Lots of people think that Walt Disney is frozen. Some say his icy remains are in a special chamber beneath the Pirates of the Caribbean exhibit at Disneyland. Some think his body is in a Salt Lake City deep freeze. It is known that there is a secret apartment in one of the spires of the Cinderella Castle at the Orlando Disnev World, built for Disney and family but (they say) never occupied. Is the late animator awaiting reanimation? The story gets a lot of play at Holmby Hills cocktail parties and elsewhere. The Disney family never has said what it did with Walt’s body. And as Disney’s studio told the press after his death, “The entire corporation is carrying on exactly as if Walt were here.”
The rumor of Disney’s “cryonic suspension” has been floating around the Disney organization, cryonics groups, and much of the nation since the cartoonist’s 1966 death. No one seems to know where or how the story started. Anthony Haden-Guest mentioned it in a 19/3 book, The Paradise Program (New York: William Morrow). It has turned up in the pages of Playboy. Cryonics popularizer Robert C. W. Ettinger has acknowledged the rumor but discounts it. One version of the tale, it should be noted, contends that Disney was frozen but his family had second thoughts and thawed him out again. Poor Walt—first evervone said he was a pothead and now this.
The premise of cryonics is that bodies may be preserved at Of before death by freezing and kept in a changeless frozen state in definitely. It is postulated that the supertechnology of a future age will be able to revive the frozen bodies and cure them of disease of injury now untreatable. The cryonics movement generated popular interest after the publication of The Prospect of Immortality by Robert C. W. Ettinger, a Michigan college instructor, in 1964 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday). Since then at least thirty-two people have been frozen.
No celebrities have been frozen. There are stories that Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower considered it, but they most certainly were not frozen. Among living notables, sixties guru Timothy Leary and Columbia University physicist Gerald Feinberg are said to have expressed interest. TV comedy writer Dick Clair (half of the team that includes wife Jenna McMahon) plans to be suspended. But nearly all the people frozen so far are middle-class Americans—housewives, a few kids, salesmen, teachers. That’s it, unless there is something to the Disney rumors.
Disney had opportunity to hear about cryonics. Ettinger’s theories received widespread attention in the two years before Disney’s death. (Ettinger made a tour of talk shows, getting into a televised argument with Buddy Hackett when Hackett made jokes about cryonics. Ettinger didn’t see what was so funny.) If Disney was frozen, he would have been the first, barring any other clandestine freezings. Disney died just a month before Dr. James Bedford, a Glendale, California, psychology professor who received publicity as “the first frozen man.”
There was no news coverage of Disney’s funeral. Likewise, even as Disney’s health failed in late 1966, he kept tight rein on media coverage of his condition.
On November 2, 1966, Disney was admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital, just across the street from his Burbank studios. Studio officials, who handled all of Disney’s personal publicity, said he was to be treated for an old neck injury received while playing polo.
While in the hospital, surgeons removed part of Disney’s left lung on November 21. A tumor had been found, according to a press release, but the studio refused to say whether it had been malignant. Disney was released. He was readmitted on December 5. This time he was said to be undergoing a routine postoperative checkup. Disney remained in the hospital until his death.
Hospital sources said that Disney died at nine thirty-five on the morning of December 15. Cause of death was not announced. Apress release said only that Disney had suffered “acute circulatory collapse.” In other words, his heart suddenly stopped beating—which, presumably, is how they decided he was dead in the first place.
On the evening of December 16, the studio unexpectedly announced that funeral services had already been held. “The services were a closely guarded family secret,” observed the Los Angeles Times, “and were announced only after they had been concluded.” The ceremony was conducted at the Little Church of the Flowers in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale. The Los Angeles Times reported that studio and Forest Lawn officials refused to reveal any further details of the service, including the disposition of the body. “Mr. Disney’s wishes were very specific and had been spelled out in great detail,” the Times quoted a Forest Lawn spokesman.
If you want to believe the cryonics rumor, there is further circumstantial evidence. Disney had a long preoccupation with death.
In The Paradise Program, Anthony Haden-Guest notes Disney’s “sombre sense of death” and “occasional touch of the horrors,” telling of a gruesome seven-minute Mickey Mouse cartoon made in 1933, two years after Disney’s nervous collapse. In it, a mad scientist tries to cut off Pluto’s head and put it on a chicken. The film was withdrawn from the Rank film library in 1970.
In The Story of Walt Disney, a 1957 biography, daughter Diane Disney Miller and Pete Martin write:
It may have been while he was undergoing the nervous wear and tear which led to his crack-up that he became concerned with the inevitability of death. Mother [Mrs. Lillian Disney] says that she first noticed his brooding about that after a party twenty years ago when a fortuneteller told him that he would die when he was thirty-five.
But my mother’s sister, Aunt Hazel, says he still worried about that prophecy even after he passed his thirty-fifth year. Whenever father gets depressed, he discusses his impending demise. He never goes to a funeral if he can help it. If he has to go to one it plunges him into a reverie which lasts for hours after he’s home. At such times he says, “When I’m dead I don’t want a funeral. I want people to remember me alive.”
Cryonics is expensive. Ettinger estimated the cost of a cryonics suspension in the mid-1960s as eighty-five hundred dollars minimum. Currently Trans Time, a Berkeley, California, cryonics organization, sets sixty thousand dollars as rock bottom foi undertaking and for setting up a fund to pay for the costs of sus pension in perpetuity. Disney’s estate was said to be worth many millions of dollars. He did set up three trust funds and a foundation, the details of which were not released (One of the trust funds endows the California Institute of the Arts, a Valencia, Cal ifornia, creative arts college since nicknamed Walt’s Tomb or the Magic Mausoleum.)
Add to that the fact that Disney was the ultimate technology freak. Tomorrowland, monorails, Space Mountain, EPCOT … it isn’t hard to believe that he might have been intrigued with cryonics.
What, then, happened to the body?
Regardless of the family’s wishes, a death certificate must be filed, and certain information must be provided on it. Disney’s death certificate is available—to anyone—from the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder’s office.
It contains information that did not appear in any newspaper account of the death. The attending physician, Dr. Bert H. Cotton, listed the cause of death as “cardiac arrest” due to “bronchogenic ca It lung.” The latter is shorthand for bronchogenic mrcinoma, left lung—that is, a cancer arising in the air passages of the left lung. Three months is given as the approximate interval between onset and death. Disney probably knew about the cancer well before the “polo injury” trip to the hospital.
The cause-of-death information on the certificate is said to have been determined from an operation November 7. This was prior to the operation disclosed to the press, which took place on November 21. The November 21 operation seems to have been his last.
The certificate says that Disney’s body was cremated at Forest Lawn, Glendale, on December 17, 1966. No autopsy was performed, but there is an embalmer’s signature—“Dean Fluss”— indicating that the body was embalmed.
The embalmer’s name and license number check out. Fluss was indeed a real embalmer working at Forest Lawn and not a fake identity cooked up to cover a cryonics trail. When contacted, Fluss’s wife said she had never heard of the cryonics rumor.
The death certificate does not say what was done with the remains. Generally speaking, though, the Forest Lawn mortuary is for those who will be interred at Forest Lawn.
The Forest Lawn management is circumspect with a vengeance. Excavated earth from fresh graves is covered with Astro turf, lest anyone be reminded that the deceased are buried in ordinary dirt. No photographs taken at Forest Lawn, including several taken for this chapter, are ever allowed to be published. The information office usually refuses to say where famous people are buried. But if you ask for the location of the marker for Walter Elias Disney, the attendant first looks in the records and then says that they are not allowed to give out that information—thus confirming that Disney is at Forest Lawn after all.
Big Secrets located Disney’s gravesite. Much like Disneyland, Forest Lawn is divided into thematic sections: Slumberland, Vale of Memory, Babyland, etc. Disney’s gravesite is in an area known as the Court of Freedom. This is on the eastern extremity of the park, about as far from the entrance as possible.
At the eastern end of the Court of Freedom is a majestic marble building, the Freedom Mausoleum. It contains the remains of several celebrities (Gracie Allen, Francis X. Bushman, Gummo Mark, Larry of the Three Stooges). Disney’s site is not inside the mausoleum but in a small private garden snug against the front wall and far to the left of the mausoleum’s main entrance. It is in the corner formed where the front of the mausoleum abuts a gray brick wall. The garden is enclosed with a low wall and gate (not locked). Inside is a marble bench, azalea and holly plantings, and a green-patinaed statue of a small girl. A metal plaque on the brick wall contains spaces for eight names. Disney’s name is in the top space. Robert B. Brown, a son-in-law, is listed third.
The only thing even slightly unusual about the site is the wall on which the plaque rests or, more exactly, what’s behind it. The wall continues far beyond the Disney family’s small garden. The wall has only a few doors, normally kept locked. Behind the wall is an enclosed area not accessible from any side.
A secret cryonics vault? No. A workman left one of the walldoors open on the day of this investigation. The hidden space is a storage area, with tools and nursery stock The only thing on the part of the wall opposite from the Disney marker is a paper-towel dispenser for workers. Walt Disney was cremated, if in secrecy, and has a perfectly ordinary gravesite.
It is easy to guess how the cryonics rumor may have gotten started. Disney had a neurotic fear of death. He wanted people to remember him alive. So he arranged beforehand for there to be no press coverage of his funeral. He specified that the public never be told the location of his grave. The utter secrecy was unusual; it stuck in people’s minds. A few weeks later and purely by coincidence, the first cryonics suspension took place. Somebody made the connection and wondered if Disney had been frozen too