ART BABBITT married Dina Gottliebova in 1948.1 He worked at a new animation studio called United Productions of America, or UPA, founded by ex-Disney strikers. There he animated on the first Mr. Magoo short, and it is rumored that the character’s irascibility was at least partially based on Babbitt. He went on to work on commercials and co-ran a small studio called Quartet Films, winning a slew of awards for his commercials and industrial films.2
He and Dina had two daughters, Michele in 1951 and Karin in 1954.
In 1959 Babbitt joined the faculty of University of Southern California, the first person to devise a curriculum and teach a course on animation. In 1960 a student named Carl Bell had moved from Ontario to take Babbitt’s class.3 He sent notes to his friend Richard Williams, who had an obsession with golden-age animation.4
Babbitt and Dina divorced in 1962. He was the co-owner of his own small production company, but Babbitt grew unhappy “having to direct and animate nights and week-ends in order to keep up with assignments.”5 In 1964 he started a long tenure at Hanna-Barbera directing animated commercials. Some days, he got lost in his own regrets. Sitting on the couch with his daughter Michele, he sighed, “Don’t be a hero. It’s not worth it.”6
In 1966 he remarried a final time, to a professional dancer and actress named Barbara Perry. He told her seven-year-old daughter, Laurel, to address him as Bill Tytla had—as “Bones.” The marriage evinced great mutual support and deep love.
By 1973 Richard Williams was running his own successful animation studio in London when he first made contact with Babbitt by phone and invited him over to teach. During the summers of 1973 and 1974, Babbitt gave daily lectures to the artists at the London studio. Williams gladly covered the expense.7 The lectures were transcribed, photocopied, and passed hand-to-hand across the industry. Animator Tom Sito wrote, “I don’t know an animator from the ’70s who doesn’t have a copy somewhere.”8
In New York City in 1975, a young animator named John Canemaker was attempting a side career as an animation historian. He met Babbitt for an interview in a hotel, marking the first time he encountered an animation legend. Canemaker said, “Your notes from Dick Williams’s seminars are being passed about here as if they were Galileo’s.”
Ever the victimized truth-teller, Babbitt replied, “Just so [long as] they won’t burn me at the stake.”9
As an elder, Babbitt gladly stepped into the role of living legend, meeting with young journalists and historians, telling stories of his work at the Disney studio. It was a mission of sorts. He did not want his name to be erased from Disney history, and he feared that the company had attempted to do just that.
Bitterness bred bitterness. Veterans of the Disney strike called Walt an anti-Semite. This made Babbitt’s martyrdom more personal and gave them justification to antagonize Walt Disney. It became a battle cry of the ex-strikers who wanted to punish Walt the way they felt they had been punished. However, the accusation had only emerged in the fury and aftermath of the labor dispute; at no time beforehand is it remotely alluded to. (Actually, Walt had a number of Jewish or half-Jewish people in his close orbit, like Lessing, Joe Rosenberg, Joe Grant, and Marc Davis.) The fact that Babbitt and some strikers were Jewish is more a statement about the propensity of Jewish activism in the twentieth century.
Babbitt periodically returned to the Richard Williams studio until the mid-1980s. In 1986, the studio was working on a big new project called Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and it would revive a global love for classic Hollywood cartoons. Many animators who had studied under Babbitt were now working on this film—including Richard Williams himself. Williams also sent animators to work directly with the seventy-eight-year-old Babbitt. He had become a catalyst for the animation renaissance of the late 1980s.10
WILLIE BIOFF stood trial with George Browne on October 8, 1941.11 On November 6 the jury found Bioff and Browne guilty of extorting $1.2 million from movie producers. Browne was sentenced to eight years in prison; Bioff was sentenced to ten.12 In 1942 Bioff testified to federal investigators about his involvement with Frank Nitti and the Capone gang. This led to a massive indictment of Chicago mobsters in 1943, the death of Frank Nitti, and the fall of the Capone crime syndicate.
Bioff was released in 1944 under the Witness Protection Program and moved with his wife to Phoenix. He didn’t keep as low a profile as he should have, and he frequented casinos. On the morning of November 4, 1955, Bioff turned on his truck’s ignition. The vehicle exploded in his driveway, throwing Bioff’s body twenty-five feet into the air and scattering car wreckage over a hundred-foot radius. The mob had caught up with him. He was fifty-five.13
WALT DISNEY never reinstated the studio art school, though the library of art books remained.
For a group of nine top animators who did not strike, Walt borrowed Franklin Roosevelt’s term for the Supreme Court justices. Les Clark, Marc Davis, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Eric Larson, John Lounsberry, Ollie Johnston, Frank Thomas, and Woolie Reitherman became known as Disney’s Nine Old Men. The designation became a badge of honor, and their status remained forever secure, even legendary.
Fred Moore battled with alcoholism, and Walt fired and rehired him. Moore died in an auto accident (as a passenger) in 1952 at age forty-one.
Once Norm Ferguson segued into supervision, he butted heads with Walt for years and finally left Walt Disney Productions around 1953. He died in 1957.
Dick Lundy left the Disney studio in 1943 and remained in Hollywood as an animator and director. He died in 1990 at age eighty-two.
Gunther Lessing remained the company vice president and legal counsel until his retirement in 1964. He died in 1965 at age seventy-nine.
Bill Tytla had become persona non grata at Walt Disney Productions and left in 1943, returning to New York. He frequently reapplied to Disney but was consistently rejected. “He was the most displaced person I ever met,” said a fellow animator.14 Tytla passed away in 1968 at age sixty-four.
Walt Disney would never again be the experimental filmmaker that he was before the strike. The period of explosive growth from 1933 to 1942, bookended with Three Little Pigs and Bambi, became known as the golden age of Disney animation. In 1966 Walt grew ill and checked into St. Joseph’s Hospital, built atop the eucalyptus grove that the strikers had occupied years before. Walt Disney passed away the morning of December 15, 1966, from lung cancer. He was sixty-five years old.
The Walt Disney Company remains a union shop to this day.