Terry treated every aspect of a cartoon like a variable in an equation. “He kept a file of A gags, B gags, and C gags,” animator Art Babbitt remembered. “The A gags would get a hilarious laugh, the B gags would get a friendly response, and the C gags were not so successful.” Terry mixed and matched the components like a dealer shuffling a deck of cards. Drawings were recycled from other cartoons, while shortcomings were often hidden by speeding scenes up or making them more violent.
“It didn’t matter what the hell the story was,” Babbitt said. The plots featured characters like “Lucky Duck” or “Rufus Rooster,” and were often just random series of non sequiturs. They rarely made sense, and the “lessons” at the end of each fable rarely had anything to do with the story. “A man who cannot remember phone numbers has no business getting married,” read one. “He who plays the other fellows game is sure to lose,” read another, which also highlighted the studio’s loose control of grammar.
“We take any idea that sounds like a laugh,” Terry told the New York Times about his business strategy. Babbitt put it another way: “What we were doing was just crud . . . Terry didn’t care—he was out for the bucks.” Terry, whose studio would remain one of the most profitable in the business well into the 1950s, would freely admit this as well. Another animator remembered applying for a job with him and being told, “We do shit here, compared to the rest of the business, but it makes me a lot of money. If you don’t like to do shit, don’t ask for a job.”
Chapter 8
“Being Famous Is Hard Work”
By 1925, Felix the Cat was by far the most popular cartoon character in the world, his name and likeness as widely recognized as Charlie Chaplin’s or Buster Keaton’s. In fact, Chaplin regularly praised him, and Keaton parodied him in the classic Go West. Director Federico Fellini, then just a young boy in Italy, would later recall fondly that Felix was his first sweet taste of American culture.
In the fall of that year, Pat Sullivan and his wife, Marjorie, embarked on a five-month promotional tour around the globe, visiting England, France, the Mediterranean, Africa, China, and Australia. They began by sailing from New York to Southampton, England, aboard the luxury ocean liner HMS Majestic, the crown jewel of the glamorous White Star fleet, a wedding cake of a ship full of dazzling ballrooms and glass-ceilinged swimming pools. In Southampton, the couple was greeted by a crowd of reporters waiting at the bottom of the gangway; flashbulbs popped as the photographers jostled for the best angles. Off to the side, a jazz band played “Felix Kept On Walking,” one of the biggest radio hits of the year (“He’s won picture fame, Felix is his name . . .”). Felix was so popular in England that the Prince of Wales made him the British polo team’s official mascot. Queen Mary, who had received a stuffed Felix doll at the Great Empire Exposition at Wembley, an event celebrating England’s global prominence, made a show of presenting it to her husband, King George.
Felix’s extraordinary popularity sparked a merchandising bonanza, prompting one trade journal to write that Felix had more “publicity producing angles than a centipede has legs.” Men wore Felix tiepins and women wore Felix brooches. Smoke shops sold Felix cigars and automakers sold Felix radiator caps. Infants smelling of Felix baby oil napped under Felix blankets. Felix Crystal Radio sets, the cat’s tail serving as the tuner and his whiskers as the crystal, played “Felix the Cat,” another megahit akin to “Felix Kept On Walking.” The merchandising rights alone earned Pat Sullivan $100,000 per year.
When the Sullivans reached the bottom of the gangway, reporters’ questions exploded around them. Mostly the reporters wanted to know how Felix came to be. Without ever once mentioning Otto Messmer, Sullivan spun yarns about himself, stories with the kind of rags-to-riches angle he knew would make good copy. “It seems a dream to look back now on my early struggles as a cartoonist,” he told one reporter. “I am one more case of a poor boy who made good abroad.” Sometimes, Sullivan brought up the character he actually did create, Sammy Johnsin, and would tie him to Felix. “Two, three years ago I was drawing a little nigger—Sammy Johnsin—for the films, and was trying to figure out something fresh . . .”
Depending on his audience, Sullivan sometimes gave credit for Felix to his wife, Marjorie. “You must blame it on my wife,” he said rather disingenuously. “She runs out of the room whenever the cat’s mentioned now, but she started the thing.” In this version of the story, Sullivan would explain that Marjorie came “bursting into the studio carrying in her arms the most washed out, pop-eyed, half starved ragamuffin of a cat that ever lived in a New York back street. I looked at the thing for a minute . . . ‘Well,’ I said, ‘what’s the joke?’”
“An idea!” Marjorie replied. “Everybody’s drawing men. Why not do an animal feature?”
“That was how Felix began,” Sullivan told the reporters.
In another interview, this one with the Sunday Express, a London paper, Sullivan used a metaphor to illustrate just how much the creative process had taken out of him. “An old German guy called Frankenstein once started something he could not finish. Well, I just feel like that about Felix,” he explained. “Frankenstein, you will remember, created a machine man that could do everything a real man could do. Except that a real man only works eight hours a day and this Frankenstein monster could work twenty-four hours to the day. All the Frankenstein creation lacked was a soul. Try as he would, old man Frankenstein could not give his creation a soul. So in the end the clockwork man got sore, boomeranged on his boss, and strangled him.”
This version of the story was surprising, even alarming, to some. Was Sullivan saying that the pressure of creating Felix would kill him?
Sullivan assured them it wouldn’t. “I don’t exactly fear at the moment that Felix will get a death grip on my windpipe; but he’s coming perilously near getting a stranglehold on my personality.”
“Then why such a burden?” the reporter asked.
“Being famous is hard work,” Sullivan replied.
While Pat Sullivan was out doing the “hard work” of “being famous,” Otto Messmer was back at the studio, doing the actual hard work of writing and directing the Felix cartoons. Sullivan never mentioned Messmer in the press, allowing the illusion that he himself alone was Felix’s creator. Not until the 1960s would film historians commonly know otherwise, after interviewing other animators from the era who all spoke about Messmer’s role. In 1974, one interviewer sat down with Messmer himself, now old and gray, and asked about Sullivan’s taking credit for his work, as well as reaping all the financial rewards. Had Messmer ever heard “the tale Sullivan told about his wife bringing in the stray cat”? the interviewer asked.
“Oh, that was publicity,” Messmer quietly answered.
“He told it all over the world.”
“I know. He had to have something.”
“Did you design the first Felix the Cat?”
“Oh yes, yes . . .”
“Why did Pat Sullivan get credit for it?”
“It belongs to the firm . . . he was the head of the studio.”
Sullivan was indeed head of the studio, but Felix had originally been created for Paramount, so how did Sullivan end up receiving all the profits for the character?
Hal Walker, an animator who worked for Sullivan, said that his boss told the story “once and only once.” After that, it became a colorful tale the animators passed among themselves. In the spring of 1920, just as Felix was starting to get popular, Paramount boss Adolph Zukor had apparently decided to do away with the packaged bundle of films—known in the industry as a “magazine,” consisting of shorts, features, newsreels, and cartoons—that the Felix series was part of. This was before Felix’s popularity had skyrocketed; Zukor, not thinking the cartoon was profitable enough, wanted to shave the expense.
When