by Neal Gabler
But construction was only one front. While Walt was tending to the building, wrangler Owen Pope was gathering livestock from across the country for Frontierland. (He and his wife Dolly would move to the park three days before its opening; Walt had given them a choice of their house and a ten-acre plot for the animals—about two hundred head at the time.) And while the Popes were gathering their menagerie, staff members at WED were manufacturing the rides for the park. Walt had personally visited the Arrow Development Company south of Palo Alto, which produced mechanisms for amusement park rides and which would provide the mechanisms for Disneyland’s Snow White’s Adventures, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, and King Arthur Carousel, all of which the WED engineers would decorate on the soundstages. And while the staff was decorating the rides, George Whitney, Walt’s amusement park consultant, was visiting parks and factories and acquiring a merry-go-round from Toronto, horses from a carousel at Coney Island, arcade games, “Music Machines,” and a test track for “dark rides” (that is, rides, like the Snow White and Mr. Toad attractions, that took passengers through a dark environment), and Nat Winecoff was contracting for miniature cars from Germany for the Autopia speedway in Tomorrowland. And while George Whitney and Nat Winecoff were acquiring rides, Walt was pressuring Casey Jones to get him a locomotive; failing that, he pressured Ward Kimball to lease his locomotive to the park. “He’d call all hours of the day and night,” Kimball said, with an offer that Kimball could engineer the train as much as he liked on Mondays, when the park would be closed. Kimball refused, so Walt built the trains and bought locomotives.
And while they were frantically engaged in all these activities, Walt and Roy were also engaged in one more essential task: trying to get additional money to finance them. Even before they had finalized the ABC deal, the brothers were courting executives of major companies, escorting them through the studio and making their Disneyland pitch for the companies to lease concessions or underwrite attractions; among the wooed were American Machine and Foundry, Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Ford Motors, B. F. Goodrich Tires, and the Kellogg cereal company. Contrary to Walt’s accounts of resistance to the park, almost everyone swooned. An officer of the DuPont Chemical Company told Walt that “he would hate to be the one not to recommend anyone to come into Disneyland.” Winecoff and Irvine visited the General Electric headquarters in Cleveland and found them “greatly enthused.” Even the usually reserved Joe Rosenberg, their longtime liaison at the Bank of America, was buttonholing prospective lessees, and a Standard Oil of California vice president had told him that “never in his life had he seen such wonderful imagination and complete detailed planning”; Rosenberg said that “they definitely wanted to be part of it” and that the vice president had even asked him to lobby with the Disneys for them.*
Many of these targets would surrender to the Disney vision and sign on: Walt collected $2.3 million in lease payments, including $50,000 from the Santa Fe Railroad to sponsor the railway, $45,000 from American Motors to sponsor a 360-degree movie attraction called Circarama, $45,000 from Richfield Oil to sponsor Autopia, the same amount from the Swift meatpacking company for its Main Street Red Wagon Inn, and another $43,000 for a grocery. Yet the estimated cost of the park kept spiraling upward, from the $5.25 million at the time of the ABC signing to nearly $17 million at the time of the opening. Walt and Roy had calculated a cushion; among other contingencies, they had purchased eleven and a half acres of land nearby worth $230,000 that they could sell if necessary. But despite the television contract, the loans, and the leases, despite even the cushion, they still fretted that there might be too little money, just as there seemed to be too little time.
This time Walt did not want to cut corners, did not want to compromise his vision. When an employee suggested that he use cut glass instead of stained glass in an attraction called Storybook Land, Walt objected. “Look, the thing that’s going to make Disneyland unique and different,” he insisted, “is the detail. If we lose the detail, we lose it all.” But as the time of the opening approached, money was dwindling and the clock was racing, and just as the Prince in Snow White shimmied because Walt couldn’t afford to correct it, he was forced to make concessions at Disneyland. He had wanted Fantasyland to resemble a Gustaf Tenggren watercolor. Instead, economies dictated that the rides be housed in prefabricated industrial sheds festooned with medieval pennants. The Canal Boats of the World, which were supposed to drift past miniature landmarks and then were later reconceptualized as transport through a Storybook Land of fairy-tale scenes, drifted past scrub and brush because Walt couldn’t afford to finish the attraction. Bill Evans had landscaped the park largely with indigenous trees that had been uprooted by highway construction, but even then Walt didn’t have enough money to finish the job and instructed Evans to put Latin names on the weeds, as if they were specimen plants. “Toward the opening,” Evans said, “we did a lot of irrigating to get the weeds to grow on the barren areas, particularly on the high dirt berm that surrounded the Park.” It was just another illusion.
The final illusion was the staff that was hired to man the park. Walt didn’t want them to spoil his fantasy, so he instituted what he called the “Disney University” to train them. “[W]e don’t hire for jobs here,” the training program’s head, Van Arsdale France, told a reporter, in keeping with the theme that this was not a park but a set, “so much as we cast for parts, especially the onstage roles—ticket takers, ride operators, tour guides.” As a Disney training manual would say, “[Y]ou can’t go on stage unless you are set to give a pleasant, happy performance.” Walt demanded that the cast be both cheerful and presentable, and though dress at the studio had always been casual and Walt himself obviously had a mustache, Disneyland employees had to observe a strict dress code, and an edict that forbade facial hair. One employee, the first manager of Adventureland and Frontierland, felt that Walt didn’t particularly like him because he was heavy. “Walt doesn’t like fat guys,” the man said.
There was also a question as to whether Walt liked minorities working at the park. The studio had never overtly discriminated. There were some Asians, like Ty Wong and Bob Kuwahara, in prominent positions, but very few African-Americans—the old strikers would say because Walt had an antipathy toward blacks. This may have just been another example of the strikers’ antipathy toward Walt, who never expressed even a hint of racism. But he, or someone at the company, may have felt that African-American cast members would have spoiled the illusion at Disneyland, since as late as 1963, the Congress for Racial Equality, a civil rights group, was conferring with Disneyland officials about the hiring of blacks and was told that the Disneyland board of directors would only consider their requests, not necessarily act upon them.
Walt certainly hated dirt and mess. One of the spurs for creating the park, of course, was the filth that Walt had so detested on his Sunday amusement park excursions with the girls. Disneyland was going to be almost eerily clean—so much so that cleanliness would become not only a hallmark of the park but a kind of running joke about it. “It is calculated that a discarded cigarette butt will lie dormant for no longer than 25 seconds before it is pounced upon,” one reporter later wrote of the famous Disneyland sanitation crew. Another called the park a “Simonized Coney Island” that “glistens in innocence not only of discarded popcorn boxes and cigarette packs but also of any least film of pavement dust or fading paint or unpolished brightwork, and in which one feels guilty [for] dropping a cigarette butt, and relief at seeing it whisked instantly into a stylish little dustpan by a juvenile lead elegantly costumed as a period street cleaner.” The park would never stay clean, a journalist predicted during a tour a week after its opening. To which Walt riposted that it would stay clean because “people are going to be embarrassed to throw anything on the ground.” This was, after all, utopia.
Now, as the July 17, 1955, opening neared, national anticipation grew. For nine months Walt had been promoting the park on his television program, and ABC had taken out $40,000 worth
of full-page newspaper advertisements to ballyhoo the ninety-minute live telecast of the event, for which the network had marshaled what it called the greatest ever concentration of television equipment and personnel—twenty-nine cameras stationed around the park. ABC had already sold out the advertising in March, and crews had been rehearsing every Sunday since May 22. The interest in the park was so intense that in April, the studio reported, the staff counted 9,500 people stopping for information at the site one weekend, Saturday noon to Sunday evening, even though there was no sign identifying the property as Disneyland.
If the country was waiting expectantly, so was Walt Disney. In spite of the park’s shortcomings, he seemed rejuvenated, almost giddy. He was the first one to ride the attractions—“just like a little kid,” Marvin Davis recalled. “He’d get off and giggle or if he didn’t like it too well, his eyebrow would go up and he’d say, ‘Fix this thing and let’s get this show on the road.’” Ten-year-old Harrison Ellenshaw, whose father, Peter, was an artist at the studio, remembered visiting the site one Saturday while his father painted a map of the park. The boy was watching the workers lay track for the railroad when Walt approached him, spotted a board on a train carriage near the track, and offered to give him a ride. Harrison jumped on the board, and Walt pushed. Then, when it had reached speed, Walt jumped on himself. “He was acting just like a kid,” Harrison Ellenshaw would say years later, echoing Davis, “on the same level as a ten-year-old kid!” In fact, Walt’s own capacity to experience the park the way guests would, with the same childlike abandon, contributed to the appeal of the attractions. One acquaintance called the park the “world’s biggest toy for the world’s biggest boy.”
Even with the opening hard upon him and even with the clear exhilaration he was feeling, Walt was still examining, still tinkering and plotting. An assistant landscaper remembered watching him five days before the dedication walking up and down Main Street and scrutinizing the facades. “[H]e would stop and face a building and look at it, step back, his head would kind of turn,” the man said, “and then he would make some notes in his little flip notepad. He then would look up at something else and make another note, look down at the bottom of the sidewalk, check out everything, and a last-minute glance and he would go on to the next building.” As a final test, Walt invited families of the members of the studio’s Penthouse Club to a kind of sneak preview. “We had a tent set up, we had a barbecue and three barrels of beer and Walt would be running the train around,” Walt Pfeiffer recollected. “Everybody was waving and the Mark Twain would go by with everybody singing—it was just a glorious day.”
And Walt clearly wanted to prolong the joy he felt. The park’s opening had been scheduled just four days after his and Lillian’s thirtieth anniversary, so Walt decided to host a party on the evening of July 13 not only to celebrate his marriage but to show off his park to friends and notables. (He invited everyone from his aunt Charlotte and Joe Rosenberg to Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, and Louis B. Mayer.) He waited cheerily at the gate to greet them; then, when most of them were delayed by a traffic snarl, he stood there smoking nervously and grumbling. It was no doubt a measure of how tense he had been over the months of construction and how relieved he now felt that as the party was drawing to a close at the Golden Horseshoe Saloon, he had drunk a little too much and was firing imaginary bullets at the stage from the balcony. Diane had to drive him home, during which time Walt was “tootling” through a rolled map of Disneyland as if it were a trumpet; then he sang a song and fell asleep holding the map.
Continuing the long festivities, the very next night he was feted at the Hollywood Bowl. Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen, who had played Crockett’s sidekick on the television show, flew in from location in Kentucky, where they were shooting a prequel to Davy Crockett; Sterling Holloway, who had voiced a number of Disney characters, narrated “Peter and the Wolf,” as he had done for the film; Cliff Edwards, who had been the voice of Jiminy Cricket, sang songs from Pinocchio; producer Winston Hibler narrated suites from two True-Life Adventures; and Disney characters performed a ballet. At the conclusion California governor Goodwin Knight declared Walt the state’s honorary governor and presented him a coonskin cap dipped in silver. According to the Los Angeles Times, as Walt was introduced, “[a]pplause rose like a hurricane in the great verdant Bowl and knocked against the stars.” Children whistled. The celebration was repeated the following evening, two days before the opening.
Even after three thousand workers had cut twenty thousand feet of timber, poured five thousand cubic yards of concrete, and laid a million square feet of asphalt, Walt still wasn’t finished. The night before the opening he suddenly seized upon the idea of taking the giant rubber squid from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and exhibiting it at the park. The problem was that the squid’s latex skin had deteriorated since the shooting, so it had to be restored and repainted. Ken Anderson, who had designed the Disneylandia miniatures, was assigned the task along with two other staff members, but then Walt appeared. “Walt put on a mask,” Anderson would recall, and “helped us spray-paint the screen [for the exhibit] with fluorescent paint.” The area was enclosed, and the paint, Anderson said, “filled the air and clogged our masks.” It took all evening to finish the operation, and Walt stayed up too—“the whole night before the opening.” Yet, for all the flurry of activity—Walt had had to go to the airport that day as well to greet lessees who had flown in for the dedication—he was preternaturally calm. “Just about everyone was worried except Walt,” said Jack Sayers, the director of guest relations. “He seemed to love the excitement.” That was because Walt Disney knew he was in his element again. And he knew he was back.*
The day bloomed bright and hot and less festive-seeming than restive. C. V. Wood had printed fifteen thousand invitations, which was the estimated capacity of the park at any given time, but he soon discovered that people had counterfeited tickets. One man even leaned a ladder against the fence and let people over for five dollars a head. The staff tried to regulate the crowd by opening the gates and then closing them at twenty-minute intervals, but even so the press of people overwhelmed the facility. Van Arsdale France, who trained the staff, thought as many as 28,000 people fought their way into the park. With the crush came problems. As the broadcast opened and the tide of guests began surging down Main Street, the women’s high heels got stuck in the hot, soft asphalt. Many of the guests complained about the lack of drinking fountains. Others were mystified when the walkway in Tomorrowland ended abruptly at a field of dirt because Walt hadn’t had the funds or the time to complete the area. Even Walt, rushing from one location to another for the show, found himself stopped by a guard who had been instructed not to let anyone through. “Either you let me through here,” Walt boiled, “or I’m going to hit you right in the face and walk over your body.”
The broadcast, which was viewed by an estimated seventy million Americans, or roughly half the population, was similarly plagued. It featured three hosts hopscotching around the park—TV personality Art Linkletter, who was a friend of Walt’s and who had visited Tivoli Gardens with him when Walt was mulling the park; and actors Ronald Reagan and Robert Cummings—and continually shuttled among them. But cues were missed, signals were crossed, and mishaps and technical glitches were telecast. By one account, even before the broadcast the director was so frazzled he suffered a breakdown and wound up orchestrating from a local hospital. Walt was certainly aware of the chaos. He told Reverend Glenn Puder, his niece’s husband, whom he had asked to deliver the invocation at the opening, that “things weren’t going quite well.” Yet through it all Walt remained remarkably composed and unruffled. Dressed in a dark suit and a light silk tie, his voice hoarse and his hair touched with gray, he read aloud the plaque that declared Disneyland “your land”: “Here age relives memories of the past. And here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future.” Elsewhere he would call it the “happiest place on earth.”
It was certai
nly that to its creator. Diane, observing her father that day, said, “I have never seen a happier man.” Mouseketeer Sharon Baird said she was watching the festivities with Walt at his apartment above the Main Street Fire Station, and when she looked up at him, his hands were clasped behind his back, he was grinning widely, and there was a “tear streaming down his cheek.” But he had never been a man to indulge his pride or rest on his laurels. At the end of the day—the longest and quite possibly the best of Walt Disney’s life in spite of the numerous calamities—he and Linkletter had dinner on the patio of the apartment and watched the fireworks display over the park. Linkletter noticed that Walt kept taking notes during the show. A stickler for detail even amid the pandemonium, he was counting the rockets being shot off to confirm that he was getting the full number.
Though there were criticisms—one reporter said, “Walt’s dream is a nightmare” and called the opening a “fiasco the like of which I cannot recall in thirty years of show life”—these were minority opinions. More generally the visitors understood that this had been not just the opening of another amusement park but a signal event in the culture, a threshold crossed. “I think that everyone here will one day be as proud to have been at this opening as the people who were there at the dedication of the Eiffel Tower,” Cummings remarked on the broadcast. Most seemed to realize that Disneyland was an extension of Walt’s animations, that it was the fantastic and imaginary now made corporeal, or as McCall’s put it, “Walt Disney’s cartoon world materializes bigger than life and twice as real.” Others saw it as the physical expression of Walt Disney’s America that had crept into the American psyche. “Mr. Disney has tastefully combined some of the pleasantest things of yesterday with the fantasy and dreams of tomorrow,” The New York Times blandly editorialized. Whatever it was—a childhood regression, a magnificent act of will, or an aestheticized rendition of America—it immediately made its claim on the national imagination.
