Disney (8 page)

Disney’s employees were aware of the company’s financial problems. In 1940, the Disneys had sold stock in the company and set aside 20 percent of the shares for employee compensation. The Disney Brother Studio was one of the first American companies to share ownership with its workers this way. But as share prices fell, the studio bought back much its stock. Shares that started at $25 eventually plummeted to $3.

By February 1941, the studio’s main creditor, the Bank of America, insisted on cost-cutting measures. To circumvent this, Disney devised a way of giving his best animators incremental raises in hopes the bank would not notice. Although the company had posted a small profit in 1941 and had retired earlier debts and property mortgages with the stock sale, losses from
Pinocchio
and
Fantasia
were mounting. Disney decided to quickly produce a lower-budget animated feature:
Dumbo
.

Back in October 1940, the Screen Cartoonists Guild (SCG) launched an effort to unionize the Disney studio. By early December, the SCG had collected cards from a majority of the studio’s employees approving the union.

Disney understood that his employees were concerned about the prospect of layoffs, given the company’s financial position, but the union decision wasn’t strictly about money. Disney’s more talented and senior animators were frustrated by slaving away anonymously for an authoritarian taskmaster who took all the credit. Other than Mickey Mouse, the Disney name was the only one that ever figured prominently in the credits of a Disney release
.

Disney was livid when he learned of the potential unionization. He called in senior animator
Art Babbitt
, one of his most valued and trusted employees and insisted Babbitt help stop the union action. Disney threatened to close down the studio before giving in to a union. Babbitt said he could not help.

Disney thought if his whole staff took a vote, they would reject the union. But the SCG declined a vote and reiterated that if the company did not sign with the union, studio employees would strike. In February 1941, Disney called a meeting with his employees. He reminded them that when other studios had cut salaries during the Depression he had continued to pay handsome bonuses even when the company was strapped for cash, but the speech backfired. In attempting to address the staff’s concerns, Disney only reminded his employees of their list of grievances. Disney’s plea as their heroic leader came across as a sob story.

When Babbitt became a vocal leader of the SCG, Disney was enraged. He told Babbitt that if he kept organizing the studio’s employees he would be “thrown out the front gate.”

But Babbitt was stubborn and fearless and popular with the other employees. That spring, just as Disney was ready to fire him, Babbitt married young Marjorie Belcher, the model for Snow White. Disney held his fire.
But by March, Disney had started referring to him as a punk.

In late May 1941, Disney fired twenty animators who had signed with SCG. A week later, he fired Babbitt. The strike began the next day.

Just how many employees went out on strike or honored their picket line was unclear. The SCG maintained that the figure exceeded 400. A rival union, the American Society of Screen Cartoonists, claimed it was only 300. The studio told
The
New York Times
the actual number was 293.

The strike was intensely personal for Disney. He felt betrayed by employees he believed he had paid well and treated like family. These men and women called him Walt and were part of a team that had revolutionized the field of animation. Disney’s kingdom was crumbling, and he was convinced he knew why.

They were all Communists. Disney went so far as to take out an ad in
Variety
accusing strike leaders of “Communistic agitation.”

As Neal Gabler writes in
Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination,
Disney was obsessed with the idea that Communists had infiltrated and destroyed his studio. It was the only way he could explain the ingratitude and treachery of people he had once loved. Everything was perfect until, Disney would say, the “Commies moved in.”

The strike continued into the summer of 1941. Disney sometimes drove his convertible Packard, top down, through the picket line, cheerfully waving to the demonstrators. One day, Art Babbitt shouted, “Walt Disney, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” Police at the gate intervened to stop the two from fighting, but while Disney believed he could outlast the strikers, the Bank of America held the studio’s fate in its hands. The bank forced an arbitration and a settlement that included significant raises for the returning employees. In early August,
The
New York Times
reported the striking workers had returned and a full slate of Disney shorts and features had resumed “normal” production.

But all was not normal. The settlement provided for layoffs, which Disney avoided by leaving for South America on a goodwill tour launched by
Nelson Rockefeller
. Rockefeller wanted to improve cultural and economic ties between the two Americas and had been recruiting Hollywood celebrities to help. While Disney was in South America, the settlement hit a snag because the list of people to be let go were overwhelmingly SCG members. Roy Disney resolved the issue by temporarily closing the studio in late August, keeping only a handful of maintenance workers and a small group of animators on hand to work on
Dumbo.
The rest of the staff was furloughed without pay until mid-September.

With the studio effectively shuttered and Walt in South America, Roy was left to handle affairs when their father Elias died on September 13. Walt decided against returning for the funeral, and Roy reassured him that was all right. By the time he got back, he told Walt, the negotiations with SCG would be “settled down.”

When Disney returned to work in October, he found the studio drastically changed. There were fewer than 700 employees. More troubling was that Bank of America had stepped in. The bank agreed to keep the Disneys’ credit line open on the condition they stop making animated features as soon as the ones in production were completed. After that, the bank insisted the studio stick to less risky animated shorts until the new feature generated a profit.

The studio closed its largest restaurant and halted all bonuses and stock incentives. Employees had to punch in on a time clock, which Disney hated almost as much as anything else. But the most significant change was in Disney himself. He grew sullen and remote, even, some said, paranoid.

To keep Disney in line with its dictates, Bank of America assembled an executive committee that included its own representative that had final say over everything the studio produced. Disney’s mood grew darker, and he vacillated between ignoring his employees and berating them for work he considered inferior.

Despite the tension, the studio managed to finish
Dumbo
. The story had been in the works since 1939, when Disney bought the rights to a book manuscript by Helen Aberson. The plot concerns a baby circus elephant who, because of his outsized ears, is teased and shunned by the other circus animals. But then he discovers he can use his ears to fly and becomes a star performer.

Dumbo
went into production in early 1941. Disney ordered that it be kept simple and short.
Dumbo
clocked in at just sixty-four minutes.

Dumbo
was released in late October 1941, only weeks after Disney’s return to the studio. Disney later said that
Dumbo
was just a little cartoon the studio had cranked out “between epics.” But audiences and critics loved it.
The
New York Times’
Bosley Crowther was completely charmed by the film’s countless “fanciful delights.” Like many reviewers, Crowther was particularly impressed with a hallucinatory sequence in which Dumbo, accidently drunk from a tank of water spiked with champagne, sees a kaleidoscopic parade of pink elephants. But critics most loved Disney’s return to gentle humor and warm sentimentality. Crowther exhorted his readers to see a film he called irresistible:

Ladeez and gentlemen, step right this way - to the Broadway Theatre, that is - and see 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! See the remarkable baby elephant that flies with the greatest of ease. See the marvelous trick-performing animals in the biggest little show on earth. See the wonderland you first saw within the pages of story books. Ladeez and gentlemen, see “Dumbo,” a film you will never forget.

With
Dumbo
sweeping the country,
Time
magazine put together a cover story on the flying pachyderm. Disney was not thrilled with the piece, which accurately reported the he hadn’t had much to do with making the film. But larger problems loomed for the Disney studio and the country. The
Time
story was scheduled for the December 8, 1941, issue. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, the
Dumbo
piece was bumped from the cover. The same day, Disney got a call from a manager at the Burbank studio, alerting him that the U.S. Army was moving in. Army truck rolled through the studio gates and 500 soldiers commandeered the studio and set up an encampment on the soundstage. The buildings were draped in camouflage, and ammunition depots were set up in garages and storage sheds. The military installment was to provide antiaircraft support to a nearby Lockheed factory, which manufactured military planes for the war.

Once the United States entered World War II, the Disney studio contributed significantly to the war effort. It produced animated training and propaganda films starring some of Disney’s favorite characters.
The New Spirit
,
released in 1942, starred Donald Duck as a patriotic citizen who had to learn how to file his income taxes. The Treasury Department commissioned the film to encourage compliance with the
Revenue Act of 1942
which made some 15 million people new taxpayers.

That year Disney also managed to release the long-awaited
Bambi. Bambi
, set to open in New York in August,
had taken five years to finish and cost more than $1.7 million.

During a test screening in February, a teenager in the audience answered Bambi’s pleading call for his mother with “Here I am, Bambi!,” ruining a solemn moment in the story. It was seen as a bad omen.

The response was even worse than expected when the film premiered at
Radio City Music Hall
. Children in attendance enjoyed the show, but
The
New York Times
called the film a brightly colored mash-up of realism and fantasy that did not go well together:

The
Times
concluded Disney had gone too far. “In his search for perfection Mr. Disney has come perilously close to tossing away his whole world of cartoon fantasy.”

In its initial release,
Bambi
grossed slightly less than its $1.7 million production cost. Disney said the studio would never again invest so much time in making a film. The studio could take some comfort from lowered expectations. With the war still on, many foreign markets were unavailable. Still, Disney had counted on
Bambi
being a hit. For now, the studio was still in debt and with no clear path forward.

In 1936, Disney had received a letter from Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover making it clear that the two would work together on issues of mutual interest. Their chief shared concern was Communist activity in the United States, and specifically in Hollywood. Disney was eager to root out the Communist conspirators he believed were epidemic in the film industry.

In 1944, Disney was elected vice president of a new anti-Communist group called the
Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals
(MPA). This led to the
Hollywood blacklist
, which interrupted, and in some cases, ruined the careers of a number of screenwriters, actors, and directors, who were denied work on the grounds that they were Communists.

Shortly after its formation, the MPA contacted Congress and suggested that Hollywood, particularly the
Screen Writers Guild
union, harbored Communists. After Republicans won control of the House in the 1946 mid-term elections, the
House Un-American Activities Committee
declared it would investigate. When the committee started issuing subpoenas, Disney, as a friend of the committee, was called to testify.

Disney testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1947. The hearings had already gotten off to a sensational start with testimony from
Gary Cooper
and
Ronald Reagan
, who, as president of the
Screen Actors Guild
, testified he thought the Communist threat in Hollywood was overstated.

When Disney was asked if there were Communists working at his studio, he was adamant that there were none, but that had not always been the case, he said. He reiterated his belief that Communists inside the studio, and others aligned with the Screen Cartoonists Guild, had engineered the strike at his studio.

During this period, Disney changed the way he lived and worked. He spent more time with his family. In 1949, he bought a new home in the Holmby Hills district of Los Angeles. The property was two-and-a-half heavily wooded acres and sloped gently down from a bluff to a canyon separating it from the road. Disney paid $33,250 for the land and hired Russian-born James Dolena, the “architect to the stars,” to design and build his 5,669-square-foot home. The construction took well over a year. There was a large swimming pool in back and a recreation building that housed a private movie theater, bar, four-car garage, and soda fountain.

The home on Carolwood Drive replaced one that overlooked Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean. But Walt also intended it as a replacement for his true home – the studio, where he spent all of his time. He built it as a haven from work - a place where he could be with Lillian and his daughters, but also alone with his thoughts. It was also far enough away from the studio that his daily commutes would give him time to meditate. In a letter to an aunt, Walt wrote about the new home, “All in all, I think it is going to be a very happy set-up, and I am looking forward to spending more time at home than I have in the past.” He called it “a sort of wedding anniversary present – our twenty-fifth.” There were reminders of his childhood home. He planted fruit trees and built a barn reminiscent of the Marceline farm.

In the expansive backyard, Walt installed a miniature railroad. In scouting for property on which to build his new house, space for his railroad was a primary consideration. Trains had long been one his passions; he had dabbled with model trains, but decided he needed one he could ride. Two of his animators – Ward Kimball and Ollie Johnson - already had working backyard railroads, but Disney would outdo them. His backyard railroad, built to one-eighth scale, had a working steam locomotive and traveled around a 2,615-foot circuit that included a trestle and a 120-foot-long tunnel. Its locomotive, named “Lilly Belle” in honor of his wife, was modeled after the Central Pacific #173 and had a wood-burning engine that was used as a prototype for the transcontinental railroad that ran through the Rocky Mountains. Disney’s scaled-down version was labeled the “CP #173,” which in this case stood for
Carolwood Pacific
. The blueprints for the Central Pacific #173, provided to him by a draftsman for the Southern Pacific Railroad, were painstakingly copied in every detail – from its engine to its smoke stack and flag poles. Much of the machinery was constructed by technicians from his studio.

The barn became the railroad’s central headquarters. From here, Disney could control the train, signals and switching of tracks with a lighted control panel. The barn also stored the train’s rolling stock – miniature cargo cars, gondolas and a caboose. The barn was a quiet place for Disney to sit and think.

The train was a rare personal extravagance. His wife and daughters tried to persuade him to build it at the studio instead of the yard but soon realized the role it served in his life. “It is a wonderful hobby for him,” Lillian said. “It has been a fine diversion and safety valve for his nervous energy. For when he leaves the studio, he can’t just lock the door and forget it. He is so keyed up he has to keep going on something.” But Lillian drew the line at her flower garden, which Walt proposed to bisect with his train track. Instead, he tunneled under the flower beds.

Disney’s teenaged daughters grew bored with the train, but it delighted the neighborhood children, whom he regularly gave rides, donning his conductor’s cap and sounding the whistle. Adult visitors, too, viewed the backyard railroad with childlike wonder. Disney designated a select few as vice presidents of his railroad.

Disney tinkered for hours on his railroad, expanding its scale and obsessively attending to minor details. He adjusted the curvature and grade of the track, and added train cars, paying as much attention to the interior as the exterior. The caboose included fake miniature magazines, cut from order forms and pasted on cardboard. Walt also built a five-and-a-half-inch-tall pot-bellied stove, which he enjoyed so much he began to replicate it. “I had a pattern made up, and it turned out so cute with the grate, shaker and door, and all the little working parts, I became intrigued with the idea,” Walt wrote. “I had a few made up: One was bronze, another black, and I even made a gold one! Then we made more and started painting them in motifs that fitted the period at the turn of the century.” Eventually, he made about 100; some he gave as gifts to friends, and some were sold at $25 each. One of his buyers was Mrs. James Ward Thorne, whose own dollhouse collection had inspired Walt at the Golden Gate International Exposition.

Perhaps more than anything, Disney enjoyed crashing his train. From his control panel in the barn, he orchestrated collisions and derailments, then took great pleasure in the necessary repairs. He bought two new locomotives, exclaiming to one of his “vice presidents,” a California senator named George Murphy, “Boy, we’re sure to have some wrecks now!”

When he wasn’t working, Walt loved to browse antique and secondhand shops along Third Avenue in New York, looking for dollhouse furniture to add to his collection of miniatures. Some of these furnishings he found a place for in his railroad. This collection eventually totaled more than 1,000 items. Besides furniture, there were model luxury cars, boats, and a battleship; musical instruments, including an organ crafted by conductor Frederick Stark; dishes and tableware smaller than thimbles; even miniature paintings and books, including eighteen volumes of plays by William Shakespeare. He placed classified ads in newspapers and hobby magazines in the names of his two secretaries. One read: “WANTED: Anything in miniatures to a scale of 1½” to the foot or under. Up to and including early 1900s. Give full description and price. Private collector.” He began to work on an old Western town in miniature, which would become a traveling exhibit. Some of the figures for these scenes were hand-carved by Disney; a chimney was built from small pebbles he collected on a vacation to Palm Springs.

In Los Angeles, he frequented the Farmer’s Market, always hoping no one would recognize him. He hated the attention that came from being “Walt Disney.”

The Disney merchandise that filled his studio office was nowhere to be seen at his house: “I’ve lived with it too much and I just didn’t want to live with it at home,” he said. He did his best to shelter his daughters from fame as well. He did a good job: When Diane was six, she asked her father, “Are you Walt Disney?” “You know I am,” he said. “
The
Walt Disney?” she asked. Walt laughed and nodded; Diane asked for his autograph. When they were young, he chased the girls around the house, and carried them on his shoulders through their swimming pool. Diane thought he was “the strongest man in the world and the most fun.”

Still, he was often preoccupied with work. He grumbled over family vacations and took them reluctantly. He worked a minimum twelve hours a day and enjoyed a highball or two when he came home. More often than not, in public, he was a hounded celebrity, and Lillian was often caught up in it, to her great displeasure. On occasion, fans who managed to get Walt’s autograph would ask for Lillian’s, too. She always signed in the flourish on the “y” in “Disney.” She hated sharing Walt and was “jealous of other people who were fond of him,” their daughter Diane remembered. At events lauding Walt, Lillian often sat on the sidelines sulking. She once said being married to Walt Disney was like being “attached to one of those flying saucers they talk about;” she never knew “when Walt’s imagination (was) going to take off into the wild blue yonder and everything will explode.”

But their friends and even casual observers saw a husband and wife who cared for each other. Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons called them “two of the really happily married people in our town.” Diane Disney said her father “always had his arm around” her mother. Walt took dancing lessons – in rumba and mambo – so that they could dance together at functions. He admired Lillian for the way she managed their household. Diane said her mother “moved in her own circle of beauty parlor appointments, reducing exercises, dressmaker appointments, and occasional shopping sprees . . . (and) always had to redecorate the corner of some room. That was her life.” And Walt indulged her proclivities; handing her a catalog of fur coats one Christmas, he said, “Here’s your present,” implying she could have her pick. His gifts were often not very thoughtful. Once, on their anniversary, he gave her a necklace strung with miniature replicas of all the Academy Awards he had won. Gifts from others could drive a wedge between the couple, too. At a Disney company picnic, one of Walt’s artists who raised goats gave him one as a pet. The young goat had a red ribbon tied around its neck, from which dangled a bell. Walt loaded the animal into the family car and was prepared to take it home, but Lillian refused. Walt returned the gift begrudgingly and spent that night at the studio.

Disney’s love of nature and all animals – besides the family pets, Walt was protective of the squirrels and rabbits that ransacked Lillian’s garden, refusing to hire an exterminator - pioneered a new genre of films at his studio. In 1947, he hired married filmmakers Alfred and Elma Milotte to film wildlife in Alaska. The Milottes returned with footage of fur-seal colonies on the
Pribilof Islands
. Disney ordered more. Eventually, more than 100,000 feet of film were shot showing mostly seals, rocks, and ocean. Everyone but Disney thought the footage was tedious.

Disney took the footage, added a script and a homespun-sounding narrator, and edited the film to just under a half hour. The resulting hit,
Seal Island
, opened in December 1948. The film won an Academy Award for Best Short Subject, and
became the first installment of Disney’s “True-Life Adventures” series of nature films.

In 1950, Disney’s only box-office hit had been
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
There had been more misses.
Song of the South
, based on the
Uncle Remus
stories, was released in 1946 to mixed reviews, charges of racism, and a small profit. The film’s best-remembered feature was an original song, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” which won an Academy Award.

Disney had another animated feature in production -
Cinderella
– but neither Disney nor his animators were enthusiastic about the project. When they released it in February 1950, to their surprise, the film was a critical and financial success. Reviewers weren’t especially enthusiastic about the main character, but they loved the score, the story, and Disney’s return to a simpler style of animation.
Cinderella
eventually grossed close to $8 million and re-energized Disney’s reputation for animated features.

A few months later, Disney released his first entirely live-action film:
Treasure Island
.
Again, critics heaped praise, and the film grossed $4 million. In July 1951, the animated
Alice in Wonderland
was released simultaneously in New York and London and did moderately well at the box office.