Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  Anaheim was the county’s pioneer town. Its settlers were German Jews from San Francisco who’d been recruited by John Froehling, a vintner in the city, to grow grapes under contract on the coastal plain. In 1857, they had traveled to a newly purchased tract of 1,165 acres on the Santa Ana River and made their home (heim) on the stream.

  For a payment of seven hundred and fifty dollars, each member of the newly formed Los Angeles Vineyard Society got a twenty-acre lot. The society was a mixed group and included in its ranks some carpenters, blacksmiths, and merchants, as well as an engraver, a musician, a poet, and a bookbinder. They hired Mexicans to plant their rootstock, dig an irrigation system, and fence the property with forty thousand willow poles, and soon their vines were bearing so heavily that Froehling bought enough grapes from them every year to produce about 120,000 gallons of wine and brandy.

  The Poles, on the other hand, were a frankly utopian crew. They hoped to model their community on Brook Farm in Massachusetts, although they knew nothing at all about farming, a dilemma that they tried to solve in an intellectual way. Sailing from Bremen, they docked briefly in New York and made a foray to Washington to pick up some government pamphlets on agriculture to study while they were steaming through the second leg of their journey, around Panama to San Francisco.

  In Anaheim, they found waiting for them a two-bedroom frame house scarcely big enough to accommodate them all, but they were not easily daunted. With a burst of communal energy, they began tilling the soil, but they discovered to their displeasure that the physical labor made their muscles sore. Moreover, they didn’t like the blood and guts of certain barnyard chores. It took three of them to butcher a single turkey. They were artists, not farmers, and they retreated, predictably, into art.

  The odd thing about the Poles was that they seemed to accept their failure without complaint. They never howled or beat their breasts. One colonist, Henryk Sienkiewicz, the author of Quo Vadis? and a Nobel laureate in 1905, simply dragged a table into the shade of some trees and sat there smoking his pipe and writing in his notebook while the entire enterprise was going down the tubes.

  “You ought to have seen how jolly they used to be,” a neighbor once remarked, “when everything on the farm was drying up in the sun and the animals were all sick and dying.”

  The communards went through about fifteen thousand dollars in six months, a vast sum back then, and reckoned, as Modjeska put it, “that our farming was not a success.” Nobody would milk the cows, so they had to buy their milk and butter. Dogs ate the eggs that their chickens laid, and other farmers stole the muscat grapes from their vines. Range cattle devoured their barley fields in spite of Modjeska’s firing at them with her revolver.

  After less than a year in Anaheim, the Poles sold the farm and sank the proceeds into return tickets to Poland—all but Modjeska, who stayed on to make her mark in the American theater, playing opposite such great actors as Edwin Booth. She retired at last to a mansion in the Cleveland Mountains, not far from her old homestead.

  The vineyards were gone from Orange County now, of course, and so were the orange groves and most other traces of agriculture. There was nothing beautiful to engage my eye as I drove toward Anaheim on the Santa Ana Freeway, just the same old march of cars and houses.

  The absence of promise, the dullness of the undifferentiated malls, the containerization, the way Orange County seemed to stick a knife into your brain and drain it of ideas—the landscape might be oppressive to me, but those who lived in the county were enchanted by it. According to a recent poll in the Times, they were among the happiest and most optimistic of all Californians.

  Almost all the people in the survey had declared that they were “very happy” or “somewhat happy” in Orange County. The single factor determining a person’s happiness appeared to be his or her relative wealth. The more money that you made, the more likely you were to be “very” rather than “somewhat” happy, but even among the county’s disadvantaged, those earning less than twenty thousand a year, only 4 percent admitted to being “not too happy.”

  Fully a third of the respondents agreed that “living in Orange County is the closest thing to paradise in America.”

  In the paradise of Orange County, real estate was a central concern. The median price of a house was among the highest in the state, and the homeowners, said the Times poll, were very attached to their property. They were also attached to their automobiles and enjoyed them as objects, status symbols, and private universes. They liked to wax, buff, decorate, and personalize them. They liked how they looked in them, and they liked to see how other drivers looked in their cars, engaging in an act of mass voyeurism on wheels—but they were worried about the traffic on the freeways.

  In theory, they believed in car pooling and in mass transit, but they confessed that they would never join a car pool, or ride a bus, a trolley, or a subway.

  “What it comes down to,” the Times pollster had commented, “is that people are hoping for a miracle that won’t cost them anything and that will allow them to commute the way they always have, which is driving to work.”

  The citizens of Orange County had expressed some other concerns in the poll. They felt that the chief social problem among adults was alcohol, with “lack of values” finishing second. Among the young, drugs replaced alcohol at the top, but “lack of values” again garnered the second spot. Promiscuity fell near the bottom of both charts.

  The Bible was still an important text to most people, with 30 percent of the survey group taking it as the literal truth, but they were not as rigidly conservative as you might imagine. They supported a woman’s right to abortion and the right to rent pornographic videos. A majority rated the “moral climate” of the county as “somewhat permissible” and endorsed an unwritten rule that mutually consenting parties could do whatever they wanted to each other as long as they did it in the privacy of their own container.

  That was progress, really, in a county where the John Birch Society had thrived, where the airport was called John Wayne International, and where, in Yorba Linda, there was a museum honoring Richard Nixon, who’d also had his Western White House at San Clemente on the coast.

  Harbor Boulevard in Anaheim paved the way to Disneyland, the very capital of happiness in Orange County. Walt Disney had called it the “happiest place on earth,” in fact, but as I looked at the many cheesy gift shops and motels selling Disneyana, I wondered if I could handle happiness in such measure. Already I was beginning to question the wisdom of my mission, thinking that to tackle the park without an obligatory child or two in tow might do me significant damage.

  AT THE ANAHEIM PUBLIC LIBRARY, I did some browsing and learned that the Disney family had ancient ties to California. Walt’s paternal grandfather, Kepple, was the first to break for the Coast, leaving his farm on Lake Huron in 1878 for a belated junket to the gold mines. He brought along his two older brothers and his oldest son, Elias, a devoutly religious youth of nineteen. Elias could spout Bible passages whole and was a firm believer in hellfire and brimstone and probably in the literalness of the Holy Book.

  During a stopover in Kansas, Kepple and the boys made Elias the butt of a cruel joke. They hired a bordello whore to relieve him of his virginity while they watched through a peephole in a closet door. Elias fended the woman off and angrily refused to continue the trip. Once Kepple had sobered up, he felt guilty about what he’d done and gave his son a grubstake before going on.

  Elias was a troubled, unstable, restless soul. He bought a farm with his stake, but he didn’t stay put. Instead, he bounced around working as a machinist and an apprentice carpenter and finally landed in Denver playing his fiddle outside saloons. Too shy to court his sweetheart, Flora Call, in Kansas, he followed her to Florida when she moved there with her family, and they were wed in 1888.

  Elias kept struggling for the next few years. He failed at being a cattle rancher, managed a resort hotel in Daytona Beach, and enlisted in the militia, only to desert it
when a war with Spain did not materialize. Flora invested her savings in a Florida orange grove, but the oranges died in a killer frost.

  In the humid, swampy climate, Elias contracted malaria, so the Disneys moved to Chicago, where Walt was born in 1901, a child of the new century and the fourth of five kids. The city soon rankled Elias with its sinfulness and once again he fled, buying another farm, this time in Marcelline, Missouri, deep in the Bible Belt.

  Walt would later remark that his years in Marcelline were his most satisfying. He gave all the barnyard animals names and liked to draw sketches of them, a hobby that bore fruit in his cartoons and his movies. So attached to the farm did he become that after his success in Hollywood he built a workshop on his estate that was a replica of his childhood barn in Missouri—a barn that was not a barn but merely a cleansed and sanitized version of one.

  The Disneys didn’t last in Marcelline, either. Swine fever ravaged all their hogs, and the ever-susceptible Elias caught typhoid fever. Now in his early fifties, frail, humorless, and embittered, he moved the family to Kansas City and put Walt and his brother, Roy, to work delivering newspapers for a franchise that he operated, skimming their wages in the process.

  Roy was the first to rebel. He took an apartment of his own and got a job as a bank clerk. Then, in 1918, Walt broke free by adding a year to his age and joining a Red Cross unit bound for France. He was assigned to the same company as Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, stretching the laws of probability to their very limit. Kroc would remember him as “a strange duck, because whenever we had time off and went to town to chase girls, he stayed in camp drawing pictures.”

  Walt also had a quiet business on the side. He made phony Kraut Sniper Derbies, or KSDs, the rare, battle-scarred helmets that American soldiers prized as souvenirs. He’d take an ordinary helmet and doctor it, shooting bullets at it and then tarnishing the holes and the burn marks so that they’d look old. It was the sort of tactic he would later perfect. Instead of banging his head against the hard facts, as his father did, Walt learned to be playful—to alter the facts, transforming them to suit his taste.

  After the war, Walt went back to Kansas City and began cartooning with a vengeance. He was clever and gifted, a natural storyteller, ebullient, dedicated, ambitious, and willful enough to surmount the many hurdles that were placed in his path.

  1919: With his friend Ub Iwerks, Disney hangs out a shingle as a commercial artist.

  1920: Kansas City Film Ad Company hires him to draw cartoon features at forty dollars a week.

  1921: Walt’s going to the movies five times a week and animating Laugh-O-Grams (topical humor) for his boss.

  1922: Takes Laugh-O-Grams indie and produces two cartoon shorts, “Puss and Boots” and “Red Riding Hood.”

  1923: Goes bankrupt trying to complete an Alice in Wonderland movie that combines cartoon figures and a live little girl. In July, he boards a train for California, traveling first class despite being broke.

  1924: Forms Disney Brothers Studio with Roy to make live action/animated “Alice” short subjects.

  1925: Weds Lillian Bounds, an inker at his studio and the only woman he ever dates seriously as an adult.

  1926: A new studio in Silver Lake. Disney Brothers becomes Walt Disney Studio, with Walt in charge.

  1927: Develops “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” cartoons. Big success. He and Roy build identical, prefab homes on Lyric Avenue.

  1928: Universal Pictures and Charlie Mintz, a distributor, connive to steal Oswald from Walt, who retaliates with a new cartoon star, Mortimer Mouse. Mortimer is transformed into the beloved Mickey.

  1929: Cuts a deal with another distributor, Pat Powers, for some Mickey cartoons. Another whopping success.

  1930: Powers is accused of withholding money from the Disneys and also of trying to steal Mickey the way Oswald was stolen. Walt falls into a major depression and takes an overdose of sleeping pills.

  1931: A million members in the Mickey Mouse Club. Mickey’s done in wax at Madame Tussaud’s. Mary Pickford says, “Mickey is my favorite star.”

  1932: A licensing agreement to merchandise Disney characters and their likenesses. Mickey Mouse watches sweep the nation. Walt wins a unique Academy Award for creating him.

  1933: The Three Little Pigs, Disney’s first really big animated hit. Porker, a Marcelline hog recollected in tranquillity, serves as a model. The American public adopts the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” as an anthem.

  By 1934, the Disney studio had almost two hundred employees. Walt had lost his carefree manner and was cracking the whip. If you were employed at Disney, you were likely to be underpaid and overworked. The studio even had a dress code, jackets and ties for men and a ban on trousers for women. Walt distrusted Jews and never hired a black technician. His fundamentalist background was beginning to assert itself in middle age.

  Although Walt’s views and his behavior became increasingly conservative, he remained a bold and inventive gambler on the creative side. He was willing to invest a half-million dollars in his first full-color, animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, when nobody thought it would succeed. He even participated in the brainstorming sessions where the names of the seven dwarfs were dreamed up. Among the discarded ones were Shifty, Flabby, Awful, Crabby, Snoopy, Nifty, and Woeful.

  Snow White went over budget by $1 million, but it netted $8 million in 1938, the year of its wide release. Walt’s cartoon characters were invested with more emotion than ever before, and at the premiere in Los Angeles, Hollywood’s biggest stars wept openly when the princess was laid upon a stone slab in mock death.

  Walt proceeded to do a string of similar pictures, and they had a penetrating impact on most children who were raised in the 1940s and the 1950s. The movies derived their power from the strong, unequivocal feelings that they unleashed. It was impossible not to cry when Bambi’s mother got trapped in a forest fire. A Disney film of the period was always urgent, primal, and mythic, about art and not packaging.

  Yet for all his success, Walt was showing signs of another suicidal depression by 1947. He hit the Scotch whisky regularly and kept up his lifelong cigarette habit, two packs a day, that gave him a rousing smoker’s hack and undermined his health. He billed himself as a devoted family man, but he worked long hours at the studio and hated to see the weekend come. He owed a small fortune in loan payments to the Bank of America.

  Almost every day, he ate lunch at his desk, usually mixing a can of Gebhardt’s chili with a can of Dennison’s chili to achieve the proper ratio of meat to beans. His beverage of choice was V-8 juice. He took a new interest in politics and cultivated right-wing causes, contributing heavily to the Republican war chest and socializing with the likes of John Wayne.

  Walt had inherited his father’s restlessness, but in Walt’s case it manifested itself intellectually. He didn’t need to jump from one geographical place to the next, only from project to project. He despised being bored, and it annoyed him that he couldn’t keep tinkering with a movie once it was done. He wanted to make something organic that would grow and change and never die. He had a farmboy’s dream of the eternal.

  Disneyland was the cure for Walt Disney’s midlife crisis. The inspiration for it came, he said, from the trips that he had made to amusement parks with his daughters after their Sunday school classes. The parks were always filthy and unfriendly, and the parents in them were ill at ease. Mickey Mouse Park, as it was first called, would be nothing like that.

  To accomplish his goal, Walt turned into a tireless student of amusement parks around the world. Tivoli Garden in Copenhagen was among his favorites because the grounds were immaculate. Cleanliness seemed to matter more to him than anything. From the start, against the prevailing wisdom, he had insisted on charging admission to keep out the riffraff.

  “If I don’t,” he said once, “there can be drunks and people molesting people on the dark rides.”

  Getting the project funded wasn’t easy. For some
seed money, Walt borrowed against his life-insurance policy and then hit on a notion to market his park to a TV network. He sent Roy to New York with some hastily done architect’s drawings and a six-page letter elaborating his vision, and a deal was cut with ABC-TV. In exchange for doing a one-hour television series, Walt would receive a half-million dollars in cash and a guaranteed line of credit for another $4.5 million. ABC’s payoff was the series plus a 35 percent share of the park.

  Walt commissioned Stanford Research Institute to scout for locations. Its researchers pinpointed a 160-acre orange grove in Anaheim that would be close to the center of southern California’s population when the Santa Ana Freeway was finished. The landscapers tagged a number of specimen orange trees to be saved as part of the park, but a color-blind bulldozer operator destroyed them by accident.

  The most cunning stroke in the Disneyland saga was Walt’s intuitive grasp of the impact that TV was having on most Americans. For the first time, he could speak directly to his audience without any interference. On camera, Walt looked harmless, avuncular, and trustworthy. Most viewers would buy a used car from him and tended to believe anything that he said.

  He used the first program in his series to run “Disneyland Story” in October of 1954, a documentary about the park’s construction that was essentially a commercial. He did the same thing on his second show, plugging a new movie, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The pitch now seemed to be as important to him as the product.

  As Disneyland got ready to open, Walt’s attention to detail and to scale grew obsessive, as did his fanatical cleanliness. He decreed that no chewing gum could be sold, because people stuck it under benches. Peanuts were also banned unless they’d been shelled. Costumed employees with brooms and dustpans would be constantly patrolling to sweep up debris. Life would not be allowed to spill over. It would be contained.