Paperback mysteries usually end this way, not Disney fairy tales.
There were no obvious signs of foul play.
He had no identification.
Credit: Everett Collection
The body was unknown and went unclaimed.
Fifty years after his death, it’s a question that continues to trouble some of his oldest friends.
“It hit him hard.
He was a heroin addict.
It was tragic and there wasn’t much you could do about it.
He was strong, he had a good intellect and he should have known better.
But that was a choice he made, and you couldn’t talk him out of it.”
It all started with a haircut.
His agent took me out to a part."
“Bobby was Disney’s live-action Mickey Mouse.”
He also made friends with castmates along the way.
“He went to his own public school when he was not working.
He had normal experiences with his peer groupjust as I did.”
He was just another teen boy with a bad case of acne.
“He controlled the money and he hated Bobby Driscoll.
He hated Hollywood kids.
He thought they were precocious, weren’t real, and were incredibly annoying.
He didn’t want Bobby Driscoll to be with Disney anymore.”
The split was devastating.
“The way I understand it, it was a rather rude dismissal,” says Gray.
That was his notification that he was no longer needed there."
“I was lonely most of the time.
A child actor’s childhood is not a normal one.
People continually saying ‘What a cute little boy!’
“I became a beatnik and a bum,” Driscoll said in the 1961 magazine article.
“I had no residence.
My clothes were at my parents' [house] but I didn’t live anywhere.
My personality had suffered during my marriage and I was trying to recoup it.”
Driscoll also engaged in a more dangerous form of recreationheroin.
“It wasn’t a secret,” says Gray.
“He liked heroin.
That’s just the way it was.”
He even created collages and small works of art.
“We loved him dearly,” remembers Berman’s wife Shirley, now 83.
(Wallace Berman died in 1976).
But trouble was never far away.
“I had everything,” he said in an interview after his sentence.
“Was earning $50,000 a year…working steadily with good parts.
Then I started putting all my spare time in my arm.
I’m not really sure why I started using narcotics.
I was 17 when I first experimented with the stuff.
“Bobby was a curiosity.
“Warhol was so perverse, that he loved having Bobby Driscoll as part of his scene.
That was Warhol’s perversity in full playyou know, dissipated Hollywood.”
“He said later that Bobby just didn’t want to be a ‘good little boy’ anymore.
He’d been too good.
He wanted to be just the reverse.
Maybe that was it.”
Eliot has a far more sobering rationale.
“Obviously he was sick and an addict and broke.
Nobody came to his rescue.
That’s the real story of Hollywood.
It’s a very sad story, but, you know, take a look atA Star Is Born.
It’s the exact same story.”
Does anyone here even know the name at the center of those five points?
“He sounds like a baseball player to me,” offers a patrolling police officer with a shrug.
“I did study him for a long time.
I think that was Bobby’s best role.”
The cause of death has no bearing on someone’s ability to be considered for Disney Legends.
But unlike Driscoll, Blair never won an Academy Award.
“That ought to settle the matter right there,” argues his old friend Gray.
(Epstein wouldn’t comment on why Driscoll hasn’t been considered.)
For his part, Allender just wants to see Driscoll remembered for his achievements, not his shortcomings.
“What’s the point of poking at it?”
he says of Driscoll’s drug use.
“People make mistakes.
Some people can’t get out of it.
I’m just saying, respect him.”
“There are a number of interesting characters from New York Citythe cool people.”
“He’s somewhere on the northern part of the island,” says Hunt.
“We just don’t know where.”
“It’s a really, really beautiful location.
There are herds of deer, these red raccoons, and a whole bird sanctuary.
So for Bobby Driscoll, it’s the perfect place to be buried.
It’s just like Never Never Land.”
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