Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  But however much he may have resented the networks’ high-handedness, Walt Disney knew he needed television, needed it to provide the money for Disneyland. All through 1953, as the fraction of American families with television sets reached two-thirds, Roy continued meeting with advertising agencies and various corporate sponsors about a series, and he was even negotiating seriously with General Foods, though he told Walt that he thought it advisable not to mention anything yet about the financing of Disneyland. That, he said, could be a bargaining chip; he would concede some points in the television budget in return for the sponsor taking a position in the theme park. With a third party involved, either by buying debentures in the park or by taking common stock, he thought he might be able to lure what he called “other friendly associated interests, such as Western Printing,” which published the Disney books and comics.

  Meanwhile, as the plans for the park continued to jell, as the studio purchased the property, and as desperation began to set in, Roy sped to New York late in September to discuss yet again the possibility of a television series with ABC but also to discuss with them now, unavoidably, the idea of the network investing in Disneyland. Roy had already left for New York when Bill Cottrell sent him an outline for four television possibilities, which apparently, after all the months of deliberation, had nevertheless been conceived in such haste that the main program, the proposed one-hour series, was only vaguely described as incorporating material from Disney movies, promotions for new Disney films, and an ongoing progress report on Disneyland. Cottrell also suggested a five-day-a-week, fifteen-minute program called The Mickey Mouse Club to air live from Disneyland, a weekly half-hour True-Life program taken from the studio’s nature footage, and a thirty-minute World of Tomorrow series that would combine live action with animation to depict man’s past and future.

  Astonishingly, for all the time he had spent on the park and for all his emotional investment in it, Walt hadn’t given much more thought to the presentation of Disneyland to ABC than he had to the programs, which testified to just how loosely and spontaneously he had been working on the park. The problem was that Roy needed something to show the ABC executives, something more up to date than Harper Goff’s old sketches and more visually suggestive than Marvin Davis’s elevations. After the months and months of brainstorming, it wasn’t until September that Walt convened a meeting in his office with the Walt Disney Productions management team to describe the park finally and to discuss producing a brochure for prospective investors. “Walt was very ‘hot’ with his suggestions,” Harry Tytle remembered, “and gave us all an insight into the terrific scope of Disneyland”—a scope that had previously been known only to the WED staff in the bungalow.

  With Roy heading to New York, there was no time to lose, not even a day. Herb Ryman, an art director who had worked at the studio in the story department in the 1940s before leaving for Twentieth Century–Fox, was painting at his home on the morning of Saturday, September 23, when he received a call from an old colleague, Dick Irvine. Irvine told him that he was at the studio with Walt and that Walt wanted to have a word with him. As Ryman later related it, Walt got on the phone and asked him how long it would take for him to get to the studio. Ryman said fifteen minutes if he came as he was, a half-hour if he dressed. Walt told him to come as he was and that Walt would meet him at the studio gate.

  After Ryman arrived and Walt escorted him to the WED bungalow—the Zorro Building, as it was now called—the artist wanted to know what the hurry was. “Well, I’m going to do an amusement park,” Walt explained, and said that Roy was going to make a presentation on Monday to show the investors what the park would look like. Ryman said that he was curious himself and asked to see the drawing. “You’re going to do it,” Walt said. Ryman immediately objected. He was afraid he would embarrass himself with so little time. “Walt paced back and forth,” Ryman recalled. “Then he went over into the corner and he turned his head around with his back to me and said coaxingly, ‘Will you do it if I stay here with you?’” Ryman didn’t see how that would necessarily help, but Walt was so plaintive—“like a little boy,” he said in one interview, “with tears in his eyes,” he said in another—that Ryman reluctantly agreed. Plied with tuna sandwiches and milkshakes and coached by Walt, who provided detailed descriptions and chain-smoked, Ryman worked straight through Saturday and Sunday, sleepless, forty-two hours in all by one account, finishing an overhead rendering of the park just in time for it to be hand-colored by Davis and Irvine and air-mailed to Roy in New York.

  As ABC chairman Leonard Goldenson remembered the ensuing discussions, it was his idea to trade a stake in the park for a one-hour television series, and his idea to have Roy address the ABC board. If so, he had been premature. As it turned out, the board, worried that ABC wouldn’t be able to secure financing itself for an investment in Disneyland, declined. But Goldenson knew he needed the Disneys as much as the Disneys needed him. ABC was the newest of the television networks and the weakest of them. It had only fourteen affiliates where NBC had sixty-three and CBS thirty, and its advertising rates were substantially lower than those of its rivals. United Paramount Theaters, which had been set up as an independent entity after being severed from Paramount by the government antitrust action against the major film studios, had acquired ABC earlier that year and had pumped $30 million into the network. To catch up to its rivals, ABC wanted to use the money to build relationships with the motion picture studios rather than pursue the much more time-consuming and laborious process of developing its own programming. Philosophizing that viewers wanted familiarity, ABC especially valued series and especially series that might appeal to the growing demographic of what one ABC executive called “youthful families.” Goldenson thought that the Walt Disney company, with its appeal to those families, was the perfect match for ABC.

  As the ABC board balked, time was running out for Walt Disney if he were to have any hope of opening the park in 1955, as he had planned. He not only needed a deal, he needed one quickly. NBC had already passed on the proposal, but as late as February 1954, while ABC stalled, Walt and Roy had scheduled an appointment with CBS chief William S. Paley. Paley stood them up, due, he said, “to the pressure of some vitally important negotiations we were conducting.” Apparently insulted, the Disneys never rescheduled. Meanwhile Goldenson at ABC was just as desperate as Disney to forge an alliance, especially since the other film studios he was courting were proving reluctant to enter television. To keep the lines of communication open, ABC executives continued to meet with Disney representatives about various programs. “They see tremendous tie-in values between Disney and ABC,” Nat Winecoff and Dick Irvine wrote Walt after conferring with Goldenson, ABC president Robert Kintner, and programming head Robert Weitman in New York. “Leonard Goldenson was most emphatic that we convey to you that they are ‘most interested’ and want to make a deal,” and Goldenson suggested they stay in “close contact” with ABC’s West Coast representative.

  But Goldenson did more than convey professions of interest. He was so eager to close a deal before the new fall television season that, as he later told it, he sent two of his executives to Texas to meet with a man named Karl Hoblitzelle, who owned several theater circuits and with whom Goldenson had worked at United Paramount Theater before buying ABC. Goldenson knew that Hoblitzelle had struck oil and gone into banking, and now Goldenson asked if he might give ABC a loan to back Disney—money, Goldenson said, he couldn’t get from the New York banks, which had doubts about the park. Hoblitzelle agreed to underwrite $5 million, and after several days of fierce negotiations between Roy and Kintner, the deal was concluded and approved by both boards on April 2, 1954. ABC would have its Disney program. Walt Disney would have his money for Disneyland. Or, as Walt would later joke, “ABC needed the television show so damned bad, they bought the amusement park.”

  The park didn’t come cheap. Earlier in the year Walt had asked SRI for an estimate of its cost. Their figure was $5.25 million—$
750,000* of which was for the property—in addition to the $150,000 that had already been expended for planning, much of that from Walt himself. SRI suggested that the company could cover some of the cost by issuing long-term leases to vendors at the park, which would allow the studio both to collect advances and to borrow against the leases, and it suggested the sale of securities. That left television, ABC, to cover most of the rest.

  The deal was complex. ABC agreed to a three-year contract for twenty-six one-hour programs each year, for which it would pay Walt Disney Productions $50,000 per show the first year, $60,000 the second, and $70,000 the third, with $25,000 per repeat the first year, $30,000 the second, and $35,000 the third. Fifteen percent of those funds was then to be funneled from Walt Disney Productions to Disneyland, Inc., a new corporate entity, as a location fee, out of which the latter was to pay off its mortgage bonds. But since Disney estimated that each program would cost the studio roughly $65,000, the real force of the ABC deal was the network’s investment in the park. ABC had committed to take $2 million of ten-year bonds, would guarantee loans up to $4.5 million (Hoblitzelle’s crucial contribution to the package), and would put $500,000 directly into the park—in return for a 34.48 percent interest, the same share as that of Walt Disney Productions. Not incidentally, that investment enabled the studio to increase its credit line with the Bank of America to $8 million. As Roy had hoped, the ABC deal also prompted another of the “friendly interests,” the Wisconsin-based Western Printing and Lithographing Company, to take $500,000 of ten-year bonds and engineer a $500,000 loan from a local bank secured by Western’s Disney royalties, in return for a 13.8 percent stake. (Unfortunately, Western’s head and one of Walt’s longtime allies, E. H. Waldewitz, described by one colleague as a “rotund little man with a squeaky voice,” would die suddenly before the park’s opening.) Walt was to keep the remaining 16.55 percent as compensation for his contributions to the park.

  With the financing in place, the studio made a public announcement on May 1: Walt Disney would be building an amusement park.

  But the ramifications of the deal, as significant as they were, went beyond ABC and Disney. In agreeing to provide a program for ABC, the Disney studio had broken ranks with its motion picture brethren who had, much to ABC’s consternation, held firm against television. Though Columbia and Republic Pictures had produced television programs, they did so through subsidiaries so as to keep the lines of demarcation between movies and television clear. Walt Disney, in putting his production company directly in the service of television without any subterfuges, had made what The New York Times called the “first move by a leading studio into the home entertainment field,” and the Times predicted that “if it turns out to be successful, it may very well lead to more such working alliances among the major studios and the networks.” The Times concluded: “The end result could, indeed, change the complexion of the entertainment business.” That was exactly what would happen.

  When ABC and Walt Disney Productions announced their agreement in a joint press release on April 2, 1954, they promised that Disney would provide the network with “an entirely new concept in television programming,” one that would incorporate the “use of both live action and cartoon techniques in a series of programs based on variety, adventure, romance and comedy.” At least, that was the stated intention. The problem was that Walt Disney, six months after Cottrell’s memo on possible television formats, had yet to conceptualize the show for which he now had a three-year contract. While the negotiations were heating up that March, Walt had called on fourteen members of his staff, along with Roy, to discuss a format. Walt knew the program had to be synergistic; it had to promote both Disney films and Disneyland, and he suggested that they set up four production units—one for each “land” in the Disneyland park. As he put it bluntly, “The main idea of the program is to sell.” A program on how the True-Life Adventures were shot would promote the latest True-Life Adventure on Africa and Adventureland while a program on American folk heroes would promote the Frontierland area of the park. And he was excited about the idea of sponsor tie-ins between the show and Disneyland. At the same time, Walt told his staff, he didn’t want to stint on quality. They shouldn’t recycle so many Disney cartoons and movies that the audience would “think of the show as a bunch of old Disney material.” The programs had to be worthy of the Disney brand: “We are honestly trying to see how many [shows] we could give that we would be proud of and that would be good for Disney. We don’t want to cheat on this.” And he exhorted them to “establish a format and see what we can do with it,” which only revealed that they hadn’t yet fully devised a format.

  Three days later, when Walt met with ABC president Robert Kintner and other ABC executives to describe the program he had in mind, he was clearly vamping. “Disneyland actually is the format of the Disneyland show,” Walt said, no doubt relying on Bill Cottrell’s old outline. “It becomes a real place springing out of what we present on the TV screen. The public is going to see it on TV and actually feel they are a part of it.” But aside from Disneyland itself, he didn’t say exactly what it was that the public would be seeing. He couldn’t even commit to the twenty-six shows anticipated in the contract. “We have to get organized first,” he told Kintner.

  That was an understatement. With the program, Disneyland, scheduled to debut in October, so as to give Walt a full season to boost the park before its opening, the staff scrambled. Though Walt was nominally involved in signing off on ideas, his main role was playing “Walt Disney” and meeting with potential sponsors to convince them to advertise on the program. The real leaders of the effort were production manager Bill Anderson and a former press agent and current writer-producer at the studio named Bill Walsh, who had become Walt’s television maven when Walt happened to meet him in the hall shortly before the Coca-Cola special and told him, “You—you be the producer of TV.” Walsh protested that he knew nothing about television. To which Walt snapped, “Who does?” Together Walsh and Anderson raced to make a presentation to ABC that April, formatting a program that was essentially a potpourri of old cartoons and live-action clips, documentary footage of the construction of Disneyland, behind-the-scenes stories of the latest Disney productions, and made-for-TV cartoons and live-action films. Kintner pronounced himself “delighted,” though this may have been a matter of trust in Walt Disney as much as anything else.

  Jerry-built as the show was, when Disneyland premiered on October 27, 1954, it met with virtually unanimous acclaim, which was partly a function of the generally feckless fare on television at the time and partly a function of the residual power of the name “Walt Disney.” The first program was a kind of sampler. It began with Walt describing his dream of Disneyland before segueing into a preview of future programs and then to a showing of the “laughing place” sequence from Song of the South, Plane Crazy, Lonesome Ghosts, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, thereby doing precisely what Walt had warned against—simply recycling old material.

  If the show sounded as if it were an extended commercial and looked as if it had been tossed together randomly, it didn’t seem to matter. The program had just ended when Kintner, watching it in his New York office with George Romney, the president of American Motors, a sponsor of the show, and a group of Romney’s friends, received a call from an advertising executive staking claim to the first sponsor vacancy. Critics were just as responsive as the advertisers. “[I]f the evening’s promise is fulfilled in future weeks,” Jack Gould wrote in The New York Times the next day, “the rest of the television industry may decide to suspend operations between 7:30 and 8:30 Wednesday nights.” Variety proclaimed that Walt Disney “will prove a dominant figure in this season’s television picture” and predicted that he would “unquestionably push ABC into the top 10 of all and sundry rating services for the first time in years.”

  Variety turned out to be right. Over the course of the season Disneyland consistently attracted over 50 percent of the audience in its time slot, and i
ts audience kept growing, its ratings climbing, until even its repeats outdrew every program on television save the Lucille Ball situation comedy I Love Lucy. (Before Disneyland, ABC didn’t have a single program in the top twenty-five.) All but one of those repeats that spring and summer posted a higher rating than when originally broadcast. As far as the network was concerned, Disneyland gave ABC an identity that the fledgling company had not had, and astonishingly it accounted for nearly half of the network’s advertising billings. By April, with only twenty shows broadcast, Newsweek was already calling it “an American institution”—the “first big-budget television show consistently and successfully aimed at the whole family,” which was critical. Walt Disney had not only conquered television as he had conquered the screen; he was being credited with using the new medium to bring America together. He was the country’s great national uncle, “Uncle Walt,” as some took to calling him.