Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  To spend the restless energy that wasn’t being exhausted by the studio, he still traveled, almost always accompanied by Lillian and always booking double beds—the annual summer trips to Europe, a cruise to Bora Bora, a Fourth of July spent in Sun Valley, a weekend in Baja for marlin fishing, a junket to Mexico City for People to People, a trip to Banff with Diane and the grandchildren. When the studio bought its planes—a Beechcraft Queen Air in January 1963 and the Gulfstream in March 1964—Walt began zipping around the country as he had zipped around Europe. As someone who had made a practice of detaching himself from reality and who had used even his trains less as a way of connecting places than of isolating himself from them, he liked the air. He had always wanted to learn to fly himself (“badly,” Sharon said), but Roy discouraged it, apparently fearing that some tragedy might befall him. So instead he logged time in the jet—150 hours between August 1965 and August 1966 alone.

  Many of those hours were spent being ferried from Burbank to Smoke Tree, where he had renovated his cottage and installed a swimming pool, largely to entertain his grandchildren, upon whom he lavished attention as he had once lavished attention upon his daughters. He was especially ecstatic when, in November 1961, Diane gave birth to a second son and named him after her father: Walter Elias Disney Miller. “I’m thrilled to have a male heir bearing my name,” he wrote director Robert Stevenson, calling it the “BIG NEWS” and still complaining that she hadn’t named her firstborn for him. Walt loved the children’s company. He would have them out to Smoke Tree, or he would drive them to school and have them picked up afterward and taken to the studio where they played in his office, or he would drive them out to Disneyland to stay in his fire station apartment and have the run of the park. Usually they would spend one weekend a month at the Carolwood house. “We’d play on the lawn and around the great big pool,” recalled Joanna Miller. “We’d stack up the patio furniture to make jets and rockets. And Grandpa would often be sitting there on the lawn, reading scripts, enjoying the glow of all the activity around him.”

  VII

  It was almost as if Walt had a premonition. It wasn’t only the talk of succession or the wistful reveries about what would happen to the company after he was gone. A sense of melancholy seemed to shroud him. He was reflective and increasingly pensive. On Fridays, at the end of the workweek, he would occasionally invite the Sherman brothers to his office and discourse about the future. Then inevitably he would wander to the window, stare into space, as he so often did now, and ask them to “play it!”—a command so familiar to the Shermans that they knew he meant “Feed the Birds” from Mary Poppins, about an old woman outside St. Paul’s Cathedral who sells bags of crumbs to feed the birds there. Whether Walt related to the song because he related to the woman’s loneliness, or whether in a life of grand gestures he appreciated her small one, or whether he recognized in her his own mortality, or whether the woman simply reminded him of his mother, he never said, and no one would ever know. But hearing the song, he would always cry.

  Still, not so much sadness but busyness, a seeming need for constant activity, characterized him now. He was back in the tumult and glad of it. When Richard Schickel proposed to write a biography—“The guy just has a sincere desire to write the best book ever on Walt’s contribution to the education, entertainment and the happiness of the world,” one studio press representative told press head Joe Reddy after Schickel visited the studio—the studio and Walt both agreed; then, suddenly, Walt changed his mind and decided to table the project. “As far as I’m concerned I am just in the middle of my career,” he wrote the editor who had suggested Schickel. “I have several years and several projects to go before my life story should be written. I don’t want to be judged on just what I have accomplished up to now for I have many plans for tomorrow and I’m too involved with those future projects to take time to rehash the past.” (Instead of the hagiography Schickel had promised, he wound up writing The Disney Version, a scathing attack on Disney.) To his niece’s husband he said that he couldn’t even leave the studio to accept an award out east, admitting, “I don’t know how much time I have,” and saying, “I need to stay here to do as much as I can to keep this enterprise twenty-five years ahead of the competition.”

  He was in a hurry, and he had so much to do. The studio produced five films a year—all of which Walt at least casually supervised and a few more than casually. He had actually outlined one, Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N., a comic updating of Daniel Defoe’s novel about a man stranded on an island, on the back of an envelope or an air-sickness bag, then gave it to Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi to convert into a screenplay. When Walsh asked Walt if he wanted credit, Walt insisted he did. The original story was attributed to “Retlaw Yensid”—“Walter Disney” backward. He continued to host the television program, for which he would occasionally take trips to gather material, as he did on a visit to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center at Huntsville, Alabama, for another show on space travel. He worked on the Marceline Project, though Roy believed that not enough of the original Disney house remained there and that the town should set up a nonprofit corporation to which WDP would consider licensing Walt’s name and providing the company’s expertise. And he had the Mineral King ski resort project. Walt visited the site with Buzz Price, Card Walker, and Donn Tatum in August 1965, and that November he and a delegation flew to Washington and spoke to officials of the Agriculture Department for two and a half hours to try to convince them to issue a permit for a $35 million development in the Sequoia National Park. In December the U.S. Forest Service awarded him the permit, which granted the company three years to submit its plans to a review board for approval.

  Though he had long since given up any supervisory control of Disneyland, Walt continued to visit the park once a month, usually when it was closed or when it was very crowded and he could race through the hordes to avoid autograph seekers. He still signed off on a new Monsanto-sponsored exhibit for Tomorrowland, approved a new Audio-Animatronic attraction called Pirates of the Caribbean, and oversaw the completion of a New Orleans Square that opened in July 1966 and of which the New Orleans mayor said, “It looks just like home.” To which Walt riposted, “Well, I’d say it’s a lot cleaner.”

  As for CalArts, Walt would regale his secretaries at the end of the workday with word paintings of what he intended to do there. But as with almost everything in Walt Disney’s life, there was action behind the talk. In September 1965 WDP, at Walt’s behest, gave the school thirty-eight acres of its backlot at Golden Oak for a new campus, and Roy was advising that the studio donate additional money for a detailed study and appraisal of the project, while the Disney Foundation, a charitable organization that Walt had formed, was to contribute another million dollars. “[W]ith that kind of a start we should be able to impress a lot of substantial people and get another five or seven-and-a-half million without too much difficulty,” Roy wrote Walt. They did. The following April the federal government loaned the school $4 million. In the meantime Walt raised $2 million from private donors. It was a sign of how dedicated he was to CalArts that Walt, who could barely sit without wiggling, tapping, grimacing, and smoking, spent two hours listening to an opera by a friend of one of the major contributors.

  Even as he was immersed in these projects, the animations remained an ever-vexing problem. He continued to feel that they drained resources that might better be devoted to other things, but he also felt obligated to produce them since they were so closely associated with the studio. Long before, he had streamlined the system, appointing one supervising director (Woolie Reitherman), one art director (Ken Anderson), four master animators (Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl, and John Lounsbery), and one storyman (Bill Peet)—that is, one man who would write the screenplay, make the storyboards, and record the voices where, as Peet himself complained, more than forty men had once been assigned to these tasks. Walt also sought to streamline the physical process by putting the animators’ drawings directly on the cel, withou
t need of cleanup men or ink girls. Iwerks had been working fitfully on this concept, essentially Xerographing the pencil lines onto the cels, at least since Fantasia, and in the late 1950s he returned from a visit to the Xerox factory with a means of copying the lines onto a light-sensitive aluminum plate and from the plate to the cel.

  The animators were generally ecstatic. For years they had had to see their lines thickened and smoothed by the inkers, who traced them. Now the drawings got onto the screen exactly as they had been on their animation boards. “It was the first time we ever saw our drawings on the screen, literally,” Marc Davis said. “Before, they’d always been watered down.” A film like 101 Dalmatians could not have been made any other way; the inkers and painters would have had to draw each spot of each dog on each cel in which it appeared. But in eliminating the middleman and gaining speed and immediacy, something was also lost. Eric Larson thought the Xerography “spoils the beauty of the design of the character” because the consistency and the sinuousness of the lines were gone. Instead one got much sharper, rougher, more angular lines, like those drawn by a pencil rather than a paintbrush, and a more vivid sense of the animator’s hand, which pointed the animation back toward the less realistic self-reflexiveness from which Walt Disney had turned it so many, many years before. The effect was to put the animators in charge—and to put their visions, not Walt’s, on the screen.

  To the extent that Walt cared, he was not impressed by the visual style, but he didn’t care very much. After Dalmatians, as Marc Davis told it, the business side of the studio was so adamantly opposed to doing another animated feature that Walt once again was ready to yield and drop animation altogether. “Then he had second thoughts,” Davis said. “He felt the guys knew how to make these films and that he owed it to them to continue.” Still, after the Sleeping Beauty debacle, the studio had slashed the budgets, and after Dalmatians it slashed them yet again; The Sword in the Stone was budgeted at 40 percent less than Dalmatians, which, Ken Peterson wrote Walt, would “require drastic steps in our production procedure, in order to make it possible.” Meanwhile Walt further retreated, leaving the animators to bicker among themselves, their old esprit almost entirely gone, and he intervened only when they begged him to do so to resolve some thorny issue. As Milt Kahl put it, “He was interested in a picture until he had all the problems solved and then he just lost interest.”

  As the staff worked that spring of 1966 on The Jungle Book, adapted from Rudyard Kipling’s stories about a boy who grows up among animals in the wild, the problems kept mounting. Reitherman importuned Walt for a meeting—“It would take about ½ hour,” he memoed Walt plaintively—and Walt complied but was not happy with what he saw. The stories were episodic rather than cumulative; they lacked a spine. He thought that the audience would not identify with the boy, Mowgli, and that the film’s tone was too sober. He was afraid that the villain, a tiger named Shere Khan, would be a cliché. Yet despite his preoccupation with other projects and his lack of interest in this one, he quickly salvaged the production, as he had done so many times in the past, by suggesting that singer Phil Harris, known for his loose, boozy, throwaway style, voice a bear named Baloo who befriends Mowgli. “When Walt heard Phil’s test track he loved it,” Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston would later write, “even to the point of starting to act out how the bear would first come dancing into Mowgli’s scene.” The bear, who had been intended as a minor figure, became the film’s costar, converting the picture from a series of disconnected adventures into the story of a boy and his hedonistic mentor—a jungle Hal and Falstaff.

  Finally, while he was engaged with the animation and television and Mineral King and CalArts, he also had EPCOT, the center around which all these other projects swirled, and now the overriding passion in his life. Walt spent the better part of the spring of 1966 on reconnaissance missions for his futuristic city, first visiting the Monsanto offices in St. Louis to discuss what that company might contribute to EPCOT and then boarding the Gulfstream for a long tour that took him to a Gruen-designed six-acre mall in Rochester, New York, which boasted three levels of underground parking; another shopping mall in Philadelphia; the new Nieman-Marcus department store in Dallas; a Westinghouse trash-disposal project in Tampa that recycled the garbage; and the model city of Reston, Virginia, a fully planned community. He also made a detour to the Disney World site. “I’m making this trip with some of my staff in order to do some checking on the latest developments in housing and shopping centers around the country,” he wrote a friend. “We need to know what is good and what is bad about some of the so-called modern concepts so we can take advantage of that in our Florida project.” It was a joyous spasm of activity, and he said to Harrison Price that between Mineral King and Disney World, he now had “enough work to keep my organization busy for forty years!” That seemed to be the point—to keep the company going.

  But despite the surge in work and the pleasure it clearly gave him, he was not feeling well. For years he had suffered with various ailments, nagging ailments that chipped away at his health. He had kidney stones. His teeth ached, sending shafts of pain up his face so that his entire head throbbed and forcing him at night to apply hot compresses to relieve the agony. He had a sore elbow, for which he had received injections and X-ray therapy. He had a chronic sinus condition that required a weekly visit to the doctor. He always seemed to be fighting a cold and at least twice was diagnosed with walking pneumonia. And he waged a losing battle against weight gain, so that where once he had been lean and hatchet-faced, then fleshy, as he passed sixty he became paunchy. Embarking on one diet, he wrote Hayley Mills, “I am in the process of losing my big, fat stomach.”

  Most of all, he still ached from that old polo injury he had suffered in the 1930s, when he had taken a spill from his horse; the cracked vertebra in his neck had calcified over the years, pinching his nerves and causing him excruciating pain. On an overnight trip with him, Peter Ellenshaw recalled that Walt lay awake all night in pain, rising frequently to go to the washbasin to apply compresses to his neck. By early 1966 the calcification had advanced, and Walt had begun dragging his right leg and occasionally listing as he walked. Even his secretary admitted “it got so bad that there were times when you’d have sworn he had been drinking, but he never drank during the day,” meaning the workday. “He constantly complained of this bad hip,” Marc Davis said, calling himself “gimpy” and talking of being “pooped.” He would ride his golf cart around the studio now, and at the end of the day he would retreat to Hazel George’s office to receive his traction and infrared treatments while he sipped his scotch through a straw. Concerned by how much alcohol he seemed to be consuming, George told him that he was in danger of becoming a “lush” and asked him what Lillian thought of his coming home with liquor on his breath. Walt told her that he kept out of Lillian’s breathing space, but he defended himself. “My nerves are all shot to hell,” he told George, “and nowadays the fuckin’ pain here is driving me nuts!” When George asked him if the treatments were not working, Walt confessed that he came for the liquor.

  Ward Kimball thought that after all the years of constant pressure and constant activity, Walt had finally broken down. “Here is the same man who had just built the park, then been in on every phase, who was sitting in his office okaying and reading scripts far into the night, going to people’s rooms and looking over their story work, making decisions on films, making decisions on [the] corporate level, laying out the new Florida complex, plus the decisions on the Lake Buena Vista EPCOT city of tomorrow, making personal appearances, greeting visitors, going down on sets, choosing,” Kimball told an interviewer. “[H]e wouldn’t admit that, physically and mentally, he couldn’t handle this…his body just gave up.” Another coworker, watching him late one night at the studio, observed how much Walt had been forced to surrender to age and infirmity, even as he fought them. “His proud head dropped forward on his chest,” the man wrote. “His usually squared shoulders lowered until the
y became round. Thinking no one else was around, he dropped all pretense of youth. He seemed to age 20 years right before my eyes.” Cameramen on Wonderful World of Color began using diffusion filters to hide Walt’s wrinkles, though Walt objected that the filters made him look out of focus.

  He had always been terrified of death, terrified of the very idea of mortality. “Whenever Father gets depressed, he discusses his impending demise,” Diane wrote in her biography of him, asserting that “he never goes to a funeral if he can help it”—he didn’t even attend his brother Herbert’s—and that if he does go to one, “he plunges into a reverie which lasts for hours after he’s home.” When he attended the funeral of onetime studio artist Charlie Philipi, Herb Ryman recalled that Walt kept drumming his fingers and rubbing his hands nervously during the service and that when he got back to the studio, he was irritable, yelling at Marc Davis and Milt Kahl to “get the hell back to work.” He hated even the mention of death. When Harrison Price joked about death statistics, Walt gave him a “fierce reaming out.” “[D]eath is not an acceptable topic,” Herb Ryman warned Price. Still, as he did with most aspects of reality, Walt used wish fulfillment to deny death. He had once boasted to his aunt Jessie that “[l]ongevity seems to run with the Disneys—on both sides of the family, I would say,” and he seemed comforted by the fact that his father had lived into his eighties and his uncle Robert, who had died in 1953, well into his nineties, and that his mother’s sisters had lived long lives as well.