It happened at 9:35 a.m. on Thursday, December 15, 1966, nearly 58 years ago.
It was just under 60 degrees in Burbank, California, and in a bed in St. Joseph Medical Center, just across Buena Vista Street from the studio bearing his name, the most famous man in the world succumbed to lung cancer and other illnesses.
Walt Disney, motion pictures’ last mogul, was dead, although much of the world didn’t want to believe it.
I was Disneyland’s Advertising & Promotion Manager at the time, and one of my responsibilities was to deal with the non-news media around the world. That meant radio and television announcers, talk show hosts and disc jockeys contacted me when they wanted information, show guests, or, most often, free tickets to Disneyland.
The first call came in from a show host in Sydney, Australia; with obvious distress in his voice, he asked, “It isn’t true, is it; Walt Disney isn’t really dead, is he?” The next call was from upstate New York, with a disc jockey equally unwilling to accept the truth of Disney’s demise. It went on that way through the morning, until newspaper “extra” editions or TV news alerts confirmed that which many didn’t want to believe: Uncle Walt was gone.
Actor Hank Jones remembers the day: “In the first of the eight movies I did at Disney Studios, I played Gudger, the wimpy head of the track team, in Blackbeard’s Ghost, with Peter Ustinov, Elsa Lanchester, Dean Jones, and Suzanne Pleshette. Working at the studio was like going to summer camp. But besides all the happy memories, that film also is draped in black crepe in my mind. It was Walt Disney’s last movie.
“As I arrived at the studio gate on December 15, 1966, I noticed the guard wiping a tear from his eye. All he said was, ‘I’m not sure if you’re working today, Hank, Walt just died.’
“We had heard he had had some health problems, but nothing serious was ever mentioned. In fact, he came to the set of Blackbeard’s Ghost just to see how things were going a few days earlier. We’d seen him unobtrusively standing with his foot on a ladder in a corner of the soundstage watching the shoot. We were stunned when we heard he had passed away in the hospital just across the street. Nobody could do any work; the whole studio closed for the day in respect and in mourning. The Enchanted Kingdom had lost its Prince.”
That evening, Eric Severeid, CBS Network’s evening news commentator, said this about Walt: “It would take more time than anybody has around the daily news shops to think of the right thing to say about Walt Disney.
“He was an original, not just an American original, but an original period. He was a happy accident, one of the happiest this century has experienced, and judging by the way it’s been behaving in spite of all Disney tried to tell it about laughter, love children, puppies, and sunrises, the century hardly deserved him.
“He probably did more to heal or at least to soothe troubled human spirits than all the psychiatrists in the world… There can’t be many adults in the allegedly civilized parts of the globe who did not inhabit Disney’s mind and imagination at least for a few hours and feel better for the visitation.
“It may be true, as somebody said, that while there is not highbrow in a lowbrow, there is some lowbrow in every highbrow. But what Walt Disney seemed to know was that while there is very little grown-up in a child, there is a lot of child in every grown-up. To a child this weary world is brand new, gift wrapped; Disney tried to keep it that way for adults…
“By the conventional wisdom, mighty mice, flying elephants, Snow White and Happy, Grumpy, Sneezy and Dopey – all these were fantasy, escapism from reality. It’s question of whether they are any less real, any more fantastic than intercontinental missiles, poisoned air, defoliated forests, and scrap iron on the Moon. This is the age of fantasy but Disney’s fantasy wasn’t lethal.
“People are saying we’ll never see his like again. We’d better.”
One of my Disneyland artists lettered Severeid’s commentary in Old English script, I sent it to him at CBS in New York and he signed it for me; it hung above my desk for many years.
But Walt was not the saint most saw him as. He drank more than his share of scotch mists; he smoked more cigarettes than he should have; and his ultra-conservative, anti-union politics were well known in the film community.
But it’s safe to say he brought more smiles to more faces than anyone else in history.
And is there a better legacy?
