by Neal Gabler
The claim was so compelling that as soon as the park opened, both its observers and its creators felt a need to analyze the experience, a need that would continue as long as the park existed. Almost from the moment Disney first imagined it, he had thought of Disneyland in cinematic terms—a “cute movie set is what it really is,” Walt told his staff. As the planning proceeded, Ben Sharpsteen said that Walt had repeatedly explained that the “success of Disneyland was primarily based upon the skills of motion picture set building and special effects techniques.” To achieve cinematic effects, he had manipulated the park’s proportions. It would often be said that Walt had built the entire park in five-eighths scale. In truth, the railroad was five-eighths scale, which allowed Walt to use narrow-gauge rails and refurbished narrow-gauge trains. Main Street was a function of clever foreshortening. The lower floors of the shops were nine-tenths scale, the second floors eight-tenths, and the third seven-tenths. As for the rest of the park, Walt wrote an old acquaintance that the “scale of objects varies according to what and where they are”—what he called a “matter of choosing the scale that would be practical and still look right.” The Mark Twain, he said, was built on a three-quarters scale.
The reason, Walt averred, was psychological—a lesson learned, no doubt, from his miniatures at Disneylandia. For one thing, the altered size “made the street a toy,” he felt, and provided the subliminal fun that toys did. For another, it underscored the sense of nostalgia because it associated the past and the fantastic with the small and quaint. “[P]eople like to think their world is somehow more grown up than Papa’s was,” he said. And finally, he thought, the scale made the park more inviting and accessible—a human monument. Ken Anderson recalled Walt saying, “You know, tyrants in the past built these huge buildings—look how big and powerful I am. And they towered over the people just to impress the people.” At Disneyland the people would be made to feel that they towered over the buildings.
Even more sophisticated effects recreated the sense of watching a film. One analyst compared the park to a Disney animation, with each of the main attractions playing the same role as the “key frames” in the films: “conveying the extremes of the action.” This effect made the images and experiences more indelible. John Hench, who helped design the park, claimed that Walt had devised a “kind of live action cross dissolve when passing from one area of Disneyland to another,” referring to a film technique in which one scene gradually fades while the next gradually appears. “He would insist on changing the texture of the pavement at the threshold of each new land because he said, ‘You can get information about a changing environment through the soles of your feet.’” But this also kept the experience fluid and organic—not just a disjointed series of rides but a complete sensory flow from one to the next.
The WED staff, or “Imagineers,” as they would later be dubbed, to acknowledge the combination of engineering and imagination that went into the task of designing the park, had not only been inspired by movies in thinking of rides; Walt had coached them to think of the rides as movie experiences. One would pass through “scenes” physically just as one did while temporally watching a film. Indeed, during the planning stages Walt, while examining the storyboards for the attractions, would actually act out guests’ reactions as he had always acted out the scenes of the animations. In effect, then, the park was designed not only to provide archetypal tableaux but to tell a story or series of stories in which the guest was put in the role of the protagonist: Snow White or Mr. Toad or Peter Pan or Alice. And the stories, one analyst believed, all resolved to an overriding theme, one that Disney had sounded repeatedly: “that Good triumphs over Evil, that the little fellow, through a combination of luck, courage, and cunning, can always overcome in the end the big bad person in his or her numerous guises, all of which signify Power and its abuse.” Subliminally, the park empowered the guest.
Because the park had been imagined as a set or group of sets, it also necessarily addressed the transaction between the reality outside the park and the fantasy within it—moving from one to the other, usurping one with the other. Walt had always intended to transport his guests to a separate space, and he once scolded a publicist who had parked his car where it could be seen from the Mark Twain because passengers in 1860 could not possibly imagine an automobile from 1955. “I want them to feel they are in another world,” he would tell his Imagineers, something he could just as easily have said about his animations. There was general agreement that he had largely succeeded. One reporter visiting Disneyland called it “less an amusement park than a state of mind, in the real meaning of the term,” which would become a common sentiment when journalists tried to pin down Disneyland’s appeal. More specifically, because it seemed so distinct from everyday reality, some would think of it as a place in which people weren’t so much indulging themselves as being transformed. “Something in the Disney parks, if not Disneyism as such,” critic Greil Marcus would write, “brings out not necessarily the best or the worst but so often the most in people—it strips them bare, reduces them to babble or prompts curses and slurs.” John Hench saw Walt’s intention as therapeutic. “When Walt built Disneyland, he was striving to make people feel better about themselves,” Hench said. “I think he had discovered what people were looking for—the feeling of being alive and in love with life,” which gave the park an almost religious aura.
The reason the visitors felt so good, Hench believed, was that Walt Disney had painstakingly conceived of his park as ordered and harmonious. Disneyland had no ambiguity, no contradictions, and no dissonance. The layout and the way guests were subtly directed to destinations, the cleanliness, the efficiency with which crowds were queued up to wait for attractions, the weather, even the sounds of the park—all contributed to a sense of absolute well-being. Publisher Walter Annenberg, after visiting the park, said that if he were forced to reduce it to a “single descriptive word I would say wholesomeness.”
Wholesomeness was certainly part of it, part of the perfection that Disneyland seemed to convey and the cocoon of joy it provided. But in the final analysis, the deepest appeal of Disneyland may have been less the perfection itself than the construction of it, as it had been in the Disney animations where the theme of responsibility meshed with the act of creation. Whatever else Disneyland did, it gave its visitors not just the vicarious thrills of the characters whose personas they assumed on the rides or their sense of triumph; it gave them the vicarious power of the man who had created it all: Walt Disney. Everything in Walt Disney’s life had pointed to this park. All his efforts, a New Yorker contributor observed, had reached their climax in Disneyland, “where, in this most elaborate of the Master’s animated productions, his live public has been fitted into the cartoon frame to play an aesthetic as well as an economic role.” At Disneyland the guests were part of the overall atmosphere of happiness, and they reveled in their own manipulation because it was so well executed, because it was so comfortable and reassuring, and perhaps most of all, because it was so empowering to know that someone could actually have achieved this. In the end, it was not the control of wonder that made Disneyland so overwhelming to its visitors; like so much else in Walt Disney’s career, it was the wonder of control.
V
Walt Disney, who had been disappointed so many times in his life, was not disappointed by his park. When one of his animated features had been completed, however far short it may have fallen of his expectations, there was nothing he could do, which was why he had developed the ability to disengage from his projects as soon as they were finished. “You’re always so absorbed in the next thing, in the thing to come, that when I finish a picture, I forget the damn thing,” he once said. The park was different. The park was organic. If it fell short, he could keep plussing it, changing it, expanding it. He liked to say that it would never be finished.
He didn’t want to disengage from Disneyland—Disneyland was his life now. “He knew everything that went into the park,” Dick Ir
vine said as one might have once commented about Walt’s knowledge of the studio. “He knew where every pipe was. He knew the height of every building.” Lillian said he knew where every nail in the park was located. After its disastrous opening and during the sweltering one-hundred-degree heat wave that followed, he was spending virtually all his time at the park “ironing out some little problems,” as he told one journalist. But even with the problems ironed out, he could not pull himself away, and as late as December he was still spending most of his time at the park, especially on the weekends. “You know, Joe,” he told Joe Fowler, “I come down here to get a real rest from the humdrum of making pictures at the studio. This is my real amusement. This is where I relax.”
Though he had an electric cart, he would usually prowl the park on foot, with that long, loping farmboy’s stride of his, often being mobbed by guests who recognized him from television and asked for his autograph. (He would later institute a policy of asking them to send requests to the studio because he could scarcely make his way through the park with the interruptions.) He would swoop down on the rides. Sometimes, remembered one Jungle Cruise boat operator, he would just stand on the dock and watch. Other times he would jump in a boat by himself or with other passengers. When he got a four-minute ride instead of the seven-minute one, he complained to Adventureland manager Dick Nunis: “If the trip is seven minutes and you cut out three minutes, it’s like going to a movie and having some important reels left out.” When he wasn’t supervising, he was enjoying the park like a child with a giant playset. An employee at the Sunkist Citrus House remembered him coming by on Sunday mornings to stuff oranges into the juicing machines. Sometimes he would suddenly appear at night—even at four o’clock in the morning. “He practically lived there,” Lillian would say, as he had once lived at the studio, and just as he had living quarters off his office at Burbank, he had an apartment over the fire station at Disneyland; it was decorated in red velvet, lace, and brocades to resemble a late-nineteenth-century home. One employee said she would occasionally see him standing at the window of the apartment, as he had on opening day, crying, moved by the achievement.
After all the doubts that the networks, his staff, his brother, and even his wife had harbored about Disneyland, Walt had been vindicated. The opening-day fiasco notwithstanding, the park was an instant triumph. In its first week it tallied 161,657 visitors, and by the end of the month it was attracting well over twenty thousand attendees each day—over a half-million visitors in all after four weeks of operation. In August nearly half of all tourists to Southern California visited Disneyland, it was estimated, and the park welcomed its one-millionth guest by the end of September. In its first year it would attract 3.6 million visitors. By the end of its second year it would greet four million more guests, for a 13 percent increase—25,000 on the second anniversary alone. It would receive its ten-millionth visitor less than two and a half years after its opening, by which time it exceeded the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone Park, and Yosemite Park as a tourist attraction.
And for the first time in nearly seventeen years—since the wake of Snow White—Walt Disney Productions was flush. Each adult visitor to the park paid a one-dollar admission; each of the children, fifty cents. In addition, they paid anywhere from ten to twenty-five cents for individual attractions. Parking at the twelve-thousand-car lot cost an additional twenty-five cents. That October, because some guests objected to the dollar admission, and because larger attractions like the Jungle Cruise and the Mark Twain were drawing a disproportionate share of riders, publicist Ed Ettinger suggested offering along with the admission a booklet of eight tickets—differentiated by A, B, and C attractions, from the least to the most sophisticated—for a single price of $2.50 for adults and $1.50 for children. The original plan was to offer the booklets for a limited time, but the system proved so efficient and popular that they became a staple of the park. A D ticket was added in 1956, and an E ticket for the most popular rides in 1959. E ticket soon became slang to describe any experience that was especially exciting.
As these millions of dollars poured into the park—the company had a gross revenue of $24.5 million in 1955, against $11 million the previous year—Walt began brainstorming again. To attract patrons at Christmastime, when he feared attendance would slacken, he created a Mickey Mouse Club Circus to run from late November through New Year’s. It had been a lifelong ambition of his to own a circus, he wrote a friend, but when attendance proved disappointing, he concluded that visitors to Disneyland did not want to spend their precious time watching a circus for two hours, and the venture wound up losing $125,000. Even before the circus ended its run, Walt had also come to another conclusion—that “it is not unique enough to be in the park.”
Disneyland needed big attractions, thrilling attractions, attractions one could find nowhere else. Just months after the opening, he was meeting with representatives of a Swiss firm to install a $200,000 cable gondola, or what Walt called an Alpine Skyway, that would traverse the park. At the same time he was meeting with executives from the Monsanto chemical company to discuss a plastic House of Tomorrow for the deficient Tomorrowland. (Monsanto had engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology design the house, and the company was looking for a venue.) “It is possible that we could handle the TV treatment of your House of Tomorrow in the same manner as we did the construction of DISNEYLAND PARK,” Walt wrote Monsanto, explaining how they could document the phases of the house on Disneyland. By January, Monsanto and Disney had closed the deal. Meanwhile Walt had entrusted Bill Cottrell with making an overall reappraisal of the park—Cottrell would revisit Europe that fall for inspiration—and in May, Walt announced a $7.1 million expansion, including the completion of Tom Sawyer Island and Storybook Land, the Alpine Skyway, an Astro Jet ride, a Rainbow Caverns mine train pegged to a True-Life Adventure titled The Living Desert, and an Indian village—all made possible, Walt told the Los Angeles Times, because the park had proven so successful that banks were lending it money at rates of 3.75 percent, a significantly lower rate of interest than the one they were willing to grant for films. Still, even Walt Disney’s power had limits. He had asked Joe Fowler to see if Fowler could provide snow for Main Street and freeze over the Rivers of America. Fowler politely told him it couldn’t be done.
Now that Disneyland was successful, there came a reckoning. All the time that the park was being constructed, Walt had had to delegate authority, primarily to C. V. Wood, the personable young Oklahoman whom Walt had put in charge of logistics while Walt himself floated above most of the practical concerns. Once Disneyland was opened, Wood headed a three-man Operations Committee that effectively ran the park. But as he had with John Reeder and Fred Leahy at the studio, no sooner did Walt delegate power than he resented the individuals to whom he had granted it. Walt needed control, especially since he feared that Wood had begun building a cadre of employees who were loyal to him rather than to Walt. By January, Wood was gone, and Walt announced that he would personally assume the duties of general manager, working directly with a new five-man, theoretically all-powerful Park Management and Operations Committee that he, as the president of Disneyland, had appointed. In effect, Walt replaced Wood with himself. When a Disneyland Policy and Planning Committee met the next month to determine the park’s philosophy and set its agenda—questions like whether it should close during the off-season or whether it should be open only six days a week—there was no doubt who was now in charge. Walt Disney, the spiritual leader, had taken temporal command.*
If Walt was besotted by the park, he was still resentful at having to play corporate chief at a studio that was increasingly making films he didn’t particularly care about, and as he assumed more control of Disneyland, he yielded more control of Walt Disney Productions. “I feel what’s wrong there’s been too much of me,” Walt told an interviewer to justify his absence from the studio, and, recalling the words he had used to describe himself just before his 1931 breakdown, he said, “I have b
een the slave driver…. I just sometimes feel like a dirty heel the way I pound, pound, pound.” He admitted that he was essentially a strategist now, the first and last resort, rather than a hands-on producer—“[W]e can talk something over and we arrive at something and they’re off”—and that the studio staff was more autonomous than it had ever been. Potential screen material was now considered by a committee at a monthly “synopsis” meeting, which Walt never attended, and eventually he entrusted Bill Anderson, who had been the production manager at the studio and then the vice president of studio operations, with the job of supervising the films.
Technically, Anderson assumed authority only in Walt’s absence, but Walt was usually absent now, at the park or abroad or sequestered in his office. As Ben Sharpsteen, who was producing True-Life Adventures, described the new process, “Walt says in effect, ‘I’m gonna be gone for quite a while,’ say six weeks, and he says, ‘You know we’ve been accumulating a lot of footage about birds, you know, that stuff and this stuff, and down there,’ and he says, ‘By the way, I want you…to put that in some kind of order and draw a bead on it.’” This was a responsibility—one that Walt had previously assumed himself—but Sharpsteen felt it was also a threat: “I want to see that stuff in usable shape when I come back or else.” That was the conundrum throughout the studio. Now that he was insulated by layers of management, Walt didn’t want to be bothered, but he also expected things to be done precisely as he wanted.