THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019 71
memorable fish man in the blackand
white, driveinready, atomicage tin
gler “Creature from the Black Lagoon.”
O’Meara located a niece of Patrick’s
who’d held on to bins full of her aunt’s
photographs and papers, and a hor
rormovie writer who’d kept files on
Patrick in an office crammed with mon
stermovie ephemera, “like something
out of an episode of Tales from the
Crypt.” But it was in an archive at the
University of Southern California that
O’Meara found the telltale heart of her
story: through internal Universal Stu
dios memos, she pieced together the
story of how Patrick’s achievement had
been discounted.
In addition to designing monster
makeup and special effects, Patrick was
a glamorous bit actress with lush, dark
hair and a penchant for cocktail dresses
that showed off her shoulders. Univer
sal’s publicity department grasped the
possibilities right away: when “Creature
from the Black Lagoon” came out, in
1954, the studio sent her on a promo
tional junket that was to have been billed
“The Beauty Who Created the Beast.”
But Bud Westmore, the domineering
head of the makeup department, com
plained, and the publicity team dutifully
rebranded the tour as “The Beauty Who
Lives with the Beasts,” downgrading
Patrick, in O’Meara’s words, “from cre
ator to the monsters’ cute roommate
who had to deal with dirty dishes and
nag at them to put the toilet seat back
down.” Worse, though Patrick’s tour
seems to have been a great success—
she charmed the press and travelled like
a trouper—Westmore evidently couldn’t
abide being upstaged, and when Pat
rick returned to L.A. he fired her. She
lived out her life as a smalltime soci
ety lady, attending charity events and
the like, and making an occasional on
screen appearance.
Being the first woman to design an
iconic movie monster might not seem
the most exalted of feminist achievements.
But O’Meara makes a good case that it
matters, because women’s psyches matter.
The forms in which women project and
objectify their fears ought to have the
chance to scare the bejeezus out of us
as often as those of men do. “Almost
every single iconic monster in film is
made and was designed by a man: the
Wolfman, Frankenstein, Dracula, King
Kong,” O’Meara writes. (If only Mary
Shelley could have been a creative con
sultant for the screen versions of her
creature.) “The emotions and problems
that all of them represent are also ex
perienced by women, but women are
more likely to see themselves as merely
the victims of these monsters.”S
ometimes the key to women’s suc
cess in Hollywood was fairly simple:
to work in a place where the men in
charge did not act like mon
sters. One of those places,
it turns out, was Walt Dis
ney Studios. That might
seem surprising for an en
terprise associated with pli
ant storybook princesses.
But Disney heroines were
always more varied than de
tractors would have it, and
certainly have become more
so as of late. And perhaps
there’s something about bringing imag
inary worlds to life every day that can
make anything seem possible. Milicent
Patrick, for one, got her start at Disney.
And she wasn’t sketching princesses; she
was helping to create the brooding mon
ster in the “Night on Bald Mountain”
sequence of the 1940 movie “Fantasia”—a
task that perfectly suited her talents.
In a sprightly new book, “The Queens
of Animation: The Untold Story of the
Women Who Transformed the World
of Disney and Made Cinematic His
tory” (Little, Brown), Nathalia Holt, a
science journalist and a popular histo
rian, introduces us to a handful of women
who worked on some of the classic Dis
ney Studios films, spins them around,
sprinkles some pixie dust, and has them
take a bow. She’s a little like a fairy god
mother, wanting us to think nothing
but the best of her charges, perhaps wish
ing that she could send them back out
into the world with a bluebird or two
twittering at their shoulders. I wasn’t al
ways convinced that the five women she
focusses on were as influential as she
suggests, but I enjoyed reading about
them in the workplace they shared.
Bianca Majolie, the daughter of Ital
ian immigrants, moved with her fam
ily to Chicago and attended the same
high school as Walt Disney. Later, as a
thirtythreeyearold commercial artist,
she wrote him a letter telling him aboutthe comics she drew at home. It was
1934, and by then Disney was ensconced
in Los Angeles, where he’d launched
a company on the success of his early
Mickey Mouse cartoons and was be
ginning to plan an ambitious, fulllength
animated feature based on the fairy tale
“Snow White.” To a teasing comment
in Majolie’s letter—“I am only five feet
tall and don’t bite”—he replied, “I am
sorry you don’t bite, but nevertheless I
should be very glad to have you drop in
and see me any time at your
convenience.” Disney ended
up hiring her as the first
woman among his dozens
of story artists.
Majolie created the lead
character for a Disney short
called “Elmer Elephant,” in
which poor, sweet Elmer is
bullied by the other animals
until he proves his useful
ness through a trunk
mediated rescue. The longtime Disney
animators Frank Thomas and Ollie
Johnston later credited it, and Majolie,
with a revelation: “We could not have
made any of the feature films without
learning this important lesson: Pathos
gives comedy the heart and warmth that
keeps it from becoming brittle.”
Majolie generated concepts and
drawings for a number of other mov
ies, but most of her work never made
it to the screen, Holt writes. She was
shy, and at a chronic disadvantage as
the only woman in boisterous story
meetings, where the standard practice
was to pitch ideas by acting them out,
complete with cartoon voices. She es
caped her desk on missions that would
fill any officebound introvert with envy:
heading deep into the majestic hush of
the downtownL.A. library to study
Italian editions of “Pinocchio,” or set
tling into recordstore listening booths
to try out potential movie scores. On
one of those trips, she found Tchaikovsky’s
“Nutcracker Suite,” which, strange as it
might seem to anyone who has lived
through an American Christmas sea
son, had never been performed in the
U.S. Walt Disney was as taken as she
was with “Waltz of the Flowers,” and
it inspired one of the loveliest chapters
in “Fantasia,” a sequence for which an
other of Holt’s subjects, Sylvia Moberly
Holland, became the story director, the