A Master of Mime Mechanics

Show business is a lot like Count Dracula. Once it bites you, it’s hard to get it out of your blood. Just ask Arnold Jones, “the Mechanical Man.”

At the age of 86, 21 years after most people have retired, Jones is still working and waiting for his big break.

“Next month I’m going into rehearsal as a singer,” he said the other day. “I think I can make it as a singer. I’ll be singing all those beautiful ballads. I really like love songs. You know, the world needs more love.”

In the meantime, he dons a tuxedo, brushes off his black suede shoes, applies black makeup to his white eyebrows and his pencil-thin mustache and goes to work five days a week, six hours a day as a street performer in front of the Guinness World of Records Museum in Hollywood.

The museum pays him $8 an hour and he gets tips on top to move and dance in the herky-jerky style of a mechanical man, a mechanical man who looks like a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Cab Calloway.

Jones has never made more money in show business than he is making now. Things are finally looking up.

Earlier this year, Guinness World Records in England accepted his claim as the “oldest working mime artist.” They even sent him a certificate saying so. It’s not an Oscar or a Grammy or a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but it’s a start.

“If you stop dreaming,” he said, “you might as well stop breathing.”

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Jones does a remarkable job on the heavy, round tabletop-sized plywood stage he made himself and rolls to the edge of the sidewalk for his show. He starts each performance by standing as still as possible as his music--from Sinatra to James Brown--begins to swell. When he moves, he looks like a dancer on “Soul Train” doing the robot.

When the music stops, he freezes in place. He goes minutes without blinking his light gray eyes and allows them to wander only when an especially pretty woman passes by.

“Show business,” he said, “teaches you discipline.”

The other day, several people, including a young man on a bicycle, stared at him for several moments, trying to decide if the mechanical man was metal or flesh.

“Hey, is that real?” the bicyclist asked the museum’s cashier, Lola Martinez.

“No,” she said. “It’s fake. It’s a dummy.”

The young man did not take her word for it. He pushed his bicycle to within an inch or two of Jones, and began poking and squeezing his arm. Jones did not move until the young man began to back away, apparently satisfied that the figure was indeed phony. Then Jones jumped and the young man almost fell off his bicycle.

Jones laughed and the young man laughed. Jones had done his job.

“I love to make people laugh,” he said. “That’s why I went into show business in the first place.”

Los Angeles is overflowing with street performers. There are a half-dozen mimes working the same stretch of Hollywood Boulevard as Jones.

“But he’s the best,” Martinez said. “He looks so fake.”

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He’s had the most practice. He started chasing the laughter and the applause when he was a 14-year-old kid back in Columbus, Ohio, his hometown. He was the straight man for a carnival comedian.

But the Great Depression made Jones put his show business dreams on hold. He dropped out of school and began shining and repairing shoes. Then one day, when he was about 20, he took a good look at himself in the mirror and decided he looked “funny enough” to make it as a fortune teller.

“I couldn’t tap-dance good enough to make it,” he remembered. “But I could talk.”

He went to a couple of seances to pick up tricks of the trade. He also did some reading on psychology and anatomy.

“I studied a lot of doctor books,” he said. “You can tell a lot about a person by the shape of their head or their nose or their ears. If someone has little ears, for instance, they’re probably real stingy. It’s not 100%. But it’s close.”

He found a turban and a tunic and went knocking on nightclub doors, looking for work. “You know, being black, you couldn’t get much work,” he said. “So I had to pose as an Indian. That’s how I finally got work.”

He billed himself as Prince Yogi.

Along the way, he also started dancing as a mechanical man for church groups. But he never could make much of a living at it until recently.

Jones lives several miles from the museum and drives himself to work through the heavy traffic. When he’s late, his foot turns to lead. He carries his makeup in a small suitcase and changes in a tiny room in the Hollywood Wax Museum, across the street from where he performs. To get to his “dressing room,” he has to pass the wax figures of Marilyn Monroe and Red Skelton.

Jones moved to Los Angeles in 1946, hoping to break into the big time. That never happened, but he’s not going to give up until the final curtain falls.

“I’ll never retire,” he said. “Well, I might retire to a half-dozen beautiful girls and let them kill me. Now, wouldn’t that be a beautiful death?”

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a group of teenagers coming down the street. He quickly climbed back on his stage and waited, perfectly still. When the teenagers began poking and squeezing his arms, the Mechanical Man came to life.