by Rees Quinn
In 1964, Disney built several exhibits for the World’s Fair in New York, including the It’s a Small World ride, a demonstration of “audio-animatronics”: lifelike robots whose movements were controlled by computers and synched with sound.
That same year, Disney representatives quietly bought more than sixty square miles of near-swampland in central Florida near Orlando that would eventually become Walt Disney World.
In his sixties, Walt Disney was painfully aware of his own mortality. He was plagued by kidney stones, debilitating toothaches, a bad elbow, and chronic sinus infections. He regularly battled colds, and his smoker’s cough worsened. Once lean and hatchet-faced, he was paunchy.
He attended to his legacy like a man in a hurry. His studio still produced five films a year, and Disney was hands-on with most of them. He retreated even more into his work and shrugged off social engagements. “I don’t know how much time I have,” he said. “I need to stay here to do as much as I can to keep this enterprise twenty-five years ahead of the competition.” But he was lonely.
His daughters were grown, with families of their own. Sharon had given him one grandchild, and by 1963, Diane had six children – one she named for her father, Walter Elias Disney Miller. Walt enjoyed his grandchildren, who spent a weekend a month with him on Carolwood. “We’d play on the lawn and around the great big pool,” granddaughter Joanna later recalled. “We’d stack up the patio furniture to make jets and rockets. And Grandpa would often be sitting there on the lawn, reading scripts, enjoying the glow of all the activity around him.” He liked to drive them to school; sometimes, they played at the studio while he worked. Occasionally, he took them to Disneyland, where after closing, they had the run of the park.
Most of the friendships he had formed over the years had faded from his life. He and Lillian seldom entertained guests; when they travelled, they always booked a room with double beds. Lillian sometimes protested long trips and would pine for her grandchildren. “Lilly just about had a fit having to be away from the grandchildren for so long,” Walt wrote after one extended stay in Europe, “and I guess I’ll have to admit to being homesick for them, too.” Walt’s beloved pets, who had provided him some solace, were gone, too.
His polo days behind him, Walt took up lawn bowling in an effort to stay active. He was a member of the Beverly Hills Lawn Bowling Club and another club in Palm Springs. He was about as good a lawn bowler as he was a polo player - not very. Once bested by an eight-year-old at the sport, he told the boy, “Don’t let it go to your head, everybody beats me!” Though he didn’t play, he was also an avid baseball fan. He bought a share of the Hollywood Stars minor league team and had box seats for their games. He was a part of the push to bring the major-league Angels to Los Angeles and hoped to establish a team in Orange County near Disneyland.
His thoughts sometimes drifted back to his childhood home of Marceline, Kansas. Walt, too, made his way there time and again, once for the dedication of a park in his honor and then the Walt Disney Elementary School. The school displayed his old Park Elementary desk, carved with his initials, in a glass case. Students in Tullytown, Pennsylvania, also voted to name their school for him.
Walt had the idea to turn his old family homestead in Marceline into a tourist attraction. It would be a model farm that families could explore. He tried to get a local entrepreneur on board, promising hoards of visitors. “When I introduce ‘Disney’s Wonderful World of Color’ on Sunday night,” Walt suggested, “I’d set the cheek of my ass up there on the table, and I’d say, ‘By the way, folks, when you’re on vacation, go by my hometown.’ What are you going to do with all the damn people?” His brother Roy talked him out of buying the family’s former farm in Ellis, Kansas.
Disney wanted to give the world more than movies, amusement, and merchandise. Since the early 1950s, he had given financial support to the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, where his animators had studied, sometimes tuition-free thanks to the generosity of the school’s namesake founder. But he envisioned something bigger. With Mrs. Chouinard’s consent, he took over the school and dedicated a committee to expanding it into a City of the Arts – a community in which students could promote and profit from their works. This concept was not fully realized; in 1962, the Chouinard school merged with the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to become the California Institute of the Arts, or CalArts. Disney boasted, “This is the thing I’m going to be remembered for.”
Death terrified Disney; he hated talking about it, but it was often on his mind. At the studio and at home, he was often suddenly overcome with sadness. A sketch artist named Bill Peet remembers Disney gazing reflectively out a window during a storyboard meeting. “You know, Bill,” he said, “I want this Disney thing to go on long after I’m gone. And I’m counting on guys like you to keep it going.” Other times, he refused to accept his own demise. He rejected more than one writer’s attempt at a biography, saying “biographies are only written about dead people.” Dismissing one publisher’s proposal for a book on his “contribution to the education, entertainment, and the happiness of the world,” Walt wrote back, “As far as I’m concerned, I am just in the middle of my career. I have several years and several projects to go before my life story should be written.”
As his health continued to fail, he made plans for Walt Disney World, and worked long days at the studio, coming home most nights with the smell of liquor on his breath. One studio employee remarked that Disney “seemed to age twenty years right before my eyes.” Time was running out. In the summer of 1965, Walt and Lillian celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary on a two-week cruise with their daughters and their families. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, and it’s the first time everything has worked out so that we could all go,” Disney said.
In the fall of 1966, Disney was scheduled to undergo surgery on an old neck injury he sustained playing polo at his country club. The hospital was St. Joseph Medical Center, across the street from the Disney Studio. On November 2, doctors going over pre-operative X-rays discovered a malignant tumor on his left lung. After the lung was removed, doctors told Disney, a lifelong smoker that he had six months to two years to live.
Walt wasn’t ready to accept this diagnosis. He continued to conduct business from his hospital bed and ordered the studio employee who delivered his mail each day to check him out and drive him to work. The day he was discharged, he was back in his office. He never talked about the cancer; and many, including two of his own siblings, found out about the surgery through the newspapers. Disney’s only acknowledgment was a telegram from actor John Wayne, also diagnosed with lung cancer. It said, “Welcome to the club.” His family clung to the hope that he may still recover. Roy, who was in Europe at the time of the surgery, was encouraged that Walt was back at work. In a letter to a former secretary, Walt wrote, “As far as my problem is concerned, it’s all over with and taken care of. I’ve been released from the hospital and am well on the road to recovery.”
After several rounds of chemotherapy, Disney took Lillian on a trip to Palm Springs. Five days later, on November 30, overcome with pain, he was flown back home to Los Angeles. Disney collapsed. He was revived by a fire-department medic and rushed to St. Joseph’s. From the hospital, he sent word to his studio executives that, while he would continue to read scripts, he would count on them to handle the rest. He refused any visitors except for family, who had a room adjacent to his. On December 5, 1966, Walt marked his sixty-fifth birthday in a hospital bed. On December 14, his daughter Diane bought him a pair of slippers because he complained his feet got cold. Lillian was hopeful on the phone that night, saying, “I know he’s going to get better.”
But the next morning, Disney took a turn for the worse. Diane drove her mother to St. Joseph Medical Center, but they were too late. At 9:35 a.m., Walt Disney died. With the exception of the cardiologist and hospital staff, he was alone.
Walt Disney never liked funerals and attended few of them. “When I�
�m dead,” he told his daughters, “I don’t want a funeral. I want people to remember me alive.”
The memorial service on December 16 was small and private, with only close relatives attending. The press was informed of the funeral after it was over. On December 17, Disney’s body was cremated and his ashes interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California.
Disney left a thriving empire. In the year of his death, an estimated 240 million people watched a Disney movie, and 100 million watched Disney’s television shows each week. Annual merchandise sales brought in $80 million. Disney comic strips were read by 150 million, and 50 million listened to Disney records. Attendance at Disneyland was 6.7 million in 1966. All told, Walt Disney Productions’ revenue was $116.5 million that year.
Once asked by a reporter to name his most rewarding experience, Disney replied “The whole damn thing. The fact that I was able to build an organization and hold it.” His stubborn and prideful determination to control every facet of his Magic Kingdom had ensured its survival and secured its future. Roy Disney boasted, “Since Walt and I entered this business, we’ve never sold a single picture to anybody. We still own them all.” In 1966, the Disney collection included:
Twenty-one full-length animated features.
493 short subjects.
Forty-seven live-action features.
Seven true-life adventure features.
330 hours of Mickey Mouse Club television episodes.
Seventy-eight half-hour Zorro adventures.
280 filmed television shows.
Walt Disney died debt free, owing nothing to the bank, nor his stockholders. He was the last of the Hollywood moguls. Disney’s studio stood alone in producing every reel of film stamped with its name; there were no deals with independent producers, or stars taking box-office percentages. In 1940, tougher times had forced Disney to make a public stock offering, but his stockholders were happy - a third of them were children, given a share in Mickey Mouse as an introduction to capitalism. Walt himself owned 262,941 shares of Walt Disney Productions stock, worth slightly more than $18 million when he died. In all, the Disney family owned about 34 percent of the company, with the Disney Foundation owning another nearly 3 percent.
Disney’s wealth eclipsed the $182,000 annual salary he had taken since 1961, and the millions he made in interest on his films. Walt Disney’s greatest fortune, the one that would pay out for generations after his death, was the hearts and minds of children.
But sentiment only went so far with Disney. He was a dreamer, but above all, an entrepreneur who didn’t measure success by fame. He often said he had “no use for people who throw their weight around as celebrities, or for those who fawn over you just because you are famous.” He saw money as a tool with which to develop new ideas and enterprises. Success, for Disney, was the product of struggle and hard work, the payoff for countless gambles, on which he had staked and often nearly lost everything. It was triumph over critics and naysayers. It was acknowledgement of his genius, and endorsement of his grand dreams. It was immortality.
Ultimately, Walt Disney’s greatest creation was Walt Disney. Disney was more than a man, more than a name. It was an entity, a brand, and an illusion. Disney the man was often mean and tyrannical, obsessive, and no doubt the ruin of many careers. The Walt Disney the world loved and admired would smile, wink, and speak to them from their television sets. He left his mark on popular culture – movies, music, books, and an endless array of merchandise. He presented a world scrubbed clean of the grime and cynicism of reality. In a 1933 interview, Disney summarized the appeal and wonder of his creations: “The Mickey audience is made up of parts of people; of that deathless, precious, ageless, absolutely primitive remnant of something in every world-wracked human being which makes us play with children’s toys and laugh without self-consciousness at silly things, and sing in bathtubs, and dream and believe that our babies are uniquely beautiful. You know . . . the Mickey in us.”
Chairwoman, CEO, and Publisher
Donna Sammons Carpenter
President and Associate Publisher
Maurice Coyle
Chief Financial Officer
Cindy Butler Sammons
Managing Editor
Molly Jones
Art Director
Matthew Pollock
Senior Editors
Ruth Hlavacek
Larry Martz
William Souder
Sebastian Stuart
Associate Editors
Donald Detore
Donna Manovich
Robert W. McCune
Val Pendergrast
Jim Ross
Chairwoman Emeritus
Juanita C. Sammons
Published by New Word City LLC, 2014
http://www.NewWordCity.com
© Rees Quinn
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-61230-794-7