Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  Most likely the first week of October via Alicoate, Winkler finally screened Alice’s Wonderland in New York and pounced. “BELIEVE SERIES CAN BE PUT OVER,” she wired Walt on October 15, while emphasizing that the photography of Alice had to be more finely focused and the camera held steadier. She also cautioned, by way of limiting Walt’s financial expectations, “THIS BEING NEW PRODUCT MUST SPEND LARGE AMOUNT ON EXPLOITATION AND ADVERTISING THEREFORE NEED YOUR COOPERATION.” She offered $1,500 for each negative of the first six films and $1,800 for each of the second six. To show her “good faith,” she said she would pay the full $1,500 immediately upon delivery of each of the first six rather than wait until she had gotten bookings or money for them. Walt, clearly with no room to negotiate and ecstatic at having any offer, promptly wrote back accepting. At the same time he abandoned the Pantages project.

  The very next day Winkler sent the contracts, incorporating her financial terms and calling for the delivery of the first Alice no later than January 2, 1924. She also included an option for two series of twelve more films each in 1925 and 1926 and a clause that awarded her full rights to all of the films Walt produced during the contract term. That same day, obviously wanting to move quickly, she asked Walt for any photographs of the actress playing Alice and of Walt, and for biographies of each. Most likely in an attempt to impress him, she telegraphed Walt again the same day suggesting that he write Harry Warner, who would attest to her competence. Walt did contact Warner, who wrote back that Winkler “has done very well” and that “she is responsible for anything she may undertake,” but by that time Walt, as anxious to proceed as Winkler, had signed the contract, with Uncle Robert serving as his witness. Returning the documents, he wrote Winkler that the first film, Alice’s Day at the Sea, was already in production and would be delivered as early as December 15. She responded a week later, a bit extravagantly: “I see no reason why these should not be the biggest thing brought out for years.”

  But despite the months he had waited for just this news and despite his promise to deliver a new film quickly, Walt was ill prepared to launch another animation studio. The day he received Winkler’s initial telegram on October 15, he headed to the Veterans Hospital, where Roy was convalescing from his tuberculosis. As he later told it, again dramatizing for effect, he arrived late, around midnight, crept onto the screened porch where the patients slept, and shook Roy awake to show him the offer and celebrate. But his enthusiasm quickly elided to panic. “What do I do now?” he asked Roy, and pleaded with him to leave the hospital and help him get started. Roy agreed to meet Walt the next morning at Uncle Robert’s house for a strategy session. Roy left the hospital the following day—he claimed that an examination had shown that he was healed—and never returned.

  Meanwhile Walt had a pressing issue to resolve. Winkler’s contract had been predicated on having Virginia Davis play Alice, but Virginia was back in Kansas City. The day he received the contract from Winkler, the day he was meeting with Roy at Uncle Robert’s, he wrote Virginia’s mother urgently telling her that he had finally gotten a distributor, that he had been screening Alice’s Wonderland in Hollywood, that “every one seemed to think that Virginia was real cute and thought she had wonderful possibilities,” and that if Virginia came out to star in the series, “it would be a big opportunity for her and would introduce her to the profession in a manner that few children could receive.” He pressed Mrs. Davis to make a decision as soon as possible since he was hoping to start production in fifteen to twenty days, and he ended rather grandiosely, not unlike Winkler in her letter to him, saying that “it will be but a short time till the series will be covering the world.”

  In point of fact, Mrs. Davis had brought Virginia out earlier that summer for a movie tryout but found that so many other mothers were attempting the same thing that the studios refused to see them. She had returned to Kansas City and was planning another assault on Hollywood in November when she received Walt’s message. Four days after his first letter Walt wrote again, this time offering terms: $100 a month for the first two months, rising in $25 increments every two months to $200 for months nine through twelve, with an option of $250 a month for the next series. He justified what he admitted was a “low salary at start” by pointing to, as Winkler had pointed out to him, the initial advertising and publicity costs.

  Though Walt could not have known it, the Davises did not need much encouragement. Virginia’s father was a traveling furniture salesman who was on the road most of the time. Her mother was a stagestruck housewife who had enrolled Virginia in dancing school when the girl was two and a half years old, and she seemed determined to get her daughter into the movies. In addition, Virginia suffered from double pneumonia, and doctors told the Davises that the dry California climate would be beneficial for her health. Mrs. Davis convinced her husband that he could sell furniture from California as easily as from the Midwest and that Virginia would have a career, but even Roy was struck by a man giving up thirty years in Kansas City for the promise of only $100 a month. Mrs. Davis wired her acceptance to Walt on October 28.

  Now he had his contract and his star, but he had neither a company nor a staff nor, most important, any money to jump-start the operation. So when Walt met Roy on October 16 at Uncle Robert’s house on Kingswell Avenue in a quiet residential section of Hollywood, part of the plan was to ask their well-heeled uncle for a loan. Since Robert had encouraged Walt to come to Los Angeles, the brothers assumed that getting the money would be something of a formality. But their uncle balked. Walt’s beloved Aunt Margaret, his advocate, had died of pneumonia, and Robert had married a much younger woman—Ruth Disney said that he had dated both the woman and her mother, and there was a “toss-up” over which would get him—who was pregnant at the time Walt requested the loan, which seemed to put Uncle Robert in a less-than-generous mood. Moreover, Walt and his uncle, who was as stubborn and disputatious as Elias, had gotten into a silly argument over whether Walt’s train west had passed through Topeka, as Uncle Robert insisted it had, or had not, as Walt insisted. Even after Robert’s new wife, Charlotte, called the railroad and proved Walt right, Robert bristled. “He demanded a lot of respect and didn’t think I gave it to him,” Walt remarked.

  Finally, there was the matter of a sixty-dollar loan Walt had received from his brother Ray. Walt still owed him the money when, the previous Christmas, Roy wrote from California suggesting the brothers pitch in to buy their mother a vacuum cleaner and agreeing to kick in Walt’s share since Walt was broke at the time, if Walt would collect Ray’s share. Ray refused to contribute, saying that Walt should cover the cost out of what he owed. By the time Walt reached Los Angeles, Uncle Robert had heard that Walt had welshed on his debt and did not think his nephew was a good credit risk. But Walt, who was not about to lose his opportunity with Winkler over petty family squabbles and who did not want to be considered a failure like his father, was persistent and nothing if not ingratiating. By November Uncle Robert had softened and loaned Walt $200 in mid-month, another $150 ten days later, another $75 early in December, and yet another $75 on December 14, for a total of $500, albeit at 8 percent interest, all of which Walt repaid the very day he received his second payment from Winkler early in January. The Disney brothers were also begging money from their friends and other relatives. Even before receiving the offer from Winkler, Walt had gotten a $75 loan from Carl Stalling, the organist at the Isis Theater in Kansas City, and received $200 more from him after signing the contract; $50 from Robert Irion, who was married to Walt’s aunt; $25 from Roy’s girlfriend Edna Francis and even $200 from Virginia Davis’s mother.

  Though Roy had helped solicit these funds—all except the money from Edna, which Walt had requested without his knowledge—it had never been Roy’s intention to join the enterprise, and in any case he had no experience whatsoever in entertainment. “I was just helping him, like you’d help a kid brother,” he later said. But Roy could never resist his younger brother. He claimed that Walt, who was
so enthusiastic and innocent-seeming, “would win your heart, and you wanted to help him, really,” and he admitted that he was afraid that without his protection, his “fervent protection,” Walt would have been taken advantage of. To prevent that, Roy, professing a “love of Walt,” agreed to become Walt’s manager and guardian angel in business as he had been in Walt’s life. In late November, when Walt moved out of Uncle Robert’s house to a room in the Olive Hill Apartments, Roy joined him there and moved with him again in December when Walt found another, cheaper room, for fifteen dollars a month, at 4409 Kingswell in an apartment building almost directly across the street from his uncle’s house. The two even saved money by eating at a cafeteria where they could split the meat and vegetable courses.

  The room was just two blocks from a cream-colored, one-story brick storefront at 4651 Kingswell with a large display window. Early that October, either in anticipation of the Winkler deal or as a work space for the Pantages reel, Walt had rented a cramped office at the rear of the building behind the Holly-Vermont Realty Company, which occupied the front. (The rent was only ten dollars a month, which was raised to fifteen dollars in December.) By December, with the contract signed, the brothers were also renting a lot nearby on Hollywood Avenue for outdoor shooting and had bought a new camera, lumber and tools, a curtain to separate them from the realtors, and a box of cigars as a thank-you present for Uncle Robert. They had a name for the studio too: Disney Bros.

  So they began. Usually Walt would take Virginia to the vacant lot, drape a white tarpaulin over a billboard there for a backdrop, and shout instructions to her: “Look frightened!” or “Sit down and pretend you’re mad.” That was, Virginia said, his favorite instruction: Let’s pretend. There were no real rehearsals and no more than a single take since Walt did not have enough film to reshoot. “It was very informal,” Virginia Davis recalled. “During the silent days we would have a lot of the curious children and the neighbors come around to watch what was going on.” More often than not, it was catch-as-catch-can, filming whenever he could, wherever he could. Once Walt was shooting in Griffith Park when he was stopped by a policeman who asked to see a permit. Walt didn’t have one, so he packed up his equipment, only to sneak back through another entrance. Every time he spotted a policeman that afternoon, he would stop shooting, pack up again, and move.

  While he shot the film of Alice, Walt had a hood over the camera and would mentally trace the position of the cartoon characters with whom the girl would be interacting. Then back in the Kingswell office he would run the film frame by frame so that he could animate the figures in what would be the white spaces around Alice—white because of the white tarpaulin. Using his camera stand, he would shoot the animations. Finally, he would combine the film of Alice and the animations in the development process so that they appeared to be in the same place—the real girl and her cartoon playmates.

  Though he animated it alone—he animated the first six Alices virtually by himself—he nevertheless delivered Alice’s Day at the Sea on December 26, ahead of the contractual schedule, and received his first $1,500 check. He knew the film wasn’t especially good, and Winkler, who had been so lavish in her predictions of success, did not disagree. She called it only “satisfactory” and thought there was room for improvement, though she tempered her criticism by telling Walt that “the progress I have made in the film industry has been due to the fact that I know just what my people want,” and she said her requests were made in that spirit. Two weeks later she sent another letter enjoining Walt to “inject as much humor as you possibly can” into the next cartoon, adding that “[h]umor is the first requisite of short subjects such as ‘FELIX’, ‘OUT OF THE INKWELL’ and ‘ALICE.’” When he shipped his second Alice, Alice Hunting in Africa, late in January, he averred that he had “made a good deal of improvement” and assured Winkler somewhat abjectly that “I will make it a point to inject as many funny gags and comical situations into future productions as possible.” She wrote back saying that she found the comedy still wanting and warned that “future productions must be of a much higher standard than those we have already seen.” Ultimately she rejected the film as unreleasable and demanded that Walt redo it.

  If this demoralized Walt, he certainly did not show it, any more than he had displayed defeat in Kansas City. He seemed impervious, continuing to forge ahead. By early February he had moved his studio next door to a nearly identical building, this time occupying the entire floor. Now anyone approaching saw the name “Disney Bros.” in gold leaf on the large front window. Behind the window was Roy’s office, just a nook really, with his desk at the front right and a utility table in the center, where he and Walt punched holes in the cels to keep them immobile on the camera stand. To the left was a row of tables for inkers and painters—the people who traced Walt’s drawings onto the cels in ink and then painted them black, gray, or white before sending them to be photographed. At the rear, through a long entranceway, was the camera room where the cartoons were shot and film stock was stored, and to the right of the camera room at the back behind the front office was the animation room, where desks were lined up against the far right wall.

  As yet Walt had no one to sit at those desks. It was essentially a two-man operation. Walt conceived the stories, directed the live action, drew the animations, and timed the exposures so that the movements were smooth. Roy did the books, occasionally manned the camera, and even washed the cels so they could be reused, though he still tired easily and often spent his afternoons back at the apartment resting. (They had asked Ray and Herb to join them, but the brothers declined.) In January they hired three women, to ink the outlines of the drawings on the cels and paint them, and two men, who probably helped operate the animation camera and generally assisted. The next month they hired their first animator, Rollin “Ham” Hamilton.

  But Walt, who had very little executive talent or inclination, was never as interested in building an operation or running a business as he was in improving the product, not only as a way of satisfying Winkler, though obviously this was a consideration, but also as a matter of personal pride and psychological need. He sincerely wanted to make good animations, sincerely wanted to be counted among the best at his craft. As it was, Winkler seemed mollified by the next Alice, Alice’s Spooky Adventure, calling it the “best you have turned out” and telling Walt that on the strength of it she was able to make deals for the series from southern New Jersey to the District of Columbia. But Walt, continuing to apologize for the quality of his cartoons, insisted he could make them better, saying that he had invited professional critics to his previews and that he was trying to be a “little different from the usual run of slap stick and hold them [the films] more to a dignified line of comedy.” On receipt of his fourth film, Alice’s Wild West Show, Winkler wired: “if none of the future ones are any worse we will have the leading single reel of the film market.”

  She was so well satisfied that early in June, when Winkler made her first visit from New York to Disney Bros., she discussed expediting the schedule to two films a month. Already by this time Walt had been hectoring Ubbe Iwwerks to leave the Film Ad Co., where he still made only forty-five dollars a week and complained of run-ins with Cauger’s relatives, and come help him in Hollywood; but the invitations gained a certain urgency with the new impending workload, since Walt still had only Hamilton helping him with the animation. At just about the time Winkler arrived in California, Iwwerks finally agreed to Walt’s proposition. “Boy, you will never regret it,” Walt wrote him eagerly, using California as an enticement. “[T]his is the place for you—a real country to work and play in.” Accompanied by his mother, Iwwerks made the trip from Kansas City to Los Angeles in seven days—Walt had arranged for him to drive Virginia Davis’s father’s big roadster, which Mr. Davis had left back home—and arrived just before July 1, when he was put on the payroll at forty dollars a week—a cut he was willing to take to get away from Cauger.

  Little had changed about Iwwerk
s since Walt had first met him five years earlier, except his name; he had anglicized it from “Ubbe Iwwerks” to “Ub Iwerks,” though no one but Iwerks would have regarded the change as significant. He was still meek, withdrawn, inexpressive, and monosyllabic. “Where two words would barely suffice, he used one,” a colleague once remarked of him. But there was one change, and it was important. From his training in Kansas City he had become a deft and rapid animator, and over the following months that summer he assumed an increasing amount of the workload from Walt, who had begun to doubt his own artistic skills. “I never made a drawing that I liked,” he would tell a reporter years later.

  The change in Iwerks led to a change in the cartoons. Partly as a result of Iwerks’s hiring, the emphasis in the series shifted from Alice to her cartoon compatriots, and by late summer Winkler was even suggesting that Walt do away with the live opening and closing entirely, even though this would make the films more difficult and expensive to produce. At the same time, Walt and Iwerks began experimenting with ways of improving the live action–animation combination, using what was called a “matte,” a cutout that could be placed over the camera lens to block off areas where the animated figures would be, rather than photographing Alice against the white tarpaulin. By August Walt was already assuring Winkler that they were working to make the “girl stand out plain and distinct when she is acting with the cartoons,” and that the photography would be “good, if not perfect,” in future productions. He added that they would endeavor to “make nothing but sure-fire laugh-getters.”