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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“What makes a good actor?” Tommy Lee Jones asks, repeating the questions. Riding to the set in the back seat of the Lincoln, Jones shifts his focus as the lush Tennessee countryside whizzes by. “Desire is the first ingredient. Hard work follows desire, and the motivation to do something about it all day, every day.” He pauses thoughtfully, settling into the subject as he puts his feet up, legs splayed, over the front seat. Something about his posture suggests that there should be a beer can between his legs, and boots, instead of Foltrigg’s dress shoes, on his feet. “Actors need to be pretty well fearless,” he continues, “able to achieve a fearless state. The moment will come when you’re called on to be courageous.” He continues working through the list methodically—“generosity,” “education,” “some practical understanding of faith”—and even though he has described himself, he would insist otherwise. “I don’t believe my work is about me,” he says. “I hope not.”
Literally, Jones is right. When the people closest to him brag on him, he doesn’t sound like he has a thing in common with murderer Gary Gilmore, whom he portrayed in The Executioner’s Song. Also, the fact that Jones has long been associated with heavies has more to do with Hollywood than with him. The dispersal of movie roles is capricious, depending on an actor’s popularity as well as his availability, and it’s awesomely conservative; it is much safer to match up Jones’s rough-and-tumble features with tough guys than with romantic heroes. Still, it is possible to see his life in his art and to see why, as he declared earlier, “the creative act is redemptive.”
Jones is, after all, a man who cites as one of his favorite essays T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In it the English poet talks of the artist’s self-sacrificial role as requiring “a continual extinction of personality.” It is a demand oddly compatible with the harrowing homelife of a poor West Texas boy—not the public life of the football star, but the private history of a child who had to make his own way. When Loretta Lynn’s husband, Mooney, sadly twiddles a beer bottle in Coal Miner’s Daughter, when Sam Gerard brusquely but affectionately tells his team to “listen up” in The Fugitive, each and every time Woodrow Call pushes love away in Lonesome Dove—if you know the world of West Texas, you will find those people as imagined by Tommy Lee Jones.
Streetwise and intuitive, Jones taught himself to know people better than they know themselves. Absorbing the lesson that he was nothing, he learned to make something of that by dissolving himself into the role of others. St. Mark’s, Harvard, Hollywood—the years of study and discipline rest on that foundation. “He approaches a character on a gut level and on an intellectual level,” says Sissy Spacek. “He just crawls inside ’em. Tommy Lee is very strong physically, mentally, emotionally, and intellectually. All these things add to his strength as an actor. He has enormous intensity and great compassion. He has all that deep well to draw from.”
Jones is not an enormous man—he stands six foot one. But just as his restless energy makes him appear caged in the back seat of the Town Car, he is an actor who can make the movie screen seem small. “I’ve only got one body to work with, one instrument,” he says, describing the limits on the kinds of characters he can play, but within those limitations, the former athlete builds his men from the inside out, with amazing risk but also amazing precision. Jones as Gary Gilmore minces menacingly to and from the service station where he commits his first murder; Jones as Coley Blake, the ex-con of Jackson County Jail, moves carelessly through the last days of his life, already certain his jig is up. Few major actors would risk playing a homosexual, as Jones did as Clay Shaw in JFK; even fewer would come up with the idea for his character to appear virtually nude and covered with paint. (When Jones learned that Shaw had entertained in this fashion, he went straight to the director. “Oliver,” he told Stone, “I’ve gotta paint myself gold!”)
But it isn’t just the bodies of Jones’s characters that make them live—it’s their souls. At his best, Jones has shown that rough and difficult men, men not unlike those who lived and died to create his particular history, are deserving of grace. Woodrow Call, reminded of a lost lover’s death, shows his grief by stepping to the doorway and slowly donning his hat; Gary Gilmore trembles with devotion when he meets his lover, Nicole, and tells her he has found his guardian angel. When Mooney Lynn is drowning in a well of loneliness and anxiety, he still answers the phone late one night and soothes one of his wife’s even lonelier fans. The power of that scene was not in the script. “Tommy Lee took what was nothing on paper and made it hugely complex and human,” says Bill Wittliff, who produced and wrote the screenplay for Lonesome Dove. “You never hear one word from that fan, but you can read her whole character through the genius of Tommy Lee’s scene.”
Reminded of that work, Jones softens. “You feel lonely for Mooney, and you admire him because he finds and takes a chance to be kind,” he says, lingering over the last word as if it were as scarce as rain in the desert. “You’ve got to love people for doing that.”
“I watched him go from a large motor home to a superlarge,” William Sanderson says of his friend Tommy Lee Jones, who rocks beside him in a matching La-Z-Boy in Jones’ star-sized trailer. The sad-eyed Sanderson, who also has a role in The Client, is best known for his portrayal of Larry, the only talkative member of a trio of brothers on Newhart. At this moment, he is chewing tobacco while Jones puffs on a large cigar. Out of costume in cotton shirts and jeans, they look like two good ol’ boys waiting for the game to start. In fact, they are waiting for Joe Light’s painting to arrive so that Jones can show it off.
All in all, it’s been a good day. The afternoon’s shoot—a brief scene in which Foltrigg watches himself on television while riding in a limousine—progressed smoothly, as have other demands of a star’s life. In a conference with the wardrobe people, Jones has found Foltrigg a brighter necktie, and at the urging of the movie’s publicist, he has autographed a decorative heart for the local mental health association’s auction. He has even agreed to do more interviews. One reporter wants to know where he eats in San Antonio; another wants a more extended audience. “He’d like to do a personality story on you,” the publicist says. “Well,” deadpans Jones, “I’ll have to get one.”
When the painting arrives, it is displayed outside Jones’s trailer, where it adds a dash of glamour to what was, until the arrival of the movie crew, and abandoned tractor factory. Again Jones stands transfixed before it. His affable driver, Jim Burns, who had gone back for the painting, tells the group that Light had become more inquisitive about his benefactor after Jones’s departure. “He’d like your autograph,” Burns says to Jones. “Just tell him not to cash the check,” Sanderson cracks.
After the viewing, Jones spends a few moments going over transcribed pages of the screenplay he has been writing in the evenings—an adaptation of Elmer Kelton’s West Texas novel The Good Old Boys, which Jones intends to direct. Feeling much at home, he gets up from the tiny table in his trailer and begins to set a scene that takes place near the closing of the frontier, when the main character, Hewey Calloway, must decide whether to settle down on a ranch or continue his life as a drifter.
“I say it’s wrong to make a man plow out a field to hold his claim,” Jones says as Calloway, altering his accent only slightly. “He ought not to rip up land that God has already planted to grass and handed to him as a gift.” The boy accompanying Calloway, his nephew Cotton, argues that God’s will might be the cultivation of the land, and that Hewey might know God’s desired better if he ever visited with Him in church. Jones’s Hewey remains intransigent, holding fast to the life he has known. “I don’t have to go to church to hunt for Him,” he says. “I see Him around me every day, everywhere I look.”
Jones finishes the scene and offers the page of dialogue from the script he has written. He has made no revisions; he has ad-libbed not at all. This one he knows by heart.
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