Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  Bracing for a showdown between these two larger-than-life figures, the studio was tense. Walt knew that he had to seize the initiative and act quickly, and he did what he had always done when faced with crisis: he appealed to the missionary zeal of his employees and their belief that they were not merely industrial workers toiling for a wage but were engaged in a great enterprise. In two shifts, at five o’clock on February 10, 1941, and then again the next day, Walt addressed his staff in the studio theater. Announcing that he had been advised to read his speech and have it recorded, lest there be any legal consequences for what he said, he began soberly by saying that the studio was in a financial crisis, a crisis that he admitted was partly of his own making. He had simply had too much faith in animation. “I have had a stubborn, blind confidence in the cartoon medium,” he told them, “a determination to show the skeptics that the animated cartoon was deserving of a better place; that it was more than a mere ‘filler’ on a program; that it was more than a novelty; that it could be one of the greatest mediums of fantasy and entertainment yet developed.” That conviction had guided his life and often driven him into poverty. Yet he persisted, refusing to cut salaries when every other studio had done so and even distributing the bonuses so that he could keep his staff intact and contented. He took virtually nothing for himself, even voluntarily taking a 75 percent cut in his own salary when the foreign markets dried up. There were, he said, three options now: cut salaries drastically, cut production and lay off workers, or sell the company to someone who was interested only in profits. He was resisting all of these, preferring instead to economize through smaller salary cuts and budget reductions. Would they agree?

  Addressing the personal grievances, Walt denied that a class system existed at the studio. Creative staff got certain advantages over the business staff because, he said, they contributed more, but the Penthouse Club was now open to everyone. To those who complained of a new police presence on the lot, presumably to stop union organizing, Walt insisted it was necessitated by insurance. Of the rumor that he was training low-priced girls to take over cleanup animation, he said the studio needed flexibility, particularly with the prospect of war. And of the complaints that he was no longer available and that he delegated too much authority, he said, “It’s my nature to be democratic,” but he came to realize that “it was very dangerous and unfair to the organization as a whole for me to get too close to everybody” because it rewarded the “apple-polishers” at the expense of the hardworking men. Moreover, he said that he didn’t want the studio to be a one-man operation. It had to survive him so that the animated cartoon would survive. And he closed by invoking once again the studio’s sense of mission: “Believe me when I say that if we should go out of business tomorrow, the animated cartoon would drop to a low commercial level.” Quality was still the primary goal, and the best animators would still be the ones best rewarded. “Don’t forget this—it’s the law of the universe that the strong shall survive and the weak must fall by the way, and I don’t give a damn what idealistic plan is cooked up, nothing can change that.” Each of the two speeches lasted nearly three hours, and Walt said nothing about unions in either one.

  Though his intention had obviously been to defuse the situation by rallying the troops, Walt instead exacerbated it by seeming to underscore the very faults his employees had discovered in him. Many of them found his speech a “sob story,” in Ward Kimball’s words, and were unpersuaded by Walt’s invocation of crisis. One said he had treated them as if he were the “benevolent and understanding father” and they were “wayward sons” and claimed that some in the audience even booed him. As the left-wing magazine The Nation later put it, “This speech recruited more members for the Screen Cartoonists Guild than a year of campaigning.”

  If so, Walt seemed oblivious, thinking he had tamped down his employees’ dissatisfaction. The very next day he met with the production control manager Herb Lamb to discuss how they might contain expenses by breaking down the cost of every department in the studio and setting strict budget controls so that everyone would know exactly what targets he had to hit to stay profitable. Those who did hit the targets would get bonuses. “When the fellows see that this economy is bringing them increases in salaries, it will go over the whole plant and then you will see something happen,” Walt told Lamb. And he recommended that they post a huge sign in front of the studio theater—Walt offered to pay for it personally—listing each department and the footage it delivered per day so everyone would know which was falling behind. But even Walt now realized that he was foundering. “I became all confused,” he later confessed of his desperation. “I didn’t know where I was. I had a big staff. I hated to lay off anybody. I tried to hold on to ’em. I tried to think of different ways. The war was not here yet. But they were still drafting. Some of my boys had to go. It was a terrible period.”

  It became more terrible as the employees began to revolt over the cracks in the utopia Walt had tried so hard to maintain. “We were disappointed in him,” said one animator, “in the promise of the big happy studio where everyone would be taken care of—that was simply not working out in reality.” Writing just days after his speech, the Communist paper the Daily Worker called Walt “almost a pathetic character” and said his labor relations were a fairy tale based on Walt’s image as an ordinary fellow, though the employees were being ground down by a system that sped up work. One union leader observed of the influx of younger employees into the studio that, unlike the longtime animators, they didn’t have “stars in their eyes about Walt…They had knocked about during the Depression, and they had some kind of social consciousness,” while the older animators were likely to say, “If it weren’t for Walt, I wouldn’t be where I am.”

  Now the discontents began to boil. Five days after Walt’s speech many of the disillusioned employees gathered at a meeting of the SCG at the Hollywood Hotel where Art Babbitt, the former president of the federation, told his colleagues over a loudspeaker that the federation was toothless. Shortly thereafter, Babbitt began to get fewer assignments, and when he protested to Hal Adelquist, the head of studio personnel, he was told it was a result of his union activities. Still, three weeks later, seemingly despairing of winning the battle, Gunther Lessing agreed to let the SCG cross-check the Disney payroll against the union’s applications for membership to support the union’s claim that it represented a majority of the studio’s employees. Then, just as suddenly, Lessing insisted that the National Labor Relations Board conduct the cross-check, knowing full well that the NLRB was proscribed from doing so while it judged the legality of the federation. Four days later the federation called a meeting at the studio and announced that Anthony O’Rourke, a former NLRB official and an attorney the studio had hired to advise it on union matters, had been named the “impartial chairman” of the studio’s proposed labor board.

  Walt, seeming to think that he could douse the union by asserting his control, instead kept fanning the flames. On March 22, with union activity intensifying, he announced a new austerity plan, cutting salaries 5 percent for those earning between $50 and $100 a week, 10 percent for those earning between $100 and $200, and 15 percent for those earning over $200 and instituting a five-day, forty-hour workweek, thus reducing overtime. The studio was also eliminating food service to the rooms and shutting the coffee shop except during the noon hour. “Let us now be assured that we can once more get to work with a mental attitude tuned to producing the amount of work which we feel certain you are all thoroughly capable of doing,” Walt declared with the same peremptory attitude that had already so riled the employees.

  Of course the employees didn’t meekly get to work as Walt instructed. But it was still unclear how much stomach he had for a union battle and how willing he was to let his beloved studio be torn asunder. In mid-April he seemed ready to concede and recognize the SCG, but O’Rourke, the “impartial” chairman, wrote him calling such a gesture a “Munich,” in reference to the 1938 agreement between England
and Nazi Germany meant to appease the latter, saying it amounted to an “eventual alliance with the ‘Soviet,’” and declaring his intention to quit if Walt did so. In any case Walt soon quashed the rumors and cheerily urged his employees to forget the tensions and just “get out the much-needed production which, after all, is the most vital thing now or any other time.”

  Meanwhile, even as the NLRB was conducting hearings on the SCG charge that the federation was a company union, the federation was negotiating with the studio over recognition and a new contract and even held a vote for new officers. In early May the NLRB ruled against the federation—the examiner said responsibility for the “union” must be “laid at the door of Gunther Lessing”—and ordered it to disband. Reluctantly the studio, with a new labor adviser named Walter Spreckels, began negotiating with the SCG, which now demanded immediate recognition, and after the months of jockeying, Walt, writing to Eleanor Roosevelt—who had visited the studio that same week and expressed concerns about the labor situation there—dismissed all the strife as nothing more than a jurisdictional dispute. “In our entire history we have never had the least bit of labor trouble,” he told the First Lady.

  But even after the demise of the company union, the so-called jurisdictional dispute just wouldn’t end. Though the studio had signed a consent decree agreeing not to discourage union organizing, Walt, clearly unwilling to cede any authority, refused to give the SCG recognition and insisted on a secret ballot, not a cross-check of payroll lists, to determine if it represented the majority of studio employees. As that stalemate dragged on, the federation held a meeting at the Hotel Knickerbocker at which it officially dissolved as ordered, only to reappear that same weekend under a new name, the American Society of Screen Cartoonists, with essentially the same officers as the federation and even the same mailing address. Like the federation, it also wanted recognition. Clearly, even under government order, Lessing wouldn’t relent.

  Walt wouldn’t either. All this time he had been stewing over the attempts to challenge his power. Just after the NLRB ruling he left for his annual ride with the Rancheros Visitadores, but before he did so he encountered Art Babbitt in the hallway one morning and ordered him to desist organizing. “I don’t care if you keep your goddamn nose glued to the board all day or how much work you turn out or what kind of work it is,” Walt snarled, “if you don’t stop organizing my employees, I am going to throw you right the hell out of the front gate.” It was a threat Walt would have been only too happy to execute.

  That was because, however much Walt Disney detested the idea of a union, he also detested its organizer: Arthur Babbitt. Babbitt had come to work at the studio in July 1932 and had steadily risen through the ranks, becoming one of the top animators. Among other things, he had animated the witch in Snow White, the mushrooms in Fantasia, and the stork sequence in Dumbo. But almost from the first he experienced a tension with Walt—Babbitt called it an “electricity between us.” Harry Tytle, a studio executive, observed that Babbitt was the “one person who seems to push all the wrong buttons” for Walt. Babbitt was loud and obstreperous and by his own admission indiscreet. He disdained office politics and wouldn’t play them. He was also a notorious womanizer: “My attitude was if it moves, screw it!” Walt was especially irritated when Babbitt began an affair with young Marjorie Belcher, the model for Snow White, and Walt was about to fire him when Babbitt decided to marry her.

  Naturally the hatred intensified when Babbitt defected from the federation and not only joined the SCG and was elected its in-house representative but also called for a boycott of Disney films unless the studio recognized the union. Lessing had warned Babbitt that if he accepted the position as union head, “I was letting myself in for a lot of trouble,” but Babbitt seemed to welcome the threat. “He was a fighter,” Ward Kimball said. “He liked to have a cause. He was a showman. He liked to be onstage.” Already that March, Walt had begun complaining about Babbitt’s work, calling it “stiff, old-fashioned stuff” and told Jaxon to pressure him to do better. “He’s a very stubborn punk,” Walt said, “but we’ve got to get him out of the groove he’s in.” As further harassment, someone at the studio, probably Lessing, arranged to have Babbitt arrested and jailed, allegedly for possession of a concealed weapon, on the day he was to testify before the NLRB on the federation—“so concealed,” Babbitt would say years later of the weapon, “that to this day they have not found it.” But Babbitt also goaded back. In mid-April he had called Walt to ask for a raise for his assistant, who was earning only eighteen dollars a week. Walt erupted, telling him to “mind your own goddamn business” and calling him a “Bolshevik.” He continued to electioneer at the studio and distributed copies of Variety with the story on the NLRB decision. “It is Babbitt,” Lessing wrote Walt, “who is keeping this plant in a turmoil.”

  By this time Walt had reached the end of his patience. On May 20, apparently hoping to quash the revolt once and for all, he began releasing animators, twenty of them, all SCG members. Protesting what it called a “blitzkrieg,” the union wired Walt requesting a summit to discuss the dismissals or face a strike vote. Walt refused. On May 27 Walt called another studio meeting in the theater at which he read a brief statement claiming he would not agree to any settlement that would force his employees to join the union and he would bargain only with a union chosen by a majority vote on a secret ballot. The SCG, insisting that its cards already proved it had a majority, believed a vote was unnecessary and a union-busting tactic. After the speech Anthony O’Rourke, the labor attorney who was still advising Walt, phoned Lessing and told him that the statement “went over with a bang and that it had a wonderful effect.” The union, he averred, was already suffering a backlash, and he predicted that within five days the “backbone of the strike will be broken.” The union responded by granting Walt a thirty-six-hour extension to explain the dismissals and then took a strike vote.

  Walt had now gone too far to give in. He could restore paradise only by expelling the traitors. The next afternoon Babbitt was exiting the commissary after lunch when the chief of the studio police took his arm and handed him a letter, telling him it was “bad news.” The letter, from Lessing, advised Babbitt that he was being terminated for union activities and had to leave the studio immediately. Babbitt asked the chief if he could drive his car up to the Animation Building entrance so he could load his effects. By the time he arrived, a small group had collected there and helped him take his belongings to the car. By the time they finished, an hour later, several hundred employees had gathered, shouting that they would see him on the picket line the next morning.

  II

  “Strike—6:00 AM—today” read the first entry in Walt Disney’s desk diary on May 28, though with the extension the strike actually began the next day. The atmosphere that morning was both festive and festering. Sorrell had the picketers crowding the gate while loudspeakers blasted music and messages at the employees driving through. Ward Kimball, who kept a diary, wrote, “Cars stopped all the way along Buena Vista Street,” which fronted the studio. “The guys were pouring their individual speeches into the ears of those on the fence.” Kimball was struck by the “magnitude of it all.” As one might have expected from animators, the picket signs were colorful. One striker sat on a knoll in a smock and beret and painted the scene. Others sang and yelled. As Kimball entered the gate, Babbitt collared him and told him that the SCG had placed supervising animators like Kimball under its jurisdiction. In entering the studio, he was defying the union.

  As Walt himself entered the gates that morning, easing his way through the throng in his Packard and genially waving to the strikers, Babbitt grabbed a megaphone from actor John Garfield, who was on the picket line to support the strike, and yelled, “Walt Disney, you should be ashamed of yourself!” Then, as Babbitt told it, he turned to the crowd and shouted, “There he is, the man who believes in brotherhood for everybody but himself!” When the crowd cheered, Walt bolted from the car and took off after Bab
bitt until he was restrained. Walt was much more sanguine behind the studio’s gates. Kimball was taking lunch in the women’s cafeteria and saw Walt there, beaming. Later that afternoon he called several of the nonstriking animators and storymen to his office. Blow-ups of photographs of the strikers were already arranged around the room, and as Walt passed them, he commented, “Damn, I didn’t think he’d go against me,” or “We can get along without him.” As Jack Kinney recalled, “We got the uneasy feeling that he was filing his feelings away in his prodigious memory for some future revenge.” Meanwhile Lessing appeared and said that he thought the strike would last only twenty-four hours. Walt broke out a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream for a toast.

  Exactly how many people were striking depended on which side was doing the counting. Babbitt claimed that of the 500 employees in positions over which the guild had jurisdiction, 472 signed with the union and 410 of those had gone on strike. James Bodero, who headed the rival American Society of Screen Cartoonists, said that 735 workers fell under guild jurisdiction and 435 of those were still working. Lessing told The New York Times that only 293 employees were on strike. The guild itself estimated that 700 employees were on strike. Most of them were the lower-paid workers—in-betweeners, assistants, inkers. Only two of the supervising animators—Babbitt and his close friend Bill Tytla—struck. The others, said one animator, were “indoctrinated by Disney…They grew up there.” Walt, insisting that the unrest was no fault of his own, branded the strikers “malcontents”—“the unsatisfactory ones who knew that their days were numbered and who had everything to gain by a strike.”