Walter Elias Disney left such a mark on our nation that it is hard to remember when his creations – and the ethos they represent – did not permeate American popular culture. In this respect he is akin to Louis Armstrong and Elvis, perhaps even Ford and Edison.
He reinvented animation as we know it, and his triumphs in this genuine folk-art medium ranged from Mickey Mouse to “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” He tapped the burgeoning baby-boom market with the Mouseketeers, and he was a trend-setting titan of early television. He conceived Disneyland and Disney World; the corporation he founded now enjoys roughly $30 billion a year in revenues.
Yet this restless, driven genius was also responsible for the term “Disneyfication,” a pejorative long in the lexicon: The word speaks to the manipulation of reality to fit one’s own vision, often to blinkered, Pollyanna effect.
All of this rooted in a childhood where a boy strained against an irascible father and longed for the halcyon years he spent in Marceline, Mo. – the idealized inspiration for Disneyland’s Main Street U.S.A.
This is the story chronicled in Neal Gabler’s “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.”
Gabler, who won praise for “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” was the first writer given total access to the Disney archives. In some respects, the book reads as a return volley at Richard Schickel’s earlier “The Disney Version,” which savaged the man and his company. In any case, Gabler’s book looks to be the definitive Disney bio of our time, limning its subject’s brio and anxiety, visionary self-invention and abject sentimentality.
Disney died of cancer 40 years ago this month at age 65, enough of a remove to take the measure of a man in his times. Gabler masterfully explores Disney’s coming of age at a time when the U.S. was moving from an isolated, agrarian society to an industrial one that would dominate the world stage.
For those not old enough to remember Mickey’s subversiveness, or how the mouse that roared reflected Depression-era America, Gabler writes with wit and insight. Disney and the development of the nation’s post-war culture seem inextricably entwined.
But meticulous as it is – Gabler is thorough to a fault – the book has its problems. Gabler never seems to crack the source of Disney’s genius: The perspiration feels chronicled down to the droplet, but what about the inspiration? It’s akin to watching every chisel stroke that went into Michelangelo’s “David,” yet still lacking any insight into how it was accomplished, save for knowing the sculptor chipped away everything that didn’t look like a man.
Ordinary in his general tastes, Disney, with only one year of high school under his belt, was extraordinary in his vision and his will to see it realized.
This came at a price. Nonstop in his pursuit of perfection, he was never quite happy within it. Pulsing with physical and nervous energy, Disney’s life was a near-compulsive jumping from one project to another. One success underwrote the next challenge, and the man spent much of his adulthood behind a financial eight ball of his own making.
Disney’s put-upon brother Roy handled most of the business dealings, and reading the back-and- forth haggling between art and commerce resonates today.
“We’re making corn,” Disney once confessed.
Well, the world lined up at the trough. When Disney jumped from ABC to NBC, launching his “Wonderful World of Color” on Sept. 24, 1961, the Peacock Network crowed that sales of color TVs jumped 105 percent over the previous September.
Some might argue the Disney studio was something of a personality cult. That would be a misreading. While Disney had charisma to burn, his underlings were driven by their own desire to master and excel in the new medium. They were also an independent lot: Disney, who labored hard to create his notion of a workers’ paradise, never quite forgave his animators for their 1941 strike.
Gabler rebuts charges of anti-Semitism that dogged Disney. The man was tough but inclusive; by Gabler’s reckoning he was guiltless of the charge, albeit tarred by association with anti- communist groups that harbored some bona-fide bigots.
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson presented Disney with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His fellow recipients that year were no mere roster of honorees, they were a veritable pantheon: poets T.S. Eliot and Carl Sandburg; novelist John Steinbeck; historians Lewis Mumford and Samuel Eliot Morison ; artist Willem de Kooning; composer Aaron Copland; columnist Walter Lippman; journalist Edward R. Murrow; and Helen Keller.
For a man whose destiny was linked to his sketch of a grinning mouse with outsized ears, it was an American journey worthy of Huck Finn.
Staff writer William Porter can be reached at 303-954-1877 or wporter@denverpost.com
—————————————-
Walt Disney
The Triumph of the American Imagination
By Neal Gabler
Knopf, 851 pages, $35
