The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  Even so, the negotiations evidently took several months. Finally, in March 1954, the Disneys signed a contract with ABC for an hour-long weekly series, starting in October. On April 5, immediately after both boards had approved the deal, Roy Disney said the TV show would be “made to serve our motion picture program.”37 Walt Disney spoke in similar terms near the end of his first season in TV: “We went into it in the belief it would help our [theatrical film] business.”38 Unquestionably, though, it was the opportunity the contract provided to build and promote his park that was most important to him.

  The show, like the park, would be called Disneyland, and its four “lands” would mimic the four—Fantasyland, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, and Adventureland—into which the Anaheim park would be divided. “I had a contract that said I had complete say of what we produced,” Disney said in 1956. “So I just sort of insisted that my Disneyland park be a part of my television.”

  In addition to the corporation that eventually became WED Enterprises, Disney had formed another corporation, Disneyland, by August 1953.39 He was the owner of “substantially all” of the stock of Disneyland, Incorporated, and he transferred from WED to the new company what a corporate document called “the plans, models and other properties for the Park.”40 Disney probably set up the Disneyland corporation in anticipation of what happened in May 1954. It was then that it became a real company, with Disney as president and board chairman. His board was made up mostly of representatives of ABC and his other principal financial backer, Western Printing and Lithographing Company, which had been for more than twenty years the publisher of Disney books, comic books, puzzles, and games. Besides Disney himself, the only member of the board from Walt Disney Productions was Paul Pease, who had been the studio’s treasurer since 1947.41

  As ABC had, Walt Disney Productions bought 34.48 percent of Disneyland’s stock. Western Printing bought 13.79 percent, and Disney himself, personally and through WED, retained ownership of 17.25 percent. The four owners invested almost $1.5 million in the park, providing leverage for the bank loans that would pay for most of its construction. So the deal with ABC did require a dilution of the control Disney valued so highly. He remained completely in control of WED Enterprises, which planned and designed the park under a July 1, 1954, agreement with Disneyland, Incorporated, but ownership of the park itself was divided.

  As construction approached, Disney sent teams of his employees to inspect other attractions that might hold lessons of some kind for the Disney park. Such visits had been taking place at least since the previous fall, when Price explored sites in the United States as well as Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. “The highlight of our feasibility analysis,” Price wrote many years later, “took place at the amusement park annual convention and trade show in November 1953 at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago. There we cornered four of the nation’s leading amusement park owners and fed them Chivas Regal and caviar in our suite. Dick Irvine, Nat Winecoff, Bill Cottrell and I presented the concept of the park in a two-hour evening session,” with Ryman’s bird’s-eye drawing as a visual aid. “The reaction was unanimous: It would not work.”42

  Disney rejected the doubters’ arguments—for example, that he was planning to spend too much on aspects of the park, like landscaping, that would produce no revenue—but not the doubters; he hired two of them as consultants. And as Randy Bright has written in his authorized history of the park, Disney took advice that he thought made sense: “One constructive point that Disney did pick up quickly from nearly all of the amusement park operators was the need for efficient high-capacity operations. It was very apparent that a few seconds lost in loading each ride vehicle translated into major attendance loss at the end of each day.”43

  Disney had an advantage in that his people were visiting more attractions, and scrutinizing them more carefully, than any operator, preoccupied with his own business, could hope to do. Harper Goff remembered that during the summer and fall of 1954, “Walt sent us all around to every amusement park in the country. We would take pictures and come back and tell Walt all about what they were doing. One of the main things we tried to get was their ‘gate’ . . . how much they charged, how many people came through, and how much they made. Also what kinds of operating problems they had, such as dishonesty.”44

  Borrowings from existing attractions were inevitable, given the tight schedule. Much of Disneyland’s novelty would have to arise from how cleverly it combined such elements in a way that made sense for a park opening in 1955.

  Roger Broggie was in charge of making a direct connection between Disney’s backyard railroad and his new and much larger layout: “In 1954, when they said, ‘we’re now going to do Disneyland,’ I pulled out all the drawings on this Lilly Belle and there were a very few modifications required to blow it up to a three-foot gauge,” the standard for a narrow-gauge railroad. “All we actually did was take those drawings of the Lilly Belle and blow it up five times and it came out 36-inch gauge.”45

  After visiting Palm Springs for a decade or more, Disney had built a vacation home there in 1950, at a private development called Smoke Tree Ranch. It was to pay for two locomotives and the track surrounding the park that Disney sold his home at Smoke Tree in 1954. The railroad was the property not of Disneyland, Incorporated, but of his personal company, WED Enterprises.46 The steam railroad would remain Walt Disney’s property, through WED, even after he transferred his minority ownership in the park to Walt Disney Productions.

  In 1950, when Disney built his Carolwood Pacific layout at Holmby Hills, “I got the power company and paid them a good price to remove or build a new power line behind me,” he said, so that the lines would not interfere with the illusion he wanted to create. He linked that early effort to exclude the outside world to what he planned for Disneyland, where he would exclude the outside world with a berm. “It’s like setting atmosphere,” he said. “You’re doing a mood. You don’t see the city out there.”

  On-site construction began in July 1954, about a year before the opening date to which Disney had committed himself in his contract with ABC. Meanwhile, Disney was scrambling to fulfill another part of that contract, to deliver a weekly TV show. “When I went into television,” Disney said in 1961, “it was a sudden thing, and I had to improvise. . . . I found myself with a contract and I had to start to deliver in October and it was April.”

  When the show was being put together, Disney said in 1956, “I know I was dying for somebody to suggest my doing the emceeing.” That he would be the host seems never to have been seriously in doubt. He was not a neophyte; besides his frequent appearances on radio throughout the 1930s and 1940s, he had appeared on a few television shows in addition to his own two Christmas specials.

  A crucial decision was that Disney would speak directly to his audience. As he said, the Christmas shows “were impersonal. We let the audience look in on something we were doing but we didn’t talk to the audience. . . . I was talking with some friends in the advertising business and they . . . said, ‘Look, Walt, you talk to them.’ Television is a very intimate thing. So they said, ‘Talk to them.’ ” He had done that on some radio broadcasts, but not on TV. For that reason, perhaps, Disney said he was “scared to death” when he was filmed for the first Disneyland shows; but he soon came to enjoy being his show’s host. He acknowledged that “I have a nasal twang. It’s a Missouri twang. And my diction—I get sloppy. . . . I say, ‘Now we’re gonna . . .’ ” His diction was in fact a little peculiar; he tended to drawl, stretching out words in no discernible pattern. But in his early appearances he never seemed stiff or nervous or tense. When he addressed his audience, it was as a relaxed, low-key camera subject who was especially suited to television, that “very intimate thing.”

  The first Disneyland show, on October 27, 1954, opened with a studio tour, the sort of amiable behind-the-scenes humbug that purports to show people at work when the only work they are doing is performing for the camera. The real business of the premiere was to ce
ment the identification between the show and the park to come. Disney spoke of the park in the grandest terms, as “a fair, an amusement park, an exhibition, a city from the Arabian Nights, a metropolis of the future—a place of hopes and dreams, fact and fancy, all in one.” He said that in the future the TV show itself would originate “from this Disneyland”—which never happened—“but this year we want you to see and share with us the experience of building this dream into a reality. “

  Here, more successfully than ever before, Disney was transforming the promotion of his products into something else, an ostensible sharing of what would ordinarily be secret. He made it seem as if he were taking his viewers into his confidence. There was no sense in what he said that by revealing how his park was built—or his films made—he might prevent anyone from sharing the illusion, the “dream” or the “magic.” Instead, what he showed of the park’s construction would itself become part of the “magic.”

  Disneyland broadcast only two additional progress reports on the construction of the park before it opened in July 1955, but there were, besides, two shows promoting 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (which was released in December 1954), two promoting the True-Life Adventures, and one promoting Lady and the Tramp, an animated feature scheduled for release in the summer of 1955. In most cases, the full hour was not devoted to such previews—but each week’s broadcast also ended with a trailer promoting a current Disney theatrical release.

  Otherwise, Disneyland relied heavily on films from the studio’s past, both animated and live action, including some features that had not done particularly well in theaters (So Dear to My Heart, Alice in Wonderland). The Disneys had always brushed aside suggestions that they might sell their older films for television showings—TV simply couldn’t pay enough, Roy Disney said—and now their wisdom had been validated; they could show their films on TV without giving up ownership in any way. “When it came to television,” Walt Disney said in 1956, “the one thing I wanted was to control my product. I didn’t want anybody else to have it. I wanted to be able to control the format and what I did with it. Now I had complete control. There is nobody . . . that can tell me yes or no.”

  The timing for a show like Disneyland was uncannily good. The eldest children of the “baby boom” were only eight years old, but the young parents of 1954 had once been the children who in the midst of a long Depression delighted in the Disney shorts and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and all the merchandise and comic strips and books associated with them. Hence there was a double layer of affection and interest. Moreover, it was only in 1954 that television was becoming truly ubiquitous in the United States; a federal freeze on new licenses had left some parts of the country without any stations until 1952. Since there were only four networks (although DuMont was fading fast), and thus a limited choice of programs at any one time, there was a great opportunity for a successful program to reach a huge audience.

  Disneyland did exactly that. In its first season, despite ABC’s weak lineup of affiliates and against popular programs on CBS and NBC, it finished sixth overall in the Nielsen ratings, watched by 39.1 percent of all the households that owned a television set. Only one other ABC program finished in the top thirty.

  Disney could not have been wholly surprised by such strong results, but he was certainly surprised by the public’s response to the first Frontierland episode in Disneyland’s 1954–55 season. On December 15, 1954, Disneyland aired “Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter.” It was the first of three Frontierland installments about the legendary frontiersman.

  Disney had been considering a film of some kind about Davy Crockett for almost a decade. A 1947 story inventory report listed a “roughout”—a rough outline for a Crockett-themed musical production—by the Missouri artist Thomas Hart Benton, who worked briefly at the Disney studio in 1946.47 In the immediate postwar years, other celebrated writers and artists, like Salvador Dali and Aldous Huxley, also worked for Disney briefly. The reasons for their hiring varied from case to case—Disney hoped to incorporate an attention-getting Dali-designed segment, “Destino,” into one of his package features, and Huxley, as an eminent English writer, was hired to work on that English classic Alice in Wonderland—but nothing came of any of those associations. In the spring of 1948, fresh from Melody Time with its folktale heroes Johnny Appleseed and Pecos Bill, Disney was speaking to the columnist Hedda Hopper about making a film of some kind based on Davy Crockett’s life, but that idea too fell into abeyance, until the TV show revived it.48

  Fess Parker, who was then thirty years old, was chosen by Walt Disney himself to play Crockett, under circumstances that the matte artist Peter Ellenshaw described: “I happened to be in the sweat box waiting for dailies, when Walt came in with a talent scout, he was looking for an actor to play the role of Davy. They screened some short scene from a film called Them!, with an actor in it by the name of Jim Arness. He was the man Walt was supposed to be considering, but when Walt asked who the actor was playing a small role in the scene, the talent scout didn’t know, had to put in a phone call to find his name was Fess Parker!”49

  Public enthusiasm for the Crockett shows was remarkably strong. The theme song by George Bruns and Tom Blackburn—simple but unforgettable—sat atop the hit parade for months. Huge crowds greeted Parker on a twenty-two-city publicity tour in the spring of 1955, and sales of coonskin caps and hundreds of other Crockett-labeled items rose into the many millions of dollars. It was a Texas exhibitor, Disney said, who suggested the highly unusual step of combining the three Crockett television shows into a feature film.50 Released in color in the summer of 1955, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier grossed $2.5 million on the tickets of customers who had mostly seen the shows before, but only in black and white.

  Disney spent more on the Crockett shows than other TV producers did on comparable fare, not just by shooting in color but also by shooting on location in North Carolina and Tennessee. There is, however, no confusing those shows with more polished Hollywood theatrical products. The climactic battle at the Alamo, in the third episode, was all too obviously shot on a confined sound stage. Writing about the Crockett craze more than thirty years later, the newspaper columnist Bob Greene was undoubtedly correct when he pointed to Fess Parker himself as the critical element in the TV shows’ success: “In his portrayal of Crockett, Parker brought to the small screen a presence that was palpable; people looked at him, and they listened to him, and they tingled. The face and the voice combined to represent everything that was ideally male in the United States.”51

  Although he leaped to celebrity in a TV show, Parker’s impact was that of a bona fide movie star. He was tall (six foot five) and handsome, but so were many other young leading men in the 1950s. Parker brought to the screen two priceless assets in addition to his good looks. For one thing, he was relaxed in front of the camera as few actors are, especially in TV, where the demands for speed and efficiency have always encouraged actors to be tight and guarded. For another, he could deliver dialogue with complete conviction, as in his stirring speech to Congress attacking President Andrew Jackson’s treatment of the Indians in the second Crockett episode. Parker seemed emotionally open, as good actors must, but the emotions were those of a strong and even stoic man—one with a sly sense of humor, suited to “grinnin’ down a bear.”

  Disney had gone into television expecting to manipulate it to his own ends, by promoting his park and his theatrical films, but television had demonstrated through the Crockett craze how unpredictable it really was; and it had bestowed on him a full-fledged star whom he had signed to a personal contract, rather than a contract with the studio, and whose career was in his hands. “We’ve had lots of offers from other studios wanting to borrow Fess Parker,” Disney said in May 1955, “but we’ve got four Davy Crockett pictures to make, and they’ll have to wait until next winter for Fess.” The idea initially was to film four more Crockett episodes for Disneyland. The first two of the second batch were filmed on location, in Ohio and
along the Mississippi River, starting in June 1955.52

  In mid-July, Disney pulled Parker and his costar, Buddy Ebsen, away from location shooting and back to Los Angeles to sing at the Hollywood Bowl on a Thursday and Friday evening, July 14 and 15. Each evening’s “Tribute to Walt Disney,” made up of music associated with Disney films, concluded with “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” sung by Parker, Ebsen, and the Roger Wagner Chorale.53 The occasion was the official opening of the Disneyland park the following Sunday, July 17, an event that would be nationally televised by ABC.

  The park would not be completed on its opening day—and not just because Disney frequently emphasized that he considered it a work perpetually in progress, in language like this: “The park means a lot to me, in that it’s something that will never be finished, something that I can keep developing, keep plussing and adding to.” Disneyland was not finished in any sense, and not really ready for guests, but they were coming anyway. The construction schedule had proved to be difficult and finally impossible to meet.

  Certain stories turn up in almost every account of Disneyland’s construction, and sometimes they tell more than might first appear. Randy Bright wrote that Disney “found it very difficult to understand the necessity for certain costly building materials and methods. As a longtime filmmaker, Walt had imagined that Disneyland would be built more like a motion-picture set, on a temporary basis. He had to be introduced to the real world of occupancy regulations and building codes. One day, on a walk-through of the construction site with [Joe] Fowler [a retired navy admiral who supervised construction] and Dick Irvine, Disney became furious when he saw the amount of concrete that was being poured for the Main Street train station foundation. ‘By the time Joe gets through burying all our money underground,’ he snapped, ‘we won’t have a thing left for the show!’ ”54