Walt Disney The triumph of the American imagination

Neal Gabler

Book - 2006

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BIOGRAPHY/Disney, Walt
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Published
New York : Knopf 2006.
Language
English
Main Author
Neal Gabler (-)
Physical Description
851 p.
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780679757474
9780679438229
Contents unavailable.
Review by Choice Review

Walt Disney (1901-66), a depression-prone, borderline alcoholic, anti-semitic, anti-union control freak with a magical imagination that created characters now entrenched in American popular culture, has been the subject of five biographies since 1956. Gabler's is the sixth, arriving a decade after Richard Schickel's The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney (3rd ed., 1997), still in print. This new work offers the most extensive scholarly biography to date, with inclusive bibliography and index, of the man referred to here as a "conservative visionary" who bridged high and low art through animation and fantasy. Gabler was supported by other Disney scholars, enabling his biography to be more of a life map for "Uncle Walt," whose challenges and contributions are here thoroughly documented through oral as much as written resources. Illustrations are few and inconsequential, given Gabler's lucid prose, which is exemplified by tongue-in-cheek chapter titles like "The Cult" and "Slouching toward Utopia." An appendix organized by date and genre of feature-length pictures produced by Disney is useful; given the book's 168 pages of notes, the next generation of Disney scholars has an amazing store of knowledge at hand. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers; lower-division undergraduates through professionals. M. R. Vendryes York College, CUNY

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review

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 White0 and Pinocchio0 --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 2006 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly 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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Gabler is probably best know for his biography Walter Winchell and the Culture of Gossip (1994); now he examines one of the most notable men of the 20th century. From his rough childhood to his success in Hollywood, Walt Disney never rested on his laurels and constantly strived to achieve the goals he conjured up. According to Gabler, he was complicated and difficult to understand. Even with his worldwide recognition, Disney suffered from nervous breakdowns and a constant need for money to complete his projects; he let his hobbies overshadow his family and few friends. And yet people would have done anything to work with this legendary figure. Gabler is the first writer to have complete access to the Disney archives, and it shows in this revealing and fascinating portrait. Fans of compelling biographies and of Disney himself will be thrilled to have this in their collection. A mandatory purchase for all public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/06.] Jeff Ayers, Seattle P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Monumental life of the contradictory impresario who founded a powerful entertainment empire and, for better or worse, "helped establish American popular culture as the dominant culture in the world." Forty years after his death, Walt Disney still epitomizes what is right and wrong with American life, depending on who's making the argument. Film historian Gabler (Life, the Movie, 1998, etc.) shrewdly observes, for instance, that though Disney was notoriously conservative--and casually anti-Semitic and racist--he also forged aspects of the 1960s counterculture's identity: anti-authoritarianism, connection to nature, "antagonism toward the moneyed class." Born with "platonic templates in his head," in Gabler's memorable formulation, Disney idealized rural life, his template being the little Missouri town in which his father perpetually failed. Walt enshrined that place as an American idyll and ideal in Disneyland, which the author rightly ranks high among the master's dreams-turned-to-reality. He was like his father, Gabler notes, in never having any business sense; brother and long-suffering partner Roy had the head for commerce. Walt lived a rather bohemian life beholden to no boss and sparked great resentment among his own employees by presenting the Disney studio's products to the world as if they were single-handedly his. "He's a genius at using someone else's genius," one disgruntled animator griped. For all that, Gabler makes emphatically clear, Disney was indeed a genius at his art: brilliant at drawing, writing and particularly editing, willing to exceed budgets time and again until an animation or a movie was exactly right. Thus Snow White, the 1937 film that put him on the map, was very nearly the Heaven's Gate of its time in terms of cost overruns, yet once released it would become the highest-grossing film in history and hold that record for many years. Gabler's remarkable biography lends Mickey's creator new dimensions and sets the standard for future biographies. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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 contented very long in any one place," Elias's cousin, Peter Cantelon, observed. The Disney wanderlust and the need to escape would send Elias back north--this time to a nine-room house in Chicago. He had been preceded to Chicago by someone who seemed just as blessed as Elias was cursed. Robert Disney, Elias's younger brother by two-and-a-half years, was viewed by the family as the successful one. He was big and handsome--tall, broad, and fleshy where Elias was short, slim, and wiry, and he had an expansive, voluble, glad-handing manner to match his appearance. The "real dandy of the family," his nephew would say. But if Robert Disney looked the very picture of a man of means, the image obscured the fact that he was actually a schemer with talents for convincing and cajoling that Elias could never hope to match. Six months after Elias married Flora, Robert had married a wealthy Boston girl named Margaret Rogers and embarked on his career of speculation in real estate, oil, and even gold mines--anything he could squeeze for a profit. He had come to Chicago in 1889 in anticipation of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, which would celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America, and had built a hotel there. Elias had also come for the promise of employment from the fair, but his dreams were humbler. Living in his brother's shadow, he was hoping for work not as a magnate but as a carpenter, a skill he had apparently acquired while laboring on the railroad in his knockabout days. The Disneys arrived in Chicago late in the spring of 1890, a few months after Charles Call's death, with their infant son, Herbert, and with Flora pregnant again. Elias rented a one-story frame cottage at 3515 South Vernon on the city's south side, an old mid-nineteenth-century farmhouse now isolated amid much more expensive residences; its chief recommendation was that it was only twenty blocks from the site of the exposition. Construction on the fair began early the next year, after Flora had given birth that December to a second son, Ray. The family enjoyed few extravagances. Elias earned only a dollar a day as a carpenter. But he was industrious and frugal, and by the fall he had saved enough to purchase a plot of land for $700 through his brother's real estate connections. By the next year he had applied for a building permit at 1249 Tripp Avenue* to construct a two-story wooden cottage for his family, which the following June would add another son, Roy O. Disney. Though it was set within the city, the area to which they moved the spring of 1893, in the northwestern section, was primitive. It had only two paved roads and had just begun to be platted for construction, which made it a propitious place for a carpenter. Elias contracted to help build homes, and one of his sons recalled that Flora too would go out to the sites and "hammer and saw planks with the men." Still, by his wife's estimate Elias averaged only seven dollars a week. But he was a Disney, and he had not surrendered his dreams. Using Robert's contacts and leveraging his own house through mortgages, he began buying plots in the subdivision, designing residences with Flora's help and then building them--small cottages for workingmen like himself. By the end of the decade he and a contracting associate had built at least two additional homes on the same street on which he lived--one of which he sold for $2,500 and the other of which he and his partner rented out for income. In effect, under Robert's tutelage, Elias had become a real estate maven, albeit an extremely modest one. But by this time, already in his forties, he had begun to place his hope less in success, which seemed hard-won and capricious, than in faith. Both the Disneys and the Calls had been deeply religious, and Elias and Flora's social life in Chicago now orbited the nearby Congregational church, of which they were among the most devoted members. When the congregation decided to reorganize and then voted to erect a new building just two blocks from the Disneys' home, Elias was named a trustee as well as a member of the building committee. By the time the new church, St. Paul's, was dedicated in October 1900, the family was attending services not only on Sundays but during the week. Occasionally, when the minister was absent, Elias would even take the pulpit. "[H]e was a pretty good preacher," Flora would remember. "[H]e did a lot of that at home, you know." From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.