by Neal Gabler
The reason Walt had the money was WED’s contract and his own contract with WDP. Walt not only received the royalty for the use of his name and the percentages from his personal investments in films; WED also received engineering and design fees from WDP and the grosses of the train and the monorail at Disneyland, both of which were owned by WED, presumably on the grounds that Walt had developed these attractions personally. In fiscal year 1960 those fees amounted to $156,000 paid to Walt himself and $188,835 paid to WED. (By this time he had sold his interest in Disneyland to WDP.) Now at the end of 1960, as the seven-year personal services contract approached its expiration—it had previously been extended for one year—Loyd Wright, Walt’s attorney and one of the most prominent lawyers in Los Angeles, was asking Roy for a 5 percent share of the gross of all the films that Walt supervised and 10 percent of the gross of all the films that he personally produced. Roy, who had always been in the untenable position of having to navigate between his brother and his company, was adamantly opposed. He thought that no one, not even Walt, was entitled to a share of the gross, only a share of the profits.
Over the years the brothers had had their differences over money, over control, and over the direction in which to take the company. “You could hear them shouting at each other all the time, even through closed doors,” Walt’s longtime secretary Dolores Voght would say. “The language was terrible.” Roy’s son, Roy E. Disney, said that he always knew when his father and Walt had had a fight because he could hear the car door slam when his father came home. Walt was often disdainful of Roy, dismissing him as a businessman with little sensitivity to art. Once when Walt screened a film for Roy and Roy afterward asked how long the running time was, Walt snapped, “We work for years creating these pictures and all Roy can say is, ‘How long does it run?’” After surviving so many prophecies of doom, he also thought that Roy was fainthearted. As John Hench explained the ongoing, unabating tension, “Roy’s great ambition in life, I suppose, was to stay out of debt. And it was Walt’s method in life to keep Roy constantly in debt.”
These disputes were typical of Hollywood, the product of the fundamental clash between the creative and financial halves of the motion picture business. It may have been occasionally exacerbated at Burbank because, unlike the situation in other studios, where the filmmakers were in the West and the businessmen were in the East, the creative and financial arms shared not only the same coast but the same building. The tension, many felt, was also a source of the company’s strength—Walt’s adventurism balanced by Roy’s pragmatism. By the same token, if Roy balanced Walt’s recklessness, he also balanced his callousness. Harry Tytle saw their individual contributions in terms of family dynamics. Walt was the “striving father, heading the family” and Roy the “more relaxed grandfather,” providing a dose of wisdom; Walt was the brusque one who drove everyone ruthlessly, while Roy was the calm and personable one who compensated for his brother’s severity.
But now, as they bickered over Walt’s new contract, the years of simmering animosity seemed to boil to the surface. Roy clearly resented Walt’s imperious attitude and his willingness to wrest as much money as he could from the company—the company they had built together—as if it were just another corporate safe to be raided. Walt clearly resented Roy’s attempts to fence him in as if he were just another employee and not the name in the company’s title and the creative force who was chiefly responsible for its success. Once Roy assumed the financial helm at the studio, the brothers had never thereafter been particularly close. Since the 1930s, when their families would gather on Sundays at Walt’s house and occasionally vacation together, they had seldom socialized, and they didn’t even share a lunch table at the commissary. But as the 1961 negotiations continued, the brothers stopped speaking to each other altogether. Card Walker became the intermediary. “Walt would tell him, ‘You go down to Roy and tell him what I said,’” Walt Pfeiffer recalled, “and Roy would tell Card what he said and [to] go back to Walt and tell him. I don’t know how long that lasted.”
In fact, it lasted for months—months of silence, anger, and recrimination in which Walt felt wounded and Roy protested that he was only trying to protect both Walt and the company from disgruntled stockholders. Some felt that the tension was further heightened by a rivalry between Roy E., who worked on the creative side at the studio, and Ron Miller, whom Walt had brought to the studio after Miller suffered an injury during a brief career in professional football playing for the Los Angeles Rams. Whether or not that was true, the situation certainly worsened considerably when, during negotiations, Loyd Wright threatened to hire Walt an agent who might shop him to another studio, which Roy saw as an act of perfidy. “That was the first time I had witnessed Roy explode in anger,” Bill Cottrell said. It was also the final assault in the battle. When Cottrell reported Wright’s warning to Walt, Walt, apparently tiring of the dispute and the ill will it had engendered, advised Cottrell to get the matter settled.
Roy was apparently of the same conciliatory mind. As Cottrell would tell it to Thomas, Roy walked in on his negotiators in the conference room next to his office during a particularly heated exchange and said, “None of us would be here in these offices if it hadn’t been for Walt. All your jobs, all the benefits you have, all came from Walt and his contributions.” When the negotiations were concluded that April, the studio had reluctantly agreed to a new seven-year personal services contract that would award Walt $3,500 a week, up $500 from his previous contract, and $1,666 a week in deferred payments—in addition to the percentages on the profits, but not the grosses, of the pictures in which he personally invested. Walt had gotten most of what he wanted. At the same time WDP also agreed to a new contract with WED at $1,500 a week for its design services and agreed to pay another 20 percent of the payroll costs of any personnel WED had at Disneyland, which was now wholly owned by WDP. Both of these contracts were subjected to stockholder approval.
In June, Roy’s birthday, the ice finally began to melt. Walt sent Roy an Indian peace pipe with a card. “It is wonderful” it read, “to smoke the Pipe of Peace with you again—the clouds that rise are very beautiful.
“I think between us over the years, we have accomplished something—there was a time when we couldn’t borrow a Thousand Dollars and now I understand we owe Twenty-four million!”
Roy put the pipe atop a large portrait of Walt that hung in his office. “We’ve made peace,” he explained to a visitor.
As he pondered his legacy at the studio and his financial legacy to his family, Walt Disney also pondered something much larger: his legacy to the world. With his sense of himself having swelled, he knew that entertainment wasn’t enough and that not even Disneyland constituted a lasting contribution. Walt Disney needed to do something that would improve society, not just distract it. Since the early 1930s he had been interested in the Chouinard Art Institute, and he never forgot Mrs. Chouinard’s generosity in letting his animators study there when Walt couldn’t afford to pay their tuition. When Mrs. Chouinard suffered a stroke in the early 1950s and became physically unable to administer the school, Walt not only supported it financially—with tens of thousands of dollars in donations—but also assigned Mickey Clark from Disneyland to audit the school’s books and do a systems survey. Clark discovered that $12,000 of the school’s funds had been embezzled and that years of accounts receivable had not been collected. Eventually, with Mrs. Chouinard’s agreement, Walt sent executives from WED to run the school and set up a planning committee charged with answering, among other questions, “What would we like to have starting from scratch?”
One of those things, Walt decided, was a new site, and as early as 1957 he asked Harrison Price to find one. While Price searched, Walt’s idea began to expand from a new site for Chouinard to his much more ambitious City of the Arts, of which Chouinard was now to be one element. For a long time Walt had been thinking of an academy of arts to be subsidized by the studio for the purpose of giving his artists the b
roadest possible creative education. “We could get the best instructors from all over the country,” he had written one educator in 1939, “and it would be sort of a school for post-graduate work.” Walt never expressed any regrets about his own lack of formal education; in fact, when a new secretary transcribed a letter exactly as he had dictated it, Walt, realizing his own deficiencies, told another secretary, “You have to do something about this girl. She’s too literal!” But as Roy later told it, “Walt was obsessed with the idea that in life you just continually go to school. You never reach any plateau of perfection.”
In the City of the Arts, Walt hoped to combine education with another of his passions: community. He envisioned the city as an American version of the German Bauhaus, where students could find practical applications for their work, and he had WED lay it out as a place where students would mingle not only with one another but with the public to whom they could sell their art. In the early 1960s he grudgingly gave up the idea of his city as too costly and impractical, but he was, if anything, even more devoted to the idea of his school. When Chouinard merged with the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music in 1962, he named his putative institution the California Institute of the Arts. “He wanted to build that school!” Harrison Price recalled. “It was the most pervasive objective in a man’s mind that I’ve ever run into. He was very close to the evolution of CalArts, he was passionate all the way. He said, ‘This is the thing I’m going to be remembered for.’”
Walt was messianic again. As he had once cornered employees to discourse on Snow White and then on Disneyland, now he would corner them to discourse on CalArts. “I want people to come there that are really able to do things,” he told animator T. Hee in a long late-night phone call. “I don’t want a lot of theorists. I want to have a school that turns out people that know all the facets of filmmaking. I want them to be capable of doing anything needed to make a film—photograph it, direct it, design it, animate it, record it.” He told another associate that CalArts would be a place where “we had schools of music, of drama, or cinematography, or dance, and of the graphic and applied arts, all under one roof, as the students walk from one class to another, passing art exhibits or students and others, they’re hearing music, and they’re living in dormitories with people that are all in the arts.” He told Alice Davis, Marc Davis’s wife, that the school would have a closed-circuit television system “so the students who were studying fine arts or illustration could watch and draw the dance students as they performed,” and he told Marc Davis that he was going to invite Picasso and Dali to teach. He even suggested that he might teach a course himself. “I don’t mean teach drawing, for God’s sake!” he said to Davis modestly. “But I’m a damn good storyman! I could teach story!”
Walt had always operated on the principle of renunciation when he felt that something had reached its potential and could not be improved, and the energy he had poured into Disneyland was now being diverted into CalArts. “He was losing interest in a lot of the things he’d done before,” Marc Davis said, “because he was seeing the new world ahead.” And while Walt was providing the vision, he was already strong-arming contributors, setting up a trailer on the lot with a model of CalArts that he showed to potential investors. “[I]f you see fit to set up a Joseph P. Kennedy Scholarship,” Walt wrote the president’s father in a typical solicitation, “I can assure you your grandchildren will receive originals from all of Walt Disney’s cartoon features to come.” Kennedy contributed.
IV
New York loomed. When 1964 arrived, the Imagineers at WED were still making final preparations for the world’s fair that would open that April. Once Walt got over the problems with Henry Ford, the Ford attraction had proven surprisingly easy. He had ridden it shortly before the opening of the fair and pronounced himself pleased with the results. The GE Carousel of Progress had been a more difficult project, particularly since the pavilion had so many elements besides the central show. When the Imagineers finished it, Walt invited GE executives to the studio to take a look. They were satisfied with the result, but Walt, after all this time, had a hesitation of his own. “It doesn’t have a wienie!” he told them. “Come back in a couple of weeks and I’ll show you.” As one of the GE officials later told it, he had no idea what Walt meant. But within a week, they received a call asking that they return to the studio. This time the show was virtually identical to the first one—except that Walt had added a comical Audio-Animatronic dog to each scene. It was the finishing touch on the exhibit.
The main problem with It’s a Small World had been time. Walt didn’t even see the prototype for the singing children until September. “We were living off of black coffee in the morning and martinis for lunch,” Rolly Crump recalled. When it opened, in what was essentially a metal shed since the budget provided for nothing more, Roy complained about the expense but wrote Walt that “it is very gratifying to see that the show is getting such a good reception,” and he predicted that “we will have a good chance of breaking even on it.”
The major headache was Abraham Lincoln. It had taken a year just to design Lincoln’s head and longer than that to program the robot. But the matter of Lincoln’s voice was even more difficult. Several Lincoln scholars recommended Raymond Massey, who had played Lincoln in John Cromwell’s 1940 film Abe Lincoln in Illinois, but Walt feared that Massey might sound too theatrical and not homespun enough. Instead, he invited to the studio Royal Dano, who had played Lincoln on an Omnibus television program, on the pretense that he would be filmed to help the programmers devise body movements. As Imagineer Bob Gurr remembered it, Walt had Dano deliver the speech, and when he finished, “Walt jumped up and said, ‘No! No! No! You don’t understand. Do it again.’” When Dano delivered it a second time, Walt leaped to his feet again, and again told Dano that his performance was all wrong. After the third try Walt rose and led the entire crew in “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Gurr said that at the time it made no sense to him. Only later did he learn that Walt was looking for a weary, agonized Lincoln and that he had finally elicited what he wanted from Dano by provoking him.
But even after Lincoln was delivered to the fair and the public preview drew near, his problems weren’t over. The Imagineers just couldn’t get the robot to function properly. “Oh, yeah, [Walt] was upset,” Marc Davis recalled, “but I must say I think he felt for us. He had to see the condition of the guys and what they were doing. And he would ask questions and say, ‘Well, guys, I’ll get with you in the morning again,’” to work out the bugs. At a special preview for Robert Moses and the borough presidents of New York City, the robot performed serviceably—“not as perfect as we had wanted, but he worked,” said Davis. But it was soon malfunctioning again, and Walt even summoned Ub Iwerks to New York to see if he could fix it. “You never saw such a stack of electronics magazines,” said one studio employee of Iwerks’s cargo.
Walt was nervous. On April 20, the day Lincoln was scheduled to be shown to a preview audience including Illinois governor Otto Kerner, UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson (a former Illinois governor), and the press corps, he dallied outside the GE pavilion signing autographs before telling designer Chuck Myall, “Well, I guess we’ve prolonged this as long as we can.” When he arrived at the Illinois pavilion, however, either Jack Gladish, who had helped design Lincoln’s head, or Dick Nunis, a Disneyland executive, gave Walt a sobering report: the robot was not reliable enough to be shown. Walt reluctantly broke the news to the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “there’s an old saying in show business. If you’re not ready, don’t open the curtain.” As he made his announcement, beneath the stage the Imagineers were weeping.
Later Walt would blame the problems on a delay in the installation of power at the pavilion and on traffic delays in New York that prevented parts from being delivered, and he warned, “This is not a toy.” Other accounts attributed the difficulties variously to dust, a blown transformer, fluctuations in current, and even unions that failed to complete the
wiring. Ralph Newman believed that Walt actually wanted to delay the opening so he wouldn’t have to compete with other attractions. But Lincoln didn’t start operating until April 30, ten days after the aborted preview, and he delivered only seven flawless performances before malfunctioning once again, prompting Marc Davis to pose another explanation: “Do you suppose God is mad at Walt for creating man in his own image?” Eventually, the Imagineers managed to repair the problems, and Lincoln began regular performances that erased the earlier embarrassments. As Sharon later remembered, “Dad cried every time he sat through it.”
Yet for all the problems with Lincoln—Walt immediately checked himself into the hospital for an examination and a rest when he returned to California from his two harrowing weeks at the fair—Disney was triumphant. At the end of the first season (the fair would have a second season after a six-month hiatus) GE’s Carousel of Progress was the third most popular attraction, behind only the General Motors exhibit, which had a capacity two and a half times as large as GE’s, and the Vatican’s, which featured Michelangelo’s Pietà. Ford’s exhibit ranked fourth. Lincoln didn’t qualify because the pavilion’s capacity was too small, but the robot had worked reliably enough that Walt, much to the consternation of Ralph Newman, was having another one made for Disneyland, which, Walt advised Newman, was “always its ultimate destination.”
During the hiatus after the fair’s first season, while Walt was being showered with accolades, something else happened: he enjoyed his greatest cinematic triumph since Snow White. As Walt told it to the Sherman brothers, years earlier, most likely in 1943, he had seen Diane and Sharon reading a book and “chuckling, really enjoying it.” A few nights later he watched Lilly reading the same book and laughing, and she recommended that Walt read it. The book was Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers, which chronicled the adventures of the magically empowered nanny of the title. (Joe Grant had a different version: Walt first heard of the book when Grant mentioned it to him after Grant’s wife had read it to their children.) Shortly thereafter Walt asked Roy to contact Travers directly rather than through an agent to see if the rights were available and, if they were, to raise the possibility of turning the book into a film. Though she was Australian-born and an English émigrée, during the war she was a single mother living with her adopted young son in a five-story walkup in New York, and she seemed to be angling for a way to go west, telling Roy that she was thinking of relocating in Santa Fe or Tucson. Roy was cagey—he wasn’t about to make a commitment with the war raging—but he did tell Travers that Walt was “intrigued” with Poppins and suggested that she consider working with the studio on an adaptation of the book.