The Animated Man (64 page)

“Plans called for a facility that would handle a wintertime daily throng of 20,000 skiers in six great areas,” Price wrote many years later. In the summer, the Disney development at Mineral King would gear up “to handle a demand comparable to Yosemite.”
¹³

Disney himself was quoted in the brochure in terms that echoed what he had often said about Disneyland: “When we go into a new project, we believe in it all the way. That's the way we feel about Mineral King. We have every faith that our plans will provide recreational opportunities for everyone. All of us promise that our efforts now and in the future will be dedicated to making Mineral King grow to meet the ever-increasing public need. I guess you might say that it won't ever be finished.”
¹⁴

As he approached a normal retirement age, Disney was pushing himself perhaps harder than ever before. “He worked seven days a week, he established a pace that he could never get rid of,” his son-in-law Ronald Miller Jr. told Richard Hubler. Disney read scripts on Saturday and Sunday, whether he was at the Holmby Hills house or at his weekend home in Palm Springs (he built a second home at Smoke Tree Ranch in 1957 to replace the one he had sold to finance Disneyland). “He would get up in the morning and start reading,” Miller said, taking a break only for the lawn bowling that had become a late-life passion. After bowling on the green—there was one both at Smoke Tree and in Roxbury Park, near his home in Holmby Hills—he returned to reading scripts. “Seven days a week,” Miller said. “If he wasn't working here, he worked there.”
¹⁵

There are hints in some memories that Disney's marriage had come under strain by the 1960s. It had certainly changed, as marriages do after thirty or forty years. Lillian Disney had lost interest in her husband's business years before, her energies absorbed by redecorating her home and scouting for antiques. Marc Davis, who had become increasingly important to Disney as an animator and then as a designer for Disneyland, said in 1968: “I have met Mrs. Disney maybe 25–30 times and, finally, I reached the point where I permitted myself always to be reintroduced.”
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By the middle 1950s, when Disney was starting to accumulate a new batch of Oscars, Lillian had stopped going to the ceremonies with him, troubled by the “commotion” surrounding them.
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“I come home at night and eat in the front of the TV set,” Disney said around the time he turned sixty-one, in December 1962. “It's either that or eat alone, my wife says.”
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By then, Lillian had long since stopped cooking
for her husband. She had learned to be a very good cook, she said, but “I never did like it,”
¹⁹
and so the Disneys' meals were cooked for them by Thelma Howard, their housekeeper and cook after they moved to Holmby Hills. Walt Disney was, in his family's description, a fussy eater who always preferred “hash house” food—a typical middle-aged husband of the time, in other words. As his daughter Diane said, “You can generally satisfy him with something out of a can.”
²⁰

By the mid-1960s, Disney was working exceptionally long hours and on at least one occasion he spent several nights in his office suite at the studio after quarreling with Lillian.
²¹
Disney was in his sixties, his health was failing, and he was working very hard at a time in his life when many others, sensing their mortality, might scale back professional concerns and spend more time with family members. Little wonder that Walt and Lillian might sometimes have words.

(Diane, who married Ron Miller on May 9, 1954, had six children by 1966; Sharon, who married Robert Brown on May 10, 1959, had one. Disney had successfully urged both new husbands to go to work for him—Miller in live-action film production, Brown at WED—within a few years of their marriages.)

Disney also quarreled heatedly with the other person closest to him, his brother Roy. The cause was Walt's continued ownership of WED Enterprises, the company he had set up in 1952 to design Disneyland and its attractions. In the early 1960s, after Disneyland itself became a wholly owned subsidiary of Walt Disney Productions, WED remained Walt Disney's personal corporation. Roy Disney had always seen legal perils in this arrangement, smacking as it did of self-dealing and conflicts of interest, and WED's prominent role in designing the Disney attractions at the 1964–65 world's fair may have brought his fears to a head. It was only after months of turmoil and argument and pained silences, ending late in 1964, that Walt Disney finally agreed to sell most of WED.
²²
The purchase agreement, dated November 20, 1964, and approved by the company's shareholders the following February, provided for a payment of $3.75 million for WED's rights in the world's fair exhibits and other assets. WED's design, architectural, and engineering staff, about a hundred employees in all, became employees of Walt Disney Productions.
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Walt Disney was possessive about his private company, the source of most of his pleasure in his business for the previous ten years. Marvin Davis remembered the time—this would have been in the mid-1960s, most likely when the brothers were still at odds—when Roy Disney asked him and another WED executive, Dick Irvine, to

have lunch with him at the studio. Dick and I didn't know what the heck was going on, but we couldn't turn down an invitation to have lunch with Roy Disney. On that day, Walt was sitting at this table over in the corner of the commissary. So we're there having a nice lunch, and Roy asked us about something down at Disney World . . . I've forgotten exactly what it was. When we finished eating, Dick and I were going to go back to WED. We got in my car, drove back to Glendale, and parked right by the door to my office. I went to unlock the door, and was just putting the key in the lock, when somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and . . . God . . . Walt was standing right behind me. And I had just left him back at the studio having lunch. He must have gotten right up and followed us. He came in and sat down and asked, “What did Roy want? What was he talking about?” And I said, “Geez, Walt, he just asked us to lunch.” And Walt said, “Well, I just wondered what's going on.” It just shows how intense he was about everything, especially his brother, who he didn't want to get ahead of him on anything.
²⁴

After the sale of most of WED to Walt Disney Productions was completed in 1965, what was left continued under a new name, Retlaw (Walter spelled backwards).
²⁵
Retlaw kept ownership of the Disneyland trains and monorail.

Disney traveled extensively in 1966. He began trying to sell his city of the future—what he called EPCOT, for “experimental prototype community of tomorrow”—to American industry, starting with a presentation to Westinghouse in January.
²⁶
On what Bob Gurr remembered as “a turbulent, low-level flight” to Pittsburgh, Disney spread out brown-line drawings of the center of EPCOT on a conference table that unfolded in the middle of a company plane.
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Even more than when he sought corporate sponsors for Disneyland attractions—and in sharp contrast to his recoil from such sponsors' interference after the war—Disney was now courting industry and seeking its involvement in his new project.

He knew that his name alone could open doors. His awards had piled up steadily; he was, as Peter Bart wrote in the
New York Times
, a man “revered and honored almost to the point of absurdity.”
²⁸
In September 1964, he received the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor a president can bestow, from President Lyndon Johnson, sharing the moment with former secretary of state Dean Acheson, the composer Aaron Copland, Helen Keller, and two dozen other familiar names. After the world's fair, he hired a chief aide of Robert Moses, retired General William E. “Joe” Potter, to help find sponsors for EPCOT. “When I first started out,” Potter told an interviewer
a few years after Disney's death, “I said, Walt, how am I going to get in? And he said—Tell them I sent you! And I wrote to all these industries saying what we were going to do, and I would like to come and talk to them . . . and I never got turned down once.”
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Disney's celebrity by the early 1960s was such that it colored his dealings with the heads of corporations much larger than Walt Disney Productions. Said Bob Gurr: “When Don Burnham, the [president and chief executive officer] of Westinghouse, got close to Walt, his bottom lip would start quivering and it was hard for him to speak. When some people got too close to Walt, they got spooked because they idolized Walt Disney. Walt was aware of this and he would deliberately dress down by undoing a button or slopping up his tie so it was askew. He tried to send a signal, ‘I'm okay.' . . . He knew he scared the daylights out of people and didn't want to let that get in the way of being able to work with him. Otherwise all he'd have is a bunch of people agreeing with him and their expertise wouldn't show.”
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For the most part, Disney used a company plane not to sell his ideas to industry but for visits to shopping centers, hotels, and schools while he trawled for ideas he could put to use at EPCOT and CalArts. As Disney's ideas for EPCOT took shape, he determined that the hub-and-spoke plan he had adopted for Disneyland would be the central element of EPCOT, too. As Disneyland's planner Marvin Davis said, Disney “wanted to solve everything with the radial idea.”
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He turned for ideas to two books on city planning, both then recently published. Victor Gruen's
The Heart of Our Cities
(1964) was a persuasive diagnosis of city ills, which Gruen traced to a never-ending, ultimately futile catering to the automobile. Gruen's own career was a bundle of contradictions, however. This severe critic of an auto-centered society was also the foremost designer of enclosed suburban malls, those magnets for auto traffic, and his solutions for inner-city ills amounted to little more than transplanting suburban features—including enclosed malls—to downtowns. For some cities he proposed a ring road around downtown that was inevitably reminiscent of Gruen's native Vienna and its Ringstrasse (although in Gruen's new version the road was more an expressway than a broad avenue).
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Gruen was also an advocate of “the radial idea,” and he admired Ebenezer Howard, whose 1902 book
Garden Cities of To-morrow
, reissued in 1965, was the earliest and most forceful statement of that idea. Howard's book was probably the strongest single influence on Walt Disney's thinking. Howard, an Englishman, was a city planner who did not care for cities—he called them “ulcers on the very face of our beautiful island”
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—and there was a similar
strain in Disney's thinking. Although he spent months at a time in New York in the late 1920s, he never warmed to that city, referring to it in his letters as “this
DAMN TOWN
,”
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grumbling about having to walk so much, complaining about the weather and how bored he was, and wishing aloud that he was back home in Los Angeles. He mentioned in one 1928 letter seeing a Broadway show,
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, but he seems never to have made much effort to enjoy what was then America's most dynamic and exciting city. Europe was another matter—Disney liked London a lot more than Howard did—but his plans for EPCOT owed little or nothing to European models.

Planning for Disney World, and for EPCOT in particular, took place in a “war room” at WED Enterprises' offices in Glendale. On October 27, 1966, when Disney went before the cameras for segments of a twenty-four-minute film promoting EPCOT, it was not in the actual war room, with what Anthony Haden-Guest called its “urgent display of maps, blueprints, aerial photographs and projection screens,” but in a re-creation of that room on a studio sound stage.
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Disney rehearsed his pitch for EPCOT before select groups of friends—the actor Walter Pidgeon, the television personality Art Link-letter, Welton Becket and his two young sons.
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The film was completed in two slightly different versions, one aimed at the Florida legislature and the other at the large corporations Disney hoped would sponsor much of EPCOT. The film, known as
Walt Disney's EPCOT '66
, was to be the most important tool in Disney's effort to recruit corporate sponsors. It is the fullest expression of Disney's vision—for once the word, applied so often to Disney's ideas, is appropriate—for his utopian city.

In the film, a narrator describes EPCOT's “dynamic urban center,” home to a “cosmopolitan hotel and convention center towering thirty or more stories,” as well as “shopping areas where stores and whole streets re-create the character and adventure of places 'round the world,” restaurants, theaters, and, of course, “office buildings . . . most of them designed especially to suit local and regional needs of major corporations.”
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Most remarkably, “this entire fifty acres of city streets and buildings will be completely enclosed,” the narration continues. “In this climate-controlled environment, shoppers, theatergoers, and people just out for a stroll will enjoy ideal weather conditions, protected day and night from rain, heat and cold, and humidity.”

This plan was an extreme expression of the idea advocated most eloquently in Gruen's book, that the cure for the ills of city centers was to increase their resemblance to suburban malls. (Enclosed shopping malls were still a recent phenomenon in 1966—the first one, Southdale, designed by Gruen, had opened outside Minneapolis in October 1956, a little over a year after Disneyland's
opening and exactly ten years before Disney's EPCOT filming.) Raising such a huge dome would have been technologically difficult, if not impossible, and wildly expensive.