Read Online The Animated Man by Michael Barrier - Free Book Online

visits as “a little sneaky,” remembered when Disney—finding that Zamora had done no work on a scene—trapped him into bringing him a stack of blank paper with only a few drawings on top. Disney peeled off those drawings, revealing the blank paper beneath. 68
    There was, in short, no smooth upward trajectory at the Disney studio, but more of a stuttering pace.
    Sometime in 1931, Disney said twenty-five years later, “I had a hell of a breakdown. I went all to pieces. . . . As we got going along I kept expecting more from the artists and when they let me down and things, I got worried. Just pound, pound, pound. Costs were going up and I was always way over what they figured the pictures would bring in. . . . I just got very irritable. I got to a point that I couldn’t talk on the telephone. I’d begin to cry.” He spoke again of weeping in a 1963 interview: “Things had gone wrong. I hadtrouble with a picture. I worried and worried. I had a nervous breakdown. I kept crying.” 69
    Disney left with Lillian on a cross-country trip in October 1931 after he “finished a picture that I was so sick of. Oh gosh, I was so sick of it. So many things went wrong with it. And I went away ‘til that picture turned over”—completed its initial theatrical runs, presumably. On that trip, Disney said, “I was a new man. . . . I had the time of my life. It was actually the first time we had ever been away on anything like that since we were married.”
    When he returned, “I started going to the athletic club. I went down religiously two or three times a week. I started in with just general calisthenics. Then I tried wrestling, but I didn’t like it because I’d get down there in somebody’s crotch and sweaty old sweatshirt.” Disney moved on to boxing and then to golf and horseback riding. He showed up at the golf course at 5:30 in the morning, played five holes, then cut across the course to the eighteenth hole. “Eat breakfast fit for a harvest hand and then go up to the studio just full of pep,” he said. Starting in 1932, Disney played what Les Clark called “sandlot polo” with Clark, Norm Ferguson, Dick Lundy, Gunther Lessing, and Jack Cutting of the animation staff; they rode horses rented from a riding stable. 70
    There is no way to know which cartoon Disney found so distracting, and it is not even clear how long he was gone on his restorative vacation—probably four to six weeks, but in any case not so long that his absence troubled the people who worked for him. None of his employees at the time ever cited his “breakdown” as a major event in the studio’s life. As closely as some of them observed their boss and tried to anticipate his wishes, his “breakdown” seems to have made no impression on them. Disney’s emphasis on his tears smacks of the self-dramatization—the obverse of “some of his ebullience”—that he sometimes lapsed into, but there is no reason to doubt that he was truly distressed.
    Roy was aware that something was wrong. He wrote to their parents on December 30, 1931, that “Walt is feeling much better than he was before his vacation, but is not back to his old self.” Roy wrote of a physical cause of Walt’s “trouble,” however—“some sort of parasitic growth in his intestines of a vegetable nature”—even though he added, “Things are going much better at the studio so it is much less of a nerve-wracking job for him than before.” 71 Whatever the nature of that “parasitic growth,” it seems not have made any lasting impact on Walt’s health.
    There is little direct evidence of Disney’s thinking in the early 1930s—nothing much in the way of memoranda, transcripts, or letters that speak tohis state of mind—but this was the time when his role in the studio changed