Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  Another factor that may have contributed to the idea that Walt Disney was anti-Semitic was that he lived in a nimbus of rich, white, conservative Protestantism that had tinges of anti-Semitism. Walt intimated to Harry Tytle that Walt’s own beloved Smoke Tree was a restricted community, and though he occasionally invited executives there for the weekend—he had had a guest house built outside the ranch grounds—he gently warned Tytle from accepting for fear of Tytle’s being embarrassed. Josie Mankiewicz, a school friend of Sharon’s and the daughter of screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, did accept and would tell of how she was having lunch with the Disneys at Smoke Tree when a man came to the table and asked them to leave. She did not report Walt’s reaction.

  Yet another theory traces the perception of anti-Semitism not to Walt himself but to one of his most trusted employees, Ben Sharpsteen. The man who had suffered so much of Walt’s abuse had heaped abuse of his own. An animator named Art Davis, who had interviewed at the studio but was not hired, said that Sharpsteen, despite having a name that might be mistaken for Jewish, was actually a vicious anti-Semite who did not knowingly hire Jews and who reviled the ones who had been hired, which was how the studio got its reputation for hostility to Jews. In this version Walt was guilty of anti-Semitism by association.

  The most plausible explanation, however, is another case of guilt by association, only a much more serious one: Walt, in joining forces with the MPA and its band of professional reactionaries and red-baiters, also got tarred with their anti-Semitism. Though Morrie Ryskind, a Jew, was one of the MPA’s most conservative and voluble members, it was widely thought both inside and outside the film industry that the group was toxic when it came to anti-Semitism and that Ryskind merely provided cover. Even the FBI was concerned. One FBI agent reported at the time of the MPA’s formation, “There is every possibility that persons anti-Semitic will attempt to rally around the MPA, making that organization definitely an anti-Semitic group.” Another report quoted John Howard Lawson, a Communist screenwriter and later one of the unfriendly HUAC witnesses, as accusing directors Victor Fleming and King Vidor, two MPA members, of each being a “notorious anti-Semite.” Producer David Selznick held the same opinion of the MPA leadership. Outside an MPA meeting in March 1944 Selznick made the charge publicly to MPA president Sam Wood. Wood, obviously trying to disarm him, invited Selznick inside to air his complaints, but Selznick, unmollified, called James K. McGuinness, the MPA founder, the “biggest anti-Semite in Hollywood” and charged him with harboring a secret anti-Semitic group called the Hundred Haters at the Lakeside Golf Club, where McGuinness was president. The charges were credible enough that Selznick’s father-in-law, MGM head Louis B. Mayer, and Warners’ production head, Jack Warner, both of whom were at the far right of the political spectrum, began to worry about the anti-Semitic element in the group.

  Walt Disney certainly was aware of the MPA’s purported anti-Semitism, but he chose to ignore it, possibly feeling that the accusation was Communist propaganda. The price he paid was that he would always be lumped not only with anti-Communists but also with anti-Semites. Regardless of whether he himself was one or not, he had willingly, even enthusiastically, embraced them and cast his fate with them. And having done so, regardless of the awards and charitable contributions, he would never be able to cleanse himself of the taint.

  V

  So many projects, so little progress. By late 1947 the studio had undergone yet another reorganization plan, this one putting Ben Sharpsteen in charge of all feature animation and Hal Adelquist, who had been head of personnel, in charge of the story department. But this was really just shuffling the chairs on the deck of a sinking ship. As Ben Sharpsteen later explained it, “We knew that it would never endure. Certain people would be put in charge of this or that, but there was very little likelihood that they would stay in that position for very long. Walt would probably give their job to someone else in a sudden move.” Still, Sharpsteen said, Walt “persisted in complaining that we had no plan for management and that we had to organize ourselves.” Fred Leahy, who was still nominally the head of production under Walt, had lost most of his authority when he suggested that the studio cut Fantasia into shorts. Jack Reeder, who was nominally the head of the entire studio operation, ran afoul of Walt by taking his own command seriously until Walt finally forced him out of the studio in May 1948. Two months after Reeder left, Walt reinstated gambling at the Penthouse Club as a kind of final kick at the bureaucrats.

  But even after retaking the helm, he was still largely diddling, disengaged, and uninterested. He spent the early part of the year finalizing The Wind in the Willows and Ichabod Crane, which he intended to release as a single film since neither part was long enough or substantial enough to constitute a feature in itself. (Walt had once written to a fan who had suggested a film of Willows: “[W]e have never considered it particularly well suited for cartoon material.”) While the studio lumbered ahead on various feature projects, Walt was also working on a live-action film set in rural Indiana about a young boy who adopts a black lamb, and a second True-Life Adventure, this one on beavers. It was another sign of the studio’s financial and imaginative stagnation, however, that its big release in 1948 was Melody Time, a compilation of seven shorts, and though it had originally been intended as an anthology of American folk heroism, the only heroes who survived were Johnny Appleseed and Pecos Bill; the rest of the film had sections as disparate as a musical interpretation of Joyce Kilmer’s poem “Trees” and a Currier and Ives–style animation titled “Once Upon a Wintertime.” The film cost a staggering $2 million and returned only $1.3 million—a loss Roy attributed to a polio scare that kept children out of theaters—forcing him to memo Walt: “It makes it all more necessary all the economies we can effect.” More layoffs followed.

  With the studio in the red, Walt had only one glimmer of hope that he might produce another feature film to win back his audience, silence the critics, and pump money back into the operation. But it was a small glimmer, because as the studio had bled animators, it had lost one of the primary resources that might have made a feature viable. And it was small because Walt, knowing that he no longer had the talent at the studio, was loath to commit himself to another feature—loath to permit himself to dream. In any case, Roy was insistent that they not gamble everything on a feature. When Woolie Reitherman returned to the studio after the war, he said that Walt was “very, very teetered,” by which he meant indecisive over whether they should make a feature or just sell the studio. At the time Walt was pondering Cinderella, which he had been developing in fits and starts since 1938, with the obvious hope that it could recapture the magic of Snow White; and he was also looking at Alice in Wonderland, for which he had hired English writer Aldous Huxley to do a screenplay and for which he had floated the name of child actress Margaret O’Brien, not only because O’Brien might attract an audience but also because she was under contract at MGM and her involvement might entice MGM to distribute the film rather than RKO, with whom the Disneys were disillusioned.

  The decision was clearly less a matter of passion than of expediency. By one account, Walt, unable to choose between the projects, called a meeting of his nonanimation employees, played them the songs composed for each film, showed them the storyboards, and then had them vote on which film they preferred. They chose Cinderella, though Alice was kept in production as well so that the animation crews on both films were effectively competing to see which might finish first. In the spring of 1946 Walt received a treatment on Cinderella from his veteran storymen Ted Sears, Homer Brightman, and Harry Reeves, and he ordered storyboards with the intention of having the film ready for a late 1949 release. Woolie Reitherman had seen the Cinderella storyboards and went directly to Walt’s office to tell him how much he liked the film and how much potential he thought it had. Years later, Reitherman said, Walt told him that “he was sure glad that I’d come to see him,” as if he might not have proceeded otherwise, which only underscored just how uncert
ain the once-infallible Walt Disney had become.

  At long last the studio seemed to regain some of its fire. “Cinderella really brought back the good feeling with a bang there,” Ben Sharpsteen said. Milt Kahl cited a degree of euphoria now that the animators were back working on something “important.” But it was soon clear that Cinderella was not Snow White, at least not in the way it was produced, and for a film that was meant to be the studio’s salvation, it received little of the attention that the early features had had lavished upon them. Walt was so reluctant to take any chances (the sort of chances he had taken on Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi) that early in 1948 he had the entire film shot in live action on the soundstage with actors mouthing the dialogue track. The aim was not to provide film to rotoscope, as the studio had done in the past, but, Frank Thomas recalled, “to see whether the scenes were going to work. Would they be too long? Too short? Will it hold your interest?” This footage was then edited and sent to the animators on large photostat sheets to duplicate. The problem, said Thomas, was that the animators were not allowed to imagine anything that the live action did not present, since that kind of experimentation might necessitate changes and cost extra money—an approach that effectively defeated the purpose of animation and gave validity to the old criticisms that Walt Disney was too beholden to realism. The animators were even instructed to draw from a certain directorial perspective—head-on—to avoid difficult shots and angles. Thomas said he felt that “your feet were nailed to the floor.”

  Moreover, the style of the animation was different; it was in the new, sharper, flatter, more minimalist Disney mode. As Walt admitted to one prospective artist who recommended a florid approach, the drawings “have to be done with a great deal of simplicity.” In fact, Walt was so determined that Cinderella not resemble Snow White visually that he asked his onetime artist Mary Blair to return to design the characters, which she did in a delicate, almost greeting-card fashion—against which, Ben Sharpsteen claimed, the animators rebelled. Whole scenes were reimagined too, to cut the detail and the cost of animating that detail. Harry Tytle suggested that during the ballroom scene the other dancers dissolve into the faces of Cinderella and the Prince so that the dancers wouldn’t have to be animated, and he further suggested that the coach in which Cinderella rides to the ball seem to float in the air so that the animators could avoid drawing the turning wheels and the coach’s filigrees. At the same time Walt was having individual scenes run for ARI audiences as soon as the animators finished them.

  In November, Sharpsteen informed Walt that Bill Peet was working on the Dress Building sequence, in which Cinderella gets her gown; composer Ollie Wallace had recorded a track for “So This Is Love”; Ham Luske and Wilfred Jackson were continuing to shoot live-action scenes; and writers Winston Hibler and Ted Sears had moved from Cinderella to the Ichabod Crane story. There was nothing unusual about any of this. What was unusual was Sharpsteen having to tell Walt these things while the studio pressed on with its first fully animated feature in nearly eight years, the feature Walt had been desperate to make. In the past Walt would have known it all already. In the past Walt would have been there supervising every last detail. But then, in the past it would have mattered.

  Nothing seemed to matter because Walt felt that everything now was hopelessly compromised. As always when he was disengaged, he traveled—this time to Smoke Tree, to Arrowhead Springs, to Alisal Ranch, and to Oak Creek Lodge in Arizona. In June 1948, after the release of Melody Time, he took a three-week cruise to Hawaii. It was a chance to spend time with his family and forget the studio. He was especially close to Sharon, whom one of Walt’s secretaries once described as “sort of like a little puppy dog,” willing to go with him on junkets like the one in Alaska or on a night train to San Francisco or on a transcontinental train trip to New York, where the two of them rode in the engine for a spell. He still routinely drove both girls to their respective schools on his way to the studio each day, and he was an involved parent, even scolding Sharon’s principal for giving the children too much homework because it took away from family time. He was also a loving and supportive father, encouraging Diane when she began attending the Chouinard Art Institute (“He would collect all my drawings and make me think I was wonderful,” Diane would recall) and attending Sharon’s school plays and afterward telling her how good she had been. At one point Diane got interested in music and asked her father to buy her season tickets to the opera. “He’d go with me to every one of them,” Diane said, “unless I could get three other girls to go. Then he would drive us down to the Shrine Auditorium and then come back and pick us up again.” Diane admitted she thought he “hated” the opera. But he never made the slightest objection about going. At the dinner table he liked to tell the family what he was doing, but he always asked them what they were doing as well. “And he would listen,” Diane said.

  He seldom disciplined them or displayed the anger in their presence that his employees so often saw; though with the girls, as with his employees, he had only to arch his eyebrow to chasten them. Sharon said that the only time he spanked her was when she had made an inappropriate comment at dinner, was sent to her room, and then complained to her aunt Grace about the punishment. It was the complaining that irked him. And Diane remembered a time he erupted when she spent most of a Palm Springs vacation driving around in his Oldsmobile convertible and socializing with the daughters of Twentieth Century–Fox production chief Darryl F. Zanuck, who had a house nearby. “You’re running a rat race,” Diane said her father yelled at her when he finally caught her at home. “You’re never here! Why am I here if you’re never around?” as he had once chastised Marjorie Sewell. Then he left for the studio. A few days later Diane was driving the Oldsmobile when she got into a “fender bender.” Walt drove right down to the scene of the accident and never said a word of reprimand. “That’s the way he was,” Diane said. “He only got mad when he felt hurt.”

  Lillian could be thoughtless with the girls. She and Walt had decided never to let Sharon know that she was adopted, but when Sharon was a teenager two of her classmates at the Westlake School who were themselves adoptees, told her that she was adopted too. When Sharon confronted her mother with the information, Lillian said matter-of-factly and without softening the blow, “Well, you are.” Diane said, “That was Mother’s attitude about a lot of things, maybe a little insensitive but not realizing it.” Walt was different. Most of the time he was considerate, even tender, with his girls. When he took Sharon to Alaska, she called him the “picture of patience,” saying that he braided her long hair every morning, washed out her clothes, and cleaned up the plane after she gorged herself on Hershey chocolate bars and got sick. When Diane experienced her first menstrual period and ran to her parents in shock and confusion, she said that it was her father, not her mother, who consoled her.

  But as much as he cherished his girls and enjoyed spending time with them, there was something solitary about him when he wasn’t at the studio—something self-absorbed and distant. With nothing to occupy him, he had impulsively decided that he was going to hack a path around the perimeter of his Woking Way property, and he spent most of his weekends the summer of 1947 blazing what the family jokingly referred to as his “Burma Trail” after the southeast Asian World War II supply line—shirtless in the hot sun, digging and lifting, perspiring profusely, alone in his own world except for Sharon, whom he paid to fetch him soft drinks. Lillian said that at Smoke Tree she once caught him out on the terrace acting out a scene on which he was working, laughing and talking to himself, so completely engrossed that he didn’t notice anyone else. His beloved chow Sunnee had died—“no other dog could equal that dog,” he would say—but he got a new dog, a brown standard poodle named Duchess, who followed him around the house and even accompanied him on his weekend forays to the studio, where employees who happened to be there got to know the clip, clip, clip of her nails on the tile floor. Paul Smith, a composer, said that when Duchess heard
him playing the piano, she would bound down the hall to his room.

  If his evenings and weekends with Duchess were a measure of Walt’s loneliness now that the girls were growing up and he didn’t feel the same sense of collaboration at the studio, so was his time with Hazel George. George was a stocky, plain-faced, tough-talking young woman who had grown up hardbitten in the Arizona border town of Bisbee, where she somehow became a ward of the juvenile court, received training as a psychiatric nurse, and was advised by a counselor to head out to California and see if she could get a job, of all places, at the Disney studio. She began working there as the company nurse during the strike. Walt’s doctor warned her, “You’re going to have a hell of a time with him.”

  In fact, she didn’t. Walt needed a confidante, someone he could just talk to, and Hazel George became that person. Every day, usually after five o’clock, she would come to his office or he would go to hers, where she administered a diathermy treatment or gave him a massage for his polo injury, and then Walt would sip a scotch and unwind by unburdening himself to Hazel. They called the offices their “laughing place,” after Uncle Remus’s shack in Song of the South—the same description Walt had used for Walt Pfeiffer’s home in Kansas City, where he had once shared gay times. There was nothing sexual about the relationship; in fact, Hazel was involved with the composer Paul Smith. For Walt, it was strictly a matter of companionship and confidence, of not having to be Walt Disney. In time it would be said that Hazel knew all Walt’s secrets and that she was probably the most secure employee in the studio. But it was more than solace Walt found in Hazel. He trusted her, no doubt because he knew she was outspoken, honest, and unintimidatable at a time when he was afraid everyone else would tell him what they thought he wanted to hear. (Of course, the employees were engaged in self-preservation precisely because Walt didn’t like to be contradicted.) He would show her storyboards, and she would render her judgments. She even claimed to have named Seal Island and Beaver Valley, the True-Life Adventure on beavers.