The Animated Man (49 page)

By the time Disney wrote to Ruth, though, the original plan for a traveling show (which at one point was to be called “Disneylandia”) was, if not yet dead, close to it. When he ultimately called a halt, only two members of the barbershop quartet had been built.

The problem was not the public's response. At the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, Harper Goff said, “people would watch and watch. They wouldn't go away. They saw the whole show and they stayed for the next one. So the show had to be stopped for 25 minutes to clear out the audience. Walt knew it was a success.”
¹³⁶
But the logistics and economics were another matter. “Walt envisioned a big long train which would go all over America,” Goff said. In each city the train visited, “people would come and go through the railroad cars. They would start at the back of the train and all the cars would have these little animated things that you could watch. This is what caused Walt to choose the size he did for the displays. . . . He wanted to make sure he had an aisle [in each railroad car] with enough room. . . . This idea called for a
21-car train on a siding with public access. The railroad companies said they would put in a ‘Disney line' with a rental of thirteen thousand dollars a month or something like that. And the word got around. I think that Walt, who was used to success on his terms, may have expected all these cities to say, ‘Oh yes, Mr. Disney, please come to our town . . .' But then everybody began planning to make a lot of money, just to let Disney in.”

Putting the displays in railroad cars was going up in cost, Goff said: “Walt bought three old Pullman cars, just to kind of fool around with. Then, suddenly, when he wanted to get some more the price had gone up substantially.” Disney learned that simply moving his special train around the country would be enormously complex and difficult: “In order to get to Denver, for instance, the train would first have to go to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Then it would have to turn around (on a different railroad, the Colorado and Southern) and go back south to Denver. And they didn't have tracks to accommodate the train.”
¹³⁷

When Granny's Cabin went on display at the Festival of California Living, Disney was already exploring another outlet for his enthusiasm for miniatures. His plans for a park to be called “Disneyland” had been public knowledge for more than seven months—not the fifty-acre park that popped up in the
Popular Science
article, but a smaller park in Burbank. In March 1952, he got tentative approval from the Burbank Board of Parks and Recreation for a $1.5 million development on the sixteen studio-owned acres across Riverside Drive from the Disney plant. His Mickey Mouse Park of 1948 was within financial reach now that the studio's fortunes had improved. Disney's desire to put his miniatures to work as an attraction had breathed new life into the dormant idea for a park, as Michael Broggie has written: “Initial design drawings by Eddie Sargeant showed an elaborate 1/8th scale railroad layout, complete with roundhouse and covered rail equipment storage tracks; rails wound over bridges crossing a gravity-flow canal boat ride.”
¹³⁸

On March 27, 1952, the
Burbank Daily Review
quoted Disney as saying that “Disneyland will be something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts and a showplace of beauty and magic.”
¹³⁹
The park was to include what the newspaper called “various scenes of Americana” and a “zoo of miniature animals,” like two donkeys he had brought from Italy.

(Disney visited Italy in the summer of 1951, in an excursion during the filming of
The Story of Robin Hood
, and he was taken with the tiny Sardinian donkeys he saw there; he brought two to Los Angeles late that fall. Although he told a reporter that he hadn't decided whether to keep the donkeys
at his home or at the studio—predictably, they wound up at the studio—he surely had his amusement park in mind when he made his purchase.)
¹⁴⁰

Disney said the park was to be home to a “complete television center,” from which programs would be transmitted to the whole country. It would “focus a new interest upon Burbank, Los Angeles and Southern California through the medium of television and other exploitation,” he said. Most curiously, Disney described the park not as a commercial venture, but rather as a facility that would be “instantly available” to civic groups. That idea fell by the wayside very quickly.

For years, Disney had been visiting amusement parks and other attractions in the United States and Europe with at least half an eye toward what he could learn that would be useful in a park of his own. In the early 1950s, with a Disneyland on Riverside Drive a live possibility, he began looking more closely at such places.

Bud Hurlbut, who owned a small “kiddieland” amusement park in El Monte, a suburb northeast of Los Angeles, told Chris Merritt of seeing Disney “kind of looking around at my rides. . . . I saw this man come on my property, and by the time he was there the second or third time I decided he wasn't just a park customer”—that is, someone who wanted to buy rides that Hurlbut manufactured. “Walt was studying how things worked, and I just walked up to him and said, ‘You look like you're interested in rides,' and he said he was ‘kind of looking at them.' He was a really nice fellow, so I sat down with him and answered a lot of his questions.” Disney wound up inviting Hurlbut “to his house to ride his miniature steam train. I spent several Saturdays over there, and it was just like being with a neighbor. He would sit on the floor and relax, and as we sat there, we talked about trains and rides.”
¹

Disney was also taking more concrete steps, like commissioning a master plan from the architectural firm Pereira and Luckman. Charles Luckman, who had known Disney for years, remembered hearing him describe his conception of Disneyland over lunch in April 1952, just after Disney announced his plans for a Burbank park: “He had a vivid mental image of it all—the streets and stores from other eras, the parade of Disney characters led by Mickey
Mouse, the bright lights, the bands playing, the variety of restaurants, the scenes and sets of his cartoons to serve as backgrounds for the concessions, water rides through enchanted lands, the mechanized people who could speak, the birds who could sing, the monorail
[sic]
which he would drive on opening day.” Disney apparently hoped that the architects would devise a plan that would permit him to pack as many attractions as possible into the small area across Riverside Drive. Luckman returned a month later with a “preliminary concept” for a seven-acre Disneyland, which Disney rejected as clearly too small. “As the weeks went by,” Luckman wrote, “the proposed size went from ten to twenty acres, then to thirty. Walt was screaming.”
²

Perhaps aware of the ongoing discussions, a
Daily Variety
columnist reported on October 27, 1952, that “Disney is shopping for a big tract of land to build ‘Disneyland'—a playground for kids and grownups with restaurant, theatre, miniature railway, etc.”
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Satisfying Disney's ambitions within the geographical constraints of the Riverside site was turning out to be beyond the abilities of an architectural firm.

“By the time we reached fifty acres,” Luckman wrote—this was probably in late 1952 or early 1953, around the time
Popular Science
wrote of a park of that size—“I called a halt.” Building a Disneyland that big, or bigger, would not only require a larger site than the one on Riverside, it would also require money that Walt Disney did not have. Disneyland was one of those rare Walt Disney projects that had run aground on Roy Disney's skepticism. Because Roy resisted making more than a small amount available for the planning and design of a park, Walt formed and funded a separate private company, Walt Disney Enterprises, to carry out those functions. It came into existence on December 16, 1952. He was the sole shareholder. The corporation changed its name to Walt Disney Incorporated in March 1953, shortly before Disney and Walt Disney Productions signed a new employment contract on April 6, 1953, that explicitly gave him the right to pursue outside projects. An entirely predictable (and ultimately unsuccessful) minority stockholder's suit followed in June, attacking the employment contract and Disney's relationship with the company generally.
⁴
Perhaps to put a little distance between Walt Disney Productions and his private company, Disney changed its name to WED Enterprises in November 1953.
⁵

The line between the public and private companies was always blurry, but Disneyland, especially in its early stages, was a personal project of Walt Disney's, distinct from the studio as little else had been since Walt Disney Productions became a public company in 1940. Disney had already bought the rights to Johnston McCulley's Zorro stories as another personal project, with an eye toward making a television series. As a result, there was a Zorro building on the lot, and that was where the first employees of WED were housed.

Ned E. Depinet, RKO's president, shakes hands with Walt Disney in 1950 to mark the conclusion of a new distribution deal. Roy Disney is at left, the Disney attorney Gunther Lessing at right. Quigley Photographic Collection, Walt Disney File, Georgetown University Library, Special Collections Division, Washington, D.C.

Lillian and Walt Disney on a 1952 visit to the Swiss village of Zermatt, a favorite Disney summer vacation spot. This photo, by the Zermatt firm Perren-Barberini, was part of the collection of Paul and Andrée (Dédée) Tilmant-Jeghers of Belgium, who visited with the Disneys at Zermatt in 1952 and again in 1958. Courtesy Pierre Nicolaï.

Disney and Richard Todd, (center), the star of three of his British-based live-action films, enjoy cotton candy with an unidentified third man on a visit to Coney Island in August 1953. Courtesy Richard Todd.