All is quiet.
He’s been awake for half an hour. Awake and motionless. Lying on his back, ramrod-straight. The sun won’t rise for a while yet. In the room next door, on the left, are Roy and Edna. His brother has never had trouble sleeping. Ever since his bout of TB in 1920, Roy has kept to a strict daily rhythm. He goes to bed before midnight. He gets up at seven. That’s still two hours away.
Walt hasn’t brought any reading matter with him, except for an issue of Life magazine, but that’s on Lillian’s side. He doesn’t want to reach across or switch on a light, for fear of waking his wife. Both the television and the little transistor radio remain firmly off. He hears the wail of a train, six, seven, eight times in succession, a passenger train or a freight train that won’t stop in Marceline. The hammering and drumming of wheels on the tracks goes quieter slowly, and becomes inaudible.
For four decades, I’ve gone from success to success, he whispers to himself, just as he does every morning in the moments between waking and getting up. There have been some setbacks, no doubt about that. But they were rare. Very rare. There were times when it looked as though we’d have to fire the entire workforce. Break up the studio. But Roy always managed to talk them round, whoever they were, the bankers, the backers, the shareholders. Roy, his elder brother by seven and a half years. The realist in the family, who dreaded every change—more, tried to prevent it from happening. Who never believed his youngest brother’s ideas could make money. Never mind: but for Roy, thinks Walt, our enterprise wouldn’t exist. The Bank of America must have advanced him millions, over time. Walt doesn’t quite understand how Roy did it. On the other hand, he is perfectly aware that it is his, Walt’s, imagination alone that made possible the endless stream of credit. I was the first, he says to himself, to give a distinct personality to cartoon films. I was the first to work in color. The first to succeed in fitting sound tracks to trick films. The first to produce a full-length animation feature. The first to succeed in setting up a theme park that was neither squalid nor dirty nor ugly. A little paradise on earth, my Anaheim empire. Walt takes immense pleasure in having his past triumphs and present masterstrokes pass in review: thirty-one, or is it thirty-two gilded Oscar statuettes I have been awarded to date, more than anyone has before me, more than anyone else will, ever. And six hundred and thirteen other miscellaneous awards, distinctions, honorary doctorates, prizes, and medals from all over the world.
I have so much to be grateful for, he says to himself every morning: no matter how many times they try to kick me around, like a weeble I’ll wobble but I won’t fall down.
It’s only in the last few years, thinks Walt in the silence, that we’ve finally been able to pay off our mountain of debt. It’s only now that every cent we make goes to us. Our company, our shareholders. And not the bank. Only since my Anaheim empire. Only since my Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and the five episodes of Davy Crockett and the 101 Dalmatians and my Mary Poppins. After Snow White we did all right, thirty years ago now. We were rich, Roy and I, for three, four, five years, our wives could buy themselves whatever they liked. I took up polo—before long, I had a dozen horses! The fat years, from ’37 to ’40! But then followed Pinocchio and Fantasia and Bambi—and it seemed the good times were over.
Lillian and Walt, man and wife for forty-one years, have not slept in the same bed for twenty-five years. It’s only on their travels that they end up sharing a bed, sometimes sharing their warmth, lying side by side. Separate beds—one of the conditions his wife put to him, following the great studio strike of the early ’40s. If he wanted to remain married to her, then he would have to spend the night in his own bed. He was too restless at night. Too many times he woke her up to bother her with his worries, his fears, his doubts concerning himself and the world. A further condition attached to the marriage was that he must agree to adopt a child. Their own daughter, Diane, was three. She wanted someone to play with. Reluctantly he signed the necessary papers. And so Sharon came into his life. During the first few years, he saw her so rarely that he sometimes asked his wife who that little girl was, running around in the garden with Diane?
*
First streaks of light touch the sky over Marceline. Gradually, the room’s fittings acquire contours. The large wardrobe. The bedside tables. The tulip-patterned curtains. The large ceiling light, with its seven spidery arms, and thinnish lightbulb on the end of each one. Once again, the wail of a locomotive, at once shrill and dull, a curious combination, loud and gentle, and the throbbing of its hundred wheels on the rails going past Marceline, no, not really past it, right through the middle of it, on its way from Chicago to Kansas City, or from Kansas City to Chicago, the characteristic sound of the place. Every twenty or thirty minutes, it breaks the rural silence.
I am a leader, a pioneer, I am one of the great men of our time, the words seem to echo within Walt. Ever since Snow White in 1937, he speaks this prayer in praise of himself every morning as he lies awake before sunrise. More people in the world know my name than that of Jesus Christ. Billions have seen at least one of my films. It’s something that never existed before me: an art form, an idea, a concept, that managed to address and move and delight the whole of mankind. I have created a universe. My fame will outlast the centuries.
But here in Marceline, he adds on this particular Saturday, September 10, 1966, they practically worship me. Four years, Walt murmurs into the half-dark room, we lived here. I was four and a half when we came, and nine when we left. I come back far too rarely, it’s ten years since I was last here.
In the afternoon, he is to open the new swimming pool and surrounding park in his name. Rarely has Walt felt so proud, not even the year before last, when a school for fourteen hundred pupils in Pittsburgh adopted his name. On that occasion too, he came; with the city fathers in attendance he cut the ribbon, but he left right after the celebration.
He eases himself out of bed, careful still not to wake Lillian, and gropes his way to the bathroom in the dark. For months now, he knows he should have gone to see a doctor, but he’s kept putting it off. His neck hurts. There’s a pulling and cramping in his right leg that he can hardly bear. His whole back is in pain. He switches on the light, and turns on the hot tap in the large tub.
His injury, sustained in the course of a polo match almost thirty years ago, torments him more than ever. He fell off his horse going after a ball he was never going to get, and in a game his team was never going to win. Pointless, really, to make the effort. But Walt and his teammates, Spencer Tracy among them, fought on, until the moment of the accident. “Never say die!” was one of Walt’s principles. Three vertebrae in his neck were affected. They never healed. A fashionable Hollywood chiropractor whose clients included stars, directors, and producers had persuaded Walt that he could get better without recourse to a body cast. No corset for his back and no plaster for his upper body. A grave miscalculation, whose consequences he has suffered ever since.
He stretches out in the hot bath. Keeps adding more water, turns the hot tap on and off with the toes on his left foot. He hasn’t been able to have a massage for two days now. The pain in his vertebrae is especially bad. In his studio in Burbank, he usually stretches out every evening at half past seven or eight, in a little room next to his office. It is decorated with photographs and drawings, and documents from his life: he calls it his laughing room. And there he pours himself a glass of Scotch, and receives heat treatment. Has his back, his neck, his hips and legs massaged. While Hazel George, the studio nurse, kneads his body, he permits her, his masseuse for twenty-five years now, certain insights into his life. He doesn’t have many secrets. The few he does have, though, he shares with Hazel George and no one else.
Her treatments generally brought him relief, though it was mostly short-lived. Lately, he still feels the nagging pain, even after a whole series of compressions and thorough physiotherapy.
Their hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Othic, are sitting in their sunny kitchen in a pleasant state of excitement when Walt and Roy appear for breakfast shortly after seven. They are proud, very proud even, to have the brothers staying with them. Their acquaintance, one could almost call it friendship, goes back to the year 1956, when Walt came to lend his name to Marceline’s elementary school. Fifty years ago, there was a small hotel in Marceline, called Allen’s, above Murray’s clothes store, on the town’s main street, Kansas Avenue, very close to the railway station. It was closed down in the mid-forties, once Marceline had lost its importance as a coalmining town and little railway junction. In the mid-sixties, there was only the one new motel on the edge of town, the Lamplighter, a badly built and ugly construction with small and squalid rooms. And since, ten years before that, neither the Allen nor the awful Lamplighter had existed, Walt called the mayor to tell him he’d rather stay with someone than get a room in Macon or Moberly, the only bigger towns in the vicinity. One thing he had to have, though, was air-conditioning, he said. That made things rather easy for Eddie Strayhall: of the two thousand four hundred and eighty-eight inhabitants of Marceline, there was only one man who had air-conditioning, and that was Othic, the prosperous farmer and mink breeder, who had had a magnificent villa built for himself on the corner of Kansas Avenue and Bisbee Street, with four bedrooms and two bathrooms. A long structure of red brick, unlike any other building in Marceline, you would have situated it in the better-off suburbs of a mid-western city, not smack dab in the prairie.
The two parties had remained in contact ever since—two of the little Othics had already visited Los Angeles several times at Walt’s invitation, touring Disneyland as his personal guests. He escorted them from one attraction to the next. At Christmas, the two boys and the Othics’ youngest daughter received generous gifts from Mr. Disney. All three of them were allowed to call him Uncle Walt, no, they had to, he absolutely insisted on it.
With the exception of one or two insiders, no one knew what time Walt had arrived in Marceline, and where he was staying. But as early as seven in the morning, there was a crowd gathered round the Lamplighter. Then the news spread like wildfire, Walt—as he had been ten years ago—was staying at the Othics’.
After breakfast, he smokes his first Lucky Strike of the day, right down to its unfiltered end, so far that his yellow-brown fingertips can barely grip its pinched stub. Then he lights the next off it, and smokes that down to the bitter end, too. Walt and Roy are wearing thin, charcoal, handmade suits from the Klein & Hutchinson fashion house on Cañon Drive in Beverly Hills, with white shirts and ties, Walt’s being pale blue, and Roy’s yellow ocher. As ever, Walt has a white handkerchief in his top pocket—and the same gold tiepin he’s been wearing for years. Even out here in the country, the brothers stick to their self-imposed dress code. One exception: they put on boots this morning, black suede cowboy boots.
Lillian and Edna are still sleeping when their husbands leave the house. The previous evening, they took strong sedatives that Lillian never travels without. Edna too has suffered from insomnia for several years now. The brothers think they will succeed in strolling unremarked to the corner of Missouri Street and Broadway, where the farmhouse stands that was once, more than half a century ago, home to their family: Elias, their hot-tempered, thin, lanky father, their mother Flora, her mouth twisted with pain and her eyes almost always sad, their then-two-year-old sister Ruth, and their considerably older brothers Herbert and Raymond, who ran away from home then, because they could no longer stand Elias’s meanness and injustice and the repeated beatings he gave them. Walt and Roy hope to be able to visit the creek where they used to go fishing with the neighboring Taylor boys and Clem Flickinger, without anyone in the town noticing and following them. They want to be alone, able to relive their memories undisturbed. They are looking forward to their expedition into the past.
The morning air bears the scent of fresh earth, cool grass, and a distant whiff of cowdung. September 10, 1966 is a Saturday. All the children are off from school. No sooner have the brothers gone one block north, out of town, at a quarter past eight in the morning, than the group that had been waiting for them outside the Lamplighter, comes running up, along with more and more people from Marceline, who have joined the original group, armed with notebooks, diaries, letter pads, equipped with pencils, crayons, ballpoints, and fountain pens. They lay siege to Walt. “Hey!” “Hi.” “Yeah!” “Uhh!” “Me.” “Sir.” Other than that the only sound is the scraping of Walt’s writing hand. No one asks for Roy’s signature. All cluster round Walt, exclusively round him, with the urgency and single-mindedness of a swarm of bees clustering round the queen.
He gives autographs, thirty or forty of them, perfectly willingly, but without the least smile. And everyone is amazed at the difference between his signature and those rounded letters that are so readily associated with his name. How unlike the signature that graces the film posters, the opening frames of the television shows, the millions of children’s books and comics.
A sunny day in late summer, with little white fluffy clouds. It’s going to be warm later on, in Marceline, Missouri. The sky is crisscrossed with little streaks of condensation from the passenger airliners traversing the continent. The smell now is of freshly mown hay, ripe apples and apricots. Walt and Roy move off again—in spite of the great crowd ringing them.
“To the house!” Walt whispers to his brother.
“No, the creek first!” beseeches Roy, just as softly.
“The house first!” Walt repeats.
And Roy follows his younger brother. Without another word.
They march off toward the edge of town. Walt is coughing. The smoker’s cough that has tormented him for twenty years has become acute. He has to stop for a minute. The horrible rattle of those coughing fits! He fights for breath.
The accompanying army steadily grows. More and more of Marceline’s inhabitants emerge from their houses, and swell the procession following the Disney brothers to the wellsprings of their childhood.
One of those trailing along, joining the pilgrimage, is me, Wilhelm Dantine. The night before, I had taken a room at the Lamplighter, on the assumption Walt would be coming here. I was surprised that no one except myself and an elderly man from St. Louis were staying at the motel. Then, at six thirty, when I was drinking my morning coffee and devouring a frosted doughnut in the gas station across the road, I learned that the Disney brothers had been staying with private hosts. I had assumed there must be a wide selection of hotels or inns in Marceline; it is after all his Rosebud, the place where Walt spent his most crucial childhood years. People would turn up from all over the world, I thought, to view this particular little town for themselves. And when I arrived late in the evening, in the orange gloaming, I understood that I was the first visitor for a long time to have made my way here on the quest for Walt’s past. The Lamplighter was primarily run for truck drivers and traveling salesmen. For outside of Marceline, hardly anyone knew of Walt’s profound association with this place of his childhood. The previous day, I’d made a stop at a coffee shop in the little town of Meadville, only twenty miles or so to the west. The place had windows stuck with colored pictures of the mouse and the duck. When I got up to pay the check, I was asked where I was headed. I pointed to Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and company. The manageress of the coffee shop, fifty, curlers in her hair, and her two young waitresses, looked at me blankly. “To Marceline!” I added. Then I understood that while the ladies might dearly love Walt’s creations, they didn’t know a thing about the life and times of their creator.
I had taken fully five days to get here from Los Angeles, in my 1961 Rambler. It’s not the first time I’ve hooked up with Walt on his travels. From time to time I show up in places where he appears, whether it’s for film premieres, openings of shopping centers, or the awarding of prizes anywhere in the country. Whenever I’ve managed to hear of such an occasion in time, I’ve made a point of being there. I have been to six now since December 18, 1959, the day I was dismissed. He hasn’t once recognized me. Two or three times I caught a look from him that gave me the sense: He’s on to me. He has some faint memory. But then his little gray eyes moved on. Or seemed to look right through me. And that was the closest we got to making contact. I had long been planning to visit Marceline, for ten years and more. I wanted to see the place with my own eyes, but never got around to it, not until this day of late summer, 1966. It goes without saying, my journeys of pursuit haven’t done much for my marriage or my family life. My wife accused me of preferring to live under Walt’s continuing spell, instead of with her and our two sons.
The last time I had a close-up view of him was two years ago, at the San Diego Zoo. It was in the summer of 1964, and he was donating a lion cub that the visiting South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd had brought him as a gift. Walt seemed years younger, or that was my impression anyway. Now, in Marceline, he looked surprisingly aged, and also appeared rather less statesmanlike than he had on previous occasions when I’d been on hand to observe him. Perhaps it was that he felt he needed to disguise himself less, because he was more relaxed here in the heart of Missouri than anywhere else I’d seen him. Roy, on the other hand, whom I saw rather less often, seemed always the same, never changed. I thought he looked just exactly the way you’d picture an aging bookkeeper from the Midwest.
The brothers headed north up Missouri Avenue. Behind them was their army of escorts, by now they must have been around sixty strong. We kept—and, as I was right in their midst, I can vouch for this—a respectful distance. Not that our presence appeared to bother Walt and Roy all that much. They would turn around every few steps to look at us, but on neither of them did I detect any sign of animosity or annoyance. They were quite reconciled to making their personal pilgrimage in considerable company.
“Hey, you guys, my grandmother, Mrs. Passig, was your neighbor, do you remember her?” a young man called out. “She says Roy had a real crush on her. Is that true?”
“Hello, boys, remember me? Remember Eileen?” a robust, elderly woman cried out. She was wearing her Sunday best, a long black dress and a pert little pink hat. “Your mother used to buy thread from us. And almost everything you wore. I remember you as if it were yesterday, you two snotnoses.”
Everybody laughed. On the corner of Missouri Avenue and Bigger Street, a new confluence of people joined our throng. Hurried along to the front, to be able to see the brothers from close up, but didn’t dare ask for their autographs. One of the newcomers wore a broad, sand-colored cowboy hat, and a sheriff’s badge on his washed-out denim shirt. He was unarmed.
“You’re not from here, are you?” asked a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy, who was walking along beside me. He had a fishing rod in his right hand.
“I moved here last month.”
From early in the morning, I had taken care not to attract attention, not to be identified as being from out of town. Tucked my long hair under a Boston Red Sox baseball cap. Wore my plainest clothes—black jeans and a gray, shortsleeved shirt. My shoes, too, could hardly be any more worn, a scuffed pair of brown moccasins.
A few steps further, I was addressed by the elderly woman who had made everyone laugh a moment ago. “Hey there, hi, you’re not from here, are you? I’m Eileen Murray. And who are you?” She seemed like a retired school principal.
I gave her the first name I happened to think of: “Charles.”
“Charlie! Like Chaplin! And what else?”
“Webster. Charles Webster.” That was a classmate of mine from high school, whom I never especially liked, and whose name I always gave when I didn’t feel like giving my own.
“Pleased to meet you. Listen here, everyone, I want to introduce you all to Charlie Webster. And where are you from, if I may ask?”
“Originally from … New York.”
“Is that a fact! We don’t often get anyone coming here from quite that far away. And you’ve come on account of Walt?”
“Just passing through.”
“That’s most unusual. People don’t come through here by chance. With us being so far from all the main routes.”
The attention that was suddenly being paid to me was very disagreeable.
“Well, you’ve come on a very special day now, haven’t you?” Mrs. Murray went on. “You’ve come on the day the swimming pool is being inaugurated. Congratulations!”
I nodded politely.
She herself, she continued, had been just eighteen when Walt’s parents had moved down to Marceline from Chicago. “It’s impossible to imagine it today, Mr. Webster, the way some people used to live out here, the conditions the Disneys had to endure. So poor! So basic! No electricity, of course, and you had to fetch the water from the well. No indoor toilet. Everything done outdoors, naturally, even in the middle of winter. In the deep snow. If you were very lucky, you had a little wooden outhouse, of the sort you find in Walt’s early films a lot. America was like Africa is today. Our children and grandchildren don’t think about that, of course, no one thinks about how things used to be, the way it really was out here. In the big cities, things were different, of course, more modern and so on. And then we had the Depression years, the twenties and thirties. Unimaginable, mister. I wonder, how old are you?”
“Almost thirty.”
“Well, then of course you can’t have any idea of how things once were, plus you’re a city boy. My God, New York! You’ve got to picture it, the houses were full of fleas and all sorts of other vermin. Cockroaches, mice, rats. Before Walt’s older brothers ran away from Marceline, Herbert, I mean, the dishonest one, and Raymond, the ugly one, seven people were living there together practically on top of each other. The five children shared one little room, even though the oldest were already fully grown. Incredibly nasty boys, both of them …”
“In what way?”
“They were rude, dissatisfied, quarrelsome, thuggish.”
“What about Walt?”
“Delightful. Helpful. Amusing. Do you know what his favorite dish was?”
“No idea,” I said, although I knew the answer, of course.
“His favorite dish was the apple pie his mother used to bake. Everyone in town loved Flora’s apple pie. She made it with the apples she grew in her own garden.”
I didn’t need to ask Mrs. Murray twice to open her treasure chest of memories. It made her happy to share with me everything she knew about Walt’s childhood. “He was terribly gifted. Even when he was only seven or eight, he was such a good artist! When he got back from school, and there wasn’t anything he had to do to help his parents either in the house or on the farm, then he would lie out under the elm tree, you’ll see it in a minute. He used to spend hours lying there, drawing whatever creatures ran or flew or hopped past, the chickens and ducks, crickets, ants, squirrels, crows and rabbits, deer, possums, mice. Mice, of course … my God, the mice!”
Up ahead, Walt and Roy were walking faster and faster now, attempting to shake off their pursuers and companions after all. They did not succeed. And by the time the little crowd got to the corner of Missouri Street and Broadway, there were about a hundred of us, men, women, and children.
“That’s the house!” Eileen Murray pointed at a two-story wooden house, painted dark red, which the Disney brothers were now walking up to. How many times Walt had used to tell us about the farm in Marceline! How many times he talked about moving from Chicago to Marceline. His father, an out-of-work carpenter, couldn’t stand the city any more. Above all, the working-class district where the family was living in the northwest of Chicago, was becoming overrun by pimps and prostitutes. Elias Disney was afraid his two older sons, aged fifteen and seventeen, might go bad, if he didn’t get them out of Chicago, and take the family out into the country. Elias’s uncle, Robert, and his wife Margaret had bought a farm in Marceline a few years before, and the nephew now followed them out there, with wife and kids, and became a farmer.
Walt strode across the porch of his former home. He knocked on the front door. The current occupants showed him in: father, mother, and two overweight daughters. Eileen told me that the Westfalls had come from the nearby hamlet of New Cambria, and had bought up the former Disney farm, which was in a pretty ruinous condition a few years ago, along with some acres of land, and had just begun cultivating it again. I watched as Walt showed the Westfalls the place on the southern wall of the building where as an eight-year-old, he had drawn a pig with tar, twelve feet long and eight feet high. He had drawn it one market day, when his parents had gone to Macon to buy a sow.
“In the evening, when Father and Mother got back,” it was the first time in two years that I got to hear his soft, deep, and melodious voice, and, as it always did, it sent a shiver down my spine, “and saw my work of art, and the fact that half the wall was smeared full of tar, I knew I was in for a hiding. I got it from my father across the backside. And a couple of slaps from my mother.”
The brothers were invited into the house to take a look at the rooms they had once lived in. A short, sixty-year-old man appeared between them, and gave Walt a powerful hug. Clem Flickinger, as Mrs. Murray went on to tell me, was a neighbor from those days, and Walt’s best friend, with whom he played every day. His other friends, the Taylor boys, John and Fred, had moved away long ago. Walt’s youngest sister Ruth, who at the age of three had fallen in love with the eight-year-old John Taylor, had gone back to Marceline in 1950, to look for her old flame. But he wasn’t living here any more, they said he was killed on June 6, 1944, one of the first to die in the Normandy invasion.
“It was Clem who showed Walt how to trap fish with his bare hands,” Eileen whispered to me. “The pair of them were both born in the same year, 1901, just a few months apart. Come along, I’ll show you the tree, would you like that? While the boys are inside the house.… Did I say something wrong, Mr. Webster? They’re still boys to me, nothing’s changed.” She led me another thirty yards or so further along Broadway, which was no wider than a trail at that point. There, in the middle of a pasture behind the house, was an ancient, mighty elm. I went up to it, stroked its rough, gray bark, pressed my hands against the trunk, reached up for leaves trembling in the wind.
“This is where he used to lie, right here, I can still see it so clearly in my mind’s eye, he was lying on his stomach, with pencils and paper, some kind of rough brown packing paper, because no one around here could have afforded fine white paper, and he would lie there stretched out, and he would draw and draw and draw, my God, for hours and hours.”
I had a little Kodak Instamatic on me, and I pulled it out, extended my arm, and took a picture of myself against part of the tree trunk that looked like the cogwheels of some great engine, as the bark was marked with ten longish circular seams, strangely regular in the way they were pressed together.
“Am I right in thinking you have some interest in Walt, then?” my companion suddenly wondered. “You could have asked me, if you’d wanted your picture taken under Walt’s meditating tree, or his belly-button tree, as I always liked to call it, because he would lie on his belly button, and draw and paint. For heaven’s sake, I could have taken that picture for you!”
I took a picture of her, she laughed, a little bashfully looking at the ground, called out, “Oh no, please, you mustn’t!” but was nevertheless quite pleased.
Walt never told us about that tree.
I crushed a leaf between my fingers, and sniffed its bitter smell. Pulled off a leafy twig, and stashed it in my jacket pocket. I noticed that a spring bubbled up right next to the roots, that made a narrow stream flowing in the direction of the open fields.
Mrs. Murray could have had no idea how much her words electrified me, kept provoking my curiosity. Still, she obviously enjoyed having taken me, the only outsider, under her wing.
“Also the business with the owl, which almost no one knows about here, Mr. Webster,” she continued. “Clem, I guess, would know the story. No one else, though. Do you want to hear it? Walt was lying out here one Sunday, same as always, thinking about life and drawing, and then he suddenly heard the call of an owl, directly above him, here in these branches. A brother of his father’s, whom he liked very much, often came to stay, he didn’t have a place of his own, he lived here and there, he vanished, came back another time. Walt called him his Uncle Elf, because he really was like a kind of good fairy to him, and Elf had always warned Walt about owls being messengers of death. Anyone who heard an owl cry outside his window was sure to die the next day. Walt leaped up before the owl could get away, grabbed it by its feet. Imagine how it must have cried, the poor creature, as he throttled and stamped it to death. The howling and hissing! It gave Walt goosepimples all down his back, on his neck and his scalp. And then he buried it, the poor little screech-owl, here, deep under this tree. I can show you the place, it’s there, right next to the spring.… Strange, isn’t it? Because owls are really among the deadliest enemies a mouse can have, owls and cats, right?”
Walt and Roy emerged from the house, accompanied by Clem Flickinger and the Westfall family. The little group seemed to make straight for the elm tree.
“Now, Mr. Webster, do you see where they’ve stopped, the boys, on that bit of open ground, there used to be a barn there, it was so pretty, and that’s where Walt made his first money. He dressed the ducks and the rabbits and the little piglets in clothes, funny little wool pants and shirts. They looked real silly. Then he got people to come and look at them, and charged a few pennies’ admission from everyone, including me, of course. I must have been the oldest member of his audience. Then, I read in the newspaper, a couple of years ago, he had the barn remade in Los Angeles, a perfect copy, from old photographs. A little piece of Marceline he always wanted to have with him.”
I moved on, until I found myself again in the crowd of onlookers, who had reached the pasture by now.
“Ah, the stranger—still with us?” called the boy with the fishing rod, whom I had avoided earlier. He waved, pleased to see me.
“Michael, my grandson,” Mrs. Murray presented him, “a sweet, bright, little fellow. Walt at the same age must have been just like him …”
“Gran, the gentleman says he’s been living in Marceline for a month. That’s not right, is it? We would have known, wouldn’t we?”
Mrs. Murray smiled. “We’re a very close-knit community, here in Marceline. There are no blacks here, no Asians, no descendants from any Indian tribes, thank God. We can tell right away if someone belongs or not. Anyone wearing a Red Sox cap around here? Well, then!”
The boy was delighted. “It’s like Reverend Brown always preaches, lies have short legs.”
“A misunderstanding,” I muttered.
Walt now clasped the thick trunk of the elm, embraced it, pressed his temple hard against the bark, so hard that his cheek got squashed upward and half-pressed his eye shut. In all the years I had known him, I had never seen him do anything as passionate. Then he let go, wiped his cheek, straightened his tie, brushed off the bits of bark that had stuck to his jacket, and plunged his hands into his trouser pockets.
“He’s looking for a coin,” whispered Mrs. Murray. “It’s a superstition with us, dropping a coin in the spring for good fortune.”
For a while he scrutinized the flat of his hand. And then exclaimed, loud enough for everyone to hear: “Not a single penny. Nothing but silver, nickels and dimes and quarters!” And the money jingled back into his pocket.
Walt opened his arms, took in the fields on either side of the property. “Down there by the pond,” he said, “that was the place where I always used to ride on Porker, the great sow. She always let me up, no problem, and I used to ride what, twenty, thirty yards. Until the point, always the same point just by the mudhole, where she used to throw me! That pig was my favorite animal, and I’m quite certain she understood every word I said to her. She was incredibly clever. I persuaded Dad not to have her butchered. We played that game all the time I lived here: getting on her back, riding, being thrown … It was the most fun I ever had.”
“Of course, when he was a boy, he saw all the usual country things,” Eileen resumed. “Slaughtering and butchering, reaping and sowing, the birth and death of cows and horses, cats and dogs. There was only one time he was present when a pig was slaughtered—and he was so disgusted. They say he’s never been able to stand the sight of blood since, neither animal nor human blood. When I was little, I always thought it was exciting somehow, animals being slaughtered. Watching a butchered pig or calf or goat being hung upside down and bled on a hook. But I was more like a boy in that way. And Walt was more like a girl. He couldn’t stand it. Watching the intestines spilling out. He couldn’t take the smell either.”
“Here,” I heard Roy whisper to his brother. I still had very keen hearing then. “This is where we watched the rabbits, you know! Were they ever wild and energetic!”
“And here,” Walt pointed the other way, “is where we caught that damned fox who used to steal our chickens …”
“… and that I wasn’t allowed to kill, because you were so sensitive!”
All at once, he started walking straight toward me; my knees turned to jelly. For perhaps half a second, Walt Disney looked me straight in the eye. And walked past, without once turning back.
“And there’s the pond,” he threw his arm around Clem, “where at break of day we would sit on the bank and imitate the call of ducks. And got all the drakes for miles around to come here! The fury and the disappointment when they realized they’d been tricked, real temper tantrums …” He mimicked the call, the female’s plaintive gurgling that I’d heard so often from him in the past. It still sounded utterly convincing.
*
When the crowd reached the narrow creek on the end of Julip Road, a quarter of a mile from the center of town, I counted two hundred people. All in commotion. All in uproar. Like the anthill where you dropped twigs or matchsticks as a child, to watch the wild panic and bustle of the tiny creatures.
We stood pressed tight on a bridge. The Disney brothers pulled off their jackets and rolled up their sleeves, and reached into the murky waters of the Wolf River with their bare hands, encouraged and advised by Clem.
They caught nothing.
Michael, though, had cast his line from the bridge, and after a few minutes had hooked a decent-sized catfish. Now he carried the twitching, dying creature down the bank, to offer it as a present to Walt and Roy. Cheers and applause rang out from all sides, paying tribute to Marceline’s favorite sons. Walt looked aside as, with Roy’s help, the boy laid the fish on a flat stone. Bashed and bashed a rock on its bony head, until it was dead.
“Was that a deer in the bushes behind me? Or was I imagining things?”
“Here, on the Wolf River?” Eileen laughed at me. Not for thinking I might have spotted a deer, but for doubting the fact. “My Lord. There’s any number of them. They’ve become quite a nuisance. But at least it’s the hunting season soon!”
We all accompanied the guests of honor to the Sherwood family residence on the corner of Chestnut and California. Here the brothers were expected for lunch. It was only ten a.m. The door opened. They were welcomed, two hours early. This was the farm of Doc Sherwood’s descendants. His maize and millet fields were the largest in Marceline at the beginning of the century. He had more livestock than anyone else in town. Trained in Chicago, he was the only doctor for many miles around. He had an old plough horse, Old Man, and Walt is said to have spent a lot of time watching the animal when it was so tired it could barely set one foot before another. He made a sketch of it when he was eight. The drawing of the exhausted horse, in soft and hard pencil, pleased Doc Sherwood so much that he paid the boy what was at the time—the summer of 1909—a small fortune: twenty-five cents.
Walt turned to face the crowd. “We’ll see you all in the afternoon!” he called out. “Thank you for the friendly escort!” Waved and disappeared with Roy into the modest farmhouse, pleased to be away from the horde for a couple of hours. A murmur went through the mass, people had counted on spending the whole day in the company of the Disneys. One or two individuals even knocked on the Sherwoods’ door, and some, the sheriff among them, looked in through the windows. No one was admitted, not even Clem, not Michael, whose catch Roy had wrapped in a sheet of newspaper and taken into the house.
Slowly, tactfully, people left the scene. Only some of the children remained in the vicinity of the farm, either propped against tree trunks, old trailers, fresh haystacks, or else sitting in the cut grass. It had gotten very hot by now.
“Why don’t you come over,” Mrs. Murray took my hand in hers, “I’ll make you lunch and we’ll get acquainted a little.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” I took my hand away, excused myself, said I didn’t want to disappoint her, but I preferred to be on my own for a while.
First, I passed the coal chute, which hadn’t been in use for decades, a ruined, rusty metal structure that soared into the sky. This was where the locomotives from the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Line used to stop to take on coal, across two pairs of rails. The station was next, an empty, two-story brick building, only the dirty little waiting room was still intact, and that smelled of cigarette smoke, pee, and moldering wood. The windows were all broken, shards of glass lay scattered on the cracked platform. On the weathered station sign, the letters L and N were missing. An express train sped through the station, with a rush of air and a howling cry. The splendid diesel locomotive bore the name Santa Fe Super Chief on it in big red letters, and I counted the cars, like I did as a child when we had moved to Los Angeles and were living in Encino, which was right next to the lines. I tried, as I did then, to see individual passengers, but could only make out the white-hatted chef, who was standing motionless by the kitchen window of the dining car, smoking a cigarette and staring out at the view.
Five minutes later, a local train stopped, coming from Quincy, Illinois, bound for Kansas City. No one got out. No one got on.
There was a little park beside the station, named after E. P. Ripley, the longtime president of the Santa Fe Railway company, later to become a close friend of Walt and Roy. In the middle of it was a small pavillion, where open-air concerts were held on Sundays and holidays, and at one end of it an old steam locomotive from the thirties, that the children of Marceline liked to climb all over and play in. On the other side of the lawn Kansas Avenue began, the town’s main street, bordered on either side by typical, low, small-town buildings. A banner had been put up across the street, and was fluttering now in the warm breeze. “Welcome Back Walt and Roy,” it read.
Marceline’s fire station, barber’s shop, town hall, candy shop, and clothes store, even the little movie house: they all strikingly resembled the buildings along Main Street U.S.A., the principal artery in Disneyland. The closest resemblance was in the case of the corner building that had once housed the Hotel Allen, but was now empty, and slowly, slowly crumbling away. The same colors and materials and window casements, the same roof shape all occur in the physical reincarnation of Walt’s fantasy world—only a tad smaller than in the original. In the course of an argument once, he had openly admitted to me that his Anaheim empire was based on the layout of Marceline. Not until September 10, 1966 did I see for myself how much truth there was in that confession. The railway line that went around the Magic Kingdom, and Walt’s whole obsession with steam locomotives, stations, rails, level crossings, passenger cars, and dining cars, could be traced back to this little town in Missouri, where the trains passed through.
Eileen’s older son Edgar ran Murray’s clothes store, which had been in the family ever since 1898. It was on the ground floor of Allen’s. Here, Flora Disney had bought Walt his first overalls in 1906. When I walked into the store, sixty years later, I marveled at the mahogany-framed glass cases that had stood there since the beginning of the century. Edgar, a fellow with a pasty face, red cheeks, and tiny eyes, had been called by his mother just before I came in. “Yes, Mom, I promise,” I heard him say, two or even three times. As he put the receiver down, I was already standing next to him.
Patiently he led me round the whole of the dark, ballroom-sized space, showed me all the stock, including probably the oddest collection of ladies’ hats I ever saw.
“What brings you to us, Mr. Webster?” he asked me then.
“I just happened to be passing through.”
“But didn’t you tell my son Michael you’d been living here for a month already?”
“That was … a mistake.”
“Mistake?”
“A … misunderstanding.”
“And what is it that you do professionally, if I might ask?”
“I help in my dad’s business. He’s not doing too well right now, health-wise.”
“I thought you came from New York? I saw your Rambler outside the Lamplighter. Your plates are from Chicago. Why is that?”
“Because … I was coming from Los Angeles, I mean to say Chicago … because my father lives there.”
“America’s a free country, Mr. Webster. You can come and go as you please. I was only wondering …”
“My father owns a chain of dry-cleaners. A couple of years ago, he asked me to scout around to see whether there was a chance of expanding into some other states.”
“Sure, why wouldn’t there be?”
“Right …”
“But what is it that brings you to Marceline, of all places?”
“As I was saying, we were thinking … of trying to move into Missouri …”
“So that’s why you’re living in New York … just now.”
“I get around a lot.”
“Do you like it here?”
“Very much. It’s a nice place.”
“It’s Walt’s place.”
“The best is still to come, Mr. Webster—the official inauguration of the swimming pool and our new town park. How odd that you should be here at the same time as Walt and Roy …”
“Just lucky, I guess.” I bought a pair of gray socks off Edgar Murray for a dollar—seventy-five percent polyester, twenty-five percent cotton—and started for the door.
“In the Lamplighter, they said they didn’t have anyone staying under the name of Webster.”
I broke out in a sweat. “When I’m on the road I often use my mother’s maiden name.”
“Sure you do.” And, after a pause. “And why is that?”
*
As I walked off, I wondered if it wouldn’t be more sensible to break off my stay in Marceline. But the persistent desire to see Walt again, hear his voice, observe his movements, even if for just a couple of minutes, prevailed. And the possibility I might finally be able to carry out my plan that night seemed almost tangibly within reach. I trembled. How would the encounter go? When would it take place? I desperately needed to rest before the opening ceremony. I’d spent most of the night lying awake.
After the gray brown concrete structure of the Bethany Baptist Church on Howell Street, which stretched out for an entire block to Santa Fe Street, came the Walt Disney Elementary School. I remembered Walt’s accounts of his 1956 trip back to Missouri. There had been a little scene during the official opening ceremony. Walt got up before the invited dignitaries, and opened with the sentence: “I have slept with two of the women present in this hall.” Lillian was seated at the head table, next to her husband. The smile froze on her lips. A gasp of horror went through the hall, on his own account. A few parents got up to leave. Then Walt added: “The other one is my former babysitter, Miss Lola Harrity, who’s sitting in the front row.” The audience sighed with relief, a few managed to chortle. “Miss Harrity, who always used to smell so wonderful,” Walt went on, “would have to slip into bed with me when my parents and my brothers were still getting in the harvest late at night, or otherwise out somewhere. She looked after me and my sister Ruth, and we paid her in butter and milk. I cried every time she came, claimed I couldn’t possibly sleep unless she was lying next to me.” Miss Harrity had turned beet red, looked strickenly at the floor. Soon afterward, apparently, she died, a little short of seventy.
“Are you looking to go in there?” It was Michael’s voice behind me. He must have come after me, and I hadn’t noticed. “The gate’s always left unlocked.” He showed me to a large glass-fronted cabinet near the front door. There was a wooden school bench with wrought iron legs. On the gently sloping top, I saw the letters WD, carved with a penknife in a couple of places. My initials, Walt’s initials. “Guess who that bench might have belonged to, Mr. Webster! You’ve got it, haven’t you? Because Park School, which Walt attended, was on the same site as this school. Grandmother says he was a good pupil, not like me. He could read and write quite well, says Granny, that’s what they taught him here in Marceline! I only like to hunt and fish, so I don’t really care that I’m not such a good pupil.”
Not without pride, he showed me the school assembly hall and gymnasium, decorated by Walt’s publicity man Bob Moore with outsize Disney figures. I thought my senses were playing a trick on me. Weren’t those the very first figures I ever drew for Walt, in late 1955? The two chipmunks, Chip ’n’ Dale, the way they appeared in the Donald Duck film Chips Ahoy, which meant that they were definitely in my version, and not in the rather dissimilar ones by Ollie Johnston or Ham Luske or Milt Kahl. No, only I drew that way, no one else. Evidently, no one had considered it worthwhile asking me for my permission. Neither Walt nor Bob Moore had troubled to find out whether I had any objection to my Chip and my Dale hanging on the gym wall of some elementary school in the Midwest. They didn’t breathe a word to me, not even after they got back.
I stood in the empty gym, staring at the flaking beige walls. Suddenly, I felt dizzy, I had to sit down. Michael pushed up a sky-blue stool.
“Are you hungry, Mister?” he asked me. “Grandmother says you should definitely eat some lunch, I’m to tell you.”
*
At the gas station next to the Lamplighter, I had them shove a pizza in the oven for me. You couldn’t eat your food on the premises, and there was nowhere to sit down. The Mobil Oil employee put the pizza in a cardboard box, which I carried the few steps to the motel. Then I sat down at a narrow vanity table under a picture of Mickey and Minnie, turning their backs on the viewer and gazing into the sunset over Los Angeles, arm in arm. I wolfed down the cheese, salami, mushroom, and tomato mix that tasted of water, papier-mâché, and salt. Laid down then, fully clothed, on the soft, sagging double bed in the windowless Room 3, and fell into an uncommonly deep afternoon sleep.
A dream went with me. It wasn’t the first time I had dreamed it. Twenty-four minutely distinguished Chip ’n’ Dale drawings make up a second of animation film. Two hundred and forty drawings of chain-smoking earthworms equal ten seconds of movement. One thousand four hundred and forty individual drawings of a dog family on skates, a baby rabbit at a piano, two chickens in a racing car, each one a tiny bit different from the one before, will make a minute of cartoon. In my dream, the shadows split off from the bodies, raging pirates burst asunder, octopuses turned into elephants. A little fish became a donkey. Locomotives ate cookies, automobiles flirted with crocodiles, bees metamorphosed into bonbons, bonbons into airplanes. But in the airplanes sat my chipmunks, bombing a small town with hazelnuts. A five-minute film with the blue uniformed drake, who fell off a cliff and carried on calmly marching through the air, until he noticed what he was doing, whereupon he promptly plummeted, and then fell off a cliff again, only this time he put out his hand at the last moment for a branch, and went on falling and falling, as his arm grew longer and longer, twenty yards, like a thick elastic band, and, once at the bottom he shot back up, and so on and so forth. A short like that was put together from over seven thousand two hundred individual drawings. One hundred and thirty thousand finely painted color pictures made up the full-length feature film Sleeping Beauty, and fully one third of the original Sleeping Beauty sketches were by me, Wilhelm Dantine. And then the dream would begin all over again—numbers, figures, animals, shapes, shadows, and so on, the squeal of brakes, the laughter of chickens, the magic of three fairies, always in a ring, mingled with my longing for my profession to which I clung with every fiber of my being, which ended so abruptly in December 1959. What a magnificent profession it was: to make characters move beautifully, to make them live, breathe, and think.
I was awakened by the wailing of a locomotive. Looked at my watch. It was five o’clock. I take a nap after lunch almost every day, but never longer than fifteen or twenty minutes. Sleeping for three hours in the middle of the day, that certainly hadn’t happened to me for many years.
I felt more exhausted than before my sleep. I got up. My footsteps led me back to the Sherwood farm. The sunlight seemed harsher, the scents of hay and apples and apricots stronger than they had in the morning. There was no one left around the farmhouse. I cautiously went up to one of the little windows and peeped inside. The table in the middle of the room was still laid, overflowing with plates, water jugs, bottles of fruit juice, and leftovers. I reckon ten people or so had sat down at it. On an old worn armchair there was a copy of the Kansas City Star. “South African Prime Minister Stabbed to Death in Pretoria Parliament,” read the headline, which was all I could make out. How strange: the last time I’d seen Walt had been at the San Diego Zoo, when he’d presented them with the lion cub that was Hendrik Verwoerd’s present to him.
It was the Kansas City Star that he’d delivered as a boy on his paper route, every morning before sunrise. This was after the family had left Marceline in the fall of 1910 and had moved to Kansas City. It was the same newspaper that he applied to later, at nineteen, for a job as a cartoonist. He was rejected. On the grounds that he was insufficiently gifted as a draftsman, and that his satirical vein was at best mediocre. He needed far more punch, they told him, some cynical insight into political events.
I walked back downtown. Murray’s was closed, even the gas station was deserted. I passed nine churches on a very short stretch, all of them dark and shut, and with little signs on their doors: “Evening prayers canceled.” I encountered no one. There was complete silence everywhere. Reached the edge of town again, the southern end of Kansas Avenue. Finally, I heard brass band music, laughter, children yelling. I headed for the noise. It was six o’clock.
All the inhabitants of Marceline had flowed out here, to this little park with its shallow pond. More than two thousand people were now making their way up the hill on whose crest the new swimming pool was situated. The sheriff was wearing a newly pressed, beige uniform—and a couple of revolvers on his belt. A dozen police officers had been recruited from Macon to make sure that the festive but extremely well-behaved crowd was kept in check. The onlookers formed up in a large tightly drawn semicircle around a wooden stage that looked to have been hastily thrown together near the entrance to the open-air pool. Right in front were the children of Marceline, either kneeling or sitting on the grass, behind them older kids, and behind them the grown-ups. All seemed to be following some unwritten rules.
Sellers of balloons and popcorn and Coke took up their places in the semicircle, quite as though they’d rehearsed this arrangement for the past several days. I went to where the children sat. “Hey!” came a cry from behind, “you go to the back!”
Time for a long look at the swimming pool; I had imagined an Olympic-size pool, a magnificent sports center like you might have in a city. But the pool of pale blue painted concrete was twenty feet wide and maybe fifty in length at the most. There wasn’t any water in it yet, perhaps to prevent exuberant onlookers from taking a dip either before or immediately after the opening ceremony.
“C’mon!” more whistles and catcalls, “get away from the front!”
I looked to see if I could spot Mrs. Murray anywhere, I was quite keen not to have her pop up at my side just at that particular moment. Instead, Edgar hurried up to me, pulled me toward the back rows. He was standing with his mother and son some way from the wooden stage.
“Well finally,” twittered Eileen; she had changed, and was now wearing a yellow chiffon dress with a large red paper rose on the lapel. Her large black straw hat would have looked more at home in Ascot than Marceline, Missouri. “We were afraid you’d left already, without saying good-bye to us. Edgar thought he’d made you angry, sort of. And Mike says you looked very pale and weak when he saw you at lunchtime today.”
Just as I was about to reply, a huge and unanimous cheer went up. The only time I experienced anything like it was in the London Palladium in fall 1965, before and during a Beatles concert. The Othics’ black Cadillac drew up at seven o’clock sharp, down on the oversized parking lot, which was two-thirds empty. Walt climbed out, followed by Lillian, the Othics, Roy, and Edna. It was the first time in all those years I had had a glimpse of Mrs. Disney from up close. She looked much more attractive than I had expected. I had imagined her as careworn and unappealing, but she was tall and rather distinguished-looking.
Walt climbed swiftly up on to the improvised podium. There was a surge of applause, which took a minute or so to die down. The fatigue he had felt from the demands of the morning seemed gone. He had recovered his beaming smile, and looked perfectly ageless. After the mayor had spoken a word or two of welcome, he stepped up to the microphone.
It took a further while before he could make himself heard. He began by pointing to the security cordon separating him from the crowd. “This is my home. I don’t need police protection!”
Cheers, applause.
“My most precious memories,” he went on, “as you know, have to do with my years in Marceline.” He turned away from the microphone, trying to shake off a sudden fit of coughing. There was silence on the slope in the little park. At last, he was able to go on: “I’m sorry for people who have to spend their entire lives in big cities. People who aren’t fortunate enough to be at home in a small community, as I was. You kids, growing up in Marceline, do you know how lucky you are? The most important things that ever happened to me, happened here—when I was a child here, I experienced more than I expect I’ll live to see in the rest of my life.” There was thunderous applause. He lapped it up, enjoyed every single handclap. “All the things that were to matter to me later were things I came across here. Not just country living, but my first circus and the circus parade that went marching down Kansas Avenue. And where did I see my first film, The Life of Christ? Well, in Marceline, on Main Street, of course, in the movie theater that’s still standing today, sixty years later.… The unhappiest moment of my entire childhood was the day we moved away, in 1910. Oh, how I missed Marceline! The one good thing about Kansas City was that it was only ninety miles away from here. In 1923, I moved on from Kansas City to Los Angeles. As you can imagine, I traveled on the Santa Fe Super Chief. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Line tells the story of my life. It begins in Chicago, where I was born. The train stops in Springfield, Illinois, where my idol Abraham Lincoln is buried, and then a few hours on in Marceline, which was a little railway junction town. The next major station: Kansas City, where we lived for thirteen years. And the end of the line? Los Angeles, where I went when I was twenty-two. Even though I was almost penniless, I bought myself a first-class ticket—and the story of what happened to me then, out in Hollywood, well, some of you may’ve heard a bit about that already.” Laughter welled up around him, and echoed on.
As he spoke, darkness slowly fell. A single searchlight dipped him in its harsh beam. He paused when a long freight train clattered by—the park was right next to the tracks. “Music to my ears; anyone who knows me at all will tell you, isn’t that right?” he resumed, once things had quieted down. The evening cool came on. I was shivering, I should have put on a sweater after my nap. “So, you know what Roy and I have achieved in Hollywood. But you must understand, I don’t just make films for kids, I make films for all ages and for all people. And what gives me the inner strength to do this? The source I draw on is here, in the heart of Missouri. The naturalness, the simple, direct, straightforward manner so typical of you, which I was privileged to encounter as a boy, shaped me, and I had to hand it on, and give it to the rest of humanity. Only someone who has seen and smelled and been touched by Marceline will be able to understand. I am Marceline, and everything I’ve become has its roots here.”
He paused to catch his breath. This was my chance, I thought, my moment had finally come.
“You know I find it difficult to speak without notes. I’m not good at it,” he went on, before I could begin to act. “I remained a farmer’s boy, all my life. A country boy, hiding behind a mouse and a duck. Today, my wife, my brother, my sister-in-law, we were all guests of the Sherwood family—and it felt to me as though I were traveling in a time machine. I was eight years old again, I was sketching Doc’s horse Old Man. The Sherwoods are like their forefathers, like their great-grandfather. They’ve remained true to their family tradition. You all have remained true to your family traditions. There is no crime in Marceline. There are no Negro riots here, no Vietnam War demonstrations, no burning of draft cards, no long-haired, drug-taking hippies, God forbid. No, here among you, among us, I dare say, there is peace, health, faith. This is the America I belong to. When I was with the Sherwoods, I asked to see my drawing from 1909, which they keep in a safe, and I offered them, or rather, as I have always steered clear of money matters, Roy offered them, ten thousand dollars in cash for that picture which I drew as a child, and for which Doc Sherwood once paid me a quarter.” This time there was a kind of collective groan that went up from the assembled masses. “That’s right, ten grand. Do you know what the Sherwood family’s reply was? ‘Even if you were to offer us a hundred thousand, or a million, we would never sell you that picture!’ You see, that’s what I admire about you all. You’re proud and principled. Now, in gratitude for all that Marceline means to me, I made a decision this afternoon, while I was in the Othics’ house, preparing myself for tonight: I want to base the Walt Disney Childhood Farm here in Marceline, right by the farm where we used to live. A place where kids will learn how to plant and sow and reap. A kind of model farm. To bake bread, to make butter, milk cows, and bottle milk. A place where we’ll teach them how pigs and goats and geese and rabbits live and thrive, how they … well, reproduce! In other words, from next spring, there’s going to be a great building site here, because I’m convinced that the children of the future will have to be taught about life on a farm, just like today we teach them the three R’s. Because the children of the future aren’t going to know these kind of things anymore: What a seed grain looks like. The way you plant an apple tree. How you grow rye and make flour. The children of the future aren’t going to know where milk and cheese come from. Where the eggs come from they eat for breakfast! Well, they’ll be arriving from all over the country, and they’ll be able to learn all those things right here, next to the farm on which I myself grew up.”
He must have counted on joyful applause at this point. But there was silence, an eerie silence.
“That’s right, next to the farm of my childhood …” he sounded quieter, a little more hesitant. “But we can see about that … next year … or maybe the year after, I’ll be back, and Roy too of course … when the time comes. For today, … it’s my great pleasure to dedicate the new Marceline swimming … the first public pool of the town of Marceline … to declare … I hereby pronounce … say, have we got a champagne bottle? To smash against the side of the pool, the way they do when they launch ships? No? Too bad! Although … well, I guess you’d have to … sweep up the broken glass later … Anyway: I hereby name the new sports center of my former hometown the Walt Disney Park.”
In the confusion following Walt’s speech, a mixture of applause, shouts, bits of talk, hollering, and running around, it would have been an easy matter to execute my plan. It would have been the perfect moment. The best and likeliest situation that was ever offered to me in all those years. Before the entire population of Marceline, in front of his wife, his brother, his sister-in-law, I just needed to dare.
I didn’t.
“Mr. Webster!” I heard Mrs. Murray call out behind me. “Charlie!” yelled her grandson, but I ran through the dark, ran as fast as my legs would carry me. Reached the car that was parked outside the Lamplighter. And drove off, breathless for the first ten minutes, along Highway 36, headed for Kansas City.
I didn’t stop until I was almost there, and then I studied the maps, and drew up a route that followed the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad westward, through La Junta, Colorado; Raton, New Mexico; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Flagstaff, Arizona; Needles, California; and on to my final destination, Los Angeles.