Woody Allen once told me he didn't like meeting people he admired. "I prefer them to remain mythological," he said. I thought that was cynical - it presumed that the person was going to let you down. Over the years, far more people have lived up to my expectations than not. Then this week, I talked to Tommy Lee Jones.
I'd heard the stories. He'd made a GQ colleague of mine cry. They were at a ranch he owned in San Antonio, Tex., and for two days he offered little but critiques of her questions and corrections of her grammar, while - I kid you not - cracking walnuts with his bare hands. When his name came up at assignment meetings, every journalist who'd interviewed him would decline. (This is the opposite of what usually happens since, generally, an interview is more relaxed the second time around.) Mention him to journalists from outlets across North America and they'd blanche and change the subject.
Naturally, I was fascinated. Every one of these people admired his work, as do I. He started on the New York stage and in the soap opera One Life to Live. He played a testy husband opposite Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner's Daughter, and slid into the manful posses of Lonesome Dove and JFK as sweetly as a foot slides into a broken-in boot.
Then, in The Fugitive (1993), when his character finally came face to face with Harrison Ford's after a thrilling 90-minute chase and Ford said, "I didn't kill my wife," Jones replied, "I don't care," so pitch-perfectly that it won him a supporting-actor Oscar and made him a star. Jones wrote the line himself and practised it for days in front of his family. A sequel built around his character, plus a half-dozen other indelible roles, cemented his status. Yes, he had a type - taciturn, impatient law-enforcement or military men who withered lesser mortals with a look. But he squeezed maximum impact out of every one. He has also written two films and directed three.
His new drama, The Company Men, is a story of the American economy in microcosm - a thoughtful, sorrowful look at what happens to three businessmen (Jones, Chris Cooper and Ben Affleck) who lose their jobs. It joins a recent string of Jones films, including A Prairie Home Companion, No Country for Old Men, In the Valley of Elah and In the Electric Mist, that have as their subtext the end of a kind of American innocence. All are imbued with a mournful unease that the bad guys are winning.
Jones's off-screen life is equally rich. An eighth-generation Texan, he went to a prestigious Dallas prep school on scholarship but worked in oil fields on breaks. His father, Clyde C. Jones (the C stood for nothing), was a drilling specialist, and his mother, Lucille Marie, was a schoolteacher and a policewoman. He went to Harvard, also on scholarship, where he lived with Al Gore and befriended the writer Erich Segal. Jones and Gore were allegedly co-inspirations for the preppie hero of Segal's novel Love Story; Jones appeared in the 1970 film.
As well, Jones played tackle in the Ivy League's most famous football match, the 1968 Yale-Harvard game in which Harvard, down by 22 points at one stage, came back in the final minutes to tie its rival (Jones appears in the recent documentary about the game, Harvard Beats Yale 29-29). He's remained close with many of his university friends and presented the nominating speech for Gore at the 2000 Democratic National Convention.
Jones, 64, married his third and current wife, Dawn Jones, in 2001. (He was married to Kate Lardner, granddaughter of the writer Ring Lardner, from 1971 to 1978; and to Kimberlea Cloughley from 1981 to 1996.) His children with Cloughley, Austin, 28, and Victoria, 19, have both acted. At 14, Victoria had a role in a film Jones directed, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, but one day, when she didn't get out of bed for her 5 a.m. call, he told her she was fired and left for the set without her. (Production staffers hustled her back in the nick of time.)
And when Jones is not on sets, he's with horses. An avid polo player, he breeds, trains and sells horses at ranches he owns in Texas and Argentina, and at a 50-acre, world-class polo operation he built and runs in Florida.
During our 15-minute phone interview, I tried to get Jones to talk about all of the above. I failed.
To my five questions about The Company Men, Jones responded thus: "The movie was shot in Gloucester [Mass.] and I just like that part of the world." "Relevance to contemporary times is part of what it takes to make a good movie." "It's relevant to the economy. A lot of people are recently unemployed, on all levels. That's obvious, isn't it." (The lack of a question mark there is deliberate.)
To a question about the benefit, to him as an actor, of shooting a scene on location in an abandoned shipyard, he said, "It would have been hard to shoot that scene anywhere else. It's an abandoned shipyard." (That thud you heard was my heart hitting my ankles.)
When I asked about the theme I'd perceived in his recent work, he replied (over three questions), "I don't really have a thematic concern, other than wanting to make good movies. The first thing I try to figure out is what the director wants to see. And then I do everything I can to make it possible for him to see it. I don't make thematic decisions unless I'm directing or writing. An actor with an agenda is a pretty scary thought." I laughed at that. He did not.
When I said, "I hear you're a big polo player," he replied, "I don't know what you mean to imply by the word big." When I later asked, "How big is your polo operation?" he responded, "Again, I don't know what you mean by big." The most personal thing he said all day was, "I think polo's the finest thing that a horse and a man can do together."
I felt like I was on a game show, where I was presented with a locked door and 1,000 keys, and given 15 minutes to try as many as possible. Afterward, it occurred to me that Jones's aggressively literal responses were a defence mechanism he'd developed to get through interviews with as little impact on his life as possible. It worked, but it did neither of us any favours.
Nevertheless, I persisted until my time was up. After exactly 15 minutes, Jones said, "I hope I've given you enough material for your article. I have another phone call to make."
"Do I have time to ask one more question?" I asked.
"Yes, you do," he answered.
I asked if he had another project to direct. He said, "Several, at various stages of development, but I'd prefer not to talk about something that I'm uncertain of." I asked, "Can you characterize what kind of projects interest you as a director?" He said, "I'm sorry, but you said one more question and that's number two," then said goodbye. The buzzer sounded. The door remained locked.
Johanna Schneller