Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince is a biography by Marc Eliot, about the darker side of entertainer Walt Disney. Among the serious character flaws and deeds of Disney's of which Eliot claims are his life-long anti-Semitism (including a deleted scene from the 1933 Silly Symphony Three Little Pigs in which the Big Bad Wolf dresses as a Jewish peddler), his covert employment by the House Un-American Activities Committee as a spy against Communists in Hollywood, intense right-wing politics (claiming he wore a Barry Goldwater badge when receiving the Medal of Freedom from President Lyndon Johnson just before the 1964 election and refusing to lower the American flag at Disneyland after the assassination of John F. Kennedy) and his fear that he was the illegitimate son of a Spaniard.

The book has been intensively criticized for its fast and loose relationship with the truth, seemingly relying on hearsay and urban legends with very little solid proof. For instance, the theory of Disney being an illegitimate child seems to stem from the fact that he never did have a birth certificate. This was because when he was born in 1901, it was commonplace for children to be born at home, as he was. Eliot suggests that Walt might have been born earlier then he was, citing a birth certificate for a Walter Disney "born on January 8, 1891." A simple review of the document shows that the document was filed on January 8th for a child actually born on December 30, 1890. That was the same date that Walt's older brother Ray was born. Also, on the day Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Disney and his brother Roy had been scouting locations near Orlando for the future Walt Disney World. Far from not even lowering the flag, the next day (November 23, 1963), Disneyland was actually closed for one of the few times in its history. (One of the next was September 11, 2001.) Eliot was criticized at the Snopes urban legend website for holding Lyndon Johnson responsible for "campus demonstrations" as a result of his Great Society program, which was why Disney supposedly wore a Goldwater button while receiving his medal. The meeting took place in September of 1964, three months before the first major antiwar demonstration at Berkeley, half a year before Johnson would begin sending troops en masse to Vietnam, and a year before the president would put his Great Society into action. In any case, Disney had died by the time anti-Vietnam rallies would start to greater gain the nation's attention in 1967.

Nevertheless, despite its tabloidish, occasionally conspiracy theory-like nature, the book has succeeded in quenching a more cynical modern public's taste for the darker side of cultural icons. The notion that Walt Disney nursed anti-Semitism especially seems to have found some dark appeal. Some possible references to these theories are from The Simpsons episode "Itchy and Scratchy Land" (in which the family visits an amusement park clearly based on Disneyland), when Bart and Lisa watch a biography about park founder Roger Myers, Sr. ("who loved everyone and was loved by all, except in 1938, when he was heavily criticized for his controversial release Nazi Supermen Are Our Superiors".) Another, clearer reference is from the Adult Swim stop-motion cartoon Robot Chicken, in which one segment shows a newspaper reading "Walt Disney Dies of Lung Cancer" with a caption: "Last Words: 'Damn Jews!'" Also, in the Family Guy movie Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story where Walt Disney is frozen in a cryonic tank the first thing he asks as he is unfrozen is: "Are the Jews gone yet?" and as the technician replies negatively he shouts: "Put me back in!" and slams shut the tank door.

However, certain items discussed at length in the book do seem to be true, such as Disney's apparent anti-Semitism, since Eliot includes quotes on it from Ward Kimball (one of the legendary "Nine Old Men" team of animators) and Henry Ford, a longtime friend of Disney's. Disney's dislike of labor unions is still well-known among Hollywood buffs, and Eliot's book goes into much detail on a crippling strike at Disney Studios in 1941, which did not help his opinions with labor groups. Disney's service with HUAC is also heavily backed up, as the book includes an image of a letter from the U.S. government thanking him for his service, dated from 1954.

Also, despite its title, the book covers many events after Walt's death up to the book's publication in 1994, including the opening of Walt Disney World in 1971, the company's severe financial and artistic woes from Walt's 1966 death until Michael Eisner's instatement as CEO in 1984, and French intellectuals' opposition to the opening of Disneyland Paris.