Walt Disney: The man behind the mouse
The Walt Disney Co., with 133,000 employees, sales in excess of $35 billion, and assets of $61 billion, started with a pencil, paper, cartoon and a young man’s imagination. Perhaps only that young man, Walter Elias Disney, could have foreseen such a colossal empire built on a mouse.
A complex man, Disney was imbued with an iron-like drive to succeed. He would push, prod and press those around him as he would himself. It wasn’t gentle, and it wasn’t always nice.
And if he appeared on screen as an amiable, soft-spoken avuncular man, his subordinates saw an entirely different person. He was “a tall, somber man who appeared to be under the lash of some private demon,” one said.
His father was a religious fundamentalist who meted out harsh discipline. Walt’s childhood resembled a sweatshop, rising at 3 a.m. to deliver newspapers or to help his father work the farm. Walt slept through school and finally dropped out in the ninth grade.
During World War I, Walt bolted the homestead and enlisted in the Red Cross as an ambulance driver.
After the war, Walt formed a small production company with another animator, Ub Iwerks. They developed animated advertising films. With limited success they moved to Hollywood where Walt’s older brother, Roy joined them. Walt and Roy had a tempestuous relationship. “Roy’s great ambition in life ... was to stay out of debt,” an employee noted. “And it was Walt’s method in life to keep Roy constantly in debt.”
Walt’s first successful cartoon character, Oswald the Rabbit, was a national hit. However, on a trip to New York, Walt learned that his distributor, Charles Mintz, claimed to own the rights to Oswald. Compounding matters, Mintz had hired Walt’s animators, many of them childhood friends of the artist.
There was one upside to the long train journey back to Hollywood: Mickey Mouse was conceived. Mickey came to his own during the Depression, his success due to an irrepressible personality and indomitable spirit. Between 1929 and 1932 a million kids joined the first Mickey Mouse Club.
In 1930, another distributor lured Iwerks from the Disney studio thinking Iwerks was the magic behind the mouse. Iwerks gave up his 20% share of Disney Studios for less than $3,000. He would rejoin Disney in 1940, but just as another paid animator.
By 1935, Disney Studios had 500 employees. But it wasn’t Mickey alone who made Walt so successful. Walt was an innovator, a man willing to take risks, many on untried concepts; he was the first cartoonist to employ music, sound and color. And he was the first to produce a full-length cartoon feature, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
Roy and Walt’s wife, Lillian, were not only skeptical they were terribly worried about the cost of the film. It ended up $1.5 million because Walt, micromanaged the production, at one point ordering his artists to add blush to Snow White’s face on over 10,000 cels because she was too pale.
“Snow White” was a resounding success. “Pinnochio,” “Fantasia” and Bambi followed in rapid succession.
Walt turned to life-action films, first with nature documentaries, then with “Treasure Island,” “Peter Pan,” “Mary Poppins” and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” And Walt’s big dream—Disneyland—opened in 1955.
Other studios were terrified of television; Walt embraced it, using television to sell his cartoons and movies. ABC TV provided the funds for developing Disneyland.
Walt died in 1966.
Photo: Library of Congress
©2008 by Daniel Alef, syndicated columnist and award-winning author of “Pale Truth,” an American historical novel. Mr. Alef can be reached at .
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