Art: Focused by Fabrice Poussin

IT COULD HAVE HAPPENED

In 1958, or maybe 1959, Daddy put me in the cab of his dented pickup. We drove to KEY-T TV studios in Santa Barbara so I could meet my grandfather. Daddy had grown up an only child, raised by his mother, and had little contact with his cartoonist father, Frank Webb, Sr.

My grandfather and the last of his many wives produced a TV show, “Let’s Draw With Frank Webb.” Aside from Daddy’s beer-laden stories of cleaning Debby Reynolds’ swimming pool, this was my first brush with someone famous.

My grandfather’s wife Valerie was what they then called a blonde bombshell. She sang like an angel, her voice performing for Cappy, the puppet who sat atop my grandfather’s easel.

“Your pencils are sharp,” she’d say. “Now what’s today’s lesson?”

My grandfather smiled into the camera, talked to kids at home, and turned a squiggly line into a lively cartoon.

One time he asked if I’d like to be his assistant. Me? On TV?  He’d already given me an autographed book from his Let’s Draw series. That day elevated me above buckteeth and Slinky-coiled hair.

My grandfather was a well-known syndicated newspaper cartoonist, though his comic strips appeared years before I was born. (Kartoon Kollege, 1940-1 and Raising Kane until 1944.) I believe he created Goofy, partly because he was a Disney studio animator in the 1930s, but mostly because he said so.

While film animator Art Babbitt (The Three Little Pigs, 1933; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937, Fantasia, 1940, etc.) gets credit for creating the anthropomorphic dog with a southern drawl and gullible optimism, several sources attribute ‘original concept drawings’ to my grandfather.

When I was older, he shared tales of his hard-drinking days when he palled around with Hollywood legends: John Barrymore, lionized for roles Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the 1920 silent horror film, and swashbuckler Errol Flynn in Robin Hood, 1938; Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., director Raoul Walsh, and other carousers. They dubbed themselves The Bundy Drive Gang. (Bundy, a street just north of Sunset Boulevard.)

My grandfather told me about a bizarre prank pulled off by his crazy friends, pegging Barrymore as the instigator in all things depraved, surviving silent films into talkies, only to succumb to cirrhosis of the liver and kidney failure in 1942. He was 60 years old.

Distraught by the death of his friend, Flynn drank himself into near-unconsciousness at LA’s famed Cock’n Bull pub. Things really turned wacky when a boozed up Raoul Walsh drove to Pierce Brothers Mortuary and bribed the parlor director.

My grandfather chuckled. “Those were the days!”

According to the tale, Walsh headed to Flynn’s mansion with Barrymore’s corpse in the backseat. I can only imagine how macabre the drive must have been. But then, it was a cool night so maybe there wasn’t much of an odor.

Back at Flynn’s mansion, Walsh is claimed to have roused the sleeping butler. “Mr. Barrymore’s drunk – so lend me a hand.”

The butler is said to have replied, “I think he’s dead.”

Here, it gets even wackier.

Walsh asked the butler to go to the kitchen for a cup of hot coffee to sober up the super-star stiff.  Not too long later, Flynn stumbled home from the pub. He’d barely sunk into his favorite chair when his butler appeared from the kitchen. “Here’s Mr. Barrymore’s coffee.”

With that, Flynn realized his dead friend was posed on the couch. “Get him out of here! You’re going to get all of us put in San Quentin!”

My grandfather didn’t recall who drove Barrymore back to the funeral parlor. Or if the mortician really said, “Why, if I’d have known you were going to take him up there, I would have put a better suit on him!’”

A version of this story appears in Errol Flynn’s memoir My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1959). A lot of ink was given to someone unnamed, though it’s impossible to know if that someone was Frank Webb, Sr.

After my grandfather died, Valerie sent me his well-worn leather vest, the one he sported when working in his studio. On the back, a colorful cartoon that resembles a human Goofy—buckteeth, bulbous nose, and a green pen tucked behind his ear.

Early images of Disney’s Goofy always show him in a vest.