could be regarded as the date of the real or final animation.
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*Here Disney was anticipating the deep-focus photography that director Orson Welles would use so famously in Citizen Kane to create a psychological effect from spatial relationships. Though Walt was obviously looking for a greater sense of physical realism, he was also, if only subliminally, looking for a greater sense of psychological realism, which was what deep focus provided.
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*Longtime employee John Hench would later say that Roy was the culprit, though this seems unlikely since Roy was supportive of the project from the inception. Watts, Magic Kingdom, p. 426.
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*Bettelheim says of the power of fairy tales to help in working through complex problems for children: “They speak about his [the child’s] severe inner pressures in a way that the child unconsciously understands, and—without belittling the most serious inner struggles, which growing up entails—offer examples of both temporary and permanent solutions to pressing difficulties.” The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), p. 6.