marciabrady: ADRIANA CASELOTTI remembers 1935 as if it were yesterday. In fact, when she closes her

marciabrady:

ADRIANACASELOTTIremembers 1935 as if it were yesterday. In fact, when she closes her eyes, she can picture herself, more than 50 years ago, saving the day for Walt Disney. The Hollywood wunderkind was working on his first full-length animated motion picture, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” and was in need of a leading lady. He combed various music studios and was prompted by a newspaper ad to place a call to Guido Caselotti, Adriana’s father. “Do you have a student who sounds like a little girl when she speaks and sings but also has some operatic training?” one of Walt’s men asked. “We want someone who can handle high notes and coloratura.” Horning in on the line, Adriana blurted out, “I can do it. I can talk like a little girl. Please let me try.” Annoyed, the music teacher abruptly told his daughter to get off the phone. Nevertheless, when audition time came, 18-year-old Adriana was in line. She was the first of 150 potential Snow Whites. Reportedly, when Walt heard her speak (she was behind a curtain so he wouldn’t be swayed by any of the girls’ looks) he said, “That’s our Snow White.” 

Not a day goes by, the now-71-year-old Adriana says, when she doesn’t sing Snow’s theme, “I’m Wishing.” Amazingly, she sounds the same as she did five decades ago. The secret, she says, “is to imagine that I’m 24 and it all comes back. It comes out just like I was 24. You see me with the lines and the gray hair, but I am not that age…I never think that way.”

Though she is now one of Snow White’s biggest fans (living in a house complete with wishing well and Disneyana), she wasn’t the biggest fan of her treatment back in the ‘30s. Since he didn’t want people to know who did the voices for “Snow White,” Disney did not give Adriana or any of the others screen credit. Further, he didn’t even invite her to the premiere. Instead, they showed up at the door. “The girl at the door said, ‘May I have your tickets, please.’ I said, ‘Tickets? What tickets?’ She said, ‘You have to have tickets.’ I said, ‘No. I’m Snow White and this is Prince Charming.’ ‘I don’t care if you’re the Witch,’ the usher said. ‘You can’t get in without a ticket.” The two slipped into the theater when on one was looking. They quickly moved to the theater’s balcony and waited a half hour until two people left their seats to go to the bathroom. “I was so excited,” Adriana recalls with a broad smile. “I saw Carole Lombard there. I knew other movie stars were there, but she was the only one I saw. Every time they clapped, I felt they were clapping for me.”

She can delight in the letters she continues to get from film goers, who tell her what seeing “Snow White” had meant to them, such as the man who wrote that he has seen it 136 times, and the children who come to the door of her Los Angeles home to hear her speak in the Snow White voice. Or memories such as her 1944 visit to a Lima, Ohio, school where, after singing and talking in that voice, a 6-year-old student loudly said “Snow White.” Teachers and fellow students rushed over to hug the girl because, as Caselotti learned, those words were the first the girl had spoken in two years. “I don’t care if I made a dollar or $2 million doing the film. I was part of one of the greatest movies ever made. No one can ever take that away from me.”