Grasshopper

Disney kills a character and the world gains a cocktail

By Valentine P. Batko 

LOS ANGELES • 1938 — Walt Disney’s secretary Angela stuck her head into Bianca Majolie’s office just after 9:00 on a Tuesday. “Boss wants to see you pronto, Bianca,” she said. 

“Now?” Bianca said. “I haven’t even had time to pour gin in my coffee.”

Angela laughed. “I’m just the messenger, signora.” Angela loved Majolie’s accent and tried to use Italian words around her whenever she could. 

The two women walked together to the elevator and ascended to Disney’s office. “Bianca!” Disney called from his desk. “Get in here. I need your help with a new thing.” 

Majolie was the studio’s only female storyboard artist. Disney adored her work, which he often described as “classic.” 

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Grasshopper 

• 1 ounce crème de menthe

• 1 ounce crème de cacao

• 1 ounce cognac

• 1 ounce heavy cream

Shake all ingredients with ice • Strain into a cocktail glass • Garnish with a mint leaf

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“Norm Ferguson gave me an old Italian book last week that you must have read as a kid,” he said. “It’s called The Adventures of Pinocchio, and I’d like to make it into a film. You did some fantastic work on “Snow White,” Bianca. Spend the next couple of weeks with the book and give me an initial storyboard we can use to flesh out the Pinocchio story.”

“Sure, Walt,” Majolie said. She knew the book. Everyone in Italy knew Carlo Collodi’s 1880s masterpiece about a lonely woodworker and his magical, mischievous puppet. It was a children’s story, yes, but a dark one. “There’s a lot in the book that’s…uh…different from most of your films,” Majolie added.

“That’s why I love it,” Disney said excitedly. “There’s something in that story we haven’t dug into before. It’s about the choices we make and the courage to live our lives according to those choices. Give it a shot, Bianca. I know you’ll come up with something that’s true to Collodi but also true to you. And do something big with the cricket. I like the cricket.” 

Bianca Majolie

Over the next week, Majolie read and reread Pinocchio. It was as dark as she remembered. She decided Disney was probably hoping to use Pinocchio to evolve the studio beyond the innocence of Snow White and Mickey Mouse. But what was his obsession with the cricket? She hated crickets. She’d grown up in a Florence neighborhood that held an annual cricket festival, and for months after the festival each year, she found crickets in her bed, in her school clothes, in her parents’ pantry. 

In Collodi’s original story, the talking cricket that has lived in Gepetto’s house for 100 years recognizes that Pinocchio is a brat. He tells the puppet that he’s stupid, and either has to go to school or get a job. Pinocchio throws a hammer at the cricket and kills him. As a child, Majolie loved that part of the book. 

But here she was, 30 years later, tasked with adapting Collodi’s story for Walt Disney who believed the story of Pinocchio was about believing in yourself. Disney had instructed Majolie to do that very thing—believe in herself—in creating the film’s storyboards. 

One night, Majolie stopped in at Patsy’s Lounge in Tujunga for a drink on her way home from the studio. Earlier that day, she’d been trying to figure out what to do with the cricket. Crickets were colorless and pedestrian. The entire point of Walt Disney's films was their color and life. She decided to make the character a grasshopper, green and vibrant. 

As she began drawing the grasshopper at the bar, Majolie asked if Patsy could make her a green drink to celebrate. She decided the character would be named Jim Grasshopper, and he would be a guide of sorts for the puppet. Jim would inhabit the dark themes of Collodi’s Pinocchio, but he would be charismatic, musical even. 

In Jim Grasshopper Majolie created a character who was true to his own degraded self. While Gepetto was out buying vegetables or chopping wood, Jim would take Pinocchio under his wing and show him what being a real boy was really like. Jim would be a corrupting influence on Pinocchio, teaching him how to be a pickpocket, cheat at pool, and drink Old Fashioneds. After three of Patsy’s green drinks, Majolie was on a roll and wrote the lyrics to a show-stopping song that Jim Grasshopper would sing to Pinocchio. 

Not a grasshopper. Not green.

Over the next few days, as her deadline approached, Majolie fine-tuned the storyboards and recruited the studio’s finest songwriter, Leigh Harline, to write the music to her lyrics for Jim Grasshopper’s big number. The morning of the meeting, Majolie lined up her storyboards in the front of the room to walk through her vision for Pinocchio with the studio’s creative team. She asked Nelson Eddy, another Patsy’s regular, and three backup singers to perform the Jim Grasshopper song as a finale to the presentation.

“Let’s hear what you’ve got,” Walt said as the meeting kicked off. Majolie walked through an increasingly nonsensical plot that involved Pinocchio, under Jim Grasshopper’s tutelage, running an opium ring for Burmese warlord Khun Sa out of a Playa Vista strip club called The Cheetah Lounge.

“Walt,” Majolie said as she wrapped up the presentation, “this is a song I wrote that I think establishes the bond between the grasshopper character and the puppet. Jim is a corrupting influence on an innocent near-boy, but he’s also teaching Pinocchio the important lesson that even if you’re disgusting and immoral, you can still be consistent in your lack of principles. It’s called ‘When You’re At a Topless Bar.’ Hit it, Nelson.” 

JIM GRASSHOPPER

When you’re at a topless bar

Makes no difference who you are

Lap dance, whiskey, honest whores

Will come to you

If you’ve got five-dollar bills

Puppet, go and find your thrills

Going to a topless bar?

Bring me with you

CHORUS

Fate is kind

She brings drinks from the bar

Tip her well and she’ll find you dope after the show

JIM GRASSHOPPER

Like an angel barely clad

Bambi’s dancing, aren’t you glad?

When you’re at a topless bar

Your dreams come true

The room was silent for a full minute. Finally, Walt spoke up: “Wow, that was all really incoherent and terrible, Bianca, thank you. Let’s move you onto the ‘Dumbo’ team.” He turned to the other creatives in the room. 

“The song is nice—shitcan the lyrics but keep the music,” he said. “Turn Jim back into a cricket. And let’s remember the stripper’s name for something else down the road. Has some zip to it.”

Editor’s Note: The Grasshopper is most associated with Tujague’s in New Orleans, which promotes the legend that the drink was created there by Philip Guichet in 1928. Citing a lack of documentary evidence to back up the Tujague story, fact-based cocktail historians claim the Grasshopper was likely created in the Midwest after World War II.

SOURCES:

• Josephus Honkle-Wrapting, “The Troubled Set of Disney’s ‘Pinocchio,’” Life (April 13, 1942): pp. 26-27

• Shirley L. Cranf, “Bianca Majolie and Walt Disney,” in Women in History Who Choked and Almost Screwed It Up for the Rest of Us, ed. Kristy Krayuns (New York: Dunlap, Frankfurter and Company, 1976) pp. 57-76

• Bianca Majolie, Grasshopper Pimp, Jim’s Story: A Novel (New York: Steiner & Sons, 1940)

Contributors Notes:

Valentine P. Batko is Artist-in-Residence at the Doli Pulio Gallery in Portland’s Little New Zealand district. Her installation, “Mungo!” is now on display.

Next week: Bee’s Knees • The discovery of Mars moons and a honey of a drink