The Un-Retiring James Earl Jones : The actor isn’t leaving the stage, just curtailing his involvement in serious dramas in favor of less-taxing TV roles

Reports that James Earl Jones is retiring from the stage were, as Mark Twain would say, greatly exaggerated.

The news, which surfaced earlier this summer, sparked a brush fire of disbelief--after all, Jones has devoted his soul, if not all of his time, to the stage since he began his apprenticeship in New York City 35 years ago.

“I panicked when I heard that he was retiring,” says playwright August Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Piano Lesson” and “Fences,” in which Jones starred for three years, winning the Tony Award in 1987. “He can take a role like Troy, his character in ‘Fences,’ internalize it, and when he gives it back it has so many more colors than I ever saw in it. When I was writing a speech for Troy, I started hearing him saying it in my mind.”

Jones’ “Othello” was celebrated, and his Caliban, Macbeth and Oberon for Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival in the 1960s won the admiration of the toughest theatrical community in the country. But it was Jones’ powerful presence in such modern works as Brecht’s “Baal,” Athol Fugard’s “The Blood Knot” and, especially, Jean Genet’s “The Blacks” that established his credentials as one of America’s finest actors.

“I miss him on the stage,” Papp says. “He spent his first five years with us and is certainly one of the the major stage actors in the U.S.”

Jones now says the word retirement was not quite right--in fact, Papp says Jones has committed to star in his 1992 production of “Measure for Measure.”

“I wish ‘curtail’ had been the operative word,” Jones says of his comments at an ABC press conference, where he claims he was misquoted. “But I have found that, after six months in a play, the fatigue factor begins to affect the quality of a performance. The audiences might not know it, but I do. My thing is serious drama, and usually the lead character has a heavy load to carry. I find that after six months, if you get four out of eight shows a week that work perfectly the way you want, you’re lucky.

“I’m not retiring, but I do expect to do fewer and fewer works on stage that aren’t specialty works, monodramas and the like.”

Like other respected actors, Jones has dabbled in television over the years and that is where he is concentrating this fall. On Sept. 12, ABC will air the one-hour pilot of “Gabriel’s Fire,” a gritty dramatic series set in the underbelly of Chicago but mostly shot, as these things are, in Los Angeles. Jones plays the character of Gabriel Bird, a policeman imprisoned for killing his partner who is released after 20 years and becomes an investigator. The network is so high on the series, which Jones created with Coleman Luck (a former writer and co-executive producer for the CBS series “The Equalizer”) that the pilot will be rerun the following night, before the series settles down in its 9 p.m. Thursday slot Sept. 20.

It is Jones’ first TV series in more than a decade. Surely the notorious grind of weekly television is as tiring as a long-running play?

Not so, Jones claims, puffing on a cigar on one of the show’s L.A. locations, outside a dilapidated office building downtown. “I tried a series before (“Paris” in 1979) and I liked it, liked the steady work and being home. The big difference in a TV series is you get a healthy hiatus, and, unlike a long-run play, you are doing something different with the character every day.”

He is, however, worried about advance word on the new series. “I have a problem with the amount of pre-air acclaim for the show,” he says. The thunderous voice that terrified a generation of kids as “Star Wars’ ” totemic bad guy, Darth Vader, rolls like distant thunder. “I recently saw a picture of myself in a story about the fall season captioned ‘The Great Autumn Hope. . . .’ Somebody had seen the pilot, which I like, not because it has all the answers, but because of its potential. I think this pre-acclaim is very dangerous, because it sets us up.”

The caption recalled, of course, Howard Sackler’s 1968 play “The Great White Hope,” in which Jones played the part of the first black heavyweight boxing champion. His searing portrayal earned Jones his first Tony, and made him an overnight national celebrity. Jones’ appearance in the film version of the play two years later brought him an Academy Award nomination. Oscar night 1971, the award was won (but not accepted) by George C. Scott for “Patton,” with whom Jones appeared in his first film, Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” in 1964.

“People think actors have fascinating stories,” Jones rumbles. “Well, the reason I was cast in that film is the only fascinating one I have. I was doing Shakespeare in the Park,” he recalls of New York’s summertime festival in Central Park. “I was the Prince of Morocco and George C. Scott was playing Shylock in ‘The Merchant of Venice.’ Kubrick wanted George to play the general in ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ but decided he wanted to see him act first. Afterwards he came backstage and said something like ‘Yeah. I do want you to play the general--and I’ll take the black one too!’ He wanted a black member of Slim Pickens’ bomber crew.”

Jones was born on a farm in Arkabutla, Miss., 59 years ago. At the age of 6, he moved to Michigan to be raised by his mother’s parents, John and Maggie Connolly, seeing his mother, an itinerant tailor, only occasionally. His father, Robert Earl Jones, left the family and farming before James’ birth to become a prizefighter in the Memphis area, earning a living as “Battling Bill Stovall.”

Soon after arriving in Michigan, Jones developed a stutter so serious that, in the one-room grammar school he attended, he could only communicate with his teacher and classmates with notes. “I was a stutterer, a stammerer, totally impaired vocally,” he recalls, “and I still am. I worked on it all my life and I still do.

“From the beginning of high school through the end of college,” he says, “my extracurricular activity was using my voice. That, necessarily, took me into all kids of classes in such things as interpretive poetry reading and the like . . . I am a rotten debater because there is something built in, some sort of dyslexia, where you’re constantly thinking of a word that you can get out.

“This smattering of exposure to the art of acting and the art of speaking that I got through those years sort of stuck with me,” he adds. In 1953, Jones graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in drama (he originally planned a medical career) and joined the Army where, two years later, the young first lieutenant was forced to decide what to do with his life. “My regimental commander said, ‘Do you want to go for your captaincy?’ and I said I didn’t know. I liked the Army. He said, ‘Is there anything on the outside that you ever wanted to do?’ ”

Jones’ father, by then, had given up his boxing career for one less painful. “During World War II, he got a few jobs being a sparring partner of Joe Louis in USO films,” Jones recalls, “and he realized that in movies you don’t get hit quite as hard or as often. He thought ‘This is for me.’

So Jones told his commanding officer, ‘Yeah, my dad’s an actor, and I’m curious about that.’ So he suggested I give it a try and on that advice, I did.”

Robert Earl Jones cautioned his son about acting’s rewards. “ ‘Look,’ he told me, ‘you’ve got to be realistic. I’ve not made a living of this. You’re taking your chances.’ But there were odd jobs. My dad was also a floor finisher, which he did throughout his acting career to sustain himself, and I joined him at that . . . we were janitors in several Broadway theaters. But,” says Jones, who before his first marriage to actress Julienne Marie in 1967 was living (by choice) in a $19-a-month cold-water flat on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, “I was always able to set my standard of living according to what (money) was coming in--not according to some dream or lifestyle.”

Two years of study at Manhattan’s American Theatre Wing (financed by the GI Bill) under Lee Strasberg and Tad Danielewski prepared him, but the day-to-day life in New York’s theatrical milieu of the ‘50s and ‘60s honed his talent.

“New York was my workshop,” he recalls. “I would run from being an actor in a play to being an actor in another play to being in the audience at another. It was a rich, rich time. I did simple things (his income averaged $45 a week), but every young actor must go through a certain process.” He believes New York is still America’s theatrical mecca: “If I had come to Los Angeles, then it would have been a joke . . . it still is. The idea of going to New York and getting your journeymanship in acting is still valid. There are wonderful audiences out here, but there isn’t the volume of work on stage, in workshops, everything.”

“I gave him a part in ‘Henry V’ in 1960,” says Papp. “It was a small role, 20 lines. But I felt he made it the leading part in the play.”

Jones still believes the turning point of his career was the role of Deodatus Village in the 1961 Off-Broadway production of Jean Genet’s savage drama of race relations, “The Blacks.” “What was special about ‘The Blacks,’ ” he says, “was the heightened consciousness about racial politics, about liberty and freedom. There was a strong focus on the issues. I am of a generation that included Lou Gossett, Roscoe Lee Browne, Raymond St. Jacques, Cicely Tyson, Billy Dee Williams . . . many of us ended up in ‘The Blacks,’ and it put us all on the map.”

For a black man who has played famous blacks from Malcolm X to Paul Robeson to Father Divine to the fictional first black President in Irving Wallace’s “The Man,” Jones’ views on the position of blacks in society--and in Hollywood--are unusual. “If you feed on bitterness,” he says, “you can nit-pick all the way to your death.”

He says he has a deep sympathy for the feelings of fellow blacks searching for roots in such a European based culture as the United States’, but deplores the fact their frustration isn’t grounded more in reality. “It’s OK, if they have time for that,” he says, “(but) it’s misleading for a lot of young black people. I can’t say I’ve been a student of black culture because I don’t think it exists. I’m of the belief that slavery, like it or not, severed a cultural connection. No matter how much we reach back out of our sentiments, it is still only sentimentality to refer to an African-American culture. I have no problem with the definition, but it is irrelevant, because we are (now) basically European by culture and language, and language is the only thing that defines culture.

“In the search for pride in race,” he adds, “it is very dangerous to be blind to degradation, the degradation that has been part of the history of this country--slavery. Just as the Holocaust was a degradation of the Jew, slavery was for blacks. But it doesn’t mean it defeats you. You can’t be a race addict, which I think is a great danger of any sort of racialism, even among blacks. You have to keep it in realistic focus.

“In Ted Turner’s movie about the Watts riots (the recently aired “Heat Wave”), the most meaningful line in the entire story occurred when, amid the riot, Molotov cocktails and in his sweat and anger, a character said, ‘You’re hurting me and you’d better stop it right now!’ I thought that’s what the movie was all about--not black rage. It’s black sensitivity--human sensitivity. ‘You’re hurting me and you’d better stop right now.’ ”

And opportunities for blacks in Hollywood? “Again that goes back to what my father was saying about being realistic,” Jones notes. “Nobody asked you to be an actor. When it comes to commercials on TV, where you’re selling soap to the populace at large, you have to find black faces, Oriental faces, Hispanic faces, women, too, representing that whatever you’re selling is good to buy. That’s commerce. If you are going to be a realist, what exists, especially in a capitalistic society, is vicious competition. You’ve got to get in there and compete.”

Jones’ ideas on other social issues are equally unconventional. In “Gabriel’s Fire,” Jones plays an ex-convict and that pleases him “because of the importance of the subject, the great need to understand the convict,” he said. “In proportion to numbers, blacks and other non-whites make up the largest population in the prisons.

There was some controversy when, in 1977, George Lucas used Jones’ voice as the voice of the “Star Wars” trilogy’s villain, Darth Vader. He snaps, “Out of the pool of bitterness you (sometimes) get a bitter expression of ‘Oh sure, yeah, there they go again . . . the only Afro-American sound comes out of the evil guy.’ Good filmmakers reach into the whole pool of mythology. The fact that George Lucas thought first of Orson Welles (as the voice of Darth Vader) is proof that he was reaching for evil archetype, not evil black man.”

Over the years, Jones has made 26 films, many of them clunkers memorable only for his commanding presence, many only for the brevity of his appearance.

“Just as, on stage, I waited years for a role like Jack (Jefferson) in ‘Great White Hope,’ or a role like Troy in ‘Fences,’ you do the same thing in movies,” Jones said. “Unless you are among that handful of exceptions, the stars who have projects lined up, you don’t wait, at least I didn’t want to wait. In spite of the wonderful things I have done in films, other than ‘Claudine’ (the 1974 film in which he played a lovesick garbageman) and ‘Field of Dreams’ and ‘Great White Hope,’ I don’t think I’ve done many films that counted. What I’m getting at, rather than waiting for that wonderful role in a movie, I take ‘off’ jobs,” he says.

After various television roles--he was the first black actor with a continuing role on a daytime soap opera (“As the World Turns”), played an African chieftain in the Ron Ely “Tarzan” series, appeared on the George C. Scott series “East Side, West Side” and had a role in the miniseries “Roots: The Next Generation”--he was cast as the lead in 1979’s CBS series “Paris.” It lasted 13 weeks.

“I played a police captain who also taught criminology in college,” he recalls. “Steven Bochco created it with me in mind. The mistake he learned was that you cannot hand it all to one actor. He went on to ‘Hill Street Blues,’ where he created the family concept which now thrives,” Jones says.

Bochco says, “He’s been a friend for years and I always had a sense I wanted to do something with him. I felt that if nobody could do a black cop better on any level than James Earl Jones.” So why did “Paris” fail? “He was a black man in a serious dramatic show,” Bochco says. “A black man in authority over whites with a complex personal life. And that made whites uncomfortable, in my opinion.”

While making “Paris,” Jones met his second wife, actress Cecilia Hart. Their 7-year-old son, Flynn Earl Jones, is his first child. Like other men who come to fatherhood at a relatively advanced age, his thoughts and words are often about his family. “I don’t want to draw attention to my son,” he says. “He understands a lot of what his mother and I do, but he doesn’t understand why I’m away so much.”

Jones, despite a number of “trophys,” as he refers to his numerous acting awards, remains an outwardly simple man.

“I always accepted that money would be a byproduct of some other measure of success,” he says. (He could retire, friends say, on what he is making for his recent Bell Atlantic Yellow Pages commercial, his first on-camera endorsement.)

“My wife, even today,” he laughs, “says I don’t live up to my celebrity status. But I have a problem with that. I say, when I go home nobody is saying ‘Hi, can I have your autograph?’ I’m me, that’s reality. I’m an actor. That’s something you do, not something you are, and I want my son to have a sense of reality. . . . Kids get impressed--’His dad is the voice of Darth Vader.’ I want him not to be impressed by that.”

One of the “specialty” plays Jones has in mind is a one-man play about Ernest Hemingway, he says. “In spite of the ‘Miss Saigon’ controversy,” Jones says of the flap over the casting of white actor Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian character. “I want to do Hemingway very much. There is a play, ‘Papa,’ written by John de Groot, a monodrama, and I want to take a shot at it.” He adds, with a smile, “Not necessarily with white makeup, but that is a consideration.”

If “Gabriel’s Fire” is a success, the 6-foot-2 Jones plans a strict diet and exercise regimen to keep in shape for the physical demands of series television. If it fails? “There are lots of wonderful cameos and a lot of good lead roles out there,” he smiles. “There are a lot of things I can do if this doesn’t work.”