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