The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life

3. The Entertainer as Success Icon

The Entertainer as Success Icon IN 1920 W ALT DISNEY made his first screen appearance, in a crude Newman Laugh-O-Gram sample reel produced in the garage of his Kansas City home. In three briefvignettes, this short, flashy film aimed to entice a local theater owner with vibrant visual images. It did more than it intended. Its opening scene shows young Walt striding into his office, sitting down at a drawing board, lighting his pipe, and starting to animate. Drawing rapidly and deftly, he quickly churns out a series of gag sketches on local life, including a caricature of himself as a busy commercial artist. The scene creates an image of a sharply dressed, dynamic, and industrious young entrepreneur, the same persona that Disney was promoting intensely in real life. At the earliest stage of his entertainment career, he was eagerly embracing the old American success story of the self-made man overcoming obstacles on the way to fame and fortune. In less than a decade, his hopes were fulfilled. He seemed a Horatio Alger character come to life.l This familiar rags-to-riches tale, however, offered an important twist. In the early twentieth century, many of the old guidelines for success seemed increasingly dated. A society characterized by mass markets, bureaucracy, corporate consolidation, and a growing leisure ethic held little place for old-fashioned Victorian ideas that demanded such stern qualities as upstanding character, hard work, self-control, and compulsive thrift. By the 1920S these traditional values were wilting in a heated new atmosphere The Entertainer as Success Icon I 43 dominated by an emphasis on personality, teamwork, self-fulfillment, and consumer spending. In other words, the world of Elias Disney was receding quickly, and his son now lived in a society that demanded new standards and dicta of success. 1. Losing Friends and Influencing People In How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), Dale Carnegie codified a message of success that he had developed over the previous two decades as a lecturer and essayist. Proclaiming that the aspiring person must abandon the hidebound moralism and probity of the vanished Victorian age, Carnegie urged instead a modern code of gamesmanship in which one manipulated one's behavior according to the perception ofothers, directed a constant barrage of flattery at friends and acquaintances, constructed "winning images;' and focused one's psychic energies. Carnegie was not alone. A host of similar figures - the "positive thinkers;' as one historian has termed this popular cadre - burst on the cultural scene in early twentiethcentury America. One of the most famous would be Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, the dynamic minister whose message of positive thinking made him a national celebrity by the 1940s. Preaching variations of "mind cure" and utilizing popular psychologies, these success ideologues promised wealth, status, and peace of mind. Their central message resonated loud and long: in a mass society of impersonal bureaucratic institutions, marshaling one's psychic resources to construct a vivid personality offered the key to success and happiness.2 Although there is no evidence that Disney read the work of such modern guides to success, he instinctively adopted many of their principles, at least in part. Eager to enter the world of moviemaking, he carefully gauged its requirements for admission and achievement. Gazing from afar, he realized that Hollywood, like the rest of corporate America, increasingly demanded not only hard work and ambition but a set of newer qualities as well: salesmanship, management skills, and personality. Quite unselfconsciously, he began to draw upon abilities later popularized by writers like Carnegie and to synthesize them with the principles of self-help that he had imbibed as a child of the Midwest. Even in the earliest stages of his career, as he tried to get Laugh-a-Grams off the ground and then to build his first Hollywood studio, the aspiring filmmaker exuded an intense ambition. Walt's sister-in-law Edna Disney recalled that even as a teenager he would come to her house for dinner and talk for hours about what he wanted to do in the animation field. Carmen Maxwell, an associate in both Kansas City and Los Angeles, remembered that "Walt always said, even back then, that he would make it big:' "The reason he was successful was because he set a goal and he just went after it;' 44 I The Road to Hollywood noted Friz Freleng, another early colleague. "You...