Tommy Lee Jones:

A certain violence, a great sweetness

THE STUDIO PHOTOGRAPHER is furious. Wisps of steam rise off the damp furrows in his brow as he readies his retreat from the set. "I've worked with everybody," he confides. "Brando, Redford, Streisand, you name it - and this has never happened to me. Never." He continues to bristle at the breach of protocol, but there is no one who can do anything to help him. Not the film's publicist who steered him here, not the producer who hired him. The picture is nearly through, and if one of the stars, particularly this star whose whims everyone has given up trying to fathom, requests that the official still photographer spend his first night on the set "just watching," then he will just watch. Or he will leave. Hoisting his refolded tripod and the heavy case of cameras lugged all the way from the hotel, the rumpled man turns toward someone lending a sympathetic ear and says it once again, a little more smugly. "Never!"

We are headed south earlier that evening toward the location in Brownsville, rolling along past the flatland farms of the lower Rio Grande Valley in the dying light when Tommy Lee Jones realizes that his hair is still wet from the shower. The actor, farmer, polo player and aesthete fiero turns to his driver and says, in an acid, saloon gambler's voice, "You know how a Texas Aggie dries his hair?" In answer to his own question - a rhetorical device he favors - Jones rolls down the window of the sedan and lunges his head and shoulders out into the rapid slipstream, hot and dry as July on the border. He gives his craggy face and jet-black hair to the wind, and on the muscles of his forearms he leans more and more of his torso out of the speeding car until he resembles a bird dog on point. When, finally, he has pulled himself back inside, there is a burst of quick, innocent laughter over the warble of Randy Newman's "Good Old Boys," playing by request on the eight-track. Jones pops the top on a can of Lone Star and, suddenly serious again, offers a reverent observation. "There's nothing like the Rio Grande Valley at sunset, boy. You'd think that God got out his box of Crayolas and started coloring."

The virtues of the remote, sun-baked Rio Grande delta, other than the strictly allegorical, are not so readily apparent to the rest of the company who have come here to finish director Martin Ritt's "Back Roads," a romantic comedy pairing Sally Field as a hooker with Jones as a ruined prize-fighter. But most of them did not grow up, as Jones did, on the bleached plains of West Texas. Nor have they studied with so much attention the history of the Spanish colonization and the wars against the Indians. They do not share his heightened sense of place or feel the consolation of the uninterrupted sky. The day that Ritt, in deference to the mounting heat, decides to switch the remaining shooting schedule to nights, Jones remarks, "No hace mas calor que quiere Dios en el cielo."("It ain't no hotter than God wants it.") "You have more faith in him than I do," the director replies.

"Tommy is a very complicated man," says Ritt, the 60-year-old director who survived Hollywood's blacklist to make many successful films, including "The Long Hot Summer," "Hud," "Sounder" and "Norma Rae." Talking about his latest leading man between takes in the cool of his trailer, Ritt speaks cautiously.

"He's a good actor.. Very intuitive. He's a little strange, but that's not news to anybody. But he's gifted. There were a number of actors considered by CBS. I kind of felt that it was his part ... I did feel in Tommy a certain violence and a great sweetness, which I knew I needed in this part."

Jones pays the formal respect to Ritt that a second-term congressman would pay to his majority leader. He addresses him frequently as "sir." (Whether there is sarcasm implied is not always clear.) Yet during filming Jones finds it difficult simply to take orders. Always he scrutinizes plot development and dialogue. He objects to Ritt's long-standing policy of not allowing actors to see the rushes. "I wish he would," Jones admits, "but that's his program, and I'm with it - with the program. I'd be a lot more help to him. But I'm working for him. If he says 'frog,' I'm gonna jump and ask him how high on the way up."

He gives the impression that he values little above loyalty, even if it sometimes clashes with his avowed distaste for authority. He boasts, for example, about the money his old class raises regularly for St. Mark's, the Dallas prep school where he just made it through the first year ("The first quarter my reports were, I remember, 'sullen, morose, and belligerent'."). He frets about a lack of shared pride in the making of a movie. "I'm worried about everything. I'm worried about the prop man, I'm worried about the cook, about the focus puller, about the extras, about the transportation, about the law enforcement, traffic control, the director's help, Marty's diet."

He gestures toward screenwriter Gary DeVore, sitting on the other side of his trailer. "We have like an 'A' team, you know? A first team. And the first team always stays worried. And if they don't ...

"C'mon, Faye!" Jones is dragging toward the door a dutiful black sheepdog adamantly opposed to leaving. He has three dogs, and they are seldom out of

his sight; they roam the set and eat dinner from the caterer's truck; they ride in cars and sleep in hotel rooms; out on the farm they race along behind as Jones circles his fields on horseback. His favorite dog, Travis, even appeared in one of the Butcher Holler scenes in "Coal Miner's Daughter." After a protracted struggle, the actor hurtles Faye out the door and down the trailer steps.

"Understand him? You're trying to understand him?" the costumer says incredulously. "You might start by calling him a sonuvabitch.' That will put you on his level."

Jones, who manages to offend people easily, also manages to get away with it. For much of his life, it seems, he has been making up the rules. His progress through the gauntlet of screen acting has been headlong, not unlike the way he moves across a hotel lobby or parking lot, leaving friends and associates in pursuit. After only five years and as many films, he is on the verge of becoming a public figure larger than that of a merely successful actor.

The picture that beamed him to the front of his Hollywood class was this year's "Coal Miner's Daughter," the popular biography of singer Loretta Lynn in which he played Dolittle "Mooney" Lynn, the good old Kentucky boy who married and first managed the queen of country music. He gave a gently humorous and touching portrayal of a cocky young hillbilly who dared to escape the darkness of the mines only to end up a prisoner of his wife's enormous success. A bear of a man diminished before our eyes into a bored, drunken camp follower, tagging along in the shadow of the woman he had pushed into becoming a star. But Jones was able to convey the charm as well as the undoing of Mooney, who felt much more at home in the seat of a bulldozer than in the gaudy bus with his wife's name on the side. The role could have been pathetic, but Jones pulled it in an opposite direction. Even during Mooney's lowest moments he was able to muster a manner of irreverence that made him endearing.

Jones did not wholly invent the quality for the picture. "I try to remain optimistic about things despite a lot that's happened," he says flatly one afternoon while saddling up a polo pony at his farm in nearby La Feria. He refers to the breakup of his marriage of seven years to Katharine Lardner, the recent disappearance of model Lisa Taylor from his life, the low currency of honor in Hollywood and, most recently, the cancellation of a polo match he has been planning for a week, news which comes as "a severe disappointment."

If you are around Jones long enough, you can watch a quieting stoicism break across his stormy surface. Elusive to a fault, he darts in and out of conversations and emotions with the same velocity he once exploded across the line of scrimmage at Harvard, where he played offensive guard and was named All-Ivy League and All-East in 1968. Part of what makes him so interesting as an actor stems from the sudden changes he is able to conjure in the broad planes of his uncommon face, a face dominated by a low hanging ridge of sturdy eyebrows and the creases left by acne suffered in his teens. When the changes come, they can bring lyricism or menace to his voice and issue punishment or reward from his hooded eyes. He can be convincingly boyish or grim as a gunfighter, but whatever his mood, it is usually urgent.

"He keeps you unsettled, which I think is part of his attraction," says Herbert Hirschman, one of the producers who, after an exhaustive search, selected Jones to play the mysterious potentate Howard Hughes in a two-part television special for CBS in 1977 - his biggest break up until then. "He wouldn't read lines the way you thought they should be read, and yet when he read them, you accepted them. We never knew what made Howard Hughes tick, and so we needed an actor who had his own presence. His natural quality was not unlike Hughes."

The mystery Jones brings to the screen he brings from his life off camera, where he is one part cowboy, one part landed gentry, sometimes shifting from one to the other in the space of a sentence (he is like Kris Kristofferson, an oral schizophrenic). These alternating currents make him a difficult person to know, attest many who have tried. He can talk a blue streak of poetry, and he can say nothing. Jones' father, retired oil-field driller Clyde Jones, who now lives on the La Feria farm, shakes his head and concedes that his son is often "incommunicative." "See, the thing is," Clyde says one evening during a visit to the set, "Tommy wants to do this and go home every night like a normal person. But you know as well as I do that it don't work that way."

Jones would have you believe he is uncomfortable with stardom, representing as it does a social hierarchy and commercial imagery that has nothing to do with acting. He voices anti-establishment views against big government, big business, big magazines and big lies. He sees publicity as bound up with the last three and does not invite it. After spotting a reporter from a national magazine taking notes on the set one night, he has the man removed and explains ceremoniously to the cast and crew, "The media is interfering with the process of American art and has been for some time now."

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