The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  Granny herself was not represented in Granny’s Cabin. At the festival, Beulah Bondi, who played Granny in the film, talked about pioneer life in a recording. Disney posed with Bondi and Kathryn Beaumont (who was the voice of Wendy in Peter Pan as well as the voice of Alice) in front of Granny’s Cabin, which was recessed into a wall at eye level.

  By then, Disney had been collecting miniatures for several years. His collection of miniatures had grown so large by early in 1951 that he was seriously considering sending it on tour.131 It would go out as what Roger Broggie called “an exhibit of Americana”—that is, a set of dioramas, each furnished with Disney’s miniatures. The Times described Granny’s Cabin as “the first unit in [Disney’s] miniature Americana.”

  Disney’s ambitions increased with each succeeding diorama. For an “opera house” miniature, Disney wanted a tiny vaudevillian to perform on stage, and so in February 1951, the actor and dancer Buddy Ebsen was filmed performing in front of a grid that Roger Broggie and Wathel Rogers used as a guide in reproducing his movements through a system of cams and cables.132 Although Disney himself built Granny’s Cabin, his direct involvement seems to have diminished as each diorama became more mechanically elaborate. The initial sketches for the dioramas were made by Ken Anderson, whom Disney borrowed from the studio’s staff for the purpose.

  Work began on a third, still more ambitious diorama—a barbershop quartet—in June 1951. Actors were filmed in front of a grid, as Ebsen had been. After Harper Goff joined the Disney staff in October, he designed a tableau with five characters, a quartet whose mouths would be synchronized with their singing voices, and a fifth man who was getting a shave. “My wife Flossie made the clothes out of a very fine silk,” Goff said in an interview with The “E” Ticket, a magazine devoted to the history of Disneyland, “and I applied a varnish to the moving areas so the material wouldn’t wear out too quickly. . . . I made a little model of the scene . . . it wasn’t a very careful model, but it was sized right. . . . The guys would sing, ‘Down by the old mill stream . . .’ Their mouths didn’t move in that first model I made. What I did was the setting . . . what the barber shop would look like, so you could visualize it. Walt then took it and had other people work on it.”133

  When Popular Science published photos of Granny’s Cabin in its February 1953 issue, it described the diorama as part of “Disneyland, a miniature historic America that is to cover a 50-acre tract in Los Angeles. . . . Its purpose is to entertain people of all ages and also to teach them by means of tiny but exact models how life in the U.S. developed to its present level.” The magazine reported that Disney had collected “miniature copies of antique furnishings from all over the country and built others in his studio workshops.”134

  Popular Science may have conflated two or more potential Disney projects, but that would have been easy to do, considering that Disney’s plans were, to say the least, fluid in the early 1950s. He seems to have flitted restlessly from one idea to another, trying to find some way to put his enthusiasm for miniatures to work in an incongruously grand project. When he wrote to his sister, Ruth, about “my newest project”—the dioramas—on December 4, 1952, while the Festival of California Living was in progress, he wrote as if he thought a touring show of miniature Americana was a live possibility. He said he was “hoping it will become a reality, but at this point it’s very much in the thinking and planning stage. . . . I’ve been collecting all sorts of miniature pieces for the past three or four years, with this project in mind. It’s been a wonderful hobby for me and I find it is something very relaxing to turn to when studio problems become too hectic.”135

  By the time Disney wrote to Ruth, though, the original plan for a traveling show (which at one point was to be called “Disneylandia”) was, if not yet dead, close to it. When he ultimately called a halt, only two members of the barbershop quartet had been built.

  The problem was not the public’s response. At the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, Harper Goff said, “people would watch and watch. They wouldn’t go away. They saw the whole show and they stayed for the next one. So the show had to be stopped for 25 minutes to clear out the audience. Walt knew it was a success.”136 But the logistics and economics were another matter. “Walt envisioned a big long train which would go all over America,” Goff said. In each city the train visited, “people would come and go through the railroad cars. They would start at the back of the train and all the cars would have these little animated things that you could watch. This is what caused Walt to choose the size he did for the displays. . . . He wanted to make sure he had an aisle [in each railroad car] with enough room. . . . This idea called for a 21-car train on a siding with public access. The railroad companies said they would put in a ‘Disney line’ with a rental of thirteen thousand dollars a month or something like that. And the word got around. I think that Walt, who was used to success on his terms, may have expected all these cities to say, ‘Oh yes, Mr. Disney, please come to our town . . .’ But then everybody began planning to make a lot of money, just to let Disney in.”

  Putting the displays in railroad cars was going up in cost, Goff said: “Walt bought three old Pullman cars, just to kind of fool around with. Then, suddenly, when he wanted to get some more the price had gone up substantially.” Disney learned that simply moving his special train around the country would be enormously complex and difficult: “In order to get to Denver, for instance, the train would first have to go to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Then it would have to turn around (on a different railroad, the Colorado and Southern) and go back south to Denver. And they didn’t have tracks to accommodate the train.”137

  When Granny’s Cabin went on display at the Festival of California Living, Disney was already exploring another outlet for his enthusiasm for miniatures. His plans for a park to be called “Disneyland” had been public knowledge for more than seven months—not the fifty-acre park that popped up in the Popular Science article, but a smaller park in Burbank. In March 1952, he got tentative approval from the Burbank Board of Parks and Recreation for a $1.5 million development on the sixteen studio-owned acres across Riverside Drive from the Disney plant. His Mickey Mouse Park of 1948 was within financial reach now that the studio’s fortunes had improved. Disney’s desire to put his miniatures to work as an attraction had breathed new life into the dormant idea for a park, as Michael Broggie has written: “Initial design drawings by Eddie Sargeant showed an elaborate 1/8th scale railroad layout, complete with roundhouse and covered rail equipment storage tracks; rails wound over bridges crossing a gravity-flow canal boat ride.”138

  On March 27, 1952, the Burbank Daily Review quoted Disney as saying that “Disneyland will be something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts and a showplace of beauty and magic.”139 The park was to include what the newspaper called “various scenes of Americana” and a “zoo of miniature animals,” like two donkeys he had brought from Italy.

  (Disney visited Italy in the summer of 1951, in an excursion during the filming of The Story of Robin Hood, and he was taken with the tiny Sardinian donkeys he saw there; he brought two to Los Angeles late that fall. Although he told a reporter that he hadn’t decided whether to keep the donkeys at his home or at the studio—predictably, they wound up at the studio—he surely had his amusement park in mind when he made his purchase.)140

  Disney said the park was to be home to a “complete television center,” from which programs would be transmitted to the whole country. It would “focus a new interest upon Burbank, Los Angeles and Southern California through the medium of television and other exploitation,” he said. Most curiously, Disney described the park not as a commercial venture, but rather as a facility that would be “instantly available” to civic groups. That idea fell by the wayside very quickly.

  CHAPTER 8

  “He Was Interested in Something Else”

  Escaping from Film

  1953–1959

  For years, Disney had been visiting a
musement parks and other attractions in the United States and Europe with at least half an eye toward what he could learn that would be useful in a park of his own. In the early 1950s, with a Disneyland on Riverside Drive a live possibility, he began looking more closely at such places.

  Bud Hurlbut, who owned a small “kiddieland” amusement park in El Monte, a suburb northeast of Los Angeles, told Chris Merritt of seeing Disney “kind of looking around at my rides. . . . I saw this man come on my property, and by the time he was there the second or third time I decided he wasn’t just a park customer”—that is, someone who wanted to buy rides that Hurlbut manufactured. “Walt was studying how things worked, and I just walked up to him and said, ‘You look like you’re interested in rides,’ and he said he was ‘kind of looking at them.’ He was a really nice fellow, so I sat down with him and answered a lot of his questions.” Disney wound up inviting Hurlbut “to his house to ride his miniature steam train. I spent several Saturdays over there, and it was just like being with a neighbor. He would sit on the floor and relax, and as we sat there, we talked about trains and rides.”1

  Disney was also taking more concrete steps, like commissioning a master plan from the architectural firm Pereira and Luckman. Charles Luckman, who had known Disney for years, remembered hearing him describe his conception of Disneyland over lunch in April 1952, just after Disney announced his plans for a Burbank park: “He had a vivid mental image of it all—the streets and stores from other eras, the parade of Disney characters led by Mickey Mouse, the bright lights, the bands playing, the variety of restaurants, the scenes and sets of his cartoons to serve as backgrounds for the concessions, water rides through enchanted lands, the mechanized people who could speak, the birds who could sing, the monorail [sic] which he would drive on opening day.” Disney apparently hoped that the architects would devise a plan that would permit him to pack as many attractions as possible into the small area across Riverside Drive. Luckman returned a month later with a “preliminary concept” for a seven-acre Disneyland, which Disney rejected as clearly too small. “As the weeks went by,” Luckman wrote, “the proposed size went from ten to twenty acres, then to thirty. Walt was screaming.”2

  Perhaps aware of the ongoing discussions, a Daily Variety columnist reported on October 27, 1952, that “Disney is shopping for a big tract of land to build ‘Disneyland’—a playground for kids and grownups with restaurant, theatre, miniature railway, etc.”3 Satisfying Disney’s ambitions within the geographical constraints of the Riverside site was turning out to be beyond the abilities of an architectural firm.

  “By the time we reached fifty acres,” Luckman wrote—this was probably in late 1952 or early 1953, around the time Popular Science wrote of a park of that size—“I called a halt.” Building a Disneyland that big, or bigger, would not only require a larger site than the one on Riverside, it would also require money that Walt Disney did not have. Disneyland was one of those rare Walt Disney projects that had run aground on Roy Disney’s skepticism. Because Roy resisted making more than a small amount available for the planning and design of a park, Walt formed and funded a separate private company, Walt Disney Enterprises, to carry out those functions. It came into existence on December 16, 1952. He was the sole shareholder. The corporation changed its name to Walt Disney Incorporated in March 1953, shortly before Disney and Walt Disney Productions signed a new employment contract on April 6, 1953, that explicitly gave him the right to pursue outside projects. An entirely predictable (and ultimately unsuccessful) minority stockholder’s suit followed in June, attacking the employment contract and Disney’s relationship with the company generally.4 Perhaps to put a little distance between Walt Disney Productions and his private company, Disney changed its name to WED Enterprises in November 1953.5

  The line between the public and private companies was always blurry, but Disneyland, especially in its early stages, was a personal project of Walt Disney’s, distinct from the studio as little else had been since Walt Disney Productions became a public company in 1940. Disney had already bought the rights to Johnston McCulley’s Zorro stories as another personal project, with an eye toward making a television series. As a result, there was a Zorro building on the lot, and that was where the first employees of WED were housed.

  Ned E. Depinet, RKO’s president, shakes hands with Walt Disney in 1950 to mark the conclusion of a new distribution deal. Roy Disney is at left, the Disney attorney Gunther Lessing at right. Quigley Photographic Collection, Walt Disney File, Georgetown University Library, Special Collections Division, Washington, D.C.

  Lillian and Walt Disney on a 1952 visit to the Swiss village of Zermatt, a favorite Disney summer vacation spot. This photo, by the Zermatt firm Perren-Barberini, was part of the collection of Paul and Andrée (Dédée) Tilmant-Jeghers of Belgium, who visited with the Disneys at Zermatt in 1952 and again in 1958. Courtesy Pierre Nicolaï.

  Disney and Richard Todd, (center), the star of three of his British-based live-action films, enjoy cotton candy with an unidentified third man on a visit to Coney Island in August 1953. Courtesy Richard Todd.

  Disney as he appeared on the first episode of the Disneyland television program on October 27, 1954. ABC Television photo.

  Disney tours Sleeping Beauty Castle in Disneyland, under construction in 1955. Courtesy University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections.

  Disney plays with young admirers at Smoke Tree Ranch in Palm Springs in an undated photo probably taken around 1960, after the Disneys had built their second weekend home at Smoke Tree. Courtesy Palm Springs Historical Society.

  Disney at the controls of Disneyland’s monorail, which began operations in the summer of 1959 along with the Matterhorn bobsled ride and the submarine ride. Courtesy University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections.

  Disney, an increasingly committed Republican over time, attended the 1964 GOP convention in San Francisco and posed there with former president Eisenhower, a personal friend. Courtesy Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas.

  Disney visited Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen frequently on his trips to Europe and acknowledged Disneyland’s debt to its Danish predecessor. On this visit, on September 5, 1964, he posed with Sven Hansen, a member of Tivoli’s Boys’ Guard. Courtesy Tivoli Gardens.

  Walt Disney, Florida governor Haydon Burns, and Roy Disney at the November 15, 1965, press conference at which the Disneys revealed some of their plans for the 27,000 acres Walt Disney Productions had bought near Orlando. Courtesy Florida State Archive.

  Disney (with help from Mickey Mouse) was grand marshal of the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Parade on January 1, 1966. Courtesy Tournament of Roses Archive.

  In his later years, Disney became a devotee of lawn bowling, both at Smoke Tree Ranch in Palm Springs and at a public park near his home in Holmby Hills. Here he is with an unidentified fellow bowler at the Smoke Tree bowling green. Courtesy Palm Springs Historical Society.

  Disney signs autographs for admirers on an October 9, 1966, visit to the Kansas City Art Institute, the school whose Saturday classes he attended fifty years earlier. Courtesy Mark Kausler.

  There is apparently no way to determine the dates when Disney hired those earliest WED employees, since the company was separate from Walt Disney Productions at the time (and the employees themselves were vague or clearly incorrect when they spoke of dates). But it could have been no later than early 1953 that Disney hired Richard Irvine, an art director for Twentieth-Century Fox who had worked for him in the mid-1940s on the live-action portions of Victory Through Air Power and The Three Caballeros. (Disney called art directors—who design the physical settings of live-action films—“brick and mortar men.”) “I think the reason that he called me was because I was the first one that built models of a set for him, and he could see immediately the flexibility by rearranging and changing, as to how we could plan the action,” Irvine told Richard Hu
bler in 1968. Irvine’s first assignment was to act as Disney’s liaison with Pereira and Luckman, then still involved with the project and exploring the possibilities of a site in Palos Verdes, on the Pacific coast. At that point, Irvine said, Disney decided he needed a staff of his own to develop his ideas before turning them over to an architect. “And then finally when he started to jell the ideas the momentum started to build and he got excited about it and went ahead and did it in house, so to speak.”6

  Irvine brought over two other art directors from Fox, Bill Martin and Marvin Davis. They shared offices with Bill Cottrell, Disney’s brother-in-law and longtime employee, and Nat Winecoff, a promoter who was playing an ill-defined role in getting the Disneyland park off the ground.7 Davis remembered the Zorro building as “a ramshackle wallboard thing, very temporary, hot in the summer and cold in the winter. . . . Walt had bought some period furniture, a dining set and other stuff . . . heavy dark wood furniture that he had in mind to use on the Zorro set. Bill Cottrell . . . was in charge of Zorro at the time. He had some scripts and some writers, and he was looking around for a cast. It might have been a feature film, or maybe a series, but it was important to Walt.”