by Neal Gabler
As he was prowling shops and poring through catalogs for miniatures, and as he was milling parts for his own railroad, he was thinking and even talking in earnest about installing a scale-model passenger train to circumnavigate the studio and about landscaping its route with what he referred to as a “village.” In the spring of 1948 Walt had mentioned to Harry Tytle the idea of constructing a train ride on the seven-acre Riverside Drive plot and in the summer of 1948 Ward Kimball was gushing to Walt about the railroad concession at an amusement park outside San Francisco that had reaped $50,000 the previous year—“enough to pay for all the other concessions in the park!” By the time Walt and Kimball left for the Chicago Railroad Fair that August, Walt was pressing Casey Jones, his fellow railroad enthusiast, to find him a locomotive for the “village” as an anchor and was half-apologizing for the scale of his project: “While I know the whole plan I have in mind sounds quite elaborate, yet I feel the success of it depends upon the project being very complete.” On the way back from Chicago, Walt and Kimball made a two-day detour to Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village in Michigan, Walt’s second visit there, and Walt returned to California more inspired and expansive than ever about his park. Kimball said it was all Walt talked about on the trip.
He could visualize it just the way he had once visualized the animations. He could see not just the train ride but the park around which it would run, and by the end of August he had made extensive notes for a production designer named Dick Kelsey. He described a Main Village with a railroad station and a village green—obviously modeled after Marceline. “It will be a place for people to sit and rest; mothers and grandmothers can watch over small children at play,” Walt wrote. “I want it to be very relaxing, cool and inviting.” A small town would be built around the green, with the railroad station at one end and a town hall at the other and police and fire stations in between. A “variety of little stores” would ring the green, where Disney merchandise would be sold. There would be a three-hundred-seat combination opera house and movie theater. In the middle of the park he envisioned an ice cream–hot dog stand, but he also thought of a restaurant. And there would be other sections too: an old farm, a western village, an Indian compound (no doubt influenced by the Santa Fe compound at the railroad fair), and a carnival area with rides—“typical Midway stuff.” A buckboard would carry passengers through the western village and the old farm. Already he was securing plans for a riverboat, and he had sent Jack Cutting, the head of the foreign operation, to scout merry-go-rounds in Europe.
By October, however, the plans had been temporarily sidelined. “To tell the truth, I have been so involved in production matters since I got back,” he wrote a Santa Fe executive to whom he had been enthusing over his plans, after returning from the railroad fair and then two weeks in Arizona, “that I haven’t given any further thought to my project.” Instead, with neither the time nor the resources to devote to his village, he launched Disneylandia, most likely because it was an inexpensive and manageable way to dip his toe into the waters of amusement and to test concepts for the larger park while he supervised production. For a man who was always impatient—always drumming his fingers during presentations, or snapping at subordinates when they didn’t grasp his ideas immediately, or dragging nervously on cigarettes—it was also a way to keep moving forward rather than wait. “I’m going to move on to something else because I’m wasting my time if I mess around with that any longer,” he would often tell nurse Hazel George about various stalemated projects. “And instead of trying to solve what momentarily was an insoluble situation,” George would say, “he would go on to something else. So he kept constantly in movement.”
The production matters that now diverted him were the completion of So Dear to My Heart; the combination of The Wind in the Willows and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which were being packaged as a single film, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad; and Cinderella—all of which were released in a period of just over a year between January 1949 and February 1950. While none of these films alone might have commanded his attention now that he was playing with his trains and contemplating his village, together they made incursions. He was also contending with Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll’s story of a girl who follows a rabbit down his hole and into a series of surrealistic adventures. No project had been at the studio longer—Walt had first discussed it with Mary Pickford in 1933 and bought the rights to the Lewis Carroll books with the Tenniel illustrations in 1938 shortly after Snow White—and none had proved more intractable. Over the years Walt had assigned various writers to the film, among them novelist Aldous Huxley, who, according to Dick Huemer, couldn’t get in a word at story meetings without being outtalked by Walt. “Five meetings or so and we never saw him again,” Huemer said of Huxley’s brief 1945 tenure. Huxley wasn’t the only one who had difficulties. “There is no story in the book,” said Bob Carr, who had been the head of the story department during one early go at Alice. Moreover, he observed, “Alice has no character. She merely plays straight man to a cast of screw-ball comics. It is too bad for any leading character to be placed in this untenable position.” Walt didn’t disagree. “You could hear him with the animators at work,” Diane recalled, “saying Alice was cold, you couldn’t get any warmth into her.” Ben Sharpsteen said that the animators were none too enthusiastic about the film either but that so many people over the years—“especially sophisticated people,” in Sharpsteen’s words—had urged Walt to make Alice that he had felt compelled to produce it whether he liked it or not.
His ambivalence was evident. As they plodded forward, Walt debated whether to make it a full animation or a combination live action–animation. He announced that actress-dancer Ginger Rogers would play the title role; then a year later that Luana Patten, the young girl slated for Song of the South, would play her; and then neither. He hired a Barnard professor to find the right “voice” for Alice, which ignited a controversy in Britain over whether the country’s beloved character might wind up sounding American, then signed a ten-year-old English actress named Kathryn Beaumont to voice the role in what was now to be a full animation. He had even consulted a psychiatrist to take a new approach to the material and assigned storymen T. Hee and Bill Cottrell to have another crack at it, but they were stymied too. Roy hated it, and Walt admitted that he would have bumped it for Peter Pan had that film been ready, which it wasn’t, but the studio had too much invested in Alice to shelve it. Instead, everyone soldiered on slowly and unhappily and with premonitions of disaster, despite Walt’s rosy predictions at the time of Cinderella’s release.
In the end, the premonitions proved all too accurate. Ward Kimball thought the sequence directors had started trying to outdo one another, which had a “self-cancelling effect on the final product.” Harry Tytle’s analysis was that Alice had “too much sameness.” Walt had always felt that it lacked heart and would later say, following Sharpsteen, that he got “trapped into making ‘Alice in Wonderland’ against my better judgment” and called it a “terrible disappointment.” “It’s terribly tough to transfer whimsy to the screen,” he said. To another interviewer he admitted, “We just didn’t feel a thing, but we were forcing ourselves to do it.” The animation suffered because the staff had been further depleted by defections to the new medium of television. And just five days before its scheduled release, in July 1951, a rival producer rushed a puppet version of the story into theaters. Walt sought an injunction, arguing that the new film was trying to capitalize on his, but he lost. Even a promotional appearance by Walt for Alice on the radio turned sour when he suddenly went blank and had to fumble his way through the interview. The film received tepid praise—“Watching this picture is something like nibbling those wafers that Alice eats,” wrote Bosley Crowther in the New York Times—and in its first release returned only $2 million on a $3 million investment.
But again Walt wasn’t in Burbank to suffer the disappointment. At the time of Alice’s release he was in Europe with Lillian and
the girls to supervise the second of the British live-action pictures, The Adventures of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, financed by the blocked monies of RKO and Disney, though this visit, like the one for Treasure Island, seemed to be more an excuse for an extended vacation than a business trip. Before leaving, Walt had screened films at the studio, looking at prospective actors and directors and making what he himself called “merely suggestions,” while he left the final decisions to Perce Pearce, who was producing. For his part, Pearce had laid out every shot in the movie in thumbnail sketches, just as the studio had done with the animations, and sent them on, along with photostats and the final script, to Walt for his approval, which Walt freely gave, though not without a veiled threat that Pearce had better make the film as quickly as possible. “[T]his is important not only to the organization but to you as the producer,” he wrote. Meanwhile, as the film was shot, Walt, Lillian, and the girls wandered through Europe, visiting the Tivoli Gardens in Denmark, and did not return to the studio until August.
When he did return, he plunged back into Disneylandia and his park. At home, Lillian recalled, he would come in after running the Lilly Belle and then regale the family with his plans. He had first talked of the park being located on the seven acres across from the studio, with the train traversing the land separating the studio from nearby Griffith Park, but his plans kept growing larger until, Diane admitted, “his conversation about it at home became so sweeping that I didn’t take it seriously anymore.” Walt, however, was deadly serious. Late that summer or early in the fall he had Harper Goff draw overhead plans and sketches of the park, which now included a small lake and an island, and he talked about the park at every opportunity just as he had talked incessantly about Snow White when he was conceptualizing it in the mid-1930s. “[E]very time you had a meeting with Walt on something else,” Milt Kahl said, “why, the Park would come up. Especially if you were up in his office, where he had all his drawings and stuff.” One executive at ABC television remembered Walt coming to the office, even before his European trip and even before he had any of Goff’s sketches, to discuss possible projects but said that Walt could talk only about the park: “Walt just carried on and on about it, and built a word picture.” The executive left “with a great deal of enthusiasm,” but he admitted that “our people seemed not to understand what he was talking about.”
The ABC executives weren’t the only ones who couldn’t get their minds around the concept of an imaginative park. Lillian said she was “afraid” of the park, afraid it was too ambitious. Roy said he wasn’t initially enthusiastic either, though he grudgingly justified the project on the grounds that the park could be used as a broadcast studio for television. None of this had the least effect in dissuading Walt, who was more energized than he had been in years. He asked John Cowles, a young architect who was the son of Walt’s early Kansas City benefactor, Dr. J. V. Cowles, to expand upon Goff’s sketches with architectural drawings, and he set him up in a bungalow on the Burbank lot. In March, using sketches made by animator Don DaGradi, Walt sent a presentation to the Burbank Parks and Recreation Board, whose approval he needed, announcing his plans for a park that would generate a small profit rather than one that would operate on a “full bore moneymaking scale,” though it now included a canal boat, a spaceship mock-up, and a submarine ride. That same week Walt had one of his associates begin searching for a small coach and Shetland ponies to pull it; he had already installed a Shetland pony trainer named Owen Pope at the studio to put up stalls and build carriages. Pope, who lived with his wife Dolly in a trailer on the lot under the water tower, said that Walt would stop by every day to talk about the park.
The project hadn’t a name yet—occasionally it was called “Mickey Mouse Village”—but a few months earlier Sharpsteen had written a memo to Walt referring to an anticipated 16mm nontheatrical release of the old Snow White promotional film for the RKO sales force as “A Trip Through Disneyland,” and the miniature project had already been dubbed “Disneylandia.” “I don’t recall a specific occasion when anyone said it’s going to be called Disneyland,” said Bill Cottrell. “I do recall that the name was suddenly said by Walt, and it sounded good, and that was it.” Thenceforth the park would be known as Disneyland, which was exactly what it would be: a land of Walt Disney’s imagination, a land under his absolute power.
But studio business kept interfering, and the plans kept stalling. Though producer Perce Pearce and writer Lawrence Edward Watkin did most of the work on the next British live-action feature, a costume drama called The Sword and the Rose, as they had on the first two, Walt did comment on the script and examine the storyboards in his office to make sure the action never slackened, and he felt the need once again to spend the summer in Europe, ostensibly to keep an eye on the production.* But even if he was essentially relaxing, the pressures were mounting again. Shortly after his return to the studio he wrote Pearce that he had been “as busy as the proverbial ‘ten cats on a tin roof.’” He was helping shepherd Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue, another British film, into production for the following year, and he was beginning preparations for the studio’s first American-made live-action feature, Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
And even as he was planning these films and even as he was riveted on the park, he was finishing Peter Pan, Sir James Barrie’s account of a boy who has never grown up and his encounters with the wicked Captain Hook, which had been in production nearly as long as Alice in Wonderland. He had acquired the rights in the post–Snow White buying spree, had completed a Leica reel as early as 1939, had spent $200,000 on developing the property by 1943 as opposed to only $15,000 on Alice, and, clearly feeling affinities for the material, had persistently pushed to get it into production before other films that were in the pipeline. (Aside from The Wind in the Willows, which was already in production at the time, it was the only feature that the Bank of America allowed to proceed during the war.) As it slowly made its way through the typical Disney process, Walt talked to actress Mary Martin, who was appearing in a stage production of the play, about voicing Peter (Roy thought her voice “too heavy, matured and sophisticated”), and the actress Jean Arthur had contacted Walt asking to be considered. Walt had also talked to Cary Grant about voicing Captain Hook, who said the “idea intrigued him.” (Walt talked to Grant as well about starring in a live-action adaptation of Don Quixote with the Mexican star Cantinflas as Sancho Panza, another project that was eventually nixed.)
As with virtually all the features, while the preparation for Peter Pan dragged on, the studio encountered difficulties. At one point shortly after the war, impatient with the delays, Walt ordered director Jack Kinney to work on sequences consecutively rather than finish the entire script before it was sent to be storyboarded, so that a scene would be approved at a morning story meeting and then immediately be put into development. When Kinney asked Walt if he wanted to see what they were doing as they proceeded, Walt insisted that they keep going until the storyboards were finished. After what Kinney said were six months and thirty-nine storyboards bearing one hundred sketches each, he made his two-and-a-half-hour presentation to Walt. When he finished, Walt sat silently, drummed his fingers, then announced, “Y’know, I’ve been thinking of Cinderella.”
Now, even after Cinderella had been completed and released, Peter Pan continued to inch forward. As with Cinderella, Walt had an entire live-action version shot on the soundstage. It starred Bobby Driscoll as Peter and Hans Conried as Captain Hook, both of whom would do the voices for those characters, and Conried said he would be called into the studio intermittently over a two-and-a-half-year period to do a few days’ or a few weeks’ work. But with the live action to work from, Walt complained that he thought the animators had let too much of Driscoll seep into the drawings. “Some of these Peter Pans look like hell,” Walt told Milt Kahl. “They are too masculine, too old, There is something wrong down there.” “You want to know what’s wrong?” Kahl replied. “What is wrong is that t
hey don’t have any talent in the place.”
Kahl was right that the talent and commitment at Burbank had continued to decline, but even the talent the studio did have struggled. Storyman Bill Peet thought it was another example of too many individuals contending against one another and said that the picture finally got moving when just a few of the staff huddled to finalize the material. Still, they were having to do it themselves without the guidance that Walt had always provided. In the golden days Walt had imposed his vision and settled disputes. Now Walt himself was uncertain. Frank Thomas, who was charged with animating Captain Hook, said Walt couldn’t decide whether Hook should be a slightly comical dandy or a snarling villain and finally left the determination up to Thomas. When Walt saw Hook’s first scenes, he told Thomas, “I think you’re beginning to get him,” and advised he keep going, which meant that Walt was conceding nearly everything to the animators and that the man who once ordained every frame of his features was now letting the film develop organically.
