Big Dreams (62 page)

By 1934, the Disney studio had almost two hundred employees. Walt had lost his carefree manner and was cracking the whip. If you were employed at Disney, you were likely to be underpaid and overworked. The studio even had a dress code, jackets and ties for men and a ban on trousers for women. Walt distrusted Jews and never hired a black technician. His fundamentalist background was beginning to assert itself in middle age.

Although Walt’s views and his behavior became increasingly conservative, he remained a bold and inventive gambler on the creative side. He was willing to invest a half-million dollars in his first full-color, animated feature,
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
, when nobody thought it would succeed. He even participated in the brainstorming sessions where the names of the seven dwarfs were dreamed up. Among the discarded ones were Shifty, Flabby, Awful, Crabby, Snoopy, Nifty, and Woeful.

Snow White
went over budget by $1 million, but it netted $8 million in 1938, the year of its wide release. Walt’s cartoon characters were invested with more emotion than ever before, and at the premiere in Los Angeles, Hollywood’s biggest stars wept openly when the princess was laid upon a stone slab in mock death.

Walt proceeded to do a string of similar pictures, and they had a penetrating impact on most children who were raised in the 1940s and the 1950s. The movies derived their power from the strong, unequivocal feelings that they unleashed. It was impossible
not
to cry when Bambi’s mother got trapped in a forest fire. A Disney film of the period was always urgent, primal, and mythic, about art and not packaging.

Yet for all his success, Walt was showing signs of another suicidal depression by 1947. He hit the Scotch whisky regularly and kept up his lifelong cigarette habit, two packs a day, that gave him a rousing smoker’s hack and undermined his health. He billed himself as a devoted family man, but he worked long hours at the studio and hated to see the weekend come. He owed a small fortune in loan payments to the Bank of America.

Almost every day, he ate lunch at his desk, usually mixing a can of Gebhardt’s chili with a can of Dennison’s chili to achieve the proper ratio of meat to beans. His beverage of choice was V-8 juice. He took a new interest in politics and cultivated right-wing causes, contributing heavily to the Republican war chest and socializing with the likes of John Wayne.

Walt had inherited his father’s restlessness, but in Walt’s case it manifested itself intellectually. He didn’t need to jump from one geographical place to the next, only from project to project. He despised being bored, and it annoyed him that he couldn’t keep tinkering with a movie once it was done. He wanted to make something organic that would grow and change and never die. He had a farmboy’s dream of the eternal.

Disneyland was the cure for Walt Disney’s midlife crisis. The inspiration for it came, he said, from the trips that he had made to
amusement parks with his daughters after their Sunday school classes. The parks were always filthy and unfriendly, and the parents in them were ill at ease. Mickey Mouse Park, as it was first called, would be nothing like that.

To accomplish his goal, Walt turned into a tireless student of amusement parks around the world. Tivoli Garden in Copenhagen was among his favorites because the grounds were immaculate. Cleanliness seemed to matter more to him than anything. From the start, against the prevailing wisdom, he had insisted on charging admission to keep out the riffraff.

“If I don’t,” he said once, “there can be drunks and people molesting people on the dark rides.”

Getting the project funded wasn’t easy. For some seed money, Walt borrowed against his life-insurance policy and then hit on a notion to market his park to a TV network. He sent Roy to New York with some hastily done architect’s drawings and a six-page letter elaborating his vision, and a deal was cut with ABC-TV. In exchange for doing a one-hour television series, Walt would receive a half-million dollars in cash and a guaranteed line of credit for another $4.5 million. ABC’s payoff was the series plus a 35 percent share of the park.

Walt commissioned Stanford Research Institute to scout for locations. Its researchers pinpointed a 160-acre orange grove in Anaheim that would be close to the center of southern California’s population when the Santa Ana Freeway was finished. The landscapers tagged a number of specimen orange trees to be saved as part of the park, but a color-blind bulldozer operator destroyed them by accident.

The most cunning stroke in the Disneyland saga was Walt’s intuitive grasp of the impact that TV was having on most Americans. For the first time, he could speak directly to his audience without any interference. On camera, Walt looked harmless, avuncular, and trustworthy. Most viewers
would
buy a used car from him and tended to believe anything that he said.

He used the first program in his series to run “Disneyland Story” in October of 1954, a documentary about the park’s construction that was essentially a commercial. He did the same thing on his second show, plugging a new movie,
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
. The pitch now seemed to be as important to him as the product.

As Disneyland got ready to open, Walt’s attention to detail and to scale grew obsessive, as did his fanatical cleanliness. He decreed that no chewing gum could be sold, because people stuck it under benches. Peanuts were also banned unless they’d been shelled. Costumed employees with brooms and dustpans would be constantly patrolling to sweep up debris. Life would not be allowed to spill over. It would be contained.

The grand opening of Disneyland was carried live on ABC in July of 1955. The hosts were three clean, white Republicans, Art Linkletter, Bob Cummings, and Ronald Reagan.

Walt Disney loved his amusement park and loved to tinker with it. Often he had breakfast at Aunt Jemima’s pancake house and dinner at Disneyland Hotel. He and Lilly spent nights in an apartment above the firehouse on Main Street. In the morning, he could sometimes be observed walking in his bathrobe to the Sunkist store for a glass of orange juice.

In his later years, Walt threw himself into a curious plan for a “city of the future” in Florida that would be even cleaner and more distant from reality than Disneyland—Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or Epcot. He did not live to see it built. His health went downhill through the 1960s, and he died of lung cancer on December 15, 1966.

D
ISNEYLAND ON A MORNING
in late August was abuzz with paying customers about to be transformed into “guests,” Walt’s quaint locution for those who passed through the portals of the number one tourist attraction in the state. For many guests, Disneyland would
be
California, its summation and its
raison d’être
.

The parking lot was filling rapidly at nine o’clock. There were rental cars from Canada, vans packed with hyperactive brats from the Deep South, and an old Bluebird bus loaded with Explorer Scouts from Chihuahua, Mexico. I found a spot on Pluto Street and looked enviously at the dads, uncles, and grandpops who held a child by the hand, wishing that somebody had opened a Rent-a-Kid shop for people like me.

It seemed obvious that an unaccompanied adult was not going to have a great time inside. He would not think that the park was the happiest place on earth. Disneyland might once have been fun for grown-ups, but it had devolved over the years into a cultural rite of passage. A child, especially a California child, could no doubt file a suit in court if his parents hadn’t taken him there by the time he was ten.

I pictured how the scene would play on the evening news, with some postliterate, yellow-haired TV reporter kneeling to get the scoop.

“We’re here with young Peter Piper of Gardena,” he’d say. “Pete, can you you tell us why you’re suing your mom and dad?”

“I’ve never been to Disneyland.”

“How old are you, Pete?”

“I’m eleven!”

Disneyland had only one entrance because Uncle Walt had wanted it that way, the better to control and manipulate his guests. You could walk to it easily, but almost everybody lined up to ride there in an open-air tram, surrendering their willpower at the earliest opportunity. Then, at the ticket booths, you got to spend another twenty minutes in line waiting to fork over your thirty dollars.

Waiting would prove to be the order of the day. In my notebook, I wrote, “Getting into the park is like being inducted into the army.” I had a feeling that everybody had been briefed but me. Those Hmongs from Fresno would shine here, I thought. They’d chew up Disneyland and spit it out for breakfast.

The young woman in the ticket booth was very polite, but that
was part of her job. Walt had been a stickler about demanding courtesy from his hirelings and had lectured them, sometimes scornfully, if they fell short. They were told to think of themselves as actors, not as wage slaves, and to believe that they had a role in a grand theatrical pageant.

Disney had laid down other rules to protect the sanctity of the park. Employees were forbidden to bring a car inside because it might destroy the illusion. Administration buildings were banned for the same reason. And for the same reason, nobody was allowed to take a photo of Disneyland when it was empty, without any guests to give it some life.

At last, I was moving through the entrance. Almost all the guests headed directly for the souvenir shops to buy some Disney memorabilia before they’d done anything worth remembering, but I was fixed in my tracks by the look of the park. It bore an uncanny resemblance to the interchangeable subdivisions of California, with familiar businesses spoking out from its hub—Coca-Cola, Carnation, Kodak, and Bank of America, among others.

When you glanced down the pathways and lanes off the hub, you caught glimpses of attractions that were intended to excite you. The tease was deliberate. Walt hoped to stir the juices of his guests and referred to the glimpses as “weenies,” after the hot dogs that animal trainers dangle on a stick.

The lines inside the park were worse than those outside. You could wait for an hour to get on a crack ride such as Splash Mountain—a ride that only lasted for a couple of minutes. In a way, the waiting expanded the scope of Disneyland and made it seem even grander and more insurmountable. If you could see everything on a single visit, you might feel cheated.

The waiting also fostered a weird sort of greediness. Once you’d decided not to squander an hour on Splash Mountain, you started grabbing at any old attraction so that your trip wouldn’t be a total waste. That was how I came to be in line for the ten o’clock showing of
Captain EO
, a 3-D movie in which I had not the slightest interest.

Waiting, ever more waiting. A battery of TV sets overhead bombarded us with commercials for Disney films and the Disney Channel. By the time we were seated in the theater, we were at the mercy of our environment, very nearly brainwashed and desperate for something,
anything
, to happen. The Disney planners were aware of that, of course, and they delivered in
Captain EO
the equivalent of a shot of crystal meth into the mainline.

The movie wasn’t about anything but sensations. It had no story that you’d relate to a friend, even if you were a child. The music was loud, and the visuals were smashing.
Captain EO
simply overpowered you. It bullied you into submission. The long lines had put us to sleep, and now we were locked into a room with an alarm clock that we couldn’t shut off. All around me, I could sense numbed nerves leaping into action, and strange hormones starting to flow.