Castle with Plants – 1955
The Book of Ruth
Part 2
by Todd James Pierce

[Today’s article is a continuation of a story I started last week – click here to read Part 1]
By May, 1955, it was clear that construction efforts at Disneyland were behind schedule.  The castle was nowhere near finished.  Same for Main Street and Frontierland and pretty much every area of the park.  The pressures no doubt amplified the growing conflicts between the Evans brothers (those men originally charged with creating landscape designs for Disneyland) and Ruth Shellhorn (the woman who, in ways, replaced them).  The Evans brothers still were designing the jungle in Adventureland while Shellhorn slowly took on most every other area of the park.  She created landscape designs for the entrance, Main Street, the hub, the castle, areas of Tomorrowland, Fantasyland and Frontierland.  She even designed the entrance to Adventureland, leaving only the dense foliage around the boat cruise to Bill and Jack Evans.  The trouble?  In addition to the time constraints and financial pressures, both the Evans brothers and Ruth Shellhorn believed that they were, officially, the landscape architects of the park.
      The problems focused initially on personality differences.  Shellhorn was used to rigid roles in terms of design, land surveying, engineering and construction.  But to get the Disney project built by its scheduled opening date (July 17, 1955), the Disney team collaborated in such a way the usual division between design and implementation was largely ignored.  For example, construction workers were constantly backing over surveyor’s stakes—creating the need to re-hire surveying teams.  By spring, Walt had had enough.  He told Harper Goff, one of the art directors, to replace the stakes himself: “Harper,” he said, “just eyeball it.”  Likewise, when money ran short, the Evans brothers discovered ways to obtain mature trees at little or no cost—including paying (or perhaps bribing) Cal Trans work crews to allow men from Disney to remove potentially valuable palm trees from land owned by the state, land earmarked for future freeway construction. 
      Repeatedly the Evans brothers adapted to these pressures, believing that a finished park—even if it was imprecise—was better than an unfinished one.  These pressures—especially the arbitrary changes to grades within planting sites—irritated Shellhorn to no end.  Repeatedly she complained to the construction foremen about grading inaccuracies throughout the park—some of them so significant the errors would effectively alter planting areas by many feet.  She believed that a project as large as Disneyland needed to follow the best possible practices—even if those practices created more delays and expense in construction.  For this, men at the construction site called her “Mother Shellhorn,” a stickler for rules and details.  At times, this insult was also overlaid with the implications of gender, as Shellhorn was the only woman on the central design team: “So to heck with it,” Shellhorn wrote on May 25, “I can see how Jack has gotten to his dirty work with the men for their attitude now that I’m a little ‘filly’ who doesn’t know how to handle a big job.” In response, she often referred to Jack Evans as the “Patrón,” meaning he was a lazy boss who oversaw sloppy work and was more concerned with his own profits than quality design.
     Walt Disney himself was drawn into this conflict.  Walt tended to surround himself with artists who worked well in collaborative situations and who rarely insisted on the importance of their own designs.  Already Walt was butting heads with Gabe Scognomillo, the man overseeing final efforts on Tomorrowland and Wade Rubottom, the man overseeing Main Street.  Walt felt that both men let their ego—specifically their desire to see their own designs built—interfere with their ability to best serve the project.  On May 24, Walt took Shellhorn aside to say that she “was as stubborn as Wade Rubottom.”  He also hit her playfully with a pencil, explaining that as a boy he did that to his sister in moments of frustration.  But then Walt said, “I have absolute confidence in your ability,” which surprised Shellhorn.  In all likelihood—though perhaps Shellhorn didn’t realize it—this was Walt’s attempt to pull her into the collaborative culture of Disney, a culture very different than the work environments Shellhorn had experienced on other projects.
     In terms of creative power, Shellhorn enjoyed great control over the landscape designs of Disneyland.  Her designs were implemented with very few changes throughout the park.  But in terms of social power, she found herself ostracized.  Men excluded her from social groups.  Repeatedly she felt “like a 5th wheel.”  At lunch, she was “an orphan,” left to herself, unless one of the few men friendly to her happened to eat at the same time.
     By the first week of June, Shellhorn recognized and attempted to embrace Disney culture.  On June 3, she wrote: “I haven’t been too particular either, and it works better.”  Then she added: one of her co-workers “told me not to worry so much.  And he’s right.”
     It also helped that Walt’s right-hand man, Dick Irvine assured her of her title: “Why you’re the landscape architect for the park,” he said.  He referred to Jack and Bill Evans as “good nurserymen and plantmen,” and explained that Walt “was very disappointed” in their original plans.   Shellhorn, he insisted, was definitely in charge of design.
      The big problem started on June 15, when Shellhorn received a letter from Landscape Architecture Quarterly, asking her to write an article about landscape design at Disneyland.  Shellhorn was enthusiastic—in part for the publicity she would receive.  She was also satisfied that she would pen the landscape story of Disneyland, not the Evans brothers.  One week later, on June 23, she approached Dick Irvine to discuss the matter.  The article, of course, would need to be cleared with the publicity department, but there was another issue.  Landscape Architecture Quarterly was a prestigious publication, one that would solidify the roles designers individually occupied at Disneyland.  Irvine said that he would need to discuss the matter with the Evans brothers—as it was clear now that the issue of titles had been intentionally muddied on the site to keep everyone happy.  When Irvine returned, he explained that “Jack [Evans] said it was OK if [Shellhorn] was billed as his assistant.”
     The rest of the story is easy to understand.
     In the final six weeks of construction, Shellhorn repeatedly threatened to quit—mostly due to a lack of collegiality on the work site.  Her irritation with the Evans brothers did not go away.  “I feel I was being used,” she wrote.  “[Jack] gets the publicity, and I do the planning.”  She could also sense the men on the project throwing their support in with the Evans brothers: “I feel so strongly that [Dick] Irvine has no love for me at all and is very chummy with Jack.”  She believed co-workers saw her “as the critical one who is always complaining.”  She also felt a sense of betrayal: “the studio let me down after telling me I represented them.”  But she stayed at Disneyland.  In part, her decision was tied to her own professionalism: she had made a commitment and would keep it.  And in part, she wanted to continue her relationship with Disneyland, this unusual park carved out of sandy soil in the middle of nowhere.  It intrigued her.
     In the days leading up to the park’s opening, she focused on her designs.  In the final ten days of construction, she created new designs for three areas in Frontierland—as nothing yet had been installed, not even cement walkways.  She oversaw the planting of many individual areas, getting down in the dirt with seedlings, including the entrance to Tomorrowland and the iconic Mickey Mouse floral mural that sloped up to Main Street Station.  She also tried to get on better terms with Dick Irvine and Jack Evans.
      As the park opened, she repeatedly expressed a desire to continue her work with Disneyland, most likely as a consultant.  Specifically she wanted to create designs for those areas that had not yet been landscaped—such as the sections of weeds and gravel around the Casey Jr. Railroad and the bare apron of dirt spreading out from Autopia.  On July 16, she talked to Walt about her position.  Walt said the company would work out some “sort of retainer” to keep Shellhorn attached to the project.  But that arrangement never arrived.   In the days after the park opened, Shellhorn waited for the men from Disney to call.  They never did.  Instead she decided to take a vacation, to recover from the enormous work of landscaping the world’s first cinematic amusement park.  As she was leaving town, she wrote: “To heck with Disneyland if they called.  They haven’t so far, and I wonder if they will.”
      The decision Walt arrived at was to retain the Evans brothers—not Ruth Shellhorn.  Without doubt, Shellhorn was the most talented landscape architect on the Disney team.  She created the actual landscape designs for most of the park.  In contrast, Bill Evans wasn’t even trained as a landscape architect; in college, he studied geology.  But despite these shortcomings, the Evans brothers possessed a few traits that Walt must have deemed more important that artistic training and strength in design.  The Evans brothers were far better able to work within the collaborative culture of Disney—a culture that often set aside individual desires and formal method constraints to meet the needs and deadlines associated with a project.  That is, during the early years of Disneyland, the results often were more important than following established practices and best procedures.
     As an interesting side note, this is one reason that the official history of Disneyland is often presented without significant tension.  Tension clearly existed within the company, as it did at all studios.  You can find tension here in the Ruth Shellhorn story, the C.V. Wood story, the Nat Winecoff story and in the story of many men and women who played important—albeit brief—roles at the company.  Walt, however, had a habit of removing artists drawn toward open creative conflict from his team.  Congeniality and collaboration, Walt must have believed, were far more effective tools than the fiery competition that regularly blazed between artists at other studios. 
     In the end, the best-trained and most talented landscape architect, Ruth Shellhorn went, somewhat unwillingly, on to other projects, while the less-skilled but more adaptive Evans brothers remained with Disney.  Shortly after the park opened, the older brother, Jack suffered a heart attacked and was limited to deskwork.  He died in 1958.  But the younger brother, Bill stayed with Disney for decades.  He supervised landscape efforts at Disneyland as it expanded.  He worked on Walt Disney World in Florida.  After he retired in 1975, he consulted on EPCOT Center and the Disney parks in Tokyo and Hong Kong.  To commemorate his work on Disneyland, he was given a window over Main Street.  Like many tribute windows at Disneyland, it celebrated an individual through a fictitious business: “Evans Gardens– Exotic & Rare Species – Freeway Collections – Est. 1910 – Morgan ‘Bill’ Evans – Senior Partner.”  In contrast, Ruth Shellhorn never received a window on Main Street.  She has mostly fallen away from the official history of the park. 
That’s it for this week.  I’m taking a couple weeks off from my articles to spend time with my family over Christmas.  But I do hope to post up one more photo essay before the New Year. 
     Until then – TJP


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Note: Quotes from Ruth Shellhorn come from her personal diaries, which are housed in Special Collections at the UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library.  

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