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Chapter 12

“That’s Money over the Barrelhead”

When Walt Disney saw The Jazz Singer, he wasn’t scared of how it might disrupt the industry, he was thrilled—and also, no doubt, curious about how it might help his career. Like Max Fleischer, he did not resist but embraced new technology. Sound offered him the perfect opportunity for reestablishing himself after his falling-out with Charles Mintz and loss of Oswald. He just had to create a new character he could use it with.

When Disney returned to Los Angeles from New York, still smarting from his encounter with Mintz, the atmosphere in the studio was tense. Only three of his top staff had remained loyal to him, including Ub Iwerks. The others had agreed to continue working for Mintz, who had set up an agreement to make cartoons, including Oswald, for Universal. Disney was still obligated to make three more Oswald cartoons under his old contract, but once those were finished, his staff would transfer to Mintz’s new studio; Disney and his loyalists would be left on their own.

Disney immediately began hiring replacement staff and working up a new plan. Not knowing whom to trust among Mintz’s people, he and his remaining loyal staff began creating their new character in secret. Iwerks erected big black curtains around his desk and always kept a pile of random drawings handy, throwing them over his sketches when others walked by. The men also worked in Disney’s garage, curtains drawn tight against the windows, where the atmosphere was more relaxed but still secret. This new character, which their livelihood depended on, soon became an obsession.

The exact origins of Mickey Mouse are murky—Disney knew that a good creation myth works best when left a little slippery. He was a performer first, never letting dry facts or details get in the way of a good story. Over the years, he would tell several different versions of Mickey’s origins, each of which would be clarified and challenged by his colleagues and family members, all of whom inevitably had their own versions.

The most popular version has Disney creating Mickey during that angry train ride from New York to Los Angeles, while fuming over his fight with Mintz. Disney claimed he spent the long hours sketching a variety of characters onto cocktail napkins, then holding them up for Lillian’s opinion. She paused when he held up a mouse named Mortimer. It was good, but a little “too sissy,” she said—a name you might associate with a soap salesman or an undertaker’s apprentice, not a cartoon character. Walt took a second to think and then suggested Mickey, a good Irish name, as well as an outsider’s name that carried a kind of plucky appeal. “It sounded better than Mortimer,” Lillian said, “and that’s how Mickey was born.”

At other times, depending on his mood, Disney put Mickey’s origins in Kansas City. Sometimes he said the inspiration came when a mouse scurried by a park bench he was sitting on. At other times he said it came after he heard a mouse in the Laugh-O-Gram office. In yet another version, he said the idea came while he was working for the Film Ad Company, after he made pets of the mice he found munching on lunch scraps in his wastebasket—these mice he trained to eat from his fingers so he could sketch them in different poses. In still another version, always told with great emotion, he spoke of having to set one of these beloved pet mice loose. “When I looked back,” Disney said, choking up, “he was still sitting there in the field watching me with a sad, disappointed look in his eyes.”

Ub Iwerks, Disney’s chief collaborator, typically laughed off these stories as “highly exaggerated publicity material.” Iwerks was also from Kansas City and had worked with Disney since the very beginning. The two were a good pairing, and even looked a little bit like each other, except that Iwerks’s hair domed up as if he had combed it with an electrical cord. He was the superb technical draftsman that Disney wasn’t, while Walt had the qualities—the storytelling gene, the showmanship, the gift for self-promotion—that the stoic Iwerks lacked.

As Iwerks remembered it, Disney didn’t return from New York bursting with confidence, strutting into the studio waving a cocktail napkin with a picture of Mickey on it. Instead, he wandered through the door depressed. According to Iwerks and several others, he, Walt, and Roy began meeting daily to brainstorm new ideas, sitting in the office, huddled away from the Mintz loyalists. Their research consisted of flipping through magazines and hoping an idea would grab them. After settling on a mouse, Walt took the first stab at designing it, but it didn’t look very good—long and skinny, more like a rat than a mouse. Then Iwerks took a turn, redesigning Disney’s idea into something rounder and cuter, which also happened to be easier to animate. If they were “to push out 700 feet of film every two weeks,” Disney recalled, “we couldn’t have a character who was tough to draw.” The circular ears could be drawn the same every time, saving animators the effort of adjusting for perspective required with more elongated shapes. Iwerks also gave Mickey four fingers instead of five, a modification that saved the animators even more time. Years later, after the Disney studio blossomed into a corporate empire, the four fingers would become an entertainment industry joke. “You realize now when you work for Disney why the mouse has only four fingers,” said one comedian. “Because he can’t pick up a check.”

Mickey first appeared in Plane Crazy, a silent cartoon spoofing Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight. Disney said he dreamed up the story during the fateful train ride from New York, while Iwerks said it originated during the spitball sessions among him, Roy, and Walt. However it came about, they all described production the same way: they worked in secret, hiding from the Mintz loyalists. Iwerks, a staggeringly productive artist, did most of the drawing himself, churning out 700 drawings a day. This first portrayal of Mickey was far different from how people would later remember him: in Plane Crazy he is chauvinistic and sexually aggressive, pawing at his girlfriend, Minnie, who flees his advances by jumping from the airplane and using her bloomers as a parachute. Mickey responds by laughing and throwing a horseshoe after her—a horseshoe she had given him as a gift, for good luck.

Once it was finished, Disney began shopping Plane Crazy around to distributors, announcing that he intended to “make the name of ‘Mickey Mouse’ as well known as any cartoon in the market.” But the distributors weren’t interested. Nor were they interested in The Gallopin’ Gaucho, another silent Mickey cartoon made on the heels of Plane Crazy. Not only were cartoons “on the wane,” as an executive from MGM put it, so were silents. Disney was planning for his third Mickey cartoon to have sound, however; he knew that this would be the future. He had even reprinted his business cards to read, “Sound Cartoons.”

While working on his first sound cartoon, Disney occasionally slipped out of the studio to go watch other animators’ efforts to do the same. But he was rarely impressed. MY GOSH—TERRIBLE—A LOT OF RACKET AND NOTHING ELSE. I WAS TERRIBLY DISAPPOINTED, he cabled to Roy after catching a sneak preview of Dinner Time, Paul Terry’s first synchronized sound cartoon. BUT HONESTLY—IT WAS NOTHING BUT ONE OF THE ROTTENEST FABLES I BELIEVE THAT I EVER SAW, he continued, unable to hold back. THE TALKING PART DOES NOT MEAN A THING. IT DOESN’T EVEN MATCH. WE SURE HAVE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT FROM THESE QUARTERS.

His next Mickey cartoon, the third one, spoofed Buster Keaton’s film Steamboat Bill, Jr., and was called Steamboat Willie. Once the cartoon was animated, the soundtrack was recorded in New York during a troublesome recording session that lasted almost two months in summer 1928. The first musician to arrive, a bass player, had a bottle of moonshine tucked away in his instrument case and played so heavy that he kept blowing vacuum tubes in the recording equipment. There were also problems with the orchestra conductor; Carl Edouarde, a showy, artistic type who wore his hair long and fancied himself a maestro, kept bickering with Disney, saying that such “comedy music” was beneath him. Then there was the difficulty of playing the sounds so they synched to the preexisting images; this required the careful use of metronomes and bar sheets to match the timing of the measures and beats with the action. (Animators would quickly learn that recording the soundtrack first, then drawing the action accordingly, was easier.) Disney spent the entire time so preoccupied with getting everything right that he forgot to eat, losing ten pounds.

Disney was pleased with the finished results, but he and Roy had one final problem: they didn’t have a distributor. Walt traveled all over New York screening the film but was constantly rejected, told by potential distributors they would be in touch if interested, which meant they probably weren’t. Finally, in a stroke of luck, Harry Reichenbach, manager of New York’s Colony Theatre, attended one screening and was impressed by what he saw. After hearing Disney fret about the lack of distributor interest, he offered to host the film for two weeks. If it got a good reception, then perhaps distributors would be more interested. Lacking a better option, Walt agreed.

Steamboat Willie debuted at the Colony on November 18, 1928, alongside a feature film entitled Gang War, about a saxophone player whose love for a dancer named Flowers traps him in the middle of a gang confrontation. Walt sat in the back of the dark theater nervously watching the audience, which he knew was really there just to see Gang War. After the crowd was in place, the lights dimmed and Steamboat Willie started rolling. Then the darkness slowly began filling with chuckles, which soon snowballed into laughs, and then into knee-slapping guffaws. Disney’s anxiety melted into relief, then ecstasy when he later saw the reviews in the papers. “Not the first animated cartoon to be synchronized with sound effects,” Variety said, “but the first to attract favorable attention. This one represents a high order of cartoon ingenuity, cleverly combined with sound effects. The union brought laughs galore. Giggles came so fast at the Colony they were stumbling over each other.”

Before the two-week run ended at the Colony, Disney got phone calls from many of the distributors who had recently rejected him. Now they wanted the film but were still stingy over what they would pay for it; many in the film industry remained unconvinced of cartoons’ staying power. Disney eventually signed a deal with Pat Powers, a businessman whose company, in addition to selling Walt the sound recording system used for Steamboat Willie, also distributed films.

Shortly thereafter, in 1929, Disney began releasing the Silly Symphony series, whimsical cartoon shorts set to sound. With a few exceptions, they were one-off cartoons that didn’t feature recurring characters. The first, and still one of the most famous, was The Skeleton Dance, a spooky, trippy portrayal of skeletons dancing in a graveyard. Ub Iwerks animated most of it in approximately six weeks. Its relative lack of plot and of gags turned out to be to its benefit, focusing the audience’s attention instead on the film’s moody and breathtaking atmospherics. It would prove to be one of the most captivating films of Disney’s entire career, although many theater owners initially hesitated to show it because they thought it too gruesome. It was a clear demonstration of Disney’s dedication to craft and high production values, employing visuals usually seen only in live-action films—the use of shadows, creative camera angles—and proved a watershed moment. Disney was fast proving himself an industry leader, filling the creative void Winsor McCay had complained about during the dinner at Roth’s. Other animators began speaking of Disney as a genuine genius, with a knack for wringing every last drop of creativity from his collaborators with his out-of-nowhere inspiration. Many wanted to quit the studios they were working for and move to California to join Disney.

After a year of distributing his films through Powers’s company, Disney felt he was not receiving a fair share of profits, so he set out to find a new distributor. Thus, in 1929 he found himself showing his films to MGM studio head Louis Mayer, a grizzled mogul who wore double-breasted suits, stabbed the air with his cigar when he talked, and was full of strong opinions. Two of Mayer’s directors, George Hill and Victor Fleming, the latter of whom would go on to direct The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, had seen Disney’s work and enthusiastically encouraged their boss to take a look. The first film they showed him was a Silly Symphony set in a garden, featuring flowers and plants swaying in time to music.

“Ridiculous!” Mayer growled, reaching over and punching a button on the projector, bringing the film to a lurching stop. “Women and men dance together. Boys and girls dance together. Maybe in boarding schools girls dance with girls . . . but flowers? Bah!” He moved toward the door, glaring at Disney. “I should be interrupted from a conference for such trash?”

Fleming steered Mayer back toward his seat and urged him to watch another, this one featuring Mickey Mouse. “That’s money over the barrelhead,” Fleming confidently assured him.

Mayer roared even louder when the next cartoon started. “Goddamn it! Stop that film!” he shouted, belching cigar smoke. “All over this country pregnant women go into our theaters to see our pictures and to rest themselves before their dear little babies are born. And what do we show them on the screen? Every woman is scared of a mouse, admit it . . . and here you think they’re going to laugh at a mouse on the screen that’s ten feet high.” When his tirade was over, Mayer stomped out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

Walt Disney posing with Mickey Mouse for a magazine profile in October 1931.

Rejected by MGM, Disney next visited Columbia, meeting there with Frank Capra, a young Sicilian immigrant who had quickly worked his way up from writing gags for Mack Sennett to become the studio’s star director. Capra was unenthusiastic about taking the meeting, remembering Walt as a “scrawny, non-descript, hungry-looking young man, wearing two days’ growth of beard and a slouch cap.” But once he saw Disney’s cartoons, he was impressed enough to urge his boss, studio head Harry Cohn, to also watch. Cohn’s studio was relatively small compared with powerhouses like Paramount, making him willing to take risks others weren’t, in hopes of standing out. Impressed with Disney’s work, Cohn signed him to a distribution deal.

As soon as the ink was dry, Columbia began promoting its new star. A full-page ad in Film Daily called Mickey “The Most Popular Character in Screendom.” The advertising soon become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Mickey’s success shot into the stratosphere as fast as Felix’s had a decade earlier. From the beginning, people recognized and theorized about Mickey’s unique connection to audiences. Dr. A. A. Brill, the first translator of Freud into English, told Photoplay that Mickey “narcotized” adults by returning them to a childhood where “everything could still be attained through fantasy.” Another analysis claimed that Mickey’s round design suggested a kind of impregnability that made him a “perfect expression of what he symbolizes—survival.” The Saturday Review of Literature suggested that Mickey tapped into the id of a jittery new machine age: “The jerky rhythm of his movements, the constant collisions, explosions, and projections, are symbolic of nervous modern man living in a whirl of mechanical forces.” Progress Today even granted Mickey a kind of religious status, calling him “St. Francis of the Silver Screen.”

Disney had a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon on his hands but didn’t get swept up in all the analysis. He seemed to intuitively understand that academic noodling would kill the magic, so he kept his answers simple and plain. When no less a writer than Aldous Huxley asked him to elaborate on Mickey’s theoretical underpinnings, he threw up his hands and shrugged. “We just make a Mickey, and then the profs come along and tell us what we got.”