by Neal Gabler
Almost immediately the Disneys had trouble with RKO’s buyers. RKO had balked at distributing the shorts, claiming that it was no longer profitable for them. Within a few months Walt and Roy were talking with Jules Stein of MCA, with whom they had already been discussing television projects, about another scheme to split from RKO. As Walt explained it to Roy after a meeting with Stein, Stein wanted the company to undergo a “complete liquidation and reorganization…wherein we will be able to secure a certain amount of cash for ourselves and still retain control of the company.” The “vital part,” however, was that the Disneys make a distribution agreement with one of the major studios under which the major would finance Disney films in return for a percentage of the profits. Walt concurred. “I feel that we have to take care of ourselves personally,” he wrote Roy, “and a new releasing deal is imperative.” Even Roy, who had feared Stein, seems to have warmed to the idea, elaborating that they could put the studio land and buildings into a separate corporation, sell the corporation to their new distributor to raise money, and then lease them back.
That plan never reached fruition, and Roy chose to ride it out with RKO for the time being, telling Walt that, despite RKO’s problems, the Disney studio was “so important to them that you might say we are getting added emphasis in the selling of our product.” (Roy may also have had second thoughts about putting himself at the mercy of either Stein or another studio.) But with the studio’s first American live-action feature, the big-budget 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, scheduled for release in December 1954, and with another feature animation, Lady and the Tramp, due out the following June, neither Walt nor Roy wanted to leave the company’s fortunes in RKO’s increasingly unsteady hands. In September 1954, Roy announced that the studio would end its eighteen-year alliance with RKO and distribute films itself through the Buena Vista arm it had created for The Living Desert, another True-Life Adventure, when RKO expressed reluctance to release it. (The company was named for the street on which the studio fronted.) Turning the tables on Roy, Walt called it “my big brother Roy’s project, which I hope works out as he has planned it.” Now for the first time in its history the studio would control the production, the publicity, and the distribution of every one of its films.
Occasionally, however, such synergies went awry. In December, the week before the first airing of Davy Crockett, Disneyland had featured a one-hour documentary, Operation Undersea, on the making of 20,000 Leagues in conjunction with the film’s release that month. (After the show remarkably won the Emmy for Best Individual Program, Walt admitted to its editor, “It was shot for TV, but did a swell job as a trailer on 20,000 LEAGUES.”) A subsequent program, also promoting Disney films, contained a clip showing the film’s star, Kirk Douglas, and his family riding Walt’s train on a visit to Walt’s home. Douglas objected that he hadn’t agreed to have the footage made public. Furious after it was shown again on a repeat, he sued the studio for $415,000 for invasion of privacy. Walt parried, claiming that Douglas had come to the house voluntarily and given his permission orally. The case wasn’t resolved until 1959, when Douglas finally dropped the suit. “It makes me a little sad—that such a thing should exist,” he wrote Walt, “—because I have nothing but pleasant memories of our association together.”
As far as ABC’s Leonard Goldenson was concerned, Disneyland was the “turning point” for the network, the point at which it could finally begin to compete with NBC and CBS. It also, as The New York Times had prophesied when the ABC contract was signed, changed the relationship between Hollywood and television. The very next year, 1955, Warner Bros. and MGM contracted with ABC, and Twentieth Century–Fox with CBS. As one Warner executive testified, “I am not sure just where the initiative started, but as a result of the success Mr. Disney was having with a feature motion picture called 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, I personally felt that his ability to exploit pictures on television was of great value, and began to wonder why we couldn’t do likewise.”
ABC was so ecstatic with the results of the show that in December Robert Kintner wrote Walt to exercise the network’s option on another of Cottrell’s ideas, The Mickey Mouse Club, and recommended that they meet the next month to finalize a deal for a five-day-a-week one-hour telecast. As on Disneyland, Walt would be given “absolute creative control.” And, Kintner rhapsodized, “I believe that in this kid strip, there is the potential for the highest-rated show in the daytime; for the greatest impact on children in the history of communications; and for the creation of a product that not only will have the enthusiastic support of parents, Parent Teacher Associations, etc., but will bring a new dimension to daytime programming.”
As tempting as the offer was, the studio had a difficult enough time producing one hour of programming a week. To produce five hours, in addition to Disneyland, was an incredibly daunting task. By one account Roy, obviously concerned, had deflected Kintner’s entreaties until Walt came into the meeting and asked Kintner if he really thought the studio could do it; when Kintner expressed confidence that Walt could, he waved off Roy’s protests. Of course Walt wasn’t the one who would have to do the work. Hal Adelquist, Bill Walsh, and Perce Pearce were the people actually charged with creating and then running the program while Walt issued approvals and made comments. Indeed, by February 1955, Adelquist and Walsh had prepared preliminary outlines for the first one hundred shows, which Walt had only to review.
The Mickey Mouse Club had been conceptualized with recurring segments—a children’s newsreel, a talent show, serials on the Hardy Boys and Spin and Marty, and a daily cartoon from the Disney library—but the real innovation was the casting. Kintner had wanted a regular host to function as Walt had functioned on Disneyland. Most likely either Walsh or Adelquist decided instead to hire a group of young performers, though Walt warned Walsh not to choose “those kinds with tightly curled hairdos.” He preferred children “who look like they’re having fun,” even if they didn’t have professional skills. Then they could be taught to sing and dance. And Walt suggested that Walsh recruit by going to schoolyards, watching children at recess, and seeing which one drew his attention. When Walsh said that the child might not have any talent, Walt countered that the one Walsh found himself watching would have “star quality.” “The talented kids on the Mickey Mouse Club will be called MOUSEKETEERS,” Walt memoed Adelquist that April, “while the adults will be known as MOOSKETEERS [sic].”
The Musical Mooseketeer, who served as the master of ceremonies, was a thin, boyish, sandy-haired composer named Jimmie Dodd. Walsh had picked him, but knowing how proprietary Walt was, he told Dodd, “We’ve got to let Walt discover you.” So he invited Dodd to a story session Walt was attending and had him perform a song he had written for a Disneyland segment. “Hey, Jim is the one who should be on ‘The Mickey Mouse Club’!” Walt told Walsh. Dodd also wound up writing the program’s theme song, “The Mickey Mouse Club March,” with its signature spelling out of Mickey’s name: “M-I-C-K-E-Y—Why? Because we like you—M-O-U-S-E.” The Big Mooseketeer and Dodd’s sidekick was Roy Williams, a lumpy bear of a man—“fat and funny lookin’,” Walt called him—who had been a longtime gag writer at the studio before Walt tapped him for the show. It was Williams who, recalling a scene from an old Mickey Mouse cartoon in which Mickey tips his skull to Minnie, ears and all, as if it were a hat, came up with the idea of a black mouse-ears cap that all the performers on the show would wear.
Though Walt personally signed off on each cast member and though he approved segments and often visited the set, The Mickey Mouse Club was a Walt Disney production in name only. There was just too much to do, and for Walt too many other priorities, and the show was basically thrown together on the fly. “We would discuss an idea in the morning,” Walsh recalled, “the songwriters would write songs that day, and we would shoot in the afternoon. It was probably the quickest draw on television.” That didn’t escape unnoticed. Jack Gould in The New York Times called the debut in October 1955 “disastrous” and fou
nd the Mouseketeers’ production numbers “only irritatingly cute and contrived and bereft of any semblance of the justly famous Disney touch.” He thought the whole show “keenly disheartening and disappointing.”
Gould may have been right that The Mickey Mouse Club was cheap and cutesy, beneath Disney’s talents, but it was clearly not a program intended for the critics. A group of 131 children previewed the show at the studio three days before its debut; all 131 said they liked it, and all said they would want to watch it every day. That proved to be a prediction. In its first season over ten million children watched the show each day and more than half as many adults. Dodd’s theme song became an instant classic, still sung decades later, and two million mouse-ears were sold within the first three months of the program’s debut. One of the Mouseketeers, dark-haired Annette Funicello, became the nation’s prepubescent heartthrob. When Dodd visited New York in February 1955, socialite and fashion doyenne Babe Paley, the wife of CBS chief William S. Paley, asked if her children could meet him. Afterward Dodd told Walt that the kids knew all the show’s songs and that The Mickey Mouse Club was the “only show Babe Paley lets her children watch.”
Walt may have found this gratifying, but it didn’t necessarily translate into profits, any more than Disneyland’s popularity had. As with Disneyland, the studio wound up spending more on the program, however economically it was made and however many repeats it broadcast, than it received from ABC—about $3 million the first season—which Roy chalked up to his own ignorance of the daytime television market. Nevertheless, as with Disneyland, the objective was neither quality nor profitability nor even popularity. The Mickey Mouse Club was another subsidy for the theme park, not only because Walt, in the words of the program’s newsreel editor, had personally issued “damned serious and direct orders” for the show to feature at least one story on Disneyland every week, but because ABC, in order to land the program, had agreed to furnish $2.4 million more to the park. It was the park that Walt Disney cared about, the park that was his dream now. Television was just a means to that end.
IV
The park. All the time that Walt had been working on the Disneyland television show, all the time he had been negotiating, preparing, and approving, he had been thinking about the park. Everyone knew that he was only tangentially involved with the other projects, even as the studio was overwhelmed. “This avalanche of work hit the studio,” said producer Winston Hibler when Disneyland began. “We augmented the staff by adding additional writers. We used our nature photographers to start moving out on projects. We had to get ourselves in high gear, from a program that included maybe three, four or five features a year to the prospect of twenty-six shows a year.” But Walt was barely part of the ramp-up. “Those were the days when he didn’t have any contact with the picture,” Ward Kimball said of Walt’s lack of participation in Man in Space. He simply attended the screening, laughed throughout, and then asked, “How in hell did you guys think up all that stuff?” Milt Kahl, who was working on feature animations at the time, had the same experience. He said that Walt would sit in on the story meetings but not as often as he once had. “[T]he difference was,” Kahl believed, “that on weekends and evenings and sitting on the john and all that stuff, he wasn’t thinking about our pictures. He was thinking about Disneyland.”
He was always thinking about Disneyland. In September 1953, as soon as he had confirmed the deal on the Anaheim property, he asked Marvin Davis to draw up new plans for the much larger park, and Davis, working frantically, would turn in a new plan every two or three days. A visitor to WED the following year, as the plans were firming up, described wading “through a fascinating jumble of miniature worlds—the frontier and of the past, the rocket space world of the future, the never-never fantasyland where the fairy tale and the Disney characters all live together happily ever after. Maps covered the walls, tables overflowed with contour models and scale drawings, and the floors of the studios, shops and hallways were knee-deep in models of old-time locomotives, paddlewheel boats, Wild West saloons, Sleeping Beauty Castles and gleaming, jet-propelled spaceships to the moon which looked quite capable of making it. This was the chaotic chrysalis of ‘Disneyland.’”
Walt was collecting still more ideas, more data, more suggestions. In June 1954, after signing the ABC contract, he sent a four-man expedition headed by Bill Cottrell on another information-gathering junket to amusement parks, museums, even arcades and shooting galleries, across the country, and he sent another representative to the Playland Park in Rye, New York, just to count the patrons. He had also hired as advisers two longtime amusement park operators, George Whitney, who ran the Cliff House in San Francisco, and Ed Schott, who ran the Coney Island Park in Cincinnati. “While we were planning Disneyland, every amusement park operator we talked to said it would fail,” John Hench recalled. “And Walt would come out of those meetings even happier than if they’d been optimistic.”
He loved the fight now that he had something to fight for, loved the hurdles he had to leap, loved the idea that he had to prove himself right again, and he talked of waging the same old battles that he once had had to wage in making the animation features. With the exception of his advisers, he didn’t want anyone on the staff who had amusement park experience because, he told them, Disneyland wouldn’t be an amusement park and because he wanted young people who would be willing to learn and make mistakes. To be the general director of the project, he hired a tall, thirty-three-year-old Oklahoman named C. V. Wood, who had been both a champion lariat twirler and the director of industrial engineering at an aircraft company during the war before becoming the manager of the Los Angeles branch of the economic research division of Stanford Research Institute, which had done the feasibility studies for the park. Wood was charming and affable with a down-home manner and a thick southwestern drawl—“the most winning and likable personality that one could ever expect to find,” said one acquaintance—and he had acquitted himself well while at SRI by using that charm to coax holdouts on the Ball subdivision to sell their land to Disney. Walt was charmed too. “Walt reacted to him the way the farmer reacts to the fast-talking city slicker,” recalled Buzz Price. Wood, in turn, recruited a retired admiral named Joe Fowler, who had once headed the San Francisco Navy Yard, as a consultant, though Walt later “trapped” the admiral, as Walt put it, into assuming the role of construction supervisor. The officers set themselves up in two old ranch houses on the site, where, just as at the old writers’ apartment at Hyperion, the staff commandeered the kitchen, dining rooms, even closets. Walt’s office was in a bedroom. There was a single bathroom in the facility.
They broke ground on July 12, 1954, which meant that they had to finish within a year to meet Walt’s self-imposed deadline. Everyone had to rush. A structural engineer, who had been hired to assist in designing the buildings and coordinating with the WED staff, had to lay out foundations and framing even before the architectural details were finished, which caused problems, especially on Main Street. And there were other problems. The soil in Anaheim was so sandy and porous that the Rivers of America kept seeping into the ground and clay soil had to be trucked to the site. Unions were aggrieved. A strike at the Orange County plant that was supplying asphalt necessitated hauling asphalt from San Diego. A plumbers’ strike limited the number of water fountains that could be installed before the opening. One group of disgruntled machinists “forgot” to bring their tools, while another crew of laborers cut the wires on the Mr. Toad ride because they were angry at being driven so hard. On one occasion union painters at the park sandblasted the locomotive Casey Jr. and repainted it because it had been painted at the studio by members of a rival union. Even nature rebelled: the weather in the spring was the wettest the county had had in twenty years.
And then there was Walt Disney trudging over the site in a straw hat and loud sport shirt, as in the old days, ordering the workers about, alternately hurrying them up and slowing them down, willing the property to conform to his dr
eam. “He walked over every inch of Disneyland,” Ward Kimball said, “telling them to move a fence a little more to the left because you couldn’t see the boat as it came ’round the corner. I’d be with him out there, and he’d say, ‘The lake is too small. Maybe we should make it larger. Let’s find out if we can move the train wreck over another fifty feet.’ He thought of everything.” Morgan “Bill” Evans, whose brother had landscaped the property at Carolwood and who had been hired to landscape the park, recalled, “Walt’s approach was to say, ‘I need a jungle,’ or, ‘I need a touch of Alpine flavor for the sky ride.’ He didn’t know which trees would work, but he knew what he wanted.” He wanted perfection. He wanted the park as realized to match the park in his mind’s eye. Evans remembered a Saturday morning when Walt complained that a Brazilian pepper tree had been planted too close to the walk at the entrance to Adventureland. Evans had to pack up the six-ton root ball and move the tree.
Having come to dread the studio, he cherished the park and the time he spent there; he would even sit in the catering tent eating hot dogs with the workers. Still, he was impatient with the pace of construction and nervous that guests might not see where the money and the effort had gone. He wanted the spending to show, and it bothered him that so much money was invested in infrastructure. Several months before the opening he grumbled to Harper Goff, “You know, I’ve spent 50% of the total budget already, and there isn’t one thing you’d call terrific out there right now.” Goff remembered that Walt was actually crying when he said it. Another time, watching the foundation being poured for the Main Street train station with Joe Fowler and Dick Irvine, he fumed, “By the time Joe gets through burying all our money underground, we won’t have a thing left for the show!” He made a similar complaint when Fowler ordered a drydock dug for the Mark Twain Riverboat that would ply the Rivers of America. He called it “Joe’s Ditch.”