The Animated Man (54 page)

Cash Shockey, who worked in the studio's machine shop on Disneyland attractions, wrote in 1968: “We had everything shipped for the grand opening except the cars for the railroad, which were to leave at 6
A.M.
Every car was finished except the observation car, which lacked murals on either side.” Around three in the morning, “Walt came by and said, ‘Cash, where are the murals for the observation car?' I told him the plans didn't call for any. In his quiet way he looked at me and said, ‘This car leaves at 6
A.M.
and they better be there at 6
A.M.
' I had never painted a mountain or a river, but I did then. When Walt saw the murals he just smiled and shook his head—he had his murals not good but fast.”
⁶²

When Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955, Main Street was finished and a half dozen Fantasyland rides were operating, but the other three “lands” offered only that many rides among them (a precise count being difficult because
so many attractions broke down in the course of the day). “From a purely landscape standpoint,” Bill Evans told
The “E” Ticket
, “I don't think that park was finished for about three years. We were striving to achieve an instant maturity—the appearance of full growth—within the constrictions of a meager budget. We had an acceptable maturity in the jungle, in Town Square and the hub, but . . . when you got out in Frontierland there was nothing but little tiny five-gallon trees.”
⁶³
Much of the park—this is visible in early photos and in the opening-day television show—was bare dirt and empty spaces.

Opening day was by general agreement a disaster, with the basic ingredients for trouble—blazing heat, water fountains that were not working, balky rides—magnified by the thousands of people who entered the park on counterfeit tickets. The TV show, rough-hewn like so much early live TV, gives only a hint of all the off-camera headaches.

Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen appeared on the show, in their roles as Davy Crockett and his companion George Russel. They were victims of one of the many opening-day mistakes, soaked by accidentally triggered sprinklers.
⁶⁴
Later, they joined Disney for a drink in his apartment above the firehouse, on the town square just off Main Street. “There wasn't any agenda,” Parker recalled for
The “E” Ticket
. “We were just sort of his ‘side men.' At that point he was wearing a sport shirt, and once in a while he'd put on his little hat and go out there. He would just stand and let people come up and speak to him. He really, truly was happy to see his hopes and beliefs succeeding right before his eyes. You know, we often see athletes when they've won an Olympics championship or some other tremendous athletic accomplishment . . . there's a way that people look when they've reached a certain goal. Walt was in that kind of elevated state on that day.”
⁶⁵

Disney was still the host who reveled in entertaining riders on the Carolwood Pacific, but now he was entertaining on a vastly larger scale. “I think if you really look at Walt Disney's life,” Michael Broggie said, “and what he took pleasure in . . . his miniatures, and what adults call ‘scale models,' the truth is, Walt was playing with his toys.”
⁶⁶
Now Disney—the newspaper carrier who had played surreptitiously on his classmates' porches—was the kid with the best toys, the most popular kid in the neighborhood.

What really set the Disney park apart, as with the Disney TV show, was the way it evoked more distinctive Disney achievements, the early animated features especially. Disney's park designers had paid close attention to those films as they made their plans. Other operators were already opening parks like Storyland in New Jersey, with attractions based on fairy tales and nursery
rhymes.
⁶⁷
But such imitators could not duplicate the Disney characters, which were not only visible in some of the rides but also roamed the park, embodied by costumed Disney employees wearing gargantuan cartoon heads.

Wherever possible, Disney linked an attraction to a film, especially an animated film, however flimsily, so that the Frontierland theater became Slue-Foot Sue's Golden Horseshoe, named after a character in the Pecos Bill segment of the 1948 package feature
Melody Time
. Such connections were easiest to make in Fantasyland. That “land,” the one that drew most heavily on Disney's films, was also the part of the park most nearly ready for visitors on opening day.

Fantasyland was dominated by “dark rides” with antecedents in the haunted houses and other attractions in older amusement parks that exploited the properties of “dark light.” Disneyland's dark rides, however, presumed to tell stories of a sort—they were made up of tableaux from various Disney films
(Snow White, Pinocchio
, the toad half of
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Peter Pan)
. Most of these potted stories made sense, though, only to people already familiar with the films; the rides were too brief for their tableaux to be experienced as stories independent of the films. At the very least, the stories being told in Fantasyland were impoverished compared with the rich narratives of the best Disney animated features. The rides resembled nothing so much as big-city department-store window displays that told a Christmas story, but with the difference that there was no opportunity for a Disneyland visitor to linger over any particular display. Where imagination was most apparent was not in the rides themselves, but in the ways Disney's people and their contractors made each ride system safe, workable, and appropriate to the attraction—so that the Peter Pan ride's passengers rode in sailing ships suspended from an overhead track, the passengers for Snow White's Adventures in mine cars, the passengers for Mr. Toad's Wild Ride in antique automobiles, and so on.

Even in Fantasyland, tight budgets meant that the rides had to squeeze into prefabricated buildings, rather than buildings designed to accommodate the rides. But it was in Tomorrowland—where there were no Disney characters to serve as window dressing—that Disney's haste and his financial strains were most evident. The sets from
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
were plugged into Tomorrowland just to fill an empty building.

Each of Disneyland's “lands” was “themed,” with every ride and store and restaurant keyed in some way to an overarching idea. Such environments had been around for a long time. The first real suburban shopping center, Country Club Plaza in Kansas City—a place that Disney surely visited after it was
built in 1922—was themed in its evocation of Spain (and was, besides, groundbreaking in the way that it catered to the automobile). The great movie palaces of the 1920s were routinely themed; examples have survived in cities as diverse as Atlanta and Santa Barbara. Many great hotels have always been themed. Especially when his studio was still on Hyperion Avenue, Disney dined often at the Tam O'Shanter Inn, a thoroughly themed mock-Scottish restaurant a mile and a half away on Los Feliz Boulevard. That Disneyland's theming had the impact of something new was thanks mainly to its thoroughness—that is, to Walt Disney's characteristic attention to detail. (For example, Disney did not want the costumed employees from one part of the park blundering into other areas and confusing the theme.)

It was in the town square and Main Street and the central hub, through which all visitors passed as they entered the park, that Disneyland was most distinctive. As the British essayist Aubrey Menen wrote in 1963, “All fairgrounds have a central avenue which is usually a blaring catchpenny road designed to make the visitor join in the fun or feel a boor if he doesn't.” At Disneyland there was no such midway: “Here all was tranquil and detached. The visitors were not belabored into enjoyment; on the contrary, it seemed as though they were forgotten. They appeared to have wandered, by chance or some spell, into the past.”
⁶⁸
It was, however, a peculiar past, much more serene and ordered than the real past ever was. In that respect, Main Street owed less to nostalgia—Marceline's Kansas Avenue never looked much like it—than to a foreign model, Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, which Disney visited multiple times, before and after he built his own park. “Architecturally and stylistically,” Buzz Price said of Tivoli, “it was in harmony with a lot of what Walt was going to do.”
⁶⁹

Tivoli has changed since Disney's day, but even now, at the center of that park, a vital similarity to Disneyland—as Walt Disney conceived it—is unmistakable. Dominated by flowers and elegant landscaping immediately reminiscent of Bill Evans's work for Disneyland, that part of Tivoli resembles a beautiful city park or public garden, but one that is free of the hint of menace that can shadow even the loveliest such places in the United States. The sense that Disneyland is completely
safe
—early guidebooks mention in passing that forty-five full-time security officers are on hand—has been a vital but unstressed part of its appeal. An admission charge always serves as a filter, but the landscaping at Disneyland, as at Tivoli, reinforced that effect by subtly imposing calm and order on an environment, the amusement park, that can be coarse and chaotic. As Walt Disney knew, such landscaping is anything but a cosmetic garnish—it encourages people to behave better. Disney
acknowledged his debt to Tivoli in a July 4, 1961, speech, at Ålborg, Denmark. “Personally, I owe much to Denmark,” he said, adding by way of explanation that Disneyland had been called “the Tivoli of the United States.”
⁷⁰

Disney claimed, in an interview with Aubrey Menen, that he conceived his park with adults as much as children in mind, if not more so: “I noticed, in amusement parks for children, that the grownups were bored. So I wanted to give them something to do.”
⁷¹
What he really did, though, was understand that adults, particularly the parents of very young children, would come to a park like his not for imaginative stimulus, but to be soothed by a perfectly orderly, predictable environment—especially one with such pleasant associations as those with the Disney films. “Something clean and respectable for all ages was what I was striving for,” Disney told a
New York Times
reporter a few years after Disneyland opened. “Sort of nostalgic, but with the fun angle, the excitement.”
⁷²

Disney's rethinking of the American amusement park had striking and immediate business consequences. Because his park was such a pleasant place, people stayed there longer, and because they stayed longer, they spent more. “Basically,” Price said, “he tripled per-capita expenditures [because] he tripled stay time.”
⁷³
After Disneyland had been open only seven weeks, it had already received a million visitors, 50 percent more than projected.
⁷⁴

The rushed schedule left Disneyland with many rough edges beyond those that marred the opening day, not just physically but in the way the park operated. Disney had hired C.V. Wood, Price's boss at Stanford Research, as Disneyland's general manager. Wood was deeply involved in every aspect of Disneyland's birth, including crucial negotiations with the city of Anaheim and the multiple owners of the property chosen as the park's site; he was besides a flamboyant personality whom Disney may have regarded as a competitor for the spotlight. Wood was, in short, the natural scapegoat in the anxious circumstances that prevailed in Disneyland's earliest days, and Disney fired him a few months after the park opened.
⁷⁵

There is a sense, in accounts of the first harried months, that Disney and his people were in a constant race to fix problems, large and small—the shortage of rides, unpredictable live animals—before they soured the pleasant experience that visitors were eager to have. For example, when Disneyland opened, general admission was a dollar, and individual attractions were priced from ten to thirty-five cents. For visitors and employees alike, handling so many coins was an irritant. Late in 1955, Disneyland began selling ticket books. The ticket books, which included admission and tickets for eight rides, were priced (at $2.50) to approximate the total that the average visitor was already spending.
⁷⁶

The early rides suffered from one miscalculation after another. “One thing we intended,” said Ken Anderson, who moved back and forth between films and Disneyland projects, “was that everybody on the [Snow White's Adventures] ride would understand that they were Snow White. As you rode the attraction, you were taking Snow White's place . . . you were the girl that was being threatened. And nobody got it. Nobody actually figured that they were Snow White. They just wondered where the hell Snow White was.”
⁷⁷

Thanks to his abbreviated construction schedule, Disney had little choice but to hire outside contractors to perform many of the park's functions, like cleaning and security. “The custodial company's standards apparently stopped at cursory cleanliness,” Randy Bright wrote. “The security guards evidently thought that they had been retained specifically to protect Disney property from thugs, a description they liberally applied to anyone who came through the gate.”
⁷⁸
Getting rid of such people quickly, and replacing them with Disney employees who had been trained to be customer-friendly, was vitally important to the park's success. No matter how good the park looked, surly employees could spoil the effect—and unlike a tabletop or backyard layout, Disneyland had to be filled with real people.

Even so, the presence of all those people could have worked against Disney's maintaining control: what if they didn't behave the way he wanted them to? It was here that Disney manifested true entrepreneurial savvy. He understood that it is easier to maintain control over customers if they think they are doing what
they
want to do, as opposed to what someone else wants them to do. To preserve that illusion of autonomy, Disney was more than willing to make countless small adjustments, like paving a shortcut that visitors were taking through a flower bed, rather than putting up a fence to keep them out.