Ambition’s Price1938–1941 By 1938, Walt Disney’s life resembled more closely the lives of other successful movie people. He and Lillian had begun visiting the desert resort of Palm Springs—he played polo there at first—and he was helping finance a ski resort, Sugar Bowl, near Lake Tahoe in Northern California. He was one of dozens of Hollywood celebrities who financed Hollywood Park, a new race track near Los Angeles.1 From playing sandlot polo with members of his staff, he had graduated to playing the game with movie stars at the Riviera Country Club in Brentwood—at one point he owned nineteen polo ponies.2 That figure may seem surprisingly large, but as the actor Robert Stack, one of Disney’s fellow players, explained, “You have to have a lot of horses because if you play a lot, they get damaged a bit and they get tired.”3 Disney himself got “damaged a bit”; he had given up polo by early 1938, after injuring his neck in a match.4 For exercise he turned to badminton.
