Winnie the Pooh, the absent-minded character created by a father for his son, both of whom resented his success, has grown up a commercial monster, reports Roisín Ingle
Winnie the Pooh, a Bear of Very Little Brain, has been known to sit in on meetings in the swanky Los Angeles office where, over the past 10 years, celebrity lawyer Bertram Fields has turned his far more substantial grey matter to his client's battle with Disney over merchandising rights. In an equally swanky Los Angeles office across the road, another celebrity lawyer, Daniel Petrocelli, has been fighting Disney's corner. This week a trial date was finally set for September 24th. A game of Pooh sticks it will not be.
Both parties hope this will be the final skirmish in a long-running and acrimonious row over exactly how much money Disney should be paying Shirley Slesinger Lasswell, the 80-year-old Pooh-pyjama-wearing widow of former literary agent Stephen Slesinger. With incredible prescience, her husband bought the North American rights to Pooh and his friends - Rabbit, Owl, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore, Kanga and Roo - from creator A.A. Milne back in 1929.
Disney says Lasswell, who is ill, and her daughter, Pati (50), have received more than enough of the Pooh fortune - the bear now makes more money for Disney than Mickey Mouse - over the years. The Lasswells maintain that Disney's royalty cheques are not adequate and that payments are not being made for lucrative DVD and video sales and profits from theme park attractions. Oh bother, as Pooh himself might say.
A.A. Milne could never have envisaged such an outcome when he returned to London from a four-year spell in the trenches during the first World War. A regular contributor to Punch, he began writing short children's poems for his son, the real Christopher Robin, whose fictional counterpart is Pooh's constant companion.
'Vespers', the first poem, was published by Vanity Fair after Milne's wife surreptitiously sent it to the magazine. This was followed by Milne's first children's poetry book, When We Were Very Young. It was this volume that contained the world's first encounter with Pooh, in the line: "A bear, however hard he tries, grows tubby without exercise."
Winnie the Pooh was based on Christopher Robin's teddy, Edward Bear, a gift bought in Harrods for the child's first birthday. The rest of the furry menagerie in Christopher Robin's playroom provided the inspiration for the other characters - Rabbit, Piglet and co - who inhabit the 100-acre wood based on a forest near the family home in Sussex.
The first Winnie the Pooh adventure, complete with exquisite line drawings from E.H. Shepard, was printed as a bedtime story in the London Evening News on Christmas Eve 1925. The whimsical humour and innocence of Winnie the Pooh, The House At Pooh Corner and Now We Are Six, another poetry collection, turned Pooh into the best-loved bear in the world. But what has been described as "the curse of Pooh", as seen in the bitter legal wranglings between the Lasswells and Disney, has always dogged those closest to the bear. Christopher Robin, for his part, grew up loving his bear and the stories while resenting the fact that, by featuring him in the books, his strict father had robbed him of "my good name".
A.A. Milne, who went on to write literature for adults, though never to the same acclaim, was bitter about the fact that he was most famous for his children's stories. Christopher Robin, who was teased at boarding-school because of the books, rarely visited his father in the years before his death in 1956, and the memorial service in that year was the last time he saw his mother, although she did not die until two decades later. Christopher Milne did not take any Pooh-related money until his daughter, Clare, was born with cerebral palsy.
When Stephen Slesinger bought the North American merchandising rights from A.A. Milne in 1929 for $1,800, he could not have guessed at the outcome either. Slesinger died suddenly in 1953, leaving his wife, Shirley, to pore over his business contracts and work out how to make a living. She decided to exploit the Winnie the Pooh deal.
"I could see what we had to do," she said. "We went into children's wear. I had dishes, toys, wall-hangings, calendars; we had Pooh Corners in all the best stores around the country."
Her efforts caught the eye of Walt Disney, who had already acquired the Pooh film rights from Milne. In 1961, he asked Shirley Slesinger Lasswell to license the Pooh rights she owned to him. "You'll never be sorry you signed with us," he said at the time.
Christopher Robin Milne was not a fan of the Disney-fication of Pooh. "He hated what they had done to the books and characters," his wife, Lesley, has said.
The first film, Winnie the Pooh and the Hunny Tree, was released in 1966, and caused consternation among Pooh fans when, for the first time, the honey-mad bear was heard speaking with an American accent. Another of Disney's creative crimes was the replacement of Piglet with a gopher character. The corporation saw the error of its ways in that regard, but the debate concerning the relative merits of Milne's original books and Disney's five films, 30 videos and a television series has continued ever since.
It is estimated that Winnie the Pooh merchandise and spin-offs bring in as much as $6 billion a year for Disney, which needs all the success it can get - its last movie, Treasure Planet, was a loss-maker. Pooh-driven products contribute a quarter of the company's annual turnover. The company recently bought all future royalties from the A.A. Milne Trust in Britain, which means the Lasswells are now the only people standing in the way of Disney and the full exploitation of this very lucrative bear.
"The contract does not cover videos, DVDs or when Winnie the Pooh dances down Main Street at Disneyland," the company's lawyer, Daniel Petrocelli, has said on the matter. "Disney has worked extremely hard to make the property immensely profitable and these people just sit back and collect cheques."
But accusations that the Slesingers are greedy do not wash with Bertram Fields. "Would you call it greedy to expect full and proper payment for what you are owed?" he asked The Irish Times this week. "If that's greed, then most of us, including Disney, are guilty."
A Los Angeles court recently sanctioned Disney for shredding some important documents relating to the case. "They can shred, but they can't hide," says Fields.
Establishing what Pooh himself might make of it all is not difficult. There would likely be much scratching of his fluff-filled head and cries of "Think! Think! Think!" before he helps himself to a little something from the store cupboard.
Today in Pembroke College, Cambridge, the Winnie the Pooh Society (which counts the Queen of England as a member) will meet to read from the Pooh books and discuss the bear and his friends.
"The appeal of Pooh is eternal childhood," says the society's president, Owen Barritt (22). "It's the knowledge that whatever happens, as Milne wrote, 'in that enchanted place on the top of the forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing'."
And that knowledge is something neither the Slesingers nor Disney can buy.
The Pooh file
Name: Winnie The Pooh
Winnie the Who? One of literature's most famous bears, created by A.A. Milne
Age: 78
Why in the news: A trial date has been set for the long-standing custody battle over merchandising rights to Pooh and his friends
Most likely to say: What's for breakfast?
Least likely to say: Bother! Honey again
Most appealing characteristic: He invented Pooh sticks, the children's game where sticks are thrown from a bridge into the river below
Least appealing characteristic: What's not to like?