I look again at the typed sheet.
Your role: As Goofy, keep your head down so that your eyes can be seen. When you walk, lope along and let your knees and stomach lead. Try to do something—anything—and when you mix it all up, laugh at yourself and go on to something else. Box with yourself or with an imaginary partner. Play baseball with Donald or tag with Pluto. Pick out a girl, and show her how shy you are. Be extra-polite, dust off chairs for ladies, then bow and chuckle. Be silly, loose, clumsy, and loveable.
Easier said than done. For a nonspeaking character, Goofy certainly seems to be able to make a lot of sounds. After a practice or two, Gutierrez agrees that an authentic “Garsh!” may be beyond my thespian skills. I try walking across the room, watching myself in the mirrors. “Lead with your abdomen,” she calls out. “Keep your head down. Splay your feet, put the heel down first and then roll. Keep moving. Nod, turn your head, now wave.” All the while I’m staring at my feet. I can’t believe how natural all those characters looked in the video; this takes a lot of coordination. Goofy also has a repertoire of gestures I’m expected to master. Since he’s tall, Goofy has to get into position for photo opportunities with young children. So he often drops to one knee, arms outstretched, or he makes what Gutierrez calls a “TaDa!” gesture, holding out one arm while he puts the other paw on his knee. Goofy also blows kisses, and can make the sound of a kiss. He laughs by raising his paws to his mouth, but when I try it, Gutierrez says it looks like I’m sneezing.
It’s time to move on to autographs, which are avidly collected by adults as well as children. Walt had decreed that each character’s signature had to match, wherever it was obtained, to preserve the illusion that each character is unique. The notion that all signatures must match seems to have become something of an obsession, and Gutierrez makes me practice Goofy’s distinctive signature over and over until I get it right. This isn’t that easy, given that Goofy’s gloved paw has just four appendages.
At 10:00 A.M. it’s time to leave for the Animal Kingdom, though I definitely could use more practice. This has been too much to absorb in just a few hours. I’m taken to a large cast building just outside the park fences. Inside, other character actors are going through a class of stretching and warm-up exercises. They are trim, limber, and all look like professional dancers. The costume warehouse is vast, with long racks of outfits stretching far into the distance. I pull on a pair of black tights and a tight black spandex shirt. I’m feeling warm even before the padded layer of fur and the colorful safari outfit. Carrying the head, Gutierrez leads me to a van, and she offers encouragement as we drive the short distance to an air-conditioned trailer just outside a door into the park. I feel like an astronaut being taken to the capsule for lift-off. “Remember,” she tells me, “to these children, you are a bigger celebrity than anyone you know from the adult world.” Inside the trailer, I’m given a cloth cap to keep my hair down, and then the heavy head is placed on my shoulders and fixed to the cap. There’s another Goofy in the trailer taking a break between his thirty-minute shifts, and he looks amused as I struggle with the headgear.
Minutes later, I’m in the park. Gutierrez is hovering nearby in case of emergency. After my first successful encounter with the young girl, I’m feeling exhilarated. My adrenaline is kicking in. People surround me. Children are lining up to get my autograph; shy faces, glowing with excitement. I frantically try to remember everything Gutierrez taught me: nod, laugh, wave, blow a kiss, gesture, get down on one knee. Act “silly.”
With my impaired vision, I fail to notice a young boy has come alongside, and when I turn my head, I bump him with my nose. Moments later, I hear a shrill voice: “Mommy, Mommy, Goofy hit me on the head.” Oh my God, a lawsuit, I’m thinking. But Gutierrez doesn’t seem to be reacting, and in any event, there are too many other autograph and photo seekers competing for my attention. Plenty of adults want their pictures taken, too, which gives me a welcome opportunity to stand up. “It must be hot in there,” murmurs one man as the flash goes off.
“You’d better believe it,” I’m thinking, even though I maintain a strict silence. In all the excitement I’d barely noticed how hot it was, but I’m now so drenched in sweat that the cloth cap to which the Goofy head is attached is starting to creep down my forehead. Soon it’s past my eyebrows, and my already limited vision is further obscured. Locked inside my costume, there’s nothing I can do to stop it. At this rate, Goofy is going to go blind in a matter of minutes.
Out of the increasingly narrow slit through which I can still see, a young boy has approached. He has blond hair and looks like he might be three years old. “Give Goofy a hug,” someone says. He stands frozen in place, and looks like he’s about to cry. Gutierrez has warned me that the characters frighten some children, and when that happens, not to make any sudden gestures. I hear her voice now: “Give Goofy a high-five,” she says. I slowly hold up my cloth paw, and the boy reaches out and touches it. Then he quickly pulls back. He circles me warily, then comes closer and holds up his palm. I give him the high-five. His face lights up in a huge smile, and people around us start to applaud.
Just as my ability to see disappears, I hear Gutierrez say, “Goofy is going to have to go. Say good-bye to Goofy.” I hear a chorus of young voices calling out to me as Gutierrez steers us to the exit, which is mercifully close by. I feel like I’ve only been “onstage” for a few minutes, but in fact I’ve completed a standard thirty-minute shift. It’s a relief to get the heavy head off and recover my vision. Still, I can see why people like Tammy Gutierrez would keep at it for fourteen years. Once you’ve seen those children’s faces, nothing else seems quite the same.
Part One
The Wonderful
World of Disney
One
On Monday morning, September 24, 1984, Michael Eisner woke up feeling a little nervous. It was his first day as chairman and chief executive of the Walt Disney Company. Tall, with dark curly hair, at age forty-two Eisner still had something of the boyish look of the prep school student he once was. Anxious to make a good first impression, he dressed carefully in a suit and tie and got in his car for the trip to Disney. He planned to drive from his home in Bel Air to Interstate 405 North, then onto the Ventura Freeway. The Disney studio was so far out of the Hollywood mainstream that Eisner had only a vague idea where it was—somewhere in Burbank. Soon he realized he was deep into the San Fernando Valley. He called his lawyer, Irwin Russell, from the car to get directions.
When Eisner pulled into the Disney lot, he saw a collection of unassuming, low-rise buildings surrounded by neatly clipped hedges and lawns in a modest four-acre campus. It was nothing like the imposing gated entry to Paramount, where Eisner had been president for the past seven years. Several bushes had been clipped into topiary shapes of Disney animated characters. The animation building that had housed Walt Disney’s office was at the intersection of Mickey Avenue and Dopey Drive. Around the corner stood the fading Western set for “Zorro,” a Disney-produced television show that hadn’t been on the air for twenty-three years. Judging from the nearly empty parking area, he was one of the first to arrive.
As he pulled in, Eisner realized he had no idea where to go. Everything had happened so suddenly. Just that Saturday, the board had voted to appoint him chairman and chief executive, along with Frank Wells, a lawyer and former head of Warner Bros., as president and chief operating officer. A boardroom coup led by Roy Disney had ousted Walt’s son-in-law, Ron Miller. The weekend had been filled with meetings with investment bankers and lawyers talking about takeover threats and bandying around financial terms that were unfamiliar to Eisner, such as “book value” and “return on equity.”
Eisner introduced himself to a guard, who summoned Disney’s head of public relations, Erwin Okun. Okun led him to Walt’s old office on the third floor of the animation building. Lining the corridors were original “cels,” hand-drawn and colored frames from the classic Disney animated features: Snow White, Pinocchio, S
leeping Beauty, Fantasia. Lucille Martin, Walt’s former secretary, was sitting just outside the office. Somewhat apprehensively, Eisner settled into Walt’s chair behind the desk.
Then Frank Wells walked in, and sat down across from him. Wells, age fifty-two, looked as if he’d been sent from central casting for the role of studio executive: tall, ruggedly handsome, wearing glasses, graying at the temples. Their new partnership was something of a shotgun marriage, hastily forged in the months leading up to the board vote. Eisner didn’t know him well, but Wells’s willingness to take the number two position, ceding the top spot to Eisner, had made a deep impression. They chatted briefly as Wells scanned their new surroundings. But Wells showed no sign of getting up from his chair. “Are we going to sit here together?” Eisner finally asked.
Wells shrugged. “I thought we would.”
“I can’t work that way,” Eisner said. So Wells moved to a conference room next door.
Like much at Disney, Eisner’s new office hadn’t changed much since Walt died in 1966. The pace at Disney was so leisurely that by lunchtime, the workday was pretty much over, at least for top executives and senior producers. They played cards every day after lunch in a small room off the executive dining room. Afterward, they often had massages from Bob Hope’s masseur, who was kept on staff, followed by visits to the steam room and Walt’s custom-made thirty-nozzle shower. Employees stopped work early to play softball every Tuesday evening. When a newly hired executive persisted in working evenings and weekends, it was considered so unorthodox that security launched an investigation.
Almost no one was fired. At most studios, numerous employees were hired for the run of a production, then let go when shooting wrapped. At Disney, they stayed indefinitely, awaiting new assignments. Instead of using outside producers, Disney kept them in-house. Disney released a new animated feature every four years, and had produced just three live-action films the year before Eisner’s arrival. Typical overhead on a Disney film was twice that of rival studios.
Eisner and Wells had already decided that this was going to change, but on their first afternoon at the company, they tried to reassure nervous employees, speaking from a bandstand that had been built for the film Something Wicked This Way Comes. It helped that Roy was with them. Then they toured the lot, meeting every employee they could and shaking hands. Eisner asked one young woman where she worked. “BVI,” she replied.
“I didn’t know Disney owned an underwear company,” he said.
“No,” she laughed. “BVI is Buena Vista International,” Disney’s movie distribution arm.
Much to Eisner’s relief, in the many interviews leading up to the board vote, no one had asked him much about Disney, either the company or its products. As he later wrote in a draft of his autobiography, “To be honest, I knew little about Disney, little about the culture or even the actual films. If Disney had not been under siege and under real risk of being acquired and sold off in pieces, I would not have passed the interview process. If Disney Production had not faltered creatively, I would not have passed the interview process. If Roy Disney had not just had blind faith in me, for reasons I will never understand, I would not have passed the interview process. And if Sid Bass had not backed this blind faith, I would not have passed the interview process.
“The fact of the matter [was], I knew far too little about Walt Disney Productions.
“ ‘So Mr. Eisner,’ the interviewer would have said. ‘What did you think of Snow White?’
“ ‘I never saw it,’ would be my answer.
“ ‘Oh really? Then tell me, how did you feel about Sleeping Beauty?’
“ ‘Never saw it,’ I would embarrassingly respond.
“The questions would continue, but eventually the conversation would reveal that I never saw a Disney film until I was an adult…. And I would also have to admit I had never seen ‘The Wonderful World of Disney’on Sunday nights…. I could have talked about Broadway musicals from my youth, like South Pacific, or Carousel, or Oklahoma!, or Kiss Me Kate, or Where’s Charley? or The King and I, or television from my childhood like ‘Hopalong Cassidy’ or ‘The Milton Berle Show’ or ‘Howdy Doody’ but not Disney.
“And I was not really like Walt. That could have hurt me in the [interview] process. It’s not that I came from Paramount or ABC, from Hollywood, if you will, but my entire background was different. Walt came from the heartland. From Chicago and Kansas. I came from New York City. Walt was in the majority, a Christian; I [was] a minority, Jewish. Walt lived in homes, on farms, in the American community. I lived in an apartment. Walt walked to public coeducational school, down dirt roads, across pastures, avoiding dogs and bulls and bullies. I walked down Park Avenue to Seventy-eighth Street past red lights and candy stores and bullies to Allen-Stevenson, a private boys’ school where I had to wear a tie. I ate dinner every night with the full family, served by candlelight with my tie still on. I suspect Walt did not.”
Once at Disney, Eisner had to absorb quickly the basic elements of the Walt story. Disney had always held itself aloof from Hollywood—its glamour and hedonism, its star system and cutthroat dealmaking. Immigrants from Eastern Europe and New York City had created Paramount and the other big Hollywood studios; Walt and his older brother and business partner Roy grew up on a Missouri farm, without electricity or indoor plumbing. An idealized view of life in rural middle America at the turn of the century—the sleigh rides, church socials, farm animals, and trips to the general store—permeated Walt’s imagination, showing up repeatedly in Disney films and especially at Disneyland, where Main Street was modeled on downtown Marceline, Missouri, Walt’s hometown.
After the family farm failed, Walt’s father moved the family first to Kansas City, then to Chicago, where Walt took lessons at the Chicago Museum of Art. He astounded his pragmatic father when he announced in 1919 that he’d decided it would be easier to make a living as an artist than an actor, his other ambition. He moved back to Kansas City, was rejected for a job as a cartoonist at the Kansas City Star, and found work at the Kansas City Slide Company, which made ads that were inserted before feature films at movie theaters. He and his friend and fellow artist Ub Iwerks created Walt’s first primitive one-minute cartoons. Emboldened by promises from a New York distributor, they founded their own company, Laugh-O-Gram Films, which went bankrupt when they never got paid.
Walt came to Los Angeles in the summer of 1923, and later that year asked his brother and Iwerks to join him in a fledgling animated film business. Roy put up most of the money and managed the business. In 1925, Roy’s girlfriend Edna came from Kansas City to marry him. Lillian Bounds joined the company, first as a painter on cartoon cels, then as Walt’s secretary. Roy married Edna on April 11, 1925; Lillian was her maid of honor. Walt married Lillian three months later.
Theirs was a hand-to-mouth existence, financed largely by sales of a cartoon featuring an Iwerks creation, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Partly due to Walt’s exacting standards of craftsmanship, the costs of producing Oswald outstripped the fees they were paid by Universal, Oswald’s distributor. Roy dispatched Walt, accompanied by Lillian, to New York to ask for more money. While they were gone, Oswald’s producer, who owned the rights to the character, hired away the Disney animators and dispensed with the Disney brothers and Iwerks. When they returned, Roy was waiting anxiously at the station. “Have you got something lined up?” he asked.
“No, but I’ve got a wonderful idea,” Walt replied.
“A mouse had always appealed to me,” Walt later explained. “While working in Kansas City, I caught several in wastebaskets around the studio. I kept them in a cage on my desk and enjoyed watching their antics. One of them was quite tame and would crawl all over my desk while I worked.”
Walt had started drawing mice on the train returning from New York, and showed his sketches to Lillian. “They were cute little things,” she later recalled. She asked him what he was going to call the main character. “Mortimer Mouse,” Walt answered.
“That doesn’t sound very good,” she said. She thought for a moment. “What about Mickey Mouse?” Never again would Walt and Roy allow someone else to own the rights to their creations.
“Steamboat Willie,” the first talking cartoon, created a sensation when it was first screened in New York in 1928. Mickey Mouse became a star, and the Disney studio was launched. In part because of Walt’s restless imagination, obsession with quality, and lack of interest in profit-and-loss statements, Disney was never on a firm financial footing until Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released in 1937. Snow White cost a then unheard of $1.5 million, financed with the Disney brothers’ own money and a loan from Bank of America.
Walt hovered over every aspect of Snow White, and even when it was done, he was not satisfied and wanted to remake a few scenes at a cost of an additional $300,000. Roy stopped him. The film brought out the showman and frustrated actor in Walt. The premiere, on December 21, 1937, at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Hollywood, drew four thousand guests and featured costumed dwarfs wielding pickaxes in a full-scale replica of a diamond mine. In the first public appearance of live cartoon characters, actors dressed as Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, and Pluto greeted guests. A live symphony orchestra, chorus, and soloists accompanied the film. The Motion Picture Herald called it “the most extraordinary premiere in cinema history.”
Snow White was nominated for an Academy Award for best music and song in 1938, and was given an honorary Academy Award in 1939. It brought millions in profit into the Disney Company and unleashed a golden age in Disney film animation. In the next five years came Bambi, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and the film Walt considered his masterpiece, Fantasia. The 1950s and 1960s produced Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmatians, Jungle Book, and Mary Poppins. And then, after Walt’s death in 1966, the brilliance of Disney animation began to fade.
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