by Neal Gabler
But for all Walt’s continuing assurances of improvement, and for all his genuine desire to make outstanding films, the Alice movies, even with Iwerks’s contributions, were only slightly better than routine. “Walt’s concept of the photography of live action was about on a par with the average box camera enthusiast,” one animator recalled, “and Iwerks’s animation was no match for the sophisticated drawings of Dick Huemer’s [the Fleischers’ main animator] Koko.” It wasn’t just the comparative crudity of the photography and drawings that marked these films. They were also imitative and unimaginative. How much this may have been the result of Walt’s inexperience or own lack of imagination is difficult to say. Winkler continuously stressed broad gags at the expense of story or personality and continuously pressed him to watch other animations, even though Walt was inclined, as he had written Winkler in February, to try something different from, and more refined than, the run-of-the-mill head-banging. Since Disney Bros. could not afford a projection room, the entire crew, including Roy, would jump into their cars and head down to the Hill Street Theater every time the program changed just to see the latest of Paul Terry’s Aesop’s Fables so they could borrow from it. “I was ambitious and wanted to make better pictures,” Walt would say, “but the length of my foresight is measured by this admission: Even as late as 1930, my ambition was to be able to make cartoons as good as the Aesop’s Fables series.” Turning out a film every two weeks, he had no time to be terribly creative—to work, as he put it, “for a twenty dollar joke rather than a one dollar joke,” adding that “[a]s fast as we thought of a gag, we animated it.” The scenarios, though still written out as they had been in Kansas City, consisted largely of an enumerated list of “Gags and Situations” like “Cat does crazy roping in first scene” or “Cat makes toboggan out of horse to get down steep hill.”
As for the Cat who performed these gags, the sudden appearance of a plump black feline with sharply pointed ears, goggle eyes, and a thick tail in Alice’s Spooky Adventure was probably instigated by Winkler, no doubt as a way of copying the more successful Felix series and perhaps, some animation historians have speculated, even as a way of irritating Pat Sullivan, with whom she was constantly bickering. Walt had more or less specialized in cats when he was making his Laugh-O-Gram fairy tales; there was a cat in The Four Musicians of Bremen and obviously a prominent cat in Puss in Boots. But the emergence of the cat in the Alice series, whom he later named Julius, was Walt’s first venture with a continuing cartoon character, and it was not long before he, no less than Margaret Winkler, was opting for the cat over the little girl, whose screen time kept diminishing as Julius’s increased. Though Alice continued to receive top billing, it was Julius, cunning, brave, and self-possessed, who now initiated the action—Julius who pulled on a bull’s skin so that Alice could best him in a bullfight and win $10,000 (Alice the Toreador), Julius who made a unicycle out of his tail to rescue Alice from a pack of vicious Chinese rats (Alice Chops the Suey), Julius who grabbed a smoke ring to rise over a prison wall and then turned his tail into a ladder to fetch Alice (Alice the Jail Bird), and Julius who attached the “idea” balloon that billowed above his head to one end of a dachshund and the dachshund’s own “idea” balloon to the other end to make the dog into a dirigible (Alice’s Balloon Race). Many of these gags—particularly Julius’s ingenuity with his detachable tail, his worried pacing back and forth, and the big question mark that sprouted over his head when he ruminated—were directly cribbed from Felix at the distributor’s insistence, essentially turning the Alice comedies into not-so-thinly veiled Felix cartoons. At one point the likeness between Julius and Felix was so close that Walt warned his staff they were flirting with copyright infringement.
Yet for all their derivativeness and for all the concessions that Walt made to Winkler, subjugating his creative instincts to hers, the Alice comedies did express a fundamental vision of Walt Disney. Unlike Out of the Inkwell, where Koko cavorts in a photographic reality that is obdurate and unyielding, in the Alices a real girl enters a fantasy of her own devising—a pliable world that, whatever the girl’s misadventures there, always finally conforms to her desires and Julius’s machinations and in which chaos ultimately yields to control. And in creating this situation, Walt was also creating through his cartoons a metaphor of liberation and power. If the Fleischers suggested the implacability of the physical world, Walt suggested the malleability of one’s own psychological world into which one could escape as Alice does. In Walt’s world one was always eluding capture, always trying to keep the intrusions of reality at bay. But as beleaguered as they often were, the denizens of Walt’s world were nevertheless free and omnipotent—so long as they stayed there, so long as the world remained intact, so long as they kept themselves separate from the real world.
And yet, sadly and eventually disastrously for Walt, reality did intrude on the Disney Bros. and kept intruding in the form of a man named Charles Mintz. Mintz, thirty-four years old at the time he and Walt Disney met, was something of a mystery even to those who claimed to know him. He was born in York, Pennsylvania, of German parents and was graduated from Brooklyn Law School, but accounts diverge from there. By one, he entered the jewelry business. By another, he entered the film business as a producer. What all agreed upon was that he could be cold, stern, and ruthless—in the words of one employee, “a grim-faced man, with a pair of cold eyes glittering behind the pince nez” who “never talked to the staff. He looked us over like an admiral surveying a row of stanchions.” A chain-smoking tyrant with a swagger, he loved the trappings of authority too. His most prized possession was a large collection of police badges.
None of this would have mattered to Walt Disney except that just a month after he signed his contract with Margaret Winkler, she married Mintz, and Mintz moved into her company, effectively taking control when she became pregnant. Winkler had been forbearing, issuing gentle critiques but also offering encouragement. Mintz instead pressed constantly and curtly for improvements in the cartoons—they were too “jumpy,” too unevenly exposed—and even temporarily dispatched his brother-in-law, Margaret’s brother George, to Hollywood to supervise production. But by the summer of 1924 Walt was complaining that as much as he wanted to make better cartoons per Mintz’s dictates, he simply did not have the resources to do so. The cartoons cost nearly as much to make as he received in compensation, he wrote Mintz that August, and the studio found itself in a “very tight place.” If Mintz could not send him an advance of $900 due on their next picture—Walt offered to pay a forty-dollar premium—they would not even be able to get their last picture out of the laboratory where the film was being developed. That same month he was forced to give the Davises a promissory note for Virginia’s services. “We need money,” Walt wrote again, clearly desperate, two weeks later. “I am perfectly willing to sacrifice a profit on this series, in order to put out something good, but I expect you to show your appreciation by helping us out.” Walt wanted the full $1,800 owed on the next film, minus what he called a “fair discount,” but Mintz did not have the money either and instead advised Walt to be patient.
Patience did not come easily. Throughout 1924 the Disney brothers had been forced to continue borrowing from Uncle Robert to meet their payroll, loans of $100 or $150 or $175, which must have been especially difficult for Walt after Uncle Robert’s initial reluctance. They had little money personally either. Walt and Roy took funds from the company as they needed them, five dollars here or ten dollars there, so as not to drain the treasury. For would-be film moguls they lived modestly; the rent on their apartment was only thirty dollars a month, though Walt, who always had his eye on the showier things, did splurge on a secondhand dark-gray Moon roadster that became a special source of pride. Not until December 1924, more than a year after forming the studio, did the brothers begin drawing a salary, fifty dollars each per week, and even then they drew it irregularly.
Yet as hard as it was, the patience seemed to be paying off. George W
inkler left New York for Los Angeles on December 8 with a new contract and the prognosis that “while things are not 100% rosy, still there is a whole lot that looks favorable.” The contract called for another twenty-six Alices at $1,500 per film, with $900 payable on delivery of the negative and $600 payable within ninety days after that—terms that were actually worse than those of the first contract, which had paid Disney Bros. $1,800 for the last six pictures. The only advantage was that Disney now shared in the receipts after the first $4,000, with the studio receiving the next $350 and splitting the proceeds equally after that, though it seemed unlikely at the time that the films would actually return enough of a profit for the Disneys to share.
There was one other revision in the contract, and this would bring another dose of reality. With the increase in the number of films to be produced from twelve to twenty-six, beginning March 1, 1925, the Disneys were now asked to deliver a new cartoon every three weeks for the first thirteen installments and every two weeks for the second thirteen. Even under the current schedule of one film every four weeks, Walt was having trouble delivering the pictures, not to mention profiting from them. What made matters worse was how seriously he took both Winkler’s and Mintz’s injunctions to make the cartoons better—injunctions he really didn’t need. He was constantly crowing to Mintz over improvements—adding more gags to the cartoons, getting a new motor drive for the camera that sharpened the cartoon photography and a new “rock steady” tripod that kept Alice from jiggling on the screen—and seemed to relish telling Mintz how well he thought the films were being received.
Improvement was his mantra—the only way to succeed, the only way to get the recognition he so badly wanted, the only way to create a full fantasy world for himself. Walt admitted now that he had been a little too cocksure when he began the studio and that he had had a lot to learn about making films, even hiring a cameraman from Century Studios, apparently at George Winkler’s behest, because he conceded he did not know enough about running the camera himself. In attempting that February to recruit two of his old Laugh-O-Gram colleagues, Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising, now that he needed to enlarge the staff to meet the new expedited schedule, his main selling point was how much California could offer since “You have’nt [sic] much chance for big stuff where you are,” and how much they needed to learn if they hoped to succeed in animation—“things that can only be learned by actual experience with experienced people.” As he had in Kansas City, Walt would provide the training. He added: “After you see Los Angeles, Hollywood and the surrounding country, you will feel ashamed of yourself for not coming sooner.”
By the end of April, after much dickering over salary, both Harman and Ising decided to join Disney Bros., swelling the staff to nine, exclusive of Walt and Roy. By one account, their arrival that summer had an immediate effect, if not on the look of the animations then on the look of the animators, all of whom, including Walt, made a friendly compact to grow mustaches. “Walt wanted to shave it off,” his wife would later recall, “but we didn’t let him.” But in point of fact Walt and Iwerks had actually grown their mustaches before Harman and Ising arrived, at least as early as April. And apparently Walt, with his love of disguise, had been thinking about growing a mustache for years, quipping to a friend in a photo inscription from France: “Well here I am but no mustache.” Roy said the mustache was not the result of a lark but a corrective to Walt’s youthful appearance; he needed it to look older than his twenty-three years so that he could better bargain with business associates and with his staff, many of whom were older than he. “[H]e did have a complex for a while of trying to make himself look older,” Roy said, “because he was so young.”
The small toothbrush mustache would become a permanent fixture on his face (and on Iwerks’s too), and the physical feature most closely identified with Walt Disney once his image became familiar to the public. But there was another change in Walt’s life that spring that would be just as permanent and far more significant to him. Walt Disney had fallen in love.
II
He had heretofore shown surprisingly little interest in women. Though his mother had thought of him as a high school lothario and though he could be sensitive and even tender—he routinely closed letters from France to his McKinley classmate and Bea Conover’s friend, Virginia Baker, with “love”—he did not chase women or have especially close relationships with them. He seemed to prefer to pal around with the guys. “[H]e was a little different,” Walt Pfeiffer remembered. “I mean he didn’t have an eye for the girls then. And even when he enlisted and went over to France after the war…when he came back he didn’t think too much of girls. In fact, I don’t think that he ever had one that I know of.” “I was normal,” Walt explained years later, “but girls bored me.” They didn’t share his interests, he said.
Part of this feeling may have been disillusionment after Bea Conover jilted him. Part of it may have been a youthful desire to avoid complications and anything that he could not control. In Kansas City, even as a young man on his own, he concentrated on animation and on Laugh-O-Gram rather than on romance, though he occasionally dated Dorothy Wendt, the young sister-in-law of his patron Dr. Cowles, taking her to the Alamo Theatre or the dance pavilion at the Electric Park, and he continued to write her after he left for California. And there was another girl named Peterson whom he saw infrequently and with whom he also maintained a correspondence. Still, he viewed marriage as a trap and said he had resolved—while watching his coworkers glumly clock in at the Film Ad Co., chained to their jobs—that he would not get married until he was at least twenty-five years old and had saved $10,000.
Nor was it only Walt who seemed to disdain romance. Roy, now thirty-one years old, had put his nuptials to Edna Francis on hold while he convalesced from his tuberculosis and saved money, but the delay had dragged on for years—dragged on, in fact, until one evening that spring of 1925. As Roy told it, most afternoons he would retire to the apartment the brothers shared for a nap to regain his strength, then return to the studio, work a few hours, and leave again to prepare dinner. On the fateful night Walt, dissatisfied with his brother’s efforts, stormed out on the meal. Roy said he was so piqued by this little tantrum that he decided at long last to send for Edna. Though they had been betrothed since at least 1920, he formally proposed in a telegram. Edna, now thirty-five and the last of the six Francis children to marry, arrived in Los Angeles with her mother on April 7—“It was getting to be that time, you know,” she later told an interviewer—and she and Roy were wed four days later in Uncle Robert’s house on Kingswell Avenue. Walt was the best man, and a girl named Lillian Bounds was the maid of honor. In home movies of the wedding Walt can be seen bear-hugging her and kissing her passionately.
Bounds was an inker at the studio and one of its first employees. She had come to Los Angeles late in 1923 from Idaho to visit her sister Hazel Sewell, who was living with her husband and seven-year-old daughter on Vermont Avenue in Hollywood, not far from the Disneys’ studio. A friend of Lillian’s sister had taken a job at Disney Bros. painting cels, and when the Disneys asked the girl if she knew someone else who might be interested in working there, the young woman told Lillian that she would recommend her on the condition, Lillian later said, that “you won’t vamp the boss.” “I had no idea of vamping him,” Lillian remembered, not seeming terribly impressed by Walt. The first time she saw him he was wearing his old brown cardigan and a raincoat and was complaining that he did not own a car. (He wouldn’t purchase his Moon roadster until later that year.) She only took the job, she said, because it was within walking distance of her sister’s house and didn’t require her to spend bus fare. She went on the studio rolls on January 19, 1924, at a salary of fifteen dollars a week.
Just shy of her twenty-sixth birthday, nearly four years older than Walt, Lillian was the very picture of a contemporary urban woman, short, slender, and pretty, with a broad smile and dark hair fashionably bobbed, but like Walt and Roy, she was actually the s
cion of pioneers and was steady rather than effervescent. Her paternal grandfather, James L. Bounds, was one of the first settlers in the Northwest Territory that became Oregon and then had made a small fortune in the California gold rush before retiring to Idaho. James’s son and Lillian’s father, Willard Bounds, was variously an Indian scout, a blacksmith, and the United States deputy marshal who drove the “hack” wagon in 1895 from Lewiston, Idaho, to Spalding carrying $626,000 in twenty-dollar gold pieces that the government paid the Nez Percé Indians to acquire their lands. Lillian, who was born three years later, grew up among the Indians in the outpost of Lapwai, which was settled in a narrow valley in Nez Percé country in the northern handle of Idaho, where the Indian Agency and the Indian school were both located and through which ranchers drove their cattle over the fenceless fields to the stockyards at North Lapwai. It was isolated country—though Lewiston was only twelve miles away, it was inaccessible except by ferry across the Clearwater River—and it made for rugged individuals. If the Disney forebears had looked like hardscrabble farmers, lean and ascetic, the Boundses looked redoubtable—Willard broad and bulky with an oversize mustache, and his wife, Jeanette, or Nettie, as she was called, short and stout at more than two hundred pounds. These were solid people.
But like the Disneys, they were no match finally for their environment. Willard and Nettie had ten children, of whom Lillian was the youngest, and the family struggled constantly. Whatever wealth the Boundses had acquired from the gold rush was long gone. Moreover, for years Willard, who had become the government blacksmith, was debilitated by intestinal problems that would eventually lead to his death in 1916. “They never knew if there was going to be enough to eat,” Lillian’s daughter said. “Mother never even had shoes that fit properly.” After Willard’s demise, Lillian and her mother relocated to Lewiston, where Lillian attended business school and where she was living when she decided to visit Los Angeles.