I stand with my five-year-old daughter in Disneyland’s Tomorrowland in front of two massive murals that face each other. “Why are you looking at those paintings, Mama?” my daughter Eleanor asks as throngs of visitors move around us. “Is it because you like space?” I do love images of outer space, especially the planets, as my daughter well knows. But this isn’t why I’m staring at the long, curved walls, each one stretching fifty-four feet.
“An artist named Mary Blair made beautiful tile murals of children playing right there,” I say to Eleanor, pointing at the walls, “but we can’t see them anymore.” “They’re just hiding, right, Mama?” Eleanor asks, and she looks a little sad now as we stare at the current murals, which, despite the planets and spacecraft, seem bland and lifeless. I nod my head yes, but the answer is only partially true. One was chipped away in 1986, but the other Mary Blair mural, created in 1967, is likely still there, its images hopefully intact and entombed under layers of plaster. The mural, like Mary’s rich legacy, remains hidden despite being right in front of us.
To cheer both of us up, I take Eleanor on the It’s a Small World ride. The boat rocks along its canal as we enter the cavernous interior, whose brilliance and gaiety soon have us smiling. “Do you see that doll up there by the Eiffel Tower?” I lean in and ask my daughter as she whips her head from side to side, trying to see everything and exclaiming so enthusiastically that at first I’m not sure she heard me. “The one holding the red balloon?” she cries excitedly. “Yes, that one, with the short blond hair,” I say. “That’s Mary Blair. She made this ride.” Eleanor turns her face to me and grins. “I love it.”
She is hardly alone. Although Disneyland was designed by Walt to be in a constant state of flux, old attractions making way for new ones, the It’s a Small World ride remains popular and has earned a permanent home in the park; it’s still here more than forty years after its designer passed away, on July 26, 1978, of a cerebral hemorrhage. The Walt Disney Studio’s weekly newsletter announced Mary’s passing in a short paragraph buried in the middle of its pages. On the front of the newsletter was a photo and lengthy article memorializing a company tax accountant who had passed away that same month.
In her last years, Mary found peace within her family circle; she delighted in her nieces and frequently painted. Her sense of color, in decline during her last years, returned at the end, and she painted scenes as vibrant and joyful as those that marked the height of her career. Her ashes were scattered at sea after a sparsely attended funeral service at the Episcopalian church in Capitola, California. In 1991, Mary was named a Disney Legend, a high honor. Lee Blair, still jealous of her, said to a friend, “Why are they giving it to Mary? She’s dead.” He chose not to attend the ceremony.
Mary’s dear friend Retta Scott similarly found peace and satisfaction late in life. In the 1980s, Retta Scott made a triumphant return to animation, working on The Plague Dogs for a company that would later be bought out by the Pixar Animation Studios and freelancing on animated shorts and other commercial endeavors. She told her son Benjamin, “You can’t draw anything if you don’t understand it.” The words were spoken from the depths of her experience. Retta suffered a stroke in December 1985 that left her weak and unable to communicate. She died on August 26, 1990, at age seventy-four, her passing nearly concurrent with the death of hand-drawn animation itself.
Grace Huntington distinguished herself in aviation, holding numerous speed and altitude records. She passed away from tuberculosis in 1948 at the age of thirty-five, leaving behind her husband and a five-year-old son. Her husband felt that Grace died not only of the bacterial infection, incurable in the 1940s, but also of a broken heart, never having been able to overcome the prejudice that existed against women in aviation. Shortly after she became ill, the military put out a call for woman pilots who were willing to ferry aircraft. It was the opportunity that she had long dreamed of, but it arrived too late.
Sylvia Holland worked for MGM Studios after being laid off from Walt Disney Studios in 1946. She then became a children’s book illustrator and, later, a greeting-card designer. She put her long-neglected architectural skills to use in the 1950s, building two houses of her own design, then started picking up new hobbies. Her love of felines, once expressed by feeding and petting the strays of the Walt Disney Studios, inspired her to develop a new breed of Siamese cat, the Balinese, gaining her an international reputation. The breed continues to thrive today, as do the cats that wander about the studio in Burbank. In her old age, arthritis began to take over her limbs, and yet she insisted on drawing despite the debilitating pain. She hoped to write her memoirs one day but, sadly, never had an opportunity to do so. She died of a stroke in 1974.
Bianca Majolie got the last laugh. The first woman to be hired at the story department lived far longer than most of her 1930s contemporaries. After leaving the studio, Bianca married fellow artist Carl Heilborn. The two opened the Heilborn Studio Gallery, where Bianca frequently exhibited her work. The gallery was located on Hyperion Avenue, just down the street from where her career in animation started. In Bianca’s declining years, her eyesight worsened and it became difficult for her to sketch and paint. “I don’t think that I shall ever be touching paint again,” she said, “but if it should happen, I shall place my fingers in a paint pot and work like a child. It might be a wonderful experience to start life all over again, as a child.” Bianca passed away at age ninety-seven on September 6, 1997.
As obscured as an entombed mural in Disneyland, the work of these female artists surrounds us, even though many of their names have faded from our consciousness, often replaced by those of the men they worked with. They have shaped the evolution of female characters in film, advanced our technology, and broken down gender barriers in order to give us the empowering story lines we have begun to see in film and animation today. In the shadow of their artistry, millions of childhoods have been shaped, with an untold number yet to come.