by Neal Gabler
But it was not as a medical practitioner that John Cowles was primarily known in Kansas City. It was as a fixer. From his association with Pendergast he knew people, and people knew he was politically connected, which is why they sought his help. He was also regarded highly for his financial acumen and even advised the First National Bank on investments. He was usually on the lookout for new investment schemes, which is no doubt how he hooked up with Robert Disney. Walt never said how he convinced Cowles to invest, though Uncle Robert’s intercession probably helped, and Cowles’s son claimed that his father could be very generous with supplicants: “Dad was always helping people out.” Those first months the doctor provided $2,500 under his wife’s signature.
Realizing he did not have enough money to procrastinate, Walt moved quickly. He rented two small, spartan rooms on the top floor of the two-story McConahy Building on Thirty-first Street just a few blocks from his old house on Bellefontaine. Within weeks he had the Motion Picture News, a prominent film trade paper, announce his company’s launch: “They will produce Laugh-O-Gram animated cartoon comedies which will be cartooned by Walter E. Disney,” though the ad also claimed that he had been making films for the Newman Theater for two years and that he had already completed six films—neither of which was true. That same month he bought a new tripod, and in July he took out his first advertisement, in the News, promising a series of twelve films, presumably the fairy tales.
At the same time he was hiring. Hugh Harman, Fred’s brother, joined Walt as an animator, as did Walt’s old trainee, Rudy Ising, and two others: Carmen Maxwell, a junior college student who was hired when he saw the Laugh-O-Gram sign in the office window and applied for a job, and a young man named Lorey Tague. William “Red” Lyon, who had run the camera at the Film Ad Co., became the camera operator at Laugh-O-Gram. An animator, Otto Walliman, joined them later. Walt also secured the services of a business manager, Adolph Kloepper, and a salesman, Leslie Mace. A few months later his old friend Walt Pfeiffer, who had continued his art training after high school at the Art Institute in Chicago before returning to Kansas City, became Laugh-O-Gram’s scenario editor, which, he admitted, meant he subscribed to newspapers and scoured them for jokes.
Disney had a staff, but he did not have a contract for his animations, of which there was only one at the time he placed his Motion Picture News ad. Though certain of success as he always was, Walt seemed unaware of the generally weak market for cartoons at the time. No one went to the movies to see animations, and distributors did not feel the need to pay premium prices for them. As the seating capacity of theaters grew during the theater-building boom of the late 1910s and early 1920s and admission prices rose, cartoons were essentially add-ons meant to fill out a two-hour program that typically included a feature film, a one-or two-reel live comedy, a newsreel, and a serial, and less frequently a travelogue, a dramatic short, or even a live vaudeville performance. According to one 1922 survey, 73 percent of theaters used a two-reel live comedy, 59 percent a newsreel, and 35 percent a serial, but only 23 percent featured a cartoon, which meant that Walt was not entering the most lucrative of fields.
He soon discovered that for himself. After his Motion Picture News ad elicited only tepid responses, Walt sent Mace, who had been a local sales representative for Paramount Pictures, to New York in mid-August to hunt for a distributor. Mace was accompanied by Dr. Cowles, who had gone there to press his oil scheme. But Mace had no more success in person than he had had with the ad. As Adolph Kloepper, the business manager, later told it, Mace was staying at the McAlpine Hotel, and the “bills were amounting to more than the amount of money that we had in the bank.” Walt had already ordered Mace home in defeat when, apparently at the very last moment, the sales manager concluded a deal with William R. Kelley, a representative of the Tennessee branch of Pictorial Clubs, Inc., which distributed films primarily to church and school groups.
It was not exactly a rescue. The Tennessee branch of Pictorial Clubs was every bit as inconsequential as it sounded, and the deal Mace made with them was as inconsequential as Pictorial itself. It was also one-sided. Though the contract called for $11,100 for six animations to be delivered by January 1, 1924, it also stipulated that Pictorial need put down only $100 on signing and that the remaining $11,000 was not due until that delivery date, almost eighteen months away. This meant, in effect, that the company would be working for nothing with only the prospect of a payout. (Mace, perhaps recognizing the corner into which he had painted the company, left Laugh-O-Gram almost immediately upon his return to Kansas City.) Walt had to parlay that promise into the repayment of old debts and the generation of new funds. Upon the signing on September 16 he immediately assigned the contract to Fred Schmeltz, the owner of a local hardware store who had advanced Walt money and equipment, to repay him and, in Schmeltz’s capacity as trustee, to repay the $2,500 that Laugh-O-Gram already owed Mrs. Cowles as well as smaller sums the company owed as back pay to its employees.
Early that September, even before the Pictorial deal had been finalized, Walt had taken out ads in the Kansas City Journal and the Post seeking another scenario writer (he advertised in both the men’s and women’s sections) and girls “with artistic ability for mounting pictures, cartooning.” Now that he had a contract in hand, that November he also convinced Iwwerks to leave the Film Ad Co. and join him to do the lettering for the titles and some animation. In a sign of confidence, he grandly offered Iwwerks fifty dollars a week.
This was more of Walt’s dizzy unreality. For all of his studying and experimenting, no one at Laugh-O-Gram really knew very much about animation, at least not enough for them to function as a studio. “[O]ur only study was the Lutz book,” said Hugh Harman, “that plus Paul Terry’s films…. We used to get them at the exchange, through a girl who worked there…and then take scissors and clip out maybe fifty or seventy-five feet [to scrutinize]…. We learned a lot from Terry.” Similarly, Walt Pfeiffer said he would get a new Krazy Kat cartoon, bring it to the studio, and run it so that the animators could determine how the New York professionals did it. And it was not only animation technique they lacked but basic drawing skills as well. At one point Walt even held an art class because, according to Rudy Ising, “Walt had the idea that maybe we should learn to draw a little better.”
They were groping, learning as they went, improvising even their equipment. The camera stand was made of four-by-fours with a plank laid on them and Walt’s Universal camera mounted above. A chain led from the camera to a crank; one turn of the crank meant one frame exposed in the camera. Characters were traced from model sheets to ensure consistency, but the sheets, which corresponded to full shot, medium shot, and close-up, also restricted flexibility. And though Walt used cels, it was not until the third cartoon that Ising suggested they draw directly on the cel rather than paste drawings onto it. Yet the groping sometimes resulted in improvements. At the New York studios the pegs that held the paper in place were at the top of the drawing board, away from the animators’ hands. Walt put them at the bottom of the board so that animators could more easily flip the pages and see the action.
There was one area, however, in which Walt Disney did not improvise. Realizing that if he could not yet challenge the New York animators in their drawing prowess, he could at least challenge them in their narrative deficiencies, he did what the New York animators almost never did: he wrote out his scenarios in scrupulous detail as if they were live-action scripts. His story for Cinderella began: “FLASH TO CLOSEUP OF ONE FAT LADY IN HAMMOCK reading ‘Eat and Grow Thin’—another girl very skinny sitting in chair—they are eating out of it—slim girl puts down book—she is cross-eyed—she begins talking to fat girl—fat girl answers back.” In the margins, in blue pencil, were the initials of the animators for each scene: D for Walt himself, H for Harman, R for Ising, and U for Iwwerks.
The pressure to finish quickly was intense—they had no money—but Walt did not allow the financial strains to subvert his other purpose: to
forge a community to replace the family he had lost. Only one of the employees, Lorey Tague, was married. The others, who had neither responsibilities nor romantic entanglements, formed an infantile gang of pranksters and hams. A friend who visited Walt’s office at the time asked Walt if he was making any money. “You smiled and said, No, but you was having fun. Again I thought, Will he ever grow up?” Walt Pfeiffer said that the group arrived at the office at nine each morning and stayed until midnight. “It was more fun than pay,” he recalled. “You didn’t look at it as work.” Adolph Kloepper spoke of the “happy spirit that existed that we could still laugh and appreciate a good gag. I well remember too that we all had many belly laughs when discussing a story or material and Walt would explode some wild gag to incorporate in the story.” Sometimes they would head to the roof of the building and pose for the camera or they would go to nearby Troost Lake and shoot footage of themselves. On weekends the staff took out the Universal camera and prowled the streets, looking for accidents. If they failed to find one, they would often stage one to shoot. On one occasion, thinking that the Universal camera was not impressive-looking enough, they rigged two large cans to a box and then cruised, pretending to film. “[P]eople would come up and pose and say, ‘Where are you from?’” Rudy Ising said. “And we’d say, ‘New York.’”
The fun was a compensation for and a release from the constant duress of scratching for money. The studio was a wonderful club, but Walt was a poor manager and, by his own admission, incautious with money. (Of his father’s frugality, Walt said, “I didn’t inherit any of that thrift.”) “It will take another five thousand to put the place over,” Red Lyon, the cameraman, wrote his mother that October, “an additional fifty or hundred thousand to put in a real production plant next spring. We originally capitalized only enough to get out four pictures of our series. Our fifth is nearly done.” But despite the pressure and the lack of funds, he said, “I am going to sit tight. I have the greatest opportunity I have ever had and I’m in for everything but my false teeth.” The next month Cowles loaned Walt another $2,500, but it only tided them over. “Walt’s checks kept bouncing,” Ising recalled. “All of us eventually worked for nothing.” Already a process server was visiting the office, asking for “Mr. Dinsey.” Several times Walt fended him off by insisting that “Mr. Dinsey” was not there, until Walt Pfeiffer called Walt’s name when the server happened to be in the office and Walt confessed: “Yeah, I’m Walt Disney. But my name is Disney, not Dinsey!” Within two weeks of his writing his mother that he was “in for everything,” Lyon now wrote her that the company was “worse than broke,” $2,000 in debt and losing $4,000 more each week, and that he was “going to try and sell my stock—loan the money to the company and possibly quit and get me something more sure.” Still, he said, they had been “turning out some real pictures.” These were the skewed fairy tales—a Puss in Boots where a cat convinces a young suitor that he can win a princess’s hand by emulating “Rudolf Vaselino,” a send-up of silent-film heartthrob Rudolph Valentino, and winning a bullfight; or Red Riding Hood, where Red is chased by a young man in a flivver while her granny is off at the movies.
Though the financial situation was never less than dire almost from the company’s inception, Walt maintained his peculiar confidence and persistence. “He had the drive and ambition of ten million men,” claimed a secretary who was dating a photographer across the hall and did some of Walt’s clerical work at the time. It was an indication of both his desperation and his ingenuity that by the end of October he had taken out yet another newspaper ad, this one declaring that Laugh-O-Gram had added the “feature of photographing youngsters to its regular business of making animated cartoons” and offering customers a projection service to show the films. In effect, Walt was angling to shoot baby pictures to keep Laugh-O-Gram afloat.
As the company continued to sink, there was more scrambling. A month later, probably through the intercession of Dr. Cowles, Walt was approached by a dentist named Thomas B. McCrum of the Deaner Dental Institute in Kansas City. McCrum would receive grants of $500 from local merchants to finance educational films on dental hygiene, and he asked if Laugh-O-Gram might be interested in producing one, Tommy Tucker’s Tooth, about two boys—Jimmie Jones, who did not take proper care of his teeth and was thus denied a job, and Tommy Tucker, who did exercise dental hygiene and won the job. Walt quickly agreed, but when McCrum asked Walt to come to the institute to finalize the deal, Walt had to demur. He had left his only pair of shoes at the shoemaker’s and did not have the $1.50 he needed to retrieve them. McCrum, who lived just down the street from Walt, offered to pay the shoemaker and then pick Walt up to close the deal.
Walt recruited the cast from local schools, including Benton, and shot during school hours once or twice weekly that December. (The film included a brief animated section showing bacteria with pickaxes hacking away at teeth.) “Walt Disney at each filming knew exactly what he wanted us to do and how we were to do it,” remembered John Records, who played Jimmie Jones. “We all liked him immediately.” Records told another interviewer that it was obvious Walt liked kids and knew how to handle them. At the end of the shooting he brought them into the office, where the animators were bent over their desks working on the fairy tales, and rewarded the children with five-or ten-dollar bills.
But the fifty or sixty dollars Walt said he finally cleared from the film hardly provided a respite, especially when the Tennessee branch of Pictorial Clubs declared bankruptcy just months after concluding its deal with Laugh-O-Gram. The New York parent of Pictorial assumed the assets of its Tennessee outlet but none of that company’s debts, triggering a long process of Laugh-O-Gram trying to enforce a contract for which it had already done significant work and toward which it had a substantial obligation. By early January 1923, with the economic pressure intensifying, Walt was being dunned by his landlord for failure to pay the office rent, and it was only through the largesse of Dr. Cowles again that the company eventually covered that debt, the light and telephone bills, and the salary still owed the departed Leslie Mace. Still, even with the loans from Cowles and from hardware store impresario Fred Schmeltz, the firm had nothing to spare. Kloepper recalled leaving Cowles’s office with Walt after picking up the payroll one Friday and seeing a dollar bill in the gutter. “I think we both made a grab for it,” Kloepper said, “but I got the dollar bill. And I held it up and I said, ‘Walt, we’re going to have lunch.’ And we did, on the dollar bill.”
But Walt, the go-getter, still had not surrendered hopes for success. With no money in the offing from Pictorial or any other source, he presented a new scheme that February. He announced a series of shorts that would combine “animated cartoons and spicy jokes.” In truth, he had already done so with the Lafflets, and he simply hired a woman to detach them from the beginning of the fairy tales and re-edit them for distribution. That month he began contacting New York distributors, among them Universal Pictures, even writing another prospective buyer, in an obvious attempt at brinkmanship, that Universal was considering the Lafflets. This campaign also proved fruitless. “We have looked at your product and think the animation is extremely good,” H. A. Boushey, Universal’s general manager, wrote Kloepper on April 4, “but we do not see how we can place it on our release program at the present time.” Another distributor responded that “we do not believe we would have any trouble whatsoever placing your ‘Laughlets’ with one of the better distributors on a percentage basis,” but like all the nibbles this one came to naught.
With the Lafflets gambit having failed, Walt now hatched yet another plan of aesthetic bravado. For several months—inspired, he said, by a series created by New York animators Max and Dave Fleischer entitled Out of the Inkwell, in which cartoon figures entered a real world—he had been thinking about a live action–animation combination, though he wrote one putative animator that doing so was “very trying and expensive” and had “not proven profitable, as yet.” In March, once again running out of money a
nd alternatives, he decided to ignore those impediments and attempt another series that he thought might, in his words, “crack the market” and save the company. “We have just discovered something new and clever in animated cartoons!” he gushingly wrote a number of distributors, describing his innovation as a variation on Out of the Inkwell, “but of an entirely different nature, using a cast of live child actors who carry on their action on cartoon scenes with cartoon characters.” He anticipated one-reelers, roughly seven minutes in duration, to be released every two weeks or once a month.
Specifically, the series would feature a little girl named Alice, like Alice in Wonderland, who entered a cartoon world and interacted with cartoon characters. For the lead role he chose a precocious blond four-year-old named Virginia Davis, a child actress whom he had seen in an advertisement made by the Film Ad Co. for Warneker’s Bread. (Davis later said that she ate a piece of bread slathered with jam, smiled broadly, and smacked her lips.) He offered no salary—he did not have any to give—but promised her parents five percent of any money he received for the film, which he had titled Alice’s Wonderland. The deal evidently included the use of the Davises’ home as the set.
Though in May Walt had assured distributors that Alice’s Wonderland would be finished “very soon,” this was more wishful thinking. In addition to having to scrape for financing, the month they began shooting they were evicted from the McConahy Building and moved into new quarters above the Isis Theater on the second floor of the Wirthman Building just up the street. Already in June Walt was writing one distributor that he had not completed the film as planned due to “numerous delays and backsets [setbacks]” but that he fully expected to take a print with him to New York in July. By this time many of the staff, including Iwwerks, who had been paid only fitfully, had departed the company, and Pfeiffer had returned to Chicago.
