PART 3

His father was near death, from a severely infected ear, the autumn night in 1946 that Tommy was born in San Saba, Texas. "They brought him around to me right away because they thought his daddy might not be there in the mornin' to look at him," Clyde remembers. The sight cheered him. He also remembers his son as being "an actor from the time he was this high," that he warmed hearts playing one of the seven dwarfs in an elementary school production of "Snow White." He was a happy and healthy baby, according to his mother Marie. Even in plays in the second grade, she says, "he was very good."

"He was very competitive from an early age," says Clyde, a man with a stocky build smaller than his son's and skin like tanned leather. By the time he was 13, Tommy could throw his father over his back when they wrestled on the lawn.

While he was growing up, the family moved around a lot, following the spread of the oil industry, and finally settled in Midland. Tommy was an only child but had the constant companionship of a cousin his own age. "We run wild till we was seven years old because we was both born after Sept. 1, and sh--, I refused kindergarten. We didn't know what school was. We had heard about it, but we couldn't match it with anything we was supposed to do. We'd seen the way the men in our lives lived, and the women. They were ignorant, largely poor, but certainly not stupid and impossible to push around. We just weren't the kind of people who responded well to authority."

Both Tommy's grandfathers, one from Mississippi and one from Alabama, came to Texas in wagons, fleeing the agony of Reconstruction. On his mother's side the family's paternal grandmother was born near Waxahachie, where her family had lived since the state was a Republic. His maternal grandmother was an Indian, rescued from a reservation.

"You could say she was a Comanche, but there was nothin' Comanche about her, nothin' at all. The language had been wrecked. The spiritual life had been wrecked. The fabric and texture and organization of the society had been . . . I mean, genocide had done its work."

His grandparents sharecropped their way through the Depression, "behind a mule, sans tractor." Clyde, who grew up in Lancaster, just south of Dallas, left school after the eighth grade and went to work as a cowboy until he was 16, when he set out for the oil fields. Tommy's mother, Marie, was reared on ranches in Knox County, north of Abilene. "They never owned anything, you know, but they could ride like the Mongol horde. They could do anything on a horse, anything. She could run a tractor when she was six, eight years old. Her brothers are all rocket scientists with a rope."

Clyde and Marie met in Benjamin when he, a young roughneck, wandered up to the drugstore fountain where she was mixing sodas. "There's a song out by George Jones," Clyde says, "that sums up to a 'T' the way I feel about Tommy's mama." The song, a country hit this summer, is "He Stopped Loving Her Today," which tells of a man who found that he could not live with a woman but felt no less about her after leaving her. The man's love ended, the lyrics reveal, only the day he died. Now divorced, Clyde and Marie separated after Tommy went east to college. They have not spoken in five years.

"It started early and kept on goin'," Tommy Lee says about his parents' troubles. "It was a long and bloody and psychically horrifying story which I will not tell, but it was not a peaceable relationship. But they have both survived, and they live independently of each other and do well now."

His mother today is an educational therapist for the mentally retarded at a state hospital outside San Angelo. Though she initially would have preferred that her son become a doctor or a lawyer, Marie has followed his acting career with great interest. "I'm very proud of Tommy," she says, "not because of the fact that he's a good actor, but because he's a good man."

In Midland, the boom town of the Permian Basin, Tommy was initiated into the Serious Rites of Friday Night, in which his estimable talent for clearing wide open spaces in the line and knocking down halfbacks emerged. When he was younger and living in Abilene, he had discovered the public library, Dr. Seuss and the pleasures of reading, but the enthusiasm had not passed over into the classroom. "I hadn't cared anything about the books. I figured, hell, you can get by at A & M if it's just agriculture and ranchin'. All I was really interested in was playin' football at A & M."

In Brownsville, during one outdoor scene that has attracted a crowd of curious Mexican-Americans, Jones watches intently and with irritation as an assistant director barks orders at them through a bullhorn. "You can't treat these people like that. I don't know why we come all the way out here on location to go and insult the people who live here."

One is reminded of the story Jones tells of the summer he spent in Midland working as a garbage man. "I spoke better Spanish than anyone else did, so I went with the Mexican crew. And one day I got my arm caught in the hydraulic press that pushes the garbage to the back of the truck, and it cut through the skin of my forearm all the way down to the bone. I think an eighth of an inch further and I'd be a one-armed man today. But I was able to yell at Lupe and tell him to shut the press down so that we could save my arm.

"And we drove the truck straight to the Midland Memorial Hospital. There were two ladies in there filing their nails in the emergency ward, and we came up there in a garbage truck all dirty and bleeding and jabbering Spanish and they, uh, informed us that we'd be better off if we went across the railroad tracks to Dr. Gutierrez." He pauses. "I considered myself a Mexican from that day on in many ways."

When the search for oil took Clyde Jones to North Africa in the early 1960s, he and Marie arranged to send Tommy, by way of a full scholarship, to St. Mark's. Which changed everything. There, at age 16, he was introduced to "a respect for books and a taste for art and a respect for the process of education," he says. But the enlightenment did not come easy. "I was definitely unready. I mean, at first it was 'D's. And I suppose that I began to get along there as soon as I began to improve my grades. For a boy away from home, in a new world, with entirely foreign challenges presented to him, it's a wonder that I survived that experience. But the reason I'm so loyal, I suppose, to that school is because they did not throw me away."

"He was very much a loner," recalls William Clarkson, who lived with Jones at a boarding house run by a St. Mark's teacher. "He wrote a lot of poetry and was deeply sensitive, but he felt uncomfortable revealing it. He didn't want to be vulnerable. So he survived by frightening the hell out of people."

Another student at the boarding house was Los Angeles filmmaker David Schmoeller. Schmoeller, who credits Jones as "the one who got me started writing," has a similar recollection. "What I remember is the contrast: he'd come to the dinner table and eat like an animal - sometimes [the housemaster] would ask him to take his food and leave the table - then he'd go out and read Dylan Thomas."

Like singer William "Boz" Scaggs before him, Jones became captain of the soccer team at St. Mark's, as well as a fierce and much decorated football player. And there was something else. "I haven't quit acting since the day I walked into that theater there - by accident. I didn't even know what the hell it was. I thought it was a barn or a tractor shed or something. They were rehearsing 'Mr. Roberts' and I watched what they was doin', and it kind of inter-ested me." Subsequently, he learned to drop his high plains drawl to play Sir Thomas More in "A Man for All Seasons" and the Welsh narrator in Dylan Thomas's "Under Milkwood." Covering his west Texas tracks until later, he shortened his name to Tom Jones.

One week before veteran Western character actor Don "Red" Barry would shoot himself to death at his home in Los Angeles, he is in Brownsville to do a cameo part in "Back Roads." Along with John Wayne and Johnny Mack Brown, Barry remains one of Jones' earliest cinema heroes ("I used to imitate him a lot in my play - get on a stick horse and chase down bad guys"). At the Holiday Inn in Brownsville, where most of the cast and crew are staying, Jones approaches Barry in the lobby one afternoon and tells him of his influence. He also asks him to referee the polo match arranged for the coming weekend. Greatly flattered, a dewy-eyed Barry returns the compliment, assuring Jones that he is an actor "of great talent. You are really going to get the scripts now," he says, his voice rising with emotion. "But be careful. I've seen too many like you get eaten up and spit out because they weren't careful with themselves." Barry offers his help in selecting scripts. "Anytime you want advice, please call me," he urges.

Jones has not seen any of the spate of new Westerns. He says he does not go to a lot of films. "If they're good, I'm jealous, and if they're bad I'm bored." Too, he does not like to be recognized and bothered by strangers. Once in New York, after he and a woman were assaulted by a wave of paparazzi on the street, he jumped into his sports car and sped away so suddenly that he barely missed running over one slow-footed photographer. "What if that guy hadn't gotten out of the way at the last second?" He asks the question, undecided between anger and sympathy. "Imagine the consequences if that had happened."

"As far as screenplays, I could just do that all the time - read screenplays and see whether or not I wanted to do them. I'm reading one right now. It's an existential chase movie. A manic depressive breaks out of prison, kidnaps a child and a cop's trying to catch him. It's very witty, very clever, funny. I haven't got to the end of it yet, but I think I will probably pass because they shoot in Canada and it's a chase movie, no matter how nifty it is. It is, finally, a chase movie. Sh--, this one, no matter how clever it is, it's a road movie. They say there are only about five stories in the world. How many stories are there in the world? Not many."

A certain violence, a great sweetness (continued)

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