Christmas Figure Wasn’t a Grinch

If Orange County can claim an iconic Christmas figure, it might well be the late animator Chuck Jones, who died last year after a career that left the world with lifelong friends.

Maybe you know some of them: Wile E. Coyote, Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny and a gentleman with the last name of Fudd.

And that movable beast, the Grinch.

The grumpy guy with the heart defect became a Christmas staple ever since he first tried to steal it in Dr. Seuss’ book and especially after Jones animated, directed and wrote the screenplay for “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” in its original 1966 TV airing.

If Jones, who died at 89, didn’t invent the Grinch, he brought him to life. As a result, the Corona del Mar resident (Jones, not the Grinch) is inextricably linked to Christmas.

Which made me wonder: How did the gifted one view Christmas?

Was he grouchy, like the early Grinch? Or was he warm and mushy, like the redeemed Grinch?

Turns out, he was neither.

“He enjoyed the holiday,” says his widow, Marian, with a lilt in her voice. “I won’t say he was utterly crazy about it or anything, but he thought it was nice -- especially if I decorated the tree and put up all the stuff. Neither one of us are very religious. He wasn’t ‘Bah humbug,’ but he wasn’t into the Norman Rockwell kind of Christmas, either.”

Marian, who was Jones’ wife for the last 20 years of his life, met him while writing for TV Guide, which assigned her to a story on the Grinch special. “I wanted to talk to Dr. Seuss,” she says. “I had a couple of kids, and I was really thrilled. I didn’t know much about Chuck at all.”

Before the meeting, she says, she asked Seuss (alias Theodor Geisel), “Do you have to bring him [Jones] along? He said, ‘I have to; he’s the director.’ I said OK. We got to the luncheon, and by the end of the chat, I’d forgotten all about Dr. Seuss.”

The couple didn’t marry until the early 1980s after Jones’ first wife died. Marian says her husband didn’t think of the show in historic terms. Over time, he learned otherwise. “He’d get feedback from college students,” Marian says. “They’d have a big party to watch it when it was on TV. They knew all the dialogue.”

No doubt, they liked the suggestion -- just a suggestion, mind you -- that captured Jones’ feeling about Christmas. Which, as Marian tells it, is that “everybody hates Christmas a little bit. We can’t say so, but that’s really true of all of us, in a sense. All the stuff of getting presents right, the aunts and uncles that we’re not that fond of, and the hassles. And some of that creeps into the goodwill.”

I ask Marian what attracted her to Jones. “He had a very brilliant mind. He was interested in so many things -- not just animation, but he had an incredibly versatile, witty mind and attitude. He had kind of an off-centered look at things.”

If Christmas wasn’t a holiday that sent him prancing about, Jones enjoyed it for the time it allowed with family (a daughter, Linda) and friends.

This will be their second Christmas without him, after his death from heart failure.

“It is a different life,” Marian says. “I miss him enormously. I miss the person, the man that I was madly in love with and had such a close relationship with. We were both kind of private people. Even with him being well-known, we didn’t do a whole lot of social circuit stuff.”

Professionally accomplished in her own right, Marian says Chuck knew he was talented. Sort of. “Like many artists, there was still that uncertainty he was really good, in a sense. Of course, he knew he was, but you always go on, you don’t get to the point where you sit there and say you’ve made it. You’re always marching on and going forward.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.par sons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.