Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  Aesthetically speaking, he saw himself as a new Walt Disney—a rehabilitated Walt Disney. Always remarkably attuned, as critic Barbara Deming had said, to shifts in the public temper, even when the public didn’t respond, he was now less interested in simply replicating an external reality than in plumbing an internal, psychological reality, as Dali had and as some American artists, in a postwar soul-searching, were doing, and he was interested in incorporating more fine art and fewer commercial elements of design into the animations. (As for his interest in fine art, in 1943 Walt had been named a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.) It wasn’t only Dali whom he was enlisting in trying to stretch the bounds of animation by bringing a new, more subjective sensibility to the medium; he had recruited the executive director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to search the country for fine artists who might also want to collaborate with the Disney studio, and he had already met with the painter Thomas Hart Benton about a project.

  Dali settled into the studio that winter, and he and Walt spent much of the early months of 1946 working on Destino before Dali departed for Del Monte, where he continued to meet with one of Walt’s layout artists, John Hench. The Disney-Dali collaboration, like the Disney-Stokowski teaming, was a happy one. “The night of our meeting I spent almost entirely without sleep,” Dali wrote Walt after one session, referencing the ideas churning in his head. Walt, in turn, said that where animation ideas usually came slowly and grudgingly, they seemed to pour out of Dali—“in fact, they spilled over into all directions such as machines, furniture, jewelry…even an extraordinary device to indicate when a painting was finished.” After Dali and Hench had devised Daliesque storyboards in which the god Jupiter morphed into a sundial and a sundial into a hand covered by ants and the ants into bicycle riders, while the heroine appeared as the shadow of a bell, which morphed into a real girl and then into a dandelion puff, and the whole thing concluded with a baseball game transforming itself into a ballet, Dali’s wife Gala gushed, “[I]t will become one of the most brilliant moments of his artistic career.” But Walt, who just months before had been constantly pushing for speed and economy, advised Dali not to rush: “We are not going to let the pressure of time stop us from getting something that will be worthy of Dali’s talents.”

  This fresh approach was typical of Walt’s new orientation in the months after the war. Now that the troops had departed and the gloom seemed to be lifting, the restraints were off, and he thought he could undo what the war had done. He could be great again. But there were problems and they surfaced quickly. For one thing, Roy wasn’t inclined to let Walt pursue his ambitious plans. Despite the economies that the studio had adopted as a result of the war and despite the infusion of cash from the debentures, despite even the fact that the largest of the outside stockholders, industrialist Floyd B. Odlum, the president of the Atlas Corporation, was encouraging the studio to resume feature production, Roy didn’t feel the studio had sufficient resources to return to its old production schedule now that the government work had dried up. It wasn’t that he wanted to assert power over Walt or to avenge Walt’s peremptory treatment of him; he always saw his role as one of compliance and facilitation. It was rather that he felt he had to save Walt from Walt’s own excesses. As he later explained it, “After the war was over, we were like a bear coming out of hibernation. We were skinny and gaunt and we had no fat on our bones at all, and I remember the years ’47, ’48 and ’49 were lost years for us.” Walt Disney, however, didn’t have time for any more lost years. In his estimation, he had already lost four years.

  Of course, despite his personal warmth, Roy had usually been the doomsayer and disciplinarian—in one animator’s words, “the typical, tightfisted, Machiavellian businessman.” He would even occasionally visit the animators when Walt was away and urge them to hold down costs. And Walt had always been resistant to these incursions, literally ordering Roy back to his office whenever he trespassed on the creative side. But this was not one of their ordinary disagreements. Walt called the argument “quite a screamer” and “one of my big upsets.” Roy was confused, Walt later concluded, and exhausted. Among other things, he’d been debilitated by arthritis and, feeling generally out of sorts, had checked into the hospital to have his appendix removed. He lacked energy and focus. “It seemed like quite a chore to get the ball rolling,” Walt observed, but he insisted to his brother that the studio couldn’t coast. “If you do,” Walt yelled, “you go backwards. I said it’s just a slow way of liquidating,” and he demanded that they do anything to, in his words, “get some action.”

  But Roy’s concerns were legitimate—and not the least of them was his brother. One of the chief reasons he resisted Walt’s pleas and emphasized fiscal accountability was Walt’s own management style, which was capricious, idiosyncratic, extravagant, and hopelessly inefficient but that Walt had justified on the basis that creativity, not efficiency, was what counted. Employees had always complained that Walt seldom provided clear guidelines and had no real chain of command. “Walt had a way of telling one person to go ahead and get what was needed, to do whatever was necessary to complete the job without telling any of the other people who would be involved in such a project,” animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston would write. That led to supervisors “trying to solve new, unheard-of problems, run their departments efficiently, and still give Walt what he wanted.” Others said it was always difficult to distinguish between the times when Walt was, in Wilfred Jackson’s term, “just talking” to test ideas and the times when he “really meant what he was saying,” though Walt expected one to know the difference and act upon it. One executive said that he could “suddenly shift course without notifying the appropriate able-bodied seamen, then lash them to the mast when they pursued the original plan as charted.” Marc Davis believed that however much Walt talked about the studio as a family, he “did not like people being too close together,” and he was constantly breaking up teams of animators or storymen in the belief, Davis surmised, that “if two guys liked one another too much they just sat there and got fat,” though it also had the effect of disrupting continuity. Dick Huemer accused Walt of being an awful judge of people—a charge that Walt had once leveled against himself—and said he had a “habit of taking any given individual and putting him into an arbitrary job, giving him a title and expecting him to do the job,” which frequently he could not do.

  But the biggest complaint against Walt was that he had an aversion to organization—organization that was absolutely necessary now that the studio had grown and bureaucratic discipline had to be imposed. No matter how many times he asked one of his subordinates to devise an organizational chart, no matter how many times he attempted to delegate authority—usually preceded by his announcing, “We are all disorganized here. We don’t know what we’re doing”—he wound up either absenting himself entirely and letting issues be resolved by default only to return at the end of the process and overrule what others had decided, or more likely, micromanaging every detail to the point where, according to one soundman, Walt even knew the entire inventory of studio equipment, including the number of lightbulbs in stock. As executive Harry Tytle put it, “The most prevalent complaint I recorded about Walt by his producers, writers, directors, and management is that he would not delegate creative authority.” In Walt’s own words, “A studio cannot be run by a committee. Somebody has to make the final decision,” though in another sign of his irresolution he also wrote an employee after describing a new studio routine, “I am convinced that there is a greater feeling of security in such an organization rather than allow one person to make all the decisions.”

  As much as Walt hated bureaucracy and corporate boxes and as much as he saw them as jeopardizing his power, he permitted the studio to hire Edward DeBord, an efficiency expert, to provide a reorganization plan in 1941, after the strike. Like all the others, this plan was never implemented, but with overhead as a percentage of studio costs having risen from 18 percent in 19
42 to 30 percent in 1944, DeBord, presumably at Roy’s and the bankers’ behest, returned to the studio in the waning months of the war to suggest how the Disneys could control costs and increase productivity. Most of DeBord’s recommendations were efficiency boilerplate: determine a practical cost for every foot of film in the studio, then set strict budgets for the shorts and features and stick to them; offer incentive bonuses to employees whose films come in under budget; and streamline the personnel department and install a central casting department to coordinate assignments of talent and prevent downtime. But one recommendation was far more problematic for Walt: DeBord suggested the appointment of a general manager to coordinate the studio’s operations.

  Walt agreed, albeit reluctantly—he had never wanted anyone at the studio to do anything but execute his orders. He knew how much the studio depended upon him, and he realized how much the burdens on him were about to increase with a revitalized operation. He also recognized how badly the studio needed a new jolt of energy after the numbing routine of the war. Walt and his staff spent the better part of 1945 reviewing candidates before settling on a forty-two-year-old Dartmouth-educated New York advertising executive named Jack Reeder, who had come recommended by Vern Caldwell. Reeder joined the studio that August as the new vice president and general manager, the first the company had ever had, at a salary of $30,000. He was followed the next month by a new production and studio manager named Fred Leahy, who had worked at Paramount for fifteen years before rising to production control manager and then moving to MGM.

  Other things changed as well. That December, Walt Disney, who had always ignored any kind of organization plan, announced a new one for the studio on the basis that he was so busy now, he was forced to delegate authority. Henceforth a management committee with Reeder as chairman would make business decisions. On the creative side there was to be a tight chain of command leading from Harry Tytle (who was to supervise shorts production), Walt Pfahler (who was to manage production services), Jack Lavin (who was to negotiate talent contracts), and Chuck Wolcott (who was to serve as musical director), up to Fred Leahy and from Leahy to Walt himself. Meanwhile Walt said he would be resigning as the president of Walt Disney Productions, his nominal title, to become chairman of the board, while Roy assumed the presidency and Reeder assumed Roy’s duties. Walt even announced that a new organizational chart was being drawn up for distribution throughout the company.

  This announcement sparked what amounted to a reorganization fever over the next eighteen months, which Walt seemed to have legitimized because he believed that the studio was beginning to rev up again. In addition to establishing the management committee and reassigning the staff, he installed Ub Iwerks as head of a department called Special Processes and Camera to develop new effects, and he later created a new Animation Board, composed of top animators personally selected by Walt, that was entrusted with helping advise Walt on other animators and devise policy on the forthcoming animations. (Of course, for those not selected, this board was yet another source of resentment and another blow to morale.) It had nine members: Les Clark, Marc Davis, Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Woolie Reitherman, and Frank Thomas, the latter two of whom had recently returned to the studio from military service. In a joking aside Walt once dubbed the members of the Animation Board his “nine old men,” after President Franklin Roosevelt’s reference to the nine members of the Supreme Court. The group would be known as the “Nine Old Men” thereafter.

  But having set up what seemed to be a formalized bureaucratic structure, Walt was clearly ambivalent about it. He didn’t want to surrender his own prerogatives. Harry Tytle claimed that neither Walt nor Roy had done the paperwork for Reeder’s appointment, even as their new general manager was about to report to the studio, and that Walt initially wasn’t going to issue a memo announcing Leahy’s hiring, preferring to wait until Leahy had arrived and Walt had discussed his duties with him before telling anyone. And even as he held those discussions, Walt openly fretted that Leahy, while at Paramount and MGM, had been “just another rubber stamp,” signing off on whatever producers had wanted, and he began to doubt as well whether Jack Reeder could adjust from the culture of an advertising firm to the very different culture of a motion picture studio, especially the Disney studio. As for the new management committee, Walt never attended a single meeting, believing that its role was to handle routine matters only, not general policy, which was his and Roy’s domain. In fact, Roy stopped attending meetings too.*

  The lines of communication and command, always so tangled, were no straighter under the reorganization plan. Walt had first told executives Harry Tytle and Hal Adelquist that the hiring of Leahy would have no effect on them; then that they were to report to Leahy on management matters but to Walt on all creative matters; then that they were to report to Leahy exclusively. But no sooner had Reeder and Leahy tried to exercise their authority than strains developed between Walt and his new management team. When Walt demanded that some of the secondary management sit in on deliberations about salaries, because he wanted to resist pressures to limit salaries or institute waiting periods for raises, they quarreled, and when the committee declared itself too busy to discuss individual merit raises, they also quarreled. They quarreled again in April when the committee, enforcing the new push for increased productivity, tried laying out terms of production. Walt exploded at what he considered an arrogation of power. He said that he was in charge of production and no one else—even though Reeder and Leahy had been hired to help shepherd production—and according to one attendee, he stated and restated this “not once but six or seven times.” He also insisted that he and Roy were running the company, “the Board of Directors notwithstanding,” and that if he wasn’t permitted to control production, he was going to quit. “Life is too short,” he told them.

  But Reeder and Leahy still didn’t seem to get the message that this was Walt Disney’s studio, not theirs. That August, Reeder prepared a report for Walt on the state of the studio. (In the past Walt wouldn’t have needed a report; he would have known.) Reeder, citing the urgent need to cut costs and boost productivity yet again and facing a new negotiation with the Screen Cartoonists Guild, suggested another round of layoffs and submitted another reorganization plan, apparently at Walt’s recommendation. Under the new plan, Leahy would be promoted to Reeder’s position and placed on the board of directors. They would need a “top administrative post to be filled by a man in whom both you and Roy have complete confidence”; the appointee was to have responsibility for all departments in the studio. “He must be welcomed everywhere in the Studio,” Reeder wrote, “not as a front office man or as a production man or as a selling man but as the coordinator who is doing his best to make the organization click as a whole.” Reeder didn’t have to say that he saw himself in this role. There was only one problem. At the Walt Disney Studio, Walt Disney was the one who coordinated all the departments and made sure the organization clicked. That had always been his primary responsibility.

  Walt didn’t fire his new managers, but they were soon dangling, just as all of Walt’s managers had dangled, not knowing exactly where their authority left off and Walt’s began. Tytle thought that Walt realized he needed someone in Reeder’s position to do the logistical work while Walt did the creative work—“in the mechanical, though not the spiritual,” as Tytle put it—but “it was almost impossible to let someone else call the shots, no matter how mundane,” which was why Walt kept undermining them. At the same time, with the new team constantly promoting new measures for greater productivity and barking at underlings—Reeder even closed the friendly poker games at the Penthouse Club—the reorganization resulted less in streamlining and energizing the studio, as Walt had intended, than in further enervating it. As one employee remembered, “The new people were interposed between Walt and Roy and the staff, and as the spring and summer wore on, the atmosphere became even grimmer.”

  If the studio atmosphere was
grimmer, the high spirits upon which Walt had briefly soared at war’s end had been dampened too, as he began to realize how difficult it would be for the studio to return to its former glory. He was ready once again to dispense with the ever-imperiled shorts when the studio finished those it was contractually obligated to provide over the next two years, until the new management team imposed draconian efficiencies that brought down the price, but even then Walt said that the studio couldn’t maintain quality, and he lost interest. (Destino would be among the casualties.) The studio produced fewer Mickey Mouse cartoons, only two during the war, now that Mickey had been practically sanitized out of existence, and Walt absolutely hated the Goofy cartoons, threatening constantly to terminate them before relenting, largely to provide work for his animators—yet another example of Walt’s vacillation under the new financial exigencies. The only surviving star was the sputtering, hot-tempered Donald Duck, and even he needed to be revitalized, as he was when he was given two new foils, a pair of pesky chipmunks named Chip and Dale, who had first appeared in a 1943 Pluto cartoon.