Nothing Funny About Sad Life Of Daffy Duck Creator

The aspiring cartoonist told his friends on Jan. 17, 1928 to go on back to Dallas without him because he had decided to stay in sunny California.  Since his mother was a distant descendant of the “Law West of the Pecos,” she christened her blessed event Frederick Bean Avery.  He was born at Taylor in 1908 but grew up in Big D graduating from North Dallas High School.

     The aspiring cartoonist told his friends on Jan. 17, 1928 to go on back to Dallas without him because he had decided to stay in sunny California.

    Since his mother was a distant descendant of the “Law West of the Pecos,” she christened her blessed event Frederick Bean Avery.  He was born at Taylor in 1908 but grew up in Big D graduating from North Dallas High School.

    With his athletic good looks and love of the outdoors, people were always surprised to learn that Fred Avery had his heart set on a career as a cartoonist.  The ink was still wet on his diploma, when he signed up for a summer course at a Chicago art institute.  But after a month of still-life sketching, he packed his bags and caught the next train for Texas.

    Waving good-bye to his buddies in the winter of 1928, Avery survived for several months by loading produce trucks and falling asleep to the sound of the surf.  Recalling his adventure as a stranger in California many years later, he smiled, “You would be surprised how warm and soft a beach is after working all night.”

    Failing to find a buyer for his comic strip, the Texan went to work as an assistant animator with the Walter Lantz Studio.  To him the ground-floor opportunity was only a necessary evil, a way to keep body and soul together until the day he made it big in the funny papers.

    But that day never came, and Tex – a nickname coined by unimaginative co-workers – eventually resolved to give animation his best shot.  His prospects were decidedly dim due to the freely admitted fact that he was “never too great an artist.  Most of those fellows at Lantz’s could draw rings around me.”

    The loss of an eye in a freak office accident put Avery at an even greater disadvantage and changed forever his disposition.  Gone was the life of the party with self-confidence to spare replaced by a brooding introvert with an inferiority complex.

    Convinced he was finished as an artist, Avery jumped at the chance to master every phase of production.  He was a dream come true for his lazy boss, who gave the eager beaver everything but his paycheck including complete charge of two cartoons in his fifth and final year with Lantz.

    As soon as his debut flicks were in the can, Avery jumped ship for an all-or-nothing, one-film tryout with Warner Brothers.  The classic Gold Diggers of ’49 so impressed producer Leon Schlesinger that he hired the 27 year old as his third animation director.

    For the next seven years, Avery and his madcap crew worked out of a small frame building dubbed “Termite Terrace.”  Only in retrospect did three-time Academy Award winner Chuck Jones recognize the unique talent of his former boss.  “I was as ignorant of his genius as I suppose Michelangelo’s apprentices were oblivious to the fact that they too were working with a genius.”

    Conceding the child market to Disney, Avery appealed to older moviegoers with a frantic gag-filled pace and adult humor that sometimes flirted with the risqué.  His wisecracking characters broke the stodgy mold with sarcastic adlibs and handheld signs that poked fun at the story as well as the audience.

    Avery created Daffy Duck, supposedly a native of Dallas’ White Rock Lake, and transformed a couple of extras into big-time stars – Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig.  Until the rabbit underwent a personality transplant in A Wild Hare (1940), he was “just Daffy Duck in a rabbit suit.”  Student slang at North Dallas High inspired Bugs’ trademark greeting “What’s up, Doc?”

    Angered by a two-month suspension for insubordination, Avery quit Warner Brothers in 1941 for the greener pastures of MGM.  He more than paid his own way with an average annual output of five cartoons over the next 13 years.

    Although many of his features – Northwest Hounded Police, Red Hot Riding Hood, Slap Happy Lion, King Size Canary and Swing Shift Cinderella to name just a few – are considered masterpieces, Avery took a backseat to William Hanna and Joe Barbera, whose Tom and Jerry series collected seven Oscars.  To compete with his rivals, the insecure workaholic rarely went home and even put off trips to the bathroom, a self-destructive practice that on one occasion necessitated the insertion of a catheter to drain his bladder.

    When MGM let him go in 1954, Avery was already burned out.  While Hanna and Barbera were taking television by storm with their own production company, he spun his wheels for 20 years cranking out commercials.

    Avery’s private life was in worse shape than his career.  His marriage did not survive the drug overdose death of his son, and he lived alone in a shabby apartment.

    Tex Avery drew his last breath on Aug. 26, 1980 in the same California hospital, where Walt Disney died 14 years earlier.  At his funeral, he was eulogized as “a leader who never established a studio, never tried to do anything but make good films.”  And, most of all, he made millions laugh in a world that is not very funny.

    Bartee Haile welcomes your comments, questions and suggestions at haile@pdq.net or P.O. Box 152, Friendswood, TX 77549.  And come on by www.twith.com for a visit!