Malcolm X, Jesse James, birthing pigs and removing testicles; Matthew Amer finds it’s amazing how much you can get through in one hour with Driving Miss Daisy star James Earl Jones.
I don’t want to sound like a child in awe or a fan-boy overwhelmed by being in the presence of greatness, but there is something strangely life-affirming about spending time talking to James Earl Jones.
Possibly it is just the opportunity to listen to his deep, warm voice for an hour. It certainly helps that it is as comforting to the ears as a pulled-up duvet in winter. But there is more. In his soft, gentle tones – yes, this is the same American actor that provided the voice of Darth Vader; in person he is far less intimidating – are delivered words of such simplicity and wisdom that talking to him honestly feels like an honour. I’ve enjoyed many an interview and liked most interviewees I’ve met. Few have felt such a privilege to spend time with.
Maybe there’s a touch of irony in there, because Jones refuses to see himself as a role model or a pioneer. This performer, who was only the second African-American man to be nominated for an Oscar, who has just won the Paul Robeson Award and who will receive an honorary Oscar later this year, simply isn’t interested in that description. “I decline being a role model or any kind of label like that,” he states when we meet in his dressing room backstage at the Wyndham’s theatre, where he is currently appearing in Driving Miss Daisy.
It is not, I think, that he is being consciously humble or that he is concerned about any pressure that comes with such a tag, but more that he really doesn’t look at life that way. If kids are searching for role models, he argues, they should look to those that raised them. “I have a hero, my grandfather, and no one will ever be more of a hero than he was to me.” As he talks about the man that raised him – his father wanted no part in Jones’s early life – the warmth in his voice grows deeper and the face-encompassing grin grows wider.
We’re here, obviously, to talk about Driving Miss Daisy, in which Jones stars opposite British acting royalty Vanessa Redgrave and multi Tony Award-winner Boyd Gaines. Jones plays what many would refer to as ‘the Morgan Freeman role’ of chauffer Hoke, who is hired to drive around the eponymous aging lady when it becomes clear she is no longer safe behind a steering wheel.
“I decline being a role model or any kind of label like that”
I suspect Jones would count himself among those who see Hoke as Freeman’s character, as it was his fellow Mississippian’s performance in the Oscar-winning film that whetted Jones’s own appetite for the role. He describes it as Freeman’s “legacy”.
Both he and Freeman, he says, appreciate “the way Hoke talked. A lot of black people are a little embarrassed still by what we call down-home talk, because illiteracy is implied. But Hoke was illiterate. The real Hoke [Driving Miss Daisy is loosely based on playwright Alfred Uhry’s own family] was illiterate. I met his grandsons, who are erudite and sophisticated. In the play you see it was his mission; Hoke worked every day, even when he was too old, he worked just to add a little bit to the tuition of first his children and then his grandchildren, to get them through college, and he achieved that.”
Uhry, he says, “wrote great simplicity that really exposes great complexity”. The tale of the relationships between the aging, Jewish Daisy, her new, black driver and her son Boolie neatly reflects the awkward time, beginning in late 1940s Atlanta, where views were altering as generations changed.
Jones knows all about living through racism. The actor was discharged from the army – his first profession – at the time of the Civil Rights Movement, “fearing that there might be a race war, listening to Malcolm X and people of sound knowledge and sound mind, which I think Malcolm X was. But he was followed by some real fools in the militant movement. There was such folly that I just knew I couldn’t get into that.”
There was more to Jones’s reluctance to associate himself with the Civil Rights Movement than a concern about its more violent campaigners. “I feel,” he says, “if you stand up for something you’ve got to be able to talk, you’ve got to deliver a reason why. I’m still a stutterer and my problem is when I get to debating, I can easily fall apart if I get emotional. The stutter comes back and I’m a wreck, so I don’t participate.”
It came as a shock to me to discover that Jones, as a child, developed a stutter so debilitating that for years he rarely spoke publicly. This is the man who provided two of the most commanding voices in movie history, voices that generations of children and film lovers will continue to listen to and love year after year, Star Wars’ Darth Vader and The Lion King’s Mufasa. The thought of him struggling with forming words is testing at least. Even talking to him, I don’t hear the stutter. Obviously, after years, he has, to an extent, learned how to control it.
I find it remarkable that someone with a stutter so bad they couldn’t bring themselves to talk has become one of the most easily recognisable voices in the entertainment industry. “It’s not uncommon that when someone has a weak muscle, by exercising it, it becomes the strong muscle,” Jones states simply and without any fuss or sense of accomplishment. “I can say voice is my strong muscle, but I’m still a stutterer and never will be facile in debate.”
“Voice is my strong muscle, but I’m still a stutterer”
The stutter emerged from imitating his elder brother as a very young child and was compounded when his family – he lived with his grandparents, mother and 13 cousins – moved from Mississippi to a farm in Michigan. “That’s supposed to be a jubilant journey for a young Southern boy: moving from Mississippi, one of the poorest, backwards states in the Union, to Michigan, that then was the automobile capital of the world, and a beautiful, tourist state. You’d think the jubilance would heal all wounds, but for me, it’s to do with the soil my feet met. We were all barefoot in Mississippi pretty much all year round if we chose to be; when my feet couldn’t touch the ground again, something happened.”
It wasn’t until an English teacher encouraged him to read poetry aloud in high school that his confidence in his speech began to return.
On paper, his childhood sounds traumatic. The absence of a father, the upheaval, the stuttering and refusal to talk; it paints a picture of sadness. “It was all very quiet,” Jones dismisses my assertion. “My conversion to a stutterer, my conversion from being a stutterer; all very quiet.”
He didn’t miss his father, as he had never known him. “It made [his mother] the saddest woman I’ve ever met for the rest of her life,” he says. “But she carried that sadness, not me.”
Instead he loved farm life, following his grandfather around and helping with the animals. He is full of tales of farmyard life, and as I listen to stories of piglets being torn in half during a failed birth – “that freaked me out a little bit” – becoming the slaughterer when he was old enough to use a rifle accurately, lopping the testicles swiftly from felled animals, and breeding cows, I realise the interview has slipped into me sitting back and inhaling tales from a great narrator. We just need a roaring fire to complete the scene.
“I never saw anything more exciting,” he says of his first experience taking one of his grandfather’s cows to be bred by a neighbour’s bull. “When a bull would approach a cow and his nostrils would expand, he would sense her readiness… and he would leap. That’s exciting.”
Even this simple story is a performance. Not a glossy, all-on-the-surface, entertain-for-the-journalist-performance, but just so well told, so engrossing, that the charismatic, imposing yet never threatening figure draws me into it.
“People that [racism] touches, they get poisoned. I was poisoned by my grandmother.”
It is the same when he talks about his last appearance in London, playing Big Daddy in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. It was a part he had lusted after since seeing Burl Ives perform the role on Broadway in the 1950s, but he had never known how he could get the chance to play the part of a white Mississippi plantation owner. When the recent production cast the family as black, Jones had his opportunity.
“He was an evil man,” he says of Tennessee Williams’s character. “I didn’t worry about making him palatable to the audience. It’s the kind of role that will make you sick. If you get into his guts as an actor, I’m not saying you take it home with you, but it begins to affect you. You have to dig into your own negatives and that’s dangerous territory. You can’t just act like you hate somebody, you can’t act like you loathe somebody; you’ve got to get in touch with your own loathing for something. The way he treats his wife is horrible. But that’s Big Daddy. I still love the character, I just don’t know if I’d want to try it again.”
Race, and racism, is never far from our conversation. It was never going to be. Driving Miss Daisy explores that topic, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof was provocative with its casting, and Jones has lived through a time of great change.
He can still be shocked. He recalls a story he recently read about American outlaw Jesse James shooting a black man dead purely because he was not a slave, so had no monetary value. Had he not been free, he would have been worth something. It is a story that caused Jones to put down the book he was reading and pause.
Lesser stories still shock me; a younger, white Brit who has thankfully not experienced such times. He tells of a young white Lieutenant, a man of equal rank to Jones when he was in the army, who would not shake his hand. He recounts a story told to him by co-star Gaines. “When he first went to work as a kid, he would call the black men ‘Sir’. His boss said: ‘You don’t say that, you don’t call a black man ‘Sir’. This was not many years ago.”
Jones knows all about racism. Not just because he has observed change happening first hand, but because it was rife within sections of his family. “People that it touches, they get poisoned. I was poisoned by my grandmother. That hero of mine, his wife was one of the strongest racists I’d ever met. I had to purge myself of that when I got north and went to school with Polish kids and Indian kids. I honour her because she gave me my first need for independent thinking.”
In that case, I honour her too. Possibly without that need for independent thought being thrust on him, Jones would not be the erudite, thoughtful, enchanting personality he is today and my hour would have been far less enriching.
MA