A Crowded Life in Comics –

It All Started with Alice –

My Friendship with Virginia Davis

by Rick Marschall

Brochure cover page of the original Alice cartoons of Walt Disney

“It All Started with a Mouse” is a legend, logo, saying that is marketed at Disney theme parks and elsewhere – this colossal enterprise all around you, all around the world, really the Disney behemoth, all commenced with a simple cartoon mouse. 

Presenting Ginni Davis with a directors’ jacket embroidered with image

 of the original Alice in Cartoonland promotional image

In fact it really began before that, and there might not have been a “Disney” empire, nor a Mickey Mouse himself, if it had not been for a little girl from Kansas named Virginia Davis. I was blessed, during my Crowded Life in Comics, to know Ginnie, and even to introduce her to cartoon fans in Rome and in San Diego, and play a little role in shining the spotlight on her career in her last years.

She was not in complete obscurity when my old friend John Province made contact with her. Her Disney years were long in the rear-view mirror, and she lived in semi-retirement as a real-estate agent in Boise, Idaho. She was a footnote in some studies; mentioned at festivals; and received attention in the book Walt in Wonderland, published in Italy and co-published by an academic press in the US. But unjustly, not a household name.

 Virginia Davis, Rick Marschall, Jassanne Wallace 

of the Circle Gallery

John tracked Ginni down and I immediately assigned him to interview her for an early issue of Hogan’s Alley.

For those of you who don’t know the name Virginia Davis, I shall not get further ahead of myself. She was born in 1918 in Kansas City, and her family were neighbors of Walt Disney. He was a struggling cartoonist and aspiring animator, producing primitive Laugh-O-Gram commercials for merchants advertising in local motion-picture theaters. He aspired to make cartoon shorts for a national audience and conceived the novelty idea of having a live-action character cavort in an animated world – the opposite, really, of the popular Out Of the Inkwell series of the Bray Studio and managed thereafter by the Fleischer Brothers.

Exhibitors Trade Review, Mar-May 1924

Disney asked the Davises if their five-year-old daughter Virginia would play Alice in the Alice in Cartoonland series he envisioned. The first, Alice’s Wonderland, became his sample, sent to distributor Margaret J Winkler in New York. She and her husband Charles Mintz had success with Pat Sullivan’s Felix the Cat cartoons. 

At ExpoCartoon, Rome, Italy: Rick Marschall; Virginia Davis; Andrea Felice, 

for whose definitive history of Disney’s Silly Symphonies I had written a chapter.

In short order, Winkler ordered a series of Alice cartoons; Disney moved to Hollywood (invited by his convalescing brother Roy, and enticed by their uncle’s offer of his garage that could serve as their studio); and Walt asked if the Davises would move to California on the promise of multiple films in which Ginnie would star… 

At Comicon: Mike Peters (political cartoons, Mother Goose and Grimm); 

Rick Marschall; Virginia Davis 

The Davis family indeed moved West. Little Virginia starred in 14 Alice comedies (Disney produced 57 in all) and through the years remained close to the movie industry, if not swimming in the middle of that stream. She auditioned for the voice of Snow White; Walt himself had the studio train her for the ink-and-paint department, and she appeared in a few movies, like The Harvey Girls and Three On a Match. 

John Province and Virginia Davis

Oh, and another of myriad footnotes to her fascinating story: when the Davis parents needed their final household items and their Cadillac brought to Hollywood, they asked another Kansas City friend, who agreed for the task… and he never really left Hollywood afterward. That friend was Ub Iwerks. After chicanery and other factors caused Walt to move from Alice to Oswald the Rabbit to… Steamboat Willie, it was Iwerks whose conceptualization of Mickey Mouse and, later, technical and thematic innovations, made him an animation pioneer in Disney’s echelon.

Virginia was in her spry eighties when I met her. She was grateful for the Hogan’s Alley interview; I invited her as a special guest to ExpoCartoon in Rome, the breakaway festival of Lucca. The director Rinaldo Traini usually issued two invitations to America guests, and Ginnie brought her teenage granddaughter. Virginia Davis was feted grandly and received a special Yellow Kid award.

Ginni Davis at the Hogan’s Alley table signing autographs, 

Comicon 1995

When Hogan’s Alley was new I invited special guests to appear at our Comicon table and in special programs. One year it was Ginnie; and the magazine arranged a special evening in her honor at the Old Town Circle Gallery in San Diego. I had several directors’ jackets embroidered with an image from an Alice cartoon, the early Disney logo, and the legend “It All Started With a Mouse” crossed out to read, “It All Started with the Alice Comedies.”

 At venues in America and Italy I hosted Ginni in interview 

sessions and walking fans through her cartoons

It is a treat, a rare privilege, to know someone who embodies a rich heritage. Virginia Davis was the last surviving link with the seminal days of Walt Disney; she was “walking history,” in a literal sense. Humble, giggly… not too far, I often thought when with her, from the little girl in pigtails who was a star before anyone ever heard of Mickey Mouse.

🐭

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