Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  As Disneyland was designed to block out the world, it was also designed to offer a particular kind of psychological experience that one didn’t ordinarily find at an amusement park or carnival, much less in reality. Most amusement parks, in fact, were like the Warner Bros. cartoons of the late 1940s—noisy, chaotic, bombastic, subversive. One was made to feel that the social rules didn’t apply there, that one was entirely free. Walt Disney, the purveyor of comfort, intended his park to provide just the opposite—not freedom but control and order. John Hench, one of its designers, said that the park had been drawn with the same kind of circles and loops as Mickey Mouse and with the same effect. Everything was harmonious, soft, and unthreatening, making Disneyland one of the most profound expressions of what Marling calls an “architecture of reassurance,” in which one feels the palpable sense of “an order governing the disposition of things.” When critics would later carp that Disneyland was too serene, too clean, too controlled, too perfect, they were right. It was what one might have called the “tragedy of perfection”—that in seeking perfection Walt seemed to drive out anything human and real. Yet perfection was the whole basis for Disneyland’s existence and the foundation of its appeal. It was a modern variant on the City on a Hill of Puritan dreams. It was the consummate act of wish fulfillment.

  As such, of course, it was a reflection of its creator and his own overweening sense of wish fulfillment. But it reflected him in a much more personal way as well. By formulating the park with a walk down Main Street at the park’s entrance, which led to Sleeping Beauty Castle at the street’s end (what Walt, borrowing an old carnival term, called a “wienie” because it enticed guests to it presumably the way a wienie entices a dog) and then to the various lands that radiated from the castle (Fantasyland, Adventureland, Frontierland, and Tomorrowland), Walt Disney recreated his own life’s journey: “the road map of Walt Disney’s life,” as WED veteran Marty Sklar would describe it. One entered the gates of the park into what was essentially the Main Street of Walt’s boyhood Marceline. (At “story sessions” for Disneyland he would reminisce about Marceline by the hour.) At the end of the street one was offered a variety of options—fantasy, adventure, the frontier, the future—so that a trip through the park became a metaphor for possibility. Like young Walt, visitors to the castle seemed to stand at the portal to their dreams with a child’s sense of omnipotence. “The symbolism,” Richard Schickel would write, “is almost too perfect—the strangers forced to recapitulate Disney’s formative experiences before being allowed to visit his fancies and fantasies in other areas of the Magic Kingdom.”

  What was uncanny, as always, was how much Walt Disney’s personal experience converged with the national experience. Early in the planning stages Walt had described the park as providing a lesson in American heritage, just as Disneylandia had been intended to do, and he wanted visitors to appreciate the kind of bedrock values of which he had become a representative after the war, values that were especially salient with the onset of the Cold War. “There’s an American theme behind the whole park,” he told columnist Hedda Hopper, which meant that Disneyland was intended to recreate not only Walt Disney’s moment of possibility but also America’s, when the country, like Walt, had been both innocent and ambitious.

  Some regarded this nostalgia for a bygone era in a time of anxiety as yet another form of comfort and another source of the park’s appeal. “So the Disney parks touch on two sources of the modern desire to return through time to an earlier state of mind: the childhood of the individual (Main Street; Fantasyland, based on children’s literary classics; and the play orientation of the parks’ activities),” wrote one analyst, referring both to Disneyland and to its sequel, Walt Disney World, “and the childhood of the nation (early twentieth century settings and back through the frontier and colonial periods).” Another analyst observed that visitors to Disneyland “found themselves completely submerged in a fantasized but nearly pitch-perfect representation of their deepest commitments and beliefs”—commitments and beliefs that, like so much else in his life, had now been idealized by Walt Disney. In the end, then, Disneyland was neither just a park nor even an experience. It was also a repository of values.

  It had gotten too big. A year before the formation of WED, before Walt had launched his full-scale planning, and just two months after he had made his presentation to Burbank officials, he was already confiding to an RKO official that he had been “looking into the advisability of securing a plot of ground—something up to 200 acres—not that we would use this much for the project, but it would give us control of the surrounding area, which we feel is important.” By the time WED was in operation, Burbank began to balk, fearing how a park might affect the calm of the community. “Burbank city did not want a kiddieland in Burbank,” John Cowles, who had negotiated with the city, recalled. Meanwhile Walt scouted a police pistol range in the Chatsworth area of the San Fernando Valley; Palos Verdes south of Los Angeles; a 440-acre spread called Descanso Gardens (Walt concluded “it is in the wrong area”); Calabasas, where Roy bought a plot of forty acres fronting the parcel on margin, to protect the plot; and Sepulveda; and he sent Dick Irvine and another WED employee, Nat Winecoff, on a mission down the Santa Ana Freeway to survey possible sites there.

  He wanted a big site now, but the decision was too complex and difficult and the stakes far too great to be left to Walt’s band of happy amateurs. At a party that summer Charles Luckman introduced Walt to Harrison “Buzz” Price of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), who had done surveys for Luckman on a stadium project in Hawaii, and suggested that Walt hire Price to examine sites for Disneyland. Walt and Price met in July 1953, and Walt explained that he had conceptualized the entrance down Main Street and the four lands radiating from it and that it would need roughly one hundred acres, but that he had no idea where the park should be located. Price agreed to have his office analyze potential areas, which were promptly narrowed down from ten (in a large square that was bounded by Chatsworth on the north, Tustin on the south, Pomona on the east, and the ocean on the west) to four along the Santa Ana Freeway corridor that Winecoff and Irvine had investigated. When Price issued his report late that August, he concluded that Los Angeles was becoming increasingly decentralized and that the highest rate of growth was likely to be in Orange County, just south of L.A., whose population had swelled by 65.4 percent from 1940 to 1950 and by another 30.4 percent in the three years from 1950 to 1953. Orange County also seemed to have the least rainfall, the least humidity, and the least extreme temperatures of the areas under consideration, and perhaps best of all, it was well situated for transportation. After eliminating more than forty sites in and around Orange County (for reasons ranging from sporting unsightly oil wells to housing a labor camp for Mexican nationals), SRI settled on a 160-acre parcel in Anaheim called the Ball Road subdivision, which was basically a large grove of orange trees, four thousand of them, in an area that was the country’s largest provider of Valencia oranges. In addition to its location, it had the advantage of having only seventeen owners, most of whom had been thinking of turning the land into a housing development, and only fifteen homes scattered across the property; the price was relatively inexpensive—$4,800 per acre, save for one plot that had been leased to a trailer factory, which, after the studio agreed to buy the company’s assets, settled for $6,200 per acre. Walt got the news of the purchase from an associate while walking in Piccadilly Square in London, though the purchase wouldn’t be announced publicly until the following May.

  Now all Walt Disney needed was the money to build his park.

  III

  All the time he had been planning Disneyland, Walt admitted that he hadn’t paid particular attention to how he would finance it. The preliminary work from Pereira and Luckman and SRI had been authorized and underwritten by Walt Disney Productions. But even before the planning had accelerated, Walt had to dip into his own funds. He borrowed against his life insurance policy—“My wife kept complaining th
at if anything happened to me I would have spent all her money,” he told a reporter only half facetiously—and, in part to offset the cost of the new house, had borrowed another $50,000 from the bank, which he called the “limit of my personal borrowing ability.” He had no sooner completed a house at Smoke Tree, (which, he gushed to his aunt, was the “first time we have ever had a place away from town and we are all getting quite a kick out of having it,”) than he had to sell it, arguing that he was just too busy to get away but actually because he needed the money. He even coaxed Hazel George to invest, and she formed a Disneyland Boosters and Backers Club of studio employees.

  Walt claimed that Roy was less amenable, though this claim may have been more self-dramatization by someone who always liked to portray himself as having to battle the conventional wisdom. Whenever Walt broached the subject with his brother, Walt said, “he’d always suddenly get busy with some figures, so I mean I didn’t dare bring it up. But I kept working on it and I worked on it with my own money.” Roy told a reporter that he “wondered where the money was coming from, but I didn’t ask; it was his baby, and he could have it.” Then, Roy said, he got a call from a banker saying that Walt had come to see him to ask for a loan on the park. “We went over the plans,” the banker told Roy. “You know, Roy, that park is a wonderful idea!” Roy said, “I nearly fell out of my chair.” Walt got his seed money from the bank, and Roy was more favorably disposed.

  But Roy, though hesitant, wasn’t as unsympathetic as either he or Walt later portrayed him as being, any more than he had been when Walt had wanted to make Snow White. In fact, as early as March 1952 Roy had written Walt that he had been “thinking considerable” about the “Amusement Park matter” and recommended that Walt present the idea to Walt Disney Productions through a third party so that Walt would be insulated from charges that he was using the company for his personal ends. “I don’t see it clearly yet,” Roy admitted, “but I do think the idea should be considered and studied on its merits [—] the whole idea to me has great possibilities.” It was also at this time that Roy first asked Walt to consider revising his personal relationship to the studio—a revision that would lead to WED. “In that way,” he closed, “this Amus. Park idea could be the vehicle to straighten out your entire matters,” which was exactly what happened.

  But even as he was financing the park’s planning largely out of his own pocket and hoping to get additional financing from the studio, Walt already had a plan: television. Television would save him.

  Walt Disney had been fascinated by television at least since the mid-1930s, when he had gone to Camden, New Jersey, to see a demonstration of the new medium by RCA head David Sarnoff. When he decided to terminate his distribution agreement with United Artists at the same time and sign instead with RKO, one of the sticking points had been television rights. Walt demanded that the studio retain them. Over the years he had only seemed more prescient, and his interest had only intensified. Shortly after the war’s end the studio applied to the Federal Communications Commission for a television station license and announced plans to build a television broadcasting center on the lot, though Roy decided to withdraw the application, fearing that the expense would be too great and that the studio would be better served waiting for color broadcasts that would better showcase the studio’s animations. But the interest never wavered. In 1947 Roy ordered ten-inch television sets for all the executives, and the next year Walt spent a week in New York with the sole purpose of watching television “day and night” to get a handle on the medium. Hazel George said that when he returned to the studio, he had become messianic about television. “Television is the coming thing,” he told her, and dismissed all those motion picture moguls who perceived it as a threat.

  As Walt saw it—and he was largely alone among film executives in this respect—television was not the enemy of the motion picture; it was its ally. It might have the effect of killing off the B-movie, he told The New York Times, but it would help advertise movies, he believed, and he intended to “take full advantage of its potential to create a new motion picture audience and to encourage the fullest box office patronage of our forthcoming pictures.” Roy was no less enthusiastic. Offering possibilities to recycle old films and make new films backed by corporate sponsors, television, he saw, was a way to underwrite the entire studio operation. “We wouldn’t have the pressure of putting entertainment product into work unless you really felt good about it,” he wrote Walt, “and that would give us a better batting average in the entertainment field and more safety—as well as more peace of mind. The sponsored films would change our business over to almost a new business with unlimited possibilities, in place of the ever pinching outlook in the strictly theatrical field.”

  Walt was eager to take the leap. As early as March 1950, he had suggested to Roy that the studio launch its own television program using old Disney shorts. Roy agreed, calling it a “grand formula,” and told Walt to select a crew and draw up a budget. That idea foundered, no doubt a casualty of the other demands on Walt’s time, but that summer Roy and Walt were talking with Coca-Cola about the company sponsoring an hour-long Christmas broadcast featuring Walt hosting several cartoons as well as a scene from the upcoming Alice in Wonderland, which Roy believed would not only give the film a “tremendous send-off” but allow them to “find out a lot about television that we don’t know now.” The program, set for NBC, would cost about $100,000, all of which would be paid by Coca-Cola, but Roy, sounding very much like the old Walt, advised that “you think in terms of pouring every dollar they give us into the show…. Give them a socko show that will be the talk of the industry—or even broader than that—the talk of the entertainment world.” Whether it was the talk of the industry or not, Walt acquitted himself well. Jack Gould in The New York Times wrote, “Walt Disney can take over television any time he likes,” and called the show “one of the most engaging and charming programs of the year.” But what the special really did was prove that Walt’s thesis about the value of television to the film industry was correct. A Gallup poll indicated that the program created new awareness of Alice and prompted Walt to talk about using TV “for point of sale.”

  What Walt wanted, though, was a regular series that would pump a regular stream of income into the studio. A few months after the special, he gathered a group in his office to discuss a half-hour program, and though Walt immediately began waffling, citing the difficulty of producing a weekly program and wondering who would be able to execute it, he charged the staff with developing three show ideas by the end of the year. Roy was also working the television front. That May he met with Jules Stein, the head of the Music Corporation of America. MCA was the most powerful talent agency in the country, and for years, even before television was a going proposition, Stein had been dogging the Disneys, trying to interest them in having him represent them in the medium and offering to seek sponsors for a Disney series. Roy found Stein “glib and offhand”—Walt called him the “octopus” because he seemed to have his tentacles in everything—and said that every time he talked with him, he got the “feeling of fearing to get in his clutches,” à la Pat Powers. But Roy was nevertheless willing to agree because he feared that if the studio didn’t act quickly, other film companies would move into the breach. His only stipulation was that the term of the agreement be short.

  But even with MCA, television wasn’t proving so easy. Discussions with Ford and Chrysler that summer to sponsor films for television that might be used in a series, and discussions with the American Broadcasting Company to air the series, all had fizzled, and Roy had backed away from doing a weekly hour-long program at least until the fall of 1952, though even as that time approached, Roy found himself without his program or the prospect of one. Talks with Lever Brothers had run aground on the Disneys’ desire for a three-year commitment, and Roy was now recommending a fifteen-minute show to promote upcoming movies. The additional benefit, he wrote Walt, who was in Europe at the time, was that a show, any show
, would “be a wonderful help in the building up of our financial and corporate program for the amusement company, as it would intrigue third parties into coming into it and having a part of it.” In short, a television show might attract interest in Disneyland.

  Whether Roy knew it or not at the time, and he probably did, Walt already saw this as the plan. As much as he appreciated television as a promotional tool for the features and as much as he valued the revenue that television could bring to the studio so that the company wouldn’t constantly be in financial straits, Walt believed—Walt hoped—that in return for a Walt Disney television program, he could induce a network or a corporate sponsor to invest in Disneyland; that was the reason he had had Roy insist on a three-year commitment. He was, in effect, trying to sell his old films and the value of his reputation to finance his park.

  All the time that Roy was talking to MCA, to ABC, and to various corporate sponsors, Walt hadn’t been idle. Through WED he had bought the television rights to a popular book titled The Mark of Zorro that had provided the basis for several film versions, including one starring Tyrone Power as the aristocrat in Mexican-governed California who dons a black mask and becomes the sword-wielding Zorro, a champion of the poor and oppressed. Walt’s idea was to film the series in Mexico, and early in 1953 he assigned Bill Cottrell to produce, hired a movie veteran named Norman Foster to write and direct the shows, and appointed Dick Irvine to design the sets. Walt described the Zorro series as “my own private venture and not part of the studio’s”—a further attempt to put distance between himself and the inferior product the studio was producing. Now Walt approached the networks. He went to the National Broadcasting Company, the Columbia Broadcasting System, and ABC. (This may have been the meeting at which he waxed so enthusiastic about Disneyland.) All three demanded that Walt shoot a pilot or sample episode. Walt was nonplussed and irritated. “Well, why should I make a pilot film with all the years that I’ve been in the film business?” Cottrell said he asked. Cottrell believed that Walt was so discouraged, he dropped the idea and decided to put all his efforts into designing Disneyland instead.