PART 5

Late one night, after his table is wet with beer and the ashtrays are overflowing from the pack of Marlboros he has smoked, Jones is asked if he had ever wanted to play in the backfield. "Yeah," he answers. "And I always wanted to be a movie star, too."

He did not care for "Eyes of Laura Mars," Jon Peters' bloody, high-fashion thriller in which he was paired with in ill-at-ease Faye Dunaway last year. "I don't think I was very good in it," he says curtly. Nor does he speak highly of "The Betsy," in which he had scenes with "Larry" Olivier, or the television guest spots he did on "Charlie's Angels" and "Baretta" when he first came to Los Angeles. "I'm not satisfied with all the work I've done, but when I have worked and been unsatisfied? My excuse was that I needed the damn money."

Does he like making films?

"Well, I'd be sittin' on a plow if I didn't."

A lot of people do things they don't like, he is told.

"Well, some things I don't like. I look back in retrospect sometimes and wished I hadn't gotten so damn drunk the night before, wished I'd left half that Mezcal in that bottle. Or sometimes I wake up and wished I'd left that old gal in the beer joint. But usually if I'm doin' it I like it - at the time. It's not just a question of doin' what you like. I usually do what I love, and I love acting. I believe that I have something to offer the world and that's my reward."

One reason he left New York, shortly after "Ulysses in Nighttown" closed, was that he had come to believe that he would be a long time acquiring leverage in the theater. "It dawned on me from that experience, that I was on the receiving end, and I needed to kick out a few jams. So when I go back to do the plays in New York, I'm not going to be quite as tethered as I was."

He had a chance to return two years ago in David Mamet's "American Buffalo" with Robert Duvall, but he could not get out from under a film commitment in time. "It broke my heart I missed it. I want to go back to the theater real soon. And I really do need to and I more or less have to and I'm just bound to. I don't know when, exactly, or where or what or how it'll work out but I've got to get back."

During a discussion of screenwriting in his trailer, he says, as he might read the time and temperature, "There are no good screenwriters. Because if they were any good they'd be playwrights or novelists." He picks a script out of his canvas travel bag and opens it at random to rest his case. "There's no iambic pentameter in here. There are no quatrains in here. You don't have to worry about entrances and exits. The camera does it all for you."

He has written both plays and screenplays though none have yet been produced. At Harvard he took a playwriting course with William Alfred, the author of "Hogan's Goat," and wrote a play about religion. He has written a play based on the autobiography of Kit Carson - which he believes might also make a movie. And there is the picture he wants to make someday about polo. He has formed his own production company, Javelina, named after the species of wild boar native to southwest Texas.

A considerate and knowledgeable acquaintance has said, "He has not been affected well by success." That delicate, facile sentence comes to mind as I peer out at the parking lot and wonder how I am going to kill the time until the shooting begins again at 8 this evening. The five days in Brownsville have been fitful, largely spent waiting for a few words here, a chance meeting there, sitting in the trailer with members of the family and hangers-on, even lending him a hand with the horses at the farm. To get away from the distractions for a change, we made arrangements on the set the night before to have one good, long talk today at his place on the island.

"Why don't I call you at 11?" I said, noticing that it was then almost 2. "Or will that be too early?"

"No, make it earlier," he insisted. "Call me at 10. Then you can come over, and we'll have lunch. We'll be by ourselves." You would have put money down on the imperative in that voice. It was the voice, after all, of Mooney promising Loretta the world. On the other hand, you might not have if you knew Tommy.

Knowing him even a little, in the way that you know someone you played on high school teams with an have not seen in a decade, the fact that he does not answer the phone at 10 or at 11 or after and that there are no messages does not come as a total surprise. I have resisted the line about success, partly out of sympathy but partly, too, out of rekindled memory. Beneath the flourishes of the hearty introductions and the eloquent sincerities, was it not always thus? Our subject remains at large.

By 3 I decide that as long as it's my last day, I am at least going to get a look at South Padre. I drive the 30 miles across the sandy plain and over the causeway to Port Isabel, then head up the coastal road. I pass the Hilton, where his condo is located, and drive on, past the hotels and guest houses. I survey the beach. It is three weeks before Hurricane Allen, and the sea is calm, the salt air a tonic. On the way back down the road, I pull into the lot at the Hilton out of sheer duty, and from a phone in the lobby I call his number one more time. He answers. "Well, come on up!" The voice greets me as if I had just arrived for a homecoming weekend.

His balcony overlooks the deep blue expanse of the Gulf of Mexico, which under the afternoon sun stretches into the eastern horizon. The apartment is clean and white, and its light wicker furniture looks new. From the carpet on the floor the portable tape player cries with the sorrows of George Jones; against the wall rests an inexpensive guitar that resembles the one Mooney bought for the young Loretta in the movie. It is a present from Gary DeVore. "I like to stay up late and play music all night long," he has said earlier, "but I'm not a musician, I'm not any good. If I want to show somebody a song, like Butter [blues musician Paul Butterfield], I say, Butter, this song's got three chords to it and I don't know what they are, but you figure it out. Then, I'll play it and he'll play it and sing along."

On the stove in the kitchen, room service coffee is warming in a stew pot. On the table in the living room, plates of club sandwiches sit wrapped in cellophane. There are two days left on the picture, and he has planned to spend the free afternoon working the horses on the beach. He is waiting for his father and three teen age cousins ("good cowboys, just like we was"), who are driving the horses in trailers over from the mainland. There is no mention of our earlier appointment, no excuse offered, no hint that unforeseen circumstances intervened.

"We've about got him retired," he says of his father, "before it killed him. He's got more scars on him than a rodeo mule. The way the oil business is, it will take one or your fingers this year [it has taken two of Clyde's], one of your toes next year. It adds up."

The faded jeans and baseball sweatshirt he has worn for the film have been replaced by fresh denims and a polo shirt. Perhaps he has not been awake long. His hair is wet, and he combs it back with his hands, sits down and unwraps one of the sandwiches. "I keep this because sometimes I need a quiet place to sit down and read a book. I don't ever go down on the beach." He gazes below to the swimming pool and tennis courts and the sand dotted with bathers. He says, "I am pretty much alone now." After three years, he broke up with Lisa Taylor, one of the two gleaming fashion models featured in "Eyes of Laura Mars," and he suggests that part of the difficulty of this picture has been that he has spent it recovering from her absence. His tone is more reportorial than self-pitying. "But I know that somewhere out there is a smart, beautiful, wonderful girl, and I hope she can wait until I find her." Our conversation turns eventually to the factors of celebrity.

"If you are a public figure, many people will try to take advantage of you and the temptation is to either run and hide or else to become cynical. Or utter a statement like 'It's lonely at the top,' which is a paranoid statement. You can't live without friends, you can't go on without 'em. And if you decide that everybody's trying to take advantage of you or that nobody likes you for your mind or that nobody knows the real you, that's a monstrous situation because it's a situation that makes itself get worse. The more suspicious you are of life and the world, the more unhappy you are.

"I have people that I believe in their friendship, and I watch and check it out because I know it's a real important thing. It's easy in the movie business to become cynical about the better values in life, and that's one of the reasons I intend to stay as close to southwest Texas as I can. Well, I have friends in the game of polo that I know are my friends, that if I became unfamous all of a sudden, you know, would still want to play polo. And I know people in the movie business that smile and smile and smile and yet remain villains.

"New York and Los Angeles will always be a significant part of my life, but as for what I'm going to do with my money and the way my kids grow up, I'd a lot rather see my kids run wild till the age of seven and grow up in Uvalde than I would have 'em go to the Dalton School at the age of three on the upper East Side of Manhattan. I think Montessori is just fine if you're trapped - in town - but if you're not, dogs and horses will do kids a lot more good. That's just the way I am. So I'm thinking about children, family. I need one. I have two failed relationships. One was a marriage. One was almost a marriage. So I'm kind of looking to set things right, make the circle unbroken. The next thing I'll do with my money is buy some real estate here in Texas, out in the country choked up with mesquite, jackrabbits, the wells down, the fences down, the man is too old and the kids all gone. I'll put it back the way it ought to be. I couldn't think of nothin' else better to do. Except maybe go to Beverly Hills and throw it all up my nose. But that ain't no way. I can't do it like that."

"The big cities, then, don't interest you as much as being out here?"

"No sir, they don't. I'm not too much interested in Houston or Dallas. San Antonio - if I was a Jew, San Antonio would be my Tel Aviv. Now that's one city I can get along with just fine. I love that old town. I love everything about it. It's bi-cultural, bi-lingual."

When "Back Roads" was finished, Jones flew to Wyoming for a week at a polo ranch, then returned to Texas where he spent some time in Austin with friends, including Sissy Spacek and her husband Jack Fisk. Next, he moved his six thoroughbreds from the farm in La Feria 500 miles north to the stables at Willow Bend, rented a house in Highland Park and said that Dallas would now be his home. This did not come as a total surprise. Really, it did not come as a surprise at all.

END

A certain violence, a great sweetness (continued)

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