Disney (5 page)

Disney was now earning $400,000 a year from his creations and planned to produce his Mickey Mouse cartoons in color the following year. A few months later, the Kennedy Galleries in Manhattan exhibited animation cels from the Disney Brothers Studio. The critics who attended the opening called Disney a “genius” and his art a “profound” expression of “the eternal ego.” One reviewer praised “the integrity of the draftsmanship, the flair for effective massing of spaces and the never failing rhythmic pattern.”

Flowers and Trees
won the 1932 Academy Award for Animated Short Subject, and Disney was given a special Oscar as the creator of Mickey Mouse.

But the summer of 1932 brought more heartbreak for Walt and Lillian. When Lillian got pregnant again, Walt was euphoric and a whirlwind of preparation. He quickly decided his family needed more room to grow and bought an acre and a half in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles. “We had been living in a little place where I couldn’t turn around,” Walt said. He built an expansive, Tudor-style house with a pool. He laughingly “made a lot of vows that my kid won’t be spoiled.” It was completed in two months. Then Lillian suffered another miscarriage.

Walt threw himself back into his work. Polo continued to provide some comfort. Most Sundays, he and Lillian spent at the country club. Walt recruited others to play on his “Mickey Mouse Team,” including Roy, and a few of his studio executives. He also played with Hollywood stars Will Rogers, James Gleason, and Spencer Tracy. Lillian was a faithful spectator, watching the matches while eating from a big bag of popcorn that Walt always bought her.

In December 1932, the outline for a new
Silly Symphony
–
Three Little Pigs
-
made the rounds among Disney’s animation staff. Earlier that year, Disney had released a
Silly Symphony
called
Babes in the Wood
,
a loose combination of a traditional British folk tale and the story of
Hansel and Gretel
by the Brothers Grimm. Disney added a troop of woodland elves that wasn’t present in either of the source stories. Everyone at the studio envisioned
Three Little Pigs
as just another cartoon version of a fairy tale, and at the time, even Disney didn’t see
Three Little Pigs
as a departure. “It was just another story to us, and we were in there gagging it just like any other picture,” he said later. As it turned out,
Three Little Pigs
was much more.

Disney modified the original story, an English nursery rhyme that first appeared in children’s books in the mid-1800s. In the traditional version, three young pigs leave home to make their way in the world. One builds a house of straw. When a wolf happens by, he blows the house over and devours the pig. The second pig’s house of sticks is no sturdier, and he, too, is eaten by the wolf. But the third pig builds his house of brick. The wolf cannot blow it down, and tries to lure the pig outside. Then the wolf attempts to enter the house by coming down the chimney. But the third pig outwits the wolf by having a cauldron of boiling water on the fireplace. The wolf falls in, is cooked and then eaten by the pig.

Knowing his
Silly Symphony
could not show pigs being eaten by a wolf, Disney adopted a less-well-known variant of the story in which the first two pigs escape the wolf and flee to their brother’s brick house. He also made the story an operetta, with all dialogue either sung or rhymed. This change helped give pig a personality. The first two sang and danced as danger approached, but the third was, like his brick house, stolid and humorless. Disney was intent on making the music work with the film, but he remained firm that the story had to stay funny. He ordered the staff to “gag it every way we can.”

Disney insisted that the pigs look like pigs but behave like people. He wanted them dressed in clothes and able to use tools and other household items. In the finished cartoon, all three pigs wear caps and walk upright on anatomically correct trotters. The two lazy pigs wear short jackets that flare and flap above their plump stomachs. The serious pig wears overalls. Their hands are rendered with the standard Disney three-fingers-in-white-gloves treatment.

Disney put three of his top animators to work on
Three Little Pigs
. Fred Moore, who had started at the studio in 1930 when he was eighteen, animated the opening sequence, which introduces each of the three pigs. Those scenes marked the first time Disney characters found the charm Walt had been looking for. Moore’s chubby little pigs came alive on the screen.

Three Little Pigs
hit theaters in May 1933. It cost Disney almost $16,000 to make and earned $125,000 in the first year. The film enhanced not only the prestige of the Disney studio, but the medium of animation in general. Audiences and critics loved
Three Little Pigs
.
The
New York Times
said it was a film you could see again and again and love it every time. Many did just that. Demand for the film was so high that in some neighborhoods prints had to be shuttled between theaters by bike messenger. Some theaters had to settle for Spanish or French versions. The film ran for so long that on a poster outside one New York theater, whiskers were drawn on the chins of the pigs, growing longer each week.

The cartoon’s theme song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” was such a sensation that thereafter every Mickey Mouse cartoon and
Silly Symphony
included a theme song.

There was one dark shadow over
Three Little Pigs.
In two scenes, the wolf attempts to lure the pigs from their houses by disguising himself, first as a lamb, then as a door-to-door salesman. In the original version, the salesman is a grotesque caricature of a Jewish peddler. He has a long, hooked nose and full beard and wears a cap, a long coat, and small, round glasses. Rabbi J.X. Cohen, the head of the American Jewish Congress, wrote Disney about the scene, decrying it as a “vile, revolting unnecessary” insult to Jews and demanded it be deleted. Disney had the scene re-animated to remove the offensive references. Disney often complained when critics took an analytical microscope to his cartoons, searching for something deeper than the silliness that sat on the surface.

Three Little Pigs
won the 1933 Oscar for Animated Short Subject, Walt’s second in a row. It was a good year for Walt personally as well. Lillian had suffered two miscarriages, but her third pregnancy went smoothly. The couple was cautiously optimistic. Walt wrote his mother that “Lilly has been feeling fine and having no trouble at all. In fact, she is so healthy that she has been worried about it.” Walt prepared a large nursery decorated in pink and blue. Lillian hoped for a girl; “personally,” Walt said, “I don’t care, just as long as we do not get disappointed again.”

Then, on December 18, 1933, while at a podium accepting an award from
Parents
magazine, the news he had been waiting for was whispered in his ear. “This is the biggest moment of my life,” he said to the audience. Before bolting from the auditorium, he added, “You’ll pardon, I hope, if I hurry away and show this beautiful award to my wife and . . .” Walt made it to the hospital in time to witness the birth of his daughter,
Diane Marie
. He wired his brother Roy, “AM PROUD FATHER OF BABY GIRL. LILLIE AND BABY DOING FINE.”

Lillian Disney said Walt was obsessed with being first. He had made the first animated film with sound, and the first in color. On the heels of his greatest success, he decided to try something more challenging and more costly than anything before in animation: a feature-length movie. Walt and Roy came up with an estimate of $500,000.

The estimate was low.

But Disney had tremendous resources at his disposal. His studio employed almost 200 people. Mickey Mouse had become a brand unto himself. Herman Kamen, who had joined the studio in 1933 as a promoter and merchandise developer, licensed Mickey’s image to some of the country’s largest and most prestigious companies and helped create and sell a flood of Mickey Mouse products, including the famous eared cap. In 1934, the studio took in $35 million in merchandise sales, plus another $200,000 in licensing fees. The next year, the animated mouse appeared plumper on screen and also more refined – his movements were sleeker; his eyes wider, and more soulful.

Disney got lots of encouragement when he started thinking about a full-length animated feature. Homer’s
Iliad
and
Odyssey
were suggested, as well as
Gulliver’s Travels.
Mary Pickford at United Artists lobbied for a version of
Alice in Wonderland
that would combine live-action with animation and even offered to put up the money to make it happen. But Disney had made up his mind to go with
Snow White.

Snow White
was a German folk story published in 1812 in
Grimms’ Fairy Tales
. The original story is macabre and unsettling. It begins with blood: A queen accidentally pricks her finger with a needle while sewing near an open window and her blood drips onto fresh snow on the windowsill. Fascinated by this stark tableau, the queen tells herself, “Oh how I wish that I had a daughter that had skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony.” Later, she does, and names the girl Snow White. But the gentle queen dies, and the king remarries a new queen obsessed with being the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. She owns a magic mirror that she consults about this regularly. Always, the mirror informs her that she is the “fairest in the land.” But when Snow White grows up, the mirror delivers the shocking news that while the queen remains the “fairest in the land,” Snow White has become “a thousand times more beautiful than you.”

Enraged, the wicked queen orders a huntsman to take Snow White into the forest, kill her, and return with the girl’s liver and lungs. But the huntsman cannot bring himself to kill Snow White, who flees deeper into the woods. Instead, he kills a boar and brings its liver and lungs to the queen. She has them cooked for her dinner. Snow White, meanwhile, is taken in by a band of dwarfs.

The queen takes matters into her own hands when the magic mirror reveals that Snow White still lives. She disguises herself, finds Snow White and makes several attempts on her life. She dresses as a peddler, and offers Snow White a lace bodice. She cinches it so tightly that Snow White faints. Snow White is saved at the last minute by the dwarfs. The queen then persuades Snow White to take a bite from a poisoned apple. Snow White falls into a deep sleep, and this time, the dwarfs cannot wake her. Thinking she is dead, the dwarfs place her in a glass coffin, where they can still gaze upon her eternal beauty.

Snow White remains in her coffin until a handsome prince happens by and falls in love with her. He begs the dwarfs to let him take her coffin away. When he does, a piece of apple is dislodged from Snow White’s throat, and she awakens. In time they plan their wedding, and the wicked queen is among the invited guests, unaware the bride-to-be is Snow White. When the queen is discovered, she is thrust into a pair of iron shoes, heated to glowing red and is forced dance as the flesh is seared from her feet. In agony, she falls dead.

Much of this, of course, would have to be softened to be suitable fare for a Disney audience. But Walt thought
Snow White
had everything. “I had sympathetic dwarfs, you see?” Disney would later say. “I had the heavy. I had the prince. And the girl. The romance. I thought it was a perfect story.”

Disney told people at the studio how much he liked
Snow White
and wanted to make it into a full-length film. Colleagues marveled at how emotional Disney would get as he told them the story - and the powerful effect his descriptions had on them. Several said they were brought to tears as Disney explained the plot. Finally, one evening in early 1934, Disney rounded up some fifty employees, told them to grab some take-out dinner, and come back to the studio’s soundstage. Disney was alone under a spotlight when they arrived.

Disney proceeded to act out the whole story of
Snow White,
giving each character a unique voice and personality. The bravura performance lasted three hours and ended with a round of enthusiastic applause.

Disney’s version presented Snow White as a dark-haired, pale-skinned girl, with a melodic voice and a cheery disposition, who is forced to tend to grimy household chores. Her dreams of being swept away by a prince are dashed by the huntsman, who instead of killing her, sends her scurrying into a dark forest, where her fears and insecurities are played out in the shadows and howls of the wind. But even the forest and its creatures sympathize with the delicate princess, and bow to her beauty, becoming charming, cuddly companions who hope to protect her from the Queen’s wrath.

The chipper squirrels, chipmunks, birds, turtles and deer usher Snow White to shelter in a hut, which upon her arrival is empty. The place is a mess, as might be expected of a home shared by seven men who are miners by trade. Snow White naturally cleans up, startling the dwarfs who return from a day’s work in the diamond mine to find their home transformed by an unsuspected intruder. Gruff, but timid, the dwarfs are reluctant to provide refuge to the evil Queen’s step-daughter. She wins them over with a gooseberry pie and her motherly instincts, insisting each of them wash their hands thoroughly before dessert.

The Queen, informed by her magic mirror that Snow White still lives, becomes an old crone, cloaked in black, and concocts a poisoned apple, with which she tempts the trusting princess. Just one bite sends Snow White into a sleeping death, which can only be reversed by the kiss of true love. Too late, the forest creatures and dwarfs discover the plot, and chase the Queen up a mountain, where a thunderbolt sends her falling to her death. Mournfully, the dwarfs place Snow White in a glass coffin, until a prince passing through the forest discovers her and wakes her with a kiss.

As news spread about
Snow White,
skeptics began to voice their opinions. Few people believed that audiences would tolerate a ninety-minute cartoon - or believe an animated love story. Disney, after all, was known for broad gags and funny animals. People in Hollywood started referring to the project as “Disney’s Folly.” Even Lillian Disney doubted the project, telling Walt, “I can’t stand the sight of dwarfs. I predict nobody will ever pay a dime to see a dwarf picture.”

Because his contract with United Artists was only for short subjects, financing a feature film was a problem. Disney asked Roy to drum up financing from bankers. But, enthusiastic as he was, he had reservations. He told
The
New York Times
that if the finished film didn’t meet his expectation, he would destroy it.

In early 1935, Disney hired 300 more animators. On a family trip to Europe, he was delighted to find that theaters there routinely showed as many as a half-dozen Mickey Mouse cartoons in a row - proof that audiences had no problem staying in their seats for animation.

By now, Disney was essentially a supervisor at his sprawling studio. “I do not draw, write music, or contribute most of the gags and ideas seen in our pictures today,” he said. But he had an abundance of creativity to draw on, and no shortage of new ideas coming from his team. While Mickey Mouse remained the Disney studio’s most-popular property, it was clear Disney could survive, even thrive, without the mouse.

Disney animators began work on
Snow White
late in the summer of 1934. Walt and Roy Disney originally thought the film might take a year-and-a-half to make; instead, it took twice that long and cost $1.5 million, three times their initial estimate. Their critics likened the project to gambling on a sweepstakes ticket, which infuriated Roy, who responded, “We’ve bought the whole damned sweepstakes.” Other Disney properties felt the pinch of the rising costs: Mickey Mouse lost his tail in a cutback that made animating him take less time, and subsequently less money.

Disney expected the finished
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
to comprise between six and eight reels, with each reel consisting of 16,000 frames - a potential of 128,000 individual images. Because each frame was a composite made from multiple drawings, the actual number of drawings was staggering.

The Disney Brothers Studio remained busy with animated shorts throughout the three years
Snow White
was in production. It made more than sixty cartoons, introduced Donald Duck, and won five Academy Awards. Disney used one of the shorts,
The Goddess of Spring
, based on the Greek myth of Persephone, a training vehicle for the animators who worked on
Snow White.

The studio now had close to 500 employees. Walt paid his animators well, even though Roy groused about it. One of their top artists earned $15,000 a year, an astonishing amount in the
Great Depression
. At the same time, the collaborative nature of the studio - which Walt valued above all else - made it seem almost communistic. For Disney, the studio had become the embodiment of an idealized vision - a “near-perfect world” he had created for himself to live in.

Life was less ideal at home. Lillian resented even more the long hours he spent at the studio. His fixation on work often set off furious arguments between the couple. A dark stain on the wall might appear the morning after a late-night tiff – evidence of a cup of coffee hurled by Lillian in Walt’s direction. As Lillian bonded with their daughter Diane, she and Walt grew apart. At one point, during production on
Snow White
, the couple considered divorce. Walt wanted more children, and they decided to try again. Then another miscarriage in 1936 brought them closer together. Walt and Lillian decided to adopt. On New Year’s Eve that same year, they welcomed a six-week-old daughter, Sharon Mae, home. A case of pneumonia sent the baby back to the hospital for a month.

The Disneys made no distinction between their biological and adopted daughters. In fact, Walt preferred to keep the adoption a secret and bristled whenever anyone mentioned it. Walt was a loving and attentive father, and, as Diane would later say, “Daddy is a pushover.” Disney was adamant, however, about keeping his daughters out of the public eye. He had been horrified by the
kidnapping and murder
of
Charles Lindbergh
’s baby in 1932. Disney kept his private life private.

Walt did not attend church, though his daughter Sharon later remembered him as “a very religious man.” She said, “He did not believe you had to go to church to be religious. He respected every religion. There wasn’t any that he ever criticized. He wouldn’t even tell religious jokes.” Lillian, for a few years, “dabbled” in Christian Science, Diane said. They attended the Christian Science Church, and Lillian enrolled Diane and Sharon in a small Christian Science school. But Sunday, Diane said, was “daddy’s day.” When the girls were old enough, Walt would drop them off for Sunday school, pick them up after, and take them to Griffith Park to ride the merry-go-round. “He’d see families in the park,” Diane remembered, “and say, ‘There’s nothing for the parents to do. . . . You’ve got to have a place where the whole family can have fun.’” Sometimes, they ended up at the studio – the girls romping through his office while Walt snuck in some work.

As Diane and Sharon grew, their personalities emerged. Disney referred to Diane as “the family brain” and Sharon as “the family beauty.” School came naturally to Diane, while Sharon struggled academically. “She’d rather ride horses than study,” Walt wrote to his sister about Sharon. Diane was also more extroverted; Sharon was shy and timid until she discovered modeling.

The Disney girls loved books and reading. As early as 1938, they discovered a book with a red cover about a stern, but magical English nanny named
Mary Poppins
. The book, a gift from publisher Eugene Reynal, had sat on a shelf in the Disney home since its publication in 1934, and was inscribed: “To Walt Disney – Not another ‘Mickey’ but I think you should like our Mary.” Both daughters fell in love with the no-nonsense nanny who blows in, with her umbrella and carpetbag, on a strong east wind and transforms the lives of the children in her charge. Disney promised his daughters that he would make a film of Mary Poppins. He reached out to the book’s author,
P.L. Travers
, who was adamantly opposed to a film adaptation of her beloved character. Travers was protective of “her Mary” and determined that she would not be made into a cartoon, which was all that Walt Disney had made to date. But that wasn’t the end of it.