Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  But he reserved his greatest wrath for the man he believed was most responsible for ruining his paradise. Art Babbitt had returned to the studio when it reopened on September 17 after the strike settlement. He was pleasantly surprised to find that nonstrikers like Jack Kinney and Dick Lundy seemed to accept him and were willing to work with him again, but he also discovered that his old office had been assigned to a nonstriker and that his new office didn’t have a Movieola. He received assignments to reanimate two scenes that had been unacceptably animated during the strike, one for a Goofy cartoon and another for a Donald Duck short, and completed them by November 1. He asked for additional work and received none, then was in his office on November 24 when a traffic boy delivered a notice that he was being terminated in the latest retrenchment, effective in forty-five minutes. Walt claimed, disingenuously, that Babbitt was no longer a “progressive” animator and that ever since Snow White he had relied too heavily on rotoscoping so that his work had gotten stiff. Asked once why he paid Babbitt so well if his work was inferior, Walt said it was because he needed to “throw confidence” to him. Walt was only slightly more honest a few months later when Lessing was coaching him for a deposition. Ignoring the union organizing as the cause for dismissal, he said that Babbitt was a “difficult person to work with.”

  Walt may have thought he was finally rid of his nemesis. That January Babbitt sailed for South America to work for an Argentine animation company. He returned four months later and that summer took a job with Leon Schlesinger at Warner Bros., then resigned and enlisted in the Marines in November. But before he did so, Babbitt had filed an unfair labor practice charge with the NLRB against the Disney studio for his termination. Walt must have known that the studio had little chance of winning, especially after several prominent animators testified that Babbitt was among the best in the business. In November the trial examiner ruled against the studio, declaring that Walt’s stated reasons for laying off Babbitt were “false and without merit” and ordering Walt to reinstate him within forty days of his discharge from the service with back pay.

  But even with Babbitt temporarily gone and the strike presumably settled, the studio roiled. Longtime friends became lifelong enemies. “It used to be, ‘Hello, how are you?,’ pat you on the back,” one employee recalled of the prestrike days. After the strike the tone of voice and demeanor changed. On the union side, one group of guild members would walk five abreast down the hallways not letting any of the nonstrikers pass. On the other side, recalled animator Bill Melendez, who had struck, the nonstrikers “never forgave us for destroying the spirit of the studio.” Shamus Culhane believed that both sides harbored a sense of guilt—the nonstrikers over whether they had sided with Walt out of cowardice, the strikers over whether they should have rent the studio as they did. In the end, wrote Culhane, the “esprit de corps that made possible all the brilliant films of the 1930s was dead as a dodo.” In the end Walt Disney’s dream of a perfect haven was dashed.

  IV

  One war was over, but another was about to begin. All the time Walt was in South America, the supervising animators who had remained at the studio during the strike were working to finish Dumbo so that the studio would have something that might generate revenue. When the film was released in October, it received extravagant reviews, even though it had cost considerably less than its three feature predecessors and even though the animation was less painterly and realistic than on the previous features. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times called it the “most genial, the most endearing, the most completely precious cartoon feature film ever to emerge from the magical brushes of Walt Disney’s wonder-working artists!” Otis Ferguson in The New Republic rhapsodized over a scene in which Dumbo, having inadvertently drunk some liquor, hallucinates pink elephants. “I have never seen anything to approach it and neither have you,” Ferguson wrote, “because there hasn’t been anything.” Some saw it as a return to Disney’s unpretentious pre-Fantasia form. Saying that Disney had recently been sold a “bill of very inferior goods” by the “long-word intellectuals,” columnist Westbrook Pegler cheered that Disney had now made “another great work which manages to ignore the evil all about and lift his fellow men.” The curmudgeonly critic Alexander Woollcott, who admitted that he had been less than enthusiastic about Snow White, Pinocchio, and Fantasia, wrote Walt, praising Dumbo as the “highest achievement yet reached in the Seven Arts since the first white man landed on this continent” and the “divine event towards which your whole creation has moved.” To which Walt responded: “It was just one of those little things that we knocked out between epics!”

  Walt wasn’t being entirely self-effacing. It was a little thing they knocked out, and though it once again traced the Disney theme of embracing maturity and responsibility and taking control of one’s own destiny, even at the risk of being exiled from one’s safe and satisfying childhood oasis, Walt didn’t really have very much to do with it. When Time ran a piece giving the main credit to his staff, Walt grumbled to Dick Huemer and Joe Grant, who had written the film, that the article made it seem that he was irrelevant. The Time article had been originally scheduled to run as a cover story on December 8, 1941, but it got bumped by another more newsworthy event, and a Time editor apologized to Walt that he had tried to reschedule it for the Christmas cover but was overruled by coeditors who feared that readers would think the magazine was trying to be “facetious” in light of what the country now faced.

  What the country faced—what had bumped Dumbo from the cover—was its entrance into World War II, triggered by the Japanese bombardment of the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7. Since it was a Sunday, Walt heard the news of the attack on the radio and then received a call from the studio manager, who had been advised by the police that five hundred army troops were already moving onto the Burbank lot and bivouacking on the soundstage, where their job was to provide an antiaircraft installation to protect the nearby Lockheed factory, which made airplanes for the armed forces. In short order army trucks pulled onto the lot, camouflage was draped across buildings, parking garages and storage sheds were converted into ammunition depots, and a mess kitchen was established. Essentially the army had commandeered the studio.

  The day of the attack Kay Kamen, the head of the company’s product division, was in Washington, D.C., seeking potential clients for commercial and industrial films and sounding out agencies about the possibility of the studio doing films for the government—the government that Walt had so recently characterized as Communistic. Though Kamen mourned the loss of lives at Pearl Harbor and wrote Walt about the necessity of winning the war, he also saw new business possibilities in America’s involvement and thought Walt’s relationship with the coordinator of inter-American affairs could serve as an entrée to other branches of government that would now need films for training and public relations. “[Y]ou should be a part of this, Walt,” Kamen wrote, urging his boss to visit the capital, “and they need you and want you and I think the trip is very important.”

  In truth, though Walt had always disdained anything that was contrary to the studio’s “essential purpose,” which was to entertain, he had begun soliciting government work long before the strike as one way out of the studio’s financial doldrums. In October 1940 he had met with a service representative about training films, and the next month he offered his assistance to the defense committee, which had been formed by the Association of Motion Picture Producers to cooperate in making movies for the government. By March he had placed storyman Robert Carr in charge of a Walt Disney Training Films Unit to solicit industrial and government work, and that month Carr sent a memo to the educational directors of the aircraft industries offering the studio’s assistance. As the memo put it: “An engineer or other representative of the client merely sits down at a conference table in the Disney studio and tells his story to a group of highly-trained mechanical draftsmen and artists.” The studio would do the rest.

  But Walt was leavin
g nothing to chance. On April 3, 1941, he hosted a luncheon and conference at the studio for government officials and representatives of the defense industries—thirty people in all. “[W]e have the plant, the equipment, and the personnel,” he told them, “and we’re willing to do anything we can to help in any way.” He followed up with a letter stating that he was motivated “solely by a desire to help as best I can in the present emergency” and that he would make the films for cost and without profit. The studio was organized in such a way, he lied, that he could make the films without hampering his own feature production, not mentioning that the feature production was already imperiled by economics. While he waited for a response, he hired a Lockheed engineer, George Papen, to help him make an animated instructional film titled straightforwardly Four Methods of Flush Riveting, which he showed to John Grierson, a documentary filmmaker who was attending the conference in his capacity as film commissioner of Canada. Shortly afterward Walt landed his first contract, from Grierson, for a film on the fundamentals of flush riveting, an instructional film on an antitank rifle, and four shorts promoting the sale of Canadian war bonds. The riveting film was budgeted at between $4,000 and $5,000, a far cry from what the studio had been paying for its own shorts, but then the animation was a far cry from what the studio had been producing. Walt was relying on recycled scenes from old cartoons and on using more limited animation—that is, animation with less movement than that in his features and shorts.

  In May 1941, with the strike looming, he felt a new urgency in getting government work, and the studio stepped up its efforts. Walt dispatched Vern Caldwell of the training department to Washington with the Flush Riveting film and had him take it from government office to government office, including the offices of General George Marshall and the general army staff. Walt continued to insist that the company was just doing its patriotic duty, but the fact was that the studio needed the contracts, if only to keep the animators working and to offset the overhead. Throughout the summer and into the fall, Walt kept trolling for business with the lure of the Canadian riveting film, which, according to Bob Carr, the Canadians had extolled as “Miraculous! Best we ever saw!” In November, after he had returned from South America, Walt was meeting with members of the defense committee and had talked with an advertising man and adviser to the Lend Lease Food Division of the Department of Agriculture named Henry Sell about making movies promoting the program and possibly making other promotional films for several of Sell’s commercial clients, something Walt had previously refrained from doing because he thought it demeaning.

  When Pearl Harbor was attacked, then, Walt Disney was already deep into government work and was about to get in much deeper. Early the very next evening, December 8, he received a call from a navy official offering the studio a contract for twenty films on aircraft and warship identification at a total cost of $90,000, and shortly thereafter the Navy Department Bureau of Aeronautics sent an officer to Burbank to supervise the project.* (The animators drew wings on the Animation Building, where the navy was now headquartered.) Meanwhile Walt had completed and shipped the films for which Grierson had contracted promoting the purchase of Canadian war bonds, and he was still dickering with Henry Sell on films for Lend Lease.

  Yet the biggest measure of just how dramatically things were about to change at the studio came that very same week in early December, when Walt received a call from John L. Sullivan, the assistant secretary of the treasury. Even before the Pearl Harbor attack, the Treasury Department had been considering producing films that might encourage Americans to pay their taxes, something that became suddenly more urgent with the country at war. Acting on a suggestion of Undersecretary George Buffington, Sullivan had told Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau that “what John Barrymore can’t do, maybe Mickey Mouse could,” and advised they meet with Walt Disney. Walt had no desire to go to Washington, especially since it was Diane’s birthday, but the Treasury Department insisted that the issue was pressing, so Walt flew out on December 12, met with Morgenthau, had dinner at Sullivan’s house that evening, where they roughed out a scenario over martinis, and then phoned Diane to wish her a happy birthday. He signed a letter of agreement the very next day, promising to produce the film for not more than $40,000, which was less than the cost of a typical Disney short.

  It wasn’t the budget, meager as it was, that presented a problem—Walt was getting accustomed to cutting corners when he had to. It was the schedule. The Treasury Department wanted the film on or before February 15, which effectively gave the staff a month to write and then polish the scenario, compose the music, and animate. Ben Sharpsteen, who was producing, and Hal Adelquist of personnel told Walt that they would need twenty men for the film, which was now titled The New Spirit, and that given the deadline, the entire short would have to be animated in a week. Never, not even during the final days of Snow White and Pinocchio when they were racing to make the premieres, had the studio been under such a crunch.

  What added to the tension was that they were no longer their own masters. They had to please Morgenthau. After working tirelessly on the storyboards, including sessions late on New Year’s Eve, Walt flew back to Washington with Roy and storymen Dick Huemer and Joe Grant on January 4 to get Morgenthau’s approval. The secretary delayed the meeting one day when there were no days to spare—he had a migraine headache. He finally padded out to greet them in his bedroom slippers with his Great Dane at his side. An aide objected to Walt’s intention to use Donald Duck—to which Walt riposted that for the Disney studio to give the Treasury Department Donald Duck was like MGM giving them Clark Gable—but Morgenthau signed off, and Walt rushed back to Burbank to finish the project.

  “We slept on the job,” Walt later recalled. “We got beds in there. We stayed right there. We worked eighteen hours a day.” There was no rough animation. Instead the original drawings went directly to cleanup and ink and paint. It was completed and sent to the lab for processing on January 20; a title song was recorded the next day; Technicolor got it by the end of that week and struck a print three days later, and three days after that it delivered 250 prints. “This is the fastest time ever made on any cartoon production,” Walt wired Undersecretary Buffington.

  But it came at a psychological cost. As Wilfred Jackson remembered it, when Walt, still the perfectionist, saw the finished film, he was unhappy that some of the animation was not smooth, and he sat there pondering uneasily, not wanting to sign off on the film. “Finally, he turned around and said, ‘Jack, ah…’” Jackson said. “He rubbed his head. ‘You know…Well, Jack…’ He shifted in his seat. He got up and said with finality, ‘Yeah.’ And he walked out. He had all sorts of ideas and he couldn’t fix it up. He didn’t have time.” Walt Disney had had to make a concession that his animation would not be the best.

  The Treasury Department had no such qualms. Buffington and Morgenthau both pronounced themselves pleased with the picture and, as George Morris wired Roy, “greatly excited over ideas for other films.” Morgenthau invited Walt and Lillian to Washington for the premiere on February 2 and a celebratory dinner. As it turned out, The New Spirit was a tremendous success. By one estimate over 32 million Americans eventually saw the film at nearly twelve thousand theaters, and of these viewers, according to a Gallup poll, 37 percent said that the film had had an effect on their willingness to pay taxes, and 86 percent felt that Disney should make shorts for the government on other subjects.

  Still, the poll contained one unsettling number that would soon bedevil Walt: only 46 percent of Americans believed that the government should foot the bill for the film. Just days after the premiere the House debated the Treasury Department appropriations and voted 259 to 112 to eliminate $80,000 that the department had requested to pay for The New Spirit. (The amount included costs for prints, distribution, and promotion.) “They have hired him to make a moving picture that is going to cost $80,000 to persuade people to pay their income taxes,” declaimed Republican congressman John Taber of New York o
n the House floor. “My God! Can you think of anything that would come nearer to making people hate to pay their income tax than the knowledge that $80,000, that should go for a bomber, is to be spent for a moving picture to entertain people?” “Billions for defense,” Taber orated, “but not one buck for Donald Duck.” Representative Carl Curtis of Nebraska called the appropriation the “most outrageous and scandalous piece of money-wasting I know of.” Other Republicans opposing the Roosevelt administration lumped Walt with an apparent boondoggle—a dancer who had been appointed to a civil defense post but whose major qualification, said the Republicans, was an apparent friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. In the upper chamber, though several senators came to Disney’s defense, the expenditure for The New Spirit was not restored to the appropriations bill.

  The irony was that Walt had actually lost money making The New Spirit, roughly $6,000 on the production itself and another $50,000 in forfeited bookings of commercial shorts that were replaced by the government short. In his business naïveté he had also signed an unfavorable agreement with the Treasury Department, saying that he would make the film for “out of pocket costs” up to $40,000, not realizing (as Roy later chastised him) that this didn’t include the “indirect costs of supervision, lighting, heat, taxes, depreciation and many other such things” and that the government’s General Accounting Office would hold him to the letter of the contract. In effect, then, Walt learned two awful but valuable lessons that would dominate his business conduct throughout the war: first, that government films operated by a different schedule and under different standards from commercial pictures, and second, that the studio was now always accountable to the government, which would prove an even sterner taskmaster than the Bank of America.

  If Walt had any relief from the work, the criticism, the disappointment, and the financial crush, it came when he and Lillian headed back to Los Angeles after the New Spirit premiere. Walt had never been a nostalgist. He was more likely to dramatize the worst moments of his life than to burnish the best. Yet what he had always cherished about his upbringing in Kansas City amid the traumas of the paper route was the Benton School. All these years he had kept in touch with his sixth-grade teacher, Daisy Beck, writing her faithfully, and he corresponded with other teachers as well, so when he was invited back to the school on his way from Washington to celebrate the installation of two murals he had donated, he accepted, even though he now routinely declined invitations to speak or be honored. He always said he was too busy and too poor a speaker.