Walt Disney Hollywoods Dark Prince

UK: Andre Deutsch, 1995. Soft cover. Very Good. 8.9 x 6 x 1.1 inches. Everyone remembers him as the creator of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Bambi, Dumbo, Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Fantasia. His films and characters inspired the great Disney theme parks. A creative genius, Walt Disney brought love and laughter to children everywhere. In this specially revised British edition, Marc Eliot presents the real Walt Disney. The author reveals Disney's twenty-five-year association with J. Edgar Hoover's FBI as a Hollywood-based official informant before promotion to the rank of 'Special Agent in Charge Contact', rooting out Communists, subversives, and Jews. A lifelong anti- Semite, he absorbed this prejudice from his father, a strict fundamentalist who believed in corporal punishment and forced child labour. . Walt Disney's phobic behaviour is examined in detail, as is his obsessive handwashing, heavy drinking, and sexual inadequacies. Unwilling to accept his father's violence as a form of love, and unable to 'prove' his own identity, he feared he had actually been adopted in infancy and was illegitimate. He spent a lifetime searching for his real mother. Marc Eliot shows how these psycho- sexual conflicts drove Walt to the depths of lifelong despair and how they found expression in his 'classic' animated characters and films, now so deeply embedded in American culture. In fact, they were created by a man who used the wealth and prestige they gave him to mould a nightmare empire of vengeance and power. Told against a panoramic view of Hollywood's golden age of glamour and backdoor politics, Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince is a fascinating work that concludes with a look into the Disney empire as it exists today.