Tommy Lee Jones

Interview, June, 1995 by Elmer Kelton

Tommy Lee Jones ranches and lives with his wife, Kimberlea, and their two children a few miles from where he was born, in San Saba, Texas, in 1946. He acts in movies, too, with such authority, and sometimes with such rage or misery, that you wonder what demons drive him. Or drove him - he's lightened up of late. He was suave and decadent as Clay Shaw in Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), a wisecracking supervillain in Under Siege (1992), and appealingly sardonic as the federal marshal trailing Harrison Ford in The Fugitive (1993), for which he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar in his second attempt. He was a wily Louisiana politician in Joel Schumacher's The Client (1994) - a rare match for Susan Sarandon - and appears this month as Harvey "Two-Face" Dent In Schumacher's Barman Forever. Yet Jones has never strayed far from playing men whose eyes have seen too much. His crack-up as the Vietnam veteran in Stone's Heaven and Earth (1993) is hard to watch because it's painful seeing big, capable men cry. Stone then pushed him toward dementia as the prison warden in Natural Born Killers (1994), while, as Ty Cobb in Cobb (1994), he gave the lie to the notion that old men mellow, making the tyrannical, vicious Hall of Famer human, if not quite lovable.

These are the highlights of the second half of a career that once seemed to have peaked. After an itinerant Texas childhood, Jones acted at prep school in Dallas and majored in English at Harvard, where he also played football with distinction. He had a small part in Love Story (1970) and a first starring role as an escaped con in Jackson County Jail (1976), and was outstanding as the pushy, insecure Doolittle "Mooney" Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter (1980). He worked hard and consistently, but without fanfare. That A-list stardom still eluded him was television's gain. As Howard Hughes in The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977), as Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song (1982), and as Woodrow Call in Lonesome Dove (1989), Jones was unequivocally great, and Hollywood caught on at last.

He made his directorial debut with this year's TNT original movie, The Good Old Boys, based on one of the thirty-three novels written by Elmer Kelton. It's a modest but handsomely made autumnal Western that stars Jones as a tough but weary old cowboy and reunites him with his Coal Miner's Daughter consort, Sissy Spacek. There seemed no better choice to Interview Jones than his west Texas neighbor Kelton, whose book he had so faithfully transposed to the screen. G.F. ELMER KELTON: Tommy Lee, this is a different kind of Interview than I'm used to doing. I worked as an agricultural journalist for about forty-two years, and I had no problem asking people about livestock markets. But I never had occasion to interview an actor about acting before.

TOMMY LEE JONES: Well, we can talk about ranching if you want to.

EK: I thought we might start that way. I read a newspaper article the other day that said you're planning to take it easy through the summer, now that you've finished Batman Forever. How easy can you take It when you have a ranch to look after?

TLJ: We're not taking it easy at all. The ground here's been wet since the eighth day of September of last year and we're getting good rains now, so I recently put a bulldozer to work to clear the juniper trees and mesquites, persimmons, and the rest of the brush. I control the regrowth that follows it up - reseeding and finding a way to relieve the grazing pressure while I'm cultivating the turf. We have to do a lot of planning, because our country's varied; there are a lot of canyons and flat places.

EK: Sometimes it's better to let the brush lie where it falls, because it provides a shelter for the seed that's coming up and keeps the livestock off of it.

TLJ: Mmmm-hmmm. You leave it there for a while, then dry it out and burn it. But I'm having trouble getting my guys to build a perfect brush pile. I don't want to bum it too hot. I've spent some time in the last few days at the Kerr Wildlife Management Area in Hunt, Texas, where the agricultural students have been doing some interesting research on prescribed burning.

EK: The main thing is to not let one of those fires get away from you. They can be awfully scary.

TLJ: Yeah, they can. You have to give ca attention to the weather, temperature, relative humidity, and be very well-organized so you can get fire back into the system. The old-timers thought, Well, fire's bad; we'll get rid of it. That was certainly a mistake. We have to get it back into the system somehow, in safe, controlled ways. That's what I'm into now.

EK: How long have you had your ranch at San Saba?

TLJ: Fifteen years.

EK: Was ranching something you'd always wanted to do?

TLJ: Yes, sir. It'd always been in the family, and I built up enough money so I could own something.

EK: I hear you've got about four thousand acres, which is a pretty good size for San Saba County. What kind of livestock do you run there?

TLJ: Commercial Brangus and some other cows.

EK: No sheep or goats?