Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  Ellenshaw painting. Mosley, Disney’s World; Greene and Greene, Man Behind the Magic.

  “Somehow that would make him not die.” Quoted in Hubler, Disney; Diane Disney Miller, interview by author.

  “I know he’s going to get better.” Diane quoted in Greene and Greene, Inside the Dream.

  Bob Brown’s visit. Mrs. Walt Disney interview by Hubler, Apr. 16, 1968, RHC, Box 14, Folder 52.

  “Uncle Roy was standing…” Quoted in Greene and Greene, Inside the Dream.

  “Now Daddy, now you won’t…” Diane quoted in http://disneygo.com/disneyatoz/familymuseum/collection/insidestory; Diane Disney Miller, interview by author.

  “Cardia arrest…” Certificate of Death, no. 7097-050719, Registrar-Recorder, Los Angeles County.

  “I took care of Walt…” Patty Disney quoted in Green and Green, Remembering Walt.

  “I knew that he was very sick.” Martin, presentation at NFFC Convention.

  “The death of Walt Disney…” Roy O. Disney, statement, Walt Disney Productions, Roy Disney Folder, Walt Disney Corr., Inter-Office, 1965-1966, A-I, A1653, WDA.

  “Why are you dragging your feet?” Mosley, Disney’s World.

  “Fancy being remembered…” Ibid..

  “Marvin, Walt’s dead.” Quoted in Marling, Theme Parks.

  “All of it,…” NYT, Dec. 16, 1966.

  “Aesop with a magic brush,…” LAT, Dec. 16, 1966, sec. 2.

  “Disney was dead,…” Time, Dec. 23, 1966.

  Funeral. Diane Disney Miller, interview by author.

  “sacred memorial…” Forest Lawn Brochure, Disney, Walt Death Folder, WDA.

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  What follows is by necessity a highly selected bibliography intended only to suggest sources for those who would like to pursue their interest in Walt Disney. It is limited because there are hundreds of books on Walt Disney, his films, and his theme parks, and the number continues to grow apace. There are also thousands of articles on him. The quantity, which rivals that of an American president, is arguably larger than that of any other figure in the popular culture and is a testament to his reach and influence, but to list them all is beyond the scope of this biography’s bibliography. Any exhaustive bibliography would easily fill a volume of its own, and it has: Kathy Merlock Jackson has published Walt Disney: A Bio-Bibliography (Greenport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993), and Elizabeth Leebron and Lynn Gartley have published Walt Disney: A Guide to References and Resources (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979). Anyone interested in serious Disney study would be well advised to consult these books.

  I attempted to read all the extant Disney literature—books and articles—and I cite many of these sources in the endnotes. This volume, however, is based primarily on my examination of documents at the Walt Disney Archives (herein WDA) and at other repositories, and these sources are referenced in the endnotes so that readers can see the materials on which I based my conclusions and so that future investigators can find those materials. Scholars are fortunate that Walt, who practically from childhood had an inflated sense of his own importance, seemed to keep everything, even a postcard he drew for his mother when he was a boy, and the archive has retained nearly all of this detritus. When I embarked on this project, I endeavored to read every letter, memo, story meeting transcript, financial ledger, chart, desk diary, annotation, and doodle in the collection in chronological order so that I would be in the moment with Walt, experiencing as best I could what he was feeling and thinking at the time and over time. There are, needless to say, tens if not hundreds of thousands of these items. I do not know whether I succeeded in reading them all—the archive continually springs surprises—but I was told that only David Smith, the longtime archivist, and I have even made the attempt. It took years, and I can only hope that the reader will feel rewarded by the effort.

  Other major sources for this biography are the recollections of those who knew Walt Disney. I conducted dozens of interviews, typically two to three hours in length. Diane Disney Miller, Walt’s only surviving daughter, not only submitted to a lengthy interview but graciously and generously sent me her observations and answered questions as I reviewed the manuscript. As for the interviews with Walt’s employees, I had a slight disappointment. I quickly discovered that those who had worked most intimately with him were now gone, that those who survived knew him only glancingly (Walt would have turned one hundred on December 5, 2001), and that as the studio expanded he so compartmentalized himself that no one really could be considered a true intimate. Nearly all of those I interviewed—even remarkable individuals like the animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, who were mainstays of the studio—had, when one considers how long they toiled there, surprisingly few personal encounters with Walt. (One employee I interviewed who had logged several decades at the studio and occupied a position of some importance could scarcely recall more than a few times he met individually with Walt.) Fortunately the archive houses dozens if not hundreds of interviews with Disney family members and studio employees, including those who worked most closely with him in the early years, and while no single interview provides or could be expected to provide an all-illuminating revelation, taken together they yield as vivid a portrait of Walt Disney as we are likely to get. Again, I have tried diligently to read all of these transcripts and listen to the tapes when transcripts do not exist, and they are extensively referenced in the endnotes, though not in the Bibliography.

  Of special note is one particular set of interviews. Shortly after Walt’s death Roy O. Disney commissioned a biography of his brother and hired Richard G. Hubler, a veteran journalist who had written a recent biography of Cole Porter and had ghostwritten Ronald Reagan’s autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me? Under studio auspices, Hubler interviewed dozens of employees as well as Roy O., Sharon, Diane, and the reticent Lillian. Though Roy was deeply disappointed with the manuscript and ultimately deemed it unpublishable, the interviews are a precious trove for any Disney biographer. I have generally cited the source for these interviews as RHC, for the Richard Hubler Collection at Boston University, though they are also available at the Disney Archives and I have used that citation when full transcripts were available at RHC.

  When Walt coaxed Diane to “write” his biography, he recruited Pete Martin, another veteran journalist, to assist her. Martin conducted long interviews with Walt and his family that serve as the basis for The Story of Walt Disney. These interviews have been transcribed and the transcripts are available at the archive, but I listened to the audio as well and found discrepancies and omissions between the original tapes and the transcriptions. I have referenced the book itself in my notes whenever possible because it is easily accessible to readers. I have referenced the transcriptions in the notes where they elaborate upon something in Diane Disney Miller’s text because they are, theoretically at least, also available to scholars. Finally, I have referenced the audio disks themselves, which are not readily available, only when they bear information not included in the book or the transcript. In any case, these interviews may be the single most valuable source in gaining a sense of what Walt was actually thinking: Walt’s version of events in his own voice.

  In addition to these materials, there are accounts of Walt and the studio, published and unpublished, by Disney employees including Dave Hand, Jack Kinney, Bill Justice, Harry Tytle, and Robert Price Foster, who was responsible for heading the operation to buy the land for Disney World. Though one must always make allowances for recollections and the vicissitudes of memory, these memoirs add substantially to the record.

  Any Disney biographer is also indebted to animation journals, especially Millimeter, Funnyworld, and Cartoonist Profiles. Several articles of particular interest are listed in the Bibliography, but many others of value are not because to do so would, again, lengthen the Bibliography beyond what would be practical or portable. Any serious investigator would be rewarded by poring through these publications, which
obviously are not limited to the animations of Walt Disney. The greatest debt for Disney specialists, however, is to Paul Anderson’s Persistence of Vision (herein POV), published irregularly when Paul thinks an issue is ready. One cannot say enough about what Paul and POV have contributed to Disney scholarship, and one cannot even try to reference single articles or single issues in a bibliography because they are all essential. Indeed, the number on the New York World’s Fair titled “A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” (1995) remains the single best source on Disney’s involvement in the fair.

  Though he is long gone, Walt Disney remains a work in progress. One suspects that his films and theme parks will supply fodder for endless rumination, analysis, and confrontation on issues like the meaning of America, capitalism, mass culture, fabrication, history, and even gender values, and that attitudes toward him will be a barometer for shifting moods about all of these things for years and perhaps decades to come. No bibliography can capture the full measure of this debate, which is why one will have to keep amending the list as the arguments over Walt Disney and his legacy continue to rage.

  BOOKS

  Allan, Robin. Walt Disney and Europe: European Influences on the Animated Feature Films of Walt Disney. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

  Anderson, Christopher. Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1994.

  At Home in Ellis County, Kansas, 1867-1992, vol. 1. Hays, Kan.: History Book Committee, 1991.

  Bain, David, and Bruce Harris. Mickey Mouse: Fifty Happy Years. New York: Harmony Books, 1977.

  Barbera, Joseph. My Life in ’toons: From Flatbush to Bedrock in Under a Century. Atlanta: Turner Publishing, 1994.

  Barrier, Michael. Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

  Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.

  Blitz, Marcia. Donald Duck. New York: Harmony Books, 1979.

  Bright, Randy. Disneyland: The Inside Story. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987.

  Brode, Douglas. From Walt to Woodstock: How Disney Created the Counterculture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.

  Broggie, Michael. Walt Disney’s Railroad Story. Pasadena, Calif.: Pentrex, 1997.

  Bryman, Alan. Disney and His Worlds. New York: Routledge, 1995.

  ——. The Disneyfication of Society. London: SAGE, 2004.

  Burnes, Brian, Robert W. Butler, and Dan Viets. Walt Disney’s Missouri: The Roots of Creative Genius, ed. Donna Martin. Kansas City: Kansas City Star Books, 2002.

  Canemaker, John. Before the Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of Disney Inspirational Sketch Artists. New York: Hyperion Books, 1996.

  ——. Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World’s Most Popular Cat. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996.

  ——. Paper Dreams: The Art and Artists of the Disney Storyboards. New York: Disney Editions, 1999.

  ——. Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men and the Art of Animation. New York: Disney Editions, 2001.

  Capra, Frank. The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography. New York: Macmillan, 1971.

  Chasins, Abram. Leopold Stokowski: A Profile. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1979.

  Cotter, Bill. The Wonderful World of Disney Television: A Complete History. New York: Disney Editions, 1997.

  Crafton, Donald. Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982.

  Culhane, John. Walt Disney’s Fantasia. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983.

  Culhane, Shamus. Talking Animals and Other People. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986.

  Eisenstein, Sergei. Eisenstein on Disney. Edited by Jay Leyda, translated by Alan Upchurch. London: Methuen, 1988.

  Eliot, Marc. Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince. New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1993.

  Feild, Robert. The Art of Walt Disney. New York: Macmillan, 1942.

  Finch, Christopher. The Art of Walt Disney: From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms, rev. ed. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993.

  Fleischer, Richard. Just Tell Me When to Cry: A Memoir. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993.

  Foresman, Sherry. The History of the Disney Family. Des Moines, Ia.: Foresman, 1979.

  France, Van Arsdale. Window on Main Street: 35 Years of Creating Happiness at Disneyland Park. Nashua, N.H.: Laughter Publications, 1991.

  Gebhard, David, and Harriete Von Breton. Kem Weber: The Moderne in Southern California, 1920-1941. Santa Barbara: University of California Press, 1969.

  Ghez, Didier, ed. Walt’s People, vol. 1. Xlibris, 2005.

  ——. Walt’s People, vol. 2. Xlibris, 2006.

  Giroux, Henry A. The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.

  Goldenson, Leonard H., with Marvin J. Wolf. Beating the Odds. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991.

  Green, Amy Boothe, and Howard E. Green. Remembering Walt: Favorite Memories of Walt Disney. New York: Hyperion Books, 1999.

  Greene, Katherine, and Richard Greene. The Man Behind the Magic: The Story of Walt Disney. New York: Viking, 1991.

  ——. Inside the Dream: The Personal Story of Walt Disney. New York: Roundtable Press, 2001.

  Hand, David Dodd. Memoirs. Cambria, Calif.: Lighthouse Litho, 1990.

  History of Marceline, 1888-1988, Centennial Edition. Marceline, Mo., 1988.

  Holliss, Richard, and Brian Sibley. Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the Making of the Classic Film. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.

  ——. The Disney Studio Story. New York: Crown Publishers, 1988.

  Iwerks, Leslie, and John Kenworthy. The Hand Behind the Mouse. New York: Disney Editions, 2001.

  Jackson, Kathy Merlock, ed. Walt Disney Conversations. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2006.

  Jones, Chuck. Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist. New York: Avon Books. 1989.

  Justice, Bill. Justice for Disney. Dayton, Ohio: Tomart Publications, 1992.

  Kanfer, Stefan. Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to Toy Story. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997.

  Kinney, Jack. Walt Disney and Other Animated Characters: An Unauthorized Account of the Early Years at Disney’s. New York: Harmony Books, 1988.

  Koszarski, Richard. An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

  Krause, Martin, and Linda Witkowski. Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: An Art in Its Making. New York: Hyperion Books, 1994.

  Lutz, Edwin G. Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development. 1920; reprint Bedford, Mass.: Applewood Books, 1998.

  Maltin, Leonard. Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, rev. ed. New York: Plume, 1987.

  ——. The Disney Films, 3rd ed. New York: Hyperion Books, 1995.

  Mannheim, Steven. Walt Disney and the Quest for Community. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2002.

  Marceline, Missouri: Past and Present Progress and Prosperity. 1913; reprint Walsworth Publishing, 1975.

  Marion, Frances. Off With Their Heads! A Serio-Comic Tale of Hollywood. New York: Macmillan, 1972.

  Marling, Karal Ann, ed. Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance. New York: Flammarion, 1997.

  McGilligan, Patrick, and Paul Buhle. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

  Merritt, Russell, and J. B. Kaufman. Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

  Miller, Diane Disney, as told to Pete Martin. The Story of Walt Disney. New York: Holt, 1956.

  Mosley, Leonard. Disney’s World: A Biography. New York: Stein & Day, 1985.

  Peary, Gerald, and Danny Peary. The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980.

>   Peet, Bill. Bill Peet: An Autobiography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

  Price, Harrison “Buzz.” Walt’s Revolution! By the Numbers. Orlando, Fla.: Ripley Entertainment, 2003.

  Ramsaye, Terry. A Million and One Nights. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1926.

  Reichenbach, Harry, as told to David Freedman. Phantom Fame: The Anatomy of Ballyhoo. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1931.

  Sammond, Nicholas. Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005.

  Santoli, Lorraine. The Official Mickey Mouse Club Book. New York: Hyperion Books, 1995.

  Schickel, Richard. The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney, 3rd ed. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1997.

  Shale, Richard. Donald Duck Joins Up: The Walt Disney Studio During World War II. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982.

  Sherman, Robert B., and Richard M. Sherman. Walt’s Time: From Before to Beyond, ed. Bruce Gordon, David Mumford, and Jeff Kurtti. Santa Clarita, Calif.: Camphor Tree Publishers, 1998.

  Shows, Charles. Walt: Backstage Adventures with Walt Disney. Huntington Beach, Calif.: Windsong Books International, 1979.

  Sklar, Martin A. Walt Disney’s Disneyland. New York: Disney Productions, 1964.

  Smith, Dave, Disney A to Z: The Updated Official Encyclopedia. New York: Hyperion Books, 1998.

  Smith, David, with Steven B. Clark. Disney: The First 100 Years. New York: Disney Editions, 2003.

  Smoodin, Eric, ed. Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom. New York: Routledge, 1996.

  Solomon, Charles. Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.

  ——. The Disney That Never Was: The Stories and Art from Five Decades of Unproduced Animation. New York: Hyperion Books, 1995.

  Susman, Warren I. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1984.

  Telotte, J. P. Disney TV. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004.