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CREATIVE EXPLOSION, 1933-1946
by Katherine and Richard Greene
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Walt reading to his daughters Sharon (left) and Diane
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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.
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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."
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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.
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The proud parents with Diane, 1934
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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."
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Diane and her baby sister, Sharon, in 1938
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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.
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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."
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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."
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Walt's parents, Flora and Elias, with their granddaughter Diane
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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."
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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."
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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."
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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."
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Walt and his daughters, Diane and Sharon, by their playhouse
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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."
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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).
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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.
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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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