Founders - #2 Walt Disney

Episode Date: October 10, 2016

What I learned from reading Walt Disney based on the book Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler.  ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

He had changed the world. He had created a new art form and then produced several indisputable classics within it. He had provided an escape from the depression, strength during war, and reassurance afterward. And he had shown generations of children how to accept responsibility while at the same time allowing them to vent vicariously their antagonisms toward the adult world they would soon enter. He had refined traditional values and sharpened American myths and archetypes, even if, as his detractors said, he may have also gutted them. He had advanced color films and then color television. He had reimagined the amusement park. He had encouraged and popularized conservation, space exploration, atomic energy, urban planning, and a deeper historical awareness. He had built one of the most powerful empires in the entertainment world, one that would, despite his fears, long survive him.

He had founded a school of the arts, and nearly 40 years after his death, his name would adorn a concert hall in downtown Los Angeles, financed largely with Disney family money. Yet all of these accumulated contributions paled before a larger one. He demonstrated how one could assert one's will on the world at the very time when everything seemed to be growing beyond control and beyond comprehension. In sum, Walt Disney had been not so much a master of fun or reverence or innocence or even wholesomeness. He had been a master of order. So the book that we're going to be talking about today is called Walt Disney, The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neil Gablerler i'm going to try to go in chronological order of his life obviously an 800 page book we're not going to be able to cover everything

but i have five to six different events in his life that kind of show you who he was as a as a person and how past experiences may have influenced decisions he makes later in life or what becomes important. So we're going to jump to when he's in his 20s. He's already found a love for drawing. He wanted to be a cartoonist and he started his first business really really young. Something a lot of people don't know about Walt Disney is he never even graduated high school. He has a ninth grade education. Yet he is one of the most arguably successful, most famous people in history.

I think even now in 2016, if you ask who, everybody knows the name Disney. Even if you're not, you've never been to a theme parks, you ask who everybody knows the name Disney even if you're not you've never been to a theme parks you've you know who Mickey Mouse is you've been touched by one aspect of the company that he started so what a lot of people don't know is he started his first business when he was 19 he um it was in Missouri he was basically trying to produce, to do advertisements, to do cartoons, to do short little, they're not really movies. I guess you would call them shorts. That business goes under. He realizes that he's lived up to his full potential where he's at, so he heads west.

He heads to Los Angeles, which he thinks would be a good way to be a cartoonist full-time and to basically open another studio that's going well he's already producing um successful drawings and art and we're gonna go to the part where he it he's betrayed so's a young man, doesn't know much about business other than just trying to go through trial and error. And let's go right to the book. This section is called Betrayal. In 1928, just as everything seemed to be going well, came one of the most devastating episodes in Walt Disney's life. An episode that would haunt him throughout his career.

With Oswald's success, Oswald's a cartoon, Mintz, this is his partner, had tired of Walt's financial haggling and his angling for control. Especially since Walt did not even draw anything himself now, and as Mintz saw it, seemed superfluous. So Mintz instructed George Winkler, who had arrived, as promised, the previous July,

to approach Hugh Harmon about taking over the studio and relieving Walt of his duties. Just before we continue, there's going to be a lot of names. There's tons of names in the book that's actually made it more difficult to keep track of everybody. What you realize when you finish the book is you don't really have to remember everybody's names, so try not to get too caught up on that. The important people stay in the book, and you'll know their names

because they're there basically the whole time. George Winkler, Hugh Harmon are not that important in this story. I was interested right away, Harmon said, because I was very disappointed in Walt and wanted to get away from him. Walt was completely oblivious to these machinations until January, when Earworks told him that Winkler, in anticipation of a renewal of the Oswald contract with Universal, had already signed up several of the animators and had asked Earworks to join him, an offer Earworks refused. Unaware of how much Mintz had come to doubt his importance or of how much his employees had come to dislike him,

Walt could not believe that Winkler would try to double-cross him or that his staff would actually conspire against him. And he dismissed the idea out of hand, inadvertently wounding earworks by seeming to attack his credibility. That's mistake number one. And Walt makes a lot of mistakes here,

but remember, he's really young at this time. Meanwhile, on February 2nd, 1928, Mintz, as expected, signed a new three-year agreement with Universal to provide Oswalt's. So Mintz is his partner. Mintz takes care of the distribution, which basically they sell and get Disney paid for all of the productions that his studio makes. And Mint's is the one that's betraying him right now. The Oswalds had been, Film Daily wrote in a report, the signing, one of the best sellers of the short subject program. Adding that, Charlie Mint's organization has been delivering and how. Still refusing to believe Mintz's treachery and brimming with confidence, Walt was in fact preparing to leave New York to negotiate his new contract with Mintz and had planned to ask for an increase from $2,250 per film, which is what he had been receiving, to $2,500 per film.

He was so certain of a favorable outcome, if not with Mintz, then with another distributor if Mintz proved intractable, that he had Lillian, this is his wife, accompany him on what they regarded as a second honeymoon. So he's traveling from Los Angeles to New York with the goal of basically getting a higher pay from his distributor, the same distributor that is secretly working behind his back to take everything, take his animators. Basically, he thinks that Walt is just an overpaid supervisor. They arrived the third week in February to a bitterly cold and blustery city and found the reception there just as chilly. With two Oswald prints under one arm

and a book of clippings under the other, Walt had gone to see Fred Quimby at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, also known as MGM in today's lingo, with the hope, at the very least, of getting a competing bid to pressure on Mintz. But Quimby told him that cartoons were on the wane, and he said he was not interested.

Walt, putting the best spin on the conversation, told Roy, Roy is a name you should remember, Roy Disney, it's Walt's older brother. Walt, putting the best spin on the conversation, told Roy that Quimby was just playing hardball and said he would follow up in a few days. Temporarily rebuffed, Walt headed directly from MGM to Mintz's office to continue negotiations. But Mintz was also playing hardball.

Not only did he not offer to increase the advance, he was now offering only the negative costs, which he pegged at roughly $1,400 a film, a 50-50 split of profits, and substantial salaries, which suggested that Walt was not a studio owner in his own right, but a subcontractor for Mintz. Walt, aggrieved by the terms, which he no doubt feared would force him to compromise on quality again and cede more control, immediately contacted his old mentor, Jack Alicote, a reserved and dignified gentleman, in Walt's words, who had helped broker the original deal with Margaret Winkler for the Allises, that's this series of shorts that he was producing before, and who now edited the trade paper firm Daily. Alicote advised Walt to continue dealing with Mintz, but as a hedge, he set up meetings for Walt with Metro again and with Fox.

Break with Charlie Looming, Walt wired Roy later that day, meaning Charlie Mintz. Before any rupture could be announced, though, and resorting to a bit of chicanery of his own to thwart Mintz, he asked Roy to have an attorney draw up an ironclad year-long contracts

for the staff with two option years. All contracts with me personally, therefore my signature necessary before contract is complete, assuring us protection without responsibility, Walt warned. Walt wanted the contracts that should be held in readiness until he gave Roy the word, and he closed reassuringly, don't be alarmed, everything okay. But of course, everything was not okay. Walt and Lillian had lunch at the Hotel Astor as guests of Mintz and Margaret Winkler the next day, Friday, March 2nd, where Mintz refused to discuss business. But from what remarks were dropped, Walt wrote Roy, I could see that he had something up his sleeve. After Mintz suggested they meet in his office the

next morning, Walt wired Roy frantically to get the contracts with the staff signed immediately, lest Mintz or George Winkler get wind of the plan and proffer contracts of their own. Make them sign or no reason before allowing them to leave, Walt telegraphed Roy, with a new imperiousness that had alienated the staff. When Roy wired back that the staff had refused to sign the contracts, Earwork's warning to Walt was finally confirmed. Since jobs for animators were scarce and the men should have jumped at Walt's offer, he realized that Mintz and George Winkler had indeed contracted with the staff behind his back. In fact, Walt was told that Mintz had been talking to an animator,

referring no doubt to the conversation with Harmon, to take over the operation under George Winkler's supervision. Walt had suffered two heavy blows. He had become expendable at his own company, and his own employees had betrayed him. But Walt had underestimated Mintz and overestimated Universal. In concluding his deal with the distributor, Mintz had granted Walt no rights to the character that Walt had created, thus leaving Walt no recourse.

Yikes. That's not good, guys. That Saturday at his office, Mint made walt a final offer he would give walt eighteen hundred dollars per picture up from 1750 plus 50 of the profits from universal but he presented a new and startling stipulation mince would take over the disney organization, paying Walt and Rory each an additional $200 a week as his employees. Okay, so before we go any further, we go back a little while ago. Walt is happy. He's confident. He's traveling to New York to go to negotiate a raise from $2,250 per picture to $2,500 per picture and hopefully a larger percentage of the profits. Mintz, in the meantime, is going behind his back, is taking his animators, and has now just said it's going to be a decrease, actually.

It's going to be $1,800 per picture. And I run the organization and I'll pay you a little bit of money and you're my employee. So something we're going to see throughout the book is Walt Disney was a master of control. Every single project that he works on, everything that he wants to do, he wants to control. Almost reminds me when I was reading this book, a lot of Steve Jobs, how it comes up constantly.

Walt's really not about making money. He's about producing whatever he's working on. He wants it to be the best. So that starts with cartoons. And that's cartoons that are in black and white with no sound. Then he's one of the first people to add sound. Then he does color and sound. Then he does short little movies.

Then he's the first person to do full feature cartoons with Snow White, which we'll talk about later. And then he goes from there to building a massive studio that he controls completely. And then he goes from there to building theme parks. And in every single thing that he's focused on, he is completely obsessed with quality and completely obsessed with control. Very much more of like an artisan as opposed to like a businessman.

His brother Roy was much more like the businessman. So with that context there, you have this extremely talented, extremely driven young version of Walt Disney being told by an older businessman that's basically trying to screw him that, hey, I'm going to control everything and you're going to work for me. That's just never going to happen.

Back to the book. Angered and distraught, Walt refused, went directly to Universal again, who offered to talk to Mintz and hurriedly fired off a telegram to Roy, asking him to find out the intentions of the rest of the staff and to send a check for $100 for additional expenses. He returned to his hotel, Lillian later recalled, fuming that he was out of a job, but at the same time he was glad of it because he would never work for anyone again. When Walt left for the city of Los Angeles on March 13th, he had nothing.

No Nolan, no character, no contract except for the one for the Oswalds that he was obligated to animate under the terms of his deal with Mintz, no staff save for the few who remain loyal like York's, no plan, and perhaps most important of all, no cartoon land to provide a haven from the real world. He would, in later years, talk often of this episode as a betrayal,

saying he had warned Mintz that those who had turned on Walt would also turn on him someday, which in time they did. He told it just like the plot of one of his stories, where good will win and the villain will be defeated, recalled one of his longtime animators. He loved telling the story because it was so poetically just. He would say that you had to be careful with whom you trusted, that he had learned that you had to control what with whom you trusted, that he had learned that you had to control what you had or would be taken from you, that he had seen how duplicitous the business world could be. He said he had learned all these lessons and would never forget them. But as he and Lillian headed back to Los Angeles on the New York Central Cannonball,

with nothing but these lessons and the sunny bromides he was writing home to buck up Roy's spirits, the internally optimistic Walt Disney, who had ridden out crisis after crisis, had one terrifying thought. He would have to begin all over again. So I wanted to start with this. This is about three chapters into the book and it's something that's referenced constantly throughout his life. He talks about it constantly. It's the span of all these events we just talked about happened over about a span of two weeks. And Walt Disney never forgot. He never forgave.

This experience where he had basically his entire studio taken from him only reassured Walt that he had to control everything. And so moving forward, he has one other business partner named Pat Powers that betrays him again in the future, but the damage was much less. But this gives you a good idea as to why most people would consider Walt Disney a control freak. And you also see, like we talked about Elon Musk last week Elon Musk is running two multi-billion dollar companies right now yet he's so obsessed with control and detail that he's taking time out of his busy schedule to edit practice press releases so yeah see this is very common with a lot of these biographies we're

gonna be talking about that the people in them are driven, they're intelligent, and they are obsessed with control. So we're going to fast forward in Disney's life. He regains his footing. He starts anew on the train ride back from being, this is one of the craziest parts, on the train ride back from being betrayed by Mince, he makes drawings and he comes up with Mickey Mouse. So he leaves New York with nothing, lands in LA, or it doesn't land, but travels to LA. By the time he gets to LA, he now has the beginnings of Mickey Mouse. And as you know, listening to this almost 100 years later, Mickey Mouse is probably the most famous cartoon in history. So he has huge

success with that. And the part we're going to go to is he basically spends years. So he's perpetually dissatisfied. Once he masters something, he quickly loses interest and moves on to the next thing because he always needs something to work on. So he spends the previous three years working seven days a week, countless hours, morning, noon, and night, developing the first feature cartoon. And it's called Snow White. And everybody's telling him it's not going to work. No one's going to watch an hour and a half, two hour long cartoon

before cartoons were basically shown in the movie theaters. They're like maybe five to eight minutes long and they were shown before the main preview or the main event rather. And once again, Walt Disney proves everyone wrong. So we're going to get into a little bit about Snow White, and then we're also going to get into his family. This part is called The Triumph of Snow White. The nine months after Snow White debuted may have been the best months of Walt Disney's adult life.

The picture was an astounding success. In its first week at the Carthay Circle, that's the theater, it grossed $19,000. In its second, $20,000. And by the time it finished its 10-week run, it had grossed just under $180,000. That's an astounding number. That's an insane, insane number for the time. We're talking about the 1930s here. At the Radio City Music Hall in New York, where the lines often stretched down the block,

it grossed over $500,000. After it went into general release in February and after Walt had reanimated The Shimmying Prince, it grossed $3.5 million in the United States and Canada alone, and returned over $1 million to the studio. By May 1939, with $6.7 million in receipts, it would become the highest grossing American film to that point, eventually surpassing the previous record holder by nearly $2 million. Let's pause there real quick. So he's trying something completely new.

No one's made a feature-length cartoon yet. Everybody's telling him it's going to fail. He kind of gets energized from people telling him it's going to fail. Walt doesn't, he kind of gets energized from people telling him it's going to fail. It's mentioned throughout the book multiple times. So in that context, everybody's going to tell him it's failed. It's never been done before. And oh, actually, it's not going to fail. It's actually going to succeed more than any other movie, period, had done at that point. Back to the book. Because of the low ticket prices at the time and because children, who were a significant segment of the film's audience,

paid even less, Walt always maintained that Snow White had been seen by more people in this country than any other motion picture. Europe was equally rapturous. The film played for 28 weeks in London, grossing over $500,000 at one theater alone, and when it was released to the seaside towns that summer, the theaters were

forced to take reservation three weeks in advance, eventually instituting special morning performances to satisfy the demand. They came in their hundreds, reporting the New York Times. Little girls with spades and pails, little boys in bathing trunks, mothers with a family shopping, young sophisticates with wind-blown sets, and the newest shade in suntan. It grossed $155,000 at one first-run theater in Paris, and over $1 million when it had been completed its second run in the city.

In 21 weeks at one Sydney, Australia theater, it took in 132 thousand dollars. When censors in Holland forbade children under 14 from seeing it because they thought it was too gruesome the youngsters stage an impromptu nationwide boycott of a dutch snow white chocolate bar and the censors relented by the time it finished its runs in 1939 it had played in 49 countries and had been dubbed into 10 languages this is really interesting. But the phenomenon didn't stop at the theater door. There were, by one account,

2,183 different Snow White products. 16.5 million drinking glasses alone were sold. Walt launched a Snow White comic strip and commissioned a play based on the movie, though it was finally decided that the theater owners might object to the competition, and the play was scratched. Prompted in part by the success of Snow White, the studio inaugurated a national radio program in January that was quickly canceled because Walt said, quote, if I listen in and the thing isn't right, I'm upset and worried, end quote. Walt even collected $15,000 by selling original cells from the film at the Courvoisier Art Gallery in San Francisco. When Kay Kamen, Kay Kamen is the guy that is running,

he runs basically a separate business for the Disney Brothers. So the Disney production studio creates the cartoons and creates the movies and has distribution all over the world. And then the merchandise that comes from those productions, that company is run by Kay Kamen. And it becomes a business that actually makes more money than the actual productions. So when Kay Kamen reported as early as May 1938 that... You'll see why right here. When Kay Kamen reported as early as may 1938 that two million

dollars worth of snow white toys had been sold and another two million dollars worth of snow white handkerchiefs the new york times merrily editorialized that animation might be a way out of the depression then were the accolades already in in January, Walt was investigating whether Snow White might qualify for an Academy Award, and was told that, quote, it is quite within the bounds of probability that the award committee might consider it for special honors, end quote. It had already been named one of the Outstanding Pictures of the Year by the National Board of Review Review and had won a special citation from the New York film critics. When the Oscars were awarded in February 1939, Walt did receive a special acknowledgement for his achievement. One large Oscar statuette and seven smaller ones. The seven smaller ones for the dwarfs, the seven dwarfs that are in Snow White.

Isn't it bright and shiny? Ten-year-old actress Shirley Temple chirped as she presented the award. Oh, it's beautiful, Walt said. Aren't you proud of it, she asked. I'm so proud of it, I think I'll bust, Walt beamed, to which Temple rejoined. Oh, don't do that, Mr. Disney. The exchange, one guest said, brought down the house. So now we're going to get into the effect,

still moving in about chronological order, of his family. His family, especially his wife and then his two daughters, become as important to Walt as his obsession with his work. Snow White had had a salutary effect on Walt's immediate family, too. His years of obsession with the film, the days and nights and weekends spent at the studio, had taken their toll on his relationship with Lillian, who had never been especially interested in Walt's work to begin with, and who once called herself her husband's severest critic, because, I always look on the dark side.

She was one of the few in Walt's inner circle who failed to appreciate the prospects of Snow White, saying, I can't stand the sight of dwarfs, and I predict nobody will ever pay a dime to see a dwarf picture. When Walt was at the studio, which was most of the time, the two seldom communicated, though Lillian did say she made certain to be home by 5 o'clock or 5.30 every afternoon, Walt's dinner time, to serve him. He demanded a lot of everyone around him, she said, as a way of explaining her schedule. He always kept everybody in turmoil. It was turmoil that Lillian didn't always appreciate.

By one account, around the time of Snow White, the couple had even discussed divorce. One problem was that as surely as Walt was focused on the studio, Lillian was focused on her family. He was very close to Lillian until Diane was born, his secretary Dolores Vaught told an interviewer years later. After Diane came along, Lillian grew more interested in her, so she pulled away from the studio affairs and concentrated on the home. Before the birth of their daughter, their first daughter, Lillian actually worked from the studio affairs and concentrated on the home. It was no doubt her way to find herself while Walt was fixated on Snow White. Lillian certainly seemed to resent her husband's preoccupation with work and the avalanche of attention he received, but she was no silent, long-suffering

helpmate. Lillian would erupt. Diane remembered coming down for breakfast one morning and seeing a large brown stain on the wall. She later learned that her mother had hurled a cup of coffee at Walt. Mother was a well-contained, poised person who never lost her temper with us children, Diane would say, but she would also not let herself be put upon. She stood up for her rights. Though Walt's deepest devotions seemed reserved for his daughter, his studio, and his pets, things seemed to improve with Lillian after she suffered her third miscarriage, and the couple, at Walt's instigation, decided to adopt. So they were trying to have kids for a long time. They had, I think, two miscarriages before Diane was born, one after, and then now they're going to adopt. On December 31st, 1936, just as Snow White was reaching its most manic stage, Walt and Lillian received their new six-week-old daughter, Sharon May, though a bout of pneumonia sent her back to the hospital for a month's recuperation.

Both parents were devoted to her. They made no distinction between her and Diane, and Walt would always bristle at any mention of her being adopted. Indeed, Walt and Lillian were so secretive about the adoption that he had his gardener, Diane's nurse, and Marjorie Sewell pick Sharon up from the hospital lest someone recognized the Disneys. When the fact of the adoption was cited nearly 20 years later in a profile of Walt for Look magazine, he wrote the editor fuming,

quote, I do not care what you say about me, but deeply resent your reference to my daughter Sharon's adoption, end quote. The magazine stopped the presses and deleted the line. Imagine that happening today. In any case, their mutual love of Sharon seemed to begin a re-approachment between Walt and Lily,

and shortly after Snow White's release, they may have been investigating a second adoption, which, for whatever reason, never came to fruition. His family became more important to him as his social activities continued to diminish. Throughout Snow White's long production, Walt had been tense and frequently ill, even after the trip to Europe that had temporarily reinvigorated him. Various doctors visited him at the studio several times each week, sometimes daily, to provide everything from hair loss treatments to chiropractic sessions for a polo injury that would bother him for the rest

of his life, forcing him to hunch over to relieve the pain when he sat and stabbing him awake at night. So his main activity that was not work and it was not his family was to play polo. But something happens and that's going to change and we'll see right now. Though during the production he continued to play polo, which had also diverted time from Lillian, his interest had waned after an accident at the Riviera Country Club on October 28, 1935. During a match there between MGM and the Disney Studio, the horse of a 31-year-old contract player at MGM named Gordon Westcott apparently collided with Waltz and Westcott fell. By one account, Waltz's horse then toppled onto the young man he died three years later without ever

regained regain without ever having regained consciousness a month later rory informed walt that he had decided to quit polo and was disposing of of his ponies walt reduced his playing time until May 1938. He wrote with Riviera that the studio demands so much of my time that I'm going to have to give up polo entirely. He requested that the club field offers for 10 of his 12 ponies. Two he was having brought to Griffin Park so he and Lillian could ride there. And failing a sale, he said he would turn them out to pasture. From this point on, his primary athletic activity would be badminton. Less time for polo meant more time for Lillian, and a month after notifying Riviera that he was

divesting himself of his ponies, he and Lillian left for a vacation in New York. But the end of Polo also meant the end of his Polo relationships, which were among the few friendships he had maintained. He had never enjoyed much of a social life. He had never had time for one. And what little he had had had been largely ruined by Snow White. In the studio's early days, when Walt fraternized primarily with his employees, his work life and his social life usually converged. But by the time he began producing Snow White, he had withdrawn from them socially.

As animator Mark Davis put it, when the studio began to become really something, a few of these men weren't growing to the same degree that he was. So pretty soon, his associations were mostly with people away from the studio, and his private life became divorced from the studio. Many of these men could never understand that Walt had outgrown them, that he had changed. Yet even as he had disengaged socially from his employees, Walt did not plunge into the Hollywood scene. Though he and Lillian socialized throughout the 1930s with the Spencer Tracys, inviting them to the new house on Working Way for an afternoon of swimming and badminton, these invitations were occasional and were tendered via telegram or letter rather than by phone. Similarly, even after he managed

to lure his childhood friend Walt Pfeiffer to the studio to work in the studio department, the two were surprisingly distant and formal, employer and employee rather than pals. Most of his associates felt that he was close to no one. Quote, Walt was a hard guy to get close to, animator Walt Kimball said. He was a workaholic. His career was his whole life. I think I was as good a friend as he ever had. Another employee described Walt as friendly, but a man who didn't appear to accept close friendships. Lillian agreed. Asked by an interviewer to name Walt's closest friends, she said, He really didn't have time to make friends. Walt had too much to do. He had to have a clear mind for work the next day. No one, not even Lillian, could crack him. He was so self-absorbed, so fully within his own mind and ideas,

that he emerged only to share them and to have them executed. That line right there, reading it now probably for the fifth time, fifth or sixth time, it's probably, if you could do a one-sentence summary of the biography of Walt Disney, that would probably be it. So let me repeat that. He was so self-absorbed, so fully within his own mind and ideas, that he emerged only

to share them and to have them executed. Walt seemed to realize that he was hopelessly addicted to work at the expense of family and friends. For years he and Lillian had been shopping for a ranch where he could get away, only to conclude, as he wrote one prospective seller, that his studios at the studio left him little time for actual recreation. Beginning in May 1938, one of his few extracurricular activities was an annual

one-week horseback ride in the California outback near Santa Barbara with a club of business professionals who called themselves the Rancheros Vistadorasas though another member disney producer dave hand observed that the visadoras might just as well have brought a long table and chairs since walt would talk more and more about his new ideas always ending with directions for me to see that certain new or different operations were affected our workers transferred or revisions of schedule upon our return to civilization. He didn't know anything else. He couldn't talk about anything but that studio. So even in his recreation, he wouldn't shut up about what he was working on. While the studio remained Walt's priority, in the months after Snow White, during a brief lull in

his workload, he had begun refocusing on his family, in part because it was only with his family that he didn't have to be Walt Disney, an even more onerous obligation after his feature film success. Walt enjoyed the limelight, but he hated the public persona he was forced to assume, and from his unpretentious Midwestern upbringing, he hated the sense of inflated importance bestowed upon celebrities, of which he now was certainly one. If he was not a man without ego,

he thought of himself as a man without heirs, and so he was. Though his two-story house was attractive and considerably more spacious than the prefabricated band box that he lived in previously, with three bedrooms, a combination library, projection room, bar, a swimming pool with its own pavilion, and a broad lawn sweeping down the hill, it was hardly the mansion one might have imagined for Walt Disney. He lived modestly in other ways too. Until he got his first Cadillac in the early 1940s, he drove Plymouths and Packards, and he bought his clothes off the rack. He liked plain food, his favorite meal was canned beans, nor did he surround himself with the trappings of his celebrity. He told one interviewer that he deliberately kept Disney products out of his house

because I've lived with it too much and I just didn't want to live with it at home. But as preoccupied as he was, when it came to Diane and Sharon, he was a doting father who sheltered them from his own fame. He enjoyed telling how six-year-old Diane asked him if he was Walt Disney. You know I am, he answered. The Walt Disney, she questioned. When he chortled that he was, she asked for his autograph. He would chase the girls around the house, cackling like the witch from Snow White. Or he would troll them endlessly by their heels for hours and hours, Diane would say. Or he would stand in the swimming pool and

let them climb up to his shoulders. I thought that my father was the strongest man in the world and the most fun, Diane recalled. At night, he read to them. And on the weekends, after he picked them up from church, he would take them either to Griffin the weekends, after he picked them up from church, he would take them either to Griffin Park to ride the merry-go-round, or to the studio, where they would follow him as he snooped about or pedal their bikes around the empty grounds while he worked. They used to love to go with me in those days, Walt would reminisce, and that was some of the happiest days of my life.

They were in love with their dad so i think that section gives you a good idea of not only the now the success that walt disney has achieved with basically creating the the highest grossing movie in history but also how as he ages he becomes less and less social and more and more his family becomes more and more important to him and especially with the birth of Diane and then the adoption of Sharon he basically, the quote we just went over is, some of the happiest days of his life were when his daughters were young, when they were in love with their dad.

So we're going to move forward to, we previously talked about one of the most important events in his life. That was the betrayal by Charlie Mintz and that devastated him. This next section talks about the death of his mother and it was also one of the worst events that happened in his life. Now as the studio was laboring on Bambi, Pinocchio, and the concert feature, a labor that had ended Walt's respite, there came an event that would end the ebullient times for Walt Disney altogether. Ever since they had received their 50th anniversary promise of a new home, Elias and Flora Disney had been living in a rented apartment on Commonwealth Street while they and Roy hunted for

a suitable residence. So let me just back up there to give you some background. The Disneys for the first time in their life are very successful financially as opposed to just having to plow all of their earnings back into the studio. Their parents, Elias and Flora, were living in Portland. They wanted to do it, but they were lonely so Roy and Walt offered to buy them a house in Los Angeles so they could be closer to the family something we're not going to talk about in this podcast but it's is a main theme in Walt Disney's life is his father Elias was a really hard man basically the complete opposite of what Walt Disney was. And the first part of the book covers that a lot of the motivation for Walt

to get away and to achieve his dreams comes from Elias trying to basically like beat the dreams out of him. And I don't mean beat it in like physical terms, but basically he was very like wary man wary man was not he's not the kind of father that would tell you go and and and pursue your dreams let's just put it that way he was not like that at all um they had a very bad relationship but Walt did have a great relationship with his mother so let's go back to the book. They finally found one that September, a brand new home at 4605 Placida in the hidden village section of North Hollywood.

The owner had suddenly died, leaving his widow to dispose of it for $8,300. It had three bedrooms, two baths, a living room, and a double garage. But, Roy wrote Walt, more important, it has a good heating system. A central gas heater with forced circulation. I'm not mentioning that. I'm not giving you more detail than you need. The gas heater is important to this story. The brothers put down $2,300 and spent between $2,500 and $3,000 to furnish the house, and their parents moved in shortly thereafter. But as soon as Elias and Flora

moved in, the much-vaunted heating system began to malfunction. We better get this furnace fixed or else some morning we'll wake up and find ourselves dead, Flores was said to have told her housekeeper Alma Smith. Roy and Walt dispatched a workman from the studio to repair it. On the morning of November 26, 1938, Flora went to the bathroom adjoining her bedroom. When she didn't return, Elias got up to investigate and found her collapsed on the bedroom floor. Feeling overcome himself, he staggered out into the hallway and fainted. Downstairs in the courtyard, Alma Smith was emptying a dustpan of oatmeal that she had spilled when she felt herself getting woozy and realized that something was amiss. She rushed back into the house and raced up the stairs, found Elias on the floor, called a neighbor, and then phoned Roy. Meanwhile,

she tried to open the window, but it was stuck. Then she and the neighbor dragged Flora and Elias down the stairs and outside, and the neighbor administered artificial respiration. Elias revived. Flora did not. She died of carbon monoxide poisoning from the defective heater. A lid on the air intake had slipped, recirculating the exhaust into the house. It may have been the most shattering moment of Walt Disney's life. Though he seldom exhibited emotion outside the studio, he was inconsolable. A misery deepened no doubt by the fact that she had died in the new home Walt had given her, and by the culpability of his own workmen. A report on the furnace ordered by Roy determined that the installation of the furnace showed either a complete lack of knowledge of the requirements of the furnace or a flagrant disregard of these conditions if they were known.

When his parents had arrived in Los Angeles, they had only wanted to see the vast Forest Lawn Cemetery. So Walt had let them off at the gate in the morning and returned later in the day to pick them up. Now Walt and Roy decided to bury their mother there. You should have seen those two brothers, recalled the Reverend Glenn Pewter, the husband of Herbert's daughter, Dorothy, and the man who officiated the funeral. In the following months, they regularly visited their mother's gravesite, but Walt never spoke of her death to anyone thereafter. When years later, Sharon asked him where her grandparents were buried, Walt snapped, I don't want to talk about it. So, Walt Disney was like the rest of us. you're famous or that you're successful or that you're rich or that you make cartoons that delight millions of people

he goes from his largest personal or his largest professional success in Snow White to a few years later the largest tragedy of his life which is the premature death of his mom

based on that happened in a house that he purchased and maybe caused accidentally by the person he sent there to fix it. So, the person he sent there to fix it. So the next section I want to talk about is what I would say was Disney's most important project he was ever involved in. So we already went over the fact that he was a constant innovator in new fields all the time. So after Snow White, they continue to make feature films.

The studio is doing really well. They go from having maybe 300 people on staff to like 1,600 people. And then there is something that basically devastates Walt Disney again and causes him to basically turn his back on the only thing he ever loved, which was his studio. And there was a strike by the animators that basically he credits for destroying the studio. So it lasts for, I think, over a year. They start fighting about it.

It's finally resolved. By the time they resolve, they go from 1,500 people down to 600. And then it's in a section of the book called Two Wars. This is happening while World War II is happening while world war world war ii is happening so not only do they go on strike and he loses basically the happy place that he built and is turned bitter when uh his employees and friends turn on him but then the u.s government he's walt disney studios has to basically be forced to be a contractor to make cartoons for the US government to gather support of the war.

So there's a huge gap in him producing stuff that he likes. It lasts for four or five years. And by that time, the studio is basically still running, but his heart's not in it anymore. And so his employees complain that he's never around, that he used to be involved in any intricate detail. Now they can't even get him to sign off on new ideas or new productions. He has like a personal tragedy where he doesn't even hang out the studio. He starts getting obsessed with trains.

So he like builds like trains that are basically like one tenth or one fifth the scale of like lifestyle trains. He puts a train in his backyard he has like two or three year period where he's just worrying about trains and the and not his studio it's it's the most bizarre part of the book um but it does show his obsessive nature that he's it's zero or a hundred he's either completely obsessed or he's not even paying attention so during his um his newfound hobby and trains he gets the idea to build an amusement park and that amusement park as we all know is disneyland and this becomes for the rest of his life his main obsession it's the place he goes when he wants to get away from the studio.

It's where he's obsessed with. It's what he's working on at nights and weekends. And it's basically his largest and most impressive project. And the one that he cares about the most. So let's go into Disneyland. It was the park that Walt Disney cared about. The park that was his dream now. The park.

All the time that Walt had been working on the Disneyland television show. And all the time that he had been negotiating, preparing, and approving, he had been thinking about the park. Everyone knew that he was only tangentially involved with the other projects, even as the studio was overwhelmed. This avalanche of work hit the studio, said producer Winston Hilbert when Disneyland began. We augmented the staff by adding additional writers. We used our nature photographers to start moving out on projects. We had to get ourselves in high gear from a program that included maybe three, four, or five features a year to the prospect of 26 shows a year. So what they're talking about is a year before the studio opens, Disney does a deal with ABC,

the television network, says that they'll make 26 shows a year. And he's now doing television, the first movie studio to do television. As you can see, Disney constantly innovates over and over and over again. But even though people are like, wow, they're basically, you have a movie studio making movie quality content for TV, which is a first. He only did that as a way to promote the opening of Disneyland, which is going to happen a year later. Back to the book. But Walt was barely part of the ramp-up. Those were the days when he didn't have any contact with the picture,

Ward Kimball said, of Walt's lack of participation in Man in Space. That's the name of the feature. He simply attended the screening, laughed her out, and then asked, How in the hell did you guys think up all that stuff? Milt Call, who was working on feature animations at the time, had the same experience. He said that Walt would sit in on the story meetings, but not as often as he once had. The difference was, Call believed, that on weekends and evenings and sitting on the john and all that stuff, he wasn't thinking about our pictures he was thinking about disneyland he was always thinking about disneyland while we were planning disneyland every amusement park operator we talked to said

it would fail and walt would come out of those meetings even happier than if they had been optimistic. So let's contrast that with earlier. He's building Snow White, first feature length cartoon. Everybody is telling it's not going to fail. Studios didn't want to distribute it. No one's going to watch a two-hour movie. Winds up being the most successful film of all time. Fast forward about 15 years, we're planning Disneyland, every amusement park operator, everybody's saying, nope, not going to work, going to fail. And what's that effect? Most people might be discouraged. Walt was happy that they thought that. And here's why. He loved the fight now. He loved the fight now that he had something to fight for. Loved the hurdles he had to leap.

Loved the idea that he had to prove himself right again. And he talked of waging the same old battles that he once had to wage in making the animation features. With the exception of his advisors, he didn't want anyone on the staff who had amusement park experience because he told them Disneyland wouldn't be an amusement park and because he wanted young people who would be willing to learn and make mistakes. That's actually a really smart move. To be the general director of the project, he hired a tall 33-year-old Oklahoman named C.V. Wood, who had been both a champion lariat twirler and the director of industrial engineering at an aircraft company during the war before becoming the manager

of the Los Angeles branch of the Economic Research Division of Stanford Research Institute, which had done the feasibility studies for the park. Wood was charming and affable, with a down-home manner and a thick southwestern drawl. The most winning and likable personality that one could ever expect to find, said one acquaintance. And he had acquitted himself well while at SRI by using that charm to coax holdouts on the Ball subdivision to sell their land to Disney. Walt was charmed too. Walt reacted to him the way the farmer reacts to the fast-talking city slicker, recalled Buzz Price. Wood, in turn, recruited a retired admiral named Joe Fowler, who had once headed the San Francisco Navy Yard as a consultant, though Walt later trapped the admiral, as Walt put it, into assuming the role of construction

supervisor. The officers set themselves up in two old ranch houses on the site where, just as the old writer's apartment at Hyperion, Hyperion's the first studio that Disney had before he moved to a larger studio before the strike. The staff commandeered the kitchen, dining rooms, even closets. Walt's office was in a bedroom. There was a single bathroom in the facility. And then there was Walt Disney trudging over the site.

They're talking about the construction site where Disneyland's being constructed, by the way. And then there was Walt Disney trudging over the site. They're talking about the construction site where Disneyland's being constructed, by the way. And then there was Walt Disney trudging over the site in a straw hat and loud sports shirt, as in the old days, ordering the workers about, alternatively hurrying them up and slowing them down, willing the property to conform to his dream. He walked over every inch of Disneyland, Ward Kimball said, telling him to move a fence a little more to the left because you couldn't see the boat as it came around the corner. I'd be with him out there and he'd say, the lake is too small, maybe we should make it larger. Let's find out if we can move the train wreck over another 50 feet. He thought of everything.

Morgan Evans, whose brother had landscaped the property at Carolwood and who had been hired to landscape the park, recalled, Walt's approach was to say, I need a jungle or I need a touch of alpine flavor for the ski ride. He didn't know which trees would work, but he knew what he wanted. He wanted perfection. He wanted the park as realized to match the park in his mind's eye. Evans remembered a Saturday morning when Walt complained that a Brazilian

pepper tree had been planted too close to the walk at the entrance to Adventureland. Evans had to pack up the six-ton root ball and move the tree. Having come to dread the studio, he cherished the park and the time he spent there. He would even sit in the catering tent eating hot dogs with the workers. Still, he was impatient with the pace of construction and nervous that guests might not see where the money and the effort had gone. He wanted the spending to show and it bothered him that so much money was invested in infrastructure. Several months before the opening, he grumbled to Harper Goff, You know, I've spent 50% of the total budget already, and there isn't one thing that you could call terrific out there right now. Goff remembered that Walt was actually crying when he he said this. Now, as the July 17th, 1955 opening neared, national anticipation grew. For nine

months, Walt had been promoting the park on his television program, and ABC had taken out $40,000 worth of full-page newspaper advertisements to ballyhoo the 90-minute live telecast of the event, for which the network had marshaled what it had called the greatest ever concentration of television equipment and personnel. 29 cameras stationed around the park. ABC had already sold out the advertising in March, and crews had been rehearsing every Sunday since May. The interest in the park was so intense that in April, the studio reported, the staff counted 9,500 people stopping for information at the site one weekend, Saturday noon to Sunday evening, even though there was no sign identifying the property as Disneyland. If the country was waiting expectantly, so was Walt Disney. In spite

of the park's shortcomings, he seemed rejuvenated, almost giddy. He was the first one to ride the attractions, just like a little kid. He'd get off and giggle, or if he didn't like it too well, his eyebrow would go up and he'd say, fix this thing and let's get this show on the road. Ten-year-old Harrison Ellenshaw, whose father Peter was an artist at the studio, remembered visiting the site one Saturday while his father painted a map of the park. The boy was watching the workers lay track for the railroad when Walt approached him, spotted a board on a train carriage near the track, and offered to give him a ride. Harrison jumped on the board and Walt pushed.

Then when it had reached speed, Walt jumped on himself. He was acting just like a kid, Harrison Elenshaw would say years later, echoing Davis, on the same level as a 10-year-old kid. In fact, Walt's own capacity to experience the park the way the guests would, with the same childlike abandon, contributed to the appeal of the attractions. One acquaintance called the park the world's biggest toy for the world's biggest boy. Even with the opening hard upon him, and even with the opening hard upon him and even with a clear x acceleration he was feeling wall was still examining still tinkering and still plotting an assistant landscaper remembered watching him five days before the dedication walking up and down main street and scrutinizing

the facades he would stop and face a building and look at it, step back, his head would kind of turn, the man said, and then he would take notes in his little flip notepad. He would then look up at something else and make another note, look down at the bottom of the sidewalk, check everything, and a last minute glance and he would go on to the next building. As a final test, Walt invited families of the members of the studio's penthouse club to kind of a sneak preview. We had set a tent up and we had a barbecue and three barrels of beer, and Walt would be running the train around, Walt Pfeiffer recollected.

Everything was waving and the Mark Twain would go by with everybody singing. It was just a glorious day. And Walt clearly wanted to prolong the joy he felt. The park's opening had been scheduled just four days after his and Lillian's 30th wedding anniversary. So Walt decided to host a party on the evening of July 13th, not only to celebrate his marriage, but to show off the park to his family, his friends, and notables. He invited everyone from his Aunt Charlotte and Joe Rosenberg to Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, and Louis B. Mayer. He waited cheerily at the gate to greet them. Then, when most of them were delayed by a traffic snarl, he stood there smoking nervously and grumbling.

It was no doubt a measure of how tense he had been over the months of construction and how relieved he now felt that, as the party was drawing to a close at the Golden Horseshoe Saloon, he had drunk a little too much and was firing imaginary bullets at the stage from the balcony. Diane had to drive him home, during which time Walt was tootling through a rolled map of Disneyland, as if it were a trumpet. Then he sang a song and fell asleep holding the map. Even after 3,000 workers had cut 20,000 feet of timber, poured 5,000 cubic yards of concrete, and laid a million square feet of asphalt, Walt still wasn't finished. The night before the opening, he suddenly seized upon the idea of taking the giant rubber squid from 20,000 leagues under the

sea and exhibiting it at the park. The problem was that the squid's latex skin had deteriorated since the shooting, so it had to be restored and repainted. Ken Anderson, who had designed the Disneyland miniatures, was assigned to the task along with two other staff members, but then Walt appeared. Walt put on a mask, Anderson would recall, and helped us spray paint the screen with fluorescent paint. The area was enclosed and the paint, Anderson said, filled the air and clogged our mask. It took all evening to finish the operation and Walt stayed up too, the whole night before the opening. Yet for all the flurry of activity, Walt had had to go to the airport that day as well to greet people who had flown in for the dedication. He was pre-naturally calm.

Just about everyone else was worried except Walt, said Jack Sayers, the director of guest relations. He seemed to love the excitement. That was because Walt Disney knew he was in his element again, and he knew he was back. After all the doubts that the networks, his staff, his brother, and even his wife had harbored about Disneyland, Walt had been vindicated. The opening day fiasco notwithstanding, the park was an instant triumph. In its first week, it tallied 161,000 visitors. And by the end of the month, it was attracting well over 20,000 attendees each day, over half a million visitors in all after four weeks of operation.

In August, nearly half of all tourists to Southern California visited Disneyland. It was estimated, and the park welcomed, its one millionth guest by the end of September. In its first year, it would attract 3.6 million visitors. By the end of its second year, it would greet 4 million more guests. It would receive its 10 millionth visitor less than two and a half years after its opening, by which time it exceeded the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone Park, and Yosemite Park as a tourist attraction. So the parts in this book on Disneyland are a lot longer than that. I just took out mainly the highlights to give you a good idea of his obsession with the park.

And then once again, his ability to take an idea in his mind and make it a reality. Even in the face of every other person. Even his wife doubting his ability to do so. Disneyland, the part in Disneyland is the second to last part in the book. And when you get that far and you read it, you realize that it's his most proud moment. It's the one thing that he would have stayed obsessed with until he died. He thought of the park as a living thing, something that is constantly improved and basically is never finished. And if he had more time on the earth, something he would have continued to improve on. So

the next section and the last section here is called the end. Walt, why no hypochondriac, was nevertheless distrustful of doctors and was concerned. He had shortness of breath, and the excess weight with which he had been struggling for years suddenly began melting away, so that now he looked emaciated and ill. Just to give you some context, this is about eight years after Disneyland opened. He must have known that his employees were commenting on his appearance, commenting on whether he was seriously ill. Writer Jack Spires was standing uncomfortably with Walt in an elevator the week before Walt's hospitalization when their eyes locked.

Walt was wearing a bright yellow cardigan, a reminder of wardrobe's past. Spires joked that he would like to wrestle Walt for the sweater, and the two made small talk before exiting. Then, just as Spires stepped into his office, he heard Walt's voice booming from down the hall, calling him. When I get out of the hospital, Walt said, when Spires re-entered the hallway, I will wrestle you for the sweater. At roughly the same time, Peter Ellenshaw saw Walt and expressed alarm about the impending operation. I'm not going over there to die, Walt told him evenly. There's no problem. But there was a problem, and Walt must have suspected it. In doing a diagnostic workup prior to the surgery,

the doctors had discovered spots on Walt's left lung and immediately ordered him into the St. Joseph's Hospital directly across the street from the studio for surgery. Lillian, who phoned Diane nearly every day, was at her kitchen door the next morning. They took an x-ray of your father's lung, she told her daughter, and they found the lump the size of a walnut. The official press release said that Walt was in the hospital to undergo tests and be treated for the polo injury. The truth was that Walt almost certainly had lung cancer. He had smoked for years since his days with the Red Cross in France. Chain smoking, nervously smoking.

Chain smoking, nervously smoking. His fingers stained from the nicotine. His voice raw and hoarse. And almost every conversation was punctuated frequently by his throat clearing. I just can't picture him without a cigarette, Diane would recall. His hacking cough was dreaded not only by among his employees, who had long regarded it as kind of

a signal of Walt's impending arrival, but among his own family. Sharon had once asked him not to attend a school play that she was acting in because she said if she heard him cough, she would forget her lines. Lillian said that Walt had burned more furniture and more rugs and more everything with his cigarettes than anybody I ever knew. claimed that one could always identify Walt's butts in an ashtray because he would smoke the cigarettes down to the last quarter inch until he could barely hold them. He would forget to put them out, she said. He would light them and get carried away with what he was thinking about and then just hold them. Sometimes he would hold them in his mouth or in his hand and get an ash on it, two inches long. Now, after a half a century of smoking, he was undergoing surgery that just a few days earlier was thought to be relatively routine.

Though Walt had typically been outwardly confident, even at times ebullient, he knew his condition was serious. The day before the operation, a Sunday, he drove the short distance from Diane's recently vacated house in Encino, where he and Lillian were staying while the Carolwood house was undergoing renovation, to Diane's new house in Encino for a visit. At the end, he got into his car, drove down the driveway to the bottom of a swell, and stopped. He sat there for some time in the car alone, watching his grandson Christopher play ball with Ron, then finally drove off. He knew. he knew when the doctor emerged from surgery the next day he told the family gathered that it was as he had expected

in fear Walt had a malignant tumor that had metastasized the doctor gave him six months to two years to live Lillian, Diane said was in denial the doctor gave him six months to two years to live. Lillian, Diane said, was in denial. Roy, too, exploding when he said that Walt had carcinoma and his daughter-in-law corrected him and said he had cancer. Walt never mentioned the cancer, though he carried with him a telegram from the actor

John Wayne, another lung cancer victim, saying, welcome to the club. No one at the studio knew. Several papers carry story of Walt falling off horse playing polo in hospital with neck injury, wrote one anxious employee to another, would appreciate confirmation that it is not serious. Not even all the members of Walt's own family knew what had happened. Ruth and Ray, his brother and sister, both learned of the surgery through the newspapers, though one of Roy's secretaries assured them, he's going to be okay. The official press release reported that a lesion had been found on his left lung,

which had caused an abscess and a portion of the lung was removed. It made no mention of a malignancy. Even as his condition continued to worsen, the family wouldn't accept that he would succumb. On December 14th, Diane went Christmas shopping, buying him fleece slippers because he complained that his feet were always cold in the hospital. Somehow, that would make him not die, she later said. That evening, Lillian phoned her to say that Walt had seemed improved that day. When he put his arms around her to kiss her goodbye, she said,

she could feel his strength. I know he's going to get better, she told Diane. Roy visited that night, and the two brothers talked for hours as Walt traced his Epcot plans with his fingers, using the ceiling tiles as a grid. Sharon's husband, Bob Brown, had also visited and told Lillian that Walt did indeed look as if he had rallied. The next morning, Lillian and Diane got a call from Tommy Willick that Walt had taken a turn for the worse. Diane drove to the old Encino house to pick up her

mother, but Lillian was still dressing, putting on her earrings with great deliberation, and staving off the hospital visit, and Diane recalled that everything seemed to be occurring now in slow motion, as if she might be able to arrest time and delay the inevitable. When they arrived at the hospital and got off the elevator, Diane saw her husband enter her father's room, then suddenly back out as if someone had shoved him. In fact, he was recoiling from the shock of seeing his father-in-law's lifeless body. Inside, Walt's hands were folded on his chest. Uncle Roy was standing at the foot of his bed massaging one of Dad's feet, Diane later recalled, just kind of caressing it, and he was talking to him.

It sounded something like, Well, kid, this is the end i guess sharon and bob brown arrived shortly afterward and brown asked diane if she would accompany sharon into the room diane took sharon's hand and placed it on waltz now daddy now you won't hurt anymore, Sharon whispered. Walt had died at 9.35 a.m. on December 15th of cardiac arrest due to lung cancer. I took care of Walt in his final days, a nurse wrote the family, and I just want you to know that that poor man was so fearful.