The Unauthorized Story of Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion
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For example, even as Walt Disney was discussing a magnificent tower that would mark the entrance to the Small World pavilion at the Fair with Crump, Dick Irvine was floating the job’s specs to WED artist Herb Ryman, a concept artist for the company, according to Imagineer John Hench, who reported the situation back to Crump. Crump was incensed, first knowing that Walt Disney had wanted him to design the job, and second, knowing that Ryman’s skill set was best utilized conceptualizing grand vistas and visualizing the emotion and activity of an area—not creating sculptural design. “John said, ‘Don’t worry about it Rolly, you’re going to design it,’ Crump recalled. ‘You have to remember that Walt gives the assignments, and he uses Dick only to pass them on to you.’ I think that bothered Dick a little bit too, that he’d give you the assignment, but then you would go directly back to Walt and not run through him on it. You’d make a run-around with Dick.” Despite these rationalizations, Crump also recognized the fact that was probably closest to the truth of the matter: “And of course I was younger. I was twenty years younger.”
So despite all the years and toil Crump had put into the Haunted Mansion, his story seems to end here, for our purposes. Or does it?
We can thank Crump for inspiring a seance room, despite the fact that it was realized in a much simpler manner than his original vision. We can credit Crump for the look of the ballroom organ, and for inspiring the idea of a demonic grandfather clock in the hall—ideas sketched out by Ken Anderson, but given weird life by Crump. His Cocteau-inspired sketches resulted in human arms used to hold torches near the end of the ride, and gave the architecture some personification. And of course, his work with Yale Gracey inspired many of the most mystifying effects found inside of the Haunted Mansion. Imagineer Jason Grandt recalled:
Rolly Crump was really a decorator—a stylist, like Mary Blair. You’d see a lot of these things for his Museum of the Weird like chairs with faces, and clocks with faces, and all of these things. So while the Museum doesn’t exist, it really does exist in the Mansion right now, because you look at the grates on the fireplace and you look at all of these things with the hidden monster faces [in the ride], and that’s Museum of the Weird, and that’s Rolly Crump. [20]
Claude Coats and Marc Davis, while favored by Dick Irvine due to their veteran status with the company, had vividly different ideas for the Haunted Mansion, and the ideas weren’t gelling. Let’s go back to the Robert Wise film The Haunting to capture an idea of where the project was heading .
Architecturally, there seemed to be agreement at WED about the look and feel of the attraction, and that was classic, gothic haunted house. Taking numerous decorating and detailing cues from Wise’s film, the Mansion was outfitted with thick heavy doors patterned very closely after the doors in Wise’s Hill House in The Haunting . Much of the moulding, hardwood detailing, and personality of the filmed house can be found in the designs used inside of the Haunted Mansion. To that end, there seemed to be little to argue about.
But a closer look at both Coats’s and Davis’s conceptual work based on that film is very telling. A general floor map for the attraction had been developed and agreed upon, and one of the set pieces was to be a long, imposing corridor of “demonized doors,” as the area was titled by WED. [21] This hallway was certainly inspired by the Wise film, and Coats and Davis both played with a number of concepts based on the oversized, threatening architecture.
One concept illustration by WED artist Dorothea Redmond, known for her prior moody production design for Alfred Hitchcock films, features an endless hallway viewed through the door, with mysterious, lights floating through the hallway off into eternity. Redmond’s ethereal take is a clear match to Coats’s aesthetic. Marc Davis’s takes on the doors, however, are mostly comical, with one sketch featuring large, frightening arms pushing out from behind the doors, stretching and dislodging them in an attempt to get out into the hallway.
As it turns out, both concepts were utilized in one form or another in the Haunted Mansion attractions, though the sample above illustrates a point: Coats was intent on spooking people, as were Yale Gracey and Rolly Crump and even Ken Anderson, to a degree. But Davis, working with the same original concepts and ideas that Coats relied on when developing his own ideas, believed that the Haunted Mansion, like every attraction in Disneyland, should communicate to every guest of the park, from the youngest to the oldest. And Davis, whom Disney had referred to as his “Renaissance man,” [22] knew that the key to multi-generational communication was humor. This is not to say that Davis was a frivolous man, nor even light-hearted. But he had a very studied awareness of the human psyche, and that of Walt Disney as well. Davis believed strongly that attractions at Disneyland should appeal to people of all types.
Marc Davis’s contributions to WED are marked by his thorough understanding of the human condition. “Marc’s father was always looking for the greener grass on the other side of the fence,” explained Alice Davis, Marc Davis’s widow and a co-designer for WED back in the 1960s. She said that because Davis’s family was always on the move during his childhood, he learned a lot about human nature as he grew up. “He learned a great deal about people, a great deal about common sense, and a great deal about humor,” she continued. “His father told him he’d give him an education he wouldn’t get anywhere else in the world.” [23] Moving all over the country, Davis found himself doing sundry jobs that opened his eyes to the human character: racking balls and caring for drunks in boomtown pool halls; collecting the cash from the tills in a brothel; working in the ring taking care of fighters; even assisting his father (also a vaudeville magician) with stage magic.
“That was the schooling his father gave him,” Alice said. “This is where he got all his humor. He could do one type of humor, but it would [amuse] the children, the young families, and the old families. That’s why he was far ahead of lots of people, because he knew about every kind of person.” In fact, Davis was brought to WED in 1961 by Walt Disney because of that appealing, multigenerational sense of humor. Disneyland’s Mine Train ride wasn’t the people-pleaser that Disney envisioned, and he needed Davis to add gags and discover the untapped humor of the attraction. Davis took this as his modus operandi regarding his work for WED, and staging humorous vignettes became his forte.
Davis continued to rework concepts and ideas that had already been developed, to give them his own principled finesse. One painting Davis conceptualized, which ended up on the walls at the Orlando Haunted Mansion when it opened in 1971, was a take on Ken Anderson’s Sea Captain, coming ashore from a watery grave. Another example is Davis’s reworking of the stretching room gag, which had been developed sometime prior to 1961 and refined by Crump. When Davis saw Crump’s take on the stretching portraits, he was unimpressed by the relative youngster’s concepts. “Those are no good. I’m going to redo them!” he reportedly stated, according to Crump in his autobiography. [24] Davis’s staging and caricature of a given concept would prove to be ideal for the Audio-Animatronic platform, and his ideas, gags, and characters became integral to the Haunted Mansion’s final design.
“Marc didn’t have any inclinations toward the supernatural,” Alice later recalled. “He just loved to have people laugh and have a good time—and that’s what he hoped would happen in the haunted house.” [25]
Claude Coats, on the other hand, was taking the influences from Hollywood’s recent portrayals of haunted houses very much to heart as he continued his work on the Haunted Mansion. Coats was tasked with developing the Haunted Mansion attraction into a specific environment with a suitable atmosphere, a task he had fulfilled years earlier with great success for some of the dark rides in Fantasyland. “Marc Davis had made a whole lot of interesting drawings, so many that we weren’t able to use them all,” Coats said. “The best ones seemed to drift to the top, and everyone seemed to be satisfied with the final selections…[then] I’d find space to put his ideas into the show.” [26] Much of Coats’s concept art for the Haunted Mansion is
drawn in vivid color on black paper, a clue to his intention to use UV lighting and some amount of fluorescent coloring in the attraction to add to the ethereal, ghostly ambience. Tony Baxter recalled:
Claude worked almost the complete opposite of how Marc Davis worked. Marc’s designs told stories without adding crutches. Today, a lot of [conceptual] artwork for attractions shows guests pointing, trying to guide you, and going “Oh look, that’s funny back there!” Marc’s didn’t—it was just the scene you were going to see in the ride, and you as the viewer would be just like you as the rider, and you’d look at it and get the entire [scene]. He knew so much about what he wanted done, that there was very little room for any one else to contribute. At the other end of the extreme was Claude Coats, who delighted in making things better by enriching them by layering people on to the process. I think Walt’s genius was putting these people together who wouldn’t necessarily have worked harmoniously together—but when Walt said, “You’re going to work with all these people,” well, you’re just going to work with them.
I think Claude’s genius was having the same sense that Walt did. For all intents and purposes, Walt could maybe sketch out a rough Mickey, but he wasn’t going to draw Sleeping Beauty for you. He had the wherewithal to put people together like a symphony orchestra, and get everybody to play together—and I think Claude had that. [27]
Coats can be credited with detailing the attraction with formidable dark wood moulding, paneling, and details (as seen in The Haunting ), as well as movie set-worthy lighting schemes that would intensify the gloom and draw attention to specific elements of each scene, giving the viewer a specific impression despite the brief window of observation afforded by the Omnimover system. Coats was intent on getting the details right. For example, he scoured Rolly Crump’s proposed Museum of the Weird visages to find the perfect demonic face to repeat as a pattern for the wallpaper used in his “demonized doors” corridor. [28]
Coats’s concept art from the time was also of a freakier bent than Marc Davis’s proposed scenarios. In a presentation at Walt Disney World, Jason Surrell demonstrated one of Coats’s ideas for the Haunted Mansion’s attic, which featured a claustrophobic, cluttered space. “That [picture] demonstrates that [Coats] was really in the scary camp,” Surrell said, “because over time—especially when we lost Walt in 1966—a little war broke out between the people that felt it should be funny, and the people that felt it should be scary. Claude led the camp that thought that it should be scary, and you can see that in a lot of his work.” [29]
With Davis creating light-hearted vignettes that could appeal to guests of all ages (despite a bit of necessary black humor—it is a haunted house, after all), and Coats developing the house that would host Davis’s humorous scenes with an ominous, imposing atmosphere, there was bound to be creative tension. “I felt there were too many men of equal standing put on this,” Davis recalled. “Too many cooks, as I say.” Davis mourned the fact that Walt Disney, the primary decision-maker before his passing, was no longer there to keep WED on track:
You know, the first guys that worked on [the Haunted Mansion] could never sell it to Walt because they were trying to sell this story about this bride who was left standing at the altar, and this groom had died a horrible death. The thing was, I found out—and Walt agreed—that this was not a story-telling medium. These attractions at Disneyland and Disney World are experiences, but they are not stories. You don’t have a story that starts at a beginning and goes until the end…These things I worked on had no story at all, and I think they worked, too. [30]
In addition to Davis’s issue with the story-telling, he also believed that the attraction, being in Disneyland park, should be friendly. “Walt wanted that,” Davis recalled. “He wanted to give them a thrill, but he didn’t want to scare them half to death. Walt was always thinking about the entire family.” [31]
Marc Davis was never happy with the results that came from the blend of his staged situations and Claude Coats’s gloomy atmospheres, despite numerous meetings and conversations about the situation with WED brass Dick Irvine and John Hench. Irvine was convinced that Walt Disney would not have wanted to truly frighten people, though the fact remains that since before Disneyland opened, Disney did constantly ask for a haunted house to be placed in the park—and that contradiction was never answered to Davis’s satisfaction. Davis has been clear about his disappointment with the Haunted Mansion after its completion, though how much of that angst may be with the process, and how much with the results, is hard to discern. After decades of working for and pleasing Walt Disney, who set the course for everything WED did, perhaps the decision-by-committee process was too much for Davis to take. “Nobody’s about to say—‘Hey, wait a minute! Let’s do it this way,’—which Walt would have done in a moment,” Davis said. [32]
“When you look back at the split between Marc and Claude—after Walt was no longer there to say ‘you guys are going to fuse and be the best design duo ever created’—I think you begin to see Marc Davis making character shows, like America Sings and Bear Jamboree—no environments,” said Baxter. “Then you’d see Claude shows, like If You Had Wings and EPCOT shows where it was all about the environment, but without that much character. That was the genius of Walt, being able to put them together.” [33]
Adding to the tension building among the creative staff, Rolly Crump recalled bureaucratic developments that started to wear on the WED team after Disney’s death. “When Walt passed away, all the power was given to the non-creative people,” Rolly Crump recalled. “They should have brought some of the art directors up to their plateau. The synergistic process was completely gone.” [34]
It seems unfair to leave this chapter without revisiting the contributions made to the project by Dick Irvine. Rolly Crump is adamant about his mistreatment by Irvine, yet we are left with the fact that Walt Disney, called “the greatest casting director in the world” by Crump himself, placed Irvine into his managerial role at WED. Where can we turn to learn more about Irvine’s contributions to the project? How about someone at WED that knew him pretty well…say, Rolly Crump?
I have to say that I learned a lot from Dick. He was a beautiful administrator, he knew how to negotiate, he knew how to subcontract work outside the studio, outside of WED, and no one else has ever been able to do that. A lot of people aren’t aware that all the sets in It’s a Small World were built by Grosh Studios. All the sets in the Haunted Mansion were built by Grosh Studios. And all the sets in Pirates were built by Grosh Studios .
R. L. Grosh and Sons is a movie set design company that, in its sound stage heyday through the ’40s and ’50s, was the go-to stage decorator and builder for the major film studios—including Twentieth Century Fox, which used Grosh regularly. Dick Irvine, with his contacts at Fox, knew exactly what Grosh’s strengths were, and what they would cost, which was of equal importance. Grosh was a pioneer in set construction and the installation of theatrical drapery, and they designed motorized stages and curved curtain tracks, the types of things that would be fundamental to the construction of the Haunted Mansion. Utilizing Grosh to build the Haunted Mansion’s sets was a move that would both save the company thousands of dollars and insure that the sets were of top-notch construction and of the latest design, saving WED countless hours of research and development. Crump said:
When it came time to do Disney World, and Dick wasn’t around to help support [outsourcing work], they decided they’d have to build a big building to manufacture everything for Florida. John Hench used to say, “Well, if it wasn’t built by Disney then it’s not Disney,” and I’d say, “John, gees! Grosh used to build all this stuff!” Then he’d kind of roll his eyes back in his head. So Dick knew how to subcontract out which would have saved millions of dollars, rather than try to do it yourself. I learned a lot from him about that.
Needless to say, countless WED Imagineers, managers, consultants, architects, and designers contributed their skills and talents to the Haunted Mansio
n. But our overall story of the development of the attraction rests on the shoulders of the designers and concept artists who, selected by Walt Disney himself, brought the project to life. Despite conflicts and disappointments, the sets and scenes inside of the Haunted Mansion were finally falling into place. All they needed was the illusive tour guide to tie everything together.
Chapter Six
The Spiritual Cacophony
Imagineer X. Atencio, who had worked on the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction with Marc Davis and Claude Coats, was also asked by Walt Disney to be a part of the Haunted Mansion team, once the attraction had been rebooted after the World’s Fair. Atencio, who had penned the wonderfully witty “Yo Ho, Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me)” for the Pirates ride, had proven his penchant for clever wordplay, and was a natural choice for the writing duties relating to the Haunted Mansion.
As we noted earlier, Atencio had first intended for the walk-through attraction to be narrated by a recurring one-eyed cat or, in later incarnations, a raven, but the Omnimover system didn’t allow the necessary time for each guest to hear the character recite its various spiels. “My idea was to have the raven be the narrator,” Atencio said. “You see him as you come up the first incline and introduce him as the host. He’d follow you through the ride, and explain some things. But it didn’t work with the timing of the [conveyance].” [1] The narration would have to travel with the riders, in order to allow each patron to have roughly the same experience. So, following a lead proposed by Marc Davis earlier, the Ghost Host was designed as an invisible, disembodied spirit that would follow you through the halls of the Haunted Mansion. An early draft of the script retained the raven as a bit player, making additional remarks in some scenes. This raven, or “jabbering jay” as it was called in the script, was intended to create a mystery to be solved as guests rode through the attraction. As the raven, adorned with a mysterious medallion around its neck, spouted bits of Poe and nonsensical whimsy throughout the attraction, the Ghost Host would make clear that the bird was looking for a mortal body to inhabit. At the end of the attraction, one of the hitchhiking ghosts glimpsed in the mirror that is supposed to be following you home would be seen to be wearing the same medallion, as the Ghost Host revealed that HE was actually the raven’s wretched soul, and he was following you home to better himself. [2]