Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  Yet even as it was expiring, its influence would be profound—as profound, in its own way, as Disney’s had been. The inexpensive, stylized animation it pioneered quickly became the industry standard, especially as television became the primary market for cartoons. Animators “cheated” now. They used fewer drawings held for a longer time onscreen, they economized on detail and movement, and they often used sound to suggest an action without actually showing it. (One producer had a dictum that if the stack of drawings couldn’t fit under his door, the scene was too long.) Joseph Barbera, who left MGM with William Hanna to form their own studio and who specialized in television animation, called this “limited” animation his “secret weapon.” All the squash-and-stretch effects for which Disney had striven, the sense of dimensionality, mass, gravity, and nuance, were largely gone and with them any vestige of the dreams that Walt had held about the possibility of providing a new world onscreen, much less a new art. Those dreams had been transferred to Disneyland. Disneyland was the refuge now. Disneyland was the hope.

  Photo Insert 4

  Walt and his Davy Crockett, Fess Parker, on July 17, 1955, at Disneyland’s opening day parade. The opening was a debacle, but Walt had achieved his dream.

  Walt with his first grandson, Christopher, reflecting the Davy Crockett mania that swept the nation in 1955.

  “Uncle Walt”: the conservative image that had subsumed Walt Disney in the 1950s and transformed him into the personification of traditional values and square aesthetics. He is wearing his favorite cravat—a Smoke Tree Ranch tie.

  Walt surrounded by his Mouseketeers of The Mickey Mouse Club on the fourth anniversary celebration of the program.

  Walt on Main Street at Disneyland, which was his utopia and his retreat from the rigors of the studio. He often wandered the grounds and spent evenings at his apartment over the fire station.

  Walt examining the Carousel of Progress, the General Electric exhibit for the New York World’s Fair in 1964 and 1965. Disney designed three more exhibits: Ford’s Magic Skyway, Pepsi and UNICEF’s It’s a Small World, and the Illinois pavilion, which featured an Audio-Animatronic robot of Abraham Lincoln.

  At the Carolwood house with his family: (left to right) son-in-law Ron Miller, Sharon, Diane with baby Joanna, Lillian with Christopher, and Walt with Lady. Walt loved the train, he loved his workshop, and he loved the recreation room where he concocted sodas.

  The press conference in Florida on November 15, 1965, with Roy and Governor Haydon Burns, announcing the Walt Disney World complex. Walt had little interest in the amusement park, much more in an experimental city connected to it.

  Walt’s own drawing of EPCOT. The Imagineers would fish Walt’s scribbles from the wastebasket to see what he wanted.

  Walt visiting the Walt Disney World site the day after the news conference—with Joe Potter, the former New York World’s Fair executive whom Walt hired to supervise the new park.

  Walt at the premiere of Mary Poppins with the book’s author, P. L. Travers. Travers had been an obstacle in the production, but she pronounced herself happy with the film, and it went on to win a Best Actress Oscar for its star, Julie Andrews.

  Walt and Roy: brothers, antagonists, and comrades. Walt saw himself as the creative force. He saw Roy’s job as getting him the resources he needed.

  Walt during the Vancouver trip in July 1966. Diane described him as “serene,” though with his health flagging he already seemed to be having intimations of the end.

  Eleven

  SLOUCHING TOWARD UTOPIA

  Now after the many years of struggle, doubt, insecurity, and unhappiness, Walt Disney had won. Thanks largely to the success of Disneyland, the earnings of Disney stock kept rising from 35 cents on revenues of $7.7 million in fiscal year 1952, before the park, to $2.44 on $35 million in revenue five years later. “Sales and net profits have enjoyed a growth trend matched by few corporations over the past five to seven years,” an investment adviser reported in 1958. The formula, commented The Wall Street Journal in a front-page article that year raving over the new Disney success, was to “[w]ring every possible profitable squeal and squeak out of such assets as The Three Little Pigs and Mickey Mouse—first by diversifying into a wide variety of activities, then by dovetailing them so all work to exploit one another.” The article quoted Roy Disney as saying that “we don’t do anything in one line without giving a thought to its likely profitability in our other lines,” adding, “Our product is practically eternal.”

  At the time the company, in diversifying, had reduced its income from films to 38 percent of its total revenue, while television accounted for 28 percent, Disneyland for 21 percent, and royalties on merchandise for 13 percent. In 1960 Roy recommended that Walt Disney Productions and Disneyland merge so that they could offset profits in one company against any potential losses in the other, and he asked Prudential, from whom WDP had recently been borrowing, to revamp their deal to include the $5.5 million that the company owed ABC for Disneyland, raising its total indebtedness to Prudential to $20.5 million—this at a studio that had once scrounged to borrow tens of thousands of dollars to complete Snow White and that had to suffer economic indignities from the war right up to the opening of Disneyland. Within the year the studio brought in $70 million, netted $4.5 million, and paid off its loans to the Bank of America, prompting Walt to joke to columnist Art Buchwald, “For the first time the banks owe me money.”

  Meanwhile early in 1957 the studio renewed its agreement with ABC to continue to produce Disneyland for two more years at a cost of $4.16 million and The Mickey Mouse Club for one more year at a cost of $3.2 million, though the show was cut back to a half-hour, and at long last Walt got ABC to finance and broadcast Zorro as well, the rights to which he had bought for WED long before opening Disneyland. Walt seemed especially excited by this last, most likely because he had personally initiated it, boasting to one potential sponsor that the studio was constructing sets “which will be unequaled in television film production history” and that the show would have a “quality and a flavor and character different from any other program on the air.” When the songwriting brothers Robert and Richard Sherman were asked to compose the show’s theme (Norman Foster and George Bruns wound up doing the actual writing), they were struck by “Walt’s finely focused intensity and the complete dedication with which he discussed the story.” They said he made it seem that “this was the most important project in his entire career.” After John Hench suggested that the titles feature Zorro slashing a Z with his sword, Walt went from office to office with a yardstick challenging employees to a duel. Bill Walsh said he would hear Walt walking down the hall with his yardstick, cutting the air in a Z and laughing.

  At the same time he was still aglow over Disneyland and still intent on expanding and improving it. He told one interviewer that Disneyland “will never be finished” and that it “will be a live breathing thing that will need changes.” To another he called Disneyland “my baby” and said, “I would prostitute myself for it.” He told yet another correspondent that “working, planning and developing it” afforded him “endless pleasure.” He had entrusted WED with devising improvements, and he was always scouring Europe himself for new attractions and ideas. In late 1958 he decided to add a 150-foot-high Matterhorn bobsled ride, keyed to a recent feature, Third Man on the Mountain; a submarine ride that would provide the illusion of going undersea, inspired by 20,000 Leagues; and a monorail that would circle the park. Jack Lindquist, the advertising manager at Disneyland, remembered Roy telling the staff that they were just “getting out of the hole” and that they would have to wait two or three years before realizing any further expansion. Then he left for Europe. “Two days after he left,” as Lindquist told it, “Walt called WED and said, ‘We’re going to build the Matterhorn, Monorail and Submarines.’” When one of the staff said that Roy had ordered them to desist, Walt responded, “Well, we’re going to build them. Roy can figure out how to pay for it when he gets back.”
(The three attractions, at a cost of $5.5 million, opened in June 1959 with another ninety-minute television spectacular, this one featuring Vice President Richard Nixon.) On another occasion Marc Davis was presenting the plans for a new Audio-Animatronic attraction called Nature’s Wonderland to a studio group that included Walt. Davis opened by saying that there were two ways of executing the project—an inexpensive one and an expensive one. “And Walt got all the way up from his seat and walked around to the front of the room where I was,” Davis remembered, “and put his hand on my shoulder and he said, ‘Marc,’ he said, ‘you and I do not worry about whether anything is cheap or expensive. We only worry if it’s good.’”

  He had big ideas. Off of Main Street he had conceived of another street, Liberty Street, and another town square, Edison Square, which would feature buildings in nineteenth-century American architecture housing exhibits on science and technology, and which would be sponsored, Walt hoped, by America’s leading technology, companies, most prominently General Electric. On the square Walt also envisioned a President’s Hall that would house animatronic robots of American presidents. He had thought as well of a New Orleans quarter with a Haunted Mansion, and he had dispatched Herb Ryman and John Hench to the city to take photographs, which later became models for the attraction. In the summer of 1961 he introduced costumed characters to the park as a regular feature, and early the following year he announced a $7 million expansion that would add eight new attractions and improve and expand current attractions. The new construction brought the cumulative investment in the park to $44 million. That amount didn’t include Walt’s secretive efforts to buy additional parcels of land around the park, on which he planned to build hotels and motels, a bowling alley, a campground, and a swimming pool.

  As he always had on past projects, Walt delegated the running of the park to subordinates while he remained the chief strategist, and as always he kept shuffling the positions whenever he detected that someone was arrogating too much power to himself. But while executives came and went, the park’s press agent told a New Yorker reporter that Walt was clearly in command. “You never know when you’ll bump into Walt prowling around the park in an old sweater, checking on whether a dead light bulb he reported earlier has been replaced,” the agent said, “or timing the rides, or complaining that a ‘Ride Not Operating Today’ sign is inartistically lettered, or plotting what to tear down next and what to put up instead.” And though Walt did appoint the Operations Committee to deal with the day-to-day operation of the park and the Management Committee, on which he himself sat, to make policy and set long-term goals, the agent stressed, “[t]he first thing you have to understand is that this whole place is Walt.”

  By the time Walt installed the Matterhorn, the monorail, and the submarine ride, the park was attracting over five million visitors a year and was considered one of the essential destinations in the country for foreign dignitaries. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India told Los Angeles mayor Samuel Yorty that the main reason he was visiting the area was to see Disneyland, and Nehru’s daughter said, “We looked forward to Disneyland as much as anything on our trip.” Nehru spent three hours there. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, in extending Indonesian president Sukarno’s thanks to Walt after a visit, wrote, “I am told that in Indonesia there are two prominent Americans who are affectionately known by their first names—‘Ike’ and ‘Walt.’” One African president continued his visit even after his public relations officer keeled over and died of a heart attack while dining at the park’s Plantation restaurant.

  The passion of foreign dignitaries to see what was now one of America’s landmarks was so intense that once it even triggered an international incident. Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev was making a tour of America in September 1959. Khrushchev’s wife Nina had seen a Disney film in 1942, found herself entranced, and requested that during the visit she and her family be allowed to see Disneyland. Walt and Lillian planned to welcome the party and escort them around the park. But when Khrushchev arrived in Los Angeles from New York, he was told that his security could not be assured and that the trip to Disneyland would have to be canceled. Khrushchev “exploded,” as The New York Times described it. “I would very much like to go see Disneyland,” he shouted. “But then, we cannot guarantee your security, they say. Then what must I do? Commit suicide?” Continuing to boil, Khrushchev asked the gathered journalists, “What is it? Is there an epidemic of cholera or something: Or have gangsters taken hold of the place that can destroy me?” He was still fuming at a star-studded luncheon in his honor at the Twentieth Century–Fox studio, Los Angeles police chief William Parker said, because Mrs. Khrushchev had passed her husband a note while he spoke reminding him of the insult. “We have come to this town where lives the cream of American art,” he began as his voice shook with indignation. “And just imagine, I, a Premier, a Soviet representative, when I came here to this city, I was given a plan—a program of what I was to be shown and whom I was to meet. But just now I was told that I could not go to Disneyland.” He closed: “I cannot find words to explain this to my people.”

  But Khrushchev went even further. Denied his visit, he told a Los Angeles audience that he could return to Russia even faster than he had arrived. “If you want to go on with the arms race, very well,” he warned. “We accept that challenge. As for the output of rockets, well, they are on the assembly line. This is the most serious question. It is one of life or death, ladies and gentlemen. One of war and peace.” And this serious question about the fate of civilization was raised all because Nikita Khrushchev had been, as he put it, “deprived of the pleasure of visiting the city of Fantasy.”

  He was king, if no longer of animation, then of American popular culture generally. With the success of Disneyland and his visibility on the television show, Walt Disney’s personal status was higher than it had ever been—as high as anyone’s in the country. The Screen Producers Guild unanimously awarded him its Lewis Milestone Award for his “historical contribution to the American motion picture.” The United States Olympic Committee appointed him the chairman of its Pageantry Committee for the 1960 Winter Games, to be held at Squaw Valley, California, and Walt planned and oversaw the torch relay, the opening and closing ceremonies, and the awarding of the medals. President Eisenhower named him to the President’s Committee on Education, which was charged with holding a conference on education beyond high school, though Walt later tendered his resignation, calling himself unqualified since he had never gone beyond the first year of high school. Eisenhower’s successor, President John F. Kennedy, appointed Walt to a nine-member executive committee under Eisenhower’s chairmanship to lead the People to People program, which was designed to promote cultural, scientific, and athletic contacts between countries. The students of Tullytown, Pennsylvania, voted to name their school in his honor, and Marceline named its new elementary school for him too. (His grammar school desk from Marceline’s old Park School, carved with his initials, was placed in a glass case in the hallway.) Walt attended both dedications. Seventeen more universities offered him honorary degrees, though Walt refused all but one—from the University of California at Los Angeles. The Museum of Modern Art contacted him about the possibility of an exhibition: The Work of Walt Disney. And the actresses Lillian and Dorothy Gish visited Oslo to campaign for Walt to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. His had become such a charmed life that even nature seemed to favor him; in November 1961, when fires roared through Bel-Air and Brentwood and were threatening his Carolwood house, the flames suddenly stopped and veered away.

  Despite his status—and despite the “magnetic field,” as Ken Anderson put it, that he seemed to have around him at the studio—most outsiders still found him unprepossessing. Edith Efron reporting in TV Guide found him “shy.” “His eyes are dull and preoccupied, his affability mechanical and heavy-handed,” she wrote. “He gabs away slowly and randomly in inarticulate, midwestern speech that would be appropriate to a rural general store. His shi
rt is open, his tie crooked. One almost expects to see overall straps on his shoulders and wisps of hay in his hair.” Another reporter found an “unearthly quality” about his conversation and thought he “laughs in the wrong places.”

  Of course, this image of him as the common man was largely created by intention. Walt had cultivated it, even if he had long since outgrown it and even if he had become an American institution that in the postwar period seemed more an emperor than an uncle. But he was still, after all the years in the spotlight and after all the wealth he had accrued from Disneyland and WED, surprisingly and genuinely plebeian by temperament. By his own admission he seldom read anything other than a script. His sense of humor, while never prurient, did often run to the scatological, and he laughed with a deep, guttural chortle. Though he was more likely to wear conservative suits now, he usually preferred a western kerchief with the Smoke Tree emblem to a tie, unless the occasion demanded one, and when he wasn’t in the public eye, he liked loose sweaters, either gray or blue, or gabardine jackets. He never wore jewelry, save for a DeMolay ring from his youth and a Cladagh ring that he had acquired in Ireland of two hands holding a heart. He wore the same 14-carat gold Hamilton watch for over twenty years until Lillian bought him a Rolex, and one of his few indulgences was a used Mercedes 230 SL that he bought late in life. The same barber cut his hair for nearly twenty-five years, and, preferring to drive his own car, he did not have a regular chauffeur. His gastronomical tastes still ran to meat and potatoes, chili and tapioca pudding. He still garbled words and still peppered his speech with colloquialisms. Things were “effective as hell” or “cute as hell,” and when he was angry, he could, according to one employee at the time, “out-cuss a drunken pirate’s parrot!”