Wild Minds. Reid Mitenbuler
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and forth between London and America. Once he had grown tired of the job, he jumped ship into New York Harbor and swam to shore, which is how he had ended up in the United States. Work as a boxer soon followed, leading to a cauliflower ear and a flat nose from too many “left wings to the button,” he liked to joke. After tiring of boxing, he then took up work as a cartoonist, which he had some experience doing back home in Australia. He was not an impressive cartoonist, however; the earliest known example of his work, published in 1907 in The Gadfly, an Australian weekly, was sloppy. But it did give a hint of Sullivan’s character. Standing on the deck of a ship, a nervous woman warily eyes a pipe-smoking seaman. “Any fear of drowning?” she asks.
“No,” he replies, “This place is full of sharks.”
Regardless of his poor artistic skills, Sullivan had an easy charm and magnetic charisma. People couldn’t help leaning in when he told colorful stories about his boxing days and adventures sailing the seas on merchant ships—impressive tales that convinced the McClure Newspaper Syndicate to give him a chance and hire him as an assistant. This same charisma is what later convinced Raoul Barré to give Sullivan a chance as an animator, although Barré drove a harder bargain and insisted on paying him $5 less per week than he had made at McClure’s.
Barré’s studio in the Bronx was located in the Fordham Arcade building, near the last stop on the old Third Avenue elevated line. Inside, the windows were painted in a grimy shade of green that cast an eerie glow on the animators’ faces. This kept the room dark, so the artists could better see the drawings on their light tables, which were arranged in long rows, as in a factory. The other animators at Barré’s studio all remembered Sullivan as a poor student who always showed up late and hungover, the alcohol vapors rising from his rumpled clothes like morning fog cooking off a pond. Animators generally weren’t known for their sobriety, so for them to have commented on Sullivan’s drinking habits suggests a pretty serious problem. Nor did his work impress Barré, who fired him after nine months.
Nine months had been enough time for Sullivan to learn the basics, however. By the middle of 1915, he started his own studio at 125 West 42nd Street, located between Times Square and Bryant Park, and quickly charmed his way into contracts with the Efanem and Edison film companies, two early studios that would eventually go defunct. The latter was owned by Thomas Edison, who was then trying to patent equipment used in the film industry and create a monopoly (like Bray’s, his efforts to do so would fail). Edison had contracted a cartoon series at Barré’s studio called the Animated Grouch Chasers, which Sullivan had worked on. Once Sullivan started his own studio, he was able to negotiate his own deal to provide Edison with cartoon advertisements and entertainment shorts. He also adapted the Sambo comic strip into a cartoon, although he changed the main character’s name to Sammy Johnsin to avoid paying royalties to Marriner’s heirs.
Of all the lessons Sullivan learned while working for Barré, perhaps the most important was that of delegation. Animation really wasn’t difficult if talented people were hired to do the work. Sullivan’s most important hire, made in early 1916, was a young artist named Otto Messmer. The two men were total opposites. Sullivan was raffish while Messmer was quiet and demure. Sullivan had traveled the world, while Messmer, who was twenty-four, still lived with his parents in New Jersey. When they first met, Messmer had just been fired from Universal, where he had attempted to start an animation unit but failed, and was glad to get the job.
Otto Messmer’s background was typical of many young men entering animation during the earliest decades of the industry. After graduating from high school in 1907, he enrolled in night classes at the Thomas School of Art in Manhattan, “where they taught you to draw more ‘straight’” rather than cartoony, he recalled. Next came a job illustrating fashion catalogues for a company called the Acme Agency. “But I didn’t like that,” he remembered. “I kept thinking about cartoons.” By 1910 he had sold a few cartoons to Life, building a portfolio he could use to get a steadier job. His brief stint at Universal came several years later. Messmer had seen all of Winsor McCay’s films, along with Émile Cohl’s Newlyweds series, and had figured out most of the basics on his own. His father helped him build a special desk with a backlit glass panel and a wooden frame that would register drawings, similar to Raoul Barré’s peg system.
Sullivan taught Messmer the techniques he had learned from Barré. “He taught me a lot of things about timing, [and] so forth,” Messmer remembered about one of his earliest assignments producing a dozen Charlie Chaplin cartoons. A movie producer had suggested featuring Chaplin as a cartoon character, an idea that Chaplin loved. “So Chaplin sent at least thirty or forty photographs of himself in different [poses] . . . He was delighted, cause this helped the propagation of his pictures, ya see?” Messmer studied the pictures in the same way a religious scholar pores over the Talmud, absorbing every lesson possible. “We used a lot of that kind of action in Felix,” he later said of the Chaplin films.
After teaching Messmer the basics, Sullivan mostly left him alone. “I did it all practically by myself,” Messmer said. His mind was wild, good at dreaming up gags and clever scenarios that defied reality. He wasn’t a fan of devices like Max Fleischer’s rotoscope, which required filming one’s subjects in live action—“Why animate something that you can see in real life?” he asked. To Messmer, a cartoon was something that described the impossible. It was most effective when it ignored reality.
The United States entered World War I, and Messmer was drafted right as he was getting his footing at Sullivan’s studio. As a corporal in the Army Signal Corps, he would see the worst horrors the war offered. Once, chatting with a buddy while scanning the smoky horizon for enemy troops, Messmer turned around to investigate why his friend had gone silent, discovering him slumped over with a bullet through his head. Another time, someone in his unit shot a German sniper who hadn’t yet died when the American troops reached him. Messmer, who spoke German, comforted him during his final moments, as the sniper showed the Americans pictures of his family. Just before he closed his eyes forever, he offered the Americans his last cigarettes, which otherwise wouldn’t get smoked. All these experiences made a deep and lasting impression on Messmer. He would rarely ever speak of the war, but glimpses of it would surface in his art once he returned to America.
While Messmer was off fighting the war, Patrick Sullivan was in New York fighting a serious lawsuit. It started one day in April 1917, after Sullivan and another animator, Ernest Smythe, began flirting with two young girls they had spotted in a rented apartment opposite the studio, whistling and catcalling to them from across the courtyard. Dark-haired Alice McCleary and her blond friend Gladys Bowen were fourteen and fifteen, respectively, and had run away from home five days earlier. They were seeking an adventure in the city. The animators convinced the girls to meet them in a nearby bar and, once everyone was settled, ordered a round of crème de menthes. The girls sipped their bright green drinks and explained they wanted to be actresses. When Sullivan heard this, he turned on his charm and announced that he and Smythe were already in show business, as animators. Basking in the glow of the men’s celebrity, the girls agreed to go out again the next night. By the third night, Sullivan had convinced Alice to go out alone, just the two of them.
A week later, police showed up at the studio and arrested the animators. Smythe was charged with “abduction,” a charge eventually lowered to “impairing morals,” while Sullivan was charged with statutory rape. During the trial that followed, animator George Clardy testified that Sullivan had shown up the morning after his outing with Alice, bragging that “he had screwed the dark one.”
“He told me that if I didn’t undress he’d undress me,” Alice told the courtroom during the trial. “After he had intercourse with me the first time I bled,” she continued. “He got me a drink of water. Then he had intercourse with me again later on. Then he had intercourse with me again . . .” The next morning, Sullivan told her “that he had made a regular girl of me,” she quietly continued. The trial uncovered other details revealing that the encounter wasn’t consensual, not to mention that Alice was underage. After seeking help, Alice learned that she had also contracted a venereal disease, almost certainly from Sullivan.
Sullivan’s wife, Marjorie, asked the judge for leniency in a letter written on studio stationery and decorated with images of Sammy Johnsin. Sullivan’s lawyer