by Neal Gabler
Of course WED was not equipped to provide the technology by itself. Walt needed partners, just as he had needed them at Disneyland, but rather than look for corporate lessees who would help provide financing, as he had at Disneyland, for EPCOT he wanted intellectual capital. (This was no doubt one reason he had been so keen on forging corporate alliances for the world’s fair.) Within months of the announcement he and his staff were visiting various companies again—GE, Westinghouse, RCA—to inquire about what they were working on and whether they might be interested in using EPCOT as their own laboratory to test new technologies, so that EPCOT would be a showcase for American knowhow as well as a showcase for Walt Disney’s imagination.
Now with EPCOT he was back at WED, as he had been in the planning stages of Disneyland and before the world’s fair. He asked his friend and neighbor, the distinguished architect Welton Becket, who was designing the Century City complex in Los Angeles at the time, to draw up a plan for EPCOT, but according to Marvin Davis, Walt was disappointed by Becket’s presentation; Davis suspected Walt felt the buildings looked inhospitable to Walt, and so that was why, as he had done on Disneyland, Walt gave the assignment to his Imagineers. Davis said that Walt’s original plans had been scribbled on the back of a paper breakfast napkin and that whenever Walt had a new idea, he would give Davis another napkin with a drawing. Sometimes the Imagineers, trying to divine Walt’s intentions, would pluck the napkins from the garbage where Walt had tossed them.
As the plans took shape, Walt would visit the offices three or four times each week, usually rearranging the models on the layout, and when the EPCOT operation moved from its tiny warren at WED to a larger, high-ceilinged room that was dubbed the Florida Room, Walt would sit at the worktable, as one Imagineer remembered it, “sketching away with a big pencil while the rest of us were sitting around, ideas going back and forth, right and left.” When they finished, they had devised a five-thousand-acre city arranged in a wheel three miles in diameter. (As with Mickey Mouse’s body, the circle was the shape of comfort.) At the center was the fifty-acre downtown commercial hub; in some plans it was a fully enclosed air-conditioned complex with a thirty-story hotel, shops, markets, and theaters arranged into international zones. Radiating in concentric circles from the hub were a greenbelt park, high-density apartments, and low-density residential areas. Traffic and garbage collection were to be routed underground on an expressway, and public transportation, a monorail, was to run from the outlying circles to the inner ones, where residents would board “people movers” or small electric trains. An industrial park was to be situated nearby, connected by the monorail, and the entire city was to be serviced by a jet airport. And in the middle of it all, as Walt imagined it, would be Walt Disney himself. “I vividly remember sitting next to Walt on a plane when he pointed to the center of EPCOT, an oval-shaped area,” Imagineer Bob Gurr later related. “Walt said, ‘When this EPCOT gets up and running, and we have all the participants there, this spot with a little bench is where Lilly and I are going to sit and watch.’” But that restful moment would have to wait.
VI
If Hollywood used Walt Disney to defend itself against charges of depravity, so the protectors of American culture used him to defend the country against the charges of materialism, imperialism, racism, and hypocrisy that were now being leveled as civil rights protests escalated, military involvement in Southeast Asia intensified, and fissures in America’s social fabric widened. Walt Disney was the living antidote to all of this turmoil, the embodiment for the country’s cheerleaders of everything that was still right with the nation. He was a Horatio Alger hero whose life demonstrated social mobility. He was a naïve artist whose work demonstrated a Jamesian unpretentiousness and common sense. He was a visionary whose plans demonstrated the breadth of American imagination and the power of American will. And however he behaved privately at his studio, he was publicly a modest, affable, and decent man whose image demonstrated America’s own decency and generosity of spirit.
Though he barely acknowledged the country’s problems himself in public (save for periodic grumblings about Hollywood’s moral decline), and though he had long since forsworn much interest in politics, even resigning his membership in the Motion Picture Alliance when, without consulting its members, it attacked the Writers Guild for rejecting a resolution barring writers who had not signed a loyalty oath, politicians still sought his support. Occasionally he gave it, actively soliciting donations for the Eisenhower campaign in 1956 and plastering a bumper sticker for the 1960 Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidates Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge on the little motorized cart he rode around the studio. (According to Ward Kimball, Walt tried to strong-arm employees into contributing to Nixon’s campaign until Milt Kahl, himself an ardent Republican, objected.) He was involved in the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater in 1964, meeting Goldwater at the Republican convention in San Francisco, donating over $16,000 to him, and offering him the use of the company planes. In thanking Diane for likewise supporting Goldwater, Walt compared it to “taking up the gun against the enemy.”
As enthusiastically as he supported Goldwater, a self-professed conservative who opposed social security insurance, he was even more fervent about the candidacy of George Murphy, a former dancer and musical film star whom Walt had known for years. When Murphy first contemplated running for the U.S. Senate in 1964, he said he consulted Walt, who confidently predicted, “Talk to enough people and you’ll win.” After Murphy declared his candidacy, Walt not only donated generously, he loaned the Murphy campaign furniture for its headquarters, chaired a fund-raising dinner for him, took out full-page newspaper ads the last week of the campaign, and allowed his name to be used in a mass mailing. Even Lillian, a registered Democrat, joined a group called Democrats for George Murphy. Still, after Murphy won, Walt wasn’t especially politicized. “I had my little fling at politics last year,” he told a reporter late in 1965. “It’s really not very interesting.”
In effect, despite his Republicanism, Walt Disney belonged to everyone. When the Tournament of Roses was looking for a grand marshal for its January 1, 1966, parade, the first to be televised overseas, via the Telstar satellite, they asked Walt because, the organizers told studio executives, they felt he was “one person no country could find fault with.” He was, The New York Times reported at the time, “revered and honored almost to the point of absurdity,” though none of his honors may have been greater than the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award the nation can bestow. Walt received it from President Lyndon Johnson at the White House during the 1964 presidential campaign—Walt wore a Goldwater button under his lapel—and it was a measure of his status that among his fellow honorees that day were the poets T. S. Eliot and Carl Sandburg, the novelist John Steinbeck, the urban historian Lewis Mumford, the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, the artist Willem de Kooning, the composer Aaron Copland, the columnist Walter Lippmann, the journalist Edward R. Murrow, and Helen Keller. Walt Disney was in the pantheon.
But with the lionization came a backlash. Before the war Walt Disney had been considered a happy exception to the mass culture that many observers—including Dwight Macdonald, C. Wright Mills, and William Whyte—warned was threatening the nation’s cultural health. Since the war some intellectuals had come to feel, as Vincent Scully did, that Walt had himself become a corporate vulgarian who coarsened the culture through commercialization and simplification. One authority on children’s literature said she found “almost everything objectionable” in his rendition of fairy tales. He “takes a great masterpiece and telescopes it,” she said, and “leaves nothing to the imagination of the child.” After the success of Disneyland, however, a more profound critique emerged, in which Disneyland itself was the primary target. These detractors felt that Walt Disney had not perfected reality so much as glossed it; his synthetic world from which danger had been purged was a means of avoiding the issues now confronting the nation and
of papering over its contradictions. Not only did Disneyland provide a fortress against reality, which, of course, had been Walt’s intention; it also provided a model and even a sensibility for transforming reality that was becoming all-encompassing, meaning that Disney had impregnated himself into the American consciousness. As the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard would put it, “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.” Disneyland had become a metaphor for America—an America that had increasingly opted for fantasy and, its critics believed, was paying a price for doing so. More than even the archetypal nation of the imagination that he had created in the 1950s, this was Walt Disney’s America.
If Disneyland was a metaphor, so too was Walt Disney himself, his image no less synthetic than his theme park. Just as the postwar Walt Disney had become the personification of American corporate power, all the bonhomie, all the bromides, all the professions of anti-intellectualism and the hints of moralism, all the dramatic accounts of personal struggle, perseverance, and triumph, had converted Walt Disney into the very personification not just of sturdy American values but of something else: of a cultural and political conservatism that could countenance neither criticism nor change. Since the 1950s, America had seen what journalist Godfrey Hodgson called a “disappointment in expectations.” Americans had enjoyed a postwar economic boom that raised wages and the standard of living, but these gains, Hodgson wrote, “seemed negated emotionally by a sense of loss and sense of threat,” especially among the white middle class—Walt Disney’s stock—“which had seen its relatively privileged status successively eroded by almost every social development of the past hundred years: by immigration, urbanization, the eclipse of Protestantism, inflation, depression and now by wartime boom and the high wages it brought to every other group.” Put another way, the old nineteenth-century ideal of America was rapidly fading.
Walt Disney, as the representative of all that was good and decent about that old, endangered America, had long been a bulwark against the sense of loss and threat. But in the roiling America of the 1960s—politically unsettled by assassinations and urban riots, protest marches, and war, and aesthetically unsettled by the Beatles, graphic violence, and increasingly frank sexuality—the nation’s favorite uncle turned into an anachronism: an emblem of conformity in a time of dissent. He knew it. Occasionally he even flashed resentment at it. During a photo shoot at his Disneyland apartment, Walt, according to the photographer, suddenly slouched in his chair, lifted a gin bottle, unzipped his pants fly, pulled out his shirttail, and said, “How’s this for the cover of a gossip magazine?” But the photographer refused to take the picture, refused to compromise his subject. The image of Walt Disney was sacrosanct.
Yet the image of the stolid conformist was at variance with the content of the films—the real content. Though they were unmistakably conservative in their aesthetics—even juvenile, as critics claimed—when one bothered to examine them closely and did not just assume that as products of Uncle Walt Disney they were necessarily old-fashioned and empty, the movies were surprisingly modern in outlook and not quite as innocuous as even Walt had declared them to be. The rock-ribbed Republican who practically created the popular vision of nineteenth-century America, had, after all, also suspected authority and often questioned it, hated money and its acquisition, was wary of materialism, detested affectation, and came to believe fervently in internationalism; and all of these values had found their way into his movies and quite possibly into the mind-set of the generation who had been weaned on them. Moreover, ever the self-dramatist who drew on his own struggles, Walt had always identified closely with the outcasts and the marginalized rather than with the powerful, and this tendency found its way into his films too—The Ugly Duckling, Ferdinand the Bull, Morris the Midget Moose, Lambert the Sheepish Lion.
As one scholar reevaluated them forty years later, Disney’s films actually often squarely contradicted the conservative values of the 1950s and 1960s. They promoted the ideas that life could be arduous and unhappy but that one had to soldier on nevertheless (as in So Dear to My Heart and Old Yeller) and that one often must painfully reconcile one’s ideals with reality, even if Walt himself fought having to do so; that innocence is always in jeopardy in an increasingly materialistic world (as in Peter Pan and Mary Poppins); that while order is desirable, authority is often stifling and sometimes has to be disrespected (as in Johnny Tremain); that rebelliousness is a perfectly acceptable form of protest (as in Robin Hood, Rob Roy, and Davy Crockett, where the hero expressly disobeys orders); that class distinctions are not a natural product of Social Darwinism and that classes need to find common ground (as in Cinderella, Lady and the Tramp, and the Spin and Marty serial); that acceptance of others is a positive good (as in Davy Crockett’s gospel of understanding the Indians); that public recognition is less important than personal fulfillment; and finally that individualism, as essential as it is, is best when it operates in the service of the community. Even Pollyanna, seemingly the most bathetic of Disney movies if one of the most moving, exposes not small-town virtues but small-town hypocrisy, attacks the forces of tradition and wealth, and makes a call for a progressive alliance to promote tolerance; and in a lesser-known film, A Tiger Walks, the Menckenian impulse is so strong that ordinary Americans are depicted as greedy and self-serving. In short, though Walt Disney was made to seem conservative—and made himself seem conservative because it fit the cultural ethos of the time—in his films, at least, he may have not been so very conservative after all, nor the barrier against the new America that he was often purported to be.
While Walt promoted community, quite possibly the most famous man in America may also have been among the loneliest. Age had made him no more social than he had been as a young man yoked to his studio. Dinner invitations to the studio almost always bore Walt’s emphatic “NO!,” in his red crayon, underlined, sometimes twice, and he was no more receptive to invitations to appear at public events, invariably begging off. Even with the girls gone he and Lillian seldom entertained, and old friends, like the Spracklings with whom they had traveled in the 1950s, faded from their lives. He had always found solace with his pets, and after Duchess died, he got himself another poodle named Lady, but Lady died too. At the studio, despite all the activity, he sometimes seemed bereft. Bill Peet recalled Walt slumping into his chair with a “mournful sigh” and announcing, “It gets lonely around here. I just want to talk to somebody,” then beginning to relate the tale of his childhood travails and his father’s cruelty. But when Peet began to talk about his own childhood miseries, Walt “jumped to his feet and said, ‘Gotta get goin’!’” Marc Davis remembered seeing Walt sitting alone at the Tam O’Shanter restaurant one evening. Davis invited him to go to a movie with himself and his wife. “[A]nd he drew a curtain just like that and said, ‘No, I’m going to stay at the studio.’” “He always had a certain reserve which he had for individuals,” Davis said.
At the end of the day he would drink. Tommie Wilck, one of his two secretaries, would serve him his Scotch Mist with water—mainly water, she said. “He may have consumed a lot of liquid, but I don’t think he really got much liquor.” Still, studio veterans knew enough to schedule meetings with him in the morning or early afternoon. “[S]tarting at five o’clock every day, a lot of people would say, ‘I’ve got to get to Walt before he uncorks the bottle because you really can’t get the decision you want [afterward],’” Ward Kimball told an interviewer. Jack Kinney said that when he worked late at the studio, he would sometimes see Walt’s car swerving out of the lot as he headed home. “That was quite a long way to go,” Kinney would write, “but he always made it. He must have had someone watching over him.” Of course when he got home, one of the first things he and Lillian did was have a cocktail, and at one point, when a doctor recommended that to lose weight Walt spend his Pa
lm Springs weekends drinking rather than eating, he began drinking heavily.
If he didn’t have many friends, he didn’t have many recreations either. He enjoyed watching baseball, and for years he had had a season’s box for the Hollywood Stars minor league team, eventually buying a share in the club. When a group of local notables organized to attempt to bring an American League team to Los Angeles, Walt joined the advisory board and even attended spring training games after the city was awarded the franchise, the Los Angeles Angels. But if he was a baseball fan, Walt also seemed to have an ulterior motive: he wanted to establish the team in Orange County near Disneyland, presumably as a way of helping his park.
His main diversion, now that he no longer had his train, was lawn bowling. He had joined the Beverly Hills Lawn Bowling Club and was a member of a small bowling club at Smoke Tree as well. He wasn’t particularly good—Walt had never been good at sports—and when an eighty-year-old bowler beat him, Walt advised him not to let it “go to your head” since “[e]verybody beats me!” Still, Walt, who had a hand-tooled bowling bag, took the game seriously enough to arrange to send thirty bowlers from his Beverly Hills club to Smoke Tree for a tournament, and to fly with a group of friends to Buck Hill Falls in Pennsylvania to compete in the U.S. Doubles Tournament. He and Lillian, who, according to Diane, found the idea of bowling tournaments “silly,” even discussed an Australian vacation with two fellow enthusiasts and their wives to coincide with the Australian Championship Lawn Bowling Tournament there. These lawn bowlers had become Walt Disney’s closest friends.