You see, that’s the whole wonder of animation directing. If you’re not something you want to be, or are something you don’t want to be, you can, through drawing, through action, create a character who will take care of the matter. All you need to do is dig down into your cluttered cellar of frustration or up into your cluttered attic of ambition and lo—there you are! Leering, smiling, crouching, sneering, or hoping from behind the furniture. It takes tugging, threats, and promises to lure the character you want to the surface, but once there, it suddenly takes on a life of its own and starts chatting and acting away in its own surprising way. “Do not come wiz me to ze Casbah,” says Pepé. “We shall makes beyootiful musics to-gezzer right here.” A perfectly sensible and absolutely logical attitude to take. You are the corn-beef, I am the cabbage, he assures his paramour, and as she flees: “Ze cab-baj do not run away from ze corn-beef!!” Well, of course, it doesn’t, and in my luscious sexual dreams, girls did not run away from me, nor, far, far worse than this, did they ignore me. Indifference and humiliation. These are the bête noire of all human beings. Well, as a girl you couldn’t ignore Pepé Le Pew, and if you did, he wouldn’t recognize it.
So, Pepé and Bugs are comic heroes, and precious few of them there are in live action or in animation. It is not just happenchance that those comedians we love the most and laugh at the longest are those who sympathetically portray our own mistakes, mishaps, and stumblings, and perhaps, subliminally, reassure us by demonstrating through that laughter that we are not alone.
Jack Benny, who supposedly had the devious crabby, miserly personality of Uriah Heep, yet moved with elegant contrast and the gallant bodily gestures of a cavalier, should have known how great a comedian he was. Yet one day he said, “I have this clinging fear that someday, someone is going to shake me into reality, and I’ll find it just isn’t so, that I’m not funny, that no one can conceivably laugh at or with me.”
In that sense, if only in that sense, I am at one with all great comedians.
APPENDIX
A human appendix can usually be removed, if a source of irritation, without seriously endangering the body. I suspect this is equally true of a book. Therefore, this appendix is included for those who find more stability for themselves in following the chronology of the author’s life. This is the reader’s inalienable right and I have no intention of disputing it.
I was born in Spokane, Washington, U.S.A., on September 21, 1912. Apparently I became bored, and emigrated to Southern California at the age of six months, accompanied on this journey by my father, Charles Adams Jones; my mother, Mabel Martin Jones; and two sisters, Margaret Barbara Jones and Dorothy Jane Jones. A brother, Richard Kent Jones, joined the procession later, and these siblings corralled a substantial and unfair portion of the cerebral matter allocated to the Jones family.
I received a sketchy but catholic (not Catholic) education in California and as a high school dropout at the age of fifteen attended Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts), graduating without distinction or the ability to draw. After ten ensuing years of night school, with the help of the great teacher Donald Graham, I still could not draw but could now fake it fairly well.
Cowpoke Jones, on the right, in the Rose Parade, 1929
So, in 1930, after art school, I found work in a commercial art studio and also found out that drawing was no particular advantage in the field of commercial art. After being thrown out of commercial art forever, I found in 1931 an occupation that was ideal: cel(luloid) washing. As a promising cel washer I was discovered by Ub Iwerks, who had just started his own studio after leaving Walt Disney. I washed cels of Flip the Frog with distinction and alacrity and began my long climb to mediocrity by becoming successively a cel painter, a cel inker, and eventually an in-betweener, now called an assistant animator, from which lofty post I was immediately fired—Mr. Iwerks recognizing the Peter Principle even then: that a good cel washer could be promoted to a singularly incapable in-betweener.
C. Jones and associates: Walt Lantz Studio, 1932
C.J., at time of wedding to Dorothy Webster, 1935
In the same year, after brief sorties with Charles Mintz and Walt Lantz, neither of whom wanted cel washers in-betweening, I returned to the Iwerks studio, where I was unrecognized, but my work unfortunately was. And I was fired again, this time by Ub’s secretary, Dorothy Webster, a sociology graduate from the University of Oregon (who later, in 1935, became my wife, probably on the wan supposition that a good cel washer might also be a good dishwasher).
Carrying my credentials under my arm, I shipped out before the mast, calling myself Ishmael and hoping to find a cel-washing factory in Central America, but the large schooner intelligently caught fire and burned to the waterline, leaving me with a suit of long red underwear and one tennis shoe to face the world.
Feeling rightly that my haberdashery fitted me for the life of a bohemian (hippie), I moved into the artists’ section of Olvera Street in Los Angeles and worked as a maladroit puppeteer and portrait artist ($1 a throw—a grotesque overcharge).
After a year of this, having had to refund ninety cents on the dollar on about 85 percent of the portraits, I felt the need for greater security and proposed to Dorothy Webster, who was still working steady and had saved up
