The Animated Man (40 page)

By the time it was finished, in the fall of 1944,
The Three Caballeros
bore little resemblance to
Saludos Amigos
. It was almost a half hour longer. It included two short subjects that had always been planned as part of a second group of Latin American shorts, and most of the rest of the film was assigned two short-subject production numbers, but the newer “shorts” were much longer and more elaborate than the other two. Far more ambitious than
Saludos Amigos, Three Caballeros
was for much of its length a sort of travelogue in which Donald and José, and then Panchito, mingled with live-action performers from Brazil and Mexico. Disney had mixed animation and live action occasionally since his
Alice
comedies in the 1920s, but never so extensively as in
Caballeros
, and never before in Technicolor.

It was during the war that he got interested in combining live action and animation again, Disney said years later, because “we did not have enough artists and animators to work on the full-length subjects.”
⁸⁰
Of course,
Three Caballeros
in its genesis was not to be a “full-length subject,” but a collection of shorts. By transforming such a modest idea into a film bursting with elaborate and frenzied combinations of live action and animation, Disney showed in
Three Caballeros
just how frustrating it was for him not to be making those “full-length subjects.”

Three Caballeros
premiered in Mexico City on December 21, 1944, and in New York on February 3, 1945. G. S. Eyssell, Radio City Music Hall's managing director—a former Kansas Citian whom Roy Disney had known as a schoolmate
⁸¹
—rejected
Three Caballeros
harshly as an attraction for that theater. “Of all the Disney feature length pictures,” he wrote to Nelson Rockefeller on November 29, 1944, “this one I feel will have the most limited appeal. . . . It seems to me that aside from its lack of story and continuity, it is a boisterous bore. Even when it becomes an animated travelogue it misses its mark because one gets but a confused and sketchy picture of Latin America.” He was not impressed by the film's pyrotechnics, dismissing them as “dull demonstrations of technical virtuosity.”
⁸²

The Three Caballeros
performed indifferently at the box office, its returns to the studio falling almost $200,000 short of its cost.
⁸³
A third Latin American feature,
Cuban Carnival
, was in the works throughout 1944, but it fell out of the studio's plans after
Three Caballeros
's disappointing results. Disney himself smarted under reviews that compared his new films unfavorably with the features he made before the United States entered the war. “I had a lot of people just hoping that it was the end” of the Disney studio, he said in 1956.

Throughout the war, Disney could do no better than assign a few people to work briefly on stories for possible films that had long figured in the studio's plans, like
Peter Pan, Cinderella
, and
Alice in Wonderland
. (Story work on
Peter Pan
was halted “to make room,” an internal Disney publication said, for
Victory Through Air Power
.)
⁸⁴
Of
Alice
in particular, Disney said in 1943 that production might be postponed until, in a contemporary report's paraphrase, “further development of methods which would sharply reduce” production time—and thus keep costs under control.
⁸⁵

Any return to full-length animated features of the
Pinocchio
or
Bambi
kind would require financial muscle that was simply not evident in the studio's annual reports to its stockholders. The idea of making cheaper features at the
Dumbo
level, with budgets under a million dollars, never quite died, but Disney continued to regard such projects with little enthusiasm. In May 1943, one possible cheap feature dropped away when Disney and RKO canceled the dormant distribution contract for the Mickey Mouse “beanstalk” feature.
⁸⁶

By 1945, the Disney studio had begun to devote “substantially all of its facilities to entertainment product,” as the company's annual report for that year said, because of the “general lessening” of the government's demand for training films.
⁸⁷
But, for the moment, Disney had embraced the idea that animated educational and training films could be a mainstay of his studio's operations in peacetime, too. Such films could speed up training, he said, and help trainees retain more of what they learned. “The screen cartoon,” he told a writer for
Look
early in 1945, “has become so improved and refined that no technical problem is unsurmountable
[sic]
.”
⁸⁸
Disney had set up an industrial film division by November 1943, when he visited Owens-Illinois Glass Company in Toledo, Ohio, on what the
Wall Street Journal
called a “preliminary investigation . . . of the place of motion pictures in the postwar industrial world.”
⁸⁹
Five large corporations contracted for Disney training films by November 1944.
⁹⁰

In September 1945, as the Disneys emerged from the war's hard grind, they hired two professional managers to share some of their responsibilities. The
move made sense, given the nature of the postwar studio as the Disneys envisioned it. John F. Reeder assumed Roy's titles of vice president and general manager. Reeder had been vice president of the Young & Rubicam advertising agency, and he was thus accustomed to dealing with big businesses of the kind that were the likeliest customers for the studio's industrial and educational films.

Fred Leahy, the new production manager, had worked in “production control” for eighteen years at MGM and Paramount, the biggest and most prestigious of the Hollywood studios. He would in effect serve as Walt's stand-in during work on films that inevitably would be, when measured against the prewar shorts and features, too dry and routine to absorb much of Walt's interest. Walt himself gave up his title of president, surrendering it to Roy.
⁹¹
He was going to devote himself to new features.

“Commercial work answered our prayers,” wrote Harry Tytle, who managed Disney's short subjects, “as it not only supplied badly needed capital during the war, but also because the companies that were our clients gave us greater access to film and other rationed materials. . . . But while the studio made money with this type of product . . . it was not a field either Walt or Roy were happy to be in. Their reasoning was sound. We didn't own the product or the characters we produced for other companies; there was absolutely no residual value. If the picture was successful, the owners of the film got the rerun value. If the films were unsuccessful, it could be detrimental to our reputation. Worse, we were at the whim of the client; at each stage of production we had to twiddle our thumbs and await approval before we could venture on to the next step.”
⁹²

Disney himself said years later that he rejected the idea of making “commercial pictures,” saying to his investment bankers, “I think that doing that is a waste of the talent that I have here and I can put it to better purposes by building these features that in the long run pay off better.” He made only a dozen commercial films, for clients like Westinghouse Electric (
The Dawn of Better Living
) and General Motors (
The ABC of Hand Tools
), before delivering the last of them in 1946.

The rationale for hiring Leahy and Reeder thus evaporated within months of their hiring. In early 1946, Harry Tytle has written, “Reeder wanted the [production schedule for a feature cartoon, apparently
Make Mine Music
] moved up so that it would fall on a more marketable release date, like Easter or Christmas. An earlier release date meant Walt would have less time to make what he felt was an acceptable picture. Reeder was circumventing Walt—and
Walt didn't like it. . . . Reeder, in a pattern that would repeat itself, was proving inflexible, apparently intent on teaching Walt and Roy the ad business instead of learning the studio ropes.”
⁹³
(Reeder left the Disney staff in 1948.)

As it happened,
Make Mine Music
did have its premiere in New York on April 20, 1946, the Saturday before Easter, although it did not go into general release until August (possibly because of the difficulty in the immediate postwar years of getting enough Technicolor prints). Joe Grant, who supervised production of the film for Disney, spoke of being with him in New York then: “Walking down a street once, during the Easter parade [on Sunday, April 21, the day after the premiere], he demonstrated some story stuff by walking up and down the curb. People all dressed up for Easter were watching this man wearing a crushed felt hat of some kind, explaining to me this gag, for a feature, I think, and going through all the crazy antics that he would do, with his eyebrow up and down, and so on, and then get back on the street and go on, and probably wind up at the automat for some beans. We stayed at the Sherry-Netherland, or the Pierre, one of those hotels, and instead of eating there, we'd go down to the automat and he'd order chili and beans.”
⁹⁴

Disney had been thinking about making such package features for years; he brought up the idea during a September 9, 1939, story meeting on
Bambi
. Both
Saludos Amigos
and
The Three Caballeros
had been package features of a sort, but
Make Mine Music
differed from them in having only “music” as a very loose theme. Many of the short cartoons that made up the film were clever but also rather broad and obvious compared with Disney's prewar work, lacking both the emotional richness of a
Dumbo
and the sugared elegance of a
Bambi
. It was not a triumphant return to feature-length animation.

After the war, Disney said in 1956, “it kind of seemed like a hopeless thing to begin to pick up again,” and even Roy “was kind of confused. He didn't know what to do. . . . I knew I must diversify. I knew the diversifying of the business would be the salvation of it. . . . I tried these package things, where I'd put five or six things together to make an eighty-minute subject. Because I had a lot of ideas I thought would be good in the cartoon form, if I could go to fifteen minutes with it.”

Wilfred Jackson spoke sympathetically in 1973 of Disney's growing disengagement from what had been his passion: “Walt wanted so badly for each thing he did to top each thing that he had done before, and he didn't ever want anything to look like a repeat of anything he had done. This made things more and more difficult, as time went on, because there's really only so much you can do with cartoons”—at least, as Jackson wrote later, “along the lines that appealed to him.”
⁹⁵
The “lines that appealed to him” were, of course,
those evident in early features like
Snow White
and
Bambi
—full-length stories, told through painstaking productions whose cost was now beyond the studio's reach.

“I think it was just after the war when nothing seemed to stimulate him,” Disney's daughter Diane said in 1956. “I could sort of sense it. I could tell he wasn't pleased with anything he was doing.”

Disney was, from all evidence, always a loving and attentive father, whose struggles and reverses rarely impinged on his daughters' lives unless they noticed that faint melancholy cast. In an August 1938 letter, Roy Disney mentioned to his mother, Flora, that he and Edna and their only child, Roy Edward, had met Walt and Lillian and the two girls at the merry-go-round in Griffith Park on a Sunday morning.
⁹⁶
Such visits to the park were a regular thing in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Diane recalled in 1956: “Daddy took us to Sunday school and afterward around to . . . Griffith Park, usually, to the zoo or to amusement parks or something, and he would sit and watch us. . . . Every Sunday we used to go with him. Wherever we wanted to go he'd take us. . . . And then he'd take us over to the studio. And we'd wander around with him from room to room, or while he was in the studio we'd roller skate around the lot. And as we grew older we'd . . . drive around the lot. . . . We learned to drive that way and we had several little disasters.”

The girls went to a Christian Science Sunday school for a while. In the fourth grade, Diane attended a Catholic school, and perhaps, from her father's point of view, liked it a little too much: “I wanted to become a nun. . . . I went around at my lunch hour saying prayers in front of statues and everything.” Disney sent her to a public school the next two years. Her father believed in God, Diane said, but never went to church. “Not that I remember—ever. I think he had had it and he felt that he wanted us to sample and to make our own choice.”
⁹⁷
Walt and Lillian did not have either daughter baptized. “Dad thought we ought to have our own church. He didn't want anything in our early life to influence us.”

The Disney girls remembered no playmates when they were children. On Woking Way, they lived “on the very top of a hill,” Sharon said, “and there were no playmates around us.” They had friends in school, but not in their own neighborhood, and so their father filled in as what Diane called “just a big playmate. I remember he could do anything. . . . He could throw us around by our heels, you know. I don't know how he did it.” Sharon remembered her father as “a great rough-houser when we were little—tossing us up in the air and throwing us around. We loved it. Just loved it. Very patient in things like that.”
⁹⁸

But not in everything. The temper he could show at work could flare at home, too. “He had quite a temper,” Sharon said. “If he was upset about something, Diane or Mother or I could make some comment at the dinner table and set him off and he'd get mad at us. He'd blow up. He would just blow up. And he'd go on about the women in the house and he usually would digress quite a bit. . . . I can't quote him. But I just remember thinking, ‘Oh, oh, he's in a bad mood tonight. Watch out.' ”
⁹⁹
Diane also remembered bursts of temper “when my sister and I would monopolize the conversation or fight or something and then he would get furious.”
¹⁰⁰