Valerie, Craig, and Todd Kausen, 1967
Same group, same pose, 1989
Another Soviet cartoonist tries his hand at portraiture
The teaching situation in the United States is best exemplified by reporting that I have lectured and conducted workshops at Stanford University, the University of Kansas, the University of Iowa, Johns Hopkins, the Universities of California and Nevada, San Francisco State College, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Cal Arts, USC, UCLA, and many others. The University of California at Santa Cruz conducted an accredited course on my films, under the direction of Tim Hunter. You wouldn’t think there would be that much interest in cel washing. I have also been honored for some reason by a three-day retrospective at London’s British Film Institute, twice at the Kennedy Film Center, by the American Film Institute, and by other backward cultural centers such as Toronto, Zagreb, Montreal. I am a Regents Lecturer at the University of California at La Jolla and Visiting Lecturer at Cambridge University, England, and Guardian Lecturer in England also.
For CBS I produced Daffy Duck’s Thanks-for-Giving Special, which includes the segment Duck Dodgers in the Return of the 24½ Century and also Bugs Bunny’s Bustin’ Out All Over; and three separate cartoons, including Portrait of the Artist As a Young Rabbit.
A Film Comment magazine issue devoted to “The Hollywood Cartoon” carried two articles on me and my cartoons by Greg Ford and Richard Thompson, whose combined encyclopedic knowledge of my cartoons baffles me. Time magazine film critic Jay Cocks featured a full-page article on me. If I was alive I would have been utterly delighted with just the opening line: “He has made moviegoers laugh as often and as well as Keaton or Chaplin.” A recent United States Information Agency magazine, printed in Russian for distribution in the U.S.S.R., features an article on my work. For the record, the name Chuck in Russian comes out “Yuk.”
I have a recently published children’s book, William, the Backwards Skunk, published by Crown in early 1987.
I have turned a penchant for lassitude into a vocation in my declining years (I decline most work offers) and at present have but a few immediate projects: a new book, How to Draw from the Fun Side of Your Brain, showing how to construct all the major Warner Bros. characters, including over a thousand drawings plus biographies of each character; and I continue to make special drawings and paintings for daughter Linda’s business, all of which keeps me at a safe level of lassitude.
My dotage has been enlivened by the unexpected: a Golden Anniversary Salute to Warner Bros. Animation by the New York Museum of Modern Art in September 1985, honoring Friz Freleng, Mel Blanc, and the subject of this unvarnished biography; by unwarranted written praise and showings from such disparate sources as Dartmouth College, UCLA, London, Deauville, Belgium, Toronto, Quebec, Montreal, Miami, Dallas; by the Telluride Film Festival (where I was honored as part of a troika consisting of King Vidor, King Kong, and me … known in some quarters as the six of clubs).
Working on the mural requested by the Museum of the Moving Image, London, 1988
All this should be taken with a grain of salt the size of an armadillo, keeping an awareness at all times of the truth that “It is not necessary to deserve something in order to enjoy it.”
I do not deserve Marian J. Dern Jones, but I enjoy her love with just as much surprise as my press notices evoke incredibility. We were married in January 1983, whereupon she reassumed her maiden name, which happened to be Jones. She is a writer of singular ability, and has been film critic for a Beverly Hills newspaper, a national staff writer for TV Guide, and a scriptwriter for TV and the comic strip “Rick O’Shay and Hipshot,” as well as for several of my TV specials. She has a son, Peter, a daughter, Rosalin, and three young grandsons.
We are incurable travelers, having made our way via ship, train, car, plane, and helicopter through Great Britain and Europe, Australia, Japan, Mexico, Canada—without being denied entry to any country so far. We dance at the drop of a quarter note, and quite beautifully so, a triumph of her grace and ability over my two left feet. And we ramble as joyfully as children along the Pacific beaches, a few hundred feet from our back door.
The old grey hair and the old grey hare
Beloved wife caught beautifully by Yousuf Karsh
Perhaps the most accurate remark about me was uttered by Ray Bradbury at his fifty-fifth birthday party. In answer to the usual question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Ray replied: “I want to be fourteen years old like Chuck Jones.”
Perhaps this will be my most apt possible epitaph.
Ted (Dr. Seuss) Geisel, Boris Karloff, and C.J. recording HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS (1967) (Peabody Award winner)
Norton Juster (author), C.J., and Robert Morley recording THE DOT AND THE LINE (1965; Academy Award winner)
Bobe Cannon by C.J.
C. Jones and Jim Henson, London, 1988
Jones and Robin Williams, Telluride, Colorado Film Festival, 1987
Theodor (Dr. Seuss) Geisel and associate, 1989
C. Jones and friend
Walt Kelly and Todd Kausen, THE POGO FAMILY BIRTHDAY SPECIAL (1971)
The ultimate tribute from Walt Kelly, 1971
Walt Kelly, Todd Kausen … and C. Jones
Marian wrote this comic strip for several years; this Sunday issue came out on my birthday
Animation desk and painting area, Corona del Mar, 1989
What language is this?
The ultimate salutes from Herblock, the greatest editorial cartoonist of our time
Mike Peters gets into the act …
and again …
and again—bless his heart
REMEMBERING DOROTHY WEBSTER JONES
1907–78
Who supplied the $3 necessary for our marriage in 1935 and who supplied the courage, patience, honesty, and love I
