“Walt Before Mickey” illuminates Disney’s tough times in Hollywood, when Walt decided that he ” … was through with the cartoon business”

Jim Hill

13 years ago

By now, you've no doubt seen the maquette of that statue of Walt
Disney and Mickey Mouse which is supposed to be prominently displayed on Buena
Vista Street (i.e. Disney California Adventure's entrance plaza. The Main
Street, U.S.A. equivalent for this revamped theme park).

In a recent entry on the Disney Parks Blog, Ray Spencer (the
veteran Imagineer who's Buena Vista Street's creative director) said that this
statue depicts the Company's founder right after he …

… arrived in California from Kansas City, and as (Walt)
looks around in wonder and optimism, the world is his oyster to realize his
dreams.

Which is all well & good. But as Timothy S. Susanin
reveals in "Walt before Mickey: Disney's Early Years, 1919-1928" (University Press of Mississippi, April 2011), optimism wasn't exactly what Walt was
feeling when he stepped on that train in Los Angeles in August of 1923.

The way that Roy O. Disney remembers his little brother
looking when he met Walt at the train station was that " … he was carrying a
cheap suitcase that contained all of his belongings." More to the point, when
Roy encouraged …

… to find work … even if it meant returning to cartooning …
Walt rebuffed his brother, saying, "No, I'm too late [for cartoons] … I should
have started six years ago. I don't see how I can top those New York boys now."
Walt later explained, "When I got to Hollywood, I was discouraged with
animation. I figure I had gotten into it too late. I was through with the
cartoon business."

And according to the painstaking research that Susanin has
done (which involved spending dozens of hours at The Walt Disney Company
Archives, The Walt Disney Family Museum and the Library of Congress, unearthing
all sort of interesting little tidbits buried down deep in decades-old
interviews, newspaper accounts and correspondence), Walt was a man of his word.
During the months of August & September 1923 …

… Although he was "fed up with cartoons," Walt decided that
he still wanted to be a part of the motion picture industry. "What I wanted to
do," he said," was get a job at a studio – any studio, doing anything." His "ambition
at that time was to be a director," even though he was open to accepting any
job a studio would offer him. He would take "anything. [I wanted to just g]et
in … Be a part of it and then move up." His goal was to "learn …. the picture business[.]"

Now regular JHM readers will remember that I recently did a
story about Walt spending several days after he initially arrived in Hollywood
lurking around the Universal Studios lot. But what Susanin has uncovered with "Disney's
Early Years, 1919 – 1928" is how much this behavior used to frustrate Walt's
brother:

"I kept saying to him, 'Aren't you gonna get a job? '" Roy
recalled. "'Why don't you get a job?' He could have a job, I'm sure, but he didn't
want a job. But he'd get into Universal, for example, on the strength of
applying for a job and then … he'd just hang around the Studio lot all day …
watching sets and what was going on … MGM was another favorite spot where he
could work that gag."

Mind you, it was while Walt was visiting with a friend from
Kansas City who was working as an extra at Metro Goldwyn Mayer that Disney
almost managed to break into the live-action side of things in Hollywood. As Susanin recounts, Walt was told by his
friend that …

"I got a job in a picture called The Light That Failed …
They need more extras. You can ride a horse, can't you, Diz?" Walt said that he
could, and "went [to the studio] and hung around and got signed." He was
selected to appear in a cavalry scene, but the weather did not cooperate. "Well,"
Walt said, "it rained like hell. So I didn't get to go. And that was the end of
my career as an actor. When they started all over again, they needed a whole
new bunch."

So who knows? If it hadn't rained that day during the production
of "The Light That Failed," an entirely career path might have opened up for
Walt Disney in the film industry.

As Roy works the camera, Walt directs Virgina Davis in one of the Alice Comedies.
Copyright Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved

It's this exact aspect of "Walt Before Mickey: Disney's
Early Years, 1919 – 1928" that made this book so enjoyable and insightful. Susanin
took what everyone else thought was a pretty well-worn narrative thread (i.e.
Walt Disney's start in film-making) and by piecing together research in ways
that film historians hadn't before, Timothy created this genuinely entertaining
& vibrant account of Walt's time in Kansas City and his struggles in
Hollywood.

And make no mistake. As "Walt Before Disney" shows, the two
Disney Brothers did go through some pretty tough times in Tinsel Town. During one
particularly tight period where Walt & Roy couldn't really afford an
apartment, Walt remembered that …

" … we took just a sleeping room and got our meals at a
cheap cafeteria to save time. We worked out a system in that cafeteria. Roy and
I always went in together. One would get a meat order, the other a vegetable.
When we reached our table we would divide up." The cafeteria was "inexpensive"
and "dreary." Walt recalled. "there was many a week when Roy and I ate one square
meal a day – between us."

Given how many people are genuinely struggling these days
just to make ends meet, I think – in a way – it's far more valuable that
Timothy S. Susanin made this portrait of the young Walt Disney available to the
world, rather than that romanticized version which Ray Spencer and his team from
WDI plan on placing on Buena Vista Street.

So if you want to get a sense of who the real Walt Disney
was – especially when he was just starting out in the entertainment industry –
be sure and pick up a copy of "Walt Before Mickey: Disney's Early Years, 1919 –
1928." And then prepare to be amazed by all of the false starts & missteps
that Walt made along the way to Mickey Mouse, all of the blind alleys that Disney
went down, all of the possible career paths that he explored before Walt finally
found lasting success in the field of animation.

FYI: The nice folks at the University Press of Mississippi provided me with a review copy of Timothy S. Susanin's book.

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