Defending
Walt Disney
Former Disney Film Narrator
The Venom of His Adversaries t's hard for the normal, well-adjusted individual to understand the sheer viciousness of the attacks on Walt Disney over the years. Most who saw it developing in the fifties have watched it grow to the almost absurd level it has attained in the nineties with something close to astonishment. There doesn't seem to be any genuine basis for it. The attacks are almost always emotional, without foundation, and completely contrived. After having spent two generations digging into Disney's life to find something ugly to use against him, and failing, his attackers have now resorted to outright lies.
Of all the ugly anti-Disney books that have come out during the past forty years, a piece of lard called Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince by someone named Marc Eliot is by far the most scurrilous and offensive. It is so manifestly vicious in its intent and so completely without value in its factual content that if it weren't so widely circulated it wouldn't be worth mentioning at all. And that wide circulation has not been the result of public acceptance. On the contrary, sales of this book have been virtually nonexistent, even with its heavy promotion. In spite of this widespread public rejection, however, it has been thrust in our faces with an almost missionary zeal by the intellectual community. In every library that I have researched, there are more copies of this disgraceful book than any other work on Walt Disney. In many, it is the only biography on the shelves. Check your own library and see for yourself. There is certainly nothing in the way of public demand to justify this. Nor does the book's content represent anything of honest value. It is liberal activism, plain and simple.
As a nonfiction writer myself, the most puzzling question to me is how someone can get away with publishing outright lies. I know from experience how an editor will challenge an author on the tiniest point of fact, especially in a book dealing with specific individuals where the potential for libel or personal harm is so great. Assertions made by the author must be documented. Stated facts must be proved. An author has to demonstrate to his editor that claims he makes are accurate and correct. It is impossible, therefore, to understand how a book like Hollywood's Dark Prince, with one brazen lie after another, could ever get past an honest editor and be published. A substantial part of the book is pure fiction, simply made up, without even the grain of truth that might impel the rumors by which a sloppy and unprofessional writer might be excused. The book makes several preposterous statements out of thin air. The "evidence" it cites for these farfetched claims is so obviously phony that a child must surely be able to see through it. It begins on the dust jacket, which boldly proclaims, "Now, for the first time, Marc Eliot presents the real Walt Disney . . ." followed by a list of new and shocking disclosures about the scandalously fraudulent Disney that would make the National Enquirer pale.
But let's draw up a little and think about this for a minute. For once we will refuse to play the Madison Avenue game with the media and let everything flow in unchallenged. As soon as we do, the absurdity of these statements becomes clear. Is it really believable, for example, to suppose that such sensational facts about Walt Disney--if they were true--could have gone undiscovered for so many years? We are forced to presume that they have been hidden away, escaping the notice of all the previous Disney critics who have tried to find some skeleton in the closet, waiting for a sharp investigator like Marc Eliot to ferret them out.
How they were ferreted out, however, is not explained. Now that we have paused, and are beginning to think about what we are reading, we can barely suppress a snicker as the author's credentials for writing this book are stated. Did he once work in the Disney organization or have some personal firsthand knowledge of the subject he writes about? No. Has he been collaborating with someone who does have such firsthand information? No. Does he name knowledgeable persons, or other reliable sources for his facts and information? No, not a single one. The dust jacket tells us that Marc Eliot, an unknown writer whose previous work has been limited to insights on rock groups, is competent to write this biography because he spent "four years researching the life of Walt Disney."
Four years? Researching?
Since nowhere in the book is this "research" defined, we are left wondering. As a writer myself who has observed the habits of many other writers, I have seen the concept of "research" cover a wide range of dalliances. It is a less-than-specific term. It does not help us understand where Marc Eliot's information has come from. But a hint is given as the jacket notes conclude. They say that Eliot "interviewed dozens of Disney's professional associates as well as friends and relations, some of whom have never before cooperated with a Disney biographer."
Dozens?
How many dozens? Two? Three? There couldn't be too many. After all, most of the people who knew anything about Walt Disney have long since been gone. There just aren't that many dozens still around. Let's say it was four. That means that the author's effort amounted to about twelve interviews a year. Or one a month. That could hardly be called exhaustive research. Even if we double the dozens, which logistically isn't possible because there aren't that many people left to interview, we still come up with a mere two interviews a month. Evidently, during his four years of research, Mr. Eliot didn't feel the need to work every day.
One would think that in four years a writer would at least get Disney's immediate family members straight. Eliot tries to tell his readers that Walt Disney was an awful father and rejected his real daughter Sharon because he "found it impossible to pay full attention to both his imaginary new daughter, Snow White, and his real-life one. He made his priorities clear," claims the intrepid Eliot, "By staying away from home for days at a time."
Not only is that statement untrue, but Sharon was not Walt's real daughter, a fact that even a pedestrian effort would have revealed to a writer who was honestly researching a biography. Sharon was adopted, and extremely loved. The Disneys took her into their family some five years after the birth of their only biological daughter, Diane, when Lillian was convinced that she would be unable to have more children. It is curious (and perhaps telling) that Bob Thomas, the former Disney animator who undertook a semiofficial biography* after Walt's death, intentionally avoided mentioning in his book that Sharon was adopted. He did this out of respect for Lillian who asked him not to do so. Both Walt and Lillian were very sensitive to Sharon's feelings and Lillian was especially careful to make sure that Sharon was treated no differently from Diane. In the beginning, both parents were very proud of their adopted daughter but in later years, Lillian went out of her way to give the impression that their two daughters were natural sisters to protect Sharon's feelings.
The curious part is that Bob Thomas' book, which gives no indication that Sharon was adopted, is the only authoritative research source that would give someone the notion that Sharon was Walt's real daughter. This is precisely the idea one would gain if he read Bob Thomas' book and looked no further. One cannot avoid the suspicion that this is exactly what Eliot did. Then, without bothering to check any other facts, proceeded to fill in "disclosures" from the vast resources of his rich imagination.
Walt genuinely loved children and animals. Corny as it sounds, it was no myth, as all of Hollywood knew. And he loved his own two little girls most of all. Stories of the showering indulgence of his daughters would become legion in the movie community. It would be a mistake to object too strongly to Walt's corniness, as most of his detractors have traditionally done. It was a fundamental part of his nature. Disney was a corny, average kind of guy. A large part of his universal appeal stemmed from the fact that he was not "streetwise and Yiddish," as Marc Eliot feels he and his films should have been.* He was a lot like most of the rest of us. He was Kansas City-farm boy real, a traditional downhome Anglo-Saxon Protestant, who shared the loftiest dreams of most of America and knew how to express them. His detractors, who are far from real, have never understood that. And while they continue to analyze his motives and try in vain to duplicate his appeal, most of the public still remembers the Disney magic and intuitively senses that Hollywood's instincts and Disneys did not spring from the same source.
It is doubtful that anyone has really taken this book seriously. Consider the "friends and relations" cited
as the sources for the startling "new information" about the real Walt Disney. Not one of these people is named. One wonders why these "friends" and "relations" have kept silent so long. And what was it about this unknown writer that made them break their lifelong silence and tell all they knew?
It is also difficult to imagine a person who would say such ugly things about a friend or relation, true or not. It is precisely this kind of moronic premise on which Eliot's entire book is based that makes it so entirely ludicrous. Not only is none of it true -- not even a grain of it -- but logically, it simply could not be. And the most naive reader must surely be able to see through its amateurish contentions.
Yet the lies it puts forth are worth examining. The author dredges the very bilges of his imagination to go all out and call Disney names. One of Eliot's new revelations is the absurd and laughable contention that Walt Disney was a drunk. An alcoholic. Eliot actually expects us to believe this.
Walt Disney was not opposed to a social drink now and then. And, like many of us, there were instances on very rare occasion when he had more than a single drink. But Disney was the furthest thing in the world from a drunk. It is true that in his later life, he did fall into the nightly habit of one or two drinks at the end of a long day. But those drinks were administered by the studio nurse, along with badly needed massage therapy to ease the excruciating pain of an old neck injury that by this time had become nearly constant. While Disney was known to indulge in a social drink on occasions, no secret has ever been made of it and anyone who knew him would break out in wheezing laughter at the suggestion that Walt Disney was a drunk.
Equally side-splitting is this dishonest author's feeble attempts to portray the straight-laced Disney as a womanizer. In the many decades that his detractors have been digging into his background, trying to find something to use against him, this is the first time anyone has had the temerity to suggest such a thing. Eliot even goes so far as to provide a photograph of Walt sitting at what appears to be a restaurant table with someone called Delores Del Rio and captioned, "Who was rumored to have been his lover." Shadows of others sitting at the table can barely be seen in the shot but the people who are casting them have been judiciously cropped out to give the appearance that Walt and this Ms. Del Rio are sitting alone.
But wait! In a later chapter the author attempts to convince us that Disney was impotent! And that he, the author, was somehow privy to everything that went on in Disney's bedroom. Surely Disney couldn't be both, a womanizer and impotent. The writer quotes as his source for his intimate and hitherto unrevealed bedroom information "A close friend of the Disney family." It really is an affront to the reader's intelligence.
But nothing in this book is aimed at intelligence. As illustrated by a truly pathetic contrivance of half truths and dangling documents intended to portray a link between Walt Disney and some sinister activity with the FBI. There is also a segment purporting to prove that Disney was not born in Chicago at all but was actually the illegitimate son of a peasant girl in Spain. The only thing lacking in this book is a segment proving that Disney is currently having a homosexual affair with Elvis in the great beyond.
But by this time we're about laughed out and the book has degenerated to the comic book mentality of those who created it. It really should have been saddle-stitched on newsprint and placed on a rack with the Green Hornet.
It is interesting that the one animator whom Walt employed in the early years of the studio who turned out to be, by virtually every peer opinion, a petty and offensive troublemaker and subsequently shown to being a Marxist disrupter, is the one man that this book holds to be the hero of the early Disney years.
Here is revisionist writing at its best. Arthur Babbitt, the admitted Marxist and misfit in the Disney organization, has never been described as a superior talent, even by those who have attempted to eulogize him. While Babbitt was a reasonably skilled animator his abilities were not exceptional compared to the others at the studio and his accomplishments were few. They amounted to the development of the character Goofy, a few barely remembered shorts* and one scene each in two Disney films. No lists of legendary animators at the Disney studio has ever included Babbitt. Babbitt would probably be relegated to a page or two about Goofy and a few minor footnotes if it hadn't been for his unbelievable arrogance and defiance of everything Disney stood for. Babbitt was, by every account of those who worked with him, a wining, disloyal and offensive little troublemaker who bit the hand that fed him. His arrogance and pettiness finally consumed him and he died a very young age of cancer after leaving the Disney studio on his own.
Arthur Babbitt is portrayed in this fictitious book as the greatest, most valuable employee Disney ever retained. The author completely rewrites Babbitt and has him as the most gifted animator, the most trustworthy and courageous artist ever employed at the studio.
As any one of a dozen early accounts of the Disney studios will verify, Babbitt was none of these things. He was, in fact, quite the opposite. It would be difficult to fully articulate the animator's ineffectuality, although Bob Thomas, one of Disney's original animators, comes close without identifying "the animator" by name. Out of a sense of decency for the deceased and matters long past, Thomas, along with most of the other Disney people who have written of those years have avoided naming the man who so openly shamed himself at the studio. Walt Disney fired Babbitt after the ugliness was over, and no one blamed him. Even the Babbitt sympathizers of today admit that you cannot call your employer ugly names in public and scream vexations against everything he stands for and retain his goodwill. But because the episodes occurred in the context of a union dispute, the artist was forcibly reinstated to his previous job by the National Labor Relations Board and the Disney people had to take him back, like it or nor. No one did. He had become an outcast in the organization, shunned by everyone. No one really understood why he wanted his job back. Surely he knew that while his pay checks continued, his effective career in the Disney organization was over.
Yet, for all of this, Marc Eliot tells us that "Babbitt was the most intellectual of Disney's animators and probably the most singularly talented, responsible for many of the classic and classiest moments in Disney features, including the renown Chinese mushroom dance from Fantasia." In fact, Babbitt's most significant distinction in the Walt Disney Corporation was being the man who nearly closed the studio down for good. Perhaps this alone is reason for the likes of Marc Eliot to hold him in high esteem.
This sorry excuse for a biography, published by a New York firm calling itself Carol Publishing Group, represents a new level of disgrace by the established press. It is a willful concoction of lies, and a viciously motivated one at that. And I challenge the Carol Publishing Group to sue me if that statement is not true.
But while the intensity of lies is new, the malicious spirit behind them is not. And this spirit is the fulcrum of events on which light must be shed. This is what must be looked at and understood. Recent history shows that Marc Eliot's mercifully non-selling book is a part of a trend of material to not only demean Walt Disney, but to rewrite history for the upcoming generations and deny that the magic he created ever existed. There seems to be a concerted attempt to expunge it from our memory and claim it was all a myth.
The question that needs to be examined is why.
More will follow.
Email comments to the author: tooneyma@yahoo.com
* Walt Disney: An American Original: Simon & Schuster, N. Y. 1976
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* Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince P. 199. Eliot unabashedly adds that among the other shortcomings of Disney's animated films was their failure to measure up to the Warner Brothers cartoons, which were "generously overlaid with sexual innuendo" and, according to the streetwise Eliot, what audiences really wanted. (All of this comes just a few paragraphs before Eliot tickles our funnybone with the straightfaced and completely serious assertion that Disney began each morning with "his breakfast of choice: fresh doughnuts dunked in scotch." Surely his editor was holding his sides by this time. If only Disney's previous attackers could have known about this, they could have exposed him much sooner!)
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* Does anyone recall The Country Cousin? Babbitt's level of talent in comparison to the other animators is illustrated in his failure to successfully develop the dwarf Dopey for Snow White. The little character was ultimately given to Fred Moore, one of Disney's top-level animators and the differences in skill between the two artists can readily be seen in their respective drawings (shown below).
Arthur Babbitt's unsuccessful attempts to create the dwarf Dopey for Snow White. The character was finally assigned to Fred Moore who succeeded in giving the little dwarf the qualities Walt was looking for. (below)
Fred Moore's drawings give a striking example of the exceptional ability of Disney's top animators. Here, the little dwarf gained a playful childlike quality and the illusion of actual life that Babbitt was unable to capture. While Arthur Babbitt was certainly a competent artist, he has never been viewed as one of Disney's outstanding talents.
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