WONDERFUL WORLD.

The weather was kind to Anaheim, California, on July 17, 1955. So kind, in fact, that the heels of women's shoes got stuck in the warm asphalt. Anything other than sunshine would have been an insult to the opening of America's latest Shangri-La: Disneyland, or, as its creator called it, "the happiest place on Earth." On that day, if you believe one estimate, as many as twenty-eight thousand people poured through the gates, with seventy million more, about half the population of the country, watching the event on television. Walt Disney had already conquered TV through "Disneyland," which was broadcast every week on ABC, and that day the Mouseketeers, Disney's troupe of performing children, danced live for the public, wearing their black skullcaps with rounded ears--the most recognizable corporate headgear after that of the Playboy Bunnies. The broadcast was hosted by three celebrities, who, just to double the delirium, played hopscotch through the crowds around the park. One of them was the movie star Ronald Reagan.

Once upon a time, in "Bambi," Disney had sought to catch the living soul of nature on film. Now he was leaving it for dead. Within three years, his new monument would outstrip Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon as a tourist draw. His attention was turning to grander but more manageable things, as if the batting of a doe's eyelashes, or little April showers going drip-drip-drop, were no longer quite suited, or satisfying, to a man of the world. His ambitions rose, and with them went the plaudits of his followers; in 1962, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, two of the patron saints of Hollywood, travelled to Oslo to argue that Disney should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Even now, forty years after his death, the slight figure of Walt himself is almost impossible to pick out from the parti-colored throng of movie clips, projects, and moral tendencies that march under the banner of "Walt Disney." Say the name to most people and you know what will flash onto their mind's eye: unashamedly bright hues, flying elephants, singing bears, corporate dominance, happy endings, and a helping of values that slip down as easily as ice cream. How did we arrive at this blinding apotheosis? One attempt at an answer, the most comprehensive to date, is provided by Neil Gabler, in "Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination" (Knopf; $35). Gabler takes more than eight hundred pages to tell and note his tale, which sounds excessive, but then Disney himself was a model of unflagging thoroughness, and, as Thumper would say, if you can't do nice annotations, then don't do nuthin' at all.

He was born Walter Elias Disney, on December 5, 1901, in Chicago. His father, Elias, was at that time a carpenter, and the first Disney-like note in the story is struck when we learn that Elias built the wooden cottage on Tripp Avenue in which his son was born. He helped to construct two more dwellings nearby, and you half expect to hear that one of them was rented out to dwarfs. One of the problems for Gabler, as for any biographer of Disney, is that he can hardly start to recount the exploits of his subject without sounding like the narrator of a Disney TV show. When Walt was four, he and his family moved to Marceline, Missouri, where, in Gabler's words, he

often spent languid afternoons fishing with the neighbor boys for catfish and bowheads in Yellow Creek and skinny-dipping afterward. In the winter they would go sledding or skating on the frozen creek, building a bonfire on the shore to keep warm. Sometimes Walt would tag after Erastus Taylor, a Civil War veteran, who would relive his battle exploits. ("I don't think he ever was in a battle in the Civil War," Walt later said, "but he was in all of them.")

That last quotation drills us straight to the core of Disney's appeal. Far from chiding the old man for his fabrications, he is fondly and supportively amused. To be gripped by a story, especially one that is trawled from the past, is everything. To realize that it might not be true, or that it might have been blown up out of all proportion, is no big deal. Changing its proportions, in fact, could be just the ticket, because what are fables if not stories that have been lofted out of the reach of regular experience, no longer scratchable by the quibbles of common sense? As for blowing up, there is no better method for showing an image to a crowd--taking a mouse-size mouse, say, and throwing it onto a screen, where it assumes the dimensions, and some of the pluckier habits, of a man.

Marceline educated Disney. It taught him how to cherish good times, as if preparing them to be the objects of a later nostalgia. Was it really the case that when Buffalo Bill came to town he stopped his buggy mid-parade and asked the young Walt to join him? Did crusty old "Doc" Sherwood really give Walt a nickel for sketching his horse, Rupert? Another version of the story, cited by Gabler, has the doctor hanging the finished picture on the wall. Either way, Disney had done his first piece of business as an artist, and, according to his older brother Roy, it remained "the highlight of Walt's life." There would never be a time, indeed, when art was not a business, although what attracted Walt, throughout his career, was not so much the money that people traded for his art (that would be Roy's territory) as the eager numbers in which they came to view it, as if reassuring its creator that his dreams were just like theirs. Disney was hardly alone in locating bliss in some lost zone of childhood, and in striving to reconstruct it in the movies; without that primary impulse we would have no Andy Hardy, no "Meet Me in St. Louis," no "Citizen Kane." Disney taught the world to look back without anger, and he traced that look to a horse. Rupert was his Rosebud.

Elias farmed in Missouri, without much joy, and in 1911 the Disneys moved again, this time to Kansas City. There Elias ran a paper route, enlisting Walt and Roy as his delivery boys. Walt would get up for work in the dark, before school, and on Sundays he had a double load, which meant skipping church. (That was no loss. The grown-up Walt never went to church--a difficult smudge for those who acclaim him as the purveyor of all-American ways.) In later years, according to Gabler, "he talked of how the route and its demands--the unyielding routine, the snow, the fatigue, the lost papers--traumatized and haunted him." One thinks instantly of Dickens, and of his toils in the blacking factory. In each case, what scarred them was not pain--a job is a job, after all, ...