Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  In the end, when Peter Pan was released in February 1953, Walt was much more pleased with the film than he had been with Alice, and so were critics and audiences. It was greeted with a special segment on the highly rated Toast of the Town television program, hosted by columnist Ed Sullivan, that recounted Walt’s life, and with the cover of Newsweek lauding Walt’s plans. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times called it “frankly and boldly created in the ‘Disney Style’”—a turn that since Cinderella had regained its positive connotation. “I might say that Roy is wearing his ‘Cinderella smile’ again!” Walt bubbled to one correspondent after the receipts started coming in. He was so satisfied that he attended the London premiere that April with Lillian, and later in the year (after spending most of the summer in Europe again on the pretense of overseeing the British live-action production Rob Roy) he attended the Mexican premiere as well.

  But even with the success of Peter Pan and the media acknowledgment that Walt Disney’s worst days seemed to be behind him, Walt was still trying to find ways to improve the animation without raising the cost, and he had assigned Ken Peterson to come up with suggestions on how to do so. Peterson’s advice was predictable and familiar, given the longtime problems at the studio: better preparation and integration of talent and assigning animators only after the script has been thoroughly worked out; but he also counseled slanting stories toward “broader cartoon action and cartoon characters” that would be easier for less talented animators to draw, and bringing in animators from outside the studio—something that Walt had strenuously avoided all these years, believing as he did in the superiority of the Disney method. Peterson also told Walt that despite the successes of Cinderella and Peter Pan and despite the desire to “produce better pictures at a lower cost,” there was a “defeatist or negative attitude which asserts that nothing can be done about it.”

  II

  But Walt Disney, who had been in despair for so many years, was not defeatist now, even if his studio was. He knew the studio was unwieldy. He knew the level of talent was not as high as in its heyday and that the spirit had never recovered from the strike, much less from the drudgery of the war. He knew that the heady days of collaboration were long since gone and that, as far as the animations were concerned, they would never return. He knew that, and he missed those days, missed them terribly, which may have been one reason why he drifted. For all the pressure he had had to endure, Walt had loved the days when he and his boys turned out the first Mickey Mouse cartoons or when they labored over Snow White, knowing that they might be making history. Now, finally, the park had restored that sense of doing something epoch-making. But it wasn’t only the fact of the park that had reenergized him. He also cherished the idea of the process of planning the park, of returning once again to the old days, the days before the big studio and the strike and the relentless financial strains, when the employees were locked in brotherhood. Walt Disney, the utopian who had spent a lifetime trying to recreate the communal spirit of Marceline, wanted the park in part because he thought the planning of it would allow him to reestablish the creative community he had lost.

  He knew that it couldn’t be done within the bureaucratic studio structure. The process had to be fresh and distinct—new. Roy, always protecting the studio from his brother and his brother from the studio, gave Walt the opportunity. Back in the summer of 1951 Roy had tried to acquire the rights to the Oz books of the late L. Frank Baum, and had discovered that Baum’s heirs didn’t hold those rights. Roy, appalled, got to thinking that Walt Disney had to protect his rights for his family, and he suggested to Walt that September that Walt sell his name to the company on the condition that the payment be regarded as a capital gain for tax purposes. He also suggested that Walt offer the studio a ten-year personal services contract, since his last contract had expired in 1947 and they hadn’t bothered to extend or renegotiate it. Some advisers told Roy that the Treasury Department wouldn’t permit Walt to sell his name to a company that he effectively controlled. Roy thought otherwise. Still, he said he was also acting in the company’s best interest since the company used Walt Disney’s name “in ways that bring us a lot of revenue,” and “I feel keenly that the company should have this right beyond any doubt in place of going along as we are now on the basis of indulgence on your part”—recognition that the name Walt Disney was now just as valuable as the man. What Walt needed, however, was a separate entity from the studio, one wholly owned by Walt and his family, to whom Walt would grant the rights to his name and with whom the studio could make an agreement both for tax purposes and to give the contract legitimacy.

  It took over a year, until December 1952, for Walt to form what eventually was called WED Enterprises, after his initials, and another three months for the board of directors of Walt Disney Productions to agree to license Walt Disney’s name for forty years and to give Walt a personal services contract—of seven, not ten, years as it was finally drafted. WED, in turn, received $3,000 a week and 5 to 10 percent of what the company collected from the use of Walt’s name on anything outside of production. Walt was also permitted to make one live-action film per year outside the studio’s auspices and could purchase up to a 25 percent ownership interest in any live-action film if he were to contribute a like percentage to the film’s budget. In addition, Walt was granted an option to buy up to $50,000 of the $1.5 million life insurance policy that the company had taken out on him and was guaranteed a royalty of $50,000 annually for ten years. The terms were favorable to Walt—so favorable that one angry stockholder brought suit against the company that summer, and Walt personally appeared in court to make his own case.

  But if Roy had encouraged WED to protect Walt Disney’s interests and to maintain the company’s claim on his name and services, Walt himself had something very different in mind for his new organization. WED would be the place where Disneyland could germinate and grow—an intimate place that was physically inside the studio but not really of the studio. He set it up either in an old bungalow at the edge of the lot that, appropriately enough, had been transported from Hyperion or in a temporary trailer. (Accounts differ.) And then he began to recruit a small staff to help him plan. Less than a week after the board and WED agreed to terms, Walt hired Lillian’s brother-in-law Bill Cottrell as the new company’s first employee to work both on nascent television projects and on the park. Art director Dick Irvine joined three weeks later, and Irvine’s associate Marvin Davis, also an art director, came with him. Harper Goff, who had drawn the original Disneyland sketches, arrived too.

  Walt was also cruising the studio for candidates. Layout artist John Hench, the man who had worked with Dali on Destino, remembered Walt stopping at his desk one day and telling him, “I want you to work on Disneyland, and you’re going to like it.” Hench said he had only the slightest idea of what Walt was talking about, but he joined the new crew anyway. Others would eventually follow: animators, machinists, additional layout artists. “When he actually got into Disneyland, he brought any number of people over to WED from the Studio,” Bill Cottrell remembered. “Business was slowing down in the Studio, and instead of laying them off, he put them on his personal payroll, the WED payroll.”

  But these were all movie people, people who knew how to make animations and live-action pictures, not amusement parks. Walt had Goff’s drawings, which were the equivalent of the thumbnail sketches for the features, but he needed an architect and engineer to execute them. In April 1952, nearly a year before the formation of WED and just weeks after the presentation to the Burbank officials, Walt invited architects William Pereira and Charles Luckman to the studio to discuss the park, and afterward Pereira conceded to Walt that he had fallen “hook, line and sinker” for the project. Of all the local architects, it was not surprising that Walt should have asked Pereira to a conference. Pereira was not only a notable Los Angeles architect—he had designed the Pan-Pacific Auditorium where Walt had shown Granny’s cabin; the Robinsons Department Store in Beverly Hills; t
he Marineland of the Pacific aquatic park; and the Los Angeles International Airport—but he had also been an art director and production designer at Paramount who had then partnered with Luckman, a former president of Lever Brothers, to form an architectural and engineering firm of their own. In brief, Pereira had flair.

  In January, Walt Disney Productions agreed to give Pereira and Luckman up to $3,000 to help design Disneyland, after which they were to return to Walt for further authorization. The plan was still to build the park in Burbank. In the spring Dick Irvine was assigned to serve as a liaison between the imaginative people in the bungalow at WED and the architectural firm, while Marvin Davis was assigned the task of taking Goff’s sketches and turning them into elevations of the Main Village. But by the time Pereira and Luckman submitted their plan for the park, Walt was beginning to have doubts. By one account, Dr. Charles Straub, the president of the Santa Anita Turf Club and an acquaintance of Walt’s, convinced him that he didn’t need a big architectural firm, that the park was essentially a matter of entertainment rather than design, and that building the park, in the words of one art director, was “very much like doing a set for a motion picture.” Walt may have also disliked the formality of using a large firm when he so enjoyed the informal excitement of WED. By the summer Pereira and Luckman had been terminated. WED was now on its own.

  Now they mobilized as they hadn’t mobilized since Snow White. Almost from the moment Walt first hatched the idea of a theme park, he and his cohorts fanned out into the field for ideas. As early as March 1951 Harper Goff went to Europe to take photographs of parks, and by the fall even Roy was investigating purchasing amusement rides in Europe. The following March, Goff was visiting New Orleans during Mardi Gras, then went on to Atlanta to examine available train stock for the park. He would make another extended reconnaissance trip a year later to New York museums, Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, the old Erie Canal, Greenfield Village in Michigan, the Lincoln Museum in Chicago, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, Colonial Williamsburg, Marineland in Florida, the Tallulah Falls Railroad in Georgia, and the Steamboat Museum in St. Louis, and he was part of a delegation that visited parks around Los Angeles to gather information on how to run a facility. There was so much activity at WED that at the same time Goff was making his tours, he was also working on the Dancing Man miniature, assembling a coach for the park, and drawing elevations for the submarine in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

  Walt himself was also spinning in a whirlwind. Despite the distractions of the features, he was personally negotiating with a specialist in miniature horsedrawn carriages about the possibility of the man selling his work to Disneyland for a separate miniature section; he was consulting with the operators of other attractions (one advised him to charge a high admission price to the park and a parking fee “to keep out the loafers and undesirable characters”); and he was visiting other amusement venues, like Knott’s Berry Farm south of Los Angeles, with Dick Irvine. These were hardly casual trips. “[W]e’d measure the width of the walkways, the traffic flow, and study how people moved about,” Irvine recalled. “Even at that time, Walt had in the back of his mind how he wanted to move people.”

  Walt was expansive again, and after the years of working under restrictions, he wanted his crew to exercise their imaginations too, though when it came to the rest of the studio, WED operated in relative secrecy. “Walt said, ‘Heavens! The dream’s wide open. There’s nothing cut or dried about it.’” “We would write our ideas out on squares of paper,” Dick Irvine recalled, comparing the planning of the park to the planning of the features, “put them up on a board, and he’d come down in the afternoon and sit there and look at them and juggle them around.” These sessions would last anywhere from four hours to six hours to the entire day. And though Lillian said that he would come home exhausted after the long days of planning, he had a drawing board at Carolwood where he could work on Disneyland at night too—“as a hobby,” he said.

  As in the old days, when he had been constantly “plussing” the animations, he was never satisfied. “The first scheme you had, Walt would completely tear apart,” Marvin Davis said. “Eventually you would come up with something better. He wanted to see every idea that you could possibly have before he settled on something.” Davis remembered a time when he had drawn a layout for an attraction and Walt had come in at night, just as he used to do with his animators, and taken it home with him. When Davis arrived at his desk the next morning, he found a sheet of tracing paper on which Walt had redrawn the entire attraction. “Here, quit fooling around and draw it the way it should be,” he ordered Davis.

  Yet for all the work and for all the long hours, Walt was happier than he had been in years. He visited the WED bungalow frequently as he had once visited the animators’ rooms—overseeing, brainstorming, musing, enthusing, goading. And he reveled in WED the way he had once reveled in the old Hyperion studio. “Dammit, I love it here,” he exulted to Marc Davis, who would move from animation to WED. “WED is just like the Hyperion studio used to be in the years when we were always working on something new.” He had found not only a purpose again but also, as he had hoped, the small joyous community he so desperately wanted: a revivification of the cult. “I thought that was why he enjoyed himself so much at the beginning of WED,” Bill Cottrell observed. “Because once again, he owned WED as he once owned the Studio, before it went public…. I think there was a feeling that Walt must have had, and certainly I had it, that at WED you no longer had any big departments to deal with…. It was just fun to get back into that small scale again.” Walt called it his “sandbox.”

  Over the months, as the WED staff loosed their imaginations, the project underwent what one might call a philosophical transformation. From the first, Walt had never thought of Disneyland as a traditional amusement park; the whole idea had been to make something different, something better. But the conceptualization, in part limited by the relatively small site, had nevertheless been narrow too—a sort of combination of Knott’s Berry Farm, with its rustic American setting, and a kiddieland with rides. By the time WED and Walt embarked on their constant plussing, Disneyland had evolved into something much more unusual and much more grandiose—not just a park that could provide fun and diversion but a kind of full imaginative universe that could provide a unified experience. It was truly a land rather than an amusement park. At least that was how the planners and Walt had come to think of it. Disneyland would be something for which there was no antecedent.

  But if there was no antecedent, in its planning the park had been the beneficiary of a host of forces and influences—the Edenic European gardens, like Tivoli, that Walt had visited; the expositions and fairs, like the Century of Progress in Chicago in 1933, the New York World’s Fair in 1939, and even the Chicago Railroad Fair; historical recreations, like Knott’s Berry Farm, Greenfield Village, and Colonial Williamsburg, all of which Walt had seen and enjoyed; and, what may have been the most important influence of all, California architecture itself. As Edmund Wilson had once described Los Angeles flamboyance: “Here you see mixturesque beauty,” a “Pekinese pagoda made of fresh and cracky peanut brittle then a snow white marshmallow igloo—or a toothsome pink nougat in the Florentine manner, rich and delicious with embedded nuts.” Los Angeles was a fantastic, eclectic, architecturally unruly city, affected as it was by Hollywood, which was also fantastic, eclectic, and unruly, as well as by a general sense of possibility. All of Los Angeles was a movie set or, as one commentator in the 1920s called it, the “child of Hollywood out of Kansas” and the “Middle Westerner’s Nirvana,” which almost perfectly described the city’s relationship to Walt Disney. His Disneyland would in many ways be the apotheosis of Los Angeles architecture, an apotheosis of Hollywood, and in talking about the park he would even describe its layout as if it were a movie: “This is scene one, this is scene two, and this is scene three.”

  Having borrowed the idiom of motion pictures for his park, Walt Disney had a
lso borrowed the movies’ intent. Hollywood—the creation largely of Eastern European Jews who expunged their pasts by devising a better world of their imaginations—refined and idealized reality. So would Disneyland, the creation of a wounded man who expunged what he saw as the darker passages of his past by devising a better world of his imagination, though one that was obviously colored by the images of Hollywood. One of the sources of the power of Hollywood was that it created archetypes that, it was often said, managed to plumb some deep Jungian ocean of collective consciousness. Disneyland, essentially a giant movie set, would deploy the same archetypes and would plumb the same depths. As one Disney historian put it, “One could take every feature of the parks [Disneyland and later Walt Disney World] and explain its appeal in terms of some instinctive or emotional response common to almost all of us.”

  At Disneyland, Walt imagined a western town that was the movies’ idea of the West, even, according to architectural historian Karal Ann Marling, instructing Harper Goff to model the saloon after one that Goff had designed for the recent film Calamity Jane. He imagined a jungle cruise ride that would be modeled after another recent film, The African Queen, which Goff loved. He imagined a castle that was the Platonic castle of everyone’s imagination. He imagined a Main Street with its quaint shops, its horsedrawn carriages, its train station, fire station, and police station, its town hall and town square that was so quintessentially turn-of-the-century American that even Walt’s promotional material boasted, “We want everyone to feel that this is MAIN STREET, U.S.A. and that you are actually living this period.”

  As Walt drew on these archetypal American images, he also drew on the archetypal images that he himself had created and that had become embedded in the American consciousness. “We enter the land of Disney with the sense of having been there before because we return to an America unified by our common experience,” wrote one visitor in The New York Times, including in that collective past the experience of Snow White, Cinderella, Three Little Pigs, Peter Pan, and Mickey and Minnie Mouse. It was a testament to how much Walt Disney had helped shape the American imagination. And to make absolutely certain that guests to Disneyland would stay within their imaginations, Walt planned a high berm, or embankment, to surround the park and blot out the surroundings, like the berm he had built at the studio and at Carolwood so that his neighbors wouldn’t be disturbed by his train. The berm literally kept the world at bay as Walt had always wanted to do at his studio. “[W]hen you enter DISNEYLAND,” the promotional brochure announced, “you will find yourself in the land of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy. Nothing of the present exists in DISNEYLAND.”