The Curious Genius of Walt Disney
In the opening line of his new biography, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Knopf, 880 pages, $35), Neal Gabler dispels what is assuredly the most enduring, and most bizarre, myth about his subject. Walt Disney was not—we repeat, not—cryogenically frozen upon his death in 1966.
His body was cremated, and his ashes were interred at the Forest Lawn Cemetery, in Glendale, California. Gabler writes that “the persistence of the rumor, however outlandish, testified . . . to a public unwillingness to let go of him, even to the point of mythologizing him as an immortal who could not be felled by natural forces.”
Indeed the public had so embraced Disney that by the time of his death, 240 million people had seen at least one Disney film, 80 million had read a Disney book, 50 million had listened to a Disney record, 100 million television viewers tuned in to a weekly Disney program, and 80 million children had watched a Disney educational film. He had left an indelible mark on American culture.
Many authors have chronicled the rise of the house of Disney, but Gabler’s book is a singular accomplishment. Exhaustively researched, vividly written, and strong on both narrative and analysis, it will assume its rightful place as the definitive Walt Disney biography.
Beginning with Disney’s childhood, spent mostly in Chicago and St. Louis, and following his subject to Los Angeles, where the high-school dropout and amateur cartoonist moved in the early 1920s with nothing but $40 in his pocket and a mind full of dreams, Gabler weaves an engaging tale of a young man on the make.
Much like Henry Ford, whose automobiles did much to destroy the localized, nineteenth-century world of small towns and interspersed farms but who labored over the years to recreate and mythologize the lost country of his youth, Walt Disney helped modernize and commercialize America, even as he wove into his cartoons, his television shows, and his theme park an idealized vision of small-town America that he only dimly remembered from a few childhood years spent in Marceline, Missouri, a way station between his longer stays in Chicago and St. Louis.
A modestly talented cartoonist whose real strength lay in his uncanny ability to anticipate the next big technological innovation, young Walt Disney was indifferent to money and material comfort, unfazed by the long string of setbacks he encountered as a fledgling motion picture animator, and completely unabashed when it came to borrowing and losing large sums of money from friends and family members who were inexplicably generous in financing his dreams.
Almost from the start, he and his brother Roy, who managed the business end of Disney Bros. Studios (later rechristened Walt Disney Enterprises), seemed to be several steps ahead of the crowd. His first major animation project was a silent series called the Alice Comedies, which anticipated Who Framed Roger Rabbit by more than 60 years, with its combination of a live human actor (Virginia Davis, who played Alice, as in Alice in Wonderland) and animated companion characters.
After a fallout with double-crossing business partners, Disney, as always on the verge of bankruptcy, worked night and day to develop a new character, a mouse with human-like qualities who would combine his own sense of adventure with a puckish spirit. In developing Mickey Mouse, he had to labor behind the backs of his staff animators, who were working in connivance with his former business partners to push him out of his own fledgling studio.
The first two Mickey Mouse shorts, “Plane Crazy” and “The Gallopin’ Gaucho,” caught the attention of studio executives, but not enough to secure their creator a distribution package. Realizing that the future of film lay with talkies, Disney raised an enormous sum of money, much to his brother’s chagrin, and produced a third Mickey Mouse film, “Steamboat Willie,” this time with sound. It was a smash hit. Within a few short years, even as America descended into the decade-long Depression, Disney’s studio thrived. Not only did the Mickey shorts draw enormously profitable distribution deals, but by 1934 Walt Disney Enterprises was selling $34 million of Mickey Mouse merchandise annually, even more than the cartoons were bringing in.
Mickey, who always seemed to make lemonade out of lemons, was as perfectly suited to the times as was Little Orphan Annie. “He is never mean or ugly,” Walt said. “He never lies or cheats or steals. He is a clean, happy little fellow who loves life and folk. He never takes advantage of the weak and we see to it that nothing ever happens that will cure . . . his conviction that the world is just a big apple pie. . . . He is Youth, the Great Unlicked and Uncontaminated.”
Even as the operation started earning money hand over fist, Walt Disney insisted on plowing every available penny back into the studio. He struck an expensive but ultimately profitable deal with Technicolor and moved away from black-and-white animation before anyone else thought to do so. He created a supporting cast of characters for Mickey, including Donald Duck, Goofy, and Minnie. What other animators spent producing a short feature, Walt doubled. Quality was his watchword, and expense was never a consideration—or rather it was for his older brother Roy to worry about. When Franklin Roosevelt declared a bank holiday in early 1933, Roy, unable to pay the staff, began to panic. “Quit worrying,” Walt chided him. “People aren’t going to stop living just because the banks are closed. What the hell, we’ll use anything—make potatoes the medium of exchange—we’ll pay everyone in potatoes.”
With the rise of the double feature, which left less time and attention span for introductory shorts, Disney borrowed $2.3 million from the Bank of America to develop the first-ever feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. “Roy was very brave and manly until the costs passed over a million,” he later said. “. . . When costs passed the one and one-half million mark, Roy didn’t even bat an eye. He couldn’t; he was paralyzed.”
Though Disney’s operations expanded steadily between the 1930s and 1950s, and though both brothers profited handsomely, the studio was always mired in debt, often to finance Walt’s next technological innovation. On the flip side, the only reason Disney was able to secure such generous financing was its cutting-edge innovations, which made it the unparalleled leader in motion picture animation. It was the first to switch exclusively to color, and in the 1950s the first to tap the potential of the small screen, when Walt Disney struck an unprecedented production agreement with ABC. For all these successes, though, it wasn’t until the creation of Disneyland that the company was permanently out of financial straits.
Gabler’s book is much more than a business story. Readers will follow Disney as he develops from a carefree young innovator to a nervous, remote, and often vindictive studio chief who was never comfortable with the growing size of his operations. He chafed at the increasing control of banks over his studio and always had trouble personally relinquishing animation, storyboarding, and character-development processes to his large staff of creative talent.
Most of his employees went on strike in 1940, and though he had evinced little prior interest in politics, he became an ardent right-winger and anti-Communist. Rumors later circulated that he had been a member of the pro-Nazi fifth-column during the war (he hadn’t), and that he was an anti-Semite (he may have been, but no more or less than was usual in midcentury America, and certainly not in his personal or business dealings). He could be cold with his family and obsessive about his pet projects. He was, in short, very different in his old age from the young man he had once been.
Ultimately, Gabler argues, Disney achieved his success by “managing, almost purely by instinct, to tap into archetypes that resonated with people of various ages, eras and cultures.” One of those archetypes was his own public image as guardian of American hometown kitsch and culture. It was a hard image to live up to. “He had created the studio,” Gabler writes, “then the studio, with his complicity, created him, making him, he fully understood, as much a commodity as a man—the very sort of diffident, genial, plainspoken, unprepossessing, and childishly enthusiastic character who would have produced Walt Disney movies.”
In the end, it was never clear that he was happy about any of it. “I’m not Walt Disney anymore,” he once told a business associate. “Walt Disney is a thing. It’s grown to be become a whole different meaning than just one man.”