The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  Disney’s health was now deteriorating rapidly. No one yet suspected that he was suffering from more than the cumulative effects of his old polo injury, but he was about to pay a penalty for decades of very heavy cigarette smoking.

  He smoked cigarettes until they burned so far down that he could barely hold them, his daughter Diane said in 1956—not to be economical, but because in his preoccupation he would forget about them until they practically burned his fingertips.48 Fulton Burley, a performer in the Golden Horseshoe Revue at Disneyland, remembered having lunch with Disney when he “picked up a cigarette with a filter on it, broke the filter off, lit it and took a puff. He caught me watching him and said, ‘You’re looking at me quizzically, Fulton. . . . My daughter gave me these cigarettes. She gave me two cartons of them at Christmas. She said, “Dad, the way you’re coughing, please use these cigarettes instead.” I promised her I would, but as you’ve noticed, I didn’t tell her how I would use them.’ ”49

  Disney had coughed so long and so loudly, even in his early twenties, that it was always tempting to some people who knew him to shrug off his coughing. In later years, though, Ollie Johnston said, Disney coughed more, “that nervous cigarette cough. It seemed he’d get into this hacking awfully quickly if anything worried him a lot.”50

  Disney entered Saint Joseph’s Hospital, across Buena Vista Street from the studio, on November 2, 1966, a week after appearing before the cameras for the EPCOT film. (He had in the meantime flown to Williamsburg, Virginia, to accept an award from the American Forestry Association.)51 X rays showed a spot the size of a walnut on his left lung. He underwent surgery the following Monday, November 7.

  On Tuesday, November 22, Walt Disney Productions announced that Disney had returned to work the previous day and for the first time acknowledged the seriousness of his illness:

  Walt Disney initially was admitted to the hospital on Wednesday Nov. 2, for treatment and preliminary examination of an old polo injury. During the preliminary examination a lesion was discovered on the left lung. Surgery was decided upon by the doctors in charge and was performed the next week. A tumor was found to have caused an abscess which in the opinion of the doctors required a pneumonectomy [removal of the lung]. Within four to six weeks Mr. Disney should be back on a full schedule and there is no reason to predict any recurrence of the problem or curtailment of Mr. Disney’s future activities.52

  An unidentified studio spokesman would not tell the Los Angeles Times if there was a malignancy.53 But Disney’s surgeon had told his family that the lung was cancerous and Disney had only two years at most to live.

  Ron Miller spoke of his father-in-law’s state of mind after his lung was removed: “Scared. Couldn’t believe that it could happen to him. . . . [But he] thought he had it licked. He was full of confidence. I think the thing that really helped him a great deal was a telegram that John Wayne had sent him when he heard that Walt had had his lung removed, saying, ‘Welcome to the club. The only problem is height’ [that is, altitude]. . . . That really meant a lot to him. It really did.”

  Even when he was deathly ill, Disney’s mind was on work, Miller said. “Up there [in the hospital after his surgery] he said, ‘Okay, I think you guys [the film producers, including Miller, who answered directly to him] can work as a team, ’cause you’ve shown it in the past three years.’ He said, ‘I’m gonna stick with Disney World and EPCOT. I’ll read the scripts, and I’ll just tell you whether to go or not. I just can’t become as active as I used to be.’ ”54

  When Disney was back at the studio on the three days before Thanksgiving, his precarious health was unmistakably visible to his employees. Milton Gray, a Disney inbetweener, remembered walking rapidly down the central hall on the third floor of the Disney animation building—the floor that housed Disney’s office—when he passed “some real old man, walking slowly northward (with his back to me), all slouched over, wearing a blue sweater. I had no idea who that would be, and it was quite unusual to see someone looking that decrepit in the studio. . . . I just went around this old man at my brisk pace. Just as I did, though, a couple other men in the hallway ahead of me turned toward the old man and said, ‘Oh, hi, Walt.’ ”55

  Disney had Thanksgiving dinner with the Millers and watched film that Ron Miller had taken on the Vancouver trip. The next day, he flew to Palm Springs. Kelvin Bailey, Disney’s pilot, remembered his boss’s last visit to his weekend home:

  While flying to Palm Springs, which took only twenty minutes, he came up to the cockpit and said, “Kel, I’ve been at old Saint Joe’s Hospital for some time. I’m a sick boy. But I’m going to Palm Springs and stay there until I get better. I’ll call you then. I don’t know when, but stand by for the call.”

  I assumed it would be weeks or months. Two or three days later, the phone rang. “Kel? This is Wa-a-a-l-t.” His voice was so fragile, so dilapidated, I hardly recognized him. “Come and get me.” At Palm Springs airport, the car drove up. Lilly got out and had to help Walt out. He couldn’t do it alone. There was a stairway leading up to the plane and he had to put his hands on both rails. He went straight to Saint Joseph’s from the Burbank airport.56

  Disney turned sixty-five in room 529 at the hospital. Private nurses assigned to “Mr. John Smith” were staying with him around the clock.57 In his last days, his daughter Diane told Richard Hubler, “when he had moments of great pain or felt something happen that he couldn’t control, he’d get very upset and you knew that he’d rather be alone then. . . . So we would just come and go.”58

  Disney died at Saint Joseph’s the morning of December 15, 1966. Lillian and the Millers arrived at the hospital minutes after his death. “As we got off the elevator on the floor,” Diane Miller said in an interview for a book and film about her father, “I turned and saw Ron go striding right into Dad’s room and then come out with his arms up as though someone had pushed him back. When we went into the room Dad’s hands were on his chest and he was gone. Uncle Roy was standing at the foot of his bed, massaging one of Dad’s feet. Just kind of caressing it. And he was talking to him. It sounded something like, ‘Well, kid, this is the end, I guess.’ You know, that sort of thing. And I saw his love as I’d never seen it before.”59

  As word spread at the studio, which had been so personal an instrument for Walt Disney, some of his employees wept as if they had lost a parent. The studio closed for the day, but Disneyland remained open. Disney’s body was cremated, and only his immediate family attended a brief memorial service at Forest Lawn on December 16.

  A few weeks later, after the flood of public tributes had ebbed, Roy Disney spoke to the Associated Press reporter Bob Thomas about his brother’s death. “On the day before he died,” Roy said, “Walt lay on the hospital bed staring at the ceiling. It was squares of perforated acoustical tile, and Walt pictured them as a grid map for Disney World, which he planned to build in Florida. Every four tiles represented a square mile, and he said, ‘Now there is where the highway will run. There is the route for the monorail.’

  “He drove himself right up to the end.”60

  AFTERWORD

  “Let’s Never Not Be a Silly Company”

  When the Carousel of Progress was installed at Disneyland a few months after Walt Disney’s death, visitors who had just watched that revolving Audio-Animatronics show were directed next to an upper floor, where they saw a huge model of “Progress City”—Walt Disney’s EPCOT. The model, built to a scale of one-eighth inch to the foot, filled 6,900 square feet, held 20,000 miniature trees, 4,500 structures lit from within, and 1,400 working street lights, each about an inch tall.1

  That was as close as EPCOT ever came to being built. Not long after Disney’s death, Marvin Davis recalled, “there was a big meeting that included Card Walker, Bill Anderson, and Roy Disney. . . . Walt had been working with me on the Florida plan. Walt just let me do it. This meeting was in a big room, and to the best of my ability I represented Walt’s concepts. I had all this material showing what EPCOT w
as going to be, and what Walt’s ideas were. I got through, and sat down, and Roy turned around and looked at me and he said, ‘Marvin . . . Walt’s gone.’ By this he meant forget what Walt was doing and start over. . . . The original plan didn’t fit very well with entertainment. Roy had figured in these difficulties in his decision, and he knew that Walt’s EPCOT wouldn’t have a lot of entertainment value.”2

  When Walt Disney died, Van Arsdale France wrote, in words that inevitably call Elias Disney as well as his son to mind, “it was a bit like a family losing a lovable yet domineering father.”3 As in most such cases, the family’s response was a sort of paralysis at first, followed by a halting effort to carry out his wishes, and then, gradually, by a questioning of the parent’s commands.

  Some projects were so near completion that adhering to the father’s wishes was the simplest course of action. That was true of Pirates of the Caribbean, which opened at Disneyland in the spring of 1967, a few months after Disney’s death. Where EPCOT ’66 was concerned, finishing it quickly was essential because it had to be shown early in 1967 to Florida legislators.

  Once the EPCOT film had served its immediate purpose, however—the Florida legislature approved the legal status for the Disney property that Walt Disney Productions wanted—EPCOT began to look like a much more questionable project. “It was a great idea, but it was Walt’s vision,” Marty Sklar said, “and only Walt Disney could have convinced industry to support it. What we were left with was 27,000 acres of land in Florida, and a corporate management that didn’t know the talent at WED.”

  WED was alien territory as far as most Disney executives were concerned. “Roy Disney had been in our building once,” Sklar said, “and Card Walker and Donn Tatum, who ran [Walt Disney Productions], had been in the building once or twice. I mean, this was Walt’s place.” Even though Disney had agreed to sell WED to Walt Disney Productions two years before his death, it remained his private preserve, and EPCOT his private project. “It was clear pretty early that no one in the company knew how to get hold of that EPCOT idea,” Sklar said. “But everybody knew how to do . . . another Disneyland in Florida with hotels where people could stay.”4

  Construction of a second Disneyland—called not that but the Magic Kingdom, the sobriquet attached to Disneyland by its publicists from the beginning—at what was now to be called Walt Disney World began in May 1969. It opened in 1971. By the time a theme park called Epcot Center opened eleven years later, it bore no resemblance to Walt Disney’s city of the future. This new Epcot was, ironically—given Walt Disney’s own cool remarks about the New York World’s Fair—a sort of permanent world’s fair, a hodgepodge of international pavilions and industrial exhibits. It was as if the name had been kept only to placate Disney’s ghost.

  Another of Disney’s last few large-scale projects disappeared without a trace. His plans for Mineral King were always vulnerable because they required the support of both the state and federal governments, and that support slowly evaporated after Disney’s plans for the valley were attacked in a lawsuit by the Sierra Club. Disney’s successors—unhappy with the controversy, lacking Walt Disney’s personal interest, and dubious about the financial prospects—eventually backed away from Mineral King. The valley was incorporated into Sequoia National Park in 1978.

  Only the California Institute of the Arts, among Disney’s late-life passions, survived his death. He left 45 percent of his estate after taxes to charity, and 95 percent was designated for CalArts. The school eventually received about fifteen million dollars. The problem was, he also left only the vaguest guidance as to how that money should be spent and what he expected the school to be like. As a result, the school’s administrators could invoke his name even as they dismantled Chouinard and turned CalArts into a radically different sort of institution, one that attached little value to the traditional skills that Chouinard’s teachers had encouraged their students to develop.5

  When CalArts officially opened its doors in temporary quarters in 1970, it was fertile ground for the sort of radical posturing and student unrest that had spread to colleges across the country. Roy Disney and other members of the family, active overseers of the school to which Walt attached so much importance, all but despaired of taming it, at one point even trying to foist it off on the University of Southern California or some other large institution. Roy Disney’s wife, Edna, believed that the stress of dealing with CalArts hastened her husband’s death in December 1971. But CalArts, like other colleges, cooled later in the decade.

  The site for CalArts’ permanent quarters had changed once again in April 1966, this time to a rural “new town,” Valencia, north of Los Angeles.6 A huge structure like the one whose plans startled Millard Sheets and Marc Davis opened there in 1971. CalArts survives today, from all appearances as a collection of art schools whose twelve hundred students happen to share a roof. Although CalArts boasts any number of distinguished alumni, there is little evidence that bringing the arts together has resulted in unique accomplishments, whether measured in fine-arts terms or by the standards of Imagineering.

  Within Walt Disney Productions itself, Walt Disney’s influence lingered in wholly predictable ways, as in the studio’s continuing output of clumsy and obvious “family” comedies. Those films’ producers clearly felt Disney’s inhibiting presence at their shoulders, almost as much as they had when he was alive.

  Winston Hibler, who advanced from writing and narrating True-Life Adventures to producing live-action features, remembered approaching Disney about a problem that arose during production of a comedy called The Ugly Dachshund (1966) after Disney had approved a shooting script. “Walt said, ‘Look I’m busy—are you producing this or aren’t you?’ Later that day, Walt called and asked what we were doing in the back lot. I said, ‘That’s where the dog picture is going to be shot.’ Walt said, ‘I think it should be shot inside’—and mentioned the time of year, etc. So that’s where we shot it. On the first day of shooting I was on the set and Walt came up, tapped me on the shoulder and asked, ‘What’s it doing out there?’ Sure enough, it was raining. Walt just had good common sense judgment about everything.”7

  Except, Hibler might have added, about The Ugly Dachshund itself, a film that comes to life only during three episodes of canine destruction. In one of those episodes a Great Dane and a supporting cast of dachshunds wreck an artist’s studio—and the artist is not a pretentious comic figure but the film’s leading man, an earnest and amiable sort played by Dean Jones. Disney would no doubt have found such a disaster heartrending rather than amusing if it had happened to an artist on his staff, but in his later years he let his movies fill up with well-trained animals whose destructiveness is supposed to be funny. Hibler and the other Disney live-action producers could not break themselves of the habit of reaching for such easy answers, and so their films made after Walt Disney’s death are like his own most unfortunate productions, only worse.

  Thanks largely to the dreariness of the studio’s live-action output—and its increasingly poor reception in theaters—Walt Disney Productions passed through a traumatic change in management in 1984. That change resulted in the ouster of Disney’s son-in-law Ron Miller, who had succeeded him as executive producer, the ultimate decision maker where films were concerned, and had then become the company’s president. Michael D. Eisner became chairman and chief executive officer. He was at the center of similar turmoil before the ascension of Robert Iger to the CEO’s job in 2005. Roy Disney’s son, Roy Edward Disney, rallied opposition to the incumbent in both episodes.

  The Walt Disney Company, as it now exists, is huge compared with the Walt Disney Productions that Walt and Roy Disney knew, and it has changed in countless ways (who could have guessed in 1954 that the ABC television network would become a Disney property?). And yet, remarkably, its foundations are still those that Walt Disney laid. The company that bears his name is still strongest at the points where Disney’s own interest was keenest. In that respect, the noisy changes at the
top of the company have simply not made much difference.

  Forty years after Walt Disney’s death, when Disney parks have spread not just to Florida but to Europe and East Asia, the original Disneyland remains the template for each new version of the Magic Kingdom. All those parks make sense only when they seem to be striving for perfection on Walt Disney’s terms. Poorly conceived rides, indifferent employees, unkempt rest-rooms—consciously or not, park visitors experience such things not just as annoyances but as defiance of Walt Disney’s clearly expressed wishes.

  It is, however, through his animated films that Walt Disney retains his firmest grip on the company he founded. In the parks not just rides but costumed employees evoke the cartoon characters, and they are otherwise everywhere that Disney’s writ extends. More than anything else, “Disney” means characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and feature films like Snow White and Dumbo. The Disney animated features made since Walt Disney’s death have always competed—sometimes successfully, more often not—against memories of the films he produced himself, and their makers have squirmed inside the luxurious prison that Walt constructed, the one built of expectations that animated features will always be, if not films made especially for children, then films readily accessible to them. That prison confines even the makers of today’s best animated features, the computer-animated films made by the Pixar studio and released by the Walt Disney Company.