At 92, Artist Still Animated : Walter Lantz is busy autographing cels, raising funds for charity : and enthusiastically recalling many years in Hollywood

Walter Lantz turned 92 on April 27. And it is characteristic of this grand old man of the art of animated film that he still loves a laugh as much as he did when he started drawing newspaper comics in 1914.

Ask Lantz what Hollywood was like in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and he’ll tell story after story, complete with names, dates and places. Then, as he finishes, he’ll crack a pixieish smile and apologize if he has forgotten someone’s name. “This is what happens when you’re 92 years old. So if I forgot anything really important, please forgive me.” He buttons off the line with a typically broad chuckle.

Saturday through May 25, Lantz--the creator of Woody Woodpecker, Chilly Willy, Andy Panda and a long lineup of familiar cartoon characters--will be at La Galerie art gallery at Universal Studios Hollywood. He will autograph copies of his biography and animation art cels that have been bought at the gallery. In addition, La Galerie will have a special showing and sale of Lantz’s original oil paintings and what he calls oilgraphs. The latter--Lantz’s own invention--are signed photos of his paintings that have been individually brush-stroked with the same oil paints used in the originals.

He has been making similar autograph-signing appearances at Universal for the last two years, greeting and chatting with admirers ranging from toddlers to grandparents.

“We’re trying to bring the legends of Hollywood to our tourist audience,” says John Poorman, vice president of merchandising for Universal Studios. “As one of the pioneers of animation, Walter is as authentic a Hollywood legend as there is. His last appearance produced one of the best audience responses we’ve ever experienced. He’s been so popular, in fact, that we’ve had to limit his autograph-signing to material that’s bought at the time he’s in attendance.”

Lantz has played an important role in the development of animated film almost since the art’s inception. His reminiscences are colorful evocations of the history of cartooning, dating to the time when he made his first short subjects at New York City’s Hearst Studios at the age of 18.

“We didn’t have any animation cameras in those days,” he says, “just Hearst-type newsreel cameras, and that’s what we used. They were like a big wooden box. No motors, just a chain and a crank. We’d put the animation cel down and hold it down with a piece of glass and a lever. We’d press the lever to smooth the cel out so it didn’t have any wrinkles, set the exposure, turn the crank and make a picture.”

Lantz laughs as he recalls his early years. “I must have made a hundred short pictures like that in New York before I came to Hollywood.”

Many of those early, seemingly primitive efforts in fact anticipated by more than half a century the live action-animation combinations of contemporary films such as “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”

“We used to do it all the time,” Lantz says. “We’d shoot some live action scenes, then we’d make 8-by-10 photographs from the negatives of our live-action film. I’d take one of the photos, put a piece of very transparent paper over the photograph and draw my character to fit. Then we’d photograph the cel and the photograph. About 3,000 photographs for one of the short films we were making.”

Lantz refined the process when Hearst shut down in 1918, and he moved to the Bray Studios. He was obliged to serve as artist, animator, director and actor.

“It was hard work, but I was 18 years old; I had lots of energy and it was a lot of fun.”

By the mid-’20s, the animation business in New York City was beginning to dry up. Prospects looked far better on the West Coast.

“One day I got a call from Bob Vignola, who had been one of the directors at Hearst’s 125th Street studio.”

Vignola, who had gone west to direct Marion Davies films, urged Lantz to come to Hollywood. Lantz decided to give it a try, and once in Los Angeles moved from the Hal Roach studios to Mack Sennett to Universal. In each case, strokes of luck appeared to work in his favor.

“Shortly after I moved out there, my pal Frank Capra and I were both rooming at the Hollywood Athletic Club. He told me Sennett had a World War I picture in which a bunch of soldiers were supposed to be scared by a giant cootie bug. Sennett wanted the cootie to be animated, but nobody in Hollywood seemed to know how to do it.

“Well, I said, ‘Gosh, I’ve been doing that kind of stuff for years in New York.’ So I met the director, he gave me the live action shot and I animated a cootie--all it was, was a black spot with six legs walking across the screen. The soldiers in the scene took one look at it and over the horizon they went. It was pretty funny.

“Anyhow,” Lantz says, “I made the damn thing in about a week and showed it to Capra. He said, ‘Don’t show it to the old man. He won’t appreciate it if he thinks you did it in just a week.’

“So I kept it for two or three weeks and then brought Sennett into a projection room to see it. Now the old man used to chew tobacco, and the secret was that when he didn’t spit, he liked the picture. But if he started spitting halfway across the room, you knew you were in trouble.

“Well, he didn’t spit through the whole scene. And after he stopped laughing, he said, ‘How’d you like a job in the story department?’ And that’s how I got started at Sennett.”

Lantz’s move to Universal was equally informal. He had been doing some animation work for a producer named Sam van Ronkel, who owned a large Rolls-Royce and was strongly intimidated by it. Lantz had labored in a garage when he was 14 and felt comfortable driving almost anything. He gave van Ronkel a hand with the driving as an entree to Hollywood’s inner circles.

“Van Ronkel used to play poker every Thursday with all the big shots in Hollywood--like Louis B. Mayer, Zukor and Carl Laemmle,” Lantz says. “I used to drive him to the parties and sit around and watch them play. I didn’t know an ace of spades from a club, but they had a beautiful buffet, and I liked that. So that’s where I met Carl Laemmle, who was the head of Universal.” (At that time, Mayer was head of Metro Goldwyn Mayer, and Adolph Zukor was head of Paramount.)

“A little while later,” Lantz says, “I drove van Ronkel down to Ensenada for some gambling. Laemmle was there, and he liked to play roulette. He’d have the dealer bring the table to his suite, and every time I was there he’d always win. So he said to me, ‘Son, you’re my lucky spot.’ ”

When Laemmle decided to set up his own cartoon studio in 1928, van Ronkel suggested he hire Lantz--for luck. It was the start of an association between Universal and Lantz that would last for more than 60 years.

Lantz’s most memorable character--the raucous but ultimately endearing Woody Woodpecker--came to life during a honeymoon at Lake Sherwood after Lantz married actress Gracie Stafford.

“We kept hearing this knock, knock, knock on the roof,” Lantz says. “And I said to Gracie, ‘What the hell is that?’ So I went out and looked, and here’s this woodpecker drilling holes in the shingles. And we had asbestos shingles, not wood. So, to show you how smart these woodpeckers are, they’d peck a hole in the asbestos shingles and put in an acorn. A worm would develop in the acorn, and a week later the woodpecker would come back, get the acorn and fly away, letting out this noisy scream as he flew away.”

Gracie Lantz suggested that Walter try making the woodpecker into one of his cartoon characters. Walter wasn’t so sure.

“I was doing Oswald Rabbit at the time,” he says, “and we were working mostly with animals. But I figured I’d give it a try. So I made a few drawings, took the idea in to the studio and talked it over with some of the boys. Alex Lovy, one of my best artists, worked on it, and Bugs Hardaway developed a story.”

The result was Woody’s debut appearance, “Knock Knock.” Lantz sent a copy of the picture to Universal’s short-subject department in New York City, and was startled by the response:

“The head of the department called and said, ‘Walter, you’re out of your head. This character’s lousy. He’s too rough, too wild.’ And Woody was pretty wild in that first model, with cockeyed teeth, big fat legs and a long bill. But I told the guy, ‘Look, it’s my nickel. So just give it a try.’ Well, Woody was a smash in the theaters, and suddenly the short-subject department was calling us to ‘make more, make a series.’ ”

Mel Blanc was the voice of Woody for the woodpecker’s first three cartoons. Then he signed an exclusive contract with Warner Bros.

“I shopped around, trying to find the right replacement,” Lantz says. “We actually used the writer, Bugs Hardaway, for quite a while--speeding up his voice to a falsetto.”

But the classic Woody laugh continued to be Blanc’s, preserved on a segment of film from the original episode. By 1948, when “The Woody Woodpecker Song” had become a national hit, and his boisterous cackle was being heard throughout the land, Blanc decided he should have a piece of the action and filed suit in a Los Angeles Superior Court. Although Blanc lost the case, an out-of-court settlement satisfied both parties, Lantz says.

By 1950, Lantz was on the verge of making another series of Woody Woodpecker shows for United Artists and felt that Woody should evolve into a cuter, more lovable character. The initial step, he decided, would be to find a new actor to create the voice. He began to hold auditions.

“I’d wanted to do Woody so badly,” Gracie Lantz told writer Joe Adamson in Lantz’s biography, “The Walter Lantz Story.” She asked her husband, who responded that Woody was a boy. “You can’t do Woody,” he said.

Gracie persisted, however, secretly including her own version of the woodpecker in a group of recordings Lantz was auditioning.

“When we had the listening session,” Lantz says, “I didn’t want to see the actors who were doing the voices. So they ran some recordings and I picked one--No. 7, I remember--and I said, ‘Who’s that?’ And it was Gracie. She sneaked it in on me. I thought, ‘Oh, God, no! What are people going to think if they find out the producer’s wife is doing Woody’s voice?’ ”

Gracie Lantz continued as the voice of Woody until her death in March, at the age of 88. The couple’s home, perched at the top of Beverly Hills, is filled with reminders of the many ways in which Woody and Andy and Oswald played very real roles in the Lantzes’ lives.

Lantz has long been involved in philanthropic activities, and he keeps a regular weekly schedule at his office in Toluca Lake. Much of his time is spent raising money for the Walter Lantz Foundation, which supports such organizations as UCLA’s Doris Stein Eye Institute and the Special Olympics.

MCA/Universal Animation Art, which produces and markets a line of Lantz-related art, pays him a fee for signing each of the pieces. Lantz uses those payments as a principal source of funding for his foundation.

His loving tone whenever he mentions his wife’s name is a clear reminder of how much he has been feeling her absence. But when he looks around his workroom-studio, it is equally clear that Lantz is not ready to hang up his paintbrush.

“It’s just a good thing that I’ve got all these paintings to finish, or I’d be thinking about Gracie all the time,” he says. With virtually every inch of available wall space filled with his drawings, sketches and oils, it’s hard to imagine where he can hang any new work.

“Oh, I’ll worry about what to do with them later,” he says. “But right now, I’ve got plenty to keep me busy.”

He chuckles. It isn’t quite Woody Woodpecker’s laugh. But the spirit is there.

Walter Lantz’s autograph session will be from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Saturday through Monday at La Galerie in Universal Studios Hollywood, 100 Universal City Plaza. Those who wish to visit La Galerie can receive a free pass, good for 45 minutes, admitting them to the park to shop, from Studio Center Guest Relations Booth. For additional information, call (818) 622-8175.