TOMMY LEE JONES
After Tommy Lee Jones won the big one last week - the Academy Award - he didn't go to Disney World.
He went to Birmingham. The best-supporting-actor winner for his role in The Fugitive didn't even have a chance to admire his trophy.
``I left it at my agent's office because he has to take it across the street so they can (inscribe) it and then it'll be shipped to our home in San Antonio,'' Jones said last Saturday as he bent and stretched along the third base line at the oldest baseball park in the country.
Here at deep green, 84-year-old Rickwood Field, Jones is sporting a shaved crown and wearing baggy, gray flannel baseball pants for his role as legendary Detroit Tiger centerfielder Ty Cobb in the feature film Cobb.
Jones is getting ready for a batting scene as cameras are positioned and extras - including players, umpires, photographers, peanut vendors and fans sweating in the stands wearing wool suits, straw boaters and high, starched collars - wait for ``Action!''
Jones keeps talking. There's a place at his home for the Academy Award, he says.
``My wife has a good jumping horse. Actually, it's the reserve champion there in Texas this year,'' he explains. ``And I've won a few polo tournaments. And my son's won a few trophies.''
``So, we actually are a competitive family and have a need for a trophy case and that's where it'll go, along with everybody else's. And the rest of mine.''
The rest of his include an Emmy award for his role as icy murderer Gary Gilmore in the 1982 NBC movie The Executioner's Song.
Cobb, a Warner Bros. film, is scheduled to hit theaters in October or November. The writer/director is Ron Shelton, a former ballplayer whose previous sports movies - Bull Durham, White Men Can't Jump - ensure that Cobb will have accuracy and attention to period detail.
Shelton, who's batting about .500 with money-making movies in an industry where .300 makes you a superstar, has picked a tough subject in Cobb. He was a nasty loner hated by even his own teammates.
Sportswriter Al Stump, Cobb's authorized biographer, delivered a more detailed Cobb in his book My Life in Baseball: The True Record. Just before Cobb died in 1961, he called Stump to write his account of a tempestuous life.
That book by Stump, now 77 and living near Los Angeles, is the inspiration for this movie. Robert Wuhl (Bull Durham) plays Stump, who narrates the movie story.
Stump's work showed that not only was Cobb a bigot, braggart and brawler, he was an astute businessman who was well-read, intuitive and a shrewd user of people. He was also a generous Coca-Cola and General Motors stockholder millionaire who gave freely to the poor and sick back home in Royston, Ga.
By phone from his southern California home, Stump says that Cobb ``was ruthless in his ball playing and private life with his wives and kids.''
Stump says that Cobb once traveled to Yale, where his son was a medical student with failing grades. Cobb took a horse whip with him and used it on the son at his fraternity house.
``I was horrified,'' Stump recalls. ``He told it to me with pride, and he said he never missed getting his grades again and he passed and became a doctor.' He died at age 29, an alcoholic.
Shelton doesn't fear his subject.
``Any time you make a movie about a complicated character and try to show all of his sides, it's not an obvious commercial sell as a movie that's all black and white.''
``That's why movies with cartoon heroes are more successful than movies with complicated heroes.''
Shelton knows that his instincts for a good story have gotten him this far and he's not about to abandon them now.
``Is it a tough sell? Yeah, it's a tough sell,'' says Shelton. ``Fox didn't want to make it and I just made 100 million dollars for them on White Men Can't Jump.
``So I left my relationship with Fox over this. Nobody knows that.''
One problem with the studio was they didn't want Jones as the star. Seems most studios balk at the name Tommy Lee Jones.
``And two weeks later The Fugitive came out. How do you like that?'' Shelton says. ``He's been a great actor for a long time.'' Blunt, rigid work ethic. But, the studios don't like his on and off screen bad behavior.
Jones, 47, educated at Harvard (where he was Al Gore's roommate) and the plains of West Texas, has a cold stare. With the right scowl those deep, dangerous eyes under thick black brows and his creased and pocked face could win a confession even if you didn't do it.
He's known as a man who doesn't suffer fools lightly, including the frequently tedious, repetitive foolishness of talking to reporters that goes with selling movie tickets.
Combine that with his blunt, rigid work ethic - in this case playing nasty, haunted Ty Cobb - and you have a reason to stay out of the star's way. He can cut you in half like butter with a hot knife.
The crew calls him "Boss" as he requested the first day and in the days since the Oscar ceremony March 21, Jones' mood has been described as very good but he now exhibits a distinct superior attitude. Away from the public, he signs baseballs and T-shirts for cancer auctions and other charity drives, that his wife Kimberlea requests of him. He melts like butter whenever she comes around.
And those working closely with him describe the man as nothing short of a standup guy and real pro.
One reason for his upbeat mood in Birmingham is his family - wife, Kimberlea, son, Bubba (Austin), 11, and 2-year-old daughter, Victoria. They are with him on the movie set as they travel with him on all of his movies. They are extras in this movie. Today, they're sitting in the third base line stands waiting for daddy to do his thing for the cameras. They come every day and sit in the sweltering heat for hours to cheer on their favorite guy. They all share a picnic lunch daily prepared by Kimberlea with all of Tommy Lee's favorite foods. She is a very health conscious wife who Tommy Lee says keeps him trim and fit, happy and sassy. "I don't know what I did to deserve her but I must have done somethin' right for once!"
Doing his thing hasn't been easy since early January, just before filming began.
Working out in Texas with former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Burt Hooten, Jones broke the tibia bone in his right leg while sliding.
He didn't have to be working on his own at home. He could have taken a few pointers from a player before scenes were filmed. And he could have called in sick after the accident.
But not Tommy Lee Jones.
He showed up for work despite the injury when cameras rolled Jan. 19 near Lake Tahoe, Nev. A producer says it's true that Jones waved off concern about playing hurt by saying, ``Ty Cobb could do it, I can do it.''
Not only did the right-handed actor have to learn to hit left-handed in Cobb's awkward style, Jones must do it on command against former and current big league pitchers, including Boston Red Sox's Roger ``The Rocket'' Clemens, who's in Birmingham to play a brief role in the film.
During a break in the filming, I asked about the leg. Jones, hands on hips and rolling at the waist in the rich, painted green grass, says, ``I broke my leg. The bone is healed. The connective tissue and muscle is not. Drop it!'' His wife puts her hand on his arm and he looks at her and he then apologizes to me for his blunt remark.
Suddenly, you're hearing the clipped cadence of Jones as Capt. Woodrow Call driving the cattle in Lonesome Dove, the popular television movie made from Larry McMurtry's novel.
``Lately, a lot of the movies I've been in have been physical,'' he says. ``Jumping out of a helicopter. Slide into second base. Stage a fistfight. Jump off something or jump through something.
``You're going to do something physical, it seems like. So this was no tougher than any other, no.''
Learning to bat the way Cobb did isn't a problem, he adds.
``Batting left-handed, the movement is really not all that dissimilar to an offside tail shot in polo.''
Jones is a noted polo player who with his wife raises and sells ponies at his ranch. Asked if that business brings him to Palm Beach, he says, ``I've been there several times.''
And he's always careful to avoid dreaded reporters so his visits go unannounced.
``Yes, I do, I sure do.''
HIS OLD LADY'S UNDERWEAR
The fans who showed up as extras Saturday got quite a show, seeing Cy Young award-winner Clemens throwing heat at Oscar-winner Jones.
The scene called for Jones to taunt Clemens, playing a Philadelphia A's pitcher named Jake.
Jones throws a pair of his wife's underwear on the plate and tells the catcher, ``Your old lady left 'me in my car last night - I thought you could give 'em back to her.'' Kimberlea stands up with her hands on her hips and shakes her finger at Tommy Lee as he looks back at the stands to see if she noticed he stole her underwear. He turns and blows her a kiss and yells out, "You don't need them when you are with me anyway, Darlin'." Kimberlea puts her hands over her face in obvious embarrassment as the crowd in the stands laugh. She sits down. Their son is laughing, too. Later she toldme Jones has been in this happy mood for days.
The catcher's cocked thumb sign would tell the pitcher to knock Cobb down with a pitch. Clemens did his job well. He cranked balls at the actor, who wasn't wearing a helmet, at what Clemens estimated was 90 miles per hour.
When it was over, Clemens, known as a hardnosed player in his own right, said it was easy to let Cobb's taunts get to him.
``Pitching - for the story - against a guy like Ty Cobb, it's kinda' weird seein' Tommy Lee stayin' in there.''
Jones also plans to be staying in there, career-wise. His next movie will be one he writes and directs for Ted Turner. And with the Oscar win, things won't be slowing down.
``I'm sure my life and now my fame will be going faster and furious-er,'' Jones says.
