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Page 11 of 28 |
Cartoon
Menagerie: |
At the Disney House |
Roy and Edna, caught in a relaxed moment
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The studio was churning out Alice cartoons at
an incredible clip. Walt's relationship with his distributor,
Charlie Mintz, was fraught with tension, and his own perfectionist
tendencies were starting to evidence themselves. He pushed his
employees relentlessly. Staffers were required to re-animate
sequences, once, twice, five times, until they were acceptable
to Walt. Of course, Walt's drive for the best applied to himself
more than anyone else. As a result, he fired himself as an artist
in order to concentrate on his greater skills as a story man
and director. "I was never happy with anything I ever did as
an artist," he later said.
Walt and Roy decided to change the name of the business from
Disney Brothers to Walt Disney Productions. One of their
employees, Hugh Harman, recalled some harsh conversations between
Walt and Roy when this idea was raised. But Disney archivist
Dave Smith says that Roy claimed the idea for the name change
as his own! In fact, given Roy's unassuming nature -- and his
dedication to his brother -- it does seem consistent that
he would forgo glory for the good of the company. |
As the studio did better, Walt and Lilly moved
to a larger apartment, and then, in the fall of 1927, Walt and
Roy bought identical prefabricated houses on adjoining lots.
At about this time, Walt brought the first of a series of dogs
into the Disney household. It wasn't easy -- at first. Walt:
"My wife would have nothing to do with dogs. She said, 'They
get hair on everything. They're dirty. And there's dog odors.'
So I got a book and read that chows did not . . . shed hair,"
nor have fleas and bad odor. The next day Walt went out and
bought a chow and kept it under wraps until Christmas. "I got
a big hat box, put the little puppy in it, and when they were
all busy I put it over by the tree. Then [my niece] brought
this big hat box over and put it in front of my wife. And my
wife said, 'Oh Walt, you didn't . . . ' and from that time on,
that was her baby. I've never seen anybody so crazy over an
animal."
With the larger quarters the new house afforded, there began
something of a Disney tradition that was to last for some time:
Lilly's relatives lived with them. At first, it was her mother.
Family members recalled him treating his mother-in-law "like
a queen." On Sundays he would take Lilly, her mother, and her
niece Marjorie out for rides in the car and stop at an ice cream
parlor on the way home. When Lilly's sister Hazel got divorced,
she and daughter Marjorie moved in and stayed for about five
years. When they moved out, Lilly's sister Grace took up residence. |
Lilly, Walt and Sunnee, their
chow dog
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Walt's niece Marjorie, who together with her mother
Hazel moved in with Walt and Lilly after
Hazel had a divorce
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Walt practiced being a father with Marjorie.
She remembers her uncle as a forgiving, loving, gentle man.
One time, after she had lived in Walt's house for several years,
Marjorie grew annoyed at Walt -- in typical adolescent fashion.
"I said, 'Well, you're a self-made man and you worship your
maker!'" she recalls. "I don't know where I'd heard this . .
. But I'd read it someplace and it seemed appropriate at the
time. I turned and went out of the room, and the worst thing
was that by the time I got to the bottom of those stairs I heard
him laughing. And that just killed me. That just undid the whole
thing. The next weekend, we also had an altercation of
some kind and he really lit into me." The following week,
Walt picked her up from school. "So I went out and he
said he had some film to deliver, which was made up. And we
went down and went to a particular ice cream parlor down there
that was very popular at that time, and we had hot fudge sundaes.
Nothing was said about my being an obnoxious brat or anything
like that. . . . He just drove me back up to school, and I kissed
him and went in, riding on high. I knew he'd forgiven me. And
he knew I'd forgiven him. That was it." |
In early 1928, Walt suffered the now-famous betrayal
of Charlie Mintz and his staff, in which Mintz stole away Walt's
then-popular cartoon character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, as well
as most of Walt's employees. It's hard to know which caused
Walt greater pain -- the loss of the character, upon which his
studio's success rested, or the loss of his staff, whom he regarded
as friends -- many of whom he had brought with him from the
early days in Kansas City. However, it's unfair to regard
these employees as renegades or turncoats. Though Walt was their
boss, he was still a very young and relatively unproven man.
His artists may not have even understood the dramatic nature
of his contributions to their work. At heart, they were just
people who wanted to make a better living for their families,
wherever it was offered.
But Walt couldn't understand this outlook.
To him, the work was everything; and he knew that his studio
was going to do the best work anyplace. Walt bounced back (sort
of like the indestructible characters in his cartoons) with
Mickey Mouse. Luckily, Ub Iwerks had stayed loyal to Walt when
the rest of his staff left him for Mintz. With Ub's help, he
quickly had a new line of cartoons to sell. When distributors
weren't interested in his new character, Walt took a giant leap
of faith and introduced sound into his cartoons. |
Charles Mintz, surrounded
by his employees
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