Walt Disney: Illigitimate Spanish Love Child?
Ron Turner
Pinned to a wall in the cluttered, ramshackle office at Tito's Beach Bar,
overlooking the Mediterranean at Mojacar, south-east Spain, are the photographs
of three men. One of them is holding up an Oscar statuette. The moustache,
receding hairline, arched eyebrows - so perfect they seem plucked - and the
almond-shaped eyes belong to the familiar face of that American icon and global
brand-name, Walt Disney.
The same features are repeated on an unfamiliar face below. The moustache is
bushier and the face is fleshier, but the resemblance is strong - although the
stiff, gentleman's pose and formal clothes date the subject to the early part
of last century. The third photograph is of a thin-lipped, long-nosed man with
his hair slicked-back in a side parting. Behind his smile lies a hard, narrow,
timeworn face.
When Tito del Amo, the American former hippie who owns the bar, invites
visitors to guess which of the latter two is Disney's father, they normally
plump for the first. They are wrong - or that, at least, is what the official
history books of Hollywood say. Elias Disney, the Christian fundamentalist who
beat his son regularly and drove him to seek refuge in a rich imagination, is
the thin, mean-faced man. The other is Gines Carrillo, a doctor whose family
were the "senoritos", the ruling clan, of Mojacar until the middle of last
century. That should be the end of it. But it is not. Because Del Amo, like
most of Mojacar's 5000 people, is convinced that old Dr Carrillo was the true
father of Walt Disney.
They are not alone. Disney's family may not like it, but two American authors,
the showbusiness biographer Marc Eliot and Disney specialist Christopher Jones
- son of one of Walt's press agents - are separately trying to prove that he
was the illegitimate son of Dr Carrillo and a local washerwoman, Isabel Zamora.
She, it is said, took him to the US but abandoned him when he was a few months
old.
The story is irresistibly, perhaps impossibly, romantic. Mojacar is a fairytale
place - a whitewashed village perched on a towering slab of rock, looking out
over a sparkling, emerald sea. Where better for a creative genius - obsessed by
castles, magic and small, vulnerable animals - to be born?
The Mojacar tale combines forbidden love, an orphan child, wicked step-parents
and even the sinister presence of J. Edgar Hoover and his G-men. "This is a
story of an orphan, brought up by nasty parents, who becomes a wizard," says
Jones. "It is the story of Harry Potter gone sour." And, Jones says, the only
time Walt was challenged - by a well-known Disney animator - on whether he
might have been born in Spain, he added fuel to the story. "Who knows?" he
replied.
Disney, the tale goes, was the product of an illicit tryst that broke both
class frontiers and Catholic strictures. His mother was hurriedly married off
to a local miner, Jose Guirao, who had no option but to follow the bullying
Carrillo family's instructions. Mother and child quickly emigrated to the US -
where they moved into her brother's house in State Street, Chicago, not far
from the Disneys' home on Tripp Avenue. The supposed brother, Juan D. Zamora,
is listed in the 1901 Chicago telephone directory as a circus acrobat. When
Isabel could not, or would not, look after him, baby Jose was secretly adopted,
presumably as an act of charity, by Elias and his wife Flora Call - who lied to
the local priest, and, possibly, to Walt.
"I rejected the idea outright when I first came here in the 1960s. We were too
busy having a good time," says the gently-spoken Del Amo. He admits that he now
sees Disney's face in the Carrillo family and all over the village.
Del Amo is from a wealthy Los Angeles family. As a small boy, in the 1940s, he
lived on Carolwood Drive, in the classy suburb of Holmby Hills, right across
the street from the Disneys. "From my house I could see a model train in his
back yard with cars big enough to sit on," he says. He even visited the first
Disneyland with Walt while it was still being built. Del Amo's obsession is
shared by Jones. He first heard the Mojacar tale as a boy from his father Tom,
Disney's favourite press agent. Not that Tom would have liked his attempts to
prove it. "My father liked him very much. He was a very loyal soldier," he
says.
Now Jones, his wife and their cat have moved from Italy to a hill town an
hour's drive from Mojacar as he works on a book, provisionally entitled Behind
the Mask of Uncle Walt, which aims to prove the illegitimate son theory.
These efforts to clarify Walt's parentage are not appreciated at the Disney
empire's headquarters in Burbank, California. America's 49th-biggest
corporation does not like the origins of its brand name questioned.
In real life Uncle Walt was a devious, megalomaniac, racist, egocentric genius.
Jones says he once sacked an Indian employee because he looked like a "nigger".
His hatred of Jews was legendary. All of this, however, was pretty standard for
the place and the times. His was the Hollywood of the House Un-American
Activities Committee - with which he collaborated enthusiastically - and
violent studio strikes. He tried to use the mob muscle of hoodlum Willie Bioff
to bust these. Walt was also vice-president of the rabidly right-wing Motion
Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Eliot says he was a
freelance agent for J. Edgar Hoover, with a 600-page personal file at FBI
headquarters.
But 29 Oscars do not lie: even his fiercest critics would not dispute that the
Disney company is the greatest film-animation factory of all time. And the
mythical, marketable Walt is a friend to every child on the planet, especially
this month when the 100th anniversary of his birth is being celebrated. "He is
everybody's favourite uncle," says Jones.
That vision of Disney is still being peddled. In its in-house centenary
biography, Walt's only recognised vice is smoking. Reviewing it in The New York
Times, Julia Salomon wrote: "In the Disney universe, cleanliness of character,
and cleverness - American virtues - prevailed every time over more sinister
forces."
When Eliot floated the Mojacar connection in his 1993 biography, Walt Disney:
Hollywood's Dark Prince, using FBI papers signed by Hoover to cast doubts on
Walt's origins, the family hired William Webster, FBI director under George
Bush Senior, to rebut that and other claims about his role as a prized FBI
informer.
The family calls the story a modern myth and, in its way, flattering. "It is
nice that the Hispanic community would like to adopt Walt," says Katherine
Greene, who, with her husband Richard, is the keeper of the Disney family's
museum.
Family snapshots of Walt with Elias's other children, the Greenes say, prove
the opposite to Del Amo's pictures. "Sometimes he looks so similar that it is
hard to tell which one is him," says Richard, who helped write the recent
documentary and is publishing a new, authorised biography, Inside the Dream. So
why does the Mojacar story, first aired in Spain's Primer Plano movie magazine
in 1940, refuse to go away?
The answer lies not in Mojacar, but in Chicago. For there is no record there of
the birth of the city's most famous son. Walt Disney did not officially exist
until June 8, 1902, the year after his supposed birthday, when he was baptised
Walter Elias Disney at a Chicago church. The Disneys told the pastor he had
been born on December 3, 1901. But it was not until 17 years later, when Walt
needed a passport, that Flora would sign an affidavit saying he had been born
at their home at 1249 Tripp Avenue, Chicago.
This undoubtedly troubled Walt. He first stumbled across his own mystery when
he tried to join the Red Cross as a WWl volunteer in 1917 and was initially
turned down because he could not prove his age. The fact that it concerned him
seems to have been confirmed by Hoover himself. In a declassified FBI document,
Hoover pledged to help Disney. "I am indeed pleased that we can be of service
to you in affording you a means of absolute identity through your lifetime," he
wrote.
Exactly how the manipulative Hoover went about this is not clear. Even 25 years
after his death, in 1992, the G-men felt that nearly half the documents on his
file still needed to be kept secret. The 600 pages made available to Marc Eliot
already showed how the FBI had approved his recruitment as a freelance, unpaid
spy. If that could be said in 1992, what on earth was in the FBI files that
could still threaten state security? Or perhaps one should ask a different
question. Just how far would the US government go to protect the Disney name?
The Greenes say this was just FBI bureaucracy in action. They have seen the
whole file and, though they admit bits are still blacked out, they found no
record there of Mojacar.
The people of Mojacar - and, especially, their American allies - have their own
theory about how Hoover went about proving, and then keeping secret, Walt's
origins. In 1940, a year after Spain's civil war had ended, a pair of mules
climbed the steep track to the village bearing the suitcases of two smartly
suited Americans. They found a village that was, literally, falling apart. Its
population had dropped from 6000 in 1900 to less than 1000 after nearby copper
and iron mines closed. Mojacar had no electricity, no phones and no running
water.
The Americans asked the way to the church of Santa Maria. There they were met
by Father Federico Acosta, a young priest who visited the parish from the
nearby town of Turre. His nephew Jose Acosta, arrived from Madrid - where Snow
White had just had its Spanish premiere - to spend the summer holidays with him
that year. Now a sprightly 71-year-old, this former journalist and lawyer
remembers his uncle's description of what happened next. "He told us that some
gentlemen from the US had come to find the birth certificate of one Jose
Guirao. They were shown the page in the register. Later, when he looked again,
the page had been ripped out," he recalls.
"He told me they had come not to find Jose Guirao's birth certificate, but to
destroy it," says Acosta. Were these Hoover's G-men? Had they been sent to find
an embarrassing truth that they could use as a lever over Disney? That is
certainly what Jones thinks. That doubt, he claims, gave Hoover a hold over
Disney for the rest of his life.
Acosta's second-hand account is corroborated by Jacinto Alarcon, who saw the
Americans arrive and later became mayor. Jacinto is dead, but Jones has a taped
interview with him in which he tells the story. "Virtually everybody is
convinced he was born here. Only the Americans don't want to admit it," says
Jacinto's son Juan.
In Mojacar, people still remembered little Jose Guirao. Gossip never dies,
especially in the narrow streets and even narrower morality of an early
20th-century Spanish village. The boy was a bastard, the child of Isabel Zamora
and, officially, of a poor miner called Guirao. He had been born in a
tumbledown house in the Espiritu Santo neighbourhood.
But Guirao's claim on the child was sketchy. The town's "malas lenguas", or
"poisoned tongues", pointed to the imposing Torreon, the modernist, Moorish
home built for himself by the eccentric Gines Carrillo.
Carrillo was not just the town's doctor - one of the few people who could see
the village's young girls in private - he was also its artistic soul. He built
a Venetian-style theatre here and directed plays. Children went there to learn
instruments, and to gape at his amazing collection of birds.
Charo Lopez, the current owner of the Torreon, keeps a framed picture of the
old man outside the bathroom. "Disney certainly wasn't born in this house. But
this is where he was conceived," she states. "This is like the existence of
God. Either you believe he was born in Mojacar, or you don't."
Whatever the truth of the birth, it can not be proven. For Mojacar's birth
register for 1901 has also disappeared. But nobody doubts that Jose Guirao and
Isabel Zamora existed. Everybody, or at least everybody's deceased parents or
grandparents, remembered them leaving. But, as with Walt's Chicago birth
certificate, nobody can prove it.
Gines Carrillo's legitimate son Diego, another doctor, lives on the beachfront.
Walt Disney's alleged half-brother, aged 79, shooed me away when I knocked on
his door. "I have said all I want to. I've had enough," he said.
A few days earlier, however, he had denied the story in Madrid's El Mundo
newspaper. "This stuff about me being Walt Disney's brother is fiction," he
said. "The journalist from Primer Plano had obviously heard something about
Walt Disney and Mojacar, that's why they came here in 1940. My father liked a
good joke, so he said 'yes' to everything they asked."
But even Diego could not resist adding a twist of his own to the story. "If you
think my father and Walt Disney look alike, you should see pictures of my
uncle. He looks even more like Disney - and he did like the ladies," he said.
Diego Carrillo's nephew, yet another doctor, confirmed the family line.
"Mojacar was a boring place then. My grandfather died when I was young but he
was a lecher, a 'viejo verde', in his old age and interested in the occult. The
whole thing was cooked up by Jacinto and him when those journalists arrived
from the film magazine."
If it was a joke, Primer Plano not only fell for it but introduced a new
element, in the form of a letter allegedly sent to the village in 1925. "Some
time ago the parish priest of Mojacar received from the US a letter. It asked
for the birth certificate of Jose Guirao Zamora, baptised in 1901, and this
letter, which disappeared in the revolution, was signed by Walt Disney. A few
days after being sent the documentation for Jose Guirao, Walt Disney contracted
marriage with Lillian Bounds. And the life of the gifted artist, creator of a
new cinematic theory, took its course many miles from Mojacar, the Moorish
pueblo." Lillian was a $15-a-week sketcher who worked for Disney and was
married to him for 41 years. A year after he died, she remarried - a fact
absent from her own glowing obituaries when she died four years ago.
Ironically, or rather spookily, according to Tito, she married a Del Amo family
friend and was thenceforward known to him as "Aunt Lillian".
If the 1925 letter was an invention, the Primer Plano piece would not have been
the first to elaborate on the bare factual bones of this story. Virtually
everybody who has written about it has provided a new twist to the tale. Even
now, village gossips continue to add new flourishes.
At least three other visits, including one confirmed sighting of a group of
American Franciscans in the 1950s, are said to have taken place by Californians
seeking Jose Guirao's birth certificate.
The Disney family has blamed Mojacar for using the Isabel Zamora story to
attract tourists. Mayor Jacinto Alarcon was certainly capable of that. He even
went on TV to tell all of Spain about Walt and Mojacar.
In fact Mojacar, now half populated by foreigners and full of souvenir shops,
has been surprisingly unsophisticated about using Walt Disney to its advantage.
Many older people prefer not to talk about it. But Father Federico Acosta was
no liar. And in 1940 nobody in this Spanish backwater had even heard of Walt
Disney.
Does that mean Jose Guirao became Walt Disney? Only science could sort out the
mystery. A DNA test of Disney's offspring, matched to one of the Carrillo
family, would be enough to confirm, or discard, the alleged blood relationship.
Diego Carrillo and his nephew both say they are prepared to take part in such a
test - if only to rid Mojacar, and the world, of any doubt. The Greenes doubt,
however, that the Disneys are ready to do the same.
**************************************************
God bless America!
Reading "Black Hawk Down" by Mark Bowden
Ozma von Oz
resemblence between Walt and his younger brother or nephew Roy Disney. How does
this fit in with the Illigitimate Spanish Love Child story?
Karen
Ron Turner
I know. I was wondering about that too. They very much resemble each other.
<shrug>