Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination - Hardcover

Gabler, Neal

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067943822X ISBN 13: 9780679438229

Publisher: Knopf, 2006

Synopsis

From Neal Gabler, the definitive portrait of one of the most important figures in twentieth-century American entertainment and cultural history.

Seven years in the making and meticulously researched—Gabler is the first writer to be given complete access to the Disney archives—this is the full story of a man whose work left an ineradicable brand on our culture but whose life has largely been enshrouded in myth.

Gabler shows us the young Walt Disney breaking free of a heartland childhood of discipline and deprivation and making his way to Hollywood. We see the visionary, whose desire for escape honed an innate sense of what people wanted to see on the screen and, when combined with iron determination and obsessive perfectionism, led him to the reinvention of animation. It was Disney, first with Mickey Mouse and then with his feature films—most notably Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi—who transformed animation from a novelty based on movement to an art form that presented an illusion of life.

We see him reimagine the amusement park with Disneyland, prompting critics to coin the word Disneyfication to describe the process by which reality can be modified to fit one’s personal desires. At the same time, he provided a new way to connect with American history through his live-action films and purveyed a view of the country so coherent that even today one can speak meaningfully of “Walt Disney’s America.” We see how the True-Life Adventure nature documentaries he produced helped create the environmental movement by sensitizing the general public to issues of conservation. And we see how he reshaped the entertainment industry by building a synergistic empire that combined film, television, theme parks, music, book publishing, and merchandise in a way that was unprecedented and was later widely imitated.

Gabler also reveals a wounded, lonely, and often disappointed man, who, despite worldwide success, was plagued with financial problems much of his life, suffered a nervous breakdown, and at times retreated into pitiable seclusion in his workshop making model trains. Gabler explores accusations that Disney was a red-baiter, an anti-Semite, an embittered alcoholic. But whatever the characterizations of Disney’s personal life, he appealed to the nation by demonstrating the power of wish fulfillment and the triumph of the American imagination. Walt Disney showed how one could impose one’s will on the world.

This is a masterly biography, a revelation of both the work and the man—of both the remarkable accomplishment and the hidden life

About this title

About the Author

Neal Gabler is the author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for history. His biography Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity was named best nonfiction book of the year by Time. He appears regularly on the media review program Fox News Watch, and writes often for The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He is currently a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society in the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California. He lives with his wife in Amagansett, New York.

Reviews

There's nothing Mickey Mouse about this terrific biography of Walt Disney (1900- 1966), arguably the most influential figure in 20th-century American culture. The research is astonishingly detailed, whether Neal Gabler is deconstructing complex business and financial alliances, revealing the shifting inner dynamics of the Disney studios or describing, in page after mesmerizing page, the creation of such cartoon landmarks as "Steamboat Willie," the Silly Symphonies, "The Three Little Pigs," "Fantasia" and "Pinocchio." There's an entire 60-page chapter just on "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937), guiding the reader through the long gestation and realization of this masterpiece of animation, the very Chartres of cartoons.

That last analogy may sound almost sacrilegious, but Gabler convincingly compares Disney animation work during its glory days -- the 1930s -- to a collective endeavor rather like the building of a Gothic cathedral. Walt, as he calls him throughout the book, supplied the soaring, transcendent vision while his artists produced the thousands of drawings that turned follies into breathtaking realities. After all, the studio worked for years, with sacerdotal fervor, on early films such as "Snow White" and "Pinocchio" (1940). To many young people of today, I suspect that the Disney animation company in the 1930s will sound a lot like Apple Computer and Microsoft in their pioneering heyday. In both cases, a small group of excited and determined people, working out of the equivalent of a garage or warehouse, was on a mission to change the world. And they did.

Walt Disney grew up poor in Missouri, delivered newspapers and handed the money to his father, received only the most basic schooling, and drew pictures all the time. As a teenager in Kansas City, he started little advertising companies specializing in cartooning, comic strips and primitive animation, and he failed again and again. But this young go-getter was nothing less than indomitable. After his older brother Roy moved to Los Angeles (and took up selling vacuum cleaners door to door), Walt joined him and began working even more intensely on animation. Soon he and Roy formed Disney Brothers to peddle their short, silent films. Roy would be the improbable moneyman, Walt the creative genius. Such dreamers! Yet so it was to be, even when the pair ruled over an empire.

For today we regard the name "Disney" as synonymous with the term "vast media conglomerate." Yet only after the creation of Disneyland in the mid-1950s did the company actually find itself without serious debt. Walt was always overextended, convinced (rightly) that money was merely a tool to achieve one dream after another. For a long period he paid himself less per week than his new recruits, and he generally plowed almost everything he made back into the company. He might spend years on a project, going deeply over budget on the conviction that, say, "Bambi" (1942) would be a huge success. (And it wasn't -- only the rather simple "Dumbo" (1941) came close to matching "Snow White" as really boffo box office.) Refusing the trappings of the typical Hollywood mogul, Walt Disney thought and lived like an artist -- what mattered was creating something beautiful and perfect. And like all real artists, he always ended up convinced that he'd failed to capture fully the fire that was in his brain.

Still, before Walt was 40 he was adored by the public, acclaimed by the critics, envied by competitors such as Max and Dave Fleischer (purveyors of the classic Popeye and Superman shorts), and generally viewed as one of the great creative imaginations of the time. All that changed in the 1940s. It was an era of what Walt saw as betrayals and losses. By then his signature hero, Mickey Mouse, had lost his edge and become a bland milquetoast. At the same time, Walt himself was losing interest in short cartoons and spending less and less time overseeing their production. After "Fantasia" (1940), his third feature-length film, he began to lose interest in that animated form as well: He felt he could never again match the quality he and his wonder boys had achieved in "Snow White" and that anything less was hardly worth bothering about. Then in 1941 many Disney employees went out on strike and picketed for a union. Walt grew bitter at what he viewed as mass treachery (later blaming communist agitators). From then on, he began to behave more and more like an all-powerful god, capricious in his moods, jealous and easily angered when vexed, casually firing longtime staffers as "deadwood." The company stopped being fun and was suddenly a major corporation rather than an artistic community. "There's just one thing we're selling here," Walt told a new recruit, "and that's the name 'Walt Disney.' "

That same Walt remained the master of "imagineering," suggesting the projects and sometimes literally acting out plot-ideas for hours on end to inspire his animation teams. (Everyone agrees that he was an amazing storyteller.) But since Walt was no longer on the floor every day, his artists and directors would end up playing "guess what Walt wants" and when they guessed wrong would risk his wrath or a dismissal.

By the end of the 1940s the camaraderie of the previous decade was long gone, and with it many of the stalwarts of that earlier era. Indeed, Disney Studio's whole concept of animation was now regarded as rather saccharine and old-hat; the hot company was Looney Tunes at Warner Brothers, where Friz Freleng, Tex Avery and Chuck Jones had created the more anarchic comedy of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. A depressed Disney started spending more and more time puttering around in his workshop or tooling around on a model locomotive in his backyard.

Walt Disney Studios had also started to make live-action films such as "Treasure Island" and "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," neither of which Walt much cared about, though they brought in needed cash. Still, the man wasn't through reinventing himself or his company. His love for miniature railroads and gadgets, his memory of the small town he'd grown up in, and the popularity of his fairy-tale films soon merged in his mind to form an almost mystical vision of a new kind of amusement park, a clean wholesome park for the entire family. It would be, he dreamed, "the happiest place on earth."

To bring in cash for its construction and to help advertise this so-called Disneyland, Roy and Walt cut a deal with ABC to produce a weekly television series, a mix of old cartoons, occasional "True-Life Adventures" (i.e., nature documentaries such as "The Living Desert," 1953), and special TV movies. "Walt Disney Presents" proved a huge and immediate success, with "Uncle Walt" himself as its genial avuncular host. And after the show featured a series about a grinning frontier scout who was "born on a mountaintop in Tennessee," it was more than successful, it was the home of a phenomenon. The nation's children went crazy for Fess Parker's Davy Crockett. (There can be few men in their late 50s or 60s who didn't once own a coonskin cap, with a long, furry tail hanging from it.) Soon thereafter, the network wanted an after-school kiddie program, and so was born "The Mickey Mouse Club." (Sing it everyone: M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E.) The show was thrown together in an almost improvisatory manner, but kids adored it. Half the pre-pubescent boys in America fell in love with dark-haired Mouseketeer Annette Funicello (none more than a certain future book reviewer, author of Annette-inspired poems in praise of her charm, her grace, her eyes, her lips, her everything).

Once Disneyland finally opened in 1955, its creator often stayed there in his own special apartment, preferring his earthly paradise to his film studio or his actual home. Within a couple of years, Walt's grandest folly was the most popular tourist attraction in the West.

But overreachers seldom just settle back and retire. Before his death from lung cancer at 65, Walt began to acquire, surreptitiously, huge chunks of property in central Florida for an even greater project: Near Orlando, he would build a second and even bigger amusement park but, more important, attached to it would be a model city, an all-American utopia that he himself would design. When he died, the model city died with him (at least until his successors, decades later, unveiled the spanking fresh town of Celebration, Fla.).

As for that second park, now called Walt Disney World, it continues to grow and evolve and, some say, spread out tentacles. According to cultural critics, America has become a true Disney world -- increasingly obsessed with order and wholesomeness, eager for the cozily reassuring and the schmaltzy, safe in its art, conservative in its values and blithely unconcerned with global realities, human suffering and social inequities.

Periodically, Gabler re-emphasizes that Walt's achievements in animation, films and magic kingdoms are all fundamentally triumphs of relentless control. In his youth Walt might have been compared to the revolutionary genius of Charlie Chaplin, but as he aged he was more often likened to that uplifting painter of old-timey scenes of mom, the flag and apple pie, Norman Rockwell.

About this superb biography, one can hardly be temperate. Gabler's only obvious flaw is also his great strength -- the sheer amount of detail and material he presents to the reader. But his engaging, unobtrusive prose, his passion for his workaholic subject (whom he regards as both genius and monster), and his steady march through an amazing career all inspire trust and gratitude. Here, then, is the definitive portrait of Walt Disney, the Dream-King.

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Neal Gabler, who penned a well-received biography of journalist Walter Winchell and An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, among other books, is the first writer to have complete access to the Walt Disney archives. Much of that wealth of information makes its way into this hefty tome. At nearly 900 pages (including 200 pages of notes), the author risks losing all but the most devoted Disney fans. Gabler uses engaging prose, numerous anecdotes, and firsthand accounts of the events of Disney's life, however, to balance the more mundane details about production budgets and the day-to-day workings of Disney's empire. For the most part, Gabler succeeds. The book works best when he focuses on Disney's often contradictory and mercurial character.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Starred Review. Few men could be said to have as pervasive an influence on American culture as Walt Disney, and Gabler (Winchell) scours the historical record for as thorough an explanation of that influence as any biographer could muster. Every period of Disney's life is depicted in exacting detail, from the suffering endured on a childhood paper route to the making of Mary Poppins. The core of Gabler's story, though, is clearly in the early years of Disney's studio, from the creation of Mickey Mouse to the hands-on management of early hits like Fantasia and Pinocchio. "Even though Walt could neither animate, nor write, nor direct," Gabler notes, "he was the undisputed power at the studio." Yet there was significant disgruntlement within the ranks of Disney's employees, and Gabler traces the day-to-day resentments that eventually led to a bitter strike against the studio in 1941. That dispute helped harden Disney's anticommunism, which led to rumors of anti-Semitism, which are effectively debunked here. At times, Gabler lays on a bit thick the psychological interpretation of Disney as control freak, but his portrait is so engrossing that it's hard to picture the entertainment mogul playing with his toy trains and not imagine him building Disneyland in his head. 32 pages of photos. 100,000 first printing. (Nov. 6)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Touted by the masses as America's beloved storyteller, derided by cultural gatekeepers as a philistine, Walt Disney was undeniably one of the most significant figures on the twentieth-century cultural scene. And as Gabler shows in this massive, thoroughly researched biography, Disney's cultural influence went far beyond the beloved cartoon characters he created. The early work produced by Disney and his talented staff--the phenomenal Mickey Mouse shorts of the early 1930s and such groundbreaking feature-length films as Snow White and Pinocchio--drew near-universal critical acclaim and massive commercial success. After World War II and a disastrous strike that shattered the benevolent if paternalistic utopia Disney had created for his employees, he disengaged from the cartoons, much to their detriment, to tackle new enterprises including live-action movies, TV, and theme parks. An ambitious planned community was on the drawing board at the time of his death in 1966--confirming evidence for Gabler's contention that Disney aimed to provide Americans not with escape, as is commonly thought, but with "control and the vicarious empowerment that accompanied it." Although Gabler focuses on corporate matters at the expense of critical treatment of the films, he presents a balanced treatment of the man and his achievements, realistically assessing Disney's considerable impact and offering insight into the hidden, restless soul who constantly challenged himself, risking the financial stability of his empire more than once in his unceasing pursuit of his dreams. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Escape


Elias Disney was a hard man. He worked hard, lived modestly, and worshiped devoutly. His son would say that he believed in “walking a straight and narrow path,” and he did, neither smoking nor drinking nor cursing nor carousing. The only diversion he allowed himself as a young man was playing the fiddle, and even then his upbringing was so strict that as a boy he would have to sneak off into the woods to practice. He spoke deliberately, rationing his words, and generally kept his emotions in check, save for his anger, which could erupt violently. He looked hard too, his body thin and taut, his arms ropy, his blue eyes and copper-colored hair offset by his stern visage—long and gaunt, sunken-cheeked and grim-mouthed. It was a pioneer’s weathered face—a no-nonsense face, the face of American Gothic.

But it was also a face etched with years of disappointment—disappointment that would shade and shape the life of his famous son, just as the Disney tenacity, drive, and pride would. The Disneys claimed to trace their lineage to the d’Isignys of Normandy, who had arrived in England with William the Conqueror and fought at the Battle of Hastings. During the English Restoration in the late seventeenth century, a branch of the family, Protestants, moved to Ireland, settling in County Kilkenny, where, Elias Disney would later boast, a Disney was “classed among the intellectual and well-to-do of his time and age.” But the Disneys were also ambitious and opportunistic, always searching for a better life. In July 1834, a full decade before the potato famine that would trigger mass migrations, Arundel Elias Disney, Elias Disney’s grandfather, sold his holdings, took his wife and two young children to Liverpool, and set out for America aboard the New Jersey with his older brother Robert and Robert’s wife and their two children.

They had intended to settle in America, but Arundel Elias did not stay there long. The next year he moved to the township of Goderich in the wilderness of southwestern Ontario, Canada, just off Lake Huron, and bought 149 acres along the Maitland River. In time Arundel Elias built the area’s first grist mill and a sawmill, farmed his land, and fathered sixteen children—eight boys and eight girls. In 1858 the eldest of them, twenty-five-year-old Kepple, who had come on the boat with his parents, married another Irish immigrant named Mary Richardson and moved just north of Goderich to Bluevale in Morris Township, where he bought 100 acres of land and built a small pine cabin. There his first son, Elias, was born on February 6, 1859.

Though he cleared the stony land and planted orchards, Kepple Disney was a Disney, with airs and dreams, and not the kind of man inclined to stay on a farm forever. He was tall, nearly six feet, and in his nephew’s words “as handsome a man as you would ever meet.” For a religious man he was also vain, sporting long black whiskers, the ends of which he liked to twirl, and jet-black oiled hair, always well coifed. And he was restless—a trait he would bequeath to his most famous descendant as he bequeathed his sense of self-importance. When oil was struck nearby in what came to be known as Oil Springs, Kepple rented out his farm, deposited his family with his wife’s sister, and joined a drilling crew. He was gone for two years, during which time the company struck no oil. He returned to Bluevale and his farm, only to be off again, this time to drill salt wells. He returned a year later, again without his fortune, built himself a new frame house on his land, and reluctantly resumed farming.

But that did not last either. Hearing of a gold strike in California, he set out in 1877 with eighteen-year-old Elias and his second-eldest son, Robert. They got only as far as Kansas when Kepple changed plans and purchased just over three hundred acres from the Union Pacific Railroad, which was trying to entice people to settle at division points along the train route it was laying through the state. (Since the Disneys were not American citizens, they could not acquire land under the Homestead Act.) The area in which the family settled, Ellis County in the northwestern quadrant of Kansas about halfway across the state, was frontier and rough. Indian massacres were fresh in memory, and the Disneys themselves waited out one Indian scare by stationing themselves all night at their windows with guns. Crime was rampant too. One visitor called the county seat, Hays, the “Sodom of the Plains.”

The climate turned out to be as inhospitable as the inhabitants—dry and bitter cold. At times it was so difficult to farm that the men would join the railroad crews while their wives scavenged for buffalo bones to sell to fertilizer manufacturers. Most of those who stayed on the land turned to livestock since the fields rippled with yellow buffalo grass on which sheep and cows could graze. Farming there either broke men or hardened them, as Elias would be hardened, but being as opportunistic as his Disney forebears, he had no more interest in farming than his father had. He wanted escape.

Father and son now set their sights on Florida. The winter of 1885–86 had been especially brutal in Ellis. Will Disney, Kepple’s youngest son, remembered the snow drifting into ten-to-twelve-foot banks, forcing the settlers from the wagon trains heading west to camp in the schoolhouse for six weeks until the weather broke. The snow was so deep that the train tracks were cleared only when six engines were hitched to a dead locomotive with a snowplow and made run after run at the drifts, inching forward and backing up, gradually nudging through. Kepple, tired of the cruel Kansas weather, decided to join a neighbor family on a reconnaissance trip to Lake County, in the middle of Florida, where the neighbors had relatives. Elias went with him.

For Elias, Florida held another inducement besides the promise of warm weather and new opportunities. The neighbor family they had accompanied, the Calls, had a sixteen-year-old daughter named Flora. The Calls, like the Disneys, were pioneers who nevertheless disdained the hardscrabble life. Their ancestors had arrived in America from England in 1636, settling first outside Boston and then moving to upstate New York. In 1825 Flora’s grandfather, Eber Call, reportedly to escape hostile Indians and bone-chilling cold, left with his wife and three children for Huron County in Ohio, where he cleared several acres and farmed. But Eber Call, like Kepple Disney, had higher aspirations. Two of his daughters became teachers, and his son, Charles, was graduated from Oberlin College in 1847 with high honors. After heading to California to find gold and then drifting through the West for several years, Charles wound up outside Des Moines, Iowa, where he met Henrietta Gross, a German immigrant. They married on September 9, 1855, and returned to his father’s house in Ohio. Charles became a teacher.

Exactly why at the age of fifty-six he decided to leave Ohio in January 1879, after roughly twenty years there and ten children, is a mystery, though a daughter later claimed it was because he was fearful that one of his eight girls might marry into a neighbor family with eight sons, none of whom were sober enough for the devout teacher. Why he chose to become a farmer is equally mysterious, and why he chose Ellis, Kansas, is more mysterious still. The rough-hewn frontier town was nothing like the tranquil Ohio village he had left, and it had little to offer save for cheap land. But Ellis proved no more hospitable to the Calls than it had to the Disneys. Within a year the family had begun to scatter. Flora, scarcely in her teens, was sent to normal school in Ellsworth to be trained as a teacher, and apparently roomed with Albertha Disney, Elias’s sister, though it is likely he had already taken notice of her since the families’ farms were only two miles from each other.

Within a few years the weather caught up to the Calls—probably the legendary storm of January 1886. In all likelihood it was the following autumn that they left for Florida by train with Elias and Kepple Disney as company. Kepple returned to Ellis shortly thereafter. Elias stayed on with the Calls. The area where they settled, in the middle of the state, was by one account “howling wilderness” at the time. Even so, after their Kansas experience the Calls found it “beautiful” and thought their new life there would be “promising.” It was known generally as Pine Island for its piney woods on the wet, high rolling land and for the rivers that isolated it, but it was dotted with new outposts. Elias settled in Acron, where there were only seven families; the Calls settled in adjoining Kismet. Charles cleared some acreage to raise oranges and took up teaching again in neighboring Norristown, while Flora became the teacher in Acron her first year and Paisley her second. Meanwhile Elias delivered mail from a horse-drawn buckboard and courted Flora.

Their marriage, at the Calls’ home in Kismet on New Year’s Day 1888, wedded the intrepid determination of the Disneys with the softer, more intellectual temper of the Calls—two strains of earthbound romanticism that would merge in their youngest son. The couple even looked the part, Elias’s flinty gauntness contrasting with Flora’s amiable roundness, as his age—he was nearly thirty at the time of the wedding—contrasted with the nineteen-year-old bride’s youth. Marriage, however, didn’t change his fortunes. He had bought an orange grove, but a freeze destroyed most of his crop, forcing him back into delivering the mail. In the meantime Charles Call had an accident while clearing some land of pines, never fully recovered, and died early in 1890. His death loosened the couple’s bond to Florida. “Elias was very much like his father; he couldn’t be content...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067943822X
• ISBN 13: 9780679438229
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 851