Neil Gabler
By Jeff Ayers, Seattle P.L. -- Library Journal, 10/15/2006
In his latest endeavor, Neal Gabler, the former movie reviewer for Sneak Previews on PBS and the author of Walter Winchell and the Culture of Gossip, tackles an American icon of the 20th century. Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (see review, LJ 10/01/06) is the result of seven years of research and writing, a complex and sensitive biography that illuminates a most complicated human being.
What inspired you to write about Disney?
[In my writing career,] I have taken it upon myself to examine segments of popular culture that have not been fully investigated by scholars, in part because they may not seem sufficiently serious or important on their face, though I think they help define our nation. That is what I tried to do in my first book, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. It is also what I tried to do in my biography of Winchell.
Walt Disney has obviously been written about, and there have been several popular biographies but no full-scale, fully annotated portrait. I wanted to plug that hole as a way of further understanding American culture by understanding Disney's life.
Your book is not sanctioned by the Disney Company, yet they granted you access to the archives. Can you explain how you reached that agreement?
I wouldn't have written it if either the Disney Company had refused cooperation or if the company had demanded to vet the manuscript. I had to be free to write unencumbered. After roughly 18 months, I was told that the company had decided to grant me access. When I went to Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, CA, to speak for the first time with the archivists and with Howard Green, the senior vice president of publicity and a Disney scholar in his own right, I wasn't given any provisos or made to jump through bureaucratic hoops. Howard's only injunction to me was to write a serious biography.
I was later told that Roy E. Disney, Walt's nephew, was perhaps the key that opened the door. He apparently felt that enough years had passed for a serious biography to be written, and I am very happy to say that he trusted me not to come with an agenda other than to tell Walt Disney's story as fully and as honestly as I could, warts and all.
Did your perception of Disney change over the course of the book's writing?
As I vicariously lived Walt's life, I was surprised by his obsessiveness, which is so at odds with the media image of genial “Uncle Walt.” Disney was, from virtually the time he was a teenager, a man possessed by a vision, a man who believed that he could ameliorate the hurts he felt he had suffered by constructing a more perfect world and then inhabiting it.
I was surprised, too, by the price he paid for his obsessiveness: the loneliness, the mental anguish, and the disappointments. He was anything but the happy, simple man we think of when we think of Walt Disney.
Do you think Disney would have been able to succeed in today's business world?
With the constraints of Wall Street, it's doubtful. Walt had only one guiding principle: that quality is the objective. If one produced quality, Walt was certain that the profits would follow. Sometimes they did; sometimes, as in Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi, they didn't. Unfortunately, quality is not the standard for most of today's businesses, and anyone with as little regard for the bottom line as Walt Disney would likely find himself booted from the company.
