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Creative Explosion
 
CREATIVE EXPLOSION, 1933-1946
by Katherine and Richard Greene
 
Walt reads to Sharon and Diane
Walt reading to his daughters Sharon (left) and Diane
In 1933, after two miscarriages, Lillian gave birth to Walt's first daughter, Diane. Several years later, the couple adopted a second child, Sharon. Walt's role as father was one of the most important in his life. He treated his daughters with a loving patience, kindness, and tolerance that was different from the impatient drive for perfection with which many of his staffers were familiar. The two girls were shielded from publicity, and their father enjoyed their company immensely. Weekend jaunts to amusement parks or merry-go-rounds were common. Fortunately for the world of entertainment, Walt's mind was capable of operating on several levels at once. So even as he was taking pleasure in his daughters' play, he was thinking of ways to reinvent the way young people were entertained. This thinking led, in large part, to the development of Disneyland. Though this period of Walt's life included some of his greatest successes -- including Snow White -- it was also a turbulent time in many ways. His mother died, tragically, in 1938, asphyxiated by gas fumes in a house Walt and Roy had given their parents. World War II put a virtual halt to many of Walt's grand plans for advancing the work of his studio. And the studio strike in 1941 left Walt disillusioned about his staff; bitter feelings from this episode were to last for many years and influence his thinking about people and politics.
 
The period of Walt Disney's life beginning in 1933 and ending with the conclusion of World War II would contain some of the most difficult times in his life. His beloved mother would die, in a tragedy for which Walt would partially blame himself. The infamous 1941 strike against the studio would test his faith in humanity and forever alter the way he felt toward his employees. But the same period also featured some real high points -- two of which occurred outside the studio's walls. In 1933, after two miscarriages, Walt was happy that Lilly was pregnant again, but apprehensive about the results. In September he wrote his mother, who was then living in Portland, Oregon, "Lilly is partial to a baby girl. . . . Personally I don't care -- just as long as we do not get disappointed again." A few weeks before Diane's birth, Walt wrote his mother again, describing life around the house. "The spare bedroom where you and Dad stayed is all fixed up like a nursery. We have a bassinet and baby things all over the place. On the dresser, bed, and everywhere else are all kinds of pink and blue "tinies" that I don't know anything about. . . . I presume I'll get used to it and I suppose I'll be as bad a parent as anybody else. I've made a lot of vows that my kid won't be spoiled, but I doubt it -- it may turn out to be the most spoiled brat in the country."
 
On December 18, in the middle of a ceremony at the studio in which he was getting an award from "Parents" magazine, Walt got word that Lilly was about to deliver. He bolted from the ceremony and arrived at the hospital just in time. The last thing Lilly remembered, before going under the anesthesia, was Walt's nervous cough. When Diane was born, the family rejoiced. The studio went wild with the news. Marjorie, away at boarding school, remembered that all the occupants of her dormitory floor cheered. Only Sunnee, the family's chow dog, was not pleased. "I guess its heart was broken when I was born," recalled Diane. "It was their baby, before they had a baby. I could never get near it." The family then lived in a two-story English Tudor house in the Los Feliz district, not far from the studio. It had a magnificent pool and a grand nursery. Pictures of their first Christmas with a baby reveal a gigantic sparkling tree, surrounded by a sea of presents.
 
Proud parents
The proud parents with Diane, 1934
 
Walt proudly brought the pictures to the studio to show off his new little girl. Walt and Lilly wanted more children, but after Diane's birth Lilly suffered another miscarriage. So they decided to adopt. In January 1937, two-week-old Sharon Mae Disney came home. Walt and Lilly were delighted. Diane was a bit disappointed that this much-anticipated event culminated in the arrival of a very uninteresting pile of baby. Obviously, all their friends and family knew that Sharon was adopted. Even when Walt wrote to old friends, like his 7th-grade teacher, Daisy Beck, he didn't hesitate to detail Sharon's origins. But to the outside world, for many years, Walt and Lilly downplayed the adoption. Even the authorized biography of Walt Disney, written after Walt's death but with Lillian's support, skirts the issue. It seems odd, in retrospect, that they would have wanted to keep her origins veiled in such an unclear mist. But the decision may have been a smarter one than is immediately apparent. They loved Sharon, treated her the same as her older sister, and wanted to protect her from an outside world that would have drawn a distinction. Consider, for instance, a biography of Walt written by Leonard Mosley in 1985. In its index entry about Sharon, she is parenthetically described as "Walt's adopted daughter." It may have been precisely this kind of ridiculous differentiation that they sought to avoid. One time, when Walt was driving Diane to school, she asked him how babies were born. She may have been expecting a little data about the birds and the bees, but Walt answered, "There are two ways to have babies. You have them yourself or you adopt them. Your mother had you and we adopted Sharon."
 
Diane and Sharon
Diane and her baby sister, Sharon, in 1938
 
When Diane entered the school, she repeated her father's words to her friends. Later, her parents cautioned her that this was one piece of family information that was not to be shared. "I was surprised later that it was a secret," she said. "There was no difference between the two of us. I was had one way and Sharon the other way." When the girls were very young, the family employed a tall Swedish nurse named Ada who helped care for them. Though both parents doted on their children, it fell to Ada to change the diapers and take care of their meals. "This is the way things were done in the early and mid-30s," says Diane. "We were kept in our little place and didn't have an awful lot of access to our parents." By the time Diane was seven and Sharon was four, though, the family didn't need nurses anymore, "and that was wonderful," she recalled.
 
In their early years, the daughters were carefully kept out of the public eye. In 1932, aviator Charles Lindbergh's baby son had been kidnapped -- a crime that was trumpeted in newspaper headlines on a daily basis for many weeks, until the child was finally found to have been killed. This episode was more than just a newspaper headline to Walt and Lilly. Given their fame, they feared that their children might also be targets for kidnappers. As a result, they installed security measures in the house, like steel-reinforced screens on the nursery, and eschewed publicity that involved Diane and Sharon. This was an intense time for Walt at work (a sentence that holds true for all but a few periods for the rest of his life). Unaffected by the Depression, the studio had turned profitable. Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphonies were the kings of the cartoon roost, winning a slew of Academy Awards. By the time Sharon arrived, Walt was deep into preparations for "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."
 
Still, he and Roy stayed very close to their family. In 1936 they chipped in on a new refrigerator to give to their parents in Portland. Roy, by this time, was one of the most successful businessmen in Hollywood, running the increasingly complex financial side of the studio. With that in mind, a letter he wrote to his sister Ruth about the gift provides real insight into the modest, careful man he remained all his life. He wrote: "Last night, I bought a Cold Spot refrigerator for Mother and Dad for Christmas from Walt and me. . . . After looking over all the boxes on the market, I think this box from Sears is just as good as any of them, and it is considerably less money. It is the newest type with a lot of gadgets and conveniences that I know Mother will like. It is a good medium-sized box, and it has a five-year guarantee, which means something on a Sears item."

 
Elias and Flora Disney with Diane
Walt's parents, Flora and Elias, with their granddaughter Diane
In 1937, Flora and Elias agreed to join their sons in California. They had been running a rooming house in Portland, and although they enjoyed their independence, it was an activity that no longer made sense. For one thing, Flora had had a series of small strokes in the mid-30s, and Walt and Roy were worried about her health. What's more, the studio was doing well enough that Walt and Roy could finally afford to take care of their parents. They bought them a house and installed a housekeeper to help. Lilly and Edna helped them decorate the new home; Herbert and his family and Raymond were living in California then too. The family sometimes gathered on Sundays for barbecues at Roy's house. The transplanted midwesterners enjoyed hamburgers, corn on the cob, and a competitive game of croquet (though Walt felt that his brothers ganged up on him, and everyone suspected Ray of moving the ball when no one was looking).
 
Despite invitations to join the family firm, Herbert insisted that he enjoyed his life as a mail carrier. Even as Walt grew steadily more successful and famous, he maintained that he was envious of his older brother, a man who appeared to be genuinely contented with his lot in life. Ray, meanwhile, was an insurance salesman and a lifelong bachelor. He was known to Walt's staff as a slightly peculiar fellow who would collar them in the studio to try to sell them policies. Ray constantly smoked cigars and made his way about Los Angeles on an old-fashioned bicycle with a big basket in front.
 
Ruth remained in Portland with her husband, Theodore Beecher, for the rest of her life, but she stayed in touch with Walt through letters and calls. When times occasionally grew difficult for Ruth, Walt and Roy were always there with a check. Until she died in 1995, Ruth remained her brothers' No. 1 fan. As she wrote in 1988, "Walt was always looking after me, from childhood through adulthood, and, in turn, our dear older brother Roy was always looking after the two of us. They were both caring people, and generous and good to me in every possible way." In a series of letters between Ruth and Flora, covering the months after they moved into their new house, Flora describes the lovely life in California: the pleasant weather, a beautiful anniversary party her sons gave her, fun times with Diane, meals with Walt and Lilly or Roy and Edna, family get-togethers, her pride at the success of "Snow White" -- a steady sequence of happy times. Then, in November 1938, the letters from Flora ceased.
 
The gas heating in the house Walt and Roy had purchased for their parents was defective. Flora had complained to the boys about the problem. As Ruth recalled, "Mother had been saying, 'We better get this furnace fixed or else some morning we'll wake up and find ourselves dead.'" Walt had sent studio repairmen over to the house to correct the flaws -- but they were not fixed effectively. On the morning of November 26, 1938, gas fumes spread through the house, silently poisoning the elderly couple. As Flora washed up that morning, she grew woozy and then passed out. Elias discovered her body on the bathroom floor and tried to carry her into another room. But the fumes were too much for him, and he, too, fainted. Their housekeeper had been preparing oatmeal when she herself began to feel dizzy. She spilled the oatmeal, swept it up, and brought it outside to a little courtyard to empty it. Her head cleared, and realizing that something was wrong, she rushed inside to check on the couple and discovered them both on the floor. Together with the man next door they pulled Flora and Elias out of the house. Flora was dead. Elias was saved by the fact that he fainted so quickly; there was less of the deadly gas near the floor.
 
The terrible tragedy was compounded for Walt and Roy by the fact that it was a flaw in the house they had purchased for their parents that had killed Flora. Walt refused to talk about it to people at the studio and even to his daughters in years to come. Sometime later, Diane was exploring one of her father's drawers: "He always kept an interesting collection of matchboxes," she explained, "and soap boxes from hotels, which I used to find fascinating, and I found the newspaper with the headline about her death in it."
 
Though Walt kept his emotions bottled up, this did not seem to curtail his ability to enjoy his children. As always, he was obsessively involved in every detail of his work, but both Diane and Sharon recalled him as a fun-loving father, fully involved in their lives. He rarely missed birthdays, school plays, or other important events. The demanding perfectionism he exhibited at the studio was dropped at home. He admired Diane's drawings, saved them, and built her sense of confidence. When Sharon was in a school play, "no matter how bad I was, he'd say, 'You did a great job, kid,'" she recalled. He drove them to school every day, enjoying their company on the way there, and the time alone to think on the way back. When Diane was five or six, she recalled, "He told me the whole story of the Night on Bald Mountain sequence from "Fantasia" on the way to school one morning. The way he told it, there were the little villagers and the mountain where Satan comes out. I went into school, my eyes wide open, and got some kids in the corner and told the whole story right over again."
 
Even though Walt arrived home from the studio after seven in the evening, dinner with the family was a ritual, even when the children were young. Often dinners were full of conversation about their school or his work. Sometimes, if Walt had gone through a difficult day, he'd be impatient with his daughters, particularly if the girls monopolized the table with childish bickering. "I used to think, at the time, that he was being very unreasonable not to listen to me," Diane once observed. "But after I had children of my own, I thought he was entirely within his rights." Outings with Daddy were often simple. On weekends he'd take one or both of his daughters to the studio, where they hung around and played while he worked. Sharon recalled being fascinated by the zoetrope in his office. Weekend afternoons, they'd also often visit little amusement parks, the zoo, or the merry-go-round in Griffith Park. "I remember, you'd lean way out on your horse and you'd feel like a Valkyrie or something," said Diane. "I remember one time I kept getting the brass ring, and I found out later he had bribed the kid to keep putting it in as I came around." On those special days with his daughters, Diane recalled "When he was with us . . . he was with us! He wasn't hurrying us on. He was just there and enjoying us. Enjoying watching us in what we were doing and watching us enjoy things."
 
That was certainly true. Equally true was that Walt's brain could work on several levels at once. While his attention was focused on his daughters he was also thinking about the way they were playing. In what has become a famous comment about the origins of Disneyland, Walt recalled, "While they were on the merry-go-round riding 40 times or something, you know? I'd be sitting there trying to figure what you could do. And when I built the studio over there I thought, well, gee, we ought to have really a three-dimension thing that people could actually come and visit." Sometimes, unexpectedly, perfectly normal days turned into certifiable adventures. "One time, when we had Diane in the car, a blimp came over," recalled Lilly. "It landed nearby and Walt wanted to go over and look at it. So, we went over and looked at it. And the guy wanted to know if we wanted to take a ride in it. Walt said, 'Sure.' Diane said, 'I will, too.' I thought, 'Well, my God. If they're going, I'm going too. If it goes down, I might as well go with them.' I hated it. There was no place to hang on."
 
That wasn't the only time Walt's desire for experiences left Lilly's teeth chattering. "He took us to a carnival," she recalled. "And there was an elephant there. He was taking pictures and they had that elephant raise its foot up. And Diane was under it. And he took a picture. I nearly died." In an effort to provide a real retreat from their day-to-day life, Walt rented, then purchased, a house in Palm Springs, California, in a resort community called Smoke Tree Ranch. At Easter, Christmas, and Thanksgiving the Disneys would take the four-hour drive and get away from everything. Walt got into the experience thoroughly, often wearing cowboy hats and boots as he taught his daughters how to ride horses. "He'd take me out for hours and devote so much time to getting me over my fear of horses," said Diane. "It seems to me that for hours and hours and hours he would play with us. Whirling us around by our heels or playing with us in the pool. He never seemed to tire of it. And even when we were a pretty good size, he used to carry us around on his shoulders." In their home, however, Walt was clearly in Lilly's domain. He deferred to her judgment on most domestic matters. Neither daughter remembered many serious arguments conducted in front of them. That was why the incident with the goat was particularly memorable. Diane: "T. Hee [one of Walt's artists] brought a goat to the Fourth of July party at the studio. I fell in love. And he said it was for us. When the picnic was over, he put her in our car and we started home. All of a sudden, I'm in the front seat and mother is in the backseat and I'm realizing now she must have been in the backseat because she was mad at Dad for bringing the goat home. All of a sudden, Mother started to cry. And she said, 'I don't want that goat!' So Dad took us home, took the goat back to T. Hee, and spent that night in the studio."
 
Walkt with Diane and Sharon
Walt and his daughters, Diane and Sharon, by their playhouse
 
Although Elias Disney had been a church deacon and Walt was actually named for the preacher of the St. Paul Congregational Church in Chicago, Walter Parr, he was not a church-going man. "He was a very religious man," said Sharon, "but he did not believe you had to go to church to be religious. . . . He respected every religion. There wasn't any that he ever criticized. He wouldn't even tell religious jokes." In January 1943, Walt wrote a letter to Ruth about Diane that nicely reflected his sentiments in this regard: "Little Diane is going to a Catholic school now, which she seems to enjoy very much. She is quite taken with the rituals and is studying catechism. She hasn't quite made up her mind yet whether she wants to be a Catholic or Protestant. I think she is intelligent enough to know what she wants to do, and I feel that whatever her decision may be is her privilege. I have explained to her that Catholics are people just like us and basically there is no difference. In giving her this broad view I believe it will tend to create a spirit of tolerance within her." Given the nature of this comment to his sister, it comes as something of a surprise to read some profiles of Walt that indicate he was anti-Semitic. Books like biographies by Leonard Mosely and Marc Eliot accept this notion as absolute truth. Yet in scores of interviews with the men, women, and family members who knew Walt best, not one recalled a single incident in which this alleged anti-Semitism reared its head. Jewish employees like Joe Grant and the Sherman Brothers all violently defend Walt's memory. Meyer Minda, a Jewish neighbor of Walt's in Kansas City, didn't remember any evidence whatsoever of anti-Jewish feelings in Walt or the Disney family. Even when Sharon dated a young Jewish man, her parents didn't voice any objections.
 
How do myths like this begin? Did Walt make offhand comments about the Jewish union members during the painful strike of 1940? Likely. Might some of his executives have harbored anti-Semitic feelings that were wrongly ascribed to Walt himself? Very possibly. Did some of his early cartoons -- notably "Three Little Pigs" -- contain the kind of unpleasant Jewish caricatures that were common to many cartoon studios at the time? Certainly. Did a few Jewish men who had difficult relationships with Walt speculate that the reason was because they were Jewish? Also yes. Does all this add up to an anti-Semite? Not by any means. In fact, the authors of this essay are Jewish, and from the outset of a decade of research into Walt Disney have looked carefully through the record -- letters, memos, conversations with reliable sources -- for any evidence that Walt may have harbored a dislike of Jews. None was found. Furthermore, in 1955 the B'Nai B'rith chapter in Beverly Hills cited him as their man of the year. Hardly an award likely to be presented to an anti-Semite.
 
Yet another area of Walt's life subject to much misguided analysis was his political orientation. The truth is that Walt's politics don't require much analysis at all. They were very simple. He believed in America. He believed in Abraham Lincoln. He believed that if people were given the right information, and the freedom to utilize it, they would behave well. Up until the 1940 election, he voted for Democratic candidates. From that time on, he tended to vote Republican.
 
Walt's father, of course, had socialist leanings himself, concepts that Walt came to disbelieve. "I grew up believing a lot of that and everything, but . . . I found that you had to be very careful giving people anything. I feel people must earn it. They must earn it." He was vigorously anti-communist. In the 1990s, that statement can be made to sound as though Walt carried a preposterous vision of a Red menace. But in the years following the Second World War, as Russia acquired satellites throughout Eastern Europe -- and on to the years when Khrushchev was threatening to bury the West in the wake of communist industrialization -- it was a perfectly justifiable point of view.
 
Of course, the great formative experience in Walt's political life was the strike against the studio in 1941. Walt became firmly convinced that many of the strike's leaders were communist-sympathizing men and women whose interest was more in advancing a political ideology than genuinely helping the workers. Is that true? The passage of time has made it difficult to know. As it pertains to Walt, however, it is clear that this belief stiffened his resolve to make sure that communists did not gain a foothold in Hollywood or elsewhere in the United States. With that in mind, he took some actions that in retrospect leave him vulnerable to criticism. In 1944, for example, Walt helped to found a conservative organization called the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideas. One of the goals of the organization was to fight "Communists, radicals, and crackpots."
 
When Walt was called upon to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee -- the congressional committee that was then attempting to ferret out communists in America, and in the process destroyed the careers of a great many innocent men and women -- he did so willingly. The vast majority of his testimony dealt with his feelings that the strike had been manipulated by Communists. Walt testified that the Communists "smeared me. Nobody came near to find out what the true facts of the thing were. And I went through the same smear in South America, through some Commie periodicals in South America and generally throughout the world -- all of the Commie groups began smear campaigns against my pictures. . . . They distorted everything, they lied; there was no way you could ever counteract anything that they did; they formed picket lines in front of the theaters and, well, they called my plant a sweatshop, and that is not true, and anybody in Hollywood would prove it otherwise." When he was asked about his personal opinion of the Communist Party, Walt replied, "Well, I don't believe it is a political party. I believe it is an un-American thing. The thing that I resent the most is that they are able to get into these unions, take them over, and represent to the world that a group of people that are in my plant, that I know are good, 100-percent Americans, are trapped by this group and they are represented to the world as support[ing] all of those ideologies, and it is not so, and I feel that they really ought to be smoked out and shown up for what they are, so that all of the good, free causes in this country, all the liberalisms that really are American, can go out without the taint of communism."
 
That last line reflected Walt's self-image. As Diane recalled: "He said, 'They say I'm a conservative, but I consider myself a true liberal.'" Claims that Walt was so anti-communist that he became some kind of a spy for the FBI just don't hold up. A thorough review of the FBI file on Walt, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, reveals absolutely nothing that would lead one to such a conclusion -- unless one pushes the material there to a ridiculous extreme. Much of the file deals with efforts on the part of the FBI to make sure Walt didn't make fun of agents in films like "That Darn Cat!" Some of the rest, believe it or not, deals with questions about whether Walt was, in fact, a communist himself (in part because he was apparently involved in a tribute to a deceased cartoonist sponsored by an organization connected to the Communist Party).
 
Did Walt have no official contact with the FBI? The file does mention that he was a Special Agent in Charge contact. But FBI representatives today explain that that designation was the kind of thing awarded to anyone in a community who might be of use to the bureau; the owner of a car dealership, who might make arrangements for vehicles; or the owner of a restaurant where FBI parties could be held. In fact, the document that proclaims Walt was a Special Agent in Charge contact states, "Mr. Disney has volunteered representatives of this office complete access to the facilities of Disneyland for use in connection with official matters and for recreational purposes." Author Marc Eliot -- the foremost advocate of Walt as spy -- begins his case with the notion that Walt and J. Edgar Hoover were close associates through the years. Eliot says, "In July 1936, Hoover sent the now-famous Disney a letter, one of many attempts the Bureau had made as part of an ongoing campaign to recruit him. The last paragraph of the letter (the rest remains classified by the FBI) reads as follows: "I am indeed pleased that we can be of service to you in affording you a means of absolute identity throughout your lifetime." Sounds nefarious enough, in the context in which Eliot places it. But the fact is that there are no other documents in the file indicating any kind of campaign to recruit him. What's more, the "classified portion" (which Eliot alludes to in such a way that readers might believe it contains secrets shared between the two men) is actually a word or two at the top of the page.
 
What is true is that ultimately Walt didn't concern himself much about the political leanings of the people he worked with. In sharp contrast to some of the myths that have grown up around Walt, he really didn't care what men or women believed -- as long as they did their job right. Herb Ryman was one of Walt's favorite artists, and a friend outside the studio as well. As Ryman recalled, "Everyone knew that Walt was a committed anti-communist. Very patriotic and all that. So someone thought they would do damage to one of the writers on "20,000 Leagues under the Sea" by telling Walt that he was a real Red. They thought that Walt would fire him or investigate him or kick him off the picture. Well, Walt's answer was, 'I'm glad to know that. It's a relief that he's a communist. I thought he was an alcoholic.'"
 
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