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 ecember
5th is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Walt Disney, a great
American with whom I had a special bond. My late father designed
the air-conditioning system at the Disney Studios in Burbank in
the late 1930s and early 40s, and I was born out there a few months
before Pearl Harbor, just as the air-conditioning job was finished.
We moved east shortly afterwards, and then returned for a year when
I was seven, and I later went to Pomona College while Disneyland
was being built. According to family legend, my mother was the model
for Snow White, and we have a picture of her that does indeed look
just like the movie character (although my mother could not carry
a tune, and never sang "Some Day My Prince Will Come,"
maybe because hers already had).
All through
my childhood we were an adjunct of the Disney universe. We got wonderful
Christmas cards, with sneak previews of forthcoming movies. My bedroom
was stocked with Disney creatures, from Mickey and Donald to Pooh
and Eeyore. When we went back to southern California, we visited
Walt and Roy, and I got to see Walt's "secret room," which
you got to by pushing a button under his desk and then a wall panel
opened and revealed a playroom full of all kinds of toys and gadgets.
And his house was really a playhouse; there was a model train that
ran from the kitchen out to the backyard, and on a good day the
train would come puffing out with hamburgers and cokes. Such fun.
Then in college
I had pretty much free run of Disneyland, and got to go on all the
rides even before the park was entirely open. So I'm a Disney friend
and a Disney fan, although the days of those privileges are long
gone. But not my appreciation of Walt's genius. (Nor my refusal
to believe the "scoops" according to which he was a vicious
anti-Semite. He was certainly good to my Jewish family.) He was
a great American with our passion for happiness (a truly revolutionary
idea), and an insistence that any dream could be fulfilled if you
just worked hard enough.
Most of all,
he and Roy — who really ran the place — insisted on high
quality. When they made
Fantasia, they hired Leopold Stokowski to conduct his
orchestra. And there were other cartoons, rarely seen nowadays,
built around fine music (
Make Mine Music for example). Indeed, in a typical Disney
cartoon, the soundtrack came first, and then the artists drew the
celluloids so they fit, not the other way around.
My father used
to tell the story of the day when one of the early television entrepreneurs
came to the Disneys with a merger proposal. It looked like big money,
and, as more modern financial wizards would say, a perfect fit:
The TV network had the medium, and Disney had the product. Walt
turned it down, because he instantly saw that television, with its
voracious appetite for material to fill up its tiny screen for 24
hours a day, would corrupt the quality of his product. He believed
that a great movie was always produced according to its own internal
deadlines, not those of a broadcaster, and if he accepted the television
deal, his movies would get worse.
I think that
story, more than any other I know, shows us the source of Disney's
consistently high quality, and holds a lesson for us all. No one,
not even the greatest genius, can hope to produce masterpieces on
demand. Even the best columnists run out of things to say from time
to time, and we would all be better off if they were permitted to
be quiet on those occasions. This insight, or something akin to
it, underlies the good intentions that created academic tenure,
and I suspect that the great sponsors of the arts, from the Medicis
to the Rothschilds, understand it well, which is why they kept artists
afloat during the bad years.
But it's rare
indeed to find someone who sticks by this principle when offered
enormous rewards to join the trend and cash in. Walt Disney stayed
out and stayed great. Would that his successors had done as well.
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