Though Walt and Lillian Disney had a number of friends in Hollywood, they seemed
far more comfortable in the company of close friends and family
than at big, celebrity-populated parties. Over the course of years,
they struck up a relationship with television celebrity Art Linkletter
and his wife, and enjoyed one another's company for years.
The recipient of two Emmy Awards and 10 honorary doctorate degrees,
Linkletter was also host of popular television and radio shows including
House Party and People Are Funny. He wrote 23 books including the
best selling Kids Say the Darndest Things. Kids Say the Darndest
Things was one of the top 14 best sellers in American publishing
history and number one for two consecutive years. What's more, in
addition to a series of successful business ventures, Linkletter
has served on the President's National Advisory Council for Drug
Abuse Prevention, the Presidential Commission to Improve Reading
in the United States, the President's Commission on Fitness and
Physical Education, and he was named Ambassador to Australia and
Commissioner General to the 150th Australian Anniversary Celebration
by President Reagan.
Disney fans will also recall that Linkletter was the master of
ceremonies for the opening day of Disneyland.
When he was interviewed for the upcoming documentary, "Walt:
The Man Behind the Myth," Linkletter was generous with both
time and anecdotes. Following are a series of his comments about
Walt's work. In an upcoming exhibit on the Walt Disney Family Museum,
we'll hear more from him about Walt's personal life.
Q. Tell us
about your first meeting with Walt.
A. When I was a young local radio announcer he came up to San
Francisco to introduce "Fantasia." There was going to
be a press conference and nobody was there but me -- I was always
early. There was a man adjusting the chairs and I said, "When
do you think Walt Disney is going to arrive?" And he says,
"I'm Walt Disney." "Well," I said, "What
are you doing rearranging and arranging the chairs?" And he
says, "I like to see things the way I want them to be."
So that was the very first time I ever set eyes on Walt and it was
a wonderful insight into his character - that he was not a big shot
in his own eyes.
The next time I saw him was on a ship. My wife and I were taking
one of our early European holidays and discovered to our delight
that Lil and Walt Disney were on board on their way to Denmark.
We had a wonderful time together talking about show business and
one thing and another. And then when we got to Denmark we decided
we'd meet together at the Tivoli Gardens, which is perhaps one of
the oldest and most famous of all the playground resorts areas.
And when we went through the Tivoli Gardens I had my first look
at Walt Disney's child-like delight in the enjoyment of families
and the cleanliness and orderliness of everything. He was making
notes all the time, about the lights, the chairs and the food. I
said, "What are you doing?" And he says, "I'm just
making notes about something that I've always dreamed about and
that is someday having a great center playground for the children
and the families of America." Years later I found myself introducing
Disneyland on the air.
Q. Could you tell us about
the first time Walt invited you to visit Disneyland?
A. One day Walt called me up and he said, "Art, would you
like to take a ride down to Orange County and see where Disneyland
is going to be? You know, it's a deep secret. You can't tell anybody
anything you see or anything you hear, because Stanford Research
has been deciding where the next place for big growth in Southern
California will center." So we rode down together and I couldn't
believe my eyes. We were going through little villages I'd never
heard of because L.A. Basin is filled with about 67 tiny communities,
which have all grown into cities now. But we were down there in
orange groves and dirt roads and he said, "This is the place."
I've never been a discouraging guy so I didn't tell him what I really
thought (You're out of your mind. This is 45 minutes from where
people live, and besides, there's nothing here!) So I just said,
"Well, Walt, good luck."
When I told him about that later after it had been a big success,
he said, "I didn't think you were enthusiastic but you didn't
have the vision of what I had in my mind when I looked at those
orange groves and saw the Matterhorn and saw the beautiful things
we were going to build."
Q. Could
you tell us about opening day at Disneyland which you covered on
television with Bob Cummings and Ronald Reagan?
A. A great mish-mash of last minute things that hadn't been done:
the cement wasn't hardened in some places, piles of lumber were
here and there, trees that had died had been repainted green instead
of watered.
And Walt Disney was moving into all this confusion like a general
directing an army. Then the show opened and history was made
I was a little worried because one time I went over to one of the
places where I was supposed to pick up a microphone and I couldn't
find it. The camera was going to be transferred to me at any second
and I couldn't find my microphone. I finally found it under a pile
of lumber, just in time to start broadcasting my end of that broadcast.
It was a very exciting day.
Q. How did Walt react
to the chaos?
A. He didn't seem to be bothered by it. He was alert to it and
he was always trying to get things fixed. I remember we had to move
from place to place while the other ones were covering us, either
Ronnie Reagan or Bob Cummings was talking and we'd be moving. Walt
tried to go down an alley to go to his next spot, over at Tomorrow
Land and there was a new guard there. And he said, "You can't
go through here." And Walt stopped and laughed and says, "Do
you know who I am?" He says, "Mr. Disney, I know who you
are, but I'm sorry I have orders. You can't go through here, nobody
can go through here they told me." And Walt said to him, "Either
you let me through here or I'm going to walk right over your body."
And the fellow moved over and Walt went on his way. He always had
a feeling that things were going to work right.
Q. You visited the park
with Walt on multiple occasions thereafter, right?
A. I met Walt a number of times and we walked around the grounds
together. Of course both of us are rather well known and there'd
be crowds of kids and families gathering around for autographs.
So he decided, we'd go down to the magic shop and get some beards
and moustaches to put on. And so we went down there and we came
out with our beards and moustaches on. You won't believe this, but
as we walked around, people walked right up to us and said, "Mr.
Linkletter, Mr. Disney, can I have your autograph?" They wouldn't
even mention the whiskers. They could just see right through them.
But Walt taught me something interesting and I've used it ever since.
He said, "Art, before we go out, we'll take a pad of paper
and we'll autograph about fifty or a hundred names each. And when
they come up and want an autograph, we'll just peel it off and hand
it to them." We did that every time we walked around the grounds
and it was a wonderful way of giving a person an autograph."
Another time Walt said, "Would you like to come out Saturday
night and have dinner and see the fireworks with me and my friends,
Richard Nixon and his wife?" At that time he was the Congressman,
not the President. So we had dinner at the rooftop of the fire station
next to the entrance and then we watched the fireworks. And, while
the fireworks were beautiful and marvelous and interesting as they
always are, I noticed that Walt was making little marks with a pad.
Finally, when it was over, he said, "Well, that was okay. Let's
see now. We got everything I bought: there were fifteen explosions,
there were 28 flags, there were 34 rockets." He'd been writing
down what he was seeing kind of as a checkup on whether or not the
guy was firing everything he'd been paid for. So he was a mixture
of a child-like person who was not a hard driving businessman and
a perfectionist.
Q. Money was never really
an issue for him was it?
A. Walt Disney never thought in terms of money. His brother handled
the money. Some people have said that Walt was tight with his money
but it wasn't Walt. He only thought in terms of the spectacle, what
he was doing, how good it was, whether it was fun, whether the people
he was working with were people he liked. He really gave me my idea
of what success is in life: doing what you love to do with people
you enjoy being with.
Q. Could you tell us
about when you worked with him at the 1960 Olympics at Squaw Valley?
A. One of the most exciting times of my life was when Walt asked
me to be his assistant at the Olympic Games at Squaw Valley, the
Winter Olympics. The job was to entertain the athletes and the officials
in the athletes' village. This was not for the public, it was not
a paid performance, it was a gratis performance by stars and entertainers
and singers that we brought up from Hollywood. And every night we
had a small spectacle. We would have Roy Rogers and a bunch of cowboys
staging a fight with stuntmen in a saloon that was made up on the
stage. We would have singing by famous musical stars or Danny Kaye
or fashion shows. And they were all flown up from Hollywood and
flown back the next day.
My wife Lois and I had a chance to live with Walt and his family
for the several weeks that the Winter Olympics occurred and I got
to know what a true family man Walt was. Sitting around talking
about the problems of getting these shows done was one of the most
educational and really inspiring times of my entire life. To be
working right with Walt and not seeing him daunted by anything.
The very opening of the Winter Olympics, with all the torches coming
down from the hills and the parades with the kids with their instruments
from the High School bands. A blizzard had blown up the night before
and it snowed steadily all night. We were on the air at ten o'clock
in the morning on CBS coast to coast. The roads were so full of
snow that some of the CBS announcers couldn't even get up to the
location in Squaw Valley. I had to be pressed into service to do
some of the broadcasting that the people who didn't show up were
supposed to do. But Walt was unfazed by it. He says, "We'll
just go right ahead and, with any kind of luck, the weather will
clear and we'll get it on the air." I would say that five to
ten minutes of ten, it stopped snowing and it began to lighten up.
We went on the air, we did a thirty-minute broadcast and five minutes
after we were over, it started to snow again. And I said, "Walt,
you have a connection." He says, "No, it's just if you
live right, things happen right."
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