The Animated Man (53 page)

Otherwise,
Disneyland
relied heavily on films from the studio's past, both animated and live action, including some features that had not done particularly well in theaters
(So Dear to My Heart, Alice in Wonderland)
. The Disneys had always brushed aside suggestions that they might sell their older films for television showings—TV simply couldn't pay enough, Roy Disney said—and now their wisdom had been validated; they could show their films on TV without giving up ownership in any way. “When it came to television,” Walt Disney said in 1956, “the one thing I wanted was to control my product. I didn't want anybody else to have it. I wanted to be able to control the format and what I did with it. Now I had complete control. There is nobody . . . that can tell me yes or no.”

The timing for a show like
Disneyland
was uncannily good. The eldest children of the “baby boom” were only eight years old, but the young parents of 1954 had once been the children who in the midst of a long Depression delighted in the Disney shorts and
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
and all the merchandise and comic strips and books associated with them. Hence there was a double layer of affection and interest. Moreover, it was only in 1954 that television was becoming truly ubiquitous in the United States; a federal freeze on new licenses had left some parts of the country without any
stations until 1952. Since there were only four networks (although DuMont was fading fast), and thus a limited choice of programs at any one time, there was a great opportunity for a successful program to reach a huge audience.

Disneyland
did exactly that. In its first season, despite ABC's weak lineup of affiliates and against popular programs on CBS and NBC, it finished sixth overall in the Nielsen ratings, watched by 39.1 percent of all the households that owned a television set. Only one other ABC program finished in the top thirty.

Disney could not have been wholly surprised by such strong results, but he was certainly surprised by the public's response to the first
Frontierland
episode in
Disneyland
's 1954–55 season. On December 15, 1954,
Disneyland
aired “Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter.” It was the first of three
Frontierland
installments about the legendary frontiersman.

Disney had been considering a film of some kind about Davy Crockett for almost a decade. A 1947 story inventory report listed a “roughout”—a rough outline for a Crockett-themed musical production—by the Missouri artist Thomas Hart Benton, who worked briefly at the Disney studio in 1946.
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In the immediate postwar years, other celebrated writers and artists, like Salvador Dali and Aldous Huxley, also worked for Disney briefly. The reasons for their hiring varied from case to case—Disney hoped to incorporate an attention-getting Dali-designed segment, “Destino,” into one of his package features, and Huxley, as an eminent English writer, was hired to work on that English classic
Alice in Wonderland
—but nothing came of any of those associations. In the spring of 1948, fresh from
Melody Time
with its folktale heroes Johnny Appleseed and Pecos Bill, Disney was speaking to the columnist Hedda Hopper about making a film of some kind based on Davy Crockett's life, but that idea too fell into abeyance, until the TV show revived it.
⁴⁸

Fess Parker, who was then thirty years old, was chosen by Walt Disney himself to play Crockett, under circumstances that the matte artist Peter Ellenshaw described: “I happened to be in the sweat box waiting for dailies, when Walt came in with a talent scout, he was looking for an actor to play the role of Davy. They screened some short scene from a film called
Them!
, with an actor in it by the name of Jim Arness. He was the man Walt was supposed to be considering, but when Walt asked who the actor was playing a small role in the scene, the talent scout didn't know, had to put in a phone call to find his name was Fess Parker!”
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Public enthusiasm for the Crockett shows was remarkably strong. The theme song by George Bruns and Tom Blackburn—simple but unforgettable—sat atop the hit parade for months. Huge crowds greeted Parker on
a twenty-two-city publicity tour in the spring of 1955, and sales of coonskin caps and hundreds of other Crockett-labeled items rose into the many millions of dollars. It was a Texas exhibitor, Disney said, who suggested the highly unusual step of combining the three Crockett television shows into a feature film.
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Released in color in the summer of 1955,
Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier
grossed $2.5 million on the tickets of customers who had mostly seen the shows before, but only in black and white.

Disney spent more on the Crockett shows than other TV producers did on comparable fare, not just by shooting in color but also by shooting on location in North Carolina and Tennessee. There is, however, no confusing those shows with more polished Hollywood theatrical products. The climactic battle at the Alamo, in the third episode, was all too obviously shot on a confined sound stage. Writing about the Crockett craze more than thirty years later, the newspaper columnist Bob Greene was undoubtedly correct when he pointed to Fess Parker himself as the critical element in the TV shows' success: “In his portrayal of Crockett, Parker brought to the small screen a presence that was palpable; people looked at him, and they listened to him, and they tingled. The face and the voice combined to represent everything that was ideally male in the United States.”
⁵¹

Although he leaped to celebrity in a TV show, Parker's impact was that of a bona fide movie star. He was tall (six foot five) and handsome, but so were many other young leading men in the 1950s. Parker brought to the screen two priceless assets in addition to his good looks. For one thing, he was relaxed in front of the camera as few actors are, especially in TV, where the demands for speed and efficiency have always encouraged actors to be tight and guarded. For another, he could deliver dialogue with complete conviction, as in his stirring speech to Congress attacking President Andrew Jackson's treatment of the Indians in the second Crockett episode. Parker seemed emotionally open, as good actors must, but the emotions were those of a strong and even stoic man—one with a sly sense of humor, suited to “grinnin' down a bear.”

Disney had gone into television expecting to manipulate it to his own ends, by promoting his park and his theatrical films, but television had demonstrated through the Crockett craze how unpredictable it really was; and it had bestowed on him a full-fledged star whom he had signed to a personal contract, rather than a contract with the studio, and whose career was in his hands. “We've had lots of offers from other studios wanting to borrow Fess Parker,” Disney said in May 1955, “but we've got four Davy Crockett pictures to make, and they'll have to wait until next winter for Fess.” The idea initially
was to film four more Crockett episodes for
Disneyland
. The first two of the second batch were filmed on location, in Ohio and along the Mississippi River, starting in June 1955.
⁵²

In mid-July, Disney pulled Parker and his costar, Buddy Ebsen, away from location shooting and back to Los Angeles to sing at the Hollywood Bowl on a Thursday and Friday evening, July 14 and 15. Each evening's “Tribute to Walt Disney,” made up of music associated with Disney films, concluded with “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” sung by Parker, Ebsen, and the Roger Wagner Chorale.
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The occasion was the official opening of the Disneyland park the following Sunday, July 17, an event that would be nationally televised by ABC.

The park would not be completed on its opening day—and not just because Disney frequently emphasized that he considered it a work perpetually in progress, in language like this: “The park means a lot to me, in that it's something that will never be finished, something that I can keep developing, keep plussing and adding to.” Disneyland was not finished in any sense, and not really ready for guests, but they were coming anyway. The construction schedule had proved to be difficult and finally impossible to meet.

Certain stories turn up in almost every account of Disneyland's construction, and sometimes they tell more than might first appear. Randy Bright wrote that Disney “found it very difficult to understand the necessity for certain costly building materials and methods. As a longtime filmmaker, Walt had imagined that Disneyland would be built more like a motion-picture set, on a temporary basis. He had to be introduced to the real world of occupancy regulations and building codes. One day, on a walk-through of the construction site with [Joe] Fowler [a retired navy admiral who supervised construction] and Dick Irvine, Disney became furious when he saw the amount of concrete that was being poured for the Main Street train station foundation. ‘By the time Joe gets through burying all our money underground,' he snapped, ‘we won't have a thing left for the show!' ”
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Disney was similarly incensed by the excavation for a dry dock for the
Mark Twain
, a scaled-back stern-wheeler: “Joe Fowler viewed the hole, a dry dock-to-be for the Mark Twain during its important maintenance overhauls, as an operational necessity. To Walt Disney, it looked more like the excavation for King Tut's tomb. ‘By the time you get through with that damn ditch, we won't have any land left!' exclaimed Disney. For a long time thereafter, he called it ‘Joe's Ditch' and gave him, perhaps, one final sarcastic jab by officially dubbing it ‘Fowler's Harbor.' ”
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The extremely tight schedule virtually guaranteed that there would be cost overruns and that the park would not be ready on its opening day—both of which happened—but Disney, anticipating the construction of what he thought would be something like a huge movie set, may not have realized just how tight the schedule really was, or how ominous the threat of cost overruns. (For one thing, the schedule was an invitation to labor problems, which arrived in the form of a plumbers' strike shortly before the park opened.)

As it happened, the estimated cost of building the park roughly quadrupled in the year construction was under way, as Joe Fowler explained to Bright: “At ground-breaking, I had a budget of four and a half million dollars. That was before we had any plans at all. Two months later, in September, it went up to seven million dollars. In November, it was up to eleven million. We were still talking eleven million dollars in April [1955] when I was walking down Main Street with Roy and a representative from Bank of America who scanned the project and said it looked closer to fifteen million. But by the time opening day had arrived, we had spent seventeen million dollars.”
⁵⁶

Ultimately, as money ran short, the financing for Disneyland was completed by what
Business Week
called “a special plan for concessionaires. The 32 of them paid the first and last year rent on a five-year lease. Then, with both ends anchored, the Disneys hocked the middle three-year lease expectations at the bank.”
⁵⁷

Disney visited the construction site most often on Saturdays. Harper Goff told
The “E” Ticket
that “Walt would seem discouraged at the beginning because nothing seemed to be happening. I guess he thought he could just ‘sneeze twice' and there would be work completed each time he went down there. They were just moving dirt . . . they weren't building anything that you could see. . . . He'd say, ‘Will they ever get this so it looks something other than just a hole in the ground?' And a week later he'd say, ‘I'd better go down there and see if I can stir them up a little bit,' and then, ‘Not one goddamn thing's changed . . . are they working?' So I'd take him over and show him the concrete forms which were in place for the waterfall, and then we'd walk around and do ‘questions and answers' on all the work going on.”
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Sometimes Disney did get the quick results he wanted. “All through the construction phases,” the landscape architect Morgan “Bill” Evans said, “Walt would be out there every weekend, and we would take a kind of ritual hike on Saturday. . . . Once in a while we'd be walking along with Joe Fowler and Dick Irvine and Walt, with all the troops strung along behind us, and Walt would turn to Joe Fowler and say, ‘Joe, that tree looks a little close to the
walkway, doesn't it?' And then he'd turn around and he'd say, ‘How about moving that tree, Bill . . . ?' And this was maybe a fifteen-ton tree.” But Evans would move it.
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Appropriately, it was the trains that were completed most quickly and easily. “We had a train running around Disneyland on the Fourth of July before the park opened,” Roger Broggie said, “and had it well finished before that. . . . We never could close in the whole track because they took a section out to run big equipment through, because the park was under construction, up until midnight before they opened. But we had a running head start on the trains.”
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On the Fourth of July, at a small party for the members of the Penthouse Club, the studio's elite, Disney had his first opportunity to operate the park's two steam locomotives. It was, Ward Kimball told Leon Janzen, “a big day for Walt. . . . To the eighty or ninety people that were there that day, the park was basically a big empty place, with a lot of work going on. . . . But to Walt, the locomotives were under steam! . . . To him the Mark Twain and the Disneyland trains were like the seventh and eighth wonders of the world.”
⁶¹

In the feverish last days before the park opened, Walt and Lillian marked their thirtieth wedding anniversary with a private party at Frontierland's Golden Horseshoe Saloon on Wednesday, July 13. The celebratory Thursday and Friday nights at the Hollywood Bowl followed. Meanwhile, work continued furiously, at the studio and the park, to tie up as many loose ends as possible. Disney, who had been giddy with happiness at the anniversary party, and who appears to be in a similar state in photos from the Hollywood Bowl, was by the Saturday night before the opening immersed in the park's unfinished details. Work continued through the night.