Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (20 page)

in the Workplace seminars. . . . We’ve helped fund proper legal [re-course] for discrimination. And what I’m most proud of is that we’ve had nine companies—with more on the way—adopt domestic-partnership benefit programs.”7 In August of that year, openly gay Hollywood attorneys organized a benefit for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Amongst those on the host committee for the benefit were Sheinberg, Warner Bros. chairman Bob Daly, ABC president Robert Igor, superagent Michael Ovitz—and Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg. A year later, the event was repeated, this time underwritten by such corporations as Sony, Fox, Warner Bros. and, to quote gay columnist Michelangelo Signorile, “amazingly, the Walt Disney Company.”8

A KINGDOM REBORN: DISNEY, THE SEXUAL

REVOLUTION AND THE EISNER/WELLS ERA

Although surprising to some, by the early 1990s the Walt Disney Company was in some ways a few steps ahead of other studios in its atti-F I N D I N G A P L AC E I N T H E K I N G D O M

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tudes about homosexuality. While protesters outside the 1991 Academy Awards pointed out the homophobia of
The Silence of the Lambs,
which would win Best Picture, that same night Disney had been nominated for Best Picture for their animated version of
Beauty and the Beast.
The studio had used the release of the film to honor the talent of lyricist Howard Ashman, an openly gay man who had helped resurrect Disney’s animated features and who had recently died as a result of AIDS.

At the Academy Awards, when Ashman posthumously won an Oscar with Alan Menken for Best Song, Ashman’s partner Bill Lauch came to the podium to accept the award.

Ashman’s award in March of 1992 and that August’s formation of LEAGUE finally acknowledged what had probably been true from almost the beginnings of the Walt Disney Company—that amongst its employees there existed individuals who self-identified as homosexuals. While such a statement may be specifically hard to document, it is almost as hard to believe that there weren’t any lesbians or gay men working at the studio during Walt’s life. Working in an industry that has traditionally attracted a large number of homosexuals, it only stands to reason that some percentage of the work force was lesbian or gay during Walt’s reign. Yet, society at large made most of these individuals hide their sexual orientation from others. Things were no less secretive during the first half of the century on the Disney lot than anywhere else, and with just cause. An anecdote related to the production of
Fantasia
(1940) describes the general attitude towards homosexuality during this time. Animator Art Babbitt recalled, “I started taking piano lessons. After the film opened, Walt heard about it, and in the presence of maybe fifty people at a story meeting, he said, ‘I understand you’re studying the piano.’ I said, ‘Yeah, that’s true.’ He said, ‘Well, what the hell’s the matter with you; are you some kind of faggot?’”9

A number of actors and actresses who were closeted homosexuals worked on Disney films throughout the years—Richard Deacon, Cesar Romero, Sal Mineo, Nancy Kulp, Patsy Kelly. Yet, it was precisely their secretiveness that kept them employed both at Disney and in Hollywood at large. For example, it is rumored that actor Carlton Carpenter was originally considered for the role of Davy Crockett’s companion but was eventually passed over because executives had heard that he might be homosexual.10

The most notorious example to serve as a warning to gay and lesbian employees of Disney was the case of Tommy Kirk. Tommy Kirk 100

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began as a juvenile actor in some of Disney’s TV shows and films—

playing one of “The Hardy Boys” on
The Mickey Mouse Club
and then starring in
Old Yeller
(1957) and
The Shaggy Dog
(1959). The inordinate success of both films made Kirk a hot commodity at the studio. Kirk himself remembers Walt Disney’s introducing the youngster to Hedda Hopper as his “good luck kid.”11 When the 1960s started, Kirk had become the most promising male actor under contract to the studio and was often paired with the studio’s reigning female star, Annette Funicello. (Of course, many might choose to remember more fondly his brotherly friendship with James MacArthur in
Swiss Family Robinson

[1960].)

Kirk’s promising future ended quickly, though. “I was 18 [in 1961],”

Kirk recalled to an interviewer in the 1990s. “My body was still growing.” It was around this time that Kirk seems to recall self-identifying as a homosexual. Yet, for a young and easily recognized actor during the early 1960s, there were very few avenues to explore this part of his personality without adverse attention. “I was young, and I had money,”

Kirk recounted, “I started fooling around and I got involved with a boy.

We saw each other about three times . . . once at a public pool in Burbank. The boy’s mother found out and went to see Walt at the studio.”12

Kirk was summoned to the studio to speak directly with Walt.

While Kirk tried to stammer out an explanation, he was informed that his contract had been terminated. No criminal charges were placed on Kirk, and the firing (much less the reasons for the firing) was never discussed in the press. Such a lack of reaction seems to suggest that the studio “dealt” with both the parents of the other boy as well as the press to keep the story “under wraps.”13 Ironically, right after Kirk was let go, Disney brought him back to film
The Monkey’s Uncle
(1964), a sequel to
The Misadventures of Merlin Jones
(1963). During the six weeks of filming, Kirk became painfully aware that many of the people he was working with had heard the rumors. “It was a terrible feeling. I was very un-comfortable, knowing that they were watching me closely.”14 Although Kirk was subsequently able to land work in a few American-International “beach party” musical comedies (again partnered with Annette Funicello), by the mid-1960s Kirk’s career as an actor was over. A slide into drug dependency and recovery followed until, in 1975, he began a carpet and upholstery cleaning business. When Kirk returned in 1984 to the Walt Disney studio as part of a
Mickey Mouse Club
reunion, he discovered that his reputation still preceded him. According to Kirk, an F I N D I N G A P L AC E I N T H E K I N G D O M

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employee from Disney’s publicity department told him, “If I had my way, all you people would be buried in the same grave.”15

It seems startling then to consider that, only eight years after Kirk’s encounter with this openly homophobic employee, LEAGUE established itself at the Walt Disney Company. But only a few years after Kirk’s contract was originally terminated at the studio, racial minorities, women and the younger generation in the nation began challenging the norms and conventions in American culture. Amongst these challenges was a questioning of sexual morals, eventually termed the

“sexual revolution.” Nineteen sixty-seven’s “summer of love,” couples

“living together” rather than getting married, the popularity of the birth control pill and the Supreme Court decision affirming a woman’s right to an abortion all contributed to an enormous upheaval in social conceptions of sex and sexuality. While helping open the door for gay rights activism to flourish, in an almost obverse trajectory, this “sexual revolution” adversely affected the status of the Walt Disney Company.

As the gay community grew more visible and organized in American society, Disney grew weaker and less important in the film industry.

The rise of the counterculture was a direct defiance of any and all authority. Anything that represented power—from the federal government and the military to corporate institutions and the mass media—

was considered the enemy. Faced with such a huge wave of disen-chantment, the entire Hollywood film industry suffered one its worst recessions in 1969–70. During the previous three years, while the counterculture grew by leaps and bounds, studio executives blindly threw millions of dollars at large, empty-headed mainstream confections like
Doctor Dolittle
(1967) and
Paint Your Wagon
(1969), which invariably sank like stones at the box office. The Disney studio was no different.

Trying to recapture the magic and success of 1964’s
Mary Poppins,
the studio released another big-budget musical with an over two-hour running time.
The Happiest Millionaire
(1967) dealt with an irascible and eccentric millionaire who imposes his opinions and attitudes on his children’s lives, yet the audience is supposed to find him charming and lovable. Expectedly for this “generation gap” era, the film was spectacularly unsuccessful.

The Happiest Millionaire
was the last film that Walt Disney personally supervised before his death in 1967. This last film of his indicates that Walt himself was probably unprepared to deal with the seemingly rapid changes occurring in American culture. Yet, Walt had always been 102

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a man with a strong vision, and his death left the company without such a leader to guide them through the tumultuous years of Vietnam and Watergate. After Walt’s death, brother and constant partner Roy took over the company. Yet, Roy had always been the bookkeeper, the ac-countant—
not
the seer or artisan. Luckily, Walt had laid out plans for a new theme park in Florida before his death, and Roy devoted the next four years to realizing this final vision of his brother’s. Three months after Walt Disney World opened in 1971, Roy himself was dead. Neither Walt nor Roy had left behind a clear line of succession. Walt never seemed to consider the possibility of his two daughters, Sharon and Diane, inheriting the chairmanship of the company. Rather, two men seemed equally poised and anxious to take over: Walt’s son-in-law Ron Miller and Roy’s son (Walt’s nephew) Roy, Jr. By the 1970s, both were members of the executive board, fighting against each other for control of the company.

Meanwhile, the daily decisions regarding film and television production, theme parks, merchandising and every other ancillary market were made by people trying desperately to keep Walt’s vision alive. Almost every account of the company’s history during this period comments that the phrase “What would Walt have done?” dominated executive meetings.16 While it is impossible to know for certain what Walt would have done, his history as a risktaker and experimenter was definitely not what company executives took from the man’s memory. Instead, the Walt Disney Company retreated into a shell—churning out almost identical family comedies, letting the animation department run on its own inertia and fretting over the most minute changes to any of the two theme parks.

Remarkably, and unfortunately in retrospect for the studio, one of the biggest box-office successes of 1969 was Disney’s
The Love Bug.
Tapping into at least the look of the era by giving a soul and mind to a Volk-swagen Beetle (whose quirky design had caught public fascination), Disney seemed to find a project that was “mod” in style, but conventional in narrative, as the heterosexual couple comes together and defeats the comic villain. As Joe Flower observes, the film’s success “froze the bland, cornball Disney formula in the minds of the Disney executives for another decade, long after it had run its course in the marketplace.”17 Also, the company’s public image as “family oriented” severely limited the projects that could be made without raising the hack-les of shareholders. While other Hollywood studios were able to F I N D I N G A P L AC E I N T H E K I N G D O M

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capitalize upon the loosened censorship restrictions of the late 1960s, Disney was obligated to refrain from embracing the sexual revolution.

In 1968, after the unveiling of the new ratings system for motion pictures, Disney stayed strictly within the “G” rating (for all audiences). In the 1970s, other studios learned that most children over the age of ten were loathe to attend a “G”-rated film, viewing such fare as “baby stuff.” Consequently, while Disney dwelt exclusively in “G”-rated material, the rest of the industry aimed for “PG” (parental guidance suggested) ratings. By the 1970s, Disney’s public image had inadvertently ghettoized its films mainly to kiddie matinees.

On occasion, some signs of the times would emerge inadvertently.

In the production number “Portobello Road” in
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
(1971), some of the dancers are actually non-white. Jodie Foster as Annabelle in
Freaky Friday
contemptuously calls her father a “male chauvinist pig.” Kurt Russell’s hair is slightly longish as Dexter Riley.

Still, it was hard to find many similarities between Dexter Riley’s Med-vale University and just about any other contemporary college campus in the nation. While Disney continued to show teenagers and college students involved in wacky hijinks that usually climaxed with the school’s big football game, California’s Governor Ronald Reagan was authorizing the use of tear gas on UC Berkeley students. Soon, hardly any attempts were being made at reaching an adult audience, as the studio had done all through Walt’s life. Films like
The Barefoot Executive
(1971),
The $1,000,000 Duck
(1971),
Gus
(1976) and
The Cat from Outer
Space
(1978) appealed only to children and to those parents who didn’t want their offspring seeing something like
Carnal Knowledge
(1971) or
The Exorcist
(1973).

The studio’s reputation suffered another major blow towards the end of the 1970s, as critics and audiences began noticing that other studios were producing fantasy and family films that were more popular than Disney’s output. While
Freaky Friday, One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing
(1975) and
Unidentified Flying Oddball
(1979) drifted off into box-office obscurity, George Lucas’
Star Wars
trilogy (beginning in 1977) and Steven Spielberg’s
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
(1982) were becoming some of the most profitable films in cinema history. Trying to rectify this situation, the studio produced
The Black Hole
(1979), a
Star Wars
-inspired science-fiction epic with a huge budget. Its failure signaled to many in the industry that Disney had “lost its touch.” The studio’s income steadily decreased, from a $34.6 billion profit in 1981, to $19.6 million in 104