When I find myself lying awake at night, my first thought is always of him. I often lie awake, ever since the time he walked into my office and told me I’d been fired. Sometimes I’ll spend an hour staring into the blackness, looking into the void, sometimes as much as two or three hours, before I can get to sleep again. I assail my thoughts with sentences we’ve spoken, with situations we’ve found ourselves in, with answers I didn’t have the guts to give, from the time I was working for him, and from the time I was no longer working for him. I look back on the story of his life, as if it was closer and more familiar to me than my own. Even today, thirty years after our last meeting, it’s him I think of the moment I wake up in the morning, and when I’ve put myself to bed at night.
A few weeks ago, when I first thought of finding a form for what I’d been through, I didn’t know whether it should become a pamphlet of lamentations and accusations, a charade, or a heroic epic. I would try, and that was all I knew, to give an account of what had happened to me since my nineteenth year and our first meeting.
I was born in Vienna on October 9, 1936. My father, Egon Philipp Dantine, having worked in the garment business after he left school, took over a shirt factory in the Tirol in 1929. As a boy, it had been his dream to be a concert violinist, something his mother had also wanted for him, though his father wouldn’t hear of it. I had to learn the violin as a boy, but to my parents’ disappointment I never got very far with it.
My mother, Mathilde Juhasz, was an actress. Her parents came from Hungary, and around the turn of the century had settled in the Viennese suburb of Inzersdorf, where my mother was born. In the early thirties she had a considerable reputation, appearing with the likes of Käthe Gold and Paula Wessely, playing Shakespeare, Chekhov, Hauptmann, Ibsen, Strindberg. Some of the Austrian theater critics between the wars recognized my mother as one of the actresses audiences liked best. My sister, Marika, twelve years older than me, stayed behind in Austria with our grandparents, Mathilde’s parents, when mother, father, and I emigrated to America. After the war, I rather lost contact with her, seeing her not more than four or five times in Vienna, on Lake Grundl, and in Los Angeles. She died a short time ago.
We started off living in Boston in the summer of 1938. After a year and a half there, we moved to Los Angeles, where Father was soon able to set up his own business, Phil’s Dry Cleaners, which became so successful that he opened a chain of stores throughout Southern California. My mother’s career unfortunately didn’t survive our arrival in the United States—something she was always to remain bitter about. She did once play a European flower girl in a 1943 movie starring Edward G. Robinson, in which she had two lines: “Roses! Beautiful red roses!” and, as she was to emphasize to the moment of her death, was given “two close-ups!” but that was really the one exception. She did put on various German language poetry readings in Pasadena, Glendale, and Palm Springs, but that sort of thing couldn’t have satisfied her. I remain convinced that her untimely illness was connected with the loss of her professional opportunities. Her life had remained thoroughly unfulfilled, or at least that’s how it appears to me, looking back on it.
I was always told my artistic gift showed itself precociously. At the age of five, I could draw with perspective, and I did draw, every day, caricatures of my parents, babysitters, teachers, playmates in kindergarten, and, later on, my friends at school. One of my more successful works of the period, I still have it today, is of the open trunk of our cherry red Oldsmobile, all stuffed full of bags and household things. Father had bought a little house in Laguna Beach, halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, and I can remember that even at the age of six or seven I used to do little watercolor sketches of the sand, the rocks, the little house, the Pacific breakers, and the hills all round.
I was a voracious reader. As I had a bilingual upbringing, I was able to read those works of German exiled literature to which my father was especially attached. But of all the novels I read when I was growing up, there was only one I was passionate about, and that was Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann.
No sooner had I finished high school than—like my idol, Doctor Faustus’s protagonist Adrian Leverkuhn, who felt himself born to compose—I meant to find work painting and drawing. I was dead set against studying. Father did what he could to talk me out of it. But the more he impressed upon me the necessity to go to college, the more I gravitated to being an artist. From a supermarket in North Hollywood, I received a commission to make an advertising film. It was my mother—she knew the manager—who got me the assignment. And even though I’d never attempted anything of the kind, I managed with a borrowed camera to make a short cartoon film. No one, I should like to emphasize, no one gave me any help. The result, a kind of fantastic dance of the various vegetables, fruits and meats, breads and cakes, and mineral waters, was so successful that other companies came to me with orders for similar films for their products.
I was just nineteen when I presented myself at the Burbank Studios on South Buena Vista Street, on the corner of Alameda. In the fall of 1955 a heat wave hit Southern California. For days on end the thermometer never dipped below one hundred in the shade. In the sunny rooms of the studio, however, thanks to an air-conditioning system that had been installed as far back as 1940, the temperature never rose above seventy, and you felt, the moment you set foot in the building, incredibly well.
I showed a portfolio of my most important sketches and watercolors, and brought along a couple of my cartoon films as well. The only reason I was applying for a job as cartoon draftsman was because father insisted that if I really didn’t want to study, then I should at least use my talent for drawing in a way that brought in some money. The little promotional films wouldn’t be sufficiently lucrative over time. I hadn’t expected to get the job, but found myself hired on the spot. A film made in that studio, Snow White was the first film I had ever seen. Though I was just five and a half when I saw it with my mother on Sunset Strip in a little movie theater on the corner of Doheny Drive, I formed the impression then that everything was possible. Everything was doable. Every dream could become reality. The universe became my playground. I believed infinity lay at my feet.
Ward Kimball, one of the most daringly original animators to work for Disney, hired me in November 1955. When I inquired about Walt, he gave me to understand that I was bound to run into him sooner or later. It was another three weeks before I first laid eyes on him. He seemed moody and grouchy, reacted sourly when I presented myself to him with the words: “It was one of your films that changed my life!” “I know. Snow White. Well, I’ve heard that before.” And he went off down the corridor that smelled permanently of linoleum and fresh paint, without giving me a second look. That initial meeting gave me the mixture of feelings I still have decades later when I think of him: bliss and hostility, reverence, awe, and rage.
A few months after that, we were both standing in the lunch line at the studio canteen. He knew I had recently begun to work on the very first drafts for Sleeping Beauty. Abruptly, he turned to face me: “The source of all originality and creativity, Bill, is dissatisfaction.” I thought those words were remarkable at the time—and they lodged in my brain like a kind of siren song.
My dismissal in 1959, four years after I was given a contract, remains the most profound shock of my life. I was twenty-three years old. I would be lying if I said that I feel it any less now, as I’m putting these words on paper, than I felt it at the moment Walt walked into my office, one eyebrow raised, one lowered, and told me I was fired. I spent a lot of time subsequently without satisfying work, and planning my revenge. It was to take me seven years to summon up the courage to put my plan into action.
Even on the morning of the fateful day, Walt had had the recurring dream that had been plaguing him for years, the dream of trudging through the snowy streets of Kansas City. At half past three in the morning, he dreamed, he got up. It was so cold, he had no sensation in his fingers or toes: every day, including Sundays, the nine-year-old who had recently moved there from Marceline, was charged with delivering the Kansas City Star before the sun came up. His father didn’t pay him a cent for it. He scampered across the porches; he wasn’t allowed to stay on the pavement and toss the newspapers in the direction of the door—each one had to be placed under the mat. That was what his father had insisted on. So that the newspapers were shielded from the wind and snow. Some of the drifts were up to his chin—and this not in his dream, but winter after winter, in fact. At last he reached Cliff Drive, where he could warm up for a moment in the heated stairwells of the apartment buildings. Sat down on the stairs and dropped off for a minute, not more than a minute. And then it reared its head, the panic fear he was to dream of until his dying day: his father would beat him, as he had done often enough before, if he learned that his youngest son had fallen asleep on his paper route, or if he got to hear that one of the subscribers had failed to get his paper that day. Elias beat him until he was sixeen years old.
On summer days, on the porches that Walt crossed to deliver the papers, there would sometimes be toys left out overnight by the children. For a few seconds, he would clutch teddy bears, toy trains and cars, and quietly would play with wooden blocks and rag dolls with tiny glass bead eyes hanging on threads. And then the sun would slowly rise. “But on winter days it was goddamned dark, and the sun wouldn’t show until I was in class,” I heard him say once to a group of animators, preparing a scene from Sleeping Beauty that was to take place at daybreak. “I often fell asleep during lessons. That’s how tired I was from having to get up so goddamn early.”
*
It was Sunday, October 9, 1966, when my older son Jonathan and I paid our call on Walt in Holmby Hills, at 335 Carolwood Drive. Lillian had gone to the supermarket, if I’m not mistaken. Burt, the butler, and Jenny, the Australian cleaner, both had the day off. The master of the house—as he liked best to do—was tinkering with his locomotive. He had a flashlight in one hand, and a pair of pliers in the other. I can still see him, in his short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt and his baggy gray polyester slacks. He was wearing his favorite cowboy boots and a blue and white striped golf cap. A humid, strikingly hot day, even so early in the morning. The air carried the typical Los Angeles scent, a mixture of orange blossoms, smog, and the salty warm sea breeze.
The locomotive, a Central Pacific No. 173 from 1881, scaled down in a ratio of 1:8, and the three cars it pulled had ground to a halt after derailing off the narrow tracks. He liked these mornings without Lillian; he still tried to make her think he wanted to spend all his days with her beside him, but that wasn’t the case, that hadn’t been the case for some time. In fact, he enjoyed being on his own, tinkering with his railway, which crossed the park-like grounds. When did he ever have any time for himself? On Sundays, if then. Only on Sundays and holidays; every other day he spent at the studio in Burbank.
“I’m not complaining,” he liked to say, “on the contrary, there’s no greater happiness than uninterrupted work. If you want to create your own world, you need to work at least sixteen hours out of twenty-four, if not more, many more. And I have created a world of my own. People often ask me: What’s your secret—how do you get to be so successful? How can we realize our dreams? And what I tell them is: you’ve gotta work. Total commitment of course isn’t enough by itself: self-confidence is the most important element of success.”
The tracks of his miniature railway led across bridges and viaducts, through tunnels and underpasses, past lofty eucalyptus trees and a red barn that I recognized as the barn that Mrs. Murray had told me about in Marceline. It served as the repair shop and locomotive hangar, and it was where the main fuses for the whole circuit were located. There was also a miniature station, with a sign drawn by one of his favorite draftsmen, Ollie Johnston: Holmby Hills. Walt usually sat up on the locomotive, his Lilly Belle, and if he had visitors, then they would take their places behind him on the little coal tender, or on one of the passenger cars.
They quarreled almost every day, Lillian and Walt, over the Carolwood-Pacific Railroad. She didn’t like her husband’s little whimsical hobby from the start, nor was she softened when he gave the locomotive the name Lilly Belle; if anything it had the reverse effect. He had half a mile of tracks laid across the garden, undertook various bulldozings and landscapings that Lillian didn’t approve of. Well, it won’t last long, she thought, when, in spite of all her protests, he started riding his train round the garden. And then his pastime had lasted another twenty years. “You’ve got your park in Anaheim!” she complained after the opening of Disneyland, in the summer of 1955. “You can ride your train around there as much as you wish. Why do I have to deal with all the noise and the soot and the smoke, here, in my house?”
None of it was the least use.
With increasing delight, he planned infractions of the speed limit, collisions, derailments. Repairing his railroad was the best medicine for him, aside from the meetings with Hazel George in the laughing room. Even the insides of the cars were true to life. In the dining car there were newspapers on the little tables; if you looked through the windows, you could make out the minute headlines: “Tsar Alexander II Falls Victim to Socialist Revolutionary Assassination Plot.” And little plates with sweet knives and forks, and lamb chops no bigger than postage stamps, and green beans like matchsticks. And tiny little glasses and bottles, and miniature champagne corks!
Not that champagne was his favorite drink; whiskey was. He enjoyed its soft, smoky, sometimes scorching rush, and I’m convinced he drank more whiskey than any other alcohol in his later years. Irish, Scotch, Canadian, American whiskey, he didn’t really mind, he just needed to feel that sweet bite on his gums and tongue, and that burning in his throat to help him regain his even temper. He had his first drink after he left his home at sixteen. He got a job as a vendor, selling coffee, sandwiches, and soda pop on the Santa Fe Express, eight hours each way; he worked sixteen hours a day on the Kansas City–Chicago run. “There’s nothing like that blissful, heart-opening feeling of freedom that you get on a moving train!” he told a reporter from the Japanese newspaper Yomyuri Shimbun six months before he died. “And since the line led straight past Marceline, I could always look out the windows as we passed it, to see the houses, the pastures, the hills. Sometimes I had the feeling I recognized a certain dog I’d known there, or a cow, an ox, or a sow, all from the train as it went thundering on its way. One time, it must have been in 1917, I felt so homesick that I got off at Marceline, spent the night at my friend Clem Flickinger’s house, and traveled on the next day. Of course, that almost cost me my job. Sometimes, I went on different routes, once I got as far as Pueblo, Colorado, and spent the night in a squalid little hotel there, and went back to Kansas City the following day. The floors were crooked, there was a stink of old food, cockroaches scuttled along the walls, mice crept out from under the floorboards, and I felt happier than at any time since my earliest childhood.”
In one of these railroad hotels, my guess is that it was as much a brothel as a hotel, he had his first taste of whiskey. No one noticed that he stole it from the chef on the Santa Fe Express, who always used to carry a flask. And he smoked his first cigarette on one of these trips, on the toilet. His love of smoking goes back to those days, and was to be with him for the rest of his life. Not until 1964 did the United States Surgeon General begin publishing the warning: it was now almost certain—people had suspected it for a long time—that there was a connection between smoking and lung cancer. Walt Disney’s favorite brand was unfiltered Lucky Strikes. He smoked those for decades, and in the last years of his life he took up French Gitanes, also unfiltered, one after the other, one after the other. “I never knew anyone to leave as many scorch marks on the furniture and the carpets and his clothes as my husband did,” Lillian would often complain.
Of course, the illness that would kill him was connected to his chain-smoking, even if he did insist, to his last breath, to Hazel George anyway, that it was my sudden appearance, on October 9, 1966, that was the principal cause of his rapid decline. “Bill turned up like a cat,” he said several times. “Oh, how I hate cats! The creeping, sneaky way they have of suddenly standing in front of you. Their disloyalty and hypocrisy. He took years off my life.”
Walt thought he had just managed to correct the steering of his locomotive. And then there we were, standing in front of him all of a sudden, Jonathan, then nine years old, and me. Shortly after sunrise, we’d climbed over several fences separating the property from the street, and that to begin with had looked insurmountable to us. But then everything passed off surprisingly easily. I couldn’t understand why there was no alarm system of the kind that had already been installed in places like Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Bel Air. Admittedly, if there had been an alarm, I would have been prepared for it. I’d read about how you detect the presence of one, and how to disarm it. In the days leading up to our ambush, I made certain that the property was not patrolled by a security guard. I walked up and down outside the house, under the ancient palms, even poked in the trash cans left at the end of the drive. Went through the Disneys’ garbage, unfortunately encountered nothing of interest, aside from innumerable and practically indistinguishable fan letters.
We had been observing Walt for quite a while, behind trees and bushes, on the edge of the vast, pale-blue swimming pool, watched him repair his Central Pacific, also overheard him talking to himself. We waited for Lillian to get the car out of the garage and drive away. My son had fits of laughter, and I thought we’d be discovered before we could accomplish anything. In my fear and annoyance, I reached out and smacked Jonathan. The sound of my hand striking his cheek must have been louder than his suppressed giggling.
I told my wife that Jon and I were taking a trip to the Mojave Desert. She was probably surprised that I didn’t want to spend that particular Sunday with her, but she raised no objection. Even today, my son talks about this adventure of ours as a high point of his life. He was altogether more excited than I had imagined he would be in the weeks preceding our coup. In fact, both of us were terribly worked up. Our hearts were in our mouths. We could hardly believe that we had come so close to this idol, this celebrity of celebrities. Looking back on it, I find it hard to understand how I ever summoned up the courage that day to put my plan into effect, especially since only a month before, in Marceline, I had run away at the very last moment. My decision not to act on my own, but together with my son, doesn’t seem to me now to have been such a great idea. Though Jonathan, at the age of thirty-nine, still raves about the experience, I think it was wrong to have taken him. He has yet to find the life he wants. He spent years going from state to state in his mobile home, looking for the right place to settle down. It must be at least partly the consequence of his less than perfect childhood, for which I am considerably to blame.
I was carrying a backpack, from which a faint squeaking came that only I could hear. It came from a mouse I had packed in a little wooden cage. (I had the same backpack with me in Marceline, with the same contents, and kept it in the trunk of my car. I found the mouse had suffocated when I pulled over near Kansas City to get some gas and study my maps.)
My hair was long and uncombed and greasy. I had stopped shaving since my return from Missouri and had a half-inch beard. My motley clothes looked as though I’d stolen them from the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Walt had instructed his staff in Anaheim: no long-haired men were to be admitted to Disneyland. But it became harder and harder to obey his order, the more numerous we flower children became, the more of us wished to visit the Magic Kingdom stoned out of our minds. Every day dozens of young men were turned away—refused admission on account of their hair length. Nor were any of his employees allowed to grow a beard, not even a mustache like the one Walt himself sported. And now one of that species turned up in his very house! I was jubilant, planned to write up my prank in the hippie and yippie papers and the counterculture magazines. I could see myself becoming a hero of the Underground movement.
Jonathan bent down beside the cars, peered fascinatedly in at the windows, instead of keeping to our agreement. We had arranged that he was to confront our victim by hurling at him the words: “You robbed my childhood of its innocence!” Instead, there he was, stroking the derailed locomotive as if it were a wounded pet, while I was hopping from one foot to the other like a worried child. “You robbed …” I prompted Jonathan. And again: “my childhood … You robbed my childhood …” Nothing.
Walt seemed neither surprised nor annoyed by our showing up in his garden. Instead he asked me for help: “You’re just in time. Here, lend me a hand, will you!” He motioned to me to pick up the front end of the locomotive. At the same time, he lifted up the back. I was so astonished, I did what he said. And, thanks to my strength, because in those days I had broad shoulders and firm, strong arms, though I’ve since gotten flabby, we managed without much trouble to hoist the locomotive back on to the tracks.
Did he know who I was? After all, he hadn’t recognized me once on the various occasions I stood in front of him in recent years. Or had he?
He sat down astride the locomotive, sounded a shrill whistle, thick clouds of steam billowed up, and the machine, without moving an inch, panted and hissed. Not a remarkable experience, I admit, but one that burned itself into my memory forever.
“So it wasn’t the goddamned quadruplex valve after all,” he swore. And did he ever swear! The words shit and ass and damn and darn spilled easily from his lips. (On the other hand, when he heard one of his animators call Mickey Mouse a four-letter word once, he fired the man on the spot.) Walt’s nasal voice, which had echoed in my head ever since our parting, his Missouri twang, as he described it, I heard again for the first time in seven years, with the difference that now he was addressing me personally.
“Maybe … a spot …” I stammered, “a spot of oil … would help?”
At that, he turned to face me properly for the first time: “Aren’t you a bit old to be running around like that? How old are you now? Late twenties? Older? Is that the new fashion? To barge in uninvited on private property?”
To which my son replied: “You’re a lot older than my Daddy, and you’re still playing with trains.”
“Jonathan knows practically every single film from your studio.” I sounded strangely proud.
“So, to what do I owe the honor of your visit?” He forced himself to remain calm.
“Today’s my thirtieth birthday, Walt. Ever since the day you fired me, I’ve been planning this. Well, now I’m here.”
“To assassinate me!” he joked.
“Hold on, hold on …” I remained astoundingly calm. “One thing at a time …”
He coughed. Earlier, long before his smoker’s cough became so pronounced, we always knew: Here comes Walt! Because we could hear him clearing his throat as he came down the corridor to see how we were all getting on with whatever project we were working on. It was like an early warning signal for us to break off private conversations, or, for some of my colleagues, to put away work that didn’t have anything to do with the studio. If we heard a cough, we knew: The boss is coming!
“One of your films changed my life,” I picked up again, when his coughing finally subsided.
“Yes, Bill, I know, you’ve told me often enough. You came to America as a kid, with your parents. And Snow White was the first film you ever saw.” He paused, drew a deep breath. “You know, your talent was obvious from every one of the drawings in your portfolio. You begged us to take you on. That wasn’t necessary, I had already decided: I wanted Wilhelm Dantine to work on the preparations for Sleeping Beauty. We were always on the lookout for gifted draftsmen, even when my studio had a staff of a thousand. Whenever someone struck me as unusually talented, I gave him a chance. The only ones to suffer were those who no longer produced the work I expected of them. Those were the ones I had to let go.”
“It was Ward Kimball who took me on. I didn’t even meet you until weeks after that.”
He laughed, laughed heartily. “You really think so, don’t you? That Ward took you on? Not one decision was made without my say-so. He showed me your work. I hired you. Not him.”
“Snow White was the first film I saw, too,” my son called out, choosing the worst possible moment to remind us of his presence. I was truly surprised to hear that Walt himself had hired me. Or was he lying? On the other hand, how well he seemed to remember me.
“Daddy took me to see Snow White when I was just five years old,” Jonathan went on, “and I got so excited I wet my pants.”
“You weren’t the only one, son. Theater owners all over the country wrote in to complain to me when the film came out. They had to get all their seats reupholstered. They were all reeking of piss.”
I sat down on the lawn, and slipped off my backpack.
“Get up!” He raised his voice for the first time. “I’ll meet you in the studio any time if you want to talk over the past. But would you be so kind as to leave my property right now.” He reached into his pocket (he always had something to snack on), and came up with a handful of nuts and biscuit crumbs that he tossed into his mouth. From the vehemence of the hand movement, I could tell he was rather nervous.
I was pleased. “I like you better this way: a little outburst, that’s what I’m used to from you. Less of that soft soap.”
Jonathan picked up a rock, and aimed it at a robin.
“I’ll see you out,” Walt went on.
My son threw his rock. It just missed.
I stayed where I was, cross-legged on the lawn. “You never gave me a single word of praise.” I was annoyed at how small my voice sounded, but my anxiety was making it hard for me to breathe. “Only slogans like: ‘Let’s bomb the shit out of the Russians!’ or ‘The Soviet Union is evil incarnate!’ ‘Let’s send in our G.I.’s to capture the Kremlin!’ But something like: ‘Wilhelm, or Bill, if you’d rather, those drafts you did yesterday, the three fairies and their cloaks, that cute little owl and her amazing cape-dance, your Prince Philip on his proud charger, you are so gifted, just go on as you are!’ Never happened. Never occurred to you. You were a sphinx. Never came up to me and asked: ‘Who are you? Where are you from? What’s on your mind?’ ”
I didn’t know then how carefully he investigated the backgrounds of every one of his employees, without our knowledge. I had no idea how incapacitated he was by bouts of deep depression that recurred throughout his life.
“If I could have it my way,” he replied, “I’d have one vast machine built that would replace all of you sons of bitches.”
“Kindly remember you’re in the presence of a child,” I admonished him, “and be a bit more careful how you express yourself.”
“It doesn’t bother me,” called Jonathan. “That’s the way you talk at home!”
Walt’s patience was exhausted. He threatened to hand me over to his friend, the sheriff of Holmby Hills. He would report what had happened, trespassing on private property carried a severe penalty. In some states, California was one of them, it was permitted to shoot trespassers on sight, even without a warning.
“In the future, I’m going to have to wall myself in, like in a fort,” he said to himself. And set off toward the gleaming white, faux-colonial villa, I imagined, to make a phone call. Then my son stood in his way, holding a slingshot with a wide elastic band—I had no idea he’d taken his little homemade toy weapon with him on our mission. That was the first moment Walt seemed to feel a twinge of fear.
“He’s going to have to call for help,” I crowed, “the poor, defenseless little man. The King of America held at bay by a nine-year-old kid! Feeling scared, are you? I never saw the least sign of fear in your eye in the two or three minutes it took you to wreck my life, seven years ago! With your sly, ironic little smile. Well, in a word: I want satisfaction from you in any way you can give it, financially or otherwise. You could, for instance, add my name to the credits on Sleeping Beauty, before or after, it’s up to you. My name first, followed by those of Frank Thomas and Eyvind Earle! Just a suggestion, to get your imagination going …”
For him, who never allowed anyone to contradict him, to be put through something like this! He always thought there was something godlike about himself. I’m not exaggerating here. I’m just repeating the way he used to speak of himself, think of himself. “I’m hewn from the same rock as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. I’m a son of this great country, a genius in the tradition of the greatest, wealthiest, most beautiful nation on the planet,” is something he said to us more than once, and he wasn’t being ironic then. “In Brazil”—I’d been working for him for a year when he came out with this—“for instance, in Rio, I’m more famous than Santa Claus.”
This rather unimpressive, uncultivated nobody, a man who left school at fourteen and a half is known to children on all seven continents to the present day. And will remain known, well into the new millennium. From Japan to Mongolia, from Nepal to Portugal, from Greenland to Peru, billions of people know who Walt Disney is. That’s the most hurtful thing of all as far as I’m concerned: that a man like Walt could achieve such lasting significance. The immeasurable gift that I, Wilhelm Dantine, possess, gets me nowhere. Whereas his lack of talent takes him to immortality. I was afraid then that it would rob me of my sanity.
When he was shown the centaur sequence from Fantasia for the first time, that wonderful explosion of illustrations created by Fred Moore, Ward Kimball, Art Babbitt, and sixteen other animators, set to the music of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, he turned to Mark Cooper, one of his assistants at the time, and remarked—and he can’t have been joking, no, this is deadly earnest: “Wow! This is really going to put Beethoven on the map!”
He wasn’t acquainted with the work of Gustav Mahler or Johannes Brahms, of Anton Bruckner or Claude Debussy. He didn’t know the operas of Richard Wagner or Richard Strauss. He wasn’t ashamed to say: “When I hear Bach, I can see a steaming bowl of spaghetti in front of me!” As soon as someone talked to him about literature, he made no bones about the fact that he had never heard of most books and their authors. He knew next to nothing about art history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Cézanne and Matisse, Manet and Monet, Braque, Chagall, and Klee were blanks to him. He hadn’t even heard of most of their names. Once I showed him an illustration from one of my art books, a reproduction of Goya’s famous war painting, Panic. “I like the guy who did that! What’s his name again?” was Walt’s response. “Francisco de Goya,” I replied. “Goya, eh? Well, he’s good, your Goya!” he said. “Where’s he live?” Then again, he was a friend of Salvador Dalí’s, who spent months working on Walt’s project, Destino, based on a Mexican ballad. I have seen the many drafts for ballerinas, baseball players, dancing bicycles, and singing beetles that Dalí drew in 1946. They are among his best works, and they all disappeared into the studio archives.
“Walt was a magician, my dear Mr. Dantine,” Dalí was to explain to me in the late 1970s in a suite at the Hotel Meurice in Paris, in the presence of his wife Gala, who had smacked him across the face so hard that morning that I could still clearly see the red marks made by her fingers. “The Disney magic is innocence in action. He has the innocence and unself-consciousness of a child. He still looks at the world with uncontaminated wonder, and with all living things he has a terrific sympathy. Do you understand me, Mr. Dantine? He had an endless love for all living creatures, everything that creeps and crawls. It was the most natural thing in the world for him to imagine that squirrels and mice might have feelings just like his.”
“I am folklore,” the sly farmer’s boy often recited to us. “I am apple pie and vanilla ice cream, popcorn, and the song on everyone’s lips. I’m a proverb from Mother Goose that everyone’s heard. Call me Father Goose. And Mickey is my prophet.”
The most sensible thing for him to do would have been to leave me there without a reply, to go into his house and call Sheriff O’Connor. In all likelihood, if he’d done that, I would have given up. But instead, he stopped in front of me, drew himself up to his full height, stroked the thin gray-white mustache on which thick beads of sweat had formed, and made an effort to defend himself: “The very first thing you were told when you started working for me, even before you signed your contract, was: ‘We’re pleased you’re coming to work for us. We will insist on your bearing in mind that one name and one name only is being sold here. Should you therefore hope to sell the name Wilhelm Dantine,’ because that was what you still called yourself then before you restyled yourself as Bill, ‘then you should quit on the spot!’ Were you told that at the time, or weren’t you?”
Jonathan replied on my behalf: “Papa always says you didn’t even invent the mouse. Nor Donald either. Is that right? What about the Beagle Boys?”
It was clear that he felt like giving my fearless, long-haired kid a smack in the face or a kick in the pants—it was written all over him. But he remained motionless, stunned. I reminded him of a conversation we’d had two years after I’d joined the firm: “I was asking you how the mouse came to be invented. Do you remember what you told me then?”
He didn’t speak.
“What you said was: ‘Now Bill, in all honesty, I haven’t got a clue how we hit upon it. We were looking for a new animal, sure, after that producer crook Mintz stole Oswald, my rabbit. I had always hated cats, although the very earliest cartoons had had cats in them. I wanted a little animal, so a mouse seemed a good idea. Kids like animals that are small and cute. In a way, I think we owed the idea to Charlie Chaplin. What we were trying to come up with was a charming little fellow who showed just a bit of Chaplin’s melancholy as well … a little critter that keeps trying to do its best. And doesn’t always make it.’ Do you remember saying that to me, Walt?”
Still he didn’t speak.
“Do you remember saying that, my Daddy wants to know!” Jonathan backed me up.
“It’s really not much like the official version, you know: you were on your way from New York to Los Angeles, in the sleeper car, after you’d lost Oswald the rabbit to Mintz, and you happened to remember a mouse you’d once given the name Mortimer, just as you were starting out on your career, when you were running a firm called Laugh-O-Grams, in Kansas City, and Mortimer was the tamest of the ten mice you kept in a cage, and the only one who was entitled to sit next to you on the drawing table and watch you draw. Not much like the story of how the rhythm of the train wheels went Chug-chug-chug-chug-mouse-mouse-mouse-mouse-chug-chug-chug-chug, nothing about how the shrill whistle—you can read this stuff in all the official accounts—seemed to go A-m-m-mou-mouse! all through the night, or how you got out at Los Angeles having decided to make a mouse named Mortimer the new hero of your company. And that it was at Lillian’s insistence that Mortimer was changed into the gentler, kinder Mickey that very same day. No, you didn’t give me a word of that whole fairy tale when I asked you about the origins of the mouse, your ‘Walter Ego,’ which went on to attain a comparable fame to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Michelangelo’s David and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers …”
Walt’s cheekbones were working. He looked livid.
“Working for you was the happiest time of my life, it was a privilege and an honor.” I began pulling out of my backpack sketches and drawings that I had once made for him, both line drawings and large watercolors and gouaches that I kept all together in a cardboard cylinder. “To make something out of nothing, with teamwork, among a group of friends. My first sixty-eight drafts for Sleeping Beauty, here they are, you see, from the fairy robes to the dragon sequence at the end, from wicked Maleficent through to the angular rooms in the castle, see, all mine …”
“That belongs to me!” He coughed. “It’s the property of my studio! You’re nothing but a common thief,” he berated me, coughing ever more violently. “How did you manage to get at … those drawings?”
“I picked them up over the Christmas break in 1959, because they are my property, Mr. Disney, not yours. And almost all of what I did for you then, ended up being used. Only, it’s strange, my name never appears anywhere. It’s always just your name, your signature that goes up in lights! Where are your collaborators credited, can you tell me that? Not on the silver screen, that’s for sure. For forty years, you’ve been going around in the king’s new clothes. Not one of the drawings that your films are based on, not a single one of them, is even by you. Not in any of the films. Even the technique of animation is beyond you. Every one of us who ever worked for you knew that. Of course, you knew how to get pictures to move. But the art of converting ideas into action, of charming living protagonists out of paper characters—all that has remained completely baffling to you. You never got it.”
He pressed his hands over his ears.
My voice grew louder and louder, to reach him: “… and the thousands upon thousands of comic books, things are no better there: Uncle Scrooge? Gladstone Gander? Gyro Gearloose? The Three Nephews? Pluto? Goofy? Neither drawn by you nor even conceived by you. Just sporting your name, that’s all. Carl Barks, a real genius, was responsible for everything in the magazines. And even now he goes on drawing, week after week, month after month, decade after decade! Every one of the Donald-and-his-three-nephews-plus-Uncle-Scrooge stories, whether they’re caught up in some Viking story, or hunting the world’s only remaining unicorn, way down in Tierra del Fuego, it’s all come out of his head. And hardly anyone in the world has ever heard of Carl Barks. You’re the thief, Walt.”
“Never in all my life have I encountered such wickedness …”
“You never allowed your animators to get the fame they deserved. You pumped and pumped and pumped all the creative juices out of us, in order to represent our ideas and our achievements as your ideas and your achievements to the world! No sooner did someone come up with an idea, but within seconds you were claiming it as yours. Ub Iwerks, just to give a name to one more of these shadows of yours, did mountains of work for you. If it weren’t for him, the goddamned rodent wouldn’t even exist. In fact, I suspect that it was Iwerks who invented Mickey. He wasn’t just the first to draw him, I think he made him up in the first place.”
“Will you shut up now and let me get a word in, you freak! You hippie!”
“Not even your cute, round signature—and this certainly represents the single most revealing detail about your whole doubtful personality—not even your signature is your own! You had one of your best animators draw it for you. And then, ever since, for decades, you’ve had to try and fake it, but of course you never managed to do it right, your versions always looked ridiculous, diseased! And you went on to treat Fred Moore so appallingly badly that he drowned his sorrows in drink—in 1952, at the age of forty, in the prime of life, he drove his car into a tree.”
“Never in all my life have I been subjected to such vile, baseless attacks, you nobody, you ridiculous creature,” Walt Disney began his counterattack. “Except once, when that little gaggle of my employees had the bright idea of getting a Commie-inspired strike going against me, and started agitating for a union of animators! Has anyone ever heard of anything so ludicrous? A cartoonists’ union! They came to me and accused me of being a filthy rich exploiter, and at a time when Roy and I were up to our ears in debt to the Bank of America to the tune of several million dollars! Your father, a textile manufacturer if I remember correctly, always encouraged you to follow your dreams, you softy. To be an artist or whatever it was you wanted to be. Every door stood open to you. My father just threatened to beat me. And he didn’t just threaten—he beat me for next to nothing. You grew up as a pampered only child, like your brattish son here, whom you saw fit to bring along. I had four siblings, and when I lit out on my own, I often didn’t have the money to buy a can of beans. I couldn’t pay to get my shoes repaired, so I ran around in busted shoes. I didn’t have my own bathroom until I was twenty, I used to take showers at the YMCA, and all the time you were growing up you had a marble bathroom to yourself. I had thirty dollars in my pocket when I got to Hollywood in 1923. And then I made something of myself! A modern magician …!”
“An averagely successful American CEO is what you made of yourself,” I butted in, “nothing more than that.”
He launched himself at me!
I leaped aside, ran twenty feet or more, like a cat, frightened when its victim suddenly puts up fight. He chased after me, caught up with me. And slapped me, which did me a lot of good, strangely enough. I laughed out loud, called to Jonathan: “Are you watching, one day you’ll be able to tell the world about the kind of guy nice old Uncle Walt really was …”
“What was that you just said, you degenerate freak?” It was only now that he really lost his temper. His voice cracked with indignation. Like the torero whose task is to provoke the bull into a blind rage before the final showdown, I had achieved my end. I had never seen him in a state like this. “Do I read you correctly? That all these films are supposedly not mine? That they’re not by me? Beginning with the very first, Oswald the Rabbit, which that Jew Mintz stole from me under near-criminal circumstances. Oswald was my creation, through and through, only I didn’t realize then that the damned distributor owns the rights! From Alice in Cartoonland and the seventy-five Silly Symphonies, from the first of the Mickey films and The Three Little Pigs and Snow White and Pinocchio right on down to the present day, and my very latest hits, like Mary Poppins: for forty years, every scene in every picture was inspired by me and steeped in me, my wishes and fantasies, my suggestions and changes. Don’t I act out every single part, however tiny, right down to the crook of the little finger, before the animators get to work? Don’t we always spend days and nights in the tiny room under the stairs, our so-called sweat box, talking through the things we have in production, putting in improvements, even sweeping changes? You know that, of course you do, you’ve been there often enough in your time with me. No pencil stroke is done without my say-so. Didn’t I set up a special school for my artists at the end of the thirties? And drive them back and forth myself, to downtown LA or wherever it was they were living, because hardly any of them could afford a car in those days. I installed a little zoo in the studio, so that the new guys we took on would have the opportunity of observing animals in movement—rabbits, mice, a couple of deer, a goat, a cow, a monkey. You must know that, you saw it all when you joined. But for me, you would all have remained nobodies, every single one of you. Just like the ones who left me to go and work for someone else—they all ended up as nobodies, without exception! I am in no sense of the word a great artist, but when did I ever claim that? I always had men working for me whose skills were greater than my own. Anyone with the slightest interest in me must know that I was and am dependent on hundreds of other people. I am an ideas man. Or are you trying to deny that? Deny our daily story meetings, where the characters took shape? Every single one of them?” He broke off, struggled for breath. “Oh, what’s the point!” He was wracked by another coughing fit.
Jonathan and I stood there, not knowing what to do with ourselves. He was listening attentively, much more so than when it was me or his teachers or some relatives talking to him. Now he gave me a signal that it was time for us to go.
“The only reason my daddy’s so angry with you,” to my horror, he seemed to be trying to soothe Walt, “was because you were so mean to him seven years ago, at Christmastime.” And with that he walked away.
I called to him not to go, to stay and keep me company. The action, I shouted, was just about to begin.
He didn’t listen to me, but disappeared into the far end of the garden, probably hoping I would come after him. I heard afterward that he waited for me for a long time by the fences, then, when I didn’t come, went inside the magnificent villa, and gave himself a tour. He ran into fine paintings, saw a life-sized bust of Abraham Lincoln, found a glass-fronted cabinet that, he later told me, contained at least thirty golden Oscar figurines. He was struck by the enormous radiogram, which had been enclosed with a record player and a tape recorder in one broad cabinet of teak. The collection of records, he said, had been by far the largest he had ever seen. But the thing that impressed him most was a dark room at the back of the building, where he had just been able to make out a small cinema, its screen concealed behind heavy curtains. He saw the rows of seats and the projection room, but also a machine from which you could help yourself to Coca Cola and ice cream. I wanted to hear many more details from his reconnaissance, and badgered Jonathan for a long time afterward with my questions, but never succeeded in getting any more precise information out of him.
Walt clearly remembered the moment my son had referred to. I could see in his face that his thoughts had wandered back to the fall of 1959. Sleeping Beauty, embarked on in January of that year, proved a financial setback for the studio. The production had cost six million dollars. Of course he was looking for other people to blame than just himself to carry the responsibility for the looming debacle.
There was another thing: in September 1959, Nikita Khrushchev was paying an official state visit to the United States. In the course of it, the Soviet premier had also come to Hollywood, and, through intermediaries, had let it be known to Walt that he would very much appreciate a chance to see the Magic Kingdom in Anaheim. To go carooming down the Matterhorn on a sledge, to stand on the deck of the Mississippi steamer while audio-animatronics alligators emerged out of the yellow brown water, to get to know the park in all its myriad aspects, taking in the Cinderella castle and the evening parade, that would be the highlight of his visit to the U.S. For reasons that never became clear, though I assume today that J. Edgar Hoover and the F.B.I. were involved, the visit never came about, foiled by the State Department, ostensibly for security reasons. Khrushchev was outraged. He refused to accept that the trip could not take place. In the course of a press conference he claimed to journalists from all over the world that his request had been turned down because of some political machinations. Mark Timmerman and Sidney Frost easily convinced me—and me alone—to sign a memorandum they had immediately drawn up and would make available to the Soviet delegation in Los Angeles. In it, it said that Walt had knowingly and personally put a stop to the visit in order not to permit the first secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR to reap an international publicity coup. Because an afternoon spent amid the attractions of Frontierland and Fantasyland would certainly have played well with a public all over the world. (Although I wasn’t a very political person, I did believe in the necessity for détente between the superpowers, and I did believe that signing the memorandum was the right thing to do.) Our letter was intercepted by Hoover’s agents. And Walt, deeply offended, found it so low and reprehensible that he fired the three of us on the very day he read the document. Two of us, Frost and myself, were involved with the Sleeping Beauty fiasco as well. That would have made the decision even easier for him. He showed up at our little drawing desks, at the time we were sharing a single small office, busy with the first drafts for the 101 Dalmatians. He stood in the doorway to our little cell, holding up our letter, and asked if we had written it. Didn’t wait for us to reply (we were rather naïve and had no idea how it could ever have fallen into his hands), but in the same breath told us we were fired. I denied any part in it, claimed not to have initiated the thing, but he didn’t want to hear another word, and turned his back on us.
“But what angered me most,” he told me now, and I had a sense of the fear slowly melting away from his features, since my son had vanished, “was the fact that the truth of the matter was so very different. As a matter of fact, I was very much looking forward to Khrushchev’s visit, and had prepared myself thoroughly for a meeting with him, read up on his life, read one of his speeches against Stalin. Of course I wanted to ask him some hard questions as well, sure I did, but he would have been up for that. And Lillian, who really wasn’t interested in politicians and actors and royalty at all, not even Eisenhower or Kennedy or Johnson, she really wanted to meet Khrushchev. I had rarely seen her so excited. We were both looking forward to the moment when I would take the general secretary to the long row of ships in our underwater show, and say: ‘And here, Nikita, is the eighth largest submarine fleet in the world!’ So the goddamned cancellation was as much of a surprise and a disappointment for us as it must have been for you or Mr. Nikita Khrushchev, you can take my word on that. But then, you know, there was something else that really pissed me off, because it demonstrated that the Bolshevism in the ranks of my own staff had still not been rooted out. I had learned, and you may as well hear about this today when it no longer matters, that you had also been making efforts to whip up feeling against me in another context, namely the arrest and the conviction of Charles Spencer Chaplin; the House Un-American Activities Committee had asked me for a couple of pieces of information, yeah, sure, and I told them what I knew, namely that Chaplin had become a lousy Commie sympathizer. You and your pals in the studio, you turned that into a whole saga of Walt the wicked wolf persecuting the poor little lamb Charlie. And you had the gall to pass caricatures of me around, really ugly ones, real crude pieces of work, by the way. And that must have been why I fired you, Bill Dantine, at least as much as your totally fabricated claims about my role in the Khrushchev visit!”
“In terms of inspiration, you owe a greater debt to Charlie Chaplin than anyone else in the world,” I retorted. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself for trying to wreck the life of that demigod. Next to him you’re a sparrow to an eagle. There’s a cosmic gulf, a chasm of emptiness, between you and Chaplin, both in human and artistic terms. And your slander was partly responsible for him being refused reentry into the States. Even the fact that you were willing to testify before McCarthy’s committee deserves the most severe punishment, unless you apologize to him—it’s never too late!”
He performed some curious rowing motions in the air: “Stop it, Bill! Enough already!”
But no, I wouldn’t be reined in, not now: “You know, you ruined my life with one blow. Why should I stop, now that I’ve finally got you in my sights? I staggered from job to job, one temporary after another. Whatever I could get. I’ve had nothing but bad luck and disappointments, time after time. There’s nothing more humiliating than feeling this desperate hunger and thirst to show your creativity, and not being able to satisfy it anywhere. You are personally responsible for the fact that nothing in my life has turned out well. And that’s why I’ve come to see you today, Walt. I’ve made the decision …”
I broke off.
For a while we both remained silent. His sunken cheeks looked creased. There were big bags under his eyes. Why didn’t he run into his house at last, and phone for help?
“What … what decision is that?” Every word cost him a huge effort.
I made no reply.
“You’re drunk, Bill. Or stoned perhaps. Come on, go home now … please, go. Your son’s waiting for you. Don’t leave him by himself.”
“You know, Walt, in Marceline, not long ago, when the swimming pool was inaugurated …”
“You were there. I know. I know it now. Of course I thought there was something familiar about you …”
“If you’d talked to me then, in Marceline, instead of being all proud and aloof, maybe I’d have spared you my visit today.”
“I was neither proud nor aloof. I felt incredibly well and happy there. Like I do every time I go to Marceline. That place is my Shangri-La. You know it is.”
“You looked through me as if I wasn’t there.”
“You should have spoken to me. But now instead, you’ll be going to prison. Was it worth it?”
“Absolutely. One hundred percent.”
“Listen, you’re going to be severely punished for this.”
“And then there’s my most important cause that in all the years of my being with you you’ve never once taken on board,” I continued. “I must have come to you a dozen times with the idea, and I’m damned if I ever heard a syllable from you, just a grunt and a shake of your ugly head: I’m talking about my idea of making a film of Hans in Luck. What a magnificent, profound, and philosophically weighty story!”
“We’re not in the philosophy business, Bill. We do entertainment.”
“As if that Grimm’s fairy tale wasn’t entertaining! After seven years of working for his master, Hans is paid: a great, big lump of gold …”
“I’m familiar with the story.”
“The lump of gold gets too heavy for him to carry, so he trades it for a horse.”
“The horse throws him, so he swaps the horse for a cow.”
“The cow kicks him, so he swaps the cow for a pig.” As I spoke, I could envision each word as a picture, a scene, flowing in front of me, I saw the gold, the horse, the cow, the pig. “He loses the pig, he swaps it for a goose …”
Walt interrupted me: “… and so on and so forth, until by the end he’s left with nothing, absolutely nothing, and he returns home to his mother with empty hands. So, what’s entertaining about that? It might satisfy your warped brain, a lofty metaphor like that, but not my audience of billions.”
“What about the hundreds of drawings you had me do for that ‘Chaunteclere’ project?”
“What ‘Chaunteclere’? Remind me.”
“Of course you forgot. Why wouldn’t you, it was one of my ideas, after all. Which you liked, apparently, to begin with. Chaunteclere the cock, the champion singer. Based on Edmond Rostand’s play of the same name. For six months, I supplied you with flawless sketches. And then all at once, it was: no, this isn’t for us. I didn’t even get to hear that one little word, ‘sorry.’ ”
“ ‘Chaunteclere’ … yes, it does seem to ring a bell. It just wasn’t right for us. End of story.”
My head was spinning, all the complaints, accusations I’d carefully prepared for this moment were now swarming around my brain in confusion. “I heard your name’s on the final list for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.” I shouted. “You of all people, Walt? What a laugh! You, who not only told us you thought the extermination of the Indians was justified, but described it as a healthy necessity, a cleansing for our nation. You, who taught us that Indians were wild, bloodthirsty savages, who had to be wiped out. One of the most horrific genocides in the history of mankind—justified and highly praised by Mr. Walt Disney! You’re to get the Peace Prize? Walt Disney, a great humanist! A second Albert Schweitzer! You, who were proud of your reception by Benito Mussolini in his pomp, in the marble halls of his dictator’s citadel in Rome. You, who refuse to have a single black working for you in your studio. Who’s against the integration of blacks into society, now that it’s finally begun! And—this has less to do with world peace, but I have to tell you just the same—you, who never allowed one single woman to take part in the creative process! Women are good for copying and painting and coloring in a man’s sketches and blueprints and ideas, but never may they provide the least creative impetus! You even parked the ‘in-betweeners’ in a separate building, to prevent any encounters between the ladies and the gentlemen …! And if a woman happened to be caught in the men’s building, she was fired on the spot.”
He should have known that it was a waste of time trying to use calm language and sensible arguments with me. Now, instead of finally breaking off the conversation, he committed the foolish mistake of egging me on still more: “That’s just so typical of you Jews—sitting in judgment on others. The gall it takes! Would a Christian ever talk to me like this? You think you’re always in the right. And that we’re always in the wrong. Why is it you keep having to raise yourselves above the Gentiles, and show them that you’re better, nobler, juster men than they are? Is that never going to end? Hasn’t history taught you enough of a lesson yet?”
“I am a Gentile, Walt.” I could now hear the mouse squeaking very loudly, and it cut me in my belly, my back, my chest. I undid my backpack, started burrowing in it, and immediately forgot what it was I’d meant to look for.
“I always thought …” he was flustered and awkward, “I always took you to be … one of the few Jews … I had in my employ … I don’t get it—so what did your folks leave for …?”
“Because after the Nazis took over, in March 1938, they couldn’t stand it in Austria any more, that’s why, sir. Because they felt solidarity with their friends, who, overnight, became victims of persecution. Among them there were painters, architects, musicians, writers. For instance, my mother was a close acquaintance of Felix Salten, who had to flee Vienna, as you are probably unaware, as you seem to be unaware of most things about Salten, other than the fact that he provided you with the original story of Bambi. It’s rare enough for you to get so excited about a book. ‘A Story of Life in the Woods,’ as the subtitle has it. Years later, you had another one of his stories filmed, Perri, the story of a heroic squirrel. I happened to be in the room when you took on the director. This time it wasn’t an animation film, but a feature film, shot in the wilds of Wyoming and Utah. Salten supplied you with the original source to a third screenplay as well, The Dog from Florence, which became The Shaggy Dog, which you produced at the end of the Fifties. Felix Salten a Jew? You probably had no idea. Am I right? And that he was the author of one of the greatest and steamiest pornographic novels ever written, I’m referring to the story of Josefine Mutzenbacher? No? No idea? Just as well, because if you had known, you’d never have made Bambi, that’s for sure! I know the first sentences of the Mutzenbacher book by heart. Would you like me to recite them for you?”
“Please don’t …”
“I became a whore at an early age, I have experienced everything a woman can …”
“That’s enough …”
“… everything a woman can experience in bed, on tables, chairs, benches, propped against bare walls, lying in the grass, in dark alleyways, in trains, and barracks, and prisons, and I don’t regret any of it …”
He buried his head in his bony hands, massaged his brow with his fingertips.
“As I say: Vienna, 1938. I don’t know if you’re capable of putting yourself in the position of people who are declared outlaws overnight, and are driven into death. But maybe this is the first time anyone has told you about these things.”
He knew about the death camps, sure he did. He was familiar with the course the war had taken in Europe, but he couldn’t stand to hear such stories. On the other hand, in 1955, the California chapter of the B’nai Brith gave him their highest award, for his life’s work. To his way of thinking, it was a waste of time “digging up” these as he called them “sad events” twenty years after they had occurred. As early as the mid-fifties, he thought of them as obsolete, as “over.”
At first he didn’t notice that I had now spread out the entire contents of my backpack on his lawn: paints, brushes, razor blades, a thick piece of rope, and the mouse lying panting for air in its tiny wooden cage—all laid out in a row. I called for my son several times, but he seemed to have disappeared for good.
“What’s all this stuff?” Walt finally asked. It felt as though minutes had passed.
After that, everything happened very quickly: first I rolled around on a carpet of three or four of my large-format sketches (I didn’t pull out any more than that, and I tried to choose what seemed to me the least valuable of my drawings). I felt like a dog, wildly rubbing my back on the grass, my arms and legs in the air. Then suddenly I leapt up, and started slashing open my cheeks with one of the razor blades. Smeared the blood, which came gushing forth, on to the locomotive, then all over my face, dipped the paintbrush in the pots of color. I daubed myself from head to foot in red, blue, yellow, and green, until my clothes started to feel damp and chill. The whole time, I didn’t say one word. Puffing and groaning accompanied my every movement. I felt full of strength, capable of uprooting trees, fences, statues.
Walt shouted at me, “Stop this crazy nonsense immediately!” I advanced, quivering, bleeding, trembling, ripped off my wet shirt, and then my dripping trousers, stood in front of him in my shorts, daubed in color from top to toe, and finally looped the rope around my neck. He was afraid, as I later heard, that I was about to climb the nearest tree and hang myself before his eyes.
And then I yelled: “I curse you.”
Those three words, nothing more. I carried on with my twitching St. Vitus dance, twirling the rope through the air like a lasso. I knew that the one thing he couldn’t stand was the sight of blood. There wasn’t a drop of blood in any of his films, not in the animated ones or in any of the wildlife documentaries or features. So I pulled down my shorts, and sliced a wound in my right upper thigh, which immediately started to bleed profusely. The wounds on my cheeks were gushing now. I had an erection, it seemed to stick out half sideways. It was as though I’d never noticed that crookedness in my penis before. From that moment on, Walt kept his eyes on the ground.
I think he probably didn’t catch the last act of my visitation, at any rate he failed to refer to it in any of his subsequent accounts. With my Swiss army knife, I slaughtered the mouse (it was half-dead anyway), shuddered at the hideous release of its bodily fluids, felt the dying mass as a sort of cross between lava and vomit, and yawed between nausea and euphoria.
At first I wasn’t aware that Walt had left the garden. It wasn’t until I heard Jonathan whisper “Daddy!” to me, that I started to come to my senses. I turned around, my son let it be known to me that Walt was calling the police. He handed me my pants and shirt, helped me pick up all that was lying around as quickly as he could.
We heard Walt give his name and address. We ran for the gates and fences that we had scaled hours before, and made it back to the car without injury and without any particular trouble.
*
He came out into the garden again. Neither the sketches nor the pots of paint, neither the items of clothing nor the rope and the brushes were anywhere to be seen. In spite of the panic rush, Jonathan and I had even managed to pick up the mouse cadaver and its little wooden cage, and stuff them back in the backpack.
What followed I had related to me several times by Hazel George, going on what Walt told her two days after my visit. The first thing he did was to search the grass for signs of my action. He was unable to find a single drop of blood or paint. There was a dark smear on the side of the locomotive, but that turned out to be machine oil. He sank to his knees, and then stretched out on his belly on the grass. The tall wrought-iron gates opened, and Lillian drove up in her white Pontiac, the crunch of the gravel in the driveway seemed to go right through Walt.
She saw her husband sprawled on the lawn. Her first thought was that something might have happened to him in the course of one of his derailments. She knelt down beside him, touched him for the first time in weeks, and saw how pale he looked. What most worried her was the fact that he was lying on his stomach and not on his back.
“What happened?”
He was so weak, he was unable to reply.
Moments before the police arrived, he told her in a whisper that he had been the victim of an attack.
Who had attacked him, and when, and what exactly had happened, asked Lillian. Was he hurt?
“No, I’m not hurt.” At last he sat up.
Ten minutes after Walt had called, three officers from Beverly Hills precinct 208 arrived at the house. The victim made a report. And even though the officers remained quite polite, and treated him with respect and reverence, still it seemed to him they didn’t really believe what he was telling them. Over their radios, they called in to ask for any information there might be regarding a Bill or William or Wilhelm Dantine. But I wasn’t listed in Los Angeles, or anywhere else in California, I had spent the last seven years living in various places out of state, and had only recently returned to Hollywood. The policemen made a search of the garden, but found no further evidence of anything, beyond a couple of spatters of yellow paint on a rhododendron bush.
They promised Walt that they would send in a team of experts early in the week to perform some forensic tests. He asked them to undertake a thorough search of the entire garden, but that request was politely ignored.
Lillian attributed her husband’s collapse to his continual overwork. The recent land purchases in Florida and the stress to do with the setting up of the New World in Orlando, had indeed taken a lot out of him.
Walt took to his bed. He remained in his room for the rest of the day. Lillian called her daughters, Diane and Sharon. They both did as their mother asked, and came by Carolwood Drive. Their father, however, declined to see them. “Not today …” he wheezed through the bedroom door, his voice was very weak. “Please, not today …”
In the late afternoon, the still hissing locomotive started to move forward along the narrow tracks. All at once, in slow motion, and all by itself.