by Bob Thomas
Frank Thomas commented that Disney prided himself in his ability to handle each member of his creative team individually.
The brilliant animator Milt Kahl was subject to periodic rages. “The way to handle Milt is to let him cool off for a couple of days and then talk to him,” Walt said. The director Dave Hand also had a fierce temper. Walt told Thomas: “When Dave gets mad, I always keep my desk between him and me. He’s a big guy, and you don’t know what he’s going to do.”
Frank Thomas remarked that Disney always sought a positive atmosphere in meetings: “If you said no to his proposal, he’d say, ‘Why the hell can’t I do that? We’re trying to get ideas here. Maybe we won’t get any good ones, but we sure won’t if you take a negative attitude.’”
This is the Walt Disney his animators knew. An uncomplicated man.
Bob Thomas
January 1994
Encino
“DISNEYLAND isn’t designed just for children. When does a person stop being a child? Can you say that a child is ever entirely eliminated from an adult? I believe that the right kind of entertainment can appeal to all persons, young or old. I want Disneyland to be a place where parents can bring their children—or come by themselves and still have a good time.”
Walt Disney was talking to me as he drove his convertible along a wide boulevard lined with fragrant groves of orange trees. The car’s top was down, but he scarcely seemed to notice the cool April morning. Nor did he appear to be cognizant of the route he had taken from his Burbank studio to downtown Los Angeles and through the sprawling orchards of Orange County; he had traveled the same freeway and streets with regularity for a year. He was intent on describing the pleasure park he was building in Anaheim.
“It all started when my daughters were very young, and I took them to amusement parks on Sunday,” he told me. “I sat on a bench eating peanuts and looking all around me. I said to myself, dammit, why can’t there be a better place to take your children, where you can have fun together? Well, it took me about fifteen years to develop the idea.”
The convertible turned off Harbor Boulevard and entered the vast black expanse which was the Disneyland parking lot. It stretched almost immeasurably, with fresh white hashmarks indicating spaces for future parkers; at the extremities, steamrollers were gliding back and forth, smoothing the steaming asphalt. Disney brought his car to a halt in front of the entrance, over which a newly painted railroad station loomed. One of the men awaiting his arrival was Joe Fowler, a plain-spoken ex-admiral who was construction boss for Disneyland.
“How’s it going?” Disney asked.
“Okay,” Fowler replied. “I took a look all around the park this morning, and I think we’ll make the opening all right. Just barely. But we’ll make it.”
“Well, I hope so,” Disney said with a wry grin. “Otherwise we’ll have to paint a lot of signs saying, ‘Watch for the grand opening of this exhibit.’”
“I don’t think we’ll have to do that, Walt,” Fowler assured.
“Just in case, I’ve ordered a lot of bunting for the opening,” Disney said. “That’ll cover up what isn’t ready.”
A handsome young Texan, Earl Shelton, said he would fetch a jeep for the inspection tour. Disney leaned against his car and pulled off his shoes and replaced them with brown cowboy boots. He was wearing gray slacks, black sport coat and a red checked shirt with a neckerchief bearing the symbol of the Smoke Tree Ranch of Palm Springs. He completed the costume with a white Western-style hat.
Disney strode through the passageway under the railroad tracks, glanced around the town square, then climbed the stairs to the train station, with me following him. “This will be a nice shady place for the people to wait for the train,” he said, looking about the bright, airy station. “Look at that detail in the woodwork. We got hundreds of photographs and drawings of railroad stations in the last century, and we copied all the details.” He stood on the platform for a minute and seemed to be envisioning the locomotive huffing into the station with breaths of steam, the passengers anxious to climb aboard.
Shelton was waiting with the jeep at the bottom of the stairs, and Disney and I climbed in. The jeep swung around the square and started idling down Main Street. The buildings were half-painted, and some of the steel superstructure was exposed. But to Walt it seemed the small-town Main Street of his youth, in turn-of-the-century Missouri.
He described what the stores would be like. An ice-cream parlor with marble-topped tables and wireback chairs. A candy shop, where taffy would be pulled and chocolate fudge concocted in view of the patrons. A music store with Gramophones and player pianos and a silent-movie house with six screens.
He talked in flat, matter-of-fact tones that were unmistakably middle-American. When he described how a part of Disneyland would dramatize itself to the customers, he seemed almost transported. The right eyebrow shot up, the eyes gleamed, the mustache waggled expressively. He had used the same persuasion in making fairy tales come to life; now he was telling how the half-finished buildings would soon contribute to the enjoyment of patrons making their way through the park.
The jeep came to a circular park where workmen were straining to lower a huge olive tree into the ground. “This is the hub of Disneyland, where you can enter the four realms,” Disney said. “Parents can sit in the shade here if they want, while their kids go off into one of the other places. I planned it so each place is right off the hub. You know, when you go to a world’s fair, you walk and walk until your feet are sore. I know mine always are. I don’t want sore feet here. They make people tired and irritable. I want ‘em to leave here happy. They’ll be able to cover the whole place and not travel more’n a couple of miles.”
He went first into Fantasyland, which he admitted was his favorite. The jeep passed over a bridge and through Sleeping Beauty’s towering, blue-turreted castle. The courtyard of the castle was a jumble of lumber and packing crates and newly painted signs, but Walt saw the place as it would be: “A splash of color all around—reds, yellows, greens. Each ride will have a mural eight feet by sixty feet. In the middle, King Arthur’s carousel with leaping horses, not just trotting, but all of them leaping. The rides will be like nothing you’ve ever seen in an amusement park before.” He described each one in detail. In Peter Pan’s Flight, you would fly out the window of the Darlings’ house, over Big Ben and the Thames and on to Never Land; in Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, your ancient automobile would crash through haystacks and fences; in Snow White’s Adventures, you would visit the Dwarfs’ diamond mine, then travel through the Enchanted Forest to meet the terrifying witch; in the Mad Tea Party, you would twirl in giant teacups that revolved around each other.
Then to Frontierland through Davy Crockett’s stockade, built of real logs and foot-long nails. The jeep bounced along a dusty road; soon, Disney said, stagecoaches would pass this way, trundling through the Painted Desert and skirting the bank of the river, only a dry ditch now. Resting on the bottom was the steel hull of a boat, with a steam engine inside and wooden planking on the deck. The superstructure was being built at the studio, Disney explained, and he described how the Mark Twain would paddle through these future waters like the great Mississippi steamers of another century. In warehouses behind Frontierland, Disney displayed some of his treasures: two steam engines of five-eighths scale for the Disneyland and Santa Fe Railroad; surreys, stagecoaches, trolley cars, all constructed new at the studio; automatic organs and pianos, hand-crank kinetoscopes and penny-arcade machines, collected by Disney scouts from all over America; rows of hand-carved carousel horses, bought in Coney Island and Toronto, all of them leaping.
Adventureland was a rambling ditch with the suggestion of a tropical jungle on its banks. Disney stepped down from the jeep and walked along the riverbed, describing to me what the jungle ride would be like. A pilot would take the visitor down the great rivers of the world, past ruined temples and through rain forests. Dangers were everywhere: hippos charging at the boat, ears twitc
hing; crocodiles with mouths agape; cannibals dancing on the shore; a waterfall that threatened to inundate the explorers. The adventures became a vivid reality in Disney’s recounting.
The jeep drove on to Tomorrowland, where a massive rocket pointed skyward. There, Disney said, visitors would enjoy the fantasy of being transported to the moon and back. Kids who dreamed of driving would be able to do so on a miniature freeway, operating gasoline-fueled cars.
The tour was over, and Disney conferred with some of his construction men about the day’s problems. Then he took off his walking boots and hat and prepared for the drive back to Los Angeles. He took a final look down the unpaved Main Street toward the castle. “Don’t forget,” he said to me, “the biggest attraction isn’t here yet.”
“What’s that?”
“People. You fill this place with people, and you’ll really have a show.”
The year was 1955, and Walt Disney was fifty-three years old. He had already developed the animated film into an art form and had made a massive contribution to the folklore of the world. Now he was on the threshold of another achievement. Disneyland proved to be an unparalleled success, as innovative in the field of outdoor entertainment as the Disney cartoons had been in the world of film.
Disneyland, together with the television series that helped finance and publicize the park, brought fiscal security to the Disney enterprise for the first time in its thirty years of existence. Roy Disney no longer needed to importune bankers for money to meet the payroll and fulfill his brother’s dreams. Financial jeopardy had never worried Walt, and release from it did not lessen his creative drive. Far from it. In the last decade of his life, Walt Disney pushed himself and his co-workers to new plateaus of creativity. He seemed to consider his time limited, and his impatience to get things done sometimes made him hard to work for. He had little patience with those whose thinking was earthbound. One of his writers observed: “When Walt dropped an idea, he didn’t expect you to pick it up where he left it; you were supposed to move a couple of steps beyond. God help you if you took his idea and ran in the wrong direction. If you did, one eyebrow would rise and the other would descend, and he’d say, ‘You don’t seem to get it at all.’”
Disney possessed a remarkable skill for drawing the best from those who worked with him. Many of them were astonished at what they could accomplish under his prodding; Disney never was. He expected the best and would not relent until he got it. The bright sharpness of his vision compelled his workers to achievement. “Walt is the best gag man around here,” his cartoonists said in awe. It was their highest compliment; not only could he devise moments of hilarity, but he could blend character and action into prodigious feats of storytelling. Above all, he was a storyteller, whether he was spellbinding a half-dozen animators in the studio “sweatbox” or providing entertainment for a packed Radio City Music Hall. The communication was the same; he had an uncanny capacity for reaching the human heart, hence causing nervousness and distrust among intellectuals. They exulted in the Disney failures—and he had some. No one could attempt so much and not fail. But he had an imperishable optimism that allowed him to overcome failure, condescending critics, foreclosing bankers, defecting employees, fraudulent distributors and other hazards of the motion picture industry. By the end of his life, his vision had taken him beyond—to the planning of a university that would intermingle all the arts and to the shaping of a city that would prove a model for the future.
How could it happen? How could one man produce so much entertainment that enthralled billions of human beings in every part of the world? That is the riddle of Walt Disney’s life. The answer can’t be found in his background. His parents were plain people who moved from one section of the country to another in futile search of the American dream. Young Walt showed no brilliance as a student; he daydreamed through his classes. Cartooning proved his major interest, but his drawings were uninspired; as soon as he could hire better cartoonists, he gave up drawing entirely. It seems incredible that the unschooled cartoonist from Kansas City, a bankrupt in his first movie venture, could have produced works of unmatched imagination—and could even have undertaken the creation of a future city. In terms of accomplishment, he might be considered a genius, but the word has lost its impact in the movie world. And even true genius must have roots.
A large part of the answer to the Disney riddle, I believe, lies in the form of expression he chose for himself at the beginning of his film career. Cartoons are the most controlled of motion-picture mediums. The animator draws his own characters, makes them move, places them against a background that is complementary. Total control.
Before Disney, cartoons were slapdash—two-dimensional characters in bizarre movement before elemental backgrounds. Disney insisted on rounded, humanized figures. He wanted the humor to come out of character, not from outrageous action. His cartoon actors had to move convincingly and distinctly; there could be no vague or unsure motion.
In 1928, Walt Disney wrote instructions from New York to Ub Iwerks, his chief animator in Hollywood: “Listen—please try and make all action definite and pointed and don’t be afraid to exaggerate things plenty. It never looks as strong on the screen as it appears on the drawing board. Always work to bring the GAGS out above any other action—this is very important.” Over the years Disney repeated to his animators: “Make it read!” Meaning, make the action distinct and recognizable. No contradictions, no ambiguities.
Disney constantly strove to make the cartoon more convincing and more entertaining. He added sound and color. He pressed his animators to develop greater skills until they were able to sustain the cartoon to feature length. When he had developed animation to its fullest, he moved to new challenges—live-action movies, nature films, television entertainment, then Disneyland. It was a natural progression, changing the audience from spectators to participants. Walt Disney brought to Disneyland all the skill and showmanship he had learned in three decades as a film maker. He thought in movie terms: transporting his audience from one scene to the next with smooth transition, combining controlled elements for a total experience.
The designers of Disneyland were movie-studio art directors—artists who knew the technique of creating sets and backdrops to provide a storytelling experience. Their Main Street was unlike any small-town Main Street that ever existed. At Disneyland, all the shops and emporiums complemented each other; even the signs and paint colors were in harmony. The result was pleasingly believable to the visitor. They thought, “That’s the way Main Street must have been in the old days!” But that was the way it should have been.
Although he was constantly reshaping it, Walt Disney was pleased with what he had wrought at Disneyland. His only discontent was with the peripheral neon jungle of motels and fast-food shops competing with each other for the tourist’s attention and dollar. “Dammit, we should have had more land,” he often muttered. “We could have done it so much better.”
After Disneyland, Disney agreed to create exhibits for the New York World’s Fair of 1964–65. His planners were puzzled. Why expend talent and time on attractions that would be shown for two years at a world’s fair? It seemed illogical, especially since Disney for the first time would be entering a field in which he could not maintain total control. He would be building shows for other corporations and competing before millions of visitors with the efforts of nations, states, and giant companies.
During the World’s Fair planning, Disney revealed his thinking in a remark to one of his designers, John Hench: “How would you like to work on a future city?” It was said with a grin, and the matter was dropped. Later Hench realized that the World’s Fair attractions were part of Disney’s long-range scheme to work with industry to restore order to city living. The first step would be another park in Florida following the pattern of Disneyland. Then Disney would build a new kind of city.
From Mickey Mouse to the City of Tomorrow. The range of Walt Disney’s talent was incredible. This biography will attempt
to trace the development of his creative processes, together with a picture of the man and his time.
ISIGNY-SUR-MER is a small windswept village on the Normandy coast, a few kilometers from the beaches where Allied troops landed on June 6, 1944. Nine centuries before, French soldiers sailed from the same coast to invade England, and among them were Hughes d’Isigny and his son Robert. The family remained in England, their name becoming anglicized to Disney. During the Restoration, a branch of the Disney clan moved to Ireland, settling in County Kilkenny. Arundel Elias Disney was born there in 1801, and in 1834 he and his brother Robert sailed from Liverpool with their families to begin new lives in America. After a month’s voyage, they arrived in New York on October 3. The two brothers parted, Robert heading for a farm in the Midwest, Elias traveling to the Canadian frontier in Goderich Township, Ontario.
The first white men had settled there only nine years before. Other immigrants—Scottish, Pennsylvania-German, Irish—were attracted to the land by promises of roads and improvements and prices of seven shillings and sixpence per acre. But the land company failed to keep its promises, and the settlers found they had brought their families to a wilderness without roads, mills, schools, or churches.
Elias Disney saw hope in the vast acreage, with its rushing, trout-filled streams, forests alive with deer and elk, meadows abounding with wild plums and berries. He built a mill beside the Maitland River and prospered by grinding wheat and sawing timber for his neighbors. His wife, Maria, gave him sixteen children, the eldest being Kepple Disney, born in Ireland in 1832. The Disney mill thrived for many years, then bad times descended on Goderich. Elias was forced to default on his mortgages.
Son Kepple married an Irish-born immigrant, Mary Richardson, and they settled in the nearby Bluevale district. Kepple was a strapping, black-bearded man who tried a variety of enterprises, from drilling for oil to operating a salt well. He disliked the Canadian winters, and in 1878 he took off for the California gold fields with his oldest sons, Elias and Robert. Passing through Kansas, Kepple Disney was convinced by a railroad agent to buy two hundred acres of Union Pacific land near Ellis. He sent for the rest of his family to join him on their new farm. Because he couldn’t afford lumber, he built them a house made of sod. The farm began to thrive on cattle and wheat, but Kepple still resisted the high prices the railroad charged for lumber. He quarried rock and built a house of stone.