Walt Disney : Hollywood’s Dark Prince

New York: Birch Lane Press / Carol Publishing Group, 1993. Bright, shiny, clean, square, and tight. Sharp corners. The Dust Jacket shows just a touch of rubbing at the high points. NOT price clipped (21.95). No chips. No tears. No creases. No owner's name or bookplate. No remainder mark. Pages are fresh and crisp -- probably never read. No underlining. No highlighting. No margin notes. Illustrated with 16 pages of photos. List of chapter notes/sources. Index. First printing, with complete number row (10 987654321) on the copyright page. Bound in the original orange boards, with a brown cloth spine. From the Dust Jacket: "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. Now for the first time, Marc Eliot presents the real Walt Disney. The author reveals Walt Disney's twenty-five-year association with J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, serving as a Hollywood-based official informant before being promoted to the rank of Special Agent in Charge, rooting out Communists, subversives, and Jews. A lifelong anti-Semite, he absorbed his prejudice from his father, a strict fundamentalist who believed in corporal punishment and forced child labor. Walt Disney's phobic behavior is examined in detail, as is his obsessive hand-washing, heavy drinking, and sexual inadequacies. Unwilling to accept his father's violence as a form of love, and unwilling 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 mold 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." . First Printing of the First Edition. Hard Cover. Fine condition/Fine dust jacket. 8vo. xxii, 305pp.