Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  He knew that he was not going to work in the jelly factory. He had long harbored two alternative ambitions—to be an actor or an artist. “It seemed easier to get a job as an artist,” he decided. So seventeen-year-old Walt Disney, newly armed with confidence and determined to avoid his father’s fate, the joylessness and the constant disappointment, would do what the Disneys had always done. He would pursue his opportunity. He would escape.

  Two

  GO-GETTER

  Now Walt Disney needed a job, and he threw himself into the pursuit. He had returned from France flush with his own youthful exuberance but also charged with the exuberance of the times. Though the war had devastated Europe, leaving what Willa Cather had called a “broken world,” it had unleashed an optimism bordering on hubris in America, where the economy boomed and American global power was now unrivaled. As one historian put it of the country’s good fortune, “America at the close of the Great War was a Cinderella magically clothed in the most stunning dress at the ball, a ball to which Cinderella had not even been invited; immense gains with no visible price tag seemed to be the American destiny.” This was not only a mood. It translated into a new national ethos of hopefulness and heedlessness that gave rise, in turn, to a new national type who seemed to embody postwar hopeful heedlessness: the go-getter. The go-getter, perhaps best epitomized and caricatured by the 1920s film comedian Harold Lloyd with his round spectacles, straw boater, and brash can-do obliviousness, was young, boyish, enthusiastic, unflappable, indefatigable, lighthearted, high-spirited, and above all, determined. Like his country, he never doubted the power of his will to realize his dreams nor the essential righteousness of the quest. “Guts and goodness in tandem,” the critic Walter Kerr would write of Lloyd.

  “Guts and goodness” also described the intrepid, innocent young Walt Disney who landed in Kansas City during the fall of 1919 determined to be successful. Almost all of his acquaintances then remarked on his resolve and absolute faith in himself, manifested not so much in brow-furrowed grit as in a sunny ebullience. From the attention he had received at Benton and at McKinley High School and in France, he brimmed with a self-confidence that was neither entirely justified nor particularly well directed, since he had arrived without a plan. He was a go-getter who did not know where he was getting to, only that he would get somewhere.

  Almost immediately upon arriving back in Kansas City, he spotted a want ad in the Star for an office boy at the newspaper, which was where he had long dreamed of working. Donning his Red Cross uniform because he thought it made him look more responsible, he went to the Star building to apply, but having filled out in France and matured, Walt no longer looked like an office boy, and despite his insistence that he was only seventeen, he was rejected for being too old. The manager suggested he apply to the transportation department instead, since he had been driving an ambulance. He did, but there was no opening. Discouraged and seeking consolation, he headed where he always headed in times of distress—to Roy, who was working as a teller at the First National Bank. One of Roy’s colleagues mentioned that two friends of his ran a commercial art shop and were looking for an apprentice. Walt quickly returned home, grabbed samples of his drawings from France, and applied for the job that same afternoon. He was hired on the spot, with the stipulation that his salary would be determined after a one-week trial.

  The custodians of the shop were two young commercial artists, Louis Pesmen and William Rubin, who were headquartered in the two-story brick Gray Advertising Building in downtown Kansas City. Walt was so anxious that first week that, as during his art classes, he never left his drawing board, not even taking a break to relieve himself until lunch. On Friday, with the trial at an end, Rubin approached him, mused for a moment, and offered him fifty dollars a month. Walt, later admitting he would have worked for much less, was so grateful, he said, “I could have kissed him!” His first impulse was to tell his aunt Margaret, who now lived with Uncle Robert in a nearby hotel and who, Walt still believed, had launched his artistic career by bringing him those tablets and pencils in Marceline. “Auntie, look, they’re paying me to draw pictures. They’re paying me to draw pictures,” he gushed. It was a disappointment, a “kind of a heartbreak,” Walt called it, when Aunt Margaret, now aged, frail, and crippled, showed so little enthusiasm for his achievement.

  But Walt himself could barely contain his joy. He was, at seventeen, a professional artist and felt he was “making a great success,” as he later put it. The work was illustrating advertisements and catalogs, and he admitted it was not terribly creative, especially since he only did “roughs,” the raw outlines for the ads, after his bosses had laid them out. In fact, most of his drawings were redrawn by Rubin or Pesmen, so much so that Walt himself did not always recognize them when they appeared in print. Still, it was valuable experience. From his brief training in art school, Walt aimed for fineness in his drawing. At Pesmen-Rubin he learned about expediency—about cutting, pasting over, scratching out with razor blades, using a pantograph to copy drawings, and anything else that would get the job finished quickly. He worked doggedly. Pesmen remembered assigning Walt the front-cover advertisement for a doughnut shop in the Newman Theater magazine. When he approached Walt at the end of the day, the boy was grinning. Walt had done both the front and back cover ads and had even added some details that Pesmen had not included in his original layout.

  His joy was short-lived. In late November or early December the Christmas advertising rush was over, and Walt was amicably terminated. He hooked on as a holiday employee at the post office, where his brother Herbert worked, and delivered mail until the end of the year. Then, jobless again, he stayed with Herbert’s family and Roy in the Bellefontaine house and drew in his bedroom, still nursing the hope that he might land himself a comic strip or a job as a political cartoonist. (One cartoon of his drawn that month had a baby wearing a sash declaring “New Year of 1920” and standing outside a door labeled “The World,” which was bursting under pressure as the words “IWW,” “Mob Lynching,” “Peace Treaty,” “Strikes,” “Turmoil,” “Sugar Shortage,” and “Reds” squeezed out through the jambs.) He drew several installments of a strip he titled “Mr. George’s Wife,” about a husband browbeaten by his shrewish mate, and worked on several others he called “As Luck Would Have It” and “It’s a Question for the Senate.” When the federal census-taker came to the house that month, Walt first declared himself a “commercial artist,” then, in an apparent change of mind, had the taker reclassify him as a “cartoonist,” which fit his ambition.

  For someone virtually without training or experience, for someone who had just lost his job, he was cocky—“I felt well-qualified,” he would say after just six weeks at Pesmen-Rubin—already thinking of opening his own art shop while he awaited a strip or newspaper position. It seemed ridiculous, but the plan got an unexpected nudge early in January when he received a visit from one of his former coworkers at Pesmen-Rubin, a “hillbilly” Walt called him, with the improbable name of Ubbe Iwwerks. Usually taciturn and unemotional, Iwwerks was visibly distraught. He too had been laid off. He complained that he had no money or prospects and that he had to support his mother, which made him especially desperate. As Iwwerks sat moping and agonizing in Walt’s room, Walt suddenly, impulsively, sprang the idea that they go into business together. Iwwerks, who was more of a plodder than a go-getter, was baffled and uncertain, but Walt told him to collect samples of his work so that Walt could begin soliciting clients for their shop.

  Other than the fact that they were both high school dropouts and both putative artists without jobs, the two prospective partners could not have been more dissimilar. Walt, with Disney grandiosity, had big dreams and outsize aspirations. Iwwerks thought only of the immediate future. Walt was gregarious and outgoing, his manner dramatic, his hair carelessly swept back on his head but always with long strands falling incorrigibly over his forehead. Iwwerks was painfully shy, even withdrawn, doleful and forlorn; he seldom spoke, and his
hair was carefully molded high on his head in almost comic effect. They differed in their approach to art too. For Walt, drawing was both an escape from his father’s hard pragmatism and an appeal for attention. For Iwwerks, who specialized in lettering rather than cartooning, art was almost a way to avoid social contact by focusing on his drawing board. At Pesmen-Rubin, where Iwwerks had arrived about a month after Walt, they had been acquaintances rather than friends, and Iwwerks even seemed to resent Walt’s self-absorption. He once remarked that while he and the other artists played poker during breaks, Walt would sit at his board practicing various renditions of his signature.

  But if Iwwerks seemed to flinch from the world while Walt embraced it, his diffidence was understandable. “He just didn’t have a childhood that was anything that he was happy about,” one of his sons would say. He had been born in Kansas City on March 24, 1901, to a local girl and a fifty-seven-year-old Dutch immigrant who earned his living as a barber. It was his father’s third marriage, and Ubbe was his fourth child. He had abandoned the others, and Evert Iwwerks was to leave Ubbe’s mother too when the boy was in high school, forcing Ubbe to end his education and take a job at the Union Bank Note Co. making lithographs to support her. (Iwwerks never spoke of his father and rebuffed any talk about him; when Evert Iwwerks died and Ubbe was asked how he wanted to dispose of the body, he reportedly said, “Throw it in a ditch.”) He left Kansas City briefly to do farmwork in Arkansas, then returned late in 1919 and took the job at Pesmen-Rubin, but he had been so remote and his life so sheltered that his mother once scolded Louis Pesmen for introducing her son to Coca-Cola.

  Iwwerks’s remoteness and social awkwardness, however, made him a perfect complement for Walt Disney, which is no doubt why Iwwerks sought him out. While Iwwerks, who was diligent, meticulous, and extremely facile with the brush, stayed at his drawing board, Walt could talk up customers and hustle business. In one version of the story Walt told, he went right out to printers and quickly landed jobs designing letterheads and theater ads. In another version he first made an arrangement with The Restaurant News, a giveaway published by the Kansas City branch of the National Restaurant Association that had evolved out of an effort by local restaurateurs to combat strikes by joining forces. Even here, however, the deal was not entirely the result of Walt’s persuasiveness or charm, effective as these were; Clem Carder, the brother of the president of the association, Al Carder, was a neighbor of the Disneys on Bellefontaine. With this entree Walt approached Al for work, and when Carder complained that he could not afford an art department, Walt made him a proposition: let Iwwerks-Disney, as the two had named their partnership (Walt said he gave Iwwerks first billing because otherwise it might have sounded like an optometric practice), do illustrations and lettering for the magazine’s advertisers; in exchange they would get free desk space in the News’s office, which was located at Thirteenth and Oak Streets, and ten dollars a page, which was what Carder was paying his printers to recycle the same old artwork each issue. Carder agreed.

  Now Walt had office space, but he needed basic equipment—desks, drawing boards, an airbrush, and a compressor to run it. The money he had earned in France was still deposited in Chicago, and he asked his parents to withdraw the funds and send them so he could make the purchases. But once again Walt ran aground on his father’s frugality. Before agreeing to release the funds, his parents wanted to know exactly what he would use the money for. He answered with indignation, saying that it was his money and he could do whatever he wanted to with it. There followed a flurry of letters, back and forth, after which Elias and Flora finally consented to send Walt half his savings—a concession that further loosened his bonds to parental authority.

  With the equipment issue resolved and the partners ensconced in the Restaurant News office, Walt went out selling again. When he had arrived in Kansas City the previous fall, he had reconnected with Walt Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer now convinced his father to let Iwwerks-Disney do the letterheads for the United Leather Workers Journal. They wound up doing the cover for the February issue as well with an etching of saddles, harnesses, and gladstone bags. Meanwhile Walt continued to visit printers, offering to become a kind of ad hoc commercial art department for them. Some agreed. (He especially remembered one assignment calling for an oil well gushing dollars. Walt, fired with enthusiasm, said he drew so many dollars that they filled the page.) By month’s end he and Iwwerks were successful enough to move into their own office in the Railway Exchange Building. Walt said they made between $125 and $135 that first month—more than their combined earnings at Pesmen-Rubin.

  But despite its promising start, neither partner seemed to think of Iwwerks-Disney as a long-term proposition. Walt was still restless and Iwwerks still nervous about the uncertainty of running his own business. For his part, Walt had not given up his dream of drawing his own comic strip. Hoping to impress some prospective employer, he would bring strips he had drawn to the printers and have “cuts” made of them in the empty spaces of his client’s plates, then print the strips on newspaper stock and surround them with news stories to make it look as if they had been published. It was a sign of the partners’ wavering commitment that when Iwwerks spotted a want ad in the Star late in January seeking an artist for the Kansas City Slide Co., he recommended that Walt pursue the job. Walt thought the Slide Co., which produced promotional slides shown in movie theaters before the feature, might hire Iwwerks-Disney as a subcontractor, but when he brought his samples and made the suggestion, he was told that they wanted a full-time employee. Ubbe then advised Walt to take the position, which paid thirty-five dollars a week, since the ad called for a cartoonist. They agreed that Ubbe would continue to run their shop.

  The Kansas City Slide Co., which Walt joined early that February, was located at 1015 Central Street, practically around the corner from his Railway Exchange office, in a narrow two-and-a-half-story vanilla-brick building with tall, hinged windows along the side to provide light for the artists. There were fewer than twenty employees at the time Walt started, but the company was already the largest mail-order slide firm in the country and was expanding rapidly. Walt said it did a million dollars’ worth of business a year. The president of the operation and the interviewer who had hired Walt was Arthur Verne Cauger, though most people called him simply “A.V.” Cauger referred to himself as “one of the pioneers of the Moving Picture business,” and in a small way he was. He had been born in Indiana in 1878 and studied engineering, but his interest in mechanics apparently lured him to the movies. He opened a theater in Granite City, Illinois, in 1907, and when a competitor drove him out by offering a longer show for the same admission, he set up another theater in Carlyle, Illinois, and then another in Neosho, Missouri. Because Neosho would not permit Cauger’s theater to draw electricity from its publicly owned power plant in the afternoons, he began making slides in his spare time. Eventually he sold the theater, moved to Kansas City, and entered the slide business full-time, shooting the pictures himself and then traversing the Midwest selling them to exhibitors. When competitors started making filmed ads, Cauger entered that business too, in time shifting almost exclusively to film.

  It was the film ads that Walt was now drawing, and they fascinated him. Many of them were live action, but the ones for which he was hired were animated pictures. By any standard the animation at the Slide Co. was crude, intended less for artistry than for economy. Basically the artists would draw a picture, cut out the movable parts, tack them with pins to a board, move the parts slightly and photograph the image, move them slightly again and photograph again, repeating the process over and over so that when the film was run and the incremental movements were strung together, they would give the impression of continuous action. The fact that it was a primitive technique, though, made no difference to Walt, who just wanted to gain experience. “I got a fine job here in K.C.,” he wrote one of his old Red Cross compatriots proudly a few months after joining the Slide Co., “and I’m going to stick with it. I dr
aw cartoons for the moving pictures—advertiser films—…and the work is interesting.”

  Though Walt had intended to continue Iwwerks-Disney to supplement his income and provide some flexibility for his career, the company did not long survive his leaving it. Iwwerks simply did not have the temperament to run a business without him. As Walt later explained, “[T]he few customers I had would call him—he would just sit there [because] he couldn’t give the old sales pitch.” Unable to drum up business and seeking the safety of regular employment, Iwwerks asked Walt if there might be an opening at the Slide Co. So the partners closed the shop less than two months after it had opened, and that March Iwwerks went to work for Cauger too, sitting alongside Walt and the other artists at their long tables and drawing slides and cartoons.

  Walt, who was sanguine about most things, did not seem terribly distressed by the demise of his small firm. Though he had already printed his own stationery featuring a caricature of himself at his drawing board, pages flying off, and declaring himself available for “Cartoons, Illustrations, Designs and Window Cards, Art Work for All Advertising Purposes,” he had, in his short time at the Slide Co., begun redirecting his attention from commercial art and even from the dream of newspaper cartooning. Indeed by one account that spring he had finally received the offer he had so long coveted—to be a cartoonist at the Star or Journal-Post—only to reject it to stay at the Slide Co. That was because Walt Disney, a young man who always seemed to be in the grip of some passion, had found a new one: he had become as intoxicated with animation as he had originally been with drawing back at the Benton School. “The trick of making things move on film is what got me,” he would tell an interviewer years later.