The weather was kind to Anaheim, California, on July 17, 1955. So kind, in fact, that the heels of women’s shoes got stuck in the warm asphalt. Anything other than sunshine would have been an insult to the opening of America’s latest Shangri-La: Disneyland, or, as its creator called it, “the happiest place on Earth.” On that day, if you believe one estimate, as many as twenty-eight thousand people poured through the gates, with seventy million more, about half the population of the country, watching the event on television. Walt Disney had already conquered TV through “Disneyland,” which was broadcast every week on ABC, and that day the Mouseketeers, Disney’s troupe of performing children, danced live for the public, wearing their black skullcaps with rounded ears—the most recognizable corporate headgear after that of the Playboy Bunnies. The broadcast was hosted by three celebrities, who, just to double the delirium, played hopscotch through the crowds around the park. One of them was the movie star Ronald Reagan.
Once upon a time, in “Bambi,” Disney had sought to catch the living soul of nature on film. Now he was leaving it for dead. Within three years, his new monument would outstrip Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon as a tourist draw. His attention was turning to grander but more manageable things, as if the batting of a doe’s eyelashes, or little April showers going drip-drip-drop, were no longer quite suited, or satisfying, to a man of the world. His ambitions rose, and with them went the plaudits of his followers; in 1962, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, two of the patron saints of Hollywood, travelled to Oslo to argue that Disney should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Even now, forty years after his death, the slight figure of Walt himself is almost impossible to pick out from the parti-colored throng of movie clips, projects, and moral tendencies that march under the banner of “Walt Disney.” Say the name to most people and you know what will flash onto their mind’s eye: unashamedly bright hues, flying elephants, singing bears, corporate dominance, happy endings, and a helping of values that slip down as easily as ice cream. How did we arrive at this blinding apotheosis? One attempt at an answer, the most comprehensive to date, is provided by Neil Gabler, in “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination” (Knopf; $35). Gabler takes more than eight hundred pages to tell and note his tale, which sounds excessive, but then Disney himself was a model of unflagging thoroughness, and, as Thumper would say, if you can’t do nice annotations, then don’t do nuthin’ at all.
He was born Walter Elias Disney, on December 5, 1901, in Chicago. His father, Elias, was at that time a carpenter, and the first Disney-like note in the story is struck when we learn that Elias built the wooden cottage on Tripp Avenue in which his son was born. He helped to construct two more dwellings nearby, and you half expect to hear that one of them was rented out to dwarfs. One of the problems for Gabler, as for any biographer of Disney, is that he can hardly start to recount the exploits of his subject without sounding like the narrator of a Disney TV show. When Walt was four, he and his family moved to Marceline, Missouri, where, in Gabler’s words, he
That last quotation drills us straight to the core of Disney’s appeal. Far from chiding the old man for his fabrications, he is fondly and supportively amused. To be gripped by a story, especially one that is trawled from the past, is everything. To realize that it might not be true, or that it might have been blown up out of all proportion, is no big deal. Changing its proportions, in fact, could be just the ticket, because what are fables if not stories that have been lofted out of the reach of regular experience, no longer scratchable by the quibbles of common sense? As for blowing up, there is no better method for showing an image to a crowd—taking a mouse-size mouse, say, and throwing it onto a screen, where it assumes the dimensions, and some of the pluckier habits, of a man.
Marceline educated Disney. It taught him how to cherish good times, as if preparing them to be the objects of a later nostalgia. Was it really the case that when Buffalo Bill came to town he stopped his buggy mid-parade and asked the young Walt to join him? Did crusty old “Doc” Sherwood really give Walt a nickel for sketching his horse, Rupert? Another version of the story, cited by Gabler, has the doctor hanging the finished picture on the wall. Either way, Disney had done his first piece of business as an artist, and, according to his older brother Roy, it remained “the highlight of Walt’s life.” There would never be a time, indeed, when art was not a business, although what attracted Walt, throughout his career, was not so much the money that people traded for his art (that would be Roy’s territory) as the eager numbers in which they came to view it, as if reassuring its creator that his dreams were just like theirs. Disney was hardly alone in locating bliss in some lost zone of childhood, and in striving to reconstruct it in the movies; without that primary impulse we would have no Andy Hardy, no “Meet Me in St. Louis,” no “Citizen Kane.” Disney taught the world to look back without anger, and he traced that look to a horse. Rupert was his Rosebud.
Elias farmed in Missouri, without much joy, and in 1911 the Disneys moved again, this time to Kansas City. There Elias ran a paper route, enlisting Walt and Roy as his delivery boys. Walt would get up for work in the dark, before school, and on Sundays he had a double load, which meant skipping church. (That was no loss. The grown-up Walt never went to church—a difficult smudge for those who acclaim him as the purveyor of all-American ways.) In later years, according to Gabler, “he talked of how the route and its demands—the unyielding routine, the snow, the fatigue, the lost papers—traumatized and haunted him.” One thinks instantly of Dickens, and of his toils in the blacking factory. In each case, what scarred them was not pain—a job is a job, after all, and there were children everywhere subsisting in more brutal conditions—but sameness, without the prospect of relief. A thin-skinned, fanciful child will remember as torment what tougher spirits would regard as routine. Both Dickens and Disney came to believe, with a kind of humiliated pride, that their sufferings placed them in good stead with the travails of ordinary folk, who would henceforth be diverted by entertainments that would never lack for incident—that would, whatever their other qualities, swarm with animation. As G. K. Chesterton wrote, irrefutably, “Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted.”
In “Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince,” published in 1993, Marc Eliot lays out a gothic account of Disney family life (“Elias would march Roy and Walt to the woodshed and dispense his brutal punishments”) and of its aftermath in the mind of the adult Walt. Gabler concedes that Elias Disney was a sour and angry man, embittered by his failure to hold down a job. (His two older sons, Herbert and Ray, left home early to seek their fortunes elsewhere.) But does that set him apart from a thousand other fathers of that time? If Walt was goaded into a frenzy of achievement, it was not because of a monster at his back but simply because, as a natural optimist and clown, he saw no profit in the deflated and the dour. Crowned “second dumbest” in the class by a teacher in Kansas City, he nonetheless found favor by performing comic turns (he did a mean Chaplin) and, in Gabler’s laconic account, “decorating the margins of his textbooks with pictures and then entertaining his classmates by riffling them to make them move.” By the time of the Disneys’ next uprooting—to Chicago, in 1917—we sense an acceleration in Walt, with the father’s restlessness (Elias was now employed by the O-Zell jelly-and-fruit-juice company) echoed in the hale, try-anything momentum of the son. Walt enrolled in night classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and his high-school magazine labelled him “Artist,” as if his fate could not be erased. A guy could go far on a riffle.
Instead of which, Walt Disney went to war. Or, at any rate, he tried. In 1918, at the age of sixteen (he altered the documentation to add a year), he enlisted in the Red Cross Ambulance Corps, but it was too late. Even so, after the Armistice, he was shipped to France—“an interesting place,” he noted, although the highest dividend of his time there was a purse of three hundred dollars that he won at a craps game in Neufchâteau. By October, 1919, he was back in America, and setting out on the rising slope that would lead to Mickey Mouse. Returning to Kansas City, he found work as a commercial artist, joining forces with a taciturn, big-browed colleague called Ubbe Iwwerks to form their own company. (One of the delights of Gabler’s book is the roster of proper names, many as rubberized as cartoons: Earl Scrogin, Friz Freleng, Grim Natwick, Pinto Colvig, Hardie Gramatky, Dr. Rufus von KleinSmid, and the Dr. Seuss-worthy Gus Van Schmus. Ubbe Iwwerks changed his name to Ub Iwerks, which didn’t exactly help.) Walt drew print advertisements, then animated advertisements on film—or, at least, cutouts that could be moved and photographed, to give the impression of continuous action. By 1921, he was preparing for his own cartoons, lasting six or seven minutes, to be screened in cinemas ahead of the main features. Laugh-O-Gram Films, Inc., was registered the following year, with Disney listed as its president, despite the fact that, as Gabler points out, “he was still a minor and legally too young to be a corporate officer.” Just like going to war.
The two hundred and ten pages of biography that whisk us from May 18, 1922, to December 21, 1937—or, if you prefer, from the creation of Laugh-O-Gram to the première of “Snow White”—read like a headlong thriller. The reason is clear. There is nothing more inspiring than to be in on the birth of a new art form or a new technology, and Disney was there for both. He was already using cels—transparent sheets of celluloid, which allowed him to manipulate the characters against a fixed background—but it was an artist friend named Rudy Ising who proposed that they draw directly on the cels instead of gluing images onto them. From a distance, that idea seems obvious, but these folk were having to make their medium up as they went along, fuelled by the sort of rushed and sleepless inventiveness that is barely conceivable beyond American shores. They were flying blind, and they were heading for a mouse.
“The first Mickey Mouse was made by twelve people after hours in a garage,” Disney recalled. I would give a great deal to have been a fly on that garage wall, or a spider in the rafters. Already, Walt had acknowledged the lowliness of his own draftsmanship, and he was relying on the superior skills of others. That first Mickey picture, “Plane Crazy” (1928), was largely the work of Iwerks, who cranked out up to seven hundred drawings a day. He duly received a credit, but—and the question has dogged Disney scholars ever since—should he therefore get the credit? If Disney remains a test case for artistic contribution, that is because he threw out the romantic notion of what an artist should be and the distance at which he should hold himself from society. Disney was up to his neck in society—not high society, which held no appeal, but in appetites and aspirations so widespread, so sweet and low, that we scarcely bother to articulate them. It is true that Disney cartoons were not physically sketched by Disney, but you might as well complain that Henry Ford was not to be found underneath a Model T, tightening nuts. Disney, in fact, was a tightener from the first, incessantly churning out gags, pulling apart and fixing the gags of others, and pained by the sloppy and the slack. “Snow White” was finished in a panic, and years later Disney was still fretting over the shortcomings of his heroine—not her ethical decision to hang out with a large group of small men, but the wobbles in her construction. “The bridge on her nose floats all over her face,” he said. He became an industry, but the one thing that links the industrialist, whatever the product, with the auteur, whatever the form, is obsessive pedantry—the will to get things right, whatever the cost may be.
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The best joke about Walt Disney is that he was not a good businessman. Anyone schooled in the legend of Disney the capitalist ogre must at some point deal with the fact that money, in itself, did not concern him. He didn’t know how to spend it, throwing no lavish parties, dressing casually in sweaters and pants, and dining on cans of beans; he earned far less of it, for years, than seems economically possible, and plowed what did come along straight back into the company; and, as for raising it in order to finance his ventures, he tended to lunge into contracts without weighing what lay in store. (Roy described the first decade of Disney Studios as “bacon and eggs without the bacon.”) Walt’s early days fit the bill of the classic struggler, and Gabler tells of a Kansas City dentist hiring Laugh-O-Gram to make short films on dental hygiene, and of Disney being unable to go and close the deal, because “he had left his only pair of shoes at the shoemaker’s and did not have the $1.50 he needed to retrieve them.” Even after he arrived in Los Angeles, in 1923, with a bagful of confidence but little else, he and Roy could not start up Disney Bros. until they had secured some family loans—twenty-five dollars from Roy’s girlfriend and five hundred from their Uncle Robert, who split the loan into four installments and charged them eight per cent interest. Do I hear the first, faint quack of Scrooge McDuck?
The problem with borrowing cash to make a cartoon was that, likely as not, you would hit a new wrinkle as you went along. It would be a wrinkle that neither you nor your backer had foreseen, but the challenge of ironing it out would be far too tempting to skip. In October, 1927, for instance, America woke up to “The Jazz Singer.” By May, 1928, Disney was calling a halt to the production of silent cartoons. “Damn it, I know how fast film goes,” he was heard to say, “but how fast does music go?” In late June, “probably around eight o’clock” (Gabler is most gripping when at his most precise), a scene from what would become “Steamboat Willie,” starring Mickey Mouse, was projected onto a bedsheet and watched in trepidation by the studio’s employees. One man with a harmonica and others tapping pencils on spittoons positioned themselves with a view of the sheet but out of sight of the audience, and tried, until two in the morning, to match the noise to the spectacle. Further experiments came and went. A tryout with an orchestra, on September 15th of that year, was a notable flop, but Disney’s letters and memos of the time sound like lines from popular songs: “Old Man Opportunity rapping at our door”; “Slap as big a mortgage on everything we got”; “ ‘Are we downhearted?’ HELL NO.”
That clarion call should be borne in mind whenever Disney is berated for his cheerfulness. Again, it echoed the good cheer of Dickens: not a vapid exhortation to enjoy the easy life but the half-desperate will to soldier on even when trouble has a paw in the door. Thus, in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated in March, “Three Little Pigs” came out in May, and before long this curt, boisterous fable was being praised for reflecting—and positively boosting—the pick-me-up gutsiness of the New Deal, guaranteed to chase away the lupine ravenings of the Depression. The fact that it was one of the first Disney projects in color (all those rounded, pleasurable pinks) was hardly going to harm its prospects, and if Walt’s new fixation was to banish black-and-white, well, such eager boyishness was never hard to sell. To praise somebody as a man of his time is vague and often condescending, but with Disney the claim could not be more exact. Well after he had ceased to make promotional films in favor of clean teeth, he retained the capacity to read a national mood and answer its demands, as though on private commission. If the song had run, “Don’t Be Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” it would have sounded like a public lecture or a distressed parent. To ask the question “Who’s afraid?” put Disney at the level of the playground. It was a taunt, and it waited for the shout of an answer: “Not me!”
To understand Disney’s advance, you need to go to Paris. In particular, you need to go to Paris before January 15th, to the Grand Palais, which is home to an exhibit of Disney’s art. This in itself is astounding. To the French mind, Disney represents the arrowhead of American cultural assault, and if America were to return the favor it would need to mount a major retrospective of soft, unpasteurized French cheese at the Metropolitan Museum. The show is predicated on the belief that Disney engendered much that was rich and strange in the iconography of the twentieth century and that the dissemination of those icons, however fiercely you object to it, makes his collected works as potent as those of any other artist. When you read in Gabler’s book that by 1935, before the arrival of full-length Disney features, Mickey Mouse was responsible for the sale of five hundred million movie tickets around the world, you must admit that the Parisians have a point.
The exhibit gathers some of the most delicate artwork that was summoned into being by Disney’s wand. There is a wonderful gouache of the sorcerer’s cavern, from “Fantasia” (1940), with the shell-like spiral of staircase winding up into the ominous dark. Below it hangs the same scene, this time in oil on paper. The sole addition is the figure of Mickey creeping along, his ears throwing bulbous circles of shadow on the opposite wall. What, the show invites us to ask, has happened here? Is it not funny, and fitting, that a cartoon hero should tiptoe through a scene from German Expressionism, the New World prankster dropped into a roomful of old European fears? Or does it mark the irredeemable progress from seriousness to kitsch, the hijacking of art for the advancement of the crass, which Disney-haters pinpoint in his style? The debate is deepened by a wonderful double act in the second room of the show, where sequences from early Disney are projected next to matching clips from masterpieces of live-action cinema. “The Mad Doctor” (1933), in which Mickey is strapped to a table beneath a descending circular saw, is juxtaposed with the laboratory scene from “Frankenstein” (1931) which suggested it. Charlie Chaplin is force-fed by machine, in “Modern Times” (1936), and in “Modern Inventions,” made the next year, Donald Duck is duly force-painted with shoe polish. As for “Fantasia,” what plunderings it required! First, there is the bewitching, sky-high devil who towers over the town in Murnau’s “Faust” (1926), and his no less lofty descendant in the “Night on Bald Mountain” section of the Disney film. And, yes, there is Mickey and that staircase, and here is its source: the flickering shadow steps of “The Golem,” directed by Paul Wegener way back in 1914.
Who did the borrowing here? Who knew about Wegener films? It comes as a shock to read that Disney and his wife, Lillian, whom he married in 1925, “socialized throughout the 1930s with the Spencer Tracys,” and that it was Chaplin—a Disney addict from the start, and a wellspring of advice—who wired Walt on the first night of “Snow White” to predict that “all our fondest hopes will be realized tonight*,*” because for much of Gabler’s book you get a sense that Disney’s operations ran in a vacuum of their own devising. I knew that “Steamboat Willie,” the first Mickey film with sound, was a nod to Buster Keaton’s “Steamboat Bill, Jr.,” but nothing in the biography had prepared me for the intense cross-referencing of the Paris show. Only when you study the artists who were lured to work for Disney does the story click into place. Not only were they encouraged to watch, and steal from, as many new releases as possible, in every genre; their own tastes, which ran to the great illustrative artists of Europe (Honoré Daumier, Gustave Doré, and Arthur Rackham), also seemed to equip and armor them for the parade of fairy tales and children’s classics on which Disney had his eye.
What he gathered was a gang of wanderers, outsiders, and post-European misfits. So did many other producers (that is half the story of Hollywood), but animation held a peculiar attraction for the lonely and the avid, who craved nothing more than pencil, paper, and peace. There was Vladimir (Bill) Tytla, born in Yonkers, the hefty son of a Ukrainian father and a Polish mother. Wolfgang Reitherman had been born in Germany, the last of seven children; he would wind up directing “The Jungle Book.” Milt Kahl, too, had a German father, who abandoned the family. (In a company questionnaire, Kahl listed his hobby as “sexual intercourse.”) Art Babbitt had lived like a bum in New York before he turned to art. Ward Kimball remembered a shiftless childhood, attending twenty-two schools. Marc Davis, in Gabler’s words, “was the son of a first-generation Jew of Russian extraction who traveled the country with a mindreading act before landing finally in Klamath Falls, Oregon.” There’s a whole novel concealed in that sentence.
In one sense, Disney’s choice of subjects was bizarre. How would all these feudal formulas—the princes who crown the climaxes of “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” and “Sleeping Beauty”—play in a modern republic? In the event, they scarcely mattered. Nobody leaves those movies pining for the unfailingly limp human males into whose arms the spunky heroines fall. Indeed, to criticize the Disney corpus as pap ignores the fact that pap was the thing that Disney, at his best, did worst of all. What lodges in the brain, after Snow White has been yanked out of her glass casket, is the macabre punch of the buildup: the poisoned apple rolling from her outstretched hand, the witch transfigured from a snotty Joan Crawford figure to something yet more disturbing. (Her voice was provided by Lucille La Verne, who is said to have managed the transition to a cackle by the simple expedient of removing her false teeth.) As for the sight of the threatened girl haring through the forest, pursued by a posse of swirling leaves, with the branches clawing at her clothes, it possesses not just the sharp-toothed, half-Teutonic atmosphere that Disney could reliably conjure from his artists; it is also edited with a violent sophistication that chops straight into children’s dreams. For a moment, it looks like Eisenstein.
It is no surprise, then, to learn that the director of “Battleship Potemkin” and “Ivan the Terrible” was a Disneyphile. “The work of this master,” Eisenstein claimed, “is the greatest contribution of the American people to art.” His comments on the subject, part of a book begun in 1941 and never finished, are available in a French edition of 1991; within three pages, the Russian has lauded the “absolute perfection” of the American’s achievement and linked his name to those of Fra Angelico, Hans Christian Andersen, and St. Francis of Assisi. Disney the anthropomorphist is conjoined with La Fontaine as someone who grasps, and dramatizes, the relentless way in which animals “hold up to their older brother—man—a deforming mirror.” It is the moral and social upheaval that is promised by such deformation which galvanizes Eisenstein, who worships the elasticity of cartoon characters, ascribing to it what he calls a “literalization of metaphor.” We talk of horseplay, of somebody who drinks like a fish and winds up as sick as a dog, but we stop at the metaphor; Disney somehow breaks through the language—not difficult, in the days when he was still shooting silent pictures—and locates the brute behavior that lurks behind it. He is not humanizing animals; he is decivilizing ordinary life, which is a far more subversive path to take, and sometimes he weeds out the human factor altogether. The animator’s trick, once more, is to rediscover the spirit, the anima, that breathes life into our descriptions of the world. When Donald Duck bursts through a door or pops round to see a friend, the bursts and pops are plainly there to see. In “The Opry House,” a short from 1929, Mickey Mouse, giving a concert piano performance, has to quell an insurrection in his instrument. Two keys turn rough and have to be subdued, and at one point the whole piano turns around and, bucking its hind legs, kicks him like a mule.
That is why Eisenstein chose to deal with early-period Walt. There was insolence and devilry in the artwork, and a definite dash of arousal: selected portions of Mickey would stretch and squeeze, as if his entire shape were tumescent. Take “The Barn Dance,” a seven-minute hoedown of music, mutilation, and rivalry made by Walt Disney in 1928, in which Mickey Mouse takes Minnie to a dance. He keeps treading on her feet, and the more he treads the more his own feet fatten and swell, till they reach the size of anvils. By now he is stamping on her legs, one of which grows so long and thin, like a strand of black spaghetti, that she stops dancing, ties a loop in it, reaches into her bloomers, pulls out a pair of scissors, and cuts off the excess. She also takes revenge, without hesitation, by turning to a second suitor—who is huge and overbearing, with a predatory leer. The little guy, however, isn’t beaten yet. He finds a balloon, shoves it down the seat of his pants, floats over the intruder, lands in front of his girl, and starts to hoof once more. No cartoon balloon, however, has ever gone unpopped, and “The Barn Dance” closes with Mickey, deflated and re-cuckolded, gazing into the camera and weeping inky tears.
How far could Disney have gone with these bendable bodies? Did he ever, in the hideaway of his nightmares, draw something like this?
The passage comes from “Cartoon,” a short story collected in Robert Coover’s 1987 “A Night at the Movies.” The phrase “its own realness” is awkwardly put, but the awkwardness feels right, because it matches the uneasy pact, familiar to all animators, between ordinary experience and the outlandish world that they have made. (Sometimes, as in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” from 1988, the two collide head-on.) “I definitely feel that we cannot do the fantastic things based on the real unless we first know the real,” Disney said, setting his sights on what he termed the “plausible impossible.” It was a deal that he would refine in the string of full-length masterworks that he delivered between 1937 and 1942: “Snow White,” “Pinocchio,” “Fantasia,” “Dumbo,” and “Bambi.” Sex, of course, has been utterly stripped from these works, not just because of the children in the audience, and the reinforcement of the Hays Code of 1934, but because Disney was by now demanding greater gravity, in every sense, from his artists. The characters would no longer balloon at will, like the Mickey of “The Barn Dance,” but would keep their feet on the ground, with all the moral purpose that such a stance implied. Heaven knows how that felt to a lover of mutability like Eisenstein, but it was essential to the smooth running of the longer narrative; if the dwarfs could ooze through keyholes or suddenly grow to be man-size, Snow White would be less inclined to mother them. Realism in the backdrops, too, became all the rage; the Paris exhibit includes exquisite backgrounds for “Pinocchio” (the most ravishing of all the films), some of them painted on glass. Only if Geppetto’s workshop and the hamlet in which it stood (modelled on the Bavarian town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber) struck the eye as architecturally sound and furnished with a welcoming warmth would we accept the presence of a top-hatted insect as narrator. “What they can’t do these days!” Jiminy Cricket exclaims.
As those capacities multiply, what is to stop the inventor? Good taste? A terror of excess? Neither is much of a brake in a global enterprise. The desire to press ahead, and to develop the next big thing, is what finally turns both the Paris show and Gabler’s biography into sad affairs. Disney was badly scalded by a strike at the company in 1941, which earned him a reputation, especially among union men, as something of a tyrant—although one might argue, in retrospect, that nobody could craft a film as persnickety and labor-intensive as “Pinocchio” and expect to make much of a profit. (If you added together the man-hours spent on the artwork for “Snow White,” they would total two hundred years.) The options were unpalatable—cuts in the workforce or a falling-off in quality—and Disney, who managed to end up with both, would never again enjoy the same bond of trust with his artists, or the same liberty to push animation to its limits. To compare “Pinocchio” with “Peter Pan,” released in 1953, is to pass from the embrace of magic to the selling of a cute idea, from the densely detailed to the dismayingly flat. The bestowing of life upon a wooden child is a perfect symbol of the animator’s art, whereas the flying lesson that Peter gives to the Darlings has the air of a cocky stunt. Disney himself was under no illusions. “We’re through with caviar,” he said. “From now on it’s mashed potatoes and gravy.”
The case against Walt Disney, which remains as sturdy as the fact that it can never win, is only in part a grudge against his films. Many parents, for instance, take issue with the merchandise, although it is nothing new. Thanks to Gabler, we are introduced to Herman (Kay) Kamen, an ungainly marketing wizard from Baltimore, who, in his four years at Disney, from 1933 to 1937, increased the licensing of Disney products by ten thousand per cent, and who boasted that his finest feat was “getting the Three Little Pigs up in lights in New York’s strictly kosher Ghetto, and making them like it.” I am sure that if Kamen were alive today he would be nudging me toward the Seven Dwarfs’ Cottage Limited-Edition Cuckoo Clock, available online for a mere hundred and ninety-nine dollars. I could sit and watch the time while wearing my Grumpy Loafer Slippers, noted for their “handsome suede accents.” Formerly priced at $16.95, they are now a steal at just under ten bucks. So many treasures, so little time.
To the seasoned protester, however, Exhibit A is and always will be Disneyland, followed swiftly by its sister parks in Orlando, Paris, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. In 1955, the year Disneyland opened, the company earned more than twenty-four million dollars, which meant that “for the first time in seventeen years,” as Gabler writes, “Walt Disney Productions was flush.” From the start, there was no mistaking the symbolic clout of the place. Disney may have designed it to hover between the child’s and the adult’s view of reality, like a magnified toy (the stores tapered from nine-tenths scale at ground level to seven-tenths at the top), but behind that cunning lurked a weird presumption—a yearning to corral the world and cut it down to size. Then, there were the inhabitants. The enduring glory of animation was that it could cram exhilarating depths of energy onto a two-dimensional surface; Mickey Mouse is by his very nature more antic than Chaplin and more volatile than even the Marx Brothers in their windmilling prime. To pluck him from that kinetic environment and stuff him into a synthetic suit, with a fixed grin and a padded ass, may be to grant him another dimension, but it is also, and more disastrously, to slow him down. Mickey ceases to be the fount of chaos; he is now a lumbering doll, made soft and safe. It is that smoothing of rough edges which distresses the cineast, appalls the political cynic, and tempts generations of iconoclasts. Hence the recent scandal, which spread across the Internet, in which employees dressed as Mickey, Minnie, Chip, Dale, and other favorites were filmed simulating sex at Disneyland Paris. It was a heresy waiting to happen. No such outrage punctuated my own visit, some years ago, but even a morally upright trip left a definite dent in the spirits. Standing in the rain on Main Street, grimly biding one’s time in the hope of a high-five with Goofy: is there a more foolproof way to break the will of a man? I would have had more fun waiting for Godot.
It was in the wake of Disneyland that cultural disdain of Walt began to stir. By the nineteen-sixties, commentators were seething. Vincent Scully wrote in Life, in 1965, that “Disney caters to the kind of phony reality that we all too readily accept in place of the true. Mr. Disney, I’m afraid, has our number.” Scully was discussing architecture, but you can imagine his terms of indictment being applied to almost any practice of the present day, starting with television and political spin. Disney has somehow become shorthand for the cushioning with which, knowingly or otherwise, we protect and console ourselves against experience: “All the conflicts of the real world, the nerve centers of bourgeois society, are purified in the imagination in order to be absorbed and co-opted into the world of entertainment.” That comes from “How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic,” a celebrated broadside written by Ariel Dorfman (later the author of “Death and the Maiden” and other plays) and Armand Mattelart. It was published in Chile in 1971, two years before the counter-revolution and the installing of a military regime, when it was banned. The book is a wrathful besmirching of what its authors identify as “the laundering process” in Disney, and its conclusions have filtered down into the consciousness of bien-pensants around the world. As so often, the left offers the most acute analysis of commercial enterprise and its use as propaganda without knowing quite what to make of the results, and some of the logic would strike even Pluto as a mess. You cannot, for instance, berate Disney for reinforcing the hegemony of the nuclear family and also argue, as Dorfman and Mattelart do, that “it is Disney who is the worst enemy of family harmony.” As they observe, “there is one basic product which is never stocked in the Disney store: parents.”
It’s a good point, though. Uncles and nephews, giddy from their lack of responsibility, swarm through the comics and films. Substitute parents—Snow White, Geppetto, Bagheera, and Baloo—slide into place to fill a need, and even Bambi, before he is orphaned, is for all practical purposes the product of a single parent. His father is seen in full patriarchal splendor, lording it over the females, on a high rock: a distant pose that will be recaptured by Simba’s father, fifty-two years later, in “The Lion King.” The preferred Disney habit is to mix yourself an instant family, stirring together a handful of unlikely acquaintances; even “Lady and the Tramp” is more of a buddy picture than a romance, despite the spaghetti-linked kiss and the crossbred puppies at the end. It is a habit that endures to this day, as in the “Toy Story” films, made by Pixar under the aegis of Disney. To judge by the conduct of Buzz Lightyear and Woody, Disney has bequeathed us not so much a vision of sanitized domesticity as a ramshackle guide to the art of brotherly love. Would he have fancied himself as Buzz, in guileless pursuit of the infinite, with only the Woodyish Roy to keep him in check? Disney once claimed that his films were not made for children. If so, that is both the most touching and the most frightening thing about him. He saw the child in us all, and treated us accordingly. He took charge of Neverland, and his chosen audience, orphaned by the rigors of adult life, was a billion Peter Pans.
The profound irony of Disney is that, long ago, he was a hero to the left. Whether or not he aimed to compensate for the severity of his own father, his adult family of choice was the one that he chose to fabricate in the great days of Mickey, on Hollywood’s Hyperion Avenue. It ran along the lines of a utopia. “Sometimes we have good old-fashioned scraps, but in the end things get ironed out and we have something we’re all proud of,” Disney said. By the time work began on “Snow White,” the setup was more like a medieval guild, with artists hastening to work in the morning, compulsory life-drawing classes, baseball games on the lot (married men versus singles), no time clock, and, according to Gabler, “three sick days in any given week with full pay before anyone investigated.” Disney, he continues, “was constantly on the lookout for any employee who he felt might be underpaid, and he would then instruct the payroll office to make a salary adjustment.” When “Snow White” finally appeared, he made good on his promise that everyone concerned would get a bonus, which he declared would be equivalent to three months’ salary; the total cost to the company was seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. “This place runs on a kind of Jesus Christ communism,” Disney said.
How, then, did Disney acquire his reputation as a kind of dark messiah—“Hollywood’s Dark Prince,” as Marc Eliot labels him? What Eliot offers is a pathological horror story, in which the unhappy child makes bitter, long-range amends by becoming quietly anti-Semitic and loudly anti-Communist, and maintaining friendly relations with the F.B.I. (J. Edgar Hoover designated Disney a “Special Agent in Charge contact” in 1954.) His main grouse to the authorities seems to have concerned Herbert Sorrell, the union leader who had inflamed the Disney strike in 1941. Over all, Eliot’s accusing tone is too melodramatic for Gabler, who finds scant evidence of anti-Jewish sympathies in Disney and prefers to present him as a connoisseur of control—a man who believed he could put the world to rights, or at least restore it to some level of pre-lapsarian order. In 1963, the publicity director at Disneyland told Kevin Wallace, a reporter from this magazine, “You never know when you’ll bump into Walt prowling around the park in an old sweater, checking on whether a dead light bulb he reported a week earlier has been replaced.” At an indefinable point along the scale of Disney’s triumph (and he cannot be alone in this regard, among the great barons of American success), the perfectionist impulse was warped into a compulsion. When the artists of the mid-nineteen-thirties found Chesterfield butts in their ashtrays in the morning, they suspected that Walt had been snooping around their desks at night and spying on their work. Is that behavior the forgivable flip side of genius, or does it foretell the Disney who appeared as a friendly witness before the huac hearings in the fall of 1947? “I feel that everybody in my studio is one hundred per cent American,” he assured the committee.
He was on his way to becoming “Uncle Walt,” that figure of faintly sinister geniality who bestrode the postwar scene. The joshing, scruffy Disney who used to sprinkle enthusiasm, like fairy dust or fever, upon his willing employees grew both touchy and untouchable. According to Eliot, he shot footage of Kirk Douglas and his sons Michael and Joel as they rode a miniature train around the Disney household, and spliced it into an episode of “Disneyland” without permission; Douglas took legal action but dropped the suit. “You can’t sue God,” he remarked. By this stage, Disney’s career was a glare of fame and wealth. It was also a tragedy, in that neither of those shining grails had impelled him to enter the business in the first place and because he was obliged to squander most of the capital that he had accrued as an original artist. The heraldic grandeur of “Sleeping Beauty” (1959) has its fans, but it feels like the frozen leftover of another age, as if in thrall to the spell of Maleficent. There is a sorrowful cameo in Gabler’s book, not long before Disney’s death, when the ailing master sits down to survey his latest product: “He spent most of the rest of the afternoon watching a rough cut of ‘The Happiest Millionaire’ and wept throughout.” Were those tears of gratification, or was he missing Mickey?
We have all been children, and many of us have children of our own; in the twenty-first century, that puts us squarely in Disney’s debt. We may resent that state of affairs, but to no avail. Although I can open Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” and start to read, in my ear the boom of Phil Harris—Disney’s own choice for the voice of Baloo—is already starting to kick in, blaring “The Bare Necessities” and drowning the original text. Cruella De Vil is my archetype of the knife-thin diva, with a lunatic’s burning eyes. (In the words of Ward Kimball, who worked for Walt over many years, “Almost all of his villains were either women or cats.”) As for Mary Poppins, the gratifying standout of Disney’s final years, she demonstrated his preternatural, Prospero-like knack for conjuring a spirit from thin air (Julie Andrews was nothing like the Mary of the novels) and persuading us that she had always been around. She is the least witchy of his dominatrices, and in her prescription for the pleasures of industry she comes close to the appeal of Disney himself:
The work ethic transmuted, with a click of the fingers, into a lark: what better alchemy for an America ineluctably on the rise? Disney was the sorcerer-in-residence, and what we have yet to measure, in reviewing the range of his potions, is the strength of the aftereffects. Did he gull us into a fatal simplicity, or was our thirst for Disneyland and its accompanying fables already present, just waiting to be slaked? That was Disney’s own contention—that we all had a Marceline, Missouri, secreted in our hearts, or deep in our common memory, and that his task was to set it free. “I have no recollection of ever being unhappy in my life,” he once said. That is both wishful thinking and bad remembering. Everyone recalls being distressed by the death of Bambi’s mother, and of his stick-legged pining in the snow, but how many of us recall what happens next? The oblivious birds strike up an immediate chorus: “Let’s sing a gay little spring song, tra-la-la.” The episode is closed, like a trapdoor. And so it is with Walt Disney. He succumbed to lung cancer in 1966, but the legend of him barely missed a beat, and his legacy, visible in everything from our viewing habits to our voting patterns, remains bewildering. In the wonderful world of Disney, death is at worst an accident and at best a blip. Immortality beckons, for mice and men, and life, being a show, goes on. ♦
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