Working with Disney (26 page)

DP:
From what I've read, I guess you and Lonnie were the two more professional kids to try out for
The Mickey Mouse Club.

SB:
Right. Lonnie and I had actually worked together before
The Mickey Mouse Club
on
The Colgate Comedy Hour.
I was under contract to Eddie Cantor, and I did his show every month.

DP:
And your legs were insured?

SB:
Yes, I insured my legs for fifty thousand dollars. Actually, when I went out to interview for Eddie Cantor, they had a sketch for two little girls and two little boys to dance on the show. And I was too small, but they liked my dancing, so they wrote in a special part for me afterwards. And after the show aired, Eddie Cantor's attorney called my folks and said that he wanted to sign me under contract.

DP:
How long had you been dancing before the contract?

SB:
I started dancing when I was three. My parents used to go squaredancing at night when I was real young. And I would want to go, too, and they would say, “No, you're too young to go.” Well, to shut me up, they would say, “If you stay with the babysitter tonight, we'll take you to your own dancing lessons.” So they took me to a little dancing school in the neighborhood. The day I went to watch, they had been working all year for a recital that was going to be held in six weeks. [The instructor] said, “You can start in six weeks, but why don't you sit down and watch.” So I did, and I was patting my foot. She said, “You want to get up and try?” And I got up and did it, and I was in the recital six weeks later.

DP:
And you won the Little Miss Washington contest?

SB:
Little Miss Washington State.

DP:
And that brought you to California?

SB:
Right, to compete for Little Miss U.S.A. I came in second. My parents had been living in Seattle, and it was too dreary for my dad—there wasn't enough sunshine. So they moved to California. I grew up in Van Nuys, and I was living in Van Nuys when I did
The Mickey Mouse Club.

DP:
And your dad worked for Flying Tigers?

SB:
In Seattle, he worked for Boeing, and then Flying Tigers when he first moved to California. Then he went to work for Lockheed for a long time.

DP:
Did you do some episodes of
Death Valley Days
before
The Mickey Mouse Club?

SB:
I did. [Also]
The Damon Runyon Theatre
I did with John Ireland. And
The Donald O'Connor Show.
Donald O'Connor—what a wonderful man he was—extremely talented.

DP:
I understand your first movie was
Bloodhounds of Broadway
with Mitzi Gaynor.

SB:
Right. With Mitzi Gaynor and Scott Brady. She was a delight. I just loved her.

DP:
And then
Artists and Models
was the next?

SB:
Yes, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, before they split up.

DP:
How were they to work with?

SB:
Great. Dean Martin was so much fun to work with. We sang and danced. And then actually I was prerecording a song that we were doing in the movie at Capitol Records, and Jimmie Dodd was there doing a recording session, and he saw me and recommended me to the Disney Studios.

DP:
At the time of the audition for
The Mickey Mouse Club,
did you want to be a Mouseketeer?

SB:
I didn't know what a Mouseketeer was. None of us knew what a Mouseketeer was. Actually, my agent didn't want me to, because people
were calling her and requesting me by name, so she didn't want me to go out for
The Mickey Mouse Club.
What she agreed to was a serial, When I Grow Up [What I Want to Be] with a [teenager learning to be a] stewardess, [but] they wanted little blond girls with freckles, and that, of course, wasn't me. But she sent me out for that hoping it would just be [okay], and I actually auditioned for
The Mickey Mouse Club
there. I wanted to do it because I loved to sing and dance, and that's exactly what it was. Also the beauty of it—and my mother came up with this—[was] that working for Disney on
The Mickey Mouse Club,
we were allowed to be ourselves, which is what they wanted. The other things that I did, I was in an adult world playing a part.

DP:
In your audition, you sang a song called “I Didn't Know the Gun Was Loaded”?

SB:
Yes, with my jump rope. First it was a lariat, and I danced, spinning the lariat, and then I put it down into a jump rope and I would jump rope, tap dance double time to the music.

DP:
Did you have one audition, or did you have to come back?

SB:
I think I went back a couple of times.

DP:
You have said that one of the best questions people have asked you is this: Are you the way you are because you worked at Disney, or did you work at Disney because of the way you are? I like that question.

SB:
I do too. And the answer is both, I'm sure. The other studios were more like a factory. At Disney Studios, I mean, there were flowers and plants, and all the streets were named after characters, and there was a lawn, and there was a baseball diamond and ping-pong tables, and Walt Disney never let anyone swear around us. And in your contract, you couldn't do anything that was not Disney, the Disney image. I just think you acquire that in your working there. But then again, you were hired because of who you were, too.

DP:
Part of the appeal of the show was that you were all yourselves, and I think for us watching it at home, it made us feel more a part of it.

SB:
Well, that was Walt Disney's idea. He didn't want a slick nightclub routine. He wanted the kids next door that would be playing in the playground.

DP:
I think that worked well.

SB:
They kept a lot of mistakes in, unless it was something drastic, you know. You'd be on the wrong foot or turn in the wrong direction. Kids do that.

DP:
You were at Disneyland on opening day?

SB:
We came out of the Mickey Mouse Theater, and we all did our little dance, and then we did the parade. And little did we know then—I feel so honored—we were in the very first parade down Main Street at Disneyland. Who knew where that was going to go? Our show hadn't opened; we didn't know if we were going to be a success. We were just kids having a good time. So we did this parade, and at the end of the parade, they took us all up to Walt Disney's apartment over the firehouse. And that's when I had my fondest memory of Walt Disney.

DP:
Can you just describe that?

SB:
Sure. We were standing in his apartment. They didn't know what they were going to do with us, so we were all just up there. Of course, it means more to me now than it did back then. But I looked up at him, and he was looking at the gate where the people were walking in, and he had his hands behind his back, and he had a grin from ear to ear. You could see the lump in his throat and the tears coming down his cheeks.

DP:
That must have really been a dream come true for him.

SB:
Oh, can you imagine that realization for him?

DP:
I wanted to ask you about Jimmie Dodd. I know everybody liked him, but I wanted to hear your characterization of him.

SB:
Well, you couldn't find a finer human being. He never said anything bad about anybody or anything. He loved and enjoyed life. He didn't preach to you, but he showed you by example what a good human being is. He gave me a little tiny pink jewelry box with a little note that said,
“For your Mousekejewels when you're out on the road.” I still have that. It's very special to me. When we were in Australia on our tour, outside the airport, they introduced us to koala bears. And they handed one to him, and its claws dug into him, and there was blood dripping down his arm, and the koala bear relieved itself, it was so scared—or so excited to see a Mouseketeer, Jimmie Dodd! And all the cameras were going, and Jimmie just kept saying, “Isn't he cute? Isn't he darling?”

DP:
Karen Pendleton, another Mouseketeer, said that before some of the tours, he would have everybody get together and say a little prayer.

SB:
Oh, before all of our shows. And then he had us all over to his house all the time for parties and stuff. And with his wife Ruth Dodd, they were the perfect couple. Roy [Williams] would pretend like he was a big old grouch, but he wasn't. He was like your big uncle.

DP:
I was thinking today that some of Jimmie's songs, you know, about proverbs and “Do What the Good Book Says,” you couldn't do those on network TV now. That was a real 1950s thing that you could have the religious overtones. It could be on a cable show, but on network TV today? And I think we were all comfortable with it then.

SB:
And do you know how many people say to me, “Why don't they have shows like that anymore? That was so much fun.”

DP:
I think they were great things that he was saying. Not that I always did them, but I thought about them.

SB:
And it sounds hokey, but he really lived that. He believed that. That was real. That's the beauty of it. I always think of Jimmie when we do those shows out at Disneyland, that he's not there and we're still doing his songs.

DP:
But you probably feel that he's there in spirit.

SB:
Oh, definitely he is, of course. He knows that we're carrying that on for him.

DP:
I understand that you could type fast and chew gum [at the studio school]. You used to help Bobby Burgess with his math?

SB:
Yes, and Annette [Funicello]. We all took Spanish together. Jean Seaman was a wonderful teacher, even though she only had you for three hours a day, and that wasn't consistent. You know, you could rehearse and then come back. You had to do at least twenty minutes [of classroom work] and then go out and shoot, then come back and do twenty more minutes. She was great. By the time I went back to [public] school, I was so far ahead of everyone. Even though they still called me Minnie at school.

DP:
Did you have any problems besides being called Minnie?

SB:
No, I mean, kids tease kids all the time. You're going to get teased about something. At least it was something that was good and decent, you know.

DP:
I noticed in Lorraine Santoli's book,
The Official Mickey Mouse Club Book,
she included a photo of Annette's school notebooks. She had written lots of names, including Zorro, Frankie, and Tab Hunter. I saw Ron Miller's name on there, and I'm guessing that Ron was attractive to all of you. He was a young guy then, too.

SB:
Oh, yeah, because he had been a football player, and he would throw the football out on the lawn with the boys. We thought he was very cute. But Annette and I had a terrible crush on Dik Darley. In fact, I had a picture of him under my pillow.

DP:
In your spare time, you appeared at Disneyland.

SB:
Yeah, it was fun. It's what we wanted to do. And, you know, we used to get there before the park opened, so we would have to warm up the rides. Anyone tell you about that? We used to have contests to see who could spin the cup and saucer the fastest [at the Mad Hatter's Tea Party attraction]. I had to stand up to do it because I was so short. I got calluses on my hands from spinning it. Oh, that was our favorite ride, to do that.

DP:
So you never felt sick doing that?

SB:
No, the faster you could go, the better it was for me.

DP:
Did you warm up the Autopia cars?

SB:
Yes, but I wasn't really tall enough for a long time. But yes, we loved that. At home, we had a split rail fence, and our car would pull in, and they'd all come running over and sit on the fence and ask, “What did you do today?”

DP:
Did they watch the show?

SB:
Yeah. We didn't get to watch the show, because we'd be working when the show was on the air.

DP:
I never thought about that.

SB:
We saw bits and pieces in the theater when they were editing it.

DP:
But you didn't get to see it on a regular basis. I just always assumed that you got to see it.

SB:
No, no.

DP:
Did you learn how to spell
encyclopedia
like we did from the song?

SB:
From Jiminy Cricket. You bet! It's amazing how many people still know that.

DP:
It was probably one of the first big words that I knew. You said somewhere that you remember Walt when he came on the set, and he had been painting or something?

SB:
Yeah, we were just running around, goofing off, and someone said, “You guys better cool it, there's Walt Disney.” “Where, where?” He was in his khakis, and he had paint splashed all over them. He had been in the paint department with the guys. He loved being involved with that. When he'd come on the set, he wouldn't make his presence known. He'd just be very quiet and come in.

DP:
Was he friendly?

SB:
Oh, yes. He wanted us to call him Uncle Walt. I'm sure you've heard that from many of us. Nobody could because he was Mr. Disney. Uncle Walt didn't seem right. But yeah, we felt he was more of a father figurehead to us all. I told you he wouldn't allow any of the crew to swear around us.