Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (18 page)

pretty but lower-class female wins over the town and the most popular boy in school by her natural charm and lack of pretension. An emphasis on good manners and looking pretty made for perfect young girl entertainment in mainstream opinion. Yet, just as “Spin and Marty” provided proto-queer boys with a boy-boy romance, it was quite possible for proto-queer girls to read a girl-girl relationship into “Annette.”

The character Annette moves to a new town from the country, and her first friend in the new school is a tomboy named Jet. Jet constantly provides the voice of common sense throughout the rest of the serial, giving Annette good advice, helping her fight her battles and sometimes literally getting into fistfights to defend Annette’s good name.

The chivalry and the downright “butchness” of Jet make it quite easy to read her as a proto-lesbian figure.76 Jet herself becomes a problem for Annette. The other high school kids, and even Annette’s aunt and uncle (with whom she is living), disapprove of Annette’s friendship with Jet and tell Annette that she should be with a “better” sort of people. While part of this disapproval is based on class bias (Jet is obviously from a working-class environment), the leap to other conclusions is not so broad. Of course, Annette’s uncle admits that he himself was friends with Jet’s father “as a youth.” This implies that such an attachment is only “a phase” that Annette will outgrow. Yet, when the uncle is played by gay actor Richard Deacon (best known as Mel on TV’s
The Dick Van
Dyke Show
), the viewer is left to wonder just much of a passing phase this friendship was!

“Annette,” working within the conventions of the “women’s film”

genre, focuses more intently on heterosexual courtship than “Spin and Marty” ever does. This makes it slightly harder to reconcile a lesbian 84

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reading into the serial. Annette is matched with high school heartthrob Steve quite early on. Yet, the constant presence of Jet throughout the narrative always complicates and destabilizes things. The hit song from the “Annette” serial wasn’t meant to add fuel to this subcultural reading, but when Annette sings the musical lament “How Will I Know My Love?,” some proto-queer girls might have had Jet in mind as the answer.

Even though Disney moved increasingly into live-action films and television as the years went on, the studio’s output still stressed the fantastic. In the live-action comedies of the late 1950s and early 1960s, this fantastic often focused on the human body—people flying, bouncing, transforming, shrinking, growing, etc. For pubescent viewers, watching various teenaged actors go through fantastic transformations could’ve been used as a method for dealing with the changes going on in their own bodies. Certainly, Tommy Kirk’s metamorpho-sizing into
The Shaggy Dog
(1959)—one of Disney’s most successful films from this period—can be understood as a portrayal of puberty gone amok. In a different manner, Hayley Mills’ discovery of another Hayley Mills in
The Parent Trap
(1961) seems to have embodied a number of both gay and lesbian teen desires to be able to be two different people, one butch and one feminine, and shows how people can act out both parts.

This tradition continued into the 1970s, after Walt’s death, when the studio focused almost exclusively on light comedies and mild adventure aimed at the preteen set.
Escape from Witch Mountain
(1975) told the story of two twelve year olds discovering that the strangeness they feel in the world is because they are actually aliens from another world. The rest of the film shows them using their paranormal powers in an effort to return to the community where they feel they belong. In an internet conversation about the film, one gay man remembered:

For months after watching
Escape to Witch Mountain
I emulated [female lead] Kim Richards in a way which should have sent off huge warning bells for my parents. Remember the scene where [the characters] Tony & Tia were carrying their jackets? . . . Tony had his hand wrapped around the top of his jacket, all bunched together—the way you’d carry a bouquet of flowers. Tia, on the other hand, had her hand overtop of the top of her jacket—very limp wrist, hand dangling as though about to plunge into Palmolive for soaking, and fingers just

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barely gripping the jacket. I thought it was so elegant, I carried my jackets that way all over town.77

In response to this, another gay man wrote, “OHMIGOD. Are you inside my head or something? . . . I made my parents take me to see this movie something like seven times.”78

Just as proto-queer boys had Spin and Marty to fantasize over in the 1950s, their 1970s counterparts could watch the dimples and blue eyes of Kurt Russell in various Disney films that transformed his body. Playing Dexter Riley in a series of three films about Medfield University, Kurt was fused with a computer in
The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes
(1970), became invisible in
Now You See Him, Now You Don’t
(1972) and then turned into
The Strongest Man in the World
(1975). In all the films, Dexter was comically antagonized by prissy Dean Higgins (Joe Flynn).

He was also pursued by petty gangster Arno (Cesar Romero) and his sidekick, Cookie, the live-action equivalent of Honest John and Figaro.

They are always together; they even share the same apartment. In one scene of
The Strongest Man in the World,
Cookie discusses plans with Arno while Arno stands in a tank T-shirt and shaves.

The final film in the series climaxes with a weight-lifting competition. The Medfield team is made up mostly of gangly weaklings who look over in awe at the tall, tanned and buffed State team, who are all also sporting the feathered hairstyle and thick moustaches that became commonly known in ’70s gay male culture as “the clone look.” Luckily, after Dexter disposes of Arno and Cookie, the Medfield team gets a handsome male of their own and defeats State.

Two years before
The Strongest Man in the World
was released, the studio produced
The World’s Greatest Athlete,
starring Jan-Michael Vincent as Nanu the jungle boy. Nanu is introduced when Coach Archer (John Amos) eyes him running across the African veldt. The delight in Archer’s eyes at watching Nanu’s loinclothed body sprinting past was matched by many audience members, for Vincent was one of the main

“pinups” in gay male culture during the 1970s. Throughout the film, Vincent’s body is constantly on display, usually for the pleasure of other men. Besides Archer, Nanu is watched by Milo, the coach’s assistant (Tim Conway); Gazenga, Nanu’s godfather and the tribal witch doctor (Roscoe Lee Browne); Dean Maxwell (Billy de Wolfe, who commonly portrayed sissy comic roles in the 1940s) and his prissy son Leopold; and a trio of sportscasters, including Howard Cosell! The privilege of 86

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watching Nanu is almost exclusively given to these men. For example, the landlady of the rooming house where Archer places Nanu after en-rolling him in Merrivale University is practically blind (played by Nancy Walker).

Only one other woman is ever introduced as a character (comically named Jane). Her presence may somewhat diffuse the rampant homoeroticism of the film, since she also objectifies Nanu’s body.

Working as his tutor, Jane introduces the subject of biology as “the study of muscles” and proceeds to touch various parts of his body to explain what the trapezius, deltoids and biceps are. Yet, the romance is consistently deflected, usually by introducing a male rival for Nanu’s attention. Namely, Nanu often seems to prefer the physical affection of his tiger Harry to Jane. In one sequence, as Jane and Nanu run towards each other in slow motion across an open field, Nanu runs right past Jane to wrestle fondly with the tiger. At another point, Harry attempts to follow Nanu into the shower, and Nanu himself asks the tiger, “Is Harry jealous of Jane?” before assuring him that

“Nanu love only you.” Jane herself accidentally seems to push Nanu in this direction. Every time she starts to feel that their tutoring sessions are getting a little too personal, she suggests that they “move onto ancient Greece.”

While there is no explicitly comparable film for proto-queer girls in the 1970s to match
The Strongest Man in the World
and
The World’s Greatest Athlete,
there was Jodie Foster in
Freaky Friday
(1977). Another transformation comedy, this time a teenaged girl and her mother switch bodies. While not explicitly dealing with female-female desires, that the girl is quite the tomboy furthers the comedy when she finds herself inhabiting her quite-feminine mother’s body, and vice versa. We are introduced to Annabelle (Foster) waking up in a mess of a room wearing a baseball jersey. As she readies for school, she threatens her little brother with bodily harm and swaggers through the house. As she narrates the type of life she leads, the film shows us clips of her as an aggressive star player for the school’s field hockey team.

On the other side, her mother Ellen (Barbara Harris) is petite, wears makeup and plays the conventional housewife. Both are on each other’s nerves, mostly because Ellen wants Annabelle to be more conventionally feminine. She complains to her husband, “Have you seen how she dresses lately?” Later, a boy across the street tells Ellen in an understanding tone, “You shouldn’t blame yourself for the way Annabelle

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is.” When the boy sees Annabelle’s trashed room, Annabelle (in her mother’s body) tries to claim that it is her brother’s.

Neither the mother nor the daughter is particularly happy with her life. Annabelle wants to get through puberty quickly and Ellen is obviously very put upon by her insensitive husband, so they get to switch personalities, just as the two Hayleys did in
The Parent Trap.
Now the femme is in a butch body, and the butch is femme. The comic aspects of the switch show these two personalities trying to play the role correctly—the butch trying to put on false eyelashes and do the laundry, the femme trying to play field hockey (after a teammate pats her on the butt before the game). Although the structure of the film tries to keep things even amongst the two characters, Annabelle’s narration invites the viewer to identify with Foster’s butch teenager. Helping the film along are a number of tough cookie veteran character actresses who seem to almost work as adult models for those identifying with Annabelle. Patsy Kelly (as the housekeeper), Marie Wilson (as a schoolteacher) and especially Ruth Buzzi and Kaye Ballard as “go-out-and-kill-em” field hockey coaches constantly show women who are not following feminine ideals. It must be said that this film is a product of a feminist age (Annabelle comes to realize that her father is a “male chauvinist pig”) and the film was written by Mary Rodgers, based on her novel. Yet, such affirmation of non-feminine roles for women was un-usual for the conservative Disney. The film tries to show that both sides learn lessons—but mainly, Annabelle learns that her father really expects a lot from her mother, while the mother realizes that Annabelle is fine the way she is. Even though the film was not a financial success, for the few young girls in the audience who were trying to come to terms with their bodies and their desires, such a message must have been quite welcome.

CONCLUSION: THE CHANGING LOOK OF NANNIES

Author Chris Cuomo labels the last section of her article, “Spinsters in Sensible Shoes:
Mary Poppins
and
Bedknobs and Broomsticks,
” “Lesbian Subtexts: The Opaque Spinster.”79 She suggests that “there are ways in which the characterizations of both Mary Poppins and Eglantine Price

[the magical nanny/spinster of
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
] resonate with both homophobic and friendly representations of ghostly and witchy 88

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lesbians in the history of Western literature and film.”80 The conflation of middle-aged lesbian stereotypes with the clichéd images of the spinster makes such a statement feasible. Both Poppins and Price are essentially humorless in demeanor, direct in their actions and speech, and, although both care for children, neither seems to display a single mater-nal instinct.

Yet, Cuomo goes on to point out the more “easy-to-recognize” nature of Price’s character. “Price has a classic lesbian look and no feminine fluff, and is tailored. . . . Villagers are wondering whether she’ll ever have a (male) romantic interest. . . . Even her diet, which includes cabbage buds, rose hips, glyssop seed, elm bark, and stewed nettles and bran porridge, fits the contemporary and historical constructions of the puritanical, health-obsessed or vegetarian lesbian-feminist.”81 While Poppins seems unconcerned with what people say or think of her and her magic, Price is at pains throughout to keep her magical powers secret. After an introduction emphasizing her lack of male companionship, such secretiveness takes on extra meaning. When one of the children under her care announces, “Game’s up, Miss Price. We know what you are,” the possibilities loom even larger.

Unlike Poppins, who never seems to be quite of this world, Price is quite rooted in the real world, trying to make a comfortable life for herself in a small English coastal town instead of floating off into the clouds. Cuomo theorizes that this more realistic context makes Price seem more “truly” lesbian than Poppins, but it also makes it more necessary for Price’s character to eventually be romantically matched with a man. Unlike Poppins, who opens her umbrella and disappears into the horizon at the end of her story, Price’s humanity must be in the end heterosexualized, and a man whom she originally saw no use for becomes her romantic partner.

Mary Poppins
was released in 1964 and was one of the last motion pictures that Walt Disney himself personally oversaw.
Bedknobs and
Broomsticks
came out in 1971, four years after Walt’s death. Although the later film owes a great deal to (and hoped to recapture the popularity of) the earlier film, Cuomo’s reading points out that times had changed.