One man and his mouse
On the 100th anniversary of Walt Disney's birth, Mark Steyn looks at his legacy
Mickey and Minnie Mouse made their screen debuts 63 years ago in an obscure silent short called Plane Crazy, a quickie Lindbergh cash-in whose only claim to fame is that it briefly played as the supporting feature to the very first talkie, Warner Brothers' The Jazz Singer.
That set the tone for Walt Disney's relationship with Hollywood: for most of his life, he was a pipsqueak supporting player to the big boys: the real moguls were the brothers Warner, Harry Cohn, Louis B. Mayer, Daryl Zanuck . . . Great names all, but today just sepia photographs on commissary walls. Only Disney endures as a brand, and only Walt endures as a mogul. Thirty-five years after he was (according to which version you prefer) either cremated or cryogenically frozen, the statue of the man and his mouse still greet visitors at the entrance to Disney World in Florida. Behind him sprawls a drained swamp twice the size of Manhattan, in which in the decades since his death all his craziest dreams have gradually come true, from Epcot — the Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow — to the 'utopian community' Celebration, a Disney town you can actually live in, where every home is wired to a fibre-optic network you can order groceries on and have your vital signs monitored round the clock by the town's health agency.
True, there have been innovations here and there of which he would not approve: the annual Gay Day, for example, for which Disney World throws opens its gates to gay and lesbian families and allows its stars to cast off their sham press-office relationships and emerge from the Hollywood closet. Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck walk around arm in arm, and so do Mickey and Donald. If that's not enough to cause meltdown in Uncle Walt's Frigidaire, then don't forget the Disney movie Priest, in which the eponymous hero is a very active homosexual, and Powder, the first Disney film to be directed by a convicted paedophile. But so what? The business was always full of types Walt didn't care for — Jews and Commies and relatives. Gay mallards notwithstanding, if the avuncular weirdsmobile isn't directing operations from inside his icebox, he might just as well be.
To today's children, that welcoming statue is a bit of a puzzle: he's no longer the familiar TV uncle he was to their parents and grandparents, the Mouseketeer generations who grew up with him week after week on ABC. His was the first studio — in 1954 — to cut a TV deal, mainly for the promotional benefits. Today, Disney owns ABC, as well as the Disney Channel, and Radio Disney ('We're All Ears!'), the 24-hour network for pre-teens who feel the need to sing along to favourites from Pocahontas at two in the morning. Walt invented the animated feature in 1937 (Snow White), and the modern theme park in 1955 (Disneyland). He invented, in a word, synergy — or, in another word, convergence. In the Nineties and the Oughts, the merger men at Sony and AOL Time Warner cooked up the labels and made a big hooha about it, but Walt had been doing it decades ago. The original blockbuster promotional spin-off? The Mickey Mouse watch: Ingersoll were selling two million a year by the mid-Thirties.
The Mickey Mouse watch was cheap, and so was Walt. He paid peanuts and got hit monkeys ('Now I'm the king of the swingers/The jungle VIP . . .'), and so his most famous creation became the only film star to do additional duty as a term of disparagement: Mickey Mouse money, a Mickey Mouse operation. Today, the Mickey Mouse operation takes in around $4 billion per annum, and Disney itself is a term of contempt, an easy shorthand for American cultural imperialism in all its venal, plastic, hollow, grinning indestructibility. Disney embodies everything the antiAmerican Euro-elites loathe about America, not just the general chirpiness but all the details, like the cupcake brassieres in The Little Mermaid. If Osama bin Laden wasn't such a loser, he'd have played up that angle. Among the many revealing items uncovered at an abandoned alQa'eda training camp near Jalalabad the other day was this application letter from Damir Bajrami, a Kosovo Albanian: 'I am interested in suicide operations. I have Kosovo Liberation Army combat experience against Serb and American forces. I need no further training. I recommend suicide operations against parks like Disney.'
To be a name brand in Jalalabad, that would have impressed Walt. From the earliest days, it was always about the franchise. He provided Mickey's voice for the first few years, but he never drew him, even in Plane Crazy and Steamboat Willie. He'd begun sketching at the age of seven, in Marceline, Missouri, in a household that lacked pens and sketchbooks and so obliged him to make do with coal on toilet paper. But he was never more than an indifferent draughtsman and after 1920, when he hooked up with another aspiring commercial artist called Ub Iwerks, he was shrewd enough to leave the visuals to his partner. According to Walt's version, he dreamt up Mickey Mouse heading back to Hollywood by train in 1928 and suddenly remembering a little mouse who used to live in his office in Kansas City. According to the Iwerks account (supported by the Disney archives), it was Ub who invented Mickey, though with Walt standing over his shoulder. Iwerks never got credit for his creation, the first in a long line of disgruntled artists, writers and musicians to discover that at Disney billing was reserved for Walt and the stars — Mickey, Goofy, Pluto, Scrooge McDuck. Iwerks and Disney were both Midwestern farmboys, both born in 1901, but lwerks's centenary passed without notice and Walt's on 5 December will prompt the equivalent of Royal jubilees from Disneyland to EuroDisney to Tokyo Disney.
To judge from almost everyone I've ever met who had any dealings with him, Walt was not a likeable man. He was beaten by his father, ignored by his mother, and came to the conclusion he must have been adopted, which he wasn't. From the age of 16, he spent years searching for his 'real' mother,
refusing to believe it was the woman who'd treated him so coldly back in Marceline. Later, after he married, his wife was so concerned about his low sperm count that she insisted he submit to various treatments, including packing his genitals in ice for hours at a time. By the time he eventually impregnated her, he was so sick of the ghastly business that, for their second child, he insisted they adopt. Given that the western world has signed over its offspring en masse to Disney's cultural care, it's worth considering what role all this played in his work. According to the psychobiographers, Walt's inability to acknowledge Ub Iwerks as Mickey's real father stems from his confusion and anxiety about who his own parents really were.
Oh. well. What's more important than who created him is why they did. Disney's first cartoon character was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, but he got outmanoeuvred and lost all the rights. That's why Walt was on that westbound train, returning from a humiliating meeting in New York and determined that it would never happen again. With his brother Roy running the administrative side and Iwerks and others handling the artwork, Walt was free to be a visionary, and in this he had no peer. He makes the fellows at MGM and Paramount look like nickel-and-dime car salesmen. He saved on source material, preferring outof-copyright works from the Old World, dark European fairytales that he jollied up for the American market. If getting rich by airbrushing Grimm seems obvious now, it wasn't then. Along the way, he produced some landmarks — the lovely, flowing_ graceful animation of Snow White, unsurpassed before or since; the vernal awakening in Bambi, its beauty freighted by death and danger (though it's not an anti-hunting film: the salient point about Bambi's mom is that she gets shot out of season). There was a ton of fine songs, from 'Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?' (a great anthem of the Depression) to 'When You Wish Upon A Star' (a hymn to the boundlessness of the American dream: 'When your heart is in your dream/No request is too extreme') to Peggy Lee and Dave Barbour's wonderful score for Lady and the Tramp. And, of course, there was a vast accumulation of marketable characters, though few of them bother with screen work these days. Minnie and Daisy long ago joined Liz Taylor in that select group of stars who no longer need to do anything so tiresome as making movies.
But for those who think Walt made no difference, consider the two decades between his death in 1966 and 8 June 1984, the day before Donald Duck's 50th birthday. As the middle-aged quack was working the crowds at Rockefeller Center, Saul Steinberg, a much feared man on Wall Street in the Eighties, announced a hostile takeover bid for Disney. The would-be corporate raider of Walt's lost ark intended to break up the empire, sell the studio, and run the theme parks himself. The company hadn't had a real hit since The Love Bug in 1969, and, after 15 years, Herbie the Volkswagen had exhausted every conceivable sequel except Herbie Has His PassengerSide Airbag Removed. To see off Steinberg, Roy E. Disney, widely derided as the archetypal Hollywood 'idiot nephew', fronted a boardroom revolt that removed Walt's son-in-law, brought in Michael Eisner and transformed the company. Eisner restored the animated feature as the Disney signature, with Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King stacking up profits Dumbo and Pinocchio could never dream of. After the Herbie years, Disney became a global behemoth mostly by returning to Walt's priorities.
The central thoroughfare of Disneyland is 'Main Street USA', an evocation of the clapboard and brick storefronts of a thousand small American towns. Walt's Main Street is a replica of the one from back home in Marceline, but he told the builders to make everything — every brick, shingle and gas lamp — exactly five-eighths normal size. He also insisted that every exterior level be smaller than the one below it, so that the stretched perspective would make adults walking down the street feel like children, without them ever quite being able to figure out why. Today, it's not just families but honeymooners and retirees who take their vacations at Disney World. That's Uncle Walt's great achievement: he literally distorted our sense of childhood. In Europe, those dark stories of stunted creatures deep in the forest were primal fears to outgrow and escape. In Walt's retelling, childhood became a world you could live in for ever. Which, from the company's point of view, makes a lot more commercial sense. Go back to '28: Warner Brothers made movies, Walt made a Disney world.
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