Before The Mouse

Writing in The New Yorker, Anthony Lane looks at the world that Walt made:

The best joke about Walt Disney is that he was not a good businessman. Anyone schooled in the legend of Disney the capitalist ogre must at some point deal with the fact that money, in itself, did not concern him. He didn’t know how to spend it, throwing no lavish parties, dressing casually in sweaters and pants, and dining on cans of beans; he earned far less of it, for years, than seems economically possible, and plowed what did come along straight back into the company; and, as for raising it in order to finance his ventures, he tended to lunge into contracts without weighing what lay in store. (Roy described the first decade of Disney Studios as “bacon and eggs without the bacon.”) Walt’s early days fit the bill of the classic struggler, and Gabler tells of a Kansas City dentist hiring Laugh-O-Gram to make short films on dental hygiene, and of Disney being unable to go and close the deal, because “he had left his only pair of shoes at the shoemaker’s and did not have the $1.50 he needed to retrieve them.” Even after he arrived in Los Angeles, in 1923, with a bagful of confidence but little else, he and Roy could not start up Disney Bros. until they had secured some family loans—twenty-five dollars from Roy’s girlfriend and five hundred from their Uncle Robert, who split the loan into four installments and charged them eight per cent interest. Do I hear the first, faint quack of Scrooge McDuck?