Disney caught wind of Mintz’s plan just before a scheduled trip to New York to meet with him about other business matters. Although he was not convinced that Mintz would do something so low, he nonetheless prepared a countermove. Arriving in New York, he began visiting other studios, Oswald prints under his arm, and soliciting for competing bids to put pressure on Mintz. Another studio’s acquisition of the rights from Universal would threaten Mintz’s distribution agreement.
It was a smart plan but didn’t get any takers. Before brusquely waving Disney off, Fred Quimby at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer told him that “cartoons [were] on the wane.” Thus, Disney was unable to gain any additional leverage.
Disney’s meeting with Mintz was awkward and strained. Mintz fidgeted and talked to him like a subcontractor. As Disney watched him, seeing how evasive and awkward he was, he gradually became convinced that the rumors were true. Wandering out of the office, he promptly wired an ominous message to Roy: BREAK WITH CHARLIE LOOMING. Anxious to prevent staff from leaving, he then ordered Roy to meet with their attorneys and draw up “ironclad” agreements: ALL CONTRACTS WITH ME PERSONALLY . . . MAKE THEM SIGN OR KNOW REASON BEFORE ALLOWING THEM TO LEAVE.
Roy wired back, reporting that most of the staff refused to sign; they considered the papers little more than loyalty oaths. From this, Walt immediately knew two things: that higher corporate powers had made him expendable at his own company, and that he had just been betrayed. Mintz had reached his employees before he himself was able to. Two days later, Disney tried to negotiate with Mintz, but hit a wall. Mintz held the upper hand. He offered Disney a slight pay raise and control of daily operations at the studio, but only as an employee, not as the owner. This was his move to squeeze out a slightly bigger take, an age-old dance between Hollywood creatives and executives. Disney realized he had no recourse, especially since he didn’t own the rights to the Oswald character. He left the meeting furious.
“He was like a raging lion on the train coming home,” Lillian Disney recalled. She had accompanied him to New York because Walt wanted the trip to be a second honeymoon. But the episode with Mintz soured the mood. “All he could say, over and over, was that he’d never work for anyone again as long as he lived,” Lillian said. “He’d be his own boss.” She spent her time on the train watching the drab winter landscape drone past her window, listening to Walt sputter and curse about how Mintz had cheated him, and how his treasonous staff had left him. Once his anger finally calmed—somewhere deep into the Midwest, Lillian couldn’t remember exactly where—Walt began planning his next steps. He would start a new studio. In the lore, as Walt would later tell it, he began doodling on a napkin and spitballing ideas, conjuring up a new strategy—and a new character—to revive his career.
Chapter 10
“Bad Luck!”
In May 1927, aviator Charles Lindbergh accomplished the first transatlantic flight. It was one of the most widely covered news stories in the world, and Lindbergh became one of the most recognized names in history. Although he regularly took his pet kitten, Patsy, on test flights, he chose not to take her across the Atlantic, explaining, “It’s too dangerous a journey to risk the cat’s life.” It was widely rumored, though never proved, that he took a stuffed Felix doll instead—the cat’s name, after all, roughly translated to “lucky” in Latin.
Five months after Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, aviatrix Ruth Elder, the “Miss America of Aviation,” attempted to become the first woman to do the same. For good luck, she likewise carried a stuffed Felix doll, along with a Bible—a curious pairing. After she ignored advice not to fly over the North Atlantic in cold weather, Elder’s plane, American Girl, splashed into the ocean shortly after takeoff. She was rescued but the Felix doll wasn’t. Pat Sullivan, always a publicity hound, seized the opportunity for a press stunt by sending her a telegram: AM ALL RIGHT. SWAM ASHORE. WILL SEE YOU SOON—FELIX.
When Elder arrived back home, she posed for the papers with a new Felix doll that had just arrived in the mail from Sullivan. Grinning for the cameras, she said, “Luck saved me.”
Felix’s popularity appeared indestructible. When reporters asked Sullivan if he ever planned to fiddle with Felix’s magic formula, he dismissed them with a wave of his hand. “Why change?” he asked. Otto Messmer remembered the time period as being caught in what felt like a permanent glow. “Felix was goin’ so good,” he recalled. “It seemed like he would go on forever.”
In the fall of 1927, right around the time of Ruth Elder’s unfortunate flight, about thirty animators met in New York at Roth’s, a swanky hotel and restaurant bedecked with dark wood paneling, polished marble floors, and burnished brass fixtures. The gathering was meant to celebrate all they had achieved in their art. A marginal novelty when it first began, animation was now a regular part of the cinema experience. The animators were proud, laughing and drinking their bootleg liquor together, the air milky with cigar smoke. Max Fleischer hosted, shouting through the din to announce the evening’s guest of honor. “[Winsor] McCay created the miracle of animation,” he said, gesturing toward their esteemed colleague, “and another miracle was getting all the animators into one big friendly gathering.”
Almost a decade earlier, McCay had released The Sinking of the Lusitania. By 1921, he had made three more short cartoons—The Centaurs, Flip’s Circus, and Gertie on Tour—that were never shown commercially and would survive only in fragments. He had also released three films adapted from Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, another of his comic strips. Like Little Nemo in Slumberland, it dealt with the complex psychology of dreams. In this trio of films, Bug Vaudeville was about dancing bugs; The Pet was about a creature, similar to King Kong, who terrorizes a city; and The Flying House was about a man who attaches wings to his house so he can fly away to escape his debts. All three were visually breathtaking and imaginative, but none was particularly popular; they played mainly to niche audiences on sporadic schedules. They were also time-consuming to make. When William Randolph Hearst learned how committed his star cartoonist remained to animation, he again stepped in to limit how much effort McCay devoted to it. McCay was once more forced to concentrate his attention on his newspaper career, forgoing animation.
McCay’s reputation as an animator quickly faded from the public mind, but he was still a hero among his fellow animators, who considered him a standard-bearer and a true artist. They buzzed with excitement whenever rumors surfaced that he was thinking of making another animated film. The projects, heard about only in bits and pieces, were always ambitious. The Barnyard Band was to involve McCay conducting, in person, a cartoon orchestra made up of animals. Another idea involved an animated history of World War I, for which he started doing concept drawings but which he ultimately abandoned. His most epic idea, however, was an animated history of the world according to the Bible; he planned on collaborating with his friend George Randolph Chester but abandoned the idea when Chester died unexpectedly.
McCay, who was always comfortable holding a microphone or standing on a stage, continued giving speeches advocating for animation. He was still convinced, wholeheartedly, that it was an art form worthy of galleries and museums. This attitude put him somewhat at odds with some of the animators present at Roth’s that night, notably Paul Terry. Terry’s low-rent style and sensibility had taken hold of a segment of the industry—it was trending, a later generation would say—and this bothered McCay. Earlier that fall, he had complained to a radio audience, “Since I originated animated drawings the art has deteriorated . . . I hope and dream the time will come when serious artists will make marvelous pictures.” Then he mused about what Michelangelo might have done “had he known this art.”
Despite McCay’s speeches and occasional public utterances, his fellow animators seemed largely unaware of his criticism. In person, he was mostly cheerful and easygoing. Perhaps this is why the cartoon they chose to play that night, partly in honor of him, was so tone-deaf.
The animators had all come together to make a special cartoon for the evening, titled Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure, the title a reference to erections and sexual intercourse.