Walt Disney

by Bob Thomas

  When Walt returned from New York after the ABC settlement, he called Donn Tatum, former ABC West Coast television head who had joined the Disney organization in 1955. “Now we can go to NBC and talk about color,” Walt said.

  From the beginning of his career in television, Walt was convinced that the medium would some day move to color. Even though ABC had telecast his show in black-and-white, all of the new material was filmed in color. Other Hollywood producers considered that an unwise extravagance, but Walt was certain that color would add future value to the shows. NBC was the obvious place for him to test his theory. The network was promoting color because its parent company, RCA, manufactured color television sets. Tatum telephoned NBC president Robert Kintner, who expressed immediate interest in a color television series by Disney.

  Both Walt and Roy Disney went to New York with Card Walker and Donn Tatum for the meeting with the RCA-NBC officials. The RCA board room in Rockefeller Center was decorated with brightly colored posters created by Disney artists, and Walt proceeded from one to the next, relating each story with emphasis on the use of color. It was a virtuoso performance, and the television executives were overwhelmed. All that remained was to work out the final details. When Walt dropped Walker and Tatum at their hotel, he told them: “Fellas, I want this deal. If necessary, I’ll stand on my head in Macy’s window.”

  Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color made its debut on September 24, 1961, with a new character, Ludwig Von Drake, lecturing on how the Disney cartoons moved from silents to sound and from black-and-white to color. It was the beginning of a long and profitable relationship between Disney and NBC.

  One day when the studio burdens seemed overwhelming, Walt muttered to his secretary, Dolores Voght Scott: “Let’s shut down this office. We’ve got Disneyland. We don’t need the studio.” He wasn’t serious, but it was an indication of his feeling about Disneyland. On one of his tours of the park with Joe Fowler, he remarked, “This is where I can get a real rest away from the humdrum of making pictures at the studio. This is my amusement area.”

  During the winter months when Disneyland was closed to the public on Monday and Tuesday, he inspected the refurbishing and building of new attractions. But he also liked to see how people were reacting to the park, and he usually toured the park every Saturday. Mobility became a problem, since television had made him readily recognizable. He seemed to enjoy the recognition, but he grew impatient with requests for autographs. Once when a grandmotherly tourist asked if he would give her an autograph, he replied, “No, but I’ll give you a kiss,” and he did. Sometimes he answered requests by handing out slips of paper on which he had previously signed his name. Occasionally there were hurt feelings, as when a mother wrote to Walt complaining that he had refused to sign her daughter’s autograph book. He replied in a letter: “It isn’t that I object to giving my autograph to fans while in the Park, but I have found that if I stop to sign autograph books, etc., for the youngsters, I usually get inundated with them and never get to where I was going nor accomplish what I had set out to do. So when they stop me I ask them to send me a note at the studio and their request will be fulfilled. This saves me endless time. If I failed to ask Tricia to do this, I am sorry, but perhaps you will give her the enclosed autographed photo taken of me and my little pet poodle, ‘Lady.’”

  During his visits to Disneyland, Walt was always “plussing”—looking for ways to improve the appearance of Disneyland and provide more pleasure for the customers. He would study an area and tell his staff: “Let’s get a better show for the customers; what can we do to give this place interest?”

  One Sunday, Dick Nunis, manager of Frontierland, was making out the weekly work schedule at the Chicken Plantation Restaurant when Walt came by on a strolling survey. The two men studied the traffic on the Rivers of America: the Mark Twain was pulling away from the dock, one keelboat was landing at the pier as another departed, two rafts were crossing to Tom Sawyer’s Island, and three Indian canoes were racing around the bend. “Look at that!” Walt exclaimed. Nunis expected him to complain about the congestion, but Walt said, “Now there’s a busy river! What we need is another big boat.” The astonished Nunis asked him what kind of boat. “Not just another stem-wheeler,” Walt said. “This time we need a sailing ship. I think we should have a replica of the Columbia. Did you know that was the first American vessel to sail around the world?” He delivered a history of the Columbia, which became the next addition to the Rivers of America.

  As the principal feature of the Tahitian Terrace, which featured Polynesian dinners and entertainment, the Disney engineers had created a huge tropical tree of cement limbs and plastic leaves. When Walt first saw the tree in the restaurant, he commented, “Trunk’s squatty.” He climbed to the highest terrace and gazed at the stage. “You can’t see the show from up here; the foliage is in the way,” he said. “Let’s do something about it.”

  After weeks of study, the engineers met with Walt at the Tahitian Terrace and confessed their inability to raise the tree without great expense. Walt studied the huge tree and remarked, “This may sound silly—but why can’t we just add six feet to the trunk?” That solved the problem. The trunk was severed, the tree raised by a crane, and six feet of cement and steel were added to the trunk.

  Walt could be severe with employees who disturbed what he was trying to create at Disneyland. He reprimanded a publicity man for parking his car near the Frontierland railroad station. “When people come here, they expect to see the frontier,” Walt said. “Your car destroys the whole illusion. I don’t ever want to see a car inside the park again.” Illusion was everything. A Disneyland television show was proposed in which Walt would soliloquize about the park as he walked down a deserted Main Street. Walt killed the idea in storyboard. “I don’t ever want people to see the park empty,” he said.

  One evening Walt and Lilly were stopped by a guard while approaching a preview of the Monsanto exhibit. When Walt explained who he was, the guard said, “All right, you can go in, but she can’t.” Walt later ordered the guard fired—“If he treats me that way, imagine how he’ll be with other people.” Early in the operation of the park, he decided that Disneyland would have to train its own security people rather than use an outside agency. “You can’t expect outsiders to give the courtesy that we want,” he said. “We want the people who come here treated as guests, not customers.”

  Walt noticed that one of the railroad conductors treated the patrons curtly. He commented to an assistant, “See if you can’t give that fellow a better understanding of the business we’re in. Try to cheer him up. If you can’t, then he shouldn’t be working here. We’re selling happiness. We don’t want sourpusses here.”

  Walt often stopped to chat with ride operators about their problems. The more perceptive employees learned to recognize the nature of his visit to the park from his attire. If he wore a gray suit and sports shirt with his Smoke Tree Ranch neckerchief, he was there for pleasure; when he was on a business tour, he wore an old pair of gray pin-stripe trousers, an ancient leather jacket, a pair of clodhoppers and a farmer’s straw hat. In his “business” clothes he sometimes went unrecognized by Disneyland workers. One day a Jungle Boat pilot failed to notice that he had a famous passenger. When Walt stepped off the boat, he walked up to the Frontierland superintendent, Dick Nunis, and asked, “What’s the trip time on this ride?” Nunis replied that it was seven minutes. “I just got a four-and-a-half-minute trip,” Walt said. “How would you like to go to a movie and have the theater remove a reel in the middle of the picture? Do you realize how much those hippos cost? I want people to see them, not be rushed through a ride by some guy who’s bored with his work.”

  “Could I go on a trip with you?” Nunis asked. He and Walt rode one of the boats through Adventureland, and Walt explained how to conduct the trip—“Speed up in the dull stretches, then slow down when you have something to look at.” For a full week, the Jungle Boat pilots were timed with stop watches
until they perfected the length of the ride. When Walt arrived for his regular visit to Disneyland on the weekend, he walked through Adventureland without stopping. He did the same the following weekend. After three weeks, he took a ride on the Jungle Boat. When he returned to the dock, he entered the next boat for another ride. He went around four times, eliminating the possibility that the operators had “stacked the deck” by giving him the best pilots. When he emerged from the fourth trip, he provided his only comment: a thumbs-up sign to Nunis.

  Tomorrowland remained a vexation to Walt; it had been neglected in the original planning because of lack of time and money. In 1959, Walt corrected the lapse with a $6,000,000 improvement of the Tomorrowland area.

  The initial Disneyland plans included a monorail sweeping over the park, but the WED engineers couldn’t lick construction problems. A couple of years after Disneyland had opened, Joe Fowler and Roger Broggie visited a monorail prototype in Cologne, Germany. Unlike other models, in which the car was suspended from the rail, this one rode piggyback, rubber wheels rolling noiselessly on a concrete ribbon. When Fowler and Broggie explained how the ride worked, Walt decided that was what he wanted.

  Another addition for Tomorrowland was an underwater ride. The WED planners had suggested a glass-bottom boat, but Walt said, “No, let’s give them a real submarine ride. We’ll take them down in the water and let them look out of portholes. Give ‘em a real show.” The planners devised mock-ups of submarine ports and tested underwater stunts of giant squids, volcanic fire, etc. It all seemed feasible, and the Submarine Voyage was put into production. The United States Navy expressed a desire to sponsor the ride, but Walt declined, fearing interference if he became involved with government bureaucracy. Instead the General Dynamics Corporation became the sponsor.

  The Matterhorn ride originated one day when Walt and Joe Fowler were sitting atop the wooded hill in the middle of Disneyland. “You know, Joe,” Walt began, “why don’t we make some snow and have a toboggan ride here?” Fowler explained that it would be difficult to maintain the snow, especially in the summertime; water drainage would also be a problem. Walt gave up the snow idea; instead, he built a replica of the Matterhorn with bobsleds racing through and around it.

  The opening in June 1959 of the Matterhorn, the Disneyland-Alweg Monorail System and the Submarine Voyage, plus a Motor Boat cruise and a revamp of the Autopia, provided much-needed capacity for growing crowds. In the four years since the opening, Disneyland had attracted fifteen million visitors. Still Walt rejected complacency. When an elaborate Christmas parade was proposed, members of the Park Operating Committee spoke against it. They argued that it would be poor economics to spend $350,000 on the parade when holiday crowds would be attracted to Disneyland with or without the attraction. Walt rejected their arguments, declaring, “We can’t be satisfied, even though we’ll get the crowds at Christmastime. We’ve always got to give ‘em a little more. It’ll be worth the investment. If they ever stop coming, it’ll cost ten times that much to get ‘em back.”

  During the first season Walt offered a circus that proved a failure; the tent seated two thousand and no more than five hundred appeared at any performance. “People don’t come to Disneyland to see a circus,” Walt concluded, and he shut it down. The stagecoach ride had become a safety problem; the horses ran away three times and the top-heavy coach spilled. Joe Fowler suggested allowing no passengers on top of the coach. “If people can’t ride on top, it’s no show,” Walt replied. “Let’s discontinue it.”

  Walt’s biggest disappointment was the periphera of Disneyland. Motels and restaurants sprang up, with eyecatching signs and sales gimmicks to attract the Disneyland millions. “I wanted to buy more land, but I couldn’t,” Walt told a reporter. “I had a helluva time raising the money as it was; I even put my family in hock by borrowing on my life insurance and stock. Believe me, if I ever built another Disneyland, I would make sure I could control the class and the theme of the enterprises around it.”

  Theatrical features remained the principal enterprise of Walt Disney Productions, and they thrived in the years following the opening of Disneyland. Walt Disney became the envy of other film producers because of his ability to pre-sell his movies on the television show, assured of a faithful audience that recognized the Disney trademark for wholesome entertainment. Producers were also envious of the gold that Disney could mine from his film vaults. Ever since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he had designed the cartoon features to be timeless in nature. Thus they were unaffected by the transition of styles and could be released to each new generation. Buena Vista began the practice of bringing back the Disney classics every seven years; since the production cost on most of the features had already been paid, the re-releases represented almost total profit.

  Walt was especially pleased when features that had failed in their first releases finally achieved vindication. When Card Walker told him that the 1957 re-release of Bambi would earn $2,000,000, Walt reflected, “You know, Card, I think back to 1942 when we released that picture and there was a war on, and nobody cared much about the love life of a deer, and the bankers were on my back. It’s pretty gratifying to know that Bambi finally made it.”

  Walt sought a wider range of film material, and he bristled when the Story Department rejected a book because it was “not Disney material,” implying that it wouldn’t appeal to children. “Dammit, I’m making pictures for the family, not just children,” he declared. “If I made pictures only for children, I’d lose my shirt.”

  Old Yeller marked a step toward greater realism in Disney films. The Fred Gipson story of life on a Texas farm in 1869 had been serialized in Collier’s magazine and became a best-selling book. Bill Anderson thought it held promise as a Disney film; he also believed it could provide his chance to become a producer. Anderson had arrived at the studio during the war and had risen to become production manager of the studio.

  Anderson poured out his enthusiasm for Old Yeller to Walt. That was a mistake. Walt did not like to be oversold on anything, and he viewed Anderson’s pitch with a suspicious stare. Anderson continued his campaign, fearing that Walt would leave for Europe before reading the Gipson story. At eight o’clock on the Sunday morning of his departure, Walt awoke Anderson with a telephone call. “You buy that story,” Walt ordered. “Don’t let anybody get in your way. Buy that story. And since you’ve been bugging me on this, we’ll see what kind of a producer you are. You can be my associate on this picture.”

  The rights to Old Yeller were purchased for $50,000, and Fred Gipson came to the studio to adapt his own story. A Hollywood writer enlarged the story, and Walt was displeased with it. In the book, the father of the family had left the farm for a cattle drive and was absent during the events of the summer. The cattle drive was added to the script, since the father was to be portrayed by Fess Parker; it seemed impractical to have the studio’s important star appear only at the beginning and the end.

  “The cattle drive will have to go,” Walt decided. In one afternoon he eliminated thirty-five pages from the script, inserting dialogue from the book. “We bought this book because we liked it,” he reasoned. “Why change it?”

  In the book, the boy was forced to shoot his beloved dog because it had been bitten by a rabid wolf. Members of the production staff argued that such an ending would be too tragic for children. “This is a Texas farm in 1869 and the dog has rabies; there’s no way he can be saved,” Walt argued. “You gotta shoot him. It’ll give the picture a touch of realism. The kids’ll cry, but it’s important for them to know that life isn’t all happy endings.”

  Walt chose an Englishman, Robert Stevenson, to direct Old Yeller. He had been brought to America by David O. Selznick, and later made films for Howard Hughes at RKO. Walt admired one of Stevenson’s television films and assigned him to direct a Revolutionary War film, Johnny Tremain, despite the director’s English background. Walt’s faith in Stevenson was justified; Old Yeller made a bigger profit than any previo
us live-action Disney film.

  The Shaggy Dog had been around the Disney studio since the 1930s; it originated with a novel, The Hound of Florence, by Felix Salten, author of Bambi. The original plot concerned an apprentice of Michelangelo who turned into a dog, and in 1941 Walt designed it to be the studio’s first live-action film. In a letter to George Schaefer, president of RKO, Walt suggested that the film “could be done in a high-class manner, with a fairly good cast, for less than $400,000. I believe it is the type of thing that would have the same appeal as Topper, The Invisible Man and other of those unusual pictures that have been so successful.” The project lapsed with the outbreak of the war. In 1957, Walt asked Bill Walsh to hunt for film subjects to showcase the popular stars of The Mickey Mouse Club. Walsh suggested updating The Hound of Florence with Tommy Kirk as a teenager transformed into a shaggy dog by a mystic ring. The project was proposed to ABC as a television series. It was turned down as being too far-fetched. “All right, to hell with those guys,” said Walt. “We’ll make it as a feature.”

  He assigned Bill Walsh and Lillie Hayward to write the script, and Walt worked closely with them, contributing comedy business from his long experience with cartoons. For director he chose Charles Barton, a veteran of movie comedy. As father of the boy-dog, Walt cast Fred MacMurray, whose career had declined to the making of routine Westerns. The budget was established at a modest $1,200,000, and Walt decided to make The Shaggy Dog in black-and-white; he reasoned that color would add a disturbing note of reality to the supernatural comedies.