Walt Disney’s mommy issues revealed: Wearing her clothes… a freak accident… and the tragic messages in his most iconic movies

Walt Disney blamed himself for the untimely death of his mother, Flora, in 1938 and would snap at anyone who dared to ask about her – even 20 years after the tragic accident.

The iconic animator brought joy to millions with Mickey Mouse and built what would become a $186billion empire. But he was ‘inconsolable’ over Flora’s passing at age 70 from carbon monoxide poisoning sparked by a faulty furnace.

Growing up, Walt had a strong bond with his beloved mother and would delight in playing practical jokes on her – handing her a fake severed thumb in a box, and pretending to be a woman while wearing her dresses.

Flora sold butter door-to-door, managed the family’s bookkeeping, and designed and furnished the homes her husband, Elias, built for a living.

‘There’s nothing mysterious about drawing up plans for a house,’ the Ohio-born matriarch was quoted saying in Bob Thomas’s 1976 biography, Walt Disney an American Original.

‘And a woman ought to know more about making it livable.’

During the height of the Great Depression in the 1930s, Flora and Elias were struggling financially while managing apartment houses in Portland, Oregon. Elias was also suffering from a bad rupture while Flora had a succession of small strokes.

‘We have been worried for some time for fear you and Dad have been attempting too much and jeopardizing your health,’ Walt wrote to Flora in 1936.

‘I think you should keep in mind that your health is worth far more than any money that might be derived by trying to do too much with your own hands. After all, money is no good to us if we do not have good health to enjoy it.’

The 22-time Oscar winner and his brother/cofounder, Roy, were soon basking in the groundbreaking success of making the United States’ first-ever animated feature film: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It went on to become the highest-grossing movie of 1938 and amass $418million.

The Disney brothers convinced Flora and Elias to relocate to Los Angeles and bought them a brand new house in Toluca Lake as a present for their 50th wedding anniversary on New Year’s Day 1938.

By September, Walt and Roy had paid $8,300 for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house. They furnished the 1936-built single family home at a cost of between $2,500 and $3,000.

‘More important it has a good heating system,’ Roy wrote Walt of the central gas heater with forced circulation.

However, the fancy furnace quickly began to malfunction, so the Disney brothers dispatched one of their studio workmen to repair it.

On the morning of November 26, tragedy struck. Flora collapsed on the bathroom floor, and Elias fainted in the hallway while searching for her. The lid on the furnace’s air intake had slipped, recirculating toxic exhaust into the house all night long.

Quick-thinking housekeeper Alma Smith, who felt woozy herself, discovered the unconscious couple at 8am.

Smith called the police and they were all rushed by ambulance to Hollywood Hospital where Elias was revived but remained ‘in serious condition.’ Flora was pronounced dead on arrival from asphyxiation.

It was only two days after Elias and Flora had celebrated Thanksgiving dinner at Walt and his wife Lillian’s Tudor-style home in Los Feliz.

Roy ordered a report on the leaky gas heater, which determined that the ‘installation of the furnace showed either a complete lack of knowledge of the requirements of the furnace or a flagrant disregard of these conditions if they were known.’

Walt had all the best intentions buying the house, so his ‘misery deepened’ by the fact that it directly caused Flora’s death. His guilt grew exponentially when he realized ‘the culpability of his own workmen.’

After the funeral, the grieving Disney brothers – who felt ‘personally responsible’ – continued to regularly visit their mother’s gravesite inside Forest Lawn Memorial Park’s Sanctuary of Truth in Glendale.

Years later, when Walt’s daughter Sharon asked him where her grandparents were buried, he lashed out, ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ – according to Neal Gabler’s 2006 biography, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.

In 1958, when one of his secretaries casually mentioned Flora’s death, he sternly replied: ‘I don’t want that ever brought up in this office again.’ 

Following the tragedy, Walt produced countless movies centering on orphaned or motherless characters.

It could be seen in films including Pinocchio (1940), Bambi (1942), Cinderella (1950), Pollyanna (1960),The Sword in the Stone (1963) and The Jungle Book (1967).

The Walt Disney Family Museum declined to comment on this article.