The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  This meant that every vision Mary had for Alice in Wonderland was jumping out of her paintings and coming to life. After Mary drew Alice trapped in a bottle riding the waves of an eerily green sea, Kathryn Beaumont, the young actress who would perform Alice’s voice, found herself trapped in a real glass container. The curved edges deformed her view of the people and movie cameras capturing her likeness, while the wobbly platform beneath her sent her rocking back and forth, as if she were bobbing in a real ocean. When Mary drew a giant Alice trapped in the White Rabbit’s house, her arms wedged in the windows and her eyes framed by the fringe of a thick thatched roof, Kathryn was similarly stuck inside a miniature wooden house frame. The chilly soundstage and awkward mechanics were doubtless uncomfortable for the actors, but thanks to Mary’s artistic interpretation, the studio was creating a faithful representation of Carroll’s text, a feat that many writers had once deemed impossible.

  In the background department, Thelma Witmer was once again using Mary’s art as her muse to paint settings that defied reality. She incorporated elaborately decorated rabbit holes, dark forests, and contrasting colors that stretched boldly behind the Queen of Hearts. Though many women had worked in the department over the years, Thelma was the first to receive on-screen credit for her work, on Cinderella.

  But many others were continuing to work with little acknowledgment. In the layout and camera departments, there was a strong contingent of women, promoted during World War II, including Ruthie Thompson, Katherine Kerwin, and Mimi Thornton. These women were responsible for planning each scene of the film, breaking down the shots and camera angles, and determining the position and movement of the characters. Their task was formidable, as they had to create perspective and build action in a film that resisted convention. They spent hours with the scenes of playing cards alone, keeping the perspective constant even as the rectangular soldiers stretched in long lines far into the distance. The work was intense, but the artists were happy to have the studio humming again, full of creativity and purpose.

  Walt was traveling more frequently than he had a decade earlier but his employees still kept an eye out for him, conscious of his path as he walked along the hallways or wandered into offices. His criticism was as feared as ever. But they no longer yelled out lines of their script as a secret signal when they saw Walt coming. Instead, a dry, hacking cough announced Walt’s presence wherever he went.

  Walt was making his own incursions into the world of television. In 1950 he filmed a television special called One Hour in Wonderland that aired on Christmas Day. Walt hosted what was essentially a long advertisement for the studio featuring Kathryn Beaumont in her Alice in Wonderland costume as well as other stars of his live-action footage. The program was a success, getting exposure for the film that would be released the following year while also teaching Walt the value of corporate patronage. Because Coca-Cola sponsored the show, he hadn’t paid a cent to make it.

  Even with Alice in Wonderland still in production, Walt was beginning to think beyond screen-based entertainment. Other studios were offering back-lot tours to their fans, a venture that not only brought in extra money but also promoted their films. But Walt didn’t like the idea of his young fans, eager to meet their hero Mickey Mouse in the flesh, learning the sad truth that the cartoon character they idolized was as thin as the paper and plastic he was drawn on. Walt began dreaming of something else—a park, perhaps, where families could picnic surrounded by cheerful statues of his cartoon characters. Accustomed to sharing his daydreams with his staff, he mentioned the idea to several people and then started appraising the empty lot across the street from the studio with an eye to its acquisition.

  At the time, amusement parks were generally seen as poor investment choices. Their rising popularity in the 1920s had come to a quick end during the Great Depression, with many of the parks falling into disrepair and frequented by pickpockets. By the end of World War II, fewer than fifty amusement parks remained in the United States. These bleak odds did not deter Walt, of course, and he began outlining his ideas in earnest.

  On July 26, 1951, Kathryn Beaumont’s car pulled up in front of the Leicester Square Theater in London. The Mad Hatter held out his hand and helped her out of the vehicle. Dressed in a bright blue dress paired with a simple white apron, Beaumont had recently been transformed from a regular girl into a celebrity. The past few weeks had been a blur of appearances, all culminating in this important day: the world premiere of Alice in Wonderland. It was the first time since Saludos Amigos in 1942 that the studio had debuted a film overseas. The event was held in London, Kathryn’s hometown, as a nod to the author’s English roots. As she posed for pictures next to Walt, she felt giddy with excitement and proclaimed to anyone who asked how much she loved the film.

  Walt did not feel the same way. He smiled for the cameras and waved at his fans, but the movie had not matched his vision. He would later call it a “terrible disappointment” and explain that “we just didn’t feel a thing, but we were forcing ourselves to do it.” After more than seven hundred drawings and three million dollars, his regrets were severe. It wasn’t Mary’s work that he blamed—he continued to admire her concept art for the feature—nor was he displeased with the young actress next to him, whom he had already hired to work for the studio’s next venture. The problem was with Alice herself. Walt regarded her character as aloof and “entirely too passive.”

  Critics didn’t think much of her either. The New York Times complained that Alice “is not the modest and plain-faced little English girl of Mr. Carroll’s suggestion and of Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations for the books. She is a rosy-cheeked, ruby-lipped darling right off Mr. Disney’s drawing-board, a sister of Snow White, Cinderella, and all the fairy-tale princesses he has drawn.” The inevitable backlash against Disney princesses had started. Other critics found the film an odd mishmash of the Carroll books that was missing many characters and had lost the essence of caprice and cleverness that distinguished the original text. Still others protested the “Americanization” of literature, the idea that books in the United States were stripped of their cultural nuance and retold with a uniformity that obliterated their significance. The result was felt hard at the box office, where the film made just half the profits of Cinderella the year before despite a nearly identical budget. Yet fate had been kind. If Walt had chosen to release Alice first, the company might well have gone bankrupt before Cinderella made its appearance.

  After Alice’s release, no one at the studio even wanted to mention the feature, speaking of it in hushed tones if it had to be talked about at all. Everyone felt the sting of failure, including Mary. Unlike Walt, she had become attached to Alice. It wasn’t simply that she loved the books; it was that she saw in Alice a heroine who seemed to have developed a personality of her own. She was unlike their other princesses—she wasn’t a hero, she didn’t grow emotionally during the film, and there was no moral at the end of her story. After the flawless Cinderella, there was something refreshing about Alice in all her imperfection.

  Fortunately Mary had a new project to sink her teeth into. Before the ink was even dry on her concept art for Alice in Wonderland, she was working on their next feature. In the seclusion of her studio, she painted pirate ships and hauntingly colored islands and struggled with one of their most difficult characters yet: a small fairy, covered in sparkling pixie dust, named Tinker Bell.

  Chapter 12

  You Can Fly!

  Occasionally the plane caught a tailwind that pushed it across the country faster; traffic on the highway toward her house mysteriously evaporated, and even her heels clicked more quickly across the pavement. For a woman who traveled as frequently as Mary did, regularly commuting between New York and Los Angeles, the joy of getting back early was keenly felt. It was wonderful to turn your key in the door, drop your bags, and embrace the comforts of home. But that was not what happened today.

  Mary opened the front door and heard voices coming from the adjoining
room. Walking in, she saw her husband sitting with a pad of paper and pencil. In front of him was a woman posing with not a stitch of clothing on. A terrible silence hung around them. It was clear to all what Mary had just stumbled upon. The atmosphere was nothing like the innocent life-drawing classes the couple had enjoyed at the studio. All her suspicions of Lee’s unfaithfulness were instantly confirmed. Mary turned to the young woman who had been sleeping with her husband and said, “You must model for me sometime.” Then, without a word to Lee, she spun on her heel and left the house—albeit temporarily.

  She was walking out of her dream home. The sprawling four-bedroom mansion the couple had built in Great Neck was close to the sparkling waters of the Long Island Sound, where the family frequently went sailing on their boat. Such an excess of luxury was something Mary could never have dreamed of as a child in Oklahoma.

  An art studio with its ceiling and three of its walls made entirely of glass sat perched in an elevated wing of the home. A real estate agent might call it a “jewel box,” but it felt to Mary like a glass cage. It was undeniably a beautiful place to live and work, but it did not offer her shelter from the increasing abuse of her husband.

  Mary’s glass studio at her home in Long Island, New York (Courtesy the estate of Mary Blair)

  As Lee was not inclined to share in the labors of married life, Mary was raising their boys essentially on her own and keeping house herself while putting in long hours on her artwork. They had some hired help, particularly necessary during Mary’s travels, but not nearly enough. Mary was overwhelmed. It seemed that the burdens of their family were hers to bear alone. Lee was often out, working or, possibly, sleeping with other women—until the incident with the model, Mary hadn’t been sure. When he was home, he sometimes drank so much that his conversation devolved into cruel barbs at Mary before he finally, mercifully, passed out.

  Mary did not know what to do. She was becoming like the Alice of her brightly colored paintings. In California she spoke cheerfully to her colleagues about her home life, devoted husband, and sweet boys. In her letters to and conversations with Walt, she was always circumspect, never giving a hint of the difficulty she faced at home. But on the plane back to New York, she felt she was falling down the rabbit hole, returning to a life that was as bewildering as Wonderland and much more miserable.

  Divorce was an ugly word in 1951. Many women felt immense shame in leaving their husbands and were often told that a broken covenant was their own personal failure. The stigma that persisted could tarnish even a reputation as brilliant as Mary’s. Approximately 25 percent of all marriages of the era ended in divorce, a rate that would stay constant throughout the 1950s, due in part to laws governing how couples could legally separate. It was not yet possible to cite irreconcilable differences—one member of the couple had to show evidence of adultery or cruelty. Faced with these options, Mary chose to stay, despite this latest incident. She had always loved drinking martinis with friends, but now when she reached for her glass, she was drinking not in the spirit of the occasion but to drown out the pain that was screaming within her.

  Two hundred miles to the northeast, a group of engineers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were working on a machine with roughly the same square footage as Mary’s grand house on Long Island. Jay Forrester was determined to build the fastest computer in the world using more vacuum tubes—thin-walled cylinders that conduct electrical charges—than any other computer anywhere. The project had started in 1943, when, under the pressures of war, the government tasked the servomechanisms lab cofounded by Forrester at MIT with designing and building a flight simulator to train pilots.

  The war ended before they finished their research on Project Whirlwind, yet the engineers could not leave the challenge behind. So the group shifted focus; they were no longer interested in training pilots but in building a computer that no other lab could even dream of.

  World War II provided the spark of interest and military funding that resulted in the first modern computers. There were not many of them in the world; the few that existed were almost exclusively housed in academic and military centers, and they were severely limited in function. One of the most prominent was the ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, typically referred to by the popular press in the late 1940s as the “Brain.” It was the first all-electronic programmable computer and, compared to human computational time, blazingly fast at calculating the accuracy of ballistic weapons, including hydrogen bombs. The machine, like all computers at the time, was massive, weighing in at more than sixty thousand pounds.

  The machine Forrester and his team of men and women built weighed in at twenty thousand pounds and necessitated five thousand vacuum tubes. It cost only a third of Alice in Wonderland’s production budget, one million dollars, and utilized a far smaller staff, just a hundred and seventy-five people. These engineers were so clever that they were nicknamed the “Bright Boys,” although women were included in their ranks.

  The first model, Whirlwind I, was completed on April 20, 1951, and it was sixteen times faster than any other computer then in existence. Forrester and his team had revolutionized the internal architecture of computers, so instead of using bit-serial mode, where the machine solves a single problem at a time, the Whirlwind worked on multiple inputs at once, thus calculating results more quickly. It was the forerunner of a new type of computer that used parallel computation and that would take over the industry in the years ahead.

  The Whirlwind wasn’t just fast, it was also groundbreaking. The engineers built a display console, a primitive type of computer monitor, on which the calculations could be viewed in real time. Even more impressive, the technology included a light pen that, to outsiders, resembled a magic wand. When it was raised to the display console, it could point and draw directly on the screen using a photo sensor, lighting up individual pixels that were so small they were not visible to the human eye. In Burbank, Walt Disney Studios continued their work unawares, having no inkling that the technology being unveiled across the country was poised to radically alter their work and art.

  While light pens worked their magic in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Mary was creating pixie dust back at the studio. Peter Pan, like Alice in Wonderland and Cinderella, was a recycled idea. The studio had worked on the adaptation more than a decade earlier, poring through J. M. Barrie’s text and sketching concepts for the large cast of characters, including Peter Pan, “the boy who wouldn’t grow up,” the Darling family, and a fairy named Tinker Bell.

  Barrie introduced the character Peter Pan in his 1902 novel The Little White Bird. In the book Peter Pan flies out his nursery window when he’s only seven days old. He plays happily with the fairies at Kensington Gardens but ultimately plans to come home to his mother. However, when he returns at the end of the chapter, he finds his nursery window closed, with iron bars preventing his entry. When he looks through them he sees “his mother sleeping peacefully with her arm around another little boy.”

  The themes of childhood innocence and painful rejection continue in Barrie’s 1904 play Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, later published as a novel in 1911. In this story, the character Peter Pan is no longer a baby but a child who, although old, has never become an adult. He listens outside the bedroom window of the Darling children as their mother tells bedtime stories. Peter wants Wendy, the eldest, to act as his mother and tell him stories, and so he invites the children to fly with him to Neverland. Here they have numerous adventures, meeting the Lost Boys, Peter’s gang of feral children; rescuing a princess named Tiger Lily, of the “pickaninny tribe”; and battling Captain Hook and his band of pirates.

  Peter is not a particularly likable character in the novel. He despises adults so completely that he increases his respiratory rate because “every time you breathe, a grown-up dies; and Peter was killing them off vindictively as fast as possible.” He also murders Lost Boys: “The boys on the island vary, of course, in numbers, according as they get killed and
so on; and when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out.” Peter’s perspective on death is revealed in a scene where he confronts his own mortality; he says, “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”

  At the end, Wendy, her brothers, and even the remaining Lost Boys all go home to the Darling parents. The book leaves Peter alone, befuddled and fulfilling the promise made in the first line of the story: “All children, except one, grow up.”

  Designing the characters was a fairly straightforward proposition, with the exception of Tinker Bell. In the play, the fairy was represented merely as a glowing orb dancing around the stage. She had no human form and could not talk. To the artists at Walt Disney Studios, Tinker Bell was a blank slate, full of possibilities. In the early days of the feature’s development at the studio, numerous artists had tried their hands at depicting the fairy.

  Dorothy Ann Blank, one of the early women of the story department, was the first to imagine the possibilities of Tinker Bell drawn as a fully formed woman. Dorothy had just completed work on Snow White, and so the fairy became an antidote to the princess. Whereas Snow White was meek and unassuming, Tinker Bell was saucy. “Tinker Bell is a surefire sensation,” Dorothy wrote to Walt, “for the animation medium can now, at last, do justice to her tiny, winged form and fanciful character.”

  Bianca saw the fairy much the same way. She was the first to go to the studio library and check out Peter Pan, and in her sketches she depicted a sweet pixie with her golden hair in an updo, her body curved and womanly. In the original sketches made by the female artists of the studio, Tinker Bell strikes a balance between stereotypical extremes. She is neither the girl-child of Snow White nor the sexual fantasy of Fantasia’s centaurettes. Instead, she is a fully formed woman in miniature. Each female artist gave the fairy a gift; in Bianca’s hands, she became overtly sensual, in Mary’s sweetly feminine, and in Sylvia’s divinely colorful.