by Bob Thomas
Tomorrowland remained the least finished area. “Cover it up with balloons and pennants,” Walt said.
To stage the pageantry for opening day and to supervise entertainment after the park opened, Walt hired Tommy Walker, who had achieved fame as both leader of the marching band and football conversion kicker for the University of Southern California. “If you have one idea in one hundred that works, I’ll be satisfied,” Walt told him. Among Walker’s ideas for the opening was the release of hundreds of homing pigeons. Walker explained to Walt that ten days before the opening the pigeons would be released halfway between Los Angeles and Disneyland; thus the birds could familiarize themselves with half of the route home. When the pigeon owners assembled at the halfway point early one morning, Walt was there. He interrogated the owners about the birds’ habits, and later he developed a television feature about pigeon raising.
One of Walker’s assignments was to hire a leader for the band which would march down Main Street and play concerts at various locations in Disneyland. Walker avoided consideration of his father, Vesey Walker, a onetime Army bandmaster who had organized thirty high school bands. “Dammit, Tommy, I want you to hire the people who are most qualified,” Walt grumbled. The elder Walker became a familiar figure with his elegant leadership of the Disneyland band. “Now, Veechy,” Walt instructed him with his habitual mispronunciation, “I just want you to remember one thing: if the people can’t go away whistling it, don’t play it.”
During the final days of construction, the Disney studio received a letter from a mother in an Eastern state. Her seven-year-old son had been stricken with leukemia, and he had expressed a desire to do two things: to meet the comedian Pinky Lee; and to ride on Walt Disney’s train. The family had already left for California, hoping to fulfill the boy’s wishes. When the family called the studio, they were told to report to Disneyland on Saturday morning. They arrived in their road-weary automobile, and Walt drove up shortly afterward.
“I understand you want to see my train—well, let’s go,” Walt said, lifting the boy into his arms and striding off to where cranes were transferring the railroad cars from flatbed trucks to the rails. When the train was assembled and the engine fired up, Walt took the boy to the cab. It was the first trip around the park for the Santa Fe and Disneyland Railway, and Walt pointed out the attractions that were still a-building.
When he returned to the administration building, he went to his car for a package. It was one of two gold-framed pictures that had been made from art work of Lady and the Tramp; the other had been sent to Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco as a wedding gift. He gave the package to the boy. “Well, we really saw the place; he liked my train,” Walt said to the parents. To a Disneyland employee, Bob Jani, who had witnessed the visit, he gave the order: no publicity.
The completion of Disneyland coincided with Walt’s and Lilly’s thirtieth wedding anniversary, and an invitation went to three hundred people for the “Tempus Fugit Celebration”:
WHERE: Disneyland…where there’s plenty of room…
WHEN:…Wednesday, July 13, 1955, at six o’clock in the afternoon…
WHY:…because we’ve been married Thirty Years…
How:…by cruising down the Mississippi on the Mark Twain’s maiden voyage, followed by dinner at Slue-Foot Sue’s Golden Horseshoe!
Hope you can make it—we especially want you and, by the way, no gifts, please—we have everything, including a grandson!
Lilly and Walt
The guests arrived in the warmth of the July evening and were transported in surreys past the glittering lights of Main Street, through the gates of Frontierland and to the Slue-Foot Sue’s saloon for cocktails. One of the early arrivals was Joe Fowler, who visited the Mark Twain for a final inspection. He encountered a lady who handed him a broom and said, “This ship is just filthy; let’s get busy and sweep it up.” And so the former admiral and Mrs. Walt Disney swept the sawdust and dirt from the deck of the Mark Twain in preparation for the guests.
Walt had been working all day at the park, and he welcomed the chance to relax with his friends and co-workers and show off Disneyland to them. He led the crowd across Frontierland Square to the dock where the Mark Twain awaited, all shiny and white and twinkling with old-fashioned electric bulbs that outlined the decks. A Dixieland band played brassy melodies and waiters circulated with trays full of mint juleps as the paddlewheeler pulled away from the dock with a whistle blast. Walt strolled among the guests and basked in their delight as the Mark Twain eased around the bend and sailed past the darkened Tom Sawyer’s Island. He felt the weariness of the long months of planning and building, and the elation of seeing his dream almost completed. Those feelings combined with the juleps to make him gloriously high.
The party returned to the Golden Horseshoe for dinner and the frontier revue with high-kicking chorus girls and comic Wally Boag playing an antic Pecos Bill. As Boag began firing his blank pistols, Walt leaned over the balcony and fired back with his finger pointed like a gun. His daughter Diane recalled what happened thereafter:
“People below started to notice him. ‘There’s Walt,’ they said. There was a little applause and general recognition from the audience. And with that, Daddy was off. He started to climb down the balcony, and every little bit of comment or applause would just keep him onward. At one point it got a little touchy—I thought he was going to fall from the balcony. But he made it down to the stage.
“He just stood there and beamed. Everyone started saying, ‘Speech! Speech!’ But there was no speech forthcoming. All he did was stand there and beam. Then everybody applauded and said, ‘Lilly! Lilly! We want Lilly!’ So Mother got up on stage, figuring, ‘If I get up there, I can get Walt down.’ Well, that wasn’t the case. So Mother dragged Sharon and me up on the stage and still nothing happened. Dad was just planted there, and he was loving every minute of it.
“I guess someone must have sensed our plight, because the band started to play and Edgar Bergen came on stage and started to dance with me, and some others came up and danced with Mother and Sharon. Everybody started dancing, and my father was gently elbowed into the wings. He was loving every minute of it, just grinning at people.
“Everyone was worried about Dad’s driving home. They were trying to steal his car keys and everything, but I just said, ‘Daddy, can I drive you home?’ He said, ‘Well, sure, honey.’ No problem at all. He was meek and mild and willing. He just climbed in the back seat of the car. He had a map of Disneyland, and he rolled it up and tooted in my ear as if with a toy trumpet. And before I knew it, all was silent. I looked around and there he was, with his arms folded around the map like a boy with a toy trumpet, sound asleep. I know he didn’t have too much to drink, because the next morning he didn’t have a hangover. He bounded out of the house at seven-thirty and headed for Disneyland again.”
The hot July sun had barely risen as crowds began to gather for the grand opening of Disneyland. Within a few hours, every street within a ten-mile radius of the park was clogged with automobiles. The first-day event was invitational; tickets had been given to studio workers and those who had constructed the park, to press and dignitaries, to suppliers and officials of companies sponsoring exhibits. But there were many more who were uninvited; tickets to the grand opening had been cleverly counterfeited. Thirty-three thousand people poured through the gates. Rides broke down after the first onslaught of customers. Restaurants and refreshments stands ran out of food and drink. A gas leak was detected in Fantasyland, and the entire area was closed to the public. Tempers flared as the sun grew hotter.
One of the young Disneyland workers retained three vivid memories of opening day: women’s spiked heels sinking into the softened asphalt of Main Street; the Mark Twain steamboat with its decks awash because of too many passengers; parents tossing small children over the heads of the crowd to gain rides on the King Arthur Carousel.
Walt was spared the ordeal of watching the fiasco; he was being rushed from
one part of the park to another for the making of a special television show. He didn’t realize the failure of the opening until he read the press accounts the following day. Most of the reports were unfavorable, and one columnist accused Walt Disney of skimping on drinking fountains to promote the sale of soft drinks. Walt telephoned the columnist to explain, off the record, that the plumbers’ strike had required him to decide whether toilets or drinking fountains would be installed first. “People can buy Pepsi-Cola but they can’t pee in the street,” Walt said.
Ever afterward Walt referred to the opening day as “Black Sunday.” Characteristically, he didn’t dwell on the disappointment. He summoned his staff to deal with the pressing problems of increasing the capacity of the rides, handling the flow of people through the park, relieving the traffic jams in surrounding areas, serving food more expeditiously. He set about to repair press relations, inviting the staffs of newspapers, magazines and wire services to bring their families to Disneyland for special evenings. He appeared at each dinner to apologize for the inconveniences of opening day.
He spent his days at Disneyland and often slept overnight in his apartment over the firehouse on the Town Square. Night workers were sometimes startled to see Walt walking through the park in his bathrobe. Early one morning he encountered two carpenters making repairs on a Main Street building. “Hey, I got the key to the Sunkist store; come on over and we’ll have a drink,” he said. He unlocked the store, turned on the lights and discussed carpentry with the two workers over tall glasses of orange juice.
During the day he walked through the park, observing the people and their reactions, asking questions of the ride attendants, waitresses, store clerks, janitors. From the beginning, he insisted on utter cleanliness. Remembering the tawdry carnivals he had visited with his daughters, he told his staff, “If you keep a place clean, people will respect it; if you let it get dirty, they’ll make it worse.” He didn’t want peanut shells strewn on the sidewalks; only shelled nuts were sold. No gum could be purchased inside the park. Young men strolled through the crowds, retrieving trash as soon as it was discarded.
He never seemed to tire of striding through the park and watching the people and their reactions to Disneyland.
“Look at them!” he enthused to a companion. “Did you ever see so many happy people? So many people just enjoying themselves?”
One day at twilight, a Disneyland engineer was strolling through Frontierland when he saw a solitary figure sitting on a bench. It was Walt Disney, savoring the sight of the Mark Twain pulling around the bend with a puff of white steam.
WITHIN seven weeks, a million visitors had come to Disneyland. Predictions of attendance had been exceeded by 50 percent, and customers were spending 30 percent more money than had been expected. Disneyland was destined for enormous financial success, despite one temporary setback. After the park had opened, $1,000,000 worth of unpaid bills was discovered in a locked desk. An employee had been absent-mindedly filing them away for months.
The Disneyland television series opened its second season on ABC September 14, 1955, with the screening of Dumbo, and the series continued to be the highest-rated television show. On October 3, 1955, Disney introduced a new concept in children’s programming, The Mickey Mouse Club.
It was the first entertainment that Walt Disney had ever designed expressly for children. “But we’re not going to talk down to the kids,” he told his staff. “Let’s aim for the twelve-year-old. The younger ones will watch, because they’ll want to see what their older brothers and sisters are looking at. And if the show is good enough, the teenagers will be interested, and adults, too.”
All of the Disney showmanship was poured into The Mickey Mouse Club. The show presented newsreels of what children were doing in foreign countries, and there were Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoons. Daily serials were based on children’s books: The Hardy Boys, with Tim Considine and Tommy Kirk; Spin and Marty, with Considine and David Stollery; Corky and White Shadow, with Darlene Gillespie and Lloyd Corrigan. Jiminy Cricket gave entertaining, instructive lectures on hygiene and safety. All of the elements were tied together by the Mouseketeers, twenty-four talented youngsters joined by entertainer Jimmie Dodd and old-time Disney cartoonist Roy Williams.
Walt had seen enough of precocious child actors to know that he didn’t want the usual Hollywood performers as Mouseketeers. He assigned Bill Walsh as producer and told him: “Look around at the local schools for nice-looking kids with good personalities. It doesn’t matter whether they can sing or dance; we’ll teach them at the studio. Watch the kids at recess. You’ll find one who is the center of attention, who is leading all the action. That’s the one we want.”
The Mickey Mouse Club produced an audience response that television had never seen before. Three-quarters of the nation’s television sets in service between five and six o’clock each weekday were tuned in to the Disney show. Children and adults everywhere were singing the club’s anthem—“M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E.” The mouse-ear caps worn by the Mouseketeers sold at the rate of 24,000 a day; two hundred other items were merchandised by seventy-five manufacturers. The Mouseketeers became national figures, and millions of children could recite “Darlene,” “Cubby,” “Karen” and all the other names during the daily roll call. The most popular of the Mouseketeers proved to be Annette Funicello, a gasoline-station operator’s daughter who had been discovered at a children’s dance recital. She attracted the most fan mail—as many as six thousand letters a month.
Never before had quality programming for children been attempted on television, and the venture proved profitable for ABC; $15,000,000 in sponsorship was sold in the first season. The returns for Walt Disney Productions were not as good. ABC provided only half the $5,000,000 cost for thirty-six weeks of five hour-long shows. Disney made back some of the deficit in merchandising of the mouse-ear caps, phonograph records, a club magazine, etc. And The Mickey Mouse Club proved valuable in other, less measurable ways. By the mid-1950s, cartoon shorts had become unprofitable, and Disney was producing only half a dozen a year. A whole new generation was growing up with little acquaintance with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and the other Disney veterans. Now, because of television, the Disney cartoons were being seen by a larger audience each day than had seen them during their entire theatrical releases. Mickey’s status as a folk hero was guaranteed for another generation.
After three decades in Hollywood, Walt Disney had finally achieved financial stability. Disneyland was successful beyond his own dreams. He had produced four hit movies in a row. Although the two television series did not provide profits, they contributed to the health of the Disney endeavors in other ways. Walt himself was slow to realize his new prosperity. He told the story: “One day I was driving home and as I was waiting at a stop signal I looked in a showroom and saw a beautiful Mercedes Benz coupe. ‘Gee, I wish I could afford that,’ I said to myself, and then I drove on. I had gone a couple of blocks when I said, ‘But I can!’ So I turned right around and went back and bought it.”
Afterward he wrote his sister Ruth: “I may not be getting as excited over studio goings-on as I once did, but I haven’t hit the rocking chair, either. No, sir. As a matter of fact, I bought myself a jazzy little sports car this year….It’s a car for a man who thinks young, and I’m just the guy for it. I thought for a while I was going to have to fight Sharon for possession of it. I loaned it to her one week while we were away and she threatened to steal it. It’s a little beauty and almost as good as a blonde on each arm for getting a little envy from my fellow men.”
But change in fortune had little effect on Walt’s personal life. Nor did he glory in the company’s financial health. “I’ve always been bored with just making money,” he said. “I’ve wanted to do things, I wanted to build things. Get something going. People look at me in different ways. Some of them say, ‘The guy has no regard for money.’ That is not true. I have had regard for money. But I’m not like some people who worship money as
something you’ve got to have piled up in a big pile somewhere. I’ve only thought of money in one way, and that is to do something with it, you see? I don’t think there is a thing that I own that I will ever get the benefit of, except through doing things with it.”
Walt realized that the company required growth and prosperity to keep faith with the stockholders. He and Roy always maintained the policy of paying minimal dividends to the shareholders, plowing the profits into the development of the company. “I have a regard for my stockholders,” Walt said. “To me, it’s a moral obligation, like the one I felt toward the people who helped me when I was having bad times in Kansas City. I worried and fretted about paying ‘em back, and I paid them back in many ways. Like the little Greek Jerry, who loaned me money and let me eat in his restaurant on the cuff. After I was out here and got Mickey Mouse going, he wrote me. He had been in the automobile business, but he met another Greek in Phoenix and they wanted to start a restaurant. ‘Walt,’ he wrote, ‘I need a thousand dollars.’ Well, I had Mickey Mouse then, so I loaned him a thousand dollars, I sent him a check. After all, Jerry had let me eat on credit. My credit never got over sixty dollars, but I gave Jerry a thousand. Later I got a telegram from Jerry saying, ‘Walter, I need another five hundred. We need air conditioning in Phoenix.’ So I sent him five hundred. Then he wrote me, ‘I’m having trouble with my partner; I want to buy him out.’ I told him, ‘Jerry, you’ve got to get along with your partner. I just can’t loan you any more.’ So my sixty dollars with Jerry cost me fifteen hundred dollars. I never saw it again. But I’ve tried, with everybody who befriended and helped me, to see that they came out all right.”
During the early years of Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphonies, he had been amused but unswayed by the efforts of intellectuals to detect profundities in the Disney cartoons. Over the years he took a realistic, sometimes self-deprecating attitude toward the films. He once remarked, “When I was a kid, I read an art book and the author advised young artists to be themselves. That decided it for me. I was a corny kind of a guy, so I went in for corn.”