Just think, Walt Disney used to walk through that door,” Neal Gabler says, as we stand at the curb in front of the former William McKinley High School on Adams Street, a block west of Damen Avenue.
“It’s kind of thrilling to be here.”
Eighty-nine years ago, Disney was a 15-year-old freshman when he passed through that entrance into the massive classical structure (now called Cregier Multiplex, home of three small public schools) where he would have his first success as a cartoonist (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
Gabler — the author of a new 851-page biography of the man who created Mickey Mouse and Disneyland, “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination” (Knopf) — has never before seen the building except in photos. And he’s excited.
But, then, he’s a man of enthusiasms — passionate about movies, passionate about writing and, even after seven years of work, still passionate about Disney.
“McKinley High School was important,” the 56-year-old Gabler says as we drive around the Northwest and Near West Sides looking at Disney sites on a sunny but sharply cold afternoon. “If you go through the McKinley Voices, Walt heavily illustrated that magazine. You see so many Walt Disney pictures in there. Clearly, this was Walt’s first opportunity to draw extensively and to be published.”
Chicago is often overlooked in accounts of the man who transformed cartooning into an art form, invented the theme park and made his name synonymous with high-quality, family entertainment. Yet, for Disney, the city was the place in which his talents and drive began to emerge — and from which he sought escape.
He was born in Chicago on Dec. 5, 1901, in a two-story frame house that his father, Elias, had built at 2156 N. Tripp Ave.
When we stop on Tripp and walk around the home, Gabler peers over a side fence, looking for the back-yard tree from which Elias, an often harsh figure, would cut switches to use in disciplining Walt and his other children. But it’s long gone.
This is a return visit for Gabler, who examined the house during his long research work on Disney, and he’s glad to be back. “You go up to the second floor of that home, and this is where Walt Disney was born,” he says. “There’s something really exciting about seeing this.”
In his book, Gabler, who grew up in Chicago about four miles north of this home, portrays Disney as a complex figure driven by memories of an oppressive, hard-edged father to achieve excellence and to create a succession of fantasy worlds in which he could exercise control and reshape reality.
Seeing the home, Gabler says, gives him the same rush he felt when he would open a file in the Disney archives and pick up a document handwritten by Disney. Both provide a physical connection to his subject.
Method biographer
“It’s tactile, but it’s also psychologically tactile,” he says. “I’m a method biographer. When you’re dealing with a subject, you’ve got to find the correspondences in yourself to make you channel the subject.”
Walt had just turned 4 when Elias decided to move the family to Marceline, a remote and, for the boy, idyllic Missouri town that, decades later, would be the model for Disneyland’s Main Street.
In an interview nearly half a century later, Disney described Chicago as a “crowded, smoky” place, the antithesis of the farm country where he joyfully herded pigs, skinny-dipped in Yellow Creek and rode an old horse named Charley.
Later, though, economics forced the family to move to another metropolis, Kansas City, where, in addition to school, Disney worked an early-morning paper route for the dour and demanding Elias.
The job was so filled with drudgery, pain and exhaustion that he had nightmares about it the rest of his life.
As an adult, Disney showed a deep distaste for urban life. “He didn’t like cities,” Gabler says during the afternoon tour. “He couldn’t understand why people would live in them.” That included Chicago and Kansas City, New York and Los Angeles.
Much of Disney’s life work, Gabler says, can be seen as an attempt to fashion alternate worlds where, unlike in the city and unlike under the thumb of his father, Walt could be in control — whether in the make-believe worlds of Mickey Mouse and Snow White or in the real-life theme parks of Disneyland and Disney World or in the full city that, at the time of his death, he was planning to build from scratch in Florida.
Yet, Walt’s only other year in Chicago was key in his development.
In 1917, again for financial reasons, the Disneys returned to Chicago and moved into a home, now gone, at 1523 W. Ogden Ave., across from Union Park. Walt entered McKinley that September and, over the next 12 months, blossomed as an artist.
Not only was he furiously drawing cartoons for the school magazine, but he also bought his first movie camera, “having himself filmed in the alley behind his parents’ home as [Charlie] Chaplin, … and then hatched a plan for making children’s films,” Gabler writes. Alas, the camera was repossessed.
Evening classes
Even more important, though, were the evening classes Disney took at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, then located in the Willoughby Building at 8 S. Michigan Ave.
It was there he realized that his talent lay in caricature, and he took a class in cartooning — “no doubt,” he later said, “the turning point of my whole career.”
A workaholic who routinely put the needs of his creative work ahead of his wife, Lillian, and a man who had been scarred by his own father, Disney was, nonetheless, a devoted parent, Gabler says near the end of our tour.
“There is no question, when you read interviews with his daughters or you talk with [his daughter] Diane, they truly adored him — not because they had to or because he was Walt Disney, but because he clearly adored them,” the biographer says.
In many ways, Walt had more in common with his daughters than with Lillian.
“Walt really was a case of arrested development,” Gabler says. “Walt enjoyed being a child. That aspect of Walt would have had a very difficult time surviving in the real world, but Walt didn’t live in the real world. He was a big kid with childlike enthusiasm. Everybody else loses that stuff. He never lost it.”
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Disney’s Chicago connection: 10 facts
1. Walt Disney’s father, Elias, worked as a carpenter in the construction of the World’s Columbian Exposition, which opened in 1893.
2. In 1893, Elias built a two-story wooden cottage (right) at 2156 N. Tripp Ave. as his family’s home.
3. Walt, the fourth Disney son, was born in that cottage on Dec. 5, 1901 (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
4. Early in 1906, Elias moved his family out of Chicago to the remote Missouri town of Marceline because two neighbor boys had been arrested for killing a policeman in an attempted robbery. Elias feared his older two sons would be similarly led astray.
5. Walt, who had just turned 4 when the family moved, later said he remembered Chicago as “crowded, smoky.”
6. When the family returned to Chicago in 1917, Walt attended William McKinley High School at 2040 W. Adams St. as a freshman.
7. Walt drew cartoons for the school magazine, The McKinley Voice.
8. Walt attended evening classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, then in the Willoughby Building, 8 S. Michigan Ave. (right), an experience that he later described as “no doubt the turning point of my whole career.”
9. In the summer after his freshman year, Walt worked as a substitute mail carrier and as a uniformed gatekeeper at the 35th Street elevated station. He also bought his first movie camera then.
10. Although he never lived in Chicago after 1918, he passed through often. On one visit, he dragooned a friend into spending the evening riding the “L” while Walt reminisced about his time in Chicago.
Source: “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination” by Neal Gabler
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Other works by Neal Gabler
In addition to his new biography of Walt Disney, Neal Gabler has also chronicled the movie industry and its impact on American culture in three previous works:
“An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood” (1988) — A study of the Jewish studio executives, talent agents and others who ran the U.S. movie industry during the first half of the 20th Century.
“Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity” (1994) — A biography of the inventor of the modern gossip column who, in his reports, became as much of an entertainer as the show people he covered.
“Life, the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality” (1998) — An examination of the depth to which entertainment has shaped American culture and life.
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Disney on celluloid
During his lifetime, Walt Disney oversaw 87 animated and live-action feature-length movies. Here are some of the most famous:
“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937)
“Pinocchio” (1940)
“Fantasia” (1940)
“Dumbo” (1941)
“Bambi” (1942)
“Cinderella” (1950)
“Peter Pan” (1953)
“Lady and the Tramp” (1955)
“Old Yeller” (1957)
“Sleeping Beauty” (1959)
“One Hundred and One Dalmatians” (1961)
“Mary Poppins” (1964)
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Disney by the book: Hero or control freak?
Neal Gabler paints Walt Disney as a complicated figure of genius, insecurities and obsessiveness. Here’s how some earlier biographers saw him:
– “The Story of Walt Disney” by Diane Disney Miller, as told to Pete Martin (1956) — Ostensibly written by Disney’s daughter Diane, this authorized biography was put together by veteran reporter Martin based on extensive interviews with Walt Disney.
– “The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney” by Richard Schickel (1969) — A harsh rendering of Disney as a control freak who tainted the childhoods of generations of American children.
– “Walt Disney: An American Original” by Bob Thomas (1976) — A reverential work by an Associated Press entertainment reporter that sees Disney as an American hero.
– “Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince” by Marc Eliot (1993) — As the subtitle indicates, Eliot is interested in Disney’s demons who hogged credit, drank too much and suffered bouts of depression.
Eliot’s accusations that Disney was an anti-Semite are discounted by Gabler.
— Patrick T. Reardon
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And you can quote him
Walt Disney on his own cartooning: “I never made a drawing that I liked” (1957).
On Mickey Mouse: “He is never mean or ugly. He never lies or cheats or steals. He is a clean, happy little fellow who loves life and folk. He never takes advantage of the weak and we see to it that nothing ever happens that will cure his faith in the transcendent destiny of one Mickey Mouse or his conviction that the world is just a big apple pie. . . . He is Youth, the Great Unlicked and Uncontaminated.” (1933)
Source: “Walt Disney” by Neal Gabler (Knopf)
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Walt and Mickey: As American as apple pie
In “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination,” Neal Gabler comments on Walt Disney and his impact on American culture, and quotes other observers. Here’s a selection:
Walt = Mickey: “Walt identified intensely, almost passionately, with his creation, as if Mickey were not just his brainchild but an extension of him. … Animator Les Clark said that `Walt was Mickey and Mickey was Walt,’ observing that even Mickey’s gestures were copies from Walt’s when he performed Mickey at story meetings, and one of Walt’s most frequent story criticisms was, `I don’t think Mickey would act that way.'”
Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, making threats in Los Angeles in 1959 after his planned tour of Disneyland was canceled: “If you want to go on with the arms race, very well. … This is the most serious question. It is one of life or death, ladies and gentlemen. One of war and peace.”
A kind of Christianity: “The novelist John Gardner, a Disney advocate, located in Disney’s work a lightly secularized Christian theology of hope and beneficence in which `God has things well under control’ and life is fundamentally good. Essentially, as Gardner saw it, Disney had reinterpreted Christianity for mass culture.”
D-Day: “At Allied headquarters the code name for the [Normandy invasion] was `Mickey Mouse.'”
A published complaint from producer Billy Rose about Disney’s increasing conservatism in 1946: “You stopped being Walt Disney, and became Walt Disney, Inc. . . . You know, chum, you’re not just another movie producer. You’re the guy we [used to] brag about.”
Walt as a brand: “With Disneyland’s popularity, Walt was now [in 1954] not only a kind of logo for the studio; he had himself become one of its stars, like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, with even a personal publicist to promote him — to promote `Walt Disney.'”
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preardon@tribune.com
