by Neal Gabler
Walt pretended to be sanguine. “CAN GET PLENTY OF GOOD MEN,” he wired Roy confidently later that morning after visiting the Krazy Kat studio, where the staff “treated me royal.” But he spent the rest of a very long and frenetic day meeting with Bill Nolan, who had been one of the leading animators on Krazy Kat for Mintz and whom Walt had been seeing in New York in an attempt to lure him to California; with Metro, which told him yet again that it had decided not to release any cartoons that year; with Fox, which said it would not handle any cartoons that it did not produce itself; and with his advisor Alicoate, who told him discouragingly that the entire industry was now “topsy turvy” and that it would be another year before things settled. Finally he met again with Mintz, bluffing that he had already received two unsolicited offers but that he preferred working out a deal with his old partner. Mintz, however, was having none of it, raising his offer only slightly to $1,750 per cartoon plus 50 percent of the profits. Walt was so frightened and desperate that he said he would take the offer if Mintz would produce the contract immediately. Mintz said he could not do so and cagily told Walt that he should take one of the better deals he had mentioned, even offering to help advise him. As Walt was leaving, Mintz barked, “Go on home to your wife and come back and see me tomorrow and let’s get down to business.”
But Walt did not go back to his hotel. Instead, he turned once again to Alicoate with a new plan: he would approach Universal and promise to make the Oswalds himself without the middleman. It just so happened that Alicoate had recently attended a boxing match with Manny Goldstein, a Universal executive, who told Alicoate that Mintz was receiving $3,000 per picture and that he would be interested in meeting with Walt. That same day Walt met with Goldstein in “some big bug’s office,” as Walt described it to Roy. Universal had to deal with Mintz for the rest of the year because of the newly signed contract, Goldstein told him. But he said they would be happy to deal directly with Walt the following year since they “want good pictures” and “they won’t stand for Mr. Mintz cutting down costs in any way that might lower the standard.” In the meantime, if Walt could not find a rapprochement with Mintz, Goldstein offered to intervene for him. He asked Walt, however, not to tell Mintz about their meeting. Walt wired Roy late that night that he felt sure “WE WILL COME OUT ALL RIGHT EVEN IF IT IS A BIT DISSILLUSIONING [sic] WE WERE SHOOTING TOO HIGH.” He added with a certain satisfaction that Hugh Harman and Ham Hamilton,* two of the traitors, would probably find themselves “in the cold” because Universal was unlikely to take cartoons from an entirely new staff.
But Walt had underestimated Mintz and overestimated Universal. In concluding his deal with the distributor, Mintz had granted Walt no rights to the character that Walt had created, thus leaving Walt no recourse. That Saturday at his office Mintz made Walt a final offer. He would give Walt $1,800 per picture, up from $1,750, plus 50 percent of the profits from Universal, but he presented a new and startling stipulation: Mintz would take over the Disney organization, paying Walt and Roy each an additional $200 a week as his employees. Angered and distraught, Walt refused, went directly to Universal again, who offered to talk to Mintz, and hurriedly fired off a telegram to Roy asking him to find out the intentions of the rest of the staff and to send a check for $100 for additional expenses. He returned to his hotel, Lillian later recalled, fuming that he was out of a job but at the same time said he was glad of it because he would never work for anyone again.
“Well, we are still hanging around this Hell Hole waiting for something to happen,” Walt wrote Roy ruefully on March 7, three days after his meeting with Mintz. “I can’t rush things any faster—just have to do the best I can. BUT I WILL FIGHT IT OUT ON THIS LINE IF IT TAKES ALL SUMMER and all our jack.” (The trip had, in fact, cost over $1,000.) As it turned out, it would only take another week, most of which he spent continuing to cajole Nolan, who was known for his speed and facility, about joining the studio, and continuing to chase prospects. But Nolan eventually joined the new team drawing Oswald, and no prospects were forthcoming. Walt could do nothing but wait out the year and hope that Universal would fulfill its vague promise to cast off Mintz. When Walt left the city for Los Angeles on March 13, he had nothing—no Nolan, no character, no contract except the one for the Oswalds that he was obligated to animate under the terms of his deal with Mintz, no staff save for the few who remained loyal like Iwerks, no plan, and perhaps most important of all, no cartoonland to provide a haven from the real world.
He would, in later years, talk often of this episode as a betrayal, saying he had warned Mintz that those who had turned on Walt would also turn on him someday, which in time they did. “He told it just like the plot of one of his stories where good will win and the villain will be defeated,” recalled one of his longtime animators. “He loved telling that story because it was so poetically just.” He would say that you had to be careful whom you trusted; that he had learned that you had to control what you had or it would be taken from you; that he had seen how duplicitous the business world could be. He said he had learned all these lessons and would never forget them. But as he and Lillian headed back to Los Angeles on the New York Central Cannonball with nothing but these lessons and the sunny bromides he was writing home to buck up Roy’s spirits, the eternally optimistic Walt Disney, who had ridden out crisis after crisis, had one terrifying thought: he would have to begin all over again.
Four
THE MOUSE
If the story is to be believed—and it would be repeated endlessly over the years until few doubted it—this was to be one of the most momentous journeys in the annals of popular culture. At the outset Walt was furious. “He was like a raging lion on the train coming home,” Lillian would recall. “All he could say, over and over, was that he’d never work for anyone again as long as he lived; he’d be his own boss.” Lillian admitted that she had another response—not rage but fear. She was in a “state of shock, scared to death,” since they had no source of income now and no idea of what the future held for them. Even before leaving New York, Walt said he had tried to devise a new character to replace Oswald, without success. When he was not venting about Mintz and his own treasonous crew, he spent most of his time on the trip sketching on the train stationery. Somewhere between Chicago and Los Angeles, he later said, he wrote the scenario for a cartoon he called Plane Crazy, about a mouse who, inspired by Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 solo flight over the Atlantic Ocean, builds himself a plane to impress a lady mouse. Walt read the story to Lillian, but she said she couldn’t focus because she was upset by the name Walt had bestowed upon his character: Mortimer. “The only thing that got through to me,” she told an interviewer, “was that horrible name, Mortimer…. I’m afraid I made quite a scene about it.” “Too sissy,” she said. When she calmed down, Walt asked her what she thought of the name Mickey, an Irish name, an outsider’s name. “I said it sounded better than Mortimer, and that’s how Mickey was born.”
As the legend would have it, Walt had been inspired in his choice of a mouse for a character by experiences in Kansas City. He had, variously, been sitting on a park bench when a mouse scampered by; or, while working for the Film Ad Co., he had caught mice in his wastebasket, where they were feasting on scraps from lunches the office girls had thrown away, then built a box for them and kept them as pets, naming one of them Mortimer; or, while bunking at the Laugh-O-Gram office, he had heard a mouse running about; or, at some undefined time, he had found a mouse scratching at his windowsill trying to escape and put him in a coffee tin—the first of many mice he supposedly captured. In these accounts, he sometimes trained the mice, tapping one of them on his nose as he ran across the top of Walt’s drawing board and causing him to change direction. Or he would feed them from his fingers and then draw them in different poses. “I’ll never forget the scream one girl gave when she came into the office one day and found a little mouse perched on my drawing board while I sketched him,” he recalled. In one story he told, when he left Kansas City for Lo
s Angeles, he took his pet mouse (just one here) and turned him loose in a field. “When I looked back he was still sitting there in the field watching me with a sad, disappointed look in his eyes.”
Such was the legend, but the truth was likely much more banal. Years later Lillian would comment that when they returned to Los Angeles, Roy met them at the station, despondent that Walt had been unable to make any connection and seemingly uninterested in or unimpressed by what Walt called a “wonderful idea,” presumably Mickey. Ub Iwerks told it somewhat differently. He said that Walt himself was deflated, hardly the frame of mind for someone who had just created a new character in which he was bursting with confidence. Iwerks called it “one of the absolute low points in Walt’s life. Usually Walt was very enthusiastic and bubbly and bouncy, no matter what happened. But he had met a stone wall in the East.” In fact, in Iwerks’s version of events, as opposed to what he later derided as “highly exaggerated publicity material,” he, Walt, and Roy began meeting daily as soon as Walt returned, flipping through magazines and batting around ideas, trying to come up with a new character. As for the inspiration, Lillian herself admitted that the Kansas City stories about Walt befriending mice were apocryphal. “We simply thought the mouse would make a cute character to animate,” she said. The Aesop’s Fables that Walt professed to admire so much frequently featured mice. Mice also figured prominently in several Alice comedies—in Alice Rattled by Rats Julius the Cat is beleaguered by an entire houseful of mice; in Alice Solves the Puzzle mice play in her washtub; in Alice the Whaler a mouse performs comic business in the galley; and in Alice’s Tin Pony a band of rats attempt to rob a train. The rodents figured so prominently that when Walt moved into the Hyperion studio and wanted a new publicity poster, he had Hugh Harman draw cartoon characters, including mice, around a photograph of him in front of the bungalow. (“A couple of the mice looked like Mickey,” Iwerks observed. “The only difference was the shape of the nose.”) Later, when Walt was producing the Oswalds, theater posters were routinely adorned with a pesky, long-eared mouse who tried to steal the scene by committing acts of mischief like cutting the rope attached to a girder on which Oswald and his girlfriend sat (Sky Scrappers) or parachuting from a plane (The Ocean Hop) or holding the billboard on which the title was emblazoned (Great Guns!).
The real inspiration for centralizing the mouse in the cartoons and the model for his rough design, according to several of Walt’s associates, including Iwerks, were the drawings of Clifton Meek, whose work ran regularly in the popular humor magazines Life and Judge, which Walt, Roy, and Iwerks were riffling through at the time. “I grew up with those drawings,” Walt told an interviewer. “They were different from ours—but they had cute ears.” It was Iwerks’s rendering, essentially Oswald with shorter ears, that became the standard—as Iwerks later described him, “Pear-shaped body, ball on top, couple of thin legs. You gave it long ears and it was a rabbit. Short ears, it was a cat. Ears hanging down a dog…With an elongated nose, it became a mouse.” As one animation historian put it, “He was designed for maximum ease of animation,” since “circular forms were simpler to animate effectively.” “Walt designed a mouse,” animator Otto Messmer said, “but it wasn’t any good. He was long and skinny.” Iwerks redesigned him.
As Iwerks told it, having settled on the mouse, he, Walt, and Roy then hit upon the Lindbergh scenario by kicking around ideas at the studio. As for the name, though at one time Iwerks credited Lillian with having come up with Mickey, he later retracted. For his part Walt, in an autobiographical sketch that he dictated in the mid-1930s, recalled, “After trying various names out on my friends, I decided to call him Mickey Mouse,” thus scanting Lillian’s contribution. Longtime Disney archivist David Smith said that Lillian herself waffled on her claim to have named the character and on Walt’s ever having called him Mortimer, and a profile of Disney in McCall’s in 1932, just four years after Mickey’s creation, stated that the name Mortimer was junked in favor of Mickey because the latter was shorter, not because Lillian objected. The nocturnal mice scurrying over Walt’s drawing board, the training sessions in which Walt domesticated them and his sad parting in Kansas City, even the sudden burst of inspiration on the Santa Fe across the plains headed for California, and Lillian’s indignation, were likely all embellishments. Rather, Mickey Mouse was the product of desperation and calculation—the desperation born of Walt Disney’s need to re-create an animation sanctuary and the calculation of what the market would accept.
Now they had to animate the cartoon, even though they had no contract for it and even though they were still obligated to produce the three remaining Oswalds under their contract with Mintz. The strain was doubly heavy because the perfidious animators were still working in the studio to fulfill the Mintz commitment. Among his top staff only Iwerks, Les Clark, the soda jerk from the Kingswell neighborhood, and an animator named Johnny Cannon had remained faithful to Walt. Within a few weeks Walt had hired another young artist named Wilfred Jackson—he preferred to be known as “Jaxon”—who had little experience but had pestered Walt into giving him a one-week trial that kept being extended. Walt assigned him to help the janitor wash cels and then to the ink-and-paint department, where he was the lone man in a roomful of women.
Jackson may have been only twenty-two and a newcomer, but he sensed that something was amiss at the studio. At the end of his first week that April, he noticed that the animators not only collected their hats and coats at closing time but also their pens, their pencils, and even their seat cushions. Jackson also noted the frigid atmosphere that was the result of distrust between Walt’s loyalists and the defectors. The distrust was intensified by the fact that while the defectors were animating Oswald, Iwerks was animating Mickey surreptitiously—surreptitiously because he and Walt did not want anyone to know their plan and possibly steal their idea. Iwerks called himself an “outcast,” saying he worked on Plane Crazy in a locked room at the Hyperion studio and kept other cartoons on his table so that he could quickly cover the Mickey drawings should anyone enter the room. Frequently he worked at night after the others had left for the day. Hugh Harman recalled that the loyal animators worked behind a high black curtain or scrim to prevent him and the others from seeing “the great secret that was going on.”
And they worked outside the studio too, where the defectors could not observe them. “The first Mickey Mouse was made by twelve people after hours in a garage,” Walt would write—his garage on Lyric Avenue. Of the twelve, however, only one animated: Iwerks. Iwerks had heard that Bill Nolan, whom Walt had tried to recruit on his trip, could pen as many as six hundred drawings a day, so Iwerks admitted that as a point of personal pride he “really extended” himself, doing seven hundred drawings a day. When Iwerks had finished, Walt put benches in his garage, and Lillian, Edna, and his sister-in-law Hazel Sewell inked and painted the cels while longtime employee Mike Marcus cranked the animation camera—at night so that the other animators would not suspect that he was diverting time to Walt’s secret project.
Given the pressure of trying to turn out Plane Crazy as quickly as possible so that Walt could find a distributor and keep his company afloat, it was grueling work. (The first charges on the company ledger against the film were listed on April 30, a week before the defectors were to finish their last Oswald and leave the Disney studio, and the film was completed by May 15 at a cost of $1,772.) And since Walt was working on speculation without a contract, there was no remuneration. “We worked night and day,” Lillian recalled. “We ate stews and pot roasts, which luckily were cheap in those days. We were down so low that we had a major budget crisis when I tripped on the garage stairs and ruined my last pair of silk stockings.”
Though Les Clark would later date the real advance of animation to the inception of Mickey Mouse, the first completed cartoon, which was intended to be the studio’s salvation, provided no evidence of it; Walt’s own children, seeing Plane Crazy years later, would be astonished by how primitive it look
ed. Mickey was crudely drawn with lines for legs and arms sticking out of his circular torso, and the scenario, equally crude, was lightly adapted from Oswald cartoons like Trolley Troubles, only here it is an airplane, jerry-built from a flivver, that careers out of control. As for Mickey’s personality, his main characteristics are a raw ingenuity and a sadistic determination; he yanks the tail feathers off a turkey for his plane’s rear strut and later grabs a cow’s udder attempting to hoist himself back into the cockpit. In slightly lesser measure, he also proves to be aggressive, lecherous, and chauvinistic, tugging at his lady mouse, Minnie—she was named, Walt is said to have admitted, after Minnie Cowles, Dr. Cowles’s wife—for a kiss and forcing her to leap from the plane to avoid his advances, after which the plane corkscrews and crashes. Unchastened when he sees her float to the ground using her bloomers as a parachute, Mickey laughs at the predicament and gets his comeuppance when he heaves a horseshoe she has given him, and it boomerangs to hit him on the head.
