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The Celluloid Food Chain

1966

His wife, his two daughters, the husky son-in-law, the older brother and look-alike nephew—all were absent in his final hour. The nurse standing over him and the doctor who had just entered his room were strangers.

“You can release the buzzer, sir,” the nurse said.

He let the cord and push button drop from his hand. They had increased the sedation and he still hadn't slept a full night; the cigarette ash color inside the window frame was confirmation.

“Are you in pain?”

He felt too weak to do anything but nod. The doctor applied a stethoscope to his chest and obviously wasn't pleased at what there was to hear.

The hospital was new, built right across the street from the studio. He wondered how much difference there was between the two of them. The studio building had been designed in such a way that it could be converted to a hospital with minimal effort—this at the insistence of the skittish bankers who weren't assured of his success. As for the people at the studio now, only Ron and Roy and Roy Jr., the extended family atop the executive pyramid, were truly familiar. Everyone else was a stranger; long ago he had found reason to fire all the old hands who came up in the business with him.

The touch of the steel diaphragm was much too firm...he felt heavy pressure on his breastbone above the raw, fiery pain in his chest. “Doctor, take that—“

The doctor jerked away the stethoscope, protecting his ears from the sudden, amplified coughing. Ten pounds of mutated pulmonary tissue had followed the directive of life, growing with no thought to anything but growth, and this minute it all wanted to burst from his mouth and nose. The coughing became spastic agony; his breastbone bowed inward till he thought it would snap.

For him, it happened quickly. More pallid figures streamed into the darkening room; more unfamiliar voices emerged before fading into stillness. When he came to himself, his eyes were closed, but his sense of balance told him he was upright, not lying in a starched bed. The light shining against his eyelids wasn't harsh, though it was brighter than the interior lighting of the hospital. The pain was gone—utterly, utterly, blissfully gone. He heard muted voices, none of them strange to him.

He delayed opening his eyes after taking all this in...the expected sight might not be present. He opened his eyes, and then he knew.

It wasn't Heaven...

***

1955

“The lots are all full, sir. Not a parking space left.”

Not surprising news given the saturation publicity, but not good news either. There hadn't been that many opening day tickets printed. As he feared, someone was hawking counterfeits, and having the culprit stopped was one more among a thousand worries.

“Alright, son,” he told his gofer. “Go tell Mr. Wood I'm on my way to meet the camera crew.”

He started walking up Main Street for the start of daylong television coverage. The great park would admit its first visitors in ten minutes, and no general preparing for a battle ever felt greater anxiety. Signs of incompletion were everywhere: drinking fountains with no plumbing, bare patches in Fantasyland and Tomorrowland, uncured asphalt paving, and on and on. Even worse was his sense that, hard as he had worked on this landscape of codified myths, he had fallen short of perfection and no amount of time or money could right that.

***

1906

His parents had too little money to buy a pony. It didn't matter; he had no trouble finding his own mount. The ears of a short-necked animal are a natural substitute for reins, and in no time, he was riding a piebald sow all over the barnyard. She couldn't run as fast as the lean, bristly hogs living wild in the nearby woods, but she could give a four-year-old boy a challenging ride. He had to wait till she felt like stopping, or else jump off her back. A horse can be stopped by covering its eyes; the sow grew indignant over her rider's one attempt at blocking her vision, and tossed him sideways into a hog wallow.

It was fiercely hot, but small children do not notice. Too young to help out with chores, the boy made the most of his first summer on a forty-five acre playground. A hobby farm to its previous owners, it was now a working farm and teemed with animals and growing plants that were just words to him a few months earlier. Neighbor children seldom came by, and they weren't missed. He had a brother and sister near enough his own age for occasional play. And, in especially large measure, he had a child's facility for shaping marvels from the commonplace—looked at a certain way, a grain silo became a castle turret, a patch of kale became a storm-churned sea.

He never got seriously in the way of the big people who shared his playground and didn't play on it. Father and two older brothers spent as much time outdoors as himself and they were always very purposeful in whatever they did, not speaking, sometimes watching his playtime activities with a look of longing. In Father's case, the longing seemed to be mingled with resentment.

As for the piebald sow, one day she wasn't in her sty. Rides on her back had lost their novelty, and in a few weeks, he stopped thinking about her. Pigs cannot give milk or lay eggs. When the long winter begins in northern Missouri, so does the meat-heavy winter diet. Years later, he realized what had happened and cried.

***

1916

The foot injury that kept him off the paper route didn't excuse him from other work, and Father Elias wanted the addition to their Kansas City house finished. Foundation, frame and roofing went up during a stretch of clear weather. Elias did not like the gathering cloud cover; the siding would be on by day's end only if three men worked at it.

He and Roy held each shiplap board while Elias nailed it to the vertical timbers. The work of a carpenter's mate bored him, but he knew better than to ask for something more responsible. The family joke went: “Wows the neighbors with a pencil; all he can do with a hammer is bend nails.” Roy was no happier, having been ordered to take unpaid leave from his work at the bank.

Elias preferred to fasten the boards a tier at a time, on all sides. At the twenty-first tier, Elias leaned a ladder against the eaves and stood on the first rung. Roy, the older son, was tall enough to lift his end without straining. The younger son tried to stand on tiptoe, let out a staccato scream and dropped his end. The board fell into the slushy stampings.

He had hoped that lengthy contact with the cold ground would numb his foot. A five-cent nail like the ones his father was driving, hidden in a curbside snow bank, had pierced his boot yesterday. The tarsal movements needed to pedal his bike were agony.

“Pick it up,” Elias said. “We got to finish this.”

“Pop, it hurts him too much,” Roy said. “Let's get the scaffolding now.”

Elias had already told the boys they could stand on the scaffold, starting with the next tier. Another man would have relented, but not Elias. The old man was adding two rooms and a bathroom to a dwindling household. Herbert and Ray had run off years ago, after Elias had demanded to be given their paychecks. Elias suspected, correctly, that Roy was weeks away from doing the same thing.

There was also something in Elias that made him despise people who gave in to pain.

“He doesn't need it yet. Pick up that board, boy. Wipe it off.”

“No!” His vocal chords were unsettled, but the tone of defiance was unmistakable. Elias stepped down from the ladder.

“Go to the cellar. Git!”

The children of Elias all knew that the cellar was the place for whippings. The cellar door was outside the house, only a few yards away.

“You don't have to,” Roy said softly.

Elias whipped around to face Roy, astounded at his seditious words. Elias remembered the hammer in his hand.

“Don't take it from him.”

Roy wasn't the target...Elias raised the hammer to smite the other object of his fury. Roy took a half-step to help his brother, and stopped because it wasn't needed. Even with only one good foot for purchase, he was winning the test of strength, having seized Elias's wrists and arrested the hammer blow at the start of its descent. Elias struggled a few more seconds and dropped the hammer. After the boy released him, Elias started ambling to the cellar door, as though he would go down there alone. He stopped and turned halfway around. Without looking directly at either of his sons, Elias said, “Get...get the scaffolding. We got to finish before dark.”

The Basques mark a son's rite of passage when he wrestles his father into submission, but on this occasion, only the son wanted to celebrate. Elias worked the rest of that day by rote, like the experienced laborer he was. His thoughts were directed elsewhere. He tried and tried and couldn't comprehend why the Lord had stripped him of his domestic sovereignty, the one satisfaction he felt he still had in this world.

***

1938

Five of his animators finally bowed in public, depicting themselves as the five assistant toreadors. The head toreador had his arched eyebrows and foppish little mustache; they had fun making him jump up and down and scream his lungs out at the flower-sniffing bull.

A pitifully inadequate comeuppance, like that of the waiter in Goodfellas who is shot in the foot and cusses the responsible party.

***

1919

He pulled the truck ambulance up behind the concrete benches of the rifle range. The range saw little use after the armistice and only one other person was in sight. He parked right next to where his business partner was standing.

“I take it back. I didn't think one day was enough.”

“I'm a fast worker. You know that, Cracker. I can peddle a lot of inventory in one day,” he said through the open window. He got out of the cab, and the two young men spent the next few minutes unloading cargo packed in cardboard boxes.

“Sure you don't want me to wait for you?”

“Yeah, I'm sure,” the partner said. “It'll take too long. My truck is parked around the backstop. I'll bring in the rest of ‘em later.” He hadn't expected to receive his cut then, but Cracker reached into a fatigues pocket and counted out over two thousand francs. “See you at roll call, kiddo.”

He got into his battered Ford and started the engine. Just as he was pulling back onto the road that led to the motor pool, he heard shots coming from the range—Cracker was a fast worker too.

It was no longer a war when he arrived in France, and the occupation was proving profitable as well as safe. He and Cracker were in the ambulance unit. After having found dozens of discarded German helmets—some never even painted—in nearby scrap heaps, Cracker proposed a cottage industry. The unpainted helmets got camo and unit markings; every helmet got an insignia of the highest rank consistent with its metal fittings. Cracker would then distress the helmets, shooting them and daubing the interiors with a stolen unit of blood.

The sales end was his; he could move their wares freely because few MPs dared stop an ambulance to search for contraband. Physical evidence of having killed a high-value Hun was now for sale, priced according to rank, and the two-thirds of an army that never sees front line combat was putting up all it could beg or borrow to substantiate future tales of glory. The cartoons he had sold to newspapers had turned a profit, but not distantly like this. Wish-fulfillment, it seemed to him, was the most marketable commodity on the face of the earth.

***

1925

He tapped the brakes of his roadster to diminish the wind effect and save Lillian from wasting matches. Los Angeles County had no freeways yet, and cars were few enough that he did not risk being rear-ended. “Thanks, hon,” he said, trying to speak clearly while holding a cigarette captive in his mouth.

It was June and the sun was still high at half-past six. There were no palm trees on the two-lane road, just native deciduous species in full leaf.

“We are dining in Santa Monica?” Lillian asked.

“Sure. I'm taking a different route. There are some old fruit stands out this way. I didn't think you'd mind the extra driving.”

He had picked her up half an hour after they got off work, just allowing her time to dress up and polish her nails. Now, glancing at her hands while she put the matchbook back in her purse, Lillian saw how little a fresh coat of nail polish did for her perpetually discolored fingers. All the artists in the Ink and Paint Department were women; the men called it “the nunnery”. Months after she had joined the staff, he screwed up the courage to ask for their first date, adding, “If you don't mind going out with the boss.”

She knew what to say for answer. “Not if the boss doesn't mind going out with a nun.” She felt she could trust him and she was proved right. His values were traditional; he respected women, he admitted later how he abhorred the casting couch mentality of other studio chiefs.

He finished his cigarette and threw away the butt just as the U-Pick stand came into view. The roadside parking lot wasn't crowded, and he pulled in two car widths from the main outbuildings. “Wait here a minute,” he said. He walked to the cutaway front and, after a few words with the fat, swarthy man on the inside, carried a folding ladder and two wicker baskets back to the car. Lillian got out on her side.

“Do you come here often?” she asked.

“Nah, first time for me. I called ahead and told Mario what I wanted.” He handed her the two baskets. “I think it's this way.”

Rows of squat young avocado trees adjoined the parking lot. He knew the feel of a ripe avocado, and it took only a couple of minutes for him to fill one of the baskets. The other basket was for oranges—filling it was more of a chore. He needed the ladder and reset it once before the basket was full.

Halfway through the work of tossing oranges down to Lillian, he paused. He had been doing farm labor in a new flannel suit, all very quick and efficient, not a bit self-conscious. Now he stared irresolutely at the dimming horizon. Lillian could see they were more secluded in the orange grove than was possible at a restaurant table or driving on the highway. He had planned a special moment tonight that he still wasn't ready for; he finished his work and folded the ladder.

“Let me take the baskets, hon. They're heavier now.”

A few minutes earlier he had let her open and close her own door, made her light his cigarette. The habit of on-the-job command had always overcome his chivalrous impulse before. Lillian followed him to the parking lot, carrying the wooden ladder that was clumsier than the fruit baskets if not heavier, and knew how she would answer when the moment really came.

Lillian had taken work at his studio because it was within walking distance of her parents' house—she couldn't afford bus fare, money was that tight. Most of the other first hires expected to be seeking work again in a few months, but Lillian knew better. He had over a hundred workers now, and the Alice cartoons were showing in theaters all over the country. She had bet on the right horse; lots of girls in her situation never even got to place a bet.

***

1915

The duration of applause told him he'd won again; he had time enough to go backstage, wipe off the greasepaint mustache and start changing out of the borrowed, battered suit before the little theater fell quiet. He sat down with the audience for the last two acts, a tumbling exhibition and a piano recital, before re-experiencing the pleasure of hearing his name called.

This time also, he was relieved that the erstwhile teacher who handed him the dollar bill didn't ask him to point out his parents. Knowing his father's opinion of the theater, he had gone to bed early and then snuck out the bedroom window. He turned his broadest smile on the audience and said, “No encore, ladies and gents. I can't do a thing without my cane.” That was enough; he got off the stage without any sounds of protest.

He decided while hurrying home that he wouldn't enter another talent contest. The people ate up his Little Tramp act, but he had cooled toward the idea of performing. His latest batch of skits was based on characters from the movies he'd watched in secret. And he had come to realize that those characters had no freestanding existence when seen in a movie—they were perceived through an optical device wielded by other hands.

***

1928

If he were still producing cartoons after this, he wouldn't forget the troupe of hired musicians. Some of them were born for animated caricature: the fat flautist; the gangly, bushy-haired harpist; the stumpy bassist who couldn't play his instrument without appearing to caress it. Better seen on celluloid than met was the conductor. “Sir, I fail to see how any one technical innovation can effect the improvement you claim.” Edouarde's pomposity was wedded to him like the swallowtail coat he wore to the sound studio.

“It'll work; trust me. I wouldn't shell out another thousand bucks if I thought it was for nothing.”

Money equals authority, even for the vainest hireling. Edouarde nodded, and the too-familiar film was projected once again on the recording room wall.

It should have been obvious to him earlier. Pat Powers, his new backer, was selling a sound system with audio impulses inscribed right on the filmstrip—no problems with synchronizing a separate audio reel. After a disastrous first attempt at composing the soundtrack, he took a few days to ink in an addition to the working print: a bouncing black dot, visible on one side of the frame, that would cue the performers better than the maestro's baton.

“Stop it! Rewind,” he said after they had all seen the first twenty seconds. “Well?”

Edouarde took his time answering. “Alright...alright, we shall try it.”

Three hours later, a perfect soundtrack was in the can. Nine hours of initial effort had yielded only missed cues, sour notes and a boxful of blown vacuum tubes. The musicians and voice actors filed out, pleased to receive a full day's pay though they wouldn't be back on the job after lunch. It was just a job to them; he knew a revolution had been sparked.

A great storyteller has to create a world for his story. The means to present that world, independent of the written or spoken word, was only partially attained before now. How paying audiences would respond when perfectly timed sounds came from everyone and everything aboard an animated steamboat! No leader of a real revolution ever felt more confidence for the future at the moment he was hoisting the old regime's flag down from the taken citadel.

***

1930

The lobby telephone wasn't in a booth and the desk clerk's voice carried too well. “Your wife would like to see you, Mr. Call.”

He waved the clerk away. “Mr. Call ?” said the telephone voice.

“It's a long story, Roy.”

“Must be a real hoot. Does it have anything to do with your swapping hotels?”

“Yeah, it does. We've been on the line too long; I'll tell you everything when I'm back in L. A.”

No verbal reply, just a slightly too-loud click. He hung up and saw Lillian had entered the lobby with both their suitcases in hand.

“We're going to miss our train,” she said. She gave the desk clerk their room key; he paid the bill. Soon they were in a speeding taxi, and he decided it was best they had no slack time before boarding their waiting train. It would be just like Powers to have a process server prowling Grand Central.

Business partners had exploited him before, but not to this extent. Pat Powers had offered the use of Cinephone and extended much-needed cash advances to the studio. At the time, Powers's distribution contract seemed to be pretty generous. Powers was charming in person; his expressive eyes and Emerald Isle speech made him an easy man to like and trust.

The studio's returns were suspiciously small, and a special trip to New York failed to win access to his partner's accounting. Just as he was considering court action, a studio lawyer called him at the Algonquin—Powers had filed a preemptive lawsuit and a subpoena was on its way. He and Lillian finished the trip incognito, sending Roy reassuring phone calls and trying to line up potential allies for the fight ahead, after they were safely outside the jurisdiction of New York State.

“I thought we could trust Powers, too,” Lillian said. She knew how disturbed her husband was; ten minutes in the back of the taxi without one word from him was almost unprecedented.

He looked at her and tried to smile. “We'll just have to cut him loose—amicably. Offer him a king-size settlement and make some kind of deal with a major studio.” He didn't say: if we make enough money from our upcoming films to buy Powers off, if we can find a studio partner who isn't a bigger crook than Powers, if that partner isn't afraid to battle Powers in the courts over cartoons already contracted for.

The thing about Pat Powers that galled the most happened just before he left the man's office, was in fact the reason for his storming out. Powers told him that head animator Ub Iwerks, loyal ever since they met in Kansas City, was ready to leave him and join a brand new animation studio under Powers's control. A quick phone call to Roy confirmed that it wasn't a bluff—Iwerks had resigned that morning. Powers thought he would be cowed by the news; instead he wanted nothing now but to fight Powers and win. He was the indispensable person, the main architect of his success, and he would prove that to Powers and to the whole world.

***

1932

It was the loudest ovation ever given for a special Oscar, and the recipient wasn't even made of flesh and blood. They had all seen him in a range of harrowing situations and applauded his victories; the art of his creator made it all but impossible for audience to resist identifying with him. A screen descended from the flyspace above the stage, and a concealed projector showed him walking into frame center from the right border.

“I'm sorry,” he said, looking out at the members of the Academy. “I can't come any further...”

And he asked that the statuette be claimed on his behalf. The volume of cheering did not lessen as the screen blacked out and his creator strode to the lectern.

The absence of Charles Chaplin, the scheduled presenter, did nothing to dim the glory of this moment. Technical challenges, scheming by corporate allies—he had beaten it all down, just as the mouse always defeated his much larger adversaries. He gave a short speech, and everyone was grateful it contained none of the “little people” claptrap usually heard from producers.

Everyone but him, that is. “Cult of Personality” was a recent expression used to describe the preening of Europe's new dictators. In the back of his mind lodged the fear that he was doing something like that. He knew how Hollywood worked; the survivors were those who convinced the world that others, not they, could be replaced. He had dared formulate a vision, took risks, made personal sacrifices, tried to manage everything, and he still knew he couldn't make films without the contributions of dozens of talented, hard-working employees.

Before getting off the stage, he hoisted the Oscar and smiled once more for the photographers. Never, he thought, will I lose my gratitude to the people who've helped me and go on helping me. That's how I'll repay them.

***

1901

The minister left, basin and baptismal certificate in hand. It was December and the church had no heat, so a lot of crying had accompanied the rite. Elias and his new son were alone inside—outside were the rude, scattered buildings and slushy dirt roads of Chicago's Northwest Side.

Elias had helped build the church. Of his many attempted careers, the present one of dollar-a-day carpenter would prove the most successful. Flora and his other sons were waiting, but Elias wasn't ready to leave God's house just yet. Wrapped in a warm flannel blanket, the child had gone to sleep in his father's arms. Elias murmured a few of his favorite Biblical quotations, beginning with Job 5:7.

***

1939

“Owls eat rabbits, and skunks too. They got a lousy sense of smell. When I was a kid, a skunky odor near a tree meant there was an owl nestin' up there.” Then the new hire folded his arms for emphasis.

The studio chief twitched his mustache. The writers and animators drew slightly away from their soon-to-be ex-colleague.

“This is your first production conference,” the studio chief said, “so let's understand something. The scenario is laid out; it's final. It's been final for months.” He broke eye contact with the new hire, who had been making cartoons back East since the war ended. “What I wanted to say, guys, is that I like the scene. The dialogue isn't quite right; let's square that away.”

Seventy toes in fourteen shoes uncurled simultaneously—this was going to be a friendly conference. Production conferences could be friendly, neutral or abusive, and the last kind had stopped being a rarity.

“This word you coined for Friend Owl: ruddockless. Doesn't spill off the tongue. Besides, I had to look in a dictionary to find out what a ruddock was . Come on, guys, let's try it again.”

“Cuddaddled,” a writer said—instantly, as though he'd been busting to put it in the script.

“Better, please.”

“Numsgull?”

“Better.”

It took twenty seconds before any of the writers spoke again. “Flitter...no...twitterpated.”

“Yeah...yeah, that'll do. Write it in. That's item of business Number One.

“Number Two is that I'm still seeing mixed signals when you draw Friend Owl. Let's act this scene out; I'll play Friend Owl.”

He put his ever-present cigarette in a nearby ashtray and joined the three writers at one end of the conference room. The animators watched closely and one made quick sketches on a scratch pad. Friend Owl had the best acting part in this scene; all that Bambi, Flower and Thumper did was react to his speech on the vertiginous experience of young love. The chief's voice wasn't right for Friend Owl, but it was a good performance otherwise.

There was a clear visual strategy for the mammalian characters; a small zoological garden had been set up on the new studio campus, and the animators studied the animals so as to draw their bodies realistically. Friend Owl was a problem, though, as an owl's plumage tends to hide its musculature and skeletal structure. The act-through by the chief showed his animators the way. It was hard not to imagine his linen-suited arms as prehensile wings, and his wingtip shoes as anything but talons gripping a branch. At that moment, he wasn't a loquacious old man or a bird of prey; he had the character of the one in the superficially convincing frame of the other. The animators saw that they had to allow themselves a show of absolutely accurate draftsmanship at just a few moments—when Friend Owl spread his wings or moved his legs, they would keep the realistic limits of his anatomy in mind. For the rest, they could use his flexible plumage for subtle parody in keeping with his character. The chief was a great ham and loved getting this chance to stop being a dull, responsible captain of industry, but he was helping to get his picture back on its production schedule and knew that very well.

He was last to leave the conference room. The new hire was first; he had sat glumly and silently through the conference, and it was obvious he would have to go. Hundreds of animation people had been imported from Europe and the Eastern U. S. after the success of Snow White —the majority had lasted a few months, at most. The chief was trying, single-handed, to generate a Golden Age of motion picture animation, and incidentally to pay off the bankers to whom he was ever more in hock. He respected creative talent of all sorts, but he needed people who shared his vision and worked efficiently with their fellows. Cut the mustard or cut out: that was his credo.

He could hear his desk phone ringing as he passed the secretaries in his outer office. Other people received his call when a telephone conference was scheduled; Herman Kamen insisted on being the one to call and usually jumped the gun by at least two minutes.

“Kay?”

“Yeah, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.”

“Okay, I'm ready for the pitch. Don't spare any details.”

Kamen didn't—by the time the chief had heard everything and lowered the headset to take a few notes, there was a blush ring around his ear from the pressure of the earpiece. Herman Kamen was a symbiote of free enterprise. For a split of the proceeds, he sold a galaxy of merchandise connected with Mickey and other studio-owned characters. Now he had a distribution deal with a department store chain in Germany, and as always, the chief waved it on through.

“Send the contract this afternoon; I'll sign it when I can. I'm glad it's your money on the line. This isn't a good time to try drumming up business in Europe.”

“Hey, I believe in myself. Didn't I bring The Three Little Pigs home? That's what a salesman I am! Bye-bye.”

Maybe he's right, the chief thought. Kamen had grown up in New York's Jewish section and somehow persuaded the theater owners to show a cartoon starring the living symbol of un-kosher.

There were no more appointments that morning and the volume of deskwork was light, so he ended up with twenty minutes' slack time before lunch. He got up to take a casual walk around the studio. Catching goldbrickers wasn't the reason; his smoker's hack always preceded him. He liked to see how other people worked, to see the individual touches the rank and file brought to their assigned tasks. And the new studio itself still interested him. It had a central axis with multiple intersecting wings. That way, every working area had windows to supply natural light—no more “sweatbox” workrooms. The light was perfectly diffused by slotted awnings, and climate control was perfect too. He had designed it all himself.

His tour took him first to a classroom. His staff knew more than anyone about the squash-and-stretch, illusion-of-motion techniques peculiar to the animation trade, but a lot of them were scanty in the matter of formal art training. He opened the door partway and saw six male employees standing around a stuffed horse, sketching it from various angles. They didn't notice him immediately and that was fine; he closed the door without a sound. The last time he visited the art class, a female model in tight leotards was their subject, and he still felt scandalized by the way the young men were looking at her.

His second and last stop was a visit to the new, improved nunnery. Moments after he had begun poking around the work stations, he saw a wispy, flaxen-haired girl reach into her handbag and get out her makeup case. He crossed the floor quickly, meaning to say something sharp about dolling herself up on company time. It was never said—when he got close enough, he could see she was daubing rouge on a cel of Jiminy Cricket's face and airbrushing it.

It isn't easy to make an insect's face look human. Ever since the conference where the first cels were unveiled, he wondered how the nuns got that just-right blush into Jiminy Cricket's cheeks. The girl looked up at him from her easel, nervous and waiting for him to say something. He couldn't remember her name; there were too many new employees. But something about her, maybe her upturned nose, reminded him of Lillian.

“Don't mind me,” he said. He left for lunch; the memory of that meeting lingered all day.

***

1941

Raising his voice, the uniformed steward said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are now starting our descent to Belea, Brazil. Please fasten your safety belts.” Female stewards and cabin PAs were innovations yet to come.

“Pardon, sir,” Lillian said from her aisle seat, “will the airport gift shops take American dollars?”

“Yes, ma'am, I'm sure they do,” the steward said. Lillian smiled with relief and buckled herself in. This stop was just for refueling and might be their only one in Brazil. The children were home attending school; the least she could do was buy them travel mementos.

Half of the people on the passenger list were collecting mementos too. A delegation of writers and animators, loyalists whose presence the chief could abide for several weeks, were flying with him and Lillian on a Latin American tour; they would leave goodwill and return with suitably south-of-the-border ideas to put on film.

The chief was irritable. A silver-skinned Strato Liner with pressurized cabin, a view from the window seat—novelties that wore off all too soon, leaving him with his stale concerns. The studio, like American businesses in general, needed Latin American markets to replace European ones dried up by the war. It was as much a going from as a going to, as far as he was concerned. The possibility of the trip came up during his last meeting with Stokowski, and the old longhair agreed it was a good idea. “Copland did the same thing,” he'd said in his accented English, “traveling to Mexico before he wrote his Latin pieces.” And that association brought back the reason he had to drum up fast profits: the failure of the concert feature.

He had been testing himself; there was nothing he loved better. This time the public wasn't impressed, and even worse, the critics turned on him. He and Stokowski had jiggered the music a little to make it fit the visual ideas. The classical music pedants wouldn't stand for that, and reviewers who never faulted him before did this time. It's inevitable, he thought, for a reaction to set up against some one who's been on top too long, but the timing was hateful. The concert feature was the most ambitious thing he'd done; it galled him to think it might get its rightful praise too late for him to hear it and much too late to help keep the studio afloat.

Lillian hadn't spoken during the descent—the Strato Liner's touching down on the smooth new tarmac broke his reverie. “This is a refueling stop,” the steward shouted. “Passengers continuing to Rio de Janeiro must return to their seats in an hour and twenty-five minutes.”

“Are you hungry, hon?” In-flight meals were in the future also.

“Not really. I'd rather shop.”

“Alright, go and shop. I want to have lunch somewhere.”

It took a few minutes to coast to the terminal, time enough to dwell on the other reason for traveling now. The Bolshevik faction had, appallingly, won most of the company's employees over to their position. He thought it would never happen, but it did—all entrances to the campus were blocked by workers carrying the most professionally lettered signs ever seen on a picket line. The pretty girl who made up Jiminy Cricket was among the pickets, and that made it hurt worse. He decided to leave town and let even-tempered Roy settle the strike; he was afraid he might get physical during the negotiations.

The modern-looking airport had no local-colorist qualities to excite the imaginations of the studio people, but they were grateful for the absence of rain, which supposedly was a near-daily occurrence at this latitude. Lillian deplaned immediately. The chief was one of the last passengers to descend the boarding ramp, and he heard an unexpected chorus of cheers before he took his second step down. A couple of hundred locals, at least half of them children, were standing loosely clustered on the tarmac. They had singled him out from the other passengers, and were now cheering, pointing at him and waving signs in their inscrutable Portuguese.

He was surprised less by the presence of the reception committee than by its having recognized him so quickly. Stars were always being collared in the street by adoring fans, but hardly anyone in America knew him except by name. His growling belly was forgotten when he stepped off the ramp into the fawning coffee-colored natives. They couldn't believe their good fortune at meeting the Norteamericano for whose celluloid fantasies they had gladly sacrificed a substantial portion of their meager incomes. He shook hands, signed autographs, answered questions from English speakers, told stories, stood for photographs...and only Lillian's return, both arms laden with packages, shook him awake to the fact that passengers were boarding and there wasn't time for even a quick bite at the airport terminal.

***

1932

“Safe!”

The throw to first had beaten him by a step. But the umpire on the company softball lot was an employee and knew how much he hated to lose, at anything.

***

1964

It was a very private celebration. He had tired of the crabby old author long ago, and the leading lady—as sunny in person as she was on the screen—wasn't invited either. Now, here, he wanted family, people in his comfort zone.

“It's a different place at night,” said Sharon, adopted daughter and youngest representative of the middle generation. That moment she was sharing the Main Street apartment with her parents, uncle and aunt, the other grown children and their spouses, and the few grandchildren old enough not to have been kept home. She turned from the window to take an ice cream sundae from her father—a simple scoop of vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup, not one of the elaborate confections possible to the soda fountain he'd installed at the house. Sharon carried the bowl back to her red velvet chair; he lingered near the window a few seconds more.

It was a soft, still evening without the scouring dryness of the Santa Ana winds. The lessened foot traffic on Main Street was hardly audible through the pane of the firehouse loft window. It seemed to him that there was something mournful about the locomotive whistle when it called boarders for the last circuit around the park. He walked to a two-cushion sofa and sat beside Lillian.

Two open champagne bottles in ice buckets lay on the floral carpet; the occasion demanded champagne, the chief thought, even though he had little taste for it. Son-in-law Ron drained his glass before anyone else—predictably, given his size—and got up to refill it. “Refill, anyone?” he said, holding up one of the dripping bottles.

“Right here,” said Roy Jr. from a chair clear across the living room. It was almost twenty feet to carry the champagne bottle, and Ron cast a glance down at the other ice bucket, only three feet from where Roy Jr. was sitting. “Never mind.” Roy Jr. got up to freshen his half-empty glass.

For years, Roy Jr. had been helping his father with the financial and practical aspects of the business, doing it with the aplomb of a youthful dopplegänger. More recently, Ron had done what he could to assist the chief with the creative side. The chief knew that these two men were likely the future stewards of the company, and he chose not to dwell on the fact that they avoided occupying the same room, even when at work.

From their respective sides of the living room, Ron and the two Roys discussed the profits their new box office smash would deliver—and it was a smash, the thunderous ovation at the premiere left no doubt about that. The chief took no part in this. Usually the most talkative person in any gathering, he had left the theater with an abstracted half-smile that lasted all evening. The grownups decided against trying to draw him out, but grandson Christopher said, through the next-to-last mouthful of his sundae, “What are you gonna do next, Grandpa?”

“Well...I haven't thought about it a lot.”

That was the truth. For the first time in his career, he felt a drowsy indifference to the whole matter of developing future projects—he could simply turn the key and walk away from it now. He knew the reason why; Mary Poppins was the film that the rest of his career had been leading up to. Partly it was the film's message, encapsulated in the final song, “Go Fly a Kite”: imagination can transform life. And the film's technique was a grand display; live action meshed perfectly with the animated medium he had done more than any other person to develop.

There was a personal level of significance too, in that he had made the film just to please himself—economic urgency had nothing to do with it.

Television had made it possible, of course. He had been timid about hosting a weekly program; he was presenting himself as himself, not hiding within a dramatis persona , and that gave him his first experience of real stage fright. But it was worth it. He had a chance to bring all his old films out of the vault, and ones that had initially tanked ended up turning a profit from sponsor dollars. Better still, the television program led to a new wave of merchandising by new incarnations of Herman Kamen. Davy Crockett created a national fad for coonskin caps, and the chief got his cut of the profits. When the sheets were balanced the following quarter, he knew that all those coonskin caps had at last settled all his debts; he was captain of his commercial fate from then on.

By nine o'clock, the grandchildren started dropping off to sleep right where they sat. “I think Lillian and I would like to sleep at home,” he said, and everyone got the message. The mess in the firehouse studio was left for the janitors. Twenty minutes later, he was driving Lillian to their now-childless house.

When he exited the master bath in his pajamas, she was sitting and brushing her hair in front of the bedroom mirror. The lamp burning on the nightstand was bright enough for her to see him walk up and put his fingers gently on her shoulders, bright enough to let him see her winsome reflected smile...the romance revived tonight and neither cared why. He turned the bed down for her and let her in on her side before turning off the lamp himself. Lovemaking would have ensued at an earlier stage in their lives; now it was enough for them to turn onto their sides, facing each other, and fall asleep with arms tenderly twined.

He went to sleep without much reflection on the serenity of purpose he felt and the perfected state of his present life. It would have been best for him had that ideal evening been his very last. As his father learned long ago, the timing of death is never so considerate.

***

1966

He was explaining the proposed city for the first time, and up to a point, it was like the production conferences of old. There were drawings and diagrams pinned to the walls, and detail men around the conference room table were hanging on his every word. What dashed the resemblance was the length of time he needed to make his introductory speech. He had to take shallow breaths every few words, and resume sentences interrupted by the coughing spells he could no longer control. Finally he sat down at the end of the table to begin the discussion period—he seemed almost to collapse in the chair.

Ron spoke quickly, just as Roy Jr. was opening his mouth. “To start with, I think we need a fairly rigid time frame. We can't pay for this. We need investors, and they'll want to know when they can expect to see a profit.”

The lips of Roy Jr. stiffened visibly—that was the very thing he wanted to say. The detail men could tell that the new leadership, when it came in, would not be a mutual love fest.

The discussion followed Ron's lead, in that the only questions addressed were of implementation, how to do the thing already decided on. The detail men were experienced managers with a host of specialized skills, and soon they were asking more questions of one another than of the chief.

“You said no retirees in EPCOT?” That question, twenty minutes in, was asked of the chief.

“That's right, no old people at all. They can live somewhere else.”

The detail man looked puzzled. “But...why?”

This was the first question of rationale. “They're a drain,” the chief said in a voice completely ignorant of irony. “Everybody who lives in EPCOT is expected to contribute , not just coast along, fathead...and I'm not about to...”

He coughed non-stop for nearly a minute. When the room was still, discussion resumed with no more questions but those of implementation. The meeting broke up three hours later, with the next scheduled for the following Monday. The detail men left in a hurry, to start fact-checking new issues of real estate and finance and government regulation. The chief got up slowly, and Ron, close behind, followed him out the door. They exchanged a few quiet words, but that did nothing to dispel the impression that Ron was there to catch the old man if he suddenly grew faint.

Roy Sr. had brought a lot of paperwork to the meeting; after he'd stowed it in his briefcase, he saw that Jr. was still in the conference room.

“Do you think it'll come to anything?” Jr. asked.

“What?”

“EPCOT.”

Around them, waiting to be taken down later, were three dozen static teasers for the newest and biggest production in the studio's history. It was something for which the chief had abandoned his hard-won security and returned to his old, perilous risk-taking. The city was designed to the smallest detail, incorporating every cutting-edge notion he and his detail men could think of. To those who equate beauty with efficiency, it might be called a beautiful city. A closed corporation would own it and allow no part of it to be altered by its users. As with More's Utopia , the users could be banished for failure to do and be what was expected of them.

“It's the kind of project,” Sr. said, “that depends on one man's leadership. If he pushes it hard, all the way to the end, it'll be a reality. Otherwise it won't, at least not in its present form.”

“There's something else, Dad, something related. I found out you were just named Uncle's executor.”

“I was.”

“And you've already got his power of attorney; I know that. Your sec has taken long-distance calls from a doctor in Thousand Oaks. It turns out he's a cancer specialist. So you know all about Uncle's health?”

“Lillian and I know more about it than he does. The doctors thought it was better that way.”

“So...this is so hard to say...how far is EPCOT going to get?”

Ever the realist, Sr. answered, “Not far.”

***

1939

It wasn't a favor she wanted. Little Diane was standing near his armchair, looking at him strangely, almost studiously. He lowered his evening paper.

“Are you Walt Disney?”

He smiled with a quiet certitude that still came easily then. “You know I am.”

She asked him for his autograph.

***

1966

It wasn't Heaven. It was better .

All he could see, for the moment, was the figures in the foreground. Without knowing how, he knew that place settings were arbitrary; finding a desired landscape was a matter of wishing for it.

His father, back-stabbing business partners, treasonous employees, all of the people who'd preceded him in death and whose renewed acquaintance he dreaded—they weren't here. Standing around him were normal people dressed in character, and a larger number of fantasy creatures and anthropomorphic animals. The non-human majority weren't humans in rigid-faced costumes or two-dimensional beings outlined in black; they were mobile-featured and solid, and the exact size they appeared to be in their respective films. He felt certain he could reach out his unwithered hand to touch any one of them, and even the most fantastic-looking of them would have the feel of warm, living flesh.

One and all, they were facing him, talking a little among themselves. They seemed to be primed for the moment of his appearance. Each of them embodied a different urge, a different fantasy of emotional fulfillment. The despised raven-haired beauty who ran away from home into the arms of a loving young prince, the lonely old man whose hand-carved puppet became the son he'd yearned for, the helpless fawn who survived constant danger and grew into the patriarch of the forest—these and dozens of other heroes and heroines of his imagination were present. The villains, always recognizable as such, always capable of being defeated, were absent because they existed only to provide opposition in a beginning-middle-and-end story.

And this, he knew, was the end of all conflict—he was in company he would share, happily, for all time to come. He had loved Lillian, Roy, his children, but not as much as the characters of his imagination, pure and noble beings every one. His earthly empire had come about because other people were made to share that love.

Dozens of mostly three-fingered hands hoisted him high off the ground. That's really too much, he thought, I'm not a conquering hero. Then he noticed that the faces around him were very stern. He was being carried, faster and faster, in the direction his back had been turned to. It was a bum's rush. That instant he knew that behind him was nothing , a precipice like the right-angled edge of a Ptolemaic Earth.

“No! I want to stay with you!” It was no good—they were almost at the edge. His old habit of command came back: “I made you! You owe your existence to me!”

They stopped; they did not release him. “We know that, Walt,” a soft, slightly donnish voice said. The speaker's face was too low to be seen fully; he could only catch a glitter of bifocals.

“Anyone else would have failed. Other people had the same longings, the same pains. There were a few who had as much imagination. They didn't have your drive, your passion to excel. It doesn't take much to make a happy ending for most people: comfort, safety, enough love to share. You're different—you're Walt Disney. You wanted to leave your imprint on the whole world, no matter what the cost, and you did. Don't you see?”

He had no presentiment this time, no idea whether he would have an eternity to ponder any useless reply he might have made.

us.”

“You're not one