Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  Many of those who saw him now seemed to detect a lack of intensity, which one could recognize in his eyes. The young Walt Disney had had “burning dark eyes,” as one reporter described them—eyes “so dark brown in color that they seemed black,” wrote another. Even Roy had described how Walt’s eyes would latch on to his listener’s and wouldn’t let go. But the older Walt Disney’s eyes weren’t so much dark and penetrating as “bright,” according to Mary Costa, who voiced Sleeping Beauty, as if they were “plugged into sockets.” Actress Julie Andrews said there was a “kind of cheerful merriment in his eyes,” the sign of a contented man.

  But while Walt Disney at long last may have seemed contented and at ease with himself, underneath he smoldered. One visiting journalist noticed that Walt “appeared to be under the lash of some private demon.” He had never fully trusted success or tranquillity. “I function better when things are going badly than when they’re smooth as whipped cream,” he would say, underscoring the irony that the man whose life was dedicated to perfection was never entirely happy within it. Walt Disney always needed action, even friction. “I’ve got to have a project all the time,” he had told Ollie Johnston, “something to work on.” Otherwise he had no place to direct his nervous energy.

  Among the projects to which he directed his attention as the new decade dawned was television. Even before Walt resigned with ABC, the network had been complaining about the cost of producing The Mickey Mouse Club and about the fact that, as ABC president Robert Kintner put it, “there are only a certain number of sponsors that will sponsor a so-called ‘kid’ show, and they have only a certain amount in their budgets.” Meanwhile Walt bristled over the paltry budget that ABC had dedicated to promoting Zorro and to the constant pressure he felt from ABC to produce Westerns, which the network obviously believed would be profitable. Walt aquiesced—he made Texas John Slaughter and The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca—but he was so unhappy about it that he largely ceased to care. Publicity chief Card Walker had to beg Walt for “approximately one hour of your time” to discuss the new schedule for the Disneyland show, which had been renamed Walt Disney Presents.

  When the ABC-Disney contract came up for renewal early in 1959, the seething tensions erupted. Roy proposed a new three-year deal for Walt Disney Presents, The Mickey Mouse Club, and Zorro. When ABC resisted, he countered with a short-term proposal excluding The Mickey Mouse Club, in which the network had lost interest, or, in lieu of that, a long-term deal that would allow Disney to sell to other networks any program on which ABC had not exercised its option. This last provision was especially salient since ABC had concluded that Zorro, despite its high ratings, was not profitable enough either and that in any case it could produce that kind of programming on its own. Still, ABC rejected these initiatives too, prompting Roy to write Walt, “I think they are a bunch of stinkers.”

  But Roy did not settle for invective; he was also trying brinkmanship. Even as he flew to New York to meet with ABC chairman Leonard Goldenson, he advised Walt that he was going to file an antitrust suit against the network, asking for a declaratory injunction against ABC that would prevent it from enforcing the contract and would allow Disney to negotiate with other networks. “In all common sense and business reasoning,” Roy wrote Walt on the verge of his meeting, “I can’t believe they will let this go to a big court fight…. They have too many things they would rather have kept quiet and not brought out in court.”

  Walt and Roy had one more consideration beyond the television series, one that was more important than television: Disneyland. ABC had initially invested $500,000 in the park. Roy wanted to use the disagreement over the television contract to buy out ABC’s stake, writing Goldenson that “it seems to us you are not as eager to continue a long-term association with Disney as you once were.” Or, as Walt would later tell it at the tenth anniversary of Disneyland, “[M]y brother figured, ‘If we don’t buy ’em out now, we’re gonna be payin’ a lot more later.’” After Roy filed his suit, and as the dispute dragged on for nearly a year, he admitted that he had no idea what ABC’s stake would now be worth and that he had plucked a figure, $7.5 million, more or less out of the air. Just an hour before closing the deal, in June 1960, he nervously phoned Walt one last time for his input, but Walt demurred. “[D]o what you think’s necessary,” he said. So Walt Disney Productions, with a loan from Prudential, bought ABC out of Disneyland. In the agreement Roy dropped his suit, ABC released the studio from its contract, and the Disneys promised to refrain for four months from pursuing another television outlet. As collateral damage, Zorro and The Mickey Mouse Club were canceled.

  But even before the four-month moratorium was up, the company was negotiating for a new home for Walt Disney Presents. Robert Kintner, with whom Walt had made his original television deal, had left ABC for the presidency of NBC, and as early as August, Card Walker was meeting in New York with Kintner and Robert Sarnoff, the chairman of RCA, NBC’s parent company, about relocating. Though NBC said it needed to evaluate the possibility of a long-term association with Disney, the network promised not to let the discussions “drift” as they had six years earlier when Walt had approached them. Walt, who was in London at the time, told Walker to “get this deal,” emphasizing how important it was to him. “I’ll stand on my head in Macy’s window,” he said, “if that will make the deal.”

  For both Walt and NBC, the urgency didn’t come simply from the need to put a new television show on the air. The stakes were much higher. RCA was now manufacturing color television sets, and the company was looking for flagship programming that would promote the infant technology, which was why NBC was subjecting the proposed partnership to such extended deliberations. Walt Disney’s colorful animations seemed a perfect vehicle. As far as the Disneys were concerned, Walt, who had pioneered color on the motion picture screen, had always wanted to produce color television programming. It was virtually inevitable, then, that the two sides would come to an agreement, which they did that October: three years at $5 million per year for twenty-five installments each year of Walt Disney Presents, which was to be renamed Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. Variety called the agreement the “most important and far-reaching in recent video annals.”

  Walt was excited. At ABC he had effected the truce between the film industry and the television industry. At NBC he would be leading the transformation from black-and-white to color television. Creatively speaking, after being forced to make those Westerns at ABC, NBC had given him carte blanche. “I shouldn’t have listened,” he told one reporter about his surrender to ABC. “I’m not listening now. I’m an absolute dictator about what goes into my show.” “I never saw such an overnight change in a man,” said a friend of Walt after the NBC contract. “Where he had been preparing the ABC programs almost automatically like a man in a dream, all of his old enthusiasms returned…. [O]ne new idea after another tumbled out of him. He kept saying over and over again, ‘Oh boy! Color and no Westerns. I can do whatever I want. Do you hear me? I can do whatever I want.’”

  “Newton Minow can relax,” opined the New York Herald Tribune after Wonderful World of Color’s Sunday night premiere on September 24, 1961, referring to the Federal Communications Commission chairman who had recently called television a “vast wasteland.” “Here, for a wonderful change, was something out of Hollywood that contributed to the enlightenment and thorough enjoyment of the entire family.” Most reviewers agreed, with only a few dissenters carping that Walt had pushed color television a little too aggressively. But that, of course, had been the whole point. Shortly after the premiere Card Walker, who was now the head of advertising at the studio, wrote Walt that sales of color televisions were soaring—105 percent ahead of the previous September. NBC couldn’t have been happier. When Walker and Donn Tatum, the head of television sales, met Kintner in New York that November, they reported that the “whole atmosphere is pleasing and on a high note” and that Kintner wanted to discuss other series. Within the month NBC renewed W
onderful World for an additional two years.

  II

  Walt was a changed man yet again. Despite his efforts to portray himself as ordinary—and despite the fact that in many ways he was ordinary, especially in his tastes and manner—he had come to have a much more expansive sense of who he was and what he could accomplish. With the success of Disneyland, he saw himself not just as an entertainer or even an amusement park operator but as a visionary planner who could impose his will on the environment as he had imposed it on the screen. Disneyland was just a prototype for what he felt he could do all over the country. Less than a month after visiting Marceline late in 1960 to dedicate the Walt Disney School, he was meeting with a local entrepreneur named Rush Johnson to explore turning his childhood homestead into a model farm. When Johnson asked how they would attract visitors, Walt said, “You know, Rush, when I introduce ‘Disney’s Wonderful World of Color’ on Sunday night, I’d set the cheek of my ass up there on the table and I’d say, ‘By the way, folks, when you’re on vacation, go by my hometown.’ What are you going to do with all the damn people?” He also wanted to buy the old Disney family farm in Ellis, Kansas, but Roy wouldn’t let him.

  One advertising executive proposed building a chain of Disney child care centers near large shopping areas. Walt was interested, but once again Roy and Card Walker dissuaded him. Another suggestion was a chain of Disney Kiddielands across the country, and Walt Disney Productions did buy a one-third interest in the Arrow Development Company, which had manufactured many of the rides for Disneyland, but the Kiddieland idea expired too. WED even hired a development consultant who was investigating relocating one of the Disneyland trains to Newport Beach, California, and building a convention center in Anaheim near the park. As early as 1958, Walt even regarded Smoke Tree as a potential development site for a new golf course, bowling alley, restaurant, and cocktail lounge, all surrounding a square with tourist shops and all to be financed by Smoke Tree under Walt’s personal supervision. He was also weighing a motel and a twelve-hundred-car mobile home “ranch” there. But after years of vacillation—the Palm Springs city council first rejected the plan, then reversed itself—Walt lost interest.

  If he had lost interest in developing Smoke Tree, he hadn’t lost his fervor for creating some kind of bowling-recreation complex under the Disney aegis, and he invested in a sports center outside Denver that included not only eighty bowling lanes but a swimming pool and restaurant—a model for a new kind of Disney franchise. Once again, though, the project dragged on, and by the time Celebrity Lanes opened in September 1960, Walt had resigned from the board. Walt Disney Productions filled the breach, purchasing a $277,000 stock interest and floating a $650,000 loan within the year to take control of the center. Walt and Lillian attended the center’s second anniversary, and the company kept it operating even as it drained money. Roy later admitted the entire project had been ill-conceived. “We wasted a million dollars there by putting in a deluxe dining room and a swimming pool,” he told one interviewer. “We had 80 lanes, one of the biggest bowling alleys in the country…. But who wants to bowl in a wet bathing suit and what bowler wears the kind of clothes that are necessary for a deluxe dining room?”

  But even as Celebrity Lanes was gasping for life, Walt had not lost his monumentalist impulses. Inspired by his experience with the Winter Olympics, he enlisted Harrison Price, the man who had found the site for Disneyland, to investigate possibilities for a family-oriented ski lodge–entertainment facility. Price discovered that southern California had one skier per hundred people. “The data pointed out a crying need for good skiing in the vast active, athletic, mobile southern California market,” he later said. Price surveyed the Mammoth Mountain area, roughly forty miles northwest of Bishop, California, located in the Inyo National Forest, and he and Mickey Clark, a Disneyland executive whom Walt had charged with analyzing the prospects, determined that the “government looks favorably upon any development that tends to enhance the beauty of the park and give additional recreational facilities to the public.” But Price thought he had found a better candidate in the Mineral King area, south of Mammoth inside the Sequoia National Forest, and he and Walt immediately began pressing state legislators to provide a highway to the location. While that project wended its way through the government bureaucracy, Walt was about to buy 2,200 acres outside Aspen, Colorado, when the deal suddenly fell through because the seller raised his asking price.

  In the eyes of many developers, and in his own eyes as well, Walt Disney had become a magical force, and the company made dozens of forays—and was requested to do so by dozens of others—to seize an area and transform it the way he had transformed the Anaheim orange grove into Disneyland. Jules Stein suggested that Walt buy Ellis Island, the portal through which immigrants had passed into the country. “I am so excited about this, Walter, I just can’t sleep,” Stein wrote him. A developer in Monterey, California, asked if Walt would consider erecting a Vacation Village with an amusement park on an Early California theme. (Walt actually visited the area one weekend.) Joyce Hall, the head of Hallmark greeting cards and a fellow member of the People to People board, asked Walt to participate in the development of 110 acres in Kansas City, which would include a zoo, aviary, butterfly garden, and international village, and Walt met with Hall and city planner James Rouse before deciding to decline. Another group, including the Seagram’s liquor company, was discussing Walt’s involvement in the development of Niagara Falls.

  But already Walt was thinking less of development than of something much more ambitious, something more commensurate with his status, something worth his time and energy, something so grand that it seemed almost outlandish: he wanted to design an entire city. At least as early as 1958 he was discussing with his WED staff what he variously called a City of the Arts or the Seven Arts City. As Walt envisioned it, the city would be a shopping and dining area centered on the idea of the arts. It would include a variety of art-themed shops—music, books, glassware, pottery, photography—as well as a theater, a TV broadcast hub, a hall of design featuring the latest concepts, an avenue of model homes, and an international street. In the middle would be a mall and fountain. But what transformed it from another commercial project into an urban planning project was that Walt was also trying to entice the Chouinard Art Institute, with which his studio had been affiliated in the 1920s, to relocate from downtown Los Angeles to his planned city, along with the Pasadena Playhouse, the Los Angeles Conservatory, and the Buckley Schools. He even visited the Lincoln Center arts complex, then under construction in New York, to investigate the relationship between the performance halls there and the Juilliard School. And what transformed this urban planning project into a real city was that just as he had once imagined building housing on the studio lot for his employees, Walt intended to build, as one draft put it, “apartment houses, dormitories, duplexes and single-unit dwellings” within the immediate environs to accommodate the students, faculty, and employees of the schools. He was already scouting potential sites in the Los Angeles area when he heard that the architect William Pereira, who had briefly worked on Disneyland, was planning to develop the Mountain Park section. Walt suggested they merge their plans, offering to take “one entire village or valley area and develop it from start to finish,” and adding that he hoped to “make this city into the internationally known tourist and entertainment attraction and educational center which it must be to be successful.” By this time he was soliciting investors and sounding out foundations for grants to create what would be not a faux utopia, like Disneyland, but at long last a real one.

  At the time there was one man who had dreams and an ego as large as Walt Disney’s: Robert Moses. Yale-and Oxford-educated, Moses had been the über-bureaucrat of New York since the 1920s, when the young man gained the favor of Governor Alfred E. Smith. Using a series of political appointments at both the state and local levels, Moses, big and bullheaded, was chiefly responsible for the planning of New York City and its suburbs
in the automobile age. He built Jones Beach on Long Island and other parks, plowed highways through neighborhoods, erected bridges and dug tunnels, hoisted edifices of public housing, and even cleared the land for Lincoln Center in the middle of Manhattan. Now Moses had been appointed to head the New York World’s Fair, scheduled for 1964, and early in 1960 he sought Walt Disney’s help. Moses had set aside eight acres on the fairgrounds for what he called a “children’s village”—or, as Variety termed it, a sort of permanent eastern Disneyland. Who better to design the park than Walt?

  It wasn’t the first time that a world’s fair had come calling. Walt had produced a four-minute Mickey Mouse cartoon for the Nabisco pavilions at the San Francisco and New York World’s Fairs in 1939, and the coordinator of the United States pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels had asked Walt to design an attraction there—“something that will impress the Europeans without offending them and without making us appear to be ‘beating our chests,’” said the coordinator. Walt wound up contributing a nineteen-minute, 360-degree Circarama film, like the one he had installed at Disneyland, called America the Beautiful, which according to one official quickly became the “hit not only of the American Pavilion, but of the whole Expo.” It was so popular that visitors found it even though there was no sign posted. When Walt had the exhibit transferred to a nylon geodesic dome at the Moscow Fair the following year, it was again one of the most popular attractions. The line of those waiting to see it typically wound one hundred yards around the exhibition grounds.