Therapeutical Patterns
Walt Disney had interviewed five women and a man to be his personal nurse, and hadn’t hired any of them. They were too clinical. Too bossy. Too pretty. Too chatty. Too patronizing. Too fussy. In that order. He needed a practical person, who ‘got it’ without much direction, the way he liked his artists to work. He was a man in a hurry, who needed a nurse to manage his aching body so his mind could manage all the projects unfolding at the company bearing his name. He and his people were hard at work on Mary Poppins. The Wonderful World of Disney TV show, four attractions for 1964 The New York World’s Fair. He had a stealth team buying 28,000 aces of land for a new Disney theme park in Florida. In addition to a theme park, Walt dreamed of building an ‘Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow,’ on that land. EPCOT. America’s inner cities were crumbling. On fire. The solution, Walt realized, wasn’t in a white flight to suburbs and malls — the kinds of designs a person could correctly say he and his company had championed — the solution was a complete re-making of how cities work. He was one of the few people in the world who could pull it off. The world’s most powerful organizations had written him blank checks to build attractions for the World’s Fair. This, he felt, was a sign. He had the economic, political and creative clout to transcend time itself, and build Tomorrow.
Walt’s body was crumbling and on fire like American inner cities. His inner city was rioting too. He spent his days wracked with pain from what the doctors thought was an old polo injury. His neck, shoulders, and face burned with every move he made, whether it was driving a car or lifting a cigarette to his lips. There were days when the pain was so bad, all he could do was make himself a drink, a Scotch Mist, and summon the Sherman Brothers, the studio’s star songwriters, to his office, to sing the music they were writing for Mary Poppins as Walt sipped his Scotch and stared out the window, dreaming of his Community of Tomorrow. When the Shermans sang Feed The Birds, the film’s ballad about caring for the smallest and most helpless among us, Walt would cry.
The personal nurse was Walt’s brother, Roy’s, idea. It was as much a financial decision as a brotherly one. Walt was the powerhouse behind every one of the company’s investments. The state of his health could make news and move markets. It would not do to have him out of commission. At the suggestion of an orthopedist, Roy had authorized the studio to buy, for the price of $3,200, a Swedish Mobile Traction Unit, a contraption designed to immobilize every part of a person’s body except an injured area, which could be isolated and moved in ‘therapeutical patterns’ with a hydraulic system powered by an electric motor. The contraption had already been set up in a former conference room adjoining Walt’s office. The personal nurse’s role would be to give Walt a massage twice a day, focusing on the injured area around the neck and shoulders, and at the end of a workday, treat him with the Swedish Mobile Traction Unit, which would isolate and move his head in therapeutical patterns.
Hazel George, 53 years old in 1964, was not a fan of the Disney films. Or of any films. She didn’t go to the movies, preferring to spend her free days in her garden, and her free evenings reading or listening to music on her state- of-the-art wire gramophone. Hazel had never married. A series of mis-adventures with a series of paramours had left no doubt in her mind that she traveled better alone. That has how she has been traveling, leading up to the day of her interview with Walt. Alone. She is independent, and glad about it.
Walt greets Hazel at the front steps of the Animation Building. Years ago, he began doing job interviews while walking around with an interviewee. It makes conversations more natural. None of the other candidates for the personal nurse’s job had even made it to his office. He had followed the same pattern with each of them. Into the Animation Building elevator. Off at the second floor. Walked them past the rooms where his films and television shows were getting storyboarded. Elevator back to the first floor. Said goodbye.
He follows the same routine with Hazel, beginning with his usual spiel, as he pushes the first-floor elevator button. When we built this place, he says, ‘the banks didn’t we were a solid investment —
The elevator door opens. Walt and Hazel get in as Walt continues —
— so we designed it like a hospital building, so that if animation business didn’t work out, we had an arrangement where we could sell it to St. Joseph’s Hospital across the street.
Hazel glances sharply at Walt. Oh, Mr. Disney, you did not, she says with certainty, as the elevator door closes.
Walt blinks. Takes a good look at Hazel for the first time. Why do you say that? he asks her.
This elevator isn’t big enough for a hospital gurney, Hazel says.
Walt breaks into a hacking laugh. It hurts to laugh, but he’s tickled. I’ve been telling that story for twenty years, he says to Hazel, and you’re the first person who’s called me on it.’
The elevator opens to the second floor. They don’t get out. Walt pushes the button for the third floor. We’ll do the interview up in my office, he says.
I had the job before we got out of the elevator, Hazel would tell me many years later.
If you do it at the right time, when no one’s around to hear it, it can be good to call a boss on his bullshit. Even when the boss is the king of make-believe.
