As 1960s filmmakers pushed the envelope of what could be said and shown onscreen, parents counted on Disney studios for entertainment that wouldn’t lead to uncomfortable questions from the kids on the ride home.
Disney, the once and future animation powerhouse, was regularly releasing live-action comedies aimed at family audiences. It’s for his appearances in these films that Dean Jones is best remembered.
He typically played the amiable, often flummoxed straight-man to a series of scene-stealing animals – a cat (That Darned Cat!), a Great Dane (The Ugliest Dachshund), a horse (The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit) and a duck (a Golden Globe-nominated role in The Million Dollar Duck) among others – not to mention a charismatic Volkswagen (The Love Bug).
In the middle of his Disney success, Jones took on the role of Bobby in Stephen Sondheim’s groundbreaking musical Company, playing at The Straz Jan. 9-14. Bobby is a 35-year-old bachelor juggling three girlfriends. His married friends are trying to sell him on the joys of wedded bliss – and revealing the imperfections of their own unions in the process.
Bobby was worlds away from Jones’ Disney characters. He was not, however, as many worlds away from Dean Jones.
Jones was married but was headed for a divorce. He had suffered from depression for years and he was, as he put it, “coming home smelling of drink and perfume that wasn’t my wife’s.”
The pre-Broadway run of Company in Boston drew mixed reviews. Jones found singing “Happily Ever After,” then the musical’s closing number, excruciating: Its conclusion was that married couples live “happily ever after in hell.”
Sondheim rewrote “Happily Ever After” as the triumphant and far more optimistic “Being Alive,” but Jones’ off-stage struggles proved overwhelming. One month into its Broadway run, Jones left the cast.
Even with Bobby’s breakthrough in “Being Alive” – “But alone is alone, not alive” – Jones still declared the musical to be “anti-marriage.”
He qualified that somewhat years later, acknowledging that his impression could have been due to being antimarriage himself at the time.
A conversion experience later in the ‘70s brought him the peace that had eluded him, and his faith factored into all areas of his life, including his work: He starred as Charles Colson in Born Again, which covered the Watergate criminal’s conversion to Christianity while in prison. He also starred in a one-man show, St. John in Exile, about the last living disciple of Jesus Christ.
He made a few more Disney films and worked steadily well into his 70s. One of his more memorable later roles was in Beethoven, in which he gleefully played against type as a villainous veterinarian.
For Broadway fans, particularly Sondheim fans, Jones remains a curiosity, the man who left what might have been a career-defining stage role. For those whose childhoods coincided with his run of Disney films, he’s a familiar, comforting presence who didn’t mind playing second banana to cute animals (or a cute VW).
“I see something in them that is pure form. Just entertainment. No preaching,” Jones said of those comedies, “We’re always looking for social significance, but maybe people just like to be entertained.”
See Company at The Straz, Jan. 9-14. Purchase tickets at strazcenter.org.