—DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN
Although Mrs. Goodwin was speaking of the War between the States, she accurately describes the post-World War II atmosphere at our studio.
These last eighteen or twenty years of the Warner Bros. Cartoons output have often been described as our Golden Age.* If so, we were blissfully and fortunately unaware of it. What we rather wanly hoped was that our cartoons would have a life expectancy of four or five years, because in those simple yet wonderfully creative years before television, we made films solely for theatrical release. Indeed, all the cartoons now shown on television as the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner shows, etc., were made for that purpose.
We were not allowed to preview our films, nor thankfully were there any such idiocies as demographics or Nielsen ratings. Just like Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd before us, we made films without any knowledge of or desire to know the human composition of our audiences.
Like our distinguished forebears, we made pictures for ourselves, believing with childlike innocence that if we laughed at and with each other, others perhaps would follow.
As was once pointed out, money cannot buy poverty, and money unfortunately cannot buy laughter either. At least at Warner Bros. Cartoons, no effort was exerted to do so. We were grotesquely underpaid, but we were being paid to do what we enjoyed doing. We were being paid to associate every day with people we loved and respected, people who were eager, excited, and joyfully willing to try almost anything.
The peculiarly wild, unbridled quality of the studio of that day was not confined to the animation stage—laughter is catching and extended clear to the front desk, where Ginger Morgan, our freckle-nosed, redhead receptionist, happily transposed Schlesinger Productions into an exalted, inadvertent (she said) spoonerism, Pleasanter Seductions, when answering the telephone.
If you entered the front door on Van Ness Avenue at 9:30 a.m. of this day, you might well have found yourself gently shouldered aside by a blond young man burdened by a 25-pound chunk of ice and a huge picnic basket, who enters the reception booth, kisses Ginger Morgan on the back of her neck, and addresses a small mirror on the wall, “If you see Cal Howard, tell him I want to see him immediately,” and tiptoes off down the hall. He is wearing one tennis shoe and one patent-leather pump.
“That’s Cal Howard,” Ginger says.
Ah, yes. Cal Howard. Cal Howard, writer, gagman, entrepreneur, and master of the unofficial Schlesinger Commissary.
Cal Howard’s Hot Dog Stand.
Mr. Howard’s boundless energy could never have been contained by a single job: if he had been a novelist during Prohibition, he would most certainly have run a speakeasy as the kind of calisthenic necessary to harness that energy. It was not so much a matter of extra money (although he never disdained pelf) as it was the joy of running a complete short-order diner under the ignorant nose of his superiors—a challenge too great to ignore for one of the most actively fecund minds of the Warner years.
Christmas party, Leon Schlesinger studio, 1934(?); 3.2 beer had just become legal, hence the suds
Starting with the fundamental tools of the writer—chairs, desk, bulletin board—Mr. Howard’s ingenuity converted his office into all the habiliments of a modern major bistro. His desk is a marvel of efficiency. All drawers are lined with zinc. One contains chopped ice, Coca-Cola, sacramental and Mogen David wines, Dr. Brown’s celery tonic, etc.; another, a spice-and-mustard cupboard including condiments, condoms, and explosives; another contains dishes, napery, cutlery; another, a wired warming oven for breadstuffs, cookies, bagels, and lasagna; the typewriter well houses a small efficiency electric stove.
All this is hidden within the desk itself, and at the advent of an enemy, only the price list on the wall need be reversed to a tasteful picture of Our Lord, signed “To my pal, Cal, from Jesus.” All other gastronomic equipment can be easily and quickly concealed simply by slamming the drawers.
And Mr. Howard need not attract a crowd to his bistro to function efficiently. A basket can be lowered from the upper floors by the attic-bound who are in need of nourishment. Cal points to the window: “Money comes down in a basket, provender goes up in the returning basket, simply a case of supply and demand. Basic stuff. But,” he adds darkly, “constant vigilance is the key to success in this exacting business.” There had been hijackings: two laden baskets had been diverted from their honest destinations by long metal hooks extended from adjoining windows.
Cal soon discouraged the raping of his baskets by switching a cargo that might be hijacked to one loaded solely with a lighted firecracker (truth being stranger than animation).
The only time Ray Katz, the studio’s slue-footed business manager, ever came remotely close to discovering Cal’s other life was when he entered his office one day just in time to see the upstairs basket being lowered outside the window.
Mr. Katz, whose intellect was far, far below that of sphagnum moss (more on that charming vegetable later), nevertheless was aware that baskets outside windows were something different, therefore suspicious. No doubt he had seen baskets before, or at least heard of them. Windows were old stuff, he’d seen windows. But baskets and windows together were quite possibly illegal. He pushed his fat blue head out the window to inspect the offending basket, fixed a pop-eyed glare at its contents: sixty cents in honest coin intended for the honest purchase of two hot dogs, two Cokes, and two aspirins. Mr. Katz, left to his druthers, would no doubt have been inclined to grab the money and run, hadn’t sterner duties prevailed. “Uh?” he asked. A long speech for Mr. Katz.
Wile E. Coyote at his wiliest: READY, SET, ZOOM! (1955)
Cal Howard glanced up inquiringly from his diligently story-sketching fingers. “Ah, yes,” he
