by Rees Quinn
The home on Carolwood Drive replaced one that overlooked Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean. But Walt also intended it as a replacement for his true home – the studio, where he spent all of his time. He built it as a haven from work - a place where he could be with Lillian and his daughters, but also alone with his thoughts. It was also far enough away from the studio that his daily commutes would give him time to meditate. In a letter to an aunt, Walt wrote about the new home, “All in all, I think it is going to be a very happy set-up, and I am looking forward to spending more time at home than I have in the past.” He called it “a sort of wedding anniversary present – our twenty-fifth.” There were reminders of his childhood home. He planted fruit trees and built a barn reminiscent of the Marceline farm.
In the expansive backyard, Walt installed a miniature railroad. In scouting for property on which to build his new house, space for his railroad was a primary consideration. Trains had long been one his passions; he had dabbled with model trains, but decided he needed one he could ride. Two of his animators – Ward Kimball and Ollie Johnson - already had working backyard railroads, but Disney would outdo them. His backyard railroad, built to one-eighth scale, had a working steam locomotive and traveled around a 2,615-foot circuit that included a trestle and a 120-foot-long tunnel. Its locomotive, named “Lilly Belle” in honor of his wife, was modeled after the Central Pacific #173 and had a wood-burning engine that was used as a prototype for the transcontinental railroad that ran through the Rocky Mountains. Disney’s scaled-down version was labeled the “CP #173,” which in this case stood for Carolwood Pacific. The blueprints for the Central Pacific #173, provided to him by a draftsman for the Southern Pacific Railroad, were painstakingly copied in every detail – from its engine to its smoke stack and flag poles. Much of the machinery was constructed by technicians from his studio.
The barn became the railroad’s central headquarters. From here, Disney could control the train, signals and switching of tracks with a lighted control panel. The barn also stored the train’s rolling stock – miniature cargo cars, gondolas and a caboose. The barn was a quiet place for Disney to sit and think.
The train was a rare personal extravagance. His wife and daughters tried to persuade him to build it at the studio instead of the yard but soon realized the role it served in his life. “It is a wonderful hobby for him,” Lillian said. “It has been a fine diversion and safety valve for his nervous energy. For when he leaves the studio, he can’t just lock the door and forget it. He is so keyed up he has to keep going on something.” But Lillian drew the line at her flower garden, which Walt proposed to bisect with his train track. Instead, he tunneled under the flower beds.
Disney’s teenaged daughters grew bored with the train, but it delighted the neighborhood children, whom he regularly gave rides, donning his conductor’s cap and sounding the whistle. Adult visitors, too, viewed the backyard railroad with childlike wonder. Disney designated a select few as vice presidents of his railroad.
Disney tinkered for hours on his railroad, expanding its scale and obsessively attending to minor details. He adjusted the curvature and grade of the track, and added train cars, paying as much attention to the interior as the exterior. The caboose included fake miniature magazines, cut from order forms and pasted on cardboard. Walt also built a five-and-a-half-inch-tall pot-bellied stove, which he enjoyed so much he began to replicate it. “I had a pattern made up, and it turned out so cute with the grate, shaker and door, and all the little working parts, I became intrigued with the idea,” Walt wrote. “I had a few made up: One was bronze, another black, and I even made a gold one! Then we made more and started painting them in motifs that fitted the period at the turn of the century.” Eventually, he made about 100; some he gave as gifts to friends, and some were sold at $25 each. One of his buyers was Mrs. James Ward Thorne, whose own dollhouse collection had inspired Walt at the Golden Gate International Exposition.
Perhaps more than anything, Disney enjoyed crashing his train. From his control panel in the barn, he orchestrated collisions and derailments, then took great pleasure in the necessary repairs. He bought two new locomotives, exclaiming to one of his “vice presidents,” a California senator named George Murphy, “Boy, we’re sure to have some wrecks now!”
When he wasn’t working, Walt loved to browse antique and secondhand shops along Third Avenue in New York, looking for dollhouse furniture to add to his collection of miniatures. Some of these furnishings he found a place for in his railroad. This collection eventually totaled more than 1,000 items. Besides furniture, there were model luxury cars, boats, and a battleship; musical instruments, including an organ crafted by conductor Frederick Stark; dishes and tableware smaller than thimbles; even miniature paintings and books, including eighteen volumes of plays by William Shakespeare. He placed classified ads in newspapers and hobby magazines in the names of his two secretaries. One read: “WANTED: Anything in miniatures to a scale of 1½” to the foot or under. Up to and including early 1900s. Give full description and price. Private collector.” He began to work on an old Western town in miniature, which would become a traveling exhibit. Some of the figures for these scenes were hand-carved by Disney; a chimney was built from small pebbles he collected on a vacation to Palm Springs.
In Los Angeles, he frequented the Farmer’s Market, always hoping no one would recognize him. He hated the attention that came from being “Walt Disney.”
The Disney merchandise that filled his studio office was nowhere to be seen at his house: “I’ve lived with it too much and I just didn’t want to live with it at home,” he said. He did his best to shelter his daughters from fame as well. He did a good job: When Diane was six, she asked her father, “Are you Walt Disney?” “You know I am,” he said. “The Walt Disney?” she asked. Walt laughed and nodded; Diane asked for his autograph. When they were young, he chased the girls around the house, and carried them on his shoulders through their swimming pool. Diane thought he was “the strongest man in the world and the most fun.”
Still, he was often preoccupied with work. He grumbled over family vacations and took them reluctantly. He worked a minimum twelve hours a day and enjoyed a highball or two when he came home. More often than not, in public, he was a hounded celebrity, and Lillian was often caught up in it, to her great displeasure. On occasion, fans who managed to get Walt’s autograph would ask for Lillian’s, too. She always signed in the flourish on the “y” in “Disney.” She hated sharing Walt and was “jealous of other people who were fond of him,” their daughter Diane remembered. At events lauding Walt, Lillian often sat on the sidelines sulking. She once said being married to Walt Disney was like being “attached to one of those flying saucers they talk about;” she never knew “when Walt’s imagination (was) going to take off into the wild blue yonder and everything will explode.”
But their friends and even casual observers saw a husband and wife who cared for each other. Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons called them “two of the really happily married people in our town.” Diane Disney said her father “always had his arm around” her mother. Walt took dancing lessons – in rumba and mambo – so that they could dance together at functions. He admired Lillian for the way she managed their household. Diane said her mother “moved in her own circle of beauty parlor appointments, reducing exercises, dressmaker appointments, and occasional shopping sprees . . . (and) always had to redecorate the corner of some room. That was her life.” And Walt indulged her proclivities; handing her a catalog of fur coats one Christmas, he said, “Here’s your present,” implying she could have her pick. His gifts were often not very thoughtful. Once, on their anniversary, he gave her a necklace strung with miniature replicas of all the Academy Awards he had won. Gifts from others could drive a wedge between the couple, too. At a Disney company picnic, one of Walt’s artists who raised goats gave him one as a pet. The young goat had a red ribbon tied around its neck, from which dangled a bell. Walt loaded the animal into the family car and
was prepared to take it home, but Lillian refused. Walt returned the gift begrudgingly and spent that night at the studio.
Disney’s love of nature and all animals – besides the family pets, Walt was protective of the squirrels and rabbits that ransacked Lillian’s garden, refusing to hire an exterminator - pioneered a new genre of films at his studio. In 1947, he hired married filmmakers Alfred and Elma Milotte to film wildlife in Alaska. The Milottes returned with footage of fur-seal colonies on the Pribilof Islands. Disney ordered more. Eventually, more than 100,000 feet of film were shot showing mostly seals, rocks, and ocean. Everyone but Disney thought the footage was tedious.
Disney took the footage, added a script and a homespun-sounding narrator, and edited the film to just under a half hour. The resulting hit, Seal Island, opened in December 1948. The film won an Academy Award for Best Short Subject, and became the first installment of Disney’s “True-Life Adventures” series of nature films.
In 1950, Disney’s only box-office hit had been Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There had been more misses. Song of the South, based on the Uncle Remus stories, was released in 1946 to mixed reviews, charges of racism, and a small profit. The film’s best-remembered feature was an original song, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” which won an Academy Award.
Disney had another animated feature in production - Cinderella – but neither Disney nor his animators were enthusiastic about the project. When they released it in February 1950, to their surprise, the film was a critical and financial success. Reviewers weren’t especially enthusiastic about the main character, but they loved the score, the story, and Disney’s return to a simpler style of animation. Cinderella eventually grossed close to $8 million and re-energized Disney’s reputation for animated features.
A few months later, Disney released his first entirely live-action film: Treasure Island. Again, critics heaped praise, and the film grossed $4 million. In July 1951, the animated Alice in Wonderland was released simultaneously in New York and London and did moderately well at the box office.
Disney’s next animated feature, Peter Pan, was more successful. It was released in February 1953, and was the last Disney film distributed by RKO. Disney set up his own distribution company, Buena Vista, later that year. A few critics complained that Disney hadn’t hewed closely enough to the original J.M. Barrie play, but audiences had no such qualms. Peter Pan was the top-grossing film of 1953, and earned $7 million in its first release.
The studio continued to produce live-action and animated features throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. Among the memorable titles: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier; Lady and the Tramp; The Great Locomotive Chase; Johnny Tremain; Old Yeller; Sleeping Beauty; Pollyanna; Swiss Family Robinson; One Hundred and One Dalmatians; and The Parent Trap.
Disneyland and Television
As films streamed out of the Disney studio, Walt Disney began thinking about an entirely different venture: an amusement park. He was inspired in part by his memories of Electric Park back in Kansas City, but was also impressed by a visit to Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. The twenty-one acre park had immaculately groomed lawns and flower beds winding among shops and restaurants, with a number of classic amusement-park rides, including a wooden roller coaster, but Disney was most impressed with how clean and manicured it was.
Disney had considered building a small amusement park adjacent to the Burbank studio for his employees, but when he started talking about something more ambitious, Roy told him they should stick to making movies. The brothers were also working to protect and promote the Disney brand, which had become valuable. After considering various licensing strategies, the Disneys set up a separate company for Walt in 1952 and called it WED Enterprises, based on Walter Elias Disney’s initials. For a fee, WED licensed Walt’s name to the Disney studio.
Disney had already decided to invest his own money in the project that would become Disneyland, but WED Enterprises provided him a corporate entity to operate from. By early 1953, designers and architects were developing ideas for the park. Later that year, Disney acquired a 160-acre tract of orange groves in Anaheim, about twenty-five miles southeast of Los Angeles.
Disney’s vision for the property was unlike any other amusement park in the world. He wanted to create a place where traditional small-town America came to life, in village greens and shop-lined streets. Naturally, Disney movies and characters would play starring roles. Against all advice, Disney insisted there would be no Ferris wheel and no beer. Safety and maintenance were top priorities. Disney’s plan was for a park that could accommodate 40,000 people in 10,000 cars a day.
His hobby of collecting miniatures also factored into his dreams for the park. In 1953, the plans included “Lilliputian Land: A Land of Little Things,” also inspired in part by author Jonathan Swift’s 1726 fantasy novel Gulliver’s Travels. Walt described the attraction as: “a miniature Americana village inhabited by mechanical people nine inches high who sing and dance and talk to you as you peek through the windows of their tiny shops and homes. In Lilliputian Land, there is an Erie Canal barge that takes you through the famous canals of the world where you visit the scenic wonders of the world in miniature. Here a little diamond-stack locomotive engine seventeen inches high steams into the tiny railroad station. You sit on top of the Pullman coaches like Gulliver, and the little nine-inch engineer pulls back the throttle taking you on the biggest little ride in the land. And for the little people who have little appetites – you can get miniature ice cream cones, or the world’s smallest hot dog on a tiny bun.” It was never built, though shades of this idea materialized in Disneyland’s Storybook Land, and later the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disney World.
All that was missing from Disney’s plan was the $5 million he needed to build it. Roy eventually took an interest in the project and offered to arrange talks between WED and the Disney studio about investing in the park.
This was welcome news. But Walt had already begun to think of another new venture: television.
Almost every filmmaker in Hollywood feared television would put an end to moviemaking. Walt and Roy thought just the opposite. The brothers believed that television could augment their movie business by promoting new features, recycling old ones, and extending the Disney brand. It was a model other studios rushed to try and emulate. Many branched out by starting record companies, investing in Broadway shows, and merchandizing. But without the stable of marketable characters the Disneys had to draw on, the others floundered. Some studios compounded the problems with desperate grabs for profit that only weakened or killed them. They sold their film libraries to television, and in many cases, sold the studio back lots where they had once filmed for real estate development or oil drilling. Only the Disney brothers mastered this transition and their studio was stronger for it.
Walt had already had a positive experience with television when he hosted a 1950 Christmas special for NBC. The broadcast featured Disney cartoons, plus a sneak preview of the soon-to-be released Alice in Wonderland. Jack Gould, a critic with The New York Times, called it a huge success and proclaimed it as a harbinger of great things to come from Disney:
Walt Disney can take over television any time he likes. Yesterday afternoon, in a special holiday show at 4 o’clock over N.B.C., he momentarily relaxed his ban against television appearances by Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto and the Seven Dwarfs. The result was one of the most engaging and charming programs of the year, an hour of make-believe that was altogether wonderful.
As will surprise nobody, Mickey and his friends in Disneyland are perfect for TV. It’s not just that the cartoons reproduce superbly on the small screen of television. But after several years of video puppets, it is heady wine for a television viewer suddenly to partake of the imaginative fantasy and enticing humor which are the stamp of Mr. Disney’s genius. From 4 to 5 o’clock yesterday all ages could relax and laugh together.
Of course, television was far too big for any one
person to “take over,” but Walt Disney did play a major role in its ascendance. In October 1954, he launched an anthology television series that eventually became a Sunday night staple for generations of children and their parents. It had several different titles over the years, including Walt Disney Presents and Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. But its original title, Disneyland, spoke of Disney’s grand vision.
Disney hosted the show and introduced its material in his friendly, warm manner. Some of it was animated, and some was live-action. Much of the content was from studio’s archives. Disney’s presence perpetuated the impression that he was responsible for every aspect of the studio’s productions. Disney told a story about an encounter with a young fan:
“You know, I was stumped one day when a little boy asked, ‘Do you draw Mickey Mouse?’ I had to admit I did not draw anymore. ‘Then you think up all the jokes and ideas?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t do that.’ Finally, he looked at me and said, ‘Mr. Disney, just what do you do?’ I said, ‘sometimes I think of myself as a little bee. I go from one area of the studio to another and gather pollen and sort of stimulate everybody.’ I guess that’s the job I do.”
Disney may have invented this story for publicity, but he was bothered by his inability to draw even his most well-known character. He asked his animators to show him how to quickly sketch Mickey to punctuate his autograph for fans and worked to duplicate the familiar signature that had become a trademark on all Walt Disney products.
