by Neal Gabler
In the end there would not be money enough for a New York trip. There would not be money enough for anything, save finishing Alice’s Wonderland, and Walt wound up doing virtually all of the animation himself. “We twice had to move during the night because we couldn’t pay the rent,” Rudy Ising said. There was not even enough money for food. “We didn’t ever have three square meals a day,” Carmen Maxwell recalled. “My mom used to mail us a cake once in a while and that was really something.” Walt and the others would take meals at the Forest Inn Café on the first floor of the McConahy Building where the owners, Jerry Raggos and Louis Katsis, extended them credit, and when the credit ran out, Nadine Simpson, the secretary who was dating the photographer Baron Missakian across the hall from Laugh-O-Gram, typed menus in exchange for their meals. Walt paid his own bill by taking pictures of Raggos’s baby. “When my credit ran out I was tempted to go and eat, order my meal and tell them I couldn’t pay,” Walt remembered. “But I didn’t have the nerve. I was so damn hungry.” Instead, he lived on leftovers from Missakian’s photo shoots until Raggos caught him scavenging and decided to extend him credit once again.
And if there was no money for food, there was no money to live either. At the time he made Alice, he was rooming in a two-story wooden frame house at 3415 Charlotte Street owned by Mrs. Gertrude McBride, who generously let Walt stay even after he had fallen twenty-five dollars behind in the rent—he would repay her a decade later—but eventually he left and slept on rolls of canvas and cushions in the office. He “slept there for quite some time in order to save money,” Kloepper remembered, and subsisted on cold beans he ate from a can. (Walt had gotten so thin that Mrs. McBride was sure he had tuberculosis, like his brother.) He took his baths once a week at Union Station, where he paid a dime for the privilege.
Without a staff or finances, Laugh-O-Gram was now a shell. It did not even own its one asset, Alice’s Wonderland, because Fred Schmeltz, in advancing his periodic loans, including the rent at the Wirthman Building that July, had secured them with a chattel mortgage on virtually all Laugh-O-Gram’s equipment and products, among which was the new cartoon. Though in March the stockholders had decided to recapitalize at $50,000 and though the plan had been approved by the state in July, this was financial bluster. Nothing was left of Laugh-O-Gram, and it had no hope of producing more cartoons. Walt tried one last desperate scheme to save the company, trying to interest the Kansas City Post in a weekly newsreel, but that failed too. “That seemed to wash up all prospects in Kansas City,” he said.
It was over. Uncle Robert advised him that his only recourse now was to leave Kansas City, and Roy told him he should “get out of there. I don’t think you can do any more for it.” Though Walt said he could have technically avoided responsibility by claiming that he was a minor at the time of the company’s incorporation, he chose instead to declare bankruptcy. In any case, no one seemed to blame Walt for Laugh-O-Gram’s demise. “[A]t no time did anybody enter a claim,” said Nadine Simpson, not entirely accurately, “as we all knew it was the fault of no one person, especially Walt’s.” Roy attributed the problem to Walt’s associates. Thinking either of Pictorial or of Schmeltz, he said that Walt had “gotten mired down with crooks.” Rudy Ising saw problems elsewhere. He attributed the company’s failure to location: “Our ideas were great, but we were in the wrong area. Kansas City wasn’t the place for this kind of work.”
But with his grand scheme for an animation studio dashed, Walt once again seemed surprisingly blithe. Throughout the failures—the fairy tales, Lafflets, and Alice’s Wonderland—throughout the days without meals and nights with restless sleep, throughout the constant begging for funds from Cowles and Schmeltz and even Roy, throughout it all Walt Disney seemed never to lose faith. “I never once heard Walt say anything that would sound like defeat,” Kloepper remembered. “He was always optimistic…about his ability and about the value of his ideas and about the possibilities of cartoons in the entertainment field. Never once did I hear him express anything except determination to go ahead.” Phineas Rosenberg, the attorney who handled the bankruptcy, concurred. “Most people filing for bankruptcy are disturbed or bitter,” he said. “Walt wasn’t.”
He seemed confident beyond any logical reason for him to be so. It appeared that nothing could discourage him. In later years he would say that he was constitutionally imperturbable, free of doubt, and happy—always happy. “I have no recollection of ever being unhappy in my life,” he once said. “I was happy all the time. I was excited. I was doing things.” But this was also for show. Though Walt normally did possess a kind of intrepid faith, a child’s faith that things would turn out right, which explains his doggedness and his myopia, at the time of the Laugh-O-Gram bankruptcy, at the age of twenty-one, he was less unaffected than he may have seemed or wanted others to think. He was, he later admitted, “crushed and heartbroken”—crushed at having failed and heartbroken at having disappointed so many who had trusted in him and had lost money for their trust: “That first big setback got me right down and out.” He swore he would make good and pay the creditors back. At the same time he said that the Laugh-O-Gram bankruptcy had left him tougher, more determined, and inured to failure.
Now he thought only of leaving Kansas City, leaving the failure. He considered going to either New York or Hollywood, then settled on the latter, where Roy was now recuperating and where Uncle Robert had relocated. He needed to leave. He would visit Union Station and “stand there with tears in my eyes and look at the trains going out…I was all alone. I was very lonesome.” He still had no money—he lived now at Iwwerks’s house or with the Cowles family—but he did have a contact: Carl Stalling, the organist at the Isis Theater, in the same building to which Laugh-O-Gram had moved before its collapse. Through Stalling Walt managed to get a contract from the Jenkins Music Co. to make what he called a “Song-O-Reel,” a live-action film with lyrics posted on the title cards, allowing the audience to sing along with the musical accompaniment. With his production of Martha: Just a Plain Old-Fashioned Name, based on a song by Joe L. Sanders, Walt earned just enough money to buy a used motion picture camera on trial. (He developed the negatives himself to cut costs.) He spent the next two weeks, as he had in the early days of Laugh-O-Gram, going door to door in a well-to-do residential section of Kansas City looking for parents who might want films of their children. Again he developed the negatives and printed the film himself, making ten to fifteen dollars per job, which allowed him to pay off the camera and save enough for a train ticket to Los Angeles. When a movie fan decided he wanted to make his own films, Walt sold him the camera for twice what he had paid, thus giving him a little extra for his trip.*
It was a bittersweet departure. Before he left, he visited the people to whom he owed money, telling them he had resolved to go west and offering small partial payments. He gave most of his personal belongings to the Harman brothers with the directive that they be sold and the proceeds distributed to his creditors, including Jerry Raggos. Of Laugh-O-Gram’s remaining assets, Hugh Harman, Rudy Ising, and Carmen Maxwell got a note for $302 from Schmeltz allowing them to purchase most of the animation equipment, after which they set up their own short-lived animation studio, Arabian Knights Cartoons: A Thousand and One Laughs. The other creditors, according to Walt, wished him well, told him he would need a grubstake for California, and graciously said he could send the money when he succeeded.*
He spent his last night in Kansas City having dinner with Edna Francis and complaining about his business misfortunes. The next day the mother of Louise Rast, his brother Herbert’s wife, prepared three bags of meals for him to eat on the train trip west and loaned Walt a suit of her son’s clothes. He did not have a suit of his own, only a pair of loud threadbare black-and-white-checked trousers, a checkered jacket, a gabardine raincoat, and an old brown cardigan. His suitcase was frayed cardboard, half of which was packed not with clothes but with animation equipment, and his only extravagance was a five-dollar pair of
Walkover shoes he had bought with the money from the sale of the camera. He was driven to Union Station by a friend of Louise’s brother—a man whose main boast in life, according to William Rast, would later be, “I took Walt Disney to the station when he went to Hollywood.” There was, Walt said, no one to see him off, though Rudy Ising later recalled that he and some of the other Laugh-O-Gram veterans were on the platform filming his departure.
Of Kansas City, where Walt had lived for ten of his nearly twenty-two years, he said he learned there “what it meant to shift for myself, to take advantage of opportunity, and the thing which every American kid must learn—to take the hard knocks with the good breaks.” Kansas City had provided a tough lesson for an essentially carefree young man. But he was leaving with his hope intact. “It was a big day, the day I got on that Santa Fe, California Limited,” he remembered. He was “free and happy.” And he remembered another feeling too, a more powerful feeling, “as if he were lit up inside by incandescent lights.” Bruised by disappointment in Kansas City, Walt Disney was now heading toward what he was certain, even now, would be success. The go-getter was heading to Hollywood.
Three
WONDERLAND
Though in later years he frequently invoked his midwestern roots and called himself a Missourian, Walt Disney was made for Hollywood. He loved dress-up and make-believe, was boisterous, outgoing, self-aggrandizing, and histrionic, and craved attention. Hollywood was his spiritual destination. Even for the general public, roughly forty million of whom, or one-third of the country’s population, attended the movies each week in the early 1920s, Hollywood was more than a provider of entertainment. It was the capital of the imagination, the symbolic center of release and recklessness, the “most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks,” as British observer Alistair Cooke would later put it. Hollywood was where one went to realize one’s dreams, which was why Walt’s grandfathers had both headed to California before being sidetracked and why Walt himself had now gone there. Just as his youthful energy converged with and was intensified by the postwar national spirit, in Hollywood the dynastic Disney dreams of escape—and Walt’s own longing for transport that had been nursed on the farm in Marceline and then expressed in drawing and in animation—converged with a national vicariousness. In Hollywood he was home.
But if Walt Disney was made for Hollywood, he himself questioned whether Hollywood was made for him. He hardly looked like a movie swell. He arrived early in August 1923 in his borrowed suit with nothing but pluck and his peculiar self-confidence. (Despite his penury, as his wife would later tell it, he had traveled first-class because he “always wanted the best way.”) His own clothes made him seem shabby and downscale, as did the months of near-starvation in Kansas City that had melted off the pounds he had gained in France and made him cadaverous. “He looked like the devil,” Roy recalled. “I remember he had a hacking cough, and I used to tell him, ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t you get TB!’”
Despite his outward confidence, he was worried about how he would make his way in Hollywood. Though he had brought his reel of Alice’s Wonderland and his drawing implements with him, he was not hopeful about his prospects in animation. He now felt he had gotten into the business too late, that it was too insular, that he would not really be able to break into the big time of animation, which was, in any case, centered in New York. “I had put my drawing board away,” he told an interviewer years later. “What I wanted to do was get a job in a studio—any studio, doing anything,” though in truth his aspirations were larger and more fanciful. He now hoped to get a job as a live-action director somewhere.
He loved motion picture studios—the very source of fantasy. Early one morning that first week he took a bus out to Universal City in the San Fernando Valley and by flashing his old Universal News press card, which he had kept from the time he worked as a stringer shooting newsreels, he managed to wangle a pass. He wandered the lot, walking through the sets, not leaving until late that night. He called it “one of the big thrills I had.” Soon afterward he toured the Vitagraph studio with his cousin Alice Allen, who was visiting from the Midwest. He also got onto the Paramount lot, where he ran into an old Kansas City acquaintance who was picking up work as an extra and who encouraged Walt to apply for a job on a Western riding a horse; he got the role, but the shoot was rained out, and Walt was replaced when it was rescheduled. He spent time exploring Metro too.
Roy, who had been working as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman before suffering a relapse of his tuberculosis and landing back in the Veterans Hospital in Sawtelle in what would later become the Westwood section of Los Angeles, thought Walt was lazy and typically overconfident (an “infection,” Roy called it) about his employment prospects, only pretending to apply for jobs so that he could linger at the studios. “Tomorrow was always going to be the answer to all his problems,” Roy said. “He was hanging around this town and I kept saying to him, ‘Why don’t you get a job?’ And he could have got a job, I’m sure, but he didn’t want a job.” But contrary to Roy’s impression, Walt was not just wandering dreamily through studios. He spent his first two months on those expeditions trying to convince someone to hire him and even had the temerity to approach producers for advice. At the same time he unsuccessfully trudged around Los Angeles with his print of Alice’s Wonderland hoping to find a distributor. Some suggested he take the print to New York, where the distributors might be more receptive. Since Walt did not have the money to go east himself to lobby, he sent the print to a well-connected intermediary named Jack Alicoate, who represented Lloyd’s Film Storage Corp., where the film had been held during the Laugh-O-Gram dust-up with Pictorial, and Alicoate, a generous man, circulated it. Grabbing at anything while it made the rounds and he awaited the distributors’ verdict, Walt revived his comic strip, “Mr. George’s Wife,” and pitched that too, without any more success than he was having with his film. He even had new stationery printed: “Walt Disney Cartoonist.”
By September, already despairing of getting a job as a director and having no prospects on Alice, he reverted to an old plan. One of the first things he had done when he reached Los Angeles was to buy a Pathé camera at Peterson’s Camera Exchange—“Cameras affected him the way alcohol affects dipsomaniacs,” his daughter Diane would write—and rig it up with a secondhand motor. Now he visited the theater impresario Alexander Pantages, a prominent vaudeville promoter who also owned several of the larger motion picture houses in Los Angeles. Walt did not get to see Pantages himself. He met instead with a factotum outside Pantages’s office, to whom he suggested a “special little joke reel” just like the Newman Laugh-O-grams, only with “the name of Pantages splashed all over it, to add prestige and keep the name Pantages before his theatre patrons.” The man dismissed Walt, saying that they were not interested, but Pantages happened to have overheard the conversation, emerged from his inner sanctum, and said he would like to see a reel. Walt headed back to Uncle Robert’s house, where he was staying, and began to animate a sample.
And there was another glimmer of hope. Even before leaving Kansas City, Walt had been sending dozens of letters soliciting distributors for Alice with his promise of having “just discovered something new and clever in animated cartoons!” and receiving polite rejections when he received anything at all. But among those to whom he had written while he was still in Kansas City trying to stave off bankruptcy was an unusual distributor named Margaret Winkler—unusual because she was the first and only female film distributor in the country. An immigrant from Budapest, Hungary, Winkler was a petite, round-faced, plain, and pleasant-looking young woman—she was twenty-eight—but her appearance belied what her son would call a feral energy, a quick mind, and a short temper. She had been the secretary to Harry Warner of the Warner Bros. film company, who was stationed in New York, though she was ambitious enough to use her position to travel to film conventions on the West Coast and make connections. By one account, Pat Sullivan, the creator of Felix th
e Cat, had approached Harry Warner in 1921 to distribute his Felix cartoon series, which had recently been dropped by Paramount. Warner demurred, but he encouraged his secretary to explore the offer. She and Sullivan signed a contract in December. “I think the industry is full of wonderful possibilities for an ambitious woman,” she told Exhibitor’s Herald, shortly after the signing, “and there is no reason why she shouldn’t be able to conduct business as well as the men.”
Margaret Winkler did. By the time Walt contacted her in May 1923, she was also representing the Out of the Inkwell series devised by Max and Dave Fleischer, in which Koko the Clown escapes his inkwell into a real, which is to say photographic, world; between Felix and Inkwell she had become one of the leading animation distributors in America. But at the time Walt Disney wrote her, trouble was brewing for Winkler. The Fleischers were threatening to leave, and she and Pat Sullivan, who was so difficult and addled by alcohol that he once allegedly urinated on the desk of Paramount Pictures head Adolph Zukor to force a concession, were locked in a bitter dispute over the renewal of the Felix option. Walt’s timing, then, could not have been better, which is no doubt why Winkler wrote back to this unknown novice almost immediately upon receiving his first letter, saying that she would be “very pleased” to have him send a print and that “if it is what you say, I shall be interested in contracting for a series of them.” But however encouraged Walt may have been, he did not have the print to send while he was in Kansas City because Fred Schmeltz, the Laugh-O-Gram creditor, had it. He continued to correspond with Winkler, apologizing over the delays while refusing to admit that he did not own the print or that he would have to remonstrate with Schmeltz to show it; by the time he reached Los Angeles, Winkler was getting impatient over his foot-dragging. Corresponding, she wrote him drily early in September, was “about all it [their communication] has amounted to.” But in a sign of her own desperation over the Felix and Inkwell threats and not realizing that Walt had no more than one Alice, she asked him “[i]f you can spare a couple of them long enough to send to me so that I can screen them and see just what they are, please do so at once.”