The Bell Curve -- Joseph N. Bell

I have in a folder, awaiting framing, the title page of Chuck Jones’

autobiography called “Chuck Reducks.” I removed it from the book because

Chuck Jones -- while we were talking in his office -- drew a wonderfully

graphic sketch of an outraged Daffy Duck on it and then wrote: “For Joe

who loves and detests the same things I do.”

It has been a treasured possession since he signed it in 1999. It is

even more so now because Chuck Jones died last week.

He was a neighbor to all of us at two quite different levels. He lived

in Corona del Mar’s Cameo Shores, almost in anonymity, for 50 years,

commuting to Los Angeles much of that time by a studio limousine. But his

alter egos were never anonymous. They were our friends and playmates and

safety valves to get off our anger and despair and irritation with

bumbling or intolerant or venal authority. Their names were Bugs Bunny

and Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd and the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote and

an improbable French skunk named Pepe Le Pew.

I grew up with these friends of Chuck, and they grew up with me in the

movie houses we both frequented. I had no idea their creator lived among

us until I did an outraged column over a despicable antiabortion cartoon

by Michael Ramirez in the Los Angeles Times.

Jones wrote me a warm supporting letter after that column appeared

that led to a personal meeting and a column about him. His response to

that column -- in which I referred to him as a “card-carrying, fully

accredited elf” -- was typical Chuck Jones: “You are a superb fictional

writer, my friend,” he wrote. “Making this desiccated dwarf into a

bouncing elf is the work of a prestidigitator of worth. I am as humble as

I can be while glowing in your rhetoric -- ill advised -- but still

grateful.”

Jones captured and codified and made enormously entertaining a quality

that has always set Americans apart for me: irreverence. No human

hypocrisy was too subtle or too politically correct to avoid being worked

over by the antics of Jones’ cartoon characters. But when I suggested

that to him, he added one word. “Our cartoons were endearing

irreverence,” he said. “Like a dancing master at Forest Lawn.”

To Chuck Jones, irreverence meant deflating the hypocrites, the

egoists, the selfish, the greedy, the intolerant, the unjust -- and

making us laugh while he was about it. He was serious about this. When

his animation film “What’s Opera, Doc” was inducted into the National

Film Registry, it was cited as “among the most culturally, historically

and aesthetically significant films of our time.”

He was serious about fine art, too, and that’s where he turned in

recent years. He was classically trained at Chouinard Art Institute, and

the worldwide exhibition of his work has included a retrospective at the

Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The day I met him, he was headed

for a talk at the Art Institute of Southern California in support of a

new program on “classical animation.”

The absurdity of the human condition was never far from his reach. In

the few conversations I was privileged to share with him, whenever the

topic got too solemn, he stood it on its head. When I asked this parent

of so many cartoon animals if he had a dog, for example, he said he

didn’t plan to get one until he was 91 “because then I can be reasonably

sure the dog will outlive me, and he’s the one who will have to grieve

over me.”

Well, he didn’t quite make it. Chuck Jones was 89 when he died last

week of congestive heart failure. When I last talked to him three years

ago, he said: “I don’t pay much attention to age. I didn’t know how to

act 6 when I was 6, and I don’t know how to act 86. I feel like a young

man who has something the matter with him.”

I took those as words to live by. The greatest reward I get from

exposure in this space is the opportunity to meet and explore a

fascinating assortment of people. Chuck Jones will always be very high on

that list, along with the friends he created who grew up with me.

He confirmed for me in a few hours of talk the importance of always

being aware of the vast abyss between taking our work seriously and

taking ourselves seriously.

“I look at my cartoon characters the same way I look at people,” he

told me. “It’s not what they are, but who they are. You can’t draw a

character or know a person unless you care about what they feel.”

Chuck Jones cared. And he left not only a legacy of work that will

delight many generations to come but also a lot of grieving friends all

over the world who knew him through that work. Including me.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.