Dreamers and Deceivers (33 page)

Roy Disney knew television executives well enough to realize that flying to New York merely to talk to them about grandiose plans for some amusement park would not go well. He was meeting with investors on Monday, and he needed something tangible to put in front of them that they could get excited about.

The only problem was that he had nothing.

•  •  •

Herb Ryman had hurried to the studio as soon as he’d hung up on the phone call from his old friend and colleague Dick Irvine.

Walt greeted him at the studio gate, a wide smile on his face. “Herbie, we’re going to build an amusement park.”

“That’s interesting,” Ryman said. “Where are you going to build it?”

“Well, we were going to do it across the street, but now it’s gotten too big. We’re going to look for a place.”

“What are you going to call it?”

“Disneyland.”

“That’s as good as anything.”

“Look, Herbie, my brother Roy is going to New York Monday to line up financing for the park. I’ve got to give him plans of what we’re going to do. Those businessmen don’t listen to talk, you know; you’ve got to show them what you’re going to do.”

“Well, where is the drawing? I’d like to see it.”

“You’re going to make it.”

“No, I’m not,” Herbie replied. “This is the first I ever heard about this. You’d better forget it. It’ll embarrass both you and me. I’m not going to make a fool of either one of us.”

“Herbie, this is my dream. I’ve wanted this for years and I need your help,” Walt pleaded. “You’re the only one who can do it. I’ll stay here with you and we’ll do it together.”

And that’s exactly what they did. For the next forty-two hours, Ryman worked side by side with Walt to bring his vision to life on paper. In the end, the drawings amounted to a large triangle with a castle at one end and a Main Street that would funnel in visitors at the other. Various segments of the park were described in some detail: True-Life Adventureland had a botanical garden; Fantasyland featured Disney characters like Snow White, Peter Pan, and Alice in Wonderland; the World of Tomorrow included an industrial exhibit, a monorail, and a moving sidewalk. There were even tracks for a small railroad.

On another page was a note outlining in writing for the first time what Walt had been dreaming about for years:

Sometime in 1955 Walt Disney will present for the people of the world—and children of all ages—a new experience in entertainment. Disneyland will be something of a fair, an exhibition, playground, a community center, a museum of living facts, and a showplace of beauty and magic. It will be filled with accomplishments, the joys and hopes of the world we live in. And it will remind us and show us how to make those wonders part of our own lives.

Walt sent the drawings to Roy and sat by the phone, eager for his brother’s reaction. When it finally came, it was quintessential Roy.

“I guess these will have to do.”

New York City

September 28, 1953

“Looks like we may have a deal.”

Roy was excited, but he tried to keep his voice on the telephone measured so that Walt’s mind didn’t start racing before he could even finish with the update.

Roy explained that CBS had flatly said no. Its executives wanted to see a pilot of Walt’s proposed television program first. “We don’t do samples at Disney,” Roy had told them—and that was that.

NBC was interested in both the show and the amusement park, but Roy couldn’t finalize a deal with them. The legendary and influential General David Sarnoff, leader of NBC’s owner, RCA, was enthusiastic. But the executives and lawyers beneath Sarnoff proved to be frustrating, bureaucratic, and time-consuming.

ABC was a long shot. They were far behind the other two in the ratings—the network didn’t have a single show on the air that rated among the top twenty-five. In the end, that worked to Roy’s advantage. Unlike the others, ABC was willing to do whatever it took to get Disney on board. They understood the power of the Disney name and they desperately needed something that would make an impression with the audience.

After long discussions with network executives, Roy managed to get ABC to agree to a deal in principle: Disney would provide a one-hour weekly TV series to them in exchange for $500,000 paid directly to the park, and loan guarantees of up to $4.5 million to finance the rest.

“They bought an amusement park,” Roy said, shaking his head in disbelief, “so they could get a TV show.”

Despite Roy’s attempts to relay the deal matter-of-factly, Walt was exuberant on the other end of the phone. Roy was excited as well, but, unlike his brother, he couldn’t stop worrying about one small wrinkle in their plan: He and Walt had absolutely no idea what the TV show was going to be about.

Burbank, California

October 28, 1954

Reviews from the previous evening’s debut episode on ABC flooded in. Walt Disney’s secretary sifted through various newspapers, telegrams, and phone messages.

From his desk, Walt could see that his show had exceeded everyone’s expectations—ABC’s, the Disney company’s, Roy’s, their sponsor’s, heck, even his own. The overnight ratings were astonishing: The program had beat every show on television, except for
I Love Lucy
—and they’d even given that a run for its money.

Ratings aside, the show itself was a huge win for Walt.
The Disneyland Show
was basically an hour-long, ABC-funded commercial for Walt’s theme park idea. He introduced viewers to the park’s concept, talked about its various areas and attractions, and mixed in some cartoons.

Walt was reenergized by the news. He already had more ideas for the show—a live-action story about Davy Crockett, and plenty of new cartoons—but far more important in his mind was that money for the park was no longer a concern.

Walt’s next task was to prove the skeptics wrong; skeptics he knew still included his big brother.

Burbank, California

March 10, 1955

Roy sighed. He had heard all of this before. Many times before. As polite as people were as they spoke, they were making it clear that Walt was being a pain in the ass.

Roy had sympathy for the complainers, but he rarely let it show. No one criticized his brother too strongly in his presence, despite how much justification they might have had. “My brother made me a millionaire,” he would tell people when they expressed their frustrations with Walt. “And you wonder why I want to do everything I can to help him?”

Whenever he needed to find his brother, Roy would invariably have to seek him out in Anaheim, the site of the park, where he was busy driving everyone crazy in person. In his straw hat and ugly shirts, he would eat hot dogs with construction workers while micromanaging their every move: There had to be
stained
glass, not cut glass; they had to move a tree six feet because it was too close to the entrance of Adventureland; and Walt had even insisted on a Disney University of sorts to train all workers so that there was consistency no matter where visitors ventured. “The thing that’s going to make Disneyland unique and different is the detail,” he insisted to everyone who’d listen. “If we lose the detail, we lose it all.”

Walt was also driving the park’s designers crazy with his endless demands. The other night one of them had called Roy to complain that Walt had taken plans for an amusement park ride and redrawn it overnight to reflect “the way it should have been.” When someone later explained that they needed to build a water tower on the site, Walt had almost thrown him out of the office. He told them that nothing so ugly and obstructive would ever be permitted at his park. Walt was even feuding with Orange County building inspectors who didn’t know how to apply city ordinances and codes to something like Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

Now, Roy had just learned, the TV show itself was also blowing past its budget—a budget they had all,
including Walt,
agreed to with ABC. Walt wasn’t one to let his imagination be limited by a lack of funds,
so he spent whatever he felt was necessary to make the show look right.

Last night’s offering on ABC was another tribute to Walt’s exactness and talent for excess—and it was yet another headache for Roy to manage. The program had included an expensive original film called
Man in Space,
in which Walt had somehow convinced the most famous scientists of the day to narrate their vision for the world of tomorrow. Even the former Nazi Wernher von Braun took part in it.

The show was putting forward all sorts of fanciful notions of the future: rockets lifting off into outer space; men living on board spacecraft; even satellites orbiting the earth. Another show, slated to air later that year, predicted a manned mission to the moon in the near future.

In the end, though, Roy couldn’t be too upset with his brother. For all his fussing and complaining, Walt was happier than he’d ever been. Besides, the numbers didn’t lie: 40 million people—
40 million!
—had watched
Man in Space
the previous night. The program was winning raves from critics. It was capturing everyone’s imagination. Well, almost everyone’s—Walt’s wife, Lillian, was so bored by the programs that she refused to watch with him.

Four Years Later

Disneyland

Anaheim, California

June 14, 1959

Once again, Roy stood in awe of his brother. Disneyland was a smashing success, surpassing even the most optimistic projections. Five million guests were expected through the gates this year alone! Cash was flooding into the company at a rate that no one could have predicted. The Disney company’s sales and net profits had risen faster than almost any company in America. The stock price was seven times what it had been before the park had opened.

Roy watched with pride as his brother debuted the park’s new, clean, and practically noiseless monorail system. Walt boasted that it was the first such service in the entire Western Hemisphere.

He also watched uneasily as reporters pressed Walt about his plans for another park. “Oh, no,” Walt said. “There will only be one Disneyland.”

But Roy knew his brother far better than any reporter did. There was something about the way he answered that suggested he might have something even bigger in mind.

He always did.

Burbank, California

December 1, 1961

Death terrified Walt Disney. He avoided funerals at all costs and thought constantly about how time was slipping away from him.

To cheer him up on his sixtieth birthday, Hazel George, the studio’s nurse, gave him a picture of herself when she had started at Disney after finishing nursing school in 1929. The photo’s message was meant to be obvious, and Walt took the hint immediately:
We are all getting older. It’s part of life. So suck it up
.

“You know, Hazel,” Walt said, “after I die, I would hate to look down at this studio and find everything a mess.”

Hazel had been attending to Walt’s various ailments, including a wrenched neck after a polo accident, for years. She was also an amateur songwriter, and Walt had let her write songs for the Mickey Mouse Club and for movies like
Old Yeller
under the pseudonym “George Gil.”

With her tart tongue and clever wit, Hazel was also one of the few people able to get away with teasing the temperamental Disney founder. “When you die,” she replied with a smile, “what makes you think you won’t be using a periscope?”

Walt smirked. “Smartass.”

Jacksonville, Florida

February 12, 1964

The seventy-three-year-old man with the distinctive face and a bearing of self-assurance walked into the hotel after arriving from the airport. At the reception desk, he gave his name for the registry. It was not his real one.

From the safety of his room, Roy Disney made a long-distance call to California. “There are some large parcels of land available,” he said.

On the other end of the line was his brother, waiting impatiently back in Burbank for news. Roy had decided that Walt was too recognizable to join the other Disney executives, who were currently fanning out all over Florida looking at land records and conducting discreet surveys. If anyone found out that the Disney company was trying to buy up large swaths of property, the prices would instantly skyrocket.

Within Disney itself, the initiative was code-named “Project X” and “Project Future.” It was so secret that the non-Disney employees in Florida involved with the real estate transactions didn’t even know their true mission or who they were really working for.

“Okay,” Walt replied. “Let’s go after some land.”

Burbank, California

May 20, 1964

Walt listened closely as a member of Project X’s clandestine team made his presentation.

Using the name “Bob Price” to avoid any ties to the Disney company, Bob Foster had linked up with a Florida lawyer to help him purchase several large parcels of land “for recreational purposes.”

Foster stood beside a large map of the state, outlining possible areas for purchase in the vicinity of Daytona Beach. Walt and his team had spent years paying for surveys of land in different areas of the country for an East Coast version of Disneyland. St. Louis had been rejected. So too had the Washington, D.C.–Baltimore corridor. Only Florida had weather conditions that would allow the park to stay open all year.

But the Daytona Beach area gave Walt serious pause. He peppered his man with questions: Didn’t that part of the state get too cold in winter? Would tropical vegetation survive? How close was Daytona to the typical hurricane routes? Wasn’t it better—and safer—to start from scratch someplace in the middle of the state?

“But inland Florida doesn’t have as much water,” Foster replied.

Walt scoffed. “Then I’ll build a lake.”

Everyone in the room realized then that Walt had already made up his mind. Forget Daytona. Walt Disney wanted another area that had already been surveyed: Orlando.

Florida Airport Tarmac

Near Orlando, Florida

September 9, 1964

Walt had insisted on going. He couldn’t
not
be there. Not for this. Even Roy couldn’t talk him out of it. Walt understood the consequences if he was seen, and he swore he’d stay out of sight.