Ladies' Man

Tom Jones thinks that the only thing his women fans really want to unbutton is their emotions. "That's as far as it goes," he insists. "If I really went after a girl in the theater, I'm sure she'd run a mile." These days, some people find that hard to believe. At the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, Jones launched into / Want a Woman, and a chic brunette leaped atop a table and offered herself. Part of the act? Perhaps. Another woman tossed her room key onto the stage. If that was part of the act, her husband knew nothing about it: red-faced, he had to plod backstage later to retrieve it.

At 29, Welsh-born Pop Singer Jones is the hottest entertainer in the U.S. Six of his nine LPs are on the Billboard chart, and the latest four have won gold records in the past two months. His weekly TV show on ABC is clobbering the competition as a summer rerun. For his two-week engagement at Manhattan's Copacabana in May, the lines began forming as early as 3 o'clock in the afternoon. The Flamingo paid him $280,000 for four weeks, and he paid them back by selling out every concert.

Sprayed-On Trousers. Jones' manager, Gordon Mills, has a one-word explanation for the fuss: "Sex." That is accurate enough--and the effect is carefully calculated. When Jones growls through a song in a black, bluesy style, the emotion seems to come more from the throat than the heart. The throat itself is a bit suspect: his keening, virile baritone has an alarming tendency to wobble. What seems to matter to female spectators is the way he writhes to a funky beat, tears off his tie, slashes the air rhythmically with both arms and strains his pelvis and thigh muscles against trousers that seem to have been sprayed on. He is taunting the women in the audience as much as any torch singer ever taunted a man. As Jones puts it: "I'm trying to get across to the audience that I'm alive--all of it, the emotion and the sex and the power, the heartbeat and the bloodstream, are all theirs for the asking."

Unlike the pubescent teen-agers who once doted on Elvis and Frank Sinatra, the Jones fans are primarily well-coiffed young matrons. Jones has programmed his entire career style around his appeal to the mature woman, starting with the neat trim that edges his thick, curly head of hair, and continuing with his tuxedo and matching vest. "You can sing to the kids in a pair of denims, long hair and a sweatshirt," he says, "but not to the adults." ABC has had no trouble at all selling commercial spots to makers of sewing machines, bras, eye makeup and suntan lotion.

Bigness Has Its Price. Thomas Jones Woodward, son of a coal miner, had an inauspicious start in his home town of Pontypridd, Wales. Trying to stay out of the mines as a youth, he chose instead to crowbar his way into movies, drink with the boys and fight in the streets. That was a far cry from his younger days when his mother would take him to the women's guild or the grocery store to warble popular songs like Ghost Riders in the Sky. Tom had to answer for every song to the fellows in the back alley--usually with fists.

Manager Mills found Jones singing in a Welsh pub in 1963 under the name Tommy Scott, brought him to London, and shortened his real name to Tom Jones to capitalize on the popularity of the movie starring Albert Finney. Mills even wrote the words for Jones' first hit song, a ballad called It's Not Unusual. It was followed by such top hits as What's New, Pussycat? and Green, Green Grass of Home. Suddenly, Jones was a red-hot property.

In Las Vegas last week, Jones was finding the dry desert air hard on his voice. That was nothing compared with the trouble Mills and a handful of security guards were having keeping Jones and mobs of adoring females apart. Much of the time Jones sat in the dank, limp atmosphere created by the six steaming vaporizers spread strategically around his suite, watching TV, sipping bourbon, and playing host to an entourage of handlers. It is possible that he thought at times of his tranquil 20-room mansion in Weybridge, Surrey, which he shares with his wife Linda, a childhood girl friend whom he married at 16, and their 12-year-old son Mark. The Joneses' drawing-room fireplace is decorated with a black Stetson, spurs, stirrups, and a bolstered revolver, a lingering reflection of his boyhood fascination with the American West. "I can't read books," Jones says. "Sometimes I can go through three pages and have to turn back to see what I've read. My mind wanders." That is understandable: a man has a lot of decisions to make when he earns $2,400,000 a year, as Jones will in 1969.

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