by Neal Gabler
Walt Disney came to this ornate edifice early in 1921 carrying his one-minute reel of cartoons that he had preemptively labeled “Newman Laugh-O-grams.” As he so often did, Walt would later tell two versions of what happened next—a prosaic version that was probably close to the truth and a heightened one that was more compelling. In the less dramatic one, he showed the reel to Milton Feld, Newman’s manager, who would later become a Hollywood producer and circus promoter, and Feld promptly placed an order. (Years later Walt would write Newman: “Of course all of my contacts at that time were through Milton Feld and I did not see much of you.”) In the more dramatic telling, he said he sat behind Newman himself in the theater, “nervous as a cat,” while the reel was projected. When it concluded, Newman quickly spun around, said he liked what he had seen, and asked whether they would be expensive to produce. Walt blurted out that he could make them for thirty cents a foot, and Newman closed the deal on the spot, saying he would take as many Laugh-O-grams as Walt could draw. Walt said he left “walking on air.” It was not until an hour later that he realized that the price he had quoted Newman was his cost with no profit.
Now, after his relatively short apprenticeship, he was an animator. His sample reel premiered at the Newman Theater on March 20, 1921. But producing the Laugh-O-grams was time-consuming, especially with Walt fully employed at the Film Ad Co., and they appeared irregularly over the next few months. He realized he would need coworkers and apprentices, and he placed a newspaper want ad for aspiring cartoonists offering not remuneration, since he had no money to give them, but experience. A high school student named Rudy Ising—“I was intrigued with the idea of animation,” Ising would say—answered the ad and began assisting Walt in the Bellefontaine garage. For the Laugh-O-grams Walt was working in the “lightning sketches” tradition. Following another Lutz suggestion, he would draw an image in light blue pencil, which would not register on the orthochromatic film he used. Then Ising would ink in the lines, inserting a photograph of Walt’s hand (the real hand would have been too thick to place between the camera and the drawing) after each increment, constantly stopping and shooting, so that when the film was run continuously the image appeared to be drawn by the hand with preternatural rapidity.
As one might have expected from a nineteen-year-old novice, the Laugh-O-grams were raw and unsophisticated, though competently drawn. They commented not only on streetcar service but also on potholes, new fashions, and a police scandal, which Walt ham-handedly satirized by showing cartoon officers filing into the precinct house and then filing out in prison uniforms. But Milt Feld was more than satisfied. He commissioned Walt to provide special titles for coming attractions and anniversary shows, and animations to be shown before the program advising proper theater protocol. In one a cartoon professor admonished moviegoers not to read the titles aloud, at the risk of being hit on the head with a large mallet.
For all their obviousness and crudeness, the Laugh-O-grams, playing as they did at Kansas City’s largest and most opulent theater, got noticed, and though Walt did not make any profit on them, he gained something he seemed to relish more than money. He got attention. “I got to be a little celebrity in the thing,” he said. As in the days when he became known for his drawings adorning Bert Hudson’s barbershop, old Benton classmates now approached him as the man who drew the Laugh-O-grams. Even at the Film Ad Co., A. V. Cauger would now introduce him to clients as the Laugh-O-gram artist and would borrow Walt’s reel to show them what the Film Ad Co. could do. Cauger even gave him a raise to sixty dollars a week.
Beyond recognition, he got encouragement to do more. Later that spring, despite his infatuation with animation, he and Harman began experimenting with live action, no doubt because it was easier and cheaper to produce than animation. Their efforts were mostly juvenilia and nonsense—a scene of Walt entering a door on which “Cartoonist Wanted” is posted, followed by a group of other young men who then run out when a gentleman emerges and tosses the sign away; a woman and her little girl playing patty-cake and then the woman and girl walking dolls in a buggy; Walt’s niece Dorothy breaking a milk bottle, which Walt then ran backward so that the bottle seemed to reassemble; more footage of Walt and a group of friends mugging for the camera in Kansas City’s Swope Park; an image of a girl unrolling her stocking and dipping her foot into water. In many of these films Walt starred, usually dressed in a costume; and in many the actors appeared and then instantly disappeared, as Walt played with the trick effects of the camera. Harman and Disney even had a name for their little enterprise: Kay Cee Studios.
Though the idea of his own studio was wishful thinking, it was not entirely frivolous, any more than the idea of his own commercial art studio had been. With the popularity of the Laugh-O-grams, which were only a minute or two in duration, he began to think of animating longer cartoons of six or seven minutes. At first he hoped to interest Cauger in the project, intending to make the cartoons under the auspices of the Film Ad Co., but Cauger, still uncomfortable with cel animation and making considerable profits with his ads, declined. A. V. Cauger did, however, order one hundred sheets of celluloid—discards, Walt would say—for Walt’s experiments and let him rent a small studio in a vacant house on a dirt hillock, eighteen steps up as Cauger remembered it, next to the Film Ad Co. Here Walt would now retire, after work each day and in his spare time, to draw.
But he was not just drawing. Still as much an opportunist as an artist, he was beginning to think of branching out into business for himself, using his Film Ad job to subsidize his scheme. In the fall, with three hundred dollars in savings, he purchased a Universal camera and a tripod and began advertising again for prospective animators whom he would pay, as he paid Ising, in experience, promising that if the project were a success, he would give them jobs in his new studio. Several began stopping by the house at night and joining in the drawing. Meanwhile, to make additional money, Walt and Fred Harman, who now worked with his brother Hugh and Walt at the Film Ad Co., bought a secondhand Model T and trolled for jobs shooting news footage with the Universal camera. “Our sights,” Harman said, “were set for long-range money and fame.” They got an assignment from Pathé filming the American Legion convention late that October and early November—the father of a friend of Walt’s had an office across the street from which Walt could film—and then, on a sudden inspiration, rented a plane to photograph the convention from above, but Walt underexposed the film and it came back black. “Our hopes for fast riches were wiped out,” Harman lamented.
Walt was not deterred. These efforts were, whatever his dreams of financial glory, just extracurricular activities to help support his real project that fall, one more grandiose than the short animations and newsreels. Influenced by New York animator Paul Terry’s spoofs of Aesop’s fables called Terry’s Fables, which had premiered in June, Walt decided that his animations would spoof fairy tales by displacing them into a modern context and giving them a contemporary slant. He proposed doing “Red Riding Hood,” though it is unclear whether he animated this one first or a send-up of “The Musicians of Brementown,” a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm.* At the same time he practiced with a reel of jokes and commentaries similar to the Laugh-O-grams that he called Lafflets, possibly as a way to break in his staff. Since he could work only in his off-hours and since his recruits were young and inexperienced, it took him six months, into the spring of 1922, to complete the fairy tale. Walt immediately tried to sell it—a friend at a local film distributor collared producers for him—but in the meantime he drove the Model T to outlying theaters in Missouri and Kansas, offering exhibitors his services to make ads like Cauger’s that could keep his anticipated studio running. “[T]hat was Walt all the time,” Roy Disney recollected, “driving himself frantic, day and night.”
Roy believed that Cauger began to suspect Walt might become a competitor, and Walt seemed to be angling to do so, but Fred Harman, who accompanied Walt on these selling expeditions, said that “we just couldn’t swing it,
” and eventually their Ford was repossessed. Even so, Walt was far from defeated. On the contrary, he seemed strangely elated, certain that his fairy tales would find a distributor and that he would soon be running his own studio full-time, and he began seriously considering leaving the Film Ad Co., even though he had no concrete prospects, just more of his wishful thinking. His father, who had suffered so many economic setbacks of his own, advised him not to go into business, warning that he could go broke. Walt got more encouragement from Roy, but he had been inclined to leave anyway. Cheerful, self-confident, and even a little affected—at the Film Ad Co. he took to wearing an eyeshade and smoking a pipe—he was too independent-minded even at twenty to think of himself as someone else’s employee for long. Taking the name Laugh-O-Gram Films, Inc., from his Newman shorts, Walt had articles of association drawn up on May 18, and a certificate of incorporation was issued by the Missouri secretary of state five days later, with Walt listed as company president, even though he was still a minor and legally too young to be a corporate officer. The purpose of the association, as described in the articles, was to “own, make, produce, buy, lease, rent, sell, release, distribute and deal in screen, industrial and commercial advertising and motion pictures of every kind and character” and, for good measure, to rent out equipment and operate a photo lab too. Walt Disney, after scarcely more than two years in the business, was now the head of his very own animation studio. The go-getter seemed to have arrived.
Walt Disney had another motivation for starting a studio besides the tenacious pursuit of animation and the fame and profit he was sure would accrue from it. All this time, from his short stint at Pesmen-Rubin through his first year and a half at the Film Ad Co., Walt had lived on the quiet tree-lined street in his old two-level childhood house at 3028 Bellefontaine with his brothers Roy and Herbert, Herbert’s wife, Louise, and their daughter, Dorothy, and later with Flora, Elias, and Ruth. It was comforting, but it wasn’t to last. Since his return from the navy Roy had been beset with nagging illnesses. His doctor suggested he have his tonsils removed, and Herb recommended a doctor who offered to perform the operation while Roy was on his lunch break so he wouldn’t have to miss work. The doctor, however, turned out to be a charlatan. Roy began hemorrhaging on the street and was rushed home by a coworker and then to the hospital. At the hospital an X-ray revealed a spot on his lung, which was judged to be tuberculosis. Since it was determined that he could have contracted the disease only while in the service, the Veterans Administration sent him in October 1920 to a sanatorium in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and, when he found the weather there too cold, to another facility in Tucson, Arizona. Thinking that he had little time left, he decided to leave Arizona too and go to California to spend his remaining days.
After his supporter, protector, and confidant went west, Walt lost the rest of his family too. Herbert applied to the post office for a medical transfer to Portland, Oregon, where he said the family physician recommended he move for the “milder climate.” (Elias’s sister Josephine had already moved there with her family, which is probably why Herbert chose that destination.) He, Louise, and Dorothy left Kansas City in July 1921. By the fall Elias, Flora, and Ruth, once again tired of the Kansas City winters, decided to join them. They moved on Sunday, November 6. Walt saw them off at the station. “I never knew Walt’s emotions much,” Ruth said, “but he suddenly couldn’t keep his face straight. He turned and left. He was clearly very upset. He knew he was going to be alone.”
For someone as social as Walt Disney, someone who loved sodality, loneliness was a curse, and he would have done anything to avoid it. He moved out of the Bellefontaine house—it was sold when Elias and Flora moved—and bounced around various boardinghouses that were occupied by other rootless young men like him. For a while he shared a furnished attic in a rooming house with Cauger’s nephew Marion, who had come to work for his uncle at the Film Ad Co., but that did not meet Walt’s need for companionship or fill the void left by his family’s departure. In May 1920, even before Roy left, Walt had joined the Order of DeMolay. DeMolay, named after the last of the Knights Templar, was a fraternity for young men that had been founded in Kansas City the previous year by a twenty-eight-year-old restaurateur and Mason grandee named Frank Land. (His charges called him “Dad.”) Walt would describe joining DeMolay as “one of the most important events of my youth, and one of the happiest, too,” and would later write Land that DeMolay ingrained in him “belief in a Supreme Being, in the fellowship of man, and in the sanctity of home.” All of this may very well have been true. But he also found an outlet for his drawing as the art editor of the DeMolay magazine, he undoubtedly enjoyed the opera bouffe uniforms that the DeMolay members wore, and, above all, he received camaraderie.
He seized another source of security after his family’s departure as well: the family of Roy’s girlfriend, Edna Francis. Roy had met Edna when her brother, Mitch, a coworker of Roy’s at the First National Bank—Mitch was the one who took Roy home after his botched tonsil operation—suggested he take her to a dance. Edna, a plain, unprepossessing woman, was four years older than Roy (she was probably twenty-nine when they met) and something of a beaten soul. Her father, a railroad worker, was a wanderer who had moved his family of six children from Pittsburgh to Kansas to Kansas City before finally abandoning them. Her mother was almost totally deaf. For Roy, who seemed to enjoy the role of guardian and bulwark and who was just as modest and unaffected as she was, Edna Francis was the ideal companion, and their romance survived Roy’s years in military service and then in the tuberculosis sanatoriums. Before he left for New Mexico, they had decided to marry should he survive. “It was a matter of my getting well and having enough money,” Roy said.
While he was gone, the Francises would invite Walt to dinner. Sometimes he would accept, then get so involved in his work that he would not remember until ten or eleven o’clock that night. Other times he would arrive and, according to Edna, “talk and talk till almost midnight. He was having a kind of struggle and when he’d get hungry, he’d come over and we’d feed him a good meal and he’d just talk. I was always a good listener.”
But the real cure for his loneliness, his real community, was not in the Francis family or in DeMolay. It was in work, and if Walt had formed his studio to pursue his passion for animation and make his name, he also formed it when he did to allay how bereft he felt with his family gone. Like DeMolay, Laugh-O-Gram would become a kind of fraternity—in this case one where footloose young men eager to learn animation could collaborate. It would be a place for work but also for fun, a place in which the sense of community would be almost as important as the animations, and a place in which the demands of adulthood could be kept at bay. And Walt Disney, who since his youth in Marceline had exulted in the bonds of community, would be the creator and the proprietor of this small, exuberant utopia where one need never grow up. Laugh-O-Gram would be his first Neverland. It would not be his last.
III
It was not much of a studio. Its primary assets were the Lafflets reel and The Four Musicians, a fairy-tale animation that Walt valued at $3,000, and equipment that he valued at less than $1,500. He had intended to finance the operation with his own money and whatever loans he could cadge from his trainees—Ising pitched in $1,000—but he realized that he could raise more funds by incorporating, and he wound up giving Ising shares of the company rather than repaying him. Laugh-O-Gram was capitalized at $15,000, about half of which was cash and equipment, divided into three hundred shares valued at $50 each. Walt took seventy and parceled out smaller numbers of shares to a few friends and to his young associates. Still, he had to secure the rest of the money, several thousand dollars after the broker’s substantial cut, to rent an office and studio, pay the staff, and buy supplies.
The challenge was for someone so young and with only the Laugh-O-grams to his credit to attract investors. Walt Disney was certainly persuasive—“quite a salesman,” Rudy Ising said. He was boyish, enthusiastic, and gar
rulous and had a way of filling one with enthusiasm too as he described his plans, which he loved to do, as his nights with the Francises attested. He had to be persuasive since the probable success of the enterprise for which he was soliciting funds, run by a young man with no managerial experience who employed younger men with even less experience, was by any measure a long shot. Roy contributed some money—and kept contributing thirty dollars here and there from his disability checks—but Walt Disney’s real angel at Laugh-O-Gram was a well-connected Kansas City doctor named John V. Cowles.
Walt had probably met Cowles through another flamboyant speculator, Walt’s uncle Robert, with whom Cowles was very likely associated in an oil refinery scheme for which the doctor himself was seeking investors at the time. Tall and heavyset, with a thick shock of hair that turned snow white as he aged and with a pronounced limp that was the result of a riding accident, possibly incurred during a brief stint at West Point, Cowles was both an ostentatious figure in Kansas City and a prominent one. He had been born there and had attended the University of Missouri and then the university’s medical school. He returned home to build a lucrative practice as a surgeon/general practitioner; Thomas Pendergast, the head of the city’s notorious Democratic political machine, and Harry Truman, later U.S. senator and president, were among his patients and friends. His success was evident in his large office downtown above the Main Street Bank and in his palatial home on Thirty-fourth Street.