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Page 11 of 28 Cartoon Menagerie: At the Disney House

Roy and Edna

Roy and Edna, caught in a relaxed moment

The studio was churning out Alice cartoons at an incredible clip. Walt's relationship with his distributor, Charlie Mintz, was fraught with tension, and his own perfectionist tendencies were starting to evidence themselves. He pushed his employees relentlessly. Staffers were required to re-animate sequences, once, twice, five times, until they were acceptable to Walt. Of course, Walt's drive for the best applied to himself more than anyone else. As a result, he fired himself as an artist in order to concentrate on his greater skills as a story man and director. "I was never happy with anything I ever did as an artist," he later said.
Walt and Roy decided to change the name of the business from Disney Brothers to Walt Disney Productions.  One of their employees, Hugh Harman, recalled some harsh conversations between Walt and Roy when this idea was raised. But Disney archivist Dave Smith says that Roy claimed the idea for the name change as his own! In fact, given Roy's unassuming nature -- and his dedication to his brother  -- it does seem consistent that he would forgo glory for the good of the company.
As the studio did better, Walt and Lilly moved to a larger apartment, and then, in the fall of 1927, Walt and Roy bought identical prefabricated houses on adjoining lots.
At about this time, Walt brought the first of a series of dogs into the Disney household. It wasn't easy -- at first. Walt: "My wife would have nothing to do with dogs. She said, 'They get hair on everything. They're dirty. And there's dog odors.' So I got a book and read that chows did not . . . shed hair," nor have fleas and bad odor. The next day Walt went out and bought a chow and kept it under wraps until Christmas. "I got a big hat box, put the little puppy in it, and when they were all busy I put it over by the tree. Then [my niece] brought this big hat box over and put it in front of my wife. And my wife said, 'Oh Walt, you didn't . . . ' and from that time on, that was her baby. I've never seen anybody so crazy over an animal."
With the larger quarters the new house afforded, there began something of a Disney tradition that was to last for some time: Lilly's relatives lived with them. At first, it was her mother. Family members recalled him treating his mother-in-law "like a queen." On Sundays he would take Lilly, her mother, and her niece Marjorie out for rides in the car and stop at an ice cream parlor on the way home. When Lilly's sister Hazel got divorced, she and daughter Marjorie moved in and stayed for about five years. When they moved out, Lilly's sister Grace took up residence.
Lilly, Walt and Sunnee

Lilly, Walt and Sunnee, their
chow dog
 

Walt's niece Marjorie

Walt's niece Marjorie, who together with her mother Hazel moved in with Walt and Lilly after Hazel had a divorce

 Walt practiced being a father with Marjorie. She remembers her uncle as a forgiving, loving, gentle man. One time, after she had lived in Walt's house for several years, Marjorie grew annoyed at Walt -- in typical adolescent fashion. "I said, 'Well, you're a self-made man and you worship your maker!'" she recalls. "I don't know where I'd heard this . . . But I'd read it someplace and it seemed appropriate at the time. I turned and went out of the room, and the worst thing was that by the time I got to the bottom of those stairs I heard him laughing. And that just killed me. That just undid the whole thing.  The next weekend, we also had an altercation of some kind and he really lit into me."  The following week, Walt picked her up from school.  "So I went out and he said he had some film to deliver, which was made up. And we went down and went to a particular ice cream parlor down there that was very popular at that time, and we had hot fudge sundaes. Nothing was said about my being an obnoxious brat or anything like that. . . . He just drove me back up to school, and I kissed him and went in, riding on high. I knew he'd forgiven me. And he knew I'd forgiven him. That was it."
In early 1928, Walt suffered the now-famous betrayal of Charlie Mintz and his staff, in which Mintz stole away Walt's then-popular cartoon character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, as well as most of Walt's employees. It's hard to know which caused Walt greater pain -- the loss of the character, upon which his studio's success rested, or the loss of his staff, whom he regarded as friends -- many of whom he had brought with him from the early days in Kansas City.  However, it's unfair to regard these employees as renegades or turncoats. Though Walt was their boss, he was still a very young and relatively unproven man. His artists may not have even understood the dramatic nature of his contributions to their work. At heart, they were just people who wanted to make a better living for their families, wherever it was offered. 
     But Walt couldn't understand this outlook. To him, the work was everything; and he knew that his studio was going to do the best work anyplace. Walt bounced back (sort of like the indestructible characters in his cartoons) with Mickey Mouse. Luckily, Ub Iwerks had stayed loyal to Walt when the rest of his staff left him for Mintz. With Ub's help, he quickly had a new line of cartoons to sell. When distributors weren't interested in his new character, Walt took a giant leap of faith and introduced sound into his cartoons.

Charles Mintz, surrounded

Charles Mintz, surrounded
by his employees

 
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