Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  Walt was now consciously fostering that image. Though he always claimed to be terrified about performing onscreen, no doubt sincerely, ABC wanted him on the programs as a host, apparently to provide them with an identity. That May, Walt reluctantly agreed to appear on not more than three programs each year and on commercials, subject to his “reasonable approval.” At a meeting two weeks later, after he had already filmed the first introduction—he would introduce the program in a wood-paneled mock-up of his office—he conceded to appear more frequently. Walt was extremely self-deprecating about his performances. He said he didn’t consider himself an actor, that he had a bad voice with a “nasal twang,” and that he had gotten “stumped” in worrying “about being in too much of it,” meaning the show. On the other hand, he said, he was always himself, which “will be the gimmick,” and he realized, whether he liked it or not, that his participation was probably necessary to get the show off the ground before he and the production staff could establish other personalities. “Got to be an M.C. to get it going,” he told his staff. “We’ve been selling the name and the personality.”

  Walt may have been “scared to death,” as he later said, and he may have frequently fumbled the scripts, garbling words or tripping over them and requiring repeated takes, but for all his demurrals, he seemed rather to like the chance to create a television persona. At nearly 190 pounds on his five-foot, ten-inch frame, he was huskier now than he had ever been, fleshier, and at fifty-two he had finally lost the ferret-faced intensity of his youth and had physically grown into the imposing postwar corporate figure that was being depicted in the media. As his creations conveyed reassurance, so did the man. He was calm, modest, unprepossessing, homespun, curious, charming, and of course, avuncular—the perfect guest to have in one’s living room each week.

  With Disneyland’s popularity, Walt was now not only a kind of logo for the studio; he had himself become one of its stars, like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, with even a personal publicist to promote him—to promote “Walt Disney.” That December, seventeen years to the day after his first Time cover, for Snow White, he was featured again on the cover of the magazine, which conveyed the new image of Disney as a homegrown cultural behemoth—a “genuine hand-hewn American original with the social adze-marks sticking out all over”—and claimed that “Disneyism has swept the world.” Ward Kimball remembered that when he and Walt went to Greenfield Village in 1948, no one had recognized him until word circulated that Disney was there. It had always been the name “Walt Disney” that created a stir, not the face of Walt Disney. Television changed that—“the change in his life,” Kimball felt. After Disneyland, Walt Disney was perhaps the most widely recognized filmmaker in the world, and Kimball believed that Walt had to conform to the public persona, which made him the very personification of American wholesomeness and decency. He was not merely subsumed by the persona, as he had been in the postwar years; he felt he had to internalize it, live within it, becoming a prisoner of his image as he had been a prisoner of his studio. “I smoke and I drink and there’s a whole lot of things I do that I don’t want to be part of that image,” he told an employee. Diane Disney agreed that he had changed. “You could see how he grew between the beginning of television and Disneyland,” she said. “Television didn’t change him as a person, but I do think it led to a more polished personality.”

  Even at social gatherings at his Carolwood home, Kimball remembered, Walt would appear in a straw hat, brand-new blue jeans with big cuffs, and an old plaid lumberjack shirt (Diane denied he ever wore the outfit except for publicity), and he would excuse himself to go work in his shop, emerging occasionally to mingle—“letting people know he was a common man,” as Kimball said. And although, Kimball observed, Walt may have “played the role of a bashful tycoon who was embarrassed in public, he knew exactly what he was doing at all times.” To his detractors, this duality vindicated their judgment that Disney had betrayed his early cultural subversion. Social historian Jackson Lears would see him as the “most flagrant example of that widespread phenomenon in American cultural history: the innovator presenting himself as a traditionalist, the mortal enemy of folk life declaring himself its chief defender, the capitalist tricked out as a populist.” “In the last analysis, Walt Disney’s greatest creation was Walt Disney,” critic Richard Schickel would write. “In retrospect it is possible to see that this is precisely what he was working at for some forty years,” even though, Schickel observed, none of his admirers seemed to notice that their “loved object was less a man than an illusion created by a vast machinery”—just like the animations and the theme park.

  But the real testament to Disneyland’s popularity was neither Walt Disney’s recognizability nor the ratings nor the advertisers nor the generational union it seemed to effect. The real testament was Davy Crockett. Since the mid-1940s Walt had flirted with the idea of doing an animation on Davy Crockett, probably as part of his prospective American heroes anthology, the Tennessee Indian fighter and frontiersman who later died defending the Alamo in Texas. He had even recruited the realist painter Thomas Hart Benton to participate, though Benton eventually begged off, writing Walt that “Walt Disney’s stuff is good enough for my money as it is without a lot of damn painters getting in it” and that he, Benton, was “too ‘set’ in my ways to be very adaptable.” By the time Disneyland was in its planning stages, Walt was urging the Frontierland unit to come up with stories on American heroes. As Disneyland producer Bill Walsh remembered it, the staff, under the press of time and with a meeting impending, decided to choose one hero and go with it. “And the first one we pulled out,” he said, “by dumb luck, was Davy Crockett.” Walt was suspicious—he was afraid, Walsh said, of “too much fighting Indians”—but the unit elaborated a long treatment with storyboards, and Walt signed off, albeit reluctantly. When the director Norman Foster retailed Crockett’s adventures at length, Walt asked, “Yeah, but what does he do?” which Walsh described as “typical” of Walt. “He never let you sit down without pouring a little turpentine on your rear end.”

  If the studio’s selection of Crockett first was a matter of luck, its selection of who would play Crockett was even more serendipitous. Walt had screened the horror film Them! to see whether the film’s star, James Arness, might be a suitable Crockett, but he was struck by another player in the picture named Fess Parker, a tall, rangy actor with a drawl who then auditioned for Walt and won the part by strumming a song on his guitar. Parker had given himself thirty-six months after graduating from the University of Texas to make a living as an actor. The deadline was the very month he began shooting Crockett.

  And there was more dumb luck still. When Bill Walsh returned from Tennessee, where the show had been shot—Walt had actually visited the location with Lillian that September—and then had it edited, he discovered that they had not shot enough footage for three full sixty-minute programs, which was the original plan. Walt suggested that Walsh think of using the storyboards themselves as a kind of introduction at the top of each show to fill out the hours, but when Walt reviewed the drawings, he thought they looked dull and offered another suggestion: that they find a song to accompany them. Walsh enlisted the studio composer, George Bruns, and the scenarist, Tom Blackburn, who together quickly wrote a ballad for the beginning of the program.

  Then something happened that no one at the time could quite explain: Davy Crockett became an overnight national sensation. Within a few weeks of the feature’s debut on Disneyland on December 5, 1954, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” with its opening lyric, “Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee/ Greenest state in the land of the free,” had become as deeply entrenched in American popular culture as “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” or “Der Fuehrer’s Face” had been in their day. (Bill Walsh, in fact, attributed the show’s success to the song.) Children not only sang the song and bought the record—seven million copies in the first six months—they also bought Crockett T-shirts, Crockett toy rifles, Crockett knives,
Crockett books, Crockett jackets, Crockett bandannas, and dozens of other Crockett paraphernalia in a buying mania that had been rivaled only by the consumption of Mickey Mouse merchandise in the 1930s. Above all, ten million Crockett coonskin caps were sold, becoming part of the essential uniform of every boy, and many girls, in the nation. At the same time Crockett pushed the Disneyland audience well over the forty million mark—one-quarter of the entire country. No one at the studio had anticipated the response; by the time the first program aired, Norman Foster had already filmed the third episode in which Crockett dies, thus precluding sequels. “ABC couldn’t believe it. Parker couldn’t believe it. Neither could Walt nor I,” Bill Walsh recalled. Walt compared Crockett as a phenomenon to Mickey Mouse, Three Little Pigs, and Snow White. The country went so Crockett-crazy that even in political circles the historical frontiersman was now the subject of debates over whether he was the embodiment of conservative values, as National Review editor William Buckley asserted, or had really been a hard-drinking, mendacious rascal, as Harper’s editor John Fisher asserted.

  Parker went to Washington that spring, met with Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and Senators Estes Kefauver and Lyndon Johnson, and then found himself mobbed by autograph seekers at a luncheon where the guests were so entranced by Parker they ignored the speakers. On a personal appearance tour through the Southwest and Southeast that June, unprecedented crowds of 18,000 to 20,000 people greeted him at the airport. “And wherever he goes, the reaction is tremendous,” publicity chief Card Walker wrote Walt. “And it was an extremely emotional reaction,” Parker later said. “I’m not kidding you. I had people handing their babies to me. I signed pictures for infants. It was very intense.” Parker, who had been unknown just six months earlier, was awed. “No young man has ever had a greater share of good fortune!” he wrote Walt appreciatively, and even better fortune since Parker, by contractual agreement, received a ten percent royalty on all the Crockett merchandise, Crockett publications, and Crockett recordings. Still, a year after the tour Walt was forced to renegotiate Parker’s seven-year personal services contract since, as Bill Anderson wrote Walt of their new star, “[s]ooner or later he will either get some kind of an adjustment or he will give us trouble.”

  In trying to analyze why Davy Crockett suddenly seized the national imagination, one could certainly point to the physical and narrative amplitude of the broadcasts and to their quality, which was vastly superior to that of most television programs and much closer to that of films. (One could call it the first television miniseries.) Children, to whom the program had largely been targeted, had never had anything on television so grand. The three installments had, in fact, cost nearly $750,000, and though MGM had loaned some old stock footage of Indians from Northwest Passage, Walt didn’t stint.* When he had visited the location the previous September, and Foster had braced to be fired for falling behind schedule, Walt instead approached him and told him to reshoot a scene in which Crockett wrestled a bear because, Walt said, he could see a zipper on the bear costume.

  Walt Disney had clearly struck a national nerve, even if accidentally, in reviving the idea of a plainspoken, fearless, idealistic, compassionate, but intrepid hero, at a time when Americans were harking back to values that they believed distinguished them from the conformity and coldbloodedness of their global antagonist, the Soviet Union, and that would demonstrate their superiority to Communism, Crockett’s death at the Alamo notwithstanding. “Davy’s Time,” Time called it, seeing Crockett as an expression of growing national confidence, and boasting, “The people of the U.S. had never been so prosperous. Never before had the breadwinner taken home so much money…. Not since the first delirious mistaken weeks after V.J. day had there been so much expectancy—with caution this time—for peace.” And one Time correspondent, reflecting on the meaning of Crockett’s popularity for Americans, opined, “Davy Crockett is the epitome of a man who can lick any problem with his wits and his own two hands.” Fess Parker himself thought it may have been a matter of what he called “hero-hunger,” and at least one analyst would observe that the phenomenon may have had less to do with self-confidence than with self-doubt after the recent trauma of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting, and that Crockett was a palliative. Whether Crockett was symbolizing optimism or trying to reestablish it, Walt was engaged, as he had been since the war’s end, in a national reclamation, and the country responded, presumably because it liked the image that Walt was fostering for it. As historian Steven Watts put it, “Walt Disney, with his instinctive feel for cultural pressure points, half-consciously shaped an ideal, reassuring representative of the American way as it faced a daunting challenge from without.”

  Reclamation of the past was not all that Walt Disney promoted on his Disneyland television program. He also offered the appeal of Tomorrowland. While preparing the Disneyland show, he instructed Ward Kimball to hunt for subjects for the Tomorrowland episodes, and Kimball came upon a three-part series on space exploration, in Collier’s magazine by three of the foremost experts on space, Wernher Von Braun, Willy Ley, and Heinz Haber. Walt read the series in one night and came to the studio the next day fired with enthusiasm. He told Kimball to get Von Braun, Ley, and Haber to the studio to prepare the programs. The result was another three-part miniseries, beginning with an animated documentary called Man in Space, that premiered on March 9, 1955. More than two years before the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite and heated up the space race, Man in Space went a long way toward building a large constituency for space exploration, and President Eisenhower ordered that it be shown to his rocket experts. At the end of 1955 Walt met with nuclear scientists Glenn Seaborg, Edward Teller, and Ernest Lawrence about a program on atomic energy, to be titled Our Friend the Atom, that would have the same effect in creating a consensus behind that technology. As a result Walt Disney, who had become one of the chief purveyors of American values from the past, also became one of the chief popularizers of and cheerleaders for American science in the future.

  Whether or not Disney had, as Watts believed, really shaped an American ideal—and he doubtless contributed to it—one could meaningfully speak in the 1950s of “Walt Disney’s America.” Evolving in the postwar decade, as the new Walt had, this America drew on democratic traditions of modesty, self-effacement, naïveté, and determination, which was what Crockett personified. Yet it also was forward-looking, evincing an almost childlike confidence in science and technology, the very sorts of things that seemed to threaten those old democratic traditions. On the one hand, it projected a quaint, white-picket-fence nostalgia of the sort Walt had celebrated in So Dear to My Heart; on the other, it projected a futuristic vision of the sort he expressed in Man in Space. Like Walt’s own image, “Walt Disney’s America” was a confection and an aesthetic—smoothly blended from Hollywood, Booth Tarkington, Horatio Alger, Norman Rockwell, Thomas Edison, and Buck Rogers—but in the same way that Walt had begun to internalize his image, America in the 1950s began to internalize hers. As Time’s chest-thumping suggested, “Walt Disney’s America” was a reassuring artifice that was embraced as a reality—the spiritual equivalent of Disneyland. It was the face, or the carapace, that the country had assumed to show to itself and to the world.

  While the success of Disneyland had many markers, including Walt’s stardom, Davy Crockett, the interest in space, and the idealization of America itself, one thing the program did not do was turn a profit for the studio. When all was said and done, the studio figured to earn $73,000 per program from ABC, including repeats. But the budgets—which ranged from $14,500 for a program on Alice in Wonderland to the nearly $300,000 for each of the Crockett episodes and for the first Man in Space—averaged just over $100,000. As he had done with the features, Walt plowed every cent back into production and then some, though he also made commercials for several of the sponsors and contracted with several companies for them to underwrite programs that would serve essentially as hour-long promotions for the companies’ agen
das. (The Portland Cement Association, for example, gave the studio $200,000 to produce a film titled Magic Highway U.S.A.) The objective, however, had never been to make a profit. It was to promote Disneyland and publicize the new features, which made Disneyland itself a commercial.

  That synergy became even more important with a decision made by Roy just before the first program aired. For years Roy had been dissatisfied with RKO’s distribution, and though he renewed the contract in 1943, the very next year, unhappy with RKO’s lax publicity, he recommended that the studio hire an ad agency to promote its films. Even with the contract, RKO had initially refused to distribute Seal Island and Two Fabulous Characters, which had been renamed The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. “By and large, they are all nice fellows,” Roy wrote Walt in September 1948, “and they all try to cooperate on the surface, but underneath you feel that resistance, and sometimes it flares into an open break.” Roy thought RKO wasn’t getting the studio half of what the pictures should be making, especially since, he felt, the major studios were colluding to protect their exhibition interests, which the government had ordered them to divest. To speed the divestiture, Roy joined other independent producers in a suit against the studios, but he was not sanguine. “Sometimes I get very blue,” Roy wrote, “thinking about it all and I have a feeling that continuing down this road of high cost, quality pictures is just a road to bankruptcy.” The only solution, he felt, was for the best independents to join forces in a distribution organization of their own.

  Two years later Roy hadn’t acted on his idea but contracted once again with RKO to release Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland and to continue releasing the studio’s reissues for a 30 percent fee and to distribute the True-Life series, though RKO was still less than enthusiastic about the last. But RKO was soon in turmoil. The eccentric billionaire industrialist Howard Hughes had bought RKO in 1948, siphoned off the company’s resources, and then put it back on the market four years later, but not before he offered the company to Walt. “They had a lot of liabilities,” Card Walker, Disney publicity chief at the time, recalled, “and he offered them ten million dollars credit besides. But Walt said, ‘What do I want that problem for? I’ve got my own little thing over here. I don’t need another studio on my hands.’” (Ironically, Walt said he had also been asked to take over the studio back in 1948 to thwart Hughes.) Instead, Hughes sold his studio to a syndicate.