by Neal Gabler
Decades later, in the mists of revisionism, Walt would say that the paper route helped forge his character, that he “developed an appreciation of what spare time I did have and used it to great advantage in my hobbies.” But in other moments he talked of how the route and its demands—the unyielding routine, the snow, the fatigue, the lost papers—traumatized and haunted him. Forty years later he was still awakening in a sweat with nightmares about the route—that he had missed some customers and had to hurry back because Elias would be waiting at the corner and might discover Walt’s dereliction. And he remembered how much of his life he surrendered to the route, how hard he had to work for so little reward, so that, his brother Roy said, he never even learned to catch a ball the way other boys did.
Adding to the oppression of the route was the humiliation that, in the beginning at least, it scarcely provided enough money, forcing the Disneys to supplement their income. On his route Walt would deliver theater bills and sell ice cream in summer, while Elias arranged for the McAllister Creamery in Marceline to ship him butter and eggs, which he then peddled to his newspaper customers. And when Elias was too ill to make the deliveries himself, he would keep Walt home from school so that Walt and Flora could make them. Even then the Disneys scrimped. At Christmas Flora took the cranberry decorations off the tree and made sauce out of them, and Walt said his most memorable Christmas gift was not any toy but that pair of new leather boots with metal toe caps to replace the old worn-out shoes that he wore on the route. He said finding them under the tree was “like a dream come true! Now I could swagger among my young friends with proper pride.”
Ruth Disney claimed that her father was not as draconian as Walt made it seem and that the children never lacked for the “comforts and good things of life and some of the luxuries.” But even within the family Elias was known for his almost pathological frugality. Walt said his father walked everywhere—“He was a very fast walker”—so he did not have to pay for the streetcar. By another account, some years later, when a nephew asked him to come to Glendale, California, to help him build a house there, Elias stayed for three months and spent only a dollar by taking advantage of realtors’ offers of a free meal in exchange for looking at property. He always paid his bills in cash and never owed money to anyone, and he tried to enforce the same fiscal stringency on his children. Walt clearly resented having to hand over his money to his father—on one occasion when he found a twenty-dollar bill, he paid off a fellow newsboy who threatened to tell Elias—though Roy said Elias took the boys’ earnings only because he “just didn’t believe in letting his kids waste their money. ‘I’ll take care of it for you—I’ll put it away and save it for you.’”
The frugality, the discipline, the taciturnity, and the reproachfulness had always been constituents of Elias Disney’s personality. The man who eschewed recreations, who never drank or swore and always said grace at the table, even though he now attended church infrequently, prided himself on his stern morality, put the fear of God into his children, and never let anyone doubt that he was the head of the family, the one whom the Disneys had to obey. Walt found him so unapproachable and obdurate that, he said, he scarcely talked to him. As one close childhood acquaintance of Walt’s observed, “The whole Disney family seemed to me aloof and unbending.”
But in Kansas City Elias had grown even more sullen and unresponsive—a hard man hardened. He had, in Walt’s words, “become very conservative…There probably was a day when he was a driver, when he was ambitious, but then he reached an age and then they start down that little hill.” Elias, at fifty-five, was heading rapidly down that hill. One could see it in his politics. The man who had once chased populist William Jennings Bryan’s buggy in Chicago so he could shake his hand and the man who boasted of his Socialism in Marceline had become a Republican, though he had not surrendered his belief in class warfare. One could see it in his mood. He had even given up the fiddle, his one indulgence, when he cut his hand on a rope and was no longer able to finger the instrument.
But above all one could see it in his temper. It had always been volcanic. Even back in Chicago Elias would send Roy to his room for some infraction, then head for the apple tree in the backyard, cut off a branch for a switch, and lay into the boy. “You had to take your pants down and get a switching,” Roy said. “That was Dad. He’d give us impulsive whacks.” Walt called Elias’s temper “violent” and said that you could not argue with him without braving his wrath. Even Ruth, who would always defend her father, acknowledged that “he did have a temper” but said “he made up for it in all other ways.”
Yet however irascible Elias had been before Kansas City, he seemed to be angrier after the move, after another disappointment, and Walt, at least in his own view, became the main target of his father’s ire—in part because he was so different from his father. Indeed, as he grew up, Walt Disney was the antithesis of Elias Disney, almost as if he had willed himself to be so as a form of rebellion, which he very well might have done. Where Elias was dour, Walt, despite his perceived hardships and complaints, was blithe. “He was full of clowning,” Roy recalled. “He was very lighthearted all the time. Very full of fun and gaiety.” He loved to pull pranks, especially on his father. Once he sent away for a rubber bladder that he placed under his father’s dinner plate, then had Flora squeeze a concealed bulb. The other Disneys buckled in hysterics as the plate rose and fell, but Elias kept eating his soup, oblivious. (Walt did say that even though his father was “very slow to catch on to a gag,” when he did, “he would laugh until he had tears in his eyes.”) Walt also enjoyed masquerading, and a cousin remembered a visit to Kansas City when Walt’s “chief delight was in dressing up in odd clothes in order to scare my sister and brother.” On another occasion Flora answered the door to find a tall woman who asked her “a lot of foolish questions.” It took a few moments for Flora to recognize that the “woman” was wearing one of Flora’s own best dresses. Walt had even borrowed a wig and hat and put on makeup to complete the disguise.
It was not only Walt’s puckishness that contrasted with his father’s severity. Where Elias was plodding and subdued, Walt was wildly enthusiastic—“enthused about everything,” said a friend. Even Elias conceded of Walt that “[w]hatever he wanted to do he did without ever thinking of the harm. He would always go ahead with any of his ideas whether he had the means or not.” Most people found him charming. Walt realized his effect—he was extroverted and attractive—but he also worked at it. Roy said that he always focused on whomever he was speaking with, that he “gave the impression he took a deep personal interest,” and that in the family he was the one who remembered everyone’s birthday and always got a present. He knew too that the effect could be disarming. At least when Walt was younger and Herbert and Ray were still living at home, it was, in Roy’s recollection, the older boys who really took the brunt of their father’s anger. Walt, on the other hand, would position a chair between himself and Elias and “just argue the dickens out of Dad. Dad couldn’t get ahold of him.” Finally Elias would capitulate.
By the time they were living in Kansas City, though, the charm no longer worked on Elias. “It reached the point,” Walt said, “that to tell the truth with my father got me a licking.” Elias was impatient with Walt too. When they were building the Bellefontaine addition and Walt would make a mistake, Elias would try to hit him with the broad side of the saw or club him with the handle of the hammer. Usually Walt would run to his mother until Elias cooled down. But a reckoning, a big reckoning, came when Walt was fourteen and Elias upbraided him for being too insolent, then ordered him to the basement for a beating. Roy pulled Walt aside and told him to resist. Obedient to his father, Walt headed downstairs anyway. Elias followed, yelling and grabbing a hammer to strike him. But this time, impulsively rising to his brother’s injunction, Walt stayed his father’s hand and removed the hammer. “He raised his other arm and I held both of his hands,” Walt later recalled. “And I just held them there. I was stronge
r than he was. I just held them. And he cried.” He said his father never touched him after that. Broken by work, Elias was now defeated in the family too.
It was Flora who provided the ballast for the Disneys—Flora who managed the money for Elias, made most of the children’s clothes and sewed their quilts, cooked their meals and encouraged their reading, connived with the children, and always exercised restraint and an even temper, and for all these things she would be beloved in their memories. And it was Flora alone who could tease her husband out of what his children called his “peevishness” and calm his raging storms, though she did so carefully, without confronting or countermanding him. Walt said he could not confide in her because “she couldn’t keep it from Dad if I told her.” Still, he thought her saintly.
But if Flora was the family’s peacemaker, Roy O. Disney was its protector—or at least Walt’s protector. Walt was never close to either Herbert or Ray, who had left years earlier, though they both lived in Kansas City, and he referred to them as “strangers to me all my life.” Indeed, Herbert had married a local girl and had had a daughter of his own. Roy seemingly had no more in common with Walt than the older brothers did, other than the fact that he still lived at home. He was eight years Walt’s senior and hardly a comrade in arms. Nor did he share Walt’s temperament. Though nowhere near as doleful as his father, whom he closely resembled physically, he was not an enthusiast or prankster or extrovert like Walt either, and he had little of Walt’s appeal. But Roy and Walt formed a very close relationship, so close that Walt seemed to regard him less as a brother than as a surrogate father, confiding in him as he could never have confided in Elias. They might argue, but when night fell, they would crawl into bed together and trade stories.
It was easy to see what Walt got from this alliance—support. But Roy willingly assumed the paternal role, feeling as close to Walt as Walt felt to him. He would buy Walt and Ruth toys out of his earnings from the bank where he clerked, or bring them candy, or announce that they were going to the movies. He would play horseshoes or pinochle with them. Roy never explained why he was so protective of his younger brother, other than to say that he felt Walt was too open, trusting, and naïve and needed someone to watch over him—in effect, that he had no common sense. Years later Roy would tell about the old television inventor Lee de Forest, who had been cheated out of what was due him and who was forced in his declining years to cadge money from a friend at the Disney studio. “I really believe,” Roy said, “that Walt would have gotten mired down with crooks…. [H]e’d have been easy prey for somebody to twist him up and take him like they took Lee de Forest, and that’s what I gave him”—a shield. But it was not all self-sacrifice. Roy gained too. Walt provided what Roy did not have and could not generate himself. Roy fed off of Walt’s energy and buoyancy and even recklessness. Walt was the vicarious outlet for a measured and cautious young man. Walt was Roy’s own escape.
Meanwhile Walt found his outlet for release outside his family, two doors up the street. The Pfeiffers were, Walt Pfeiffer would say, Walt’s “real family,” and their house was what Walt later called, after Uncle Remus, his “laughing place.” “My own family were all pretty unfrivolous, hardworking people,” Walt wrote a correspondent, expressing his constant longing for a more exuberant environment. “There was nothing unhappy about them—they just weren’t used to having fun. But this wasn’t so with the Pfeiffers. Whatever they did, they had the best time doing it, and they were always together.” Walt Pfeiffer was more direct: “[O]ld Elias didn’t like anything that had anything to do with entertainment. He was kind of ‘churchy’ as we called it in those days…. He’d read the Bible.”
In effect the Pfeiffers adopted Walt, and he escaped into them. Walt had met Walt Pfeiffer in fifth grade at the Benton School even before the Disneys had moved to the same block on Bellefontaine as the Pfeiffers. They had become casual friends then, but the relationship was cemented later, when Walt Pfeiffer came down with the mumps and Walt Disney, dismissing Mrs. Pfeiffer’s warnings and saying he had already had the mumps himself, came over and kept the bedridden Pfeiffer company, teaching him how to draw. The two soon became inseparable, spending their time drawing together or playing with Pfeiffer’s dog Brownie.
The deeper bond between them, however, was not proximity; it was exhibitionism. As his masquerading attested, Walt Disney loved to perform, and so did Walt Pfeiffer, a moon-faced boy as extroverted as his friend. In fact, the Pfeiffers were a whole family of performers. Mr. Pfeiffer was the treasurer of the local United Leather Workers Union, but his real love was show business, and his son called him a “ham.” At the Disney house Elias, thinking that Walt might become a musician, insisted that Walt take violin lessons and would slap his elbow when he stuck it out incorrectly. (Walt claimed to have a “tin ear,” and the lessons ended in “mutual disgust” after a few months.) But what was punitive at the Disney house was joyful at the Pfeiffers’. Walt Pfeiffer’s sister Kitty would play the piano while the others sang, or she would accompany her brother and Walt while they performed comedy sketches. Walt Disney so enjoyed these sessions that at night he would sneak out the window—he was ordered to bed at nine o’clock so he could get up for the paper route—and head over to the Pfeiffers’ for the fun, then sneak back. “I went to bed tired,” he said, “but knowing the past hour and a half had been the nicest part of the day.”
Already Walt had been performing at school. “I’d do anything to attract attention,” he would say. In the fifth grade he fashioned a stovepipe hat out of cardboard and blackened it with shoe polish, dabbed a wart on his cheek, wrapped himself in a shawl, and came to class as Abraham Lincoln. He had even memorized the Gettysburg Address to recite. Delighted, Walt’s teacher said he was going to be an actor—“because I squinted my eyes on certain passages”—and called in the principal, who then paraded Walt into every classroom. Walt also staged plays with his classmates. “I always got something where I could bring in fifty kids because the kids would always laugh at other kids. I’d get laughs that way.”
Soon the “Two Bad Walters,” as Pfeiffer and Disney called themselves, were performing routines at school. With Mr. Pfeiffer instructing and rehearsing them, they began entering talent contests staged at the local Agnes Theater and, depending on how Walt told the story, either won quite a few of them or once split a twenty-five-cent fifth prize. (Pfeiffer said that Walt had to slip out of the bedroom window for these forays too so Elias would not know, “’cause we were kind of afraid of him.”) Some of the time they did what they called a “Dutch” act, playing Hans and Mike. Walt Disney would dress in Elias’s old deacon’s coat from his church days, and Walt Pfeiffer would decorate his jacket with various badges and medals that his father had collected from conventions. They would sing songs and tell jokes: “My sister is a princess.” “How do you know your sister is a princess?” “Because she wears a princess slip!” “My brother wears a union suit, but that doesn’t make him belong to a union!” Later they became fascinated with the film comedian Charlie Chaplin, whose popularity was soaring at that time. The boys would see each of Chaplin’s films, not once but several times, studying them carefully and then discussing his technique. That changed the act. Walt Disney now played Chaplin. He “could do it to perfection,” a boyhood acquaintance remembered, even recalling Walt “kicking that cigarette behind” himself in one of Chaplin’s signature moves. Walt Pfeiffer played the Count, Chaplin’s nemesis. “[W]e always got a little more applause than someone else imitating Chaplin because we were younger and it was a team of us,” Walt said.
But even if the act was amateurish and the applause as much for youthful effort as for talent, Walt Disney found himself hooked on performing—hooked on the acknowledgment of performing as he had been hooked in Marceline on the acknowledgment of his drawing. These performances, he said, “reacted on me like the taste of blood on a lion. In other words, I liked acting! Liked the applause, liked the cash prizes that were being handed to us, liked
the weird smells and weirder sights behind the scenes.” He even began to think of acting as a career. In entertainment Walt Disney had found another escape.
Even before he began considering a career in show business, school had become an afterthought. As in Marceline, he had been placed in the same class as his younger sister, and both, due to the vicissitudes of the Kansas City school system, had been forced to repeat the second grade, which meant he was well over a year older than most of his classmates. The paper route did not help. Walt often dozed in class, and teachers later described him as “courteous” but also “sleepy,” “preoccupied,” and “seldom more than lukewarm about the funny business of the three Rs.” One teacher placed him in the “second dumbest” seat in the classroom. Walt, who was clearly quick-witted, attributed his inattentiveness to his being creative rather than uninterested and called himself a “dreamer.” A classmate said he was always imagining things. Walt admitted, “I’d sit in class and I’d be way off.”
