Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  Hazel George, perhaps better than anyone else including Lillian, knew that Walt was anxious and aimless, without real animations to engage him. It was she who suggested he go to a railroad fair in Chicago, even though he had returned from Hawaii only a few weeks earlier. She said he still needed to relax. Picking up on the idea, Walt mused that Ward Kimball, a railroad enthusiast himself, always seemed relaxed, so he called Kimball and asked if he wanted to accompany him. They took the Super Chief from Pasadena. At one point the president of the Santa Fe Railroad invited Walt and Kimball to ride in the engine and pull the cord to blow the whistle. Kimball said that Walt pulled long and hard. When they returned to their car, Walt “just sat there, staring into space, smiling and smiling,” Kimball recalled. “I had never seen him look so happy.”

  Walt received more of the same courtesy once they arrived at the fair, a general commemoration of the building of the railroads in America. The president of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, Lenox Lohr, who hosted the fair, let Walt and Kimball backstage at a pageant called Wheels a Rolling, presented on a 450-foot platform off Lake Michigan embedded with tracks for historic locomotives. Walt was even allowed to run several of the old engines and appeared briefly in the show. “We were like little kids, running famous locomotives like the Lafayette, the John Bull, and the Tom Thumb,” Kimball remembered. In addition to the show, the fair featured exhibits—“lands,” one observer called them: a replica of the New Orleans French quarter erected by the Illinois Central Railroad; a dude ranch; a generic national park with a geyser that erupted every fifteen minutes, sponsored by several of the western railroads; and an Indian village set up by the Santa Fe.

  But for all the fun and diversion Walt enjoyed at the fair, it was, like the trip to Goderich the previous summer, a journey into the past as well—a journey to rediscover himself and to rekindle his passions. During the trip out Walt, obviously lonely, would rap on the door to Kimball’s quarters, invite him into his sleeper, pour two whiskeys from a glass decanter, and talk. “He was very preoccupied with his own history,” Kimball said, “and he spent two nights telling me his entire history from the time he was a boy, sold papers and the whole thing.” As always Walt especially savored telling about Mintz’s treachery and the creation of Mickey Mouse—savored it even more now that he was foundering. “You see, I was right,” he would tell Kimball. “You see, I got back at them and they lost their ass.” Once they were in Chicago, Kimball, a musician, wanted to visit some of the jazz clubs. Walt refused. Instead, one night Walt coaxed Kimball into riding the elevated train with him as Walt, looking out the window, described the scenes of his youth in the city. At one isolated, dirty station, Kimball said, Walt and he got off, and Walt explained that this was where he would transfer trains to get to his post office job in 1918. “Walt was reliving his youth,” Kimball assessed.

  But the fascination with trains was more than a way to relive his youth in Marceline, when his uncle Mike, the engineer, would come up the lane to the Disney farm with his bags of sweets, or the summer in Kansas City, when Walt rode as train butcher selling candy and soda, or the elevated train rides in Chicago before he left for war. Walt thought of the trains as a recreation and a way to decompress from the pressures of the studio. Lillian once claimed that after the war Walt had come close to another breakdown like the one he suffered in 1931, because he was working too hard, she said, though the better explanation was that he was depressed from his work showing so little result, even as he kept pressing ahead. “No matter what plans I made for the weekend,” Lillian recalled, “we would always end up at the studio. He couldn’t get it out of his mind.” Walt was a little more candid when he called the trains “just a hobby to get my mind off my problems.”

  But as much as Walt Disney loved trains—he was always urging Lillian to put her foot on the rail so she could feel the vibrations—and as much as he needed a distraction, they were clearly becoming more than a hobby. The trains were turning into a replacement for animation, a new form of control in a world that was yielding less readily to him than it had in the golden days. Kimball said that he himself had planted the seed as early as 1945, when he finished a full-scale railroad on his two-acre plot in San Gabriel, complete with nine hundred feet of narrow-gauge track, an operating locomotive, and a passenger car. He called it the Grizzly Flats Railroad, after a sign he had once seen in an abandoned Sierra logging town. Walt attended the “steam up” party and got to play engineer as the locomotive crawled out of Kimball’s engine house; he grinned broadly as he pulled the whistle and clanged the bell. Kimball could see that he was hooked on the power and the thrill. Once Walt even brought home a train piston and proudly displayed it on the dining room table.

  Apparently wanting people to share his enthusiasm, Walt bought three of his grandnephews Lionel model train sets for Christmas 1947, then decided to get one for himself too, justifying it on the grounds that his doctor told him he needed a hobby. “I bought myself a birthday Christmas present,” he wrote his sister Ruth, sounding almost exactly like a child, “—something I’ve wanted all my life—an electric train. Being a girl, you probably can’t understand how much I wanted one when I was a kid, but I’ve got one now and what fun I’m having. I have it set up in one of the outer rooms adjoining my office so I can play with it in my spare moments. It’s a freight train with a whistle and real smoke comes out of the stack—there are switches, semaphores, stations and everything. It’s wonderful!” Walt was actually soft-pedaling his new train set. In actuality, with the help of a machinist in the studio shop, Roger Broggie, he had built an elaborate layout in the office. According to one visitor, it was large enough to fill half of a two-car garage, boasting two trains with tunnels, miniature towns, and lead counterweights to raise and lower bridges. He loved playing with it, but when it was finished, he asked Broggie, “This is an electric train. Now what’s for real?”

  In point of fact, Walt had seen what was for real when he saw Kimball’s engine. When Kimball invited animator Ollie Johnston to Walt’s office to look at Walt’s electric train, Johnston told Walt about a one-twelfth-scale steam locomotive that he was having built for his yard in the Sierra Madre foothills, and Walt began visiting the machine shop in Santa Monica, where the parts for Johnston’s railroad were being milled. Meanwhile Kimball introduced Walt to another train enthusiast, Dick Jackson, who had made a fortune in auto accessories before retiring and devoting himself to scale railroads. Walt, along with Lillian and Sharon, visited Jackson at his Beverly Hills home and got to run Jackson’s steam engine. Walt had met yet another railroad buff that spring, William “Casey” Jones, who also had a scale railroad at his home in Los Gatos and who also let Walt work the throttle. “Personally, I envy you for having the courage to do what you want,” Walt wrote Jones, clearly thinking of his own predicament.

  Now Walt wanted a train of his own—not a model but a real train that was just large enough for him to sit on. He had Richard Jones, the head of the studio machine shop, begin making discreet inquiries of people who might be willing to sell miniature trains—discreet because he obviously did not want potential sellers to know that it was Walt Disney who wished to make the purchase. Jones also placed an ad in Railroad Magazine requesting information on where he might buy a live-steam eight-gauge or sixteen-gauge railway, and he wrote other enthusiasts for information on how to lay a mile of miniature track. Later that summer Walt and Sharon attended a fair of little engines in Lomita, California. When he returned to the studio, he had Dick Jones and Eddie Sargeant, a draftsman, draw up blueprints and then begin work on an inch-and-a-half scale model of the Central Pacific 173 engine, a prototype of which he had seen at the Golden Gate International Exposition on the same trip. As Roger Broggie told it, Walt had shown up in the shop at seven-fifteen the morning after returning from the exposition and told Broggie to get to work on the train. Meanwhile Walt entrusted William Jones with finding him a scale locomotive engine “if it can be had at a reasonab
le price.”

  But Walt’s plan was not simply to purchase a train or even to have one made for him at the studio to his specifications. The train, like the animation, was to be all-consuming—his escape from the animations, as the animations had been intended as an escape from reality. In effect, the train would be his job. And so Walt was going to make the train himself alongside Dick Jones, Eddie Sargeant, and Roger Broggie. At night for three or four hours at a time and for long stretches on weekends, he began visiting the studio machine shop, located near the studio entrance in what were called “boxcars,” where Broggie had set up a workbench for him and taught him how to use the jeweler’s lathe, a miniature drill press, and a milling machine. He would go down there on Saturdays in his work-clothes, often accompanied by Duchess or by Sharon, who would play in his office or ride her bicycle or drive her father’s car slowly around the lot while he worked. (Walt had taught her to drive there.) Just as often he was the only one in the shop. Fabricating the train became his new passion.

  And if he loved the model trains, he also loved this uncomplicated, democratic process of making them—a process in which he was just a “rookie machinist,” as he called himself, and in which there were no expectations on him and no demands. “You know, it does me some good to come down here and find out I don’t know everything,” he told Roger Broggie. It was like the early days at the studio when it was still fun. Ollie Johnston would remember occasions working side by side with Walt on their trains and Walt saying, “Hey, I think I found out where they keep the hardwood,” and off they would go to find scraps of lumber. And Walt enjoyed the craft—the sense of finally doing productive work again and doing it with perfection the way he had done the early features. Indeed, the detail work was such that it demanded perfection. He would carry his unfinished train wheels with him wherever he went that fall and winter. “If he took his family to Palm Springs the box of wheels went along,” Diane recalled, “and he sat there filing in the sun.” And sitting there filing, Walt Disney was as contented as he had been in years.

  Just before Christmas 1948, a year after setting up his electric train set in his office, Walt finished the Central Pacific 173, laid a circle of three hundred feet of track on the soundstage, and fired up the engine. He arranged another test run shortly before New Year’s. Eddie Sargeant was at the throttle and took a turn too quickly, falling off the tender and pulling the engine off the track, but Walt was ecstatic anyway. He had his train. He had the joy of collaboration again. He had an object on which to lavish his affection. He had the pleasure of doing work exactly as he wanted and an opportunity to exercise the control that he had lost.

  But if he was ecstatic, others were bewildered. Visiting the studio during this period, New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther was struck by how uninterested Walt seemed in movies and how “wholly, almost weirdly, concerned with the building of a miniature railroad engine and a string of cars in the workshops of the studio. All of his zest for invention, for creating fantasies, seemed to be going into this plaything.” Crowther said, “I came away feeling sad”—sad because Walt Disney, the man who had helped shape the American imagination, was now spending most of his time playing with trains.

  VI

  As distracted as he was and as much as he wanted to avoid them, the demands of the studio still made claims on his time and attention. While he was playing with his trains, his staff was finishing another live action–animation combination film, So Dear to My Heart, based on a popular novel by Sterling North titled Midnight and Jeremiah, about a boy and his pet lamb. It starred Bobby Driscoll and Luana Patten, two children whom Walt had put under contract after their appearances in Song of the South. Like most Disney features, it had been in production a long time; Walt had begun meeting with screenwriter Edwin Justus Mayer in 1945, and Perce Pearce had gone to Indiana, where the film was set, that summer to get a sense of atmosphere, just as Walt had gone to Atlanta to soak up atmosphere for Song of the South. The actual filming, on location in California’s San Joaquin Valley where the Indiana town was recreated, began late in the spring of 1946. Walt was on the set for long stretches at the beginning and then on weekends, making suggestions over Sunday breakfast, though director Harold Schuster, whom Walt had recruited from Twentieth Century–Fox after seeing Schuster’s horse movie, My Friend Flicka, said that Walt never pressed him. “He left the reins firmly in my hands,” Schuster claimed.

  In postproduction, however, Walt was forced to retake the reins. He wasn’t particularly happy with the outcome of the film and had decided to rework at least one entire section, ordering Bill Anderson, who was responsible for the budget, out of the meeting at which he discussed the changes because Walt didn’t want to be encumbered by financial considerations. But even as he reworked scenes, he was discouraged. While preoccupied with his trains, he nevertheless spent another year on the picture after the filming was concluded, finally deciding to add animated sequences as he had done in Song of the South and justifying them as “figments of a small boy’s imagination.” As publicist Card Walker put it, “He knew he had a problem.” (It was to escape tensions on the film that he had gone to Hawaii and then to the railroad fair.) The addition of the animation prompted “Mr. Harper” in Harper’s magazine to observe, only half in jest and while the film was still in production, “No good, certainly, can come of breaking down the barrier that still protects live, three-dimensional people from the inhabitants of Mr. Disney’s two-dimensional world who have been so firmly protected from the mediocre and the phony”—a protection that had been the point all along. Now they no longer were.

  But it wasn’t only mediocrity from which Walt Disney himself needed protection. In fact, So Dear to My Heart was actually a warmer, more sincere, and, in most reviewers’ assessments, better film than Song of the South. For Disney, the problem was that it was a concession, an exercise in excessive nostalgia no doubt influenced by his memories of Marceline. In celebrating small-town life and small-town values, he had ostensibly gone over to Norman Rockwell territory and reinforced his new postwar image not as a daring folk artist but as a conservative folksy artist. So Dear to My Heart—even the title was sentimentalized—was not a bad film. It was, however, on its face a kitschy, syrupy, unimaginative one—essentially a greeting card. Still, Walt needed a hit so desperately that he spent three weeks that January attending premieres in Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee—this from a man who once couldn’t spare the time to attend the American premiere for Bambi.

  Yet in one respect, one important respect, the film was a departure and a hope. Walt had conceived it as a fully live-action feature, his first, even though it hadn’t turned out that way, and as such it was a kind of fulfillment. Almost from the moment he had arrived in Los Angeles, making live-action films had been his ambition. Live action was easier than animation and cheaper, and at least when Walt had begun, it was much more prestigious than animation. Unable to break into live action, he had retreated to the one thing he knew, cartooning, but he had never quite surrendered the dream, and by the time the strike was approaching, Walt, presumably in anticipation of losing some of his animators, had drafted a treatment for a film titled Hound of Florence, which he sent to RKO’s production head, George Schaefer, with the instruction that Schaefer keep in mind “this is not intended for combination cartoon–live action, but instead it is written entirely for live action, using all the tricks we know a dog can do and playing it for comic suspense throughout.” He thought it could be made for under $400,000, which was considerably less than he was spending on his feature animations.

  The film was not made, another casualty of belt-tightening, but Walt had edged closer to live action, largely as an economy measure, with Song of the South and then So Dear to My Heart, and the animators were concerned. “As soon as Walt rode on a camera crane,” one animator quipped, acknowledging Walt’s love of both control and technology, “we knew we were going to lose him.” Ben Sharpsteen admitted that many animators were �
�very upset” and asking whether Walt was deserting them and abandoning animation altogether. When one of them, Milt Kahl, went to Walt’s office to protest, Walt said, “Well, I’ll tell you, Milt. I have to make a whore of myself to pay your salary. It’s as simple as that.”

  But it wasn’t quite that simple, because there was another consideration in deciding to make a live-action feature. The British government, in an attempt to revive its own film industry after the war, had imposed a 75 percent import tax on American films shown in Britain and ordered that 45 percent of the films shown in British theaters be made in England. (The American State Department had agreed to a similar quota with France, restricting the number of imported American films there to 110, to be supplied by the major production companies, which effectively froze out the Disneys, and Roy wrote Secretary of State General George Marshall to protest.) For a studio that had always relied heavily on foreign receipts and had been devastated by wartime restrictions, these were terrible blows. To make matters worse, the French and British governments had both impounded receipts earned by American studios in those countries, insisting that the currency be spent there. For the Disney studio, this amounted to more than $1 million. Obviously, Walt couldn’t set up an animation studio in England or France, but he had another option. He could make a live-action film in England and finance it with the blocked funds. In effect, then, when Walt Disney finally crossed over into live action, it was because the British government had forced him to do so.

  The project Walt selected for his British live-action feature, as he was winding down with So Dear to My Heart, was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, about a young boy who joins up with a group of pirates, and he dispatched Perce Pearce and Fred Leahy to England to supervise the production. But Walt, who was still at loose ends, decided that he would take Lillian and the girls for a European vacation on the pretense that he had to supervise the film personally. (Later he was candid about it. “I did them in summer,” he said of his English productions. “That gave me a chance to…get away.”) It was clearly a relief to be free of the studio that he had once loved so deeply, and Disney representative William Levy wrote Roy that Walt had arrived that June “in excellent spirits and full of confidence and repeatedly remarked that with any luck the picture should be brought in at a reasonable budget.”