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of vocal music coach Guido Caselotti, who was called in as a consultant. Adriana, overhearing a phone conversation between her father and a Disney casting director, got on the line and demonstrated her shrill girlish voice. Guido shouted for his daughter to get off the phone, but she had already made an impression on the casting director, who invited her to audition. Disney hired her on the spot.
    Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered at a star-studded event at the Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles on December 21, 1937. Charlie Chaplin and Cary Grant were seen choking back tears as the dwarfs mourn the seemingly lifeless Snow White before putting her into her glass coffin. As the lights came up, the audience stood and roared its approval.
    The filmopened three weeks later in New York and Miami to acclaim. At Radio City Music Hall in the first week alone, Snow White grossed $108,000, and tickets from scalpers on the street cost as much as $5. People left theaters humming Snow White ’s songs, including the seven dwarfs’ workday theme song, “Heigh-Ho,” which became as infectious as “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?” Audiences particularly fell in love with the boyish, big-eared Dopey, the only dwarf not sport a bushy beard.
    This was good news for the Disney studio, which had ballooned to 650 employees in the push to finish the film. Walt later joked that Roy had been “brave” about financing the film - until the tab exceeded $1 million. The critics were again silenced, and Mickey Mouse got his tail back.
    Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the highest-grossing motion picture of 1938. Disney earned another honorary Academy Award for its “innovation” and for having “charmed millions.” Child star Shirley Temple presented Disney with the golden statue - along with seven miniature ones celebrating the dwarfs. The Disney Brothers Studio expected to make $2 million that year.
    Other honors followed. At the Forty-ninth Annual Tournament of Roses Parade that year, he was presented with a marble electric clock and received plaques from Radio Guide magazine “in appreciation of pleasure brought to radio listeners by Disney’s characters,” the National Broadcasting Company, and a collective of artists in Havana, Cuba.
    Though he never completed high school – “I’m a very uneducated man, a graduate of the school of hard knocks,” he told the New York Post - suddenly Disney was being hailed as an intellectual. Colleges clamored to award him honorary degrees. He received an honorary Master of Science degree from the University of Southern California, and Master of Arts degrees from both Yale and Harvard universities and turned down another honorary degree from Boston University. “Get me right, boys. I’m grateful for these honorary degrees and the distinction they confer,” Disney said in an interview for The American , a William Randolph Hearst newspaper. “But I’ll always wish I’d had the chance to go through college in the regular way and earn a plain bachelor of arts like the thousands of kids nobody ever heard of.”
    When Harvard President James B. Conant wrote to Disney to offer the honorary degree, Disney humbly accepted, writing back, “We’re selling corn, and I like corn. I try to entertain, not educate: an important part of education is stimulating an interest in things.” He later submitted measurements for a cap and gown - “I am five-feet-ten-inches tall and usually take size forty in wearing apparel” – and at the Harvard ceremony, was filmed playfully blowing his tassel out of his eyes as it dangled from the mortarboard. His degree included the citation: “A magician who has created a modern dwelling for the Muses.”
    Disney looked the part of a Hollywood mogul. He wore lounge coats, open-throated shirts, and expensive sweaters. He often twirled a lock of his dark brown hair around his finger as he spoke, and when discussing his projects, he became as animated as