by Neal Gabler
When Iwerks visited Roy’s office three days after his resignation to explain himself, he insisted that he hadn’t known that Giegerich was actually representing Powers until he’d received the contract just days earlier.* This mollified Roy slightly—“We know how gullible and easily led Ub is, and we have a good dose of how two-faced Charlie Giegerich and P.A. are,” he wrote Walt—but he still expressed how “deeply shocked and hurt” he was at Iwerks’s betrayal, and he rescinded his $5,000 offer. Now that Powers was involved, he would give Iwerks only $2,920, payable in one year, which Iwerks accepted as settlement for all his claims. The alternative, Roy warned, was to dissolve their partnership, which would force Powers to open his books and would undoubtedly ignite his anger at Iwerks. As Iwerks left Roy’s office, he expressed his regrets and said he intended to write Walt because, he told Roy, he did not want Walt “to feel hard against him—that he would never have gone into this had he any idea it would turn out as it has.” For Walt’s part, though he and Iwerks had never been personally close, he nevertheless, according to one acquaintance, “obviously loved that guy,” and when a young animator joined the studio the week of Iwerks’s departure and met Walt, Walt was still wounded and angered by Iwerks’s disloyalty and talked about little else.
Losing Iwerks would have been a blow in any case, but he was not the only defector that week. Unsettled by Iwerks’s departure and increasingly upset himself at what he saw as Walt’s high-handedness, Carl Stalling, who had known Walt since the Kansas City days, ambushed Roy the very morning Iwerks resigned and began complaining about his liability in the recording studio and the royalties he expected from “Minnie’s Yoo Hoo,” if it were published. (Stalling had a point. Walt’s attorney had advised that the song be copyrighted in Walt’s name because, Roy wrote Walt, “it would not be a good idea for us to have him [Stalling] having too many strings on things—at least until he takes a one hundred percent cooperation attitude.”) Roy offered to buy Stalling’s share in the recording studio, which seemed to appease him, but he was back at Roy the next morning saying that he was unhappy, that he couldn’t get along with Walt, and that he felt, like Iwerks, that he should leave immediately. Roy thought Stalling had gotten “nasty,” and when the composer demanded his back pay and brandished legal notices that he had written himself, Roy had the accounting office cut him a check and sent him off.
The disloyalty of Stalling and Iwerks, two men who had been with Walt since virtually the beginning, hurt Walt; so too did the fact of Iwerks’s even being wooed. It was unclear whether Powers had signed Iwerks as a way to pressure Walt into renewing the Mickey contract, as Powers himself told Walt he had, or whether, like Mintz, Powers believed that Walt was superfluous and that Iwerks was the real talent behind Mickey. Whichever it was, Walt seemed to be stung by the idea that Iwerks would be more highly regarded than he was. To him, the studio was Walt Disney. Roy made a point of telling him that while the studio staff expressed shock at Iwerks’s and Stalling’s leaving, they had closed ranks behind Walt. Ben Sharpsteen told Roy that “US fellows who have been in this business so long, know who is the ‘guts’ of this organization…. [W]e know the difference of these cartoons over the average run, is nothing more or less than Walt’s personality…. [N]obody could kid themselves that it was otherwise.” Roy himself assured Walt that “the year to come will show them all who is really responsible for Mickey Mouse.”
While the warfare with Powers continued—the Disneys had still not cut their ties or signed with a new distributor—and Powers geared up for his own studio by raiding Universal for Ham Hamilton, poaching Hugh Harman from Mintz, and attempting to pry sound engineer William Garity from Walt, Walt and Roy wasted no time bringing in reinforcements of their own. The very day Stalling resigned, Roy met with Ollie Wallace, a former organist at the Million Dollar Theater in downtown Los Angeles, who had been recommended by Mickey Mouse Club impresario Harry Woodin as a possible replacement. Wallace laughed derisively when Roy told him the salary, $150, but Roy said that if Wallace’s contributions paid off, he would be amply rewarded. At Walt’s insistence, Roy had also tendered a contract to Tom Palmer, who had been working for producer Walter Lantz at Universal, and promoted Bill Cottrell, who had joined the studio a year earlier in ink and paint, to animation. That same week Roy hired animator Dave Hand, who had been trained at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, where Walt had once studied, and then worked at the Bray studio. Nearly all the recruits earned more than Walt, whose salary fluctuated between $125 and $150 a week, depending on how much money was in the studio’s till at the time.
Meanwhile Walt was girding for the final showdown. He and Roy had decided that they would try to enlist Columbia on their side by complaining that by luring Iwerks away, Powers had disrupted their organization, delayed their production schedule, and generally wreaked havoc, which was costing not only the Disneys but Columbia as well. Roy even suggested that Walt use Powers as an excuse to discontinue the Symphonies or deliberately produce a few inferior ones to support their case. (In fact, Walt advised Roy to suspend temporarily production on the Mickey Mouses, which Powers still distributed, and concentrate on the Symphonies, which Columbia distributed.) To press their claim, the brothers hired a young California attorney named Gunther Lessing, who headed to New York to help Walt cope with Powers. “ATTORNEYS POSITIVE CONTRACT CAN EASILY BE ABANDONED IF NOT SATISFACTORILY ADJUSTED,” Walt wired Roy, adding that he and Lessing were trying to work out a settlement with Powers. Indeed, despite all the bad blood between them, Powers hadn’t given up trying to keep Walt. Undercutting Iwerks, he told Lessing that he was willing to give Walt a salary of $2,000 a week, a staggering sum in 1930, if Walt would fulfill the current contract and sign another allowing Powers to distribute the Mickeys the following year.
Remarkable as it may seem, Walt still hadn’t entirely closed the door on Powers—Roy was terrified that Powers would somehow sweet-talk Walt into signing another contract—but he had become too disillusioned by Powers’s unwillingness to make an accounting of profits and by his stealing Iwerks to see him as anything but a last resort, and he was counting on a new distributor taking him on now that Mickey Mouse was so successful. “Powers is crooked,” Lillian wrote Roy and Edna, no doubt echoing Walt, “so I don’t know how it will all turn out.” At the same time Walt had received an offer from Warner Bros. to buy the studio outright, had once again approached Felix Feist, the sales manager for MGM, about picking up the Mickeys, and was talking to Columbia itself about a similar deal.
The difference between this confrontation and his confrontation with Mintz was that Walt now seemed to have the upper hand—the Mickeys, after all, were popular—but Powers was as shrewd and incorrigible as Mintz was bullying. Though MGM was ready to conclude a deal, Powers scared them off by threatening a lawsuit, and Walt worried that Powers and Columbia might collude somehow to force the Disneys to re-sign with him. Roy also worried that if they broke with Powers, Powers would set up another Cinephone operation to compete with theirs and they would never be able to meet their royalty guarantee. As if Powers’s threats weren’t enough, that same week John Randolph Bray, the animation pioneer, demanded a meeting with Walt during which Bray told him that he was going to enforce his patents and limit the number of cartoons allowed on the market. “Boy, they are gunning for him from all sides,” Lillian wrote Roy and Edna, “and he is dying to get back and make pictures, is getting pretty nervous.”
Indeed, Walt, usually imperturbable, was getting frantic, certain that Powers would intimidate other suitors as he had intimidated MGM, and concerned that Powers might file a breach-of-contract suit against him that would keep them tangled in court proceedings. He was constantly on the move, looking for a solution. Racing from meetings with lawyers to meetings with distributors to meetings with Powers, he had been in New York nearly two weeks before he could meet Lillian for lunch or see a Broadway show with her. At lunch with animator Dick Huemer, whom Walt was still trying to enlist for t
he studio, Walt was uncharacteristically distracted, sullen, and monosyllabic. “[A]ll through the meal,” Huemer recalled, “I don’t think Walt addressed five words to me,” prompting Huemer to muse what a “strange guy” Walt Disney was, especially for someone who was recruiting.
After a week of fraying nerves and jousting with Powers, who still adamantly refused to open his books, Walt finally broke with him, instructing Roy to stop producing the Mickeys. Then he braced for the inevitable lawsuit, which, when it came, set off a farcical game of hide-and-seek. Lessing phoned Walt at the Algonquin Hotel that Powers was about to serve him with papers. Walt and Lillian hastily threw their clothes into a trunk, called a bellboy, paid the bill, and hailed a cab, telling the driver to go anywhere. They eventually found a small hotel, the Piccadilly, and registered under the names Mr. and Mrs. Walter E. Call, Flora Disney’s maiden name. After another week they left New York for California.
All the time he was in the city, Walt had been sending basically cheery messages back to Roy, reassuring him again and again that everything would turn out satisfactorily. “[W]hen he really got kicked in the teeth and got out completely,” Roy later remembered of the split with Powers, “on his way home he tells me, ‘Everything’s fine. When I get back we’re going to make a big start.’…But he really didn’t have anything. And then on the train he sweated out some plans. That was typical of him.” It was, Roy might have added, Charlie Mintz all over again. Even with Mickey Mouse, they seemed right back at the beginning—back having to fight to make their cartoons.
But the situation that February was not as dire as Roy and even Walt seemed to think. For one thing, the recording studio had begun to generate profits, so much so that the company occasionally borrowed from it to meet its payroll and so much so that in that year’s federal census, while Walt identified himself as a “producer,” Roy identified himself as a “sound recorder.” For another, and more important, Columbia Pictures, having grossed nearly $400,000 on the first thirteen Symphonies and obviously recognizing just how much profit it could earn if it distributed the Mickeys too, had surprisingly decided to step into the breach and take on Powers. Within weeks of Walt’s returning to California, his attorneys had worked out an agreement with Columbia and then successfully arranged a settlement with Powers, though one attorney confessed that the settlement papers were “complicated,” which was an understatement. Roy estimated that Powers had made $100,000 in his two years of distributing the Mickeys, but the old rascal was not about to let Walt go cheaply. He demanded $50,000, which Columbia had conceded to pay in ten monthly installments secured by the Disneys’ overages from any source, and retention of everything he had collected on the Mickeys to date. Roy later bargained this down to 40 percent of Powers’s collections from exhibitors to whom he had already rented cartoons and 25 percent from franchisees who had already bought the rights to the cartoons, but this was minus expenses of roughly $150,000 for negatives and sound equipment. In addition, Powers was to receive Walt’s share of the net profits from Cinephone up to $62,000. Columbia would retire its note from percentages on the first fifteen Mickeys, which it was now authorized to redistribute, and the first six Silly Symphonies, while the Disneys would receive 80 percent of the profits on the remaining Powers bookings from which he had yet to collect rentals. The settlement was not particularly favorable for the Disneys; legal fees alone had cost them $50,000. But Powers had left them without an alternative. “While sacrifice burns me up,” Gunther Lessing wired Roy, “I believe in straightening entire mess imperative and less costly in the long run.”
Even then it wasn’t over. Though Walt, Columbia, and Powers had all agreed to the terms, the deal wasn’t concluded until Roy went to New York early that April to iron out the final wrinkles, which, as was typical with Powers, proved stubborn. After eight hours of negotiations on April 22 Roy, Powers, the Columbia executives, and all the attorneys—“a regular army,” Roy said—had to reconvene at eleven in the morning the next day for another eight hours. “[I]f someone didn’t raise an objection to every single thing,” Roy wrote Walt later that day, “some[one] else did.” Throughout, Powers was jovial and kept referring to Mickey Mouse as Mickey Louse. At the end of the day, with the exception of the Cinephone agreement—which Roy later negotiated down from $13,000 a year to $8,500—the Disneys were rid of Pat Powers once and for all.
Now it was Roy providing the optimistic missives. “I HONESTLY FEEL ELATED OVER EVERYTHING,” he wired Walt as he was finally leaving New York after three weeks of bargaining. “SETTLEMENT GOING TO WORK OUT GOOD AND FUTURE VERY BRIGHT.” Having wriggled out of Powers’s control, Walt was ecstatic. George Morris, who had recently joined the Disneys’ business office, said that the deal had lifted “a weight of worry off Walt’s shoulders” and enabled him to return to moviemaking again after the months of distraction.
Under the new Columbia contract Walt would be receiving a $7,000 advance per cartoon in addition to a percentage of profits. But having once again been betrayed in business—and Walt having once again been reminded of the treacherous reality that lay outside his cartoon world—the Disneys hardly regarded Columbia as a deliverance from deviousness. As he was negotiating with both Powers and Columbia, Roy learned that Columbia had secretly approached their nemesis with an offer of $60,000 for all his rights in the Mickeys or, alternatively, $30,000 and 20 percent of the profits they would make from them, telling Powers that they would, in Roy’s words, “fight it out with us” themselves. Roy immediately corralled Columbia executives Joe Brandt and Jack Cohn, who backed down, but Roy was still distrustful of his new partners and insisted on the contractual right to examine Columbia’s books periodically, fully expecting that he would have a showdown with them someday too.
But until then Walt could retreat back into the Mickeys and the Silly Symphonies. Until then he was free.
IV
The reason Columbia was willing to spend $50,000 to extricate Walt from Pat Powers, and the reason larger and more established distributors had avidly pursued Walt before Powers discouraged them, was that Mickey Mouse was becoming a phenomenon. When Columbia took out a full-page advertisement in Film Daily that December proclaiming Mickey “The Most Popular Character in Screendom,” they may not have been far off. Even before the Columbia deal one reviewer noted that “‘Mickey Mouse’ is one of the very few ‘cartoon stars’ to have his name featured by theaters on an almost equal basis with the feature screen attraction.” A cartoon in The Saturday Evening Post that fall showed a wealthy man with a pince-nez and cane at a theater box office window digging into his pockets for the admission and asking the ticket seller, “Am I too late for Mickey Mouse?” An article in Literary Digest, comparing Mickey Mouse to Charlie Chaplin, jazz bandleader Paul Whiteman, and detective stories, claimed that he had also been discovered by the intelligentsia as these other exemplars of popular culture had. Chaplin reportedly demanded that a Mickey Mouse cartoon be played with his new film City Lights, and Madame Tussaud requested permission to immortalize Mickey in wax. In one three-week stretch Mickey Mouse received thirty thousand fan letters, and by one estimate one million separate audiences saw Mickey Mouse cartoons each year in the early 1930s.
Nor was his popularity confined to America. Photoplay called Mickey the “most popular motion picture star in all European countries” and noted that English exhibitors often featured his name in lights “four times as large as well-known stars.” The German biographer Rene Fulop-Miller called Mickey the “preeminent personality of the screen today, and the only ‘artist’ who exemplified in his work and technique the pure form of talking films.” French critics from one end of the aesthetic spectrum to the other praised him, and an Austrian critic complained that he was now more popular than Mozart.
Perhaps most telling of all about Mickey’s popularity was how many of Walt’s competitors were already imitating the mouse just as they had once imitated Felix. The Disneys brought suit against both Pathé and Van Beuren for Mickey
look-alikes and warned Mintz about a character who looked suspiciously like Mickey. At the same time Harman and Ising created a new character named Bosko who resembled Mickey. Dick Huemer told Walt that the animators at Paramount and those drawing Krazy Kat for Mintz got each Disney cartoon and ran them again and again so they could copy the work, at which Walt crowed, “Our pictures are the center of attention back here—all the New York artists are trying to compete with them.”
By the early 1930s a raft of analysis dissected what exactly made a round, chirpy little mouse so enormously appealing. When Walt was pressed to explain, his early assessments were surprisingly routine and superficial. He cited the constant motion in Mickey cartoons, the sharpness and brevity of the gags, and the exaggeration of emotions that were grounded in human experience and familiar to everyone. He told another interviewer that Mickey’s size elicited sympathy and that when he triumphed, the small over the big, the audience rejoiced with him. On another occasion, celebrating Mickey’s twenty-fifth anniversary, he attributed his creation’s appeal to simplicity: “Mickey is so simple and uncomplicated, so easy to understand, that you can’t help liking him.” And on still another occasion, when Aldous Huxley asked Walt what theory he employed behind Mickey, Walt threw up his hands and said, “We just make a Mickey, and then the profs come along and tell us what we got.”