I'm the right person to review this book. I grew up in the shiny new L.A. suburbs in the early 1960s, and for my fourth birthday, my parents took me to Disneyland—then itself still shiny and new. We rode the Mad Hatter's Teacups, took the boat ride through the jungle, visited radiant Tomorrowland. And then, on the way out through Main Street, we came across the capering Disney characters. Mickey himself frolicked my way—and proceeded to stomp on my small foot with his big wooden shoe. It hurt, and it scared me too—this big-headed rodent, a confusing blend of real and pretend. In our newer, more litigious age I'd probably have been able to collect a million or two for psychic damage, but at the time I just limped away as fast as ever I could. It's possible that a seed of ambivalence toward mass entertainment culture was planted then and there, though in fact I remember many subsequent Sunday evenings watching quite happily many years of The Wonderful World of Disney. All I know is, it made a big impact on me.

But then, Mickey and Uncle Walt (and at times they were very nearly the same) made a big impact on everyone in the 20th century. Disney was by no means an insignificant artist—he and his team of animators made major breakthroughs in the visual arts. But his greatest innovations were as an impresario and a businessman, and by the time he was done his combination of image and music and merchandise and theme park had paved the way for the cocooned entertainment culture in which we now exist. Even more than Coke and McDonalds—and perhaps even more than the church—Disney was the great brand artist of his era, carving out a niche in most American brains and hearts. As the consumer society grew more secular, he supplied an easy and alternate creed, complete with icons, pilgrimage sites, and spiritual comforts. In the hymnal of the American religion, most of the happy, whistling tunes were his. He bears pondering.

Neal Gabler, it should be said at the start, has written a superior biography. His previous chronicles of Walter Winchell and of the studio moguls have won many plaudits; he understands the history of the movie business, especially at mid-century. With Disney, though, he had to go deeper, because he's dealing with a man who made—consciously and unconsciously—the story of his life into the stories of his art, and then into one of the templates for our own understanding of the world.

Perhaps the key source for Disney's dream world was the half decade, beginning at the age of four, that he spent in Marceline, Missouri. His family moved from Chicago, and would eventually move on to Kansas City, but the heart of his boyhood was spent on a small farm a mile north of the town's grain elevator. "Despite its modest size, Walt would always recall the farm through the prism of a child's wonder and always think of it as a paradise. Game abounded; there were foxes, rabbits, squirrels, opossums, and raccoons." There were hogs, chickens, and cows, too, and five acres of orchards. There were boys to fish with, and sledding and skating; old Civil War veterans to retell battles; a sprawling rail yard:

But it was not just the homey appearance of Marceline or the cultural rites of passage he experienced there that Walt Disney loved and remembered and would burnish for the rest of his life; it was also the spirit of the community. In Marceline people cared for one another and were tolerant of one another. … "Everything was done in a community help," Walt recalled. "One farmer would help the other, they'd go and help repair fences." … He especially enjoyed the camaraderie of threshing season, when the wagons would be hitched behind a big steam engine and rumble thorough the fields, and the neighbors would gather to help, sleeping in the Disney's front yard, and their wives would arrive too, all joining forces to cook for their men in a scene that Walt would always think back on fondly.

I quote at such length because, at some level, this is the America Disney really wanted to re-create.

But it wasn't what he ended up reproducing, at least not most of the time, and perhaps that's because he spent only a few years in Marceline. His father wasn't much of a farmer; eventually he threw in the towel and moved his family to a working-class section of Kansas City, where he earned his living delivering newspapers. He worked his boys, Walt and Roy, long and hard—they were up at 3:30 to get out the morning papers, and the boys had to leave school half an hour early for the afternoon edition. On early winter mornings, sometimes "the cold and his tiredness would conspire, and Walt would fall asleep, curled inside his sack of papers or in the warm foyer of an apartment house to which he had delivered, and he would awaken to discover it was daylight and he had to race to finish the route." He had to push himself out of poverty, and out of the tough and cheerless world his dominating and dour father created.

For that job, it turned out, he had the necessary skills: relentless enthusiasm and drive, a fair dollop of charm, and a particular talent for drawing. Ten years earlier and he would likely have become a newspaper cartoonist, but the new medium of film opened possibilities for animation, and Disney was quickly enchanted. He started a company drawing shorts for Kansas City theaters; eventually it folded and he moved to L.A., center of the movie business, where he founded another firm. (If there's one section that drags in Gabler's massive account, it's this part of the story—the endless detail about whom he borrowed money from to meet yet another payroll could have been better spent on the last decade of Disney's life, which gets comparatively short shrift.) Suffice it to say that the early work was crude and unsophisticated: gags mostly, done on short order and a tight budget. But Disney was obsessed with improving the quality of his films, both technically and emotionally, and he plunged every penny he made back into the business (much to the dismay of brother Roy, who spent his life running the financial side of the Disney enterprise). He progressed from a cat named Julius to a rabbit named Oswald to a mouse named Mortimer—no, change that to Mickey. And with that, a change in fortune. Partly because Mickey was appealing, and partly because he was one of the first cartoons that came with sound. Steamboat Willie, the six-minute short that really launched Disney, was essentially a mouse "in the throes of musical passion," turning a goat into a hurdy-gurdy and a cow's jaw into a xylophone.

Felix the cat, reigning champion of the cartoons, was knocked flat by noisy Mickey, who soon captured the world. In the early years of the Depression he was regarded as one of the top movie stars across America and Europe—an Austrian critic moaned that he was more popular than Mozart. Soon there were hundreds of Mickey Mouse Clubs in theaters across America—according to one paper, they had more members than the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts combined. And why? The professors weighed in, of course—he was an idealistic altruist, or a counterweight to the rise of totalitarianism, or a "representative of a jittery new machine age." Gabler argues strenuously, though, that Mickey was mostly a projection of Walt himself—"his intrepid optimism, his pluck, his naïveté that often got him into trouble and his determination that usually got him out of it, even his self-regard, branded him as Walt's alter ego." Whatever else we might say about him, Gabler concludes, "Mickey Mouse is in thrall to his abilities of imaginative transformation. Whether he is turning an auto into an airplane or a cow into a xylophone, Mickey … like Walt Disney himself, is always in the process of re-imagining reality… . He makes the world his. In the end, Mickey Mouse was the eternal promise of cheerful solipsism."

Solipsism, of course, no matter how cheerful, is the opposite of the community spirit that so enchanted Disney in his boyhood idyll. The two themes—Horatio Alger individualist pluck versus open-hearted camaraderie—competed for his soul, but over time the first almost always won out. The heart of Gabler's book recounts Disney's achievements in his greatest decade, the 1930s, and especially the story of the relentless, feverish dedication with which his team made Snow White, perhaps his greatest triumph, and Fantasia, perhaps his most unusual success. The movies—from Bambi to Dumbo—are true masterpieces, both of art and spirit. And yet they tend, as Gabler says, toward a pattern: "the Disney theme of embracing maturity and responsibility and taking control of one's own destiny, even at the risk of being exiled from one's safe and satisfying childhood oasis." Autobiography made art.

And art made autobiography yet again. Because Disney never stopped yearning for that lost community he had known in Marceline, and he attempted to build it in his ever-expanding studios. At first the combination of round-the-clock work, initial success, and adventure on the cutting edge of a new (and funny) art made the workshop a kind of paradise, albeit overcrowded and overheated, where people willingly put in endless days and months. "Walt had always loved social organizations, always loved to forge people into a happy unit," Gabler writes. There were no time clocks, pay was high, a volleyball court waited across the street. One time he told an employee, with a sense of real pride, "this whole place runs on a kind of Jesus Christ communism."

The fly in the ointment was the need for control, for domination. When he built the huge new Disney studio in Burbank at the end of the 1930s, he designed a worker's paradise—even disassembling the animator's chairs to figure out how he could make them more comfortable. There were snackbars everywhere; you could order a sandwich and a cup of beer brought to your table: think Silicon Valley at the height of the dotcom era, with cartoons instead of search engines. But as Disney was becoming famous, he also was increasingly distant, "more distrustful of what people wanted from him." He could be contemptuous, sarcastic, downright nasty. And he never shared credit with the people who were actually doing the drawing (even the drawing of Mickey Mouse). When one animator, who had worked for years on Pinocchio, went to see a preview and noticed his name never appeared on the screen, it "made me realize I was still just another sketch man, just one of the mob, and I was depressed for weeks afterward."

In the late 1930s, in left-wing Hollywood, the reaction to Disney's high-handedness was inevitable: a union. And Disney's reaction was probably inevitable too: complete revulsion, complete opposition, a scorched-earth decision to fire the organizers. On the first day of the strike, as he came to the gates of the studio, one of the animators shouted, "There he is, the man who believes in brotherhood for everybody but himself." The strikers won, and Disney was forever embittered. He became convinced that communists were behind the unrest, and he went before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee to complain that it was leftists from the Daily Worker and, bizarrely, the League of Women Voters, who had undone him.

The studio continued, of course. Indeed, in the 1950s it flourished as never before, as television proved the ideal and insatiable market for everything Disney could churn out. But he no longer had his heart fully in it, and in any event was no longer spending the money or the effort to make sure the movies and shorts were really great. Animation, which was expensive, became less and less important; cheaper live-action films, from Davy Crockett to The Absent-Minded Professor, became the new bread and butter.

Walt didn't care, because his need for control had found a new outlet: Disneyland. He began to plan his new park obsessively, drafting and redrafting every inch, and when construction had begun he patrolled the site every hour, ordering trees moved and ponds re-dug. America had seen plenty of amusement parks before, of course, but they were places like Coney Island: "noisy, chaotic, bombastic, subversive." Disneyland was to be different—"an architecture of reassurance," its buildings slightly smaller than they should be so one would feel larger standing next to them. No cigarette butt would rest on the pavement for more than a few seconds before a well-trained "cast member" would sweep it up. "When critics would later carp that Disneyland was too serene, too clean, too controlled, too perfect, they were right," says Gabler. "It was what one might have called the 'tragedy of perfection,' with all that was human driven out. … It was a modern variant on the City on a Hill of Puritan dreams. It was the consummate act of wish fulfillment."

Its fantasy worked both backwards (Main Street) and forwards (Tomorrowland)—only the present was missing. It's perhaps not surprising that Ronald Reagan was one of the announcers for the TV special that heralded the park's opening in 1955, a day that marked one of the first (but certainly not the last) fuzzy-lensed new "mornings in America."

The vision sold, of course, sold like nothing before or since. Within two years, more people were visiting Disneyland than the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone or Yosemite; today, Disneyworld in Orlando pretty much defines mass tourism. The corporate tie-ins were everywhere—Monsanto's all-plastic House of Tomorrow, for instance, or Arco's Autopia. It was a perfect corporate world: "Disneyland had no ambiguity, no contradictions, and no dissonance." The very opposite, that is, of a real town, a real community, but the model for all that was to come, from the fixed smile of the McDonalds cashier to the washed-out pastels of too many megachurches:

At Disneyland the guests were part of the overall atmosphere of happiness, and they reveled in their own manipulation because it was so well executed, because it was so comfortable and reassuring, and perhaps most of all, because it was so empowering to know that someone could actually have achieved this. In the end, it was not the control of wonder that made Disneyland so overwhelming to its visitors; like so much else in Disney's career, it was the wonder of control.

The theme parks made money, the television shows made money, the merchandise made money—the enterprise coasted through the last decade before Disney died of lung cancer. (And no, he wasn't frozen, though the control motif makes it easy to understand why people spread the rumor so fast and so far.) He made only one great movie in his waning days, and it was an unusual one: Mary Poppins, which has more than a hint of the subversive—of the child lurking inside the captain of industry, and not the captain of industry lurking inside the child. But it was too late to alter his destiny, and he died, in Gabler's words, "quite possibly the most famous man in America" but also "among the loneliest." With neither the consolations of religion or close friendship, he bowed out ten days past his 65th birthday, so terrified of death that he hadn't even left instructions for his burial. He was cremated, his ashes interred in a remote corner of the vast (and very orderly) Forest Lawn cemetery.

This, ultimately, is a sad story. There's a chance he might have been better off if he'd lived out his days in Marceline—and for all the pleasure he provided, there's a chance America might have been better off too.

Bill McKibben is scholar in residence in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. He is the author most recently of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, just published by Times Books.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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