The Animated Man by Michael Barrier Read Free Book Online

Symphony
called
Autumn
, but he failed to show up). 34 That Saturday morning, he and Roy had what Roy described, in a letter to Walt written later that day, as a “very calm, quiet” talk. “I told him frankly that the worst feature of this whole affair was the fact that a fellow as close to us as he had been should turn on us at a time like this.” Iwerks had begun negotiating for his own producing deal the previous September, Roy wrote, and “did not even know until two days before he received his contract that [Powers] was behind it. . . . We know how gullible and easily [led] Ub is, and we have a good dose of how two-faced Charlie Giegerich and P. A. [Powers] are. Not trying to excuse Ub, but just trying to size it up all the way around, I believe Ub at the start meant O.K., and I am sure that right now, even though he won’t admit it, he regrets very much the outcome.” 35
    Powers had made a fatal misjudgment, since Iwerks was simply too reserved a personality—especially compared with Walt Disney—to succeed for very long as the head of a cartoon studio. * “Ub shunned responsibility,”Ben Sharpsteen said. “He’d be kind of generous on being solicited and he’d give all the advice he knew how, but he didn’t put himself ahead.” 36
    Like the Mintz recruits in 1928, Iwerks cited his arguments with Walt Disney as his motivating force. Roy wrote: “Ub said when first approached, you and he had been having considerable friction and that he made up his mind it was best to step out.” 37 For his part, Disney said in 1956 that he thought Iwerks had nursed a lingering sense of injustice. Disney believed that Iwerks was always troubled because he was far more experienced as a commercial artist—and surely more skilled—but was paid less than Disney after they both went to work for the Kansas City Film Ad Company.
    Carl Stalling also resigned from the Disney staff, the day after Iwerks did. “I thought something was wrong,” Stalling said many years later. “When Roy Disney told me that Ub was leaving, I told him, ‘Well, I guess I’ll be leaving, too.’ ” 38 In Stalling’s case, as in Iwerks’s, arguments with Walt had made him eager to leave. Stalling had accepted Walt’s offer of a one-third interest in the
Silly Symphonies
—twenty-five dollars a week had been withheld from his salary since December 31, 1928—but as in Iwerks’s case, leaving the studio voided the agreement. 39 Stalling had also invested two thousand dollars in the Disney Film Recording Company early in 1929, when Walt was trying to raise enough money to pay for the Cinephone equipment he needed on the West Coast. The Disneys repaid that money.
    More acrimony surrounded Stalling’s departure than Iwerks’s. When Stalling returned to the studio to remove his sheet music, on the same day that Iwerks said his farewell, Roy refused to let him take all of it. “He showed a disposition to get nasty and take it in spite of me,” Roy wrote to Walt, “and I thought I was going to have to resort to throwing him out!” 40
    Walt Disney had now been in two partnerships with Ub Iwerks, one rather more nebulous partnership with Fred Harman, and a semipartnership with Carl Stalling. Two of those partnerships, the first with Iwerks and the one with Harman, had fizzled quickly, and the other two had ended in the rupture of long friendships. There would be no more partnerships. Although the Disneys seriously considered sharing ownership with outside investors in 1932, only Walt and Roy and their wives would own the company as long as it remained privately held. 41 Disney spoke guardedly or misleadingly of all his former partners in future years (in 1956, he referred to Stalling as “the organist”), and, as one new employee learned in 1930, he was particularly bitter about the most important one, Ub