The Times Magazine: A big fight over Winnie the Pooh
A small bear with a very big legal bill
It's a little like Eeyore trying to knock out Tigger - the old-school family who bought the American rights to A. A. Milne's creations have victory in their sights in their vicious court battle with the unstoppable Disney.
By David Rowan
For a cuddly bear of Very Little Brain, Winnie the Pooh has left behind an awful lot of ill will. Alan Alexander Milne, for a start, never forgave Pooh for defining his legacy not in terms of pacifist essays and satirical plays, but through a quartet of whimsical children's books. He had, after all, brought the Hundred Acre Wood to life simply to amuse his only child, Christopher Robin - "little thinking", as he reflected in a later poem, that "all my years of pen-and-inking/Would be almost lost among/These four trifles for the young".
For Christopher, the books' success was to cause far greater turmoil. At first amused by his instant fame, he came to resent the oppressive public persona that his father had created for him. Until he died seven years ago, Christopher Milne spent his adult life evading his unsought celebrity, running a bookshop in Devon and believing that his father "had got where he was by climbing on my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son".
Pooh Bear's fame would also come to bump, bump, bump his original illustrator, Ernest Shepard, on the back of the head in a bothersome manner. Walt Disney decided that Shepard's sketches needed "adapting" to maximise their commercial value in a series of films and spin-off merchandise. The artist denounced Disney's 1966 film, Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, as "a complete travesty" - rebranding his fluff-stuffed bear in the clean-cut, T-shirted form demanded by toy stores, Americanising his accent, even replacing Piglet with a gopher. As Eeyore might have thought sadly to himself, Why? and Wherefore? and In as much as which?
But there is another family, thousands of miles from Milne's beloved Ashdown Forest, that Pooh has left feeling not just sad, but very, very angry. This family, called the Slesingers, lives in Beverly Hills. Although the Slesingers have never been to play Pooh sticks in Sussex, they love the silly old bear as they would an adopted child. And this sweltering morning, as she sits by her swimming pool, the most outspoken of the Slesingers, a middle-aged lady called Pati, is furious at what the Disney Company has done to him.
"I'm mad at Disney, and I'm mad at the chairman Michael Eisner, as he's the one who's supposed to be in charge," Pati says in a determined if exhausted voice. "We've given him so many opportunities to turn this around. And he's never even come to the table!" For more than 12 years, Pati and her elderly mother have been pursuing Disney in an epic lawsuit that could only have been scripted in Hollywood. At its heart lies a 1930 agreement struck between Pati's late father, Stephen, and A. A. Milne himself, which gave the Slesingers the North American merchandising rights to Pooh. But since Disney bought out their rights four decades ago, in exchange for a share of total royalties, the Slesingers claim that they have been cheated out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Disney denies the charge. The Slesingers, it says, are motivated purely by greed.
Case number BC022365 is the longest-running lawsuit currently in the Los Angeles court system. It is an extraordinary David vs Goliath battle, which has thrown out just enough entertaining sideshows - conveniently destroyed documents, diversionary secondary lawsuits, questionably acquired private memos - to retain Tinseltown's interest whenever the show seems to be flagging. It helps that the tale is being narrated by some of the most high-profile, and expensive, showbiz lawyers in Hollywood.
The Slesingers had hoped, finally, to get Disney in the dock this autumn, when, after repeated delays, the case was at last scheduled to go to trial. But having already spent tens of millions of dollars taking on this most aggressively litigious of Hollywood studios, they are resigned to the trial being pushed back for another year. Judge Ernest Hiroshige, who had been hearing the case, withdrew a few weeks ago: it now sits with the court's "complex litigation unit". The lawyers' bills, meanwhile, continue to soar higher than a balloon disguised as a rain cloud - rising with every deposition, motion to quash, order and objection. For the Slesingers, this means pouring ever more money into what has become a Very Deep Pit.
It takes a certain diplomacy to arrange a visit to the Slesinger home. Pati, 51, is concerned that Disney has portrayed her and her mother as greedy opportunists, and is wary of talking to the British press. She almost never gives interviews - she once spoke to CNN about her main business, an annual guide to luxury living called the Goldbook. But she knows that Disney has powerful friends in the media, and she presumes that coverage will be slanted against her family. Why, even Fortune magazine, whose reporter she had trusted, made great play last year of her "plush house with a swimming pool and a Jacuzzi", quoting her mid-interview as snapping "Water!" at one of her two servants.
There is also the more practical matter of her 80-year-old mother's health. Shirley Slesinger Lasswell - she remarried in 1964, to the late cartoonist Fred Lasswell - has been in and out of hospital with flu. According to the family's New York-based PR consultants, Pati wants her to rest with no distractions.
After three days in Los Angeles waiting to secure our promised meeting, I finally reach Pati at home from a hotel payphone. The call lasts for an hour and 40 minutes. Pati evidently values having someone to talk to: expecting guarded formality, I find her keen to prolong our discussion to cover English customs, the week's news, her father's achievements. Finally, a deal is struck on the basis that I will bring some fine English tea. But I should, she warns, dismiss any thoughts of getting to see Shirley.
The Slesinger front door is open when I arrive at 10.30 the next morning, bearing Earl Grey, Belgian chocolates and limited expectations. Pati, wearing a full-length loose-fitting gown, has been searching on eBay for various items of Pooh merchandise. But she has also been busy preparing for the visit. On a vast dining-room table, below extravagant murals depicting Italian Renaissance artworks, there are 20 or so plates and dishes filled as if for a feast - cucumber sandwiches, chocolate-chip cookies, crudites, cakes, and silver teapots. Her two Hispanic staff are on hand to help. Pati is later visited briefly by her husband, an English-born businessman who no longer lives with her. She asks that I do not mention a younger family member, "for reasons of security".
Over three hours, Pati narrates the Slesinger vs Disney story as she sees it. The Pooh revenues that she says have been hidden in other parts of Disney's accounting system; the endless paperchase to find evidence, only for Disney to say that documents have been destroyed. "It's like they have a master plan to obstruct, confuse, delay and outspend," she says. "They must sit there thinking, hmm, you're not gone yet? We'd better turn up the heat. I guess it's just their way of litigating when there's so much money at stake."
At the poolside, looking through the smog towards LA's towering lawyers' district of Century City, Pati talks warmly of the "masterwork" whose potential her father recognised back in 1929. Stephen Slesinger, a literary agent whose list included the Tarzan and Red Ryder books, set sail for England that year to meet A. A. Milne. At a time when character merchandising was in its infancy, Slesinger offered Milne $1,000 for the North American marketing rights to the Pooh characters, whose celebrity had grown since their first appearance in the Christmas Eve 1925 edition of the London Evening News. Then in 1932, at no extra cost, Milne expanded these rights to include a share of royalties whenever the Pooh characters appeared on radio, television, or any "other mechanical instrument" or similar "devices" created in the future.
When Stephen died in 1953, leaving Shirley with a one-year-old daughter, Winnie the Pooh merchandise was starting to make money for Stephen Slesinger Inc. But it took the Disney marketing machine, from the mid-Sixties, to turn Pooh into the multibillion-dollar franchise that made him the company's most important character - more valuable than Donald, Mickey and Goofy combined.
"The dynamics of the characters are remarkable, and the verses are fabulous," Pati says wistfully, stroking some original Fifties soft toys she has arranged around the garden table: Kanga, Piglet, Pooh and - her favourite - sad old Eeyore. "When my father died, my mother sat on the floor of his office, a 30-year-old widow, just wondering what she should do. She familiarised herself with all my father's characters, but it was Winnie the Pooh who appealed most to her. And so she put all her effort into promoting him."
Shirley started calling herself "the Pooh Lady", selling tickets for Pooh tea parties, negotiating with board-game manufacturers and clothes firms, and doing whatever she could to market her scruffy friend. "She was always working," Pati says. "She wasn't home when I got back from school, and I got a little jealous of Pooh for taking my mommy away." She rasps a throaty laugh.
Walt Disney, too, was quick to recognise the bear's potential. Buoyed by the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, he approached Milne to acquire film and merchandising rights to Pooh. Milne was happy to make a deal, but the Slesingers' share of the rights, as Walt's brother Roy warned in a memo, put the family in "a beautiful spot to either hold us up for an outrageous price or sit back and reap the rewards of our work". It was not until 1961, when Walt negotiated with Shirley, that his company acquired full world rights. The Slesingers and the Milne heirs would receive a small percentage of the global revenue: the Slesingers 4 per cent, the Milnes 2.5 per cent. Five years later, Disney released its first Winnie the Pooh animation. Walt died a few months later - and that, according to the Slesingers, was when things started to go wrong.
"We first smelt a rat in 1979," Pati sighs. "My mother called me and said she thought there was something up with the royalty statements. We went to Disney, and they showed us a huge computer printout and said, no, they must be right. A couple of weeks later we got a call from our attorney, who said Disney wanted him to represent them on another case so he couldn't work with us."
For years, Shirley and Pati had brought home Pooh merchandise whenever they travelled overseas. They claim to have identified items - from Pepsodent toothbrushes to Japanese T-shirts - never accounted for in their royalty statements. They wondered why Disney was not paying royalties on videos, DVDs, theme-park tickets and software, which they believed were covered under the original 1932 agreement with Milne. So on February 27, 1991, having failed to get Disney to open its books, the Slesingers sued.
"When we started, we thought perhaps this would take a year," Pati says wearily. "It's not as though we planned to go to a 12-year crusade. It's just that day by day there are little skirmishes that lead to further skirmishes. The bottom line is, they owe us money. They need to honour their contract, and it's unconscionable to think they won't."
Today, you can buy Winnie the Pooh car mats, cutlery, exercise equipment, breakfast foods, "Roo Juice", telephones and waffle irons. He was the foundation stone for the Disney Channel, his videos are among the biggest sellers ever, and, according to Disney, he is its "key pre-school property". There is no disagreement that Pooh now brings more honey in to Disney's pot than any of his stablemates. Disney puts his worth at around $1 billion a year.The Slesingers' lawyers say he is in fact worth $4 billion, or even $5 billion. That would account for a fifth of everything Disney makes - an excellent reason, they say, for the firm to play down his true value.
The Slesingers have certainly done well out of Pooh - banking $70 million sincethe Seventies, according to the Disney side. Their royalty payments, according to papers filed in court, rose from $79,828 in 1983, when the contract was re-negotiated, to $627,631 in 1993, and, as the Disney stores expanded, $2.1 million in 1995. By 1997, they were receiving $7.6 million; for each of the three years from 1998, the windfall had grown to $12 million. Yet, although Pati owns another house at Newport Beach, the Beverly Hills place is not extravagant, the swimming pool far too small to register on the Hollywood glamour index. It is easy to see where the royalties are going: according to Pati, their legal fees are up to $800,000 a month.
I put it to her that the family might be said to have done rather well financially out of the Disney franchise. Was it wise to spend pretty much all of their current after-tax royalties on lawyers? "It's not about money, it never has been," Pati shoots back. "It's the principle. It's about the ethics. Sometimes they make you so mad that you just want to show them. It's about my mother's life. She's 80 and she got into this lawsuit when she was 67. Would you want your mother to be in a lawsuit against Disney for all that time, over a simple agreement they don't want to honour because they're Disney?"
By now, Shirley is feeling well enough to make an appearance. Ever the showgirl, she has put down her oxygen mask and put on her make-up. She is wearing jeans and a Winnie the Pooh T-shirt with the slogan: "Oh bother!", and she soon relaxes, even flirts, as she reminisces about the old times. It is not hard to picture the dancer who, on Broadway in Hellzapoppin' in the Forties, caught the eye of Stephen Slesinger, more than two decades her senior, and soon became his wife.
"I couldn't believe I'd married the man who had Winnie the Pooh," Shirley says. She looks over to the neighbouring chair. "Here's my friend." She pats a 3ft-tall bear, whom she calls her "litigation bear". "These are my children."
She recalls Stephen introducing her to the Milnes - Alan and Daphne - which she considered "quite an honour". "He was quiet - very sweet. I liked him very much." In 1961, she met Walt Disney himself when she agreed to give up her North American rights. "He said, Shirley, everybody loves Winnie the Pooh. You'll never be sorry."
Today, Shirley says disbelievingly, "Walt Disney would be going whirly-whirly if he knew what they were doing to us." The family has been shortchanged, she says, firmly - to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. And she is not prepared to let Disney win. "Winnie the Pooh's my whole life. I've had people call me and say, you're little and they're big, and I'm so glad to hear that you're after them, that you're not giving up. And I'm not going to give up. Because they owe it to us."
For the past couple of years, this blockbuster has co-starred some of Hollywood's most powerful celebrity lawyers. In Century City, where litigation fees have built vast towers on the lot where Ben Hur's chariot race was filmed, the opposing teams until recently worked across the street from one another. Disney's forces, at number 1999, Avenue of the Stars, are led by Daniel Petrocelli, an Italo-American from New Jersey. Petrocelli, aged 50, became famous winning the Goldman family's civil suit against O. J. Simpson.
Until last summer, the Slesingers' lead attorney was Bert Fields, an elegant 73-year-old amateur Shakespeare scholar whose clients have ranged from Brando to the Beatles. Fields, based at 1900 Avenue of the Stars, is one of the few lawyers who makes Disney executives nervous: six years ago, he won a rumoured $250 million settlement for Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former Disney studio boss. But Fields suddenly withdrew from the Slesingers' case in July without giving his reasons. The word in Century City is that relations cooled over his firm's growing bills. Pati's version of events sees Fields's departure as evidence of yet another Disney dirty trick. Mattel, a Disney partner in the litigation, wanted Fields dismissed because his firm had represented its own interests over unrelated matters. "They succeeded in driving a wedge between us," Pati says.
Lawyers close to the case suggest Petrocelli's team are billing Disney between $1 million and $1.5 million a month. The stakes could not be higher for the company: in May 2002, it disclosed in a US securities filing that, if the Slesingers win, "damages could total as much as several hundred million dollars and adversely impact the value to the company of any future exploitation of the licensed rights". In other words, Disney could lose Winnie the Pooh. Its stock price fell by almost a third in two months.
Sitting at his desk, surrounded by courtroom sketches from the Simpson case, Petrocelli explains that "fictional characters" have never interested him. As a boy he cared more for the Yankees' star Mickey Mantle than for a toy bear. Perhaps this explains why he has little time for the Slesingers' attachment to what, as he sees it, is a commercial property that Disney successfully reinvented.
"They roll out Mrs Slesinger as 'the Pooh Lady', but that's just a market-driven manipulation to make her seem to be the living personification of Winnie the Pooh," he says. "But she hasn't done anything. The Slesingers did not create Winnie the Pooh, they didn't write a word or draw a picture." Their motivation is simple, he says. "Money, and lots of it. Ten to 12 million dollars a year isn't enough. They want more."
The reality, he explains, is not only that they have been paid their full due, but they have "probably been overpaid". He rejects as "misrepresentations" claims that Pooh's true annual revenue is closer to $ 5 billion than the acknowledged $1 billion. And the lawsuit has been drawn out not through stonewalling by Disney, but because his opponents challenge every transaction.
The fight has been dirty. Petrocelli has sought to have the case dismissed on the grounds that a convicted felon allegedly helped the Slesingers obtain Disney documents unlawfully. Judge Hiroshige, in turn, issued sanctions against Disney for destroying 40 boxes of documents, including a file marked "Winnie the Pooh: legal problems". Surely that weakens Disney's case? "Well, the judge has not ruled that Disney acted to do anything wrong," Petrocelli fires back. Some old files had merely been "inadvertently discarded".
"They seem like pleasant enough people," Petrocelli concedes. "But Disney is being forced to defend itself because wild and extravagant charges are being made to take a simple contract and convert it into massive monetary claims. Anybody would have to fight that."
In the four months since losing Bert Fields, the Slesingers have also split with the firm that took over from him. "They say they can't budget this case for less than $ 800,000," Pati says. "They say that Disney is putting on pressure by making it as expensive as possible." Bert Fields understands the tactics. "When you get into a fight with Disney, you know you're probably going to have to go to trial, and it can cost a fortune," he says. "They bleed people by this tremendous stress they put on fighting to the end."
Although no longer representing them, Fields says that he has "continued confidence in the merit of the Slesinger case and I feel they will prevail at the trial". If the court agrees with him, and allows the Slesingers to claim both damages and the right to terminate the contract, it could, Fields says, cost the company billions of dollars. Disney, meanwhile, is pursuing a separate copyright action to let Milne's granddaughter, Clare, reclaim the Slesingers' rights.
Pati Slesinger is briefing her eighth set of lawyers. She sees the next year as "the home stretch". Remarkably, Pati has also been reassessing her view of Michael Eisner, the Disney chairman and her declared enemy. They met recently, with the help of an intermediary, to discuss Pati's plans for her charitable Pooh Foundation. She was impressed by Eisner's attitude. Had they met earlier, she believes, the dispute could have been settled many lawyers ago.
In the meantime, the 13 boxes of documents relating to the case continue to pile up in the Los Angeles Superior Court archives, the legal bills keep growing, and Shirley Slesinger Lasswell becomes an ever more delicate potential witness. Pati Slesinger, though, is starting to imagine life after litigation. "I always saw light at the end of the tunnel," she says. "It's just that Disney kept throwing all of these rocks in the way."
And then Pati reads a poem that she has written, in an attempt to tell the story of the Slesingers' fight with Disney in a form that A. A. Milne would have appreciated. The poem ends:
"Now, oh giant corporation,
This Pooh wants an explanation.
Tell me, please, how much you owe,
And where did all my Hunny go?
Through all the tangled, tangled vines
Of your worldwide accounting lines,
From what and why did you subtract,
Trade off, commingle and redact?
To cut my tiny share until
Gross was net and net was nil?"
Pati Slesinger does not expect her questions to be answered any time soon.
(The Times Magazine, London, November 22 2003)
It's a little like Eeyore trying to knock out Tigger - the old-school family who bought the American rights to A. A. Milne's creations have victory in their sights in their vicious court battle with the unstoppable Disney.
By David Rowan
For a cuddly bear of Very Little Brain, Winnie the Pooh has left behind an awful lot of ill will. Alan Alexander Milne, for a start, never forgave Pooh for defining his legacy not in terms of pacifist essays and satirical plays, but through a quartet of whimsical children's books. He had, after all, brought the Hundred Acre Wood to life simply to amuse his only child, Christopher Robin - "little thinking", as he reflected in a later poem, that "all my years of pen-and-inking/Would be almost lost among/These four trifles for the young".
For Christopher, the books' success was to cause far greater turmoil. At first amused by his instant fame, he came to resent the oppressive public persona that his father had created for him. Until he died seven years ago, Christopher Milne spent his adult life evading his unsought celebrity, running a bookshop in Devon and believing that his father "had got where he was by climbing on my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son".
Pooh Bear's fame would also come to bump, bump, bump his original illustrator, Ernest Shepard, on the back of the head in a bothersome manner. Walt Disney decided that Shepard's sketches needed "adapting" to maximise their commercial value in a series of films and spin-off merchandise. The artist denounced Disney's 1966 film, Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, as "a complete travesty" - rebranding his fluff-stuffed bear in the clean-cut, T-shirted form demanded by toy stores, Americanising his accent, even replacing Piglet with a gopher. As Eeyore might have thought sadly to himself, Why? and Wherefore? and In as much as which?
But there is another family, thousands of miles from Milne's beloved Ashdown Forest, that Pooh has left feeling not just sad, but very, very angry. This family, called the Slesingers, lives in Beverly Hills. Although the Slesingers have never been to play Pooh sticks in Sussex, they love the silly old bear as they would an adopted child. And this sweltering morning, as she sits by her swimming pool, the most outspoken of the Slesingers, a middle-aged lady called Pati, is furious at what the Disney Company has done to him.
"I'm mad at Disney, and I'm mad at the chairman Michael Eisner, as he's the one who's supposed to be in charge," Pati says in a determined if exhausted voice. "We've given him so many opportunities to turn this around. And he's never even come to the table!" For more than 12 years, Pati and her elderly mother have been pursuing Disney in an epic lawsuit that could only have been scripted in Hollywood. At its heart lies a 1930 agreement struck between Pati's late father, Stephen, and A. A. Milne himself, which gave the Slesingers the North American merchandising rights to Pooh. But since Disney bought out their rights four decades ago, in exchange for a share of total royalties, the Slesingers claim that they have been cheated out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Disney denies the charge. The Slesingers, it says, are motivated purely by greed.
Case number BC022365 is the longest-running lawsuit currently in the Los Angeles court system. It is an extraordinary David vs Goliath battle, which has thrown out just enough entertaining sideshows - conveniently destroyed documents, diversionary secondary lawsuits, questionably acquired private memos - to retain Tinseltown's interest whenever the show seems to be flagging. It helps that the tale is being narrated by some of the most high-profile, and expensive, showbiz lawyers in Hollywood.
The Slesingers had hoped, finally, to get Disney in the dock this autumn, when, after repeated delays, the case was at last scheduled to go to trial. But having already spent tens of millions of dollars taking on this most aggressively litigious of Hollywood studios, they are resigned to the trial being pushed back for another year. Judge Ernest Hiroshige, who had been hearing the case, withdrew a few weeks ago: it now sits with the court's "complex litigation unit". The lawyers' bills, meanwhile, continue to soar higher than a balloon disguised as a rain cloud - rising with every deposition, motion to quash, order and objection. For the Slesingers, this means pouring ever more money into what has become a Very Deep Pit.
It takes a certain diplomacy to arrange a visit to the Slesinger home. Pati, 51, is concerned that Disney has portrayed her and her mother as greedy opportunists, and is wary of talking to the British press. She almost never gives interviews - she once spoke to CNN about her main business, an annual guide to luxury living called the Goldbook. But she knows that Disney has powerful friends in the media, and she presumes that coverage will be slanted against her family. Why, even Fortune magazine, whose reporter she had trusted, made great play last year of her "plush house with a swimming pool and a Jacuzzi", quoting her mid-interview as snapping "Water!" at one of her two servants.
There is also the more practical matter of her 80-year-old mother's health. Shirley Slesinger Lasswell - she remarried in 1964, to the late cartoonist Fred Lasswell - has been in and out of hospital with flu. According to the family's New York-based PR consultants, Pati wants her to rest with no distractions.
After three days in Los Angeles waiting to secure our promised meeting, I finally reach Pati at home from a hotel payphone. The call lasts for an hour and 40 minutes. Pati evidently values having someone to talk to: expecting guarded formality, I find her keen to prolong our discussion to cover English customs, the week's news, her father's achievements. Finally, a deal is struck on the basis that I will bring some fine English tea. But I should, she warns, dismiss any thoughts of getting to see Shirley.
The Slesinger front door is open when I arrive at 10.30 the next morning, bearing Earl Grey, Belgian chocolates and limited expectations. Pati, wearing a full-length loose-fitting gown, has been searching on eBay for various items of Pooh merchandise. But she has also been busy preparing for the visit. On a vast dining-room table, below extravagant murals depicting Italian Renaissance artworks, there are 20 or so plates and dishes filled as if for a feast - cucumber sandwiches, chocolate-chip cookies, crudites, cakes, and silver teapots. Her two Hispanic staff are on hand to help. Pati is later visited briefly by her husband, an English-born businessman who no longer lives with her. She asks that I do not mention a younger family member, "for reasons of security".
Over three hours, Pati narrates the Slesinger vs Disney story as she sees it. The Pooh revenues that she says have been hidden in other parts of Disney's accounting system; the endless paperchase to find evidence, only for Disney to say that documents have been destroyed. "It's like they have a master plan to obstruct, confuse, delay and outspend," she says. "They must sit there thinking, hmm, you're not gone yet? We'd better turn up the heat. I guess it's just their way of litigating when there's so much money at stake."
At the poolside, looking through the smog towards LA's towering lawyers' district of Century City, Pati talks warmly of the "masterwork" whose potential her father recognised back in 1929. Stephen Slesinger, a literary agent whose list included the Tarzan and Red Ryder books, set sail for England that year to meet A. A. Milne. At a time when character merchandising was in its infancy, Slesinger offered Milne $1,000 for the North American marketing rights to the Pooh characters, whose celebrity had grown since their first appearance in the Christmas Eve 1925 edition of the London Evening News. Then in 1932, at no extra cost, Milne expanded these rights to include a share of royalties whenever the Pooh characters appeared on radio, television, or any "other mechanical instrument" or similar "devices" created in the future.
When Stephen died in 1953, leaving Shirley with a one-year-old daughter, Winnie the Pooh merchandise was starting to make money for Stephen Slesinger Inc. But it took the Disney marketing machine, from the mid-Sixties, to turn Pooh into the multibillion-dollar franchise that made him the company's most important character - more valuable than Donald, Mickey and Goofy combined.
"The dynamics of the characters are remarkable, and the verses are fabulous," Pati says wistfully, stroking some original Fifties soft toys she has arranged around the garden table: Kanga, Piglet, Pooh and - her favourite - sad old Eeyore. "When my father died, my mother sat on the floor of his office, a 30-year-old widow, just wondering what she should do. She familiarised herself with all my father's characters, but it was Winnie the Pooh who appealed most to her. And so she put all her effort into promoting him."
Shirley started calling herself "the Pooh Lady", selling tickets for Pooh tea parties, negotiating with board-game manufacturers and clothes firms, and doing whatever she could to market her scruffy friend. "She was always working," Pati says. "She wasn't home when I got back from school, and I got a little jealous of Pooh for taking my mommy away." She rasps a throaty laugh.
Walt Disney, too, was quick to recognise the bear's potential. Buoyed by the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, he approached Milne to acquire film and merchandising rights to Pooh. Milne was happy to make a deal, but the Slesingers' share of the rights, as Walt's brother Roy warned in a memo, put the family in "a beautiful spot to either hold us up for an outrageous price or sit back and reap the rewards of our work". It was not until 1961, when Walt negotiated with Shirley, that his company acquired full world rights. The Slesingers and the Milne heirs would receive a small percentage of the global revenue: the Slesingers 4 per cent, the Milnes 2.5 per cent. Five years later, Disney released its first Winnie the Pooh animation. Walt died a few months later - and that, according to the Slesingers, was when things started to go wrong.
"We first smelt a rat in 1979," Pati sighs. "My mother called me and said she thought there was something up with the royalty statements. We went to Disney, and they showed us a huge computer printout and said, no, they must be right. A couple of weeks later we got a call from our attorney, who said Disney wanted him to represent them on another case so he couldn't work with us."
For years, Shirley and Pati had brought home Pooh merchandise whenever they travelled overseas. They claim to have identified items - from Pepsodent toothbrushes to Japanese T-shirts - never accounted for in their royalty statements. They wondered why Disney was not paying royalties on videos, DVDs, theme-park tickets and software, which they believed were covered under the original 1932 agreement with Milne. So on February 27, 1991, having failed to get Disney to open its books, the Slesingers sued.
"When we started, we thought perhaps this would take a year," Pati says wearily. "It's not as though we planned to go to a 12-year crusade. It's just that day by day there are little skirmishes that lead to further skirmishes. The bottom line is, they owe us money. They need to honour their contract, and it's unconscionable to think they won't."
Today, you can buy Winnie the Pooh car mats, cutlery, exercise equipment, breakfast foods, "Roo Juice", telephones and waffle irons. He was the foundation stone for the Disney Channel, his videos are among the biggest sellers ever, and, according to Disney, he is its "key pre-school property". There is no disagreement that Pooh now brings more honey in to Disney's pot than any of his stablemates. Disney puts his worth at around $1 billion a year.The Slesingers' lawyers say he is in fact worth $4 billion, or even $5 billion. That would account for a fifth of everything Disney makes - an excellent reason, they say, for the firm to play down his true value.
The Slesingers have certainly done well out of Pooh - banking $70 million sincethe Seventies, according to the Disney side. Their royalty payments, according to papers filed in court, rose from $79,828 in 1983, when the contract was re-negotiated, to $627,631 in 1993, and, as the Disney stores expanded, $2.1 million in 1995. By 1997, they were receiving $7.6 million; for each of the three years from 1998, the windfall had grown to $12 million. Yet, although Pati owns another house at Newport Beach, the Beverly Hills place is not extravagant, the swimming pool far too small to register on the Hollywood glamour index. It is easy to see where the royalties are going: according to Pati, their legal fees are up to $800,000 a month.
I put it to her that the family might be said to have done rather well financially out of the Disney franchise. Was it wise to spend pretty much all of their current after-tax royalties on lawyers? "It's not about money, it never has been," Pati shoots back. "It's the principle. It's about the ethics. Sometimes they make you so mad that you just want to show them. It's about my mother's life. She's 80 and she got into this lawsuit when she was 67. Would you want your mother to be in a lawsuit against Disney for all that time, over a simple agreement they don't want to honour because they're Disney?"
By now, Shirley is feeling well enough to make an appearance. Ever the showgirl, she has put down her oxygen mask and put on her make-up. She is wearing jeans and a Winnie the Pooh T-shirt with the slogan: "Oh bother!", and she soon relaxes, even flirts, as she reminisces about the old times. It is not hard to picture the dancer who, on Broadway in Hellzapoppin' in the Forties, caught the eye of Stephen Slesinger, more than two decades her senior, and soon became his wife.
"I couldn't believe I'd married the man who had Winnie the Pooh," Shirley says. She looks over to the neighbouring chair. "Here's my friend." She pats a 3ft-tall bear, whom she calls her "litigation bear". "These are my children."
She recalls Stephen introducing her to the Milnes - Alan and Daphne - which she considered "quite an honour". "He was quiet - very sweet. I liked him very much." In 1961, she met Walt Disney himself when she agreed to give up her North American rights. "He said, Shirley, everybody loves Winnie the Pooh. You'll never be sorry."
Today, Shirley says disbelievingly, "Walt Disney would be going whirly-whirly if he knew what they were doing to us." The family has been shortchanged, she says, firmly - to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. And she is not prepared to let Disney win. "Winnie the Pooh's my whole life. I've had people call me and say, you're little and they're big, and I'm so glad to hear that you're after them, that you're not giving up. And I'm not going to give up. Because they owe it to us."
For the past couple of years, this blockbuster has co-starred some of Hollywood's most powerful celebrity lawyers. In Century City, where litigation fees have built vast towers on the lot where Ben Hur's chariot race was filmed, the opposing teams until recently worked across the street from one another. Disney's forces, at number 1999, Avenue of the Stars, are led by Daniel Petrocelli, an Italo-American from New Jersey. Petrocelli, aged 50, became famous winning the Goldman family's civil suit against O. J. Simpson.
Until last summer, the Slesingers' lead attorney was Bert Fields, an elegant 73-year-old amateur Shakespeare scholar whose clients have ranged from Brando to the Beatles. Fields, based at 1900 Avenue of the Stars, is one of the few lawyers who makes Disney executives nervous: six years ago, he won a rumoured $250 million settlement for Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former Disney studio boss. But Fields suddenly withdrew from the Slesingers' case in July without giving his reasons. The word in Century City is that relations cooled over his firm's growing bills. Pati's version of events sees Fields's departure as evidence of yet another Disney dirty trick. Mattel, a Disney partner in the litigation, wanted Fields dismissed because his firm had represented its own interests over unrelated matters. "They succeeded in driving a wedge between us," Pati says.
Lawyers close to the case suggest Petrocelli's team are billing Disney between $1 million and $1.5 million a month. The stakes could not be higher for the company: in May 2002, it disclosed in a US securities filing that, if the Slesingers win, "damages could total as much as several hundred million dollars and adversely impact the value to the company of any future exploitation of the licensed rights". In other words, Disney could lose Winnie the Pooh. Its stock price fell by almost a third in two months.
Sitting at his desk, surrounded by courtroom sketches from the Simpson case, Petrocelli explains that "fictional characters" have never interested him. As a boy he cared more for the Yankees' star Mickey Mantle than for a toy bear. Perhaps this explains why he has little time for the Slesingers' attachment to what, as he sees it, is a commercial property that Disney successfully reinvented.
"They roll out Mrs Slesinger as 'the Pooh Lady', but that's just a market-driven manipulation to make her seem to be the living personification of Winnie the Pooh," he says. "But she hasn't done anything. The Slesingers did not create Winnie the Pooh, they didn't write a word or draw a picture." Their motivation is simple, he says. "Money, and lots of it. Ten to 12 million dollars a year isn't enough. They want more."
The reality, he explains, is not only that they have been paid their full due, but they have "probably been overpaid". He rejects as "misrepresentations" claims that Pooh's true annual revenue is closer to $ 5 billion than the acknowledged $1 billion. And the lawsuit has been drawn out not through stonewalling by Disney, but because his opponents challenge every transaction.
The fight has been dirty. Petrocelli has sought to have the case dismissed on the grounds that a convicted felon allegedly helped the Slesingers obtain Disney documents unlawfully. Judge Hiroshige, in turn, issued sanctions against Disney for destroying 40 boxes of documents, including a file marked "Winnie the Pooh: legal problems". Surely that weakens Disney's case? "Well, the judge has not ruled that Disney acted to do anything wrong," Petrocelli fires back. Some old files had merely been "inadvertently discarded".
"They seem like pleasant enough people," Petrocelli concedes. "But Disney is being forced to defend itself because wild and extravagant charges are being made to take a simple contract and convert it into massive monetary claims. Anybody would have to fight that."
In the four months since losing Bert Fields, the Slesingers have also split with the firm that took over from him. "They say they can't budget this case for less than $ 800,000," Pati says. "They say that Disney is putting on pressure by making it as expensive as possible." Bert Fields understands the tactics. "When you get into a fight with Disney, you know you're probably going to have to go to trial, and it can cost a fortune," he says. "They bleed people by this tremendous stress they put on fighting to the end."
Although no longer representing them, Fields says that he has "continued confidence in the merit of the Slesinger case and I feel they will prevail at the trial". If the court agrees with him, and allows the Slesingers to claim both damages and the right to terminate the contract, it could, Fields says, cost the company billions of dollars. Disney, meanwhile, is pursuing a separate copyright action to let Milne's granddaughter, Clare, reclaim the Slesingers' rights.
Pati Slesinger is briefing her eighth set of lawyers. She sees the next year as "the home stretch". Remarkably, Pati has also been reassessing her view of Michael Eisner, the Disney chairman and her declared enemy. They met recently, with the help of an intermediary, to discuss Pati's plans for her charitable Pooh Foundation. She was impressed by Eisner's attitude. Had they met earlier, she believes, the dispute could have been settled many lawyers ago.
In the meantime, the 13 boxes of documents relating to the case continue to pile up in the Los Angeles Superior Court archives, the legal bills keep growing, and Shirley Slesinger Lasswell becomes an ever more delicate potential witness. Pati Slesinger, though, is starting to imagine life after litigation. "I always saw light at the end of the tunnel," she says. "It's just that Disney kept throwing all of these rocks in the way."
And then Pati reads a poem that she has written, in an attempt to tell the story of the Slesingers' fight with Disney in a form that A. A. Milne would have appreciated. The poem ends:
"Now, oh giant corporation,
This Pooh wants an explanation.
Tell me, please, how much you owe,
And where did all my Hunny go?
Through all the tangled, tangled vines
Of your worldwide accounting lines,
From what and why did you subtract,
Trade off, commingle and redact?
To cut my tiny share until
Gross was net and net was nil?"
Pati Slesinger does not expect her questions to be answered any time soon.
(The Times Magazine, London, November 22 2003)
posted by David Rowan at Saturday, November 22, 2003
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