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Reanimated
By DEBORAH SOLOMON
Published: February 22, 2004
Roy E. Disney, who has long been derided as ''Walt's idiot nephew,'' as he puts it, is actually an eloquent, thoughtful man who completes the daily crossword in ink. Yet he does have a quirky sense of humor that he tends to unleash at his own expense. One recent afternoon, while we were sitting in his living room with his wife and his oldest son, I looked up from my notepad and was astonished to see him tugging on both ears, dangling his tongue from his mouth and panting like an exhausted dog. ''Did you know,'' he asked me, ''that I was the model for Goofy?''
At 74, Disney is an affable, gray-haired man whose long face and squinty eyes lend him an uncanny likeness not to old Goofy -- for whom he did not actually pose -- so much as to their mutual forebear Walt. His temperament, though, is closer to that of his father, Roy O. Disney, the kinder, gentler and lesser-known of the entertainment empire's founders. Within the company, the younger Roy has always been viewed as an oddly nonchalant heir, indifferent to the seductions of power, content to spend his days tinkering with films and keeping court with the old-time animators whom he had watched, in his privileged boyhood, sketching scenes for ''Pinocchio'' and ''Fantasia'' on their storyboards.
''When you grow up around a company in which the power is already yours,'' he explained that day at his home in Toluca Lake, a suburban section of Los Angeles, ''you look at power in a different way. I believed that the work was the important thing. I wasn't political. I wasn't trying to nudge some guy out of the way.''
These days, however, Roy Disney is very intent on nudging a guy out of the way. He is trying, by his own admission, to destroy Michael D. Eisner, the chairman and chief executive of the company and a man Disney himself helped hire in 1984. The rancor between the two men spilled into public view in November, after Disney, invited one Friday afternoon to meet a fellow member of the board of directors at a bar in a Pasadena mall, was told that he was too old to be renominated for his longtime seat on the board. In a state he describes as deep shock, he calmly walked to the parking lot of the mall and called his wife from his car. When he arrived home, Patty Disney was choking back tears. ''He was gray when he walked in,'' she told me. ''He looked like he had been kicked in the stomach.''
Two weeks later, on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, Eisner was in New York, watching a pro football game in his Fifth Avenue apartment when a three-page letter was slipped under his door. In it, Disney offered his resignation as vice chairman of the board and also forfeited his day-to-day job as the head of the company's feature-animation division. He went on to pinpoint seven problems at the company he said he believed were entirely Eisner's doing, ranging from the loss of creative energy to a drop-off in quality at properties like ABC and the theme parks to a general deficiency in leadership that Disney said had caused a perception that the company was ''soulless'' and ''rapacious.'' The letter concluded, ''It is my sincere belief that it is you who should be leaving and not me.''
On March 3, Eisner is scheduled to play host to the company's annual shareholders meeting at the convention center in Philadelphia, turning the city of brotherly love into a site of unbridled aggression. Roy Disney plans to hold his own reception the day before to welcome many of the 25,000-plus sympathizers who have so far signed on to savedisney.com, a Web site he founded to drum up support for his anti-Eisner effort. But when Eisner faces the shareholders, he will have more on his mind than Roy and his homespun campaign. Three weeks ago, Pixar Animation Studios, which has created some of Disney's most profitable and artistic films in recent years, abruptly called off talks to extend its distribution deal with the company. And on Feb. 11, Comcast Corporation, the country's largest cable operator, made a $54 billion hostile takeover bid for Disney, partly because Roy Disney's crusade against Eisner had helped create the impression that the chief executive and his company were vulnerable. By the end of last week, photographs of Eisner's solemn, square-jawed face were on newspaper front pages everywhere and the Disney board had announced that it was considering the Comcast offer. ''I think the bid is a validation of everything I have been saying for two years,'' Roy told me. ''But as for the details, I am still evaluating them.''
Whether or not Eisner falls, the battle to oust him carries a symbolism all its own. For the Walt Disney Company is not just another lucrative film studio or creator of theme parks; it is an essential part of the American imagination. Since its founding in 1923, it has asked us to wish upon a star, to whistle while we work, to believe that our prince will someday come. It practically invented the idea of happy endings. But in reality, life does not resemble a fairy tale, even if your name is Roy Disney, the last man at the company connected by blood to its founders.
''I am so pained for Roy,'' Patty Disney, a short, blunt woman of 69, told me as we sat in her living room. ''I would go over there and punch Michael out if my husband let me.''
''I wish you had gotten that over with right at the start,'' Roy replied with a chuckle.
''We want to take Michael sailing,'' joked the couple's son, Roy P. Disney, known as Patrick, a father himself, who lives around the corner and had dropped by his parents' house to lend them moral support.
''Yes,'' Patty said. ''Scare him to death! You see, he doesn't have any hobbies, and he is terrified of boats. He's a xenophobe. He is afraid to leave the country. Our family has so many interests. But Michael is one-dimensional. He doesn't do anything. He doesn't even play golf!''
Roy Disney's family, whose worth has been estimated at more than a billion dollars, might not exactly qualify as plain folk. And Roy Disney, who races yachts and drives a red Ferrari, who owns a castle in Ireland as well as a Boeing 737 jet to fly him there, cannot fairly be described as salt of the earth. Yet on this shining winter afternoon, he and his family certainly seemed like the picture of normalcy as they sat in their comfy three-bedroom home, talking about a stock villain of domestic life -- Dad's mean boss -- with a mixture of outrage and sardonic humor.
''We're not fancy people,'' Patty said, adding that she runs her household on a modest budget and has no hired help -- no chauffeur, no cook, no maid. She and the rest of the family seem eager to define themselves in opposition to the mythic excesses of Hollywood, perhaps because they are genuinely unshowy, or perhaps because their proprietary passions for the Walt Disney Company have led them to buy into its fabled emphasis on the common touch.
''You really need to touch the ground,'' Patrick said. ''My mother shops at Costco. She shops at Target.''
''I do not shop there,'' Patty protested.
''You do too, Mom!''
''Well, sometimes I do,'' Patty conceded. ''It's a great place to buy T-shirts.''
Patrick added: ''I make my kids stand in line at Disneyland. They stand in line for two hours just like everyone else.''
His father, who was sitting at the far end of the couch, observing the banter between mother and son with visible amusement -- he seems to seek out the social margins not only at work but even within his own family -- jumped into the conversation at the mention of the theme parks. ''I will promise you,'' Roy Disney said, ''there isn't a member of the Disney board who has ever stood in line at the parks. When they go, they get back-doored into everything.''
''When we go to the parks,'' Patrick continued, ''if we see a candy wrapper on the ground, we stop and pick it up and put it in the trash. Do you think Michael would ever think of doing a thing like that? Oh, pleeeease!''
These days, Michael Eisner is on the defensive, and some say he is in possession of a newly friendly and even solicitous personality. He has been meeting with major shareholders and stock analysts and giving little pep talks on his own behalf. His board has been rallying behind him, sending off letters to about a third of the company's 2.8 million shareholders that brim with ''good news'' about the stock price while condemning the ''misleading and distorted campaign'' against him. When I called Eisner's office to request an interview in January, I was turned down. Instead, I was invited to visit company headquarters and talk to top executives -- so long as I agreed not to quote them by name in this article. ''We don't think we should be [expletive] on Roy in public,'' Zenia Mucha, senior vice president for corporate communications, said. Later that day, she e-mailed me some 20-odd articles chronicling the shortfalls of various companies held by Roy Disney, his associates and his children.
The gesture was surprisingly aggressive, particularly since Roy Disney is not mounting a full-blown proxy contest, which would require that he propose a successor -- someone, anyone -- to replace Eisner. Instead, he has merely called for Eisner's removal, which, in corporate circles, tends to be viewed as roughly tantamount to a high-school senior trying to topple the president of the student council by going around saying, ''He stinks.'' Disney's goal, he says, is to have at least 10 to 12 percent of shareholders ''withhold consent'' for Eisner's re-election before March 3, which he says he believes could sway the board to dump its famously entrenched chief.
In the meantime, Eisner still reports to work at the Disney Studio in Burbank, a squeaky-clean sprawl of manicured lawns and squat brick buildings. The grounds look like Disneyland but without any people. Management occupies the Team Disney building, as it is called, which was designed by the architect Michael Graves as a playful exemplar of postmodernism. Outside, sculptures of the seven dwarves serve as faux Doric columns that appear to be holding up the roof. The whole gang is on hand, including Dopey in his pointy dunce cap, an underachiever and the sort of guy not likely to be hired here.
Inside these halls, the business of Disney is, of course, business, and Roy Disney is viewed essentially as a man who only gets in the way. His critics at the company point out that he earned his job only on family connections and resists innovation in favor of recycling the long-vanished past. For instance, his recent pet project, ''Fantasia 2000'' -- a remake of the 1940 masterpiece that remains a coup of modernist experimentation -- garnered admiring reviews but was one of the company's biggest-ever failures, with losses of around $100 million.
Disney executives also fault Roy for his frequent assaults on the machinery of merchandising. They tell, in ominous voices, the story of ''the white Mickey.'' Last year, the Disney Store offered for sale a white plush Mickey, a seasonal venture intended to capitalize on snowy Christmas. Roy says he felt it represented an affront to the integrity of the mouse, who historically has appeared in red shorts, his ears two black orbs. He called Eisner on multiple occasions to voice his displeasure and demand a meeting.
http://www.Link
Reanimated
By DEBORAH SOLOMON
Published: February 22, 2004
Roy E. Disney, who has long been derided as ''Walt's idiot nephew,'' as he puts it, is actually an eloquent, thoughtful man who completes the daily crossword in ink. Yet he does have a quirky sense of humor that he tends to unleash at his own expense. One recent afternoon, while we were sitting in his living room with his wife and his oldest son, I looked up from my notepad and was astonished to see him tugging on both ears, dangling his tongue from his mouth and panting like an exhausted dog. ''Did you know,'' he asked me, ''that I was the model for Goofy?''
At 74, Disney is an affable, gray-haired man whose long face and squinty eyes lend him an uncanny likeness not to old Goofy -- for whom he did not actually pose -- so much as to their mutual forebear Walt. His temperament, though, is closer to that of his father, Roy O. Disney, the kinder, gentler and lesser-known of the entertainment empire's founders. Within the company, the younger Roy has always been viewed as an oddly nonchalant heir, indifferent to the seductions of power, content to spend his days tinkering with films and keeping court with the old-time animators whom he had watched, in his privileged boyhood, sketching scenes for ''Pinocchio'' and ''Fantasia'' on their storyboards.
''When you grow up around a company in which the power is already yours,'' he explained that day at his home in Toluca Lake, a suburban section of Los Angeles, ''you look at power in a different way. I believed that the work was the important thing. I wasn't political. I wasn't trying to nudge some guy out of the way.''
These days, however, Roy Disney is very intent on nudging a guy out of the way. He is trying, by his own admission, to destroy Michael D. Eisner, the chairman and chief executive of the company and a man Disney himself helped hire in 1984. The rancor between the two men spilled into public view in November, after Disney, invited one Friday afternoon to meet a fellow member of the board of directors at a bar in a Pasadena mall, was told that he was too old to be renominated for his longtime seat on the board. In a state he describes as deep shock, he calmly walked to the parking lot of the mall and called his wife from his car. When he arrived home, Patty Disney was choking back tears. ''He was gray when he walked in,'' she told me. ''He looked like he had been kicked in the stomach.''
Two weeks later, on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, Eisner was in New York, watching a pro football game in his Fifth Avenue apartment when a three-page letter was slipped under his door. In it, Disney offered his resignation as vice chairman of the board and also forfeited his day-to-day job as the head of the company's feature-animation division. He went on to pinpoint seven problems at the company he said he believed were entirely Eisner's doing, ranging from the loss of creative energy to a drop-off in quality at properties like ABC and the theme parks to a general deficiency in leadership that Disney said had caused a perception that the company was ''soulless'' and ''rapacious.'' The letter concluded, ''It is my sincere belief that it is you who should be leaving and not me.''
On March 3, Eisner is scheduled to play host to the company's annual shareholders meeting at the convention center in Philadelphia, turning the city of brotherly love into a site of unbridled aggression. Roy Disney plans to hold his own reception the day before to welcome many of the 25,000-plus sympathizers who have so far signed on to savedisney.com, a Web site he founded to drum up support for his anti-Eisner effort. But when Eisner faces the shareholders, he will have more on his mind than Roy and his homespun campaign. Three weeks ago, Pixar Animation Studios, which has created some of Disney's most profitable and artistic films in recent years, abruptly called off talks to extend its distribution deal with the company. And on Feb. 11, Comcast Corporation, the country's largest cable operator, made a $54 billion hostile takeover bid for Disney, partly because Roy Disney's crusade against Eisner had helped create the impression that the chief executive and his company were vulnerable. By the end of last week, photographs of Eisner's solemn, square-jawed face were on newspaper front pages everywhere and the Disney board had announced that it was considering the Comcast offer. ''I think the bid is a validation of everything I have been saying for two years,'' Roy told me. ''But as for the details, I am still evaluating them.''
Whether or not Eisner falls, the battle to oust him carries a symbolism all its own. For the Walt Disney Company is not just another lucrative film studio or creator of theme parks; it is an essential part of the American imagination. Since its founding in 1923, it has asked us to wish upon a star, to whistle while we work, to believe that our prince will someday come. It practically invented the idea of happy endings. But in reality, life does not resemble a fairy tale, even if your name is Roy Disney, the last man at the company connected by blood to its founders.
''I am so pained for Roy,'' Patty Disney, a short, blunt woman of 69, told me as we sat in her living room. ''I would go over there and punch Michael out if my husband let me.''
''I wish you had gotten that over with right at the start,'' Roy replied with a chuckle.
''We want to take Michael sailing,'' joked the couple's son, Roy P. Disney, known as Patrick, a father himself, who lives around the corner and had dropped by his parents' house to lend them moral support.
''Yes,'' Patty said. ''Scare him to death! You see, he doesn't have any hobbies, and he is terrified of boats. He's a xenophobe. He is afraid to leave the country. Our family has so many interests. But Michael is one-dimensional. He doesn't do anything. He doesn't even play golf!''
Roy Disney's family, whose worth has been estimated at more than a billion dollars, might not exactly qualify as plain folk. And Roy Disney, who races yachts and drives a red Ferrari, who owns a castle in Ireland as well as a Boeing 737 jet to fly him there, cannot fairly be described as salt of the earth. Yet on this shining winter afternoon, he and his family certainly seemed like the picture of normalcy as they sat in their comfy three-bedroom home, talking about a stock villain of domestic life -- Dad's mean boss -- with a mixture of outrage and sardonic humor.
''We're not fancy people,'' Patty said, adding that she runs her household on a modest budget and has no hired help -- no chauffeur, no cook, no maid. She and the rest of the family seem eager to define themselves in opposition to the mythic excesses of Hollywood, perhaps because they are genuinely unshowy, or perhaps because their proprietary passions for the Walt Disney Company have led them to buy into its fabled emphasis on the common touch.
''You really need to touch the ground,'' Patrick said. ''My mother shops at Costco. She shops at Target.''
''I do not shop there,'' Patty protested.
''You do too, Mom!''
''Well, sometimes I do,'' Patty conceded. ''It's a great place to buy T-shirts.''
Patrick added: ''I make my kids stand in line at Disneyland. They stand in line for two hours just like everyone else.''
His father, who was sitting at the far end of the couch, observing the banter between mother and son with visible amusement -- he seems to seek out the social margins not only at work but even within his own family -- jumped into the conversation at the mention of the theme parks. ''I will promise you,'' Roy Disney said, ''there isn't a member of the Disney board who has ever stood in line at the parks. When they go, they get back-doored into everything.''
''When we go to the parks,'' Patrick continued, ''if we see a candy wrapper on the ground, we stop and pick it up and put it in the trash. Do you think Michael would ever think of doing a thing like that? Oh, pleeeease!''
These days, Michael Eisner is on the defensive, and some say he is in possession of a newly friendly and even solicitous personality. He has been meeting with major shareholders and stock analysts and giving little pep talks on his own behalf. His board has been rallying behind him, sending off letters to about a third of the company's 2.8 million shareholders that brim with ''good news'' about the stock price while condemning the ''misleading and distorted campaign'' against him. When I called Eisner's office to request an interview in January, I was turned down. Instead, I was invited to visit company headquarters and talk to top executives -- so long as I agreed not to quote them by name in this article. ''We don't think we should be [expletive] on Roy in public,'' Zenia Mucha, senior vice president for corporate communications, said. Later that day, she e-mailed me some 20-odd articles chronicling the shortfalls of various companies held by Roy Disney, his associates and his children.
The gesture was surprisingly aggressive, particularly since Roy Disney is not mounting a full-blown proxy contest, which would require that he propose a successor -- someone, anyone -- to replace Eisner. Instead, he has merely called for Eisner's removal, which, in corporate circles, tends to be viewed as roughly tantamount to a high-school senior trying to topple the president of the student council by going around saying, ''He stinks.'' Disney's goal, he says, is to have at least 10 to 12 percent of shareholders ''withhold consent'' for Eisner's re-election before March 3, which he says he believes could sway the board to dump its famously entrenched chief.
In the meantime, Eisner still reports to work at the Disney Studio in Burbank, a squeaky-clean sprawl of manicured lawns and squat brick buildings. The grounds look like Disneyland but without any people. Management occupies the Team Disney building, as it is called, which was designed by the architect Michael Graves as a playful exemplar of postmodernism. Outside, sculptures of the seven dwarves serve as faux Doric columns that appear to be holding up the roof. The whole gang is on hand, including Dopey in his pointy dunce cap, an underachiever and the sort of guy not likely to be hired here.
Inside these halls, the business of Disney is, of course, business, and Roy Disney is viewed essentially as a man who only gets in the way. His critics at the company point out that he earned his job only on family connections and resists innovation in favor of recycling the long-vanished past. For instance, his recent pet project, ''Fantasia 2000'' -- a remake of the 1940 masterpiece that remains a coup of modernist experimentation -- garnered admiring reviews but was one of the company's biggest-ever failures, with losses of around $100 million.
Disney executives also fault Roy for his frequent assaults on the machinery of merchandising. They tell, in ominous voices, the story of ''the white Mickey.'' Last year, the Disney Store offered for sale a white plush Mickey, a seasonal venture intended to capitalize on snowy Christmas. Roy says he felt it represented an affront to the integrity of the mouse, who historically has appeared in red shorts, his ears two black orbs. He called Eisner on multiple occasions to voice his displeasure and demand a meeting.
