The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  Bianca relished the organization of the storyboards and devoted a great deal of time to rearranging her scenes. For this process, the environment in the story department was intense but collegial, the men spending long hours together. Bianca’s presence was like a rainstorm moving in at the end of a hot and sticky summer day, breaking the humidity and leaving the atmosphere clean and cool. While comedy gags and slapstick action often dominated the meetings, Bianca’s work was new and fresh, using story lines that reflected the complexity of human relationships with a mix of sensitivity and playfulness.

  One of her first projects was a short released in March 1936 called Elmer Elephant. In the cartoon, a young elephant is teased and mocked by the other animal children before finally using his trunk to save the day and gain approval. As Bianca wrote the script and rough-sketched the round, cheerful ears and face of Elmer, she considered how difficult it was for her to fit into the masculine environment at the studio. She hoped to find a happy ending like Elmer’s, her artistic talents acting as the elephant’s trunk had.

  While Bianca struggled to fit into the male world of animation, the studio was discouraging other women from joining her. The standard rejection letter sent by Walt Disney Studios to all women applying made this clear: “Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen, as that task is performed entirely by young men.” The letter went on to describe the work available to women in the studio’s Ink and Paint department, yet it also warned women not to get their hopes up about even this lesser role, noting, “It would not be advisable to come to Hollywood.… There are really few openings in comparison with the number of girls who apply.”

  Fortunately, one of these letters didn’t make its way to 419 Lorraine Boulevard in Los Angeles, a stately white colonial home with a sweeping driveway lined with bowing oak trees. The outside of the home exuded wealth, but the inside revealed the crumbling façade of the family’s fortunes. Although the Huntingtons had once been very wealthy, they, like most Americans, had lost their savings in the stock market crash of ’29 and were struggling to pay the bills. Mr. and Mrs. Harwood Huntington had three children, Charles, Harriet, and Grace. In 1936, Grace Huntington was twenty-three and had her head in the clouds. Grace loved airplanes and longed to experience the thrill of piloting. She also dreamed of finding a job in which she could apply her passion for writing and drawing, perhaps earning enough money to buy her own plane, or at least pay for flight lessons. Her parents, however, just wanted her to get married.

  Grace’s days were spent navigating the social scene as her family dictated, but her nights were for writing. Grace would head to the Vista Theater, watch a cartoon and catch an early movie, then stop to drink coffee on the way home. With the vigor of youth, she would stay up writing until seven in the morning, filling notebooks with her stories. Her goal was to get a job at Walt Disney Studios, a mere five miles from her house.

  Although she never felt her stories were quite finished, she reached the point where she could go no further with her editing and so decided it was time to submit something. She took her best work and, through a friend, managed to have it read by Ted Sears, the man Bianca both feared and admired. When Grace learned she had a job interview, she felt as light and nimble as Wendy Darling flying over London in one of her favorite books, Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie. In her naïveté, Grace figured she would learn immediately whether her dreams of working for Disney would come true, unaware that she was hoping to enter a department that was more akin to a secret society than a business. While Sears could recommend Grace, the story department was Walt’s crown jewel and no one could enter unless invited by him personally.

  When Grace met with Walt the next week, the minutes seemed to fly by although the interview lasted an hour and a half. They spoke at length about her stories, discussing her different ideas for material. Soon, though, Walt said the words she had been dreading. “You know I don’t like to hire a woman in the story department,” he began. “In the first place, it takes years to train a good story man. Then if the story man turns out to be a story girl, the chances are ten to one that she will marry and leave the studio high and dry, with all the money that had been spent on her training gone to waste and there will be nothing to show for it.”

  Grace could only nod as she thought of all the married women she knew. Her mother, her friends, her neighbors—they were all housewives. Not a single one had both a husband and a career. When she realized this, her face flushed with resentment, and she suddenly felt determined to get this job, the first she had ever applied for. As Walt described it, this might be the only chance she would ever have to work.

  Walt seemed to recognize her frustration as he explained, the edge gone from his voice, that if a girl could write, perhaps she could work at home after she married so that she could continue to contribute her ideas. For Walt, these words were not an empty promise—he would soon prove that he meant them.

  There was still one huge hurdle for Grace to leap. She would be the second woman joining the exclusive club, but that did not mean that the chauvinistic atmosphere of the department would alter. “It’s difficult for a woman to fit in this work,” Walt told her. “The men will resent you. They swear a lot. That is their relaxation. They have to relax in order to produce good gags and you can’t interfere with that relaxation. If you are easily shocked or hurt, it’s just going to be too bad.”

  Walt watched her face carefully as he told her this, waiting for her eyes to pop. This moment was a test, his way of determining her resiliency in a workplace that alternated between creative amusement and obnoxious yelling. What Walt didn’t realize was that these words were practically music to Grace’s ears. She had spent much of her young life annoyed by the limitations of her gender, wishing that she had been born a man every time she was told that something she wanted to do was not ladylike—or simply too difficult for a woman. Here was Walt Disney himself offering her a chance to dive headfirst into the world of men and leave behind the cultural constraints of womanhood. It seemed the job would be the perfect antidote to her prim upbringing.

  When she entered the story department just a week later, she could feel every eye on her. She had never attracted so much attention in her life; the curious and wary gazes of the men made her feel like an alien. She fought back her anxiety. Let them look, she thought. She had decided that no matter what happened or what anyone did or said, she was going to hold on to this job. As Bianca traded glances with the new hire across the room, she smiled, wishing she could adequately warn her about what lay ahead. Unfortunately she knew from personal experience that nothing could prepare you for the horror of your first writers’ meeting at Walt Disney Studios.

  Chapter 2

  Whistle While You Work

  Under her desk was a pig. Grace stared unbelievingly at the real live farm animal rooting its dusty pink snout in a heap of crumpled paper, the garbage can beside it overturned. She glanced around the room looking for some explanation for the animal’s appearance, but nothing else in the office was amiss. The men of the story department sat at their desks, seemingly oblivious to their barnyard intruder. Grace put her hands on her hips and called out to the room, “Hello? What’s going on here? There’s a pig at my desk!”

  The men turned their heads toward her, their faces bland and expressionless at first, but then the quiet room exploded. All around her, the story men and animators erupted with laughter, clapping madly, as if they were watching the final act of a star-studded performance. Grace looked around, astounded, before smiling and giggling nervously, trying to pretend that she didn’t mind being the object of persistent jokes. This must be what Walt meant when he said that I couldn’t be too sensitive, she thought as she stared into the pig’s brown eyes, her smile now frozen in place.

  Grace was struggling to fit in at the studios at 2719 Hyperion Avenue in a neighborhood known as Silver Lake, just east of Hollywood. From the outside, the Walt Disney Studios
looked homey and unintimidating. There was a small cluster of white stucco buildings with red-clay roof tiles surrounded by a whitewashed brick wall. At the top of the main building hung a cheerful hand-painted sign: WALT DISNEY STUDIOS, MICKEY MOUSE AND SILLY SYMPHONY SOUND CARTOONS. A cartoon Mickey Mouse stood at its peak, his hand raised in welcome. Despite the fame of Mickey Mouse, the “mouse studio” confused local residents, and quite a few stray cats were tossed over the fence by well-meaning neighbors. The kittens found their new home far more comfortable than Grace did at first. They spent their days napping in the grass and were doted on by the studio staff; even Walt would stoop to stroke them.

  The feline population wasn’t the only aspect of the studio that was growing. In 1936, the company took out an ad in Popular Mechanics that read “Walt Disney Wants Artists” in bold type; this was followed by “Walt Disney, creator of Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies, offers exceptional opportunities to trained male artists. Write for particulars, giving age and occupation.”

  The advertisement itself was not new—the company had put out similar ones over the past few years—but its placement in the prominent magazine brought in a flood of young men, all of them starting work at the same time as Grace. Establishing a career in animation was an arduous slog. The atmosphere was jovial on the surface, but the competition was cutthroat. Animators were hired at a fast pace. They were employed as apprentices and stuffed in a rear building known as the annex, and the new hires knew that the majority of them would last mere months. If they wanted to stay, they had to prove themselves, and quickly. While the ability to steadily churn out drawings was one requirement of the job, artistry in creating the characters was the true necessity. Whether an animator could breathe life into his drawings determined if he would ultimately last at the studio. With this pressure, the atmosphere in the annex turned aggressive, even among those with permanent jobs. Practical jokes became a way to release tension, and the young staff was relentless. The long hours spent together formed a rushed intimacy among them all even as they tortured one another at story meetings. While Walt often held smaller meetings with his writers, large story meetings also took place that were attended by members of both the animation and story departments.

  Grace’s first story meeting was as painful as Bianca had feared it would be. As Grace approached the soundstage building where the regular meetings were held, a security guard blocked her path.

  “Sorry, ma’am, this is a story meeting. Restricted entry.”

  “I’m a writer here and I’m supposed to attend these meetings,” Grace explained, puzzled.

  “Women aren’t admitted to the story meetings. It’s men only,” the guard said gruffly, then turned his head from her.

  “No, no, you’re mistaken. I’m a new hire, and I should be in there.” She gestured to the door. “And anyway there’s another woman in the story department!”

  “Nope, all the women work in Ink and Paint.” The guard pointed to the building across the unkempt, weed-filled lot. “No women in here. I’m afraid I can’t let you in.”

  Grace could feel the anger bubbling up as she fought to keep her voice calm. “I’m going in now. The meeting is starting and I need to be a part of it.” She stomped by the security guard, who was too stunned by her boldness to restrain her.

  Her cheeks flushed from the encounter, she made her way through the double doors and down the aisle. She was early, despite her delayed entry, but inside, fifty men already filled the room. As she searched for a seat, the men began calling and whistling, trying to attract her notice as if she were a shapely woman passing a particularly crass crowd of high-school boys. The whistles rattled her, heightening her insecurities and forming an invisible barrier of exclusion somewhat stronger than the one imposed by the security guard outside. Ignoring their pursed lips and open mouths, she spotted a seat in the middle of an empty row and sat, her muscles tense even as the room continued to fill with more writers and animators. She waited for another woman to come in so she could point out how mistaken the security guard had been. Yet none appeared; all the rows around her became crammed with men, seventy-five staff members ultimately packing in, until every seat in the auditorium appeared to be filled except for two—the ones on either side of Grace.

  Grace sometimes felt she needed armor to attend story meetings, as shown in one of her sketches. (Courtesy Berkeley Brandt)

  While Grace sank into the embarrassment of isolation, Bianca reveled in her solitude. She skipped as many story meetings as she could, her attendance becoming infrequent not entirely due to her pride or her fear but simply because she felt her time was better spent elsewhere.

  She sometimes retreated to odd places. One day Bianca got a call she had long been anticipating: A new baby was coming into the world. Walt had arranged for the staff at the San Diego Zoo to call Bianca when a pregnant deer went into labor, a process that typically lasted twelve hours or more, and now the time had come. Bianca dropped what she was doing and drove the two and a half hours south. She arrived at the zoo to see a white-tailed deer lying in the grass with a small pair of hooves beginning to emerge from her womb. She immediately got out her sketch pad and pencils and began drawing the doe, tracing the long curve of the animal’s neck. Her grip on her pencils faltered, however, when the fawn made its first appearance in the world. Bianca watched, mesmerized, as the doe stood and licked her newborn, its sticky brown coat dappled with white spots as it lay trembling in a heap.

  Within ten minutes, the baby was already testing out its new legs, standing up and wobbling uncontrollably before falling down again. Bianca laughed as she watched the animal’s persistence. She wasn’t expecting to find comedy here, yet it was just the sort she reveled in, the tenderness of the fawn’s birth mingling with the silly spectacle of its first steps. She recognized that the sweetness of the situation enhanced its humor. She drew the wobbly legs of the newborn over and over, making copious notes as she observed the first meeting between mother and child. She could feel in her gut that here, in this moment, was a critical scene in their next project, and she wanted to be sure to capture it completely.

  Even as the studio’s staff labored over Snow White, having no idea whether their first foray into feature films would be a huge success or merely a long cartoon few would bother to sit through, Walt was looking to the future. Bianca was at the forefront of that endeavor. The studio was interested in adapting Felix Salten’s novel Bambi: A Life in the Woods, first published in serialized form in a Viennese newspaper in 1923. While Walt was working on obtaining the rights, which had already been optioned by another filmmaker, Bianca began to explore the possibilities of the story. There was beauty in the book, a description of the woods such as she had never read before, and it made her feel incomparably tranquil—that is, until the humans showed up.

  The human ability to destroy what is beautiful and precious was growing in 1936. As Bianca was finding artistic inspiration in Salten’s novel, other copies of it were being thrown into bonfires in Nazi-controlled Germany. The book was banned not only because of the author’s Jewish heritage but also for its metaphors about anti-Semitism. At one point in the story, the deer ponder peaceful integration with the human world, asking each other, “Will they ever stop persecuting us?”

  Many readers understood the book as an allegory about the Jewish experience of oppression in Europe. The experience of marginalization is repeated throughout the book; even the butterflies of Salten’s novel experience a diaspora not unlike that of Jewish communities. Bambi describes the winged creatures as “beautiful losers [who are] always searching farther and farther because all the good places have already been taken.”

  The book’s message of peace made the project dear to Bianca. She had come to the studio seeking purpose in her life, and in many ways the cartoon shorts that were the primary output of Walt Disney Studios were failing to provide it. Sometimes she felt she had little to add to the crass jokes, crude stereotypes, and predictable gags. Her st
ory ideas for the shorts, which she poured hours into developing, were often passed over. Despite the stinging unhappiness of her work life and her feelings of inadequacy, however, her career at the studios was taking off. Her Elmer Elephant Silly Symphony short was proving exceptionally popular in theaters. Walt showed Bianca a report from Kay Kamen, the studio’s merchandising executive, saying that the character had “taken hold” and that it would be “a good idea if we could have another Elmer Elephant picture.”

  The elephant who tried to fit in, endured rejection, then found strength in his perceived physical flaws was a surprising success. Elmer Elephant was different from the other Silly Symphony shorts. Bianca had infused the story with anguish and longing in a way that had not been attempted by Walt Disney Studios before. The slapstick comedy, though still present, was diminished, and the story department found a lesson for their own work: that sadness transforms comedy, tingeing its edges with emotion and thus delivering fewer laughs but more real humor. Despite the importance of this message, it wasn’t at all clear whether Walt would make more shorts like Bianca’s.