Not long before he died, Walt Disney was asked to name the most rewarding experience of his life. The response was blunt and brief: “The whole damn thing. The fact that I was able to build an organization and hold it.” His words may seem surprising. To the public at large he was an avuncular Horatio Alger character, a spinner of sweet tales for children, a man whose taste and morality comfortably reflected those of the middle-class American majority. This image was carefully nurtured by a corps of press agents and sycophants as competent and energetic as any in Hollywood—men as skillful in turning aside questions and questioners that might damage that image as they were in propagating it. In fact, however, Walt Disney was a grouchy, inarticulate, withdrawn man. Intellectually and emotionally he remained a child, but he was anything but childlike when it came to managing and directing the only thing he greatly cared about—his business or, to use the phrase favored by his publicity department, his “magic kingdom.”

Poorly educated, the product of a childhood no objective observer could possibly describe as happy, bankrupt in his early twenties, he was a driven and a driving man, determined to “make it” in a way more honored in the folklore of our capitalistic system than in its practice. If he had had his way, for example, Disney would have financed the growth of his enterprises solely out of profits; he would never have had anything to do with outsiders like banks or stockholders, whom he tolerated with ill-disguised distrust. Everything that came out of his workshops was stamped with his name and, indeed, with his taste and personality, a practice which eventually drove most of his genuinely talented elves from his employ.

This egocentricity caused many problems. A man less insistent on maintaining absolute personal control of every aspect of his enterprise might have built faster and have made fewer difficulties for himself. But he could not have built better. And here the career of Disney and his studio following the birth of the mouse is significant. Adored by both intellectuals and children, winner of awards and fame for his creator, Mickey was a problem child. After a delightfully bratty beginning he matured into a terrible square, simply incapable of the kind of irreverent comic turns that a great comedian must master. Disney felt, as he said, “locked in” by the mouse. From 1929 through 1937 he plowed all his profits and energy into unlocking innovations—more viable comic characters like Pluto and Donald Duck, the Silly Symphony series, and, most important of all, the attempt to create a feature-length cartoon, which culminated in Snow White .

Another man might have rested and consolidated his gains after the success of that film. Disney instead pressed forward and had three full-length features on the drawing boards of his expensive new studio when a strike— which he handled with inept repressiveness—and the beginning of World War