It’s a known fact that many classic Disney films began as books. Mary Poppins (1964) was based on the Mary Poppins book series written by Pamela Lyndon “P.L.” Travers, the first of which was published in 1934, and The Jungle Book (1967) came from a collection of stories written by Rudyard Kipling in 1894. But before Disney produced those films, they produced 101 Dalmatians in 1961. “Dalmatians,” was based on a book that had been published five years earlier, in 1956, The Hundred and One Dalmatians, and the book was written by author/playwright Dodie Smith. Smith’s story is worth telling because in addition to writing several books and plays, she and Walt Disney became friends. And in addition to all of that, on January 25th, 2021, “101 Dalmatians,” the film will turn 60 years old!
Dodie Smith was born May 3rd 1896, in Whitefield, Lancashire, England. Her father, Ernest, worked as a bank manager, but he regularly attended theater. He sadly passed away when Dodie was two years old. Her mother, Ella, had aspired to be an actress, but to no success, the only exception playing walk-on parts (parts with no dialogue). It was because of both her parents that Dodie herself wanted to be an actress, though she also developed an interest in writing, and she wrote her first play when she was ten years old.
As a teenager, Smith began acting in small parts at the Manchester Athenaeum Society. Her mother remarried when Dodie was 14, and the new family relocated to London. By the time she reached young adulthood, Dodie discovered that she was going to have better success as a writer rather than actress. She took a job at Heal and Son’s furniture store in London in 1923 and it was while working there that she wrote her first play, Autumn Crocus, which she wrote under the pseudonym C.L. Anthony. Surprisingly, the play caught the attention of London’s Lyric Theatre, who agreed to stage the show. It opened on April 6th, 1931, to huge success.
She wrote another play, Call It a Day, which opened at London’s Globe Theatre in 1935, playing a total of 509 performances, making it her longest-running play. She married Alec Macbeth Beesley in 1939. He had been a co-worker Heal and Son’s furniture store, but also became her business manager. She was hired to write the screenplay for the movie The Uninvited released in 1944. The couple relocated to America when Beesley wanted to avoid legal complications for choosing to be a conscientious objector (one who refuses to serve in the military). While living in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, she wrote her first novel I Capture the Castle in 1948. She and her husband became friends with writer John Van Druten who adapted the novel Goodbye to Berlin into a play. (“Goodbye to Berlin,” later became the musical Cabaret, which opened on Broadway in 1966).
Beesley and Smith relocated to London again in the 50s, and in 1952, she wrote the play Letter From Paris. Prior to that, she also wrote the screenplay for the film Darling, How Could You! (1951). Around this time, Smith began to think about writing a children’s novel about dalmatian puppies. She and her husband both owned and adored dalmatians, having a family of nine of them at home. (Their dog family’s patriarch was named Pongo, just as in the film.) At one point, she saw that a friend of hers had seen a group of dalmatian dogs nearby and she overheard her friend say, with no evil intended, “those dogs would make a lovely fur coat,” and that triggered the plot to tell the story of a family of dalmatian dogs who successfully evade a woman who wants to do just that, The Hundred and One Dalmatians.
The novel was a hit, and it wasn’t long before it slid across the desk of Walt Disney in December of 1957. Disney knew instantly the book had the “animated movie potential,” despite the fact that at this point his career, he was more focused on producing live-action films as well as the Disneyland theme park. He wrote Smith a letter asking her about turning the book into a movie, and though it took lengthy negotiating, Smith was only too happy to sell him the rights. In response, she wrote to Walt acknowledging that she had hoped that he would make a cartoon film because she had fantasized about how some of the scenes in the book would look in cartoon when she wrote it, and even sent him an autographed copy of the book. In response, Disney sent her some of the early production sketches of the film.
When the film finally premiered in January of 1961, Smith and her husband attended a private screening and she and her husband both loved the movie, which Disney was glad to hear. Pongo stretching by Roger’s window at the very beginning of the film was her favorite movie frame. She had only a small complaint, which was that her name was small and briefly flashed on the screen during the film’s main titles. She had preferred her name be big and on screen for longer. She wrote to Walt Disney about that. Disney sincerely apologized, and as token of apology, he sent Smith original full-color photos from the movie. At this point, Smith and he were also talking about her writing another story that he would turn into a movie, and he assured her that her name would be bigger, but sadly their second collaboration never came to fruition. Though they never actually met one another in person, they continued being pen pals until Walt’s passing in December of 1966.
Smith wrote a play called Amateur Means Lover which premiered the same year as the film. She wrote a sequel to “Dalmatians,” entitled The Starlight Barking in 1967, and wrote four autobiographies: Look Back with Love: A Manchester Childhood (1974), Look Back with Mixed Feelings (1978), Look Back with Astonishment (1979) and Look Back with Gratitude (1985). She passed away at her home in Essex, England on November 24th, 1990 at the age of 94. Since her passing, Disney readapted “Dalmatians,” for live-action in 1996, and her novel “I Capture the Castle,” was also made into a movie in 2003. (Disney also made sequels to “Dalmatians,” that have no connection whatsoever to “Starlight Barking,” though they do acknowledge Smith’s name in the opening credits: 102 Dalmatians (2000) and 101 Dalmatians 2: Patch’s London Adventure (2003)).
To say that Dodie Smith is a good writer is an understatement. She wrote several stories throughout her career, but the most beloved is undoubtedly “The Hundred and One Dalmatians.” It is amazing that she was able to develop the extraordinarily vile Cruella DeVil from something that a friend said. In addition to being a humorous and heartwarming story, the book also does a great job of conveying to us humans that we should never underestimate a dog’s capabilities. And Walt Disney’s 1961 film version of the book helps the story continue to be endearing today, even 60 years later.
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