ESSAYS

The Mysterious Dumbo Roll-A-Book

When I wrote in a January 14, 2010, post about the history of the black crows in Dumbo, I reached back as far as the 102-page treatment that Joe Grant and Dick Huemer submitted to Walt Disney in the early months of 1940, in installments. But Dumbo's history goes back further than that, as Huemer himself acknowledged in his interview with Joe Adamson, part of which I published in Funnyworld No. 17. Adamson asked, "Where's the story that Dumbo comes from?" and Huemer replied:

I never saw it, but they say it was on a little strip that was given away on a cereal box. Or maybe it was even printed on the outside, I don't know. But it had the basic elements of the story: the little elephant who had big ears, was made fun of, learned to fly, and was redeemed. All in just a few panels. Well, we took it from there, had a few story meetings, then Joe Grant and I wrote it up a chapter a time and submitted it to Walt. He used to come down and say, "That's coming along good,. We'll make it!"

Then we got sketch men and story men and went to work and put together what we call a Leica reel. A Leica reel was a way of presenting a storyboard with the individual pictures on a filmstrip that was run through a Leica projector. You'd flip over a picture and talk about it, then flip over the next. ...

This was how we often held a story meeting. Sometimes we had rough Leica reels in pencil, and later we would make a color reel.

Adamson: When you first got Dumbo, what form was it in?

Huemer: Somebody had started working on it and there were quite a few sketches that I remember, but no storyboards yet. Mostly talk, getting together with Walt, and taking notes, and studying them. Dumbo was put aside a while to concentrate on another picture, I suppose, then Joe Grant and I picked it up.

Although I talked with Joe Grant about Dumbo on several occasions, I was surprised to find that I don't seem to have asked him about that "little strip" that Huemer mentioned. He did speak about it to the New York Times, though, in 1999, six years before his death at the age of ninety-six, and he said that he had seen the "strip," even though Huemer hadn't. Grant said, in the Times' paraphrase, that the "story and about a dozen illustrations appeared on a small, short scroll that was built into a box. ... Mr. Grant said he remembered seeing only one 'Dumbo' box-and-scroll, the one that was used in making the movie. 'It was sort of a little novelty idea, he said. 'As you rolled this little wheels on top, the pictures would appear like they would in a film.'"

That original version of Dumbo was copyrighted in 1939 as a "Roll-A-Book" by the company of that name. The Copyright Office's card catalog includes a registration for the book that reads as follows:

Dumbo, the flying elephant

Roll-a-book publishers, Inc.

550 Erie Blvd., W.

Syracuse [New York]

Publication date: 4/17/39

Registration date (and copies received date): 4/29/39.

The authors' names are listed as follows, in brackets: [Pearl, Helen, and Pearl, Harold]. Helen Pearl was the author known very soon afterwards as Helen Aberson—after a divorce, I believe, although I haven't yet located the record of that divorce. At the time of her death on April 3, 1999, at the age of ninety-one, she was married to Richard Mayer and was known as Helen Aberson Mayer. The New York Times, reporting on her death, did not mention a marriage to Pearl. The Times identified her in a headline as "Dumbo's creator."

The Times said—citing Helen Aberson Mayer's son, Andrew Mayer, as its source—that Pearl illustrated the story rather than wrote any of it, even though he was listed as its co-author. Pearl himself, however, writing as "Hal Pearl" in a bylined article in the Miami Daily News for November 2, 1941, described how "we" had written Dumbo, inspired by the example of Munro Leaf's Ferdinand (also made into a cartoon, of course, as the first Disney short to be based on a licensed property). Pearl, who was living in Miami at the time, never makes clear in his piece whether he is using the authorial "we" or is referring to his actual co-author, who goes unnamed. It's hard not to believe that spite was at work.

As to what a Roll-A-Book looked like, Peter Hale has provided the answer by sending me a link to the patent for the Roll-A-Book. This is the first of the five pages, illustrating the "display device."

Peter writes:

Funny, but I'd always pictured it scrolling from right-to-left, landscape-style, rather than up—but then this way the format looks more like a book.

Patent applied for November 2, 1938, granted June 20, 1939. Even assuming the publishers had started production before the patent was applied for, it would seem they couldn't have published many Roll-A-Book titles before Disney picked up Dumbo.

That's surely correct. Walt Disney's desk diary for 1939, which I reviewed at the Disney Archives in 1993, shows his first meeting on Dumbo as taking place in Joe Grant's Model Department on June 27, 1939, one week after the patent was granted to Roll-A-Book Publishers, Inc., and a little more than two months after the Dumbo the Flying Elephant Roll-A-Book was officially published. The desk diary shows Walt viewing a Dumbo Leica reel in "Joe's room"—Joe Grant's, that is—on August 29, 1939.

That Leica reel was presumably made by someone other than Grant and Huemer, when Dumbo was still envisioned as a short cartoon. The sketches at the top of this page, and the sketch of Dumbo with "Dr. I. Hoot," the owl psychiatrist at the left, date from this early phase of story work. All were published in 1942 in Robert D. Feild's book The Art of Walt Disney, as was the (presumably later) color sketch of Dumbo and Timothy Mouse.

(As Huemer remembered, there was also at least one Dumbo Leica reel made after he and Grant began submitting their chapter-by-chapter treatment in January 1940. There's a reference to such a Dumbo reel in the 1940 desk diary; Walt saw part of a sequence as a Leica reel on June 24, when work on the feature was well under way.)

There's reason to wonder if Dumbo the Flying Elephant was ever really published in its Roll-A-Book format—that is, made available for purchase by the public at large. The Walt Disney Archives had no copy of the Roll-A-Book version when I was doing research there in the 1990s, and Dave Smith, the Disney archivist, told me in 1997 that there was no copy in the company's "main files," either; those are the files of continuing legal significance, and as such have always been barred to researchers. The Dumbo Roll-A-Book is a "mystery book" that no one seems to have seen, at least not since 1939.

It seems likely that the the Dumbo Roll-A-Book never went on public sale once Disney bought the rights to the story. There's support for that idea in Time's highly accurate article about Dumbo in the issue of December 29, 1941, which says that the story was bought in manuscript, and also in what Milt Gray and I were told by John Clarke Rose.

A native of the San Diego area, Rose was a commercial artist in New York City and then worked for two advertising agencies; he oversaw Procter & Gamble's advertising on such early radio soap operas as Vic and Sade. He joined the Disney story department in 1936—he told Milt he met Walt at a party—and according to a 1961 resumé he was at the time of Dumbo "Story Editor and Story Research Director for all Disney productions, both features and shorts." Those titles may have been somewhat inflated—Dick Huemer once wrote to me of Rose's "fantastic displays of misdirected energy"—and Rose himself said, "I think I was generally known on the lot as the manager of the story department. ... Walt considered me the head of the story research department, as the studio grew." But there is no reason to doubt that he had a great deal to do with Dumbo's becoming a Disney property. Rose wrote to me in March 1978, after reading Huemer's memories of Dumbo in Funnyworld No. 17:

I was also amused by my old friend Dick Huemer's uncertainty over Dumbo's origin. As the guy who recommended that delightful story to Walt (after I found it serving to demonstrate a new children's novelty item, about to come on the market and called "Roll-A-Book"), I could fill in the background that Dick didn't know about. That Roll-A-Book product had a little handle for presenting an unwinding story through a cut-out window shaped like a movie screen—and the sample story was the basic plot-line of Dumbo, written by a schoolteacher in Buffalo, as I recall. [Actually, Helen Aberson was from Syracuse, New York, and her Times obituary does not mention any work as a teacher, saying instead that after graduating from Syracuse University in 1929 she was host of a radio program and "later did clerical work in Manhattan."] So far as I know the novelty product was never actually manufactured in any quantity, but for sure I promptly acquired the rights to that schoolteacher's little story when Walt shared my recognition of its possibilities.

Milt Gray interviewed Rose later that month, as part of the research for my book Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, and Rose enlarged on his memories of Dumbo. The Roll-A-Book had come to his attention, he believed, through Kay Kamen, the marketing genius who licensed the vast array of Disney products:

Kay had, I think, first been approached in New York by these people who were going to merchandise this new toy, a cardboard book-shaped business with this little wheel that wound up what was virtually like toilet paper, with the story unfolding in a frame-dimensional opening. To demonstrate this Roll-A-Book, they had to have a story, and I discovered this was a story we could damned well use, for production—forget the Roll-A-Book, per se. [The story] had been written by a school teacher in, I think, Buffalo [sic], and maybe somebody else was involved; but let's say it was an amateur, an imaginative somebody who I figured had been influenced by "The Ugly Duckling." And there it was, a beautiful story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.I probably told Kay that the Roll-A-Book per se was beyond my province, but that I damned well was going to propose [the story] to Walt. ... It was not a feature-length story; it was going to take a hell of a lot of padding—well, not padding, development, and extension, and imaginative input that I knew our guys, particularly my Otto [Englander], would provide. So when Dick [Huemer] said that he and [Joe] Grant had received something on which there had been preliminary work, it was Otto with whom I had consulted. ... I discussed Dumbo with Otto, and was delighted to find that Otto responded to it personally and was eager to go, for the creative opportunity that it afforded.

Was the display device that the patent covered, and that Rose saw, ever manufactured and sold with other Roll-A-Books? Not that I can tell, so far, but that's a question that I may not be able to answer until after my next visit to the U.S. Copyright Office in Washington.

Dumbo made many other book appearances, of course, the first as a Disney property in 1941. Getting that first book into print was not entirely a smooth process, as evidenced by a letter I came across in the Disney Archives. On March 28, 1940—around the time that Grant and Huemer finished writing their treatment of the story—John Rose wrote to Franklin Waldheim, a Disney lawyer in New York, "that upon my return to the coast, I discovered that DUMBO is definitely shaping into a feature production; in fact, at this stage [it] is so different from the original story that we are afraid the Aberson book will suffer once the picture is released and subsequent book versions of the picture are published. ...

"The new studio-created DUMBO text will run considerably longer than [the book versions of] either SNOW WHITE or PINOCCHIO. ... DUMBO is approximately 28,000 words. Helen Aberson's original DUMBO runs approximately 4,500 words. Ours is not only over five times as long but it also includes many brand new characters and situations."

I haven't made a word count of the Grant-Huemer treatment, but Rose surely had the treatment in mind when he mentioned the word count for the "studio-created" text, and it seems likely that "Aberson's original" was not the version of Dumbo on the Roll-A-Book roll—could any such roll have held that many words?—but a new version that she wrote after she knew of Rose's interest, and perhaps of Walt's. Here, as so often with Dumbo, guesswork is simply unavoidable.

Rose wanted to renegotiate the deal with the authors and "O'Hara," their agent or attorney, with the apparent goal of reducing their royalty participation and their credit in the book, but he was evidently not successful. The 1941 book, the earliest book version of Dumbo in the Disney Archives' collection when I was there in the '90s, is titled Dumbo the Flying Elephant and shows Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl as the authors. Published by Whitman—that is, by Disney's longtime licensee Western Printing & Lithographing Company—it bears two copyrights: 1939 by The Roll-A-Book Publishers, Inc., and 1941 by Walt Disney Productions.

The 1941 book's story, which has obvious similarities to the early sketches reproduced in Feild's Art of Walt Disney, tells of the collapse of the elephant pyramid and Dumbo's consignment to the clowns. Dumbo leaves in disgrace and is befriended by a robin named Red, who takes him to an owl psychiatrist, Prof. Hoot Owl. When Dumbo tells him that he dreams of flying, the owl tells him to go ahead and fly. They climb to the top of a cliff and Dumbo flies, with Red's encouragement. Then he surprises everyone at the circus by flying when he jumps from the platform—again with Red's encouragement.

The cartoon story is, if I need say it, a much stronger handling of the same basic ideas.

(The accompanying illustration is from the amazon.com page for the 1941 edition, which is for some reason identified there as a paperback. The illustration was posted by an amazon customer, and I can't guarantee that it's actually the cover of the 1941 edition—I saw that book too many years ago to be absolutely sure—but it looks right to me.)

Aberson's son spoke after her death of her working at the Disney studio from 1939 to 1941, but that may have been based on a misunderstanding on his part. The Times quoted Dave Smith, the Disney archivist, as saying that there was no record of her working for Disney, and I've never run across her name in any studio documents. The only record I've found of so much as an Aberson visit to the studio is an entry in Walt's desk diary for November 19, 1941, a few weeks after Dumbo's New York premiere. The entry for 11 o'clock that morning reads as follows: "Mrs. Pearl (co-author Dumbo)  Mr. Rose - First introduced Dumbo."

As for John Rose, after army service in World War II he was involved with a string of musical, radio, and television projects, culminating in the film that he wrote and produced for release by Warner Bros. in 1964: The Incredible Mr. Limpet, the combination animation/live-action feature starring Don Knotts.

A footnote: Syracuse University, Helen Aberson Mayer's alma mater, holds the papers of Helen R. Durney, whose "biographical history" on the university library's Web site includes the following: "Artist and illustrator Helen Durney (?-1970) is best known for her illustrations of Harold and Helen (Aberson) Pearl's story 'Dumbo the Flying Elephant.' Sold to the Walt Disney Corporation in 1939, the story was first published by the Roll-A-Book Company of Syracuse, New York." Here's a description of the Durney collection:

Spanning 1934 to 1942, the Helen R. Durney Papers comprises correspondence, artwork, writings, and memorabilia of the American illustrator. Correspondence consists of miscellaneous correspondence from 1939. Artwork contains Dumbo material as well as sketches for other projects including the Percy Hughes School murals. Writings contains articles, a list of illustrations and promotional ideas for "Dumbo," copies of Durney's column for Design Magazine, and a transcript of her radio program over station WFBL of Syracuse. Memorabilia contains galley proofs for two "Dumbo" books, including the original Roll-a-Book version, and one published copy of "Walt Disney's Dumbo of the Circus," along with articles, clippings, an exhibit catalog, and some artwork by others.

I'm not aware that anyone has examined that material, at least not to report on it through the Web or a printed source, and I know from long experience that such collections can often be very disappointing. I would bet that the galley proofs and such are from the 1941 edition, rather than the original 1939 Roll-A-Book. But still....

[Posted February 4, 2010]