The Animated Man (50 page)

Disney as he appeared on the first episode of the
Disneyland
television program on October 27, 1954. ABC Television photo.

Disney tours Sleeping Beauty Castle in Disneyland, under construction in 1955. Courtesy University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections.

Disney plays with young admirers at Smoke Tree Ranch in Palm Springs in an undated photo probably taken around 1960, after the Disneys had built their second weekend home at Smoke Tree. Courtesy Palm Springs Historical Society.

Disney at the controls of Disneyland's monorail, which began operations in the summer of 1959 along with the Matterhorn bobsled ride and the submarine ride. Courtesy University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections.

Disney, an increasingly committed Republican over time, attended the 1964 GOP convention in San Francisco and posed there with former president Eisenhower, a personal friend. Courtesy Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas.

Disney visited Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen frequently on his trips to Europe and acknowledged Disneyland's debt to its Danish predecessor. On this visit, on September 5, 1964, he posed with Sven Hansen, a member of Tivoli's Boys' Guard. Courtesy Tivoli Gardens.

Walt Disney, Florida governor Haydon Burns, and Roy Disney at the November 15, 1965, press conference at which the Disneys revealed some of their plans for the 27,000 acres Walt Disney Productions had bought near Orlando. Courtesy Florida State Archive.

Disney (with help from Mickey Mouse) was grand marshal of the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Parade on January 1, 1966. Courtesy Tournament of Roses Archive.

In his later years, Disney became a devotee of lawn bowling, both at Smoke Tree Ranch in Palm Springs and at a public park near his home in Holmby Hills. Here he is with an unidentified fellow bowler at the Smoke Tree bowling green. Courtesy Palm Springs Historical Society.

Disney signs autographs for admirers on an October 9, 1966, visit to the Kansas City Art Institute, the school whose Saturday classes he attended fifty years earlier. Courtesy Mark Kausler.

There is apparently no way to determine the dates when Disney hired those earliest WED employees, since the company was separate from Walt Disney Productions at the time (and the employees themselves were vague or clearly incorrect when they spoke of dates). But it could have been no later than early 1953 that Disney hired Richard Irvine, an art director for Twentieth-Century Fox who had worked for him in the mid-1940s on the live-action portions of
Victory Through Air Power
and
The Three Caballeros
. (Disney called art directors—who design the physical settings of live-action films—“brick and mortar men.”) “I think the reason that he called me was because I was the first one that built models of a set for him, and he could see immediately the flexibility by rearranging and changing, as to how we could plan the action,” Irvine told Richard Hubler in 1968. Irvine's first assignment was to act as Disney's liaison with Pereira and Luckman, then still involved with the project and exploring the possibilities of a site in Palos Verdes, on the Pacific coast. At that point, Irvine said, Disney decided he needed a staff of his own to develop his ideas before turning them over to an architect. “And then finally when he started to jell the ideas the momentum started to build and he got excited about it and went ahead and did it in house, so to speak.”
⁶

Irvine brought over two other art directors from Fox, Bill Martin and Marvin Davis. They shared offices with Bill Cottrell, Disney's brother-in-law and longtime employee, and Nat Winecoff, a promoter who was playing an ill-defined role in getting the Disneyland park off the ground.
⁷
Davis remembered the Zorro building as “a ramshackle wallboard thing, very temporary, hot in the summer and cold in the winter. . . . Walt had bought some period furniture, a dining set and other stuff . . . heavy dark wood furniture that he had in mind to use on the Zorro set. Bill Cottrell . . . was in charge of Zorro at the time. He had some scripts and some writers, and he was looking around for a cast. It might have been a feature film, or maybe a series, but it was important to Walt.”

Davis first met Disney when Irvine introduced them in the Zorro building. “Then he invited both Dick and I up to his house to take a ride on his train, which was impressive for me because it was Walt Disney,” Davis said in an interview with
The “E” Ticket
. “I was pretty thrilled about all of this. I got the impression that he was trying to give us the idea of what he wanted for Disneyland. He used his Carolwood Pacific railroad as an example of what he wanted to do next. There was a definite link between Walt's train at his home and what he went on to do at Disneyland.”

When Davis went to work for WED, Disney had not yet surrendered the idea of Disneyland as a park on the sixteen acres across Riverside Drive, “which at that time was a storage area for pieces of sets and props and things,” Davis said. Harper Goff, who had joined the Disney staff a few months before the plans for a Riverside Drive park were announced in March 1952, had drawn what Davis called “a little schematic thing, drawing up what was mostly a kiddieland, because that was what the idea was at that time. He did a kind of aerial perspective of it, and it was filled with mostly Harper's ideas. He had a train going around it, and some other stuff, and from that, Dick Irvine and I got started.”