Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (2006) by Neal Gabler

Walt Disney is an American icon. In Neal Gabler’s award-winning biography, “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination,” the legendary animator and his eponymous company come to life.

A Mid-Westerner by birth and disposition, the author suggests that Disney was forever chasing the idealized vision of his brief boyhood home in Marceline, Missouri. “Marceline would always be the touchstone of the things and values he held dear; everything from his fascination with trains and animals to his love of drawing to his insistence on community harked back to the years he spent there.” In many ways, Gabler writes, Disneyland’s Main Street USA, with its street trolley and town square, is a re-imagination of the Marceline of his youth.

Disney is an unusual character in the American pantheon. His most lasting legacy is the multi-billion dollar Walt Disney Corporation and when he died in 1966 he possessed a net worth of roughly $20 million from a 14% stake in his company (about $160 million in 2019 dollars but a share that would be worth roughly $25 billion today), but he was neither a sagacious businessman nor a bon vivant (he drove a used Mercedes in his later years). One of the most interesting things about “Walt Disney” is how poorly his studio performed for decades on end. Some of the most memorable Disney productions, including Pinocchio, Bambi, Dumbo, Alice in Wonderland, and Sleeping Beauty, actually lost significant money. The studio survived, year-after-year, on a steady diet of Bank of America loans and corporate layoffs.

One of the more disappointing aspects of Gabler’s detailed treatment of Disney’s career is the lack of details concerning the Disney business enterprises. For instance, the author breaks down the income generated by Disney’s highly diversified operations just once, that for the year 1958 when 38% of revenue was generated by films, 28% from television, 21% from Disneyland, and 13% from merchandise and royalties. One gets the sense that Gabler was as disinterested in the details of Disney Inc. as Walt Disney was himself, who left financial operations almost entirely in the hands of his big brother, Roy. (Disney once famously quipped: “Roy, we’ll make the pictures, you get the money!”)

That leads to another interesting question about Disney: just where exactly did his genius lie? He was certainly no business or managerial genius. He was an animator of middling talent. By his own admission, he was a poor judge of men. Besides Mickey Mouse, the Disney studios created few of their most well-known characters. What Disney brought to the table, according to Gabler, was a gift for storytelling and an unwavering commitment to excellence. He possessed “a near-religious commitment to greatness,” Gabler writes. For much of his career, no detail was too small for his discerning eye. He was “the Boss” of the Disney enterprise. No decision was final until he said it was.

On the personal side of things, Gabler describes Disney as a doting father to his two daughters (one of whom was adopted) and a loyal husband. He chain-smoked and drank – sometimes heavily in his later years – but otherwise led a modest and upright life. Politically speaking, Disney was a “rock-ribbed Republican,” according to Gabler, an anti-communist who supported Nixon over Kennedy in 1960 and defiantly wore a Barry Goldwater lapel pin to the White House when he received the Medal of Freedom from President Lyndon Johnson.

Disney emerges triumphant in Gabler’s narrative, but “Walt Disney” is no hagiography. Touchy and controlling, the author concedes that his subject was “over-bearing, mercurial, ungrateful, and impossible to please.” If one of his managers began to gain notable clout within the company he would be summarily dismissed. There was only one big shot at Walt Disney – and that man was Walt Disney. Indeed, with the exception of the very early years at the studio, which Gabler describes as “cult-like,” Walt Disney Studios does not come across as the type of place one would want to work. Long hours, intense pressure, frequent layoffs, and a domineering boss, life working for Walt Disney was not easy.

I found many similarities between Walt Disney and Steve Jobs, another famously prickly man committed to product excellence. What made both men and their companies great was the ability to consistently deliver a superior product experience, whether that experience is a cartoon, a mobile phone, a feature-length movie, a retail store, or an amusement park. Both Disney and Jobs possessed a genius of a different sort. The ability to know what consumers wanted even before they did themselves.

In the end, perhaps that greatest thing Walt Disney ever created was Walt Disney. Gabler’s closing assessment is worth quoting at length. “He was a Horatio Alger hero whose life demonstrated social mobility. He was a naïve artist whose work demonstrated a Jamesian unpretentiousness and common sense. He was a visionary whose plans demonstrated the breadth of American imagination and the power of American will. And however he behaved privately at his studio, he was publicly a modest, affable, and decent man whose image demonstrated America’s own decency and generosity of spirit.”