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.66Animators might achieve something lifelike, and take pride in the result,but such occasions were still scattered and rare.Ed Benedict, who assisted RudyZamora, spoke of Zamora s pleasure in one scene in The China Plate, a SillySymphony with Chinese characters that Zamora was animating in March 1931: Rudy had this scene and he was quite delighted to have thought to do thishimself; I remember him leaning over to me, flipping the animated drawings[and] saying, Hey, how do you like this?.This little girl was to turn fromleft to right but when she turned, the hair trailed across her face.That hadnever been done before.That s a first beginning to loosen up things. 67Zamora was, however, famously casual about his work, and he lasted atthe Disney studio only about a year, from January 1931 until early in 1932.He was at one point a victim of Disney s habit familiar to his employeessince the 1920s of roaming through the studio after hours.Dave Hand,who described Disney s nocturnal visits as a little sneaky, remembered whenDisney finding that Zamora had done no work on a scene trapped himinto bringing him a stack of blank paper with only a few drawings on top.Disney peeled oª those drawings, revealing the blank paper beneath.68There was, in short, no smooth upward trajectory at the Disney studio,but more of a stuttering pace.Sometime in 1931, Disney said twenty-five years later, I had a hell of abreakdown.I went all to pieces.As we got going along I kept expectingmore from the artists and when they let me down and things, I got worried.Just pound, pound, pound.Costs were going up and I was always way overwhat they figured the pictures would bring in.I just got very irritable.I got to a point that I couldn t talk on the telephone.I d begin to cry. Hespoke again of weeping in a 1963 interview: Things had gone wrong.I had84 you' ve got to really be mi nni e trouble with a picture.I worried and worried.I had a nervous breakdown.I kept crying. 69Disney left with Lillian on a cross-country trip in October 1931 after he finished a picture that I was so sick of.Oh gosh, I was so sick of it.So manythings went wrong with it.And I went away til that picture turned over completed its initial theatrical runs, presumably.On that trip, Disney said, I was a new man.I had the time of my life.It was actually the first timewe had ever been away on anything like that since we were married. When he returned, I started going to the athletic club.I went down re-ligiously two or three times a week.I started in with just general calisthen-ics.Then I tried wrestling, but I didn t like it because I d get down there insomebody s crotch and sweaty old sweatshirt. Disney moved on to boxingand then to golf and horseback riding.He showed up at the golf course at5:30 in the morning, played five holes, then cut across the course to the eigh-teenth hole. Eat breakfast fit for a harvest hand and then go up to the stu-dio just full of pep, he said.Starting in 1932, Disney played what Les Clarkcalled sandlot polo with Clark, Norm Ferguson, Dick Lundy, Gunther Less-ing, and Jack Cutting of the animation staª; they rode horses rented from ariding stable.70There is no way to know which cartoon Disney found so distracting, andit is not even clear how long he was gone on his restorative vacation probablyfour to six weeks, but in any case not so long that his absence troubled thepeople who worked for him.None of his employees at the time ever citedhis breakdown as a major event in the studio s life.As closely as some ofthem observed their boss and tried to anticipate his wishes, his breakdown seems to have made no impression on them.Disney s emphasis on his tearssmacks of the self-dramatization the obverse of some of his ebullience that he sometimes lapsed into, but there is no reason to doubt that he wastruly distressed.Roy was aware that something was wrong.He wrote to their parents onDecember 30, 1931, that Walt is feeling much better than he was before hisvacation, but is not back to his old self. Roy wrote of a physical cause ofWalt s trouble, however some sort of parasitic growth in his intestinesof a vegetable nature even though he added, Things are going much bet-ter at the studio so it is much less of a nerve-wracking job for him than be-fore. 71 Whatever the nature of that parasitic growth, it seems not havemade any lasting impact on Walt s health.There is little direct evidence of Disney s thinking in the early 1930snothing much in the way of memoranda, transcripts, or letters that speak tobui ldi ng a better mous e, 1 928 1 93 3 85 his state of mind but this was the time when his role in the studio changeddecisively.His distress probably arose from that circumstance, and it may havebeen building for years, contributing to his repeated arguments with his clos-est associates.By 1931, Disney s involvement even in story, the area where he concen-trated his eªorts after he surrendered the director s duties to Iwerks and Gillett,had diminished with the hiring early that year of two full-time gag men, TedSears and Webb Smith.After so many years of animating and then directingand, before that, years of other kinds of jobs that required working with hishands, and before that, years of manual labor, all the way back to his news-paper-delivery days Disney now had to persuade himself of the legitimacyof purely mental work.He was still trying to persuade himself, a quarter century later. Peopledon t.attach any importance to the coordinating of all the talents that gointo these things, he complained in 1956. The vital part I played is coordi-nating these talents.And encouraging these talents.I have an organiza-tion over there of people who are really specialists.You can t match them any-where in the world for what they can do.But they all need to be pulled together. For Disney to be a coordinator in 1931 was especially hard because he wasnot leading his men toward some goal that only he could see.He was lead-ing them toward something that even he had only a vague conception of.His new role and his difficulties in adjusting to it were making more com-plex what been a basically simple personality.Like his father, he had alwaysbeen an entrepreneur by nature, with an entrepreneur s rather diªuse urge todominate and control.Now he was on the verge of becoming an artist, too.With that change would come an impulse to control for increasingly distinctand ambitious purposes
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