The Fugitive
Tommy Lee Jones has spent years running away from nosy reporters, fawning fans, and the typical movie star lifestyle. With his recent success, he can’t run anymore.
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Or oysters. Schumacher says of the mundane scene to come, “The ones where they murder your children are easy. These are the hardest to do.” In subsequent rehearsals, Jones improvises, building on the language and the delivery of his few lines. He is accustomed to working this way. In The Fugitive he and director Andrew Davis converted deputy U.S. marshal Samuel Gerard from a loner to someone who thrives on the energy and loyalty of his own investigative team. “The supporting players could have been played by rubber gloves,” says Jones, describing the original script. “The audience had more to identify with if these characters became human.” So too with Foltrigg. You may despise him by the time Jones is done with him, but you will know him.
Take one (impatiently) “Stab at it with your fork and stick it down your throat. I want that kid in court and on the stand mañana.”
Take two: (angrier) “You know what I’m telling you? Stab it with your fork. Just eat the damn thing, McThune. Get it in your mouth! Don’t you have something to do somewhere?”
Take three: (just as angry, but colder; oyster remains impaled) “You hear what I’m tellin’ you? Don’t you have something to do? Go wake somebody up.” (Slams a salt shaker down for emphasis.)
What is interesting about the scene is how alone Jones appears in it, or rather how alone he is with the character. In just a few takes, Foltrigg has come alive in several variations. Schumacher rarely intervenes, and Jones seems to be the only actor on the set who needs little to nothing from him. Other actors eye the director expectantly with the completion of each take; Jones simply moves on to the next. When Schumacher finally decides that there is, indeed, too much talk of oysters and not enough action, Jones does not mourn his lost line; in the grips of his imagination, he simply diverts his energy elsewhere. As the scene continues, a woman at the next table in the restaurant approaches Foltrigg for an autograph, and the surly prosecutor becomes momentarily flirtatious. In character, Jones signs the autograph agreeably as he has done in previous rehearsals, but then he broadly studies the actress’ backside as she returns to her chair. “Sure is nice to see you,” he improvises winningly, and the crew bursts into applause. The oyster is gone, but Jones has lost nothing.
“A misled mind and a misinformed mind is more harmful to life than AIDS,” Tommy Lee Jones reads in a gravely Southern patois. He is standing outside a ramshackle building in a poor black Memphis neighborhood of listing Victorian gingerbread and crumbling storefronts. Jones’s text is one of many hand-lettered signs nailed to an old brick store that is now the studio of Joe Light, a folk artist of some renown. Jones, who collects what is often described as primitive art, had spied the place on the ride to another set for this afternoon’s shoot. With time to kill, connections were made via car phone (“We’re visiting from San Antonio and we’re familiar with and interested in your art”), and now Jones awaits Light’s arrival.
Directly, the artist drives up in a battered blue Mercury, smoke billowing from its tail pipe. He is a tall middle-aged man the color of coffee grounds; a portion of his hair has been straightened and another part crests in an ebullient wave. Jones extends a hand in greeting: “Mr. Light, I’m Tommy Lee Jones.” Light takes in Jones’s Lincoln Town Car and driver and registers if not recognition then a very warm welcome.
The studio is dusky and chaotic, thick with the smell of turpentine, the ceiling stained from an ancient leak. Paintings, mostly on wooden boards, are strewn about the room, their prices indicated by tiny strips of pencil-marked masking tape. The work has a childlike loveliness—deceptively simple renditions of birds, trees, and fish shot with color and animation, usually accompanied by Light’s philosophical captions. “I’ll let y’all have anything half-price,” he says. “Y’all are my first customers.”
Jones prowls the studio, picking up this painting and that one, until his eye is drawn to a work in the back that is painted on a hollow-core door. It depicts an exuberant Southern mansion painted yellow, surrounded by dancing orange-colored trees; the ground the house sits upon is a radiant green dotted with wild red patches, and the sky is awash in frantic blue brushstrokes. Jones studies it, walks away, and then is drawn back. “Does it represent any particular house?” he asks Light. “Any particular one?”
Light shakes his head, and Jones returns to his hunt. He picks up a smaller work, a boisterous fish, studying it from end to end. “Do you know you are famous, Mr. Light?” Jones asks without looking up.
Grinning, Light acknowledges that he does indeed know that he is famous.
“This kind of color is what you’re famous for,” Jones instructs, still admiring the painting.
Light laughs softly. “Nobody ever told me that,” he says, shaking his head. “I never knew the reason why. That’ll make me add more color to my pictures.”
While Tommy Lee Jones would be the last guy to add color to his pictures, he should not be confused with someone who is indifferent to fame. The media have painted him as an anti-star star; they deride him for being a hostile interview subject while they laud him for abandoning Hollywood for the home in northeast San Antonio he shares with his wife of twelve years, Kimberlea, and their two children, ten-year-old Austin and two-year-old Victoria. But Jones is no critic of the film industry; a mildly contemptuous comment about Hollywood produces a torrent of praise not just for Oliver Stone and Andrew Davis but for Terry Semel and Bob Daly, the current heads of Warner Bros. He has devoted his life to the pursuit of creativity within a commercial context—to him it is important not just to be famous but to know why. The better to decide what to do with it.
Born in 1946 in San Saba, Jones spent his early life tied to the oil fields. His people had worked ranches in the area for generations, but his father bet on the future and became a roughneck. “When I went to work with my dad, I got to see a very big machine and the brave men working on it,” Jones recalls. It was a go-to-sleep-in-one-town-wake-up-in-another kind of life, hard and cold as a blue norther in the desert. “We were poor as snakes,” says one of Jones’s cousins, country singer Boxcar Willie. The domestic drama of divorce and remarriage that was his parents’ life Jones once described as “a psychically horrifying story.” An only child, he had nothing but his dreams as comfort. It was something of a family joke that whenever guests came to visit, he packed a suitcase and attempted to leave with them. By the time the family moved to Midland, Jones was a difficult and angry boy who lived on the wrong side of town, a kid whose job one summer was working on a garbage truck. But he was also handsome and charming when he wanted to be, a natural with the girls and a natural on the athletic field, the keys to fame in that part of the world.
“Football was a reason for living,” Jones says. “It was everything. I’d lie awake at night dreaming of the day I could play.” When he signed on in the seventh grade, he weighed only 98 pounds. “Most people I played with were bigger than me. That made me faster, meaner,” he says. Football gave his life a center and some much-needed discipline; when his parents threatened to take that away—when Jones’s father took an oil-field job in Libya—the boy balked. He wanted to play, and he was interested in a girl who, like many children of wealthy Midlanders, was headed for Hockaday in Dallas. Tommy Lee Jones got himself a scholarship to nearby St. Mark’s and, in the tenth grade, left home, finished with the past.
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