Pinned to a wall at Tito’s Beach Bar, overlooking the Mediterranean sea at Mojacar, south-east Spain, are the photographs of three men. One of them is holding up an Oscar. The moustache, receding hairline, arched eyebrows and the almond-shaped eyes belong to the familiar face of that United States icon and global brand-name, Walt Disney.
The same features are repeated on an unfamiliar face below. The moustache is bushier and the face fleshier, but the resemblance is strong — although the gentleman’s pose and formal clothes date the subject to the early part of the past century. The third photograph is of a thin-lipped, long-nosed man with slicked-back hair. Behind his smile lies a hard, narrow, time-worn face.
When , the American 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 señoritos, the ruling clan, of Mojacar until the middle of the past century. That should be the end of it. But it is not. Because Del Amo, like most of Mojacar’s 5 000 people, is convinced that Carrillo was Walt Disney’s true father.
They are not alone. Disney’s family may not like it, but two American authors, Marc Eliot and Christopher Jones, are separately trying to prove that he was the illegitimate son of Carrillo and a local washerwoman, Isabel Zamora. She, it is said, took Disney to the US but abandoned him when he was a few months old.
The story is irresistibly, perhaps impossibly, romantic. Mojacar is a fairy-tale place — a whitewashed village perched on a towering slab of rock, its houses clinging to the edge of the slopes, looking out over the sea. Where better for a creative genius 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.
The US’s great economic and cultural icon — 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, José 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 Chicago house, not far from the Disneys’ home. When Zamora could not, or would not, look after him, baby José was secretly adopted, presumably as an act of charity, by Elias Disney and his wife Flora — who lied to the local priest, and, possibly, to Walt.
“I rejected the idea outright when I first came here in the 1960s,” says Del Amo. But he now admits that he 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 in the classy suburb of Holmby Hills, across the street from the Disneys. He even visited the first Disneyland with Walt while it was still being built. His obsession is shared by Jones.
Like Del Amo, Jones has a photograph of himself as a boy with “Uncle Walt”, taken watching a Disneyland parade in the mid-1960s. Now Jones has moved from Italy to a hill town an hour’s drive from Mojacar as he works on a book that 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. The US’s 49th-biggest corporation does not like the origins of its brand name questioned — nor does the company or family, understandably, want the word “bastard” attached to it.
In real life Uncle Walt was a devious, megalomaniac, racist, egocentric genius. Jones says he once sacked an Indian employee because he was so dark he looked like a “nigger”. His hatred of Jews, especially those from New York, 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, following Ronald Reagan on to the stand — and violent studio strikes. He tried to use the mob muscle of hoodlum Willie Bioff to bust these. Disney was also vice-president of the rightwing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Eliot says he was a freelance agent for J Edgar Hoover, with a 600-page thick 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 cartoon factory of all time. And the mythical, marketable Disney is a friend to every child on the planet. The father of Bambi, Dumbo, Snow White, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse is sacrosanct, especially this month — when the 100th anniversary of his birth is being celebrated.
That vision of Disney is still being peddled. In its in-house centenary biography, produced by grandson Walter Elias Disney Miller, Walt’s only recognised vice is smoking.
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 Snr, to refute that and other claims about his role as a prized FBI informer.
The family calls the Mojacar connection 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. “It seems outlandish to the family. They know the truth.”
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. 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 5 1901. But it was not until 17 years later, when Disney needed a passport, that Flora would sign an affidavit saying he had been born at their home in Chicago. Oddly, she signed a second affidavit in Oregon in 1934.
This undoubtedly troubled Disney. He first stumbled across his own mystery when he tried to join the Red Cross as a World War I 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. 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 Eliot already showed how the FBI had approved his recruitment as a freelance, unpaid spy, or a “Special Agent in Charge contact”. If that could be said in 1992 what 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?
Former FBI chief William Webster said Hoover’s offer of an “absolute identity” referred to the fact that he had Disney’s fingerprints on file. Eliot’s book provoked a rare public riposte from Disney’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller. “He bases everything [his theory about an FBI connection] on the illegitimate Spanish birth theory, that’s why it’s all so crazy,” she told the Los Angeles Times.
The people of Mojacar 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.
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, José Acosta, arrived from Madrid to spend the summer holidays with him that year. Now a sprightly 71-year-old, this former journalist and trained 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 José 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 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, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood? That is certainly what Jones thinks. That doubt, he claims, gave Hoover a hold over Disney for the rest of his life.
Whatever the truth of Disney’s birth it can not be proven. For Mojacar’s birth register for 1901 has also disappeared. But nobody doubts that José Guirao and Isabel Zamora existed. Everybody remembered them leaving. But, as with Disney’s Chicago birth certificate, nobody can prove it.
Gines Carrillo’s legitimate son Diego — 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 Carrillo 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.
The Disney family has blamed Mojacar for using the Zamora story to attract tourists. Mayor Jacinto Alarcon was certainly capable of that. He even went on TV to tell the whole of Spain about Disney and Mojacar.
The village’s tourism councillor, José Luis Cano, is not sure what to do with the Walt Disney story. “I want people to talk about Mojacar,” he says. “Do you know a sculptor who might do a bust that we can put up?”
In fact Mojacar, now half populated by foreigners, has been surprisingly unsophisticated about using Disney to its advantage. Many older people prefer not to talk about it. But Father Acosta was no liar. And, in 1940, nobody in this Spanish backwater had even heard of Walt Disney.
Does that mean José 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 says he is 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.