The Animated Man (28 page)

As to whether the studio could survive failure in the marketplace—that was another matter. “I recall the preview of
Snow White
[at a theater in Pomona],” Wilfred Jackson said, “the first time the picture was shown to an audience. About two-thirds of the way through the picture quite a number of people got up and walked out of the theater all at about the same time. It was an awful moment. We, all of us from the studio, just about died on the spot. But then, after this fairly large group had left, no one else walked out until the end of the picture. Afterward, we learned there had been a large
number of students in the audience from some nearby school dormitory where they had a curfew, so they had to leave to keep out of trouble. But, for a few moments, it looked as though the people who had warned Walt, ‘No one will sit through a feature-length cartoon' were right.”
⁹⁹

Throughout the 1930s, critics commonly paired Disney with Chaplin as the two great motion-picture artists. By the time
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
opened at the Carthay Circle Theatre on December 21, 1937, it was perhaps the most widely anticipated film ever—not only because Disney had made it, but also because no one could be absolutely sure that the audiences that loved Disney's short cartoons would love a cartoon ten times as long.

As soon as the film opened, first in Los Angeles and then a few weeks later in New York and Miami, the answer was not in doubt. Critics as well as audiences adored
Snow White
, which was praised as much in intellectual journals as in the mainstream press. Disney had so thoroughly transformed animation in just a few years that sophisticates who would have yawned at the old silent cartoons found themselves weeping with the dwarfs at Snow White's bedside.

Disney had become a father again in the midst of work on
Snow White
. In January 1937, after Lillian—who was now approaching forty—had suffered another miscarriage, the Disneys adopted a two-week-old baby girl they named Sharon Mae. There would be no Walt Disney Jr. As the father of two young girls, Disney expressed a certain wry satisfaction in censors' occasional classification of
Snow White
as too intense for younger children. “Before seven or eight,” he told a reporter, “a child shouldn't be in a theater at all. But I didn't make the picture for children. I made it for adults—for the child that exists in all adults.”
¹⁰⁰

Snow White
radically altered the Disney studio's financial status. In 1937, total income was $1.565 million, including $1.187 million in film rentals. In 1938, in the first nine months alone, total income was almost three times greater, at $4.346 million.
¹⁰¹

The film's success, artistically and financially, altered Disney's own status as well. On successive days in June 1938, he received honorary degrees from Yale and Harvard Universities (neither degree a doctorate, but rather a master of arts).
¹⁰²
Talking to reporters after the Harvard ceremony, Disney expressed uncharacteristic regret that he had never had a college education himself: “I'll always wish I'd had the chance to go through college in the regular way and earn a plain bachelor of arts like the thousands of kids nobody ever heard of who are being graduated today.”
¹⁰³

Disney recalled in 1956 that when he was on the train to California in 1923—“in my pants and coat that didn't match but I was riding first class”—he
fell into conversation with some fellow passengers and told them that he made animated cartoons. “It was like saying ‘I sweep up the latrines' or something, you know.” As he acknowledged, those anonymous skeptics meant nothing to him; but remembering them contributed to the satisfaction he felt at the success of
Snow White
.

In a piece published under Disney's name in 1937—and that does seem to reflect his thought—he articulated his growing ambitions for animation, invoking “caricature” as his goal. “While we have improved greatly in our handling of human figures,” he said, “it will be many years before we can draw them as convincingly as we can animals. . . . The audience knows exactly how a human character looks and acts, but is rather hazy regarding animals, and therefore accepts our caricatured interpretations of animals without reservation. Some day our medium will produce great artists capable of portraying all emotions through the human figure. But it will still be the art of caricature and not a mere imitation of great acting on stage or screen.”
¹⁰⁴

In another interview with the
New York Times
's Churchill, published early in March 1938, just as the dimensions of
Snow Whites
huge success were becoming apparent, Disney again used the crucial phase “a caricature of life”: “Our most important aim is to develop definite personalities in our cartoon characters. We don't want them to be just shadows, for merely as moving figures they would provoke no emotional response from the public. Nor do we want them to parallel or assume the aspects of human beings or human actions. We invest them with life by endowing them with human weaknesses which we exaggerate in a humorous way. Rather than a caricature of individuals, our work is a caricature of life.”
¹⁰⁵

“Caricature” has a parasitic sound, though, and by the time Disney was finishing
Snow White
he was actually up to something rather different. He was working his way through the artificial elements of animation—all its elements—so as to emerge with an art form that was unmistakably artificial, did not turn its back on animation's fundamental characteristics, but still had the breadth and impact of those rare live-action films—Jean Renoir's, say—that had fully captured life on film.

The subversive thought that
Snow White
encouraged was that hand-drawn animation's capacity for artistic expression might equal if not exceed that of live-action films. In live action, it is ultimately the actors who must win the audience's allegiance, by seeming to become the characters they portray.
Snow White
proved that on this ground the animators could compete as equals. There was no reason that animation as powerful as the best of that in
Snow White
had to be restricted to animal stories and fairy tales.

The critic Otis Ferguson, writing in the
New Republic
, was among the many who rejoiced in
Snow White
, but with this caveat: “There is this to be said of Disney, however: he is appreciated by all ages, but he is granted the license and simplification of those who tell tales for children, because that is his elected medium to start with. It is not easy to do amusing things for children, but the more complex field of adult relations is far severer in its demands.”
¹⁰⁶
By the time
Snow White
was released, Disney had already decided not to deal with such demands, at least not yet.

By 1938, Walt Disney's life resembled more closely the lives of other successful movie people. He and Lillian had begun visiting the desert resort of Palm Springs—he played polo there at first—and he was helping finance a ski resort, Sugar Bowl, near Lake Tahoe in Northern California. He was one of dozens of Hollywood celebrities who financed Hollywood Park, a new race track near Los Angeles.
¹
From playing sandlot polo with members of his staff, he had graduated to playing the game with movie stars at the Riviera Country Club in Brentwood—at one point he owned nineteen polo ponies.
²
That figure may seem surprisingly large, but as the actor Robert Stack, one of Disney's fellow players, explained, “You have to have a lot of horses because if you play a lot, they get damaged a bit and they get tired.”
³
Disney himself got “damaged a bit”; he had given up polo by early 1938, after injuring his neck in a match.
⁴
For exercise he turned to badminton.

He also continued to ride, and for several years starting in the late 1930s he rode with Los Rancheros Visitadores—“the visiting ranchers,” a group composed of dozens of mostly wealthy and famous horsemen who made an annual weeklong trek through the Santa Ynez Valley, north of Santa Barbara, camping out each night. Frank Bogert, who played polo with Disney at Palm Springs and shared a camp with him on those rides, remembered him as a man who could give and take practical jokes:

There was a guy named Clyde Forsythe, who was one of the leading Western artists. . . . We were riding way out, a whole bunch of guys, and Walt came
over and told me, “We're going to play a gag on Clyde.” He said to Clyde, “There's a beautiful view over here. Come on out with us.” So we went away from the ride, way out on a point. Clyde was stone deaf, and he had a great big battery hanging down on his chest. Walt and I started talking but never saying anything. Clyde said, “Oh, shit, I'm off the air.” And he took out his battery and threw it down the hill.

The next year, Walt had a little pup tent he slept in, one of those little bitty things, and Clyde brought up a descented skunk and stuck it in Walt's tent. Walt knew something was in there. He got his flashlight and found out it was a skunk, and he ripped that tent apart trying to get out. He said, “The son of a bitch got even with me.”
⁵

Even on his rides with the Rancheros, Disney never left his work wholly behind. David Hand recalled that when he accompanied Disney on one such trip, Disney “would talk at me, all the time . . . what we should do on some picture or problem,” thinking aloud until Hand got “so full and so confused, with his changing his mind,” that he began avoiding his boss.
⁶

Walt and Roy Disney shared their prosperity with their parents, who in early 1938 moved from Oregon to a new home their sons built for them in the Los Angeles suburb of Toluca Lake, near Roy's home. The new house had a defective gas furnace. On the morning of November 26, 1938, Bill Garity, the studio's chief engineer, noted in his “daily report”: “George Morris called me to advise that Walt's and Roy's mother had passed away in the morning from gas poisoning of some kind.”
⁷
Flora had been overcome by the concentration of gas in her bathroom. Elias too was rendered unconscious by the gas, but the elder Disneys' housekeeper found him in time to revive him. Flora was buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery on November 28.
⁸

As deeply as both brothers were affected by their mother's death—years later, Walt Disney could not bring himself to speak of it—they could not pause in their work for long. Walt's success in the late 1930s meant that the demands his studio was imposing on him were actually growing, as he said in 1956: “As soon as
Snow White
hit, I said, ‘Well, we've got to go into features. We've got to begin to make features.' And there was no denying it after it grossed eight million dollars.” In the Hollywood of 1938 it was an all but inevitable step for Disney to make his studio into a feature-film factory, even though his first feature owed its distinctive character to its being nothing like the products of the MGM or Warner Brothers assembly lines. By 1938, almost none of Disney's Hollywood peers were making films one at a time, the way he had made
Snow White
. Chaplin worked that way, but Chaplin's
films—still silent, with music tracks—were increasingly eccentric in the Hollywood scheme of things. His most recent one,
Modern Times
, had lost money in its domestic release in 1936.
⁹

For five years, from 1932 to 1937, Disney's short cartoons were distributed by United Artists, a company founded by Chaplin, among others, as a distributor for films made by independent producers. When Disney went into feature production himself, he adhered not to Chaplin's model but to that of a United Artists producer of another kind—Samuel Goldwyn, who made a small number of relatively expensive and prestigious features each year.

Disney broke with UA over its insistence on controlling the television rights to his cartoons.
¹⁰
On March 2, 1936, he signed new distribution contracts for the short cartoons and
Snow White
with RKO Radio Pictures, not one of Hollywood's biggest major studios, but a major studio nevertheless. Both contracts—each of which Disney signed twice, as an individual and as president of Walt Disney Productions—reflected how much Disney's stature in the film industry had grown in just a few years. RKO would advance $43,500 for the production costs of each short and as much as $23,000 for prints and advertising, and split the revenue from distribution fifty-fifty after recovering its costs. The
Snow White
contract gave Disney 75 percent of domestic revenues, and smaller but still very high percentages of foreign revenues.
¹¹
The financing for Disney's features would come not through advances from his distributor, but through a line of credit from the Bank of America.

Disney began work on two more features before he completed
Snow White
. Some of his writers were studying Felix Salten's novel
Bambi: A Life in the Woods
by the summer of 1937, and Disney attended a
Bambi
story meeting in August. The writing of a feature version of Carlo Collodi's
Pinocchio
was under way by late November 1937, a month before
Snow White
's premiere.

Disney undertook this expanded schedule without making any corresponding changes in his own role, which was in critical respects more demanding than that of the typical producer of live-action films. He retained control of his films not just as an impresario, the ultimate authority, but as an artistic arbiter who could be, as in the case of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
, even more intensely involved in day-to-day work than a film's nominal director. A live-action director like John Ford could make a film that was really his own even while he was working under the aegis of so assertive a producer as Darryl Zanuck. No Disney director could do that.