The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  In 1965, Walt Disney Productions—and presumably Walt Disney himself—took the logical next step and decided to take the school out of the city altogether and build it on a thirty-eight-acre tract cut out of the studio’s 728-acre Golden Oaks Ranch at Newhall, northwest of Los Angeles. That would, at the least, be simpler than trying to raise the millions of dollars that would be required to build near the Hollywood Bowl.109 Whether students would really benefit from such isolation, or from enforced exposure to one another’s disciplines, was another matter, but Walt Disney took such gains for granted. In his planning for the school there were echoes of his planning in the late 1930s for the Burbank studio, a facility that he also expected to be an ideal environment for artists of various kinds.

  The same impulse—to plan comprehensively and impose order—was at work in the mid-1960s as Disney approached the development of a much larger project.

  * To set Disneyland apart from the tawdry amusement parks of the past, the official Disney position has always been that it is a “theme park,” and that its rides are “attractions.” Walt Disney often ignored such distinctions.

  CHAPTER 10

  “He Drove Himself Right Up to the End”

  Dreaming of a Nightmare City

  1965–1966

  Even before Disneyland opened, Walt Disney identified Florida as the only possible location for a second version of the park. “You have to have a year-round business to make money from such a large investment,” he told Bob Thomas in the spring of 1955. “The only other place it would be possible is Florida. In the East, you could get only three or four profitable months.”1

  Late in 1959, Disney’s WED Enterprises and Buzz Price’s Economic Research Associates prepared what Price later described as “an economic and physical master plan for the City of Tomorrow at Palm Beach, Florida, on 12,000 acres owned by John McArthur, the billionaire insurance man.” This would have been, Price said, “a four-way deal” involving Disney, RCA, NBC, and McArthur. “We put our effort together with WED in determining what kind of an interrelated park and city could be developed on that site. Walt wanted to emphasize future development in urban living. . . . The park would take up some 400 acres. A town base of 70,000 people would take up the rest.” The deal fell through. “At the presentation, no one seemed to rally to what Walt was talking about.”2

  Price’s report, titled “The Economic Setting of the City of Tomorrow” and dated December 14, 1959, suggests that Disney actually had narrower concerns at that time (and it puts the total acreage involved at five thousand to six thousand, not twelve thousand). One question the report addressed was whether “the local and tourist populations in Florida will provide adequate support for a major park development.” Another was whether a new Florida park would cannibalize Disneyland’s business. (Both answers favored a Florida park.) As far as the City of Tomorrow was concerned, the idea was to incorporate “advanced concepts of architectural design and technological improvement . . . in all phases of the town development,” but there is no hint that Disney would have been deeply involved in that aspect of the development.3

  The City of Tomorrow fizzled, evidently when RCA backed away, but Walt Disney’s interest in such a city had been piqued. With Disneyland a huge success and an eastern version clearly practicable, Disney was now contemplating Florida as the setting not just for a second theme park, but also for a sort of large-scale, working version of Tomorrowland. In particular, his success in manipulating people’s movements at Disneyland may have encouraged him to believe that he could do the same thing in an entire city. Although cars and the adjacent freeway were both critical to the success of Disneyland, the park itself, as Karal Ann Marling has pointed out, “offered a utopian alternative to the ongoing erosion of city centers by cars.”4 Public transportation of a sort—the monorail, for instance, and the PeopleMover, small, constantly moving vehicles propelled by the electricity in their track—was the rule at Disneyland.

  Disney asked Price to study Florida locations in 1961 and then again in late 1963, when Disney’s work for the New York World’s Fair was almost done. The second study, Price wrote, identified “Orlando, centrally located, [as] the point of maximum access to the southerly flows of Florida tourism from both the east and west shores of the state.”5 In 1964, Walt Disney Productions began quietly assembling thousands of acres southwest of Orlando. The eventual total was around twenty-seven thousand acres, a much larger tract than would be needed for a theme park alone.

  In 1965, his interest in a city of the future quickening, Disney flew east for a week to meet with the developer James Rouse and tour Reston, Virginia, and Columbia, Maryland, two “new towns” that Rouse had developed.6 Disney had been praised by Rouse, who famously said at a 1963 urban design conference at Harvard University that “the greatest piece of urban design in the United States today is Disneyland. If you think about Disneyland and think about its performance in relation to its purpose; its meaning to people—more than that, its meaning to the process of development—you will find it the outstanding piece of urban design in the United States.”7

  By November 15, 1965, when Walt and Roy Disney and Governor Haydon Burns announced plans for the Florida development, Walt Disney was thinking in more specific terms about his City of Tomorrow. He was deliberately vague, though, when asked at that press conference whether such a city was in his plans. “Well,” he said, “that’s been the thing that’s been going around in our mind for a long time and there’s a lot of industrial concerns that would like to work on a project of that sort. The only problem with anything of tomorrow is at the pace we’re going right now, tomorrow would catch up to us before we got it built.”

  In the same news conference, Disney said that his new amusement park would not be “another Disneyland” but rather “the equivalent of Disneyland. . . . This concept here will have to be something that is unique, and so that there is a distinction between Disneyland in California and whatever Disney does—and notice I didn’t say Disneyland in Florida—whatever Disney does in Florida.”8

  In fact, a second Disneyland—or something immediately recognizable as Disneyland’s very close kin—was essential to Disney’s plans for his city of the future. “Walt was so smart,” said Richard Nunis, by then one of Disney’s theme-park executives, of the planning for what was to be called Disney World. “He said, ‘We’ve got to put Disneyland, which everybody will know, at the very upper end of the property because that will be the weenie”—the term Disney liked to use for conspicuous landmarks that drew people toward them, like Sleeping Beauty Castle at the end of Disneyland’s Main Street. “Then whatever we build after that, the public will have to drive by to get to the Park.”9

  The scale of the Florida development, and the nature of its city-of-the-future component in particular, made it highly desirable that Walt Disney Productions have quasi-governmental powers over the property, so that local governments could not throw up roadblocks. The Disneys thus had to bargain with state government to a much greater extent than they had in California. By the middle 1960s, the brothers had settled into a good cop—bad cop routine both within the studio—where Roy was the affable, sympathetic one—and outside it, where Roy assumed a more forbidding role. Once the Florida project was public knowledge, they played those parts in dealings with Florida officials. As Fortune reported in the spring of 1966:

  A Florida state delegation sent to California to talk to the Disneys came back awed by the brothers as negotiators. “I think those two men offer as effective a combination as I’ve ever worked with,” says one member of the delegation. “It is more effective than any I have seen in Wall Street, Miami, anywhere. Roy Disney is the hard shell, the tightfisted conservative businessman, the financier. He’ll keep asking when are you going to be specific. And Walt is the best politician I ever saw. The night we said goodby, he came in and said, ‘Let me show you what we can do with a mallard duck.’ He had some plastic ones. We have a lot of mallards in Florida. He said, �
��How do you think 500 of these would look on the lake near Kissimmee?’ He described how he would put lights on the lake so it would be pretty at night. Then, later, when Walt was not there, Roy was back in business asking, ‘What about those tax liabilities?’ Walt keeps giving you confidence that they are going to be there and Roy keeps sharpening the pencil.”10

  Walt Disney had by this time become something like a highly unusual real estate developer, one who specialized in unique projects, and the Florida project was only the largest such.

  Disney had been a skier since the 1930s, when he helped finance the Sugar Bowl resort, and he had been delighted with Zermatt, the Swiss ski town he visited several times in the 1950s, starting in 1952 and culminating in his filming there of Third Man on the Mountain in 1958. Buzz Price wrote: “The things he liked about Zermatt were simple: a great mountain, no autos, entry by shuttle train, and dual season operation with a base development full of charm and activity in both summer and winter. The village at Zermatt reflected the qualities of a Disney style and ambience.”11 Disneyland’s success had confirmed, in the most emphatic fashion, Disney’s good judgment about what would draw visitors. Now he decided to transform the ski business by creating a resort that would mimic Zermatt.

  Through his own company, WED Enterprises, Disney commissioned Price to study the ski-resort potential at several locations, over a five-year span beginning in 1960. One of the earliest of those studies, in 1960, concerned the Mineral King Valley in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, but it was not until 1962, Price wrote, that Disney began the “serious final quest for Mineral King . . . after a fruitless search throughout the rest of the U.S. for a comparable resort site.” In Price’s account, the United States Forest Service (part of the Agriculture Department and committed to the productive use of the national forests under its control) encouraged Disney to pursue development of Mineral King. “Late in 1964, under Walt’s instruction, we began the assembly of the private acreage holdings on the floor of the Mineral King valley, a 26-acre site essential for the project base village. One of our group . . . succeeded in buying out the Forest Service leasehold positions of 18 families.”12

  On December 17, 1965, after competitive bidding, the Forest Service designated Walt Disney Productions to develop Mineral King Valley and the surrounding slopes. The Disney proposal called for spending thirty-five million dollars. In a brochure published the next year, the company laid out plans for a development that would resemble Zermatt. “Mineral King is perhaps more similar to the European Alps than any other area in the western United States,” the brochure said, and, accordingly, all structures would be “styled along the lines of the Swiss chalet.” As at Zermatt, automobiles would be barred from the valley.

  “Plans called for a facility that would handle a wintertime daily throng of 20,000 skiers in six great areas,” Price wrote many years later. In the summer, the Disney development at Mineral King would gear up “to handle a demand comparable to Yosemite.”13

  Disney himself was quoted in the brochure in terms that echoed what he had often said about Disneyland: “When we go into a new project, we believe in it all the way. That’s the way we feel about Mineral King. We have every faith that our plans will provide recreational opportunities for everyone. All of us promise that our efforts now and in the future will be dedicated to making Mineral King grow to meet the ever-increasing public need. I guess you might say that it won’t ever be finished.”14

  As he approached a normal retirement age, Disney was pushing himself perhaps harder than ever before. “He worked seven days a week, he established a pace that he could never get rid of,” his son-in-law Ronald Miller Jr. told Richard Hubler. Disney read scripts on Saturday and Sunday, whether he was at the Holmby Hills house or at his weekend home in Palm Springs (he built a second home at Smoke Tree Ranch in 1957 to replace the one he had sold to finance Disneyland). “He would get up in the morning and start reading,” Miller said, taking a break only for the lawn bowling that had become a late-life passion. After bowling on the green—there was one both at Smoke Tree and in Roxbury Park, near his home in Holmby Hills—he returned to reading scripts. “Seven days a week,” Miller said. “If he wasn’t working here, he worked there.”15

  There are hints in some memories that Disney’s marriage had come under strain by the 1960s. It had certainly changed, as marriages do after thirty or forty years. Lillian Disney had lost interest in her husband’s business years before, her energies absorbed by redecorating her home and scouting for antiques. Marc Davis, who had become increasingly important to Disney as an animator and then as a designer for Disneyland, said in 1968: “I have met Mrs. Disney maybe 25–30 times and, finally, I reached the point where I permitted myself always to be reintroduced.”16 By the middle 1950s, when Disney was starting to accumulate a new batch of Oscars, Lillian had stopped going to the ceremonies with him, troubled by the “commotion” surrounding them.17

  “I come home at night and eat in the front of the TV set,” Disney said around the time he turned sixty-one, in December 1962. “It’s either that or eat alone, my wife says.”18 By then, Lillian had long since stopped cooking for her husband. She had learned to be a very good cook, she said, but “I never did like it,”19 and so the Disneys’ meals were cooked for them by Thelma Howard, their housekeeper and cook after they moved to Holmby Hills. Walt Disney was, in his family’s description, a fussy eater who always preferred “hash house” food—a typical middle-aged husband of the time, in other words. As his daughter Diane said, “You can generally satisfy him with something out of a can.”20

  By the mid-1960s, Disney was working exceptionally long hours and on at least one occasion he spent several nights in his office suite at the studio after quarreling with Lillian.21 Disney was in his sixties, his health was failing, and he was working very hard at a time in his life when many others, sensing their mortality, might scale back professional concerns and spend more time with family members. Little wonder that Walt and Lillian might sometimes have words.

  (Diane, who married Ron Miller on May 9, 1954, had six children by 1966; Sharon, who married Robert Brown on May 10, 1959, had one. Disney had successfully urged both new husbands to go to work for him—Miller in live-action film production, Brown at WED—within a few years of their marriages.)

  Disney also quarreled heatedly with the other person closest to him, his brother Roy. The cause was Walt’s continued ownership of WED Enterprises, the company he had set up in 1952 to design Disneyland and its attractions. In the early 1960s, after Disneyland itself became a wholly owned subsidiary of Walt Disney Productions, WED remained Walt Disney’s personal corporation. Roy Disney had always seen legal perils in this arrangement, smacking as it did of self-dealing and conflicts of interest, and WED’s prominent role in designing the Disney attractions at the 1964–65 world’s fair may have brought his fears to a head. It was only after months of turmoil and argument and pained silences, ending late in 1964, that Walt Disney finally agreed to sell most of WED.22 The purchase agreement, dated November 20, 1964, and approved by the company’s shareholders the following February, provided for a payment of $3.75 million for WED’s rights in the world’s fair exhibits and other assets. WED’s design, architectural, and engineering staff, about a hundred employees in all, became employees of Walt Disney Productions.23

  Walt Disney was possessive about his private company, the source of most of his pleasure in his business for the previous ten years. Marvin Davis remembered the time—this would have been in the mid-1960s, most likely when the brothers were still at odds—when Roy Disney asked him and another WED executive, Dick Irvine, to

  have lunch with him at the studio. Dick and I didn’t know what the heck was going on, but we couldn’t turn down an invitation to have lunch with Roy Disney. On that day, Walt was sitting at this table over in the corner of the commissary. So we’re there having a nice lunch, and Roy asked us about something down at Disney World . . . I’ve forgotten exactly what it was. W
hen we finished eating, Dick and I were going to go back to WED. We got in my car, drove back to Glendale, and parked right by the door to my office. I went to unlock the door, and was just putting the key in the lock, when somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and . . . God . . . Walt was standing right behind me. And I had just left him back at the studio having lunch. He must have gotten right up and followed us. He came in and sat down and asked, “What did Roy want? What was he talking about?” And I said, “Geez, Walt, he just asked us to lunch.” And Walt said, “Well, I just wondered what’s going on.” It just shows how intense he was about everything, especially his brother, who he didn’t want to get ahead of him on anything.24

  After the sale of most of WED to Walt Disney Productions was completed in 1965, what was left continued under a new name, Retlaw (Walter spelled backwards).25 Retlaw kept ownership of the Disneyland trains and monorail.

  Disney traveled extensively in 1966. He began trying to sell his city of the future—what he called EPCOT, for “experimental prototype community of tomorrow”—to American industry, starting with a presentation to Westinghouse in January.26 On what Bob Gurr remembered as “a turbulent, low-level flight” to Pittsburgh, Disney spread out brown-line drawings of the center of EPCOT on a conference table that unfolded in the middle of a company plane.27 Even more than when he sought corporate sponsors for Disneyland attractions—and in sharp contrast to his recoil from such sponsors’ interference after the war—Disney was now courting industry and seeking its involvement in his new project.