The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  Davis first met Disney when Irvine introduced them in the Zorro building. “Then he invited both Dick and I up to his house to take a ride on his train, which was impressive for me because it was Walt Disney,” Davis said in an interview with The “E” Ticket. “I was pretty thrilled about all of this. I got the impression that he was trying to give us the idea of what he wanted for Disneyland. He used his Carolwood Pacific railroad as an example of what he wanted to do next. There was a definite link between Walt’s train at his home and what he went on to do at Disneyland.”

  When Davis went to work for WED, Disney had not yet surrendered the idea of Disneyland as a park on the sixteen acres across Riverside Drive, “which at that time was a storage area for pieces of sets and props and things,” Davis said. Harper Goff, who had joined the Disney staff a few months before the plans for a Riverside Drive park were announced in March 1952, had drawn what Davis called “a little schematic thing, drawing up what was mostly a kiddieland, because that was what the idea was at that time. He did a kind of aerial perspective of it, and it was filled with mostly Harper’s ideas. He had a train going around it, and some other stuff, and from that, Dick Irvine and I got started.”

  Davis remembered producing “a hundred and thirty-three different drawings and designs, because we had no idea where the park was going to be or anything [else about it], to begin with. I just started out putting together the ideas that we had all talked about . . . the idea of the train circling everything, in a kind of oblong shape. Then we started using the pear shape, because it seemed to accommodate all the things we needed.”8

  Davis’s job was to help Disney “see what the vague ideas in his mind would look like on paper”9—thus the constant flow of new plans for the park. It was not long, Davis said, before “we were planning something bigger, and we knew it wouldn’t fit on the property there.”10

  Disney regularly visited the Zorro building, which was near the front gate to the studio, as he entered from the parking lot. “He would drop into my office every day and see what I was doing,” Bill Martin told The “E” Ticket. “He didn’t pressure you, and at first I wondered how you got a decision around there. Things just seemed to happen.”11

  Disney maintained that vagueness deliberately, Dick Irvine said: “We used to have storyboards, and we would make a list of ideas, concepts and nothing was really pinned down except that ‘what would people need,’ ‘what would they do,’ ‘what kind of entertainment would they have.’ All the needs for the public that would have to be contemplated going into this park. We would just take this and put up our ideas, write our ideas out on squares of paper, put them up on a board, and he’d come down in the afternoon and sit there and look at them and juggle them around. . . . And eventually it evolved.”12

  There were similarities between the Disney of the early 1930s and the Disney that Irvine, Davis, and Martin knew in the early 1950s. In the 1920s, Disney had first animated, then had written gags for others to draw as he directed their work. In the early 1930s he finally moved into a wholly supervisory role, and only then, after he assumed that role, did his films begin to change at an accelerated pace. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, likewise, Disney first worked with his own hands, using machines and woodworking tools to build miniatures of one kind or another. By 1953, he had realized that the park taking shape in his mind would be, in effect, a tabletop layout blown up almost (but not quite) to full size. Its trains would be small but indisputably real, and far more satisfying to own and run than his miniature Lilly Belle. And this time, Disney moved from a hands-on role to a supervisory role with no evidence of the distress he felt in the early 1930s.

  It was instead his wife who felt distress as he poured their own money into planning for the park. “Before I got that park going, I spent over $100,000 that I borrowed on the insurance that I’d been paying on for thirty years,” he said in 1956. When he did, Disney said years later, “my wife raised the dickens with me. She wanted to know what would happen to her if something happened to me.”13

  In Bob Thomas’s words, “The stock [in Walt Disney Productions] was his principal asset, and although he lived well, by Hollywood standards he was not a rich man.” Even in 1951, Disney responded to a friend’s request for a loan by pleading that he had “borrowed close to the hilt on my insurance and on personal notes—am close to fifty thousand dollars in debt, which is the limit of my personal borrowing ability. The new house cost much more than I anticipated.”14 Said Lillian Disney in 1956: “I’ve always been worried. I never have felt secure. Never. . . . He’s always telling us how wealthy we are, how much we’ve got, and we haven’t got anything.”15

  The involvement of the studio—and, as it turned out, of other sources of money—would be essential when Disney was ready to move beyond planning and design to the purchase of land, the building of rides, and construction of the park itself. The first step, though, was to decide where the park was to go. To help make that decision, Disney turned to a consulting firm called Stanford Research Institute (SRI), which had a five-man Los Angeles office.

  “Walt was at a cocktail party with Charles Luckman, the architect, and Luckman knew me,” said Harrison “Buzz” Price, a member of SRI’s Los Angeles staff. “Walt had been trying to get help from Luckman and [William] Pereira and [Welton] Becket; he had three buddies who were big-time architects in town. He was having a hard time articulating his idea in architectural terms so he could have a dialogue with guys like that. Luckman told him, ‘Why don’t you go to Stanford Research? They did a good job for us in Hawaii when we were building a new kind of stadium.’ That’s how I got the lead.”16

  Price’s first meeting with Disney took place on June 3, 1953.17 Writing about that meeting, Price said that what Disney described to him “sounded strange, unlike anything you would expect in an amusement park. . . . Walt’s major investment would be committed to creating a storytelling environment. Rides would be subordinate to story and setting. Most shocking, there were no thrill rides, no roller coaster, no super fast fear of falling rides anywhere.”18 Moreover, Disney wanted to open his park in just two years, in 1955.

  Disney was, in Price’s description, coolly hardheaded when it came to finding the most desirable location for the new park in Southern California. He refused to point Price toward any desired outcome, deferring instead to the data that Price and his colleagues would assemble. “I asked him, ‘There are four thousand square miles. Do you have any ideas of your own about where you think it should be?’ He threw it right back at me: ‘You tell me.’ . . . So we did. We came back in twelve weeks and told him right where it ought to go.”19

  Two days after meeting with Disney, Price submitted his “Proposal for Research for Disneyland” dated June 5, 1953. A site study, titled “Analysis of Location Factors for Disneyland,” was dated August 28, 1953, exactly twelve weeks later.20 Roy, committed now to his brother’s idea, paid Stanford Research a total of $32,000 for that site study and a four-month feasibility study.21

  Price’s analysis took into account a large number of factors, including likely population growth patterns, freeway construction, and “the effect of terrain on television transmission,” since the idea was that TV “will play an important part in the promotion and development of Disneyland.”22 The study pointed toward a location southeast of Los Angeles in Anaheim, in Orange County just off the Santa Ana Freeway. That freeway was then under construction, but most of it between downtown Los Angeles and Orange County was scheduled for completion in 1954. It would be the main route to Disneyland.

  “I had a precise assignment,” Price said in 2003, “and I didn’t burden myself with the idea, is this crazy? For example, how do you figure the location of this thing that’s going to draw a lot of people and it’s going to have worldwide interest. Where do you put it in southern California? There were ways to measure that, and we did it, and we put it in the right place.”23

  Disney’s behavior in 1953 was as entrepreneurial as it had
been thirty years earlier, but with a major difference. He now understood that he needed solid footing of some kind before he made a speculative leap. Even then, economic studies could not tell him whether an amusement park like Disneyland would be successful, but only how to improve the odds for success. Harper Goff remembered that Disney recoiled at first from the implications of Price’s study, taking refuge again in the notion of a Riverside Drive park. “The Stanford Research people said that when Walt Disney puts in an amusement park, he’s got to have a lot of space, but Walt was horrified,” Goff said. “He said, ‘They think I’m making a lot of money, and they’re trying to get me to spend a lot. I can’t go into a big thing like that.’ But finally Walt was convinced when they said there wouldn’t be enough space for parking” at the Riverside Drive site.24

  Goff’s own involvement with Disneyland was limited at the time because he was the de facto art director (a title that union rules denied him on the screen) of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It was while Disney was ramping up his involvement with Disneyland that work on that film got under way. For the first time, Disney had signed top-rank movie stars—Kirk Douglas and James Mason—for one of his live-action films. Douglas’s salary alone, for twelve weeks’ work, was $175,000, which Douglas later claimed, probably correctly, was the most Disney had ever paid an actor in his live-action films.25 Making 20,000 Leagues would entail other expenses exceeding any previously incurred on the studio’s live-action films. The new sound stage was only the beginning; underwater filming off the Bahamas and abundant special effects still lay ahead. 20,000 Leagues was one of the first films made in the CinemaScope wide-screen process, a major weapon in Hollywood’s effort to win back audiences lost to television.

  Disney was making his entrance into real Hollywood filmmaking as flashy as possible, clearly with the idea of establishing himself immediately as something more than a producer of children’s films. 20,000 Leagues was unusual, Disney said, in that Roy Disney had confidence in the film, even as the budget climbed past four million dollars. “For some reason, from the very start he believed in that picture. . . . I got worried then. I thought there was something wrong with him.”

  Harper Goff remembered that Disney himself could not suppress anxiety about the risks he and his brother were taking. Goff had designed the Nautilus, Captain Nemo’s submarine, to suggest a sea beast, with prominent “eyes” and saw blades on the prow that could tear through the hulls of wooden ships. “I had to sell the features in my drawings of the Nautilus to Walt. He’d say, ‘Do you think all of this is necessary? Do you know what all of this is going to cost? . . .’ Walt tried everything he could to keep things simple and keep things cheap because he hadn’t made any money from these pictures yet. He once said to me, ‘Harper, all the money that my brother and I have made in our lives is tied up in this one stupid picture.’ ”26

  Other members of the Disney staff sensed in Disney—who was now in his early fifties—some of the same unease. “Walt Disney had to make a lot of difficult decisions in the 1950s,” Frank Thomas said in an interview with The “E” Ticket. “He scaled back animation, increased his involvement with Disneyland and live-action filming. I don’t think he was that sure of himself on a lot of his decisions, at that point. I can remember the way he said things to us, and the way he acted, and the way he squirmed in his chair. I felt that he wasn’t sure, but he didn’t want to admit that he wasn’t sure, because he was our leader.”27

  Whatever Disney’s worries, they did not slow his improvised research for his park. In August 1953, when The Sword and the Rose was released, Richard Todd was in New York “doing a promotional thing for him—I was there damn near a month, and I was living at the Waldorf-Astoria in the Towers, being very well looked after.” Disney had just returned to New York on August 9 from a month in Europe. “He rang me up one day and said, ‘Come to Coney Island with me.’ I could feel my face falling. It wasn’t my ideal place, but, anyhow, I said, ‘Yes, yes, thank you.’ We had a hell of a good day, actually. That was the beginning of Disneyland. He was going to see what the things were that people liked doing. We did everything—the switchbacks [roller coasters], the horses, everything. We ate the fluffy stuff [cotton candy]. We had a lovely day, thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.”28

  In California a few days later, Todd and his wife spent a day with Walt and Lillian at their home in Holmby Hills, where Todd saw “cabinets full of the objects he loved: tiny things; miniatures of all sorts in china, wood or metal.” Disney gave Todd a tiny potbellied stove that he had made himself, “a beautiful little thing about six inches high, painted in white, green and gold.”29

  With a site for his park chosen but his own resources exhausted, Disney needed the studio’s help to buy the 160 acres Disneyland would require. On September 11, 1953, he won his board’s support by arguing, in effect, that television could be used for more than promoting the studio’s theatrical films, until then the prevailing rationale. He would use television as a lever to bring his park into existence, by making a network’s investment in it a condition of his providing a program. Then he would use his TV show to promote the park itself.30

  But first he had to find a willing partner. Although the park may have come up in discussions with networks and potential sponsors—as in the General Foods deal that fell through earlier in the year—only now did the Disneys begin seriously pushing to make support for it part of an agreement.

  Walt Disney’s own thinking about Disneyland had advanced past enthusiastic words to the point that it could be embodied in a drawing—not by him, but by Herb Ryman, who was no longer working at the Disney studio. Disney may have been reluctant to reduce his ideas to a drawing, even so. “He had I think thirty-seven or forty ideas for different rides,” Irvine said. “He had tried to lay out areas for different theme ideas [but] he wasn’t anxious to get it to sketches and visualization.” Disney was most concerned, instead, with “a plan for circulation,” for people’s movements within the park. “However,” Irvine said, “we had to do a birds-eye view of it for Roy to take back to New York.”31

  Disney summoned Ryman—a highly facile illustrator who had a particular gift for romantic, atmospheric drawings of unusual places—over the weekend of September 23–24, 1953, to collaborate with him on an aerial rendering of the proposed park. This very large drawing—the image area is 39 inches high by 67 ½ inches wide on a slightly larger sheet—is one of the most celebrated relics from Disneyland’s early history. It shows a park divided into various “lands” that open off a hub—Frontier Country, Fantasy Land, Lilliputian Land, True-Life Adventureland, and so on, all dominated by a castle at the end of Main Street. Visitors would enter through one entrance, under an elevated railway station; the tracks would encircle the park.32

  A “pitch kit,” prepared around the same time (it bears a 1953 copyright date), described Disneyland’s “lands” in considerable detail, and the park itself in fulsome language:

  The idea of Disneyland is a simple one. It will be a place for people to find happiness and knowledge.

  It will be a place for parents and children to share pleasant times in one another’s company, a place for teacher and pupils to discover greater ways of understanding and education. Here the older generation can recapture the nostalgia of days gone by, and the younger generation can savor the challenge of the future. Here will be the wonders of Nature and Man for all to see and understand.33

  It is not clear what kinds of meetings Roy Disney held during his September trip to New York, but, in any case, there were no immediate takers for a Disney TV show with park attached. NBC and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) were the dominant networks, with far more affiliates than the also-rans, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) and DuMont. Neither of the two big networks was interested.

  In November 1953, Roy was back in New York. He said in Motion Picture Daily’s paraphrase that “work is progressing on a format for a Disney television show to emanate from the studio. When the for
mat is completed . . . network affiliation will be sought.” As far as the Disneys were concerned, Roy said, TV would be what Motion Picture Daily called “an exploitation medium for theatrical pictures.” The article made no mention of the Disneyland park.34

  In the official Disney version, a frustrated Roy Disney, fed up with NBC’s stalling, called ABC’s president, Leonard Goldenson, and ABC leaped at the chance to strike a deal.35 Goldenson’s version differed. When the Disneys called him in late 1953, he wrote in his autobiography,

  ABC was really [Walt] Disney’s last hope. He’d gone to the banks, and when he tried to explain what he wanted to build, they just couldn’t grasp the concept. They kept thinking of a place like Coney Island. Very risky. They turned him down. . . .

  I offered to take the Disneys in to see our board. But as a condition, I said, “I want a one-hour program, every week.” . . . At first my board opposed the deal. After all, they said, CBS had turned Disney down. NBC had turned him down. And the banks had said no. More to the point, where were we going to get financing? . . .

  Then I hammered out a deal with the Disneys. We would put in $500,000 and guarantee [bank] loans [of $4.5 million]. In exchange we took 35 percent [actually 34.48 percent] of Disneyland, and all profits from the food concessions for ten years. I knew that could be a gold mine.

  And of course there was programming. That’s what I really wanted from them. We agreed to a seven-year deal, with an option for an eighth, at $5 million a year. At $40 million, it was then the biggest programming package in history.36

  ABC and Disney were actually a good fit. ABC had been frozen in place for two years, until early in 1953, while the federal government scrutinized its merger with United Paramount Theaters. It desperately needed not just high-profile programming like a Disney show, but programming of any kind. Moreover, Goldenson was an early advocate of filmed programs—the Disney show would be one—at a time when most TV shows were “live.” The Disneys needed a network that would put their show on the air, with minimal interference, and invest some money in the park, and ABC had every incentive to do both.