The Animated Man (60 page)

“While the public thinks of Disney as playing with trains and exchanging pleasantries with juvenile alumni of the now-defunct
Mickey Mouse Club
, he actually is one of the most widely read, most widely traveled, most articulate men in Hollywood. I became acutely aware of this when I spoke with him recently at lunch in the private dining room of his . . . studio. While he devoured a dietetic meal of lean hamburger and sliced tomatoes he spouted rustic witticisms with the aplomb of a modern-day Bob Burns. But every once in a while his eyes would narrow, the rural twang would disappear from his voice and he'd discuss financial projections for 1962, the modern art of Picasso and Diego Rivera, and Freudian psychiatry. In a few moments, however, he'd catch himself” and revert to homespun stories.
⁵¹

By the early 1960s, Disney had lived in Los Angeles and been part of its film industry for forty years. The industry and Los Angeles itself had changed dramatically in those years. The industry and its attendant glamour and cynicism were far more dominant in the city's culture than in the 1920s, when Disney's journey from Kansas City to Los Angeles was in effect a move from one midwestern city to another, the California version distinguished
mainly by its better climate. To the extent that Disney had real friends in the 1960s, they held high places in the film industry or in industries that were in some ways comparable to it, like architecture (he and Lillian traveled with the celebrity architect Welton Becket and his wife, who were neighbors in Holmby Hills). Disney could have remained a “country boy” under such circumstances only through a calculated exercise of the will in itself hard to reconcile with warmth and spontaneity. Repeatedly, the magazine writers who spoke with Disney in the 1960s found him a different man than they expected, or thought they had seen on television, and so they observed him intently. They may have borrowed from one another to some extent, but for the most part their descriptions seem drawn from life.

“Before I met him,” Aubrey Menen wrote in
Holiday
in 1963, “every effort was made by his aides to impress me that Walt Disney was, in fact, avuncular. He was open and affable, they said, and easy to talk to. Instead I met a tall, somber man who appeared to be under the lash of some private demon. Mr. Disney's face and figure are familiar to all the world. In private he smiles less—I remember him smiling only once—and he is not at ease. He speaks in short sentences with pauses in which he looks at, or rather through, his listener. . . . Mr. Disney's hands move restlessly all the while he talks, picking up things from his desk or the restaurant table, playing with them and casting them aside with a sharp gesture, as though they had failed to come up to his standards.”
⁵²

In 1964, Stephen Birmingham, writing for
McCall's
, described Disney in similar terms, as “a haggard, driven-looking man with a long, mournful face and dark, heavy-lidded eyes. The man who is almost always photographed grinning actually grins seldom, and when he does grin, it is with an almost bitter curl of the lip. Sometimes his eyes seem to withdraw and to focus on remote, secret places. ‘You can always tell when Walt's bored or dissatisfied with something,' an associate says. ‘He gets that glassy look, as though he's just noticed something very small and ugly at the back of your skull.' His big hands move restlessly and incessantly, as though his body, even in repose, knew no peace—pawing at the package of French Gitanes cigarettes that is never far from his reach or, at a dinner table, playing noisily and endlessly with the silverware. Sometimes his fingers begin to rap out a sharp staccato rhythm on the desk top or chair arm—a storm warning, almost invariably. . . . His dress is casual, to put it mildly. Usually, his clothes have a look of having been tossed on in great haste that morning from the chair where they were hurled the night before. Despite the benign Southern California sunshine, Disney
tends to bundle up—in a shapeless cardigan, a baggy tweed coat, or a wind-breaker.”
⁵³
The natty young dresser of the early 1930s had disappeared along with the enthusiastic young cartoon maker.

“He is shy with reporters,” Edith Efron wrote for
TV Guide
in 1965. “His eyes are dull and preoccupied, his affability mechanical and heavy-handed. He gabs away slowly and randomly in inarticulate, Midwestern speech that would be appropriate to a rural general store. His shirt is open, his tie crooked. One almost expects to see over-all straps on his shoulders and wisps of hay in his hair. . . . If one has the patience to persist, however, tossing questions like yellow flares into the folksy fog, the fog lifts, a remote twinkle appears in the preoccupied eyes, and the man emerges.”

Here again, as in other interviews from the 1960s, Disney permitted himself to sound bitter and resentful when he said anything of substance: “These avant-garde artists are adolescents. It's only a little noisy element that's going that way, that's creating this sick art. . . . There is no cynicism in me and there is none allowed in our work. . . . I don't like snobs. You find some of intelligentsia, they become snobs. They think they're above everybody else. They're not. More education doesn't mean more common sense. These ideas they have about art are crazy. . . . I don't
care
about critics. Critics take themselves too seriously. They think the only way to be noticed and to be the smart guy is to pick and find fault with things. It's the
public
I'm making pictures for.”
⁵⁴

It is at this point in his life that anecdotes about Disney's drinking become more numerous. No one ever suggests that he was an alcoholic, but his consumption—perhaps stimulated by his increasing physical discomfort, from his old polo injury and nagging sinus trouble—was undoubtedly higher than average. One of Disney's luncheon companions in the early 1960s remembered him, in a hurry, start their meal by telling the waiter, “We'll have two martinis each and bring them both at the same time.” More drinks followed.
⁵⁵

Alcohol was taken for granted in the Disney household. Disney taught one of his daughters, presumably Diane, how to mix drinks when she was twelve, although, he said, neither girl drank as an adult.
⁵⁶
A five o'clock drink, preceding a massage by the studio nurse, Hazel George, was part of his office routine, but frequently that single drink became several, because Disney often stayed at the office until 7 or 7:30 at night. His secretary Tommie Wilck, concerned about his drive home, tried to limit his consumption by serving him a scotch mist, a drink made up mostly of ice and water.
⁵⁷

There was no such constraint operating when Disney was on the road, as one of his traveling companions remembered. “I think he was meaner than hell when he had five scotches,” Buzz Price said, “but who isn't? . . . Walt
would work all day, intense, intense, intense, and he would unwind in the evening with a few glasses of scotch. My experience, in traveling, was that his intensity began to transition into irritation.”
⁵⁸

Disney's absorption in his own thoughts, always a distinct characteristic, was, if anything, more pronounced now than ever before.
Newsweek
suggested in 1962 that “his only conspicuous trait” might be “his capacity for total preoccupation. One associate recalls him considering a problem and absently dipping a doughnut in his Scotch.” The magazine quoted Fred MacMurray: “He's never quite listening to what you say.”
⁵⁹

Tommie Wilck remembered a Disney who “had tremendous powers of concentration. Sometimes he'd be sitting in his office and I'd go in and talk to him and he wouldn't even hear me. He could shut himself off with all sorts of noise, phones ringing, and think.” A common experience, the animator Milt Kahl said, was “to lose him while you were talking to him. This didn't happen just to me. . . . And it could be quite annoying sometimes if you didn't realize what he was doing. . . . You didn't [bring him back]. You just [had] to pick another time, or wait till he's in a frame of mind to start listening again.”
⁶⁰

When Disney thought out loud, he wanted only an audience, not a response—someone to talk at, not with. Lillian regularly played that role, hearing without really listening, but other people, like Ward Kimball and Bill Peet, were on occasion recruited into it, too. Disney might reminisce or speculate for many minutes, but then, if his auditor tried to respond in kind, he would end the conversation abruptly.

In the memories of his employees, Disney was variously considerate or irritable, kind or petty, depending on the circumstances and his state of mind—a perfectly ordinary man in many respects, and more decent and likable than most—but he rarely showed real interest in other people. In this he was indistinguishable from entrepreneurs generally, who are almost by definition people engrossed in their businesses. Said Price: “He had no patience with people who weren't on the same wavelength with him, or people who couldn't help him, or people who were trying to finesse him. If you could help him, everything was rosy.”
⁶¹
Joyce Carlson told Jim Korkis about Disney's visits to WED's Christmas parties: “He'd always show up! He'd talk to the traffic boys [studio messengers] and tell which project, like the Haunted Mansion, was coming up and they'd stand there listening to Walt. He used to be so excited telling them about all the new projects. He was wonderful and the boys were just so thrilled.”
⁶²
But the boys were, of course, an audience.

When Disney got carried away with an idea while he was talking to an employee about it, noted Jack Cutting, “if you did say, ‘Well, now, wait a
minute, Walt, you said so-and-so . . . ,' a cloud would come over his face. It was like you'd dumped a bucket of cold water on him. . . . He might later think it over and take that into consideration, but if you did that at a time like that, you were somebody he couldn't work with.”
⁶³

The Disney of the 1960s was still capable of enthusiasms, as some of his interviewers discovered. “His heavy-lidded and rather mournful eyes grow dim with ennui when a subordinate or friend tries to slip in a compliment,” Peter Bart wrote in the
New York Times
. “Disney's dry Midwestern voice trails off into inaudibility when he is asked to discuss some question that does not interest him—and a formidable list of things fit into this category.” But Disney came to life, Bart wrote, when he talked about the Christmas parade at Disneyland: “Disney's voice booms, his face crinkles into an exuberant smile. ‘We'll have these giant mushrooms and dolls,' he enthuses. ‘Inside the figures will be men riding little motor scooters. The parade may set us back $250,000 but it will be the best we've ever had.' ”
⁶⁴

In the 1960s, as his park neared the end of its first decade, he still spoke of Disneyland with a lover's fierce passion. “You need the sharp-pencil boys, but you can't let them run the joint,” he said in a
Look
interview published early in 1964. “Since Disneyland opened, I've poured another $25 million into it. To me, it's a piece of clay. I can knock it down and reshape it to keep it fresh and attractive. That place is my baby, and I would prostitute myself for it.”
⁶⁵

That intensity, never visible to viewers of Disney's television show, showed itself in his behavior when he was in the park. “He would never walk past a piece of litter,” said Michael Broggie, a ride operator in the early 1960s. “He would reach down and grab it, and everyone was expected to do that.” Disney employees observed him as intently as he scrutinized the park. He followed a routine when he was escorting an important guest around the park, Broggie told
The “E” Ticket
. “He would go to the Golden Horseshoe Saloon, and if he came out and turned right, it meant he was to go to the Mine Train. If he turned left, it meant he was going [toward New Orleans Square] or back to his apartment. His route was monitored, and with two-way radios they would report on Walt's location. This went on whenever he was in the park, unbeknownst to Walt, because everyone wanted to be on their toes when the boss was in the area.”
⁶⁶

Disneyland was malleable, and—much like the Disney studio in the late 1930s—it was staffed by hundreds of people eager to carry out their patron's wishes. The challenge was to find ways to change the park that went beyond simply adding new rides that would inevitably echo rides in older amusement parks or at Disneyland itself. One way was to make the place funnier.

When Marc Davis finished his work on
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
, Disney sent him to Disneyland to look at a train ride through the landscaped area called Nature's Wonderland, because it was full of mechanical animals and, Davis said, “he knew I knew a lot about animals. I did a flock of drawings on it.”
⁶⁷
As it turned out, Davis said, “he just wanted me to look it over and tell him how great it was, [but] I looked at it quite critically and came up with a lot of opinions.”
⁶⁸
Davis had not been an admirer of the park. “When I went down to Disneyland the first time,” he said, “I felt from the very beginning that there was very little that was entertaining or funny to me. There was just a lot of stuff, like a World's Fair. . . . As soon as I started to work on this stuff, I tried to find ways to add something that people could get a laugh out of.”

Davis provided what he called “storytelling tableaus.” “Here's a prime example of the humor, the storytelling that was missing: He had a couple of ‘kit foxes' . . . one was looking at the train over here, and its head went up and down, and there was another one maybe a hundred feet away, and its head went side to side. Well, I took the two of them and put them face-to-face . . . so one nods like this and the other one does this . . . and you immediately have an idea. That's what I started doing on the rides.”
⁶⁹