by Neal Gabler
Increasingly desperate, Walt began hiking to studios again with his animations, hoping to interest one of them in securing the rights from Powers. The writer Frances Marion claimed that two editors at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had seen Disney’s cartoons and recommended them to Marion and Metro directors George Hill and Victor Fleming. Standing in the projection room, Walt was, as Marion remembered, a “tall, shy youth who wore a shabby suit and whose apprehensive glance at us told very clearly of many past disappointments.” He even apologized for the crudeness of the animations. But the group was enthralled by Mickey; Fleming, his “long arms flailing the air,” exclaimed, “Man, you’ve got it! Damnedest best cartoon I’ve ever seen!” Marion said that Walt had also brought along a second cartoon, a Silly Symphony, which in her description sounded like Springtime, though this is unlikely since the cartoon had yet to be drawn, and that the group was just as enthusiastic about it—so much so that Marion immediately headed to the office of Metro head Louis B. Mayer to drag him down to the projection room.
Mayer, however, was not impressed. Watching the Symphony, he pushed a button to stop the projector, pronounced the cartoon “ridiculous,” and groused that while men and women dance together, and boys and girls dance together, flowers do not dance together. When Mayer rose to leave, Fleming eased him back into his chair and advised he see the Mickey Mouse. No sooner did the film start, however, than Mayer let out a bellow and demanded that the cartoon be stopped. Driving his fist into the pit of his stomach, he declared that pregnant women go to see MGM films and that women are terrified of mice, especially a mouse ten feet tall on the motion picture screen. Mayer stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him, while Walt stood there in embarrassment.
It was Columbia that provided him with a reprieve. Frank Capra, a Sicilian immigrant who had worked his way from writing gags for silent comedy producer Mack Sennett to becoming Columbia’s leading director, had been prevailed upon by the studio’s lab technician to watch a cartoon one night after Capra screened the rushes of his own film. Capra was tired and unenthusiastic about the prospect, and he was even less enthused when the lab technician introduced him to Walt—a “scrawny, nondescript, hungry-looking young man, wearing two days’ growth of beard and a slouch cap.” But when the cartoon hit the screen, Capra was entranced and insisted that Columbia head Harry Cohn see it. Cohn, who also grumbled about having to see a cartoon, turned out to be equally impressed. Columbia, not a major studio but an aspiring one, was willing to take on the cartoons.
Powers was amenable since he would be getting the bulk of the receipts. That August, after the successful showings of The Skeleton Dance at the Carthay Circle and the Roxy, Giegerich was able to conclude a distribution agreement with Columbia—one Symphony each month for a $5,000 advance. (It was a testament to just how successful The Skeleton Dance was and to the Disneys’ growing reputation that Columbia made the offer without seeing another Symphony because there was no other Symphony to show.) Since Powers had already sold the foreign rights for $3,500, the Disneys would be receiving $8,500 for each cartoon, less the 10 percent commission to Powers and less other expenses like negatives, advertising, and the sound royalty. The deal also called for a sixty-five–thirty-five split of profits favoring Powers until all costs were repaid and a fifty-fifty split thereafter. Roy calculated that the actual studio receipts after all the deductions were roughly $6,000 per cartoon, which he admitted wasn’t exceptional, but it was regular, and “even $6,000 net—for certain every few weeks for a year will be a big help towards establishing ourselves firmly.”
But survival wasn’t what young Walt Disney had in mind. After his problems at Laugh-O-Gram and with Mintz, he wanted domination—domination that would make his position unassailable. That fall, with the Columbia deal signed and a steady cash flow assured, and with most of his rivals reeling, he concentrated on a new objective in his larger quest to become the animation overlord: he was determined that Mickey Mouse would supplant Felix the Cat. Felix, a thick black cat with oval eyes, pointy ears, and an expressive tail, had long been the reigning cartoon star, not only in America but around the world. There was a Felix song, a Felix comic strip, Felix books, dolls, pencils, and figurines, even Felix cigars. When RCA demonstrated its new television system in the summer of 1928, a twelve-inch papier-mâché Felix figure was the first image transmitted. The best tribute to his popularity, however, may have been the fact that over the years he had given rise to at least a half-dozen imitations, including Mintz’s Krazy Kat and Walt’s own Julius.
But Felix’s creator, the unpredictable Pat Sullivan, had none of Walt Disney’s drive or foresight. When his distributor pressed him to convert Felix to sound after Mickey’s triumph, Sullivan dallied, finally losing his contract. By the time he decided that he had to add sound to his cartoons, that was precisely what he did—add it to previously animated cartoons rather than conceive of them, as Walt did, in terms of sound. “By 1930 Felix was doomed,” said one of his animators, “because he was a silent pantomime character. We tried sound but it was a flop.”
Felix’s sudden demise provided Walt Disney with his opening. At the beginning no effort to catapult Mickey into stardom was too small. Walt would even have friends call theaters asking what time the Mickey Mouse cartoon would show, and if they were told that there was no Mickey, he instructed them to ask why. More aggressively, Walt arranged with one downtown theater to make a cartoon of Mickey leading the theater’s live orchestra and then being pelted by the musicians. In exchange the theater booked another Mickey cartoon and put the title on the marquee, where Walt could have it photographed for publicity. By August he was taking out full-page ads in the motion picture trade papers declaring Mickey Mouse “Amazingly Clever—Screamingly Funny—Perfectly Synchronized Sound Cartoons.”
But the biggest boost to Mickey Mouse, aside from sound itself, occurred not through Walt’s promotions, which were scattershot, but through those of Harry Woodin, the young manager of the Fox Dome Theater in Ocean Park, a Los Angeles suburb. On his own initiative late that summer, Woodin had organized a Mickey Mouse Club, filling his theater on Saturday afternoons with children who took a Mickey Mouse pledge, performed in an impromptu Mickey Mouse band, and then watched Mickey Mouse cartoons. Woodin had invited Walt to one of the matinees, and Walt said he got “quite a kick to see about one thousand kids cheering for MICKEY MOUSE.” But Woodin himself, not unlike Walt Disney, had larger aspirations. He convinced Walt that what he was doing locally he could also do nationally. Walt was encouraging. “I feel positive that a stunt like this, combined with a Comic Strip and various toys and novelties that might be made around MICKEY,” Walt wrote Giegerich eagerly, “would help us in making this series one of the biggest things that has ever come out.”
By January, under studio auspices, Woodin had launched a Mickey Mouse Club campaign. Theaters would buy a charter from the studio for twenty-five dollars, which entitled them to run special Mickey Mouse matinees and stage various activities, from pie-eating contests to marble tournaments to the ever-present Mickey Mouse band. The studio then funneled that money to salesmen who hawked buttons, banners, and other Mickey paraphernalia to the theaters; the purchase of this, Walt advised, could be subsidized by local merchants. Woodin had even devised a Mickey Mouse creed—“Mickey Mice do not swear, smoke, cheat or lie”—that was recited at every meeting, and a Mickey Mouse song, composed by Stalling, titled “Minnie’s Yoo Hoo,” that was sung before each adjournment:
I’m the guy they call little Mickey Mouse
Got a sweetie down at the chicken house,
Neither fat nor skinny
She’s the horse’s whinny
She’s my little Minnie Mouse
It featured a chorus of animal sounds, concluding, “With all the cows and the chickens, they all sound like the dickens / When I hear my little Minnie’s yoo hoo.”
How much the clubs were responsible for propelling Mickey and how much Mickey was responsible for prope
lling the clubs is difficult to determine, but the promotion took off immediately and kept growing, giving theaters revenue from Saturday matinees, parents a three-hour respite from their children, the film industry a beacon of wholesomeness to which they could point to deflect critics, and Walt Disney a powerful means of promoting his creation and himself. The Biltmore Theater in Miami signed up 1,200 members; the Fox Eckel Theater in Syracuse, New York, 1,300; the Fox MacDonald Theater in Eugene, Oregon, 1,500, and it regularly turned away hundreds of others who arrived for the shows. At one theater children began gathering on the sidewalk at nine o’clock in the morning for an eleven o’clock matinee. In Milwaukee three thousand Mickey Mouse Club members staged a parade as a highlight of a Mickey Mouse Club convention. At their peak, Roy estimated, there were over eight hundred chapters in the country with, by another estimate, more than one million members—more, according to the Motion Picture Herald, than the combined membership of the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts of America. The Mickey Mouse Clubs had become a movement.
Walt was looking to newspapers, too, in his campaign to establish Mickey as a national figure, just as Pat Sullivan had used a comic strip to establish Felix. At least since June 1929, when Iwerks received a letter from J. V. Connelly of the King Features newspaper syndicate lauding the Mickey Mouse cartoons and suggesting the possibility of a Mickey Mouse comic strip, Walt had been aggressively pushing the idea with Powers and Giegerich, not so much to exploit Mickey as to promote him further. By early August, King Features had made a firm offer—this was when Roy was attempting to enlist Dick Huemer to draw the strip—and on January 13, 1930, it made its first appearance. Walt contributed the stories while Iwerks drew the strip and another artist named Win Smith inked the drawings. When Smith suddenly quit four months later, Walt shifted a young animator named Floyd Gottfredson into the job on a temporary assignment. In the end Walt was too distracted by other obligations to find a replacement, and Gottfredson would continue drawing the Mickey Mouse strip until his retirement in 1975.
Like the Mickey Mouse Clubs, the comic strip was an instant success and another enormous boon to Mickey’s popularity—perhaps as powerful an engine in disseminating his image as the cartoons themselves. By the summer the strip was being syndicated in as many as forty newspapers and in twenty-two countries and was earning the Disneys $1,500 a month, out of which they paid $800 in salaries and other costs. It was evidence of the strip’s appeal that when, as a promotion for it, a dozen papers offered readers a Mickey Mouse photo, they received twenty thousand requests.
Throughout the months that he was pressing to launch the Mickey Mouse Clubs and the comic strip, Walt was also prodding Giegerich to make a deal to manufacture Mickey Mouse merchandise, offering him 10 percent of the profits—an offer that Giegerich ultimately rejected. In this Walt was almost certainly thinking of the tie-in between Pat Sullivan and George Borgfeldt & Co., which manufactured Felix toys, including a popular Felix the Cat doll that reportedly earned Sullivan substantial royalties; but he was also no doubt considering that there was already bootleg Mickey merchandise on the market from which he was not profiting—yet another sign of Mickey’s popularity. As Walt later told it, he was in New York with Lillian early in 1930 when a man approached him at his hotel and waved $300 at him, which the man was offering for the right to put Mickey Mouse on cheap paper tablets for schoolchildren. Walt said he needed the money, so he took it, making this his first license for a Mickey Mouse product.
But this was more an accident than a premeditated effort. Walt had been urging Giegerich to contact Borgfeldt for months, and when Giegerich failed to act, Walt apparently contacted Borgfeldt himself during the same New York trip and made his own deal on January 29 for toys and novelties. By early April, the studio machine shop was making Mickey Mouse doll models to send to Borgfeldt, though Walt, as particular with his merchandise as with his animations, was displeased with them and asked that they be held off the market. At the same time Roy was soliciting publishers for a book of animal stories featuring Mickey, was discussing a Mickey comic book with one firm, and was attempting to interest various confectioneries, including the large Curtiss and Mars companies, in a Mickey Mouse candy bar.
“Things are happening fast for us now,” Roy wrote his parents that January, with the clubs, the comic strip, and the merchandise all rapidly coming to fruition, “so much so they have our heads swimming.” He added that, amid the success of Walt’s Mickey campaign, they were looking for a new distributor as well—“trying to decide which is the best place, as we have had overtures from every outlet in the business, including Fox, Paramount and Warner Bros. How does that sound?” Of course, they were still obligated to Pat Powers for the Mickeys for some time to come, but that hadn’t prevented them from quietly approaching other distributors and fielding offers without Powers’s knowledge; nor had it prevented Charles Giegerich, Powers’s right-hand man, from approaching them with an offer to serve as their distributor and freeze out Powers. Nat Levine, the president of Mascot Pictures, which specialized in serials, and a longtime adviser to the Disneys, offered them $50,000 up front to bind an agreement. At the same time Walt was in discussions with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and expected them to deliver a draft contract, and the old Van Beuren animation studio offered to buy them outright. “If they [the cartoons] weren’t good, and good paying propositions,” Roy assured Walt, who had gone to New York in January to listen to offers, “they [distributors] would not be fighting hard to take them away from us. We never were in as good a position before to fight them as we are now.”
There was a reason the Disneys were conducting secret negotiations, and the reason was the chicanery of Walt’s onetime savior, the genial Pat Powers. As early as the previous fall, tensions had begun to surface between Walt and Powers over the remittance of royalties from the cartoons. Jack Cohn of Columbia, believing that the dispute might explain what he saw as the inferior quality of the second Silly Symphony, had even ordered Walt to his office to discuss it. Walt insisted that relations were good and any hint to the contrary was “absurd,” though he later complained about Columbia’s own seeming lassitude when it came to promoting the Symphonies. That in turn prompted Powers to write him darkly, just as Mintz once had, that Walt had put him in an “embarrassing position” and shown ingratitude “after every distributor in the business had refused to handle the product under any kind of basis which would enable us to get even the cost of it back.” In fact, Powers said, he knew of no instance “where they were even receptive or seriously considered handling the product.”
If these insults weren’t enough, tensions heightened considerably when Powers repeatedly refused to give the Disneys a full accounting of the money due them. Roy knew there was a lot of money at stake, but when he went to New York to remonstrate and Powers still refused, he returned to the studio and told Walt that Powers was a “crook.”* Walt was suspicious but not entirely convinced (“You know, my greatest weakness is that I’m a lousy judge of people,” he once said) and called Roy a “troublemaker.” Meanwhile Powers, sensing that the Disneys might be attempting to circumvent him with a new distributor, wired Walt testily that they had obviously decided to terminate the agreement, and he wanted the courtesy of a notification so that he could make arrangements with another animator. Wary of making any move until he received his money, Roy suggested that Walt go to New York himself and confront Powers. Walt left with Lillian on January 17, 1930.
By the time Walt arrived in New York, the skirmish had escalated into all-out war, eerily reminiscent of the showdown with Charles Mintz just two years earlier, right down to the betrayal by one of Walt’s closest associates. The morning of January 21 Ub Iwerks had gone to Roy’s office, abruptly announced that he wanted to leave the studio as soon as possible, and asked to be released from his contract and from the partnership he had formed with the Disneys. Roy was stunned and hurt, though he offered Iwerks $5,000 for his 20 percent share of the company. What Roy did not know at the t
ime and only heard later that day in a wire from Walt—who had learned it when Powers gleefully sprang it on him during a meeting in Powers’s office—was that Iwerks had been lured away by Powers himself. Though Iwerks had initially denied having a contract with Powers, he sheepishly admitted in a long talk with Roy as he was preparing to leave the studio that Giegerich had contacted him as early as September—the same time that Giegerich had contacted the Disneys with the plan to double-cross Powers—about forming a studio of his own.
Iwerks wasn’t terribly ambitious and he had never shown any inclination or talent to run a studio, but he entertained the offer, he confessed, because he had long seethed silently under Walt’s command. He bristled when Walt would visit his animation table at night and rearrange the drawings on the exposure sheets, even though Iwerks had already timed them. And he bristled when, after he had roughed out a scene for The Skeleton Dance, Walt insisted that he give it to an “in-betweener,” or novice animator, to complete, believing that Iwerks’s time was too valuable to have him fully animate everything. Indeed, animating to “extremes,” as it was called, was the way most animators now worked—providing the key or extreme poses and letting an assistant fill in the rest of the action. Iwerks, however, believed that he animated best when he animated straight ahead, and he had no desire to change.
Finally, and perhaps most important, Iwerks had come to feel that he had been living in Walt’s shadow, and he resented not receiving the credit he felt he deserved for the cartoons, whose title card read, “A Walt Disney Comic by Ub Iwerks.” Iwerks’s wife recalled attending a party where a boy approached Walt with a pen and paper and asked him if he would draw Mickey. Walt promptly handed the paper to Iwerks, ordered him to do the drawing, and said that he would sign it. Iwerks, usually imperturbable, snapped, “Draw your own Mickey,” and left. Indeed, Iwerks was so resentful of the credit denied him that, obviously under Powers’s encouragement, after he left he threatened to sue the Disneys for Mickey Mouse on copyright grounds. “If Ub’s action reaches crew,” Walt wrote Roy from New York, “advise you ridicule it as foolish as he is being used as a cat’s paw by Powers and may never make any pictures.”