The Animated Man (67 page)

Except, Hibler might have added, about
The Ugly Dachshund
itself, a film
that comes to life only during three episodes of canine destruction. In one of those episodes a Great Dane and a supporting cast of dachshunds wreck an artist's studio—and the artist is not a pretentious comic figure but the film's leading man, an earnest and amiable sort played by Dean Jones. Disney would no doubt have found such a disaster heartrending rather than amusing if it had happened to an artist on his staff, but in his later years he let his movies fill up with well-trained animals whose destructiveness is supposed to be funny. Hibler and the other Disney live-action producers could not break themselves of the habit of reaching for such easy answers, and so their films made after Walt Disney's death are like his own most unfortunate productions, only worse.

Thanks largely to the dreariness of the studio's live-action output—and its increasingly poor reception in theaters—Walt Disney Productions passed through a traumatic change in management in 1984. That change resulted in the ouster of Disney's son-in-law Ron Miller, who had succeeded him as executive producer, the ultimate decision maker where films were concerned, and had then become the company's president. Michael D. Eisner became chairman and chief executive officer. He was at the center of similar turmoil before the ascension of Robert Iger to the CEO's job in 2005. Roy Disney's son, Roy Edward Disney, rallied opposition to the incumbent in both episodes.

The Walt Disney Company, as it now exists, is huge compared with the Walt Disney Productions that Walt and Roy Disney knew, and it has changed in countless ways (who could have guessed in 1954 that the ABC television network would become a Disney property?). And yet, remarkably, its foundations are still those that Walt Disney laid. The company that bears his name is still strongest at the points where Disney's own interest was keenest. In that respect, the noisy changes at the top of the company have simply not made much difference.

Forty years after Walt Disney's death, when Disney parks have spread not just to Florida but to Europe and East Asia, the original Disneyland remains the template for each new version of the Magic Kingdom. All those parks make sense only when they seem to be striving for perfection on Walt Disney's terms. Poorly conceived rides, indifferent employees, unkempt rest-rooms—consciously or not, park visitors experience such things not just as annoyances but as defiance of Walt Disney's clearly expressed wishes.

It is, however, through his animated films that Walt Disney retains his firmest grip on the company he founded. In the parks not just rides but costumed employees evoke the cartoon characters, and they are otherwise everywhere that Disney's writ extends. More than anything else, “Disney” means
characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and feature films like
Snow White
and
Dumbo
. The Disney animated features made since Walt Disney's death have always competed—sometimes successfully, more often not—against memories of the films he produced himself, and their makers have squirmed inside the luxurious prison that Walt constructed, the one built of expectations that animated features will always be, if not films made especially for children, then films readily accessible to them. That prison confines even the makers of today's best animated features, the computer-animated films made by the Pixar studio and released by the Walt Disney Company.

The power of Disney's art was harnessed to commerce first by Disney himself and then by his successors. Transforming his best films into durable commercial properties has meant the loss of their emotional immediacy—thus the heavy-handed repetition of words like “happy” and “magic” in selling them, to make up for what is missing. Distinguishing what is genuine and valuable, among the many things that bear the Disney name, from what is flimsy and synthetic has been a task building since long before Disney's death. That task is extraordinarily difficult now because so many people—whether they are critics or apologists—have acquired a vested interest in conflating everything “Disney.”

Walt Disney has since his death become a sort of Disney character himself. In 1981, Walt Disney Productions exchanged $46.2 million in its stock for all the stock of Retlaw Enterprises, the family company that owned not just Disneyland's narrow-gauge railroad and monorail but also the rights to Disney's name.
⁸
There was never any question about the use of Disney's name in the name of the company itself, or on those films and TV shows that he produced, but Retlaw got a 5 percent share of Walt Disney Productions' royalties on licensed products that bore Walt Disney's name.

Walt Disney, as a name and a person, is a far more visible part of his company's activities than, say, Henry Ford is at the company that bears his name. “Disney” has not become as generic as “Ford,” or, for that matter, the names of many other company founders, and appropriately so, considering that Walt Disney's presence in his company's products is still so large. His name is routinely invoked in ways that would be unusual at other large corporations. Said CEO Michael Eisner in 2001: “You ask what is the soul of the company and what is our direction? I'm trying to be the bridge from what Walt Disney made and created to whoever will be the next person after me that maintains that same philosophy of ‘Let's put on a show.' Let's be silly. We're a silly company. Let's never not be a silly company.”
⁹

Curiously, those repeated invocations of Walt Disney's name, and incessant praise for his “dreams” and his “vision,” have made him seem less like a real person. “When I talk to school groups,” Michael Broggie said in 2003, “I'll ask for a show of hands . . . who was Walt Disney? Was he real? Was he fictional? They answer overwhelmingly that he was a fictional character, and that he never really lived.”
¹⁰
The Disney family, in voicing its loyalty to Walt Disney's memory, has contributed to the sense that he is as much a fabrication as Betty Crocker. Disney's surviving daughter, Diane Disney Miller, has sponsored a film, a book, a CD-ROM, and a Web site about her father that are occasionally illuminating but more often devotional; Roy Disney's son, Roy Edward Disney, has glorified his uncle (“The Great One”) as one means of denigrating Walt's successors at the head of the Disney company, including his cousin's husband.
*

Disney seems no more real in the growing body of academic critiques of the man and the company that bears his name. Many of these critiques are vaguely if not specifically Marxist in their methodology, and they display the usual Marxist tendency to bulldoze the complexities of human behavior in the pursuit of an all-embracing interpretation of Disney's life and work. What fatally cripples most academic writing about Walt Disney is simple failure to examine its supposed subject. Disney scholarship, like many other kinds of scholarship in today's academy, feeds on itself. The common tendency is for scholars to rush past the facts of Disney's life and career, frequently getting a lot of them wrong, in order to write about what really interests them, which is what other scholars have already written. It is this incestuous quality, even more than such commonly cited sins as a reliance on jargon, that makes so much academic writing, on Disney as on other subjects, claustrophobically difficult to read.

Disney has attracted other writers whose unsupportable claims and speculations sometimes win approval of scholars all too eager to believe the worst of the man. The persistent accusations of anti-Semitism are only the mildest examples of an array whose cumulative effect is to portray a Disney who was, among other vile things, racist, misogynist, imperialist, sexually warped, a spy for J. Edgar Hoover, desperate to conceal his illegitimate Spanish birth,
and so terrified of death that he had his body cryogenically frozen. Pathologies are undoubtedly at work here, none of them Disney's.

The real Disney may yet elude his most fervent admirers' and detractors' suffocating grasp. When he was young, he was a sort of human Brer Rabbit, constantly wriggling out of the snares set for him by the likes of Charles Mintz and Pat Powers (not to mention Laugh-O-gram's creditors). He emerged finally, and unexpectedly, as the creator of a new art form, one whose potential has still scarcely been tapped, by him or anyone else. It is hard to imagine that man—the passionate young artist, the intense “coordinator,” the man who scrutinized every frame of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
with a lover's zeal—trapped forever in anyone's briar patch.

*
Diane Disney Miller and Roy Edward Disney are the only surviving blood relatives who can claim to have known Walt Disney intimately. Lillian Disney married John L. Truyens in 1969, was widowed again in 1981, and died in 1997, at the age of ninety-eight. Sharon Disney Brown was widowed in 1967, remarried in 1969—her second husband was William Lund—divorced in 1975, and died in 1993, at the age of fifty-six.

ABBREVIATIONS

Corporate Archives

RKO: RKO Radio Pictures Corporate Archives, Turner Entertainment Company, Culver City, California (as of 1988)

WDA: Walt Disney Archives, Burbank

Court Cases

Laugh-O-gram bankruptcy papers: Bankruptcy Case 4457, Laugh-O-Gram Films, Inc., filed October 4, 1923, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri, Kansas City. National Archives, Central Plains Region, Kansas City.

Government Archives

NLRB/Babbitt: In the Matter of Walt Disney Productions, Inc., and Arthur Babbitt; Office of the Executive Secretary, Transcripts, Briefs, and Exhibits 4712, 8 October 1942. Records of the National Labor Relations Board, Record Group 25, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Except as noted, all NLRB/Babbitt citations are to pages in the hearing transcript.

References to published NLRB decisions are in standard legal form, e.g., 13 NLRB 873.

Libraries

AMPAS: Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills. Magazine and newspaper articles identified this way have been copied from the Herrick Library's microfiche files, which typically do not include page numbers.

Baker: Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Cambridge

BU/RH: Richard G. Hubler Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University

CSUN/SCG: Screen Cartoonists Guild Collection, Local 839, AFL-CIO, 1937–1951, Urban Archives Center, California State University, Northridge

NYU/JC: John Canemaker Animation Collection, Fales Library/Special Collections in the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University

RAC: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow. All references are to Nelson A. Rockefeller, Personal, Record Group 111, Series 4.

Wisconsin/UA: United Artists Collection, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison

Oral Histories

Adamson/Freleng, Adamson/Huemer: These oral histories were conducted by Joe Adamson with Friz Freleng and Richard Huemer, respectively, for the University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Theater Arts in 1968–69 as part of “An Oral History of the Motion Picture in America.”

Personal Papers

Disney cost and box-office figures were provided by the Walt Disney Archives for films completed after 1947. The figures cited as grosses include both domestic and foreign revenue and are the combined rentals received by the Disney studio and its distributors. The pre-1947 figures are, as noted, from a balance sheet prepared by the studio for negotiations with RKO and are the actual rentals that Disney itself received.

Employment dates are also from the Walt Disney Archives.

The Disney “meeting notes” are ordinarily—although not invariably—transcripts; the term “meeting notes” is one used at the Disney studio itself. Meeting notes were usually distributed as typescripts, in multiple carbon copies, or sometimes hectographed, although at the height of the studio's prosperity, during the production
of
Pinocchio
and
Fantasia
, notes were frequently mimeographed. The cited lecture transcripts and memoranda were also variously distributed in mimeographed or carbon copy form.

Complete runs of the studio and union newsletters mentioned in these notes are rare or nonexistent. The Walt Disney Archives does not have a complete set of that studio's
Bulletin
, for instance.

Although it would be normal to identify the city where each interview occurred, that has not been done here, both to save the space that would otherwise be devoted to essentially redundant information—most of the interviews took place in the Los Angeles area—and, in a few cases, to protect the privacy of the people involved. Except as specified, all interviews were conducted by the author (in many cases with Milton Gray as a participant).

My standard procedure was to make a transcript, or in some cases summary notes, of each interview, and to give the interviewee the opportunity to revise that transcript; usually, but not always, the interviewee took that opportunity. (A few people died before an interview was transcribed, or before they returned a transcript.) I have quoted from the revised transcript whenever there is one.

PREFACE

1
. Diane Disney Miller, foreword to
Inside the Dream: The Personal Story of Walt Disney
, by Katherine Greene and Richard Greene (New York, 2001), 9–10.
The Story of Walt Disney
was reissued by Disney Editions in 2005, for sale at Disneyland as part of the observance of the park's fiftieth anniversary, with a new introductory note by Miller and corrections of factual and typographical errors by David R. Smith of the Walt Disney Archives. In her note, Miller says that the
Post
offered Disney $150,000 for his autobiography and paid Miller and her sister, Sharon, half that amount. Curiously, the version of
The Story of Walt Disney
published in the
Post
differs from the version published as a book. Disney is “Dad” in the magazine—as he was to his daughters in real life—but he is “Father” in the book.