Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  The fact was that Walt himself had had very little experience in live-action films either—only the Alice comedies, The Reluctant Dragon, and Seversky’s scenes in Victory Through Air Power. Though Stokowski’s scenes in Fantasia and Seversky’s in Victory had been shot on soundstage 1, it was not fully equipped for live action, and the estimated cost of refitting it for that purpose was just under $200,000, or about a third the entire cost of Dumbo. In fact, Jonathan Bell Lovelace was as worried about the Disneys’ inexperience as about the objections from the black community; he suggested that they partner with one of the major studios. Instead Walt contracted with Samuel Goldwyn, with whom he had collaborated for years on the aborted Hans Christian Andersen project and to whom he had as close a relationship as he had with any producer in Hollywood with the possible exception of Walter Wanger. Goldwyn also lent the studio his cinematographer, Gregg Toland, who had shot Orson Welles’s legendary Citizen Kane. The total cost of Goldwyn’s services would be $390,000—steep but necessary under the circumstances.

  The filming began in December 1944 in Phoenix, where the studio had constructed a plantation and cotton fields for outdoor scenes, and Walt left for the location to oversee what he called “atmospheric shots,” missing Diane’s birthday and just barely making it home in time for Christmas. So eager was he to make a real movie amid the government work that he was back again in February and then again in March. Even as the live action was shot, the bulk of the animation was going to have to wait; with its war contracts, the studio could spare only a few animators, and the ones who did work on the film proceeded slowly. Wilfred Jackson and Perce Pearce, who directed in tandem—Jackson the animation and Pearce the actors—took the same deliberate approach to the live action, and Walt, obviously tense and hoping to save money, wasn’t pleased, scolding Jackson that they were spending too much time on these scenes. Yet for all their care Walt had to come to the rescue on the final day of shooting when Jackson discovered that the scene in which Uncle Remus sang the film’s signature song, “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” hadn’t been properly blocked. “We all sat there in a circle with the dollars running out, and nobody came up with anything,” Jackson would recall. Then Walt suggested that they shoot Baskett in close-up, cover the lights with cardboard save for a sliver of blue sky behind his head, and then remove the cardboard from the lights when he began singing so that he would seem to be entering a bright new world of animation. Like Walt’s idea for Bambi on ice, it made for one of the most memorable scenes in the film.

  But all of that seemed to have taken place a long time ago when Walt returned to the project after the war to complete the animation. In June 1946 the film, now called Song of the South (to the consternation of the Harris family, who preferred the original Uncle Remus), was finally completed—the first nonwar-themed Disney feature in nearly four years. Walt was pleased. Though it contained less than a half-hour of animation, that limit allowed the animation to be done as painstakingly as in the old days. Marc Davis, alluding perhaps to how enervating the war work was, said that “almost all of the animators that worked on it would have to say that they never did anything that was more fun than that,” in part because they had such great voices with which to work. Milt Kahl went further. He called it “kind of a high in animation.” They weren’t the only ones who thought it might be a return to form. “SAW WALT DISNEY’S SONG OF THE SOUTH THIS MORNING AND IT IS IN MY OPINION THE MOST DELIGHTFUL CREATION THAT WALT HAS THUS FAR BROUGHT TO THE SCREEN,” RKO executive Ned Depinet beamed in a telegram he sent to Gus Eyssell, the manager of the Radio City Music Hall, “AND HAS SAME WIDE AUDIENCE APPEAL AS SNOW WHITE,” though Vern Caldwell wrote Walt skeptically that while this might be Depinet’s “real feeling,” it was at least “the way he is talking it up.”

  Walt heard the same kind of enthusiasm from other quarters but also a more sobering prediction. The Audience Research Institute had determined that the “highest potential” of the film was $2.4 million—less than half what the studio had expected. Disney publicist William Levy said the figure “surprised and shocked” him, until he realized that the studio had been “feeling the pulse of the Trade” while ARI had been “feeling the pulse of the Public.” Now, Levy wrote Roy, they could only hope that word-of-mouth might save the picture. Meanwhile Walt left the studio on November 6 for the film’s premiere at Loew’s Theatre in Atlanta.

  The dim financial prospects notwithstanding, if Walt Disney had hoped to regain his artistic standing with the critics, he did not. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times complained, “More and more, Walt Disney’s craftsmen have been loading their feature films with so-called ‘live action’ in place of their animated whimsies of the past, and by just those proportions has the magic of these Disney films decreased.” Citing the ratio of live action to animation at two to one, he concluded that is “approximately the ratio of its mediocrity to its charm.” Still, the film wound up grossing $3.3 million, better than the ARI estimate and more than the $2.2 million gross of Make Mine Music.

  The most scathing criticisms, however, weren’t aesthetic; they were political. The release of the film had revived all the protests in the black community that had lain dormant while the film itself had lain dormant. Many found abhorrent the idea of Uncle Remus happily serving a wealthy white family while he lived in a shanty. Walter White of the NAACP complained that the film perpetuated the impression of an “idyllic master-slave relationship which is a distortion of the facts.” Congressman Adam Clayton Powell called it an “insult to minorities.” The Theatre Chapter of the National Negro Congress threw a picket line around the Palace Theatre in New York, where the film was playing, and had its protesters carry placards reading, “We fought for Uncle Sam, not Uncle Tom.” Producer and columnist Billy Rose accused Walt of having caved to corporate interests and warned, “You stopped being Walt Disney, and became Walt Disney, Inc.” And he added, “You know, chum, you’re not just another movie producer. You’re the guy we brag about.” Even Maurice Rapf, who cowrote the film, said he agreed with the attackers. But the worst criticism, certainly the most telling, may have been a remark in the B’nai B’rith Messenger, the publication of the Jewish social and charitable organization, that Song of the South “tallies with the reputation that Disney is making for himself as an arch-reactionary.”

  Walt might have been mystified if he hadn’t had the Communists to blame. He liked the film, and he especially liked James Baskett, who he told his sister Ruth was “the best actor, I believe, to be discovered in years.” Long after the film’s release Walt stayed in contact with Baskett, even picking up a record of the singer Bert Williams for him when Walt was in New York because Walt knew Baskett was a fan of Williams. More, when Baskett was in ill health, Walt began a campaign to get him an honorary Academy Award for his performance, saying that he had worked “almost wholly without direction” and had devised the characterization of Remus himself. Thanks to Walt’s efforts, Baskett did get his honorary Oscar at the 1948 ceremonies, then died a few months later, after which his widow wrote Walt thankfully that Walt had been a “friend in deed and [we] certainly have been in need.”

  Even with Song of the South under his belt, Walt Disney was restless. “Let’s do anything to get some action,” he said he told Roy during this period. Restlessness was his congenital condition, expressing his fear that if he wasn’t moving forward, he was moving backward. His early features—from Snow White through Bambi—spoke to maturity and the assumption of responsibility; they didn’t address what happened after maturity was attained. For a man who usually had to be pried away from his beloved studio and traveled only because the war work had compelled him to do so, he was frequently on the road after the war, as if to burn off energy that he could no longer burn off on his films—heading to his retreat at Smoke Tree in the desert or to the Sugar Bowl for skiing or to confer with the Dalis at Del Monte. As Song of the South was being completed, he even took a brief trip to St. Louis, stopping in Kansas City along the way and dri
ving dreamily through his old neighborhood, lamenting how dilapidated it now looked. And in November 1946, after the Atlanta premiere of Song of the South, he flew to New York, then boarded the Queen Elizabeth with Lillian, Perce Pearce, screenwriter John Tucker Battle, and their wives for the crossing to England and on to Ireland to gather material for a film on leprechauns. It was his first European trip since the triumphant tour in 1935.

  If he was restless, he was spinning in a dozen different directions, none of which seemed to excite him the way the old animations or even Song of the South had. He returned to Los Angeles on December 17, the day before Diane’s birthday, which he had missed so often, and began the new year juggling the compilation film about American heroes, another combination live action–animation called So Dear to My Heart, an animated version of Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and an animated Edgar Allan Poe story that had been suggested to him by the British actor James Mason. “It would, of course, be a new departure for us and something the public would never expect,” Walt wrote Mason, clearly searching for ways to change his image and reinvigorate the studio. He was even thinking of asking Alfred Hitchcock to direct.

  But with the economic gloom still not having lifted as he had hoped and the cartoons still not finding favor, Walt was beleaguered and despondent, and though he always claimed that he functioned better in adversity and that a “kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you,” he had been kicked in the teeth for years now, and the kicks were not abating. “When he came back to animation after the war,” Frank Thomas observed, “Walt never had the same enthusiasm…. It was never like it was on the early pictures, where he knew every frame of the film.” Moreover, the layoffs in 1946 and attrition had shrunk the workforce; despite Walt’s promises to stockholders that the studio was on the rebound, only an emergency loan of $1 million from RKO late in 1946 rescued the company from insolvency. When Woolie Reitherman returned to Burbank in 1947, he recalled that “there was quite a lot of down feeling at the studio.” He would see Walt eating at the Penthouse Club, and Walt “always seemed to be a little worried.” One animator remembered a story conference where Walt was clearly distracted. The man who had been pitching the story was forlorn at Walt’s lack of interest. “Walt looked at him and said, ‘You haven’t anything to worry about. It’s me. I’m the one that has to worry. Goddamn, I’ve got to stay up all night thinking about things for you guys to do.’”

  He was always thinking about ways to save the studio, always worrying. One night after work Walt sauntered down to Roy’s office on the second floor of the Animation Building, and the two brothers sat there until roughly eight o’clock pondering their predicament. “Look,” Roy said he told his brother angrily, breaking the silence, “you’re letting this place drive you nuts. That’s one place I’m not going with you.” And Roy stormed out. He didn’t sleep that night. Neither, he said, did Walt. The next morning Roy was sitting at his desk still fretting when he heard Walt’s footsteps in the hallway and his hacking cough. “He came in and he was filled up,” Roy said, “he could hardly talk.” And Walt said, “Isn’t it amazing what a horse’s ass a fella can be sometimes?”

  Though he was only forty-four, in addition to the mental strain he wasn’t feeling well physically either, which made it even more difficult to cope. Always slight and fragile, save for his time in France when his frame filled out, he suffered from a painful flare-up of an old polo injury, for which he received daily diathermy treatments in his office and which got so bad that he had to be hospitalized early in 1947; his cholesterol rating was just under 250 milligrams, where 180 milligrams was normal; his teeth bothered him; he would soon need reading glasses; and he couldn’t seem to shake colds, possibly because of his chain-smoking. Between the tensions at the studio and the nagging problems with his health, one of the most famous and celebrated men in America wrote his robust postman brother, Herbert, about how much he envied Herbert’s life. Of his brother’s new trailer and the freedom it provided, Walt wrote, “I’d give a lot for a little of it, and believe me, I mean it.”

  But it wasn’t just the sense of corporate crisis or middle-age infirmities that were afflicting Walt Disney. In the same way that the strike had stiffened and soured him, he had undergone another personal transformation during the war, one that paralleled his country’s transformation. America had entered the war powerful but naïve. It emerged from the war as the dominant nation in the world; in President Truman’s words, spoken on V-J Day when Japan surrendered, it held the “greatest strength and the greatest power which man has ever reached.” Within the next two years the United States would enjoy unprecedented prosperity and abundance. In 1947 it produced nearly half the world’s manufactures, which led to a sinking unemployment rate, rising wages (roughly a 45 percent rise in just four years), and a skyrocketing birthrate (nearly one million more births per year than during the Depression). After two decades of isolationism, not unlike Walt’s own isolation in his studio, the country had also been forced to assume a new international responsibility—what publisher Henry Luce had called for in his famous 1941 Life essay, “The American Century.” In Luce’s view, the nation had to change its sense of itself as it shouldered new global obligations. It had to become the custodian to the world.

  Walt Disney, who represented America to much of the world, had entered the war as one of the nation’s most popular entertainers, “the guy we brag about,” as Billy Rose had said, not only for the quality of his work but also for the seemingly naïve and unpretentious way he produced it—that appealing American primitivism of Walt’s. Despite the studio’s ongoing problems, Walt had emerged from the war as something else: a corporate burgher and the embodiment of the new imposing, powerful America, helping to transmit its values around the globe or, as historian Jackson Lears would later put it, a “central figure in the corporate reclamation of the national mythology, the redefinition of the American Way of Life from a vague populism to an equally murky notion of free enterprise.”

  As Lears indicated, it was difficult to put one’s finger on exactly what constituted the change, but like the country, Walt Disney now seemed somehow hegemonic, which was another reason he lost favor with intellectuals and critics. Even his employees saw it. “If no one [else] was in the room, if you were one-on-one with Walt,” Ward Kimball recalled, “things were a lot more agreeable. He didn’t feel he had to demonstrate his position, and you could talk to him…. But when you got into a room full of people, he was a different man.” In a room full of people he was no longer a folksy outsider charged with making people laugh or cry. He wore his responsibility heavily. The war and the war films had moved him inside the Establishment.

  He even looked different. The boyish young Walt Disney had dressed casually and flamboyantly, often with a scarf or a handkerchief around his neck rather than a tie and with a sweater rather than a suit or sports jacket and often with a floppy fedora. One reporter writing in 1939 described a Tyrolean jacket to which Walt had become “addicted”—purple on the outside, red satin on the inside, with silver buttons the size of half-dollars. “It’s the sort of thing that would overwhelm a lesser man,” the reporter observed, “but he wears it gracefully,” proud of “the sensation it creates.” Another reporter called Walt’s outfits a “pied ensemble” and said he was wearing moccasins at the time of their encounter. But now, though he still favored those crushed hats that, according to Lillian, he thought made him look dashing, and though he still often wore sports shirts and sweaters, he was also going to Bullock’s Department Store for fittings two or three times each year, and his suits were more likely to be solid blue or gray and conservatively cut than wildly patterned and loose-fitting. Even his once-unkempt hair, which had added to the rakish effect, was increasingly tamed with pomade.

  One reason for this transformation from a heedless entertainer to a cautious corporate leader who consulted ARI surveys rather than rely on his own instincts was the need to make films without
also making mistakes. The studio couldn’t afford the risk. Another reason was a growing conservatism in Walt that was itself a function of the studio’s embattled status; of his government work and his role as American goodwill ambassador; of his suspicions of Communist intrigue after the strike; and even possibly of his age, now that he was in his mid-forties and no longer a reckless young visionary. Walt, who had never aspired to be a businessman or industrial kingpin, seemed to recognize the change and gamely struggled against it with his Dali and Poe projects and the more modernist animation style, but the dull, uninspired animations, the sluggishness in the studio now, and the racial obtuseness of Song of the South were unmistakably the products of an artist who was less dexterous and less contrarian than Walt Disney had been before he had a large studio apparatus to maintain. It was the Warners who now played the subversive role that Walt Disney had once played with the early Mickey Mouse cartoons. Walt’s animations seemed to be aimed squarely at the middle so as not to offend, which made them a function not only of a different Walt Disney but of a different America. As art critic Robert Hughes would describe the change in Disney, “He turned himself from a cartoonist into the Old Master of masscult.” What this meant in cultural terms, according to historian Steven Watts, was that Disney’s “critiques of the social order gradually gave way to a powerful preservationist impulse.”