Part 2

On another occasion he says, "I don't like to make movies with big stars in them," remarking that most of his leading ladies, including Sally Field, have been cold to him. Yet the question of the actor's own warmth is brought up repeatedly by members of the "Back Roads" company in Brownsville. "He's contentious. You almost have to be the same way with him," observes Gary DeVore, who wrote the screenplay and who shared a house with Jones on location in Alabama. "He's eaten everybody else on this film alive."

Long-time production designer Walter Herndon, who refers to Jones as "Mr. Charm," brings up the subject of fear. "Squeezing a young lady's arm too hard, not to hurt her but leaving the suggestion that he might" is the way Herndon describes Jones' penchant for turning people wary. Consciously or not, Jones wears a halo of surliness. While at the farm demonstrating the proper use of a polo mallet, he cracks a hard wooden ball directly at a friend standing 10 yards away. The friend leaps aside to avoid a direct hit to the shins. Moving on another ball, Jones does not look up.

His fellow Texan Sissy Spacek, who played opposite him as Loretta Lynn, is the only woman he has ever worked with who could or would talk to him. "But even she wouldn't ride in a vehicle with me. She thought I was going to kill her. I mean, we almost couldn't get her on that damn bulldozer."

Discussing a celebrated Harvard halfback, a teammate from the sixties, Jones remembers: "He was a good boy and an excellent football player, but somehow he never did live up to his potential as an athlete because he didn't have that much facility with physical aggression, you know? He was extremely fast, quick, well-balanced, damn good football player. Had all the equipment, but he wasn't ready to . . . somehow his commitment to the physicality of it wasn't there. Football, you've got to really lay awake at night dreamin' about how mean you're gonna be the next day. You have to do that. And I don't believe he did that very much."

A facility with physical aggression has served Jones well in the roles he has played since leaving the New York stage for Los Angeles in 1975. In "Jackson County Jail" he played a brutalized, escaped convict, on the lam with Yvette Mimieux; in "Rolling Thunder," a violent Vietnam veteran; in "The Betsy," a dare-devil race car driver; and opposite Faye Dunaway in "Eyes of Laura Mars," a maniacal New York police detective. He does not see a pattern emerging. "I've never played the same character twice. Or maybe I only play the same character all the time. Anyway, typecasting is obviated. It's of no concern to me. If I can't get a job, I can't get a job. I don't know why. If I get a bunch of jobs, I get a bunch of jobs. I still don't know why. Typecasting means nothing to me."

"It would be easy to typecast Tommy as a heavy," says Michael Black, the young agent who has managed Jones' career since steering him to the Howard Hughes role. "But we want to get away from that idea. There's a whole other side to him, a real vulnerability. Well, he showed that in 'Coal Miner's Daughter.'"

A director who has watched Jones' career closely believes his talent can be gauged by a simple reckoning: In the films where he has worn a suit, he has been only ordinary; but in roles that have allowed him to rely on his natural animal magnetism, he has excelled. "When the pockmarks show, and he looks rugged and rough and dangerous, that's when the magic comes through," argues the director. "And that's what the women like."

"He scared me to death," Sissy Spacek says about the first time Jones took her for a spin in Mooney's Jeep. "Don't get me wrong, he's a good driver, but you'll never see me in a Jeep with him again." Yet Spacek found him an inspiration as an actor. "He had a great deal to do with 'Coal Miner's Daughter' turning out the way it did, and not just with his character. He gave us a lot of ideas. My Loretta wouldn't have been the way it was without Tommy Lee."

Like the relationship they were portraying, Spacek and Jones went through some difficult times on location in Kentucky. "It wasn't one of those movies that you breeze through. The characters consumed both of us. There were times when we got mad at each other, but never when we stopped bein' friends. We let ourselves get angry because we needed it in the film. But then we'd send each other bottles of champagne afterwards.

"You know the scene after our wedding night when I throw food at him and then he slaps me. Well, we did that

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hard . He demands a lot from people. But I want to get thrown out there. You don't want to work with people who are pretending. You want to touch bottom, and I felt that way about Tommy Lee. I have a great fondness for him.

"I remember the first time I touched him," she adds, catching her breath. "I remember thinking the second before it happened, it was kind of scary but it was also exciting. It was like when I used to barrel-race in rodeos, and there's that moment when you're waiting on the horse in the stalls and you're real nervous. Then, the gate opens and before you know it, it's wonderful."

Jones took a full year off after finishing "Coal Miner's Daughter," a picture for which

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for a change, he liked. He spent that year mostly playing polo, often at the Santa Barbara Polo Club, and grooming a team of horses at the farm in Texas. "I've passed on about eight times the business I've accepted," he says. One role he turned down was that of the villainous bull-rider in "Urban Cowboy," the part eventually played by Scott Glenn. "Well, I don't care that much about the money, you know. If I wanted to get rich I'd work all the time, but I don't care that much about it."

"If Tommy wanted to go back to New York and spend a year working on the stage for $600 a week, that would be fine with me," says his agent. "We're in it for the long run. You only have one shot at the apple - very

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"He is attentive to my aesthetic decisions and responsive to my business decisions," says Jones about Black. "And he believes in art. I mean, a year will go by and there will be a board meeting or something, and he will be obliged to take me to lunch and sit me down and open up his book and say, 'Here's a list of all the things you've said 'no' to, and here's a list of all the things you've said 'yes' to and you know, we have this potential for business with you, and our commissions are not living up to that potential.' And I say, "Well, Michael, you know as well as I do that you're gonna have to go back and tell those people, 'Tough sh--.' And he says, 'Well, yeah, that's right.'

"I don't work that much. There's not that many things I believe in. And I don't have much overhead at all. I've got feed, I've got hay, new tires on the truck every once in a while. Everything else is free and clear. What the hell do I want to go off and do 'Airport '81' for?"

The tiny town of La Feria, named for the historic northern Mexico rodeo ground once located there, is almost at the southern tip of Texas. Its name means in Spanish "the fair." "An appropriate place for me to end up," says Jones, smiling. "I'm interested in art, but I'm also interested in agriculture," a remark he makes in front of the rows of orange and grapefruit trees that line his 30 acres. Since he moved out of his house in Santa Monica three years ago, he has lived here and there, on the road. He bought a condominium at the Santa Barbara Polo Club and then another in a high-rise on South Padre Island, 45 minutes from the farm. Recently he has been spending weekends at the Willow Bend Polo and Hunt Club north of Dallas. "Texas is very important to me now. I have no intention of going back to Southern California for any other reason than polo and business. I have come to abide Los Angeles. I would much rather live in a place where men have hip pockets on their britches."

Driving along the crest of the irrigation canal that borders his property, he points proudly to a rutted, grassy patch below. "There's enough flat land to build a polo field, and that's what I'm doing now. We have 12 acres of citrus trees, one house, a barn and a corral. We're going to build a little stick and ball area. I'm pretty serious about polo. It helps me get through life." The last word he pronounced in west Texan, "lahf."

"To play polo," a word he pronounces usually with emphatic Eastern precision, "all you need to do is have a concept of a stroke and be able to ride a horse, and I've been able to ride a horse for a long time, since I could walk. The game is new, relatively new. I've been playing polo for two years. It's a fine art, and that's what I love about it. It reminds me of the theater. It does a lot of things for me that play-acting does. It's older than Christianity. There ain't but one way to hit a polo ball, and they've been doin' it for a long time. So when you get into it you exchange that information with the horse and you bring the horse along. And the horse puts out for you, and you put out for the horse. And it's just like you can think and feel back to what it was like to have been my grandaddy workin' cattle or my great, great, great grandaddy with the wild Indians or the 10th Cavalry or the Light Brigade. There's a lot of history. It's like ballet. It's art. The art of it is what seizes you.

"Oh, I loved football. I was devoted to football and was crazy about football, but you know you grow up after awhile. And football is a game for boys. You have a daddy-figure coach and you have ri-di-culous rules that you have to observe. I mean, I wouldn't call a professional football player a 'man.' Everybody say, 'What? Tell that to L. C. Greenwood and Terry Bradshaw.' Those men will tell you that they get treated like boys when they're playing their profession.

Polo is a fine art and a Texas tradition, and those are two things that really make me happy and give me a sense of fulfillment: to do something I was born into and get to practice a fine art so that I'll have something to pass on that you can't put a number on. Those are my ambitions."

A certain violence, a great sweetness (continued)

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