by Neal Gabler
I also received encouragement and assistance from the community of Disney scholars—and it is a community. Virtually all of them offered to help, welcoming me into their ranks and sharing their interviews, their documents, their contacts, and their insights. I owe thanks to Michael Danley, Katherine and Richard Greene, J. B. Kaufman, Jeff Kurtti, Les Perkins, Alex Rannie, Rick Shale, and above all Paul F. Anderson, the editor and publisher of the indispensable Disney journal Persistence of Vision, who not only provided material from his own extensive archives and supplied his informed perspectives on various issues but gave me a personal guided tour of Walt Disney’s Los Angeles. I benefited greatly from his expertise and counsel.
In Marceline, Missouri, Kaye Malins escorted me through her house, which was once the Disney farmhouse, let me roam the acreage, and recounted Walt’s trips to the area. Dan Viets, another Disney scholar, not only accompanied me on my visit to Marceline but gave me a tour of Disney sites in Kansas City, from the old Disney house on Bellefontaine to the Laugh-O-Gram offices in the now-empty McConahy Building. Dan even pried a large piece of plywood off the McConahy door so we could stand, albeit precariously, in Walt’s old business quarters. Barbara Babbitt, Art Babbitt’s widow, pored through her photo collection to provide me with images of her husband.
I am also indebted to the many Disney employees, family members, and acquaintances who submitted to lengthy interviews or provided information. Of them I would single out for special thanks three individuals: the late Harry Tytle, who worked at the studio for over thirty years, most of them in an executive capacity, and kept a daily journal that he was kind enough to let me peruse; Diane Disney Miller; and again Roy E. Disney.
I have not tallied the number of archives and libraries I visited or with which I corresponded, including presidential libraries, local historical societies, and even church offices, though to list them all would take several pages at least. The staffs of each of them have my deepest gratitude. My own local library, the Amagansett Free Library in the sublime community of Amagansett, New York, filled dozens of requests for books with unflagging good cheer, often surprising me at how quickly the staff managed to locate even the most obscure volumes. For these efforts, and for not taking no for an answer, librarian Judith Wolfe deserves special praise.
A basic hardship of writing a book over the time it took me to write this one is financial. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation provided a fellowship that lifted that burden slightly. I am grateful for the honor and the stipend.
Over the years my friends have listened to me talk about Walt Disney, too kind to manifest the boredom they must have felt. Robert Solomon provided guidance; David Suter offered insights; Elizabeth Bassine read the manuscript with a keen eye; Bob Spitz, a superb biographer in his own right, commiserated, advised, and supported; Craig Hoffman gave me a place to stay in California, a substitute family, and unwavering moral support; Ann and Ed Dorr were another home-away-from-home on my many visits to Los Angeles when I was holed up in the archives; Marty Kaplan and my colleagues at the Lear Center at the University of Southern California provided intellectual sustenance; and Phil Rosenthal and Monica Horan were good friends during my extended stays.
At Alfred A. Knopf, my publishing home, my editor Jon Segal, with whom I have now done three books, was a model of old-fashioned stewardship. He read, he probed, he encouraged, he promoted and advocated, he lauded what he regarded as the book’s strengths and sought to have me correct what he saw as its deficiencies. His editing improved the book immeasurably. He was also uncommonly patient, appreciating how long it takes to gather data, especially when one does the research single-handedly, as I do, and to craft a book. Above all, he cared both about the quality of the book and about its fate. In a world of corporate implacability, one couldn’t ask for more.
I am also indebted to Jon’s assistant, Ida Giragossian, who once again performed so many thankless but necessary tasks and who served as wrangler in getting the manuscript through production; to Gabrielle Brooks, my publicist, who seems genuinely to love the books she champions, which is why her authors genuinely love her; to the incomparable Mel Rosenthal, who scrutinized the manuscript with his unfailing eye and engaged me in long, fruitful debates on style and grammar; to Soonyoung Kwon for her sensitive design of the book; and to Barbara de Wilde, who designed her third jacket for me with her usual inventiveness and brilliance. Finally, like everyone at Knopf, I am grateful to Sonny Mehta for the standards he sets and the support he provides. Anyone working at Knopf has some sense of the mission that the Disney animators felt in the studio’s heyday.
In my career I have only had one agent, which testifies to how wonderful my agent is professionally as well as how much I adore her personally. For twenty-five years now Elaine Markson has been a source of encouragement, reassurance, understanding, and calm. She reads acutely, she defends ferociously, she intervenes diplomatically, and she supports enthusiastically. I cannot imagine doing a book without her.
As much as this book has been the product of dozens if not hundreds of individuals, it finally belongs to my family, who often had to suffer through the research and writing of it and who certainly sacrificed for it. I hope they think that it was worth it since the gratitude I can extend to them—to my wife, Christina, my daughters Laurel and Tänne (to whom this book is dedicated), and my mother—is certainly insufficient. I love my work, but I live for them.
Needless to say, I take full responsibility for what appears on these pages, even though, like Walt Disney, I had an army of people to help. My profoundest hope is that I have justified their faith in me and in this project.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Neal Gabler is the author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, for which he won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History; Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named the nonfiction book of the year by Time magazine; and Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, which has been assigned on college campuses across the country. Mr. Gabler has been a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he is a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society at the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California. He was born in Chicago and lives with his wife in Amagansett, New York.
ALSO BY NEAL GABLER
Life the Movie:
How Entertainment Conquered Reality
Winchell:
Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity
An Empire of Their Own:
How the Jews Invented Hollywood
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2006 by Neal Gabler
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This book makes reference to various Disney copyrighted characters, trademarks, marks and registered marks owned by The Walt Disney Company and Disney Enterprises, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gabler, Neal.
Walt Disney : the triumph of the American imagination / Neal Gabler.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Disney, Walt, 1901–1966. 2. Animators—United States—Biography. I. Title.
NC1766.U52D5375 2006
791.43092—dc22
[B] 2006045257
eISBN: 978-0-307-26596-8
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