One of his great pleasures, as the “mayor” of Disneyland, was to meet and greet world figures, and he relished the chance to show off his park, his personal personification of the American dream, to the world’s most famous Red.
Walt would have got a particularly big charge out of showing off his Disneyland Navy. Under his hands-on supervision, old-fashioned cannons had been affixed to the steamers that churned through the Adventureland’s jungle and down his version of the Mississippi, and he had assembled the paddle-wheelers — along with his Jules Verne submarines — in the Tomorrowland lagoon with an eye on presenting them to the Soviet leader, with tongue in cheek, as “the tenth largest battle fleet in the world.”
Not that losing the publicity of a Khrushchev visit was anything that concerned him… crowds remained strong, fed by the Disneyland TV show, even if the Davy Crockett fad had finally burned out, replaced by Mousekeeter caps and the God-given puberty of Miss Annette Funicello.
The only negative remained the ongoing complaints about the high price of admission (fifteen dollars, which included a book of ride coupons). Walt had to charge what he did because the park cost a lot to build and maintain — he had no government subsidy, after all! The public was his only “subsidy.” Hadn’t he mortgaged everything he owned, put his studio itself in jeopardy for “Disneylandia” (as it had originally been called)?
Walt glanced at the fancy version of a Mickey Mouse watch on his wrist: it was approaching two a.m., and he still hadn’t gone to bed… just sat there with his bottle of Scotch and pack of cigarettes, puffing like one of his prized scale-model steam engines, going over Bud Swift’s latest draft of Pollyanna, a fine piece of sentimental craftsmanship which had brought a tear or two to his eyes.
Seemed like everything made him cry these days.
Sometimes he just had to get away to this apartment, his private personal retreat, free from Lillian and Holmby Hills. He had chosen the decor himself — lavender-, red-, and pink-flocked wallpaper, thick red rugs, lush upholstery, heavy drapes, wind-up phonograph, china knick-knacks, faux gas lamps, brass bed, the furnishings Victorian all the way.
“Hell, Walt,” Ward Kimball had said, one of the few who dared kid him like this, “what fella wouldn’t feel at home here — darn thing looks like a New Orleans whorehouse!”
Walt had just laughed and held his temper in check, but the remark had cut him: he had done his best in the apartment to replicate the living room of the Disney family farmhouse back in Marceline, Missouri. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been able to make much use of this hideaway lately; brother Roy had gently broken it to Walt that a rumor was rife among Disney employees that Walt was using the apartment as a love nest for unceasing assignations with various young women.
The rumor was ridiculous, unfounded — he was not a womanizer, had never been sexually driven; like any studio boss, he could have had one starlet after another, if he so desired, and when he happened to walk through a dressing room where shapely girls were in various states of nakedness, he remained unimpressed: if you’d seen one naked girl, you’d seen them all.
But the rumors had to be quashed — he insisted on moral behavior from his employees at the park, and a single “damn” or “hell” would get a staffer fired on the spot — and, now, only occasionally did Walt use the apartment above the fire station adjacent to city hall, here on Disneyland’s Main Street.
That first six months he had spent all his days and nights at the park. Lillian had accompanied him at first, until one morning a guard at the Monsanto exhibit refused to let Mr. and Mrs. Disney inside, before opening. Walt had shown the guard his driver’s license, and had been admitted… but the guard still refused Lillian. Walt fired the son of a bitch, of course — anyone who’d paid to visit the park deserved the same courtesy given a guest at the Disney home — but Lillian was highly insulted.
After that, Mrs. Walt Disney refused to go to Disneyland.
Walt, however, hated to leave the place, and had the private apartment installed, to give him twenty-four-hour access to the nostalgic world he’d created, which he found so preferable to the real one. Often, during the day, he would amble along Main Street, chat with visitors, tousle the kids’ hair; but just as often crowds of autograph seekers would make that impractical. Instead, he would sit locked in his Main Street apartment and stare out the window wonderingly at the Americans from every state and every walk of life who were strolling down his boulevard of unbroken dreams.
And bittersweet tears of joy at this manifestation of his imagination, tinged with the sting of a lost youth and forever bygone America, would stream down his face and pearl in his mustache.
He looked out into the darkness, only a few security lights providing pools of occasional illumination on his Main Street, which represented to Walt the heart of a small Midwestern town from his childhood. He had designed the park so that, at first blush anyway, it provided a trip into the recent past — his past.
With the railroad defining the borders of the park, its main station was plopped down right at Disneyland’s main entrance. From here, visitors — starting at the small square with its town hall and fire station (over which his apartment nestled) — would wander down the archetypically American Main Street, whose storefronts bore such familiar names as “Elias Disney, Contractor” (Walt’s father) and “Main Street Gym, Christopher D. Miller, Proprietor” (his grandson).
Main Street provided an operating base for concessions, too, but (no matter what anyone thought) Disneyland wasn’t about money to Walt. He wanted to create a home away from home for all Americans, and hence had — with his cartoonist’s instincts — seen to it that everything on Main Street was built slightly smaller than life-size, to create a sense of friendliness, intimacy, a childlike world.
At the end of Main Street, an unlikely sight for small town Americans beckoned: Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Walt had dangled this “weenie” (as he put it) to keep people moving, to propel the park’s visitors onward, visual magnets pulling them into the next world of attractions.
Following this route clockwise, visitors moved from Main Street, finding themselves in Adventureland, then Frontierland, Fantasyland, and finally Tomorrowland, the logical conclusion to a journey that had begun in the nostalgic past. But — unlike a movie, where a viewer was drawn through a linear sequence — Disneyland could be enjoyed however the visitor pleased: a left turn, a right turn, changing the sequence of events and the “story” being told. This concept delighted Walt.
But for all of the lavish lengths that he’d gone to, to bring each of his “lands” to life, Walt himself remained most happy, most at home, with Main Street. Right now he sat on the over-stuffed sofa at the window, a black cigarette in one hand, glass of Scotch in the other, staring down at the dark street — empty of people, let alone horse-drawn streetcars.
His advisors had been after him to add a security force at the park, and he was considering doing so — perhaps he’d dress them like Keystone Kops — but he felt convinced that Disneyland was secure after dark. The Anaheim police did their drive-bys, didn’t they? In four years there had been no break-ins, no vandalism — that would have been un-American. That thought was just fading when the two figures in black moved down Main Street, into his God-like view.
Walt sat forward, eyes wide as Mickey Mouse. The window had been cracked open — no air-conditioning in his apartment, they didn’t have that back at the turn of the century, you know — and he could not only see the men, but hear them.
He could not, however, understand them: it was some Oriental language, Japanese, Korean…?