ESSAYS
[I spent most of June 2004 in Europe, visiting people and places
associated with Walt Disney. I also spent a couple of days at the
animation festival at Annecy, France. I'm writing about that trip,
which took me to Switzerland, Denmark, and England as well as France,
in several installments. MB]
European Journal
III. Zermatt
The Matterhorn, that most famous peak in the Swiss Alps, can be
seen from many hotel rooms in the village of Zermatt, including
those at the Daniela, the hotel where Phyllis and I stayed for three
nights. (That's the view from our room just below.) At the Daniela,
they told us about an American woman who had come to Zermatt and
been shocked to discover that the Matterhorn is a real mountain—she
thought it was only a ride at Disneyland.
 Walt
Disney and his family visited Zermatt on summer trips to Europe
in the fifties, and he loved the town. It is in truth a lovable
sort of place, its streets clean and free of cars, the people friendly,
and the scenery a constant delight. Zermatt sits in a narrow valley,
hemmed in by imposing mountains (see the photo below), and getting
there is not especially easy—since cars are forbidden, drivers
must park miles away and take the train. I suspect that the difficulties
involved in getting to this alpine Shangri-la make time spent there
seem all the sweeter.
Zermatt was important to Walt Disney as more than a holiday destination.
Third
Man on the Mountain, one of his very best live-action films,
is set in a fictional version of Zermatt, and much of the film was
shot in and near the town in the spring and summer of 1958. Disney
was in Zermatt for part of the filming. The Matterhorn bobsled ride,
inspired by his visits to Zermatt, opened in June 1959, five months
before Third Man was released. At the end of Disney's life,
in 1966, when he was planning what would have been the Mineral King
ski resort in the Sierra Nevada mountains, he envisioned it as being
like Zermatt, which is a magnet for skiers in the winter.
 As
important as Zermatt was to Walt Disney, he is not particularly
important to Zermatt. I wrote the tourist office in advance of my
visit, asking for help in getting in touch with any residents who
might have known him or worked on Third Man, but I never
received a reply. When I got to Zermatt and asked about Disney at
both the tourist office and the Alpine Museum, I drew blank stares.
The same was true at the Zermatterhof, the town's oldest and grandest
hotel. I felt sure the Disneys had stayed there, and I was later
able to confirm that with a British member of Third Man's
crew. He remembered that Walt had annoyed his wife, Lillian, by
dancing too enthusiastically at the hotel with the film's wardrobe
mistress. (At last! A Walt Disney sex scandal!)
The walls of another old hotel were filled with photos of mountain
climbers (along with an autographed photo of Sir Winston Churchill),
but the young women at the reception desk not only did not know
whether Walt Disney had stayed there, they had only a dim idea of
who he was. If I had been a climbing buff at a Disneyana convention
and had asked someone there about Edward Whymper (the Englishman
who was the first to climb to Matterhorn, in 1865), I could not
have gotten a more baffled reaction. Sic transit gloria,
indeed.
At the Daniela, the staff took an interest in my quest and steered
me to a young man in the bar. He remembered hearing that the faded
lettering on a wall near the museum was a remnant from a Disney
movie, presumably Third Man. I'd read that a corner of Zermatt
had been spruced up to serve as the town square in Third Man
and that, as John G. West Jr. has written in The Disney Live-Action
Productions, "Zermatt town fathers liked the new village
square so much that they promised to maintain it as a public park
in Walt Disney's honor." When Phyllis and I went looking for
the mysterious lettering, though, we found nothing.
 We
did find evidence, though, of how much Zermatt has changed in the
almost fifty years since Walt Disney was visiting there. Tucked
away on back alleys were old darkwood chalets in the "Walliser"
style—there's a photo of some of them at right—as well
as barns raised above stone discs that kept vermin out. (Zermatt
is in the canton called Valais or Wallis, depending on whether you're
a French or German speaker; either way, the name means "valley,"
the valley in question being that of the Rhone River.) These traditional
buildings—some like them can be glimpsed in Third Man—were
very much in contrast to the sleek new stores and hotels that now
dominate the town.
Like other resort towns, Zermatt lives in the present, save for
the occasional bow to pioneers like Whymper. Most of Zermatt has
been built or rebuilt since Disney's death, and a great deal of
building is still going on. Geography limits how large the village
can grow, but it hasn't reached those limits yet, and it's much
larger than it was when Walt and Lillie were visiting. Walt would
still recognize the Zermatterhof and other landmarks in the center
of the town, like the churchyard filled with stones memorializing
climbers who died on the Matterhorn. But only the mountain itself
is truly unchanged.
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[Click here to read the first
installment in this journal, about Disneyland Paris, the second
installment, about the Annecy festival, or the fourth
installment, about Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens. Click here to go to the official tourist
site for Zermatt.]
[Posted July 26, 2004; revised July 31, 2004; updated December 2, 2004]
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