Each Christmas my granddaughter Joan receives an exquisite selection of toys from a fellow named Walt Disney. The gifts, tho making her squeal with delight, always puzzled her. Until recently she had never seen a regular movie – and her first was "Peter Pan," so to her Walt was as mysterious and remote as Santa Claus. Even when he gave a birthday party for Joan and her friends, Walt was not to be seen, so Joan became suspicious "Is there really a Walt Disney?" she asked me.
The question startled me since Walt and I have been friends for many years. I assured her there was such a man, but then I began to think of what prompted her query. How much of Walt the man had been hidden behind Walt the filmmaker? His name had been so much associated with fantasy that it had become virtually a fantasy itself.
I thought of the night "Alice in Wonderland," in which a fortune was involved, was previewed at the Disney studio. After the show was over, an associate said, "I want to show you Walt's latest project." He took me to the studio machine shop, and there all alone, to our surprise, was Walt putting together a toy train. Without even mentioning "Alice," he said, "Hedda, every time I begin to think myself a big shot, I come to this shop, work with my hands, and learn humility."
"Walt is a perfectionist," another employe told me. "He knows instinctively what is right. Even in the machine shop, he may work for hours making some gadget. But if he feels that it’s not the best he can do, he'll throw it away and start all over again. It's the same with his pictures. When we start creating characters, Walt decides whether they are right or wrong. For instance, one of my jobs was to originate a character for 'Alice in Wonderland.' Walt looked over the sketches and said, 'No. He's got to be more flexible.' So the character was changed."
"I think," said a friend, "that Walt's sense of discipline began in his childhood. At the age of 9 or 10, he began delivering papers. His father insisted that, tho the snow be knee-deep, Walt put those papers on the porches, never throw them into the yard to save time. The fact that Walt worked practically all his life may be the reason why he deals so much in romance and fantasy – the world of a child which grownups find strangely attractive and familiar."
"You see Walt was a news butch on a train running from St. Joseph to Hannibal, Mo.," added another employe. "But he never was without great imagination. As a child he made himself up to look like Abraham Lincoln, devised his own costume, and delivered 'The Gettysburg Address' in school. He was 17 when World War I broke out. Walt tried to enlist in the army, but was turned down because of his age. So he tried to get a job in a Chicago postoffice, but lost out there, too, because of his youth. He had tried to pass himself off as 21.
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