Walt Disney

 

BY EDITH EFRON

A cheerful group of men sits at a round table in the commissary, chatting, laughing and lunching. Their high spirits are not surprising. They are stockholders, and their company is doing well. Their annual report — adorned with a photograph of Mickey Mouse leading a triumphal parade in front of a white, fairy-tale castle — says, in its very first paragraph: “Consolidated net profit after taxes . . for the fiscal year ended Oct. 3, 1964 was $7,057,435.”

At a near-by table, a tall, heavy-set man is chatting away, in his slow, affably rambling fashion, about his theories of color and composition. “Purpose,” he says, “determines composition. Now, for instance, if I were to paint that stockholders’ meeting over there. . . ” Then, he grins slowly. “Well, if I wanted to sell it to them. . . I'd sure feature the Chairman of the Board.”

It’s a fanciful notion, in this case, because the affable, rambling man is somewhat in the position of the gold to the stockholders of a gold mine. It is from his amazing imagination that the “consolidated net profit after taxes” has flowed. He is Walt Disney. And he rarely  bothers to go to stockholders’ meetings.

The story of this curious genius has often been told. His is not only a household name, it is an international institution. Just last year, a prominent French publication recommended that he be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; and President Johnson did award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest tribute a civilian can receive. He is one of the few men in show business whose names stand for something significantly larger than their own work; to say “Walt Disney” is to pay a subtle compliment to the human race which, in an age of chaos and conflict, still responds happily, eagerly and universally to the fantasies of this childlike genius. He has been called “innocence in action,” and this is as good a way to describe him as any.

The details of Walt Disney’s life have often been published. But all that is really essential to know is that his is a pure Horatio Alger ‘story — the story of a very poor boy who was raised on a Missouri farm, who never finished high school, who worked incessantly to bring his innocent personal visions into existence, who succeeded after a series of bitter struggles, who rose to international fame by embodying some of mankind’s most endearing characteristics in a mouse, and who has been free, ever since, to produce his very special type of fantasies.

His accomplishments, whether cartoons, nature films, movies, electronic wonderlands, or TV shows, are also unnecessary to list. There can be few people in this country who have not been exposed to some of them.

If his name and achievements are a matter of household knowledge, the man behind the name and achievements is not. He has never emerged, distinctly, as a personality in all these years. In part, this is due to the fascination of his activities, which have tended to divert eyes from the man engaging in them. But, more profoundly, it is because Walt Disney is one of the most disguised personalities alive.

His chief disguise is dullness. At first meeting, as profile writers have attested with seasonal regularity, Walt Disney seems almost unbelievably commonplace. One prominent Hollywood writer says of him: “He’s a mystery man. The biggest men in Hollywood are in awe of him. They call him ‘The King.’ And yet, whenever you see him, he’s always dull and colorless. He has a halting way of speaking. You’d think he was a second-rate accountant.”

More precisely, you’d think he was a first-rate hayseed. He is shy with reporters. His eyes are dull and preoccupied, his affability mechanical and heavy-handed. He gabs away slowly and randomly in inarticulate, Midwestern speech that would be appropriate to a rural general store. His shirt is open, his tie crooked. One almost expects to see over-all straps on his shoulders and wisps of hay in his hair.

This dull, rural affability is an acute depressant to conversation — which is apparently its purpose. If one has the patience to persist, however, tossing questions like yellow flares into the folksy fog, the fog lifts, a remote twinkle appears in the preoccupied eyes, and the man emerges.

“Tt all begins with dreams,” he says, haltingly. “As a kid I was a dreamer. Td sit in class and I’d be way off. What I was dreaming about I don’t know. I was always getting lectured: ‘Now, Walter, I know you're intelligent.’ I was always a creative kid. I built things in the back yard. I organized the kids of the neighborhood to build a tree house.

“People say I still have he innocence of a child. Maybe I have. I still look at the world with wonder, and with all living things I have a terrific sympathy. It was the most natural thing in the world for me to imagine that mice and squirrels might have feelings just like mine.

Not much formal education

"I didn’t have a formal education to speak of. I had only one year of art in night school. But the way to get an education is to do something. You get yourself into a problem, and you'll do the research to solve it. I have a feeling that’s what’s missing in our schools — the tackling of the hard job, then the series of ‘Ahh. . . I see now where I was off.’ That’s how you learn.”

Walt Disney has worked ceaselessly since boyhood. “I’ve never known him when he wasn’t working,” says his brother, Roy Disney, who runs the business end of the Disney enterprises, leaving Disney — a shrewd businessman himself — free to concentrate on the artistic aspects of the work. “Money,” says Walt, “is not my motivation. Money is a means to my creative end. Money doesn’t excite me — my ideas excite me.” Like all men whose greatest joy in life has been their work, Disney does not understand nonproductive people. “Somewhere, there’s a spark of creativity in everyone mentally sound,” he insists. “And yet, there are guys who don’t want to work. They seem to lack this desire, this drive.”

He claims that he does not condemn such people: “I envy them. I envy the guy who doesn’t want to do a thing in life but go fishing," he says. But this is not strictly true. Like most purebred Horatio Alger heroes, he reveres the productive process in man, and he is opposed, on personal and political principle, to rewarding the nonproductive. “I don’t believe in people getting things for nothing,” drawls the ex-farm boy, who is a political conservative. “We've reached the point where we can’t get people to do all kinds of jobs any more. I washed dishes, I carried parcels, I delivered newspapers. It didn’t hurt me.”

But he is even more concerned about creativity than about productivity, if this fine distinction can be drawn. Throughout the years, he has hunted for originality as other men hunt for diamonds — and has literally spied on his own workers to see if he could detect a flicker of originality behind a derivative facade. “I learned early that a lot of talented people are often conforming to what is already being done,” he says, in his slow, solemn way. “I’ve prowled around their offices at night, you know,  and studied their work. I look for the things that will give me the key to their talent. The little things they love to do on their own. Often, they hide their own ideas. They’re afraid not to conform.”

Reputation as a tyrant

Disney’s demand for creativity in his workers has won him a reputation as one of Hollywood’s major tyrants. “He can’t stand people who don’t produce, people who are stupid,” says one of his old-time workers. According to one of Disney’s famous cartoonist graduates, Walt Kelly, creator of Pogo, Disney’s reputation as a “tyrant” comes from those who “didn’t measure up.”

“I'd never say he was a tyrant,” says Kelly. “He’s an easy man to work for, if you're putting out. He is very demanding, there’s no doubt about it. He can be fairly sharp tempered and tough if people are stupid or unproductive, and this causes griping among those who don’t live up to his standards. But if you are hard-working, he’s an amazing man to work for. You learn an enormous amount, artistically. He helped to groom me, and I appreciated the experience enormously. I thought of him as a genius.”

Artistically unique

Disney himself is artistically unique — a pioneer of form as well as of content. He has never followed Hollywood trends; he has set his own with a breathtaking independence that has been called “stubborn,” “mulish” and “irascible.” Typical of Disney’s calmly walking one way, when most of the film industry was walking the other, was his confidence, when television began to encroach on the motion-picture business, that the home screen would not eliminate movies. “They were all screaming you had to have huge screens, spectaculars . . . . I went out and shot a little nature film [ ‘The Living Desert] . . . small screen. . .” He smiles wryly. “It was a hit.”

He is perfectly aware that his work, which is usually wholesome-to-Victorian, bubblingly gay and sometimes lyrically beautiful, runs directly counter to those current cultural trends which stress corruption, misery and ugliness. “These avant-garde artists are adolescents,” he says, frowning. “It’s only a little noisy element that’s going that way, that’s creating this sick art. I don’t think the whole world is crazy! Those plays like ‘Wine and Roses’ -- cut it! I don’t want to see that kind of thing. If I did, I’d go down to the county nut ward, or something — cut it!”

His own audience, he says, is “the honest adult, the one who hasn’t reached such a level of boredom that he can’t laugh or cry, that he actually wants this sick stuff.”

The entertainment credo of this former farm boy has gone unchanged over the years: “Virtue triumphs over wickedness. Tyrannical bullies are conquered by our good little people, human or animal. There is the happy and satisfactory ending. There is no cynicism in me and there is none allowed in our work. I think we have made the fairy tale fashionable again.”

Although Walt Disney has won perhaps more awards than anyone in show business, and has been acclaimed as one of America’s contributions to the limited market of world geniuses, his work has often been called “corny,” “syrupy,” “saccharine,” “escapist,” “childish” and “shallow.”

This has obviously bewildered and hurt Disney more than he will admit. “I don’t like snobs,” he says slowly. “You find some of the intelligentsia, they become snobs. They think they’re above everybody else. They’re not. More education doesn’t mean more common sense. These ideas they have about art are crazy. They’re the ones who call Disney a ‘cornball’  — There’s another one of Disney’s saccharine things.’

“Early in the game it bothered me. It doesn’t bother me now. But it affects my artists sometimes. They read reviews in the New Yorker or Time magazine. They get all upset. I tell them, ‘Oh, that’s the way they are.’

Doesn't work for critics

“I don’t care about critics. Critics take themselves too seriously. They think the only way to be noticed and to be the smart guy is to pick and find fault with things. It’s the public I’m making pictures for.”

He feels a lot less vulnerable in the company of men of substantial achievement than in the company of city-slicker reporters. He cherishes the tributes he has received from great men. “You’ve heard of Millikan?” he asks, with touching diffidence. “He was a wonderful person to talk to, a Nobel scientist at Cal Tech. He used to come over and have lunch with me. One day he called and said, ‘You know, what you’re doing over there is somewhat akin to something we’re doing.’ He brought over 12 top scientists, most of them Nobel Prize winners. They questioned me endlessly. It was so interesting.

“The Russian film director Hisenstein was here all the time too, while he was working at Paramount, and Supreme Court Justice Burton. He’s dead now. But I used to get letters from him all the time. He saw everything I’d ever made. So did Alex Woolleott . . . Henry Ford, too. He’d bring his engineers in to see ‘Bambi.’ He’d run it over and over."

Despite his vulnerability to attack and praise, Walt Disney is privately well aware that he is an amazingly gifted human being. And through the unpretentious and rambling discourse, one can detect a remote, well-concealed arrogance. It emerges in his estimate of his own work. He will not do temporary exhibits at fairs any more: “I’m interested in doing things of lasting value. It’s heartbreaking to tear them down after two years.” It emerges in his response to a question about his reputation as a “dictator” in his studios. “Benevolent!” he snaps. “You can’t run anything by committee. Someone has to say, ‘We'll go this way.’”

‘What is a genius?’

In some sense, he knows that he is a genius, and has given some thought to this category of human being: “Oh, once in a while I make a bluff at being a genius,” he drawls. “But what is a genius, anyway? Edison said it was 99 percent perspiration and one percent inspiration. That’s what I think, too.” Then the man who has worked incessantly all his life adds, with no awareness of contradiction, “The most important thing about me is that I have always lived for pleasure. I have gone on doing what I had fun doing as a boy. I am a pleasure-seeker.”

At the next table the stockholders, still laughing and chatting, rise. They have finished their lunch. And they leave the commissary, waving in response to a friendly grin from their gold mine.

Then the gold mine himself rises. “You see them?” he drawls softly. “This has been a good year. ‘Mary Poppins’ is a hit. Everybody’s happy . . . but not me. I’m on the spot. I have to keep trying to keep up to that same level. And the way to do it is not to worry, not to get tense, not to think, ‘I got to beat Mary Poppins, I got to beat Mary Poppins.’ . . . The way to do it is just to go off and get interested in some little thing, some little idea that interests me, some little idea that looks like fun.”

He leaves the commissary and walks past the building where men with movie cameras are coaxing a little dachshund to run off with a bone in a certain direction, past the building where men are installing complex electronic machinery inside marvelous robots that look like real people, to the building where men sit chuckling over their drawing boards as they bring the characters of Kipling’s “Jungle Stories” to life.

There, Walt Disney stops. He leans forward, the affable rural fog dissipated long ago, his eyes piercing and intense. “Listen,” he blurts out, “You want to understand? We’re living. There’s work to do. It never stops.”

Then the man who is described as “innocence in action,’ the vulnerable hayseed-genius who has spent his life in a fairy-tale world, returns to the noble art of pleasure-seeking. And he disappears into the building with the austere silver letters saying “Animation” on the door, and a picture of Mickey Mouse set, like a heraldic symbol, into the tile floor.