February 1998
PORTFOLIO TWO • Fame and Fortune
There is one star on Texas’ flag but many in its firmament. The portraits showcase Texans who skyrocketed to celebrity or success.
There is one star on Texas’ flag but many in its firmament. This portfolio of 34 portraits showcases Texans who skyrocketed to celebrity or success. Many personify the promises implicit in Texas’ very name: bigness (basketball great Hakeem Olajuwon), likability (ex-governor Ann Richards), power (politico Bob Bullock), wealth (billionaire Ross Perot), strength (boxer George Foreman), independence (rocker Janis Joplin), and resolve (actor Tommy Lee Jones). But even lesser luminaries gain that extra little fillip of fame that comes from being a Texan.
These are people on the move, but they all managed to sit (or stand) still long enough to have their picture taken. The photographers—including Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, and Keith Carter—often had star power themselves, as well as a flair for disarming their subjects and distilling qualities beyond the merely physical.
Images from the Twenty-fifth anniversary issue are not available online.
The Stories Behind the Pictures
No.34
Actor Tommy Lee Jones by Andrew Eccles
Arkansas, “The Fugitive” October 1993
I’M NOT SURE I’VE SPENT A DAY ANY MORE enjoyable than the one I spent with Tommy Lee Jones for a piece called “The Fugitive.” The movie of the same name would prove to be Jones’s breakthrough, the one that bumped him up that last notch from serious actor to Academy award–winning star, and he agreed to allow us to catch him at that moment, in freeze-frame. Still, I was nervous: I was unaccustomed to interviewing celebrities and had heard that he despised journalists.
What I found was a courtly, solicitous man who reminded me more of a West Texas cowboy than a Hollywood movie star. Jones allowed me to watch him rewrite script pages and film his scenes. We went shopping for folk art, ate Memphis barbecue, and tooled around the banks of the Mississippi in his chauffeur-driven car while he riffed on acting and fame. Initially, he’d told me that having a writer follow him around was “unseemly,” but he seemed to get used to it pretty fast.
Photographer Andrew Eccles’ experience was a little different. Jones also reminded him of a character out of the West—an extremely vigilant sheriff—and Eccles felt like a stranger in his town. “He hates to have his picture taken,” Jones’s then-wife had told me, a fact that no one but Jones would communicate to Eccles. At one point during the intense, competitive session, Eccles was stung by a wasp. “Tommy Lee stared me in the eyes,” he says. “I refused to flinch.” In the end, Eccles got the cover shot, and Jones had to admit he was happy with the image. “Tommy Lee wrote me a beautiful thank-you note,” he says. “He won, but I won too.” Mimi Swartz
No.35
Musician and Mystery Novelist Kinky Friedman by Will van Overbeek
Kerrville, “Long Live the Kink” August 1988
“NUDIE, THE FAMOUS HOLLYWOOD TAILOR, made this coat years ago for a mysterious man who ordered it but never picked it up,” Kinky Friedman says of this portrait. “Bob Dylan and I went into his store in 1976 while we were with the Rolling Thunder Revue, and Bob bought it. He wore it a little bit, not even out of the store, and then gave it to me. I then had about seven years of bad luck, both personally and professionally, with many people I knew going to Jesus in rapid succession.
So around 1990, I sold the coat at auction at Sotheby’s in London. It sold for much less than it should have—a jacket made by Nudie and worn by Bob and myself. It was a big disappointment to the Kinkster, not a financial pleasure. It went for something in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million dollars, and most of that was leeched away by my homosexual lover, Cleve Hattersley. Later I told Bob that I’d sold it, and he thought it was very bad karma. I have no idea where it is today. Last I heard, it was hanging at the Hard Rock Cafe in Tel Aviv.” Evan Smith
No.36
Actor Lou Diamond Phillips by Andrew Eccles
New York, “The Texas Twenty” September 1996
IN THE PAST DECADE, ANDREW ECCLES OF New York City has become one of the country’s best-regarded photographers of show business personalities. Dozens of magazines, including Texas Monthly, regularly hire him to shoot celebrity portraits. At our behest he was able to persuade the temperamental Tommy Lee Jones to sit still long enough for a photograph, he talked Dallas native Morgan Fairchild into wearing tantalizing black leather, and he asked Lou Diamond Phillips, who grew up in Flour Bluff (which is now part of Corpus Christi), to submit to head-to-toe painting in gold for his photo session.
Why gold? Phillips was featured in our September 1996 issue as one of the year’s twenty notable Texans for his portrayal of a disturbed Gulf War soldier in the movie Courage Under Fire and his Tony-nominated performance in Broadway’s The King and I. When Eccles attended the play, he noticed that most of the sets were painted gold. “I knew I wanted to use gold as some sort of theme in the photograph,” Eccles explains. “And there was also a lot of talk that year about Lou maybe getting an Oscar, which is also gold. And then—to show you how a photographer’s mind works—I was thinking about how I could get my shot on the cover of Texas Monthly. So I thought, ‘What about painting him gold and calling him Texas’ Golden Boy?’” Because Eccles loved Phillips’ haircut, he emphasized it by photographing the actor from behind. The resulting picture didn’t make the cover—we went instead with a shot of actor and martial artist Chuck Norris—but Eccles’ vision is indeed priceless. Skip Hollandsworth
No.37
Model and Slashing Victim Marla Hanson by Michael Halsband
New York, “Scarred” January 1993
ON OTHER OCCASIONS, I HAD SEEN the glamour of model Marla Hanson, but when I interviewed her in 1992, this was the face she chose to present. She had survived the infamous razor-blade attack in New York in 1986, and after many surgeries, the last glaring scar was the cruel furrow in her cheek. I wondered at her no-makeup message: Was there a hint of accusation? I shared the gender of the person to whom this beautiful woman’s face was the most hateful thing on earth. But as we talked—about her Texas roots, her upbringing in a charismatic faith, a modeling career destroyed in a parking lot awash in blood and terror, and the bizarre celebrity that resulted—I came to believe that her look was an overture of trust.
My state of mind was nothing compared to that of Michael Halsband when he set up this shot through an eight-by-ten camera. His head was under a cloak, and Marla’s image appeared upside down. A fashion and music industry photographer, Halsband had been helping her make a short film, and they became friends. “I loved her, yet I was trying to strip away emotion,” he says of this photo. “I was never affected by the scars. But they weren’t on my face, and they were definitely an issue with her. An eight-by-ten camera sees better than we ever can. I was after something that was not happy, not sad, not indifferent. Something beneath struggling to get to the surface.”
Marla is now married to a man working in movie production, and a few months ago she had a baby. “She sounds very happy,” Michael says. “I think she’s finally found some peace.” Jan Reid
No.38
Fitness Guru Susan Powter by Greg Watermann
Dallas, “The Skinny on Susan Powter” November 1993
AT FIRST, SUSAN POWTER AGREED to give Dallas photographer Greg Watermann only an hour and a half to shoot a series of photographs for the November 1993 cover story about her transformation from pudgy high school dropout to national fitness guru. She set out many other conditions as well: She needed extraordinary amounts of sushi and bananas, she preferred to be photographed only from one side of her face, and she didn’t plan on living up to any stereotypical expectations that Watermann, a male, might have had about how she was supposed to look. After all, anger—especially anger toward men—was the shtick of this crew-cut woman who identified herself as the “used-car salesman of feminism.”
