Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  By the time Ron completed his military obligations at Fort Ord in northern California, Diane had had a second child, Joanna, born in April 1956, and Walt was building the family a house in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley, one that he had personally designed after rejecting each of Ron and Diane’s choices. While the house was being constructed, the Millers moved in with Walt and Lillian at Carolwood, and though Walt conceded that “it gets a bit hectic at times, Granddaddy and Grandma are having the time of their lives with little Chris and Joanna. Joanna is as cute a little pixie as ever drew a breath and Chris is still as wonderful as ever.” Indeed, Lillian, who had never been particularly social, further contracted her life around her grandchildren. “[W]hat with our new granddaughter in the family, I am having quite a time these days in getting her to go anywhere,” Walt wrote the head of a charity that was holding a function and had invited the Disneys to attend.

  Though Walt cosigned the mortgage for the Millers’ new house, he had another source of financing in mind for the young family. For years various authors and publishers had begged him to cooperate on a biography. Walt had always demurred, saying that he was still in his prime and that any biography would consequently be incomplete. Even when he did grudgingly agree to a series in The Saturday Evening Post, he was frank that his biography would only be a promotion for Alice in Wonderland, telling the writer that he recognized “in writing such a story or serial based on life stories, it is frequently necessary to change actual events and experiences and to dramatize and fictionalize them”—a veiled admission that he had been embellishing for years.

  That series never came to pass, but shortly after the Disneyland television show hit the air, Walt was approached by another writer, Paul Hollister, who had written an earlier piece on Disney for The Atlantic Monthly and had been commissioned by the magazine to do a biographical series on him, which would then be released as a book. Hollister, who had been led by the Atlantic to believe it had Walt’s authorization, completed the book, only to discover that Walt had not authorized it and, worse, that Roy, to whom Walt had passed the manuscript for approval, vehemently advised Walt not to let it be published because its style was “annoying” and its facts inaccurate. Incensed when he was offered a small payment to drop the book, Hollister accused Walt of having “old Fixer Roy” try to buy him off because Roy and Walt knew that Hollister needed money. Neither the series nor the book ever appeared.

  But now Walt decided that if anyone were to capitalize on his story, it should be his daughters. Early in 1956 The Saturday Evening Post approached Walt once again about a biographical series, and Walt countered by proposing that Diane be at least the nominal writer. “I can’t get any money to you kids,” he told his daughters, apparently referring to tax implications, “and this is a way to do it!” Diane as the writer of her father’s story was only a conceit. At most she prompted the conversation. The actual author was a veteran journalist named Pete Martin, who conducted extensive interviews with Walt at Carolwood that summer—more than thirteen hours’ worth—and interviewed associates at the studio as well. The series appeared in the magazine that fall, and Diane received $75,000 from the Post—it is unclear whether she split the proceeds with Sharon—and another $11,000 from Henry Holt, which had contracted to publish a book version, The Story of Walt Disney. (Martin received a portion of the Holt money and a portion of the foreign serial rights.) Walt was so eager to see the girls benefit that he even offered to rearrange his schedule so that he could come east to promote the series.*

  Life was more difficult for Sharon, whom Walt had classified as the family beauty while Diane was called the family brain. While Diane “just sails through her classes,” as her father wrote his sister Ruth, Sharon had never been a good student. Walt himself conceded that “school has always been tough for her” and that “she’d rather ride horses than study.” She was also much shyer than Diane. Walt told one educator that her “personality seemed to be hidden under a curtain of apprehensive timidity,” until he found a special program for her from which she emerged “well-poised and completely confident of herself.” After graduating from the Westlake School for Girls in the Westwood section of Los Angeles, she enrolled at the University of Arizona—Walt took her there himself—and though he told his sister that she “loves” it, she lasted only a year and a half before she quit. Back in Los Angeles she attended USC at night for a semester, then quit that too. “I really just didn’t like it,” she said years later.

  What she did seem to like was modeling. She was tall—5'8½" in her stocking feet, to Diane’s 5'4½" in heels—slender, and attractive, with reddish, light-brown hair and blue eyes. Walt had even put her in one of his films, a Revolutionary War drama titled Johnny Tremain, to see if she might like acting, but, he wrote Ruth, “after this one stint, she has decided that modeling is still her first love and will stick to that.” For two years she drifted, working various odd jobs at the studio from secretarial to assisting Lillian’s niece, Phyllis, who was producing television commercials on the lot with her husband, the acclaimed Hollywood glamour photographer George Hurrell. For most of this time she dated a young Kansas City–born interior designer named Robert Brown, who had worked at Pereira-Luckman and then, when that partnership ended, for Charles Luckman Associates. Sharon introduced him to her father in March 1959, while Walt was in the hospital convalescing from a bout of kidney stones, and the couple were married two months later, on May 10, in a small ceremony at the First Presbyterian Church in Pacific Palisades. (It was so hastily arranged that Roy, having made other plans, couldn’t attend.) Though he genuinely liked Brown, Walt seemed traumatized at “losing” his daughter. During the ceremony, Diane said, he “shook like a man with a fever,” and when Sharon and her new husband were dancing at the reception, Walt cut in, snapping to his new son-in-law, “This isn’t your dance yet. You get her the rest of your life.” Sharon admitted that her father was “a little annoyed.”

  Now Walt and Lillian were alone, thrown back on themselves. The only other person in the house was their cook and housekeeper, Thelma Howard. Like Lillian, Howard had been born in Idaho, one of a large family, but hers had been dogged by tragedy. Thelma’s mother had died in childbirth when Thelma was six, and a sister had died at the age of eight when she and Thelma were cooking dinner on a wood-burning stove and the girl’s dress caught fire. At eighteen Thelma left for Los Angeles. By the time she came to work for the Disneys in 1951, at the age of thirty-eight, she had been annealed by life. She was a slight woman but feisty, with thick, short hair and a rugged face. She loved to smoke, as Walt did, and play gin rummy. Walt, finding in her the same brassy, iconoclastic spirit he had found in Hazel George, enjoyed her company—in part, no doubt, because Lillian often seemed so sharp and brittle by comparison. He could joke with Thelma, tease her, criticize her cooking, and tell her she ought to go to Biff’s, a local watering hole, and find out how they prepared their food. She was fully a part of the Disney family.

  As for Lillian, she knew Walt’s priorities. “If it ever comes to a showdown between his studio and his wife, Heaven help me!” she half-joked to a reporter. She was right, but at least she knew her only co-respondent was the company or Disneyland. Walt was diffident around most women, and outside of the ink and paint department, which some used to refer to as the Nunnery, there were very few women on the lot.* Some of his associates thought Walt didn’t particularly like women. “He didn’t trust women or cats,” Ward Kimball observed. “Almost all of his villains were either women or cats.” Marc Davis agreed that Walt had a “great suspicion of women” and was happiest working on masculine films like 20,000 Leagues and The Great Locomotive Chase. But Hazel George took just the opposite view, saying that Walt was “more at ease with women than he was with men” and that he felt “identification and camaraderie with women” though the difference may have been that he was comfortable with strong, no-nonsense women like George herself and Thelma and shy around the others.

 
In any case, however Walt felt about women, no one ever accused him of infidelity or even of showing much interest in the opposite sex. Back when he was absorbed by his animations, he told Ward Kimball, “I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I’ve ever known.” Now that Walt was obsessed with his park, Ken Anderson recalled having a chicken dinner with him at the Plantation restaurant at Disneyland about a week before the opening. It had gotten back to Walt that many of the men who had been working down at the site away from their families for long stretches were having what Anderson called a “wild time at nights.” Walt was incredulous. “‘You know, Ken, I can’t understand it. Some of these guys…’ he was even looking at me, he said, ‘…are majoring in women down here.’ He said, ‘Boy, I just can’t understand that, Ken,’ he said. ‘It’s like women were their hobby.’ You know. ‘This is my hobby.’” And he swept his arms across the expanse of Disneyland.

  With Disneyland opened and Walt increasingly disillusioned with his studio, he and Lillian settled into a routine. As he headed home from work each day, his secretary would phone to alert Thelma and Lillian so dinner would be ready. (Lillian never cooked; if Thelma was off, she and Walt would go to the Tam O’Shanter or the Brown Derby.) When he arrived, he and Lillian usually had a cocktail together before sitting down for dinner, invariably in front of the television set. While the girls were still home, he usually watched just the news. After they left he became less discriminating. “He looked at everything,” Lillian would recall. “We’d get a lousy program and I’d say, ‘Do you want me to change it?’ ‘No, no, I just want to study it,’ he’d say. I’d get annoyed and go upstairs and let him keep watching it. He was the same with pictures. I’d say, ‘That one had a bad review.’ ‘I don’t care,’ he’d say. ‘I want to see what the director did.’” When it came to his own programs, he was especially riveted and demanded that Lillian be riveted too. “Every time I would take a mouthful of food,” she remembered, “he would look over and say, ‘You’re not looking.’” He had also had a widescreen Cinemascope projection system installed at the house to view movies, but he stopped bringing home the studio’s films because, he told his secretary, Lillian and Thelma didn’t laugh loudly enough.

  Since the Disneys seldom socialized and since Walt was no longer racing back to the studio at night as he used to do, their evenings usually ended early. Walt was in bed by nine or ten o’clock. But just as he hummed with nervous energy during the day, he was often restless in bed, especially when he was working on a project. Lillian said that he would sometimes get up in the middle of the night and stand at his dressing table talking to himself or sketching or reading a script there, because his old polo injury had made it uncomfortable for him to sit without hunching over.

  Given Lillian’s snippiness, he still was often exiled, or exiled himself, to the studio or to his apartment at Disneyland. Sometimes it was a matter of work. An employee remembered seeing Walt at the studio one evening because, Walt said, Lillian “wouldn’t get off his back,” and he had a script to read before a meeting the next morning. Other times it was Lillian’s temper that sent him away. Even before Disneyland opened, he earned Lillian’s wrath when he dissuaded her from attending the 1954 Oscar ceremonies with him because he was sure he wouldn’t win and then wound up with four statuettes. He decided to spend the night at the studio. On yet another occasion Lillian erupted when Walt rehired her niece, Phyllis Hurrell, despite the fact that Lillian’s sister Hazel thought he had already given flighty Phyllis too many chances. Walt stayed at the studio for three nights. He did not phone Lillian once.

  Mostly they traveled. Walt called these journeys “trips” rather than “vacations”—when Milt Kahl, upon Walt’s return, once asked if he had had a good vacation, Walt snapped, “Goddamn it, I’ve been working”—but though he often visited film locations and toured sites that might inspire something for Disneyland, his excursions were not really for business. They were primarily a way to leave the studio behind, as they had always been. Lillian and Walt traveled constantly. They attended premieres across the country, they went to resorts, and they sailed on long Caribbean cruises; on one trip they drove up and down the Eastern Seaboard to revisit Williamsburg, meet with various government officials and associations, see dioramas at the Museum of the City of New York, and consult with a professor at MIT in Cambridge. Walt even returned to Marceline in the summer of 1956 to attend a dedication of a park in his name and revisit his childhood haunts with Roy.

  On the old pretense that Walt had to supervise productions in Europe, he and Lillian now made a yearly visit there too and stayed there for weeks, sometimes months. For all his professions that he was conducting business, he set his own agenda. Often he and Lillian drove themselves—on several of the European trips they were accompanied by William Sprackling, the president of Anaconda Wire and Cable, and his wife, who became the couple’s closest friends and who shipped their Cadillac overseas—and tried to avoid the glare. “I don’t want any publicity at all,” Walt wrote an associate, explaining that he had even taken to traveling under the name Jones. “I just want to be myself and do and see what I’d like to.”

  When their 1957 European trip ended, Walt wrote Ruth that “[w]e were more than glad to return home.” They had seen “some wonderful places” while touring the backcountry of England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain; Walt was especially cautious that his Spanish visit not be publicized because of the longstanding but erroneous rumor that he had been born there. But “Lilly just about had a fit having to be away from the grandchildren for so long,” he said, “and I guess I’ll have to admit to being homesick for them too.” While they had been away, Walt had had another home built at Smoke Tree in Palm Springs, to replace the one he had sold to raise money for Disneyland. Now, when he and Lillian weren’t traveling around the country or abroad, they would retreat to the desert, where, Walt wrote a friend, he made it an “inviolable rule not to do anything but rest and relax.” To which one might have fairly asked, what did he need to rest and relax from, save the pressure of having to be Walt Disney?

  VII

  Animation, the base on which the empire had been founded, was now being sustained more out of tradition and habit than for profits—something Walt acknowledged as early as 1953, when he told Bill Anderson that while he didn’t want to spend his time on animation, it nevertheless “has to go on.” The shorts, having hung for years by a thread, finally fell, as movie audiences plummeted through the 1950s, defecting to television, and as theaters either closed or opted for double features. It had taken drastic budget reductions to keep the shorts profitable, and then only barely, and Ward Kimball said that the studio had increasingly used them as make-work—as “something to keep the animation and story departments afloat between features; if Walt was having a problem with a new feature, you’d mark time by picking up work on a short.” By 1957 the shorts units had been dismissed one by one, and when the storymen importuned Walt to let them try their hand at live action, which was taking up a larger and larger portion of the studio’s resources, Walt was unsympathetic, saying that he couldn’t afford to train them and that if they wanted to write live action, they could do so at another studio.

  He wasn’t much more supportive of the animated features. Watching footage from Snow White one day with Wilfred Jackson to find excerpts for television, he said that “it didn’t seem possible to make a better picture than Snow White,” and he didn’t seem inclined to try. All the animators knew that his passion had been redirected from animation to the theme park. “You had to ask Walt to come into meetings on ‘Lady and the Tramp,’” Frank Thomas said, comparing it to the times when Walt would be “rummaging around in every room looking to see what people had done.” As Thomas analyzed it, “I think he had really spent himself on what he wanted to do in animation.” Now he would come into an animator’s room when one asked for his input, look at the work, and say blandly, “You’re not in any trouble.” Thomas took that remark to mean that Walt wa
s making his staff depend on themselves, “like a mother bear shoving her cubs up a tree,” but others took it, probably more accurately, as a sign of Walt’s lack of interest. Where once he had a dozen pictures in the pipeline and was frantic over which to do next, he now had so few that the animators had to prod him to put animations into production.

  Ironically, as Walt lost interest, the studio was actually generating more animation than it had produced in years as a result of the Disneyland program and The Mickey Mouse Club, but it was simplified to make it easier to draw and thus less costly. In fact, by 1956 the quality of the animation within the studio—the studio that every animator had once tried to emulate—had so deteriorated that Harry Tytle advised Walt that the work could be “farmed-out” to outside animators, “not only greatly reducing cost,” Tytle said, but also, in what would have been heresy even a few years earlier, “getting a better quality.” Walt may have been disengaged, but he wasn’t blind to these shortcomings. He knew that much of what the studio produced was junk. He was just willing to accept it now because, as he would tell Hazel George, “[w]hat the hell. It’s going to help build Disneyland, kid.”

  Disney wasn’t the only studio where animation was in decline. Animation of the sort that the Disney studio had inspired was endangered everywhere—a casualty of high costs, fewer trained animators, and more competition from television, where the animation necessarily had to be more primitive to meet tight deadlines and budgets. Paul Terry sold his studio to CBS in 1955 and retired. MGM closed its animation unit in 1957 because, according to Joseph Barbera, who was running it along with William Hanna at the time, the studio discovered that a reissue earned as much as 90 percent of what a new cartoon made. Even Warner Bros. temporarily shuttered its animation unit in 1953 because it had too many cartoons in its inventory. When it reopened, it never had quite the same energy or flair as it had had in the 1940s.