Dickie Jones: Child Actor and Voice of Disney's Pinocchio (1927–2014)

Richard Percy Jones, Jr., screen actor, known as Dickie Jones when he was a child actor in films during the 1930s, was born on February 25, 1927, in Snyder, Scurry County, Texas, to Richard Percy Jones, Sr., and Icie Laverne (Coppedge) Jones. The family soon relocated to McKinney, where Jones’s father was a newspaper editor and foreman for the McKinney Daily Courier-Gazette and the Weekly Democrat-Gazette. At age five Jones began performing as a singer on Dallas radio. Billed as the “Little Cowboy Rambler,” he was mentored by Western singer Bill Boyd. True to his moniker, Jones was at home on horseback from an early age. In 1932 he was discovered at the Dallas State Fair by Western film star Hoot Gibson, who took Jones as a protégé. The young Jones moved with his mother to Hollywood and was instructed in trick riding by “Skeeter Bill” Robbins, manager of Gibson’s Golden State Rodeo. By age seven Jones was billed as the “World’s Youngest Trick Rider and Roper.” He continued to perform as a singer and made his film debut as a boy angel in blackface in “Going to Heaven on a Mule,” a Busby Berkeley-directed sequence in Wonder Bar, a 1934 Al Jolson musical.

While he primarily performed in B-Westerns, Jones also appeared in a number of A-movies, including Babes in Toyland (also known as March of the Wooden Soldiers) with Laurel and Hardy in 1934, Little Lord Fauntleroy with Freddie Bartholomew and Mickey Rooney in 1936, and Black Legion with Humphrey Bogart and Stella Dallas with Barbara Stanwyck in 1937. Another notable film was the Dalton Trumbo-penned A Man to Remember (1938). He also appeared in a number of Our Gang (later known as The Little Rascals) shorts, including Our Gang Follies of 1936 (1935) and Our Gang Follies of 1938 (1937). In 1939 Jones appeared in Nancy Drew… Reporter with Bonita Granville; Young Mr. Lincoln with Henry Fonda; and Destry Rides Again and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, both with James Stewart. In the latter film he played a Senate page named Richard Jones.

In late 1938 Jones was cast to voice the title character in Pinocchio (1940), Walt Disney’s second animated feature following the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). The film was based on an Italian children’s novel about a marionette who yearns to be a real boy. Disney decided that he needed a real boy rather than an adult to voice the character and settled on Jones. Jones’s work in the film went beyond reading lines of dialogue in front of a microphone. To assist the animators, Jones’s expressions and lip movements were filmed, and he was even dressed up in a Pinocchio costume to act out some sequences. He also voiced the character in the 1939 Lux Radio Theatre dramatization of the film. Jones and the other voice actors were not unknowns, but they were not big stars. Despite their key contributions to the success of the film, their names did not appear in the credits on screen, which was the custom for Disney films at the time.

Though uncredited, Jones’s contribution to Pinocchio may have helped launch his radio career. While he continued to work in films, he also appeared in a variety of radio shows, including The Aldrich Family (for which he starred as Henry Aldrich from 1943 to 1945), The Kate Smith Hour, and The Lone Ranger.

Jones was required to have a tutor, referred to as a studio teacher, on the set during production. Jones later said that he would have preferred to remain in public school and expressed dissatisfaction with the life-style of Hollywood child actors. He saw a number of his peers beset by drug problems, which he avoided. Evoking his role as Pinocchio, he once said of his desire for normal childhood experiences, “I wanted to be a real boy.” He eventually graduated from Hollywood High School.

Following Pinocchio, Jones appeared in minor roles in an assortment of B-Westerns and A-movies, including Virginia City with Errol Flynn and Knute Rockne, All American with Pat O’Brien and Ronald Reagan in 1940; and The Outlaw with Jane Russell and Heaven Can Wait with Gene Tierney in 1943. After coming of age, Jones served in the U.S. Army during the waning days of World War II and the early post-war period. After his discharge, he returned to Hollywood and resumed his acting career. Now an adult, Jones switched his billing from Dickie to Dick Jones. He married Betty Antha Bacon on April 9, 1948.

Jones’s horsemanship continued to serve him well as television Westerns replaced the B-Westerns that had saturated movie theaters. Gene Autry, with whom Jones had worked before the war, remembered him. Autry, who was phasing out his acting career and moving into production, set up his Flying A Pictures television production unit in 1950. Jones appeared in several Flying A productions, including ten episodes of The Gene Autry Show (1950–55), seventy-eight episodes of The Range Rider (1951–53), four episodes of Annie Oakley (1954–57), and forty-two episodes (as the title character) of Buffalo Bill, Jr. (1955–56).

On February 8, 1960, Jones received a star (located at 7042 Hollywood Boulevard) on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The television Western craze was peaking, and he found that film and television roles had dwindled. Jones was offered work in television commercials but did not wish to go that route. At age thirty-eight he received his final screen credit for Requiem for a Gunfighter, released in 1965.

Jones retired from acting in favor of a career in real estate. In 2000 he was named a Disney Legend, an honorific for individuals who have made “a significant impact on the Disney legacy.” He was a featured guest at film festivals at Williamsburg, Virginia, in 2009 and Memphis, Tennessee, in 2010. Jones continued to live in Los Angeles. He died at his home in the Northridge area of the San Fernando Valley on July 7, 2014, after a head injury he suffered in a fall. He was survived by his wife and four children, Rick, Jeffrey, Jennifer, and Melody. He was the last surviving member of the Pinocchio voice cast.