According to Sullivan, Zukor, one of the most intimidating men in the film industry, picked up his phone and told his attorney to hand over the rights. The story would be impossible to believe if Sullivan hadn’t actually somehow come away with the rights. Perhaps Zukor, a man with bigger fish to fry, just wanted the maniac out of his life. Sullivan then tried to make a quick buck by selling the series to Warner Bros., but Harry Warner, who was little interested in cartoons, encouraged Margaret Winkler to take it on as part of her new distribution business. This was a lucky break, paving the way to a much bigger fortune than Sullivan ever anticipated.
The animators working in Sullivan’s studio remembered their boss barely ever being there. When he did show up, he was almost always drunk. According to Shamus Culhane, Sullivan was “the most consistent man in the business—consistent in that he was never sober.” Culhane’s most vivid memory of Sullivan was of someone who would stumble through the doorway, toss a bag of dirty laundry to the nearest animator, and fire him on the spot if he didn’t take it to the cleaners fast enough. Messmer would then write the animator a severance check, send him home, and quietly welcome him back the next morning, after a night of hard drinking had washed the memory from Sullivan’s brain.
In the meantime, Messmer kept the studio running. During Sullivan’s long absences, he would forge his boss’s name on the studio’s checks, memos, and other paperwork. In addition to writing and directing most of the films, he also drew the weekly Felix comic strips, signing Sullivan’s name to those as well. This earned his boss an extra $80,000 per year on top of the nearly $8,000 he made per film, plus the $100,000 he made on merchandising. In comparison, Al Eugster, an animator who started working at the studio on April Fools’ Day, 1925, started off at ten dollars per week, nine dollars less than he previously made at the American Radiator Company. He didn’t care about the pay gap, though, because “it was something I wanted to do,” he said. There was a priceless thrill in helping to create an iconic character then dominating popular culture. “At last, here was the symbol of our generation scrambling to realize its wild dreams in absurdities,” M. Paule wrote of Felix in Hollywood Life in January 1927. “There was the airplane, the submarine and the Charleston. Felix of the form plastic could manipulate that war dance as no living human with two legs. In sum here was in Felix the Cat the Delphic oracle and a world horoscope rolled all into one.”
Chapter 9
“I Love Beans”
Felix attracted countless copycats. His success created a giant slipstream these imitations maneuvered their way into, trying to see how far they could get—most were barely discernible from the original. John Bray’s Thomas Cat, created in 1920, could have been mistaken for Felix in a police lineup. Paul Terry, who was in animation only for the money, introduced a cat that not only looked similar, but was actually called Felix until the threat of legal action convinced him to change the name to Henry Cat. But the most exasperating imitator of all was a cat named Julius. It first appeared by that name in 1925, created by a young upstart animator struggling to get noticed.
Walter Elias Disney first arrived in California in August 1923. Only twenty-two years old, he tried to look older by sporting a mustache, a wispy over-the-lip number that begged others to take him seriously. He arrived by train from Kansas City, a skinny kid in a borrowed suit hoping to break into Hollywood. Tucked away in his luggage was a small handful of films he had made back home, a series entitled Alice’s Wonderland, a mix of live action and animation, that was loosely based on Lewis Carroll’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He hoped to sell the series in a format featuring Alice in various settings: Alice’s Day at Sea, Alice Hunting in Africa, Alice’s Spooky Adventure, Alice’s Wild West Show, and so on. It was in these films that Disney occasionally cast Julius, the Felix knockoff, which appealed to distributors wanting to capitalize on Felix’s success, but not enough for them to sign a contract with him.
Disney’s first two months in Los Angeles were filled with rejection. Nobody was interested in this unknown kid’s pitches. His contacts suggested he might have better luck in New York, where most of the animation studios were located and where distributors might be more receptive. But there was no money to travel east, so Disney was stuck in California, continuing to knock on doors.
In October he finally caught a lucky break and signed a distribution deal with Margaret Winkler. She lived in New York, but Disney, covering his bases, had started corresponding with her from afar. He had caught her at the perfect time, when she was desperate for new talent amid troubles with her star clients. Max Fleischer was threatening to begin distributing his Out of the Inkwell shorts on his own, while Pat Sullivan was likewise threatening to take Felix elsewhere for more money. Winkler badly needed to diversify her portfolio to hedge against the potential losses and hoped Disney’s films might help her avoid disaster.
Once the contracts were signed, Disney set to work scraping up money to start a studio. Partnering with his brother Roy, who had come to California to recover from tuberculosis, he received a small loan from his uncle, enough to rent a small office and studio space. Then he convinced the family of Virginia Davis, the young girl from the live-action portions of the Alice shorts, to move from Kansas City to California. Her father, a traveling salesman who already spent a lot of time on the road; and her mother, a stagestruck housewife obsessed with her daughter’s potential stardom, were an easy sell. Once they arrived, Disney took Virginia around town and filmed her live-action sequences himself, using mainly public spaces and occasionally ducking the police because he lacked the proper filming permits. He also drew most of the films’ animated sequences himself, delivering the first new installment of the series, Alice’s Day at Sea, to Winkler by December.
Winkler was disappointed when she saw it. The film wasn’t particularly funny and the work felt rushed. She demanded he do it over, explaining that she knew what audiences wanted. “Inject as much humor as you possibly can,” she told him, suggesting he make it more like Felix the Cat and Out of the Inkwell. But even though she was critical, she was also encouraging, hoping to cultivate this young upstart she had taken a gamble on: an unknown kid with few contacts, no money, and no real studio. Plus, he was trying to make animated cartoons in California, a continent away from where they were usually made, in New York. Many had already asked Disney the same question: why had he come here and not gone there?
If the stars had aligned a little differently, Walt Disney might have been born in California. In the nineteenth century, both of his grandfathers, Kepple Disney and Charles Call, had set out for California in search of gold, departing in wagon trains for the frontier. But the trip was hard, and along the way they both got sidetracked, putting down roots in the Midwest instead. Thus, in 1901, Walt was born in Chicago, a town he remembered as noisy and dirty, penetrated by the dark breathing of factories and slaughterhouses.
When Walt Disney was four, his family left dirty Chicago for Marceline, Missouri. It was a postcard town: Zircher’s Jewelry Store, with an impressive freestanding clock on its corner; Hott’s Tavern, run by the cheerful Judge Hott; and Ripley Square, full of handsome gazebos where bands played during the warm summers. The beautiful farmhouse they lived in was fronted by a carpet of green grass and shaded by swaying willows that whispered in the breeze. Disney’s memories of Marceline were always pleasant: his Aunt Maggie giving him his first drawing tablet and pencils; or his neighbor, Doc Sherwood, paying him a nickel to sketch his horse. That moment—receiving money from Sherwood to draw—was, up to that point, “the highlight of Walt’s life,” according to Roy Disney.
Unfortunately, Walt’s father was not a good farmer. Elias Disney had interesting notions about agriculture, including the idea that using fertilizer was like “giving whiskey to a man—he felt better for a little while, but then he was worse off than before.” After the farm inevitably failed—when Walt was ten—the family moved to Kansas City, into a house that was cramped, lacked plumbing, and was close enough to the street for the Disneys to hear drunks rustling by in the night. By now, Elias had decided that Walt