Life before Mickey

In an excerpt from Neal Gabler's massive biography of Walt Disney, the young animator arrives in Hollywood -- and gets his break.

By Neal Gabler

Read more: Hollywood, Books, Disney, Animation, Books Features

Oct. 31, 2006 | 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 [Disney, Walt's brother] 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" [a live action-animated film of Walt's] 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 Pathi 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.

Next page: Walt meets the first female film distributor in the country -- and gets picked up