Authors’ note: In August 1965, Walt Disney and other bidders arrived in Porterville, California, to submit their bids to develop the land in Mineral King, California, for skiing. This chapter describes the planning that went into the bids, some of Walt’s interesting competition for the project, and some of the political drama that was happening around the same time.
Chapter 5: A Hollywood Bidding War
The normally quiet town of Porterville, California—a mountainside village located some fifty miles north of Bakersfield—looked more like a movie set than a sleepy little town on this late August day in 1965. Porterville was known for its small-town charm, annual rodeo, and close proximity to Sequoia National Park. Save for one Hollywood moment in its history—Walt Disney Productions had filmed some of the family drama “So Dear to My Heart,” starring Burl Ives and Harry Carey, in Porterville in 1946, and the train depot the studio had built for the production inspired the Frontierland stop on the Disneyland Railroad—the town didn’t experience a lot of glamour. And it certainly wasn’t accustomed to celebrities arriving by private plane at the tiny Porterville Municipal Airport.
Today was different, though. Cameramen, reporters, and photographers jostled for position outside the airport while locals gathered in a crowd, holding signs and streamers and flags to welcome Walt Disney and his entourage to town. Porterville residents were used to seeing Walt on their television sets every Sunday night, introducing that week’s movie, cartoon, documentary, or nature special on his weekly “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” program, but to see Walt in person, stepping off the airplane, with his fatherly smile and trademark mustache, was like catching a glimpse of a movie star.
It was August 31, 1965, and Walt was among the bidders who had come to Porterville—site of Sequoia National Forest headquarters—to deliver their Mineral King proposals. When his Gulfstream private plane landed at the Porterville airport after its short flight from Burbank, Walt, clad in a suit and tie, walked down the airstair and was met by his friend Ray Buckman, a longtime Mineral King resident who had sold several acres of land in the area to Disney one year earlier and was advising the company on its Mineral King bid. Others from Disney’s Mineral King team had accompanied Walt to Porterville, including Willy Schaeffler, public relations assistant Frank Allnutt, economist Buzz Price, and Bob Hicks, who had become project manager on the Mineral King endeavor after lobbying Walt for the role. As the men made their way to the Sequoia National Forest building, some clutching large artists’ cases containing the maps and drawings of the Disney proposal, Walt stopped to meet the locals, shake their hands, and talk to them about his plans.
UNDERWRITTEN BY
Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.
It was the first time the company had shared its ideas for Mineral King outside of the studio walls. Disney was so worried its competitors would catch wind of its proposed plans that when Allnutt and Disney executive Robert Jackson had checked into a local motel on a previous visit to Sequoia National Forest headquarters in Porterville, they looked for telephone wiretaps and other hidden microphones that might be used to bug their room.
Arriving in Porterville by another route was Robert Brandt, the stockbroker who had prevailed on the Forest Service earlier in 1965 to put the Mineral King area up for development bids. Brandt’s entrance was, quite literally, even bigger than Walt’s: he pulled into town towing a fifty-five-foot house trailer he had set up as a viewing area for his proposal. It included a large-format, three-dimensional model of the entire Mineral King valley as he envisioned it, complete with scale-model hotels and ski lifts. The trailer, however, wasn’t the most attention-grabbing element of Brandt’s entrance. That was the woman riding along with him: Brandt’s wife, Hollywood starlet Janet Leigh. The “Psycho” actress, a native of the nearby California town of Merced, had become a household name in 1960 after her iconic shower scene in the Alfred Hitchcock flick horrified viewers and nabbed her an Academy Award nomination. She had found further fame in other films since, including the 1963 movie musical “Bye Bye Birdie,” with Dick Van Dyke, who the next year sang and danced again, this time atop London’s chimneys, in Walt Disney’s megahit “Mary Poppins.” Ironically, Leigh had been discovered in 1946 at the Walt-funded Sugar Bowl ski resort, where her parents worked. A staff photographer had added a picture of Leigh to a photo album that was placed in the lobby for guests to peruse, and it was seen by actress Norma Shearer. Shearer took the photo with her back to Hollywood, and MGM soon contacted Leigh to sign a contract.
Leigh and the thirty-eight-year-old Brandt had made headlines three years earlier, when they wed the day after Leigh had divorced actor Tony Curtis in an expedited proceeding in Juarez, Mexico. Brandt and Leigh had met at a tennis party hosted by crooner Dean Martin and his wife, Jeanne, where Brandt impressed the actress with his wavy, thick, black hair and movie-star good looks. Their wedding ceremony took place on the patio of the presidential suite at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, where the Martins were staying while Dean performed nightly shows in the theater downstairs. That evening, Dean brought Brandt and Leigh on stage to cut their multitiered wedding cake in front of an enthusiastic Vegas audience.
Walt and Brandt were the most high-profile respondents to the Forest Service prospectus for Mineral King, but others were in Porterville to deliver their bids as well, including Los Angeles architect Ragnar Qvale and his brother Kjell, the largest distributor of imported cars in the United States. The Qvale brothers’ proposal for Mineral King called for the formation of an artificial lake in the valley, on its banks a deluxe hotel with a price tag of $1 million. Inside the Sequoia National Forest headquarters building, located just a half mile from the Porterville airport, Walt, Brandt, the Qvales, and the other bidders took turns presenting their visions for Mineral King to members of the Forest Service and a group of curious journalists. Walt’s large-scale maps and colorful concept drawings, set up on wooden easels, showed the locations of ski runs—the most of any resort in the Western hemisphere—hotels, restaurants, tram stations, and more, and Walt talked proudly about how no cars would be allowed. Visitors would park at the entrance to the valley, he said, and travel to the resort in a new transportation system being developed by Disney engineers.
Outside the building, Brandt, dressed casually in a button-down shirt, open at the collar, invited the foresters and journalists into his trailer-turned-plush salon to view the concept drawings and scale models for his proposed Mineral King resort. They had been created by influential Southern California architect Harry Gesner, who had studied for a time under Frank Lloyd Wright, and his futuristic domes and peaks looked like something out of a Batman comic book. Brandt envisioned a Nordic-inspired theme for the resort, with Viking architecture, a fifteen-foot bronze statue that would welcome visitors at the valley’s entrance, and a glass-walled restaurant at the top of White Chief Peak. Leigh stood nearby, dressed in faded jeans and sneakers, and told the reporters she had been skiing for about three years. “I can get down most any ski hill, although I’m not a bomber,” she said, adding that her two daughters—Kelly and Jamie Lee Curtis, nine and six respectively—were pretty good on the slopes as well.
Speaking with journalists after their presentations, Walt and Brandt each made the case for his version of a Mineral King ski area, Walt trying to quell fears that his proposed resort would be anything like the “mountainside Disneyland” environmentalists were fearing. “We will stay close to God in our development and try to complement the work He has done in this magnificent place,” he said at the time, weeks later assuring another journalist that Mineral King would be “a recreation project, not an entertainment center. There will be no Hollywood flourishes. And the name Disney won’t be a part of it. Of course, our company will run the operation. But it is strictly a natural theme based on the beauty of the country.”
“Disneyland on the Mountain”
>> READ AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHORS
Where to find it:
- Prospector: Search the combined catalogs of 23 Colorado libraries
- Libby: E-books and audio books
- NewPages Guide: List of Colorado independent bookstores
- Bookshop.org: Searchable database of bookstores nationwide
SunLit present new excerpts from some of the best Colorado authors that not only spin engaging narratives but also illuminate who we are as a community. Read more.
At the end of the day, the Forest Service had received six bids to develop Mineral King for skiing—much more interest than it had expected—and the agency’s staff had a lot of work to do to make sure they picked the right company for the job. It was the largest response the Forest Service had ever received to a prospectus, and a decision—based on the applicants’ experience and reputation, as well as their detailed proposals—was promised within thirty days. Sequoia National Forest Supervisor Larry Whitfield was impressed by the bids—Walt’s and Brandt’s in particular—but he had to admit to being a little overwhelmed by the proposals that were brought to Porterville. Brandt was proposing a $15 million project; Disney’s bid came in $20 million higher. Given that the prospectus the Forest Service had issued in February called for a $3 million outlay, Whitfield began to worry that the clear front-runners in the Mineral King ski resort battle might be too big for the valley. He knew the Sierra Club had similar concerns, and he invited Michael McCloskey, who had just been named the Sierra Club’s first conservation director, and Kern-Kaweah Chapter chairman John Harper, head of the Sierra Club’s Mineral King Committee, to Porterville for a private review of the proposals.
The two men spent the afternoon of September 3, 1965, poring over plans, maps, charts, photographs, models, and more, trying to envision how each concept would alter the character of their cherished valley. They were still opposed to development, but they wanted to see for themselves exactly what the impact might be. Two of the submissions, they felt, were hardly worth considering, but Harper and McCloskey found some redeeming qualities in the plans submitted by the Qvale brothers and by Marcon Construction in Glendale. Disney’s proposal far surpassed the others in terms of total capacity, but the two Sierra Club members didn’t find it especially innovative. Brandt’s, on the other hand, “seemed to render minimum impact and maximum architectural and aesthetic grace,” Harper later wrote. “Brandt’s designers fragmented the overnight accommodations into numerous small clusters of aesthetically pleasing units scattered through the woods on lower slopes and valley bottom. . . . In addition, their lift lines and ridgecrest facilities blended much more imperceptibly into the natural surroundings.” Harper and McCloskey gave their recommendations to Whitfield, but the decision as to who would develop Mineral King would ultimately be made on the other side of the country.
Regional Forester Charles Connaughton and his team were in charge of the final review of the Mineral King proposals from Connaughton’s office in San Francisco, where the Forest Service staffers took their time looking over each proposal. Taking the same view of the submissions as Harper and McCloskey, the foresters soon eliminated four of the weaker bids, leaving only Disney’s and Brandt’s remaining. The two men continued to lobby for their selection—Walt invited Forest Service employees Slim Davis and Roy Feuchter to the Disney studios in Burbank, where a scale model of Walt’s vision for the resort, its miniature peak-roofed buildings surrounded by fake snow and tiny evergreen trees, took up part of a soundstage. On October 24, 1965, Brandt brought his trailer to the Mineral King–adjacent town of Visalia to show locals his model and get them excited about his concept. He even brought along a stenographer, who took sixty-five letters in support of his project. But since media coverage of the Disney-Brandt battle over Mineral King was heating up, attracting the attention of California Governor Pat Brown and other politicians in California, and given that Brandt and Walt both had political connections that went all the way to Washington, news of the bidding war soon made its way over Connaughton’s head. Orville Freeman, President Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of agriculture and overseer of the U.S. Forest Service, reached out to Connaughton, suggesting that Freeman and his team review the two bids. The decision on the fate of the Mineral King ski resort would now be made in Washington.
Kathryn Mayer is a Denver-based writer and journalist whose work has appeared in numerous publications including Health, Observer, Business Insider, and PopSugar. She primarily writes about business, covering workplace health and benefits strategies, and she has appeared on radio, TV, and podcasts as an industry expert. She has undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Denver.
Greg Glasgow is a longtime writer and journalist for numerous magazines and newspapers in Colorado and elsewhere, includingThe Denver Post, 5280 and the Boulder Daily Camera, where he worked for 10 years as arts and entertainment reporter and editor. He lives in Parker, Colorado, with his wife and co-author, Kathryn Mayer. A Colorado native, Greg has an undergraduate degree in journalism from Colorado State University and a master’s in creative writing from the University of Colorado Boulder.
