Eisner talked to Katzenberg about forming a business partnership to produce movies and television, and the two even worked up a business plan. After years of working in Eisner’s shadow, Katzenberg was thrilled that his mentor held him in such high regard. “Don’t worry,” Eisner told him. “Whatever happens, we’re partners for life.”
Several other possibilities were floating around—a move to CBS, or Capital Cities/ABC, for example—but moving back to television didn’t excite Eisner. He and Ovitz strategized about a buyout of American International Pictures, which Eisner wanted to rename Hollywood Pictures. And then, while visiting his sons at Camp Keewaydin in August 1984, Eisner learned of Roy Disney’s resignation from the Disney board, and called him. “Are you still interested in coming to Disney?” Roy asked when he returned Eisner’s call.
During the 1980s, the era of swashbuckling corporate raiders, Roy E. Disney seemed like the last person to lead a boardroom coup or hostile takeover. Somewhat quiet and shy by nature, with a wry sense of humor, Roy rarely spoke at Disney board meetings. He and Eisner served together on the board of the California Institute of the Arts, a school founded and endowed by Walt and Roy O. (Walt’s brother and Roy E.’s father). In those meetings, Eisner never heard Roy say a word. Though he bore a strong family resemblance to his uncle Walt and was the only male heir in the family, Roy had long ago been pushed aside in the Disney hierarchy in favor of Ron Miller, the handsome ex–football star who married Walt’s daughter Diane. But Roy’s gentle demeanor masked other qualities he’d inherited from his Disney ancestors: determination, persistence, and a strong, even stubborn, will.
After their respective marriages, both Walt and his brother Roy had been slow to conceive children. There was rejoicing in the two families when Roy Edward was born to Roy and Edna in 1930. (It is a somewhat confusing tradition in the Disney family to name sons after their fathers, but to choose a middle name that begins with their mother’s initial, in this case “E.”)
Roy was a quiet only child who loved books. Walt often read aloud to Roy, and acted out stories. Roy later said the studio’s animated Pinocchio disappointed him because Walt’s telling of the story had been more exciting and dramatic. “For Roy Edward,” his father wrote to Roy’s grandparents, “I can’t think of anything he appreciates more than good story books. He loves that little Indian book you gave him while you were here. I am reading to him from ‘The Swiss Family Robinson’a little bit at a time in the evenings…. He sits around and reads and is a fine little boy. He said the other day that he thinks Christmas is a ‘fine idea.’ ”
Walt’s and Lillian’s daughter, Diane Marie, was born in 1933. The couple adopted another daughter, Sharon Mae, in 1936. Walt doted on his two daughters, as did their uncle Roy. In a 1938 letter to his parents, Roy O. wrote, “Gosh, it makes me jealous. I wish we had a little girl at our place, but I haven’t been able to talk Edna into it as yet. I thought we might be able to go down and adopt one, if we could find one we could fall in love with. But I think my wife is having too good a time right now and hates to take on the added responsibility.”
Old home movies show a young Roy E. frolicking in the backyard pool with his cousins Sharon and Diane, with their parents looking on fondly. When she was ten, Roy taught Diane how to dive. He and his cousins had the run of the Disney studio lot, riding their bikes through various stage sets. Roy loved to watch the animators at work in their cubicles in the animation building. He and his friends got to test-drive the miniature race cars that later appeared at Disneyland.
When Roy was ten, he received an HO-scale model railroad, which he put together in a toolshed behind the house. The next time Walt came over, Roy was eager to show it to his uncle, and the two disappeared into the toolshed for several hours. About a month later, Walt invited Roy to visit. “Come on out and see this,” he told his nephew, leading him to a playhouse that Diane and Sharon had outgrown. Inside was an array of HO-scale model trains, with every accessory Roy had ever dreamed of.
Though the close bond between Walt and Roy and their families survived early hardship and near-bankruptcy, it suffered from the pressures of wealth, fame, and success. Walt and Lillian moved from the modest Hollywood bungalow next door to Roy and Edna, first to a larger home in Los Feliz Hills and then to an even larger one they had built on Carolwood Drive in Holmby Hills, an exclusive enclave wedged between Bel Air and Beverly Hills. Roy and Edna moved to the San Fernando Valley, to a spacious home in Toluca Lake. The Kansas-born Edna was famously thrifty and down-to-earth, always doing her own grocery shopping and employing a couple as housekeeper and gardener. Walt and Lillian had a household staff.
Still, Roy E. and his parents made regular visits to his uncle and aunt in Holmby Hills. Still fascinated by model trains but no longer content with HO-scale replicas, Walt had built a coal-fired steam railroad that wound through the five-acre property and traversed a small ravine. Walt had always loved the Central Pacific, so he used the CP logo and called his line the “Carolwood Pacific.” The track ran 2,615 feet and included a 90-foot concrete-reinforced tunnel, which neighbors referred to as Los Angeles’s longest bomb shelter. The cars and engine were one-eighth scale, and Walt had the coal custom-ground in Scranton, Pennsylvania, also to one-eighth scale. Whenever Roy came over, Walt had him wipe down and polish the cars and haul water for the steam engine. Other kids in the neighborhood—Candice Bergen and Nancy Sinatra among them—joined in the rides, with Walt driving the engine in an engineer’s cap.
One afternoon when Roy was eighteen, the passenger cars derailed. Roy, who was tall and lanky, had been dragging his foot on the ground, kicking up dust and gravel, some of which landed on the track. The engine separated from the cars. Walt got off and stalked back to the youngsters. Roy could tell his uncle was angry because of his scowl and cocked eyebrow. Roy still had the incriminating foot on the ground. “I didn’t mean to, Uncle Walt,” Roy said.
Roy was sentenced to the barn for the rest of the afternoon.
The backyard railroad was the inspiration for the Disneyland steam-powered railroad, a centerpiece for the new theme park, which triggered the first serious breach between Walt and his brother Roy O. Walt wanted to retain personal ownership of the railroad, as well as a planned monorail, through a new company called WED, his initials. WED would also own all rights to the Walt Disney name, always a source of proprietary interest on Walt’s part. Publicly traded Walt Disney Productions, in which Walt and Lillian held roughly a third of the shares, and Roy and Edna a fifth, would pay royalties to WED and Walt’s salary of $153,000 a year to a personal services subsidiary, Retlaw (“Walter” spelled backward). Roy had never minded being out of the limelight, but he was skeptical about the Disneyland venture and strongly opposed to this potential conflict of interest. He was angered when Walt nearly hired an agent to aggressively champion Walt’s interests. He was also surprised, since Walt had never seemed all that concerned with his personal wealth. He was particularly upset that Walt would now claim ownership of the Disney name. It had been bad enough when Walt insisted on changing the name of the company from Disney Brothers Productions to Walt Disney Productions to reflect his creative role. Even so, Roy grudgingly acquiesced rather than prompt a showdown with Walt.
But there was a new distrust that had never been there before. Even though Walt refused to join the board, saying it would distract him from the “real business” of the company, the brothers now vied for influence. Walt installed two personal allies—E. Cardon Walker, who handled advertising and public relations, and producer Bill Anderson—expressly to do his bidding. Employees at Disney were soon divided between “Walt men” and “Roy men.”
Ten years later, with payments to Walt’s WED and Retlaw soaring, and shareholders threatening a lawsuit (the board had never approved Walt’s self-serving arrangements), Roy confronted Walt during a weekend the families spent together at Walt’s Smoke Tree Ranch in Palm Springs. The moment the subject of WED was broached, the brothers boil
ed over. They yelled at each other the entire weekend. “Dammit, I want to be on a par with what other people are making in this industry, Roy,” Walt yelled at one point. “If you don’t do that, I’m going to leave.”
Walt and Roy didn’t speak for the next six months. Eventually, after contentious negotiations, Walt Disney Productions bought back WED from Walt, including the rights to use the Disney name, for $60 million. Walt gave Roy a wooden peace pipe, which he hung on his office wall. “It was wonderful to smoke the pipe of peace with you again,” Walt wrote his brother. “The clouds that rise are very beautiful.” Roy E. later inherited the pipe from his father, and keeps it in his office.
But the rift between the families never fully healed. The huge payment by Walt Disney Productions to Walt, which ended up making the Walt side of the family enormously wealthy, rankled throughout the Roy side. When Roy E. went to work for the company after graduating from nearby Pomona College, his father worried that Walt wouldn’t treat his son as well as other employees.
Roy worked in the editing room on one of Walt’s early nature documentaries, The Vanishing Prairie. They were viewing footage of ducks and geese returning in spring when Walt spotted a sequence in which a duck unwittingly lands on a still-frozen pond and tumbles over and over. “Where’s the rest of this, where he hits the other ducks on the pond?” Walt asked. No one answered. “I know it’s there somewhere,” Walt said. “Roy, go find it.”
Roy started poring through millions of feet of film negatives. He couldn’t find it. “Where is that film?” Walt asked again at the next screening. Roy meekly said it didn’t exist. Finally the director sent a crew to Minnesota where they staged a duck’s landing into a group of ducks on a frozen lake, then incorporated the footage into Vanishing Prairie, accompanied by the sound of a bowling ball hitting pins. Walt loved it. “See, I told you you had that footage,” Walt said. Roy suspected that Walt knew all along that they didn’t. “Go find it” was Walt’s way of saying “Go shoot the footage. Get this done.”
To Roy, Walt’s frequent criticism and impatience with him simply reflected how stingy Walt was with praise and how demanding he was with all his employees. When Roy finally got up the nerve to ask permission to make his own nature documentary, Walt agreed, and Roy produced An Otter in the Family. During a screening, Walt laughed out loud at one sequence, which Roy knew was high praise—and all that he’d get.
When Roy got married to his childhood neighbor Patty Dailey in 1955, Walt attended the wedding. “Great news! My nephew’s marrying a girl with some spunk!” he said. In private, Walt complained that Roy lacked drive and ambition. After Walt complained to Card Walker that Roy would “never amount to anything,” Walker dubbed him the “idiot nephew.”
By the time Roy was making nature films, Walt had already transferred his plans for the next generation to his son-in-law, Ron Miller. After Miller married Diane in 1954, Walt had talked him into joining the company. Miller had fractured his nose and rib playing for the Los Angeles Rams, and afterward Walt came up to him. “Ron, if you play another year of football, you’ll get killed out there and I’ll have to raise those kids. Why not come work with me?”
Miller’s first job was as a messenger, ferrying architectural plans for Disneyland from Burbank to Anaheim. Then Walt got him into the Directors Guild, and as an assistant director he directed Walt’s lead-ins to the weekly Disney television show, which made him nervous. Walt was a chain smoker, and whenever his voice got hoarse Miller stepped in with a glass of water.
Diane recalled that her parents took an immediate liking to Miller. “Ron was very shy. He was not very articulate. He was kind of a fizzle at education,” she recalled. But “I think Dad was thrilled with the way Ron came along and grasped” the business. “And actually, Ron had no training for anything else. He was like a blank notebook. Dad could take him and mold him in his pattern. I think the nicest thing I ever did for Dad was that through some quirk of fate I was able to marry a man who fit into Dad’s dream.”
Miller certainly looked the part: a trim six-foot-five, with dark hair, broad shoulders, blue eyes and a perpetual tan from his frequent golf outings. He and Diane owned the Silverado vineyard in the Napa Valley, a ski house in Aspen, and they and their seven children lived in John Wayne’s former house in Encino. He drove a Rolls-Royce and the vintage white-and-gray Mercedes that had been Walt’s favorite car.
Although Roy was the largest individual shareholder of Disney, with about 3 percent of the company’s stock, the Walt side of the family, allied with Miller, controlled a total of about 11 percent, divided among Walt’s widow Lillian, Diane and Sharon, and various trusts, which gave them effective control of the company. Now that Walker was chairman, it didn’t help Roy’s standing that his father had once tried to have Walker fired. Walker and Miller did little to conceal their low esteem for Roy, brushing aside his ideas for films and excluding him from any role in decisions.
For Roy, the breaking point came in 1977, a year after Miller was named to head the studio. Roy’s lawyer and business partner, Stanley Gold, suggested that Roy leave the company, but continue as an independent producer for Disney. In contrast to the mild-mannered Roy, Gold was short, stocky, restless, filled with pent-up energy, and aggressive by nature. His weight fluctuated with his latest diet. He punctuated his speech with profanities. He’d grown up in modest circumstances in south-central Los Angeles, attended public school, Berkeley, and UCLA, and then law school at Oxford and the University of Southern California. When he joined the law firm of Gang, Tyre & Brown as a new associate, he was assigned to work with Frank Wells, one of whose clients was Roy Disney, a former classmate of Wells at Pomona College.
After Wells left the firm to help run Warner Bros., responsibility for Roy’s interests descended to Gold. Though Gold bore little resemblance to the polished Wells, Roy recognized in him qualities that he himself lacked. Gold’s first deal for Roy was the acquisition of a ranch in Oregon with Peter Dailey, Patty Disney’s brother, and their children. Gradually Gold expanded his work for Roy, eventually forming Shamrock Holdings to manage Roy’s assets. Soon Roy was confiding in Gold, not just about financial matters such as Disney’s faltering share price, but also his worries about Miller and the studio.
Roy and Gold met with Walker to discuss Roy’s departure and to seek approval for a modest production deal. “What do you want to do, Roy,” Walker asked sarcastically. “Make Deep Throat?”
Roy sat in shocked silence at this mention of pornography. Gold jumped in. “We’re just trying not to do The Love Bug for the fifteenth time,” referring to Disney’s 1968 film about a Volkswagen Beetle named Herbie—the last time the studio had a hit.
Roy had always known that Walker didn’t like or respect him; he knew that he was the one who had dubbed him the “idiot nephew.” But he didn’t understand why Walker had to insult him.
On March 4, 1977, the forty-seven-year-old Roy resigned from the company bearing his name with a letter expressing his frustrations. “The creative atmosphere for which the Company has so long been famous and on which it prides itself has, in my opinion, become stagnant,” he wrote. “I do not believe it is a place where I, and perhaps others, can realize our creative capacities. Motion pictures and the fund of new ideas they are capable of generating have always been the fountainhead of the Company; but present management continues to make and remake the same kind of motion pictures, with less and less critical and box office success…. The Company is no longer sensitive to its creative heritage. Rather, it has substituted short-range benefits…for long-range creative planning.”
When news of his resignation broke, Roy received hundreds of calls from people curious to know his plans, including one from Michael Eisner. Since he knew him slightly from the CalArts board, Roy returned the call, using the number at the Middlebury Inn that Eisner had left.
By 1984, Disney was ripe for a hostile takeover. Disney stock, after hitting a high of $123 in 1973, a year after Disney Wor
ld opened in Florida, had plunged after the Arab oil embargo and by 1984 was still hovering at just $50. Though Walker had nominally retired in 1982, ceding his chief executive position to Miller, he kept his office, remained chairman of the board, and blocked nearly every innovation Miller and other executives proposed. When they wanted to raise the price of parking at Disneyland from a ridiculously low $1 per car, Walker vetoed the move. “The parking lot is the first thing the guest sees,” he argued. “Walt wanted them to think that this is the greatest place on earth.” Likewise the admission price couldn’t be touched. “We have to keep our prices low,” Walker argued, “so that guests feel they’ve gotten good value.”
At the same time, costs at the theme parks were soaring. Another of Walt’s late visions—the Epcot theme park at Disney World in Florida—had cost $1.2 billion, three times the estimate, even after Walt’s original concept of a domed city that would be a “living blueprint of the future” had been whittled down to little more than a perpetual world’s fair, at a time when an increasingly sophisticated public had wearied of world’s fairs. The 1981 world’s fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, was such a flop that the concept had all but died. Roy refused to attend Epcot’s grand opening in October 1982.
One reason the Disney live action studio hadn’t had a hit since The Love Bug was because Walker did not believe in marketing and advertising. Tron, an expensive, computer-generated science fiction picture, opened a few weeks after E.T.: the Extraterrestrial and Annie. The competing studios were spending a then astronomical $10 million each on advertising and marketing campaigns. Walker refused to raise the minuscule marketing budget, citing Walt’s adage that the only publicity worth the money was free. When Tron finished its opening weekend in a dismal sixth place, Walker still refused to increase advertising, insisting that word of mouth would come to the rescue. Much of the $17 million cost had to be written off.
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