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Walt Disney wears the Hollywood uniform: lounge coats, open-throated shirts, fancy sweaters. His thick, dark brown hair, which dips to a widow's peak slightly less emphatic than Robert Taylor's, has a long top lock which Disney wraps around his finger while he talks. At a loss for words, he often resorts to pantomime. He works until six or seven o'clock every night, in busy times works round the clock. He drives his Packard roadster home to dinner, plays with his baby daughters, Diane Marie and Sharon Mae, and goes to bed. Hollywood hotspots seldom see him. Weekends he plays poor but occasionally inspired polo at the Riviera Country Club, where he has a one-goal rating. That he has any rating at all he attributes to the fact that he pays a pretty big club bill.
He and his wife and his brother and his brother's wife own the business—the nepotist corporate structure which is another Hollywood characteristic. But neither the corporate structure, nor Mr. Disney's indefatigability, nor the 75 animators, nor the $75,000 camera, nor the $800,000 plant, nor the $2,000,000 gross explain the great Quality X in Walt Disney, Inc., the thing which in the past decade has sent thousands of feet of wonderful little animals and fairybook people dancing out into the world—people and animals whose appeal is so profound and so pervasive that they are loved by literally everybody everywhere.
Other animated cartoons have heroes as bold as the Prince, as resourceful as Mickey or the sensible little pig. Other animated cartoons present portents cataclysmic as the Wolf's house-flattening puffing, physical violence as severe as the heroic bartering Donald Duck undergoes in Modern Inventions. But whereas Popeye's inevitable fight at the finale is almost inevitably cruel, grotesque and ugly, the worst beating ever handed out in a Disney film—the "pacifying" the big wolf gets in Three Little Wolves—somehow manages to be as charming, as delightfully inventive, as it is deserved.
Perhaps no one is less analytical, or cares less, about Walt Disney's Quality X than Walt Disney himself. He was actually puzzled when pundits discovered social significance in Three Little Pigs. "It was just another story to us," he says, "and we were in there gagging it just like any other picture. After we heard all the shouting, we sat back and tried to analyze what made it good. Then we tried consciously to put some social meaning into The Golden Touch. It ended with King Midas surrounded by his gold, hollering for a hamburger. It was a tremendous flop."
Nevertheless, when no less a savant than Aldous Huxley went to Hollywood, he tried to find out just what made Walt Disney do the kind of work he does. Mr. Disney was not much help. "Hell, Doc," he said, knitting his eloquent brows, "I don't know. We just try to make a good picture. And then the professors come along and tell us what we do."