Every
Disney Hero Has a Voice!
Peter
Pan
Bobby
Driscoll
March
3rd, 1937 – March 30th, 1968
Robert Cletus "Bobby" Driscoll (March 3,
1937 – March 30, 1968) was an American child actor known for a large body of
cinema and TV performances from 1943 to 1960. He starred in some of The Walt
Disney Company's most popular live-action pictures of that period, such as Song
of the South (1946), So Dear to My Heart (1948), and Treasure Island (1950). He
served as animation model and provided the voice for the title role in Peter
Pan (1953). In 1950, he received an Academy Juvenile Award for outstanding
performance in feature films.
In the mid-1950s, Driscoll's career began to decline, and
he turned primarily to guest appearances on anthology TV series. He became
addicted to narcotics and was sentenced to prison for drug use. After his
release he focused his attention on the avant-garde art scene. In ill health
from his drug use, and his funds completely depleted, he died in March 1968.
Early life
Born Robert Cletus Driscoll in Cedar Rapids, Iowa,
Driscoll was the only child of Cletus Driscoll, an insulation salesman, and
Isabelle Kratz Driscoll, a former schoolteacher. Shortly after his birth, the
family moved to Des Moines where they stayed until early 1943. When a doctor
advised the father to relocate to balmy California due to pulmonary ailments he
was suffering from his work-related handling of asbestos, the family moved to
Los Angeles. Driscoll's barber urged his parents to try to get the cute child
into the movies, and the man's son, an occasional actor, got him an audition at
MGM for a bit role in the 1943 family drama Lost Angel, which starred
up-and-coming Margaret O’Brien. While on a tour across the studio lot,
five-year-old Driscoll noticed a mock-up ship and asked where the water was.
The director was impressed by the boy's curiosity and intelligence, and chose
him out of forty applicants.
Career
"Wonder Child"
Driscoll's brief, two-minute debut helped him win the
role of young Al Sullivan, the youngest of the five Sullivan brothers, in the
20th Century Fox's 1944 World War II
drama The Sullivans, opposite Thomas Mitchell and Anne Baxter. With
his natural acting and talent for memorizing lines at that young age, he was
soon considered a new "Wonder Child". One major studio recommended
him to another, leading to screen portrayals as the boy who could blow his
whistle while standing on his head in Sunday Dinner for a Soldier (1944), the
"child brother" of Richard Arlen in The Big Bonanza (1944),
and young Percy Maxim in So Goes My Love (1946), with Don Ameche and Myrna Loy.
In addition, he had a number of smaller roles in movies such as Identity
Unknown in 1945, and Mrs Susie Slagel's, From This Day Forward,
and O.S.S. with Alan Ladd, all three of which were released in 1946.
Disney
Driscoll was the first actor Walt Disney put under
contract, to play the lead character in 1946's Song of the South, which
introduced live action into the producer's films, in addition to extensive
animated footage. The film turned Driscoll and his co-star Luana Patten into
child stars, and they were discussed for a special Academy Award as the best
child actors of the year, but in 1947 it was decided not to present any
juvenile awards at all.
Now nicknamed by the American press as Walt Disney's
"Sweetheart Team", Driscoll and Patten starred together in So Dear to
My Heart, opposite acting balladeer Burl Ives and veteran character actress
Beulah Bondi. It was planned as Disney's first all live-action movie, with
production beginning immediately after Song of the South, but its
release was delayed until late 1948 to meet the demands of Disney's co-producer
and long-time distributor RKO Radio Pictures for some animated content in the
film.
Driscoll played Eddie Cantor's screen son in the 1948 RKO
Studios musical comedy If You Knew Susie, in which he teamed up with
former Our Gang member Margaret Kerry. He and Patten appeared with Roy Rogers
and the Sons of the Pioneers in the live-action teaser for the Pecos Bill
segment of Disney's cartoon compilation Melody Time, which was released in
1948.
Driscoll was "loaned" to RKO to star in The
Window, based on Cornell Woolrich's The Boy Cried Murder. However Howard
Hughes, who had bought RKO the previous year, considered the film unworthy of
release and Driscoll not much of an actor, and delayed its release. When it was
released in May 1949, it became a surprise hit and recouped a multiple of its
production costs. The New York times credited Driscoll with the film's success:
"[...]The striking force and
terrifying impact of this RKO melodrama is chiefly due to Bobby's brilliant
acting, for the whole effect would have been lost were there any suspicion of
doubt about the credibility of this pivotal character.[...] "The
Window" is Bobby Driscoll's picture, make no mistake about it.[...]
So Dear to My Heart and The Window
earned Driscoll a special Juvenile Academy Award in March 1950 as the
outstanding juvenile actor of 1949.
Driscoll was cast to play Jim Hawkins in Walt Disney's version of Robert
Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, with British actor Robert Newton as Long
John Silver, the studio's first all-live-action picture. The feature was filmed
in the United Kingdom, and during production it was discovered that Driscoll
did not have a valid British work permit, so his family and Disney were fined
and ordered to leave the country. They were allowed to remain for six weeks to
prepare an appeal, during which director Byron Haskin hastily shot all of
Driscoll's close-ups, using his British stand-in to film missing location
scenes after he and his parents had returned to California. Driscoll's work in
this film earned him a star at 1560 Vine Street on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame.
Treasure Island was an international box office hit, and
there were several other film projects involving Driscoll under discussion, but
none materialized. For example, Haskin recalled in his memoirs that Disney,
although interested in Robert Louis Stevenson's pirate story as a full length
cartoon, always planned to cast Driscoll as Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. At that
point in time, he was at the perfect age for the role, but because of a story
rights ownership dispute with Hollywood producer David O. Selznick, who had
previously produced the property in 1938, Disney ultimately had to cancel the
entire project. Driscoll was also scheduled to portray a youthful follower of Robin
Hood following Treasure Island, again with Robert Newton, who would play
Friar Tuck, but Driscoll's run-in with British immigration made this
impossible.
Driscoll's second long-run Disney contract allowed him to
be loaned to independent Horizon Pictures for the double role of Danny/Josh
Reed in When I Grow Up (1951). His casting was suggested by Oscar-winning
screenplay writer Michael Kanin.
In addition to his brief guest appearance in Walt
Disney's first TV Christmas show in 1950, One Hour in Wonderland,
Driscoll lent his voice to Goofy, Jr in the Disney cartoon shorts, Fathers
are People and Father's Lion, which were released in 1951 and 1952,
respectively.
Driscoll portrayed Robert "Bibi" Bonnard in Richard
Fleischer's comedy The Happy Time (1952), which was based on a Broadway play of
the same name by Samuel A. Taylor. Cast with acting veterans Charles Boyer,
Marsha Hunt, Louis Jourdan, and Kurt Kasznar, he played the juvenile offspring
of a patriarch in Quebec of the 1920s, the character upon whom the plot
centered.
Driscoll's last major success, Peter Pan, was produced
largely between May 1949 and mid-1951. Driscoll was cast opposite Disney's
"Little British Lady" Kathryn Beaumont, in the role of Wendy Darling;
he was used as the reference model for the close-ups and provided Peter Pan's
voice, while dancer and choreographer Roland Dupree was the model for the
character's motion. Scenes were played on an almost empty sound stage with only
the most essential props, and filmed for use by the illustrators.
In his biography on Disney Marc Elliot described Driscoll
as the producer's favorite "live action" child star: "Walt often
referred to Driscoll with great affection as the living embodiment of his own
youth [...]"However, during a project meeting following the completion of Peter
Pan, Disney stated that he now saw Driscoll as best suited for roles as a
young bully rather than a likeable protagonist. Driscoll's salary at Disney had
been raised to $1750 per week and compared to his salary, Driscoll had little
work from 1952 on. In March 1953, the additional two-year option Driscoll had
been extended (which would have kept him at Disney into 1956) was canceled,
just weeks after Peter Pan was released theatrically. A severe case of acne
accompanying the onset of puberty and explaining why it was necessary for
Driscoll to use heavy makeup for his performances on dozens of TV shows, was
officially provided as the final reason for the termination of his connection
with the Disney Studios.
TV and radio
Driscoll encountered increasing indifference from the
other Hollywood studios. Still perceived as "Disney’s kid actor" he
was unable to get movie roles as a serious character actor. Beginning in 1953
and for most of the next three years, the bulk of his work was on television,
on such anthology and drama series as Fireside Theatre, Schlitz Playhouse of
Stars, Front Row Center, Navy Log, TV Reader's Digest, Climax!, Fort
Theatre, Studio One, Dragnet, Medic and Dick Powell’s Zane Gray Theater. In
some special star-focusing series, he appeared with Loretta Young, Gloria
Swanson, and Jane Wyman.
Between 1948 and 1957, he performed on a number of radio
productions, which included a special broadcast version of Treasure Island
in January 1951 and of Peter Pan in December 1953. And as it was common
practice in this business, Driscoll and Luana Patten did promotional radio gigs
(starting in late 1946 for Song of the South) and toured the country on
various parades and charity events through the years.
In 1947 he recorded a special version of "So Dear to
My Heart" at Capitol Records. In 1954 he was awarded a Milky Way Gold Star
Award, chosen in a nationwide poll for his work on television and radio.
Post-Disney
After leaving the Disney studios, Driscoll's parents
withdrew him from the Hollywood Professional School which served child movie
actors, and sent him to the public Westwood University High School instead.
There his grades dropped substantially, he was the target of ridicule for his
previous film career, and he began to experiment with drugs. He said later,
"The other kids didn't accept me. They treated me as one apart. I tried
desperately to be one of the gang. When they rejected me, I fought back, became
belligerent and cocky — and was afraid all the time." At his request,
Driscoll's parents returned him the next year to Hollywood Professional School,
where in May 1955 he graduated.
However, his drug use increased. In an interview years
later, he stated, "I was 17 when I first experimented with the stuff. In
no time I was using whatever was available, ... mostly heroin, because I had
the money to pay for it." In 1956, he was arrested for the first time for
possession of marijuana, but the charge was dismissed. On July 24, 1956, Hedda
Hopper wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "This could cost this fine
lad and good actor his career." In 1957, he had only one television part,
that of the loyal brother of a criminal immigrant in M Squad, a long-running
crime series starring Lee Marvin.
In December 1956, Driscoll and his girlfriend Marilyn
Jean Rush (occasionally misspelled as "Brush") eloped to Mexico to
get married, to avoid their parents' objections. The couple was later re-wed in
a Los Angeles ceremony that took place in March 1957. They had three children,
but the relationship didn't last. They separated, then divorced in 1960.
Later roles
Driscoll began using the name "Robert Driscoll"
to distance himself from his youthful roles as "Bobby" (since 1951,
he had been known to friends and family as "Bob", and in Schlitz
Playhouse of Stars - Early Space Conquerors, 1952, was credited as
"Bob Driscoll"). He landed two final screen roles: with Cornel Wilde
in the 1955 release The Scarlet Coat, and performing opposite Mark
Damon, Connie Stevens and Frances Farmer in The Party Crashers (1958).
He was charged with "disturbing the peace" and
"assault with a deadly weapon", the latter after hitting one of two
hecklers with a pistol, who made insulting remarks while he was washing a
girlfriend's car; the charges were dropped. Late in 1961 he was sentenced as a drug
addict and imprisoned at the Narcotic Rehabilitation Center of the California
Institution for Men in Chino, California. His last known appearances on TV
were, among others, small roles in two single-season series: The Best of the
Post, a syndicated anthology series adapted from stories published in The
Saturday Evening Post magazine, and The Brothers Brannagan, an unsuccessful
crime series starring Stephen Dunne and Mark Roberts. Both were originally
aired on November 5, 1960.
When Driscoll left Chino in early 1962, he was unable to
find acting work. Embittered by this, he said, "I have found that memories
are not very useful. I was carried on a silver platter ... and then dumped into
the garbage."
New York City
In 1965, a year after his parole expired, he relocated to
New York, hoping to revive his career on the Broadway stage, but was
unsuccessful. He became part of Andy Warhol's
Greenwich Village art community known as The Factory, where he began focusing
on his artistic talents. He had previously been encouraged to do so by famed
artist and poet Wallace Berman, whom he had befriended after joining Berman's
art circle (now also known as Semina Culture) in Los Angeles in 1956. Some of
his works were considered outstanding, and a few of his surviving collages and
cardboard mailers were temporarily exhibited in Los Angeles at the Santa Monica
Museum of Art. In 1965, early in his tenure at The Factory, Driscoll gave his
last known film performance, in experimental filmmaker Piero Heliczer's
underground movie Dirt.
Death
He left The Factory in late 1967 or very early 1968 and,
penniless, disappeared into Manhattan's underground. On March 30, 1968, about
three weeks after his 31st birthday, two boys playing in a deserted East
Village tenement at 371 East 10th St found his body. The medical examination
determined that he had died from heart failure caused by an advanced hardening
of the arteries due to longtime drug abuse. There was no ID on the body, and
photos taken of it and shown around the neighborhood yielded no positive
identification. When Driscoll's body went unclaimed, he was buried in an
unmarked pauper’s grave in New York City's Potter’s Field on Hart Island.
Late in 1969, about nineteen months after his death,
Driscoll's mother sought the help of officials at the Disney studios to contact
him for a hoped-for reunion with his father, who was near death. This resulted
in a fingerprint match at NYPD, which located his burial on Hart Island.
Although his name appears on his father's gravestone at Eternal Hills Memorial
Park in Oceanside, California, it is merely a cenotaph since his remains still
rest on Hart Island. Driscoll's death was not reported until the re-release of
his first Disney film, Song of the South, in 1971/72, when reporters
researched the whereabouts of the film's major cast members, and his mother
revealed what had happened.
Tributes
In February 2009, singer-songwriter Benjy Ferree released
Come Back to the Five and Dime Bobby Dee Bobby Dee, a concept album
based in part on Driscoll's life.
In September 2011, American singer-songwriter Tom Russell
released the song "Farewell Never Neverland" on the album
"Mesabi", an elegy for Bobby Driscoll as Peter Pan.
Selected filmography
Film
|
Year
|
Title
|
Role
|
Notes
|
|
1944
|
The Fighting
Sullivans
|
Al Sullivan as a
child
|
Uncredited
|
|
1945
|
Identity
Unknown
|
Toddy Loring
|
|
|
1946
|
So Goes My
Love
|
Percy Maxim
|
Alternative
title: A Genius in the Family
|
|
1946
|
O.S.S.
|
Gerard
|
|
|
1946
|
From This Day
Forward
|
||
|
1946
|
Song of the
South
|
Johnny
|
|
|
1948
|
So Dear to My
Heart
|
Jeremiah Kincaid
|
|
|
1949
|
The Window
|
Tommy Woodry
|
Won Academy
Juvenile Award
|
|
1950
|
Treasure
Island
|
Jim Hawkins
|
|
|
1951
|
The Lux Video
Theatre
|
Billy Crandall
|
Episode:
"Tin Badge"
|
|
1952
|
The Happy Time
|
Robert
"Bibi" Bonnard
|
|
|
1953
|
Peter Pan
|
Peter Pan
|
Voice and
close-up model
|
|
1955
|
The Scarlet
Coat
|
Ben Potter
|
|
|
1956
|
Crusader
|
Josef
|
Episode:
"Fear"
|
|
1956
|
Climax!
|
Gary
|
Episode:
"The Secret of River Lane"
|
|
1957
|
M Squad
|
Stephen/Steve
Wikowski
|
Episode:
"Pete Loves Mary"
|
|
1958
|
Frontier
Justice
|
Trumpeter Jones
|
Episode:
"Death Watch"
|
|
1958
|
The
Millionaire
|
Lew Conover
|
Episode:
"The Norman Conover Story"
|
|
1959
|
Trackdown
|
Mike Hardesty
|
Episode:
"Blind Alley"
|
|
1960
|
The Brothers
Brannagon
|
Johnny
|
Episode:
"The Twisted Root"
|
|
1965
|
Dirt
|
Unknown
|
Produced by Andy
Warhol
|
Stage
|
Year
|
Performance
|
Role
|
Dates
|
|
1954
|
The Boy With
a Cart
|
The boy
|
February 1954
|
|
1954
|
Ah,
Wilderness!
|
Richard Miller
|
August 1954 (Pasadena
Playhouse)
|
|
1957
|
Girls of
Summer
|
unknown
|
May 1957
(Players Ring Theatre)
|
Radio shows
(This is not necessarily a complete list, it only displays all of those radio-shows, which could be located and verified until now).
|
Year
|
Show
|
Role
|
Dates/Notes
|
|
1946
|
Song of the
South - Promo-Interview
|
Bobby Driscoll
and Luana Patten, hosted by Johnny Mercer
|
Aired in late
1946
|
|
1946
|
Bobby Driscoll,
Luana Patten, Walt Disney and James Baskett, hosted by Johnny Mercer
|
Aired in late
1946
|
|
|
1946
|
The Dennis
Day Show (aka A Day in the Life of Dennis Day) - "The Boy Who Sang For A
King"
|
Cecil (a little
carol-boy)
|
Aired on
December 25
|
|
1948
|
Family
Theater - "As the
Twig is Bent"
|
Aired in
February 1948
|
|
|
1948
|
Family
Theatre - "The
Future is Yours"
|
Aired on February
19
|
|
|
1948
|
Family
Theatre - "Jamie
and the Promise"
|
Aired on August
19
|
|
|
1948
|
Family
Theater - "A Daddy
for Christmas"
|
Aired on
December 15
|
|
|
1950
|
Family
Theater -
"Mahoney's Lucky Day"
|
Aired on April
19 - hosted by himself
|
|
|
1950
|
Hallmark
Playhouse - "Knee
Pants"
|
Aired on June 25
|
|
|
1950
|
Movietown
Radio Theater -
"The Throwback"
|
Aired on July 6
|
|
|
1951
|
Lux Radio
Theater - "Treasure
Island"
|
Jim Hawkins
|
Aired on January
29
|
|
1951
|
Cavalcade of
America - "The Day
They Gave Babies Away"
|
Aired on
December 25
|
|
|
1953
|
Family
Theater - "The
Courtship of John Dennis"
|
Aired on April 8
|
|
|
1953
|
Lux Radio
Theater - "Peter
Pan"
|
Peter Pan
|
Aired on
December 10
|
|
1955
|
Family
Theater - "The
Penalty"
|
Aired on October
12
|
|
|
1956
|
Family
Theatre - "Fair
Exchange"
|
Aired on
September 19
|
|
|
1957
|
Family
Theatre - "A Shot
in the Dark"
|
Aired on August
7
|
Recordings
|
Year
|
Performance
|
Role
|
Other notes
|
|
1946/47
|
"So Dear to
My Heart"
|
Jeremiah Kincaid
|
Capitol Records
(CDF 3000) - narrated by John Beal
|
|
1950
|
"Treasure
Island"
|
Jim Hawkins
|
RCA Victor
(Y-416) - narrated by Bobby Driscoll
|
|
1964
|
"Treasure
Island"
|
Jim Hawkins
|
Disneyland
Records (DQ-1251) - condensed version of the original motion picture
soundtrack - narrated by Del McKennon
|
