2023-05-27 00:58:46
Bizarre urban legends have been sprinkled over the figure of Walter Elias Disney with the aim of demolishing the myth of the exemplary American. That he didn’t know how to draw, that he didn’t really create Mickey Mousethat he was an anti-Semite, that he was an informer at the service of the FBI and until he was frozen shortly before his death… But, as with the story of the last words written by the American entertainer or that he was born in Mojácar ( Almería), a town dotted with a recent vote buying plotsome have an important real basis.
Officially, Walt Disney was born on December 5, 1901 in Chicago, Illinois. His father, Elias Disney, a farmer of Irish ancestry, was married to schoolteacher Flora Call, native of Ohio but of German ancestry. According to the biography approved by the American animator, director, screenwriter and producer, the family moved in 1906 to a farm near Marceline, Missouri, because of the increasing crime rate in Chicago. Disney’s first dabbling with drawing and his great fondness for trains date from this time.
However, Elias Disney suddenly fell ill with typhoid fever and, despite the help of his older sons, found himself unable to continue working on the farm. He sold it, and the family lived in a rented house until 1910, when they moved to Kansas City. After serving as an ambulance driver during World War I in France, Walt launched his career as a cartoonist in Kansas. There he emulated the most classic American story: the man who builds an empire from scratch.
Isabel Zamora, the washerwoman of Mojácar
This is the end of the first years of the official biography of the founder of the Disney factory, which the FBI itself described as confusing in its reports. And out of those doubts emerged the legend of Isabella Zamora, a young laundress who emigrated from Mojácar with her son, named José Guirao Zamora, to the United States in search of new opportunities. The bastard son, possibly the doctor’s Gines Carrillo, was the reason that the woman from Almería decided to flee from a rural population that marginalized single mothers. Zamora left the port of Cartagena, heading to Chicago, where he handed over the child to the couple formed by Elías and Flora Disney.
According to the book that Cristopher Jones –son of one of Disney’s former press agents– dedicated to the matter, a Chicago city directory dated 1900 confirms that a man named Juan Zamoraby all accounts a brother of Isabel, lived on the same street as Elias and Flora Disney.
Disney in 1937 featuring the seven dwarfs in the original Snow White trailer
True or not, the legend attracted the interest of the cartoonist himself. According to the testimony of the locals, the American sent to the Andalusian town in 1940 – when the Spanish magazine ‘Primer Plano’ first revealed the story – three men dressed in gray suits who claimed to be representatives of Walt Disney Studios. They searched the municipal register for the birth certificate of Jose Guirao Zamora, but they did not find his file, which could have been the victim of a fire in the Civil War along with other files in the town. However, according to the version of Christopher Jones, the visitors did find the document and tore the pages to transfer them to the US It is worth mentioning that Walt Disney’s birth certificate in Chicago has never been located either – only a baptismal certificate dated years after he was born–, despite the fact that those of the other brothers are preserved.
Eduardo Soler directed the documentary ‘Disney through the mirror’ in 2010, where he tried to shed light on how true the legend was. One of the axes of the documentary is the fruitful relationship of the cartoonist with John Edgar Hoover, the most famous and controversial director of the FBI. As payment for his role in the witch-hunt against Hollywood members suspected of being communists, rumor mill says Hoover helped the filmmaker hide his complicated origins. Indeed, declassified documents show that Disney acted secretly as an FBI agent from the early 1940s and that in 1954 he was promoted to the rank of “special agent contact” (special agent contact) by direct order of Hoover.
Did Disney confess his secret to Dalí?
Another point that would confirm Walt Disney’s strange interest in Almería from the 1940s is that, according to the mayor of Mojácar, he confessed to Salvador Dalí, whom he met in 1945 during the filming of ‘Remember’ by Hitchcock. that he felt Andalusian. At the beginning of 1946 they began to work together to make an animated short, ‘Destiny’, which after eight months of work was abandoned. Not surprisingly, the time they spent together would have given rise to this delicate confidence. News that, if made public, would have cracked the immaculate public image of the patriot par excellence.
“I thought I could prove that it wasn’t true, but I couldn’t. Now I doubt the history of Chicago and that of Mojácar»
Likewise, the photographer Tito del Amo, whose testimony is extremely important in Eduardo Soler’s documentary, met Disney at the age of 10 when they were both neighbors in The Angels and paradoxically ended up living in Mojácar. After covering the Palomares nuclear accident as a photographer, the American businessman settled in Almería without having the remotest idea of the Almería origins of the father of cartoons.
When Master’s Titus heard about the legend, his first reaction was to embrace the most widespread version (it was a propaganda campaign orchestrated by the regime and the mayor of the municipality), but, after inquiring about the matter for years, he has ended up being convinced of it. that there is nothing clear in the Disney biography: «I thought I could prove that it was not true, but I could not. Now I doubt the history of Chicago and that of Mojácar ».
Still, the only way to check if Walter Elias Disney was really José Guirao Zamora, in the absence of documentary evidence, it is through a DNA test the son of the doctor Ginés Carrillo, the one who supposedly got Isabel Zamora pregnant. Many locals, however, question that the doctor was hers who had relations with her, whose trace was lost forever in Chicago.
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