Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  From Rio the group descended upon Buenos Aires, Argentina, where they hunkered down for the next month in a large room on the top floor of the Palace Hotel to begin plotting out the films. Here they drew up storyboards, entertained locals with ideas for the movies, and listened to South American music for inspiration. And as in Rio, Walt was feted—“dances and feasting and drinking,” Cottrell recalled. (Lillian observed that he was much more recognized and fussed over in South America than in his own country.) Walt, who cared more for work than for public acclaim, was patient, visiting zoos and ranches, but at the end of the month he announced to his staff that he was leaving for Chile because he was “goddamned tired of being dressed up like a gaucho and put on a horse.”

  As Walt departed in a DC-3 for Santiago, taking the mail flight route that he would depict in one of his South American shorts about a little mail plane named Pedro, the remainder of the group divided, one contingent heading to northern Argentina for more research, the other heading to La Paz, Bolivia, and the Lake Titicaca region. After a week in Chile Walt and his crew went north, taking a boat for a desultory trip along the coast to Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, where they grabbed a launch and went thirty miles upriver into the jungle. Though the staff commandeered a section of the boat to work on the films, Walt later confessed to a friend that he was “so worn out by the time we reached Chile that the boat trip home was the only way I could get any rest.” They took the liner Santa Clara from Colombia up through the Panama Canal—where a local film exhibitor ordered them off the boat so that Walt could attend the Panama City premiere of Fantasia—and then up the Eastern Seaboard to New York for the premiere there of Dumbo, then back to Los Angeles by plane. “In all we were gone twelve weeks,” Walt wrote his old teacher Daisy Beck, “and could have stayed much longer but we were homesick for the kids…and of course they were tickled to see us come home, all of which made us very happy.”

  The one thing they did not discuss during the trip was the strike. On August 12, the day after Walt left, the studio, under pressure from the Bank of America, had submitted its list of layoffs to the union, which objected that the layoffs discriminated against the strikers. (There were 207 guild members and 49 nonguild members on the list.) Both sides asked the federal conciliator, James F. Dewey, to review the matter, but Dewey was hospitalized in Detroit at the time. Rumors and ill will were now swirling through the studio, so Roy decided to fly to Washington the next day to discuss the matter directly with the head of the Conciliation Service, Dr. John Steelman. But before Roy left he instructed the board of directors to close down the entire studio on August 18, save for a skeleton crew finishing Dumbo and another doing the Mickey Mouse comic strip, pending Dewey’s arrival in Los Angeles. As it turned out, Dewey, either too ill or too exasperated, never did arrive, and the guild refused a request from the Conciliation Service to accept the layoffs until the list could be revised. Over the next two weeks, as the studio remained closed, Roy made two more trips to Washington attempting to resolve the issue—“hat in hand and on bended knee,” according to Dave Hand, who accompanied him—and on September 10 the Conciliation Service finally issued a ruling, setting a ratio in each department of strikers to nonstrikers and ordering that the layoffs maintain that ratio.

  And so on September 16, after three and a half months, work finally resumed at the Burbank studio with 694 employees on the payroll—down from nearly 1,200 at the beginning of the strike. Despite the cutbacks, Roy and Walt felt they had been sandbagged by the Conciliation Service, which, they thought, had favored the union.* Of his forays to Washington, Roy wrote Walt, “We are definitely in a period of social revolution and changes and if we’re going to continue to conduct our business, we’re going to have to find out how to work with the present social problems and the Washington administration attitude.” In short, the government, as Lessing had implied earlier, was now as much of a problem as the union.

  While Walt was in South America, something else had happened. Ever since Flora Disney’s death Elias Disney had been, in his daughter Ruth’s words, “completely lost and heartbroken.” Though his doctor found him in “remarkable physical condition for a man of his age,” at eighty-two Elias nevertheless suffered memory lapses, as one might have expected, and occasionally seemed to think that his wife was still alive. Ruth thought he was still discombobulated by the gas. Walt would take Diane and Sharon to visit him every Sunday at the house in Toluca Lake to which Elias had returned after Flora’s death, but he was, in Walt’s description, “really a lost person.” Walt said he had never felt so sorry for anyone in his whole life. The hard man who had once tyrannized his sons and driven Walt to seek a better imaginative world was no longer.

  On September 6, with Walt in South America, Roy left for one of his trips to Washington to discuss the strike settlement. The afternoon before he left, a Friday, he got an urgent call from Alma Smith, Elias Disney’s housekeeper. Elias had started vomiting. Late on the afternoon of his departure Roy spent the last hour before takeoff with his father, who was still in bed and heaving periodically, though, Roy wrote Walt, “between his vomiting he was very rational and said he felt very well except that he had a bloated abdomen and some distrubance [sic] in his bowels.” He and Roy talked primarily about Walt’s trip. As Roy was leaving, Elias bade him a “casual farewell.” Elias slept through the night, but when he awoke the next morning, he began vomiting again, and the doctor ordered an ambulance to take him to Hollywood Hospital. On Monday he took a turn for the worse. The doctors suspected a bowel obstruction and debated whether to operate. Uncle Robert, who had gone to the hospital to be at his brother’s bedside, accused the doctors of trying to make money, but Roy phoned from Washington with the decision to proceed. Elias was on the operating table for two hours. He came out of the surgery well, and Roy flew home that Friday to visit him. Already there was a gurgle in his lungs, suggesting the onset of pneumonia. When Roy and brother Ray arrived the next morning, September 13, Elias was running a temperature of 105, and the doctors pronounced his condition “hopeless.” The brothers left at nine to get breakfast and went home while Elias rested. At noon they received a frantic call from the attending nurse summoning them to their father’s bedside. As Roy was picking up Edna to return to the hospital, he learned that Elias’s doctor had called: Elias Disney was dead.

  Funeral services were held at the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather at the Forest Lawn Cemetery, and Elias was interred in a crypt there in the Sanctuary of Truth next to his wife. When Roy had first heard of his father’s condition, he had written a cable to Walt from Washington, then decided not to send it because he didn’t want to alarm Walt unnecessarily. When Elias expired, Walt received a telegram, but he chose not to return for the funeral—perhaps one last act of rebellion against the man he felt had so tormented him. Instead the South American crew sent a three-and-a-half-foot cross of lilies for the chapel. “I believe that by the time you get home, we’ll have it settled down and some sense of the whole thing,” Roy wrote Walt after the funeral, speaking again of the strike. “Don’t be surprised at anything you find when you come home. We have been up against a tough proposition and have done the best we could.”

  Walt returned to the studio in mid-October to find that nearly everything had changed, though as a result less of the negotiations between management and the union than of the negotiations between the studio and its primary benefactor. Now that the strike was settled, the Bank of America was making new demands. Roy had written Joe Rosenberg that he expected Dumbo to gross $2 million, Fantasia the same, and the impending Bambi $3 million, which would allow the company to reduce its debt to less than $1 million. But Rosenberg was not mollified. Concerned about what he saw as Walt’s profligacy, he ordered Roy and George Morris to the bank’s San Francisco headquarters on October 9 and issued an ultimatum. The bank would permit an absolute loan limit of $3.5 million. In return, he ordered the studio to restrict itself to the production of shorts. It would be allowed to finish th
e features already in production—Dumbo, Bambi, and Wind in the Willows—but no other feature was to be started until these had been released and earned back their costs. Though Roy remonstrated that concentrating exclusively on shorts would cost the studio in terms of manpower losses, depleted inventory, and overhead, not to mention the difficulty of remobilizing should they decide to resume making features, Rosenberg was unmoved, and Roy wound up abjectly telling him that the “entire organization now has an entirely new mental attitude and approach” designed to cut costs and that he would talk to Walt about accepting the changes, which he knew would devastate him.

  But there was more. The bank was so fearful that Roy could not control Walt that Rosenberg insisted on the creation of an “executive committee,” including a bank representative, that would, as Roy later explained it to Walt, “function as the governing body of the Studio, where all matters of general policy will be discussed and agreed on before any action is taken.” Roy added that while the bank didn’t lack confidence in them, “they do have qualms about your ‘enthusiasm and possible plans for future production’”—though it had been that enthusiasm that had built and sustained the studio. Hal Adelquist, the head of personnel, and Vern Caldwell, who worked under him, had even drawn up a new organization chart. In effect, the studio was no longer Walt Disney’s fiefdom. He was now under the control of the businessmen.

  What was especially galling in this new arrangement was the moratorium on feature film production. Feature films had become the reason for the studio’s existence. Just the year before, Walt had claimed that he had put the studio on a footing to release as many as nine features in two years. Now he was having to shelve everything: the Mickey Mouse feature; Alice in Wonderland; a film based on the stories of Uncle Remus; another called Lady, about the romance between a pedigreed dog and a street cur; and a film of the Sinclair Lewis story “Bongo.” They continued to proceed slowly on Wind in the Willows, one of the films permitted because it was already in production, though after mulling it over during Thanksgiving, Walt informed Roy that he was going to make Peter Pan instead because he thought the two films would cost the same amount and the latter would have more box office appeal. In the end, the studio soon stopped work on that film too.

  But the effects of the Bank of America weren’t felt only on the production schedule. The economies it demanded resulted in the shuttering of all the studio restaurants save the commissary, the return of the IBM machines they had rented, and the installation of a time clock—the clock that Walt had so dreaded in Kansas City. “It was like being in another world!” Dave Hand would later write. “I think that that one decision [of the time clock] ended my closeness to Walt” because Walt insisted that Hand, a supervisor and Walt’s right-hand man, punch the clock with the other employees. At the same time all the bonuses and incentive plans were discontinued. Even Walt’s beloved art classes were disbanded. “My wife used to accuse me of running a Communistic outfit,” Dick Huemer recalled Walt remarking grimly. “Well, all that is over now.”

  “From all the reports I get and my own observations, I feel there is a new life, understanding and appreciation on the part of the present Studio personnel,” Roy wrote Walt that October. “I really think a lot of good will has come out of all our past trouble and that we are now on a good firm basis on which to go ahead.” But this was wishful thinking. Nothing good had come of it, unless one regarded the necessary belt-tightening as a blessing. With another round of layoffs that November, the number of employees at the studio was more than halved. Making the best of it, Walt later claimed that this move was a necessary purgative and that he had rid the studio of a bad element. “Sometimes you’ve got to kind of build yourself up and explode,” he would say. “And then you kind of begin to pick up the pieces and kind of take stock, you know?”

  But this was a rationalization. Between the downsizing and the recriminations following the strike, he would lose some of his best animators, including Bill Tytla, who had animated the washing sequence in Snow White, the devil in the “Bald Mountain” sequence in Fantasia, and Stromboli, the cruel puppetmaster, in Pinocchio. “He was aloof; he just stayed by himself,” Bob Carlson, his onetime assistant, observed of Tytla after the strike. “He just came to work and stayed in his room and went home.” Though he persevered as long as he could, eventually, feeling discriminated against by Walt for having struck, he left for the Paul Terry studio in the East. Others left too, among them some of the most innovative young animators in the studio, like Walt Kelly, who later created the popular Pogo comic strip, and John Hubley, who became a highly regarded experimental animator in his own right. Some, like Hubley, joined former Disney animator Frank Tashlin at the Screen Gems studio, where, in Hubley’s words, “We were doing a lot of crazy things that were anti the classic Disney approach.”

  Walt’s relationship with those who remained also suffered. Already increasingly distant before the strike, Walt became churlish and suspicious. “It hurt him deeply,” Joe Grant said of the strike. “He felt betrayed, felt that everyone who had formerly been behind him had now left him.” Ham Luske believed that it “almost broke Walt’s heart” and that his “attitude changed radically from the strike on.” He was bitter. He sincerely believed that he had created a perfect world for his employees and that they hadn’t appreciated it. He even turned on Gunther Lessing, who he thought had failed him during the strike. Lessing kept his position and his office but, according to Ward Kimball, “only out of pure sympathy.” He was, said Kimball, a “broken man.”

  The place where everyone had once caroused was now a “very hard-nosed place,” said Jack Kinney, just like the other studios. The joy was gone. Walt may have been inspiring, but he had never been a very effusive leader, and now he was worse. He had always doled out compliments parsimoniously, once telling an employee that “praise accomplishes nothing but a feeling to a small extent of self-confidence” and warning that it is “just as likely to be a dangerous factor.” When he did issue a compliment, it was seldom directly to one’s face. Typically an animator would hear that Walt had praised him to a colleague. By the same token Walt was contrarian when it came to anyone else’s praise. “[W]e always said if you wanted to get even with somebody—praise them in front of Walt,” Ward Kimball observed, “or if you wanted to do someone a favor, run them down in front of Walt and he would stick up for them.”

  But the new atmosphere after the strike wasn’t just a matter of Walt’s curtness or contrariness. There was a fear of Walt now, a fear that had always been latent in the sweaty palms and nervous silence at the story sessions, a fear of displeasing him, but that now surfaced as a fear of arousing his wrath. Even Bianca Majolie, who had known Walt since high school, would vomit after she made a presentation to him. Everyone in the studio was terrorized by the swift distinctive clack of his heels on the hard gray tile floor and his hacking smoker’s cough as he approached a room, and the animators would jump into their seats when he entered. “Don’t be afraid of me,” Walt would growl. “I don’t want to see you jumping into your seat like that.” But they were afraid. “He had a way of giving you the evil eye, with his finger pointed at your chest, that was very intimidating,” Jack Kinney would write. “He’d punctuate his words with ‘y’know, y’know, y’know,’ until you were answering ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’—whether you knew what he was talking about or not.”

  The fear was so thick that anyone who was thought to be out of favor with Walt became a pariah with everyone else at the studio. On one occasion layout artist Ken Anderson inadvertently singed Walt’s mustache while lighting a cigarette with a new lighter during a storyboard session, and Walt jumped out of his chair, howled at Anderson, “What the God damn hell are you trying to do, burn me up?” and ran out of the room. Anderson threw away the lighter and never smoked again. Meanwhile no one at the studio would talk to him. Anderson admitted he cried and thought he would be fired, though this time Walt called him, asked him to lunch, and demonstrated to the sta
ff that Anderson was back in his good graces. It was a rare instance of benevolence.

  Beyond the fear he inspired, Walt now displayed a vindictiveness, occasionally even bordering on cruelty, that hadn’t been there since his days with Mintz—a cruelty that only his most ardent supporters could excuse as pushing for improvement. He could be scathing to an errant employee, embarrassing him in front of the entire staff. “You’d go to a meeting and try to be as invisible as possible because you wanted to avoid this,” Ward Kimball said. On one occasion a story sketch artist visibly grimaced as Walt was about to pluck one of the man’s sketches from the storyboard, so Walt “carefully and deliberately,” according to Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, “pulled down that sketch and the next three clear off the board, tearing the corners where the pushpins had held them captive; then he released the paper to let it flutter helplessly to the floor.” Another time he screened some old footage that Ben Sharpsteen had animated, then ridiculed it before the staff. “[H]is whole approach to everybody,” Kimball said, “was to put somebody down.”