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Chapter 10

“Bad Luck!”

In May 1927, aviator Charles Lindbergh accomplished the first transatlantic flight. It was one of the most widely covered news stories in the world, and Lindbergh became one of the most recognized names in history. Although he regularly took his pet kitten, Patsy, on test flights, he chose not to take her across the Atlantic, explaining, “It’s too dangerous a journey to risk the cat’s life.” It was widely rumored, though never proved, that he took a stuffed Felix doll instead—the cat’s name, after all, roughly translated to “lucky” in Latin.

Five months after Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, aviatrix Ruth Elder, the “Miss America of Aviation,” attempted to become the first woman to do the same. For good luck, she likewise carried a stuffed Felix doll, along with a Bible—a curious pairing. After she ignored advice not to fly over the North Atlantic in cold weather, Elder’s plane, American Girl, splashed into the ocean shortly after takeoff. She was rescued but the Felix doll wasn’t. Pat Sullivan, always a publicity hound, seized the opportunity for a press stunt by sending her a telegram: AM ALL RIGHT. SWAM ASHORE. WILL SEE YOU SOON—FELIX.

When Elder arrived back home, she posed for the papers with a new Felix doll that had just arrived in the mail from Sullivan. Grinning for the cameras, she said, “Luck saved me.”

Felix’s popularity appeared indestructible. When reporters asked Sullivan if he ever planned to fiddle with Felix’s magic formula, he dismissed them with a wave of his hand. “Why change?” he asked. Otto Messmer remembered the time period as being caught in what felt like a permanent glow. “Felix was goin’ so good,” he recalled. “It seemed like he would go on forever.”

In the fall of 1927, right around the time of Ruth Elder’s unfortunate flight, about thirty animators met in New York at Roth’s, a swanky hotel and restaurant bedecked with dark wood paneling, polished marble floors, and burnished brass fixtures. The gathering was meant to celebrate all they had achieved in their art. A marginal novelty when it first began, animation was now a regular part of the cinema experience. The animators were proud, laughing and drinking their bootleg liquor together, the air milky with cigar smoke. Max Fleischer hosted, shouting through the din to announce the evening’s guest of honor. “[Winsor] McCay created the miracle of animation,” he said, gesturing toward their esteemed colleague, “and another miracle was getting all the animators into one big friendly gathering.”

Almost a decade earlier, McCay had released The Sinking of the Lusitania. By 1921, he had made three more short cartoons—The Centaurs, Flip’s Circus, and Gertie on Tour—that were never shown commercially and would survive only in fragments. He had also released three films adapted from Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, another of his comic strips. Like Little Nemo in Slumberland, it dealt with the complex psychology of dreams. In this trio of films, Bug Vaudeville was about dancing bugs; The Pet was about a creature, similar to King Kong, who terrorizes a city; and The Flying House was about a man who attaches wings to his house so he can fly away to escape his debts. All three were visually breathtaking and imaginative, but none was particularly popular; they played mainly to niche audiences on sporadic schedules. They were also time-consuming to make. When William Randolph Hearst learned how committed his star cartoonist remained to animation, he again stepped in to limit how much effort McCay devoted to it. McCay was once more forced to concentrate his attention on his newspaper career, forgoing animation.

McCay’s reputation as an animator quickly faded from the public mind, but he was still a hero among his fellow animators, who considered him a standard-bearer and a true artist. They buzzed with excitement whenever rumors surfaced that he was thinking of making another animated film. The projects, heard about only in bits and pieces, were always ambitious. The Barnyard Band was to involve McCay conducting, in person, a cartoon orchestra made up of animals. Another idea involved an animated history of World War I, for which he started doing concept drawings but which he ultimately abandoned. His most epic idea, however, was an animated history of the world according to the Bible; he planned on collaborating with his friend George Randolph Chester but abandoned the idea when Chester died unexpectedly.

McCay, who was always comfortable holding a microphone or standing on a stage, continued giving speeches advocating for animation. He was still convinced, wholeheartedly, that it was an art form worthy of galleries and museums. This attitude put him somewhat at odds with some of the animators present at Roth’s that night, notably Paul Terry. Terry’s low-rent style and sensibility had taken hold of a segment of the industry—it was trending, a later generation would say—and this bothered McCay. Earlier that fall, he had complained to a radio audience, “Since I originated animated drawings the art has deteriorated . . . I hope and dream the time will come when serious artists will make marvelous pictures.” Then he mused about what Michelangelo might have done “had he known this art.”

Despite McCay’s speeches and occasional public utterances, his fellow animators seemed largely unaware of his criticism. In person, he was mostly cheerful and easygoing. Perhaps this is why the cartoon they chose to play that night, partly in honor of him, was so tone-deaf.

The animators had all come together to make a special cartoon for the evening, titled Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure, the title a reference to erections and sexual intercourse. Which studio started the film is not known, but once it animated a short section, it passed that on to the next studio, which animated another short section and passed the film on again, creating a kind of animated chain letter. This was never meant for public consumption, and in fact was so dirty that no lab in New York would process the film, for fear of violating decency laws; apparently it had to be developed in Cuba, where the law was more lax. It was so notorious, and its showing at Roth’s so hush-hush, that many animators and historians, over time, began to doubt that it had ever actually existed. Only a few scattered copies would survive until the Internet age caused it to be widely disseminated.

Once the cartoon started rolling, it was immediately clear that no topic was out of bounds, no matter how tasteless or crude. There were glistening erections, fully detailed labia, mounds of pubic hair, endless ethnic jokes. Eveready Harton, the main character, has a penis so big he needs a unicycle to support it as he runs around trying to have sex with both people and animals, opening a Pandora’s box of gags involving venereal disease, bestiality, any and all types of sexuality. No fold, flap of skin, or bodily secretion went hidden.

“The laughter almost blew the top off the hotel where they were screening it,” one animator remembered. It provided a glimpse of what many animators of the era—mostly young men—thought was truly funny when left entirely to themselves. It was the equivalent of the filthy jokes stand-up comics tell to one another in the dressing room after their sets, trying to one-up each other.

Later in the evening, Max Fleischer motioned for McCay to come to the front of the room and give a speech. Winsor made his way through the crowd, unsmiling. The room quieted down once he reached the front, then the situation turned awkward as he started a dry lecture about the technical aspects of animation. Everyone there already knew the details of what he was talking about and became distracted; the room was soon lost, filling rapidly with the sound of scattered side conversations. Sensing that he had lost control, McCay regained everyone’s attention by abruptly changing the topic to what he really wanted to discuss: the current state of animation. “Animation should be an art,” he scolded the room, his voice cold. “That is how I conceived it. But as I see what you fellows have done with it, is making it into a trade. Not an art, but a trade. Bad luck!”

The night, which was supposed to be jovial, turned sour, as Izzy Klein recalled. The way McCay’s speech had ended—“Bad luck!”—didn’t even make complete sense. It sounded like a bad omen, or even a curse. But there was an uncomfortable grain of truth in McCay’s words. For all the inventiveness, imagination, and achievements of a handful of artists—McCay, the Fleischers, Otto Messmer, and now Walt Disney—the industry was slipping into a lull. In many ways, much of McCay’s work from a decade earlier was still the high-water mark of the industry. Animation hadn’t evolved at the same rate live action had during the same period. Many animation studios, particularly the ones operating in Paul Terry’s wake, were becoming overly reliant on the same formulas and patterns, based on the same repetitive gags. Theater owners were beginning to grow weary. The only major studios still bothering with cartoons at that moment were Paramount and Universal. If animation were going to blossom into something bigger, as McCay hoped, the industry would need something new to shake it up.