Disney

by Rees Quinn

  Fantasia ran more than two hours, with an intermission, and included some 500 animated characters. Distributor RKO was nervous; worried executives believed it was a “longhair musical” that would not keep cartoon lovers in their seats. RKO and Disney decided to open Fantasia in a number of “roadshow” engagements that would include twice-daily screenings, each with a fifteen-minute intermission. In New York, Disney decided to open Fantasia at the Broadway Theatre, formerly the Colony Theater, where he had introduced Mickey Mouse to the world. Disney installed Fantasound at the Broadway, hired ushers, printed a program, and opened a telephone bank for advance ticket sales. Demand was huge.

  On November 13, 1940, despite a steady downpour in Manhattan, Fantasia opened to a full house. Critics’ reviews were mixed. Bosley Crowther, writing for The New York Times, claimed that motion-picture history had been made. Fantasia, he wrote, dumped “conventional formulas overboard,” and boldly revealed the scope of Disney’s imagination. The Times’ music critic Olin Downes panned the pairing of classical music with cartoons, writing that “No good is accomplished by trying to scramble different arts together.”

  The film fared better with critics when it opened the following month at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles. The Circle, named for its unique auditorium that formed a perfect circle and extended vertically into a cylindrical seating plan, was trimmed in blue, capped with a tall bell tower and a neon marquee that could be seen for miles. A star-studded audience of 5,000 included Cecil B. DeMille, James Cagney, and Shirley Temple. Los Angeles Times critic Edward Schallert called Fantasia a wonderful and “courageous” film that would appeal to both middle-brow and high-brow moviegoers. Isabel Morse Jones, the Times’ music critic, thought the film was a “dream” brimming with imaginative and seductive “pictorial ideas.”

  Disney’s collaborators were thrilled. Stravinsky signed a contract with the studio for future projects, and other composers vowed a lifetime commitment to Disney, if needed.

  Fantasia played to packed houses at the Broadway in New York for more than a year. Experts at a private showing at The New York Academy of Sciences marveled at the depictions of dinosaurs in Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” Its thirty-nine week run at the Carthay smashed the record set by Gone with the Wind. The movie sold out even in smaller cities - some 50,000 people saw it in Pittsburgh. But even in eleven “roadshow” stops during Fantasia’s first year-and-a-half of release, the film grossed only $1.3 million. It cost $1 million more to make.

  Installations of the complicated Fantasound systems meant that Fantasia could only screen in twelve theaters at a time, making it more like a touring stage production than a wide theatrical release. Disney played to this similarity, hiring a salesman named Irving Ludwig to manage the first of these engagements, down to the marquee setup, curtain and lighting cues. Disney also hired ushers to escort theatergoers to their seats and distribute programs illustrated by children’s book author Gyo Fujikawa. Despite the dramatic debut, it became clear Fantasia was going to lose even more money than Pinocchio.

  As the financial problems with Fantasia mounted, Roy believed the studio, which now had 1,500 employees, was facing bankruptcy. The Disneys owed their bankers $4.5 million. The brothers laughingly congratulated each other on being successful enough to owe that much money. “Just imagine,” Walt Disney said in response to Roy’s recitation of their debts, “a couple of rubes from Kansas City being in a position to owe the Bank of America all that money.” There had been a time when no one would have loaned them $1,000, but their current obligations were a bigger problem for the creditors than for the studio. The banks, after all, were the ones who were out the money.

  Disney’s employees were aware of the company’s financial problems. In 1940, the Disneys had sold stock in the company and set aside 20 percent of the shares for employee compensation. The Disney Brother Studio was one of the first American companies to share ownership with its workers this way. But as share prices fell, the studio bought back much its stock. Shares that started at $25 eventually plummeted to $3.

  By February 1941, the studio’s main creditor, the Bank of America, insisted on cost-cutting measures. To circumvent this, Disney devised a way of giving his best animators incremental raises in hopes the bank would not notice. Although the company had posted a small profit in 1941 and had retired earlier debts and property mortgages with the stock sale, losses from Pinocchio and Fantasia were mounting. Disney decided to quickly produce a lower-budget animated feature: Dumbo.

  Back in October 1940, the Screen Cartoonists Guild (SCG) launched an effort to unionize the Disney studio. By early December, the SCG had collected cards from a majority of the studio’s employees approving the union.

  Disney understood that his employees were concerned about the prospect of layoffs, given the company’s financial position, but the union decision wasn’t strictly about money. Disney’s more talented and senior animators were frustrated by slaving away anonymously for an authoritarian taskmaster who took all the credit. Other than Mickey Mouse, the Disney name was the only one that ever figured prominently in the credits of a Disney release.

  Disney was livid when he learned of the potential unionization. He called in senior animator Art Babbitt, one of his most valued and trusted employees and insisted Babbitt help stop the union action. Disney threatened to close down the studio before giving in to a union. Babbitt said he could not help.

  Disney thought if his whole staff took a vote, they would reject the union. But the SCG declined a vote and reiterated that if the company did not sign with the union, studio employees would strike. In February 1941, Disney called a meeting with his employees. He reminded them that when other studios had cut salaries during the Depression he had continued to pay handsome bonuses even when the company was strapped for cash, but the speech backfired. In attempting to address the staff’s concerns, Disney only reminded his employees of their list of grievances. Disney’s plea as their heroic leader came across as a sob story.

  When Babbitt became a vocal leader of the SCG, Disney was enraged. He told Babbitt that if he kept organizing the studio’s employees he would be “thrown out the front gate.”

  But Babbitt was stubborn and fearless and popular with the other employees. That spring, just as Disney was ready to fire him, Babbitt married young Marjorie Belcher, the model for Snow White. Disney held his fire. But by March, Disney had started referring to him as a punk.

  In late May 1941, Disney fired twenty animators who had signed with SCG. A week later, he fired Babbitt. The strike began the next day.

  Just how many employees went out on strike or honored their picket line was unclear. The SCG maintained that the figure exceeded 400. A rival union, the American Society of Screen Cartoonists, claimed it was only 300. The studio told The New York Times the actual number was 293.

  The strike was intensely personal for Disney. He felt betrayed by employees he believed he had paid well and treated like family. These men and women called him Walt and were part of a team that had revolutionized the field of animation. Disney’s kingdom was crumbling, and he was convinced he knew why.

  They were all Communists. Disney went so far as to take out an ad in Variety accusing strike leaders of “Communistic agitation.”

  As Neal Gabler writes in Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, Disney was obsessed with the idea that Communists had infiltrated and destroyed his studio. It was the only way he could explain the ingratitude and treachery of people he had once loved. Everything was perfect until, Disney would say, the “Commies moved in.”

  The strike continued into the summer of 1941. Disney sometimes drove his convertible Packard, top down, through the picket line, cheerfully waving to the demonstrators. One day, Art Babbitt shouted, “Walt Disney, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” Police at the gate intervened to stop the two from fighting, but while Disney believed he could outlast the strikers, the Bank of America held the studio’s fate in its hands
. The bank forced an arbitration and a settlement that included significant raises for the returning employees. In early August, The New York Times reported the striking workers had returned and a full slate of Disney shorts and features had resumed “normal” production.

  But all was not normal. The settlement provided for layoffs, which Disney avoided by leaving for South America on a goodwill tour launched by Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller wanted to improve cultural and economic ties between the two Americas and had been recruiting Hollywood celebrities to help. While Disney was in South America, the settlement hit a snag because the list of people to be let go were overwhelmingly SCG members. Roy Disney resolved the issue by temporarily closing the studio in late August, keeping only a handful of maintenance workers and a small group of animators on hand to work on Dumbo. The rest of the staff was furloughed without pay until mid-September.

  With the studio effectively shuttered and Walt in South America, Roy was left to handle affairs when their father Elias died on September 13. Walt decided against returning for the funeral, and Roy reassured him that was all right. By the time he got back, he told Walt, the negotiations with SCG would be “settled down.”

  When Disney returned to work in October, he found the studio drastically changed. There were fewer than 700 employees. More troubling was that Bank of America had stepped in. The bank agreed to keep the Disneys’ credit line open on the condition they stop making animated features as soon as the ones in production were completed. After that, the bank insisted the studio stick to less risky animated shorts until the new feature generated a profit.

  The studio closed its largest restaurant and halted all bonuses and stock incentives. Employees had to punch in on a time clock, which Disney hated almost as much as anything else. But the most significant change was in Disney himself. He grew sullen and remote, even, some said, paranoid.

  A Hit and a Miss

  To keep Disney in line with its dictates, Bank of America assembled an executive committee that included its own representative that had final say over everything the studio produced. Disney’s mood grew darker, and he vacillated between ignoring his employees and berating them for work he considered inferior.

  Despite the tension, the studio managed to finish Dumbo. The story had been in the works since 1939, when Disney bought the rights to a book manuscript by Helen Aberson. The plot concerns a baby circus elephant who, because of his outsized ears, is teased and shunned by the other circus animals. But then he discovers he can use his ears to fly and becomes a star performer.

  Dumbo went into production in early 1941. Disney ordered that it be kept simple and short. Dumbo clocked in at just sixty-four minutes.

  Dumbo was released in late October 1941, only weeks after Disney’s return to the studio. Disney later said that Dumbo was just a little cartoon the studio had cranked out “between epics.” But audiences and critics loved it. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther was completely charmed by the film’s countless “fanciful delights.” Like many reviewers, Crowther was particularly impressed with a hallucinatory sequence in which Dumbo, accidently drunk from a tank of water spiked with champagne, sees a kaleidoscopic parade of pink elephants. But critics most loved Disney’s return to gentle humor and warm sentimentality. Crowther exhorted his readers to see a film he called irresistible:

  Ladeez and gentlemen, step right this way - to the Broadway Theatre, that is - and see the most genial, the most endearing, the most completely precious cartoon feature film ever to emerge from the magical brushes of Walt Disney’s wonder-working artists! See the remarkable baby elephant that flies with the greatest of ease. See the marvelous trick-performing animals in the biggest little show on earth. See the wonderland you first saw within the pages of story books. Ladeez and gentlemen, see “Dumbo,” a film you will never forget.

  With Dumbo sweeping the country, Time magazine put together a cover story on the flying pachyderm. Disney was not thrilled with the piece, which accurately reported the he hadn’t had much to do with making the film. But larger problems loomed for the Disney studio and the country. The Time story was scheduled for the December 8, 1941, issue. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, the Dumbo piece was bumped from the cover. The same day, Disney got a call from a manager at the Burbank studio, alerting him that the U.S. Army was moving in. Army truck rolled through the studio gates and 500 soldiers commandeered the studio and set up an encampment on the soundstage. The buildings were draped in camouflage, and ammunition depots were set up in garages and storage sheds. The military installment was to provide antiaircraft support to a nearby Lockheed factory, which manufactured military planes for the war.

  Once the United States entered World War II, the Disney studio contributed significantly to the war effort. It produced animated training and propaganda films starring some of Disney’s favorite characters. The New Spirit, released in 1942, starred Donald Duck as a patriotic citizen who had to learn how to file his income taxes. The Treasury Department commissioned the film to encourage compliance with the Revenue Act of 1942 which made some 15 million people new taxpayers.

  That year Disney also managed to release the long-awaited Bambi. Bambi, set to open in New York in August, had taken five years to finish and cost more than $1.7 million.

  During a test screening in February, a teenager in the audience answered Bambi’s pleading call for his mother with “Here I am, Bambi!,” ruining a solemn moment in the story. It was seen as a bad omen.

  The response was even worse than expected when the film premiered at Radio City Music Hall. Children in attendance enjoyed the show, but The New York Times called the film a brightly colored mash-up of realism and fantasy that did not go well together:

  And yet for all its frequent gossamer loveliness, “Bambi” left at least one grown-up more than a little disappointed. For in re-creating Salten’s fable, Mr. Disney has again revealed a discouraging tendency to trespass beyond the bounds of cartoon fantasy into the tight naturalism of magazine illustration. . . . The free and whimsical cartoon caricatures have made way for a closer resemblance to life, which the camera can show better. Mr. Disney seems intent on moving from art to artiness.

  The Times concluded Disney had gone too far. “In his search for perfection Mr. Disney has come perilously close to tossing away his whole world of cartoon fantasy.”

  In its initial release, Bambi grossed slightly less than its $1.7 million production cost. Disney said the studio would never again invest so much time in making a film. The studio could take some comfort from lowered expectations. With the war still on, many foreign markets were unavailable. Still, Disney had counted on Bambi being a hit. For now, the studio was still in debt and with no clear path forward.

  In 1936, Disney had received a letter from Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover making it clear that the two would work together on issues of mutual interest. Their chief shared concern was Communist activity in the United States, and specifically in Hollywood. Disney was eager to root out the Communist conspirators he believed were epidemic in the film industry.

  In 1944, Disney was elected vice president of a new anti-Communist group called the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA). This led to the Hollywood blacklist, which interrupted, and in some cases, ruined the careers of a number of screenwriters, actors, and directors, who were denied work on the grounds that they were Communists.

  Shortly after its formation, the MPA contacted Congress and suggested that Hollywood, particularly the Screen Writers Guild union, harbored Communists. After Republicans won control of the House in the 1946 mid-term elections, the House Un-American Activities Committee declared it would investigate. When the committee started issuing subpoenas, Disney, as a friend of the committee, was called to testify.

  Disney testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1947. The hearings had already gotten off to a sensational start with testimony from Gary Cooper and Ron
ald Reagan, who, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, testified he thought the Communist threat in Hollywood was overstated.

  When Disney was asked if there were Communists working at his studio, he was adamant that there were none, but that had not always been the case, he said. He reiterated his belief that Communists inside the studio, and others aligned with the Screen Cartoonists Guild, had engineered the strike at his studio.

  More Work, Play

  During this period, Disney changed the way he lived and worked. He spent more time with his family. In 1949, he bought a new home in the Holmby Hills district of Los Angeles. The property was two-and-a-half heavily wooded acres and sloped gently down from a bluff to a canyon separating it from the road. Disney paid $33,250 for the land and hired Russian-born James Dolena, the “architect to the stars,” to design and build his 5,669-square-foot home. The construction took well over a year. There was a large swimming pool in back and a recreation building that housed a private movie theater, bar, four-car garage, and soda fountain.