The Reel Life Of Bobby Jones

Richard Arlen, then a celebrated heartthrob star who was renowned for his portrayal of a fighter pilot in Wings, was one of the few stars who played serious golf. "Paramount allowed me to go over and do this short because of the esteem they had for Bobby Jones ," Arlen says. "It was a loan that wasn't often done in those days. It was probably the greatest two weeks I ever spent. One of the marvels of Jones 's game was the way he putted very quickly. He always contended that your initial judgment was the best. He never looked over a green or paced around a ball."

The series was a star-studded social success, but there is some doubt that it was the financial bonanza Warners had anticipated. The initial episodes were shown to exhibitors at a convention in Atlantic City in April 1931. "The first Bobby Jones reel is a darb!" said Motion Picture Daily. "Corking!" said Film Daily. "Far and away the best thing in sports instruction on the screen." In all, the first series of 12 reels was shown in 6,000 movie houses, with the audience estimated at 20 to 30 million. A New York Times reviewer said Jones was a good actor: "Looking back on those Bobby Jones films and comparing them with other short sports pictures, one can readily rate them as among the best and most human. It is no wonder that they have been popular."

Warner Bros. signed Jones to a five-year option and filmed another set of six reels called How to Break 90. The corniness of some of the action in the first series embarrassed Jones , and in the next he was determined to talk about aspects of the swing, backswing, wrist action, the grip, left-arm control, impact and other fine points. "There was less horseplay in these," Jones remembers, "and they were more frankly instructional."

But Hollywood could never let well enough alone. By the time the second series was made in 1933 the emphasis was on striking pictorial effects. Sometimes Jones was dressed in gleaming white clothing to demonstrate his shots against a solid-black background. More often he was filmed in a strange half-black and half-white costume, so that his left arm and left side could be made to stand out against the black background, while his right side—the black side of his costume—so blended with the black background that it seemed to have disappeared.

It created a far-out, or off- Hollywood , effect, all right. In the old Creighton Hale serial, The Invisible Man, a mad scientist discovered a compound "a thousand times blacker than the blackest black" the effect of which was that anyone wearing it could not be seen at all. At times Jones 's demonstrations of his golf swing looked as if someone had found Creighton Hale's invisible cloak in the prop room and used it for part of Jones 's costume. The art-movie photography of How to Break 90 inspired humorist Robert Benchley, a good friend of Jones 's, to write a movie parody of it entitled How to Break 90 in Croquet. Still, the 18 reels represented a fantastic achievement. They recorded the talent of a marvelous athletic performer at the peak of his career with a detail that could hardly have been captured in any other way.

The bottom dropped out of the movie-short business during the Depression, and Film Daily reported that shorts were in trouble, though the Bobby Jones series was going strong. Essentially the difficulty with How I Play Golf stemmed from Hollywood 's mistaken notion of the habits of moviegoers. The episodes were intended to follow one another, but few fans went to the movies every week, or each time a new feature was shown. People might see reel one of Jones , and then reel six, missing the instructional sequence idea that was part of Jones 's original intention. On the other hand, the entire set of 12 reels in one series and six in the other made too bulky a package for people interested only in golf, plus the fact that the comedy interludes were merely a distraction for them.

So the true achievement of the series was historical. The Hollywood folkways that were caught in the Bobby Jones films illuminated a side of the movie colony found nowhere else. The stars in their off-stage, relaxed moments appeared more often to be enjoying themselves in a production of some super home movie than to be living up to their roles as celebrities. And mixed up and contradictory as the instructional films were, they nevertheless documented with thoroughness how Jones thought golf should be played.

But, ironically, the films have not been preserved. Through the years of the Depression no one associated with the Warner Bros , distribution system bothered to take care of all those cans filled with old golf movies. The reels that were deposited in the Library of Congress for copyright purposes have vanished. Warner Bros , itself has no copies. George Marshall , who kept in touch with Jones and remained a good friend, has only a few stills from some of the reels. It seems that everyone concerned with the project assumed that someone else was keeping the material. The photographic museum, Eastman House, does not have a set, nor can one be found in any of the many movie libraries in Hollywood . No one even kept a record of the stars who appeared in the films.

In all probability all traces of the films would have disappeared had it not been that an Atlanta banker. Mills Lane, managed to buy a complete set years ago. He gave them to Jones , who in turn gave them to the Peachtree Golf Club in Atlanta . They are now in a safe deposit vault of the Trust Company of Georgia . Occasionally a reel or two is taken out—a matter about as easy to arrange as borrowing the Hope diamond from the Smithsonian Institution—and shown at some golf gathering. Without actually seeing them, it would be difficult to credit that they ever really existed. And even when seen, they have an unreal quality about them. As W. C. Fields remarked after watching Jones drive in reel No. 1 of How to Break 90, "I still don't believe it."