The Magic Kingdom

His accumulation of 30 Oscars is unequaled in the history of the motion picture industry. He has won 900 other awards and five honorary doctorates (though he never graduated from high school). The corporation bearing his name has grown fourfold in ten years; in 1965 it grossed $110 million--a 27% rise over 1964. The charitable foundation he established without fuss or ballyhoo has generously endowed educational and cultural activities in Southern California. Yet for all his laurels, Walt Disney at 64 is still the busiest man in Hollywood.

To be sure, Walt stopped drawing his own cartoons in 1928, and has not piped the voice of Mickey Mouse on a sound track in years. He has even cut his workday from 14 hours to ten. But his calendar for last week included 30 conferences at his production lot in Burbank or at his research-and-development facility in Glendale, a back-to-backbreaking schedule with time out only to sip Sanka poured from his silver carafe.

At the pink stucco Disney Productions studio, no fewer than three full-length movie features were being edited and scored, and two new TV shows were in production for the 1966-67 season. At the Glendale proving ground, architects, engineers and "imagineers" are developing an addition to his "Magic Kingdom" (Disneyland) that will cost more than the entire original $17 million investment. Also in the works are plans for 1) Mineral King, in California's High Sierra, which, upon opening in 1976, will become one of the world's largest ski centers, and 2) Disney World, a 43-sq.-mi. vacation empire in central Florida that will be almost 170 times as big as Disneyland.

King Bee. The official corporate leader of all this activity is Walt's brother Roy, 72, who is president and board chairman of Disney Productions. Walt calls himself the executive producer, "the little bee who goes from one area to another, gathering pollen and sort of stimulating everybody." Obviously he is the head bee. One ex-Disney executive notes that, for all its 3,300 employees, the corporation is still a one-man show. "Everything in that plant goes through Walt and with his blessing. The king is king, as far as he's concerned. He okays ideas, and he's used the ideas of many, many talented men over the years--but before he's through, he has everyone believing they were his ideas."

Still, the central idea of Walt Disney Productions and its unerring feel for the market have come from no one but Walt. His credo is that "you can't live on things made for children--or for critics. I've never made films for either of them. Disneyland is not for children. I don't play down." Or up. "I've always had a nightmare," he says. "I dream that one of my pictures has ended up in an art theater, and I wake up shaking." The audience he aims at is "honest adults." In short, it is himself. "We're selling corn," he says, "and I like corn."

His easy self-deprecation belies the real contribution that Disney has made in the entertainment industry. His Fantasia in 1940 used wide-screen and stereophonic sound 15 years before their use became general. When Disney decided that the market for animated shorts was becoming saturated, he shifted to nature shorts and then to brilliantly original full-length nature features such as Living Desert and The African Lion. And when animated features such as Cinderella became impractical, he embarked on live-action "people" films such as The Story of Robin Hood and Mary Poppins, as well as a variety of smoothly made TV adventure stories.

Tie-In Trouble. The Disney approach is visionary to the point of idealism. "I'll stack Mary Poppins," he says, "against any cheap and depraved movie ever made." He refuses to deal with "unpleasant" things. "I hate to go to prisons," he says. "I hate zoos where the animals are caged. And I seldom watch today's type of movies. I run them in pieces just to check a certain actor or actress. It can get pretty painful. I screened that picture Days of Wine and Roses, and I knew what was coming--she'd turn out to be a dipsomaniac--so I told the operator to cut. Why sit there and watch something like that?"

The one criticism to which Disney has been vulnerable is that of oversentimentalizing and oversimplifying the literary classics. In the latest example, a printing house on a tie-in contract put out 27 different editions of Walt Disney's Mary Poppins. Poppins' original author, Pamela Travers, got credit only in small type inside the storybooks. The Disney editions were so geared to the screenplay that one outraged public library in California installed a sign reading COME IN AND MEET THE REAL MARY POPPINS. Disney, however, should not have to be concerned any longer with that kind of criticism. He has just signed a deal with the prestigious Scholastic Magazines Inc., which will take over tie-in publication of Disney stories from now on.

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