The Animated Man (10 page)

Los Angeles itself was a natural destination for a midwesterner like Disney, more so than New York. In the Los Angeles of the early 1920s, the big movie studios were starting to introduce an exotic immigrant seasoning of the sort that was already part of life in the Northeast, but many residents were uneasy with the newcomers. Los Angeles was still in its prevailing mores a transplanted midwestern city.

“I'd failed,” Disney said of his Laugh-O-grams venture—but, he added, that was a good thing. “I think it's important to have a good hard failure when you're young. . . . I learned a lot out of that.” He came away from his failure buoyed by the entrepreneur's conviction that he would always land on his feet, and so “I never felt sorry for myself.”

Disney said in 1961 that by the time he arrived in Los Angeles “I was fed up with cartoons. I was discouraged and everything. My ambition at that time was to be a director.”
²
He said he would have taken any job at a live-action studio—“Anything. Anything. Get in. . . . Be a part of it and then move up.” Roy Disney, speaking in 1967, had his doubts: “I kept saying to him, ‘Why aren't you gonna get a job? Why don't you get a job?' He could have got a job, I'm sure, but he didn't want a job. But he'd get into Universal,
for example, on the strength of applying for a job and then . . . he'd just hang around the studio lot all day . . . watching sets and what was going on. . . . And MGM was another favorite spot where he could work that gag.”
³
Walt Disney said forty years later, “I couldn't get a job, so I went into business for myself” by returning to cartoons and building a camera stand in his uncle's garage.
⁴
Again, though, the documentary record indicates that his state of mind differed from what he chose to remember, and that he always intended to go into business for himself—making cartoons.

Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, he had a letterhead printed—“Walt Disney, Cartoonist”—with his Uncle Robert's address, 4406 Kingswell Avenue in Hollywood. He wrote to Margaret Winkler in New York on August 25, telling her that he was no longer associated with Laugh-O-gram and was setting up a new studio. “I am taking with me a select number of my former staff,” he wrote, “and will in a very short time be producing at regular intervals. It is my intention of securing working space with one of the studios, that I may better study technical detail and comedy situations and combine these with my cartoons.”
⁵
In other words, Roy was right—Walt was insinuating himself onto the big-studio lots not in search of a job but to “study technical detail and comedy situations.”

When Winkler replied on September 7, she was clearly getting impatient. “If your comedies are what you say they are and what I think they should be, we can do business,” she wrote. “If you can spare a couple of them long enough to send to me so that I can screen them and see just what they are, please do so at once.”
⁶

By then, Winkler had special reasons to be interested in Disney's film. She had been distributing Max Fleischer's
Out of the Inkwell
cartoons, but Fleischer was about to leave her and distribute his cartoons through his own company, Red Seal. Another cartoon-producer client, Pat Sullivan, wanted to take his popular
Felix the Cat
cartoons elsewhere for more money. Winkler was a states-rights distributor who marketed films to subdistributors who paid for the right to sell them for a limited time in one or more states; she was on the fringes of the business, compared with the big film companies like Paramount and Universal. She needed a new cartoon series, quickly, and
Alice's Wonderland—
Disney apparently sent her a print he had brought with him to California—persuaded her that Disney could meet that need. He was in the midst of making a sample “joke reel” for the Pantages theater chain—a new version of his Newman reels—when Winkler sent him a telegram on October 15, 1923, offering a contract for a series of six
Alice
films, with an option for two more sets of six.
⁷
Disney returned the signed contract on October 24.
⁸

(Winkler wanted to buy
Alice's Wonderland
as an emergency backup reel, but Disney could not sell it because he did not own it—it belonged to Laugh-O-gram and ultimately passed into other hands during Laugh-O-gram's bankruptcy proceedings. Winkler offered only three hundred dollars for the film, a price that Disney was able to dismiss, no doubt with considerable relief, as simply too low.)
⁹

At his brother's urging, Roy left the Sawtelle sanatorium to join Walt in a new Disney Brothers Studio. “One night,” Roy said, “he found his way to my bed at eleven or twelve o'clock at night and showed me the telegram of acceptance of his offer and said, ‘What do I do now . . . can you come out of here and help me get this started?' I left the hospital the next day and have never been back since.”
¹⁰

With characteristic optimism, Walt had already rented space (for ten dollars a month) on October 8, at the rear of a real estate office at 4651 Kingswell,
¹¹
a couple of blocks west of Robert Disney's home and just around the corner from Vermont Avenue, a major north-south Hollywood artery that was home to many film exchanges. Instantly, when Roy joined him, Walt had a balance wheel of the kind he had lacked in Kansas City. Said Wilfred Jackson, who worked alongside both Disneys for thirty years: “Everybody thinks of Walt Disney as one person. He was really two people, he was Walt Disney and Roy Disney.”
¹²
In 1961, Walt summarized the difference that Roy made, in this way: “Roy is basically a banker. He's pretty shrewd on the money.”

Roy was also Walt's big brother, and the family ties that bound the brothers not just to each other but to Elias were as much in evidence in Hollywood as in Marceline. “When we were just getting started down here,” Roy told Richard Hubler in 1968, “our folks put a mortgage on their house in Portland and loaned us twenty-five hundred dollars. In our family we all helped each other. I got that paid off just as quick as possible.” Apparently, Elias's grudging way with a dollar no longer ruled when his sons were pursuing an entrepreneurial path of the sort he had taken so often himself. Roy himself put “a few hundred dollars” into the new business, and Robert Disney lent them five hundred dollars.
¹³

“By Christmas we delivered our first picture,” Roy said in 1967. “We got twelve hundred dollars. Thought we were rich.”
¹⁴
(Roy's figures were a little off, in both directions. Margaret Winkler offered fifteen hundred dollars per cartoon. The first one,
Alice's Day at Sea
, was due January 1, 1924, but Winkler received it the day after Christmas.)

Roy remembered Walt at this time as “always worried, but always enthusiastic. Tomorrow was always going to answer all of his problems.” Walt still
bore the marks of his last few months in Kansas City, when he camped out in his studio and ate very little. He was “skinny as a rail,” Roy said, and “looked like the devil. . . . I remember he had a hacking cough and I used to tell him, ‘For Christ's sake don't you get TB.' ”
¹⁵
(Walt was a heavy cigarette smoker by then; he most likely picked up the habit during his year in France.)

Walt Disney had embarked on his Laugh-O-grams with money in the bank and a small but adequate staff, but without Roy at his side. When Disney Brothers Studio opened for business on October 16, 1923—the day after Walt got Margaret Winkler's offer—he and Roy and Kathleen Dollard, whom they hired to ink and paint the animation cels, made up the entire staff. Margaret Winkler wanted Virginia Davis to star in the new series of
Alice Comedies
, and Disney wrote to her mother, Margaret Davis, that same day, offering the role.
¹⁶
In testimony to the power of Hollywood's glamour, the whole Davis family moved west in a matter of weeks.

The earliest
Alice Comedies
are not really cartoons at all, but are instead live-action shorts—strongly resembling Hal Roach's
Our Gang
series—with animated inserts. They could hardly be anything else, since Walt Disney himself was the only animator (and Roy his cameraman). Disney's animation is painfully weak even set against the Laugh-O-grams, burdened as it is by poor drawing and a desperate use of every conceivable kind of shortcut.

“In the very early days of making these pictures,” Disney said in 1956, “it was a fight to survive. It was a fight first to get in, to crack the ice. So you used to do desperate things. I used to throw gags and things in because I was desperate.” In a speech to his fellow producers in 1957, he remembered shooting live action in Griffith Park and narrowly escaping arrest “for not having a license. We couldn't afford one. So we used to keep an eye out for the park policeman, and then run like mad before he got to us. We would then try another part of the park, and another.”
¹⁷

As the Disneys settled into a production routine, they slowly added staff—first a cel painter, Lillian Bounds, on January 14, 1924 (“They tried to use me as a secretary, but I wasn't very good at it,” she said more than sixty years later).
¹⁸
They hired a cartoonist, Rollin Hamilton, who at twenty-five was three years Walt's senior, on February 11. That same month, they moved to larger quarters, a storefront next door at 4649 Kingswell. Now they had a plate-glass window on which to emblazon “Disney Bros. Studio.” The Disneys shared one large room with their employees; a smaller room housed the animation camera stand.
¹⁹

In May 1924, Ub Iwerks wrote to Disney telling him he was ready to leave his Film Ad job a second time and join the Disney staff as an animator. Disney
was delighted, and he encouraged Iwerks to come to Los Angeles as quickly as possible (“I wouldn't live in K.C. now if you gave me the place”).
²⁰
With Iwerks on his staff, Disney could finally cut back on the live action in his films, first making it a true framing device—short segments before and after the animation—and then getting rid of it altogether, except for increasingly brief appearances by Alice. Iwerks was now a more accomplished animator than Disney himself, and his technical skills were immediately useful, too. The Disneys' camera had to be hand-cranked to shoot the animation frame by frame, but Iwerks converted it to a motor drive, so that each frame could be photographed by pressing a telegraph key. He also drew the posters and lettered the titles and intertitles (the title cards in the body of the film) for the
Alice Comedies
.
²¹

While their business was getting under way, the Disney brothers lived together nearby for more than a year. “First,” Roy said in 1968, “we had just a single room in a house”—this was across the street from Uncle Robert at 4409 Kingswell, the home of Charles and Nettie Schneider, where the brothers probably moved in the fall of 1923 around the time they started their company. Later, Roy said, “we got an apartment”—the address is unknown—“and I used to go home in the afternoon and take a sleep because I was convalescing.” Roy returned to the studio for a couple of hours before going home again to prepare dinner.

One night Walt “just walked out on my meal,” Roy said, “and I said, ‘Okay, to hell with you. If you don't like my cooking let's quit this business.' So I wrote my girl in Kansas City”—Edna Francis, to whom he had been more or less engaged since before he entered the navy—“and suggested she come out and we get married, which she did, and she and I were married on April 11, 1925. So that left Walt alone. So apparently he didn't like living alone, even though he didn't like my cooking.”
²²
Shortly afterward, Walt Disney proposed to Lillian Bounds, and she accepted.

Lillian Marie Bounds was from Idaho, where her father had worked as a blacksmith. She had followed her older sister Hazel Sewell to Los Angeles and taken a job at the Disney studio soon after she arrived. The studio was close to her sister's home, and she could walk to work. She was a slender, dark-haired girl, a head shorter than her boss and future husband. He stood around five feet, ten inches, and his slicked-back hair was light brown. Disney was slender himself then, so much so that in photos from the time his features seem sharper and his nose more prominent than in later years.

Disney's wardrobe was extremely limited when she first knew him, Lillian said. “He didn't even have a suit.”
²³
He wore a tan gabardine raincoat,
a brownish gray cardigan, and a pair of black-and-white checked pants. He did not own a car, either, until sometime after Lillian was hired.

“We used to work nights,” Lillian told Richard Hubler in 1968. “By that time he had a Ford roadster with one seat and an open back. He used to take us home after work. He took the other girl home first. When he got to my sister's he was embarrassed to stop in front of the house. One night he asked me, ‘If I get a suit can I come and see you?' ” The Disney brothers both bought suits at the same time, but Walt's had two pairs of pants to Roy's one. “Walt always got the best,” Lillian said.
²⁴

“He just had no inhibitions,” Lillian said of Walt. “He was completely natural. . . . He was fun. Even if he didn't have a nickel. . . . We would go to see a picture show or take a drive”—Disney had graduated to a Moon roadster by then. “We would drive up to Santa Barbara sometimes.” On their dates, she said, “He was always talking about what he was going to do. He always wanted to do the talking.”
²⁵

Although Disney was making films that were seen throughout the nation, he was well short of being any sort of celebrity.
²⁶
An article about her marriage, ghostwritten from Lillian Disney's point of view, was published in
McCall's
almost thirty years later. Although bearing a title—“I Live with a Genius”—that inspires skepticism, the article is persuasive in many of its details, as in this account: