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Page 23 of 28 Vision of the Future: The Image of Walt

Walt draws Lilly's attention to the distant horizon

Vision of the Future: Walt draws Lilly's attention to the distant horizon during an Atlantic cruise

The last six years of Walt's life were marked by a furor of activity. Although he obviously had no idea that his life was to be abbreviated by lung cancer right after his 65th birthday, he seemed deeply impatient to get as much done during these years as he possibly could. This included feature-length animated films, more work on Disneyland, and the live-action film that was arguably his greatest -- "Mary Poppins." Plans for the future were also abundant, including dreams of a ski resort in California, a new kind of university for creative young people, and ? most notably -- his notion of a city of tomorrow, dubbed EPCOT, to be built in Florida. As all this was going on, he was a powerful presence in the lives of his grandchildren. Even today, over 30 years after his death, those who were old enough still recall a man who seemed endlessly entertained by their exploits. 
His last months continued to be filled with activity, including a memorable shipboard trip through British Columbia waters in July 1966. Onboard, Walt and Lilly celebrated their 41st wedding anniversary. He enjoyed being surrounded by all his grandchildren and spent his spare moments reading about city planning. During Halloween he took another trip with Lillian, Sharon, and her husband to Williamsburg, Virginia. Sharon recalled him as the perfect tourist, showing his family around the place with pleasure. Just days later, Walt was in the hospital. His left lung was removed. Though he paid several visits to the studio in the next few weeks, he was back in the hospital on November 30, and died on December 15.
Other men might have been slowing down as they entered their sixth decade. Not Walt. If anything, his pace seemed to accelerate, despite the fact that the passage of the years had taken some toll on his health. Though he could still out-work most 20-year-olds, he seemed to frequently come down with colds and sinus infections. Meanwhile, his old polo injury had left him with chronic neck pain; biographer Bob Thomas indicates that it sometimes caused "almost unbearable agony." Many nights at five o'clock he would visit studio nurse Hazel George for heat treatments that were supposed to relieve the discomfort. A drink or two helped the relaxing treatments along. Walt obviously had no inkling that he had only a few years left to him. Still, he was not oblivious to his own mortality. In 1961 his oldest brother, Herbert, died at 72. "Dad was scheduled to go to Vandenburg Air Force Base," recalled Diane, "and Ron went with him. He didn't go to the funeral. I remember standing by the grave and I saw a plane overhead, and I've always thought it was Dad. He never, ever, went to funerals. He went to one once and said, 'I hope no one ever has to go through this for me.' It wasn't for lack of love that he didn't go to Herb's funeral.". Walt relaxing?

Walt relaxing? On the contrary. In his
sixth decade, Walt engaged in a burst
of activity, as if he felt that time was 
of the essence.

Walt enjoying a cigar

Walt enjoying a cigar while relaxing
with Lilly at Jenny Lake Lodge in 
Wyoming, during the shooting of a
film about otters in the nearby 
Snake river

On May 31, 1963, he sent a memo to Roy concerning estate planning: "It is not myself I am thinking about, but it is the effect of what might happen to whatever is left that bothers me. When I'm up in heaven playing the harp, I really couldn't put my heart into it if I thought I had left things a mess down here." His smoker's cough was as bad as ever. And he always had a cigarette in his hands; for years he preferred unfiltered Lucky Strikes. Later he smoked strong French cigarettes, Gitanes. He'd light one up, become engrossed in conversation, and hold the cigarette in his fingers until the ash was two inches long. Said Lilly, "He's burned more furniture and more rugs and more everything with his cigarettes than anybody I ever knew." When Diane was younger and sat in his lap, she was burned more than once by the ubiquitous cigarettes. Of course, the surgeon general's report, which straightforwardly pointed to the link between smoking and disease, didn't come out until 1964. Still, it was clear that the chain smoking couldn't be doing him any good. "He got into one of these coughing jags once," recalled Ward Kimball. "It was longer than usual. I stood there and I just blurted out, 'For Christ's sake, why don't you give up smoking?' He looked up and his eyes were watering and he said, 'A guy's got to have a few vices, don't he?'" 
The general public was virtually unaware that Walt smoked altogether. Out of thousands of photographs published of him during his lifetime, virtually none show him smoking; artful cropping at the studio ensured that. Walt also enjoyed a drink or two at the end of the day. For years, his drink of choice was an Irish Mist -- a mixture of scotch and crushed ice. But he rarely drank during the workday. Though he didn't approve of staffers who had liquid lunches -- and given the pressure of the studio, there were more than one -- he rarely brought the matter up. All that mattered was that they got their work done. In the late 1960s he told Imagineer Marty Sklar, "You know something? I'm not Walt Disney anymore. Walt Disney is a thing. An image that people have in their minds. And I spent my whole life building this. Walt Disney isn't that image. I smoke and I drink and there's a whole lot of other things that I do that I don't want to be part of that image." This may have been a major tactical error on Walt's part -- as well as the publicists' at the studio. By perpetuating a mythic, idealized version of the man ? the so-called Disney Version, as author Richard Schickel put it in his less than positive portrait of Walt -- they opened the door to countless revisionist versions of his life. There are some journalists -- some good, some bad -- who regard any previously hidden information as a sure sign that there are closets full of skeletons, ready to be exposed to a world that enjoys seeing its great men and women defiled
Walt

Walt told Imagineer Marty Sklar:
"I'm not Walt Disney anymore. 
Walt Disney is an image that
people have in their minds."
 

 
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