Walt Disney was 21 years old, broke, and sleeping on the floor of a Kansas City office he could no longer afford. His first studio, Laugh-O-Gram Films, had collapsed after a distributor went bankrupt without paying for six delivered cartoons. He sold his camera, packed the unfinished reel of a film called Alice’s Wonderland into a cardboard suitcase, and bought a one-way ticket to California. The hard years in Kansas City shaped the rule that governed the rest of his life: own what you create and never hand control to anyone else.
That lesson was driven home in 1928, when Disney walked into a New York office expecting a raise and walked out having lost his first hit character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and most of his animation crew. The distributor Charles Mintz told him Universal Pictures owned the rabbit outright. Mintz had also quietly signed nearly all of Disney’s animators to work for him. Disney refused the pay cut he was offered and left, wiring his brother Roy to lock the one loyal artist who remained, Ub Iwerks, into a contract.
On the train ride home, the idea for a mouse that would become Mickey Mouse took shape. Iwerks did the design work, and the third Mickey short, Steamboat Willie, became a sensation after Disney added synchronized sound. The lesson of the lost rabbit never left him. Every character and idea that left his studio would belong to him alone.
That determination drove him into the riskiest decision of his career. In the mid-1930s, Hollywood called the project Disney’s Folly. Walt wanted to make a full-length animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, something no American studio had attempted. His brother Roy and his wife Lillian both tried to talk him out of it.
The budget swelled from an estimated $250,000 to nearly $1. 5 million, a staggering sum during the Great Depression. More than 500 artists worked on the picture. When the money ran out, Walt mortgaged his own house.
The Bank of America hesitated to lend more until a vice president watched the unfinished film and told Disney it was going to make a fortune. Snow White premiered in December 1937 and became the highest-grossing film of 1938, earning around $8 million in its first release. The bet had paid off. Success did not soften the family that Walt had built.
In May 1941, about half of the studio’s thousand artists walked out on strike. The pay gap between top animators and younger artists was enormous, and Walt had ended the staff bonuses that once shared profits. Art Babbitt, the animator who created Goofy, led the union drive and was fired for it. Walt had a federal mediator rule against him, and the strike settled with the union recognized and raises granted.
It was legal and it was fair, but something in him went cold. He later blamed the strike on communist agitators in trade publications and before Congress in 1947. The bitterness pushed him toward a project he could control completely. Disneyland opened in Anaheim in July 1955, built on 160 acres of orange grove in a single year.
Almost no one would fund it, so Walt borrowed against his life insurance and made a deal with the ABC television network. The park was built so fast that on opening day the asphalt was still soft, drinking fountains were dry because a plumber’s strike had forced a choice between restrooms and fountains, and more than 28,000 people poured in, nearly twice the intended capacity. Counterfeit tickets flooded the gates and one man charged people five dollars to climb over the back fence. The company called the day Black Sunday.
Walt fixed the problems within weeks and the park became a lasting success. The last project consumed him in his final years. Through a series of front companies, one called MT Lot, which sounds like “empty lot,” Disney quietly bought about 27,000 acres of swampy Florida land around Orlando for a little over five million dollars. A reporter at the Orlando Sentinel uncovered the secret in October 1965.
Walt confirmed it publicly in November. He planned a Magic Kingdom and, beyond it, a real city of the future called EPCOT, with the land granted its own form of government by the state of Florida so that he could control everything on it. He never saw any of it rise from the swamp. In early November 1966, an X-ray showed a shadow on his left lung about the size of a walnut.
Surgeons removed the lung, but the cancer had already spread. He died on December 15, 1966, ten days after his 65th birthday. He was cremated and his ashes placed in a marked family plot at Forest Lawn in Glendale. A persistent rumor that he had been cryogenically frozen is not true; his daughter Diane had denied it in 1972 and the death certificate says cremation.
The Florida project fell to Roy, the brother who had handled the money since the beginning. Roy was nearly 77 and ready to retire, but he took personal charge and insisted the park be named Walt Disney World, so that no one would forget whose dream it was. It opened in October 1971. Roy read the dedication plaque himself, and ten weeks later he died of a stroke.
From that point on, the company the brothers had built belonged to other people. In the early 1980s, the Walt Disney Company was a sleepy giant living off a dead man’s name. Corporate raider Saul Steinberg began buying shares and threatened to break the company into pieces. Disney paid him roughly $30 million in profit to make him go away, a practice known as greenmail, and came out more than $800 million in debt.
The family stepped back in. Roy E. Disney, Walt’s nephew, gathered friendly investors and forced out Walt’s son-in-law Ron Miller in 1984. He installed Michael Eisner as chairman and chief executive.
For the first time since the founders, the company would be run by men who had never met Walt. The turnaround worked. The animation studio produced a run of hits from The Little Mermaid to The Lion King, and the stock multiplied many times over. But the balance held by Frank Wells, the company’s president, ended when Wells died in a helicopter crash in 1994.
Eisner pushed out Jeffrey Katzenberg, who left to found DreamWorks, and then hired and fired Michael Ovitz within 14 months, at a cost of about $140 million. By 2003, Roy E. Disney, the last family member with real power in the company, decided Eisner had lost its soul. He resigned, launched a public campaign called Save Disney, and asked shareholders to rise up.
At the 2004 annual meeting, 43% of shareholders refused to back Eisner. The board stripped him of the chairmanship that day, and he left the company for good in 2005. Roy E. Disney died in 2009.
The company then bought the rest of Hollywood. Under Bob Iger, Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, Marvel in 2009, Lucasfilm in 2012, and most of 21st Century Fox in 2019. In 2006, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit came home after 78 years, traded back to the company Walt built. The family that carries the name holds only a little stock, no more power than any other shareholder, and the most visible Disney in America today is a critic.
Abigail Disney, Walt’s grandniece, has stood with Disneyland janitors unable to rise above the poverty line and publicly criticized the gap between the top and the bottom of the company her family built. Walt Disney built a kingdom on the promise that he would never lose control of it, and control was the one thing he could never hand down. The rabbit came home.
The family did not.