by Neal Gabler
There was another reason, beyond Mickey’s visual appeal, that the merchandise was seemingly becoming more popular than the cartoons: onscreen Mickey had faltered, if not in audience appeal, then with critics and even within the studio. He was scarcely five years old when, given his split personality between Chaplin and Fairbanks, he began to suffer the inevitable identity crisis. Recognizing the problem, Jack Hannah, an animator at the time, recalled, “We began to have an awful hard time defining stories for Mickey…. [He] began as a mischief maker, but he developed right off the bat into a little hero type, and you couldn’t knock him around too much.” Animation historian Michael Barrier believed that there had been different conceptions of Mickey in different media but that the cartoon Mickey, who had arrived with a gleefully puckish, anarchic streak, increasingly came to resemble the comic strip Mickey, who was thrust into situations in which he was required to act heroically—essentially sacrificing his Chaplin half to his Fairbanks half. Mickey now was always rescuing Minnie from the clutches of the sadistic Peg Leg Pete.
While these halves of Mickey were warring, he was plagued by yet another, almost metaphysical question: what exactly was Mickey Mouse? Was he a mouse with mouselike attributes that led him to bedevil his antagonists, or was he a human in the form of a mouse? More to the point, was he a little boy in the form of a mouse? This question had troubled Walt and the animators too and had even prompted some critics to speculate whether, as Theatre Arts Monthly put it, Mickey would be “abandoned gradually in favor of the symphonies” or whether his creators would “divorce him from the animal world and marry him into the human.” Back in 1928 he seemed to have been conceptualized as a mouse with human affectations, but by 1932 he had come to resemble a happy and sometimes hapless child, which may have made Mickey Mouse the first casualty of the studio’s growing obsession with realism.
The early and impudent Mickey Mouse seemed to belong in a universe not unlike the one cartoonist George Herriman created for his Krazy Kat—an arid abstract plane where rubber hose was more appropriate than squash and stretch. “In the beginning of the thirties,” animator Eric Larson acknowledged, “Mickey could do almost anything: stretch his arms, use his body. Later in the thirties he was not able to do that.” What had happened between these two Mickeys was realism. The early Mickey wasn’t real in the sense that the little pigs were real, which is to say fully realized; in fact, he was barely a character. As he had rubber hose actions, he had broad rubber hose emotions too, which adapted to any situation, rather than a core personality that, as in squash and stretch, could change but retained its basic identity. But when Walt introduced realism as a means of developing personality and thus eliciting a stronger audience reaction, Mickey was bereft. Walt “realized the minute we got into believable stories that held up with motivations and character and personality,” animator Ward Kimball said, “you open up a limitless world, whereas the mouse was limited.”
Since Walt couldn’t countenance dispatching his alter ego to oblivion, he tried to conform him to the new landscape. Throughout 1932 and 1933 Mickey gradually became rounder, shorter, thicker, less sinewy—his mouselike features shrinking and softening as his human features—his hands, his head, and his feet—grew, and his mouselike characteristics yielding to gentler, more human ones. By 1936 Les Clark was describing Mickey to a group of would-be animators as having a “feeling of cuteness and boyishness,” and he said, “He is generally considered and handled as a little boy.” Where he had been light-footed and snappy in the early days, his feet were heavy now—“His feet should be at least half the volume of his body,” Clark advised—which literally gave him a gravity he had not had. More, he was not always dressed in his trademark shorts anymore. As early as 1932 he was wearing other clothes, lived in a house, and had his pet dog Pluto. Walt even insisted once that Mickey and Minnie were married in real life, though they played boyfriend and girlfriend on screen.
But the reconceptualization and domestication that were intended to “humanize” Mickey actually wound up neutralizing him by blunting what few sharp edges he had. Losing his angularity, he also lost his impertinence and cheek, so that where Walt had once compared him to the incorrigible Chaplin, he now compared him to eager-to-please Harold Lloyd. Mickey even lost the self-centered obliviousness that had made him so apt a figure for the Depression. “To me there was something perfect about the way Mickey looked in the ’30s,” children’s book author Jan Wahl once remarked. “When they gave him that zoot suit and made him part of California suburbia, I stopped paying attention to him. It was when he fell into our ordinary world—that’s when I think he lost his luster.”
But if Mickey Mouse was a victim of pacification, he was a victim of his own popularity as well: the tragedy of success. He had won that popularity through an impish subversiveness; he could only maintain it, Walt felt, by becoming inoffensive. The rodent who had begun life by bucking Minnie out of an airplane and maliciously pressing a pig’s teats to make music was now on his best behavior. “If our gang ever put Mickey in a situation less wholesome than sunshine,” Walt wrote in 1933, “Mickey would take Minnie by the hand and move to some other studio.” Indeed, Walt continued, “He is never mean or ugly. He never lies or cheats or steals. He is a clean, happy, little fellow who loves life and folk. He never takes advantage of the weak and we see to it that nothing ever happens that will cure his faith in the transcendent destiny of one Mickey Mouse or his conviction that the world is just a big apple pie…. He is Youth, the Great Unlicked and Uncontaminated.” To which The Nation grumbled that Mickey had turned into “an international bore.”
With Mickey beginning to fade as an aesthetic force, the studio needed a new star, a character who had been conceived with and internalized the insolence that Mickey had lost—a character who could generate gags as Mickey now could not and a character who was immune to the expectations of civility that burdened Mickey. The new character that evolved, in fact, would become a foil to Mickey—the unbridled id to his anodyne ego. For a studio that was already becoming exasperated with its star, he was the anti-Mickey, or rather all the things that Mickey had been and more.
But it was a long gestation. Mickey had begun life visually and then found a voice, so that he was a design before he was a character, which had been part of his problem. His foil began life as a voice and then had to find a physical form, which was part of his success. The voice belonged to a tiny, apple-cheeked twenty-nine-year-old Oklahoma-born milkman named Clarence Nash. In school in rural Missouri, where his family moved when he was nine, he found an early talent for making animal noises, which he later parlayed into an act playing the mandolin and performing bird calls on the Redpath Lyceum and Chautauqua circuit. When he got married, he promised his eighteen-year-old bride that he would quit show business for a more secure position, and the Nashes moved to California, where he got a job with the Adohr Dairy, visiting schools in a milk wagon pulled by miniature horses and making his animal noises to entertain the children. He also performed periodically on a local radio program. During one of these broadcasts late in 1933 Walt, who was listening for voices he could use in the cartoons, said he heard Nash and subsequently invited him to the studio. Nash had a different version. He said that he visited the studio on his own initiative, got an interview with Jaxon, and did a rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in a voice that he modeled after a bleating goat. While Nash recited, Jaxon secretly switched on the intercom to Walt’s office, and Walt burst in, shouting, “That’s our talking duck!” Walt didn’t know exactly what to do with Nash yet but signed him to a retainer anyway.
It would be another year—during which Nash went back to work for the dairy—before Walt summoned him (Nash once said it was because he had told Walt that the Iwerks studio wanted to use his voice for a duck) and cast him in 1934 as an irascible, selfish, bottom-heavy, long-beaked, and long-necked duck in The Wise Little Hen, who begs off helping the hen plant and harvest her corn by feigning a bellyache every ti
me she approaches. It wasn’t instant stardom, though the studio did copyright the character shortly thereafter, dressing him in a blue sailor suit with a sailor’s cap because, Walt later said, “Being a duck, he likes water. Sailors and water go together.” When the studio decided to pair him with Mickey Mouse in Orphan’s Benefit, the anti-Mickey and the Mickey together, Ward Kimball, who helped animate the cartoon, called it a “turning point” both for the studio and for the further development of personality animation. In the cartoon, Mickey, acting as master of ceremonies at a benefit for orphaned mice, introduces Donald, who recites “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and then erupts when the audience razzes him as he begins “Little Boy Blue.” By cartoon’s end the young mice are tormenting him with a bombardment of bricks and boxing gloves, and Donald is apoplectic. “Well, the reaction that came pouring into the studio from the country was tremendous,” Kimball recalled. “The kids in the theater loved or hated or booed Donald Duck.”
By early 1935, when Donald was harassing Mickey in The Band Concert, considered by many the best of the Mickey Mouse cartoons, the duck had already begun overtaking the cartoon’s nominal star. “There have been signs that the impudence and cockiness of the Mouse were dwindling, that Mickey was going polite,” Gilbert Seldes observed in The New York Journal. “In ‘The Band Concert’ the duck takes over. It is a bad, wicked duck, a malicious and mischievous duck, a duck corresponding to all the maddening attractiveness of bad little boys and girls—a superb character.”
In some respects Donald Duck seemed to offer audiences both a vicarious liberation from the conventional behavior and morality to which they had to subscribe in their own lives and which the Duck clearly transgressed and, since he usually got his comeuppance, a vicarious revenge against the pretentious, unattractive, and ornery at a time when the entire world seemed to be roiling in anger and violence. Whereas Mickey had turned into a smiling cipher, the lumpy Duck was hot-tempered, vain, pompous, boastful, rude, suspicious, self-satisfied, and self-indulgent—a taxonomy of misconduct and offensiveness. Audiences quickly identified him with President Roosevelt’s outspoken and irritable secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, who was known generally as the “Great Curmudgeon.” “Sometimes it was hard for an audience to tell whether Ickes was imitating the Duck or the Duck was imitating Ickes,” Walt said.
Whether or not the curmudgeonly Donald liberated audiences, he certainly liberated the storymen and animators at the studio from the shackles of Mickey. “Every time we put him into a trick, a temper, a joke,” said one writer of the mouse, “thousands of people would belabor us with nasty letters. That’s what made Donald Duck so easy. He was our outlet…. Everyone knew he was bad and didn’t give a damn. So we can whip out three Donald Duck stories in the time it takes us to work out one for the Mouse.” Walt himself agreed, saying that Mickey was funny only when the situation was funny, while intemperate Donald was inherently funny. “The duck can blow his top and commit mayhem,” Walt once told an interviewer. Mickey couldn’t.
Nash, whose quacking voice had inspired the character, credited Walt with extending Donald’s range and turning him into a personality by suggesting that Nash try being angry in the duck voice or laughing in it. Jack Hannah, who would later direct many of the Donald Duck cartoons, said that “Donald could be anything. He had every emotion a human being had. He could be cute, mischievous, go from warm to cool at any moment. You could half kill him and he’d come right back. He instigated trouble. Not mean, but he always saw a chance to have fun at other people’s expense.” In short, Donald was the prime example of Walt’s caricatured reality and the first Disney star to be born full-blown from that aesthetic.
Now that he was beginning to move from featured player into leading man, the gangly duck that Art Babbitt and Dick Huemer had designed for The Wise Little Hen was shortened, softened, and rounded by animator Fred Spencer, just as Mickey had been, to make him visually cuter and more expressive. By 1935 he was being featured in his own series of books, and by the fall of that year, though Donald had yet to star in his own cartoon, Walt was already fretting that Nash, who had been offered a three-year contract extension at $55 a week, might try to strong-arm them. “If we start using the duck character a lot,” Walt memoed Roy, “we don’t want Clarence to get any inflated ideas of his importance here.” Then he attempted to tamp his own worries by saying that if Nash were to leave the studio and voice a duck elsewhere, the Disneys could probably sue. In the end, Nash signed the contract, and Donald finally got a starring role, in Donald and Pluto, the following year, and then a full series of his own; but even before that Variety observed of Donald’s appearance in another Mickey cartoon, “Again it’s manifest how fast growing is the vogue of Donald Duck, the volubly irate gander who bids fair to par Mickey as Disney’s favorite creation.” To most Americans, Donald already had.
IV
Donald Duck was not the only character at the studio to achieve stardom in the mid-1930s. Awards and recognition had tumbled in for Walt himself. The Art Institute of Chicago exhibited one hundred Disney drawings, which the institute’s director said “constitute art in nearly every sense.” The Writers Club of Los Angeles had feted him at the dinner with Will Rogers and Chaplin in attendance, the American Art Dealers Association awarded him one of its four gold medals, and the Art Workers Guild of England, whose ranks included George Bernard Shaw, bestowed an honorary membership on Walt—the first ever in recognition of a filmmaker. The United States Junior Chamber of Commerce named him the outstanding man of the year over New York district attorney Thomas E. Dewey, who would soon be his state’s governor and later the Republican presidential candidate. The French Legion of Honor awarded him its red ribbon, and he received a gold medal at the Venice Film Festival. Critics now regularly labeled him a genius.
Famous visitors clamored to tour the studio and meet him—among them Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, H. G. Wells and Chaplin, actress Madeleine Carroll, director Ernst Lubitsch, humorist Robert Benchley, critic Alexander Woollcott, and Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, who wrote that he was sometimes frightened watching Disney’s films—“frightened because of some absolute perfection in what he does” and because Disney seemed to know “all the most secret strands of human thought, images, ideas, feelings.” Later, among other notables, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, novelist Aldous Huxley, and composer Igor Stravinsky would also visit. “Everybody in the world beat a path to Walt’s door,” remembered Dick Huemer. And there was the media coverage—a 1933 profile in Time, a 1934 article in The New York Times Magazine, a full-page photo portrait of Walt by Edward Steichen in Vanity Fair with Mickey and Minnie behind him, and scores of newspaper interviews. His narrow, mustachioed face was familiar enough now to qualify him, while not yet thirty-five, as a celebrity. “I sometimes feel that I should pinch myself to make sure that I am not dreaming,” he blushed to a reporter from a Kansas City newspaper.
If he had fame, he also had an image. He loved to recount the hardships of his youth and the adversity he had overcome, and these elements of his personal mythology now became part of his public story. Reporters referred to him as the “Horatio Alger of the cinema” for his long, hard grind to prominence, while generally ignoring the rambunctiousness that had got him there. They also found him humble, down-to-earth, and anything but a Hollywood glamour boy. Asked what it was like to be a celebrity, Walt demurred, saying that it helped him get better seats at football games and was a nuisance when he had to contend with autograph seekers. But, he added, “As far as I can remember, being a celebrity has never helped me make a good picture, or a good shot in a polo game, or command the obedience of my daughter, or impress my wife. It doesn’t even keep the fleas off our dogs.”
Playwright Robert Sherwood, meeting Disney for the first time, expected to find him overbearing and boorish and instead reported that he seemed “almost painfully shy and diffident.” He was also self-deprecating, quipping when one admirer told him he had personality that
“[i]t’s the mouse that has the personality.” Nearly everyone commented on his informality—on the casual clothes he wore and on the studio edict that his employees call him “Walt.” His office was modest and austere with a plain dark-stained desk and a few framed awards on the walls. He was unaffected by praise. Once the wind of fulsomeness passes, wrote critic Otis Ferguson in The New Republic, the “air clears and he becomes what he was in the first place: common and everyday, not inaccessible, not in a foreign language, not suppressed or sponsored or anything. Just Disney,” which made him the very paradigm of the homespun, unpretentious, hardworking American artist. Walt played up this idea, saying he seldom read and had little truck with art, leading one reporter to write, “Disney is as free as Al Smith [the raspy-voiced former New York governor] from the taint of book-learning; no man could be clearer of the curse of sophistication.”
To complete the portrait, Walt was always portrayed as indifferent to everything but his work. Hundreds upon hundreds of desperate individuals petitioned him during the Depression, asking if he might have a job for them or could spare some money from his wealth. He almost invariably refused, even turning down Dr. Cowles, his old benefactor, now in financial straits, claiming that he had no money since he plowed everything he earned back into the company to maintain quality. He was not, an early profile suggested, much of a businessman, and he cared nothing for money except as a means to an end. Article after article promoted the idea that Walt’s only ambition was to make great cartoons, not a great fortune.
