A certain violence, a great sweetness (part 4)

PART 4

The week he enrolled at Harvard (again on a scholarship) Jones auditioned for a production of "The Tempest," got the rich part of Caliban and then backed out after a talk with the freshmen football coach. "He told me that I could act for the rest of my life, but that I only had four years to play football." Still, in the offseason, he became one of the best-known actors on the campus. "He's always been a star," says Timothy Mayer, the director who cast him in "The Tempest" and who later worked with him on numerous student productions.

Jones: "I got into Shakespeare, Brecht and Euripedes and pretty much stuck with those three cats through college and summer rep. And I did four Pinter plays. And some original plays, political satires and revues, radical theater - Artaud, Yeats, real kind of intellectual type theater." In perhaps his most prominent role at Harvard, he played Shakespeare's Coriolanus under the direction of playwright Thomas Babe.

Mayer adds, "He had a strange combination of the natural and the literary. He had a critical mind with the text, and he would prepare methodically, just as he prepared for athletics." (Producer Hirschman recalls, "He knew more about Howard Hughes than we did by the time we started.") Jones was part of an era in Harvard drama that Mayer remembers fondly as "the golden years." The undergraduate ensemble included Stockard Channing, John Lithgow, Trish Hawkins and Kathyrn Walker.

At Harvard, as at St. Mark's, Jones kept people guessing. "He would re-invent himself every 18 months," recalls one college friend. "But that wasn't that unusual at Harvard, where there were so many characters walking around."

He finished at Harvard with a degree in English at the height of the Vietnam war, but like a lot of college seniors that year he was opposed to the war on principle and had no intention of joining it. He sought and won a medical deferment based on a doctor's opinion that he was not psychologically suited to be a soldier.

Upon graduation, he was awarded a $12,000 fellowship from Harvard intended for study in England, but he took the money and headed for New York instead. ("I've worried a lot about it over the years, I have.") His heart set on the theater, he started with a reference from the Harvard team doctor whose daughter was actress Jane Alexander. He went to see Alexander, who was then appearing on Broadway in "The Great White Hope." After an introduction backstage, she took him to see her agent, "who passed me down to the greenest, lowliest agent in that outfit who got me into an open call." The call was for John Osborne's "A Patriot for Me," being readied for Broadway, and he won a small part. He had not been in New York yet 10 days, still had never had any formal acting training and did not have a union card.

"It ain't hard to teach somebody to act," Jones says one afternoon in the trailer, discussing former Band drummer and friend Levon Helm's precocious debut as Loretta's father in "Coal Miner's Daughter." "You know a man's voice is a great instrument, and if he's got natural ability . . . It's like Leon Russell said about playin' the piano: it's the easiest f-kin' thing in the world, all you got to know is which key to hit and when to hit it. So I basically, you know, told him to relax and apply the same intellectual process to his acting that he would to any of the rest of his art. Do everything in a certain rhythm."

A native of Arkansas, Helm was cast in the part by English director Michael Apted, according to Jones, "because he had the right spiritual quality. We were gonna do a movie name 'Coal Miner's Daughter,' and - damn! - We didn't have no coal miners! So I told 'em, if they had any sense, they'd go get Levon, see if he'd work with 'em."

"I told him how to do it. I taught him how. We all gathered up in Nashville, and then we had to drive to Kentucky because you couldn't get in there by any other way. We bought us a bottle of whiskey and destroyed it and time we got up there I'd taught him how to act. But he was good. He was out of this world. I mean, an actor is an actor whether he knows it or not."

"A Patriot for Me" was not a success, but it was a start. Jones worked intermittently on and off Broadway between 1969 and 1974. In his last stage role, he played Stephen Dedalus to Zero Mostel's Leopold Bloom in Burgess Meredith's production of "Ulysses in Nighttown," an adaptation from Joyce's novel. Critic Clive Barnes, then of The New York Times, detected "a fine, clear cut anger" in his performance as young Stephen. Douglas Watt of The Daily News found him "appropriately romantic." But the play had a short run. "It was a small, intimate play, the finest language, the greatest talents, and where did [producer] Alex Cohen put it but the Wintergarden [one of the biggest theaters on Broadway]. And it wouldn't read past the 12th row."

In New York, he married Katharine Lardner, an aspiring actress met while the two worked on a small, foundation-financed film. She is the niece of Ring Lardner Jr., the screenwriter. She brought two children from an earlier marriage. "The Lardners were a hard family to get into," Jones says. "Katharine never cared much for my family or for Texas." He enjoyed being a father, and he becomes animated at the memory. "I liked it so much that I'm gonna have to adopt some kids here pretty quick if I get too old to have any."

To support his life in the theatre, he eventually went to work on the ABC soap opera, "One Life to Live," as "an impossibly good doctor" named Mark Toland. "I think it was $225-a-show, and you was guaranteed one-and-a-half shows a week, and I wound up doing five shows a week because I was doing a very good job of helping them sell their soap. I became a minor matinee idol." He burps. "It was disgusting."

"But I did learn a lot about acting and a lot about videotape studios and how to use them, and I learned that I could withstand any amount of diabolical pressure, that you cannot scare me in front of a camera. Because there's more pressure in a soap than there is an anything else except, I guess, bein' a fighter pilot. It's the pressure of time. Time pressure. And people who don't have any respect for what they're doing."

"He really didn't like doing the show," remembers Sam Hall, one of the writers on "One Life to Live." "He always objected to the script. He wanted great writing every day. He was not the most popular young man around the set. But he had wonderful, individual qualities." Not at all surprised by Jones' subsequent success, Hall says, "He was right to do what he did."

He stayed with "One Life to Live" for three years, working sometimes 20-hour days if he was also appearing in a play. He finally resigned one day after a heated scene that took place off camera. During a rehearsal, he made a disparaging remark about the script in front of one of the show's young directors, and the director started screaming at him. "He followed me into my dressing room and was still screaming at me. He wanted me to apologize. (They're under a lot of pressure.) I didn't apologize, and I was tired of doing that anyway, so I gave them my notice and made plans to go to California." The show's writers had a few weeks to turn the charming Dr. Mark Toland into a degenerate, who was then eliminated by a jealous gunman.

"Back Roads," scheduled for release in early 1981 by the newly formed CBS Theatrical Films, is a cross-country romance that involves a lot of hitchiking, drinking and fighting (at one point Tommy Lee's boxer returns to the ring to take a dive against a small-town bruiser). The scenes in Brownsville depict the film's odd couple run out of luck, love and money in a border town while on their way to better days in California.

What persuaded Jones to pick this project after he had turned down so many? "Marty Ritt and Sally Field. And the part of Elmore. I was attracted to the idea of doing a physical comedy." He is being paid $375,000 for the 10 weeks of shooting.

For several nights running, the filming is inside a ramshackle honky tonk, where the air is hot and heavy enough to peel the paint off the walls and where the fans have to be turned off because of the noise. In one take after another, Jones yanks the petite Miss Field, the former Flying Nun and this years Academy-Award-winning actress, across the café's dance floor and up to the bandstand, where he grabs the microphone and tries to auction her off to a roomful of truckdrivers. A brawl ensues, and a trucker built like a mountain man pole-axes the star. Emerging wearily from the steambath of the café one night about 2 a.m., Jones observes, "I'm getting' to be a sure-enough by-God expert at bouncin' off that floor."

The rock band from New Orleans recruited as atmosphere for the scene remains each night after the wrap and plays during the wee hours for lingering members of the cast and crew. Jones always stays, downing Lone Star beer in long-neck bottles and tapping his monogrammed boots to the music. "Train songs, play train songs," he requests. Mostly he sits alone, although other people pull up to his table from time to time. He likes country music, and carries with him on the road a portable tape player and a case full of cassettes by Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, George Jones, Emmylou Harris, Jimmie Rogers and, yes, Loretta Lynn.

The music for "Back Roads" has been contracted to Henry Mancini, but Jones, warmed by the sound of these young, unknown musicians trying "All Around the Water Tank" and "The Wabash Cannonball" in his honor, decides that they belong on the soundtrack as well. He huddles with them their first evening on the set and lays a strategy by which they might convince the director to include one of their numbers in the picture. Since the movie has a train, he believes it ought to have a train song as well.

Watching this closely, a member of the crew narrates the scene: "Now that's Tommy. See, he's gonna get those folks' hopes up and make 'em think that they're gonna get a big break and all, and he don't have nothin' to say about it. He can be real generous with people like that, and then, wham, the next day he doesn't know you. It weird. It's like, you never know whether he's with you or not, you know what I mean?"

A certain violence, a great sweetness (continued)

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