Could Snow White be a wicked witch in disguise? With maybe perverse sexual cravings for dwarfs and an addiction to apple cider?
Nowadays it would surprise no one were some writer to claim that very thing. And in fact, the animated Snow White’s ostensibly beloved creator comes in for much the same treatment in a grim new closet-emptying biography titled “Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince.”
Author Marc Eliot unsparingly reveals that the Chicago-born filmmaker, who gave the world Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and “Fantasia,” was actually a mean, tyrannical, paranoid drunk and anti-Semite who happily spied on his fellow movie folk for the FBI, while at the same time seeking the help of organized crime to control his movie studio’s unions.
As if that were not enough to digest for generations who used to sing along with the “Mickey Mouse Club” and viewed trips to Disneyland and Disney World as an obligatory part of childhood, we also learn that America’s “Uncle Walt” was physically abused by his father as a child and took out his resentments on his older brother Roy by urinating on his back while he slept, and had a pathological fear of sex, women and the truth about his own origins.
The book is no anomaly. In another hot new seamy wallow, “Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend,” we are told (once again) that “The Wizard of Oz’s” enchanting Dorothy was an out-of-control, wantonly self-destructive drug addict.
These merciless volumes come at us as part of a seemingly unending stream of tell-all, hard-cover, sometimes hard-core, best-seller-list-bound, posthumous muckrakings-some of them works of diligent scholarship; others festering stews of disputed fact, rumor, innuendo, sensationalist hyperbole and outright fabrication; still others a combination of scholarship and sleaze.
Kitty Kelley’s 1991 biography of Nancy Reagan portrayed the former first lady as a scheming, insatiably ambitious, pathologically insecure harpy who followed her floozy mother’s example in using sex to make her way in life. Although it provoked no lawsuit, it did prompt an enormous and unexpected groundswell of sympathy for Reagan and was even denounced by Barbara Bush, whom Reagan had treated quite frostily.
Other books have trashed J. Edgar Hoover (relying on the word of a single, possibly impeachable source and asserting that he was a secret transvestite), Errol Flynn (as a boozing, pro-Nazi seducer of underage girls) and Cary Grant (as a tormented bisexual who used to go to quiet restaurants to hold hands with longtime amour and cowboy movie star Randolph Scott).
The aristocratic Grace Kelly not long ago had the sheets ripped off her regal image by James Spada’s “Grace: The Secret Lives of a Princess,” which portrayed her as a mixed-up wanton who slept with seemingly every man she ever met and went to her untimely death a fat, pathetic drunk. Spada quotes Gore Vidal quoting a woman friend as describing Grace’s brassiere as “the kind her grandmother had worn-made of canvas! Miles of it.”
And before the world commenced peeking into the princess’ underwear, it went on horror trips through the brutal family lives of lovable crooner Bing Crosby and Joan Crawford, among other unspeakable places.
Though off limits for decades, the private lives of presidents and other political figures have become open books in recent years-most excessively in the case of John Kennedy, whose backstairs love life, including trysts with a gangster moll, has become legend.
Franklin Roosevelt’s affairs with two secretaries have been exposed in print, as has his wife Eleanor’s supposed affair with a female journalist. Thomas Jefferson’s alleged dalliance with his beautiful black slave, Sally Heming, has become the subject of both fiction and the most rancorous imaginable debate among Virginia historians.
A new book about the young George Washington, “For King and Country: The Maturing of George Washington,” by respected historian Thomas A. Lewis, dodges the question of possible adultery between the Father of His Country and his best friend’s comely wife, Sally Fairfax, but otherwise presents this seemingly unassailable American icon as a greedy fortune hunter and insufferable snob.
Inquiring minds want to know. Or do they? More to the point, should they?
Eliot, whose work on Disney relied heavily on FBI files unearthed through the Freedom of Information Act, claims he is serving the 1st Amendment, history and the world’s understanding of cinematic art.
“I don’t think the book is vicious (as one critic charged), and I don’t think the book is particularly anti-Walt Disney,” Eliot said in a recent interview.
“It takes the position that he was a major artist of the 20th Century. If you knew nothing about Van Gogh, and only had access to his paintings, you might wonder who this man was and why are these stars so huge and why are there chairs without dimension and who are these faces and what is this mood and where does it come from. What we now know about Van Gogh only enhances his work. I don’t see where it distracts from his work. The reason is that he was a major figure.”
Disney’s search
To Eliot, those memorable, heart-rending scenes from “Bambi,” “Dumbo” and “Pinocchio” were simply Disney’s versions of Van Gogh’s intense, contorted images. And-though Van Gogh was manic-depressive and Disney a victim of child abuse-they resulted from the same kind of torment.
“The point is,” Eliot said, “Disney’s work didn’t come from nowhere. His influence on children, his popularization of the theories that Bruno Bettelheim later articulated-where did that come from? Who was this man? He certainly was not the man that the (Disney) studio likes to promote: `Uncle Walt,’ `Uncle Sam,’ the same mythic uncle.
“He feared that he might have been illegitimate or adopted, and it’s that fear he channeled into all these fairy tales about children who were searching for their true parents: Snow White’s wicked stepmother; Pinocchio . . . having a fairy godmother, not a real mother; Dumbo, whose mother is imprisoned and Dumbo has to become a star in order to liberate the identity of his mother; Bambi, whose mother dies in a fire, and who has this imperious father figure.
“One after another, the same story, Disney’s own quest. What’s amazing about that is that, for someone who was essentially uneducated and absolutely anti-Freudian for any number of reasons, including that Freud was a Jew, he was right on the money-when he was illustrating his plight. That’s what makes him so great. He was instinctively, organically able to express exactly his own light.”
Eliot, whose biographical specialty is pop culture and rock musicians, said he draws the line at biography that wallows in sleaze for its own sensational sake, such as the recent book about the depraved and pathetic life of the late actor and Kennedy in-law Peter Lawford.
“It was mean-spirited and pointless,” he said. “Lawford was not a major figure. The revelations don’t have any weight. Cary Grant was a homosexual. Therefore, what follows? There’s no therefore.”
The effect on others
Thomas Reeves, a historian at the University of Wisconsin at Parkside and author of 1991’s “A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy,” draws the line more narrowly. The private lives and character of the famous, he said, are important only in how they affect what these individuals do and did.
“Frank Lloyd Wright’s private life is unimportant,” he said. “Revelations about it can degrade what he did and said. The character of mere celebrities is unimportant, unless they’re like Duke Ellington, who was the subject of much exaltation. He went into cathedrals and lectured other people on how to live their lives, yet he was actually a despicable person.”
Reeves said he was at first much bothered by the many sleazy revelations concerning Kennedy, thinking they were irrelevant.
“Nixon, we’ve learned, was a despicable person, yet he was a successful president,” Reeves said. “Jimmy Carter was of high character, but he was a flop.”
But he began to have nagging thoughts about Kennedy’s character and the role it played.
“I went through his administration in an effort to trace his character, to find out if his character played a role in his administration, or if it was just smut, like Ike’s having an affair with his (British female Jeep) driver years before he took office. I found that, in the White House, Kennedy’s character was terribly relevant. He was a liar, conceited, ruthless, irresponsible-a man who couldn’t be trusted. And a lot of it derived from his father.”
In his book, which sums up his grappling with the question, Reeves found on balance much to credit Kennedy’s performance and reason to believe he was becoming a better man in the presidency. But the reality of JFK was still much at odds with his public image-and public conduct and statements. And his weak character affected his important decisions.
“In the Bay of Pigs,” Reeves wrote, “Jack rejected moral and legal objections to an invasion; he lied, exhibited an almost adolescent macho temperament, became involved with military operations just enough to make them worse, and then blamed others for the failure. He soon approved Operation Mongoose, the clandestine exercise in terrorism and murder.
“Determined to win in Cuba at any cost, Jack had secret dealings with one of the top mobsters involved in the assassination attempts. This reveals an irresponsibility and lack of judgment bordering on dereliction.”
Attacks on Lincoln
University of Illinois historian Robert Johannsen, a Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln scholar and author of “Lincoln, the South and Slavery,” also holds that character in public figures is important, but that character assassination by biographers can be harmful.
Johannsen noted that, in contrast to Washington, whom historians have reflexively apologized for and defended, Lincoln has been subject to unrelenting attack by historians and others trying to find flaws in him.
“I tend to take a dim view of this, especially in Lincoln’s case,” he said. “People have been digging up all kinds of stuff, but it shows only that he was human, and that he was a politician. None of it changed the essential man, or what he was trying to do.
“We need our heroes. They’re very important. Their lives provide example and coherence. They’re the cement in our national development.”
If one forgoes the likes of Parson Weems’ fantasized homage and researches Washington’s life diligently enough, one will find more than ample reason to believe that he lusted after Sally Fairfax in every way imaginable, that he probably committed a murder that sparked the French and Indian War, that he married for money, and certainly that he was an incompetent, often-bumbling military tactician.
But none of that changes the essential courage, resolution and honor of character he displayed in keeping his ragtag army together and in using his prestige and force of will to make the U.S. a unified, democratic republic and a nation governed by laws, not people.
Van Gogh vs. Gauguin
But what of artists? Do we need to know what pain, suffering and twisted souls produced such masterpieces as Van Gogh’s sun-hot fields and starry nights-or, if you will, the beauty of Disney’s “Fantasia”?
Consideration of artists’ personal lives is “an eternally debatable and debated subject,” said J. Carter Brown, recently retired director of Washington’s National Gallery of Art. “It’s only legitimate to the extent that it enhances one’s appreciation of art, but not if it interferes with it.”
He explained that knowing about Van Gogh’s manic-depression enables people to better understand the intensity of his painting, but that someone objecting to Picasso’s treatment of his wives and mistresses might be prejudiced against his art.
He noted that some women dislike Paul Gauguin’s art because of his callously irresponsible and selfish treatment of his wife and family.
“You see,” Brown said. “Interference.”
Some artists don’t require much probing and investigation. The brilliant modernist Austrian painter Egon Schiele lived a depraved life, and every bit of it showed in his frequently outrageously obscene but profoundly compelling paintings and drawings.
Given present trends, the question may soon become moot. With everyone’s private life becoming totally exposed while they’re still alive, what difference will any of it make?
What pop-culture scholar or sleazy biographer is going to make much capital out of, say, Madonna’s private life?
Unless it turns out that, secretly, she has been spending her off hours baking chocolate chip cookies like Hillary Clinton.
