Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [126]
The two worked on Walker’s drawing, Eisner adding touches that made the bear more endearing, more squeezable. The drawings were turned over to Kermit Love, the master puppeteer and major influence to Jim Henson, and Love brought the bear to life. Snuggle the Bear became the fabric company’s longest-running symbol.
As soon as he saw his first Snuggle commercial, Eisner called Walker.
“They chose the goddamn bear,” he declared, clearly pleased with his role in seeing the idea through fruition. “I told you I was right, Johnny.”
He paused for a moment, then asked: “Do we get royalties on this?”
According to Ann Eisner, her husband showed very little interest in balancing his personal checkbook—she managed the household’s finances—but as a professional, from his earliest days with Eisner & Iger through his final day on earth, Eisner kept a close watch on where the money was coming from and how it was being spent. In the years following the Depression, when he was running his comics studios, he earned a reputation for pinching pennies—using scraps of discarded paper as notepaper or even using pencil extenders to prolong the lives of the nubs that passed as pencils. Employees such as Bob Powell, Lou Fine, and Jules Feiffer battled him over their salaries, and Feiffer referred to him as a “stingy boss.” Eisner never disputed his reputation. When reminded of the Feiffer quote, he laughed and admitted, “Oh, that’s true. Jules and I used to argue over nickels all the time.”
Because of his publisher-artist relationship with Eisner, Denis Kitchen had occasion to see Eisner in action, professionally and privately. Pete Eisner, Kitchen said, would calculate the royalty payment to the exact decimal point, rather than rounding off the numbers, which resulted in at least one almost surreal experience.
“His brother must have calculated it to twelve decimal points,” Kitchen remembered, “and when we sent a check and a statement, Pete compared it to the contract and said, ‘You’re thirty-seven cents short.’ I said, ‘You gotta be kidding me.’ I mean, I sent him a check for three thousand dollars, and he says it’s thirty-seven cents short. I said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ He said, ‘Send a check.’ He was punctilious when it came to that sort of thing. I learned to live with it.
“After I first met Will,” Kitchen continued, “I went to White Plains and was their houseguest for a weekend. They took me out to dinner to this very fancy, expensive place, and Ann was exceptionally generous. We got the menu and Ann said, ‘Do you like lobster?’ I said, ‘Well, I very, very rarely have it, Ann. It’s just too expensive. Where I live, it’s kind of a specialty.’ She said, ‘Order the lobster.’ I could see Will kind of raise his eyebrow. And then—and I’ll never forget this—she said, ‘You’re a growing boy. I bet you could eat two lobsters.’ I said, ‘Well, I probably could.’ She said, ‘Well, order two.’ This time I saw Will’s brow furrow, and there were serious wrinkles in the brow. It was subtle. He just thought it was excessive, and he was picking up the tab. I was paying him a lot of money then, and certainly a lobster, two lobsters, was a tiny fraction of what I’d been paying him. But nonetheless, it was the principle for him.”
Kitchen reasoned that much of Eisner’s frugality was the result of his Depression-era upbringing and the struggles his family had faced when Sam Eisner couldn’t find work. Kitchen noted, as did others, that Eisner could be as generous as he was frugal. He had supported his family, put his sister through college, and, through his shops, provided the livelihoods for numerous families.
Eliot Gordon, who married Eisner’s sister, Rhoda, recalled how a newly