When Bianca Majolie stood up at the front of the room, the blood immediately drained from her face, her palms started to sweat, and she could feel her heart pounding. Bianca took a deep breath and opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out. Her mouth felt dry and gritty, as if her saliva had given up and left to hide in the pit of her stomach. It was January 25, 1937, and Bianca wished she could hide too. She had worked for the Walt Disney Studios for two years and she dreaded nothing more than the story department meetings where the writers pitched their ideas in front of the group. It was not due to a lack of talent on her part. Bianca’s characters and lively plots were destined for the silver screen. Nor was it her shy personality. When necessary, her soft-spoken tone gave way to the loud, booming voice of one passionate about her work. The problem stemmed from the fact that she was born a woman in a world that wanted men.
She skipped as many of the meetings as she could, her excuses ranging from mundane claims of illness to fantastic tales of car accidents complete with shattered glass sprinkled across the highway and the smell of burned rubber. Her alibis were mostly unnecessary—there was no obligation to attend a meeting unless you were the one pitching. When it was her turn to share her ideas with the group, she approached the matter as she would swimming in the chilly Pacific Ocean: better to just get it over with, plunge into the waves headfirst, and let the cold water numb your body.
On this January day, however, the room felt colder than the Arctic. Everyone knew that Snow White was Walt’s darling, and the hapless writer who suggested changes to one of its scenes, even if necessary, was certain to incur the wrath of the room. As Bianca stood there in silence, she could hear lighthearted laughter outside the windows, and for a moment, she imagined she was one of the women on the other side of the glass, relaxing on the lawn without a care in the world. I could be like them, she thought. All I have to do is leave.
At the Walt Disney Studios, it was not enough to simply have an idea or even write a script. In the story department, you had to stand up in front of your colleagues and act it out. As much as Bianca hated dramatizing her ideas at the meeting, she loved watching the other writers perform their material. Dick Lundy could mimic the voice of Donald Duck flawlessly as he pretended to walk across the street, then slip and fall right in front of her seat, his body twisting in contortions worthy of the Three Stooges, before he tittered in Minnie Mouse’s falsetto: “Oh, Donald, have a nice trip? Tee-hee-hee.” The room would roar with laughter, Bianca joining in until tears ran down her face. Sometimes they would don costumes; once, the men applied rouge and lipstick and performed an elaborate cancan, kicking their knobby-kneed legs as high as they could while they belted out tunes. The atmosphere could be boisterous, full of pure joy and childish antics, and it made Bianca proud to be one of them.
But other times it could be terrible. The men would yell obscenities and throw wads of balled-up paper at the presenter when they considered an idea unworthy of development. At these moments, Bianca could feel her colleagues’ aggression, the room becoming a pressure cooker for the unlucky person whose only crime was sharing his or her work. Too often, it seemed that the ugliest responses, the ones that could shake the confidence of even the most talented writers, were directed at her. At these moments, Bianca wished she had some special ability to distract her colleagues from her flaws. If only she were a great beauty or could sing or dance or even, more humbly, mimic the happy squeak of Mickey Mouse. Sometimes what she wanted most was to be a man, if only for the few hours a week she spent at story meetings.
Bianca thought about this now as she stood trembling before her peers and resolved to appear confident. With a deep breath, she shoved her natural shyness aside and placed her storyboards—corkboards filled with artwork pinned in sequence—on the wooden easels facing the group. Her sketches showed dancing flowers and animals. Voices of dissent started rising almost immediately and Bianca found herself shouting, trying to get her ideas heard, but her soft voice was drowned out. In the midst of the fray, Walt Disney quietly walked up to the easels and yanked Bianca’s sketches from the corkboards, sending pushpins flying. With hardly a word, he ripped the papers in half. The room went silent as the scraps of Bianca’s work fell to the floor, a smiling flower peeking out from under one page.
The moment represented Bianca’s worst fears realized, and like Snow White scrambling through the forest to escape the huntsman, she instantly fled. She could hear the group of men running after her, the pounding of their feet growing louder as they continued to taunt her. She had never been so thankful to have a private office. She ran into it, turned the lock, then covered her face with her hands and let the tears of embarrassment and shame she had been holding back flow. As she caught her breath she could hear shouts on the other side of the door and then her colleagues’ insistent knocking. The voice of one of the men, “Big Roy” Williams, a firebrand with a famously short temper, suddenly rose clearly from the crowd as he yelled, “This won’t do!” The rapping seemed suddenly to grow angrier. Bianca cowered in the corner, her heart beating wildly, and her panicky gasps for air becoming high-pitched. She felt helpless. It wasn’t enough to have her work rejected by Walt, whom she respected and who was frequently her champion. She knew that the team wanted her to be thoroughly humiliated. Her tears fueled their cruelty.
The wooden door frame began bending now, the plywood and nails no match for the pressure of so many men on the other side. With a loud craack, the wood splintered, the door gave way, and a crowd of men tumbled into Bianca’s sanctuary. She buried her head in her arms, covering her ears to try to block their shouts, but it was no use. She would have to take it like a man. “This is why we can’t use women,” Walt said of the incident, “they can’t take a little criticism.”
Bianca was an awkward seventeen-year-old when she first met Walter Elias Disney. They both attended McKinley High School in Chicago, Illinois. When she saw Walt dressed in the drab fatigues of the American Red Cross ambulance service, she shyly approached and handed him her yearbook. Walt was sixteen but pretending to be seventeen in order to join the war effort; he’d even lied about his birth date on the Red Cross application. He desperately wanted to be like his three older brothers, who would come home on leave looking handsome in their navy uniforms, their sailor caps jauntily tilted on their heads. (Instead, he would find himself in the last days of World War I driving an ambulance through Europe, occasionally doodling on the vehicle’s canvas flaps.) But that day in high school, he scribbled cartoons in Bianca’s yearbook, smiled, and walked away. It was a moment that meant little to either of them at the time, being but the briefest of encounters, yet the memory of the interaction would linger, destined to sway both of their futures.
Bianca was born Bianca Maggioli in Rome on September 13, 1900, and immigrated to Chicago with her family in 1914. Her high-school French teacher soon Americanized her name to Blanche Majolie. She never felt like a Blanche, though. It was the name of a stranger, and it was Walt who, two decades later, ultimately insisted she shake it off.
Bianca studied composition, anatomy, and painting at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, then moved to New York City to take further classes in drawing and sculpture; after that, she pursued fashion assignments throughout Europe. She lived in Rome and Paris, but the glamorous life of fashion did little to pay the bills, and in 1929, disappointed in her hopes and a little lonely, she moved back to New York City and took a job as an art director and brochure designer for the J. C. Penney catalog.
Bianca found the heat oppressive that first summer as she rode the streetcar lines that cut Manhattan Island into rectangles, as you would slice a sheet cake. With her bobbed hair and shift dresses, she was the epitome of the stylish flapper and she fit in perfectly with her new, fashionable friends at the department store’s offices. Yet Bianca, like nearly everyone else, was hardly prepared for where the country was headed.
She was sitting at her desk, sketching women in dropped-waist dresses for Penney’s brochure, on October 29, 1929, when she heard a woman shout, “The stock market’s collapsed! Everyone’s in the street!” Bianca rushed to the window overlooking Sixth Avenue and Fifty-Second Street, but there was nothing out of the ordinary below, merely the usual cars and people out walking at that hour. “No, not here,” said one of the women who worked with her. “All the men are at Wall Street, trying to get their money back.” Bianca looked around and realized that, sure enough, their workplace was currently composed entirely of women. For the past week, news of the stock market’s impending collapse had been on everyone’s lips. The tense atmosphere made Bianca nervous, even though she didn’t own any stocks herself and couldn’t imagine that her family in Chicago would be affected by the events in a city nearly eight hundred miles away. A few days earlier, one of the men she worked with had quieted her nerves by telling her things were sure to improve and that the bankers were optimistic about the market’s recovery. Yet even with her incomplete knowledge of the financial system, she could tell, on this day that came to be known as Black Tuesday, that things were different.
In the midst of the largest financial crisis the world had ever seen, a small number of entrepreneurs were able to climb out of the muck and find success. In 1929, one of them was Bianca’s former classmate Walt Disney. The year before, the character Mickey Mouse had made a smash hit in an eight-minute cartoon called Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse animated short to synchronize movement with sound. In other hands, accompanying the adventures of a hand-drawn mouse with music and sound effects might have been a clumsy endeavor, neither lifelike nor humorous, but Walt had an innate sense of how to integrate the soundtrack with the story. As Mickey and Minnie made music by cranking the tail of a goat, yanking the tails of nursing piglets, and tapping the teeth of a cow, the synchronized sound brought the scenes to life in a way that audiences had never experienced before.
The cartoon was Thomas Edison’s dream realized. In the late 1800s, Edison had imagined integrating the sound of his phonograph with the moving pictures captured by his camera, but the technology eluded him. At the end of his life he would see it finally come to fruition with the advent of the talkies. Yet he was not as impressed with the results as one might expect. “I don’t think the talking moving picture will ever be successful in the United States,” Edison said to the newspaper Film Daily in 1927. “Americans prefer silent drama.” While silent pictures still dominated the box office, the world of movies was on the precipice of monumental change.
The transformation began with the microphone. Before microphones made their appearance, at the end of the nineteenth century, the waves created by sound could travel only as far as a person could shout or an instrument could blare. The energy within those sound waves quickly dissipated. By using a magnetic field, the microphone took the energy created by sound and turned it into something more powerful: an electric current. Now that energy, instead of being lost, could be recorded and stored forever. By the 1920s, an innovative technique to store that energy was to record it on film. The electric current created by the microphone was boosted by an amplifier and then run through a light valve. The valve consisted of a thin piece of metal sitting between the lamp of a camera and a strip of film. The electricity caused the valve to vibrate according to the tempo and volume of the original sound, deflecting the light through the opening and thus converting sound into light. The light was then photographed onto the narrow edge of a filmstrip, giving permanence to what was once fleeting. When Walt Disney gave Mickey Mouse his high falsetto voice, speaking into an RCA 77 microphone in a recording studio in New York City, the sound was transformed into wiggly lines on film.
While Walt had no trouble matching his voice to the action of his troublemaking mouse, the sixteen-piece orchestra hired for Steamboat Willie couldn’t keep up with the pace of the animation. To fix this for Walt, audio engineers developed the click track, a technique to keep the sound and effects timed to the film. Small holes were punched directly into the edge of the film, creating a tiny bouncing ball. The ball bounced to the tempo of the cartoon and served as a metronome that the conductor used to keep the orchestra synchronized with the action. It wasn’t easy to make thousands of hand-punched holes, but the perforations ensured that the music and pictures were coupled as closely as possible. The technique became known as Mickey-Mousing.
Using the sound technology on Steamboat Willie, developed by a company called Powers Cinephone, took all of Walt’s savings and more. To come up with the $4,986.69 it cost, Walt had to mortgage his studio and his home, then sell his car, a 1926 Moon Roadster. The gamble, however, paid off. By the end of 1929, Walt was bringing in five hundred dollars a week and had officially formed Walt Disney Productions Ltd.
Much of the success of Mickey Mouse lay in the character’s optimistic message during a time of despair. In a March 10, 1935, article titled “Mickey Mouse Emerges as an Economist” in the New York Times Magazine, the writer L. H. Robbins declared, “The fresh cheering is for Mickey the Big Business Man, the world’s super-salesman. He finds work for jobless folk. He lifts corporations out of bankruptcy. Wherever he scampers, here or overseas, the sun of prosperity breaks through the clouds.”
One late afternoon in February 1934, Bianca walked along Seventh Avenue, the low winter sun illuminating the street so brightly that it made the Manhattan tenements as dark as silhouettes. As fortunate as she had felt over the past five years, especially when she considered how few people had steady paychecks, she was unsatisfied in her career and in her life. She was supposed to meet friends that evening, but she felt a sudden need for solitude. She ducked into a movie house and sat down to watch the newsreels.
When they ended, people moved in and out of their seats as a cartoon started up. Bianca barely noticed what she was watching until she heard the roar of laughter. It struck her that it had been a while since she had heard an audience laugh with such abandon—certainly the news of the day didn’t inspire merriment. Then she saw a familiar name on the screen: A Walt Disney Comic. She had known about his success, of course, but sitting in the darkened theater, she was filled with awe at what he had created. Admiration and jealousy running together, she felt an urge to bring her own animated character into the world and imagined what it would be like to see her art on the screen, worshipped by millions. She went home and started sketching a comic strip about a young girl named Stella who was constantly on the hunt for a job. Thwarted by the Great Depression, a theme that it seemed no one could escape in either fantasy or reality, Stella found that something always went wrong in her search. Bianca printed the dialogue in speech bubbles, relying heavily on jokes made at Stella’s expense. Underlying the humor, Stella’s struggles had a theme, echoing Bianca’s own need, of finding somewhere to belong in a world gone adrift.
On April 1, 1934, Bianca sent a letter to Walt Disney asking him to visit her in New York, telling him about her comic strip, and joking, “I’m five feet tall and don’t bite.” Although she doubted he would remember her and was not sure exactly what sort of guidance she expected from him, she couldn’t help but count the days before she might hear back. It took ten days for the letter to reach him in Hollywood and three more before he wrote a response. His answer was worth waiting for. It would change the course of her life.
In his playful manner, Walt expressed regret that Bianca didn’t bite and then invited her to send him her comic strips so he could assist her.
A correspondence began between them, and Bianca was touched by his warm, generous personality, even when his attempts to help her comic strip did not pan out. On New Year’s Day 1935, she made a resolution that she would leave Penney’s. She wanted to be an artist again, to rediscover the young, optimistic student she had once been. To spark her creativity, she planned a trip through China, Korea, and Japan, squirreling away her earnings, every dollar representing days of her freedom. By February, though, she had set those plans aside to travel to Los Angeles. She met Walt at one of his favorite spots, the Tam O’Shanter, which sat just outside Hollywood in a Tudor-style building. With its pitched roof, iron chandeliers, and stone fireplace, it looked more like a movie set than a restaurant.
In this atmospheric location, Walt launched into the story of Snow White. He described the wicked queen, the loyal dwarfs, and the handsome prince vividly. The fairy tale was familiar, at least in the blurry way of half-forgotten childhood memories, but his narration was fresh. Walt loved telling the story of Snow White and repeated it often to almost anyone who would listen. Soon, though, he brought the conversation back to what Bianca had traveled across the country for: her art career.
Bianca gingerly placed her portfolio on the table. Neatly organized inside were her sketches and story ideas. In anticipation of Walt’s seeing them, she had rearranged them countless times. She needn’t have worried—when he cracked open the oversize binder, he was instantly overwhelmed by her talent. Her delicate lines forming softly colored flowers were unlike anything he had seen come out of his studio. She had never studied cartooning and had no desire to be an animator, but her story ideas were remarkable. Although his story artists were all men, he believed so strongly in her skill that he offered her a six-month apprenticeship in the story department.
Bianca hesitated. She hadn’t been expecting her life to change so quickly, yet it was what she desperately wanted: to work for her passion, not just for money, and see the result of her hard work reflected in the smiling faces of an audience. She said she’d think about it. The next day was Valentine’s Day, and she decided not to wait any longer to give Walt her answer. She wrote to him in a playful manner, referencing an inside joke between them: “You are everything and much more than I visualized, and the really amazing thing is that you haven’t changed, in spite of the terrifying eyebrow lift, that succeeds only in arousing my merriment.” She accepted his offer and said she would start as soon as possible.
Their letters reveal a mutual respect and a lighthearted friendship but not a romance. In 1925, Walt had married a woman named Lillian Bounds who worked for him in the Ink and Paint department. In her letters, Bianca congratulated him on finding a spouse and laughed at herself for being an old maid at the age of thirty-five. She had no interest in marriage. She wanted the freedom to work, and Walt viewed her independence as an asset.
With no prior experience in entertainment, Bianca had had only a basic understanding of the inner workings of a Hollywood production before she started at Walt Disney Studios. She was surprised when she saw the Ink and Paint department packed with women, roughly a hundred of them hunched over their desks. Most were under the age of twenty-five. After the animators sketched each scene of the movie, every second of film requiring twenty to thirty drawings, the women of Ink and Paint traced their lines using india ink on transparent sheets of cellulose, or cels. After the ink dried, they flipped each delicate sheet over and colored inside the lines, using every paint tint imaginable. In the studio, the Ink and Paint women were focused, but during their breaks, they often sprawled companionably across the grass under the palm trees that stood outside the small complex of one- and two-story buildings. They seemed so young and carefree to Bianca. The story department where she worked had a very different atmosphere. There, she had the distinct feeling that her coworkers were looking for any weakness they could find.
The story department was located in a timeworn L-shaped building on Hyperion Avenue in Hollywood, and the quarters were cramped. Before she received her private office, a mark of seniority, Bianca had been penned in next to Joseph Roy Williams, known as “Big Roy,” and Walter Kelly, two men with big personalities who delighted in teasing their new female coworker and passing a football in front of her nose as she tried to concentrate on her sketches. Although the three had similar responsibilities, Bianca was paid far less than her male counterparts. She started at eighteen dollars a week while most of the men around her made seventy-five to eighty-five dollars a week. Some employees earned even more. Art Babbitt, a young animator who joined Disney in 1932, took home a lavish $288 a week.
For a time, Babbitt held drawing sessions in his bachelor pad, hiring women to model nude for the Disney animators to sketch. When Walt found out, he insisted they transfer the extracurricular activity to the studio, initiating what would become an enduring tradition: the Disney life-drawing class. Bianca loved the classes. They were reminiscent of her days at art school in Chicago. As she sketched models in all the glory of their naked forms, she was reminded that at its heart, this business was about putting pencil to paper.
Bianca had arrived at an auspicious moment in the studio’s history. In February 1936, after numerous delays, the animators at Disney had finally begun working on the first full-length animated movie: Snow White. The movie had burst into their lives at the end of a workday back in February 1934; Walt had stopped all of his most trusted staff members as they left for home, gave them each fifty cents to buy dinner, and told them to hurry back. When the team of artists and animators returned at seven thirty, they found the soundstage dark except for a single spotlight. None of them were quite sure what to expect, so they sat down nervously, speculating about what their boss was up to this time. Walt took the stage and not only told the story of Snow White but also acted it out. His voice became as high-pitched as a child’s as he pranced in front of them playing the princess, then turned deep and rumbling as he emulated the witch’s evil laugh. At the end of his performance, the audience members were mesmerized. They had seen their future and it would be the story of a young princess.
Walt’s performance became legendary at the studios. For decades, the animators present that night would recount how he had captivated them with the tale of Snow White. Bianca had not yet joined the studio on that magical evening, but she too had felt entranced by Walt’s tale during their meeting at the Tam O’Shanter, and she got there just as work on the feature had begun in earnest.
Less romantic than the film’s origin, however, was the day-to-day work on the movie. The meetings of the story department were long and intense, with every detail of the script being revised and debated. Just a single scene of the proposed film, in which frogs jumped into a pair of shoes and chased Dopey the dwarf, prompted five long meetings over the course of three weeks, only to be cut in the end. Some of the script changes Bianca participated in were large, conceptual shifts, such as Walt’s idea of making the woods come alive around Snow White in a terrifying frenzy. The branches transform into hands that grab at the princess as she runs through the forest, while the wind blows her to and fro, giving the unsettling sensation that the natural world has turned against her. Other times, the writers argued over minute details; for instance, going over and over Dopey’s precise movements as he runs down a flight of stairs.
As the team worked on Snow White, Bianca learned about a brand-new technique called storyboarding. Ted Sears, the head of the story department, had helped invent it. Bianca mostly liked Ted, who had occupied his supervisor position since 1931. He was one of the best gagmen at the studio, perfectly suited to writing jokes and sketching comedy routines, although he couldn’t draw to save his life. But with Bianca’s respect, there was also fear; Ted could be brutal in his criticism, and she often heard his jeers rise loudly above the crowd at meetings.
Ted’s voice reached peak intensity at one particular story meeting in which the staff debated what clothes Snow White should wear. It was just one of twenty-five story meetings the staff held to discuss her dress. These were frequently held in the evenings, around seven o’clock, and on this occasion the room was packed with writers and animators, everyone jumping in with ideas while Walt sat quietly on the side. Animator Myron “Grim” Natwick tacked a few sketches of the princess on the corkboard. Under his pencil, Snow White had grown long, dark eyelashes; she held up her dress to reveal a shapely calf, and her lips formed a deep red pout. From the beginning, Walt had said he envisioned Snow White as an innocent child, so to see her depicted as a sexy, sophisticated woman was jarring. The staffers yelled about her provocative pose until poor Natwick took the sketches down. Eventually they would decide to make one of her outfits a peasant dress, patches visible near the hem, paired with simple brown clogs. By giving her modest clothing and a demure demeanor, they had made Snow White the epitome of wholesomeness.
At Walt Disney Studios, as at other cartoon studios of the era, writers developed the story ideas while working closely with animators creating preliminary sketches. Many writers, like Bianca, found a background in art essential as they made the first rough drafts of the characters and scenes. Once the story began to gain traction, the writers and animators would produce an explosion of sketches to capture all their ideas for the project, the bad along with the good. The sheer amount of paper frustrated Ted; it was impossible to assess the flow of the action when there were so many sketches floating around. Working on the animated short Three Little Pigs in 1933, Ted couldn’t keep the characters and their developing personalities straight. One of the story men, Webb Smith, grabbed a handful of pushpins and started to tack the scenes and dialogue in order on the wall. When he was finished, they could view the progression of the entire cartoon. This made it far easier to shuffle the scenes and assess what needed to be cut or added. With Snow White, storyboards became crucial, as the artists were working with thousands of sketches.
Bianca relished the organization of the storyboards and devoted a great deal of time to rearranging her scenes. For this process, the environment in the story department was intense but collegial, the men spending long hours together. Bianca’s presence was like a rainstorm moving in at the end of a hot and sticky summer day, breaking the humidity and leaving the atmosphere clean and cool. While comedy gags and slapstick action often dominated the meetings, Bianca’s work was new and fresh, using story lines that reflected the complexity of human relationships with a mix of sensitivity and playfulness.
One of her first projects was a short released in March 1936 called Elmer Elephant. In the cartoon, a young elephant is teased and mocked by the other animal children before finally using his trunk to save the day and gain approval. As Bianca wrote the script and rough-sketched the round, cheerful ears and face of Elmer, she considered how difficult it was for her to fit into the masculine environment at the studio. She hoped to find a happy ending like Elmer’s, her artistic talents acting as the elephant’s trunk had.
While Bianca struggled to fit into the male world of animation, the studio was discouraging other women from joining her. The standard rejection letter sent by Walt Disney Studios to all women applying made this clear: “Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen, as that task is performed entirely by young men.” The letter went on to describe the work available to women in the studio’s Ink and Paint department, yet it also warned women not to get their hopes up about even this lesser role, noting, “It would not be advisable to come to Hollywood.… There are really few openings in comparison with the number of girls who apply.”
Fortunately, one of these letters didn’t make its way to 419 Lorraine Boulevard in Los Angeles, a stately white colonial home with a sweeping driveway lined with bowing oak trees. The outside of the home exuded wealth, but the inside revealed the crumbling façade of the family’s fortunes. Although the Huntingtons had once been very wealthy, they, like most Americans, had lost their savings in the stock market crash of ’29 and were struggling to pay the bills. Mr. and Mrs. Harwood Huntington had three children, Charles, Harriet, and Grace. In 1936, Grace Huntington was twenty-three and had her head in the clouds. Grace loved airplanes and longed to experience the thrill of piloting. She also dreamed of finding a job in which she could apply her passion for writing and drawing, perhaps earning enough money to buy her own plane, or at least pay for flight lessons. Her parents, however, just wanted her to get married.
Grace’s days were spent navigating the social scene as her family dictated, but her nights were for writing. Grace would head to the Vista Theater, watch a cartoon and catch an early movie, then stop to drink coffee on the way home. With the vigor of youth, she would stay up writing until seven in the morning, filling notebooks with her stories. Her goal was to get a job at Walt Disney Studios, a mere five miles from her house.
Although she never felt her stories were quite finished, she reached the point where she could go no further with her editing and so decided it was time to submit something. She took her best work and, through a friend, managed to have it read by Ted Sears, the man Bianca both feared and admired. When Grace learned she had a job interview, she felt as light and nimble as Wendy Darling flying over London in one of her favorite books, Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie. In her naïveté, Grace figured she would learn immediately whether her dreams of working for Disney would come true, unaware that she was hoping to enter a department that was more akin to a secret society than a business. While Sears could recommend Grace, the story department was Walt’s crown jewel and no one could enter unless invited by him personally.
When Grace met with Walt the next week, the minutes seemed to fly by although the interview lasted an hour and a half. They spoke at length about her stories, discussing her different ideas for material. Soon, though, Walt said the words she had been dreading. “You know I don’t like to hire a woman in the story department,” he began. “In the first place, it takes years to train a good story man. Then if the story man turns out to be a story girl, the chances are ten to one that she will marry and leave the studio high and dry, with all the money that had been spent on her training gone to waste and there will be nothing to show for it.”
Grace could only nod as she thought of all the married women she knew. Her mother, her friends, her neighbors—they were all housewives. Not a single one had both a husband and a career. When she realized this, her face flushed with resentment, and she suddenly felt determined to get this job, the first she had ever applied for. As Walt described it, this might be the only chance she would ever have to work.
Walt seemed to recognize her frustration as he explained, the edge gone from his voice, that if a girl could write, perhaps she could work at home after she married so that she could continue to contribute her ideas. For Walt, these words were not an empty promise—he would soon prove that he meant them.
There was still one huge hurdle for Grace to leap. She would be the second woman joining the exclusive club, but that did not mean that the chauvinistic atmosphere of the department would alter. “It’s difficult for a woman to fit in this work,” Walt told her. “The men will resent you. They swear a lot. That is their relaxation. They have to relax in order to produce good gags and you can’t interfere with that relaxation. If you are easily shocked or hurt, it’s just going to be too bad.”
Walt watched her face carefully as he told her this, waiting for her eyes to pop. This moment was a test, his way of determining her resiliency in a workplace that alternated between creative amusement and obnoxious yelling. What Walt didn’t realize was that these words were practically music to Grace’s ears. She had spent much of her young life annoyed by the limitations of her gender, wishing that she had been born a man every time she was told that something she wanted to do was not ladylike—or simply too difficult for a woman. Here was Walt Disney himself offering her a chance to dive headfirst into the world of men and leave behind the cultural constraints of womanhood. It seemed the job would be the perfect antidote to her prim upbringing.
When she entered the story department just a week later, she could feel every eye on her. She had never attracted so much attention in her life; the curious and wary gazes of the men made her feel like an alien. She fought back her anxiety. Let them look, she thought. She had decided that no matter what happened or what anyone did or said, she was going to hold on to this job. As Bianca traded glances with the new hire across the room, she smiled, wishing she could adequately warn her about what lay ahead. Unfortunately she knew from personal experience that nothing could prepare you for the horror of your first writers’ meeting at Walt Disney Studios.