Booby Driscoll The Face of Peter Pan

Bobby Driscoll

He was supposed to live forever.

That was the point of Peter Pan, wasn’t it? The boy who never grew up. The one who could fly, laugh at danger, and still make it home for bedtime. For a while, Bobby Driscoll every bit of him, from the crooked grin to the sparkle in his eyes.

 

He got his start a long way from Neverland: Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1937. His father sold insulation. His mother kept the house. Ordinary stuff. Then the family moved west, chasing clean air and a little luck. A barber thought the kid had “it” and sent him to a Hollywood agent. That’s how it worked back then. One minute you’re getting your hair cut, the next you’re under contract at Disney Studios.

 

He was nine years old when Walt Disney signed him—the first child actor the studio owned outright. “A fine, sincere boy,” Disney said. Bobby called Walt “Uncle Walt.”

 

Then came the hits. Song of the South. So Dear to My Heart. Treasure Island. Critics called him “a natural.” One said he carried the film “with warmth and genuine feeling.” By thirteen, he had a miniature Oscar, and his face was as familiar as Mickey’s ears.

 Then Disney turned him into Peter Pan. Not just his voice—the animators traced his face, his expressions, the way he moved. He was the film. The boy who would never grow up, brought to life by a boy who desperately wanted to.

 

That’s where the fairy dust ran out.

 

Bobby’s voice changed. His jawline got sharper. He wasn’t “cute” anymore. One day, he tried to visit the Disney lot and was told to go home. “I was carried on a silver platter,” he said later, “and then dumped into the garbage.”

 

He went to public school, but didn’t fit in. “I tried desperately to be one of the gang,” he said. “When they rejected me, I became belligerent and cocky—and was afraid all the time.”

 

At seventeen, he turned to heroin. “In no time at all,” he said, “I was using whatever was available… mostly heroin, because I had the money.” A string of arrests followed for narcotics, forgery, and vagrancy. He did time at Chino State Prison and came out older and lost. “I don’t know who I am anymore,” he told another inmate.

 

He headed east after that, and drifted through the art scene, painted a little, hung around the Warhol crowd. People called him “sweet, quiet, and broken.”

 

In March 1968, two kids found him in an abandoned tenement. Empty bottles. Religious pamphlets. A body . The city buried him on Hart Island, the potter’s field. No name. Just a number. Months later, fingerprints told the truth: it was Bobby Driscoll, the boy who could fly.

 

He was thirty-one.