Bombshell by Max Collins (pdf ebook reader TXT) 📕

Mrs. Arthur Miller ignored this, and, as they walked toward the ride, she began, “Mr. Toad was very rich, but he was an irresponsible fellow …”

“I have known such a man,” Nikita interrupted. “But he was snake named Stalin. He would not want to take Wild Ride, believe me. He would hide under table.”

She kept walking him along. “… and one day Mr. Toad got his hands on an automobile. Only Froggy didn’t know how to drive, at least not very well.”

Marilyn continued the fable as she and Nikita approached the ride’s dark entrance, unaware that someone else had already slipped inside.

Someone who, like them, was an uninvited guest at the Magic Kingdom.

12 Apartment On Main Street

Walt Disney was depressed. This was not one of those suicidal bouts of depression the fifty-nine-year-old movie mogul had suffered in the early days, back when the weight of his growing studio had been so crushing. It seemed, ever since his friend and employee Ward Kimball had got him interested in scale-model railroading, he’d no longer had to fight that sort of battle with himself.

The railroad at Disneyland was an offshoot of the scale-model railroad he’d had constructed around his home in Holmby Hills, much to his wife Lillian’s consternation (cutting through her beloved gardens as it did). Between this hobby, and his in-house masseuse at the office (and the occasional belt of booze), Walt had managed to avoid the specter of another nervous breakdown.

Nonetheless, these last few years, he’d been sparring with melancholia, if not outright depression, despising growing older, a process emphasized in the mirror each day (“Mirror, mirror …”) by his thinning, graying-on-the-sides hair, his increasingly droopy eyelids, his jowly cheeks, and his spreading paunch. The public might like the image of “Uncle Walt,” but in his mind, Walt Disney viewed himself as the same vital young animator who had built on meager drawing talents and abundant entrepreneurial instincts to create a Hollywood kingdom.

Having the State Department yank the rug out from under the planned festivities for Premier Khrushchev had really hacked Walt off royal. Would he be reimbursed for the expense and trouble he’d been put to? No! Would he look a fool in the press, after he’d courted so much attention for the Russian visit? Yes!

One of his great pleasures, as the “mayor” of Disneyland, was to meet and greet world figures, and he relished the chance to show off his park, his personal personification of the American dream, to the world’s most famous Red.

Walt would have got a particularly big charge out of showing off his Disneyland Navy. Under his hands-on supervision, old-fashioned cannons had been affixed to the steamers that churned through the Adventureland’s jungle and down his version of the Mississippi, and he had assembled the paddle-wheelers—along with his Jules Verne submarines—in the Tomorrowland lagoon with an eye on presenting them to the Soviet leader, with tongue in cheek, as “the tenth largest battle fleet in the world.”

Not that losing the publicity of a Khrushchev visit was anything that concerned him … crowds remained strong, fed by the Disneyland TV show, even if the Davy Crockett fad had finally burned out, replaced by Mousekeeter caps and the God-given puberty of Miss Annette Funicello.

The only negative remained the ongoing complaints about the high price of admission (fifteen dollars, which included a book of ride coupons). Walt had to charge what he did because the park cost a lot to build and maintain—he had no government subsidy, after all! The public was his only “subsidy.” Hadn’t he mortgaged everything he owned, put his studio itself in jeopardy for “Disneylandia” (as it had originally been called)?

Walt glanced at the fancy version of a Mickey Mouse watch on his wrist: it was approaching two a.m., and he still hadn’t gone to bed … just sat there with his bottle of Scotch and pack of cigarettes, puffing like one of his prized scale-model steam engines, going over Bud Swift’s latest draft of Pollyanna, a fine piece of sentimental craftsmanship which had brought a tear or two to his eyes.

Seemed like everything made him cry these days.

Sometimes he just had to get away to this apartment, his private personal retreat, free from Lillian and Holmby Hills. He had chosen the decor himself—lavender-, red-, and pink-flocked wallpaper, thick red rugs, lush upholstery, heavy drapes, wind-up phonograph, china knick-knacks, faux gas lamps, brass bed, the furnishings Victorian all the way.

“Hell, Walt,” Ward Kimball had said, one of the few who dared kid him like this, “what fella wouldn’t feel at home here— darn thing looks like a New Orleans whorehouse!”

Walt had just laughed and held his temper in check, but the remark had cut him: he had done his best in the apartment to replicate the living room of the Disney family farmhouse back in Marceline, Missouri. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been able to make much use of this hideaway lately; brother Roy had gently broken it to Walt that a rumor was rife among Disney employees that Walt was using the apartment as a love nest for unceasing assignations with various young women.

The rumor was ridiculous, unfounded—he was not a womanizer, had never been sexually driven; like any studio boss, he could have had one starlet after another, if he so desired, and when he happened to walk through a dressing room where shapely girls were in various states of nakedness, he remained unimpressed: if you’d seen one naked girl, you’d seen them all.

But the rumors had to be quashed—he insisted on moral behavior from his employees at the park, and a single “damn” or “hell” would get a staffer fired on the spot—and, now, only occasionally did Walt use the apartment above the fire station adjacent to city hall, here on Disneyland’s Main Street.

That first six months he had spent all his days and nights at the park. Lillian had accompanied him at first, until one morning a guard at the Monsanto exhibit refused to let Mr.