Walt Disney

Beans and a bankruptcy

Walter Elias Disney was born in Chicago in 1901, spent his early childhood on a farm in Marceline, Missouri, and from 1911 lived in Kansas City, where he got up at 3:30 a.m. to deliver newspapers on his father’s route and fell for vaudeville and the movies. In 1918 he lied about his age to join the American Ambulance Corps and served in France after the war had ended. Back in Kansas City he took a $50-a-month job at the Pesmen-Rubin commercial art studio and met Ub Iwerks; their own firm, Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists, failed after a month. Both then worked at the Kansas City Slide Company, discovered animation there, and Disney began making Newman Laugh-O-grams, advertising and topical shorts, while keeping his day job.

In 1922 he incorporated Laugh-O-gram Films with $15,000 from local backers. Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, Friz Freleng and Carman Maxwell worked on its fairy-tale cartoons, several of them names that return in this story, but the company made little money. A September 1922 contract with Pictorial Clubs of Tennessee promised $11,000 for six shorts; Pictorial paid $100 in advance and then went bankrupt itself. By late 1922 Disney was living in the studio and bathing weekly at Union Station; Neal Gabler’s 2006 biography has him subsisting on beans. Laugh-O-gram filed for bankruptcy in July 1923. Disney sold his movie camera, took money for filming a baby, and left for Hollywood with an unfinished reel, Alice’s Wonderland: a live-action girl, Virginia Davis, among drawn characters. The film belonged to the failing company, so he could use it only as a calling card. The pattern to watch in the chapters that follow is our reading, not a claim about his thoughts: whoever held the prints and the contract held the money.

The rabbit he did not own

In Los Angeles the New York distributor Margaret Winkler offered a contract for an Alice series, on condition that Davis kept the role. Walt saw he needed a partner and asked his brother Roy, who took the business side; the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio began in 1923, first in an uncle’s garage and the back of a real-estate office. Kathleen Dollard was its first employee, and Ann Loomis also inked and painted. In 1924 Disney hired animators, Iwerks among them, and stopped animating himself to concentrate on story and direction. The studio moved to Hyperion Avenue in 1926. In 1927 the distributor Charles Mintz contracted it to make a series around a new character for Universal Pictures, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which succeeded.

In February 1928 Disney went to New York to ask for a bigger budget. Mintz refused and, by the account in Timothy Susanin’s study of Disney’s early years, proposed a cut. He had already hired away several of Disney’s animators, including Harman, Ising, Maxwell and Freleng, with George Winkler approaching them behind Disney’s back; Iwerks told Disney what was happening. Disney learned that Universal owned the character. He refused Mintz’s terms and lost most of his staff. Iwerks stayed. Universal later took the series from Mintz and gave it to Walter Lantz, who made 142 Oswald cartoons. The Walt Disney Company got Oswald back in 2006, in a trade with NBCUniversal that released the sportscaster Al Michaels from ABC and ESPN so that he could work for NBC. From 1930 Roy and Walt licensed Mickey merchandise themselves. It is fair to read their later grip on their characters as a response to 1928; the sources record the loss, not their thoughts.

A character finds a voice

Back in California Disney met his remaining staff and they came up with Mickey Mouse. Dave Smith, the Disney company’s archivist, says only that on the train home Walt may have recalled a mouse that had lived in his Kansas City studio; he adds that there are many stories of the character’s inception. Iwerks was tasked with designing Mickey, with input from Walt. In Neal Gabler’s account, Iwerks drew the final design, a round-eared variation on Oswald, and animated Plane Crazy largely by himself, much of it behind a locked door. Plane Crazy and The Gallopin’ Gaucho were silent, and no distributor would take a series on them.

Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer had arrived in the autumn of 1927; according to Gabler, Roy later said it pushed Walt towards sound. Steamboat Willie, the third Mickey, was made with sound in mind. Wilfred Jackson, whose mother taught music, suggested a metronome and drew up a chart, later called a bar sheet, that laid music and effects out against the drawings. To test it, Disney projected a scene onto a bedsheet hung outside a studio window while staff behind the sheet made the effects, Jackson playing “Turkey in the Straw” and “Steamboat Bill” on his harmonica, with the staff’s wives as audience. Iwerks then animated almost the whole film himself, and Disney found the money wherever he could: a new mortgage on the studio and the sale of his Moon automobile. Roy’s notes put the cost at $4,986.69.

Los Angeles had no sound studio, so Disney took the film to New York and to P. A. Powers’s Cinephone system. The first recording session, on 15 September 1928, with a 17-piece orchestra and three effects men, went terribly: the orchestra could not follow the picture. A bouncing ball was added to the print so that the conductor could speed or slow the tempo, and a second session two weeks later worked. Steamboat Willie opened at the Colony Theatre on 18 November 1928, ahead of the feature Gang War; Variety called it “a peach of a synchronization job all the way.” Disney’s own archivist calls it the very first cartoon with synchronised sound; others point to Max Fleischer’s earlier Song Car-Tunes, which did not stay in sync, and dispute the claim. What is safe to say is that its sync was tight enough to turn a gag into a sound and a sound into a gag. The screen credit read “A Walt Disney Comic by Ub Iwerks,” and Disney voiced Mickey himself for almost twenty years, until 1946.

The partnership did not last. Iwerks resigned on 21 January 1930 after arranging a deal with Powers, and opened a studio of his own that never became a major success; Carl Stalling resigned the same year. In October 1931 Walt had a breakdown, which he blamed on overwork and Powers’s business tactics. Iwerks returned in August 1940. In between came the Silly Symphonies, exclusive use of three-strip Technicolor for cartoons in 1932, Flowers and Trees (the first Academy Award for a cartoon), and in 1933 Three Little Pigs, whose song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” became a Depression anthem.

A strike, a Variety ad and a list of names

Disney’s artists were among the best paid in the industry, but unevenly: some earned up to $300 a week and others as little as $12, many wanted screen credit, and the profit-sharing they expected after Snow White had not come. After the 1940 losses Disney laid off staff. In early 1941 Herbert Sorrell and the Screen Cartoonists Guild met Disney workers, and Art Babbitt, the studio’s highest-paid animator and president of its company union, resigned to join the Guild. In February Disney addressed some 1,200 employees and told them to “put your own house in order.” He fired Babbitt and sixteen other Guild members. Walt, the Guild’s history says, “felt personally betrayed.” The strike began on 29 May 1941, in the middle of Dumbo, and more than 200 walked out.

On 2 July 1941 Disney bought space in Variety to say, in the words quoted by the Disney historian Jim Korkis, “I am positively convinced that communistic agitation, leadership and activities have brought about this strike.” The animator Ward Kimball, per Korkis, called it typical “Walt overkill.” Disney left on a goodwill tour of South America while the Guild pressed the State Department and a federal mediator found for the Guild on every issue. The settlement reinstated those fired, equalised pay and set up a grievance procedure; the Guild says Disney signed fearing the loss of government contracts and the recall of bank loans. The studio emerged with 694 employees. Babbitt, Bill Tytla, Walt Kelly and Frank Tashlin were among those who left; several strike veterans helped found United Productions of America. Some have read the clowns in Dumbo as a jab at the strikers. Babbitt denied it, saying the sequence had been assigned to him before the strike began.

Babbitt’s conflict with Disney outlasted the picket line. On the picket line he is reported to have heckled Disney through a bullhorn, with Disney getting out of his car and others preventing a fistfight. Babbitt won reinstatement in NLRB v. Walt Disney Productions (Ninth Circuit, 1944), and after the war returned to a studio where, as the director Jack Kinney recalled it, Disney told Kinney, “If he gets in your way, let me know.” Korkis says Walt fired him three more times. Babbitt later claimed he had seen Disney at German American Bund meetings; Gabler calls that “highly unlikely,” and Disney’s appointment book records no such meetings. Roy E. Disney contacted him in 1991 and the feud ended; Babbitt died in March 1992. No account read for this profile records Babbitt’s own words about Disney; the bitterness is in what he did. One more fact: his first wife, from 1937 to 1940, was Marge Champion, Snow White’s reference model.

Disney became a founder and vice-president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in 1944. On 24 October 1947 he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a friendly witness. As Korkis quotes the transcript, Disney said of Sorrell, “I believe at that time that Mr. Sorrell was a Communist”; of David Hilberman, “I believe he is a Communist. His name is David Hilberman”; and of William Pomerance and Maurice Howard, “In my opinion they are Communists. No one has any way of proving those things.” Sorrell was a labour leader who headed the Conference of Studio Unions, not a Disney animator. The evidence tying him to the Party was thin; in a 1953 court case, reported by the Los Angeles Times, he testified that he had never been a Communist but admitted taking Communist money. Hilberman, who had worked on Snow White’s dwarfs and co-founded UPA, and his wife attended some Communist Party meetings in the late 1930s and early 1940s. His company Tempo Productions lost its clients after the newsletter Counterattack listed them in December 1953 and urged a boycott, and he sold it. Whether Disney’s testimony caused any of that is left open by the accounts. A 1993 New York Times report said Disney had passed information to J. Edgar Hoover; FBI officials said his 1954 title of Special Agent in Charge Contact was largely honorary, and the file’s correspondence is mostly about educational films.