The Animated Man (37 page)

The result of the Disneys' flirtation with Bioff was, as the federal mediator Stanley White reported to Washington, to leave the strikers and the studio more antagonistic than ever.
²⁵
In the wake of the Bioff episode, the federal government began pressing for arbitration to end the strike. The guild embraced the idea but the Disneys rejected arbitration until finally accepting, through a telegram from Gunther Lessing, on July 23. The strike ended on July 28 after the arrival in Burbank of James F. Dewey, described by
Daily Variety
as the labor department's “ace conciliator.” He required the studio to reinstate all the strikers while arbitration hearings were under way. When almost three hundred strikers came to the studio the next day, fifty were given work, and the rest were to get work as it became available.
²⁶
That layoffs would soon follow was a given;
Daily Variety
reported on July 31 that a large number of Disney employees would be laid off “under a retrenchment policy planned by the company” once an agreement with the union had been reached. The critical question was how the layoffs would be distributed among strikers and nonstrikers.
²⁷

Roy Disney, Gunther Lessing, and Bill Garity represented the Disney studio at the arbitration hearings; Walt Disney was not present. On the second day of the three days of hearings at the studio, the Disney executives agreed to recognize the guild and accept a closed shop—key elements of the award that Dewey and Stanley White, the other federal arbitrator, imposed on studio and union on August 2.

A “final report” bearing that date by the labor department's Conciliation
Service noted that, on August 1, Dewey had gone to the studio to “try to bring about a reconciliation between the inside ‘independent' union [a new company union called Animated Cartoon Associates] and the returning strikers' Union. He addressed a large theatre gathering of all the Disney employees, and the process of restoring a measure of harmony was begun. It was a bitter conflict, with a great deal of personal vilification between the parties.”

The strike's poisonous effects were felt in a more concrete form. When Roy Disney proposed on August 11 to lay off 207 strikers and only 49 non-strikers, the guild protested. On August 15, with studio and union at an impasse, Roy ordered the studio shut down for two weeks. It ultimately stayed closed until September 15, a few days after Dewey imposed a settlement that required the studio to lay off strikers and nonstrikers in line with their percentages in each department.

Art Babbitt returned to the studio with the other union members who had been laid off in May. By October 1941 he was animating on a
Donald Duck
cartoon called
The Flying Jalopy
.
²⁸
Dave Hilberman, the other strike leader, gave up his job—because, he said, the union “offered my scalp in exchange for so many people to be returned. . . . Disney felt he was making a great deal, but I was a very willing sacrifice. It was a mistake; I should have gone back, simply to cement the victory and make sure that things went well.” But he returned to art school instead.
²⁹

The Disney bonus plans, now relics of much happier days, officially ended on September 12.
³⁰
The studio installed time clocks around the same time. Walt Disney had scorned such devices only a few years earlier, but he was not at the studio to see his opposition to them overturned. He and Lillian had flown out of Burbank August 11, leaving on an 11
P.M.
flight for a trip to South America. He made the trip in the company of fifteen employees, a mixture of writers, artists, and other staff people—none of them strikers. Lillian's sister Hazel Sewell, who was by then married to Bill Cottrell of the Disney staff, also came along. (She had been the supervisor of Disney's ink and paint department until her marriage.)

On the day he left, Disney wrote a rambling, defiant three-page letter to the right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler. In words that echoed his February speeches, he declared that “the entire situation is a catastrophe. The spirit that played such an important part in the building of the cartoon medium has been destroyed.”

The strike had been “Communistically inspired and led,” he said, and the strikers themselves were “the malcontents; the unsatisfactory ones who
knew that their days were numbered and who had everything to gain by a strike. . . . I am thoroughly disgusted and would gladly quit and try to establish myself in another business if it were not for the loyal guys who believe in me—so, I guess I'm stuck with it.”

Disney told Pegler that the South American trip was “a godsend. I am not so hot for it but it gives me a chance to get away from this God-awful nightmare and to bring back some extra work into the plant. I have a case of the D.D.'s—disillusionment and discouragement.”
³¹

As early as October 1940, before any Disney trip to Latin America was contemplated, the federal government, through John Hay Whitney, was encouraging Disney to add “some South American atmosphere in some of the short subjects to help the general cause along,” as Roy Disney put it.
³²
By June 1941, during the strike, Disney had agreed not only to make a trip but also to produce twelve shorts on South American themes.
³³
The federal government would underwrite 25 percent of the cartoons' negative cost, as well as paying seventy thousand dollars of the expenses of the trip itself.
³⁴

Disney recalled years later that he had resisted making a mere goodwill tour of Latin America: “I said, ‘I'd feel better about going down there and really doing something instead of going down there and shaking a hand.' ” The 1941 trip was thus officially a “field survey” during which the Disney group would “make a study of local music, folklore, legends, scenes, characters and themes.” The trip took the Disney group from Miami to Puerto Rico, and then on extended visits to Rio de Janeiro (from August 16 to September 8, with a side trip to São Paulo) and Buenos Aires (September 8 to September 25, with a side trip to Montevideo).

Leaving Buenos Aires, the group—“El Grupo,” as its members called themselves—split up. Disney himself flew to Mendoza, in the foothills of the Andes, while others in the party scattered to points in Argentina, Chile, and Peru. After a few days in Chile, Disney, Lillian, the Cottrells, and seven other members of the group boarded the Grace liner
Santa Clara
in Valparaiso on October 4. The trip to the United States took more than two weeks, with stops along the way in Peru, Ecuador, and Panama.
³⁵

On September 13, while Disney was in Buenos Aires, his father died. Elias was buried next to Flora at Forest Lawn.

Whatever Disney's intentions when he set out, the trip's “survey” nature was mostly eclipsed by an unending round of cocktail parties, special screenings of Disney cartoons, interviews, public appearances, and meetings with politicians and other local luminaries. The artists in the group did make some sketches, and the Disney people even set up an impromptu studio on the
roof of a Buenos Aires hotel, but the trip was in substance the goodwill tour Disney later said he had not wanted to make—even though, as it turned out, he was very good at it.

“Walt Disney is far more successful as an enterprise and as a person than we could have dreamed,” Whitney reported to Nelson Rockefeller from Rio de Janeiro on August 29. “His public demeanor is flawless. He is unruffled by adulation and pressure—just signs every autograph and keeps smiling.”
³⁶
(Rockefeller was in overall charge of such activities as the government's coordinator of inter-American affairs; Whitney, another heir to a famous fortune, was director of the motion picture division of the coordinator's office.)

As noted in a detailed itinerary written after the trip, apparently by John Rose of the Disney staff, Disney entertained two thousand children at Mendoza not only by showing them cartoons, but also by literally standing on his head.
³⁷

Disney reached New York from his South American trip on October 20, 1941, and was interviewed soon thereafter by a writer for the
New Yorker
. Although he had previously explained his role at his studio by describing himself as a sort of an orchestra conductor, his experience with
Fantasia
may have made him uncomfortable with such an analogy. In any case, he now used a new one, one he invoked repeatedly in the years ahead. “In the studio,” he said, “I'm the bee that carries the pollen.” The
New Yorker
described Disney as he demonstrated: “Rising in illustration, he held out his two cupped hands, filled with invisible pollen, and walked across the room and stood in front of a chair. ‘I've got to know whether an idea goes here,' he said, dumping some pollen into the chair, ‘or here,' he went on, hurrying to our side of the room and dumping the rest of the pollen on our knees.”

In that interview, Disney repeatedly disdained the “arty,” using language strikingly different from the ambitious sentiments he had often voiced during work on
Fantasia:
“A man with a dramatic sense but no sense of humor is almost sure to go arty on you. But if he has a really
good
dramatic sense, he'll have a sense of humor along with. He'll give you a little gag when you need it. Sometimes, right in the middle of a dramatic scene, you've got to have a little gag. . . . I don't want any more headaches like the ‘Nutcracker Suite' [in
Fantasia
]. In a thing like that, you got to animate all those flowers, boy, does that run into dough! All that shading. That damn thing cost two hundred thousand dollars—just the one ‘Nutcracker Suite.' ”
³⁸

Disney spoke of working “off the cuff. Don't have any script but just go along and nobody knows what's going to happen until it's happened.” He had not made films in anything like that way since the 1920s, but he may
have been measuring
Fantasia
, which required so much preparation, against the film he was then promoting; it had its premiere in New York on October 23, 1941, succeeding
Fantasia
at the Broadway Theatre. Fifteen years later, Disney described
Dumbo
as “the most spontaneous thing we've ever done. . . . It started with a little idea, and as we kept working with it we kept adding and before we knew it we had a feature.”

Dumbo
, the story of a baby circus elephant that learns to fly using its very large ears, originated as a very short children's book, which may never have been published in its original form (the Disney studio purchased “the name and basic story,” apparently while the book was still in manuscript).
³⁹
It was one of the dozens of properties the studio scooped up in 1938 and 1939, after
Snow White
's success provided both the money and the incentive to acquire suitable stories. Although the idea at first was to make
Dumbo
as a short, in January 1940 Joe Grant and Dick Huemer, the team that had supervised the writing of
Fantasia
, began writing a feature treatment, a book-length version broken down into chapters. Disney was immediately enthusiastic, and by late in February 1940, with chapters of the treatment still arriving in his office,
Dumbo
had won a place on the feature schedule.
⁴⁰

From that point on, the film did indeed fly through production, especially as measured by the pace set by
Pinocchio
and
Bambi
. It took only about six months to put up storyboards for
Dumbo
and iron out a few kinks in the Grant-Huemer treatment, and animation was under way by October 1940. The film was finished, except for some rerecording of the sound track, when the strike began.
⁴¹

By the time of
Dumbo
's premiere,
Pinocchio
and then
Fantasia
had failed at the box office, the war in Europe had wiped out a large part of Disney's foreign market, and the studio had been roiled by Disney's standoff with the Screen Cartoonists Guild.
Dumbo
, with its modest budget—at around $786,000,
⁴²
its cost was close to the $700,000 limit Disney had agreed to accept in the spring of 1941—had acquired an importance in the Disney scheme of things out of proportion not only to its cost but also to its length. It was sixty-eight minutes long, barely acceptable for a feature—but it was the only kind of feature that Disney's finances would permit him even to consider making in the fall of 1941.

Dumbo
won uniformly favorable reviews and a warm reception in theaters. Not all was smooth sailing—a planned cover feature in
Time
in early December was bumped by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—but it ultimately returned a profit to the Disney studio of about a half million dollars on its initial release. Here was a way for Disney to continue making
features—and at the same time escape from the trap that has snared so many American popular artists.

Such artists have always found it difficult to sustain growth in their work for more than a few years without losing much of their audience. Most often they are trapped by their own success; the public demands repetition, not change. Film directors of whom the public was only half aware, like John Ford and Howard Hawks, could over a long span of years make films that satisfied both themselves and their audiences, but the more visible Frank Capra was not so lucky when he tried to advance beyond his huge popular successes of the 1930s. Disney had been nimbler than most, but, with
Fantasia
especially—two hours of animation set to classical music—he had run up against that seemingly iron law. Now, with
Dumbo
, he had begun winning his audience back.

There was a problem, though, one that Disney himself identified when he read the paean to
Dumbo
that ultimately appeared in
Time
's issue of December 29, 1941. Unusually, that article dwelled at length on the contributions of people like Grant, Huemer, and the animator Bill Tytla. Disney himself was mentioned relatively little. “Walt didn't like that writeup,” Huemer said. “He said, ‘Hell, it looks like I didn't do anything on this picture.' ”
⁴³