Biographer Neal Gabler Discusses Walt Disney

Posted on November 3, 2006

The L.A. Times profiles biographer Neal Gabler, who has just written a comprehensive biography of Walt Disney. Gabler finally got access to all of Disney's correspondence, paperwork, photos and family legal records and set out to write the definitive biography of the man who so influenced American pop culture: from the Davy Crockett show to Mickey Mouse to Disneyland, Walt Disney left his mark on the American entertainment industry.

The ultimate message of Walt's life is that he believed he could reinvent everything, on the screen, in amusement parks, in all aspects of his creative life," Gabler said during a recent interview at his publisher's office. "Everything he did was designed to perfect this new world. And the secret of his success is that his visions coincided with America's yearning for the same kind of escape and wish fulfillment."

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The author, a trim, gray-haired man who lives in Amagansett, N.Y., and teaches at USC Annenberg's Norman Lear Center, said: "I tell students there are six words that summarize what you need to do in writing a biography: 'What's the story?' and 'What's the point?' " A biographer, he said, must find a narrative arc within the massive details of one person's life. "When you have this narrative, you've created a fiction," he noted. "Because no one's life resolves into neat, narrative episodes. A good biographer fictionalizes a life, but not the facts."

As he saw it, the theme of Disney's life was a perpetual quest to escape and to control. Gabler spent two years sifting through thousands of documents in the Disney studio archives before he began writing. From there, his ideas took shape.

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Knopf) is in bookstores now.

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