WALT DISNEY: HOLLYWOOD’S DARK PRINCE
By Marc Eliot
Andre Deutsch, £7.99, 312pp
ISBN 0 233 05122 8
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EVERYONE CALLED him Uncle Walt, even his fellow paranoid, the FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, but Walt Disney was a lot more interesting than the avuncular figure he presented to the world. Born to a fundamentalist, Midwestern family, regularly brutalised by his father and starved of love by a distant mother, his entire life seemed to be a search for respect, interspersed with vindictive attacks on anyone he saw as a threat.
His insecurities were often real. Though he effectively introduced the modern sound cartoon, and regularly used colour long before his rivals, his relatively small studio remained in a perpetual state of financial disarray, hardly ameliorated by the obsessive perfectionism that still gives his best work a lasting resonance.
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Like that other “Uncle”, Joseph Stalin, he was a cruel sort. A pragmatic anti-Semite, railing at his perceived Jewish rivals in the movie business (though not above using their help on occasion) and an obsessive anti-Communist who preferred Mob-run trade unions to the real thing, the psychodrama of his life was echoed on the screen. Forever uncertain about his origins (Eliot investigates a long-standing rumour about Spanish forebears, but can’t divine a definitive conclusion), films such as Pinocchio and Snow White, with their evil mother substitutes and questions of identity, hinted at demons hidden within him, although he always denied any deeper intent. Eliot even resorts to a touch of Freud, interpreting the charming Mickey Mouse as Disney’s superego, and the bad-tempered, striving Donald Duck as his id.
Walt certainly had issues. Main Street at the original Disneyland was a replica of his tiny Missouri home town.
He might have been rather evil, though no more so than the average business mogul in America’s pseudo-democracy, and capable of holding a grudge longer than Dumbo’s ears, yet Disney’s best work still stands. At this distance his snitching for the FBI and maltreatment of employees can be just about forgiven. But his true, unfortunate legacy was his invention of modern merchandising, sanitised theme parks, television tie-ins and the discovery that material could be re-released profitably again and again. Bugs Bunny, a real anarchist, always did stomp on Disney’s insipid rodent.