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I'm the right person to review this book. I grew up in the shiny new L.A. suburbs in the early 1960s, and for my fourth birthday, my parents took me to Disneyland—then itself still shiny and new. We rode the Mad Hatter's Teacups, took the boat ride through the jungle, visited radiant Tomorrowland. And then, on the way out through Main Street, we came across the capering Disney characters. Mickey himself frolicked my way—and proceeded to stomp on my small foot with his big wooden shoe. It hurt, and it scared me too—this big-headed rodent, a confusing blend of real and pretend. In our newer, more litigious age I'd probably have been able to collect a million or two for psychic damage, but at the time I just limped away as fast as ever I could. It's possible that a seed of ambivalence toward mass entertainment culture was planted then and there, though in fact I remember many subsequent Sunday evenings watching quite happily many years of The Wonderful World of Disney. All I know is, it made a big impact on me.
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But then, Mickey and Uncle Walt (and at times they were very nearly the same) made a big impact on everyone in the 20th century. Disney was by no means an insignificant artist—he and his team of animators made major breakthroughs in the visual arts. But his greatest innovations were as an impresario and a businessman, and by the time he was done his combination of image and music and merchandise and theme park had paved the way for the cocooned entertainment culture in which we now exist. Even more than Coke and McDonalds—and perhaps even more than the church—Disney was the great brand artist of his era, carving out a niche in most American brains and hearts. As the consumer society grew more secular, he supplied an easy and alternate creed, complete with icons, pilgrimage sites, and spiritual comforts. In the hymnal of the American religion, most of the happy, whistling tunes were his. He bears pondering.
Neal Gabler, it should be said at the start, has written a superior biography. His previous chronicles of Walter Winchell and of the studio moguls have won many plaudits; he understands the history of the movie business, especially at mid-century. With Disney, though, he had to go deeper, because he's dealing with a man who made—consciously and unconsciously—the story of his life into the stories of his art, and then into one of the templates for our own understanding of the world.
Perhaps the key source for Disney's dream world was the half decade, beginning at the age of four, that he spent in Marceline, Missouri. His family moved from Chicago, and would eventually move on to Kansas City, but the heart of his boyhood was spent on a small farm a mile north of the town's grain elevator. "Despite its modest size, Walt would always recall the farm through the prism of a child's wonder and always think of it as a paradise. Game abounded; there were foxes, rabbits, squirrels, opossums, and raccoons." There were hogs, chickens, and cows, too, and five acres of orchards. There were boys to fish with, and sledding and skating; old Civil War veterans to retell battles; a sprawling rail yard:
But it was not just the homey appearance of Marceline or the cultural rites of passage he experienced there that Walt Disney loved and remembered and would burnish for the rest of his life; it was also the spirit of the community. In Marceline people cared for one another and were tolerant of one another. … "Everything was done in a community help," Walt recalled. "One farmer would help the other, they'd go and help repair fences." … He especially enjoyed the camaraderie of threshing season, when the wagons would be hitched behind a big steam engine and rumble thorough the fields, and the neighbors would gather to help, sleeping in the Disney's front yard, and their wives would arrive too, all joining forces to cook for their men in a scene that Walt would always think back on fondly.
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