IN 1956 THE ANIMALS themselves were, not surprisingly, showing signs of even greater wear and tear, and a representative from the New York Natural History Museum, no less, was called in by Elliott Graham, to discuss what action to take:
Wednesday June 20th 1956
Fair
This fool taxidermist, or whatever he is, will charge $150.00 to repair Eeyore. God knows what he’ll want for the others. It‘s all a great shame. We paid $2,500 for these animals.
In 1961 Stephen Slesinger’s widow Shirley sold the merchandising rights which A.A. Milne had passed to her husband in 1930. The new owner was Walt Disney.
That same year in June, Daphne Milne perhaps naively, added complication to complication by licensing the motion picture rights also to Disney. Her decision was to give New York’s now rather bedraggled bear earning-potential beyond imagination. It was also to sow the seeds for what was to become America’s longest-running and most bitter legal battle, the one between the Milne Trustees, the Slesingers and Disney.
At the time Daphne was confident that she was only doing something with which her husband would have been happy. Always a fan of Disney’s work, he had commented that he would be honoured should he ever want to animate the Pooh stories.
Their admiration was mutual, for Disney’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller, has since explained that when she was a little girl her father often read her the stories at bed-time. It was Christopher Robin’s toy – the teddy bear – that had originally caught his imagination and inspired the films that were to follow. The first film, Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (without the hyphens) was Disney’s translation of the stories of Winnie-the-Pooh and Some Bees (with hyphens) and Pooh Goes Visiting. Both were taken from the book Winnie-the-Pooh. The film was released on 4 February 1966. Daphne watched it on television and said she was relieved ‘nothing jarred’. The British press, however, were less benign. The Daily Mail headlined ‘Massacre in 100 Aker Wood’.
On the other hand, A.A. Milne’s niece, Angela, wrote in Punch, ‘It makes me furious the way people are grumbling over Walt Disney’s version of Winnie-the-Pooh as though they had gone and ruined a masterpiece.’ She went on to tell how even the gopher’s appearance in the film, which upset so many purists, WAS real after all! It appears that the Mid Sussex Herald had reported in 1925 that a gopher had actually escaped from a crate in Brighton and how Moon was sure at the time that he had found one in the garden at Cotchford Farm.
Walt Disney brought together the many talents of the studio to develop and create a new, if undeniably controversial, masterpiece. His inspiration and supervision made the film a classic: from concept-art, to the storyboard, to the animation, music and voices.
The original plan was to develop Pooh as a feature-length animated film but Disney decided to break the film into short featurettes. The Pooh stories were still not as widely familiar to Americans as they were to the British and Walt Disney believed that Pooh would be much more popular if he was allowed to build up an American following. He under-estimated their impact.
In December that year, Walt Disney died from cancer but the empire he had masterminded went on from strength to strength – with just a little help from Pooh!
The fight for the rights in this furry property ever since has been a nightmare of Hollywood screen proportions.
Journalist David Rowan, bringing the story of the ongoing saga up to date in The Times Magazine of November 2003, likened the fight between an old school family (the Slesingers and the Milnes) and the unstoppable Disney, to a fight between Eeyore and Tigger.
In Los Angeles, Case No BCO22365 became the longest-running, most complex lawsuit in the history of Tinseltown’s legal minefield. For over seventeen years some of the most high-profile, expensive show-business lawyers in California locked horns eagerly for a curious prize – a tussle that involved allegations of industrial espionage on one hand and the destruction of key documents on the other.
That prize? Their share in the royalties generated by the small, now elderly British teddy bear.
The Disney Corporation had turned Winnie the Pooh into the annual five billion pounds-plus juggernaut he is today, but the descendants and Trustees of A.A. Milne and Stephen Slesinger did battle first with them and eventually with each other over who owed what to whom.
It is a fact, however, that the great Disney take-over created a cartoon character which, though sacrilege to many of Pooh’s original devotees, in his turn had managed to touch the hearts of a new international generation of children. Pooh is, today, the Disney Corporation’s hottest property.
Not at all bothered at the eye of the storm, was the original teddy bear who inspired it all and who, through the imagination of A.A. Milne, had become, in the minds of his followers, a cult leader. The world already honoured his name but despite this, few of his followers realised that he was not fiction, neither was he American, as Disney implied. Winnie-the-Pooh was a very real English fact.
This was the wise and innocent bear who had stomped across Ashdown Forest with the little boy Billy Moon. Over the following years Pooh’s fame brought additional excitements for Elliott Graham. He was thrilled by his first-ever ride in a black Rolls Royce limousine that arrived to collect him with his protégé and he enjoyed many television appearances with Pooh and sometimes the other animals at his side.
In 1960 Winnie-the-Pooh was first translated into Latin by Alexander Lenard with the enthusiastic support of Elliott. It was illustrated by Ernest Shepard. Winnie Ille Pu remains the only book in Latin ever to grace The New York Times List. It was followed by a companion volume Winnie Ille Pu Semper Ludet. The critics raved once again that Latin is not a dead language and Pooh, as everyone knows, will also live forever.
It was in 1962 that Elliott was responsible for the publication of The Fourth of June, a book by British author and playwright David Benedictus and the two became friends. They met whenever Elliott came to London, went to the races and the theatre. ‘He was a short stocky man, usually in a raincoat and a homburg hat – always on time’, says David Benedictus.
In those days, David didn’t share Elliott’s interest in Pooh, so it is somewhat ironic that more than forty years later, in 2009, he was to square the circle and write the Pooh Trust-approved book of stories Return to the Hundred Acre Wood which in its turn became a best seller. The drawings by Mark Burgess had a strangely Shepard-like look about them and the book was another success for Pooh, as it told the story of Christopher Robin’s return to the Forest on a bicycle and wearing not girlish smocks but proper boyish shorts.