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New Horizons
 
NEW HORIZONS, 1946-1960
by Katherine and Richard Greene
 
Walt with grandson
Walt shares his kingdom with his first grandchild, Chistopher Miller
With the end of the Second World War, someone watching Walt's career from the outside might have thought he was slowing down. His first films were not remarkable, and his studio seemed to be losing direction. At the same time, Walt's love of trains transformed itself into a hobby that was to fascinate him for years to come. He started building miniature trains and eventually had a ride-it-yourself steam engine on the grounds of his home -- a home that also featured a soda fountain, which entertained so many of his daughters' friends that he happily groused that he was "supplying the whole neighborhood with sodas." But of course Walt was far from heading into a life of ease and leisure. During this time he was to break into live-action films and nature films. And in 1955 he opened the attraction that was to be one of his greatest loves -- Disneyland. At the same time, his entrance into television altered Walt's life in a dramatic way. Though his name had been famous for years, now fans recognized his face from blocks away. Of course, as Diane and Sharon entered their teen years, the days of happy jaunts to the merry-go-round came to an end. Although this was a disappointment for Walt, it was just a waiting game. In time, both girls got married and set Walt forth on another road in his family life: that of grandfather.
 
The men and women who worked for Walt never tired of trying to figure him out. In off hours at work, on weekends, or over lunch, often the conversation centered around this man who was an enigma to many of them. His midwestern roots were far from remarkable. His education had ended with one year of high school. He didn't have any formal training in music, and he had long before conceded that his artists were better than he. And yet there was little question that Walt was the one indispensable man in the Disney organization. To be sure, his staffers were capable of producing top-notch work without him ("Dumbo," for example, was created with relatively little input from Walt). But day in and day out, most of them would concede that it was Walt's clear vision of the work that separated Disney animation and films -- and later Disneyland -- from anything being done anyplace else. And Walt knew it. His faith in himself was remarkable. When Roy or Lilly were dubious about his plans, he pushed forward anyhow. When critics complained about his work, he dismissed them. Critics are "odd creatures," he said. "I can't figure out what they want. . . . I've just never built anything for them. . . . To hell with them. . . . It's the public [that counts]."
 
It unquestionably took all the resolve Walt could muster to recover from the twin blows of the strike and World War II. The strike had shaken his faith in his staff. The war -- and the accompanying loss of European markets -- had turned even a masterpiece like "Pinocchio" into a financial drain. At war's end, the studio was under a mountain of debt, and Roy was nervous about plunging into new, expensive projects. While Walt lived in a world of fantastic new ideas and wonderful creations, Roy had to confront stern-faced bankers and anxious stockholders. "The company was about two inches from going under," said Roy's son, Roy Edward, who remembered his father's sleeplessness at the time. "He had a bicycle downstairs and he would get up in the middle of the night and ride the bicycle for an hour." In the next several years, Walt produced some of the most disappointing works of his career -- grab-bag films that consisted of packages of short pieces tied together by negligible plots. Even "Song of the South" was not well received, and it was the most ambitious effort the studio was to mount for several years after the war. Although he and Roy had bitter arguments about the future of their company, the disappointments only toughened Walt's resolve to diversify and improve. So several years in the doldrums were followed by yet another growth burst as the studio got involved in live-action films, True-Life Adventures, and a trio of ambitious animated features that included "Cinderella," "Peter Pan," and "Alice in Wonderland."
 
As the energy level in the studio began to return to a higher level, Walt's own desire for play seemed to reach a new high. By the late 1940s, Diane was getting a little old to be her daddy's playmate. But Sharon was still happy to follow him around wherever he went. Generally, that just meant trips to the studio or excursions to museums. But in August 1947, she almost followed him off the edge of the earth. The Disney family had been invited on a flying tour of Alaska by a friend named Russell Havenstrite. Diane was away at camp, and Lilly thought the trip too difficult to make herself. So Walt and Sharon went off into the wild blue yonder together. By and large it was a wonderful adventure, but at one point on their way to the tiny community of Candle, things turned a bit alarming. The plane was in thick clouds, and the pilot told them that the radio had gone dead and there wasn't sufficient visibility to land. Meanwhile, Walt and Havenstrite drank. In part they were toasting the recent birth of a grandson to Havenstrite, but Diane later speculated that their drinking was also out of concern "that they might not ever see any of their loved ones again." A half-hour trip turned into two hours, and the plane was running low on fuel. So the pilot decided to take his chances and descend into the clouds. When Earth came into view, the plane was right over Candle. Walt finally emerged from the plane, tripped, and fell on his face. Later he said, "I don't know whether I kissed the ground -- or fell on it."
 
That fall Walt wrote to his sister Ruth to inquire as to whether her son -- named Ted, after his father -- might like a train set for Christmas. According to "Walt Disney's Railroad Story," an absorbing book about Walt's love affair with trains by Michael Broggie, "He made the same offer to his niece Marjorie Davis, for her son Geoffrey, and his brother Herbert's grandson, David Puder. Underscoring this gift suggestion was Walt's desire to create a railroad hobby for himself. If the hobby also provided an opportunity to share trains with kids in the family, so much the better."
 
That Christmas he wrote Ruth again. "I bought myself a birthday-Christmas present," he proudly reported, "something I've wanted all my life -- an electric train. Being a girl, you probably can't understand how much I wanted one when I was a kid, but I've got one now, and what fun I'm having. I have it set up in one of the outer rooms adjoining my office, so I can play with it in my spare moments. It's a freight train with a whistle, and real smoke comes out of the smokestack -- there are switches, semaphores, station, and everything. It's just wonderful!" Walt had given up on polo a few years before -- after an accident that crushed four of his cervical vertebrae -- so he had time to throw himself into his new hobby. He built miniatures -- many of which complemented his trains -- that required hours of painstaking effort, and took great pride in his handiwork. "He'd come up to the dinner table," recalled Diane, and "bring this little piece of wood he had [been working on], and sit there all through dinner and be so proud of it. He'd pass it around for inspection." It was a natural hobby for Walt. He had loved trains since his childhood, waiting for his Uncle Mike Martin, a railroad engineer, to emerge with bags of candy from the line that passed by Marceline. As an adult, Lilly remembered, "We'd go over and stand and watch the trains coming in. And after they'd go by he'd watch the vibrations on the tracks . . . that was recreation."
 
In 1948 he took one of his animators, Ward Kimball, on a trip to the Chicago Railroad Fair. This was an ideal choice; Kimball was a railroad fan too, and he loved toys of all kinds. "In the mornings, we'd go down there and the locomotives would be worked on, getting greased and ready for the first performance," Kimball said. "They let us run them. We were like little kids, running famous locomotives like the Lafayette, the John Bull, and the Tom Thumb." Kimball wanted to go to hear jazz after the fair closed down for the day. But Walt insisted on taking long trips on the elevated trains with him. Kimball: "He'd be looking out the window and reliving his childhood." After they left the fair, the two men visited Greenfield Village in Michigan -- a "museum of buildings" founded by automobile pioneer Henry Ford. Unrecognized by the crowds, Walt and Kimball were happy tourists, taking home movies and enjoying the enormous collection of cottages, barns, and antique buildings that Ford had assembled there. Soon after arriving home, Walt wrote a memo to Dick Kelsey, a production designer at the studio. According to Broggie, "for the first time, Walt described a revolutionary idea he called 'Mickey Mouse Park,'" the first of many concepts that would ultimately lead to Disneyland.
 
In the summer of 1949, Walt, Lilly, Diane, and Sharon took a memorable trip to Europe, where he was working on "Treasure Island" -- the studio's first all-live-action film. They enjoyed five weeks in England, three weeks in France and Switzerland, and a few days in Ireland. Diane recalled one afternoon when Walt returned to their Paris hotel room, heavy laden with boxes full of little mechanical toys -- tiny wind-up gadgets of all kinds. He set them going on the hotel room floor and stared with the intensity for which he was famous. "Look at that movement," he said, "with just a simple mechanism. Look at that." Was he beginning to think about Audio-Animatronics? It's impossible to know, of course. But given Walt's famous capacity for storing away information for years, it's not unlikely. The family all had a good time, and Walt particularly enjoyed revisiting some of the locations he had known when he was in the Red Cross. He even tried out his not considerable command of the French language on more than one occasion.
 
The soda fountain
To be sure, the girls did enjoy the soda fountain . . .
 
The next year, Walt and Lilly celebrated their 25th anniversary, and they decided it was time to build a new house. They selected a site on Carolwood Drive in Holmby Hills, an elegant location between Beverly Hills and Bel Air. Though there was space for a projection room, it wasn't an enormous house and was designed in a way that would simplify housework, making a large staff unnecessary. As Walt wrote, "It's built to conform to our present needs, and I know we're going to like it very much. There's a playroom with a soda fountain . . . where the girls can entertain their friends without disturbing the rest of the household." To be sure, the girls did enjoy the soda fountain, prompting Walt to later happily gripe about "supplying the whole neighborhood with sodas at my expense." He was delighted to have the girls bringing their friends home rather than gallivanting around. What's more, Walt seemed to enjoy his sweet laboratory too. "He'd experiment," said Sharon. "He'd go out there and make these weird concoctions that nobody would eat, including himself. I remember one time, trying to make a champagne soda. It was the most awful thing. He couldn't get anybody to taste it and he agreed it was pretty bad."
 
But perhaps the most outstanding attribute of the new house was that it contained property appropriate to the construction of a half-mile circle of one-eighth-size train tracks, upon which Walt intended to ride his own miniature steam engine. "Walt was not so much interested in a new house as he was in the property so that he could build his train on it," said Lilly. Lilly was concerned that Walt's train not destroy her plans for beautiful flower beds. So Walt had a 90-foot tunnel dug that ran underneath the garden. He even had a studio attorney draw up a facetious legal document, giving him the right of way to run his train through the property. In its mock legalese, Walt was described as the "first party," Lilly was the "second party," and Diane and Sharon were the "third parties."
 
Walt equipped the property with a red barn (modeled after his family's barn back in Marceline) with woodworking and machine tools and enlisted the aid of studio staffers like Roger Broggie, who had established the Disney Studio machine shop (and whose son is author Michael Broggie). He decided that it would be more exciting if the tunnel were shaped like an S -- so that riders wouldn't be able to see the light at the end when they entered it. One worker thoughtfully advised Walt that it would be cheaper to build the tunnel straight. "No," said Walt, in a classic Disney response, "it's cheaper not to do it at all." Walt dubbed his train the Carolwood Pacific Railroad, and he treated it like another child. Sunday afternoons he would take visitors out for rides. This was a marvelous opportunity for Walt to socialize. Walt really couldn't abide small talk and the kind of inside-Hollywood gossip that consumed people's time at parties. But his train provided a perfect way to entertain guests without actually having to undergo the pointless chitchat. When he wasn't actually riding the train around on its track he enjoyed working on it in his barn, creating his own yellow caboose, among other things. "It's my pride and joy," he said, "and I love it." In the early years with his wonderful new toy, Sharon was something of a junior partner in the railroad. "He taught me how to run the thing and how to fire it up -- get the engine going. I thought it was great fun," she said.
 
Carolwood Pacific Railroad
Walt and the Carolwood Pacific Railroad.
 
As time passed, Sharon joined her sister in the realm of teen interests that were out of her father's grasp. As Walt recalled, "They reached an age where they fell in love with horses. And their dad didn't count for much except to pay for the horses and things. Then from horses, instead of getting them back they fell in love with parties and all of the things that come when you get in that teenager bracket. I was rather frustrated through there for awhile. I just didn't know what was the matter with me. I'd get my kids. I'd say, 'Come on, let's go somewhere.' 'No, Daddy, we've got to stay home, or there's a prom on.' And they had to go get their hair done and things." Bob Thomas tells a revealing story in his biography of Walt. "Once, when he was visiting friends, a little girl sat on his lap. Memories of the younger Diane and Sharon returned, and he told the girl, 'I think you'd better get down, dear, or you're going to see your Uncle Walt cry.'" Despite his quick temper at the studio, neither girl feared him. "We would clash at times," recalled Diane. "I was very assertive. But I was never afraid of him -- not ever. I challenged him all the time."
 
That didn't mean, of course, that Walt never got angry with his daughters. If Diane's resistance turned into insolence or disrespect, he was quick to let her know she had gone too far. Ordinarily, he'd call Diane "kid," but she knew that if he was referring to her as "sweetheart" something was amiss. As his older daughter reported, annoyances weren't left to fester; "nothing was ever under the surface in our family." Recalled Sharon, "One night [my parents] were going to bring some people home from a restaurant. We had one telephone line and I was sitting there on the phone. They tried to call our housekeeper to tell her to make some coffee. They didn't have emergency breakthrough then, and the operator would not cut in. When Daddy came home I was still on the phone, and Daddy walked down the hall, very quietly, saw me sitting there with my feet up on the wall, just talking away. He just walked down, and his eyebrow went up, and his finger went down on the receiver and he didn't need to say anything. That was enough. That raised eyebrow was a scolding in itself."
 
By and large, neither girl was overly delighted with the burdens their father's fame placed on them. "To us, he was just Daddy," said Sharon. "I always wished he was just ordinary people," said Diane. "From the first moment I became aware of his fame, I hated it. I didn't like the attention drawn to me. . . . I loved him, respected him, admired him, and thought he was a wonderful father. And we had a wonderful life. But it feels like for the rest of my life, I'm living being Walt Disney's daughter, without being an ordinary somebody." In 1951 Diane started at the University of Southern California, while Sharon attended Westlake high school. Like so many fathers, Walt decided by this point that he had them pegged: Diane was the intellectual and Sharon was the beauty. He'd comment on Sharon, as she prepared for a date, "Look at her. This is my glamour puss. This is my beautiful daughter."
 

Sunday, May 9, 1954: Diane and Ron are married in Santa Barbara
 
While at USC, Diane had a blind date with a handsome, six-foot-five football player named Ron Miller. Soon enough -- with Walt and Lilly's blessing -- they announced their desire to marry. Walt cried at Diane's wedding -- tears were running down his cheeks as he gave away his precious daughter. But, she said, "at the reception afterwards he was his old . . . self. He's wonderful. He had to stand on tiptoe for the photographers because Ron is so tall." Ron and Diane, for their part, giggled through much of the ceremony in a style reminiscent of Lillian, almost 30 years before. After the wedding, Ron worked for Walt for a while and then joined the army. He and Diane lived in Pacific Grove, near Fort Ord.
 
Diane was pregnant and Walt was delighted; he'd introduce her as the "custodian of my grandson." However, when Christopher Miller was born, there was one disappointment. Walt had assumed that if Diane's first child was a boy he'd be named Walter. But when the time came, Diane decided that this child needed a brand-new name. Walt was nice about it, but he proclaimed that the next boy would be Walter. And that's what indeed came to pass -- Walt would have to wait while Diane had three girls in between: Joanna, Tamara, and Jennifer. After Ron got out of the service, he signed on with the L.A. Rams and played a year for them. "We didn't have a place to live right away, so we lived with Walt and Lilly for a while," recalled Ron. "That was quite an experience. Here's this big guy sleeping until eleven o'clock, and Walt had been up for four or five hours by then."
 
In 1955 Walt's career took a turn that propelled his family even more squarely into the public eye. His television show, "Disneyland," began on ABC on October 27, 1954. Walt was the master of ceremonies, and his face soon became known throughout the world. No longer could he visit places and be an unrecognized tourist. Now he was immediately besieged by men and women in search of an autograph. He loved the fame -- much of the time. But after Disneyland, the park, opened the following year, Walt came to understand that his now-famous face meant he was besieged by crowds there once it opened in the morning. This was fun, but it also stopped him from actually getting any work done. So he sometimes disguised himself with sunglasses and a floppy-brimmed hat. If people recognized him and requested autographs, he'd ask them to send a note to the studio. Sometimes, though, a child would approach him. He would place his finger to his lips -- conspiring with his young admirer to keep his identity a secret -- and hand the child an autograph he had prepared that morning in the apartment he and Lilly kept over the firehouse on Main Street.
 
When Diane was pregnant with her second child, the young couple started making plans for a new house. Walt drew up the plans himself. At that time he was very excited about the Monsanto House at Disneyland, and told Diane he thought she should use her kitchen as a laboratory of new labor-saving devices. When Joanna was born, Ron called his in-laws immediately. Lilly answered and conveyed the news to Walt that Diane had a little girl. "Oh, how wonderful for Ron," he said, "A daughter. Oh, Ron will just love this." Then, Lillian reported, he lit a cigarette, got out the house plans and said, "Now, let's get separate bathrooms for the children." After one season in which Ron played for the Rams, Walt was worried. The two times he had gone to see Ron play, his son-in-law got hurt -- on one occasion knocked unconscious. "If you keep playing football," Walt told him, "you're going to die, and I'm going to have to raise those little guys." Ron went to work with Walt on a number of television and film projects, including "Old Yeller" and "Darby O'Gill and the Little People." "Walt thought of Ron as being his son," said artist and family friend Herb Ryman. "He would stand outside the studio watching the cars come in and he'd explain to Ron who the various people were so that Ron would know how the business worked."
 
Ron enjoyed the working relationship enormously. "Hell, I even relished the times he called me in at 6 or 6:15 p.m. I wanted to talk with him. I wanted to hear from him. It was very stimulating. . . . Of course, sometimes when he was in a bad mood, it was just the opposite." Occasionally Ron even directed Walt -- on some of the lead-ins for the "Disneyland" television show. This wasn't always easy; even though Walt loved Ron, he showed him no preference on the set. Ron: "Walt and the writer always went over the lead-ins together before they were shot. In one case, they had him behind a desk. He'd walk over to the bookcase and then come back to the desk. Well, that seemed like a false move to me. Why didn't we just find him at the bookcase and then bring him over to the desk? So Walt came in first thing in the morning and he went to the desk. I had it all lined up the other way. He looked at the camera and said, 'What's it pointing over there for?' I said, 'Well, Walt, I thought I could save a move by starting at the bookshelf and coming here.' He said, 'Didn't you read the lead-in? What do you think I do? I thought this out very carefully. We start at the desk.' We started at the desk."
 
Meanwhile, Sharon tried her hand as a model. She even took a small role in Walt's film "Johnny Tremain." Diane reflected around the time, as her family was growing, "Dad always thought that I would be the intellectual and the career woman. Well, it's sort of reversed. Sharon's gone out and started to pursue a career in modeling. And she's becoming an intellectual and reading poetry."
 
Sharon met and fell in love with Robert Brown, a designer at the Charles Luckman architectural firm. The romance blossomed. In March 1959, while Walt was recovering from trouble with a kidney stone, Sharon and Bob announced to Walt that they wanted to get married. "She's your problem now," Walt told his future son-in-law. They were married in May 1959, and true to form, Walt cried at the wedding. Soon after, he started inquiring as to when some more grandchildren might be on the way. By this time, Diane had given birth to her third child, Tamara. And Walt loved being a grandfather. "He was delighted with our family because he always wanted a large family," said Diane. "He loved children. He thought I was bright. He thought I was a good mother and a good wife. And that made him very happy."
 
Sharon and Bob Brown marry
The wedding of Sharon and Bob Brown
 
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