Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  Which, in fact, Harman was. Tired of the harangues and insults, he and Ising had conspired to lure other animators, including Iwerks, to abandon Walt and join them in starting their own rival studio. They had already held discussions with producer Jesse Lasky. “This will leave Walt in a mellavahess,” Ising gleefully wrote Carmen Maxwell, an old Laugh-O-Gram colleague, in August 1926, “but business is business.”* But before they could actualize the plan, Walt fired Ising for falling asleep at the animation camera with his hand on the button. He fired Freleng too after spotting him riding a double-decker bus when he was supposed to be at work. Freleng said he arrived at the studio the next day to find his desk cleared. Before he left, Ising described the studio as a “den of strife and vexation.” Iwerks, who suffered Walt’s new abuse with his typical equanimity and counseled others to do the same, described the studio as “Koo-Koo Hatchery” and “Knut Mansion.” But the resentments would linger; they would linger long, and they would linger hard. They would linger until they wrecked the studio.

  IV

  Now there was a sense of crisis. The previous, June, Walt had put his staff on a two-and-a-half-week-per-film schedule and had even awarded bonuses to speed the films’ delivery to one every two weeks, but between personnel changes triggered by Walt’s abusiveness and other bumps like Iwerks’s marriage and honeymoon that January, it was becoming increasingly difficult to meet the timetable. Though Walt kept pressuring the staff to improve the animations and though the Alice films did show greater visual sophistication, even Walt realized that the series was losing steam. “I have felt we have sort of been in a rut in regard to the stule [sic] and general construction of our plots and gags,” he wrote Mintz in February 1927. “I tried every way possible to find out just what was lacking and now I believe I have found ‘IT.’” Though Walt didn’t say what “it” was, he asked Mintz to take special notice of the new films and tell Walt what he thought. Still, it was a measure of how thin the novelty was wearing that the live action continued to shrink, even as Mintz, for economy’s sake, was now urging Walt to increase the cheaper, live-action sections after years of insisting that he shorten them. By early 1927 George Winkler had replaced Margie Gay with yet another girl, Lois Hardwick, who Walt enthused was “full of life and expression” and the “best yet.” Mintz, before reluctantly giving the go-ahead to use her, sniffed that “her legs seemed kind of heavy.”

  They needed to do something. At the time Mintz, apparently concluding himself that the Alices were in their death throes, was already conducting negotiations with Universal to provide a new cartoon character for another series, and he had asked Walt to provide drawings. “[T]hey seem to think there are too many cats on the market,” Mintz instructed. “As long as they are doing the buying, naturally, we must try to sell them what they want.” Walt sent him sketches of rabbit characters. Six weeks later, on March 4, 1927, Mintz signed an agreement with Universal, which was reentering the animation field after a ten-year absence, to provide twenty-six shorts featuring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Mintz headed to California that same week, presumably to meet with Walt, though Motion Picture World reported ominously that George Winkler was also heading out to “establish a specially constructed studio for the purpose of turning out these Oswald comedies.” Walt finished the last of his fifty-six Alices that month.

  Now suddenly there was an entirely new challenge—not only the new character but the need to produce the films quickly to prove Walt’s efficiency to Universal. With Mintz urging him to “shoot the first picture as soon as possible,” Walt immediately, even before George Winkler’s arrival, began producing the Oswalds and finished the first one, Poor Papa, early that April in a little over two weeks. Walt surely recognized what a tremendous opportunity was being afforded him—making a major cartoon series for a major distributor—and how much a success would advance his career. But neither Mintz nor Universal was satisfied with the cartoon, and the latter took the drastic step of refusing to release it. Mintz thought there were too many competing characters in the cartoon and that Oswald needed to be “young and snappy looking with a monocle,” not elongated with a heavy round torso, gangly arms, short legs and oversized feet, which is how Walt had had Iwerks draw him. In addition, Universal apparently complained that there was no real story, just a string of gags.

  Walt answered that he was disappointed himself and had already begun reconceptualizing the character—“forget the monocle”—and making him lighter and less bottom-heavy, but he also defended his approach. He did not want Oswald to be just a “rabbit character animated and shown in the same light as the commonly known cat characters,” he said, meaning that he did not want Oswald to be simply a peg for gags—the direction in which Mintz had always pushed him and which Universal had now rejected. Rather, he wanted to forge Oswald into a distinctive personality, “to make Oswald peculiarly and typically OSWALD.” At the same time he fended off criticism that there was insufficient narrative by saying that “[o]ur poorest pictures have been the ones where we went into story detail” and asserting that cartoons cannot really be “built like a feature picture” without losing the constant stream of laughs.

  What he was arguing for was something new: gags that weren’t impasted on Oswald, as gags were in most cartoons, but instead arose organically from him—from who he was. Even during the Alices, creating personality had been a crusade of Walt’s. When Freleng animated a kitten clinging to the edge of a washtub while being scrubbed, Walt beamed that Freleng had made the kitten act like a child. “That’s what I want to see in the pictures,” he told the staff. “I want the characters to be somebody. I don’t want them just to be a drawing.” One could debate whether Walt really incorporated personality into his revivification of Oswald, but already by the second one and the first to be released, Trolley Troubles, which featured Oswald as a harried streetcar conductor who must cope with everything from a recalcitrant cow blocking the tracks to an ornery goat who butts the car and sends it careering off the path, the reception had improved. “I am the LUCKY rabbit,” Universal announced brightly in its promotional materials. “I’m the animule Universal discovered after two years’ experimentation and preparation seeking the Krazy Kartoon Knockout that would set the industry on its rabbit ears.” Though it was puffery—Walt had worked on Oswald for roughly two weeks, not two years—it was not much of an exaggeration, given the initial enthusiasm for the series in the trade press. “Oswald looks like a real contender,” Film Daily gushed. “Funny how cartoon artists never hit on a rabbit before. Oswald with his long ears has a chance for a lot of new comedy gags, and makes the most of them.” “This series is destined to win much popular favor,” Motion Picture News concurred. “They are clearly drawn, well-executed, brimful of action and fairly abounding in humorous situations.” Motion Picture World cited Walt by name for making his creations “simulate the gestures and expressions of human beings.” Of the third in the series, Oh, Teacher, the same publication said, “It contains some of the best gags we have ever seen in cartoons.”

  To a large degree, this praise was less a reflection of Walt’s creativity than of the rather low state of animation in the mid-1920s, when even crude gags and broadly drawn characters could seem inventive against the shapeless gags and barely drawn characters of most cartoons. Yet some animation historians do credit Oswald as an advance over his contemporaries in more substantial respects. One compared the rabbit to silent-film comedian Buster Keaton in his ability to “transform the absurd mechanical environment of the modern world into something useful and humane,” and also cited numerous instances of phallic imagery—Oswald’s straightening and collapsing ears, for example—that testified to his libidinous nature, something that had not been explored previously in cartoons. Two other historians distinguished Oswald from his predecessor, Julius the Cat, by noting both that Oswald was far more conscious of his body than Julius, more capable of enjoying pleasure and suffering pain, and that his body was far more plastic than Julius’s, m
ore stretchable, squeezable, and twistable, leading to more imaginative situations. Even in the 1920s some rival animators regarded the Oswalds as the industry standard. Dick Huemer, who worked for the Fleischer brothers at the time and who had been a standard himself, said that he and his colleagues there would seek them out since, “bad as they look today” (Huemer was writing in 1969), “they were tremendously superior to our things.”

  Once again Walt seemed to have ridden out a crisis, both aesthetic and financial, and the studio was suddenly thriving again. In preparation for the Oswalds Walt had added staff through the previous winter and spring of 1927, among them a soda jerk named Les Clark from a confectionery around the corner from the old Kingswell studio, who would rapidly become one of his most trusted employees, and Walt’s own sister-in-law, Hazel Sewell, who was put in charge of an expanded ink-and-paint department. By the end of the year the staff had grown to twenty-two—a tribute to Oswald’s success. Walt had also, no doubt under competitive pressure now that Iwerks’s work was gaining recognition, hiked the laconic animator’s salary from $70 a week, when he first began drawing the Oswalds, to $120 two months later. He was, Walt wrote Mintz, “a man of experience whom I am willing to put alongside any man in the business today.”

  Walt himself was only drawing $100 a week at the time and Roy only $65, but they were now clearing roughly $500 on each Oswald and splitting the year-end profits sixty-forty between them—$5,361 to Walt in 1927, $3,574 to Roy. Never one to hold on to his money, Walt bought ten acres of desert land in October and November, possibly at Uncle Robert’s behest, since the Disney brothers were also investing in stock for Uncle Robert’s and John Cowles’s oil drilling venture. More important, in June Walt and Roy had each put a $200 deposit on adjacent lots on Lyric Avenue, in the Silver Lake district at the foot of the Los Feliz hills, not far from the new studio, and they began constructing homes that August.

  The homes were not large compared to the mansions of the Hollywood moguls whose ranks they hoped to join; they were only eleven hundred square feet each, with two bedrooms, a dining room, a living room that, at thirteen by twenty feet, was the biggest space in the house, and a kitchen—all in a style that might be described as mock English Tudor. They were Ready-Cuts, meaning they were prefabricated, and, observed one reporter, among the “commonest type of middle-class construction in Hollywood.” The total cost, according to Roy, was only $16,000 for both, not an inconsiderable sum at the time but not extravagant either, and even that estimate may have been high. Still, these were the Disneys’ first homes of their own. Walt’s niece, Marjorie, said his was the finest house she had ever seen.

  The problem for Lillian was that Walt, always working and not terribly domestic to begin with, was seldom home to enjoy it. Possibly to keep Lillian company, Walt had her mother move in with them shortly after they took possession in December. “Walt was so good to my grandmother,” Marjorie Sewell recalled. “He treated her like she was a queen.” (Walt always said that he loved to hear the Bounds’s tales of pioneer life on the Idaho frontier.) Walt was sympathetic to Lillian’s loneliness. After becoming so preoccupied with a cartoon one night that he stayed at the studio while Lillian waited nervously at home for him, he was so goaded by guilt that he decided to get her another companion that first Christmas on Lyric Avenue. Lillian disliked dogs, though Walt pressed her one day to say what kind of dog she would want if she absolutely had to make a choice. Lillian said she had read somewhere that chows had little odor, so that would be her choice. So Walt went to a kennel, picked out a puppy, fetched it on Christmas Eve, and kept it next door at Roy’s house until Christmas morning, when he put it inside a hatbox with a ribbon on top and then asked Marjorie to get it—a scene that would be incorporated into Lady and the Tramp. When she received the box, Lillian was upset that Walt would select a hat for her without her approval, but when she opened it and saw the puppy inside, she immediately melted. “I’ve never seen anybody so crazy over an animal,” Walt would say, though he was every bit as smitten. They named her Sunnee. Lillian would not let the dog out of her sight. It slept in their room. When Walt would take Lillian and her mother and little Marjorie for Sunday drives, he always stopped on the way home for ice cream, and he made a point of buying an ice cream for the dog, standing on the curb and feeding it to her. One night when they could not find her, Walt canvassed the entire neighborhood in a rainstorm without success. It was two o’clock in the morning before he could coax Lillian to go to bed. “I’ve never seen anybody so upset.” He found the dog the next morning in Roy’s garage, where she apparently had gotten locked in when Roy returned home from work. Thus was calm restored.

  V

  Then, early in 1928, just as everything seemed to be going so well, came one of the most devastating episodes in Walt Disney’s life, an episode that would haunt him throughout his career. With Oswald’s success, Mintz had tired of Walt’s financial haggling and his angling for control, especially since Walt did not even draw anything himself now and, as Mintz saw it, seemed superfluous. So Mintz instructed George Winkler, who had arrived, as promised, the previous July, to approach Hugh Harman about taking over the studio and relieving Walt of his duties. “I was interested right away,” Harman said, “because I was very disappointed in Walt and wanted to get away from him.” Walt was completely oblivious to these machinations until January, when Iwerks told him that Winkler, in anticipation of a renewal of the Oswald contract with Universal, had already surreptitiously signed up several of the animators and had asked Iwerks to join them—an offer Iwerks refused. Unaware of how much Mintz had come to doubt his importance or of how much his employees had come to dislike him, Walt couldn’t believe that Winkler would try to double-cross him or that his staff would actually conspire against him, and he dismissed the idea out of hand, inadvertently wounding Iwerks by seeming to attack his credibility.

  Meanwhile, on February 2, 1928, Mintz as expected signed a new three-year agreement with Universal to provide Oswalds. The Oswalds had been, Film Daily wrote in reporting the signing, “one of the best sellers of the ‘U’ short subject program,” adding that “Charley Mintz’s organization has been delivering and how.” Still refusing to believe Mintz’s treachery and brimming with confidence, Walt was in fact preparing to leave for New York to negotiate his new contract with Mintz and had planned to ask for an increase from $2,250 per film, which was what he had been receiving, to $2,500. He was so certain of a favorable outcome, if not with Mintz then with another distributor if Mintz proved intractable, that he had Lillian accompany him on what they regarded as a “second honeymoon.”

  They arrived the third week in February to a bitterly cold and blustery city and found their reception there just as chilly. With two Oswald prints under one arm and a book of clippings under the other, Walt had gone to see Fred Quimby at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer with the hope, at the very least, of getting a competing bid to put pressure on Mintz, but Quimby told him that “cartoons [were] on the wane” and said he was not interested. (Walt, putting the best spin on the conversation, told Roy that Quimby was just playing hardball and said he would follow up in a few days.) Temporarily rebuffed, Walt headed directly from MGM to Mintz’s office to continue negotiations, but Mintz was also playing hardball. Not only did he not offer to increase the advance, he was now offering only the negative costs, which he pegged at roughly $1,400 a film, a fifty-fifty split of profits, and “substantial salaries,” which suggested that Walt was not a studio owner in his own right but a subcontractor for Mintz. Walt, aggrieved by the terms, which he no doubt feared would force him to compromise on quality again and cede more control, immediately contacted his old mentor Jack Alicoate, a “reserved and dignified” gentleman, in Walt’s words, who had helped broker the original deal with Margaret Winkler for the Alices and who now edited the trade paper Film Daily. Alicoate advised Walt to continue dealing with Mintz, but as a hedge he set up meetings for Walt with Metro again and Fox.

  “BREAK WITH CHARLI
E LOOMING,” Walt wired Roy later that day. Before any rupture could be announced, though, and resorting to a bit of chicanery of his own to thwart Mintz, he asked Roy to have an attorney draw up “ironclad” year-long contracts for the staff with two option years. “ALL CONTRACTS WITH ME PERSONALLY THEREFORE MY SIGNATURE NECESSARY BEFORE CONTRACT IS COMPLETE ASSURING US PROTECTION WITHOUT RESPONSIBILITY.” Walt warned that the contracts should be “held in readiness” until he gave Roy the word. And he closed reassuringly: “DON’T BE ALARMED EVERYTHING OK.”

  But of course everything was not okay. Walt and Lillian had lunch at the Hotel Astor as guests of Mintz and Margaret Winkler the next day, Friday, March 2, where Mintz refused to discuss business, but “from what remarks were dropped,” Walt wrote Roy, “I could see that he had something up his sleeve.” After Mintz suggested they meet in his office the next morning, Walt wired Roy frantically to get the contracts with the staff signed immediately lest Mintz or George Winkler get wind of the plan and proffer contracts of their own. “MAKE THEM SIGN OR KNOW REASON BEFORE ALLOWING THEM TO LEAVE,” Walt telegraphed Roy with the new imperiousness that had alienated the staff. When Roy wired back that the staff had refused to sign the contracts, Iwerks’s warning to Walt was finally confirmed: since jobs for animators were scarce and the men should have jumped at Walt’s offer, he realized that Mintz and George Winkler had indeed contracted with the staff behind his back. In fact, Walt was told that Mintz had been talking to an animator—referring no doubt to the conversation with Harman—to take over the operation under George Winkler’s supervision. Walt had suffered two heavy blows. He had become expendable at his own company, and his own employees had betrayed him.