by Neal Gabler
Walt seemed to realize that he was hopelessly addicted to work at the expense of family and friends. For years he and Lillian had been shopping for a ranch where he could get away, only to conclude, as he wrote one prospective seller, that his duties at the studio left him “little time for actual recreation.” Beginning in May 1938, one of his few extracurricular activities was an annual one-week horseback ride in the California outback near Santa Barbara with a club of business professionals who called themselves the Rancheros Visitadores, though another member, Disney producer Dave Hand, observed that the Visitadores “might just as well have brought along tables and chairs,” since “Walt would talk more and more about his new ideas, always ending with directions for me to see that certain new or different operations were effected or workers transferred or revisions of schedule upon our return to ‘civilization.’” “He didn’t know anything else,” Hand said, “he couldn’t talk anything else but that studio.”
While the studio remained Walt’s priority, in the months after Snow White, during a brief lull in his workload, he had begun refocusing on his family, in part because it was only with his family that he didn’t have to be “Walt Disney,” an even more onerous obligation after his feature film’s success. Walt enjoyed the limelight, but he hated the public persona he was forced to assume, and from his unpretentious midwestern upbringing, he hated the sense of inflated importance bestowed upon celebrities, of which he was now certainly one. If he was not a man without ego, he thought of himself as a man without airs, and so he was. Though the two-story house at 4053 Woking Way was attractive and considerably more spacious than the prefabricated bandbox on Lyric Avenue, with three bedrooms, a combination library–projection room–paneled bar, a swimming pool with its own pavilion, and a broad lawn sweeping down the hill, it was hardly the capacious mansion one might have imagined for Walt Disney. He lived modestly in other ways too. Until he got his first Cadillac in the early 1940s, he drove Plymouths and Packards, and he bought his clothes off the rack. He liked plain food; his favorite meal was canned beans. Nor did he surround himself with the trappings of his celebrity. He told one interviewer that he deliberately kept Disney products out of his house because “I’ve lived with it too much and I just didn’t want to live with it at home.”
But as preoccupied as he was, when it came to Diane and Sharon, he was a doting father who sheltered them from his own fame. He enjoyed telling how six-year-old Diane had asked him if he was Walt Disney. “You know I am,” he answered. “The Walt Disney?” she questioned. When he chortled that he was, she asked for his autograph. He would chase the girls around the house, cackling like the witch from Snow White, or he would twirl them endlessly by their heels, “for hours and hours,” Diane would say, or he would stand in the swimming pool and let them climb to his shoulders. “I thought that my father was the strongest man in the world and the most fun,” Diane recalled. At night he read to them. And on the weekends, after he picked them up from church, he would take them either to Griffith Park to ride the merry-go-round or to the studio, where they would follow him as he snooped about, or pedal their bikes around the empty grounds while he worked. “They used to love to go with me in those days,” Walt would reminisce. “And that [sic] was some of the happiest days of my life. They were in love with their dad.”
In the wake of Snow White even the usually dolorous Roy was excited. That April, with the film raking in $200,000 a week, he had gone to Europe to work on foreign distribution deals and to conduct an acquisition spree of properties for future features. The Disneys had already secured rights to A. A. Milne’s classic Winnie the Pooh (Diane always hugged a ragged Winnie the Pooh doll when she went to bed) and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, and they were negotiating for the rights to Don Marquis’s Archy and Mehitabel, about a precocious cockroach and a cat. While in England, Roy struck a deal for rights to Sir John Tenniel’s drawings for Alice in Wonderland, and he had hashed out an odd agreement for Peter Pan with the Great Ormond Street Hospital, the institution to which Sir James Barrie had willed the rights to his play when he died in 1937; the hospital had granted the Disneys the opportunity to make an arrangement with Paramount Pictures, which had acquired the live-action screen rights for Peter Pan, and failing that, it was willing to sell them the cartoon rights, thus keeping them from the Fleischers, who were embarking on their own program of cartoon features. Even so, upon Roy’s return from this European foray, a reporter commented that he “still wears the look of a man who isn’t quite sure yet whether the time has come to stop worrying.”
It had. Though Snow White had cost a staggering sum of money (over $100,000 for the story development alone, nearly $300,000 for the animation, and well over $1 million overall) and though the studio had gone seriously into debt to finance it (the Disneys had borrowed a total of $2.3 million from the Bank of America between May 1936 and May 1938), the film’s success had more than rewarded them. On May 20, 1938, just five months after Snow White’s premiere, they retired the entire obligation, vindicating Walt’s belief in the project. “Roy brought Mr. Giannini for a meeting with me to hurry me along to finish Snow White,” Walt gloated to a group of his animators over lunch after the conference. “[I]nstead I got Mr. Giannini so interested and excited about our next project, Pinocchio, that he advanced us another bundle of money…. I beat Roy in this one.” Moreover, the studio for the first time was actually running ahead of schedule on the shorts, and RKO, the distributor, had offered to set up a revolving fund of over $1 million upon which Disney could draw for its next two features should they renew the contract. Reporting to Roy that RKO was willing to give them anything they asked for, Gunther Lessing joked, “We already took the last drop of blood, so it may not be equitable to extract liver, heart and stomach. However, no matter what we do Walt will raise hell and want a better deal.” He ended: “There is no doubt in my mind that everybody connected with RKO considers Disney as the most important and prominent element in RKO. We are absolutely essential to them.”
While Walt was waxing expansive over Snow White’s success, he wanted to deliver on his promise that everyone at the studio would benefit from it. That May he had stormed into George Morris’s office and demanded that the bonuses on Snow White now be paid. (They initially amounted to $115,000, though in June he declared that each employee would receive three months’ salary, which finally cost the studio roughly $750,000.) “They deserve it,” Walt told columnist Ed Sullivan. “They made the picture possible, didn’t they?” After years of working on Saturdays until noon, he also decided to put the studio on a five-day week that summer. Finally, in a gesture of gratitude, he announced that he would be hosting a weekend retreat for his employees and their families beginning June 4 at the Lake Narconian Hotel and Club near Palm Springs.
As it turned out, the retreat was a debacle. All the years of pent-up energy on Snow White gushed forth. Alcohol flowed freely. Men and women openly paired off for romantic liaisons. One of the studio watchmen threw his wife into the swimming pool, then ran to the roof of the hotel and made a high dive to rescue her. Another employee rode a horse into the hotel lobby. Drunken Fred Moore fell out of a second-story window but landed on a bush and walked away unhurt. Walt was embarrassed and disappointed.
The horseplay didn’t square with the effusive encomia that Walt was now receiving. In addition to the praise he was garnering as one of the nation’s greatest artists, that June he received an honorary degree from the University of Southern California, his first such award, but he had already been notified in February that Yale University would be awarding him a degree at its June commencement, and Harvard quickly followed suit—the first honorary degree it had ever awarded to a person in film. The Yale and Harvard degrees, in fact, were bestowed on successive days, June 22 and 23, and Walt received “prolonged applause” at the Harvard ceremony. These honors prompted Walt and Lillian’s trip east, where he was also feted by a host of notables at the Music Hall in New York City, includin
g Radio Corporation of America chief David Sarnoff and publisher Ogden Reid. When he returned to his office at Hyperion, he installed trophy cases to house the numerous awards he had received—as New York Times critic Frank Nugent enumerated them after a visit, “a crystal and silver goblet from Russia, loving cups from most of the junior Chambers of Commerce, medals and plaques from France and Brazil and countries in between, honorary scrolls from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,” and of course his honorary degrees.
Inevitably, despite the shenanigans at Lake Narconian, a new sense of dignity began to pervade the studio—and a new pressure. Snow White had proven the power of the animated cartoon, and it had provided the studio with a financial cushion. But it had also raised the stakes once again, especially since Disney’s rivals, the Fleischers and Walter Lantz, were also preparing features now. After the flush of Snow White, Walt was beginning to worry. “We have to prove to the public that SNOW WHITE and feature cartoons are not just a passing novelty,” he wrote that May to one of his chief supporters, Gus Van Schmus, the general manager of Radio City Music Hall, “but that they have a very definite place in the entertainment world and are here to stay.” He admitted to one reporter that after Snow White “he was afraid he could not equal it in other endeavors”—an attitude, the reporter observed, “quite in reverse of the Hollywood philosophy of coasting as long as possible on one successful film.” And at a sweatbox session that July he was already lamenting that his directors were not thinking creatively but rather were “taking literally everything that is put in there…and just carrying it out mechanically—just by formula, instead of inventing all the time and improving.” He exhorted them to start “raising their values.”
Given the sudden emphasis on feature animations, it was natural to think of Snow White as the beginning of a new era in the studio, a golden age of cartoons in which the values were raised and the studio really was transformed into the communal guild of which Walt had dreamed. The truth as it turned out was something else. Snow White may have been less a beginning than an end—of old ways of crafting cartoons and running the studio. For one thing, with the feature’s success had come a vast expansion in the workforce, as Walt braced for the new films to come. Nearly eight hundred employees were added to the payroll in the two years following Snow White, but because Walt had been slow to advance feature production as he awaited the results of that picture, he wound up creating a glut. Many of the new employees simply sat doing nothing through most of 1938. Sharpsteen didn’t want to work with them because they weren’t experienced enough. Ham Luske tried to find them assignments, but he remembered it as a “horrible deal.”
Because there were so many new employees and because the studio was being converted virtually overnight from one that was dedicated to producing six-and seven-minute cartoons to one that was dedicated to producing seventy-and eighty-minute features, chaos began to descend. Snow White had been a long, deliberate labor of trial and error, but it was sui generis; it provided little guidance in making features on a regular schedule, which was what the studio needed to do now. By Walt’s own admission, the two years after Snow White were “years of confusion, swift expansion, reorganization.” And he described the training of the new recruits as being “fitted into a machine for the manufacture of entertainment which had become bewilderingly complex”—a far cry from the heady, messy, lurching collaboration on Snow White. As he would later tell his employees, “The only way to have a [commanding] position in the field is to have an organization so that there will be no weak sisters coming from the plant.” But for all Walt’s earlier fitful attempts to routinize the process of animation and for all the increasing specialization, the studio had never really been a machine. Now he had to try to make it one.
The transformation was reflected in a proposed change in the company’s name that year. Roy had decided to consolidate the various Disney entities—the studio, the merchandise division, and a real estate investment arm that the brothers had formed in the early 1930s called Liled Realty after their wives, Lillian and Edna—under the banner “Walt Disney Enterprises.” While the new name may have sounded more formal and majestic than Walt Disney Productions, it also ignited a firestorm of protest within the company. Critics charged, in Roy’s words, that Walt Disney Productions “sounds less like a billion dollar project—world-wide enterprise with a lot of money and power,” than the proposed name did, and that Walt Disney Enterprises might give the public the wrong impression, perhaps that the Disney studio had gone corporate. In the end Roy capitulated, but the incident nevertheless indicated a new tone and direction at the studio.
That May the studio saw a more direct and dramatic example of its own swelling status and corporatization. Embarking on an ambitious feature program with his newly enlarged staff, Walt realized that he needed new facilities. At first he decided to erect a new building for the shorts unit on Hyperion, across the street from the main studio, but as he mulled the idea one weekend and went over the plans with his chief engineer Bill Garity and a contractor named Frank Crowhurst, he suddenly changed his mind. Now, with virtually no deliberation, he decided that he was going to build an entirely new studio instead and promptly asked George Morris in the business office to lay out a financing scheme. When Morris protested that he needed to know what the cost of the new studio would be, Walt, with his customary disdain for money, shrugged. “Well, go ahead and figure on $500,000 and we will talk about the rest of it later.”
In short order Walt whipped himself into a frenzy over the new studio. Even with Roy in Europe, he began scouting properties, and Morris helplessly memoed the absent brother: “It looks as though we’re going ahead with the new studio.” Indeed, Walt was now so enthusiastic about the prospect and so eager to proceed that Gunther Lessing also contacted Roy and urged him to return before matters got out of hand. Though the Los Angeles Times reported in June that Walt was considering sites in the Westwood section of Los Angeles and in the barren suburb of Burbank, north of Los Angeles, within three weeks of his decision to build the studio he had already settled on an isolated fifty-one-acre tract in the latter community, which had served as the polo field for the Black Fox Military Academy, and he had begun negotiations with the Department of Water and Power, which owned the property. The asking price was $100,000.
“You know how I got this studio, don’t you?” Walt once asked a meeting of his employees. “They thought they would be very happy if Snow White grossed three million, so when it went over that I said: Let me have this—I want to build a new studio…and that is how we got the new studio.” In fact it wasn’t quite so simple. The lion’s share of Snow White’s profits had gone to retire the debt, so Walt dispatched Morris and Garity to consult Joe Rosenberg at the Bank of America about a loan. Rosenberg was amenable, but after sending out an appraiser to look at the Burbank site, he thought it overpriced, said he would advance the Disneys only $30,000, and advised that Walt look at other properties. Undeterred, Walt quickly closed the deal with the Department of Water and Power and that July announced that construction would begin within weeks. As always, Roy would get him the money.
Having secured his sprawling tract set against the Hollywood Hills, Walt was no more inclined to erect another slapdash studio like Hyperion than he was inclined to produce slapdash animation. Planned from scratch, the new studio was going to be perfect, the physical realization of his long-held dream for an animation utopia. To design it, he hired not a conventional architect but a lugubrious-looking German-born industrial designer named Kem Weber whose primary experience in architecture had been drawing sets and occasionally planning buildings for Paramount. Having undergone an artistic conversion during a trip back to Europe in the mid-1920s, Weber had become an exponent of the Moderne style, which sought to express the zeitgeist of technology in architectural form—clean, sleek, and streamlined like an airplane, with no ornate flourishes. It seemed the appropriate style for an industry that combined art with technology, not
to mention for a studio chief who always regarded himself as forward-looking, and it was a style Walt clearly hoped would have a positive psychological impact on the employees as well since, as Weber would later write of Walt’s instructions, the “comfort of mind and the happiness in the place of your work depends not only upon pure, practical, and functional solutions but also on their appearance.”
Weber, for whom the Disney project was by far his largest commission to date, was described as the studio’s “supervising designer,” but Walt was not about to let anyone’s vision supersede his own. No less than Snow White, this was his dream. “Walt planned out very carefully,” recalled Ben Sharpsteen. “He planned out the buildings, he made mock-ups of the units on the ground with the old studio and called anybody in that wanted to contribute with ideas…. He went to as much work on that as he did in the creative side of his pictures.” Because he wanted it to be a workers’ paradise, he not only solicited suggestions from his employees but actively brought them into the process. Frank Thomas remembered Walt calling back the staff for night meetings at Hyperion, where he had a layout of the new studio and models of the buildings. “He’d say, ‘How about if we put the theater here, the animation building there, the restaurant here, the sound stage there, the orchestra stage, the camera department, ink and paint, cutting, process lab, all those things.’ We would move all those models around, then someone would say, ‘What do you do in rainy weather?’” And then Walt would calculate how many rainy days there were likely to be and begin brainstorming about digging underground tunnels between the animation building and the ink and paint building. “He really thought it through and involved us in it all the way.”
