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FOR Jackie "Butch" Jenkins a movie career was not only inevitable, it was unavoidable. Far from seeking fame, Jackie hid from it. He wasn't looking for a place in the sun. He had one — in the backyard of his family's beach home at Santa Monica.
Most children who attain screen success are shoved into it by mothers fierce with ambition for their offsprings. Butch's mother is Doris Dudley, stage and screen actress, a vibrant blonde young woman who was far too absorbed in playing the feminine lead in "Moon And Sixpence" to seek the complications of another career in the family.
Director Clarence Brown, searching for a child to portray Mickey Rooney's young brother in "The Human Comedy," chanced across Butch playing in the beach sand. The tiny boy was unknown to him, but Brown saw freckles big as gingersnaps almost blotting out a microscopic nose . . . pudgy cheeks and big brown eyes soft with daydreams . . . blue jeans and an old sweatshirt ... a fishing rod and bare feet — the flesh-and-blood realization of Saroyan's brain-chili
Revelation of the child's identity and dramatic heritage was cause for further rejoicing at the M-G-M Studio. Not only his mother, but also his grandfather are responsible for the histrionic corpuscles dancing in Butch's bloodstream. His entire family tree is loaded with artistic apples, including one labelled "oldtime vaudeville." It followed as the night the day that the National Critics' Poll of the FUm Daily, a motion picture trade paper, should acclaim Jackie Jenkins' first screen appearance as the Best Juvenile Performance of 1943.
Butch is an animate version of the barefoot boy of your childhood memories, spiked with an imagination that scampers mischievously from tall tales of derring-do to highly original methods of expediency. His latest "fish story" may well end all fish stories. Butch spends most of his spare time fishing off the Santa Monica Pier and generally manages to bring back a couple of minnows or the like. This time, however, he returned with only the head of a huge barracuda strung quite professionally on his pole. Mom's gray eyes narrowed with suspicion at his dramatic account of the (Please turn to page G%)
In large pictures on this and facing page, Butch is shown with the family pet, Heidi, two hundred pounds of playful St. Bernard clipped like a French poodle — yes, by Butch. By the way, the boy's growing up— see how tall he looks, at right. Above, a scene from "National Velvet," in which Butch appears (as Jackie Jenkins, of course) with Mickey Rooney and Elizabeth Taylor. Kid has terrific crush on pretty Elizabeth. At left above, breakfast scene in the Jenkins home at Santa Monica beach: Butch, his older brother, Skipper, and their pretty mother, known on the screen as Doris Dudley, to her sons as "Genius."