"It was over Halloween and the leaves were all dropping deep in the streets," recalled Sharon Disney Lund, Walt's younger daughter, in an interview about ten years ago. "There was no one around. It was raining. We were in a reproduction house in Williamsburg, Virginia for about three days and on Halloween night, one little boy came to the door for Trick or Treat. We hadn't thought of it. Well, it was the most awful feeling of not having anything. I remember Daddy going from room to room, trying to find a pack of gum or anything. And he finally found something upstairs in his room. It was a pack of gum for this little boy. It really bothered him."
That was typical. Walt Disney loved children. He loved his own daughters; his grandchildren, other relatives and, in fact, children generally.
Artist and family friend Herb Ryman recalled a family outing in which the entire group of adults grew annoyed at a little girl who was peering through a fence at them, and later tossing things over the fence from a walnut tree in her yard. "A pest," the group proclaimed. Not so, said Walt. "She's just lonesome, that's all. She's lonesome."
Walt's understanding and affection for young people spilled over into his professional life, as a whole series of child performers agree. His first child-star, Virginia Davis, was the original Alice in the Alice comedies Walt made in his early 20s. Her memories, to this day, are of an affectionate, warm man who instinctively understood that the way to get the best out of a four-year-old girl was to suggest that acting was just a game of "let's pretend."
In later years, when it came time to cast the Mickey Mouse Club, Walt could have had his choice of an army of well-trained child stars. But that wasn't what he wanted. Instead, he wanted "the kid next door." Writes Bill Cotter in "The Wonderful World of Disney Television," Walt said, "I don't want those kids that tap dance, or blow instruments while they're tap dancing or skip rope or have curly hair like Shirley Temple's or nutty mothers and things like that -- I just want ordinary kids."
And although the Mouseketeers didn't see Walt on the set frequently, they almost all recall him with great affection. Annette Funicello, then 12, became the most famous of them all. She had never sung in public before, and was understandably nervous when Walt asked her to sing. But soon her anxiety vanished. "He made light of it," she remembered years later. "And was so kind. I felt such warmth from him." He was particularly protective of his young performers; trying to ensure that little or no swearing took place in front of them. As for himself, although he was a heavy smoker at the time, he never lit up a cigarette in front of the Mouseketeers, according to Mouseketeer Bobby Burgess.
Later, when he brought 12-year-old Hayley Mills to America to film Polyanna, she discovered that he had made sure her hotel room was filed with flowers, fruits and candies. He took Hayley and her family on a personal tour of Disneyland, enjoying the rides with them. "The best part of it all was that he was so much part of our own personal life," she said. "He was a very calm and gentle person and became a friend."
Karen Dotrice, who played Jane in Mary Poppins has similarly warm memories. As she told authors Howard and Amy Green, "He was there at a birthday party held for me on the set. I remember it being particularly special because he was wheeling in the cake and he gave me a stuffed teddy bear, which I have to this day. He could hit the nerve of what children want or what they were feeling at the time. . . I absolutely worshipped the man."
At around the same time, he took yet another child star under his wing; Kurt Russell. Russell elaborates on his relationship with Walt in an interview exhibited in the Walt Disney Family Museum this month. One of the themes that runs through his memories is that the 60-plus-year-old man, famous internationally, made Russell feel like an equal in conversation. "He just didn't talk down to me," he said. "He did it in a good way that didn't make me feel too self-important. That wasn't what it was about. He was genuinely interested in the conversation."
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