Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck were now afterthoughts, as Walt delegated as much responsibility for the shorts as possible so that he could focus on Snow White. Once the first outlines had been presented, he began meeting with the writers several times each week throughout October and November at what were often marathon sessions. His first order of business, after he and the staff had established the basic lineaments of the story, was naming the dwarfs. The initial lists included Scrappy, Cranky, Dirty, Awful, Blabby, Silly, Daffy, Flabby, Jaunty, Biggo Ego, Chesty, Jumpy, Baldy, Hickey (“always hiccoughing at wrong moment”), Gabby, Shorty, Nifty, Wheezy, Sniffy, Burpy, Lazy, Puffy, Dizzy, Stuffy, and Tubby, along with Grumpy, Happy, Doc, Bashful, and Dopey, which would eventually make the final cut, though not without considerably more scrutiny. While they pondered these names—and they would be pondering them for months—Walt decided to break down the story into narrative blocks the way he broke down animation into scenes, beginning with the introduction of the dwarfs to Snow White. “Rather than spend too much of our energy at the present time working out the first and less important sequences,” went a studio instruction at the end of October, “Walt prefers to start actual work at the point where Snow White finds the cottage of the Seven Dwarfs. FROM THIS POINT ON, our basic plot development is fairly definitely established. What happens UP TO THAT TIME is still rather hazy.” The first dialogue, most likely transcribed by Dick Creedon from Walt’s recitation, was dated October 19, and Creedon delivered a full draft of the scene three days later.

  The next week, in a sign of how furiously Walt was mobilizing the studio and drafting everyone into the project, he held a three-hour meeting on the soundstage to hash out more plot details and assign characters to the animators so that they could experiment with their own interpretations. (Among other things, Walt had yet to decide whether the Queen should be a “fat, cartoon type” with a comic element or a “high collar—stately beautiful type.”) At the same time that the story department was writing scenes and dialogue, Walt charged the music department with composing songs for the film and circulated yet another outline, this one by story department head Ted Sears, to inspire gags from everyone in the studio. “Try to give at least one good gag on each individual section of the whole sequence,” he urged on the introduction scene. “There are good gag possibilities throughout the sequence.” He made similar requests every few days after each scene was submitted. In return he received boxes full of suggestions for gags, another sign of just how enthusiastic the employees were about the new project.

  Though Walt had been edging away from gags for years in favor of larger narrative blocks that would elicit more complex responses from the audience, he was resorting to them for the feature as a form of security. Gags were what the studio knew best. “At the start [of Snow White] everything was gags, gags, gags,” recalled animator Frank Thomas. But through the fall and winter of 1934, as the script was being developed, Walt, in Thomas’s words, “was seeing something new and more things that he could do with animation, and the layout men would give him new drawings, and everybody was coming up with new ideas and so Walt was going, ‘What have I got here?’ He was like an organist playing all the stops.” Essentially, Walt’s vision was expanding as he conceptualized the film.

  Throughout the winter he continued to meet endlessly with the story crew, not only during the day but occasionally at night as well, reviewing and revising each line, each gag, each story point in the introduction scene, not once or twice but a dozen times in session after session, before reluctantly moving on to the scenes in which the Queen questions her Magic Mirror over who is the fairest in the land, the Queen induces Snow White to eat the apple, and the Queen dispatches her huntsman into the woods with Snow White with the intention of killing her. But for all the attention lavished on the story and for all the talent commandeered to execute it, Walt was moving so incrementally, scene by scene, line by line, even word by word, that by the spring of 1935 he had yet to name all the dwarfs or characterize them, much less finalize the script. If there was any possibility to a scene, he seemed determined not to overlook it. Snow White would not be rushed, even if that meant disregarding the original schedule. It would percolate for as long as it took the film to brew.

  There was another drag on the process that winter and spring besides Walt’s perfectionism: Walt wasn’t well. Feeling out of sorts, he had been taking injections for what his doctors had diagnosed as a “defective thyroid,” but Roy found that the treatment seemed to make Walt more jittery. He was also spent. He had been working indefatigably on Snow White for months—his last vacation had been a three-week cruise to Honolulu the previous summer—while also having to oversee the entire production of shorts. Obviously cognizant of how dependent the entire studio was on Walt’s well-being, Roy suggested that they take their wives on an extended tour of Europe to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversaries—the first time Walt would have visited the Continent since the war. Walt, who hated to leave the studio, reluctantly or not left for New York on June 2, 1935, and boarded the Normandie on its maiden voyage to Plymouth, England, on June 7, arriving five days later. Mindful of how much needed to be done, he instructed the staff not to let “matters accumulate until my return that will hold up production in any way,” and he put Ted Sears in charge.

  Even as Walt was weighed down with concerns, the cruise was giddy. “Everyone aboard is a ‘somebody’ or a reporter,” Roy wrote his staff in Los Angeles. “[M]y god what a collection of snooty folk.” Edna Disney recalled, “We weren’t used to the celebrities so we were having a big time. We were just like farmers.” One evening at dinner they sat next to one of the Rothschilds, who asked Walt to draw Mickey on the menu for the president of France. But if the Disneys felt like bumpkins among the wealthy and elite, they had underestimated their own fame. When they arrived at Paddington Station in London on the boat train, the crowds waiting for them were so large that the police had to protect the Disneys, and when they settled in Grosvenor House, according to one account, a “hundred pressmen followed Disney from room to room,” even tailing him into the bathroom. From that point on, throughout the trip, Lillian kept chiding Walt, calling him “Big Shot.”

  Over the next six weeks the Disneys toured Europe, driving north to Scotland and the Lake Country, which Walt loved, then going to Paris, where they were feted by the League of Nations. Appreciating the formality of the occasion, Walt and Roy had morning coats made for them, “only to find,” Walt would later recall, “that everyone there had wanted the boys from Hollywood to feel at home so they came in casual clothes!” Walt never wore the morning coat again. For two weeks they drove aimlessly through the French countryside, visiting the places where Walt had bivouacked during the war; then they drove into Germany, stopping at Baden-Baden and Munich, crossed the Alps to Switzerland, and took the train from Venice to Rome, where Walt was again greeted at the station by an appreciative mob and where he had audiences with Pope Pius XI and Benito Mussolini, who bragged to Walt that the Italian trains were now safe from brigands.

  The trip seemed to have the intended restorative effect. When the Disneys returned home, after sailing on the Italian luxury liner Rex from Genoa on July 25, they said they were “tired but happy.” Certainly they had been buoyed by the reception they received. Walt and Lillian “got such a welcome as Europe has given few Americans in recent years,” reported the Los Angeles Times, citing a cartoon in the British magazine Punch in which John Bull greeted Walt as “Public Benefactor No. 1.” Roy happily concurred. “Walt has been royally received everywhere,” he wrote their parents. “You have good reason to be proud of Walt. He has conducted himself in a marvelous manner. Aside from the question of whether he deserves all the honors that have been conferred on him, he keeps his head and is still the same boy you knew.” As for his physical condition, Walt felt rejuvenated. When his doctor’s receptionist called and advised him to come to the office to resume his thyroid injections, Walt snarled, “You tell Doc
I never felt better in my life. He can shoot those things in his own ass from now on.”

  He came back, he said, having learned some lessons about the world at large and about his animations within it. Asked what he thought of political tensions in Europe with the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany, Walt said that he wasn’t alarmed. “When a dispatch from Chicago says ‘150 stricken by heat’ it sounds as if the whole Middle West were burning,” he told a reporter, “but when you find that one prostration was in Columbus, one in Omaha, and so on, and millions of people are going about their business as usual, it doesn’t seem so bad, though the reports are quite truthful.” For his own business, Walt said he now believed that dialogue should be reduced to a minimum. “I found that all over the world people want to laugh,” he told columnist Louella Parsons upon his return, “but you cannot translate American slang and American humor into any other language, so I will try to keep my comedy, so far as possible, in pantomime.”

  He also returned to his obsession with Snow White. He had decided that rather than divide his attention each day between the feature and the shorts, which was obviously driving him to distraction, he would instead spend alternate weeks on each. But before long he was violating his own rule. Snow White was the only thing that mattered. Writing to Roy that December, Walt called the feature “our one chance for real recognition, and with this thought in mind, I am going to concentrate on this feature, even at the expense of the shorts so I can have it out definitely one year from now.” All that fall and winter he was meeting again with his writers on Snow White, meeting in long sessions during the day, meeting sometimes at night with animators to solicit gags, meeting even on Saturday mornings for hours where he again performed the scenes repeatedly (still concentrating on Snow White cleaning up the cottage and then meeting the dwarfs) and dictated the continuity. And all these months, while fighting off a nasty cold that he couldn’t seem to shake, he was continually running the story through his head, picking up on the tiniest filigrees—“Snow White catches squirrels sweeping stuff under the rug—corrects them” or “Have some birds up in the rafters getting cobwebs around their tails”—and even writing out the dialogue in his own loopy scrawl on the back of the continuity, where most of his dialogue had already been typed, cutting just a word here or there, making Snow White a little more ingratiating and seemingly absorbing the story through his hand as he had through his performances. And all these months he was thinking and rethinking: Should there be more gags or more emphasis on personality? Should they aim for the cute or for the more deeply felt? By early December, after well over a year of intense concentration, he felt he had mastered at least the basic outline and tone if not all the details. “I’ve had continuity all wrapped around my neck like a bunch of spaghetti,” he wrote Sidney Franklin that December, explaining why he hadn’t been able to make further progress on Bambi. “While my story is not yet completely worked out, I believe we have something that is going to be good.” He now hoped to have the story licked by spring, he told Franklin, and the entire film finished in a year, at which time they could proceed to animate Bambi. In the meantime Walt was eager to perform Snow White for Franklin and hear his criticisms.

  But though Walt was already asking his top animators to begin conceptualizing scenes visually—he had even sent the continuity to animator Bill Tytla, who was in the hospital recovering from a polo accident—he had underestimated his own perfectionism and badly miscalculated the schedule. Snow White was still a long, long way from completion—and a long, long way from being everything he wanted it and needed it to be.

  II

  He required more staff. Even before he began to gear up for Snow White, the obligation to produce two full slates of cartoons—the Mickeys and the Symphonies—and the ever-increasing sophistication with which they had to be made now that he was the Walt Disney, required him to hire more animators. Walt was always hunting for talent, always seeking to add animators to his crew if they could improve the product. Some of his new recruits were veterans who wanted to work at the preeminent animation studio. Carmen Maxwell, one of Walt’s old cronies from Kansas City who was then toiling for Harman-Ising, wrote Walt that “I can’t be satisfied any more there, because they lack certain fundamental grown up ideas without which they are never going to be able to make really first class pictures.” He added, “Believe it or not, I’d prefer to work harder and make less money, if I knew my efforts were going into pictures that were carefully planned and properly made.”

  Harboring the same sentiment, several animators throughout 1932, 1933, and 1934 decamped for the Disney studio, and Walt, with Snow White obviously in mind, welcomed them. One of eight children growing up in Nebraska and Iowa to an impoverished father, Art Babbitt had headed for New York as a teenager with the intention of working his way through Columbia University and becoming a psychiatrist, but after six weeks of sleeping under a church stairwell and scavenging food from garbage pails, he landed a job at an advertising agency, became a freelance artist, and eventually wound up at the Paul Terry animation studio. When he saw The Skeleton Dance, he had a revelation: “I knew that was the place I wanted to work.” He quit Terry, left for California, and went directly to the Disney studio. When he couldn’t get an appointment with Walt, he painted him a giant letter—twenty by twenty-four feet—in which he requested an interview and had it sent special delivery. Walt capitulated, granted him an audience, and then hired him a few days later.

  This kind of quest to work at the Disney studio would become a familiar story among dissatisfied animators, prompting a kind of hegira to Hyperion. Dick Huemer, who had quit high school to go to the Art Students League and then quit the Art Students League to join the Raoul Barré studio in animation’s early days, was working for Charlie Mintz when Mintz instituted a pay cut. Huemer immediately headed for California and joined Disney in 1933, though he would be earning roughly half of what he made from Mintz. Grim Natwick had been courted by Roy and Walt after Walt saw a scene that Natwick had drawn for the Fleischers of Betty Boop climbing aboard a moving train. Natwick declined the invitation and eventually went to work for Ub Iwerks’s new studio in 1931 “because the rumor in the East was that the genius of the [Disney studio] was Iwerks.” Three years later, like so many animators, he was making overtures to Disney, though it was said that Walt would never hire anyone who had previously rejected him. Nevertheless Ted Sears, a friend of Natwick’s, intervened, and Natwick, after a two-hour tour of the studio conducted personally by Walt, was tendered a contract.

  Perhaps the most important addition among the veterans was a large bear of a man who had been born in Yonkers, New York, of a Ukrainian father and a Polish mother. With his bushy mustache, thick brows, and unruly hair, Vladimir “Bill” Tytla looked like the Russian dictator Stalin, and at parties he would pound his chest with one hand, hoist a vodka in the other, and exclaim, “I’m a Cossack!” It wasn’t just a pose—it was also an attitude of work. Grim Natwick said that Tytla “hovered over his drawing board like a giant vulture protecting a nest filled with golden eggs. He was an intense worker—eager, nervous, absorbed.” Sometimes he drew with such focus and passion that his pencil tore holes in the paper. What made Tytla special was that he transferred his ferocity to the screen. His work at the Paul Terry studio was so distinctive that Walt could identify which scenes Tytla drew, and when Roy visited New York in May 1933, he took Tytla to dinner in hopes of luring him west. “He expresses a keen desire to have the opportunity to do ‘better work,’” Roy wrote Walt, but he wouldn’t leave Terry without a “lucrative offer.”

  While Tytla played hard to get, the Disneys played their own hardball. Ben Sharpsteen, who was in charge of recruiting and training, wrote Tytla in December that the studio had had difficulty indoctrinating animators from other studios in the Disney style and that “to bring a stranger in without rating his ability with the others, would be an injustice to members of our own animating staff.” He offered $100 a week, which, for an anima
tor of Tytla’s stature, was clearly unacceptable. Still, as Snow White inched closer to realization, Roy kept wooing him over the next year, taking Tytla to dinner whenever Roy visited New York. Tytla described it as an “on-again off-again romance,” until Walt and Roy convinced him to fly out to California and see their facilities. It was in November 1934, after an eighteen-hour flight and a studio tour, that he finally surrendered to the Disney onslaught. His arrival created what Don Graham, the studio’s resident art instructor, labeled a new school of animation, Forces and Forms, predicated on the fact that Tytla conveyed power through the thrust of moving parts. He was so admired that after he left the studio for the day young animators would race to his office to pluck his discarded drawings from the wastebasket.

  At the same time that he was signing veterans, Walt, with his urgent manpower needs, was also collecting a group of malleable young guns who had either been recommended to him or had worn him down through persistence; they would in time become both the main proponents of the Disney style and the bulwarks of the studio. As animator Ham Luske put it, Walt had imported these New York animators and “the idea was like a chain letter—every animator needed ten assistants and dozens of in-betweeners.” So they came. Born in Germany, Wolfgang Reitherman, known as “Woolie,” was the last of seven children of a bottled-water plant owner who brought his family to Kansas City to escape what he called “political unrest” and then to Sierra Madre, California, for the climate when one of his daughters contracted tuberculosis. After attending junior college and dabbling in art, Reitherman was working at the Douglas Aircraft Company—tall, lanky, and handsome in the Lindbergh mold, he dreamed of being an airman—when he lost hope and suddenly decided to go to art school at Chouinard instead. One of his instructors there was Phil Dike, who assisted Don Graham at the studio. Dike suggested that Reitherman, then twenty-four, apply for a job at Disney, where he began work in June 1933, gaining a reputation, Walt would say, as the “kind of guy you give him a tough assignment and he smiles…He’s [got] an ability to take masses—big, bulky things.”