The Animated Man (42 page)

There was a related problem. A number of times, as Harry Tytle wrote, Disney's “husbanding of authority proved to be an expensive bottleneck,” in particular because of the “lack of story inventory.”
¹¹⁶
If Disney would not make decisions and let stories move forward into animation, the people making his short cartoons would be left without work or would spend their time redoing what they had already done.

But Disney was, as always, the absolute ruler of his studio. Joe Grant spoke of what happened when he supervised
Make Mine Music
and tried to make his decisions stick: “On a picture like that, if there's something you don't like, you almost had to go in on Walt's coattails and put him in front of you. . . . There was only one authority in that studio: Walt. That was the final signature on everything.”
¹¹⁷

Periodic efforts, by Disney or members of his staff, to work around the consequences of his absolute rule almost invariably failed, and members of the staff were left, as before, trying to find ways to manipulate him so that production could move forward. Jack Kinney remembered writing the “All the Cats Join In” segment for
Make Mine Music
with Lance Nolley and Don DaGradi: “We did some very rough sketches—scratches. . . . We put them up for staging, and the business,” using only one pushpin for each drawing. “He came in, and we went through the story, and he says, ‘This needs tightening up. Tighten it up, and call me in' ”—meaning, make the action itself more pointed and economical. “So we tightened it up,” Kinney said. “We got Tom Oreb, and he took the same drawings, and put them underneath his drawing board [and made more polished versions of the same sketches]. This time we put two or three pushpins in each drawing. Walt came in and he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, that's fine.' ”
¹¹⁸

It is easy to picture the Walt Disney of the middle and late 1940s: distracted, financially pressed, and impatient to put films into the marketplace
and begin collecting rentals. It was in work on his short subjects that this Disney was most clearly visible. He now looked for nothing more in his short subjects than reassuring gestures—synthetic cuteness, perfunctory bows toward narrative logic. That such gestures were employed feebly mattered less than that a short cartoon was recognizably “Disney.” Disney and his people were willing to settle for much less than they would have found acceptable a few years earlier. Exhibitors and theater audiences had responded. Whatever their residual fondness for Disney characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, they had by the middle 1940s transferred their loyalties to more aggressively comic rivals, particularly Bugs Bunny, from Warner Brothers, and Tom and Jerry, from MGM.

Except in 1938, when he assigned them to David Hand, Disney seems never to have delegated supervision of the shorts entirely to their directors, or to anyone else. Disney—so much the small businessman in other ways—was one here, too, retaining control even though he could no longer exercise it effectively. During story work on the shorts in the mid-1940s, the sketch artist Eldon Dedini said, “Walt Disney was there for the final meeting. Then there was a yes or no. When we had a meeting at 11 o'clock, from 8:30 till 11 we were going to the bathroom about every ten minutes.”

Dedini, who had not worked at the Disney studio in earlier years, still found it an attractive and stimulating place to work. He recalled “great enthusiasm. . . . There was a lot of in-house foolishness—which I think was wonderful, because, after all, that's eventually what had to show up on the screen. You almost had to be it to do it.”
¹¹⁹

Other people, who had been on the staff in better times, measured the postwar atmosphere against those memories. The animator Marc Davis said of Disney: “I've heard Walt say that he liked to put people together who were in conflict with one another, because he probably got a better result. I never fully understood this, but I guess he was just putting another kind of pressure on you, the pressure of having a contest with the guy you're working with. . . . He felt that if any two guys got along too well, they became complacent.” When Davis and Ken Anderson worked together briefly as a story team in the late 1940s, and Davis told Disney they had enjoyed the collaboration, Disney replied: “What do you guys want to do, sleep together?”
¹²⁰

There was friction throughout the studio. The writer Ralph Wright spoke of the story department: “The jealousy in that place, my God! You never heard anybody say . . . it was too bad somebody lost a story. There was kind of a sadistic delight in it: ‘Walt kicked all his stuff out.' ”
¹²¹
Said Homer Brightman, another writer: “Walt was a hard man to get on with, he really was, because
he was very temperamental and changeable, and he was a perfectionist. He believed that if you can go this far you can go that far. Money didn't mean anything to him, and he didn't think that the fellows should really be interested in money. . . . He would take all the pains in the world to get a picture the way he thought it should be, but he didn't think about the people working on it, they didn't count, they were cogs in the machine. And he took all the bows.”
¹²²

Brightman was a jaundiced witness—Disney eventually fired him—but his portrait is consistent with what others observed. For Disney, the muffled conflict that characterized his relations with his employees had become the natural state of affairs. There had been competition throughout the studio before the war, of course—the difference was that such competition was no longer secondary to making ever-better cartoons.

In mid-1946, Disney was still talking ambitiously of making three features a year, weighted toward combinations of animation and live action. He spoke to the Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper of an
Alice in Wonderland
in which Alice would be a real girl, played by Luana Patten (one of the two child leads in
Song of the South
), of yet another Latin American feature, and of
The Little People
, a feature set in Ireland.
¹²³
Disney visited England and Ireland in November 1946, his first trip to Europe since the end of the war.
¹²⁴

The big layoffs in August 1946 derailed some possible features. Jim Algar and Frank Thomas were codirecting
Wind in the Willows
until it was shelved again after the layoffs. But
Alice
—in its original form a loosely connected string of bizarre episodes—at least promised to lend itself to adaptation as one of the new combination features: it could easily be envisioned as a collection of animated short subjects, with a live-action Alice as the bridge connecting them. And about all that the Disney studio could now do reasonably well, it had become clear by the end of 1946, was make short cartoons—not traditional shorts, but the kind embedded in features as different as
Make Mine Music
and
Song of the South
.

*
After
Song of the South
, Foster directed just a few insignificant theatrical features.

Walt Disney was a founding member of a conservative organization called the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals—others of its leaders included the directors Sam Wood, Norman Taurog, and Clarence Brown—which vowed its opposition to “the effort of Communist, Fascist, and other totalitarian-minded groups to pervert this powerful medium into an instrument for the dissemination of un-American ideas and beliefs.”
¹
At the alliance's first meeting at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel on February 4, 1944, most of the speakers attacked only the Communists. Disney was present—and was elected as the organization's first vice president—but did not speak.
²

He was not an aggressive Red hunter; his conservatism had a strongly personal cast. An employee's politics were not of any particular concern to him if that employee was not challenging him as Art Babbitt and Dave Hilberman had. Some of Disney's employees, like Ward Kimball, flourished even though it was no secret that their politics were far more liberal than his. Maurice Rapf, who worked for Disney as a live-action screenwriter for two and a half years in the middle 1940s, was an extreme example. He wrote many years later that Disney “knew very well that I was a dedicated left-winger. He may even have known that I was a Communist. He certainly knew that I was Jewish.”
³
When Rapf left the studio in 1947, it was not because of his politics but because Disney refused him a raise.

Rapf's politics were, however, not a matter of public record: “Whether I would have been fired later in the year when I was named as a Communist at the hearings of the [House Committee on Un-American Activities], where Disney appeared as a friendly witness, I will never know.”
⁴

Disney testified in Washington on October 24, 1947, during highly publicized hearings on Communist infiltration of the movie industry; he was the principal witness on that Friday. Speaking of the strike, he said, “I definitely feel it was a Communist group trying to take over my artists and they did take them over.” He denounced Hilberman as the “real brains” behind the strike. “I believe he is a Communist. . . . I looked into his record and I found that, No. 1, that he had no religion and, No. 2, that he had spent considerable time at the Moscow Art Theater studying art direction or something.”

(As vocal as he was in his dislike for Hilberman, nothing indicates that Disney pursued a vendetta against his old adversary. He held grudges, certainly, but he seems to have acted on them rarely. By 1947, Hilberman was in New York, as one of the proprietors of a new commercial animation studio called Tempo. “But we had just knocked on a couple of doors; nobody knew us, so [Disney's testimony] had no impact,” he said in 1976. “We were able to grow without that affecting us at all.”
⁵
It was in the early 1950s, long after Disney's testimony, that Hilberman and Tempo suffered for their Communist connections.)

Asked his opinion of the Communist Party, Disney replied: “The thing that I resent most is that they are able to get into these unions, take them over, and represent to the world that a group of people that are in my plant, that I know are good, 100-percent Americans, are trapped by this group, and they are represented to the world as supporting all of those ideologies, and it is not so, and I feel that they really ought to be smoked out and shown up for what they are, so that all of the good, free causes in this country, all the liberalisms that really are American, can go out without the taint of communism.”
⁶

As always, Disney was refusing to concede that the strike might have had causes other than the Communist affiliations of some of its leaders.

Harry Tytle contrasted Walt with his elder brother: “Roy relished the flexibility, the give-and-take approach in studio relationships . . . and he wanted others to be the same way. . . . Walt was not prone to praise people directly. Perhaps he was afraid it would prompt them to ask for an increase which they didn't deserve, maybe he thought it would make them overconfident. Roy, on the other hand, was effusive when he felt praise was due, and Roy was not only generous with praise but also with other, more tangible rewards. . . . Thus, while both Walt and Roy were truly family men, Roy's interest in the domestic side
included
those at work; for Walt, the two worlds were quite separate.”
⁷

Outside the studio, Disney certainly knew a great many people, but he was also a self-isolated figure. “He really didn't have time to make friends,”
Lillian Disney said. “Sam Goldwyn was one . . . but we very seldom saw him socially. Walt had too much to do. He had to have a clear mind for work the next day.” Lillian herself rarely talked with her husband about his work. “As a rule I never paid much attention to the studio,” she said. “Walt was all I had contact with.”
⁸

Sharon Disney Brown remembered that her father “never brought [studio business] home. If he was terribly enthused . . . he'd start talking about a funny scene or something. . . . But other than that he never really talked that much about it. . . . If he was enthusiastic he was just going to talk whether we listened or not. . . . Once in a while [her mother would] make some remark, something like, ‘Well, I don't think that's too funny.' And he'd say, ‘Well, you don't know anything about it anyway.' That would be the end of it.”
⁹

After dinner, Disney read scripts.

In the postwar years, live action—with its real scripts—was an increasingly large part of Disney's plans. In the spring of 1947, he envisioned several combination features, including
Treasure Island
and a Hans Christian Andersen feature.
¹⁰
One all-live-action feature was also held up by Roy Disney as a possibility in a letter to N. Peter Rathvon, RKO's president.
Children of the Covered Wagon
, based on a 1943 novel by Mary Jane Carr, would have been a vehicle for Disney's two child stars of
Song of the South
, Bobby Driscoll and Luana Patten.
¹¹

Disney had already begun work in 1946 on a combination feature called
How Dear to My Heart
(based on a Sterling North book called
Midnight and Jeremiah
); production eventually stretched well into 1948. The film was released early in 1949 as
So Dear to My Heart
. This was a film set at the turn of the century, around the time of Disney's own boyhood, in a small midwestern town that inevitably recalled Marceline, Missouri, and with a boy protagonist, Jeremiah (played by Bobby Driscoll), who loves a black lamb, just as Disney loved the animals on the Disney farm.