The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  Throughout the late fall and winter of 1922–23, and on into the spring, Laugh-O-gram survived, barely, on small loans, the first (twenty-five hundred dollars on November 30, 1922) from its treasurer, J. V. Cowles, who was presumably reluctant to see his initial investment turn sour. The next lender, Fred Schmeltz, owner of a hardware store, made loans totaling more than two thousand dollars between February and June 1923. Schmeltz, as a member of Laugh-O-Gram’s board, had good reason to know how desperate the company’s situation was, and he tried to protect himself—his loans were secured by all the company’s equipment. On June 2, 1923, Disney assigned the Pictorial Clubs contract to Schmeltz as security not just for his loans but also Cowles’s, as well as the unpaid salary owed to two employees.98

  Disney’s personal lifeline was an occasional check from his brother. Roy had been diagnosed with tuberculosis in the fall of 1920, and he moved from one government sanatorium to another—from the first, in New Mexico, to another in Arizona, and finally to one in Sawtelle, California, now a part of the city of Los Angeles abutting Santa Monica. Disney remembered that Roy sent him blank checks with instructions to fill them out for any amount up to thirty dollars, “so I’d always put thirty dollars.” He scraped by on those small checks and the generosity of the Greek owners of the Forest Inn Café on the first floor of the McConahy Building. He also imposed on Edna Francis, Roy’s girlfriend, who remembered that Walt “used to come over to my house and talk and talk till almost midnight. He was having a kind of a struggle and when he’d get hungry he’d come over to our house and we’d feed him a good meal and he’d just talk and talk.”99

  Disney said in 1956: “I was desperately trying to get something that would take hold, catch on. So I thought of a reversal. They had had the cartoons working with the humans, which was originated by Max Fleischer. I said, well, maybe I’ll pull a reversal on that, I’ll put the human in with the cartoons. . . . The [Fleischer] cartoon would always come off the drawing board and run around in a real room and work with a real person. I took a real person and put ’em into the drawing.”

  On April 13, 1923, Disney, for Laugh-O-gram, signed a contract with the parents of Virginia Davis, a four-year-old Mary Pickford look-alike with blonde curls who had already performed in at least one Kansas City Film Ad commercial. He hired Virginia to appear in a new film called Alice’s Wonderland; her payment was to be 5 percent of the film’s proceeds.100 After the live action was shot, Disney and a few other members of his original staff worked on the film in the late spring and early summer of 1923. Hugh Harman, who was on Laugh-O-gram’s payroll throughout May and June, claimed to have animated most of it.101

  In the midst of production, probably in mid-June, Laugh-O-gram moved from the McConahy Building to less expensive quarters, the same space above Peiser’s restaurant that had housed Disney’s Kaycee Studios. “The studio was then in financial trouble,” Rudy Ising wrote in 1979, “and Walt, Hugh, Maxwell, and I secretly moved all our equipment back to the original building . . . one night, leaving McConahy with some unpaid back rent.”102 Starting in July, Fred Schmeltz paid the monthly rent (seventy-five dollars) for the space above Peiser’s. Maxwell remembered “taking turns with Walt on the camera stand for a long session shooting a circus parade”—a cartoon parade welcoming the live-action Alice to cartoonland—after the move.103

  In May 1923, while Alice’s Wonderland was still being animated, Disney wrote about it to potential distributors, offering to send them a print when it was finished. But, he said in 1956, “I couldn’t get anywhere with it.” Actually, his letter of May 14 to Margaret J. Winkler, a New York–based distributor, brought an immediate response. “I shall, indeed, be very pleased to have you send me a print of the new animated cartoon you are talking about,” she wrote to Disney on May 16. “If it is what you say, I shall be interested in contracting for a series of them.”104

  Disney wrote to Winkler again more than a month later. “Owing to numerous delays and backsets we have encountered in moving into our new studio,” he wrote on June 18, “we will not be able to complete the first picture of our new series by the time we expected.” He planned to be in New York around July 1 with a print and “an outline of our future program.”105 Winkler replied that she would be happy to see him.106 When Disney spoke of “backsets,” he may have had in mind what happened after the animation for Alice’s Wonderland was photographed. When the film was developed, the emulsion on the negative ran in the summer heat; at least part of the animation had to be reshot.107

  In the film, Alice visits the Laugh-O-gram studio to see how cartoons are made, watches an animated cat and dog box on a drawing board, and that night dreams she is in a cartoon herself. The novelty is all in the combination work, which, as Rudy Ising explained, “was bi-packed, that is, the live-action print was run through the camera operation along with the unexposed negative film, thus being superimposed on the film at the same time as the cartoon was being photographed.”108 Alice’s Wonderland otherwise suffers from some of the same disabilities as the Laugh-O-gram fairy tales, especially their repetitiveness, aggravated in this case by four off-screen fights that include three involving Alice and some escaped lions.

  Regardless, by midsummer 1923 Disney had a finished film in hand and a New York distributor who was eager to see it. He probably could not afford a trip to New York, but he could have followed through in other ways, and he did not. The fate of the six modernized fairy tales may have had something to do with his failure to act.

  In his first letter to Winkler, Disney invited her to get in touch with W. R. Kelley of Pictorial Clubs’ New York office, “and he will gladly screen several of our subjects”—the fairy-tale cartoons—“for you.”109 It was around this time that Pictorial Clubs, a Tennessee corporation, went out of business. The films—but not the obligation to pay for them—wound up in the hands of a New York corporation also called Pictorial Clubs. Disney had been swindled, and Laugh-O-gram would not see the eleven thousand dollars it was supposed to receive the following New Year’s Day.110 That disagreeable experience with one distributor may have left him less than eager, for a time, to pursue a contract with another. Rudy Ising remembered that in the summer of 1923, after the move back to the original studio above Peiser’s, “Walt was seriously considering going back to New York” to seek work as an animator on the Felix the Cat cartoons.111

  In later years, Disney may not have wanted to remember this episode, perhaps the only time after he left Kansas City Film Ad that he was on the verge of going to work for someone else and giving up the idea of running his own business. Just as the memory of his failed partnerships seemed to annoy him, so the very idea that he might have spent his life working for someone else may have been too unpleasant to contemplate. He was by nature a man who wanted to be in charge, in undisputed control, and so he could tolerate neither sharing power with a partner (other than Roy) nor surrendering it to a boss.

  With Alice’s Wonderland finished and his hopes for a new series in abeyance, Disney returned to the kind of cartoon that had first brought him modest success. “I spent a number of weeks working on a plan to make a weekly newsreel for the Kansas City Post,” he said in 1935, “but that deal fell through, too. That seemed to wash up all the prospects in Kansas City, so I decided to go to Hollywood.”112

  As Disney recalled in his 1941 speech to his employees, he passed through one true starving-artist phase in Kansas City, apparently when the studio was in the McConahy Building (although his reference to an “an old rat-trap of a studio” wouldn’t seem to fit that place). His business a shambles, he was living at his studio and bathing once a week at Kansas City’s new Union Station. He had nothing to eat but beans from a can and scraps of bread from a picnic. Characteristically, though, Disney refused to take a romantic, languishing view of his predicament when he talked about it again in 1956. Whenever he spoke of his hardships and how he overcame them, his voice was usually that of a rigorously optimistic entrepreneur. He loved bean
s, he said—“I was actually enjoying this meal.”

  * Disney’s “digging” was probably to prepare for his 1959 live-action feature Darby O’Gill and the Little People, a film rich in Irish atmosphere but shot entirely in California.

  CHAPTER 2

  “A Cute Idea”

  The Self-Taught Filmmaker

  1923–1928

  As his father had on several occasions, Walt Disney responded to defeat by pulling up stakes. When bankruptcy arrived for Laugh-O-gram Films in October 1923, he had already decamped for California, probably in late July. As had been the case with Elias in 1906, Robert Disney was part of the lure—he had moved to Southern California in 1922 and gone into the real estate business1—but so was Roy, since he was still hospitalized at Sawtelle.

  Los Angeles itself was a natural destination for a midwesterner like Disney, more so than New York. In the Los Angeles of the early 1920s, the big movie studios were starting to introduce an exotic immigrant seasoning of the sort that was already part of life in the Northeast, but many residents were uneasy with the newcomers. Los Angeles was still in its prevailing mores a transplanted midwestern city.

  “I’d failed,” Disney said of his Laugh-O-grams venture—but, he added, that was a good thing. “I think it’s important to have a good hard failure when you’re young. . . . I learned a lot out of that.” He came away from his failure buoyed by the entrepreneur’s conviction that he would always land on his feet, and so “I never felt sorry for myself.”

  Disney said in 1961 that by the time he arrived in Los Angeles “I was fed up with cartoons. I was discouraged and everything. My ambition at that time was to be a director.”2 He said he would have taken any job at a live-action studio—“Anything. Anything. Get in. . . . Be a part of it and then move up.” Roy Disney, speaking in 1967, had his doubts: “I kept saying to him, ‘Why aren’t you gonna get a job? Why don’t you get a job?’ He could have got a job, I’m sure, but he didn’t want a job. But he’d get into Universal, for example, on the strength of applying for a job and then . . . he’d just hang around the studio lot all day . . . watching sets and what was going on. . . . And MGM was another favorite spot where he could work that gag.”3 Walt Disney said forty years later, “I couldn’t get a job, so I went into business for myself” by returning to cartoons and building a camera stand in his uncle’s garage.4 Again, though, the documentary record indicates that his state of mind differed from what he chose to remember, and that he always intended to go into business for himself—making cartoons.

  Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, he had a letterhead printed—“Walt Disney, Cartoonist”—with his Uncle Robert’s address, 4406 Kingswell Avenue in Hollywood. He wrote to Margaret Winkler in New York on August 25, telling her that he was no longer associated with Laugh-O-gram and was setting up a new studio. “I am taking with me a select number of my former staff,” he wrote, “and will in a very short time be producing at regular intervals. It is my intention of securing working space with one of the studios, that I may better study technical detail and comedy situations and combine these with my cartoons.”5 In other words, Roy was right—Walt was insinuating himself onto the big-studio lots not in search of a job but to “study technical detail and comedy situations.”

  When Winkler replied on September 7, she was clearly getting impatient. “If your comedies are what you say they are and what I think they should be, we can do business,” she wrote. “If you can spare a couple of them long enough to send to me so that I can screen them and see just what they are, please do so at once.”6

  By then, Winkler had special reasons to be interested in Disney’s film. She had been distributing Max Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell cartoons, but Fleischer was about to leave her and distribute his cartoons through his own company, Red Seal. Another cartoon-producer client, Pat Sullivan, wanted to take his popular Felix the Cat cartoons elsewhere for more money. Winkler was a states-rights distributor who marketed films to subdistributors who paid for the right to sell them for a limited time in one or more states; she was on the fringes of the business, compared with the big film companies like Paramount and Universal. She needed a new cartoon series, quickly, and Alice’s Wonderland— Disney apparently sent her a print he had brought with him to California—persuaded her that Disney could meet that need. He was in the midst of making a sample “joke reel” for the Pantages theater chain—a new version of his Newman reels—when Winkler sent him a telegram on October 15, 1923, offering a contract for a series of six Alice films, with an option for two more sets of six.7 Disney returned the signed contract on October 24.8

  (Winkler wanted to buy Alice’s Wonderland as an emergency backup reel, but Disney could not sell it because he did not own it—it belonged to Laugh-O-gram and ultimately passed into other hands during Laugh-O-gram’s bankruptcy proceedings. Winkler offered only three hundred dollars for the film, a price that Disney was able to dismiss, no doubt with considerable relief, as simply too low.)9

  At his brother’s urging, Roy left the Sawtelle sanatorium to join Walt in a new Disney Brothers Studio. “One night,” Roy said, “he found his way to my bed at eleven or twelve o’clock at night and showed me the telegram of acceptance of his offer and said, ‘What do I do now . . . can you come out of here and help me get this started?’ I left the hospital the next day and have never been back since.”10

  With characteristic optimism, Walt had already rented space (for ten dollars a month) on October 8, at the rear of a real estate office at 4651 Kingswell,11 a couple of blocks west of Robert Disney’s home and just around the corner from Vermont Avenue, a major north-south Hollywood artery that was home to many film exchanges. Instantly, when Roy joined him, Walt had a balance wheel of the kind he had lacked in Kansas City. Said Wilfred Jackson, who worked alongside both Disneys for thirty years: “Everybody thinks of Walt Disney as one person. He was really two people, he was Walt Disney and Roy Disney.”12 In 1961, Walt summarized the difference that Roy made, in this way: “Roy is basically a banker. He’s pretty shrewd on the money.”

  Roy was also Walt’s big brother, and the family ties that bound the brothers not just to each other but to Elias were as much in evidence in Hollywood as in Marceline. “When we were just getting started down here,” Roy told Richard Hubler in 1968, “our folks put a mortgage on their house in Portland and loaned us twenty-five hundred dollars. In our family we all helped each other. I got that paid off just as quick as possible.” Apparently, Elias’s grudging way with a dollar no longer ruled when his sons were pursuing an entrepreneurial path of the sort he had taken so often himself. Roy himself put “a few hundred dollars” into the new business, and Robert Disney lent them five hundred dollars.13

  “By Christmas we delivered our first picture,” Roy said in 1967. “We got twelve hundred dollars. Thought we were rich.”14 (Roy’s figures were a little off, in both directions. Margaret Winkler offered fifteen hundred dollars per cartoon. The first one, Alice’s Day at Sea, was due January 1, 1924, but Winkler received it the day after Christmas.)

  Roy remembered Walt at this time as “always worried, but always enthusiastic. Tomorrow was always going to answer all of his problems.” Walt still bore the marks of his last few months in Kansas City, when he camped out in his studio and ate very little. He was “skinny as a rail,” Roy said, and “looked like the devil. . . . I remember he had a hacking cough and I used to tell him, ‘For Christ’s sake don’t you get TB.’ ”15 (Walt was a heavy cigarette smoker by then; he most likely picked up the habit during his year in France.)

  Walt Disney had embarked on his Laugh-O-grams with money in the bank and a small but adequate staff, but without Roy at his side. When Disney Brothers Studio opened for business on October 16, 1923—the day after Walt got Margaret Winkler’s offer—he and Roy and Kathleen Dollard, whom they hired to ink and paint the animation cels, made up the entire staff. Margaret Winkler wanted Virginia Davis to star in the new series of Alice Comedies, and Disney wrote to he
r mother, Margaret Davis, that same day, offering the role.16 In testimony to the power of Hollywood’s glamour, the whole Davis family moved west in a matter of weeks.

  The earliest Alice Comedies are not really cartoons at all, but are instead live-action shorts—strongly resembling Hal Roach’s Our Gang series—with animated inserts. They could hardly be anything else, since Walt Disney himself was the only animator (and Roy his cameraman). Disney’s animation is painfully weak even set against the Laugh-O-grams, burdened as it is by poor drawing and a desperate use of every conceivable kind of shortcut.

  “In the very early days of making these pictures,” Disney said in 1956, “it was a fight to survive. It was a fight first to get in, to crack the ice. So you used to do desperate things. I used to throw gags and things in because I was desperate.” In a speech to his fellow producers in 1957, he remembered shooting live action in Griffith Park and narrowly escaping arrest “for not having a license. We couldn’t afford one. So we used to keep an eye out for the park policeman, and then run like mad before he got to us. We would then try another part of the park, and another.”17

  As the Disneys settled into a production routine, they slowly added staff—first a cel painter, Lillian Bounds, on January 14, 1924 (“They tried to use me as a secretary, but I wasn’t very good at it,” she said more than sixty years later).18 They hired a cartoonist, Rollin Hamilton, who at twenty-five was three years Walt’s senior, on February 11. That same month, they moved to larger quarters, a storefront next door at 4649 Kingswell. Now they had a plate-glass window on which to emblazon “Disney Bros. Studio.” The Disneys shared one large room with their employees; a smaller room housed the animation camera stand.19