by Neal Gabler
By any rational assessment, Fowler was right: there wasn’t enough time. Walt did not even meet with Pepsi vice president Don Kendall until March 1963. But as WED sculptor Rolly Crump recalled, Walt rounded up his WED staff one day and announced that there was “one more piece of real estate that they’ve offered to us.” Walt said he already had an idea for it. He described to them a “little boat ride that maybe we can do.” Crump said the designers were shaken. “[W]e thought a little boat ride? I mean, God, we were working on Lincoln, the Carousel of Progress, both of which were using the highest technology and animatronic figures. And we were working on Ford, too. All of this, and Walt wants a little boat ride!”
What Walt really seemed to want was the challenge, the excitement, the race to the wire, to prove once again that he could succeed under the most difficult of circumstances—to prove that he couldn’t fail. The basic idea of the attraction, appropriate to UNICEF, was a large boat that would float on a canal through a universe of small animated dolls representing all the countries of the world and demonstrating the fundamental unity of mankind—a platitude given the archetypal Disney treatment. Originally Walt had thought to have the dolls “sing” their national anthems, but the result was cacophony. Instead he asked the Sherman brothers, who had written songs for various films at the studio, to write a composition that could be sung by all the children. Harriet Burns, who worked on the exhibit, remembered Walt telling the Shermans offhandedly, “It’s a small world after all,” which became the title of their song and of the attraction.
With time so short, Walt mobilized just as he had with Snow White and the war training films and Disneyland. He had Claude Coats design the route through the lands. He had animator Marc Davis provide small comic flourishes and Davis’s wife, Alice, the costumes. He had Rolly Crump draft a colorful 120-foot mobile sculpture to stand outside the pavilion. When he decided that the drawings of the dolls lacked a certain charm, he had them redesigned by Mary Blair, who had been a sketch artist at the studio in the 1940s, before moving east to draw greeting cards and illustrate children’s books. Finally, he had a full-scale mock-up of the ride constructed at WED, just as he had done with the Carousel of Progress. According to Crump, “We would put Walt on a boat that was on wheels and that was elevated to the right sightline, and then push him through the ride” so that he could experience exactly what a visitor would experience and tinker with what he felt needed improvement. In the end, as with everything in which he was personally invested, he was determined not only to meet the deadline but to meet it spectacularly because, as he now imagined, nothing less than perfection was suitable for Walt Disney.
III
As Walt approached sixty, with his hair and mustache beginning to gray, he was thinking again about his legacy—about what would happen to the studio when he was gone. Storyman and sketch artist Bill Peet remembered sitting at the coffee table in Walt’s office discussing a project with him when Walt, suddenly enveloped in sadness, rose, went to the window, and stared out silently. “You know, Bill,” he finally said, “I want this Disney thing to go on long after I’m gone. And I’m counting on guys like you to keep it going.” Sometimes he would say that he was delegating more responsibility to his subordinates and continually reorganizing them so he would be sure the company would survive him, then was quick to add that he was in perfect health and expected to outlive them all. Other times he seemed to despair of the company existing after he was gone. “They won’t be able to handle it, anyway,” he once told director Ken Annakin, speaking of his executives. “So just let it fritter away.”
The studio, in any case, was very different from the one he had founded, different even from the one he had constructed at Burbank. It was different physically. Walt had added a third soundstage at a cost of $250,000 to house the 90-by-165-foot water tank for 20,000 Leagues, and he built a fourth soundstage in 1958 both for television and for the film Darby O’Gill and the Little People as part of a $1.6 million studio expansion. Early the next year the studio purchased the 315-acre Golden Oak Ranch, about twenty-five miles from Burbank near Newhall, the site of California’s first reported gold strike, which the company used as a backlot for its television and film productions and as a pasture for the studio’s livestock. Walt kept buying adjacent parcels until early in 1964 the holding totaled 726.5 acres.
If the studio was different physically, the men who now populated it were different too. Wilfred Jackson and Ben Sharpsteen had both retired, or rather been retired—the last of the executive old guard who had worked on Mickey Mouse and Snow White. But then longevity had never mattered much to Walt, only usefulness. As Marc Davis told it, Walt had even fired Ward Kimball after giving him a chance to direct Babes in Toyland and then arguing with him over his approach. Kimball went to Walt “on bended knee” asking to be reinstated, and he was, but Walt relegated him to animating Ludwig Von Drake, a new character, for Wonderful World of Color, a clear humiliation.
As the old guard left, a new guard had moved in, headed by Bill Anderson, the production chief, and Card Walker, a longtime employee who had worked his way through the ranks from a traffic boy to a camera operator to a member of the story department to publicity chief to vice president of advertising and sales, though his purview seemed to incorporate much more. Within this operation Walt called himself the studio’s “executive producer,” having resigned all his official titles in 1963. “I’m the boss of everything that’s produced here,” he told a journalist, to explain his function. “I work on story ideas and gags; I work on every script, writing dialogue and planning scenes. When the story is set, I turn it over to the boys, and they make it.”
Of course while Walt had been working on Disneyland, that description hadn’t been entirely true. His involvement in production had been minimal then; he generally just reviewed the scripts, approved the casts, and fired off memos on small rectangles of distinctive dark blue paper or scribbled instructions in a bold red crayon, typically “NO” or “OK.” “I’m not the perfectionist anymore,” he told a reporter, not altogether accurately. “It’s my staff. They’re the ones always insisting on doing something better and better. I’m the guy trying to hurry them to finish before they spoil a job.” But as Disneyland settled into a routine, Walt, evidently bored again, slowly disengaged from the park as he had from the studio, resigned all his titles there as well, and reasserted his control in Burbank. He became the paterfamilias again, not only reading the scripts but also painstakingly polishing them, not only approving the casts but also making sure the actors were comfortable at the studio, not only sending memos but also sitting in on endless production meetings to make certain the films were ready before they were put before the cameras. “It was run from the top down, but there were no middlemen,” wrote one employee at the time. “At the top, alone, like Napoleon (and at times like Attila the Hun), was our leader and captain, el Jafe [sic], Numero Uno, the Man, the Boss—in short, Walter Elias Disney. All things started with Walt. And Walt had the final word—always!” “Walt would never let any person get in and start building a big team, an empire,” director Robert Stevenson said, echoing earlier criticisms of Walt. “The tradition here was that if anybody got so important that they put the name on the door, they would not be here in a couple of weeks,” though Stevenson charitably believed this had less to do with Walt’s ego, which everyone acknowledged was large, than with his fear of political cliques forming within the studio. Walt may have delegated power and appointed committees to do work that he had once done himself, but he reserved the right to be the ultimate and only authority.
If the studio and the staff were different from the ones over which Walt had presided before Disneyland, so now were the films they produced. For one thing, animation had practically disappeared; in the five years after Sleeping Beauty the studio produced only two animated features, 101 Dalmatians and The Sword in the Stone. As for Mickey Mouse, he hadn’t appeared in a short since 1953. The emphasis had shifted to live-acti
on films. Of these, some were family-oriented historical costume dramas of the sort he had done in England, children’s adventures, and even an occasional tearjerker like Pollyanna, based on the Eleanor H. Porter novel about an orphaned girl who comes to live with her aunt and changes people’s lives through her goodness. But the studio had also begun to specialize in a new genre: family comedies like The Absent Minded Professor, about an inventor who discovers a substance that allows things to fly, and The Shaggy Dog, about a boy who turns into a sheepdog.
While other studios were discharging their stars and retrenching as audiences declined with the growth of television, Walt recruited a Disney repertory company—among them, former Mouseketeer Annette Funicello, now a teenager; a gap-toothed little boy named Kevin Corcoran, who appeared in Mickey Mouse Club serials, then advanced to features like Old Yeller (“I think he is a find,” Walt wrote Bill Anderson. “We better get some kind of option on him.”); Tim Considine, another young veteran of the Mickey Mouse Club serials; another serial actor, Tommy Kirk; longtime Hollywood star Fred MacMurray, who had migrated to television; and perhaps most important of all, a young blond British actress named Hayley Mills, the daughter of the actor John Mills. She had come to the attention of the studio when Walt, having searched fruitlessly for an actress to play Pollyanna, was about to shut down production on the film. Bill Anderson and his wife were in England at the time, and Mrs. Anderson had seen Hayley there in her debut film, Tiger Bay. At his wife’s suggestion, Bill Anderson rushed out to see the film, liked it, then had a print sent to Walt in California. Pollyanna’s director, David Swift, wasn’t impressed, but Walt overrode him. A natural, unaffected actress, Mills became one of the studio’s biggest stars, not only headlining hits like The Parent Trap and The Moon-Spinners but also becoming a recording artist for the Disney label.
Since the days of Mickey Mouse, the name “Disney” had been a brand: the best in what seemed to be, oxymoronically, mass-produced folk art that appealed to everyone from sophisticates to innocents. Indeed, Walt had always pointedly insisted that his films were not made primarily for children or even primarily for profit, and few critics had treated them that way, at least until the postwar period when the art largely disappeared and there seemed no motive other than profit. Beginning with Cinderella, Walt received a new critical pass through most of the 1950s, but by the end of the decade the live-action films—broad, simple, and clearly child-oriented—had changed the brand and revoked the pass. Now the name “Walt Disney” was synonymous with wholesome family entertainment that no one could possibly mistake for art, folk or otherwise. As Dr. Max Rafferty, the superintendent of public instruction in California, put it in praising Disney, “His live movies have become lone sanctuaries of decency and health in the jungle of sex and sadism created by the Hollywood producers of pornography.”
Walt understood the change and defended it, no doubt in part because his films proved so profitable. The Absent Minded Professor grossed $8.9 million domestically on a budget of $1 million, The Shaggy Dog $9.6 million, and The Parent Trap $9.3 million, while 101 Dalmatians grossed only $6.2 million. By comparison, two of the most popular films of Hollywood’s reigning star at the time, perky Doris Day, grossed $7.4 million (Pillow Talk) and $7.7 million (Lover Come Back). (Walt had asked the studio for the comparison.) Walt, who was happily unsophisticated himself, sincerely enjoyed some of his studio’s live-action films. He wrote the manager of Radio City Music Hall that he honestly felt The Absent Minded Professor was “one of the funniest comedies that ever came out of this town,” and director David Swift said that Walt broke down in tears watching Pollyanna in the sweatbox. Swift, who made the film, said he personally “hated it,” but when he told Walt that they would have to cut twenty minutes out of the picture because it was running long, Walt protested, “No, no, no, don’t touch it!”
On the other hand, Walt did not delude himself about the meaning of the studio’s new brand. “Our part in things is to build along the lines we are known for, with happy family stories and comedies,” he told Newsweek, contradicting the long-standing Disney position. “I’ve never thought of this as art. It’s part of show business.” To an employee, he was more candid. “We’re making corn, Peter,” he would tell matte artist Peter Ellenshaw. “I know it’s not your kind of corn, but it’s got to be good corn. Let’s make it the best we possibly can. We’re trying to please people.” As for the increasingly mature competition in Hollywood that was tackling serious issues, Walt turned philistine. “These avant garde artists are adolescents,” he griped to a reporter. “It’s only a little noisy element that’s going that way, that’s creating this sick art. I don’t think the whole world is crazy!” Referring to a recent film about alcoholism, Days of Wine and Roses, he said, “I don’t want to see that kind of thing. If I did, I’d go down to the county nut ward, or something.”
As Richard Schickel saw it, Walt Disney’s live-action films denied mankind its “infinite possibilities” by “reducing it to comic clichés, by imitating old imitations of life.” And so,” Schickel concluded, “he passed, at last, beyond—or beneath—criticism,” while at the same time serving as a convenient bulwark against those who criticized the motion picture industry for excessive sex and violence. But it wasn’t only the critics who felt Walt Disney’s films had sanitized art out. Bill Roberts, who wrote the original screenplay for The Absent Minded Professor, demanded that his name be removed from the credits after reading Bill Walsh’s revision. “I feel that wit has been replaced by cuteness,” Roberts wrote Walt angrily. “Almost every character speaks alike, with a kind of vapid juvenility reminiscent of comedies of twenty years ago.” Hayley Mills’s parents chafed over the kind of saccharine scripts she was being given and decided not to renew their contract until, as Bill Anderson relayed their concerns to Walt, “they have had the opportunity to read the material involved and the role to be played.” Walt, in turn, felt that the Millses didn’t know what kind of pictures were right for their daughter, and he huffed to Anderson that “I do not want my name attached to the type of pictures Mary [Mills] apparently wants Hayley to do.” Yet even Walt, for all his belligerence toward Hollywood’s new frankness, seemed to have misgivings about being stuck making puerile movies. After watching To Kill a Mockingbird at a screening in his home, he lamented, “That’s the kind of film I wish I could make.” But he couldn’t. He was Walt Disney, and Walt Disney was now committed to making films that were innocuous enough to be enjoyed by the entire family.
As he pondered the future of his empire, he thought of his own family’s security too. While in England, he had seen an article about the demise of a company after its proprietor died, and, he wrote Roy, “it set me to thinking about our own situation here of having all our eggs in one basket,” meaning having their assets tied up in Disney stock. Walt was concerned about what would happen if his family were forced to sell the stock to pay estate taxes. “When I’m up in heaven playing my harp, I really couldn’t put my heart into it, if I thought I had left things in a mess down here!”
Roy, however, had another financial concern. Back in 1953 he had piloted both the deal between WED and WDP and the personal services contract between Walt and WDP through the board of directors over the objections of three members, who eventually resigned, and over the objections of the dissident stockholder who had brought suit against the company. Now Roy worried that the growth of WED over the years with Disneyland and the world’s fair and the large sums of money that both it and Walt were drawing from WDP might bring renewed and unwelcome scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission and even a possible stockholders’ revolt over the sweetheart contract with Walt.
The problem was broaching the issue with his brother. As Roy’s biographer, Bob Thomas, told it, Roy decided to confront Walt over what was expected to be a long weekend at Smoke Tree. What ensued instead was a one-day shouting match—“a lot of yelling and screaming and everything else,” Ron Miller, who was there with Diane, told
Thomas—after which Roy and Edna promptly returned to Los Angeles. Walt couldn’t see why anyone would possibly object to his contract. “I tried to explain to Walt one time that even though everything was proper and aboveboard,” studio attorney Neil McClure told Thomas, “he had to be like Caesar’s wife—above suspicion. Walt blew. ‘What do you mean? I haven’t done a damn thing that’s wrong.’”
Walt’s relationship to WED was a sensitive issue. Walt loved WED and guarded its independence from WDP and from Roy, moving it in 1961 at the time of the Ford exhibit to a rented building in a Glendale industrial park that Imagineers called the Pancake House because it had a high peaked roof and was painted orange and blue like the International House of Pancakes franchises. As Disneyland expanded and as the world’s fair contracts came in, WED had grown too, to three hundred employees, necessitating organizational charts and building plans; but Walt continued to regard it as his refuge from the studio and its bureaucracy. “Nobody had to ask anyone at the studio for permission,” Bill Cottrell said. “If you wanted to start developing a thing like Audio-Animatronics, you’d do it as long as you had the money to do it. And by this time, Walt had the money.”
