Dream It! Do It! (Disney Editions Deluxe) (4 page)

In my first year at UCLA, I joined my Zeta Beta Tau fraternity brothers in a Bruin tradition, the annual Spring Sing competition. We performed pretty well singing George Gershwin’s “’S Wonderful,” but it was one of Tom Lehrer’s unmistakable songs that brought out the best in our male chorus. The Harvard math professor turned lyricist and nightclub performer created such satirical tunes as “The Old Dope Peddler,” “I Wanna Go Back to Dixie,” and “The Wiener Schnitzel Waltz.” In the Spring Sing we performed “Be Prepared,” the Boy Scouts marching song.

We didn’t win any prizes at that Spring Sing, but it was part of my introduction to university life. At UCLA, we freshman were often in classes with veterans who had just returned from the Korean War. And graduate schools, like the UCLA Law School, were often populated by those who had fought in World War II; their undergraduate years, aided by the GI Bill, began in 1946 or 1947.

For me, a key reason to join a fraternity in 1952 was to have a place to live within walking distance of the campus. There were no, zero, men’s dormitories at UCLA at the time (the first was opened in 1959), and only one women’s dorm, Mira Hershey Hall. UCLA in the 1950s was definitely a commuter campus.

I wanted to be a sportswriter. When I entered Kerckhoff Hall in hopes of becoming a staffer at
The Daily Bruin
, I brought with me some high school newspaper credentials. I was editor of the paper at Long Beach Poly High School and also wrote a sports column called “Sklargazing.”

You have to pay your dues as the kid reporter; my first assignments were covering swimming and water polo. But I soon graduated to track and field, and, in 1954, to football in the fall, followed by basketball for the 1954–55 season. What an amazing opportunity.

The 1954 UCLA football team, coached by Henry “Red” Sanders, was co-national champion with a 9–0 record. They were “co” because sportswriters for the Associated Press and United Press International split the vote between Ohio State and UCLA. I traveled with the team to Lawrence, Kansas; Corvallis, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; and Berkeley, California, to report on Bruin victories that season by scores of 61–0, 67–0, and 72–0. And 34–0 over our crosstown rival, the Trojans of USC at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

But it was the opportunity to cover basketball and get to know Coach John Wooden that became the touchstone of my UCLA years. I learned about being a leader from the very best. Yes, the Bruin hoopsters were good; in the 1954–55 season, Coach Wooden’s team had a 21–5 record, 11–1 in the Pacific Coast Conference—and split two games with the eventual NCAA champion, the University of San Francisco, with their two dominating stars, Bill Russell and K. C. Jones.

Coach Wooden’s remarkable record of ten national championships in twelve years would not begin until ten years later, in 1964, but what I learned by observing Coach as a
teacher
(his preferred term) has lasted a lifetime. At practice, the organization was obvious; Coach Wooden planned out every minute each day, and after each drill—no matter how long or short—an assistant blew a whistle and the team moved on to the next planned teachable moment.
Failure to prepare is preparing to fail
is one of Coach Wooden’s best-known lessons, but there were so many more contained in the myriad of popular books Coach wrote before he passed away in 2010 at age ninety-nine. Many of these gems were contained in
The Wisdom of Wooden
, written with Steve Jamison and published by McGraw-Hill after Wooden’s passing:
Be quick, but don’t hurry… Don’t let making a living prevent you from making a life… Be true to yourself…
and, of course,
Make each day your masterpiece.

I had two favorite experiences with Coach Wooden—neither of which were on the basketball court. The first occurred in 1954, when a quirk in the NCAA rules allowed an incoming student from San Pedro, California, eligibility to play either varsity or freshman ball; frosh teams were the first step in an athlete’s college career at that time. This student was no ordinary athlete; he was the player of the year in the Los Angeles high schools. One day I received a call at
The Daily Bruin
from Coach Wooden, asking me to come to his office. His message was clear; he had decided that Willie Naulls, the player in question, would play immediately for the varsity. To paraphrase Coach’s message:
Marty, I would never tell you how to write your story for the student newspaper. But please remember there are four newspapers in Los Angeles and all the sportswriters will write about what an impact Willie will have on our team. He’s going to have tremendous pressure from every one of those newspaper reporters.
(In 1954, Los Angeles sports coverage appeared in the
Times
,
Mirror News
,
Examiner
, and
Herald-Express
. Today, only the
Times
survives.)

Coach didn’t have to tell me how he was hoping I would handle
The Daily Bruin
story. It was emblematic of how his first concern was always for his players.

Small wonder that all those All-Americans and pro all-stars who came along later—Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton, et al—continued to come to him for advice even thirty and forty years after their playing days ended. (And Willie Naulls did become a star: all-American, first-round NBA draft choice, three-time pro all-star, three-time NBA champion with the Boston Celtics.)

The second event was a talk Coach Wooden gave as part of a wonderful series called “My Last Lecture” at the University Religious Conference in October 1955. By then, I was editor in chief of
The Daily Bruin
, and wrote this editorial urging my classmates to attend his lecture:

Fifty-five years later, I was a member of the board of directors of the UCLA Alumni Association. Ravi Doshi, the president of the Alumni Scholars Club, approached me with some questions about the “My Last Lecture” series. He had seen my 1955 editorial, and was intrigued by the following idea: “What would the great teachers at UCLA in 2010 tell their students if they had but one lecture to give—their final lecture on this earth?” he asked me. A fellow Alumni Scholar, Max Belasco, had heard online a speech by that title delivered by a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who was dying of pancreatic cancer. I had yet another connection: that professor, Randy Pausch, had worked as a consultant at Walt Disney Imagineering.

Ravi and the Alumni Scholars put their own twist on the idea: they conducted a popular vote in which two thousand students selected the professor they most wanted to hear deliver a “last lecture.” In April 2010, Dr. Asim Dasgusta, professor and vice chairman of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics, launched a new Bruin tradition based on a fifty-year-old idea, when a sold-out lecture hall of students heard him talk. “I just wanted to tell students what I’ve learned through the years of my life as a scientist for thirty years,” Dr. Dasgusta said.

* * * * * * * * * *

UCLA in the early 1950s was sometimes referred to as “the little red schoolhouse.” It was the time of McCarthyism, and the UCLA administration shared many of the senator’s views. One day Dean Milton Hahn called me to his office. He was standing at the window when I arrived, and his first words amazed me: “Anytime you look over campus,” he said, “there are five hundred homosexuals wandering around.” Some things you just don’t forget. The administrator was paranoid about active political protests.

What worried the administrators was the fear that the student newspaper might be taken over by left-leaning campus reporters and editors. Freedom of the press was not in their vocabulary when they made sure my friend and fellow
Daily Bruin
associate Irv Drasnin became editor in chief in the spring of 1955. When student elections took place before the school term ended, Irv was elected student body president—and I was “elected” editor of
The Daily Bruin
. An election by the student body may have seemed like freedom of choice. I had served my apprenticeship—two terms as sports editor and one as city editor—so I had all the requisite credentials for the top job at
The Daily Bruin
. But it should never have been a popularity contest for a position that the student body at large was truly not knowledgeable enough to fill.

My education at UCLA, by the way, also happened in classrooms and lecture halls. I remember well professors like George Mowry in history and Currin Shields in political science. And I will never forget the opportunity to know the brilliant philosophy teacher Abraham Kaplan, or listen in on a lecture by the demonstrative education professor Frederick Woellner. (“Text,” he almost shouted, “from context is
pretext
!”)

And beyond all else, I met my wife to be, Leah Gerber, at UCLA. We were married May 12, 1957.

* * * * * * * * * *

My biggest disappointment at UCLA was trying out for, and becoming the last candidate eliminated from more than one hundred competitors, for a special project run jointly by the University Religious Conference and the Ford Foundation to combat the negative image of America in India. It was called, simply, “Project India.” Beginning in 1952, Project India sent twelve students of diverse ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds for nine summer weeks to India, meeting college students, living with their hosts in villages and cities, and hopefully making friends for America. It was a kind of precursor to the Peace Corps, which began in the early 1960s.

In 1955 I truly felt that I had earned the right to be the second Jewish student selected—to join my friend Sandy Ragins, who later became a rabbi. But I was not chosen, and I wished the ambassadors well as they prepared to depart for India.

Less than a week later, I received a call at the ZBT fraternity house. It was that “Las Vegas dealer,” Card Walker, asking if I could come to the Walt Disney Studio for the interview that would change my life. Surely that trip to India would never have had such a lifelong effect.

At the end of 1965, Walt celebrated his sixty-fourth birthday, and Roy O. Disney, age seventy-two, began to plan for his own retirement. The presumptive future CEO, Card Walker, called me and the Studio’s graphics leader, Bob Moore, to his office. “We have to let the media, our fans, and the entertainment industry know that as great a talent as Walt is, he’s not the
only
creative person at Disney,” Card told us. “Let’s use the annual report to start the dialogue.”

Bob Moore and I were good soldiers. With Card’s direction, we identified the company’s top creative talent, and developed a plan to photograph them at work on their current projects. Some of the pictures would be with Walt, some without. There was Bill Walsh, Don DaGradi, and Bob Stevenson—the
Mary Poppins
team—in live-action films; Dick and Bob Sherman, the Academy Award–winning songwriters; the “Nine Old Men” in Disney animation—all were still working, although Marc Davis had moved to Imagineering; and John Hench, Claude Coats, and Davis at Imagineering. The photographs told the story, and soon, with Bob Moore’s page layouts and my captions identifying the talent, we accompanied Card to review the concept with Walt. He listened patiently—and said, “No.”

“Look,” Walt told us, “I don’t want people to say ‘that’s a Bill Walsh production for Disney,’ or ‘that’s a John Hench design for Disneyland.’ I’ve spent my whole life building the image of entertainment and product by Walt Disney. Now Walt Disney is a thing, an image, an expectation by our fans. It’s
all
Walt Disney—we all think alike in the ultimate pattern.
I’m not Walt Disney anymore
.”

In the end, the pictures still told the story in the annual report. Walt okayed the images and caption copy identifying the Disney project only. No names were used; no individuals were identified or credited in the photos. We all got the message.

In thinking about this portion of the book, I realized that few people in the entertainment world have been written about as frequently as Walt Disney. I asked Richard Benefield, then executive director of the extraordinary Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, and Becky Cline, director of the Walt Disney Archives at The Walt Disney Company, to provide the number of biographies they believe have been written about Walt. Despite his death more than forty years ago, the number seemingly expands like the Flubber in his 1961 film
The Absent-Minded Professor
; they estimate the biographies at fifty-two, ranging from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s (Diane Disney Miller’s
The Story of Walt Disney
and Bob Thomas’s
Walt Disney: An American Original
) to the twenty-first century (Harrison Price’s 2003
Walt’s Revolution! By the Numbers
and Neal Gabler’s 2006
Walt Disney—the Triumph of the American Imagination
, the latter a “triumph” in 851 pages that was
not
well received by the Walt Disney family).

While everything worth knowing about Walt Disney hasn’t been written, I’m going to tell only personal stories—that is, those experienced directly by me or my peers. Most of these stories have never appeared in print. But I can’t help starting with several of my favorite Walt stories told to me by those who were there, illustrating his multidimensional character:

• One of the first Disney traveling art exhibits, “The Art of Animation,” was about to open in Denver, Colorado. Walt attended the opening, but arrived in Denver the night before for a final check of the exhibit. At breakfast the next morning, he joined the installation team, which had already ordered their food. Walt made his choice; before the waitress could leave the table, all four of the installation team, one by one, changed his order with a “that sounds good, I’ll have that too!” comment. Now there were five identical breakfast orders. “So,” Walt said, “it’s going to be
  one of those days
  !” And he was gone.
  
• A Disney Studio television producer was unhappy because Walt did not consider him to be “creative.” Determined to change Walt’s view, and recalling Walt’s own handiwork on his backyard trains and miniatures built in the workshop barn at his Holmby Hills home, the producer spent weeks making a model to show Walt. He arrived early one morning and set up his work in Walt’s outer office, insisting that Walt view his efforts before starting his day. Enthused over the product of weeks of work, the producer waited for Walt’s reaction; however, none was forthcoming. “Well,” the producer lamented, “at least you can give me ‘E for Effort.’” Reacting at last, Walt replied: “I’ll give you ‘S for Shit.’”
  
• As Walt emerged from the Disney Studio Animation Building and attempted to light his cigarette, his lighter malfunctioned. Into the breach stepped one of the Studio’s great story and character development talents, Ken Anderson. His lighter worked, so well in fact that he set fire to Walt’s signature mustache in front of a large crowd of his fellow animators no less. Ken did not sleep well that night, and when he was summoned to Walt’s office the next day just before noon, he expected the worst—that his days at Disney were numbered. Walt was waiting for him—with instructions. “Come on, Ken—let’s go to lunch.” And they did, in the Disney commissary, where everyone could see them eating and talking together.
  

Years later, I was reminded of these stories during a recording session for the Ford Motor Company attraction at the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair. I had written the narration for the Magic Skyway ride that Walt and the Imagineers had created for the Ford Pavilion. In the second year of the World’s Fair, Ford asked Walt to serve as narrator.

We recorded early one morning at the beginning of 1965. Walt’s voice was even more raspy than usual. As he mangled line after line, the number of expletives mounted. At first they were directed at me as Walt tripped over the length of some sentences I had written and the pronunciation of the dinosaurs featured in the ride. Here is the flavor of the recording session:

“Thanks to some old-fashioned magic, this Ford Motor Company car will be your time machine for our story—so if your imagination is ready, here we go! We’ll be traveling backwards in time—many millions of years—back to a time when giant creatures thundered over the land, and soared like gliders over the sky. You’re probably familiar with some of the names: allosaurus, brontosaurus, triceratops, tyrannosaurus…

Boy what a mouthful—that’s a big long one there—I got a dang frog in my throat… Is that any better, Marty? Lousy? Oh, shit—I don’t want anyone to hear me cussing, Marty—before you send it to Ford, you’ll edit it first, right Marty?”

Yes indeed, Walt!

Walt was
not
a boss who wanted a “yes” at all costs. He just didn’t like “no.”

In 1953, Walt sent Dick Irvine, Bill Cottrell (president of WED; he was married to Lillian Disney’s sister, Hazel), and Harrison “Buzz” Price to Chicago to review his concept for Disneyland with the major amusement park operators of the time, who were all attending a convention of their peers. The WED team reported the reaction of the amusement park “experts”: “Bottom line, Mr. Disney’s park idea is too expensive to build and too expensive to operate. ‘Tell your boss,’ they said, ‘to save his money. Tell him to stick to what he knows and leave the amusement business to people who know it.’”

The articulate master at “getting to yes” with Walt was his favorite consultant, the self-described “numbers man,” the author of
Walt’s Revolution! By the Numbers
, Buzz Price. From the very beginning of Disneyland, Buzz focused on Walt’s objectives.

“Walt said that his park was to be a work in progress,” Buzz wrote later. “Unlike existing enterprises of this kind, it was never to be finished. This idea of constant reinvestment was a new concept. Walt recognized the fickleness of audiences and the challenge of always providing something new. For me, this great entrepreneurial adventure was an exposure to ‘yes if’ consulting as a more useful format than ‘no because’…‘Yes if’ was the language of an enabler, pointing to what needed to be done to make the possible plausible. Walt liked this language. ‘No because’ is the language of a deal killer. ‘Yes if’ is the approach of a deal maker. Creative people thrive on ‘yes if.’”

For many of us, Walt was the supreme casting director. He knew the talents of his staff better than anyone, and was constantly seeking ways to expand their skills—as if to ready us for an assignment on a future project still only in his head.

Not long after moving to Imagineering after twenty-seven years as an animator, X. (for Xavier) Atencio was called to Walt’s office. “I want you to write the script for Pirates of the Caribbean,” Walt explained.

“But Walt,” X. replied, “I’ve never written a script.” X. not only became the author of lines later spoken by Johnny Depp in the Pirates of the Caribbean motion pictures—he also became a songwriter when Walt liked his idea for a tune the buccaneers would sing:
“Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me!”
And when a full-size mock-up of the key auction scene in the Pirates attraction indicated to X. that he had overwritten the dialogue, Walt would not allow X. to cut any lines. “Think of it this way,” Walt explained. “It’s like a cocktail party: you hear bits and pieces of conversation, and you get the idea of what’s going on. Our boat ride is even better; if you want to hear the rest of the conversation, come back for another ride!”

Herb Ryman used to say that Walt was “the conductor of one of the world’s great orchestras—and I was proud to be one of the musicians.” But John Hench thought of Walt’s cast of talents as “dogs on a leash.” The “dogs” most trusted, John said, “could wander far to the east and far to the west, trying new tricks.” But others were kept on a tight leash; they had to stay close to home and “mind the store.” The key for everyone, John explained, was this: “Once Walt decided what direction he was going, no one wandered off. If he decided to go north,
everyone
went north; no one went south.”

In the late 1950s, one of my jobs was to write the copy for the
The Story of Disneyland
souvenir guide. As the costs of printing and production grew to 24 cents for a product that sold in the park for 25 cents, the merchandise staff wanted to double the price, to 50 cents. In those days, Walt was the judge and jury for even decisions as mundane as this. I accompanied the merchandise staff to a meeting with Walt, and watched them strike out. “No” was the answer.

Walt’s reasons were clear and direct. “Look,” he said, “we don’t have to make a profit on
every
line of merchandise. Our guests take those souvenir books home, put them on their coffee tables, and their friends see them and think, ‘That place looks like fun!’ And when they come, they buy tickets to the park, and food, and merchandise inside.
That’s
when we’ll make our profit. Keep the price at 25 cents; I want as many souvenir books as you can sell in homes across the country—around the world.”

Marc Davis, one of the Disney greats in animation since the 1930s, had a similar experience when he moved from the Studio to Imagineering in the early 1960s. Although he had made dozens of presentations to Walt in the course of creating some of the best known characters in Disney animation—from Tinker Bell in
Peter Pan
to Cruella De Vil in
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
and Maleficent in
Sleeping Beauty
—Marc was still nervous when he pitched his first storyboard sketches for a Disney park show to Walt.

When Walt, deep in thought, did not respond immediately, Marc stepped into the void. “Walt, I’ve got another idea for this, and it’s a lot cheaper.” Now Walt responded quickly. Putting a hand on Marc’s shoulder, he set the tone for how Imagineers were to create for the Disney parks. “Marc,” Walt said, “I have a whole floor of finance people and accountants upstairs who are going to tell me what the cheapest way to do something is. What I pay you for is
to tell me the best way!
”

I experienced an embarrassing situation when I was twenty-five or twenty-six. My lesson became a cardinal rule I shared with Imagineering’s creative staff for the next half-century. In a meeting, Walt asked an informational question, and I gave him the answer. Unfortunately, when I got back to my office, I discovered my information was incorrect. Then I made the
real
mistake—instead of calling or sending a note to Walt to correct the error, I did nothing.

About a year later, a similar subject came up in a meeting, and this time I had the right answer. I enthusiastically offered my information. Walt’s look of disdain would have withered the Wicked Witch of the West. “The last time we discussed this, you said…”

I didn’t need Walt’s autograph on a memo to explain this “youthful mistake” to me. Here’s the rule: no one is expected to have all the answers. If you are asked a question, and do not know the answer, just say, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.” And when you do, never fail to pass along the correct information. You can never tell who the elephant in the room may be—because elephants just don’t forget.

* * * * * * * * * *

The Disney company aircraft—an early Grumman Gulfstream purchased in 1963—was a favorite of Walt and Mrs. Disney’s. When it was finally retired to permanent display on the back lot at Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Florida in 1992, it had established both longevity and mileage records for corporate service: twenty-nine years and 12,300 hours in the air as it logged 4.3 million miles!