The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  Alcohol was taken for granted in the Disney household. Disney taught one of his daughters, presumably Diane, how to mix drinks when she was twelve, although, he said, neither girl drank as an adult.56 A five o’clock drink, preceding a massage by the studio nurse, Hazel George, was part of his office routine, but frequently that single drink became several, because Disney often stayed at the office until 7 or 7:30 at night. His secretary Tommie Wilck, concerned about his drive home, tried to limit his consumption by serving him a scotch mist, a drink made up mostly of ice and water.57

  There was no such constraint operating when Disney was on the road, as one of his traveling companions remembered. “I think he was meaner than hell when he had five scotches,” Buzz Price said, “but who isn’t? . . . Walt would work all day, intense, intense, intense, and he would unwind in the evening with a few glasses of scotch. My experience, in traveling, was that his intensity began to transition into irritation.”58

  Disney’s absorption in his own thoughts, always a distinct characteristic, was, if anything, more pronounced now than ever before. Newsweek suggested in 1962 that “his only conspicuous trait” might be “his capacity for total preoccupation. One associate recalls him considering a problem and absently dipping a doughnut in his Scotch.” The magazine quoted Fred MacMurray: “He’s never quite listening to what you say.”59

  Tommie Wilck remembered a Disney who “had tremendous powers of concentration. Sometimes he’d be sitting in his office and I’d go in and talk to him and he wouldn’t even hear me. He could shut himself off with all sorts of noise, phones ringing, and think.” A common experience, the animator Milt Kahl said, was “to lose him while you were talking to him. This didn’t happen just to me. . . . And it could be quite annoying sometimes if you didn’t realize what he was doing. . . . You didn’t [bring him back]. You just [had] to pick another time, or wait till he’s in a frame of mind to start listening again.”60

  When Disney thought out loud, he wanted only an audience, not a response—someone to talk at, not with. Lillian regularly played that role, hearing without really listening, but other people, like Ward Kimball and Bill Peet, were on occasion recruited into it, too. Disney might reminisce or speculate for many minutes, but then, if his auditor tried to respond in kind, he would end the conversation abruptly.

  In the memories of his employees, Disney was variously considerate or irritable, kind or petty, depending on the circumstances and his state of mind—a perfectly ordinary man in many respects, and more decent and likable than most—but he rarely showed real interest in other people. In this he was indistinguishable from entrepreneurs generally, who are almost by definition people engrossed in their businesses. Said Price: “He had no patience with people who weren’t on the same wavelength with him, or people who couldn’t help him, or people who were trying to finesse him. If you could help him, everything was rosy.”61 Joyce Carlson told Jim Korkis about Disney’s visits to WED’s Christmas parties: “He’d always show up! He’d talk to the traffic boys [studio messengers] and tell which project, like the Haunted Mansion, was coming up and they’d stand there listening to Walt. He used to be so excited telling them about all the new projects. He was wonderful and the boys were just so thrilled.”62 But the boys were, of course, an audience.

  When Disney got carried away with an idea while he was talking to an employee about it, noted Jack Cutting, “if you did say, ‘Well, now, wait a minute, Walt, you said so-and-so . . . ,’ a cloud would come over his face. It was like you’d dumped a bucket of cold water on him. . . . He might later think it over and take that into consideration, but if you did that at a time like that, you were somebody he couldn’t work with.”63

  The Disney of the 1960s was still capable of enthusiasms, as some of his interviewers discovered. “His heavy-lidded and rather mournful eyes grow dim with ennui when a subordinate or friend tries to slip in a compliment,” Peter Bart wrote in the New York Times. “Disney’s dry Midwestern voice trails off into inaudibility when he is asked to discuss some question that does not interest him—and a formidable list of things fit into this category.” But Disney came to life, Bart wrote, when he talked about the Christmas parade at Disneyland: “Disney’s voice booms, his face crinkles into an exuberant smile. ‘We’ll have these giant mushrooms and dolls,’ he enthuses. ‘Inside the figures will be men riding little motor scooters. The parade may set us back $250,000 but it will be the best we’ve ever had.’ ”64

  In the 1960s, as his park neared the end of its first decade, he still spoke of Disneyland with a lover’s fierce passion. “You need the sharp-pencil boys, but you can’t let them run the joint,” he said in a Look interview published early in 1964. “Since Disneyland opened, I’ve poured another $25 million into it. To me, it’s a piece of clay. I can knock it down and reshape it to keep it fresh and attractive. That place is my baby, and I would prostitute myself for it.”65

  That intensity, never visible to viewers of Disney’s television show, showed itself in his behavior when he was in the park. “He would never walk past a piece of litter,” said Michael Broggie, a ride operator in the early 1960s. “He would reach down and grab it, and everyone was expected to do that.” Disney employees observed him as intently as he scrutinized the park. He followed a routine when he was escorting an important guest around the park, Broggie told The “E” Ticket. “He would go to the Golden Horseshoe Saloon, and if he came out and turned right, it meant he was to go to the Mine Train. If he turned left, it meant he was going [toward New Orleans Square] or back to his apartment. His route was monitored, and with two-way radios they would report on Walt’s location. This went on whenever he was in the park, unbeknownst to Walt, because everyone wanted to be on their toes when the boss was in the area.”66

  Disneyland was malleable, and—much like the Disney studio in the late 1930s—it was staffed by hundreds of people eager to carry out their patron’s wishes. The challenge was to find ways to change the park that went beyond simply adding new rides that would inevitably echo rides in older amusement parks or at Disneyland itself. One way was to make the place funnier.

  When Marc Davis finished his work on One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Disney sent him to Disneyland to look at a train ride through the landscaped area called Nature’s Wonderland, because it was full of mechanical animals and, Davis said, “he knew I knew a lot about animals. I did a flock of drawings on it.”67 As it turned out, Davis said, “he just wanted me to look it over and tell him how great it was, [but] I looked at it quite critically and came up with a lot of opinions.”68 Davis had not been an admirer of the park. “When I went down to Disneyland the first time,” he said, “I felt from the very beginning that there was very little that was entertaining or funny to me. There was just a lot of stuff, like a World’s Fair. . . . As soon as I started to work on this stuff, I tried to find ways to add something that people could get a laugh out of.”

  Davis provided what he called “storytelling tableaus.” “Here’s a prime example of the humor, the storytelling that was missing: He had a couple of ‘kit foxes’ . . . one was looking at the train over here, and its head went up and down, and there was another one maybe a hundred feet away, and its head went side to side. Well, I took the two of them and put them face-to-face . . . so one nods like this and the other one does this . . . and you immediately have an idea. That’s what I started doing on the rides.”69

  There were limits to what could be done along those lines, though, and Davis acknowledged them on other occasions when he contradicted his own use of “storytelling.” An amusement park’s rides “should be what people don’t expect them to be,” he said, “and it doesn’t have a lot to do with continuity of story. It does have to do with the entertainment value of surprise and seeing things that you can’t see anyplace else.”70 He and Disney were in agreement on that, he said: “Walt knew that we were not telling stories . . . he and I discussed it many times. And he said very definitely, ‘You can’t tell a story in this
medium.’ ”71 By the early 1960s, preliminary work on a Haunted Mansion was under way, but that work was wedded to the idea of telling a gruesome story as visitors walked through. And that story line, Davis believed, was the reason “Walt never bought the Haunted Mansion in his time.”72

  If storytelling was not possible, the experiences that Disneyland could provide otherwise were constrained by the extremely limited movement that was possible for its mechanical creatures. As The “E” Ticket explained, the Jungle Cruise’s mechanized animals “moved without really moving. These animal replicas . . . were very realistic in appearance but were mostly limited to lateral motion and a few hydraulic mechanical functions.” The animals included “crocodiles with hinged jaws, a gorilla that rocked up and down, giraffes whose necks would sway and rhinos which circled on tracks in the dry grass.” Their actions “consisted mostly of charging and trumpeting, surfacing and submerging, and sliding around on underwater runways.” (In the early days of the park, these simple mechanical movements were called “gags.”)73

  Disneyland’s vaunted malleability was thus something of an illusion. Finding some way to make his mechanical animals more lifelike was for Disney a necessity if the park was not to become an increasingly ordinary place, for him and for its visitors.

  As with so many other things, Disney had nursed an interest in mechanical movement for years before he put it to use at Disneyland. At least since his 1935 trip to Europe, he had been intrigued by mechanical toys and had brought them back to the studio. “When we went to Paris,” Diane Disney Miller said—that was probably in 1949—“Dad went off on his own and came back with boxes and boxes of these little windup toys. He wound them all up and put them on the floor of the room and just sat and watched them. You know, the dog that rolls over and stuff like that. He said, ‘Look at that movement with just a simple mechanism.’ He was studying. . . . We thought he was crazy.”74

  Even before that, probably in New Orleans on his 1946 train trip to the Atlanta premiere of Song of the South, Disney had bought what Wathel Rogers called “this little mechanical bird in a cage. . . . One of those that you could wind up and it would whistle.” Years later, when Disneyland was open and Rogers was on the WED staff, “Walt gave it to me and asked me to look inside it. I was supposed to take it apart, and it was like taking apart a piece of jewelry. When I finally got it all apart and laid everything out I found a little bellows made of canvas, and some little cams and other parts.”75

  To an extent now hard to determine, Disney’s interest in such mechanical toys figured into his plans in the early 1950s for his Americana in miniature, but it was for Disneyland that his WED employees seriously investigated such mechanisms and began applying what they learned to animated figures. By the fall of 1960, Disney was demonstrating to reporters the animated heads of what one writer called “his new waxworks figures.”76 In 1963, it was when his glum luncheon conversation with Aubrey Menen turned to the robotic technology he now called “Audio-Animatronics” that Disney finally brightened: “ ‘Now there,’ he said, smiling at last. ‘There is where I am happy.” ’77

  That interview was published when Disneyland was about to open the Enchanted Tiki Room, the first true Audio-Animatronics attraction. As The “E” Ticket explained, “The mechanized figures developed after 1963 were a complete departure from those installed in the park in its first years of operation. . . . Access to space-age fabrics, plastics and metals, miniaturized solenoids and other electronic components made new degrees of animation possible. With hydraulic movements (for strength) and pneumatic movements (for low-pressure delicacy), and with ever smaller servo-mechanisms, Disney began creating improved, more believable animals and humans. . . . For the first time (with the help of Marc Davis and other new designers) they could individually perform for the audience. The complex control systems devised for the Enchanted Tiki Room and other shows began as notched platters and light-sensitive photo cells,” were succeeded by magnetic tape and ultimately were computerized, long after Disney’s time.

  “With these methods, Disney was able to dictate and sequence great numbers of actions for one or more figures, from a distance. It became possible to program specific movements of face and head, limbs and body, the character’s words and music, and even coordinate the actions of many performers within an entire attraction or show.”78

  The Tiki Room aside, the initial showcases for the new technology were not at Disneyland, but at the New York World’s Fair of 1964–65.79 He undertook the world’s fair projects “to benefit Disneyland,” Disney said in 1963. “We won’t lose money on the work, but we don’t expect to make much, either. We expect these exhibits, or part of them, to end up at the park, where they will add to our free attractions. Or, if the corporations do not decide to exhibit them at Disneyland, they will pay a penalty which will amount to our profit in creating them.”80

  Said Bob Gurr, a member of the WED staff: “One big thrust behind our design work for the World’s Fair was the fact that we were going to own all the equipment. In other words, somebody else would build the pavilion, on somebody else’s property, but the show equipment that went in there was Disney’s, and he had a ready-made location waiting for it. The fact that the Fair was going to run two years meant he could build more expensively, and Disney priced these projects in a way that the sponsors were paying for everything for a two-year use.”81

  Disney approached the fair with a certain skepticism, even so. “You don’t like to do those things unless you have fun doing ’em,” he said in 1961, when work on the exhibits was just getting under way. “You don’t do ’em for money.” Robert Moses, the imperious road builder who was in command of the fair, “wanted us to develop the amusement area and we looked at it,” Disney said, “but it just wasn’t for us. I wouldn’t want to try to do anything in New York. I’m not close enough. . . . On top of that, I mean I don’t know whether I want to do any outside of Disneyland because you don’t want to spread yourself thin.”

  By the time the fair opened, Disney had banished any such reservations and was planning a new amusement park in central Florida. His world’s fair exhibits would allow him to learn just how receptive East Coast audiences—especially tough New York audiences—would be to the Disneyland-style entertainment he expected to offer in Florida, although by 1964 he had scant reason for doubt on that score.

  All four exhibits were, however, a reversion to the kind of sponsored shows that Disney had abandoned almost twenty years earlier when he stopped making industrial films. (Dick Irvine referred to General Electric’s Progressland Pavilion, which housed the Disney-designed Carousel of Progress, as “a refrigerator show.”)82 When he was desperate to fill Tomorrowland’s empty spaces before Disneyland opened, Disney let several companies open static exhibits—including what the official guidebooks called “the modernistic Bathroom of the Future”—that were nothing more than displays of their products. In general, Disney had not had happy experiences with such sponsors, except when his position was strong enough that he could tell them what to do.

  But the fair was appealing to Disney because with the help of subsidies from the four sponsors, he could use all the exhibits to refine Audio-Animatronics. That technology was now central to his continuing enthusiasm for Disneyland.

  Two of the exhibits, Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln (for the state of Illinois) and the Carousel of Progress, revived ideas for unrealized attractions in Disneyland itself. “As usual,” Randy Bright wrote, “Disney kept closely involved in the [carousel’s] design. When his staff worked on a comical 1920s scene in which lazy, beer-drinking ‘Cousin Orville’ was to sit in a bathtub with his back to the audience, Walt questioned the staging. He turned the tub around to face the audience, took off his shoes and socks, and jumped in. ‘He’d wiggle his toes, don’t you think?’ was Disney’s conclusion. It was another of the subliminal touches that had become a Disney trademark.”83

  Audiences at the Carousel of Progress rotated around four central st
ages, each depicting a home that became increasingly electrified over the course of the century. The carousel, populated by Audio-Animatronics figures, was optimistic about the future in a way that brooked no dissent, highly sentimental in its depiction of changing family life, and curiously ambiguous about the family itself (it seemed as if no one in it ever died). Like the carousel, two other Disney-designed exhibits were technologically ingenious but vulnerable to criticism on other grounds. Pepsi-Cola’s exhibit, It’s a Small World, combined an insistently repetitive song by Disney’s house composers, the brothers Richard and Robert Sherman, with animated displays designed by Mary Blair to represent the world’s children. Blair, who made preliminary color sketches for many of the animated features of the 1940s and early 1950s, embraced emphatically modern ideas about color and form but applied them to figures that could only be called “cute” (and without a trace of irony). The Audio-Animatronics Abraham Lincoln for the Illinois pavilion provoked especially intense criticism—it seemed to the novelist John Gardner that what made the “obviously dead” figure “horrible . . . was the ghastly suggestion, which had never occurred to Disney and his people, that all religion and patriotism are a sham and a delusion, an affair for monstrous automatons.”84 All three exhibits invited aesthetic and intellectual objections that could not be applied seriously to the earlier rides at Disneyland.

  The Ford exhibit, called Magic Skyway, was more conventional, with less-advanced animated figures. Disney’s friend Welton Becket was the architect for the pavilion that housed the Magic Skyway exhibit, and he remembered the intense interest Disney took not just in the exhibit itself but in its surroundings. “He wanted the toilets in the right positions,” Becket said, and he wanted the people waiting in line to have something to look at. “I’ve never seen a great executive get down and take his coat off and really direct and work as he did on those exhibits.”85