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Chapter 6

“This Place Is Full of Sharks”

In 1914, William Marriner, a notoriously volatile cartoonist working for the McClure newspaper syndicate, committed suicide by lighting his house on fire and refusing to leave. As a result, the fate of Marriner’s comic strip, Sambo and His Funny Noises, was uncertain. Originally based on a book by Helen Bannerman, The Story of Little Black Sambo, the strip was an unfortunate example of the era’s casual racism—its main character exists mainly to mock African-American dialects (“Dere ain’t no room on dis earth fo’ dem white boys an’ me!”)—but was nevertheless quite popular. As Marriner’s affairs were sorted out, the strip was taken over by his former assistant, Patrick Sullivan, who immediately began seeking ways to boost its popularity. Intrigued by the potential of animation, he decided to adapt it into a cartoon.

But first he would need to learn how to animate. Knocking on the doors of New York’s few fledgling animation studios, he began asking for a job.

Australian by birth and twenty-nine years old, Sullivan had few qualities recommending him to an employer, although his résumé was no doubt interesting. It included a position he described as “gentleman in waiting and special valet to a boat load of mules,” referring to a job as a deckhand on a commercial ship traveling back and forth between London and America. Once he had grown tired of the job, he jumped ship into New York Harbor and swam to shore, which is how he had ended up in the United States. Work as a boxer soon followed, leading to a cauliflower ear and a flat nose from too many “left wings to the button,” he liked to joke. After tiring of boxing, he then took up work as a cartoonist, which he had some experience doing back home in Australia. He was not an impressive cartoonist, however; the earliest known example of his work, published in 1907 in The Gadfly, an Australian weekly, was sloppy. But it did give a hint of Sullivan’s character. Standing on the deck of a ship, a nervous woman warily eyes a pipe-smoking seaman. “Any fear of drowning?” she asks.

“No,” he replies, “This place is full of sharks.”

Regardless of his poor artistic skills, Sullivan had an easy charm and magnetic charisma. People couldn’t help leaning in when he told colorful stories about his boxing days and adventures sailing the seas on merchant ships—impressive tales that convinced the McClure Newspaper Syndicate to give him a chance and hire him as an assistant. This same charisma is what later convinced Raoul Barré to give Sullivan a chance as an animator, although Barré drove a harder bargain and insisted on paying him $5 less per week than he had made at McClure’s.

Barré’s studio in the Bronx was located in the Fordham Arcade building, near the last stop on the old Third Avenue elevated line. Inside, the windows were painted in a grimy shade of green that cast an eerie glow on the animators’ faces. This kept the room dark, so the artists could better see the drawings on their light tables, which were arranged in long rows, as in a factory. The other animators at Barré’s studio all remembered Sullivan as a poor student who always showed up late and hungover, the alcohol vapors rising from his rumpled clothes like morning fog cooking off a pond. Animators generally weren’t known for their sobriety, so for them to have commented on Sullivan’s drinking habits suggests a pretty serious problem. Nor did his work impress Barré, who fired him after nine months.

Nine months had been enough time for Sullivan to learn the basics, however. By the middle of 1915, he started his own studio at 125 West 42nd Street, located between Times Square and Bryant Park, and quickly charmed his way into contracts with the Efanem and Edison film companies, two early studios that would eventually go defunct. The latter was owned by Thomas Edison, who was then trying to patent equipment used in the film industry and create a monopoly (like Bray’s, his efforts to do so would fail). Edison had contracted a cartoon series at Barré’s studio called the Animated Grouch Chasers, which Sullivan had worked on. Once Sullivan started his own studio, he was able to negotiate his own deal to provide Edison with cartoon advertisements and entertainment shorts. He also adapted the Sambo comic strip into a cartoon, although he changed the main character’s name to Sammy Johnsin to avoid paying royalties to Marriner’s heirs.

Of all the lessons Sullivan learned while working for Barré, perhaps the most important was that of delegation. Animation really wasn’t difficult if talented people were hired to do the work. Sullivan’s most important hire, made in early 1916, was a young artist named Otto Messmer. The two men were total opposites. Sullivan was raffish while Messmer was quiet and demure. Sullivan had traveled the world, while Messmer, who was twenty-four, still lived with his parents in New Jersey. When they first met, Messmer had just been fired from Universal, where he had attempted to start an animation unit but failed, and was glad to get the job.

Otto Messmer’s background was typical of many young men entering animation during the earliest decades of the industry. After graduating from high school in 1907, he enrolled in night classes at the Thomas School of Art in Manhattan, “where they taught you to draw more ‘straight’” rather than cartoony, he recalled. Next came a job illustrating fashion catalogues for a company called the Acme Agency. “But I didn’t like that,” he remembered. “I kept thinking about cartoons.” By 1910 he had sold a few cartoons to Life, building a portfolio he could use to get a steadier job. His brief stint at Universal came several years later. Messmer had seen all of Winsor McCay’s films, along with Émile Cohl’s Newlyweds series, and had figured out most of the basics on his own. His father helped him build a special desk with a backlit glass panel and a wooden frame that would register drawings, similar to Raoul Barré’s peg system.

Sullivan taught Messmer the techniques he had learned from Barré. “He taught me a lot of things about timing, [and] so forth,” Messmer remembered about one of his earliest assignments producing a dozen Charlie Chaplin cartoons. A movie producer had suggested featuring Chaplin as a cartoon character, an idea that Chaplin loved. “So Chaplin sent at least thirty or forty photographs of himself in different [poses] . . . He was delighted, cause this helped the propagation of his pictures, ya see?” Messmer studied the pictures in the same way a religious scholar pores over the Talmud, absorbing every lesson possible. “We used a lot of that kind of action in Felix,” he later said of the Chaplin films.

After teaching Messmer the basics, Sullivan mostly left him alone. “I did it all practically by myself,” Messmer said. His mind was wild, good at dreaming up gags and clever scenarios that defied reality. He wasn’t a fan of devices like Max Fleischer’s rotoscope, which required filming one’s subjects in live action—“Why animate something that you can see in real life?” he asked. To Messmer, a cartoon was something that described the impossible. It was most effective when it ignored reality.

The United States entered World War I, and Messmer was drafted right as he was getting his footing at Sullivan’s studio. As a corporal in the Army Signal Corps, he would see the worst horrors the war offered. Once, chatting with a buddy while scanning the smoky horizon for enemy troops, Messmer turned around to investigate why his friend had gone silent, discovering him slumped over with a bullet through his head. Another time, someone in his unit shot a German sniper who hadn’t yet died when the American troops reached him. Messmer, who spoke German, comforted him during his final moments, as the sniper showed the Americans pictures of his family. Just before he closed his eyes forever, he offered the Americans his last cigarettes, which otherwise wouldn’t get smoked. All these experiences made a deep and lasting impression on Messmer. He would rarely ever speak of the war, but glimpses of it would surface in his art once he returned to America.

While Messmer was off fighting the war, Patrick Sullivan was in New York fighting a serious lawsuit. It started one day in April 1917, after Sullivan and another animator, Ernest Smythe, began flirting with two young girls they had spotted in a rented apartment opposite the studio, whistling and catcalling to them from across the courtyard. Dark-haired Alice McCleary and her blond friend Gladys Bowen were fourteen and fifteen, respectively, and had run away from home five days earlier. They were seeking an adventure in the city. The animators convinced the girls to meet them in a nearby bar and, once everyone was settled, ordered a round of crème de menthes. The girls sipped their bright green drinks and explained they wanted to be actresses. When Sullivan heard this, he turned on his charm and announced that he and Smythe were already in show business, as animators. Basking in the glow of the men’s celebrity, the girls agreed to go out again the next night. By the third night, Sullivan had convinced Alice to go out alone, just the two of them.

A week later, police showed up at the studio and arrested the animators. Smythe was charged with “abduction,” a charge eventually lowered to “impairing morals,” while Sullivan was charged with statutory rape. During the trial that followed, animator George Clardy testified that Sullivan had shown up the morning after his outing with Alice, bragging that “he had screwed the dark one.”

“He told me that if I didn’t undress he’d undress me,” Alice told the courtroom during the trial. “After he had intercourse with me the first time I bled,” she continued. “He got me a drink of water. Then he had intercourse with me again later on. Then he had intercourse with me again . . .” The next morning, Sullivan told her “that he had made a regular girl of me,” she quietly continued. The trial uncovered other details revealing that the encounter wasn’t consensual, not to mention that Alice was underage. After seeking help, Alice learned that she had also contracted a venereal disease, almost certainly from Sullivan.

Sullivan’s wife, Marjorie, asked the judge for leniency in a letter written on studio stationery and decorated with images of Sammy Johnsin. Sullivan’s lawyer argued for the same on the grounds of his client’s budding career as an animator. Persuaded by this argument, the judge sentenced Sullivan to two years in prison instead of the maximum ten, calling him “a man of very considerable ability.” Within days, Sullivan was sent to Sing Sing Prison, a gray clutch of stone buildings on the bank of the Hudson River thirty miles upstream from New York City. Serving only nine months of his sentence, Sullivan appeared to spend more time corresponding with his lawyer than he did with Marjorie, decorating his letters with doodles of Sammy Johnsin living prison life. In one, Sammy wears a striped uniform while busting rocks in the prison yard with a sledgehammer. “Golly ids is a skinch!” Sammy says in his pidgin English. “Think ob de poor goop dats gotter dig dese hyah rocks outer de quarry fo’ me—an all ah gotter do is smash em!!”

Sullivan’s studio disbanded while he was away but reopened when he was released from prison. On July 6, 1918, when the Motion Picture News announced Sullivan’s return to “Cartoon Making,” it didn’t mention where he had been in the interim, nor would any of the many articles that would come afterward. When Messmer returned from France eleven months later, he found the studio barely survivng. Needing a job, he went back to work for his boss, and their relationship returned to its former pattern: Sullivan drumming up new business while Messmer handled the creative work. They started making the Chaplin cartoons again, as well as short parodies of travelogue films, which had become popular in theaters.

By 1919, the studio was so busy it sometimes had to turn away job offers. That year, Earl Hurd, who worked for John Bray and had helped come up with cel technology, approached the studio to ask if it had any extra material to sell. He was putting together a package of films for Paramount and was short some cartoons.

Sullivan almost said no but hesitated because Messmer wanted to pitch something new. “If you want to do it on the side, you can do any little thing to satisfy them,” Sullivan told him. He then stressed that this wouldn’t be freelance work for which Messmer would be paid separately; Sullivan would still enjoy profits and credit on work Messmer did in his spare time. Messmer agreed.

Messmer tackled the side job on nights and weekends. His first task was coming up with a new character; he settled on an all-black cat because that design required less time to draw. Using one block of color saved him “making a lot of outlines, and solid black moves better,” he recalled. His sample cartoon, called Feline Follies, featured the cat—which would soon be named Felix—committing suicide in order to avoid the drudgery of domestic life after he knocks up his girlfriend, Miss Kitty White. It pushed the envelope and might have been in poor taste, but Paramount executive John King, who couldn’t stop laughing, loved it anyway. This is when King told Messmer to “make us another.”

Felix’s rise to fame was meteoric, a big bang moment. The name Felix was used for the first time in the character’s third film, The Adventures of Felix, released in December 1919, a date that sat on the edge of a new decade and big changes. The war was over and the world was ready to move on, to tip into the Jazz Age.

Felix stars alongside an animated version of Charlie Chaplin in Felix in Hollywood (1923).

Success like Felix’s can’t be engineered; timing and luck gathered in a perfect storm. But one factor in Felix’s success was crucial: he was the first recurring cartoon character with a distinct personality, a thinking character and not a mindless action figure. He communicated directly with the audience, winking at them from the screen, holding up a finger as if to say, “Watch this” before launching into some caper. These mannerisms echoed Messmer’s as he waltzed through the studio, pantomiming Felix’s movements for his staff: clenching his fists straight down when he was frustrated; pondering a question by pacing back and forth, hands behind his back; and the famous “eureka” gesture, slapping his fist into his palm when he had a revelation.

During Felix’s early years, Messmer sometimes drew from his war experience for storylines. Just before shipping out to France, he had married Anne Mason, who remained his wife for fifty-nine years. Some of Messmer’s friends, however, had returned home to discover that their girlfriends had left them. In Felix Turns the Tide, Felix likewise returns home from war to discover that his girlfriend has had kittens with another cat. But before Felix can get mad, he sees how she nags this other cat, which is saddled with a litter of needy, whining kittens. Suddenly, Felix is relieved, shrugging it off while laughing to a friend, “Gosh! I had a narrow escape!”

Nor did Messmer’s war-themed cartoons shy away from showing violent death. Mountains of limp bodies, x’s for eyes, pile up on the battlefield in Felix Turns the Tide, released in 1922, which featured Felix joining the Army after rats declare war on cats. In later years, after the movie industry imposed censorship rules on itself, audiences would no longer see images so graphic. A cartoon character might fall off a cliff, have an anvil crush its skull, or be blown up by dynamite, but viewers would never see it actually die. There was a window of time during Felix’s earliest years, however, when Messmer showed death graphically.

Felix’s on-screen movements—full of unexpected changes, improvisation, and metamorphic riffs—resonated with the decade’s new jazz sounds. His look, angular and pointy, moved away from art nouveau, the curvilinear and fluid motion of Winsor McCay, toward the fragmented cubism of postwar modernism. Felix’s rising popularity, however, soon demanded adjustments to his appearance. Animators needed a look that allowed them to draw him faster, so they could meet increased demand for more cartoons. Animator Bill Nolan, a former Hearst employee, helped Messmer develop a look that was more round than angular, helping smooth Felix’s on-screen motion and making him easier to draw. Rather than diminish Felix’s popularity, the changes seemed to boost it. One psychologist thought the rounder head, accentuated by a smaller body, triggered the audience’s innate affection for babies. Messmer himself put this analysis in terms of psychology, saying, “Felix represented a child’s mind . . . and that’s why I think it took hold. He’d wonder where the wind came from, or how far away is a star? How deep is the ocean? Things like that . . . then, with some gag, he would solve the problem.”

Pundits of the Roaring Twenties excitedly declared Felix the icon of their era. “He becomes the impossible,” Marcel Brion of the Académie Française wrote in 1928. “Nothing is more familiar to him than the extraordinary, and when he is not surrounded by the fantastic, he creates it.” The literary world was also enthusiastic. Aldous Huxley wrote in Vanity Fair that European filmmakers should study Felix cartoons—this would help improve their humor, he said, and guide them to be less pretentious. George Bernard Shaw gave particularly high praise, seeing the same potential in cartoons—as a high art—that Winsor McCay saw. “If Michelangelo were now alive,” he said, “I have not the slightest doubt that he would have his letter box filled with proposals from the great film firms to concentrate his powers to the delineation of Felix the Cat instead of the Sistine Chapel.”