Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  He was also something of an iconoclast, even if it was only to attract attention. He once caught a field mouse, tied a string around it, and brought it to class. When one of his classmates screamed, the teacher rushed to his desk and slapped him on the cheek. Walt, though, was anything but resentful. “I loved you all the more for it,” he wrote the teacher years later, suggesting just how attention-starved he really felt. And when every other boy in his seventh-grade class took manual arts, Walt opted instead for domestic science, essentially homemaking, with the girls, carrying a little blue bag with his supplies. Even Walt Pfeiffer found this unusual. “[T]he kids used to make fun of him carrying this bag around,” Pfeiffer remembered. “[T]hat kind of shows you that he was a little out of the ordinary.” But Ruth said that rather than feeling chastened, Walt loved being the only boy in his class. “He used to come home and tell all about the fun he had there.”

  It may have been a sign of just how much Walt desired a sense of community, of belonging, especially after losing the support he felt in Marceline, that he would look back on his days at the Benton School fondly and often—not for the education he received there but for the warmth he felt. He recalled the principal, James Cottingham, who thought nothing of wandering into a classroom and interrupting the lesson with a story, and he recalled the teachers—especially Miss Daisy Beck, the one who slapped him for having brought the mouse—who demonstrated their concern even though Walt was, by his own description, a “laggard.” (He would continue to correspond with several of them until their deaths.) Of Daisy Beck particularly, he cited the “great patience, understanding, and incredible faith” she lavished upon him. The paper route prevented Walt from participating in after-school activities, but he frequently recounted how Beck, who coached the school’s championship track team with Cottingham, urged him one recess to try out. Walt wound up winning a medal on the sixty-pound relay team, and probably because he was never much of an athlete, he always cherished the memory and Beck’s role in it, never failing to cite it whenever he discussed his days at Benton.

  Most of the time, though, young Walt Disney was secluded in his own world—away from the route and Elias and school. The Pfeiffers and performing provided one escape from his vexations. Drawing continued to provide another, more powerful one. He had never stopped drawing. In school he propped up his books as a blind so he could draw. He spent hours decorating the margins of his textbooks with pictures and then entertaining his classmates by riffling them to make them move. One classmate recalled him going to the blackboard and drawing a perfect likeness of Teddy Roosevelt in chalk, while one teacher remembered him drawing flowers during an art assignment and animating them. Always encouraging, Daisy Beck had him draw the posters for school events, and Walt Pfeiffer said that he began drawing cartoon advertisements on glass slides for the Agnes Theater. After school, after the route, while most of the boys were playing basketball in the schoolyard, he, Walt Pfeiffer, and one or two other boys interested in art would sit on a stone wall and draw. When a group of neighborhood boys built a clubhouse, Walt decorated it with his drawings. At home he took his father’s Appeal to Reason and practiced redrawing the front-page cartoons of capital and labor until “I had them all down pat.”

  This was what his Benton classmates remembered: Walt Disney drawing. He drew constantly. He drew even though it was not always socially acceptable to draw. “It was kind of sissy for a guy to draw,” Walt Pfeiffer admitted, but that did not deter Walt Disney. He drew and drew well for a boy his age. He drew until it became the primary source of his identification at Benton: Walt Disney, the artist. “Even in our old 7th grade in Miss Beck’s room,” a classmate recalled, “we all knew you’d really be an artist + genius of some kind… when I heard once that you couldn’t draw I sure set them straight. Because even in the 7th grade that’s all you did.”

  And it was not only at the Benton School that Walt Disney was gaining attention for his art. He hung around a barbershop at Thirty-first Street on his paper route, just around the corner from his house, idly drawing cartoons. Impressed, the proprietor, Bert Hudson, offered Walt a free haircut in exchange for the drawings and later, when Walt did not need a cut, ten or fifteen cents. More important for Walt, Hudson hung the pictures in the window in a special frame just as Doc Sherwood had hung the picture of Rupert. “It was a great stimulant to me to know my efforts were appreciated,” Walt would write Hudson more than thirty years later, “and boy, how I looked forward to the showing of that weekly—or was it monthly [—] cartoon in your shop.” One acquaintance remembered the shop being “plastered with drawings,” and a neighbor said he often watched Walt sitting outside the shop drawing cartoons on a blackboard. Even Elias admitted that the drawings became an attraction: “The neighbors would go down to the shop ‘to see what young Disney had this week.’”

  Obsessed with drawing and encouraged by the attention he was getting, Walt would accompany his father to the Kansas City Star office when Elias picked up papers or conducted business there and head up to the art department or engraving room to watch the cartoonists, occasionally even receiving instruction from the art director, Mr. Wood. Once he was even emboldened enough to ask for a job, but he was told the paper was downsizing at the time and no position was available. “It was a sad day, believe me,” Walt recalled. During this same period Walt, for the first time, sought formal instruction. Though Elias had no understanding of Walt’s passion and no affinity for art whatsoever, when Walt turned fourteen he did permit him to attend Saturday classes at the Kansas City Art Institute in the YMCA Building downtown, where the boy not only drew but learned the rudiments of sculpture and casting.

  Just as he had contemplated a career as a performer when he was receiving accolades for his act, he began to think of becoming a newspaper cartoonist now that he was receiving accolades for his drawings. He admitted that by the time he graduated from the Benton School—the school went only to the seventh grade—he had lost interest in anything but drawing and performing and that “[g]etting through the seventh grade was one of the toughest trials of my whole limited span of schooling.” As Walt received his diploma in June 1917, Cottingham, who made a brief quip about each graduate, said of Walt, “He will draw you if you like,” underscoring just how much art had become Walt’s identity. (Walt even drew two pictures of girls in broad-brimmed hats in the style of the famous illustrator Charles Dana Gibson in his sister’s graduation book.) Along with the diploma, Cottingham also awarded him a seven-dollar prize for a comic character Walt had drawn. “I am still prouder of that money than any I have earned since,” Walt told the Kansas City Journal-Post nearly twenty years later. “I really think that is what started me as an artist.”

  Then Elias Disney escaped again. For several years he had been investing his money—and Walt’s earnings too—in a jelly and fruit juice company in Chicago named O-Zell. In March he sold the paper route—by one account he made $16,000 on the sale—and bought additional shares of O-Zell with the intention of moving back to Chicago to head up construction and maintenance at the company’s factory, obviously feeling that this time he might finally find the success that had so long evaded him. At fifty-seven this was almost certainly the last opportunity he would have to rival his brother. When Elias and Flora left, Walt stayed behind to assist the man who had bought the route, and lived with his brother Herbert, who had moved into the Bellefontaine house with his wife and year-old daughter. Once the transfer had been completed, Walt, at either Roy’s or Herbert’s suggestion, signed up with the Van Noyes Interstate News Company and spent the rest of the summer as a “butcher” selling papers, candy, soda, and tobacco to passengers on the Santa Fe train route between Kansas City and Spiro, Oklahoma. Roy, who provided the fifteen-dollar bond for his brother and who had been a butcher himself one summer, thought it would be “educational” for him.

  As it turned out, it was. Though Walt just liked the idea of being on a train—sometimes he would bribe the engineer with a plug o
f tobacco so that he could ride in the coal car; other times he would sit in the yard staring at the engines and dreaming of firing them up—he got to see Colorado and Oklahoma and, filling in for other butchers, ventured as far east as Mississippi. He was especially struck by the Pullman sleeper cars and years later, according to one screenwriter who worked for him, would reminisce about the “elegance of this plush and velvet world he glimpsed for the first time.” He got a brief education in the rough-and-tumble business world too. One time a group of soldiers to whom he had sold soda refused to give him back the bottles on which he made his profit. (Walt had to get the conductor to force them to pay.) Another time Walt was replenishing his basket during a stop at Lee’s Summit, Missouri, only to return and find that the cars had been detached from the engine at the station and his bottles had gone with them. He also claimed that there was “finagling” and that he was given rotten fruit in his hamper, but Roy chalked the losses up to Walt’s own carelessness. “He’d go up and down the train, leave his locker unlocked and when he’d come back find…a lot of empty Coke bottles and some of the candy gone.” Walt admitted he ate up his profits. After two months he resigned.

  By that time Roy was gone. With America having entered World War I that spring, he had joined the navy just fourteen days after Walt’s graduation. By summer’s end Walt was gone too, reunited with his parents in Chicago. He would always say that even though he was a Chicagoan by birth, he was a Missourian by temperament and usually pointed to his childhood in Marceline as the foundation of his life, but his six years in Kansas City were no less formative. If Marceline had been where Walt Disney forged his fantasy, Kansas City was where he forged his personal mythology—what one Disney scholar would call the “opening chapters of an American success story where good triumphed over evil and progress overcame adversity.” Though Ruth in particular would contradict her brother’s somber vision of the Disney family, and though Roy himself, who confirmed Walt’s depiction of their father’s distance and temper, would nevertheless call the Disney family’s home life “wonderful” and dismiss contentions that Walt was abused or neglected, Walt, a blatant self-dramatist, would fasten on the deprivations of his youth in Kansas City—on the hardships of the paper route, on the obduracy of his father, on the need to find release on the stage or the drawing pad. True or not, he conceptualized his early life in Dickensian terms, with the kindnesses of the Pfeiffers or Daisy Beck or Bert Hudson relieving the gloom. For Walt Disney, Marceline had to be recaptured, but Kansas City, the grit against which his life would rub, had to be remembered to show from what he had risen. In Kansas City, Walt Disney not only began to channel his escape; he began to create the idea of Walt Disney—the idea of someone who beat poverty, hardship, and neglect.

  IV

  For all his children’s professions of his thrift, Elias Disney did not salt all his money away. Instead, most likely under the supervision of his brother Robert, he kept investing and speculating in hopes that he could still make his fortune, even at his advanced age. How he came to put money in the O-Zell Company is uncertain, though the firm, which was incorporated in Arizona and headquartered in Chicago, did have an office in Kansas City and a warehouse there housing equipment. But regardless of how it came to his attention, he began investing shortly after he arrived in Kansas City—and investing heavily. Flora got one hundred shares of stock in April 1912, and Elias bought two thousand more shares a few weeks later. In May 1915 he purchased 1,054 more shares and another 3,700 that September. The next year he bought fifty shares out of Walt’s savings and 275 more shares for himself—all at a dollar a share. By December 1916, with O-Zell’s officers complaining of “difficulties” in the business, a freight embargo, and “lack of capital,” Elias agreed to invest an additional $3,000 and move to Chicago to work at the plant, with the stipulation that Walt would be put on the payroll “a little later.”

  When Walt arrived in Chicago at summer’s end, passing through Marceline on the way, he enrolled as a freshman at William McKinley High School on Chicago’s West Side, not far from the Disneys’ house on Ogden Avenue. But McKinley, like Benton, held little interest for him. Drawing did, and he fell into it with the same alacrity as he had in Kansas City. He had been at McKinley scarcely a month when the school magazine, The McKinley Voice, pronounced: “Walter Disney, one of the newcomers, has displayed unusual artistic talent, and has become Voice cartoonist.” The magazine’s circulation manager said he was always having to write passes so that Walt could be excused from class to draw. “[A]lready,” the manager later wrote him, “it was THE PASSION of your life!” Walt seemed to spend most of his time that school year drawing cartoons for The Voice, many of them with a political bent, commenting on the war: a parody of Mark Antony’s eulogy for Julius Caesar was illustrated with a group of flashily dressed burghers standing over the kaiser’s body; another cartoon attacked slackers with two men, one in a straw boater, the other in a derby, quizzing a wounded doughboy with the caption, “Your summer vacation. WORK or FIGHT. Will you be doing either?” One classmate remembered him scribbling cartoons “even when the teacher thought we all ought to be doing mundane things like schoolwork,” while another remembered his desk cluttered with pictures of pretty dancing girls. His sister claimed that during school socials held every Thursday afternoon he would get up and draw, and another student recalled Walt entertaining classmates by sketching a man’s head on a large sheet of paper, then turning it upside down to reveal a different face. Walt so excelled at illustration that when his art teacher gave a homework assignment of drawing the human body and Walt submitted a perfect rendering, she thought he had copied it and made him draw another in front of the class. Describing students with one-or two-word epithets, The Voice simply called Walt “Artist.”

  And when he wasn’t drawing, he was thinking about it. Occasionally he played hooky, going to the Art Institute or hanging around the newspaper offices “with my mouth wide open, watching (to me, at least) the fascinating things that went on and hoping that some day I, too, would be on the staff of a big newspaper.” He revered a Chicago Tribune cartoonist named Carey Orr who drew a feature called “The Tiny Trib” that summarized the news of the day through barbed illustrations, and Walt began drawing a takeoff of his own called “The Tiny Voice.” By the winter, encouraged by one of the Voice editors, he was attending evening classes three times a week downtown at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts in the Willoughby Building, where Orr taught, getting his father to foot the bill by convincing him it had educational value. It was the first time that Walt worked with live models, and he was so entranced by the process he would not even take a bathroom break. But despite these classes, Walt realized he would never be a fine artist and that his talent lay in caricature. His real excitement at the academy was taking a class in cartooning from LeRoy Gossett, who worked for the Chicago Herald. In the end he attended the academy for only a short time—probably until the spring of 1918—but he later called his time there “no doubt the turning point in my whole career.”

  Still, realizing perhaps how long the odds were of landing a newspaper job, he hadn’t completely abandoned the idea of show business. While he drew at every opportunity, he also sent away for books on magic with the idea of doing tricks onstage. At the same time he and a fellow McKinley freshman named Russell Maas (his McKinley Voice epithet was “Small,” which was intended as ironical since Walt described him as big and tall) formed a Dutch comedian act like the one Walt had done with Pfeiffer, but when they attended a tryout at a seedy theater one Saturday night, they promptly got the hook. Walt admitted he was devastated. He even began pondering photography as an alternative career path.

  In truth, as a newcomer in Chicago without friends or footing, he had lost some of his Kansas City extroversion, which may have accounted for his failure on the stage. Whereas a Kansas City acquaintance called him a “‘smart alecky kid,’ inclined to have slight snobbish actions,” the editor of the Voice described him as “extrem
ely shy and reserved,” possibly, she suspected, because he was older than his classmates, and said that when Walt submitted his drawings, he “literally fled from the scene.” With girls he was usually diffident, and though his sister Ruth described him as “something of a ladies’ man,” saying she once sighted him with a girl on each arm, this was more likely a function of how attracted they were to him—he was a handsome teenager—than of how comfortable he was with them. A girlfriend of one of the Voice editors had a crush on him, but she was unable to loosen him up. When he did find himself with a girlfriend, another classmate named Beatrice Conover, the relationship seemed social rather than romantic, with the two of them sharing ghost stories or romping through Humboldt Park. She thought of him as “happy-go-lucky Wally,” though she also described his habit of gnashing his teeth, which suggested that he was not so carefree anymore.

  Conover was convinced that Walt would be famous one day and told him so, but when school ended for the summer, he pursued neither drawing nor show business. Instead he took a job at the O-Zell factory constructing boxes, crushing apples for pectin (an ingredient in the jellies), and running a jar capper and washer. Occasionally he even filled in as the night watchman. It was uninspiring work, dull work, but Sarah Scrogin, the young wife of O-Zell’s president, saw his drawings and encouraged him, even buying some. She also assigned Walt the job of drawing the poster for the annual picnic and gave him time during work to do it. Years later she would remember sitting with Flora and discussing Walt’s potential as an artist.