Gag Man

Grover Jones was a round, ruddy, bespectacled little man with a rim of reddish hair around his shiny bald head. Pounding up & down a room, swinging a long cigar through the air, he could tell the tallest tale in Hollywood. Inside the brick wall circling his two-acre property he kept a pony, a goat, 14 English sheep dogs, ducks, geese, chickens, ravens, down-&-out friends and relations, his father, his mother, his wife Sue. His profession was screenwriting, for which he received as much as $3,500 a week, $40,000 a script. He reached Hollywood from West Terre Haute, Ind. 27 years ago, with 50-c- in his pocket and experience as coal miner and sign painter. As extra, prop boy, sign and scenery painter, gag man, director, producer, he grew up fabulously with the fabulous movie business.

Three years ago Jones sat in an NLRB hearing as witness in the intramural squabble among Hollywood screenwriters. Rambling on for two days he told his story. Reprinted, the transcript emerged as the best history of Hollywood to date--impudent, humorous, honest. Excerpts:

"So I came to Hollywood, and I starved to death. I used to walk . . . from Hollywood down to Inceville, down in Santa Monica Canyon, where I played Indian for a dollar a day and lunch, when I got it. I grew a little bored with that because there was a man, who is now a rather popular director . . . and he was always the child in the Conestoga wagon. He was the only one who didn't get killed by the Indians, you see. And I used to rescue him about three times a week, and it bored me. . . .

"In those days Hollywood was rather colorful, because nobody took off his makeup at night, and everybody walked up & down the streets at night dressed like Napoleon, and did their business. And we used to wait to get a call . . . and when we got the call we would grab a sand wagon and go to Universal, which was the popular studio at that time. . . .

"But because I could write poetry, a man by the name of Stever Woods--he was in charge of the scenic department--he would paint my sets without anybody knowing it, because he wanted me to write poetry about certain people that he went out and got drunk with. . . . This was in the early days when Otis Turner was the Cecil B. De Mille and Frank Lloyd was an actor with only one suit of clothes. . . .

"And then one day the assistant to the technical man in the department . . . came to see me. . . . He asked me if I could draw and I said, 'Yes, I can draw.' So he said, 'Draw something.' So I couldn't think of anything to draw; so I drew an Indian, and he gave me the job of being the assistant technical man in charge of 700 people. . . ."

Then Grover Jones became a typist at Paramount. "I found out that the most charming thing about a studio was that little ethereal something that I can't define, that thing of being in that department where you didn't know what it was all about. And so I turned my attention to writing. I tried to write a great many things, and they were all flops. I even sat and wrote a comic history of the U. S. I don't know how many thousand words I wrote, which was proof I didn't know what I was writing about. Right in the midst of my desire to become a writer I was fired. I have been fired from practically every studio in Hollywood, including some of those that aren't even painted. . . ."

Then Grover Jones became a gag man. "And I sat there all day watching Gilbert Pratt direct these two comics trying to get into a dancing school. And that was the usual routine of comedies in those days. Incidentally, the girl who was dancing was the girl who became my wife, and is now my wife. So I sat there and watched him, and I made a suggestion. I said, 'Wouldn't it be funny if one of those comics hid in that suit of armor in the hallway?' Gilbert Pratt looked at me and said, 'What for?' I said, 'And then when the professor walks in and he throws his cigaret away, and he throws it in the suit of armor, look what will happen. . . .' That started me on the career of what you call writing."

From then on Grover Jones kept at the career, amassed more than 350 screen credits. He directed a quickie for a comic who called himself Charles Chaplin and who went to Mexico when he was sued by Charlie Chaplin. He wrote a seven-reel drama for Anna Held. He wrote scripts for Lives of a Bengal Lancer, The Plainsman, Souls at Sea, 52nd Street. Last June he went to St. Vincent's Hospital for a kidney operation, began dictating the screenplay of Three Girls and a Gob soon after he came out of the anesthesia. Three weeks ago, with the script finished, the kidney trouble returned, forced him back to the hospital. There, last week, Grover Jones, 47, died.

CURRENT & CHOICE

The Howards of Virginia (Gary Grant, Martha Scott, Sir Cedric Hardwicke; TIME, Sept. 16).

Foreign Correspondent (Joel McCrea, Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall, Robert Benchley, Albert Basserman; TIME, Sept. 2).

The Great McGinty (Brian Donlevy, Akim Tamiroff, Muriel Angelus; TIME, Aug. 26).

The Sea Hawk (Errol Flynn, Flora Robson, Claude Rains, Brenda Marshall, Henry Daniell; TIME, Aug. 26).

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