The Animated Man (9 page)

Four of the six completed Laugh-O-gram fairy tales have survived, and the cartoons are notable mainly for their strained efforts to be “modern.” Cinderella, a little girl with dark hair fashionably cut, goes to the ball in a big car, with her pet cat as her chauffeur, and Red Riding Hood's “wolf” is a lupine predator of the human kind. The cartoons make heavy use of animation-saving devices, especially cycles. The drawing is invariably crude, too,
even measured against the heavily formulaic drawing that dominated most cartoons made in the early 1920s. Cartoonists who could draw well while cranking out enough drawings to fill a one-reel cartoon were not plentiful in 1922, and on the evidence of the Laugh-O-gram fairy tales, none of them lived in Kansas City.

However lacking their cartoons, the Laugh-O-gram staff had a good time making them. “Walt was very much one of the boys,” Maxwell wrote in 1973. Disney and his crew “would often get together on Sundays, to pretend we were shooting Hollywood type movies.” Photos survive of such mock shooting on the roof of the McConahy Building. “Hugh Harman and a friend of his, Ray Friedman, had built a tiny log cabin in Swope Park,” south of Kansas City, Maxwell said, “and that was a favorite rendezvous. . . . The movie camera used on these outings was a phony, built by Ub out of a box, a crank, and two film cans on top to represent magazines.”
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It was not until September 16, 1922, that Laugh-O-gram finally signed a contract with a distributor for its cartoons. That company, Pictorial Clubs, distributed films to schools and churches, rather than theaters. Pictorial Clubs obligated itself to make only a hundred-dollar down payment for six cartoons, with a balance of eleven thousand dollars not due until January 1, 1924
⁹³
—an astonishing arrangement that could not possibly make sense unless Disney had other sources of cash, as he did not. In accepting such a contract, he was amplifying the mistake he had made by selling his original Newman Laugh-O-grams at cost.

By October, Disney was completing
Puss in Boots
, the fifth of the six cartoons covered by the contract, but Laugh-O-gram's money was gone, and the company was rapidly descending into debt. Red Lyon, Laugh-O-gram's cameraman (or “technical engineer,” as his business card had it) wrote to his mother in mid-October that the company was “worse than broke” and going into debt “about four hundred more each week.”
⁹⁴

The search for additional sources of income began late in October. Laugh-O-gram announced then that the company had, in the words of a
Kansas City Star
report, “added the feature of photographing youngsters to its regular business of making animated cartoons. An admiring parent wishing to preserve the native graces of his progeny's actions” had only to get in touch with Disney and Lyon. “Then comes the stalking of the baby.” A private screening in the parents' home was part of the package. Few if any doting parents took the bait.
⁹⁵

For reasons never explained, Ub Iwerks left his job at Kansas City Film Ad and came aboard Laugh-O-gram's sinking ship early in November 1922.
Max Maxwell remembered that after Iwerks came to Laugh-O-gram he invented what came to be called the “biff-sniff,” a device for reducing or enlarging animation drawings: “He put the film in the projector, at the back of the machine, projected it up onto the glass, where the pegs were, and we could make it bigger or smaller.”
⁹⁶

By the end of the year, after delivering
Cinderella
, the last of its cartoons for Pictorial Clubs, Laugh-O-gram had stopped paying its employees.

Laugh-O-gram did make a few more films, some for money and some as samples that went unsold. Around the end of 1922, Disney made an educational film on dental care,
Tommy Tucker's Tooth
, for which a local dentist paid five hundred dollars. In March 1923, Laugh-O-gram tried unsuccessfully to interest Universal in a sample reel of
Lafflets
, the very short comic films; none of them have survived. Around that time, Laugh-O-gram also made a “Song-O-Reel” called
Martha
, a sing-along film in which Ub Iwerks appeared in live action.

Disney was shameless in other efforts to keep Laugh-O-gram afloat. At one point, he offered a mail-order course in animated cartooning, using the letterhead “Animated Cartooning Studios” and listing himself as general manager and Ising as educational director. A promotional piece dangled the lure of “large earnings,” saying: “The remuneration to be derived from taking this training will amaze you.”
⁹⁷
That was undoubtedly true.

Throughout the late fall and winter of 1922–23, and on into the spring, Laugh-O-gram survived, barely, on small loans, the first (twenty-five hundred dollars on November 30, 1922) from its treasurer, J. V. Cowles, who was presumably reluctant to see his initial investment turn sour. The next lender, Fred Schmeltz, owner of a hardware store, made loans totaling more than two thousand dollars between February and June 1923. Schmeltz, as a member of Laugh-O-Gram's board, had good reason to know how desperate the company's situation was, and he tried to protect himself—his loans were secured by all the company's equipment. On June 2, 1923, Disney assigned the Pictorial Clubs contract to Schmeltz as security not just for his loans but also Cowles's, as well as the unpaid salary owed to two employees.
⁹⁸

Disney's personal lifeline was an occasional check from his brother. Roy had been diagnosed with tuberculosis in the fall of 1920, and he moved from one government sanatorium to another—from the first, in New Mexico, to another in Arizona, and finally to one in Sawtelle, California, now a part of the city of Los Angeles abutting Santa Monica. Disney remembered that Roy sent him blank checks with instructions to fill them out for any amount up to thirty dollars, “so I'd always put thirty dollars.” He scraped by on those
small checks and the generosity of the Greek owners of the Forest Inn Café on the first floor of the McConahy Building. He also imposed on Edna Francis, Roy's girlfriend, who remembered that Walt “used to come over to my house and talk and talk till almost midnight. He was having a kind of a struggle and when he'd get hungry he'd come over to our house and we'd feed him a good meal and he'd just talk and talk.”
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Disney said in 1956: “I was desperately trying to get something that would take hold, catch on. So I thought of a reversal. They had had the cartoons working with the humans, which was originated by Max Fleischer. I said, well, maybe I'll pull a reversal on that, I'll put the human in with the cartoons. . . . The [Fleischer] cartoon would always come off the drawing board and run around in a real room and work with a real person. I took a real person and put 'em into the drawing.”

On April 13, 1923, Disney, for Laugh-O-gram, signed a contract with the parents of Virginia Davis, a four-year-old Mary Pickford look-alike with blonde curls who had already performed in at least one Kansas City Film Ad commercial. He hired Virginia to appear in a new film called
Alice's Wonderland;
her payment was to be 5 percent of the film's proceeds.
¹⁰⁰
After the live action was shot, Disney and a few other members of his original staff worked on the film in the late spring and early summer of 1923. Hugh Harman, who was on Laugh-O-gram's payroll throughout May and June, claimed to have animated most of it.
¹⁰¹

In the midst of production, probably in mid-June, Laugh-O-gram moved from the McConahy Building to less expensive quarters, the same space above Peiser's restaurant that had housed Disney's Kaycee Studios. “The studio was then in financial trouble,” Rudy Ising wrote in 1979, “and Walt, Hugh, Maxwell, and I secretly moved all our equipment back to the original building . . . one night, leaving McConahy with some unpaid back rent.”
¹⁰²
Starting in July, Fred Schmeltz paid the monthly rent (seventy-five dollars) for the space above Peiser's. Maxwell remembered “taking turns with Walt on the camera stand for a long session shooting a circus parade”—a cartoon parade welcoming the live-action Alice to cartoonland—after the move.
¹⁰³

In May 1923, while
Alice's Wonderland
was still being animated, Disney wrote about it to potential distributors, offering to send them a print when it was finished. But, he said in 1956, “I couldn't get anywhere with it.” Actually, his letter of May 14 to Margaret J. Winkler, a New York–based distributor, brought an immediate response. “I shall, indeed, be very pleased to
have you send me a print of the new animated cartoon you are talking about,” she wrote to Disney on May 16. “If it is what you say, I shall be interested in contracting for a series of them.”
¹⁰⁴

Disney wrote to Winkler again more than a month later. “Owing to numerous delays and backsets we have encountered in moving into our new studio,” he wrote on June 18, “we will not be able to complete the first picture of our new series by the time we expected.” He planned to be in New York around July 1 with a print and “an outline of our future program.”
¹⁰⁵
Winkler replied that she would be happy to see him.
¹⁰⁶
When Disney spoke of “backsets,” he may have had in mind what happened after the animation for
Alice's Wonderland
was photographed. When the film was developed, the emulsion on the negative ran in the summer heat; at least part of the animation had to be reshot.
¹⁰⁷

In the film, Alice visits the Laugh-O-gram studio to see how cartoons are made, watches an animated cat and dog box on a drawing board, and that night dreams she is in a cartoon herself. The novelty is all in the combination work, which, as Rudy Ising explained, “was bi-packed, that is, the live-action print was run through the camera operation along with the unexposed negative film, thus being superimposed on the film at the same time as the cartoon was being photographed.”
¹⁰⁸
Alice's Wonderland
otherwise suffers from some of the same disabilities as the Laugh-O-gram fairy tales, especially their repetitiveness, aggravated in this case by
four
off-screen fights that include three involving Alice and some escaped lions.

Regardless, by midsummer 1923 Disney had a finished film in hand and a New York distributor who was eager to see it. He probably could not afford a trip to New York, but he could have followed through in other ways, and he did not. The fate of the six modernized fairy tales may have had something to do with his failure to act.

In his first letter to Winkler, Disney invited her to get in touch with W. R. Kelley of Pictorial Clubs' New York office, “and he will gladly screen several of our subjects”—the fairy-tale cartoons—“for you.”
¹⁰⁹
It was around this time that Pictorial Clubs, a Tennessee corporation, went out of business. The films—but not the obligation to pay for them—wound up in the hands of a New York corporation also called Pictorial Clubs. Disney had been swindled, and Laugh-O-gram would not see the eleven thousand dollars it was supposed to receive the following New Year's Day.
¹¹⁰
That disagreeable experience with one distributor may have left him less than eager, for a time, to pursue a contract with another. Rudy Ising remembered that in the summer
of 1923, after the move back to the original studio above Peiser's, “Walt was seriously considering going back to New York” to seek work as an animator on the
Felix the Cat
cartoons.
¹¹¹

In later years, Disney may not have wanted to remember this episode, perhaps the only time after he left Kansas City Film Ad that he was on the verge of going to work for someone else and giving up the idea of running his own business. Just as the memory of his failed partnerships seemed to annoy him, so the very idea that he might have spent his life working for someone else may have been too unpleasant to contemplate. He was by nature a man who wanted to be in charge, in undisputed control, and so he could tolerate neither sharing power with a partner (other than Roy) nor surrendering it to a boss.

With
Alice's Wonderland
finished and his hopes for a new series in abeyance, Disney returned to the kind of cartoon that had first brought him modest success. “I spent a number of weeks working on a plan to make a weekly newsreel for the
Kansas City Post,”
he said in 1935, “but that deal fell through, too. That seemed to wash up all the prospects in Kansas City, so I decided to go to Hollywood.”
¹¹²

As Disney recalled in his 1941 speech to his employees, he passed through one true starving-artist phase in Kansas City, apparently when the studio was in the McConahy Building (although his reference to an “an old rat-trap of a studio” wouldn't seem to fit that place). His business a shambles, he was living at his studio and bathing once a week at Kansas City's new Union Station. He had nothing to eat but beans from a can and scraps of bread from a picnic. Characteristically, though, Disney refused to take a romantic, languishing view of his predicament when he talked about it again in 1956. Whenever he spoke of his hardships and how he overcame them, his voice was usually that of a rigorously optimistic entrepreneur. He loved beans, he said—“I was actually enjoying this meal.”

*
Disney's “digging” was probably to prepare for his 1959 live-action feature
Darby O'Gill and the Little People
, a film rich in Irish atmosphere but shot entirely in California.

As his father had on several occasions, Walt Disney responded to defeat by pulling up stakes. When bankruptcy arrived for Laugh-O-gram Films in October 1923, he had already decamped for California, probably in late July. As had been the case with Elias in 1906, Robert Disney was part of the lure—he had moved to Southern California in 1922 and gone into the real estate business
¹
—but so was Roy, since he was still hospitalized at Sawtelle.