Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  Walt declined the invitation to design the “children’s village” for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, thinking that New York State would not dedicate the funds to make the park permanent and seeing no way of making a profit otherwise. When Walt explained the problem to Moses over dinner at Jones Beach on August 3, 1960, Moses understood and immediately countered with another proposal: that Walt design pavilions for companies that would be exhibiting at the fair. Whether Moses knew it or not, WED had already been contacting various companies about the possibility of having Disney plan their exhibits; on the very trip during which Walt was meeting Moses, he was also meeting with executives of RCA, American Machine and Foundry, IBM, AT&T, the American Gas Association, General Dynamics, and General Electric. Meanwhile Jack Sayers, who had once headed Disneyland’s lessee program, was touring the East, pressing executives to sign up with Disney, and by December he had closed development deals with the Ford Motor Company and IBM and had received a request from Owens-Corning Fiberglass to research an exhibit for them. At the same time, Ford officials visited Disneyland to see Walt’s plans for Liberty Street and to discuss its feasibility as a world’s fair attraction, and executives from GE spent a week at the studio to discuss an agreement.

  Obviously Walt thought providing exhibits for major corporations could be lucrative for WED. The GE research and development deal alone called for $50,000, a figure that did not include any costs for the actual design and fabrication of the attraction. But no one at WED thought Walt was motivated primarily by money. Donn Tatum, a Disneyland executive who was involved in the world’s fair planning, said that Walt had gathered the WED staff, told them about the world’s fair, and charged them with devising attractions because, Walt said, “It will help us. We’ll learn a lot and it will give us a chance to develop technology we’re working on.” Bill Cottrell, who also worked on the fair, thought that Walt saw it as a showcase for what WED could do as a kind of engineering firm and also as a commercial for Disneyland, especially since Walt was hoping to move some of the attractions to the park after the fair under the sponsorship of the corporations. Another WED employee, Marty Sklar, believed that Walt was using the fair as a “trial balloon” for future plans. “He wanted,” Sklar said, “to see if his kind of entertainment would appeal to the more sophisticated eastern audience—‘sophisticated’ in that that’s where the nation’s leaders, the decision-makers were based.” And there may have been one more consideration, this one psychological: the fair, like Disneyland before it, allowed Walt to hole up with his Imagineers in yet another small, creative enterprise where he could enjoy their camaraderie and actually see the uncompromised results of his own imagination now that even Disneyland had outgrown its origins.

  At least that was what he may have expected. In actuality the planning would take years, nerves would be frayed, and Walt’s own visions would be beset by corporate interference. The first to commit was Ford. Walt tried to get the company to sponsor his Hall of Presidents, but Ford rejected the idea. Instead, Walt and the Imagineers devised a twelve-minute trip through the history of invention using 160 Ford convertibles to “drive” through tableaux of Audio-Animatronic figures. (Ford had suggested the cars be chauffeur-driven; Walt, realizing the impossibility of such a system, recommended that the cars be automated, and according to head engineer Roger Broggie, he himself had the idea that the cars be pulled by a series of underground wheels, after he saw a hot ingot at the Ford factory in Dearborn, Michigan, being sent down a system of rollers.) Still, all was not entirely peaceful. When, after nearly a year of planning, Walt and a small delegation from WED accompanied a prototype of the attraction to Ford’s Dearborn headquarters and demonstrated it to Henry Ford II, Ford got up, expressed his thanks, and said that he would let Walt know. Walt, who had assumed the meeting was a mere formality, was shocked, and only when the vice president for public relations chased after Ford, then returned to tell Walt that the project was indeed a go, did the tension dissipate.

  The situation was even more nerve-wracking at GE. Walt had been courting the company for years to sponsor Edison Square at Disneyland. What he got instead was a version of Edison Square at the fair. Walt would settle on a six-part Audio-Animatronic show, loosely inspired by Thorton Wilder’s Our Town, about progress through electricity featuring GE appliances—a “Carousel of Progress,” as he called it, since the entire auditorium would literally rotate like a carousel from one tableau to the next. In addition, Walt agreed to provide several exhibits in the pavilion: a Corridor of Mirrors, a Skydome Spectacular slide show, a demonstration of controlled nuclear fission, and a model of a Medallion City of the future. The budget for all this was just under $10 million, $850,000 of which was to be paid as a retainer to WED. Walt suggested that GE also pay something for the use of his name, so Bill Cottrell, who was conducting the negotiations, asked for a million dollars for “Walt Disney.” When GE reluctantly agreed, Walt, joking or not, told Cottrell, “Don’t you think you might have asked for a little more?”

  The initial agreement was signed in September 1961, and GE executives approved Walt’s historical approach the following May. But by the time the executives came to the studio in late July to view the outlines, they had had a change of heart. Now the company decided it didn’t want the history of electrical progress and offered to provide its own storyline. By one account, Walt exploded. “I spent my whole life telling stories with nostalgia,” he supposedly chided the GE officers, “and this is the way you communicate with people!” Walt even asked the legal department if he could break the contract. Within a month another GE vice president smoothed the ruffled feathers, and the company agreed to support Walt’s vision, but Walt was not entirely appeased. GE executives would occasionally visit the studio to view the progress on the pavilion. At one of these sessions, according to Jack Spiers, one of the writers for the show, Walt stood at the head of the table and announced: “All right, gentlemen, what I want you to do is go down to the Coral Room and have a good lunch. Then I want you to go back to Burbank Airport and get in your Grumman Gulfstream and fly back east where you came from and stay there until I’ve got something I want you to see. Then, I’ll call you. Thank you, gentlemen.” And he turned around and left the room.

  The art director, Dick Irvine, would dismiss the Carousel of Progress as a “refrigerator show,” since it essentially hawked GE products. But Walt took it very seriously, in part because the show, featuring a family enjoying the advances of electricity from the turn of the century through the 1960s, gave him a chance to experiment with Audio-Animatronic figures on an unprecedented scale, and in part because it was a huge and unique entertainment. Walt ordered a full-scale mock-up of the carousel to be built in Glendale, where WED had relocated, and sculptor Blaine Gibson, who helped fabricate the figures, said Walt would climb onto the stage and act out the actions the way he had once acted out the scenes from the animations. For one scene, in which a visiting cousin was taking a bath and wound up inventing air-conditioning by placing a block of ice in front of a fan, Walt jumped into the tub, mused about what a bather would be doing, then began wiggling his toes and extemporizing dialogue. “Walt had his foot in everything,” Blaine Gibson recalled. “I would be working late at night at the studio on something for the Fair and I would leave around 2 a.m. There he would be, in his pajamas and bathrobe—he was there reviewing our work and working on something.” As Joe Fowler put it, “There was more of Walt in the Carousel of Progress than in anything else we’ve done.”

  But as the fair grew closer, Walt was not content with just Ford and GE. Throughout 1962 and into 1963 he was still approaching companies to sponsor a Circarama film, to no avail, and he and Charles Luckman met with the Deparment of Commerce in Washington to sound them out about installing the Hall of Presidents in the United States pavilion. The department declined. He solicited Coca-Cola about sponsoring an Audio-Animatronic attraction of birds at Disneyland, and he commissioned Buzz Price to do a feasibility study for a mo
norail for the fair that he hoped would later become a permanent part of the New York transportation system, but Moses balked at the price. (Imagineer Bob Gurr suspected that Walt had also been victimized by standard manufacturers who “were always putting us down as ‘For amusement parks only,’” which could only have riled Walt, whose own vistas had expanded into engineering.)

  Even with the raft of rejections, Walt did not despair of convincing some corporation to sponsor his beloved Hall of Presidents and give him yet another opportunity to pursue Audio-Animatronics. He had been toying with the idea since the late 1950s, assigning Jim Algar, who wrote many of the True-Life Adventures, to read up on the presidents and write a script for a historical presentation. Walt produced a thirty-two-minute show with Algar’s script, as well as scale models and paintings by studio artist Sam McKim, and he invited potential corporate backers to the studio to see it, but the project was expensive, and it foundered. In June 1961, with the prospect of the world’s fair, Walt revived the presentation, retitled it One Nation Under God, and had it brought to New York to show Moses and corporate chiefs from, among others, Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive, Union Carbide, and Hallmark, at the RCA Victor Theater on Forty-ninth Street. Moses was impressed, but he now felt the show shouldn’t have corporate sponsorship; he thought it should be a major installation at the United States pavilion. Trying to get them to reverse their initial rejection, Moses lobbied Undersecretary of Commerce Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., to convince the deputy commissioner and the assistant commissioner for the federal pavilion to visit the studio and see the Hall of Presidents presentation themselves; when he was told the cost of the attraction was prohibitive, he circumvented Roosevelt and personally pressured the deputy commissioner to go to the studio. The commissioner finally did but concluded once again that the cost was too high for the government. Still undeterred, Moses and his deputy, Martin Stone, encouraged Disney to construct the hall under WED’s own auspices, with Stone saying that it was “too important to the Fair and to Walt Disney to drop this without exhausting all possibilities.”

  For Walt, the appeal of the Hall of Presidents had always been less the appeal of history than the appeal of creating life. “I’d like to not be able to tell them from real people,” he had told Sam McKim of his presidential robots. Ever since his experiment with the Dancing Man in the early 1950s, he had sought a way to make human robots, and though he had gotten distracted with Disneyland, in the late 1950s he asked WED to reinvestigate. Walt decided to create a Chinatown at Disneyland with two two-story buildings across an alleyway connected at the top floors by a pedestrian bridge. One of the buildings would house a Chinese restaurant, and Walt foresaw a robotic Confucius who would answer questions from loudspeakers scattered throughout the dining room that would make it sound as if diners were the ones doing the asking. (It was at this time, apparently, that Bill Cottrell coined the word Animatronics, to which Dick Irvine added the Audio.) Ub Iwerks actually erected the Confucius head and had it talking, but the rubber “skin” allegedly tore, and in any case the Chinatown idea was aborted.

  The idea of human Audio-Animatronic robots, however, survived, if only, Walt said, because “you can’t have human beings working three or four shifts; we can’t afford to pay ’em, or they’ll make mistakes, or somebody won’t show up. We’ve got to figure out a way to have automated shows.” He set some of his Imagineers to devise for Disneyland a show of mechanical birds that he called the Enchanted Tiki Room. (This was the exhibit in which he tried to interest Coca-Cola.) Another group went to work on the Hall of Presidents and on a specific idea of Walt’s for the attraction that seemed as chimerical as his idea to construct an entire city: Walt had decided he wanted to create a life-size robot of Abraham Lincoln.

  Walt had always admired Lincoln, and though he read very little beyond newspapers and scripts, he had devoured information on the sixteenth president—one American institution channeling another. He was certainly aware of the hubris of trying to bring Lincoln to life. When he showed Audio-Animatronic prototypes to a minister, the minister told him, “It was all right for you to bring fairy tales to life and for you to create a humanlike mouse, but to create a man—that’s usurping the powers of a higher authority.” Even some of Walt’s own Imagineers had qualms about trying to make human robots. “It seemed that we were getting into areas that were competitive with acting, something that could be done much better by live performers,” Blaine Gibson said. Walt rebutted that only a robotic Lincoln could look exactly like Lincoln. (He had actually had Gibson sculpt the face from a life-mask of Lincoln.) He may have been more honest, however, when he said, “We’re making the legend of Pygmalion come true.”

  How much of the project was about Abraham Lincoln and how much about Walt Disney was difficult to say. Harriet Burns, who helped fabricate the robot, said that Walt visited WED “and cocked his eyebrow, and with his mouth he clenched and gritted his teeth. He pointed to his cheeks and said, ‘We have to do this—the muscles in the body. There’s no reason we can’t do this.’” For the mechanics of the robot, Walt had WED adapt a tape system used on the navy’s Polaris nuclear submarine, the patent for which he paid $17,000. Each tape had fourteen tracks capable of delivering sixteen electromagnetic impulses each. “All we have to do is set the time and we can put on the shows without even a coffee break,” Walt told a New York Times reporter in describing the forthcoming Tiki Room, which was itself a test run for Lincoln. The movements were programmed onto the tape from a harness that one of the Imagineers wore, and the machinery was placed inside the figure, though when Lincoln began to drip oil during a test, Walt ordered Bob Gurr to fabricate the parts of lighter material so that, in Gurr’s words, the robot would “weigh half as much and do twice as much.”

  Already by the summer of 1961, the Imagineers had made a Lincoln figure that could rise from its chair. Early the next year, to squelch a dispute between the machinists (who made the mechanical components) and the sound engineers (who made the electrical and control elements), Walt had his Lincoln moved to a small, secret room in the Animation Building where the WED staff continued to work on it. “Walt was always running people in and out [of the room],” remembered machinist Neil Gallagher. “We were always running it for a bunch of people. Sometimes we couldn’t even run it. He would just talk them through it.” Among those whom Walt ran into the room was Robert Moses. Moses had come to the studio that April to see the Ford and GE drawings, to review WED’s other possibilities, and to encourage Walt’s continued participation in the fair. Walt asked Moses if he would like to meet Abraham Lincoln and took him to the room, where he made the introduction. Lincoln extended his hand, and Moses was instantly captivated. He insisted that he had to have Lincoln at the fair. When Walt protested that the project was five years from completion, Moses waved him off. He was determined to have his Lincoln.

  The obstacle, like the obstacle for the Hall of Presidents, was finding an institution that would sponsor what was sure to be an extremely expensive endeavor. But Moses wasn’t going to be dissuaded. He hunted for months and finally found a prospect when the legislature of Illinois, Lincoln’s home state, established a commission for the fair, and the commission decided that the theme of its exhibit would be “The Land of Lincoln.” Moses immediately had Joe Potter, the fair’s executive vice president, and Martin Stone, its head of the industrial sector, contact the commission’s temporary chairman, advertising executive Fairfax Cone, urging him to see Disney’s Lincoln. Cone visited the studio in April and pronounced himself “overwhelmed.” Two weeks later Cone phoned Jack Sayers to confirm his interest and say that he and key Illinois leaders “look with great favor on the possibility of the Lincoln figure as the ‘show’ feature of their Fair exhibit.” The commission convened that May to discuss the Lincoln figure, and Walt tentatively agreed to $400,000 for the first year and $200,000 for the second, but when the state legislature appropriated only $1 million for the entire pavilion, the commission’s new permanent cha
irman, a Lincoln scholar named Ralph Newman, asked Walt to reconsider. Even Moses wired Walt urging him to lower his demand. Walt would not budge, calling his offer the “best business proposition we can consider” and claiming to be relieved that “we do not have to proceed with the Lincoln figure,” though privately he admitted that he would be willing to settle for $250,000 the first year of the fair and $350,000 for the second once the attraction had proven itself.

  Walt was playing hardball not only with the Illinois commission but with Moses who, Walt knew, was not about to lose his Lincoln over a few hundred thousand dollars. As negotiations stalled that summer, Moses made concessions to Illinois on security, rental fees, and utilities, then finally offered the state a secret $250,000 subsidy to pay Disney.* With that Illinois had its exhibit. On November 19, the centennial observance of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Walt, Moses, and Ralph Newman flew to Springfield, the Illinois state capital, to meet Governor Otto Kerner and announce the project. Not everyone in Illinois was pleased. One paper objected that the Lincoln robot was a “cheap carnival trick that would demean the memory of Abraham Lincoln and degrade the Illinois exhibit,” while another called it “macabre.” But speaking before an Elks Club luncheon in Springfield that day, Walt assured his listeners that his own reputation was on the line and that the exhibit would be anything but a trick. “Imagine you’re in the presence of that great man,” he suggested, then promised that Lincoln would seem genuinely alive—“Maybe more alive than I am.” The criticism subsided. Pygmalion had charmed them all.

  While Walt was negotiating with the state of Illinois, WED received an urgent call from the Pepsi-Cola Company. With the opening of the fair little more than a year away, Pepsi, which was collaborating with the United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF), had been dithering over its own proposals and had finally contacted Disney to inquire whether it might plan an exhibit. The offer was daunting. Pepsi had a space of roughly 94,000 square feet at the fair and a budget of only $650,000. It was more daunting given the schedule. The old Disneyland supervisor, Joe Fowler, who had been the liaison between Disney and Pepsi, told Pepsi there simply wasn’t enough time. That, Dick Irvine later recalled, infuriated Walt. “I’ll make those decisions,” he insisted, then instructed his staff to tell Pepsi that he would do it.