by Neal Gabler
The shooting began on July 4, 1949, in “fantastically wonderful sunshine,” the Disneys’ British agent, Cyril James, wrote Roy. The weather seemed to portend a relatively stress-free production. Walt, despite the professions of supervision, visited the set at the Denham Studios outside London only occasionally, and director Byron Haskin’s agent wrote Jack Lavin, the studio talent coordinator, that Walt “seems pleased with everything.” With the film sailing along calmly, Walt had provisions sent to the Dorchester Hotel in London (two cases of Johnnie Walker Black Label whiskey, six cans of bacon, four cans of corned beef hash, Spam, and franks, six cans of boiled ham, and twenty-four cans of his favorite dish, chili and beans) and played tourist with his family. When they tired of London, they visited Ireland for two days, then spent three weeks in France, where Walt revisited the sites of his Red Cross service, then crossed to Switzerland.
After five weeks in all, he and the family left for America, but in yet another sign of Walt’s restlessness, he returned to England a month and a half later, this time without Lillian or the girls, as the production rolled to its climax. The only suspense had been whether the British government would issue a work permit to Bobby Driscoll, who was to star in the film, since a British law prohibited the employment of actors under thirteen years of age. Frantic upon learning this, Fred Leahy arranged to have the Educational Bureau agree to “look the other way” during the filming, while Driscoll was to say that he was only in England on a visit. But when Driscoll was forced to stay longer than had been expected, due largely to weather delays, the crew worried that the police might issue a summons, so Driscoll was shuttled between the first unit (doing the principal photography) and, when that unit was setting up, the third unit (usually assigned to do the scenes in which actors were not necessary). That way Driscoll’s time was maximized, though it meant that all his scenes had to be shot first. In the end Driscoll’s parents and the studio were both fined for violating the work permit law, but it was a small price to pay to complete the photography.
Now came the typical race to finish the film in time for its contracted release in the summer. Though Walt had left most of the production to Pearce and Leahy, he was unusually involved in the postproduction—at least compared to the offhanded way he had been treating recent films. He had asked Pearce and Leahy to air-mail him specific takes for editing, and after a test screening in early January, he ordered them to cut ten to twelve minutes and provide a more forceful musical score; he also advised them that a more detailed criticism would follow. Two days later he ordered the editor to fly from England to Los Angeles, apparently so that Walt could oversee the editing himself.
The finished film, Walt Disney’s first all-live-action feature, was both a critical and a financial success—the first in a long, long time. Treasure Island grossed $4 million, returning to the studio a profit of between $2.2 and $2.4 million. Roy, looking to the future, crowed that if “we have a subject that seems to have a world-wide appeal—we have it in Technicolor and sell it as a Walt Disney picture,” the studio could safely spend as much as $1.5 million in negative costs and still have a “reasonably safe investment.” This euphoria led Disney fans to worry, as the animators had, that Disney animation was dead, but Walt wrote Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., one of those concerned, “We are not forsaking the cartoon field—it is purely a move of economy—again converting pounds into dollars to enable us to make more cartoons here.” It was a strange turn. Walt Disney had to make live-action films now to save his animations.
As they were finishing the shooting, the Disneys suffered another blow. Through all the adversity, all the economic ups and downs, they had had one bedrock: the merchandise division headed by Kay Kamen. Though Walt often micromanaged his studio, he never interfered with Kamen, and Kamen had repaid the trust by following a policy as simple as Walt’s own. “The prestige and dignity of the name Walt Disney had to be maintained,” he wrote a merchandising representative. “The production of the Disney prestige was always more important than any royalties we would get.” The policy worked. In 1947 Kamen claimed that the Disney label was selling roughly $100 million in goods each year, including toys, clothes, statuettes, snacks, and a full line of Donald Duck foods including field peas with snaps, peanut butter, catsup, chili sauce, macaroni, mayonnaise, and egg noodles. In 1948, when the Disneys renewed their agreement with Kamen for another seven years, the five-millionth Mickey Mouse watch was sold and more than two thousand Disney-related products were being manufactured. These sales brought in $1.25 million in profits, which the Disneys split with Kamen on a seventy-thirty basis, the bulk going to the Disneys, up from the fifty-fifty split the parties had had prior to the war. That didn’t include a ten-year license extension on books and magazines that Roy himself had negotiated with the Whitman Publishing Company early in 1948 that also required Whitman to underwrite a bank loan to the studio for $1.06 million.
The Disneys not only trusted Kamen but liked him and enjoyed his company, and by happy coincidence Walt, Roy, and Kamen all happened to be in Europe that October—Walt overseeing Treasure Island, Roy conducting business, and Kamen vacationing with his wife. The night before the Kamens were to depart for the States, they had dinner with Walt and Roy in Paris. Walt recalled that they were “very happy.” Earlier that day Kamen had written the vice president of his company in New York raving over his vacation but expressing his fear of flying back. The Kamens died the next day, October 27, 1949, in an Air France crash over the Azores.
Thus ended seventeen years of one of Walt Disney’s happiest and least tempestuous collaborations. At the time of Kamen’s death the studio’s profits from merchandise had reached a “new high in our history,” Roy wrote Walt. Kamen was irreplaceable, the Disneys knew, and they didn’t even try to find a new agent. Instead they decided to run the merchandising arm themselves, appointing O. B. Johnston, who had been a studio accountant, to head the division. (A few months earlier the Disneys had set up their own music-publishing division to retain the rights to Disney songs and to acquire rights to other songs that had a Disney flavor, like the hits “Mule Train” and “Shrimp Boats.”) Roy admitted nine months later that in taking over merchandising from Kamen’s estate, they had had “some ups and downs” but that “we are now finally beginning to get hold of it and make progress.” Still, though it was one of the most profitable divisions of the company, it only added to the growing if mistaken impression of Walt Disney as a corporate magnate rather than an artist—someone who was now out to exploit rather than to create.
VII
Since the very beginning of Disney Bros., the studio had been Walt Disney’s refuge and his real home. “[N]o matter what you were talking about, he’d get back to this goddamn Studio,” Ward Kimball said, referring to the train ride to the Chicago Railroad Fair. “He wanted to talk about it. This was HIM. This was his SEX! This was EVERYTHING…. The orgasms were all here.” Milt Kahl told one interviewer that “he lived here, really. God, his home life was nothing compared to his studio life.” (There was, in fact, the room off his office with a bed and shower where the naval officer had stayed for a time during the war and where Walt would occasionally spend the night.) His secretary recalled how he frequently ignored the clock and at seven or eight in the evening would still be in his office, and she would phone Lillian to tell her that Walt wouldn’t be home for dinner.
So it was yet another sign of Walt’s discontent that as he was embarking on his train-building, he was also investigating building a new house for his family as what he called “sort of a wedding anniversary present—our twenty-fifth.” The Disneys had lived in the home on the hill at 4053 Woking Way, from which they could see the Pacific Ocean and Los Angeles below, since before Diane’s birth, and even then, despite its five bedrooms and five baths, its pool and playhouse and badminton court and screening room in the library where wood panels slid back to reveal the projector, it had been a modest structure for a film executive of Walt Disney’s stature. The new ho
use was partly a project, something to hold Walt’s attention, partly a haven to replace the studio as the trains had replaced the animation, and partly a way to secure himself against the assaults of the world by retreating to his family. “All in all, I think it is going to be a very happy set-up,” Walt wrote his aunt Jessie Perkins, “and I am looking forward to spending more time at home than I have in the past.”
One of the major lures was Walt’s train. In looking for a new home site, he was seeking a place where he could lay track for the railroad that consumed him. Diane and Lillian had found a site off Wilshire Boulevard, but Walt vetoed it because there was no place for the train. Meanwhile Lillian had phoned Harold Janss, a well-known developer, who suggested a heavily wooded two-and-a-half-acre property at Holmby Hills, a rich development in western Los Angeles that Janss’s family had owned since the 1920s. Walt and Lillian drove out to view the plot one Sunday in May 1948, and as Lillian put it, “Walt took one look and said, ‘That’s it!’ He could see that train here.” Unlike Woking Way, which was close to Burbank, the site had the additional advantage, Walt would say, of being far enough from the studio so that he could use his drive there for precious time to meditate.
They closed the deal on June 4 for $33,250. (Walt applied for a $25,000 building loan from the Bank of America and listed his income as $104,000.)* The site gently sloped down from a bluff on which the home was to be built to a canyon that would separate the home from the road. Walt’s neighborhood in Los Feliz had been something of a bohemian district; it spoke to the exclusivity of the new neighborhood that one adjacent home was owned by William Goetz, MGM head Louis B. Mayer’s son-in-law and one of the top executives at Universal-International. The new house itself, designed by a highly regarded Russian-born architect and furniture maker named James Dolena, sometimes called the “architect to the stars,” was a 5,669-square-foot split-level modern sheathed in white that flared out into two wings. The lawn behind the house led to a 22-by-44-foot swimming pool. Beyond the pool was a fifteen-hundred-square-foot recreation building that housed a screening room, a bar, a four-car garage, and Walt’s own pièce de résistance—a fully operational soda fountain.
The Woking Way house had been completed in two months as the Disneys awaited the birth of the child Lillian would miscarry. The construction of the new house at 355 Carolwood Drive was much more languorously paced, though Walt, seeming to want the distraction, wasn’t impatient. It took well over a year to finish, and even after the family moved in late in May 1950, Walt spent another six months laying the track for his railroad and building a small engine house and workshop that had been adapted from the design for the barn in So Dear to My Heart, which, Walt claimed, had itself been adapted from his father’s barn in Marceline, making the Carolwood house yet another reminder of Walt’s happiest memories. The Disneys even planted fruit trees as on the Marceline farm.
Though it had seventeen rooms, the house was hardly palatial. (Having reinvested his money in the studio, he “didn’t make the kind of money those guys [film moguls] did,” Diane recalled.) Walt said that it was scaled to the family’s needs and designed to simplify Lillian’s housekeeping, and it was, but it was also designed to allow Walt to withdraw not only from the world generally, as he had always desired to do, but into the kind of delayed childhood that he was now enjoying. He often spent his evenings in the workshop making tiny furniture for his railroad while Duchess, to whom he slipped bologna and hot dogs that he had stuffed in his pockets, slept on a blanket. Then exactly at midnight, he said, she would get off the blanket and begin nudging him to go to bed. “And she’d sit and look at me until I came,” Walt would recall. “She wouldn’t leave my side until I came.” Other times he manned his soda fountain with its red leather barstools and its long bar with shelves of glasses behind it. Walt jokingly complained that he supplied sundaes to the entire neighborhood, but he relished playing the soda jerk. Ward Kimball said he had every kind of syrup and topping, and he would “fix these huge goopy things for his guests, ice cream sodas and the biggest banana splits you ever saw.” Sharon remembered his mixing “weird concoctions,” including on one occasion a champagne soda that even he admitted was barely potable. But he had another motive in installing the soda fountain besides indulging his childhood fantasies. He was hoping to freeze time. For the father of two teenage daughters, the soda fountain, the pool, and the other amenities were, he confessed, a “means of keeping them from going away from home to school, which will be all right with me,” so that the sprawling wings of the house not only welcomed, they also held dear.
Of course the main attraction of the house, as far as Walt was concerned, was the railroad. He had intended for the train to run around the property—about a half-mile of track—but Lillian protested that the plan would ruin a flower garden that she had had designed. So Walt countered by having one of the studio’s construction supervisors draw up a ninety-foot-long tunnel to run under Lillian’s garden. And for good measure the supervisor threw in an S-curve to give riders a special thrill. To memorialize the compromise, Walt had Gunther Lessing draw up a mock contract in which Lillian granted the “Carolwood Pacific Railroad” a right-of-way on the property. By the time he was finished, he had his tunnel, a forty-six-foot trestle, and just over 2,500 feet of track girdling the property; and he had spent nearly $17,000, not including $10,000 in labor costs that he had transferred from his home account to his railroad account. “We spent the first half-year in the house with a bulldozer in the back yard fixing grades for the railroad,” Lillian told an interviewer. “Bulldozers cost a lot to rent. They drive you crazy with their noise.” Still, Walt was not going to sacrifice his railroad, no matter how much Lillian complained. “Father was sympathetic but firm,” she said.
Just as he loved to play soda jerk, he loved to play engineer. He would don an engineer’s cap and a plaid shirt, straddle the tender behind the engine, which he had named Lilly Belle, in Lillian’s honor, and fire up. Guests to the Disney home were invariably invited to take a ride on the train, and Walt would issue passes to “vice presidents” of the Carolwood Pacific—a list that included Walter Wanger, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, singer Dinah Shore, actor Dick Powell, and even Salvador Dali, who thought the detail so perfect that he feared the train would have accidents that mimicked real train crashes “or even sabotage…like miniature train wreckers!” Dali told Walt, “Such perfection did not belong to models!” But that had been the whole point. With his train Walt Disney had regained perfection.
As Walt was preoccupied with his trains and his house, his animators—three crews headed by Gerry Geronomi, Wilfred Jackson, and Ham Luske—were barreling ahead to finish Cinderella. Walt supervised, as always, and his was the final word, but he was considerably less involved than on Snow White or even Dumbo, and some of the staff complained about it. “Walt is not an artist,” one former employee told a reporter. “He doesn’t have the instincts or the imagination of an artist. His little-known virtue is that of a great producer, who happens to recognize the importance of putting out a product technically better than anyone else’s.” Another employee described Walt’s demeanor as more “businesslike” now, less excitable but also less exciting. Harry Tytle found him more unpredictable. Walt had ordered Tytle not to renew the contract of composer Oliver Wallace, who had written some of the score for Cinderella, because Walt wanted to divert the raise Wallace was due to in-betweeners; then a few months later he demanded to know why Wallace wasn’t under contract.
Still, despite Walt’s disengagement and unpredictability, everyone knew what was at stake on Cinderella. It was the first real animated feature since Bambi, and Walt had told his employees early in the production, “Boys, if Cinderella doesn’t make it, we’re through!” He certainly wouldn’t have had the resources to begin another feature once Alice in Wonderland, already in production, was completed. When the film was finished late that fall of 1949, Walt was, typically, not entirely happy. “Th
e finished picture is not everything that we wanted it to be,” he told one magazine editor, “but, today, it is quite a problem what with costs, labor, etc., to do all the things you would like to,” and he boasted that “we are now getting our organization in such shape that I think we are going to come out with a real postwar production—ALICE IN WONDERLAND—which is now in work. It looks unusually good.” To another interviewer he said of Cinderella, “That was just a picture.”
In fact, despite the shortcuts in the animation and the eventual lack of passion from the staff, most people saw Cinderella as a welcome return to form for Walt Disney after the years of disappointments. William Levy, now Walt’s eastern press representative, had held four days of screenings that November and reported “unstinting praise from all,” saying that many “rate Cinderella above Snow White.” How much of this was wishful thinking or the desperation of Disney admirers to see him regain his art and popularity is difficult to say. But Cinderella—with an effervescent score and a tense subplot of helpful mice menaced by a wicked feline named Lucifer (Walt had asked Ward Kimball to model it on one of Kimball’s own cats)—was a more fully realized and dramatic animation than any the studio had done since Bambi, and it received the best reception a Disney animation had gotten since Dumbo. In personal correspondence director Michael Curtiz hailed it as the “masterpiece of all pictures you have done.” Producer Hal Wallis declared, “If this is not your best, it is very close to the top.” Walter Wanger wrote him, “You are still the number one producer on my ‘Hit Parade.’” When it opened in February 1950, most reviewers were equally effusive. Cinderella was an unqualified critical hit, and it would soon join the early Disney features as an acknowledged classic.