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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Entertainment writers like to make much of the tall Texan’s heading for Harvard, but the real change in Jones’s life occurred at St. Mark’s. “They should have thrown me away, but they didn’t,” he once told a close friend. St. Mark’s in the early sixties was a cultural oasis in a city and, for that matter, a state that was still harshly conservative, with little to no appreciation for an intellectual much less an artistic life. Perhaps more than any of his fellow students who came from more-comfortable situations, Jones understood absolutely the size and scale of the opportunity that had been made available to him, and he took to the place with a passion that could only have been forged in earlier deprivation. “He came to St. Mark’s with a street kid’s knowledge of life,” recalls one former teacher. “St. Mark’s was more or less a shelter for kids from the battering that life gives them, but Tom arrived a battered kid. He knew what life was like out there. He had been aged by his background.”
At the school, Jones discovered a deep love of literature (to this day, when confronted with a word he does not recognize, he stops to look it up), a chance to hone his athletic skills, and most important, the world of the stage. One day, while walking to his dorm, he overheard a rehearsal in progress, directed by a magical Englishman named Tony Vintcent. Jones walked into the theater and never walked out. In those days, the drama teacher was in charge of a department that attracted much of the city with its productions; there was nothing schoolboyish about them. It wasn’t long before Jones was a featured actor. Just as he had understood the value of football as a path to liberation in Midland, so too did he find, within the world of St. Mark’s, the path that lead to the most acclaim. He was smart, determined, preternaturally competitive; he had mastered the art of appearing afraid of no one. The caption under one yearbook picture baldly asked, “Who needs God?”
On scholarship at Harvard in the late sixties—where, most people now know, he roomed with Vice President Al Gore—Jones continued to play football. An offensive lineman, he made all-Ivy and all-East and was all-American honorable mention, but his size precluded a career in professional sports. His future was decided: In what he later described to the Los Angeles Times as his happiest period in the theater, Jones performed everything from Shakespeare to Brecht in summer repertory with Stockard Channing (then at Radcliffe), John Lithgow (Harvard) and James Woods (MIT). Even then he had an eroticism onstage that attracted both sexes; a director friend used to joke that he would always be able to sell tickets if he could get Jones to remove his shirt while performing.
Initially, Jones’s road to success was not circuitous. After graduation he moved to New York, performing on the soap opera One Life to Live during the day and on and off Broadway at night. When he saw better roles going to actors who were “more famous,” he moved to Los Angeles in 1976, rented the home where Marilyn Monroe committed suicide, and went about getting himself onscreen. He had little trouble finding work—within months, he was featured in the pilot episode of Charlie’s Angels—and soon landed his first starring role, in a Roger Corman picture called Jackson County Jail. In what would become something of a Jones specialty—thanks partly to his more-than-slightly-menacing good looks—he played Coley Blake, a sociopath with a heart of gold.
HEIFERS ARE JUST FOR FUN, BUT TOMMY LEE JONES IS PAID TO KNOCK THE LADIES OFF THEIR FEET was the headline on a breathless People profile that appeared in 1978. By then Jones’ seven-year marriage to Kate Lardner (the granddaughter of author Ring Lardner) had broken up, but he was well positioned on the Hollywood Hunk track. He had starred in The Amazing Howard Hughes on TV and had played a homicidal homicide detective alongside Faye Dunaway in Eyes of Laura Mars. For People, he showed off his calf-roping skills and his new girlfriend, model Lisa Taylor. “It’s love,” he told the magazine with typical gruffness. “There’s no reason to keep it a secret—nor is there any reason to go into detail.”
The roles kept coming, but it was a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of career for a person bent on becoming a star. He appeared in some stinkers (The Betsy), a few mediocres (Back Roads), and some films in which he could really show his range (The Executioner’s Song, for which he won an Emmy, and Coal Miner’s Daughter). Considering the bland handsomeness that much of Hollywood banks on, Jones’s progress was something of an inspiration: He stayed in the game, even though for a star, his face was wrong, his accent was wrong, his manner was wrong. He exploited his best roles and didn’t sleepwalk through the worst; he educated himself about screenwriting and camera lenses with a ferocity that would occur only to the most ambitious performers. And then he left.
“Probably the most difficult times Tommy Lee had were the years he lived in Hollywood,” says his friend Sissy Spacek, his co-star in Coal Miner’s Daughter and JFK. Along with a sinister black Porsche and California real estate investments, there were the predictable excesses of parties and alcohol. There was a slugfest on one set and an even more belligerent public stance. “Sometimes I’ve been drunk at the wrong time,” he told People in a rare concession. “But who hasn’t?” In 1980, after meeting San Antonio photographer Kimberlea Cloughley on the set of Back Roads, Jones had his worldly goods shipped back home; the couple married in 1981 and have remained in Texas ever since. “That’s probably the closest he has come to living the Hollywood life, and it just didn’t suit him at all,” Kimberlea says of Jones’ sojourn in Southern California. “He tried that on, and it just didn’t fit.”
Fortunately, the work followed him home. He desperately coveted the part of Woodrow Call in Lonesome Dove and beat out the likes of Richard Harris and Burt Reynolds for the role. Jones’s performance as Call inspired Oliver stone to cast him as Clay Shaw in JFK, for which he received an Academy award nomination for best supporting actor. Nowadays Jones has grafted a more than a little bit of Hollywood glamour onto the world he inhabits, but fame has meant more to him than the usual opportunity to play better roles and make more money: It has given him the chance to make his peace with the place he came from. He pours his money into a sprawling cattle ranch in San Saba (also the base for his extensive polo addiction). A play that he directed five years ago in San Antonio, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, still seems as important to him as many of his movie roles. When Al Gore was running on the Democratic ticket, Jones loyally rode the campaign bus from San Antonio to Austin. Should a Texas organization invite him to speak, Jones is there with a flawless text, playing both the appreciative star and, in some oddly over-prepared way, the restless, unsure boy who still has to prove himself. That vigilance endures, fame or no. “There’s plenty of ranches I can go to and get a job,” he says. “I can ride most anything, I know cattle, I can do most things you’d expect a cowboy to do, and I’m not afraid to work. Even if you’re my age and have a wife and two children, there are some places that will give you a place to live.” Maybe he was acting when he delivered these lines, and maybe he wasn’t.
Back in Joe Light’s studio, Jones’s mood is considerably brighter. He moves again toward the large painting of the yellow house. He asks whether he can take it outside, and Light obliges. When the painting is laid against an exterior wall, Jones steps away from it, onto the pavement baking in the summer sun. The yellow mansion with the tall columns shimmers. Surveying it, Jones shifts his weight to one side and puts his hands on his hips, satisfied, knowing the work is already his. When he smiles, weathered crow’s-feet explode like firecrackers down the side of his face. “It reminds me of my ranch house,” he says, able to see home from the middle of a Memphis street.
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