by Neal Gabler
Far more important for the studio, Cinderella was a financial success as well. Sailing from New York to London, Roy wrote Walt, “I feel stronger than ever that we should do in the United States and Canada a minimum of $5,000,000. I wouldn’t be surprised if we hit $6,000,000. It is the talk of the business.” In the final analysis, Roy had actually underestimated the film’s return. Cinderella had cost the studio $2.2 million. It would gross $7.9 million. And that didn’t include what the film generated in sales of merchandise and music, especially since one of the film’s songs, “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo,” became a popular hit and would receive an Academy Award nomination. The film, the failure of which would have sunk the Disney studio, wound up rescuing it from financial disaster and spiritual despair.
Yet Walt Disney didn’t seem particularly elated. He saw the problems and the compromises and the shattered camaraderie, and even as he focused on his trains and his new house, he began looking elsewhere to recover what he felt had been stolen from him and to find what he hoped would save him. He was looking to create an even better fortress for himself, an even more perfect world than the world of animation had been.
Photo Insert 3
The Disney family at the fiftieth wedding anniversary of his parents, Elias and Flora, in January 1938. At the rear, left to right, Ray and Roy, in front Herbert, Flora, Elias, and Walt. As a present the brothers bought their parents a home in the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles, not far from the studio.
Walt and his beloved mother. Her death shattered him, no doubt because he felt partly responsible.
Gunther Lessing, the studio’s longtime legal counsel and the individual who encouraged Walt and Roy to hold the line against the strikers—a decision that destroyed the studio’s spirit. The strikers burned Lessing in effigy.
The man Walt held chiefly responsible for the end of his workers’ utopia: animator Art Babbitt (center), flanked by Fred Moore (left) and assistant Tom Codrick (right).
Paradise lost: strikers outside the Disney studio gates in 1941. Walt refused to recognize the Screen Cartoonists Guild as his employees’ representative. Art Babbitt is in the white slacks at the left.
Abandoning the chaos: Walt in Argentina during his South American goodwill tour in 1941 financed by the coordinator for inter-American affairs, Nelson Rockefeller. Walt entertained his hosts, even standing on his head. He returned to make two features on Latin America, Saludos Amigos and The Three Cabelleros.
Walt with Major Alexander de Seversky (standing), the gadfly Russian-born air corps officer whose best-selling 1942 book, Victory Through Air Power, promoted the idea of long-range bombers to win the war. Walt was determined to change the course of the war himself by making a film of the book and thus popularizing the idea.
The Walt of old, reviewing Pinocchio storyboards with storyman Otto Englander. The war and financial problems would sap his enthusiasm.
Joining the red-baiters: Walt testifies as a “friendly” witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee on October 24, 1947 and describes how the Communists tried to strongarm him during the strike. He also carelessly implicates the League of Women Voters as a group sympathetic to Communists and later has to recant.
Walt in the late 1940s reading to his daughters, Diane (left) and Sharon (right), whom he loved deeply and to whom he was a devoted father.
Adrift: The animations having lost their appeal, Walt turned to model trains. Here he tests his train, which he had helped manufacture, on the studio soundstage.
Walt riding the train with the locomotive Lilly Belle at his new home on Carolwood Drive in the tony section of Holmby Hills, where he moved in 1950. One of the chief attractions of the property was that it had room for his train.
Looking for new worlds to conquer: Walt directs dancer Buddy Ebsen in a dancing scene he will use to construct a small mechanical dancing man.
Walt studying a tiny ship in a bottle in front of Granny Kincaid’s cabin, which he had designed for an exhibit he called Disneylandia. He intended to build a series of miniature tableaus of Americana and have them tour the country. Much of the work in crafting the small objects he did himself.
Walt with ABC Television president Robert Kintner (far left), ABC executive Robert O’Brien, and Roy in 1954 at Walt’s office signing the contract for the Disneyland television show, which would help finance the Disneyland theme park.
Walt and Disneyland supervisor C. V. Wood examining plans for the park. Wood, a fast-talking Oklahoman, would be fired when Walt thought the young man had begun to usurp Walt’s authority.
Ten
CITY ON A HILL
It had always been about control, about crafting a better reality than the one outside the studio, and about demonstrating that one had the capacity to do so. That was what Walt Disney provided to America—not escape, as so many analysts would surmise, but control and the vicarious empowerment that accompanied it. And that was what America seemed to want from him. Though the immediate postwar period had been triumphant for the country, the mood quickly turned from euphoria to uncertainty—what historian William Leuchtenberg would describe as a “troubled feast” in his account of the time. The feast was the nation’s unprecedented economic growth, fueled largely by military spending. In the ten years after the war wages rose and working hours decreased, home ownership jumped, higher education was made available to returning veterans, and general consumption soared. All of which led sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset to declare, “The fundamental problems of the industrial revolution have been solved.”
But despite the hopefulness, a general sense of malaise wafted through the nation. In part it was a result of the Cold War between the capitalist and Communist blocs, colder still after the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb in August 1949. Americans understandably felt they were threatened from without by Russia. They would also come to feel that they were threatened from within by a cadre of Communists and Communist sympathizers who had wedged their way into the government—the alleged fifth columnists that Senator Joseph McCarthy would ride to headlines. But it wasn’t just the Communist threat to government that led to anxiety. No less an authority than President Truman’s attorney general, J. Howard McGrath, said Communists were everywhere—“in factories, offices, butcher stores, on street corners and in private business. And each carries in himself the death of society.”
Dire as that sounded, probably more important was the feeling of dislocation that accompanied rapid change during the period. Along with the rise of wages and the growth of consumption, America was undergoing suburbanization, a revolution in mass communication with the introduction of television in the early 1950s, increased physical mobility with automobiles, a national highway construction program and a boom in commercial airlines, new technologies, bureaucratization, and even the development of a new personality type to negotiate the new society—a type that sociologist David Riesman would describe as “other-directed,” or driven less by an internal compass than by a need to please others, and what William Whyte would call the “organization man,” who was concerned as much with managing the bureaucracy as with acquiring skills. What all these phenomena—from McCarthyism to suburbanization to the organization man—had in common, historian William Chafe would write, was that all were related “to the existentialist dilemma of finding a way to create meaning in the face of forces over which one had no control.”
Walt Disney, like General Dwight Eisenhower, who would be elected president in 1952 and hid an iron will behind a facade of affability, promised control. When America was enjoying its burst of self-confidence immediately after the war, critics generally disdained Disney’s cartoons, in part because the films were shabbily made and the sense of control in them seemed to have diminished. But once the Cold War began, Americans seemed again to need reassurance, which may explain why Cinderella, an old-fashioned and familiar sort of Disney animation, a controlled animation, found favor. (Walt’s own comment on the nuclear peril was, “If people would th
ink more of fairies they would soon forget the atom bomb.”) Disney, a tonic force during the Depression, was now a touchstone, providing comfort in a time of foreboding.
As was so often the case, what was true for the country was true for Walt Disney personally. If America found control and reassurance in his films, he had found both in his model trains, which was one reason he pursued them. But that was not the only reason. The trains were also the bridgehead of a much larger scheme that was organizing itself in Walt Disney’s mind. At least as early as 1947 he had begun collecting miniatures—furniture, figurines, coaches, boats, farm machinery, even tiny liquor bottles and crates. Ostensibly these were adornments for the train layout and another pastime to take his mind off the studio when, as he wrote his sister, “problems become too hectic.” But as Walt scoured miniature shops during his trip to Europe in 1949 and on his various forays to New York and even up into New England; as he attended miniature shows; as he enlisted friends to find miniatures for him; as he solicited miniatures through catalogs, midwestern newspapers, and hobbyist magazines (using the name of a studio secretary as he had used machinist Dick Jones to solicit model train information), he hit upon a plan. With his own two hands he would create an entire miniature American turn-of-the-century village, a sort of Lilliputian Marceline, and then display it in large cases across the country. True to Walt’s new postwar persona, he said that the project would be a means to convey traditional values, though the underlying metaphor couldn’t have been more transparent. Building the village was another way for Walt to assert his control at the very time he seemed to be losing it.
To realize the plan, Walt buttonholed layout artist Ken Anderson and offered to put him on his personal payroll: Anderson was to paint scenes of Americana that Walt would then bring to life with the miniatures. “You can paint some paintings like Norman Rockwell,” Anderson recalled Walt saying, “and I’ll build them.” The work would be done secretly, not so much, it seemed, because Walt was afraid of the idea getting out as because he didn’t want the project to be infected and corrupted by the studio’s corporate mentality. This was his—not the company’s. He installed Anderson in a room on the third floor of the Animation Building to which only he and Anderson had the keys. Here Anderson painted. Eventually the two of them would take little expeditions to downtown Los Angeles, hunting for materials. Sometimes Walt would disappear for a day or two, Anderson said, and then return with a “whole sack full” of various items from which to construct the scenes. Walt himself admitted to one vendor of materials, “I become so absorbed that the cares of the studio fade away…at least for a time.” Indeed, as Anderson explained it, Walt was “having such fun making these things that he completely forgot to pay me,” and when Walt happened to ask whether Anderson had been compensated and Anderson said he hadn’t, “I got paid and paid and paid.”
Over time Anderson drew nearly two dozen sketches of archetypal American scenes—among them a blacksmith reading a newspaper, a minister in the pulpit, a klatch of gossiping women, a general store, a granny in her rocker before a hearth. But even before he began constructing his tableaux, Walt came to two realizations. The first was that he couldn’t fabricate the scenes completely by himself and that he would need more assistance. He recruited a sculptor named Christodoro to help make the figures and a sketch artist named Harper Goff, whom he had met in a London model train shop during his European trip to oversee Treasure Island. The second realization was that the scenes couldn’t be static. They had to move, which required the additional recruitment of machinist Roger Broggie, who had helped Walt build his train, and an animator-cum-sculptor named Wathel Rogers.
Now Walt, inspired by wind-up toys that he had found and dissected in Europe, began an experiment. In February 1951 he hired the actor and dancer Buddy Ebsen to perform a short tap dance in front of a grid. (Walt directed it himself.) The performance was filmed on 35mm stock and then analyzed by Broggie and Rogers to determine how they might replicate the movements with a mechanical figure that Christodoro had made. Broggie later recalled that they examined the footage frame by frame, only to discover that Ebsen never exactly repeated his steps. Moreover, just as it had been difficult to animate clothing, Broggie and Rogers could never quite get the mechanical figure’s pants to flop in the same way that Ebsen’s did. Still, they made the man dance, using the same kind of cam system that the wind-up toys employed, and Walt entered a new territory that further extended the metaphor of control. As the historian Jackson Lears would observe of this departure, “The quintessential product of the [Disney] empire would not be fantasy, but simulated reality; not the cartoon character, but the ‘audio-animatronic’ robot,” of which the “mechanical man” was the first. Walt Disney had crept closer still to creating and perfecting life.
Already in January, even before the Ebsen experiment, Walt was writing a specialist in display cases that “it always takes a lot of time to work the bugs out of mechanical contraptions and this one must be absolutely right before I can go ahead on the others,” but that he expected to have a “pretty good show worked up by next Christmas.” At the time he had the crew work on another tableau, this one of a barbershop quartet, while he personally worked on the scene of Granny in her rocker. By March, when he asked shorts production chief Harry Tytle to handle the logistics of the touring show, he had already spent nearly $24,000 on the miniatures and the train, and he demanded as much value for his money as he had on the animations. He was constantly having miniatures sent to him on approval, then returning them for shoddy craftsmanship or lack of detail. For a man of his stature, he was also surprisingly concerned about the value of his own craftsmanship. He had designed and fabricated by hand small potbellied stoves that he sent on consignment to a miniatures dealer in New York, but he was incensed when the dealer charged only fifteen dollars and asked that she “keep them on display for a while longer and see what you can really get for them.” When the dealer boosted the price to twenty-five dollars and sold one, Walt glowed. “The thing that pleases me is that you sold a stove for $25.00!”
Meanwhile, Walt forged ahead on his exhibition, which was now called Disneylandia and which he described as a series of “visual juke boxes with the record playing mechanism being replaced by a miniature stage setting.” He was considering exhibiting the show in department stores or in railroad cars, where schoolchildren could bring coins to “play” the scenes, though Walt hesitated at having children come to freight yards, and in any case he had been told emphatically that the exhibition couldn’t possibly be profitable. In the end, he settled for unveiling the scene of “Granny Kincaid” at a Festival of California Living at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles in November 1952. The vitrine, roughly eight feet long, contained tiny rugs, a plank floor, a stone fireplace, lace curtains, dishes, and even an outhouse with a potty, and it featured a narration by actress Beulah Bondi, who had played Granny Kincaid in So Dear to My Heart. Columnist Hedda Hopper, who had visited the festival, marveled at Walt’s handiwork and asked, “Why does he do it?” To which Walt answered, “Damned if I know.”
But he knew very well why he did it. Beyond the psychological benisons of control and the tactile exhilaration of his own craftsmanship, beyond the way it preoccupied him while the studio seemed to wobble, he did it because he harbored an even larger, more audacious plan—a plan for which Disneylandia was only a trial run and a plan that seemed to sustain him even as he was losing interest in the rest of his company.
It is impossible to say exactly when, but Walt Disney had decided to build an amusement park.
Rudy Ising, an old Kansas City friend and one of the Laugh-O-Gram employees, recalled his and Walt’s visits to Electric Park, an amusement complex, and how on one of these excursions Walt had told him, “One of these days I’m going to build an amusement park—and it’s going to be clean!” Diane Disney thought the inception took place during the Sunday afternoons when Walt picked the girls up from religious services—he never attended
them himself—and took them to the Griffith Park merry-go-round, where they would spend hours. “He’d see families in the park,” Diane would recall, “and say, ‘There’s nothing for the parents to do…. You’ve got to have a place where the whole family can have fun.’” Diane thought he used those afternoons and later ones with Sharon at a small amusement park at La Cienega and Beverly in Los Angeles as a “sort of research project.” Roy thought that it had all begun with the model trains. Once Walt began building his locomotive, Roy told an interviewer, “he always wanted to build a big play train for the public,” though it was unclear whether Walt built the model trains because he had the park in mind or whether he had the park in mind because he built the model trains. Wilfred Jackson said that Walt had first broached the idea for an amusement park during the Snow White premiere, where Walt had a dwarfs’ cottage erected outside the theater as a display. As they walked past it, Walt told Jackson that he wanted to build a park scaled to children’s size. Ben Sharpsteen said he first heard about a park in 1940 when he accompanied Walt to New York for a demonstration of Fantasound and Walt discussed his plans for setting up displays on a strip of land across the street from the studio between Riverside Drive and the Los Angeles River—“just something to show people who wanted to visit the Disney Studio,” Walt said. Dick Irvine, an art director at the studio, remembered Walt coming into the office during the war and describing a public tour of the studio that Irvine felt later expanded into the amusement park. And John Hench, an animator and layout man, recalled Walt in the 1940s pacing out the parking lot and imagining the boundaries for an amusement park there.
