Close-Up: Biographer Neal Gabler on Walt Disney
Writer Neal Gabler sat down with Box Office Mojo at the Walt Disney Studios to discuss his new biography of the entertainment giant's namesake and founder, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.
Bursting with enthusiasm for the book, Gabler also visited the studio's archives where he was warmly greeted for a question and answer session with the staff, with whom he had worked for seven years. Afterwards, Gabler, whose other books include An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality and Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity, headed to the studio store for a book signing, where a long line of eagerly awaiting Disney employees had already formed.
Box Office Mojo: What is the theme of Walt Disney's career?
Neal Gabler: There are several. If you had to enumerate them, number one is the power of wish fulfillment. That sounds something like a cliché, but it was anything but a cliché for Walt Disney. Walt was someone who believed in his own imagination very much, he had tremendous self-confidence about the power of that imagination, and he was able, somehow, miraculously, to do what very few people are able to do—to impose that imagination on the world and to make the world conform to it, at least pieces of the world. The animations are products of Walt's wish fulfillment. The theme parks are products of Walt's wish fulfillment. EPCOT [Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow], had it been designed and executed the way that Walt wanted it designed and executed—as this fully operational city of the future—was a product of Walt's wish fulfillment. So, the rule of wish fulfillment is one of the central themes of his life. In the process of executing that wish fulfillment, there is a theme of control. Walt is someone who was very obsessive, very much a perfectionist. He believed in perfectibility, which is an American theme as well as a Disney theme, and he believed that you could control things—indeed, that you had to control things. Walt never delegated, unless he wanted to. That's not a contradiction; there are things that Walt cared about deeply and he would never delegate when there were things about which he cared deeply. There were things that he didn't care that deeply about, in part because he didn't ever think they could be perfect and, when Walt came to the conclusion that something wasn't going to be perfect, as he did about the animations, frankly, he said: "let somebody else do that." Walt only wanted to be personally invested in things that could be perfect—things over which he would then exercise control. Those are kind of the three [ideas]: wish fulfillment, perfectibility, control—and, obviously, they all link in Walt's life.
Box Office Mojo: Is there a single, overriding theme—?
Gabler: Walt intended, through his wish fulfillment, control and perfectibility, to create an alternative reality. In some ways, whether this was mythology or not and it's very hard to say, because Walt was a great romanticist about his own life, Walt always looked at his childhood—at least his Kansas City childhood—as being enormously arduous, suffering great deprivations, both financial and emotional.
Box Office Mojo: When you say alternative reality, do you mean through representational art, to uplift the human spirit?
Gabler: Exactly—to remove one from the reality in which one lives one's daily life—from the drudgery and from life's complications, in an affirmative sense. That doesn't mean that his [recreation of] reality—in terms of the animations particularly—didn't recognize difficulty. One of the unfair knocks that Walt Disney gets—and it is interesting when you look at the continuity of his career—is that he took the edge off and made everything seem easy, which people were saying in the 1960s. When you go back to the late 1930s and early 1940s, people were saying that kids were terrified by Walt Disney's films—they deal with the complexities of life in ways that children are very much challenged by. His own daughter, Diane, asked him 'why did you kill Bambi's mother?' and Walt's answer is 'because it's in the original source material—it's in the book by Felix Salten.' Diane says, 'yeah, but you changed a lot of things—you're Walt Disney, you can do anything.' His answer to that is that his job isn't to show you how easy everything is—that's not what he wanted to do—he wanted people to realize and recognize some of the conflicts. That doesn't mean he doesn't attempt to resolve them in his alternative reality, but the main aspect of that reality is that it can be controlled. That's the important thing: that [humans] have the power to control our environment. Certainly, Disneyland is a testament to that.
Box Office Mojo: Did Walt Disney seek order and control as an end in itself?
Gabler: To a certain extent, yes.
Box Office Mojo: That's true perfectionism.
Gabler: Yes, and that's what Walt was about, which is why Walt was always disappointed. One of the things you find in Walt Disney's life that is poignant in my estimation is that Walt set the bar so high that he could never meet it. So he could make an animation, even Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and he would say, 'that's not good enough,' or Pinocchio—'not good enough'—or Fantasia—'not good enough'—nothing was ever good enough, because if your standard is perfection, and if you have that template in your head, nothing is ever going to be good enough and you're always going to be disappointed. Walt Disney was a man who lived within his disappointment, even as he was creating these worlds which we all love and which teach and transport us—but Walt was disappointed in them.
Box Office Mojo: Yet, by your account, he achieved perfection—?
Gabler: Yes. In the final analysis, Walt has a kind of perfection. His life all comes together. He certainly wasn't infallible and he'd be the first to say that, though he had tremendous confidence in his own judgment, which he had to have in order to succeed. But in the final analysis, he accomplished so much. It's a happy ending, in a way—only unhappy to the extent to which Walt Disney had said, 'if only I had 15 more years, imagine the things I would accomplish …,' clearly thinking of EPCOT and urban planning and the true legacy he wanted to leave.
Box Office Mojo: What legacy was that?
Gabler: Changing the world in a physical way—in the way people live. Of course, he changed the world in a number of other ways and that's a powerful legacy unto itself. He created something that some people dislike.
Box Office Mojo: Who? Intellectuals?
Gabler: Yes. Again, it's interesting to see the transformation in Walt Disney's public acceptance, particularly in terms of intellectuals. In the 1930s, he was a darling of the intellectuals, in part because they felt superior to him. Walt Disney was not their equal, in their estimation, he was this plainspoken primitive, artlessly artful, Midwestern fellow who had no pretensions whatsoever—a man completely without pretense and, therefore, they could embrace him. It's very patronizing—and it's also wrong, because Walt Disney always had pretensions to art and he would talk about this. 'We're not making cartoons,' he said at one story meeting that I quote in the book. It's about art. Fantasia became a kind of turning point, because with Fantasia, he tipped his hand. In Fantasia, he exposed to intellectuals that he did have pretensions, that he was interested in art, and it's with Fantasia that intellectuals began to turn on him. They turned on him with a vengeance in the post-[World War 2] period because the animations weren't very good and they felt that he declined in terms of his artistry. That continued pretty much through the end of his life. To this day, there's a great division about Walt Disney. You can almost divide the country, like red and blue states, [between] those who love Walt Disney and those who hate Walt Disney. Those who love him feel he was optimistic, genuine, that he taught them the power of wish fulfillment, and those who hate him felt he took all the menace out of life and had a fascistic potential because Disneyland puts everyone through the same kind of experience. There's less intellectual disdain today than, say, five or ten years ago, but does it still exist? I've encountered it with this book: 'why write seriously about Walt Disney—don't you know that Walt Disney wasn't serious?' So, it's there.
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Box Office Mojo: Why did you write this book?
Gabler: Because Walt Disney, in my mind, is one of those people who's an architect of the American consciousness. That's my own portfolio, to examine architects of the American consciousness, particularly in a popular cultural context—people who shape who we are and how we think. My first book was about the Hollywood moguls, who created and defined America. My second book was about gossip columnist Walter Winchell, who helped define celebrity culture and redefine journalism in America. But I don't think there's a single figure that is more of a colossus of popular culture than Walt Disney is. Yet, almost 40 years after his death [on Dec. 15, 1966], there was not a single, full-scale, fully annotated biography of Disney. Now, of course, there are biographies of Walt Disney—I'm not saying there aren't—and some of them are perfectly fine, I'm not criticizing them, but what I think is interesting is that the two great visual imaginations of the 20th century in my estimation, are [Pablo] Picasso and Walt Disney and virtually all of American art can be traced to these two visual imaginations. Picasso has two dozen biographies written about him. Now Walt Disney has one.
Box Office Mojo: Why the discrepancy?
Gabler: Walt Disney is fundamentally not taken seriously. Biographers weren't drawn to Walt Disney because they knew that there's no great profit, and I don't mean financially, in writing about Walt Disney because you can't win awards. There's so much disdain for him.
Box Office Mojo: In the beginning of the biography, you touch upon art and commerce—how there's no contradiction between the two. Was that Walt Disney's view?
Gabler: Absolutely. For most people, Walt symbolizes commercialism.
Box Office Mojo: He wasn't ashamed of it?
Gabler: No. By the same token, Walt would never have said he was doing something simply to make money—because he wasn't interested in making money [as an end in itself]. Walt became somewhat anti-intellectual in his later years because he was so attacked by intellectuals. His defense mechanism was, 'I'm going after them, I don't need all this intellectual crap,' it was immaterial to him.
Box Office Mojo: Was that why he was hated, because he was viewed as a capitalist by intellectuals who hated capitalism?
Gabler: Yes. But Walt couldn't have won that battle. If Walt had wanted to create art, which he did, then they'd say, 'oh, he's pretentious.' If Walt had said, no, I'm not gong to create art, I'm going to do things that appeal to [mass] audiences, then he'd be regarded as a blatant capitalist. It's a no-win situation in this culture. I regard Walt Disney as an artist. If you really pressed him to the wall, and he would have hated to admit this, he'd say, 'yeah, I am an artist,' and that's what my book is about. He made Snow White not to make money, not even to satisfy an audience; he wanted to satisfy himself and his own artistic ambitions.
Box Office Mojo: In the book's introduction, you write that "he was less original than quintessential … [that] he lived in the American experience and seemed to embody it in his doggedness, his idealism, his informality, and his lack of affectation, perhaps above all in his sudden rise from poverty and anonymity to the summit of success." Walt Disney was living the American Dream—?
Gabler: He was—and part of his genius, and I do regard him as a genius, though the book is not hagiography and I don't overlook his faults—the book includes warts and all—but part of his genius was this uncanny synchronicity between Walt Disney and America. And the synchronicity existed intuitively, naturally, because Walt was so fully American, in so many respects. He had the mind, the intuition and the taste of the average American. Now, average Americans don't have the talent Walt Disney had, but he was able to translate his own feelings, fears and ambitions into American aspirations and ambitions.
Box Office Mojo: What was the first Walt Disney motion picture you saw?
Gabler: Pinocchio. I know that because it was the first movie I ever saw in my life. It remained with me forever. I've revisited it many times since and I will make this claim, for which I will no doubt be attacked by those intellectuals who hate Walt Disney: that's the apex of animation art, in my estimation. But it's also one of the apexes of American art. If you want to look at the great works of American art, the very greatest works, and I'm talking about the greatest works of literature, fine art, music—Pinocchio ranks near the very summit of the greatest works of American art. Visually, it's beautifully drawn, it is thematically complex, it is emotional—though many people didn't find it emotional at the time of its release—it is just an extraordinary work of art. That is not Walt Disney's most popular film and there are many people who denigrate it, and who think Snow White is superior, or Dumbo is superior and simpler, but, to me, it's Pinocchio.
Box Office Mojo: What is the movie's theme?
Gabler: The same as virtually all the great animations. Walt made the same movie over and over and over again. Snow White is Pinocchio is Bambi is Dumbo. All the same movie. The essential theme is what it takes to become a fully integrated—socially and psychologically—human being. That's what Walt was interested in and that's why kids resonate with it—because it's about how children become fully integrated human beings. Snow White has to learn what it is to love, to form a sense of community, to accept responsibility, as she does in becoming the mother to the dwarves, and she even goes through a sexual initiation when the Prince kisses her—all of those things lead to her being able to usurp the previous generation and assume her role. Pinocchio is the same thing. He literally turns from wood to flesh because he learns about love and loyalty and responsibility and honesty and all of those [virtues] that make us human. Dumbo and Bambi are the same thing. That theme follows through these movies, even Cinderella, though I don't regard it as one of the classic animations. Even a movie like The Lion King would have fit very comfortably in the Walt Disney canon. It is Snow White, Dumbo, Bambi—it follows almost the exact contours as those films.
Box Office Mojo: Are there Walt Disney animated pictures that don't?
Gabler: Of Walt's films? Well, Fantasia's different because it has a different ambition to it. It's structurally different. Fantasia came at a point when Walt was tired of [the] narrative [approach], when he felt he'd gone about as far as he could go [with narrative], and there were new things to explore besides just narrative. Initially, when Walt was expanding the [animated] shorts, he got tired of gags, which was the fundamental constituent of animation. He thought gags have to be set into narratives and connected [to the story], then, he grew tired of those narrative connections to gags, and he made Snow White, which was a much more full-bodied narrative. The real suspense with Snow White was: is an audience going to cry? Will you get an audience to cry at animated drawings? After Snow White and Pinocchio he said, can we do something that breaks the mold? Can we do something non-narrative? Do we have to be tethered to this idea? Can't we go off in all sorts of directions? So, Fantasia goes off in all sorts of directions. But, more or less, they all fit the mold, whether it's Mulan, Tarzan or The Little Mermaid, which I think is the best of the modern Disney animations. That is a classic. They're about what it means to be human.
Box Office Mojo: You write that Walt Disney hated the animated character Goofy.
Gabler: Yes. He hated Goofy. He was always threatening to pull the plug on Goofy. I don't know exactly what it was—Walt seemed to think that Goofy was just stupid. For a man who loved realism, Goofy was the least realistic of the characters and the one who had the least realistic base, more so than even Donald Duck, who's heated and gets angry—he has human characteristics. But Goofy was just dumb, an imbecile, what's the human characteristic in him?
Box Office Mojo: As against Snow White's dwarf, Dopey, who Walt Disney said was not an imbecile—
Gabler: That's right. Not at all. Dopey is NOT an imbecile. There's an innocence to Dopey and a way of viewing the world that is actually quite charming but none of that in Goofy. He was always threatening to get rid of Goofy: 'why are we making these stupid Goofy cartoons?' Ultimately, he had to make them to keep the studio going because so much of what happens was make-work to keep the animators going. You have to pay the bills and Walt understood that.
Box Office Mojo: You're bursting some bubbles in this book with what Walt Disney thought of some treasured Disney characters and movies, such as Goofy, Lady and the Tramp and Sleeping Beauty.
Gabler: Walt wasn't all that interested in Sleeping Beauty. When I embarked on this project, I understood that Walt is so Protean that one could write five volumes. So how does one get the life into one volume? I'll tell you how I did it: follow Walt. Only follow Walt. Don't go off on Ward Kimball, Frank Thomas, Dick Nunis. Any time I give something short shrift, it's because Walt wasn't interested in it.
Box Office Mojo: It is not the history of the studio—
Gabler: No, it's not. It's a biography of Walt. You're right to make that distinction.
Box Office Mojo: Did he hate Jews, as some have claimed?
Gabler: No. He did not hate Jews.
Box Office Mojo: There's no evidence at all?
Gabler: There is no evidence whatsoever. I don't exculpate him completely from charges of anti-Semitism because, although he was not an anti-Semite, in the sense that he never made anti-Semitic slurs, he never said anything about Jews to anyone, he was associated with one group—the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, which was regarded as a viciously anti-Semitic organization. Walt never evinced any anti-Semitism but the reason I say I don't exculpate him entirely is because Walt knew—he must have known, he was way too sophisticated a man [not to have known]—that they were widely regarded as a group of anti-Semites and he willingly allowed himself to be associated with them, which is why he was regarded [by some] as an anti-Semite. I think people felt: if he's not an anti-Semite, then what's he doing with them? Why didn't he denounce them? Later, he did denounce them but not for their anti-Semitism. He felt they became sort of idiotic and extreme and he left the organization. But it was too late at that point for him to save his reputation in terms of this issue. But I do not believe that Walt Disney was an anti-Semite. He did not hate Jews. I don't think Walt Disney hated anybody. To the extent that he disliked anybody, he disliked people who did not fulfill his desires to accomplish the things he wanted to accomplish. Walt was an anti-communist, but he hired a communist to do a rewrite on Song of the South. The point is that Walt's interest was to realize his vision and if you didn't want to realize his vision, you were gone.
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Box Office Mojo: You raise Walt Disney's opposition to communism. It was genuine and it was, you write, grounded in reality; he was right that communists had infiltrated the labor union and he has been vindicated by history—
Gabler: Yes. Walt was not paranoid. When it came to the union, he was wrong in terms of the way he treated his employees in that period, but clearly Walt's idea that the communists were going to attack Walt Disney because Walt was a symbol of America and they wanted to get at him for that is true. To be balanced, that does not excuse some of the things Walt did, the way he treated Art Babbitt, who was not a communist, the way he got rid of employees who had gone on strike, most of whom were not communists, Walt could have managed this much, much better than he did. Walt was not a very good people wrangler when it came to the strike and he suffered for it.
Box Office Mojo: Did he testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee because of the strike?
Gabler: I believe he did. It wasn't vindictive, but it was definitely personal. Walt was a man who took everything personally. I don't think Walt was ideological—to his credit, in my estimation. Walt was an artist; he wasn't an ideologue. Walt worked for [left-wing Democratic President] Franklin Roosevelt in 1936. Walt didn't come to anti-communism with an ideological agenda. Walt came to anti-communism because the communists had ruined something that he loved and it was a personal fight for him. One of the things I like about Walt Disney, frankly, is that he hated the notion of billboard patriots. He hated the idea of people who were pious about religion and patriotism. If you're a patriot, be a patriot [was his attitude], don't go showing it and talking about it all the time. Walt didn't like that. That's a characterization of Walt people will find very different from what most people think. He's thought of as a rock-ribbed Republican, which he was, and as somebody who wore a flag on his lapel all the time—but that wasn't Walt Disney. He didn't have to do that. Ironically, if you look at his FBI file, there is a recurring theme that the FBI doubted Walt's patriotism because he had allowed his name to go on a letterhead in a tribute to Art Young, who was a left-wing artist, he had sent greetings to the Soviet Union on its anniversary, so there was some question as to whether Walt Disney was really patriotic. But Walt had a very congenial attitude.
Box Office Mojo: He made war propaganda movies—
Gabler: He did them but he was very hesitant. He said: 'I don't want to do propaganda. How are people going to think of me if they know my ambition is to fool them?' He wanted to do what he could to help the country during the war.
Box Office Mojo: There is a perception that Walt Disney was piously religious. Is that true?
Gabler: Totally wrong. The Religious Right cannot claim Walt Disney. Walt virtually never stepped into a church after his childhood. His father was a deacon at St. Paul's Congregational Church, which [Walt Disney] helped build in Chicago, and that church still stands two blocks from the house where Walt Disney was born, and while his father was deeply religious, Walt was not. He would take his daughters to Sunday school but he would never enter church. He never talked about religion. I think he felt uncomfortable dealing with explicit spirituality. The religion was in the animation, not in mouthing off about religious values.
Box Office Mojo: What's the biggest surprise about the response to your biography?
Gabler: There are several surprises, some of them pleasant. I know there are people who virtually revere Walt Disney as a deity, and I was worried that they would respond negatively to the book because I don't deify Walt Disney—nor do I demonize him—and I'm pleasantly surprised that those people have accepted the balance of the book, by and large. That's been a pleasant surprise. I'm unpleasantly surprised by the vestiges that we talked about earlier of the antagonism to Walt Disney that I thought was kind of gone—and they're still there, people criticizing the book because I take Walt Disney seriously. Don't I see that Walt Disney doesn't deserve this kind of attention? How deluded can I be? In this day and age, when the name Walt Disney is ubiquitous, yeah, I'm surprised at that. I think those people should have grown up by now. In one review my wife told me about—I don't read reviews—the guy spent a paragraph or two criticizing the subtitle of the book, saying how dare I say that Walt Disney is the American imagination. Frankly, that's ignorant. It's absolutely ignorant, but it also shocked me—that in this day and age somebody would criticize a subtitle of a book that deals with Walt Disney whose imagination is obviously so pervasive in America. How can one deny that? I mean, you may hate it, but you can't deny it. So, I am amazed at that.
Box Office Mojo: Did you try to limit the psychologizing?
Gabler: You're always nervous about psychologizing because you cannot get in someone else's head. Whether it's with Hollywood moguls or Walter Winchell or Walt Disney, I always try and light pedal that. That is, let the reader draw his own conclusions. Occasionally, you have to salt the book with certain ideas because you want to make sure that the theme does emerge. I always do that with a great deal of trepidation nevertheless I think everything I write in the book is validated by the life.
Box Office Mojo: What is your favorite live action Disney movie?
Gabler: This may surprise you but I really admire Pollyanna. Mary Poppins is the best, to me, of the combination animation/live action hybrid, that's a great movie, but Pollyanna, for what it is, is a surprisingly underrated movie. It has the reputation that it wallows in pathos and certainly the source material would lead one to believe that's where it's headed but there's a combination of tough-mindedness and sentimentality and it takes on small-minded hypocrisy and piety—it takes on religious piety—and it's very much about [achieving] a sense of community. And in the final analysis, it's a deeply moving film.
RELATED LINK
• Book: Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination
Bursting with enthusiasm for the book, Gabler also visited the studio's archives where he was warmly greeted for a question and answer session with the staff, with whom he had worked for seven years. Afterwards, Gabler, whose other books include An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality and Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity, headed to the studio store for a book signing, where a long line of eagerly awaiting Disney employees had already formed.
Box Office Mojo: What is the theme of Walt Disney's career?
Neal Gabler: There are several. If you had to enumerate them, number one is the power of wish fulfillment. That sounds something like a cliché, but it was anything but a cliché for Walt Disney. Walt was someone who believed in his own imagination very much, he had tremendous self-confidence about the power of that imagination, and he was able, somehow, miraculously, to do what very few people are able to do—to impose that imagination on the world and to make the world conform to it, at least pieces of the world. The animations are products of Walt's wish fulfillment. The theme parks are products of Walt's wish fulfillment. EPCOT [Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow], had it been designed and executed the way that Walt wanted it designed and executed—as this fully operational city of the future—was a product of Walt's wish fulfillment. So, the rule of wish fulfillment is one of the central themes of his life. In the process of executing that wish fulfillment, there is a theme of control. Walt is someone who was very obsessive, very much a perfectionist. He believed in perfectibility, which is an American theme as well as a Disney theme, and he believed that you could control things—indeed, that you had to control things. Walt never delegated, unless he wanted to. That's not a contradiction; there are things that Walt cared about deeply and he would never delegate when there were things about which he cared deeply. There were things that he didn't care that deeply about, in part because he didn't ever think they could be perfect and, when Walt came to the conclusion that something wasn't going to be perfect, as he did about the animations, frankly, he said: "let somebody else do that." Walt only wanted to be personally invested in things that could be perfect—things over which he would then exercise control. Those are kind of the three [ideas]: wish fulfillment, perfectibility, control—and, obviously, they all link in Walt's life.
Box Office Mojo: Is there a single, overriding theme—?
Gabler: Walt intended, through his wish fulfillment, control and perfectibility, to create an alternative reality. In some ways, whether this was mythology or not and it's very hard to say, because Walt was a great romanticist about his own life, Walt always looked at his childhood—at least his Kansas City childhood—as being enormously arduous, suffering great deprivations, both financial and emotional.
Box Office Mojo: When you say alternative reality, do you mean through representational art, to uplift the human spirit?
Gabler: Exactly—to remove one from the reality in which one lives one's daily life—from the drudgery and from life's complications, in an affirmative sense. That doesn't mean that his [recreation of] reality—in terms of the animations particularly—didn't recognize difficulty. One of the unfair knocks that Walt Disney gets—and it is interesting when you look at the continuity of his career—is that he took the edge off and made everything seem easy, which people were saying in the 1960s. When you go back to the late 1930s and early 1940s, people were saying that kids were terrified by Walt Disney's films—they deal with the complexities of life in ways that children are very much challenged by. His own daughter, Diane, asked him 'why did you kill Bambi's mother?' and Walt's answer is 'because it's in the original source material—it's in the book by Felix Salten.' Diane says, 'yeah, but you changed a lot of things—you're Walt Disney, you can do anything.' His answer to that is that his job isn't to show you how easy everything is—that's not what he wanted to do—he wanted people to realize and recognize some of the conflicts. That doesn't mean he doesn't attempt to resolve them in his alternative reality, but the main aspect of that reality is that it can be controlled. That's the important thing: that [humans] have the power to control our environment. Certainly, Disneyland is a testament to that.
Box Office Mojo: Did Walt Disney seek order and control as an end in itself?
Gabler: To a certain extent, yes.
Box Office Mojo: That's true perfectionism.
Gabler: Yes, and that's what Walt was about, which is why Walt was always disappointed. One of the things you find in Walt Disney's life that is poignant in my estimation is that Walt set the bar so high that he could never meet it. So he could make an animation, even Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and he would say, 'that's not good enough,' or Pinocchio—'not good enough'—or Fantasia—'not good enough'—nothing was ever good enough, because if your standard is perfection, and if you have that template in your head, nothing is ever going to be good enough and you're always going to be disappointed. Walt Disney was a man who lived within his disappointment, even as he was creating these worlds which we all love and which teach and transport us—but Walt was disappointed in them.
Box Office Mojo: Yet, by your account, he achieved perfection—?
Gabler: Yes. In the final analysis, Walt has a kind of perfection. His life all comes together. He certainly wasn't infallible and he'd be the first to say that, though he had tremendous confidence in his own judgment, which he had to have in order to succeed. But in the final analysis, he accomplished so much. It's a happy ending, in a way—only unhappy to the extent to which Walt Disney had said, 'if only I had 15 more years, imagine the things I would accomplish …,' clearly thinking of EPCOT and urban planning and the true legacy he wanted to leave.
Box Office Mojo: What legacy was that?
Gabler: Changing the world in a physical way—in the way people live. Of course, he changed the world in a number of other ways and that's a powerful legacy unto itself. He created something that some people dislike.
Box Office Mojo: Who? Intellectuals?
Gabler: Yes. Again, it's interesting to see the transformation in Walt Disney's public acceptance, particularly in terms of intellectuals. In the 1930s, he was a darling of the intellectuals, in part because they felt superior to him. Walt Disney was not their equal, in their estimation, he was this plainspoken primitive, artlessly artful, Midwestern fellow who had no pretensions whatsoever—a man completely without pretense and, therefore, they could embrace him. It's very patronizing—and it's also wrong, because Walt Disney always had pretensions to art and he would talk about this. 'We're not making cartoons,' he said at one story meeting that I quote in the book. It's about art. Fantasia became a kind of turning point, because with Fantasia, he tipped his hand. In Fantasia, he exposed to intellectuals that he did have pretensions, that he was interested in art, and it's with Fantasia that intellectuals began to turn on him. They turned on him with a vengeance in the post-[World War 2] period because the animations weren't very good and they felt that he declined in terms of his artistry. That continued pretty much through the end of his life. To this day, there's a great division about Walt Disney. You can almost divide the country, like red and blue states, [between] those who love Walt Disney and those who hate Walt Disney. Those who love him feel he was optimistic, genuine, that he taught them the power of wish fulfillment, and those who hate him felt he took all the menace out of life and had a fascistic potential because Disneyland puts everyone through the same kind of experience. There's less intellectual disdain today than, say, five or ten years ago, but does it still exist? I've encountered it with this book: 'why write seriously about Walt Disney—don't you know that Walt Disney wasn't serious?' So, it's there.
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Box Office Mojo: Why did you write this book?
Gabler: Because Walt Disney, in my mind, is one of those people who's an architect of the American consciousness. That's my own portfolio, to examine architects of the American consciousness, particularly in a popular cultural context—people who shape who we are and how we think. My first book was about the Hollywood moguls, who created and defined America. My second book was about gossip columnist Walter Winchell, who helped define celebrity culture and redefine journalism in America. But I don't think there's a single figure that is more of a colossus of popular culture than Walt Disney is. Yet, almost 40 years after his death [on Dec. 15, 1966], there was not a single, full-scale, fully annotated biography of Disney. Now, of course, there are biographies of Walt Disney—I'm not saying there aren't—and some of them are perfectly fine, I'm not criticizing them, but what I think is interesting is that the two great visual imaginations of the 20th century in my estimation, are [Pablo] Picasso and Walt Disney and virtually all of American art can be traced to these two visual imaginations. Picasso has two dozen biographies written about him. Now Walt Disney has one.
Box Office Mojo: Why the discrepancy?
Gabler: Walt Disney is fundamentally not taken seriously. Biographers weren't drawn to Walt Disney because they knew that there's no great profit, and I don't mean financially, in writing about Walt Disney because you can't win awards. There's so much disdain for him.
Box Office Mojo: In the beginning of the biography, you touch upon art and commerce—how there's no contradiction between the two. Was that Walt Disney's view?
Gabler: Absolutely. For most people, Walt symbolizes commercialism.
Box Office Mojo: He wasn't ashamed of it?
Gabler: No. By the same token, Walt would never have said he was doing something simply to make money—because he wasn't interested in making money [as an end in itself]. Walt became somewhat anti-intellectual in his later years because he was so attacked by intellectuals. His defense mechanism was, 'I'm going after them, I don't need all this intellectual crap,' it was immaterial to him.
Box Office Mojo: Was that why he was hated, because he was viewed as a capitalist by intellectuals who hated capitalism?
Gabler: Yes. But Walt couldn't have won that battle. If Walt had wanted to create art, which he did, then they'd say, 'oh, he's pretentious.' If Walt had said, no, I'm not gong to create art, I'm going to do things that appeal to [mass] audiences, then he'd be regarded as a blatant capitalist. It's a no-win situation in this culture. I regard Walt Disney as an artist. If you really pressed him to the wall, and he would have hated to admit this, he'd say, 'yeah, I am an artist,' and that's what my book is about. He made Snow White not to make money, not even to satisfy an audience; he wanted to satisfy himself and his own artistic ambitions.
Box Office Mojo: In the book's introduction, you write that "he was less original than quintessential … [that] he lived in the American experience and seemed to embody it in his doggedness, his idealism, his informality, and his lack of affectation, perhaps above all in his sudden rise from poverty and anonymity to the summit of success." Walt Disney was living the American Dream—?
Gabler: He was—and part of his genius, and I do regard him as a genius, though the book is not hagiography and I don't overlook his faults—the book includes warts and all—but part of his genius was this uncanny synchronicity between Walt Disney and America. And the synchronicity existed intuitively, naturally, because Walt was so fully American, in so many respects. He had the mind, the intuition and the taste of the average American. Now, average Americans don't have the talent Walt Disney had, but he was able to translate his own feelings, fears and ambitions into American aspirations and ambitions.
Box Office Mojo: What was the first Walt Disney motion picture you saw?
Gabler: Pinocchio. I know that because it was the first movie I ever saw in my life. It remained with me forever. I've revisited it many times since and I will make this claim, for which I will no doubt be attacked by those intellectuals who hate Walt Disney: that's the apex of animation art, in my estimation. But it's also one of the apexes of American art. If you want to look at the great works of American art, the very greatest works, and I'm talking about the greatest works of literature, fine art, music—Pinocchio ranks near the very summit of the greatest works of American art. Visually, it's beautifully drawn, it is thematically complex, it is emotional—though many people didn't find it emotional at the time of its release—it is just an extraordinary work of art. That is not Walt Disney's most popular film and there are many people who denigrate it, and who think Snow White is superior, or Dumbo is superior and simpler, but, to me, it's Pinocchio.
Box Office Mojo: What is the movie's theme?
Gabler: The same as virtually all the great animations. Walt made the same movie over and over and over again. Snow White is Pinocchio is Bambi is Dumbo. All the same movie. The essential theme is what it takes to become a fully integrated—socially and psychologically—human being. That's what Walt was interested in and that's why kids resonate with it—because it's about how children become fully integrated human beings. Snow White has to learn what it is to love, to form a sense of community, to accept responsibility, as she does in becoming the mother to the dwarves, and she even goes through a sexual initiation when the Prince kisses her—all of those things lead to her being able to usurp the previous generation and assume her role. Pinocchio is the same thing. He literally turns from wood to flesh because he learns about love and loyalty and responsibility and honesty and all of those [virtues] that make us human. Dumbo and Bambi are the same thing. That theme follows through these movies, even Cinderella, though I don't regard it as one of the classic animations. Even a movie like The Lion King would have fit very comfortably in the Walt Disney canon. It is Snow White, Dumbo, Bambi—it follows almost the exact contours as those films.
Box Office Mojo: Are there Walt Disney animated pictures that don't?
Gabler: Of Walt's films? Well, Fantasia's different because it has a different ambition to it. It's structurally different. Fantasia came at a point when Walt was tired of [the] narrative [approach], when he felt he'd gone about as far as he could go [with narrative], and there were new things to explore besides just narrative. Initially, when Walt was expanding the [animated] shorts, he got tired of gags, which was the fundamental constituent of animation. He thought gags have to be set into narratives and connected [to the story], then, he grew tired of those narrative connections to gags, and he made Snow White, which was a much more full-bodied narrative. The real suspense with Snow White was: is an audience going to cry? Will you get an audience to cry at animated drawings? After Snow White and Pinocchio he said, can we do something that breaks the mold? Can we do something non-narrative? Do we have to be tethered to this idea? Can't we go off in all sorts of directions? So, Fantasia goes off in all sorts of directions. But, more or less, they all fit the mold, whether it's Mulan, Tarzan or The Little Mermaid, which I think is the best of the modern Disney animations. That is a classic. They're about what it means to be human.
Box Office Mojo: You write that Walt Disney hated the animated character Goofy.
Gabler: Yes. He hated Goofy. He was always threatening to pull the plug on Goofy. I don't know exactly what it was—Walt seemed to think that Goofy was just stupid. For a man who loved realism, Goofy was the least realistic of the characters and the one who had the least realistic base, more so than even Donald Duck, who's heated and gets angry—he has human characteristics. But Goofy was just dumb, an imbecile, what's the human characteristic in him?
Box Office Mojo: As against Snow White's dwarf, Dopey, who Walt Disney said was not an imbecile—
Gabler: That's right. Not at all. Dopey is NOT an imbecile. There's an innocence to Dopey and a way of viewing the world that is actually quite charming but none of that in Goofy. He was always threatening to get rid of Goofy: 'why are we making these stupid Goofy cartoons?' Ultimately, he had to make them to keep the studio going because so much of what happens was make-work to keep the animators going. You have to pay the bills and Walt understood that.
Box Office Mojo: You're bursting some bubbles in this book with what Walt Disney thought of some treasured Disney characters and movies, such as Goofy, Lady and the Tramp and Sleeping Beauty.
Gabler: Walt wasn't all that interested in Sleeping Beauty. When I embarked on this project, I understood that Walt is so Protean that one could write five volumes. So how does one get the life into one volume? I'll tell you how I did it: follow Walt. Only follow Walt. Don't go off on Ward Kimball, Frank Thomas, Dick Nunis. Any time I give something short shrift, it's because Walt wasn't interested in it.
Box Office Mojo: It is not the history of the studio—
Gabler: No, it's not. It's a biography of Walt. You're right to make that distinction.
Box Office Mojo: Did he hate Jews, as some have claimed?
Gabler: No. He did not hate Jews.
Box Office Mojo: There's no evidence at all?
Gabler: There is no evidence whatsoever. I don't exculpate him completely from charges of anti-Semitism because, although he was not an anti-Semite, in the sense that he never made anti-Semitic slurs, he never said anything about Jews to anyone, he was associated with one group—the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, which was regarded as a viciously anti-Semitic organization. Walt never evinced any anti-Semitism but the reason I say I don't exculpate him entirely is because Walt knew—he must have known, he was way too sophisticated a man [not to have known]—that they were widely regarded as a group of anti-Semites and he willingly allowed himself to be associated with them, which is why he was regarded [by some] as an anti-Semite. I think people felt: if he's not an anti-Semite, then what's he doing with them? Why didn't he denounce them? Later, he did denounce them but not for their anti-Semitism. He felt they became sort of idiotic and extreme and he left the organization. But it was too late at that point for him to save his reputation in terms of this issue. But I do not believe that Walt Disney was an anti-Semite. He did not hate Jews. I don't think Walt Disney hated anybody. To the extent that he disliked anybody, he disliked people who did not fulfill his desires to accomplish the things he wanted to accomplish. Walt was an anti-communist, but he hired a communist to do a rewrite on Song of the South. The point is that Walt's interest was to realize his vision and if you didn't want to realize his vision, you were gone.
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Box Office Mojo: You raise Walt Disney's opposition to communism. It was genuine and it was, you write, grounded in reality; he was right that communists had infiltrated the labor union and he has been vindicated by history—
Gabler: Yes. Walt was not paranoid. When it came to the union, he was wrong in terms of the way he treated his employees in that period, but clearly Walt's idea that the communists were going to attack Walt Disney because Walt was a symbol of America and they wanted to get at him for that is true. To be balanced, that does not excuse some of the things Walt did, the way he treated Art Babbitt, who was not a communist, the way he got rid of employees who had gone on strike, most of whom were not communists, Walt could have managed this much, much better than he did. Walt was not a very good people wrangler when it came to the strike and he suffered for it.
Box Office Mojo: Did he testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee because of the strike?
Gabler: I believe he did. It wasn't vindictive, but it was definitely personal. Walt was a man who took everything personally. I don't think Walt was ideological—to his credit, in my estimation. Walt was an artist; he wasn't an ideologue. Walt worked for [left-wing Democratic President] Franklin Roosevelt in 1936. Walt didn't come to anti-communism with an ideological agenda. Walt came to anti-communism because the communists had ruined something that he loved and it was a personal fight for him. One of the things I like about Walt Disney, frankly, is that he hated the notion of billboard patriots. He hated the idea of people who were pious about religion and patriotism. If you're a patriot, be a patriot [was his attitude], don't go showing it and talking about it all the time. Walt didn't like that. That's a characterization of Walt people will find very different from what most people think. He's thought of as a rock-ribbed Republican, which he was, and as somebody who wore a flag on his lapel all the time—but that wasn't Walt Disney. He didn't have to do that. Ironically, if you look at his FBI file, there is a recurring theme that the FBI doubted Walt's patriotism because he had allowed his name to go on a letterhead in a tribute to Art Young, who was a left-wing artist, he had sent greetings to the Soviet Union on its anniversary, so there was some question as to whether Walt Disney was really patriotic. But Walt had a very congenial attitude.
Box Office Mojo: He made war propaganda movies—
Gabler: He did them but he was very hesitant. He said: 'I don't want to do propaganda. How are people going to think of me if they know my ambition is to fool them?' He wanted to do what he could to help the country during the war.
Box Office Mojo: There is a perception that Walt Disney was piously religious. Is that true?
Gabler: Totally wrong. The Religious Right cannot claim Walt Disney. Walt virtually never stepped into a church after his childhood. His father was a deacon at St. Paul's Congregational Church, which [Walt Disney] helped build in Chicago, and that church still stands two blocks from the house where Walt Disney was born, and while his father was deeply religious, Walt was not. He would take his daughters to Sunday school but he would never enter church. He never talked about religion. I think he felt uncomfortable dealing with explicit spirituality. The religion was in the animation, not in mouthing off about religious values.
Box Office Mojo: What's the biggest surprise about the response to your biography?
Gabler: There are several surprises, some of them pleasant. I know there are people who virtually revere Walt Disney as a deity, and I was worried that they would respond negatively to the book because I don't deify Walt Disney—nor do I demonize him—and I'm pleasantly surprised that those people have accepted the balance of the book, by and large. That's been a pleasant surprise. I'm unpleasantly surprised by the vestiges that we talked about earlier of the antagonism to Walt Disney that I thought was kind of gone—and they're still there, people criticizing the book because I take Walt Disney seriously. Don't I see that Walt Disney doesn't deserve this kind of attention? How deluded can I be? In this day and age, when the name Walt Disney is ubiquitous, yeah, I'm surprised at that. I think those people should have grown up by now. In one review my wife told me about—I don't read reviews—the guy spent a paragraph or two criticizing the subtitle of the book, saying how dare I say that Walt Disney is the American imagination. Frankly, that's ignorant. It's absolutely ignorant, but it also shocked me—that in this day and age somebody would criticize a subtitle of a book that deals with Walt Disney whose imagination is obviously so pervasive in America. How can one deny that? I mean, you may hate it, but you can't deny it. So, I am amazed at that.
Box Office Mojo: Did you try to limit the psychologizing?
Gabler: You're always nervous about psychologizing because you cannot get in someone else's head. Whether it's with Hollywood moguls or Walter Winchell or Walt Disney, I always try and light pedal that. That is, let the reader draw his own conclusions. Occasionally, you have to salt the book with certain ideas because you want to make sure that the theme does emerge. I always do that with a great deal of trepidation nevertheless I think everything I write in the book is validated by the life.
Box Office Mojo: What is your favorite live action Disney movie?
Gabler: This may surprise you but I really admire Pollyanna. Mary Poppins is the best, to me, of the combination animation/live action hybrid, that's a great movie, but Pollyanna, for what it is, is a surprisingly underrated movie. It has the reputation that it wallows in pathos and certainly the source material would lead one to believe that's where it's headed but there's a combination of tough-mindedness and sentimentality and it takes on small-minded hypocrisy and piety—it takes on religious piety—and it's very much about [achieving] a sense of community. And in the final analysis, it's a deeply moving film.
RELATED LINK
• Book: Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination
