I know of at least five authors who are hard at work even as I type these words on biographies of Walt Disney. My personal book shelf bulges with almost three dozen biographies of Walt, some of them published in foreign countries and never translated into English and some of them “juvenile” biographies meant for younger readers.
However, nearly four decades after Walt Disney’s death, I still highly recommend WALT DISNEY:AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL by Bob Thomas as a fair and accurate view of the life of the great Imagineer.
While his daughter Diane Disney Miller claims that “my father was not a complicated man”, biographers are still intrigued by this deceptively simple man who each person he touched saw him somewhat differently than others.
Walt Disney so feared a biography about him while he was alive that rumors that one was in the works prompted him in 1956 to sit for a series of intensive interviews with his daughter Diane and writer Thornton “Pete” Martin (a feature writer and associate editor for Saturday Evening Post who had proven himself a “friendly” writer about celebrities especially with his popular “I Call on…” series) so that Diane could write a series of eight articles about Walt’s life for Saturday Evening Post. These installments proved so popular that they were later re-edited and combined into a book, THE STORY OF WALT DISNEY published by Holt in 1957 with a paperback edition from Dell in 1959 and at least three foreign editions. In the early days of Disneyland, a person could have purchased an autographed copy of the hardcover for less than five dollars. (Personally autographed by both Walt and Diane.) For many years, this was the only biography of Walt Disney available.
Bob Thomas wrote a “juvenile biography” of Walt entitled WALT DISNEY-MAGICIAN OF THE MOVIES published by Grosset and Dunlap in 1966. Walt provided four lengthy interviews to Thomas in the preparation for that biography. (Thomas had previously written a book with Walt Disney’s co-operation entitled THE ART OF ANIMATION which was used to publicize the production of SLEEPING BEAUTY which was released in 1959. Thomas had the opportunity to learn exactly the Disney approach to animation and the history of the studio through countless interviews with animators, composers, directors and more. That original book is still much more impressive than the later editions in the 1990s to hype BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and HERCULES.)
After Walt’s death, the first unofficial and controversial book biography of Walt Disney appeared in 1968 from Simon and Schuster, THE DISNEY VERSION: The Life,Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney by Richard Schickel. It was the first biography of Walt to paint him in darker tones as a difficult man and hard taskmaster at times. Schickel was a film critic for LIFE magazine and later TIME magazine (beginning in 1972) as well as a film historian and author of several books.
“Asked late in life what he was proudest of, Disney did not mention smiling children or the promulgation of family values. “The whole damn thing,” he snapped, “the fact that I was able to build an organization and hold it.” Richard Schickel observed: “These were not the sentiments of anyone’s uncle – except perhaps Scrooge McDuck.”
Bob Thomas in 1976 commented: “There was some mix-up. Schickel wanted to do a biography. Somebody gave him the wrong answers and then when he was not given access to the studio, he decided to write an anti-Disney book. He went to all the ex-employees who were disgruntled. He dwelled on Freudian aspects, claiming that the Disney films were obsessed with baby bottoms and that they scare children. He was purportedly writing a biography, but it was a denial of truth in advertising.”
Schickel at one time was a journalist associated with Life magazine and he had toured the Disney Studios in that capacity and even had lunch with Walt himself. According to Schickel, Walt himself told the writer to contact READER’S DIGEST who was interested in doing a biography of Walt. After Disney’s death, he was denied access to information from the company so he was forced to develop independent sources. When the book was published, Schickel was denied access to Disney screening rooms even though he was a respected tilm critic.
“I wanted to do an independent, objective book. I don’t consider it an assault. In many respects, I gave Disney high marks,” Schickel commented. (When the third edition was printed in 1996, Schickel wrote a new foreword where he acknowledges that some of his assessments were too harsh and he was too swayed by academic pretensions but that basically the book presents a positive image of Walt overall.)
Schickel’s book was immediately met by outrage at the Disney Company who were upset at many of the opinions and the fact that other than Diane’s long out-of-print biography of her father, it was the only Walt Disney biography available to the general public.
After Walt’s death, the Disney Company had a number of writers begin work on a Walt biography over the years but none of the results were satisfactory to the management. Finally, Card Walker who was then President of the Walt Disney Productions started thinking about Bob Thomas who had a reputation as a strong writer and fair-minded reporter who had worked on covering the Hollywood scene since 1944 and who more importantly had frequently interviewed Walt.
Thomas was the reporter whom Walt drove in a Nash rambler through the dry riverbed of Adventureland as Walt described what future guests would see along the bank. Thomas still recalls that during that experience Walt was such an enthusiastic storyteller that Thomas could actually “see” what was going to be on the Jungle Cruise instead of the dusty, unplanted ditch that actually existed at the time.
At a cocktail party in 1973 at UCLA (where both Walker and Thomas had attended college), Walker ran into Thomas and told him that if anyone could write a fair biography of Walt that Thomas was the one to do it. Although the book contract was negotiated by a Disney executive, Thomas declared himself a free agent. He requested that the book not be labeled an “official” biography. Thomas informed the Disney Company that he would write neither a hatchet job nor a whitewash but try to capture an accurate depiction of the Walt Disney as a human being. So this was the first time that the world learned of Walt’s nervous breakdowns and his getting tipsy at his wedding anniversary at Disneyland before the park officially opened and the frightening last weeks with cancer. Thomas was given complete freedom to write the story of Walt Disney as he saw it.
The Disney family as well as the Disney Company extended its complete cooperation and Thomas had full access to documents, records and personnel, something that had never been given to anyone outside the family or company let alone many who actually worked for the Disney Company. When it came time to view the completed manuscript, only a few points of fact were corrected and at the family’s request no mention was made of Sharon Disney Lund being adopted.
Thomas wrote the book on weekends and vacations while still maintaining his regular schedule of four articles and two columns a week for Associated Press. Unlike his other books, Thomas adopted an uncharacteristic storyboard style of organizing the material and went through three drafts before he was satisfied. Roughly, it took him almost three years to research and write the book.
“Each life is different, each subject requires a different approach,” Thomas explained in an interview in 1976 with the Los Angeles Times, “Garson Kanin once told me that all my books deal with power. Thalberg, Cohn, Selznick, Hughes-all had tremendous power of a kind that is virtually nonexistent today. Disney, too. Some see him as a political conservative, some see him as a benefactor of mankind, some as a benevolent despot, some as the tyrant of the studio. The truth is somewhere in between as it most often is. With Walt, his daughter Diane told me that he once said he pitied his biographers because he had lived such a dull life. I found myself going into the creative aspects of his life to try and explain where his creativity came from, how it worked.”
And so, in 1976, Simon and Schuster released WALT DISNEY: AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL (which was revised and updated in 1994). As we celebrate Walt Disney’s birthday, it is a good time to take the Thomas book off the shelf yet again and enjoy a “good read” from someone who knew Walt and someone who gathered information from people who knew and worked with Walt. With all the biographies on Walt that have appeared since 1976 and all the ones being worked on, no one has yet matched the accessible writing style and informative, straight-forward presentation of the life and times of Walt as this book by Bob Thomas.