TOMMY LEE JONES, CHAPTER 1: Texas Monthly executive editor Skip Hollandsworth is musing, "Et tu, Tommy Lee?" after reading Tommy Lee Jones' comments about him last week in the San Diego Union Tribune. The actor recently released his feature-film directorial debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.
Describing Skip's profile of him in the current Texas Monthly, the actor calls the piece "a hatchet job." Of the Dallas-based writer, he says, "He didn't get as much time as he felt he deserved. It was my son's birthday. He took revenge. That used to be a good magazine. Now it's a low-grade advertising whore, a slick-page tabloid."
"A hatchet job?" asks Skip, truly puzzled. "Tommy Lee is a cantankerous guy who enjoys being cantankerous. It's a side of him that all of his friends seem to be familiar with and it was a side of him I enjoyed. He was a heck of a lot more fun to interview than these actors who refuse to reveal anything about what they are really like."
TOMMY LEE JONES, CHAPTER 2: To hear Skip tell it, it was quite a laff-fest between him and Tommy Lee. They met at Scholz, the famous Austin watering hole, then climbed into the actor's car for a drive to his ranch in San Saba.
According to the writer, "I knew things were going downhill when I walked in and said, 'I'm Skip.' He just stared at me and said, 'Skip?' as if to say, 'What moron would walk through his adult life with a name like Skip?'"
The yuks continued in the car. "I don't know anything about polo, ranching or acting," Skip says. "So to him, I'm just some idiot. I'm not suggesting I'm not an idiot. But he really lets you have it if you put to him any question that he feels is inane."
TOMMY LEE JONES, CHAPTER 3: So there Skip was in San Saba. He and the Oscar-winning actor were not going to have a second date. How did he get home? "I took a cab to Austin," Skip says. A cab? The drive is more than two hours. "Yes," says Skip. "It cost $250."
GUNNING FOR GAME: Rising country star Miranda Lambert is no lightweight, 28-gauge hunter like Vice President Cheney. Raised 80 miles east of Dallas in Lindale, the 22-year-old Sony recording artist talks about her hunting fetish in the March issue of Blender magazine.
"I got a turkey last year, but I only had my rifle with me," she says. "So after I shot it there wasn't much left."
CASH AND CARRY-OUT: With her retinue of security, Mexico's first lady Marta Sahagun de Fox would be a poor target for a purse snatching. But FYI, the woman carries cash.
On Wednesday, Ms. Fox was among the dignitaries at the Dallas Museum of Art's opening ceremony for the exhibition "Lords of Creation: The Origins of Sacred Maya Kingship."
After touring the exhibit, the Mexican first lady hit the DMA store and bought two large Maya pillows. The wife of President Vicente Fox was watched over by (discreetly) gun-toting American G-men, her own Mexican security detail and assorted Dallas police officers as well as the museum's security staff. One of them was given the job of hustling her purchase out to the car.
E-mail apeppard@dallasnews.com
