The Animated Man Read online

  SIMPSON

  IMPRINT IN HUMANITIES

  The humanities endowment

  by Sharon Hanley Simpson and

  Barclay Simpson honors

  MURIEL CARTER HANLEY

  whose intellect and sensitivity

  have enriched the many lives

  that she has touched.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Simpson Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

  THE ANIMATED MAN

  The Animated Man

  A LIFE OF WALT DISNEY

  MICHAEL BARRIER

  Frontispiece. Disney draws Mickey Mouse at a reception at the Savoy Hotel in London in 1946. Quigley Photographic Collection, Walt Disney File, Georgetown University Library, Special Collections Division, Washington, D.C.

  University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

  University of California Press

  Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

  University of California Press, Ltd.

  London, England

  © 2007 by Michael Barrier

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Barrier, J. Michael.

  The animated man : a life of Walt Disney / Michael Barrier.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN: 978-0-520-24117-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

  1. Disney, Walt, 1901–1966. 2. Animators—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  NC1766.U52D53155 2007

  791.43092—dc22

  [B] 2006025506

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is printed on Natures Book, which contains 50% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

  To my parents

  CONTENTS

  Plates follow pages 140 and 236

  PREFACE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION: “It’s All Me”

  1 “The Pet in the Family”

  On the Farm and in the City, 1901–1923

  2 “A Cute Idea”

  The Self-Taught Filmmaker, 1923–1928

  3 “You’ve Got to Really Be Minnie”

  Building a Better Mouse, 1928–1933

  4 “This Character Was a Live Person”

  The Leap to Feature Films, 1934–1938

  5 “A Drawing Factory”

  Ambition’s Price, 1938–1941

  6 “A Queer, Quick, Delightful Gink”

  On a Treadmill, 1941–1947

  7 “Caprices and Spurts of Childishness”

  Escaping from Animation, 1947–1953

  8 “He Was Interested in Something Else”

  Escaping from Film, 1953–1959

  9 “Where I Am Happy”

  Restless in the Magic Kingdom, 1959–1965

  10 “He Drove Himself Right Up to the End”

  Dreaming of a Nightmare City, 1965–1966

  AFTERWORD: “Let’s Never Not Be a Silly Company”

  NOTES

  INDEX

  PREFACE

  Anyone who writes a biography of Walt Disney is obliged to explain what he is up to, given that a dozen or more biographies of Disney have already been published. It is not enough to say that most of those books are not very good. The question is whether a new biography can avoid the pitfalls that have doomed the earlier ones.

  Most Disney biographies have portrayed either a man who fell short of perfection only in a few venial ways (he smoked way too much and used a great deal of profanity), or one who was personally odious (anti-Semitism being the sin of choice) and the products of whose labors are a stain on American culture.

  I have found few signs of either Disney in my own research into his life, which began in 1969 with my first trip to California and interviews with Ward Kimball, one of his best animators, and Carl Stalling, the first composer for his sound cartoons. Disney was, in my reckoning, a stunted but fascinating artist, and a generally admirable but less interesting entrepreneur. The trick, I think, is to wind those strands of his life together, along with a few strands from his private life, in a way that yields something close to the whole man; and that is what I have tried to do in this book.

  I have concentrated my attention on his work, his animated films in particular, because that is where I have found his life story most compelling. He was, from all I can tell, a good husband and a devoted father, but he was indistinguishable in those and other respects from a great many men of his generation. The Disneyland park was, and remains, an entrepreneurial marvel, but it was much more a product of its times than Disney’s films, and its impact on American culture, for good or ill, has been exaggerated. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford may have transformed their country, but Walt Disney only helped to shape economic and demographic changes that would have occurred without him. It is his animated films of the 1930s and early 1940s that make him uniquely interesting.

  My great advantage in writing this book is that I have already written a history of Hollywood animation (Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age) that includes a history of Walt Disney’s studio in those years. In writing this book, I have been particularly fortunate in being able to draw on the interviews that Milton Gray and I recorded as part of my research for Hollywood Cartoons. Most of the people we interviewed who knew Walt Disney—some of them as long ago as the early 1920s—were rarely if ever interviewed otherwise, and almost all of them have since died. No one undertaking a Disney biography now can draw on a richer store of memories of Disney and his studio than the interviews for Hollywood Cartoons. Not all those memories are of equal value, of course, but Disney was a volatile and demanding boss, and his employees had every incentive to observe him closely and remember what they saw and heard.

  For this book, I have interviewed a few more people who knew Walt Disney, mostly in connection with his live-action films. Regrettably, most of the people who worked alongside Disney on Disneyland are gone now. Milt Gray and I interviewed some of the park’s most important ride designers—people like Marc Davis, Ken Anderson, Claude Coats, and Herb Ryman—but they worked first on cartoons, and our interviews for Hollywood Cartoons dealt almost entirely with their work in animation. Fortunately, however, there is no shortage of documentation in this area. Disneyland and related subjects, like Walt Disney’s passion for railroads, have been the subjects of several well-researched books, notably Walt Disney’s Railroad Story, by Michael Broggie, and an occasional memoir. The “E” Ticket (P. O. Box 8597, Mission Hills CA 91346-8597; www.the-e-ticket.com), a magazine devoted to Disneyland’s history founded by Jack E. Janzen and his late brother, Leon J. Janzen, has included a valuable and often unique interview with a Disneyland veteran in almost every issue.

  Walt Disney never wrote an autobiography, but he came reasonably close in 1956 when he sat for a series of interviews with Pete Martin, who interviewed celebrities for the Saturday Evening Post and had already ghostwritten books with Arthur Godfrey and Bing Crosby. As Disney’s daughter Diane Miller explained in 2001, the original idea was that Disney’s ghostwritten autobiography would be serialized in the Post, but he was not interested. Disney suggested instead that “they change their concept and have his story told by me, his eldest daughter. My si
ster and I would be paid for it and, although it would be about half of what they’d offered him, it was still a lot of money.” That was Disney’s way of helping his daughter and son-in-law and their two children get a financial foothold. As Diane Miller wrote, “I was always uncomfortable with assuming credit for authorship of the ensuing book [The Story of Walt Disney by Diane Disney Miller as told to Pete Martin (New York, 1957)], because I had very little to do with it, save for attending, with great delight, all of Pete’s interviews with Dad. . . . The result is hours of taped interviews, which have been a wonderful resource for subsequent researchers.”1

  Internal evidence—like references to Jean Hersholt’s death and a forthcoming Disney TV show—indicates that the interviews were recorded in May and June 1956 (not July, as Diane Miller remembered). Extensive excerpts from the interviews have been published on the Walt Disney Family Museum Web site and in many Disney-sanctioned books, sometimes in modified or paraphrased form. Copies of the complete transcripts (and the transcript of a 1961 Martin interview with Disney) are held by the Walt Disney Archives in Burbank and as part of the Richard G. Hubler Collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. I have quoted from the transcripts rather than their published equivalents, correcting only misspellings and other obvious errors.

  Hubler was a freelance writer who wrote many magazine pieces and was the as-told-to coauthor of Ronald Reagan’s memoir Where’s the Rest of Me? He was the first author commissioned by Walt Disney Productions and the Disney family to write a biography of Walt Disney, less than a year after Disney’s death. In late 1967 and 1968 Hubler interviewed many Disney employees and members of Disney’s family, some of whom were never interviewed otherwise. His book was never published. “Turned it in for corrections and/or defections in fact—and got a blank wall,” he told me in 1969. “No comment, no reasons, no nothing at all. . . . They paid the considerable contractual penalty and let it drop dead.”2 Hubler retained drafts of his manuscript, complete and partial transcripts of dozens of interviews, and a wealth of other material, all of which he donated to Boston University and much of which I consulted in the course of writing my own book. Transcripts of a number of Hubler’s interviews are also held at the Walt Disney Archives, and they have been quoted extensively in subsequent Disney-authorized books like Bob Thomas’s biographies of Walt Disney and his brother Roy.

  In all these interviews—my own, Martin’s with Disney, Hubler’s, and others with Disney’s friends and employees—there are no gaping chasms of fact, few if any irreconcilable disagreements. (In my research, I have encountered starkly different versions of events only for the filming of Swiss Family Robinson on the island of Tobago. Disney never visited the island during shooting, so those disagreements were of limited importance to this book.) Disney himself, from the time in the early 1930s when he began revisiting his personal history for interviewers and approving press releases about it, was remarkably consistent in what he said. When he smudged or passed over episodes in his life, it was usually for readily discernible reasons, like his continuing resentment of what he saw as a former employee’s disloyalty.

  The greatest obstacle to writing an accurate Disney biography is not deliberate falsehood but the lapses of earlier writers. No writer wants to repeat research that other people have already done well, but a great deal of what has been published about Walt Disney’s life incorporates small, avoidable errors. As reflected in the endnotes, I have tried to avoid such errors, especially by relying on primary materials whenever possible. Errors are inevitable, though, and as they surface I will post corrections on my Web site, www.michaelbarrier.com.

  Some primary materials are more accessible than others. As part of my research for Hollywood Cartoons, I saw almost all of the theatrical sound cartoons that Walt Disney produced, as well as almost all of the surviving silent cartoons and a great many of the sponsored films like those made for the military. Thanks especially to the Library of Congress’s collection, I have since seen all the live-action features made during Disney’s lifetime, as well as almost all the live-action shorts, along with dozens of the Disney television shows. (I have seen only a sampling of the Mickey Mouse Club, however; you have to draw the line someplace.)

  Although I enjoyed years of access to the Disney Archives during my work on Hollywood Cartoons, the rules have tightened since then, and I did not do any on-site research at the archives for this book—a minor inconvenience, fortunately, considering the research I had already done and the other sources available. Some primary materials are not yet available even to researchers who have the company’s blessing. Roy Disney’s papers, made available to Bob Thomas for his biography, remain closed to most writers, as do materials with continuing legal significance (in what are called the “main files”). If such a thing as a “definitive” biography of Walt Disney is even possible, it will be decades before it can be written. I make no such claim for this book. But I know that it is far more accurate than most books about Walt Disney, and I hope that it also offers a strong sense of what the man Disney was like and why he still commands our attention today. If I have succeeded in those aims, I will be more than happy to let someone else aspire to write the definitive biography much later in this century.

  Little Rock, Arkansas

  August 1, 2006

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book draws heavily on research I conducted for Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, my history of Hollywood studio animation. Milton Gray, the animator who provided me with invaluable assistance during my work on that book, deserves just as much thanks for his contribution to The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney, even though I did not impose on him nearly as much this time around. I could use only a small part of the valuable information he gathered for me in the first book, and with this book I have made only another small dent in the accumulation.

  I am grateful for the same reason to Mark Kausler, the greatest student of Hollywood animation. Without all the help he gave me in writing the first book, I could never have written this one. In writing about Walt Disney I have also received valuable help from my friends Robin Allan and J. B. Kaufman, two of the people most deserving of the much-abused title “animation historian.”

  Kaye Malins, the greatest booster for Marceline, Missouri, the little railroad town where Walt grew up, gave my wife, Phyllis, and me a wonderful tour on a rainy morning in March 2005, and she has been a great help in other ways. Michael Danley helped me locate many rare documents. Paul F. Anderson provided me with missing issues of The “E” Ticket and his own excellent magazine about Disney, Persistence of Vision. Keith Scott, the greatest authority on cartoon voices, sent rare audiotapes of Walt Disney’s radio performances in the 1930s and 1940s. Gail Fines, May Couch, and Craig Pfannkuche were of invaluable help in finding markers of the Disney family’s life in the public records of Kansas City, Marceline, and Chicago, respectively.

  I have enjoyed assistance from dedicated people at many libraries, archives, and other organizations, but especially the following:

  David R. Smith and Robert Tieman of the Walt Disney Archives; Rosemary C. Hanes of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress, Washington; Ned Comstock of the Archives of Performing Arts and Dace Taube of the Regional History Collections at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles; Howard Prouty, Barbara Hall, and Faye Thompson of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills; Maria Morelli of the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University; Carol Neyer, Lynn Rosenfeld, and Coco Halverson of the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia; Stine Lolk and Sven Hansen of Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen; Sally McManus and Jeri Vogelsang of the Palm Springs Historical Society; Joan Blocher of Chicago Theological Seminary; Elizabeth Konzak of the University of Central Florida Libraries, Orlando; Carol Merrill-Mersky and Julio Gonzalez of the Hollywood Bowl Museum, Los Angeles; Fred Deaton of the Mar
shall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama; Janet Moat of the British Film Institute, London; Lillian Hess of the Danish Tourist Board, New York; Elaine Doak of the Picker Memorial Library at Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri; Sara Nyman of the Kansas City, Missouri, Public Library; Eric Lupfer of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; Michelle Kopfer of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene; Carol Martin of the Harry S. Truman Library, Independence; Lisa L. Bell of Smoke Tree Ranch, Palm Springs; Martha Shahlari of the Jannes Library at the Kansas City Art Institute; Por Hsyu of the Burbank Public Library; and the interlibrary loan staff of the Central Arkansas Library System.

  Phyllis Barrier, Milton Gray, J. B. Kaufman, and Mark Kausler read the manuscript and made many helpful suggestions.

  During my work on Hollywood Cartoons, around 150 people who worked for Walt Disney or knew him in other settings sat for interviews with me or Milton Gray, or with both of us, mostly in person but sometimes by telephone. Others provided full tape-recorded responses to my written questions. Many of the people who sat for interviews also answered my questions in letters and provided me with documents of various kinds. It is a source of deep regret that so many of the people on the following list are no longer here to read this book. I regret too that not everyone on the list is represented in the text, but they all contributed to my understanding of Walt Disney and his work. I am grateful to:

  Edwin Aardal, Ray Abrams, Kenneth Anderson, Michael Arens, Arthur Babbitt, Carl Barks, Aurelius Battaglia, Ed Benedict, Lee Blair, Mary Blair, Preston Blair, Billy Bletcher, James Bodrero, Stephen Bosustow, Jack Boyd, Jack Bradbury, Jameson Brewer (known in the 1930s as Jerry), Homer Brightman, Bob Broughton, Jack Bruner, Robert Carlson, Jim Carmichael, Marge Champion, Donald Christensen, Ivy Carol Christensen, Bob Clampett, Les Clark, Claude Coats, William Cottrell, Chuck Couch, Jack Cutting, Arthur Davis, Marc Davis, Robert De Grasse, Eldon Dedini, Nelson Demorest, Philip Dike, Eyvind Earle, Mary Eastman, Phil Eastman, Jules Engel, Al Eugster, Carl Fallberg, Paul Fennell, Marceil Clark Ferguson, Eugene Fleury, Hugh Fraser, John Freeman, Friz Freleng, Gerry Geronimi, Merle Gilson, George Goepper, Morris Gollub, Campbell Grant, Joe Grant, Richard Hall (known in the 1930s as Dick Marion), David Hand, Jack Hannah, Hugh Harman, Jerry Hathcock, Gene Hazelton, T. Hee, John Hench, David Hilberman, Cal Howard, John Hubley, Richard Huemer, William Hurtz, Rudolph Ising, Willie Ito, Wilfred Jackson, Ollie Johnston, Chuck Jones, Volus Jones, Milt Kahl, Lynn Karp, Van Kaufman, Lew Keller, Hank Ketcham, Betty Kimball, Ward Kimball, Jack Kinney, Earl Klein, Phil Klein, Fred Kopietz, Eric Larson, Gordon Legg, Fini Rudiger Littlejohn, Hicks Lokey, Ed Love, Richard Lundy, Eustace Lycett, James Macdonald, Daniel MacManus, C. G. “Max” Maxwell, Helen Nerbovig McIntosh, Robert McIntosh, Robert McKimson, J. C. “Bill” Melendez, John P. Miller, Dodie Monahan, Kenneth Muse, Clarence Nash, Grim Natwick, Maurice Noble, Dan Noonan, Cliff Nordberg, Les Novros, Edwin Parks, Don Patterson, Bill Peet, Hawley Pratt, Martin Provensen, Thor Putnam, Willis Pyle, John Rose, George Rowley, Herb Ryman, Leo Salkin, Paul Satterfield, Milt Schaffer, Zack Schwartz, Ben Sharpsteen, Mel Shaw (known in the 1930s as Mel Schwartzman), Charlie Shows, Larry Silverman, Joe Smith, Margaret Smith, Carl Stalling, McLaren Stewart, Robert Stokes, John Sutherland, Howard Swift, Frank Tashlin, Frank Thomas, Richard Thomas, Clair Weeks, Don Williams, Bern Wolf, Tyrus Wong, Cornett Wood, Adrian Woolery, Ralph Wright, Rudy Zamora, and Jack Zander.