Last January, seventy-six days before winning and Academy Award as best supporting actor for the role of a relentless lawman in "The Fugitive," and the day before the scheduled beginning of rehearsals for the filming of "Cobb," on location at Lake Tahoe, where Ty Cobb, the baseball legend, had lived, Tommy Lee Jones was in San Antonio, where he lives, practicing hitting and sliding a la Cobb. While sliding, under the supervision of a production-assigned coach, one of Jones's cleats got stuck in the dirt; his ankle turned over, and he suffered a fracture of the fibula. The next day, he made it to Tahoe, wearing a Bledsoe leg brace with Velcro straps and walking with the support of a carved wooden stick with serpentine decorations. With Jim Burns, a soft-spoken North Carolinian who was his assistant, he occupied a pleasant rented house, with a fine view of the lake, the mountains, and the glorious sunsets. The "Cobb" production offices--including one for Ron Shelton, the writer and director of "Cobb," who is a former second baseman for a Baltimore Orioles farm club and also wrote and directed "Bull Durham"--had been set up in the Cal Neva hotel nearby, and rehearsals were being held in the hotel's Frank Sinatra Celebrity Showroom. Jones's wife, Kimberlea, was back in Texas, with their two children, and was due to visit soon. Jones was taking anti-inflammatory medicine, rehearsing scenes for "Cobb," and putting in some time working on a screenplay he was writing for a TNT movie called "The Good Old Boys," based on the Western novel of that title, by Elmer Kelton, who, like Jones, is from West Texas.
In Tahoe, a few days later, I found Jones in his house, standing in front of a huge stone fireplace, his back to a picturesque wood-burning fire. He had the brace on his right foot and a low black lace-up boot on his left, and he was wearing bluejeans, a maroon sweater, and a black felt railroad cap. He greeted me with a creased smile and a lot of unforced enthusiasm about his new character, whom he referred to consistently as Mr. Cobb. "I'm learning the quality of Mr. Cobb's life," Jones said, speaking quickly. "He's seventy-two years old, and there are wrinkles, with the help of a latex application. This old arthritic, with his liver spots and freckles and every disease known to man, is also still an athlete. He's a scrapper. He has a black eye. Mr. Cobb is drinking lots of whiskey, holding his millionaire's investment empire together, and he's planning his visit to Cooperstown, for the testimonial dinner at the Baseball Hall of Fame. This mean, violent, powerful old man who has been powerful all his life is now dying. But he's Mr. Cobb."
Jones, who is forty-seven years old, moved gracefully away from the fireplace with a single-footed jump, then took off his cap. "They shaved my head for me to wear a thin white hairpiece for the movie," he said, running his hand over his pate. He held his walking stick, in his left hand, as though it were a baseball bat.
"Now let me explain to you how to hit a baseball," he said, talking fast, confidently, belligerently. "It's a lost art. Ever since Babe Ruth started hitting home runs, the skill, the art, and the science have been lost. You see, the bat is like a wand, a magic wand." He swung the walking stick. He was Ty Cobb, giving his lines. "Hitting a baseball is really very easy. You can't force it. You can't overpower it. You go with the pitch. You let the bat do the work. It's all rhythm and flow." He swung the stick again. "I've been trying to do Mr. Cobb's bunt right down the first-base line," he said. "The pitcher would come in to make the play, get caught in the right-of-way, and Mr. Cobb would cut him in two."
"Tommy does not try to make you like Cobb, this violent, hard-drinking, hated man who was a genius," Ron Sheldon said to me later that day. "But Tommy makes you care about Cobb."
The next day, Jones and Sheldon met in one of the hotel rooms commandeered by the production crew, in order to select a cane for Mr. Cobb to carry. Jones, costumed in nineteen-forties tweed pants and red-suspenders, a blue shirt with a high white collar, a loud red necktie, and a Burberry cap, handled the possibilities. "Let's give these names," he said, with Mr. Cobb-like authority.
"We have a silver horse head, we have the shillelagh look, we have deer antlers. For the cane du jour, we tend to favor those with animals. Let me see the bulldog."
"Looks like a medieval beast," Sheldon said.
"I like the dog," Jones said.
Jones moved to another office nearby, to select more wardrobe for Mr. Cobb. He sang and whistled to himself while considering pajamas offered him by Ruth Carter, a quiet, poker-faced woman, who was the costume designer. She showed him pajamas decorated with yellow pintail ducks ona red background and pajamas with brown cowboys and broncos on a blue background. "I prefer the ducks," Jones said, holding the pajamas up against him. "Mr. Cobb--this elegant man, this powerful man--is deciding to go on a road trip. His valet has quit. So Mr. Cobb starts throwing stuff in suitcases."
Now Ruth Carter offered Jones a jacket, and he tried it on. "Mr. Cobb's going to wear these duck pajamas with this burgundy-and-black houndstooth jacket," Jones said. "He wants this jacket. The jacket's a good look, a real good look.
Combining it with the duck pajamas makes perfect sense to him. It doesn't make any difference, because he's Mr. Cobb anyway."
Ruth Carter offered Jones a black hat, and he said, "This homburg has a good shape. Reblock it so that the crown has more body." He tried on a black suit with white pinstripes. "Great look, great look," he said. Over the suit he put on a large black double-breasted chesterfield with black velvet pocket flaps and a black velvet collar. He put on the homburg, and said, "I like the hat; I like all of it. Mr. Cobb wants to be timelessly elegant. Mr. Cobb has got a pistol in this pocket"--he lightly slapped the right pocket--"and he's got thirty-five thousand dollars in cash in the other." He slapped the left one, and said, "This old man, with his white hair and his latex face. Mr. Cobb is ready to go to the casino and gamble." Jones picked up the walking stick with the bulldog head. "Plus, if Mr. Cobb gets in trouble he can whack his way out of it," he added.
He took off his forties outfit, put on his jeans, laced up the low black boot for his left leg, and replaced the brace on his right. He put on a black vinyl windbreaker with white letters spelling out "Harvard Polo," but he was still breathing Cobb. "You come to the rehearsal, Ruth!" he said bossily to the costume designer. "To the testimonial dinner! All the great ones will be there."
He was giving her his lines. "The great Mickey Cochrane will be there. You're gonna meet great athletes, great warriors, great men at the Hall of Fame dinner."
That night, Jones said as we parted, "We had a meeting with the costume department and found some good gambling clothes and walking sticks. We rehearsed in the Frank Sinatra room at the Cal Neva. I finished the first draft of 'The Good Old Boys' at a mere hundred and forty-five pages and sent it to be printed, and Jim found some good take-out barbecue ribs."
Michael Black, Jones's agent, is a friendly, voluble, likable man, who probably has the most polished, mahogany-toned suntan in the state of California. I saw him not long ago in his office, a glassed-in cage in the ultra-modern International Creative Management building on Wilshire Boulevard.
"Tommy was always different," Black told me. "Different in look. Different in presence. He was very original and very smart. Money walks, money talks. Basically, this town wanted to tintype him. That's the way they are. Tintype.
Tintype. Tintype. I never perceived that Tommy ever doubted his own talent. He's unlike most actors--no matter how many jobs he failed to get, I never heard anything in Tommy's voice indicating that he himself questioned his talent. then came the one-tow punch." Black punched one fish against the other. "'Lonesome Dove' and 'JFK' turned the people around."
Since "The Fugitive," Jones's fees, which had already been in what people in the business describe as "seven figures," have tripled. In "The Fugitive," the fierce, obsessed lawman became the fearsome but forgivable Jones. The most memorable of his lines, written, like many of his lines, by Jones himself--Jones's "I don't care!" practiced by Jones for days and days during pre-production, while he studied his script in his San Antonio home and performed for the benefit of his wife and children.
"My life was slow until yesterday," Jones had said to me last fall, in Boston, where he was filming "Blown Away"; he was playing an Irish terrorist named Gaerity who is hiding out in Boston. Dressed for his role as Gaerity, he wore khaki trousers and a plaid sports shirt. His face had unobtrusive makeup; the creases around his mouth looked untouched. He has high cheekbones, black hair, and deep-set, watchful black eyes. He looked calm but poised to move quickly. "It is very embarrassing for me to be asked for autographs," he was saying. "Airports are the worst." His voice was not deep and not pitched high; it was as we hear it in the movies, light and businesslike, and it hung overhead, remote from his body. longer than most other voices.
We were standing in a patch of sunlight on a street near the waterfront, in front of a bar. Movie trucks and trailers, soundmen, wardrobe people, electricians, extras, and onlookers clogged the streets. Waiting to be called inside, Jones didn't seem to be paying attention to anybody. A couple of short, chubby women holding cameras approached him and, offering scraps of paper, requested his signature. "Yes, Ma'am," he said to each woman, and then he signed. He gave each a polite half smile that came out in creases around his mouth, almost like a grimace, as though it hurt.
"They're ready for him!" someone called from inside the bar.
"'Him' is basically a euphemism for me," Jones remarked. "I can be standing next to two a.d.s, and they'll say 'Bring him over' or 'Put him in makeup.' In this business, you're totally objectified." Having said that, he went inside and, as Gaerity, sat down at the bar next to Lloyd Bridges, who, white-bearded and rather saintly-looking, was playing Max, an informer. Max pretends he does not recognize Gaerity as the terrorist, while Gaerity pretends he does not know that Max has indeed recognized him and plans to turn him in. There was something ominous and overcheerful about Gaerity as he slapped the bar hard with the flat of his hand and called to the bartender for drinks. It was a reliable Jones acting bit: frightening the viewer while simultaneously eliciting sympathy and support for his sure-to-come violence.
The next day, in Cambridge, Jones, wearing jeans, black moccasins, a plaid cotton shirt, and a tan windbreaker, went to a Harvard-Lafayette football game.
In the late sixties, Jones attended Harvard on a scholarship. (One of his roommates at Harvard was Albert Gore, Jr.) He played in the famous 1968 harvard-yale game, in which Harvard, in the last forty-two seconds, scored sixteen points to earn a tie. He also appeared in productions at the Loeb Drama Center, beginning in his freshman year with Harold Pinter's "The Caretaker."
After the Harvard-Lafayette game, Jones walked to Athens Street, where William Alfred, the playwright and Harvard English teacher--with whom Jones had worked in 1969 on his senior-year tutorial, about Flannery O'Connor--lived in a gray clapboard house. Professor Alfred, when he opened the door, was wearing a navy-blue pin-striped suit and a dark-blue necktie. A brass-plated chain across his midriff was attached to an American Waltham silver turnip watch, which, he later said, his mother had given him on his sixteenth birthday. Alfred had a splendid Brooklyn-Irish accent, and was shy and subdued. Jones sat down on a sofa with a white linen slipcover. Alfred sat opposite him on a white-linen-covered armchair. Jones edged forward on the sofa as professor Alfred poured tea and offered cookies. Then he edged farther toward Professor Alfred. without diffidence, and as though he were picking up the discourse where it had been not twenty-five years but twenty-five minutes earlier, Jones said, "Well, I've decided to become a writer." He explained that he was writing a screenplay, based on Elmer Kelton's "The Good Old Boys." The book had been optioned by producers, Jones said, who had sent it to him with the idea that he would play the lead role, Hewey Calloway. "They didn’t' know I knew about Elmer Kelton, " Jones went on. "He's written a lot of books about western Texas, and he also wrote for a local paper, the Livestock Weekly. They couldn't afford me as an actor. But I said I would act in it if I could direct it, and at led to my writing it. I've got myself a director’s job." He edged still farther forward on the sofa. "I want to be this character, Hewey Calloway." He spoke rapidly.
"Hewey believes the plow is a mistake. He says it's wrong to plow back what God gave as a gift, that God's too big to stick in a church house. He's telling it to his nephew, a teen-age kid who just wants to see an automobile. And Hewey’s brother wants him to marry the local schoolmarm and settle down." He looked intently at Professor Alfred. "my outlines were coarse at first, sir, but I did the first page, then the second page, and it finally began to write itself."
"Hewey Calloway," Alfred said slowly, refilling Jones's teacup. "Well, I saw you as Coriolanus here at the Loeb. You were able then to get over to us a sense of what a man would be like if he believed in his own nobility."
"I'm glad I found something to do," Jones said in a matter-of-fact way.
Later, walking back to his hotel, amid the students near Harvard Square, Jones looked sharply at the young women and said they were so different today from the way they had been when he was in college. "I stopped in at the Coop today to buy something and I said, 'Yes Ma'am,' to a kind of reconstructed Radcliffe girl, and I got a real dirty look from her," he said. "That reminded me that things are different now."
Tommy Lee Jones was born on September 15, 1946, in West Texas, in the town of San Saba, which then had a population of just over three thousand. He is an eighth-generation Texan. His father, Clyde Jones, was a specialist in drilling tools who worked in oil fields--not only in Texas but all over the world. Tommy Lee himself worked in the Texas fields, with his father and without him, during school vacations. Clyde Jones died of a heart attack when he was in his mid-fifties. Tommy Lee's mother, Lucille Marie Scott, known as Marie all her life, worked at various jobs, including those of policewoman and schoolteacher. When Tommy Lee was about three, Marie had another son, who died in infancy. Now, with her second husband, she lives in Cameron, about a hundred and ten miles east of San Saba and a hundred and forty miles northeast of San Antonio.
"I've talked myself into believing I remember the day I was born," Jones said to me as we walked along. "I hang on to my memories with cat's claws. I can remember tornadoes in Knox County when I was three. We were living in a trailer, next to a hospital and near a cotton field. The tornado jumped over our trailer and hit the hospital. I remember seeing X-rays from the hospital floating down over the cotton plants in bloom. Some of my memories are clear--very, very clear. Both my mother and father used to go to honky-tonk bars, to do what everybody in that part of Texas did--drink. I'd wait for them outside in the car, alone. I remember hearing music and singing coming through the walls of the saloon to me in the car. I remember lying there, just waiting, just waiting, alone."
Jones started playing tackle football at the age of thirteen, when he was in the seventh grade at Alamo Junior High School in Midland, and later attended St. Mark's School of Texas, a prestigious prep school, in Dallas. "St. Mark's started bringing out the best in me, " he said. "I played football. My father was able to get to some games. he was very proud of my football playing. One day I happened to walk into a practice room and came upon a rehearsal of 'Mister Roberts.' It was the first time I saw people working systematically at their imagination. Almost immediately, I started acting in plays--'Under Milk Wood,'
'The Caine Mutiny Court Martial." My feelings at this discovery were indescribable. I was very happy, elated, with this wonderful feeling of security, joy, and humor."
Jones spoke without emphasis, almost without expression. "I don't get excited thinking about the past," he said. "But I can tell you I still have all my old friends. I'm represented by an attorney we've known all our lives. My banker is a friend I played football with at Harvard. We're all part of the same community. All my football teammates, the guys I played with--one never forgets them. These guys know I'd do anything for them today. And if I needed something, I'd know where to go for it."
When we reached the hotel, Jones said, "It's been a wonderful day." He added quickly, almost throwing the words away, "I took a long walk around Cambridge. I went to the football game. We had tea and cookies with Professor Alfred and some
good talk."
