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Chapter 9

“I Love Beans”

Felix attracted countless copycats. His success created a giant slipstream these imitations maneuvered their way into, trying to see how far they could get—most were barely discernible from the original. John Bray’s Thomas Cat, created in 1920, could have been mistaken for Felix in a police lineup. Paul Terry, who was in animation only for the money, introduced a cat that not only looked similar, but was actually called Felix until the threat of legal action convinced him to change the name to Henry Cat. But the most exasperating imitator of all was a cat named Julius. It first appeared by that name in 1925, created by a young upstart animator struggling to get noticed.

Walter Elias Disney first arrived in California in August 1923. Only twenty-two years old, he tried to look older by sporting a mustache, a wispy over-the-lip number that begged others to take him seriously. He arrived by train from Kansas City, a skinny kid in a borrowed suit hoping to break into Hollywood. Tucked away in his luggage was a small handful of films he had made back home, a series entitled Alice’s Wonderland, a mix of live action and animation, that was loosely based on Lewis Carroll’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He hoped to sell the series in a format featuring Alice in various settings: Alice’s Day at Sea, Alice Hunting in Africa, Alice’s Spooky Adventure, Alice’s Wild West Show, and so on. It was in these films that Disney occasionally cast Julius, the Felix knockoff, which appealed to distributors wanting to capitalize on Felix’s success, but not enough for them to sign a contract with him.

Disney’s first two months in Los Angeles were filled with rejection. Nobody was interested in this unknown kid’s pitches. His contacts suggested he might have better luck in New York, where most of the animation studios were located and where distributors might be more receptive. But there was no money to travel east, so Disney was stuck in California, continuing to knock on doors.

In October he finally caught a lucky break and signed a distribution deal with Margaret Winkler. She lived in New York, but Disney, covering his bases, had started corresponding with her from afar. He had caught her at the perfect time, when she was desperate for new talent amid troubles with her star clients. Max Fleischer was threatening to begin distributing his Out of the Inkwell shorts on his own, while Pat Sullivan was likewise threatening to take Felix elsewhere for more money. Winkler badly needed to diversify her portfolio to hedge against the potential losses and hoped Disney’s films might help her avoid disaster.

Once the contracts were signed, Disney set to work scraping up money to start a studio. Partnering with his brother Roy, who had come to California to recover from tuberculosis, he received a small loan from his uncle, enough to rent a small office and studio space. Then he convinced the family of Virginia Davis, the young girl from the live-action portions of the Alice shorts, to move from Kansas City to California. Her father, a traveling salesman who already spent a lot of time on the road; and her mother, a stagestruck housewife obsessed with her daughter’s potential stardom, were an easy sell. Once they arrived, Disney took Virginia around town and filmed her live-action sequences himself, using mainly public spaces and occasionally ducking the police because he lacked the proper filming permits. He also drew most of the films’ animated sequences himself, delivering the first new installment of the series, Alice’s Day at Sea, to Winkler by December.

Winkler was disappointed when she saw it. The film wasn’t particularly funny and the work felt rushed. She demanded he do it over, explaining that she knew what audiences wanted. “Inject as much humor as you possibly can,” she told him, suggesting he make it more like Felix the Cat and Out of the Inkwell. But even though she was critical, she was also encouraging, hoping to cultivate this young upstart she had taken a gamble on: an unknown kid with few contacts, no money, and no real studio. Plus, he was trying to make animated cartoons in California, a continent away from where they were usually made, in New York. Many had already asked Disney the same question: why had he come here and not gone there?

If the stars had aligned a little differently, Walt Disney might have been born in California. In the nineteenth century, both of his grandfathers, Kepple Disney and Charles Call, had set out for California in search of gold, departing in wagon trains for the frontier. But the trip was hard, and along the way they both got sidetracked, putting down roots in the Midwest instead. Thus, in 1901, Walt was born in Chicago, a town he remembered as noisy and dirty, penetrated by the dark breathing of factories and slaughterhouses.

When Walt Disney was four, his family left dirty Chicago for Marceline, Missouri. It was a postcard town: Zircher’s Jewelry Store, with an impressive freestanding clock on its corner; Hott’s Tavern, run by the cheerful Judge Hott; and Ripley Square, full of handsome gazebos where bands played during the warm summers. The beautiful farmhouse they lived in was fronted by a carpet of green grass and shaded by swaying willows that whispered in the breeze. Disney’s memories of Marceline were always pleasant: his Aunt Maggie giving him his first drawing tablet and pencils; or his neighbor, Doc Sherwood, paying him a nickel to sketch his horse. That moment—receiving money from Sherwood to draw—was, up to that point, “the highlight of Walt’s life,” according to Roy Disney.

Unfortunately, Walt’s father was not a good farmer. Elias Disney had interesting notions about agriculture, including the idea that using fertilizer was like “giving whiskey to a man—he felt better for a little while, but then he was worse off than before.” After the farm inevitably failed—when Walt was ten—the family moved to Kansas City, into a house that was cramped, lacked plumbing, and was close enough to the street for the Disneys to hear drunks rustling by in the night. By now, Elias had decided that Walt was old enough to work. No more playing and drawing, his first love; now he had a paper route with 650 customers. His childhood was over. He creaked awake before dawn to deliver the morning Kansas City Times, and stumbled home in the dark after delivering the evening Star.

When giving interviews later in life, Disney would sometimes use the examples of Marceline and Kansas City as a way to compare the extremes of American life—country versus city, one an ideal to strive for, the other a thing to avoid. It was a philosophy often echoed in his cartoons. Marceline was bucolic, peaceful, and full of friendly neighbors. Kansas City was the opposite: noisy, crass, filled with hustlers. Walt’s sister Ruth and his brother Roy would both claim their upbringing wasn’t nearly as hardscrabble as Walt described, but that was part of Disney’s genius: reimagining the past and shaping it to fit the aspirational myths that people want to believe.

During Disney’s freshman year in high school, the family moved from Kansas City back to Chicago after Elias invested in O-Zell, a promising (he hoped) jelly and fruit juice company. It was yet another city Walt didn’t particularly care for. He enrolled in a new school, but his teachers there remembered him as “seldom more than lukewarm about the funny business of the three Rs.” He preferred doodling in his textbooks instead, converting them into flipbooks to entertain his classmates. “Walter Disney, one of the newcomers, has displayed unusual artistic talent, and has become Voice cartoonist,” the McKinley Voice, the high school newspaper, announced shortly thereafter. When America entered World War I, his cartoons took a sudden political bent. One, a drawing of a wounded doughboy, featured the caption “Your summer vacation. WORK or FIGHT. Will you be doing either?” Disney was too young to fight, but he wanted adventure, so he dropped out of school and joined the Red Cross, which had a younger age limit than the Army.

Just seventeen, Disney remarkably found himself driving a Red Cross ambulance in France, soon after the war ended. He also moonlighted as his unit’s painter, drawing sketches for the chow hall menu, designs for the tent flaps, and caricatures of the troops. Teaming up with a young man from Georgia, nicknamed “the Cracker,” he started an artistic side hustle of salvaging German helmets from the dump, scuffing them up in the mud, shooting them to make an “authentic” bullet hole, and selling them to replacement troops who didn’t know better.

Disney returned home in 1919 and informed his family that he was going to be an artist. “This nonsense of drawing pictures!” Elias shouted when he heard the news. How could Walt reject the good job Elias had gotten for him at O-Zell that paid $25 a week!? Elias was upset but also saw that Walt was an adult now, tall and broad across the shoulders, his hands rough from his time in France. He had also started smoking, the beginning of a lifetime habit that he now used to perfect his impersonation of Charlie Chaplin’s famous kick-a-cigarette-behind-his-back move. Walt had been obsessed with Chaplin ever since high school, dissecting all his moves and performing them for friends. He loved acting as much as drawing, performing in school plays and local competitions. “[I] liked the applause, liked the cash prizes that were being handed to us, liked the weird smells and weirder sights behind the scenes,” he later recalled. When finally faced with the choice of drawing or acting, however, he got practical and chose drawing because “it seemed easier to get a job as an artist.”

“I went for it,” Disney said about his decision to move back to Kansas City. Roy was living there, and Walt managed to get a job for a printing company designing catalogue and letterhead art for publications like the Restaurant News and the United Leather Workers’ Journal. He drew comics on the side, but no money came from them, only yellow rejection slips from magazines like Life and Judge. Thinking wishfully, he made “cuts” of his unpublished comics on the blank margins of his customers’ printing plates, later pressing them onto blank newspaper stock and surrounding them with news stories, pretending they had been published. His coworkers, as a rule, respected his work but didn’t admire it—by Disney’s own admission, he was never a great artist, just an adequate one. His coworkers did, however, admire his work ethic. “He had the drive and ambition of ten million men,” one secretary remembered. During breaks, the other artists played poker, gently making fun of Disney, who chose instead to huddle in the corner, hunched over a pad of paper so he could practice his autograph.

That fall, in 1919, Disney told a federal census-taker that he was a “commercial artist.” As the census-taker walked away, Walt reconsidered his answer and waved him back, correcting his response to “cartoonist.”

Disney was laid off from the printing shop after the holiday rush but quickly got another job at the Kansas City Slide Company, located in a pale-brick building lined with tall windows that provided good light for the artists. They drew advertisements to play in movie theaters before the main attractions. Disney wrote to an old Red Cross friend to say he was now drawing “cartoons for the moving ­pictures—­advertiser films . . . and the work is interesting.” Soon he convinced his boss to let him write and shoot his own ads, rather than work with the copy department, and to lend him an old camera that was otherwise collecting dust on a shelf.

Walt Disney’s business card from 1921.

Disney’s interest in animation quickly swelled into an obsession, consuming his nights and weekends. His parents had moved back to Kansas City after O-Zell failed to pan out, and he converted the shabby garage behind their house into a makeshift studio. He worked there at night, after a full day at the Slide Company, with Roy dropping by for late visits. Roy recalled later how the studio window was always the last on the street to go dark, with Walt inside, “puttering away . . . experimenting, trying this and that.”

Disney learned the basics of animation by picking the brain of a former Slide Company artist called “Scarfoot” McCrory, who had left Kansas City to work at a New York animation studio but frequently returned for visits. He also began studying a book by Edwin Lutz entitled Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development; the work was a gateway read for many budding animators. Its advice included making films that satirized “topics of the hour,” prompting Disney and a handful of friends to make a series of shorts spoofing Kansas City’s potholes, local news, and slow streetcar service. They called them “Laugh-O-Grams,” and the local Newman Theater liked them well enough to place an order. For about an hour after the sale, Walt was ecstatic, “walking on air,” until he suddenly realized the price he had quoted the theater didn’t include profit—his greatest gifts didn’t involve finance, a deficiency that Roy would later help remedy. Still, the attention he got from the Laugh-O-Grams was worth it. “I got to be a little celebrity in the thing,” he remembered.

In the summer of 1920, the Slide Company changed its name to the Kansas City Film Ad Company and began shifting its business from slides to movies. This was lucky for Disney, who now had access to more equipment that would help him pursue animation in his free time. He recruited a “staff”—mainly friends—for his own upstart studio, telling them that he could pay them only “in experience.” They didn’t seem to mind, though—“It was more fun than pay,” his friend Walt Pfeiffer charitably remembered. Profits, once they came, were razor-thin—exhibitors weren’t willing to pay much for material they considered little more than a way to kill time before the main attraction. Disney slept in his office on a few thin rolls of canvas and some moth-eaten old cushions. He couldn’t afford to heat the beans he lived on, prying them cold from the can. This didn’t bother him, however—“I love beans,” he said, keeping a positive attitude. (Even after he was a success, he often continued eating cold beans from a can for lunch, munching away on them while sitting in his spacious office.)

Disney eventually decided to leave the Film Ad Company and start his own outfit, called the Laugh-O-Gram Studio. The tiny staff focused its efforts on gag cartoons similar to Paul Terry’s spoofs of Aesop’s fables, as well as inventive adaptations of other stories such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This is how he came to make the sample films he would later take to California. But Disney’s talent and drive notwithstanding, his cartoons failed to find a market and his studio was forced into bankruptcy—he still couldn’t match the quality of New York animation. It was time to admit the drawbacks of being in Kansas City. “Our ideas were great, but we were in the wrong area. Kansas City wasn’t the place for this kind of work,” animator Rudy Ising recalled.

Refusing to quit, Disney decided to start anew and began evaluating new locations. All the great animators worked in New York, but Walt had reservations about moving there. The animation industry was there only because it always had been, close to the newspapers and art schools that provided talent. But the movie business, which it was a part of, had clearly migrated to California; there was year-round good light and a disdain for unions, allowing the studios to get away with paying lower wages. It seemed to Disney that it might make better sense to move west. He was torn, but California had one factor that tipped the balance in its favor: Walt’s older brother Roy was recuperating from tuberculosis there, thus ensuring that Walt would have a place to stay. Roy also had business acumen and would prove a valuable partner.

When Walt announced his decision to his family, he was dressed in black-and-white-checked trousers, a mismatched checkered jacket, a gabardine raincoat, and an old brown cardigan—a look suggesting that he’d slipped into a clown’s closet and dressed in the dark. He didn’t own a suit of his own, and those close to Disney always remembered him as an eccentric dresser. His brother Herbert’s mother-in-law looked him up and down as he announced his news, then slipped out of the room and returned with an outgrown suit of her son’s. She also had three bags of meals for him to eat on the train; she hoped the food would help him regain some of the weight he had lost while struggling to start his studio. Disney was driven to the train depot by another Kansas City acquaintance, his name lost to time. The man’s family would later joke about how his main boast in life was telling everybody in Kansas City, “I took Walt Disney to the station when he went to Hollywood.”

Several months after starting his studio in Los Angeles, Walt Disney hired an inker named Lillian Bounds. She was not particularly enamored of show business, nor would she ever be. Around her, Walt would stay grounded; she was a source of valuable, non-Hollywood perspective. He was shy toward her at first, politely giving her rides home from work, but he clearly liked her, and she him. In 1925, the two were married. When they returned from their honeymoon, they were in a glow, and their wave of good fortune continued. It had been more than a year since Disney had started making Alice shorts for Margaret Winkler—a long, shaky beginning—but he’d finally found a groove, earning positive reviews from the trade papers. “Here is a clever cartoon novelty . . . and should lend an acceptable variety to your program,” Film Daily advised theater owners looking for material. Walt and Roy’s growing success made them feel comfortable about putting down a $400 deposit on an office building located on Hyperion Avenue near Griffith Park. The new studio was the size of a small supermarket, a spacious upgrade compared with the two cramped rooms they had previously been using.

Still, a few positive trade reviews notwithstanding, the Alice shorts were not a knockout hit. Throughout 1926 they rarely made more than $300 profit per installment, and sometimes even lost money. The series’ success had plateaued, putting the studio in a shaky financial position. This was clear to Charles Mintz, a film producer who had married Margaret Winkler in 1924 and took over her business once she was pregnant. Mintz began pushing Disney to create a character that looked “more like Felix,” prompting a shift to focus on Julius as much as Alice. But Disney was never comfortable with what felt like plagiarism, telling his staff, “You’d better watch that stuff, fellows, you’re going to run into copyright problems.” Nor was Julius ever particularly popular—there were just too many Felix knockoffs on the market, none nearly as good as the original. Disney’s work was also hamstrung by the brutal production schedule demanded by his contract with Mintz: one new cartoon every two weeks, a breakneck pace that valued quantity over quality. There simply wasn’t enough time to allow for proper creativity, and this lack bothered Disney. After four years in Los Angeles, he was hitting a ceiling and burning out. As he said later, “I was ambitious and wanted to make better pictures.”

By 1927, Disney was not only searching for new characters and ideas; he was searching for new staff. Upon hearing that Otto Messmer, not Pat Sullivan, was actually the creative force behind Felix, he tried to hire him away. Because Sullivan was taking all the money anyway, Disney probably figured he could get a steal. “He begged and pleaded,” Messmer remembered. “It was pressure!” But Disney’s offer came with a catch that Messmer wasn’t ready for: move to California. Messmer turned him down, recalling, “My home, family, and roots were in New York.” It was an attitude shared by many animators, native New Yorkers who thought of animation as a homegrown industry.

The surplus of Felix clones indicated that any new breakout stars would need to be original. This was clear to Carl Laemmle, head of Universal, who spread the word that his studio wanted to reenter animation after a ten-year absence—he, like many, had been skeptical of animation, but he was starting to come around. He wanted his new cartoon star to be an animal, although he couldn’t say exactly what kind of animal. Mintz had heard of Laemmle’s desire for new material and took the prospect to Disney. But all he could tell Disney about Universal was that “they seem to think that there are too many cats on the market.”

Disney began brainstorming with an employee, Ub Iwerks, with whom he had worked in Kansas City and whom he later convinced to move to California. Then they started designing a rabbit with long ears and, for some reason, a monocle. Universal liked the initial design but wanted some adjustments, starting with losing that monocle—the result was basically a character resembling Felix with rabbit ears. Disney knew better than to just copy Felix’s look, however; he knew the cat’s success was due to a unique personality—all the gags and everything else were just an extension of that. “I want the characters to be somebody,” he explained. “I don’t want them just to be a drawing.” Happy with the result after seeing it, Universal signed an agreement with Mintz for twenty-six shorts, which the Walt Disney Studio would make, receiving an advance of $2,250 for each cartoon.

“I am the LUCKY rabbit,” a promotional poster read when Disney and Iwerk’s new character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, debuted in 1927. Universal was confident the “Krazy Kartoon Knockout” would “set the industry on its rabbit ears,” it announced in an advertisement. As Oswald began flickering up on screens across the nation, reviewers tended to agree. Motion Picture News called the series “clearly drawn, well-executed, brimful of action and fairly abounding in humorous situations.” Film Daily mused that it was “funny how cartoon artists never hit on a rabbit before,” as if the animators had discovered a new element in the Periodic Table. Not only was the character novel, it had charm and personality lacking in so many of its competitors. In the contest to oust Felix from his throne, the paper declared that “Oswald looks like a real contender.”

Walt Disney developed Oswald’s personality by closely studying films of comedians whose gags were extensions of their personalities: Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton, among others. He also observed the actor Douglas Fairbanks, a master of expressing personality purely through movement. These lessons, alongside creative camera effects, angles, and editing, made the Oswald shorts stand out from the competition.

Movie poster for an early Oswald cartoon, released shortly after Walt Disney struck a fortunate business arrangement with distributor Margaret Winkler.

The Oswald series was successful enough to improve the studio’s financial footing. Walt’s salary was only $100 a week and Roy’s $65, but yearly profits beyond that were $8,935, split sixty-forty between them—solidly middle-class incomes, although nothing extravagant. By the end of the year, the number of staff increased to twenty-two, a large portion of it new inkers and painters.

Before the Oswald series was even a year old, however, Disney fell out with Charles Mintz. Located far away in New York, Mintz had little insight into exactly how the studio was run. He questioned how it was operated without knowing the full details. Since cartoon studios were organized like factories, he extended that comparison, forgetting they made art, not widgets. To him, Disney was just another cog in the machine, one that drew a higher-than-average salary and was always haggling with Mintz for more money and control. He was a headache.

Looking to raise his take and rid himself of this problem child, Mintz devised a plan: he would take over. He sent his brother-in-law, George Winkler, to California to begin quietly hiring away Disney’s animators. Once they were all hired, so went the plan, the Disney brothers would be cut loose, in a quick and silent coup. What Mintz didn’t fully realize was that Disney was actually a visionary, not just a factory foreman watching over a bunch of workers drawing pictures of a rabbit. He injected the enterprise with its spirit; his ideas and input were a crucial part of Oswald’s success.

Disney caught wind of Mintz’s plan just before a scheduled trip to New York to meet with him about other business matters. Although he was not convinced that Mintz would do something so low, he nonetheless prepared a countermove. Arriving in New York, he began visiting other studios, Oswald prints under his arm, and soliciting for competing bids to put pressure on Mintz. Another studio’s acquisition of the rights from Universal would threaten Mintz’s distribution agreement.

It was a smart plan but didn’t get any takers. Before brusquely waving Disney off, Fred Quimby at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer told him that “cartoons [were] on the wane.” Thus, Disney was unable to gain any additional leverage.

Disney’s meeting with Mintz was awkward and strained. Mintz fidgeted and talked to him like a subcontractor. As Disney watched him, seeing how evasive and awkward he was, he gradually became convinced that the rumors were true. Wandering out of the office, he promptly wired an ominous message to Roy: BREAK WITH CHARLIE LOOMING. Anxious to prevent staff from leaving, he then ordered Roy to meet with their attorneys and draw up “ironclad” agreements: ALL CONTRACTS WITH ME PERSONALLY . . . MAKE THEM SIGN OR KNOW REASON BEFORE ALLOWING THEM TO LEAVE.

Roy wired back, reporting that most of the staff refused to sign; they considered the papers little more than loyalty oaths. From this, Walt immediately knew two things: that higher corporate powers had made him expendable at his own company, and that he had just been betrayed. Mintz had reached his employees before he himself was able to. Two days later, Disney tried to negotiate with Mintz, but hit a wall. Mintz held the upper hand. He offered Disney a slight pay raise and control of daily operations at the studio, but only as an employee, not as the owner. This was his move to squeeze out a slightly bigger take, an age-old dance between Hollywood creatives and executives. Disney realized he had no recourse, especially since he didn’t own the rights to the Oswald character. He left the meeting furious.

“He was like a raging lion on the train coming home,” Lillian Disney recalled. She had accompanied him to New York because Walt wanted the trip to be a second honeymoon. But the episode with Mintz soured the mood. “All he could say, over and over, was that he’d never work for anyone again as long as he lived,” Lillian said. “He’d be his own boss.” She spent her time on the train watching the drab winter landscape drone past her window, listening to Walt sputter and curse about how Mintz had cheated him, and how his treasonous staff had left him. Once his anger finally calmed—somewhere deep into the Midwest, Lillian couldn’t remember exactly where—Walt began planning his next steps. He would start a new studio. In the lore, as Walt would later tell it, he began doodling on a napkin and spitballing ideas, conjuring up a new strategy—and a new character—to revive his career.