It's Don Henley's fax machine.

With its assistance (and one assumes, the aid of the industrial-strength Xerox Memorywriter it abuts), Henley turns into more than the "best thin-lipped soul singer alive," as Cher has called him; he is rock and roll's great communicator. Over the years, Henley has fired off scores of letters--some charming, many splenetic, all impassioned-- to an ever-widening array of recipi­ents, copying other friends and busi­ness associates on his more vivid ef­forts. The Mad Faxer” is how record producer John Boylan refers to Hen­ley, while political activist Danny Goldberg has two Hen­leygrams posted in his office, including one especially pun­gent note to Sidney Blumenthal, then of The Washington Post, in which Henley states emphatically—very emphati­cally—that he did not introduce Donna Rice to Gary Hart at a 1987 party he threw in Aspen- One of the best books in the entertainment business would be a collection of Don’s letters, says Irving Azoff, head of Giant Records and Azoff Entertainment and for twenty years Henley’s friend and adviser. “I’ve got a great file.”

In a quarter century, some things apparently haven’t changed. “He always had something to say about almost every subject,” recalls Margaret Lovelace, Henley’s high-school English teacher,, "He was a good writer and had a good command of the language." It was those very skills, applied to songcraft (and combined with a sturdy drumming technique and a dazzling singing voice), that helped take Henley out of Texas, where he’d covered up an uncool love of literature by tomcatting with the town rowdies. “I made good grades,’ he says, “but I also got drunk and threw up every day.”

Like thousands of misfits before him, Henley rushed headlong to the self-reinvention capital of the world, Los Angeles. There, in league with a fun-loving doper out of Detroit named Glenn Frey, he would wed the down-home harmonies of country music to studio-polished rock; that sound became the trademark of the Eagles, the most com­mercially successful band of the 1970s. During that decade, the group would sell more than 50 million albums, win armloads of Grammys and become Public Enemy Number One to a generation of rock critics, who found in the roar of punk the artifice-free passion they weren’t getting from such mellow milestones as “Take It Easy. The irony, of course, was that Henley didn’t know how to take any­thing easy and wound up with the ulcer to prove it. In such signature songs as “Hotel California” and “Life in the Fast Lane,” Henley excoriated the very sybaritic pleasures—kinky sex and cocaine, to name a couple—in which he was then indulging. But as Eagles producer Bill Szymczyk would later note, “It’s hard to ride a hike and be under it at the same time,” and the in-house motto for the group’s much-delayed, overbudget, too-much-drama- mama final studio album, The Long Run, instead became a trenchant epitaph: “We made it, and it ate us.

The Eagles’ 1980 breakup, and some less foreseeable per­sonal crises, would traumatize Henley into finding new col­laborators and fashioning a new sound. The dense, bracing, contemporary aural constructs that issued from his debut solo album, I Can’t Stand Still, incorporated more of Hen­ley’s naturally ferocious intellect; to his surprise, critics as well as the public greeted his broadsides warmly. Then, several years later, on consecutive albums, came two unfor­gettable songs, “The Boys of Summer” and “The End of the Innocence,” stirring melodies bravely sung, both of which seemed to pluck out of the air his audience’s previously unarticulated longings—for love, consolation and the se­renity of the past—and serve them up in compelling, un­mistakably adult music. He would win a Grammy for “The Boys of Summer,” a second Grammy for the triple-platinum The End of the Innocence and the ultimate tribute: a skewer­ing from rock-and-roll court jester Mojo Nixon entitled “Don Henley Must Die” (“Don Henley must die/Don’t let him get back together with Glenn Frey”).

A fair description, perhaps, of Henley after-hours, the dark prince of Beverly Hills, a man with considerable appe­tites, and not just for peace and justice. Given that, at 44, he is smart, funny, famous and preposterously handsome, he doesn’t lack for female companionship, though he notes with a grin that “the great thing about getting older is that you put sex in perspective. When you finish having sex, is there anybody there to talk to? Is there somebody you can watch David Letterman with?" And while the mention of actress Dana Delany, whom he dated briefly a while back, can trigger a paroxysm of wordless rapture, there apparently has been no consuming romantic relationship in Henley’s life since his longtime love actress Maren Jensen moved out, in February of 1986. Saint Augustine’s plea- “Give me chastity and continence, but not just now” -could be Hen­ley’s, though he prefers to cite James Taylor: “I hear words, I hear voices/I guess I was horn with too many choices.”

“If you spend any time with Henley, things are usually crackin’ pretty good in terms of hanging over the preci­pice,” says Danny Kortchmar, the gifted instrumentalist and producer who has been Henley’s collaborator and friend since his solo career began. “He doesn’t like it unless there’s too much to do and everything’s in a real state of flux. He likes shit to he real busy.” Such sensory chaos, filtered through Henley’s natural outrage, makes for good art, no-nonsense social activism, vigorous faxes-and easily bruised relationships.

“Everyone that spends time around Don eventually incites his wrath” says Kortchmar. “He’s a marvelous friend, and his friends are very loyal-but Don also turns around and focuses on you: ‘You’re the reason, motherfucker!’

Henley’s solo career had its genesis in the sundry miseries of 1980. Glenn Frey’s announcement that he would be leaving the Eagles and doing his own album struck his partner as ‘a sort of horrible relief.” To Henley, the consequences were clear: “I knew it meant I was going to have to do the same thing--I mean, some of the guys wanted to go on without him, which was really ridiculous--and that scared me a little bit. A lot, as a matter of fact,” Then, as now, the career-mortality rate for solo artists spun off from successful hands was brutal, and while Henley’s songs and voice had held sway on radio for a decade, his public profile was low, As “a band guy, a drummer,” he understood that for his solo stint, “I needed to find a new partner.”

He settled on Kortchmar-”Kootch,” to his colleagues- who’d worked with James Taylor, Carole King and Jackson Browne, not so incidentally at the height of their respective careers. Henley offered Kortchmar a chance to make the move from sideman to producer. “We were trying to create a sound from scratch,” says Kortchmar. “What instruments will work and what won’t? What would the background vocals be? I’d never had that kind of freedom from any other artist, ever.

The size of the task ahead of them took its toll. “For a while, I was pacing a lot in the house and I was drinking a lot,” says Henley. “That was a really rough time for me.” But things would get worse. Around 9A.M., on November 21, 1980, Henley called the L.A. Fire Department, seeking medical aid for someone at his home who appeared to he having a seizure. That someone was a prostitute, who turned out to be suffering from aftereffects of Quaaludes and cocaine and who also turned out to be 16 years old. Hours later that day, police came to Henley’s home and arrested him, after reportedly finding quantities of cocaine and mari­juana in the house. This is Henley’s least favorite topic, hut when asked about it, he is admirably straightforward. The firemen “just flat-out lied to me. They said, ‘Well, by law, we re supposed to take this little girl to the hospital, but if you’ll take cave of her, we’ll leave her here. , . - We’re not here to get anyone busted.’ She was fine by the time they got there. I had no idea how old she was. I had no idea that she was doing that many drugs; I didn’t have sex with her, you understand. Yes, she was a hooker; yes, I called a madam; yes, there were roadies and guys in my house-we were having a farewell to the Eagles. I got all of them our of the house; I took complete blame for everything. I was stupid; I could have flushed ev­erything down the toilet. I didn’t want this girl dying in my house; I wanted to get her medical at­tention. I did what I thought was best, and I paid the price.” Con­vinced he would have beaten the rap but tired of getting clobbered in the press, Henley pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delin­quency of a minor and was fined and given two years probation.

The incident had a cruel cor­ollary; it came as Henley’s girl­friend, Maren Jensen, was in Dallas filming a horror movie-­and unbeknownst to her, was becoming one of the first people in Hollywood to suffer the debilitating effects of Epstein-Barr syndrome. “I was Patient Zero at the time,” recalls Jensen, who has since recovered. “It was a really tough period, in my life and in his as well. I was so young, and to have so many different things bombarding me all at once, it was overwhelming. But we hung in there; we had a lot of love for each other.

“I stood by her and she stood by me,” says Henley, who spent some months caring for the bedridden Jensen-but he admits that, given his own change-of-career worries, his behavior wasn’t exactly flawless. “I was freaked out, and while I was attentive and supportive, I didn’t exactly come home when I was supposed to, ‘cause I was traumatized. Kootch and I were just guzzling scotch and vodka; we’d record until three in the morning and then go to my house, sit up with bottles and tell each other how great we are, just to bolster our confidence. . . and poor Maren would get up at eight o’clock and here were these two drunken monsters: ‘Hi, bay-beh. . . whassss hap’nin’?’

In the studio, at least, something was indeed happening. Kortchmar beefed up Henley’s drum sound and took advan­tage of high-tech studio capability: “To use this technology, knowing that you’d have this amazing soul singer over the top of it,” he muses, “that’s what would prompt me to come up with a song like ‘Dirty Laundry.’ One night, I just got this keyboard groove going and I thought, This is it! This is

it!’’

The insistent riff, wedded to a fiery Henley rant on the media’s evils (“Kick ‘em when they’re up/Kick ‘em when they’re down”), got club play soon after the 1982 debut of I Can’t Stand Still but didn’t become a single until two independent promo men each called Asylum Records with a simple message: If you don’t release “Dirty Laundry, you’re crazy. The song became a mini-sensation (the Washington press corps did its own video of it), and its distinctive sound helped Henley shed his Eagles baggage. The albums that foltowed-1984’s Building the Perfect Beast and 1989’s The End of the Innocence-carved out Henley’s new artistic identity: obsessive, pissed-off, reflective, looking to the fu­ture without surrendering the past.

The necessities of modern-day rock stardom have re­quired Henley to develop skills as a music-video performer (two black-and-white efforts, which cast Henley more as a Greek chorus than as a protagonist, have garnered him a shelf full of video trophies) and as a front man, out from behind his drum kit. And while Henley will never be con­fused with Bruce Springsteen as a live performer, his forty- five-date tour this summer is showcasing his grow­ing in-concert comfort zone. “I’m a hell of a lot more comfortable than I was in ‘85, I’ll tell you that,” he says. “1 don’t know if I’ll ever be entirely comfortable. But on some nights I go, ‘Hey, this isn’t so bad; I kind of like this.’

And yet there is some disquiet in his world too. His future with Geffen Records, for example, is on shaky ground. “1 guaran-fucking-tee you I’ll be on the market after the next two albums,” Henley says. “I want out. They’re nickel and diming me to death. [David] Geffen has one set of rules that apply to him and one set of rules that apply to everyone else.”

In recent months, Henley and Kortchmar have had a falling-out over a business matter, and future collaboration seems doubtful. “I love Kootch. I think he’s wonderful,” says Henley, “but we may have reached our creative peak together.”

Instead, for his next album, Henley plans a departure: “I’m going back to Dallas,” he says, “recruit some local guitar players. I’ve done all the Danny Kortchmar produc­tion I can do; I want to do a blues-oriented kind of thing, go back where I came from. Besides,” he adds with a grin, “thanks to Paul Simon and David Byrne, God knows there are no foreign cultures left to rape and pillage.”

Henley was an only child, the July 22, 1947, issue of a 40- year-old auto-parts-store owner and his 30-year-old school­teacher spouse. If Hughlene Henley was responsible for her son’s affinity for literature, Don surely got his temper from his father, C.J., whose methods of discipline included whacking a doubled-up leather belt across his offspring’s bare butt. But C.]. also imbued his son with a love for the land, especially the two and a half acres the family tended in Linden, a small town in Northeast Texas’s Cass County. As he grew older, Don was put to work in the field; after school, from six until eight, and on the weekends, too, sometimes rising at five. “There was a time in my teens when other kids were hot-rodding around,” he recalls, “and my dad would make me stay home and work.” Riding in his father’s truck, Don got his first taste of country music: Eddy Arnold, Jim Reeves, Ernest Tubb.

In high school he failed at the trombone and took up drumming instead. His first band was a cross-generational instrumental outfit, but the emergence of the Beatles made vocals a must, and Henley won the intra-band audition. He and his buddies-eventually known as Shiloh-gigged at bars, clubs and Eat houses across the ArkLoTex area, pull­ing down as much as $500 a night and always carrying a revolver in the glove compartment. “We were hair pio­neers,” jokes Henley. “I was the first guy in town to smoke grass or have my hair touch my ears."

After a failed engagement to his high-school sweetheart and stints at Stephen F. Austin State University and at North Texas State, Henley beelined it to L.A. in 1970 and dropped in at the Troubadour, the seminal club on Santa Monica Boulevard. “I remember the first time I walked in” he says. “The first guy I saw was Rodney Dillard [of the influential electric-bluegrass act the Dillards]. There was Ronstadt, standing over near the corner with this short little Daisy Mae dress on, barefoot, literally scratching her ass; Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash . . . I thought, I’ve ar­rived.” Sulking, in the corner were a country duo known as Longbranch Penny~vhist1e, who were about to go their sepa­rate ways: J.D. Souther and Glenn Frey.

“Glenn was really charming,” recalls Henley, “and he was going somewhere. He had this fucking plan, he had a vision. He told me about this guy named David Geffen; I didn’t know him from a hole in the ground.

John Boylan, then serving as Linda Ronstadt’s producer, prevailed upon Henley and Frey to back her up on an upcoming tour, eventually with a bassist from Rick Nelson's Stone Canyon Band named Randy Meisner and bluegrass picker Bernie Leadon out of the Flying Burrito Brothers. “Henley was the kind of guy you could depend on to show up on time,” says Boylan. “All his bills were paid on time; his house was always pretty well together.” His symbiosis with Frey, says Boylan, “was based on difference: Glenn brought Henley a sense of fun and commerciality, and Henley brought Glenn a more serious, intelligent, poetic way of looking at things.”

The four dubbed themselves the Eagles, and it was Frey and fellow Troub habitué Jackson Browne who wrote the group’s first hit single, the banjo-fired, high-harmony an­them of California rock, “Take It Easy,” in 1972. By the end of the year, the Eagles were an across-the-board smash, destined to become the apotheosis of country rock. Despite changes in personnel and ever-edgy relationships, the group flourished through the mid-Seventies, releasing one record a year. The band was augmented by the hard-rocking Don Felder, in 1974; Leadon left the group in ‘75 and was re­placed by guitar hero-clown-enigma Joe Walsh. “The high standards in the singing, the playing and the writing were set by Henley and Frey,” recalls Bill Szymczyk, who pro­duced the group’s last six albums. “Henley was always the English lit major-the final lyrics were always his. Until he pronounced the words done, they weren’t done.”

In Henley’s view, the group reached its high point in 1976, with the release of Hotel California, a devastating critique of the band’s own life-style. L.A. scenestress Loree Rodkin, who was dating Henley at the time, recalls “the dynamics of people making so much money at such young ages: affording private planes and wanting to go to Paris for dinner. That was the fast lane to me. As for Henley, “I think probably Don was more prone to having a girlfriend at the time, whether that had parameters for him or not. Parameters such as .......? "Fidelity,” says Rodkin, laughing.

Henley’s prodigious romantic escapades would include an affair with Stevie Nicks, who “I believe to the best of my knowledge became pregnant by me. And she named the [unborn] kid Sara, and she had an abortion”-and then wrote the song of the same name “to the spirit of the aborted baby. I was building my house at the time, and there’s a line in the song that says ‘And when you build your house, call me.’

In the wake of Hotel California's stupendous success and the pressure to follow it up, the band, now boasting Timo­thy B. Schmit on bass, began its slow disintegration. “May­be we were taking it all too seriously,” Henley allows. “But at the time, it was very serious. And there was a lot of pressure from the record company, the fans, the managers, everybody. We needed a vacation, and we didn’t get one. A lot of our creative energy was spent just trying to placate the egos-you know, some guys wanted to sing more songs and write more songs. Glenn and I tried to keep it as democratic as possible, but every man is not a jack-of-all-trades. Everybody in the band cannot do things equally well; that’s why you have a band. But unfortunately, the singers and song­writers get most of the glory, so it makes other people unhappy.”

The Long Run was released in late ‘79, followed by what apparently was a uniquely unpleasant tour; afterward, the group dis­banded for keeps. “We broke up in ‘80,” Henley says, “and nobody really knew about it until ‘82, because the managers and the record company didn’t want to tell anybody. They thought, Oh, they’ll get over it.” They didn’t; in fact, Frey couldn’t stand to be in the same studio as his ex- colleagues, Henley in particular. “When we were doing fixes on the live album,” remembers Szymczyk, “I had my assistant in Los Angeles with Glenn, and I had the rest of the band in Miami. We were fixing three-part harmonies by Federal Express.” (Frey didn’t respond when asked to discuss his ex-partner for this article.)

Through the Eighties, even as relations between Henley and Frey thawed, the band resisted outside attempts to reunite them, until last year, when such a reunion nearly took place. “You know, in some quarters, things are not quite so rosy as they are for me,” says Henley. “That’s a good enough reason alone, as far as I’m concerned.” (According to Irving Azoff, “Tim Schmit and Felder both desperately wanted and needed this, and Henley felt a great loyalty to them.”) “I got together with Glenn and we began to write,” says Henley, “and a month or two down the road, things fell apart. Old ghosts reared their ugly heads.”

In a way, those ghosts had been there from the very beginning. “When things were coming to a halt, Glenn said to me on the phone, ‘You know, Don, we’re very different people than the people we were then.’ And I thought to myself, No, Glenn, we’re exactly the same.”

Not even rock and roll, though, could con­tain Henley’s disputatiousness and ideal­ism, and so it should hardly be surprising that for more than a decade now, Henley has steeped himself in the hurly-burly of political and environmental activism. “I remember sitting at the breakfast table,” says Maren Jensen, “with these stacks of letters from the Wilderness Society, the Cousteau Society, and he’d sit there and write checks, And I’d go, ‘Gee, you’re real­ly supporting these places.’”

He has chaired events, raised funds, hosted dinners, badgered politicians and has been, for more than a decade, in the front lines of environmental conservation. “He doesn’t care if people like him,” says lawyer Lisa Specht, who helped Henley as­semble a California-based antidevelop­ment group called Mulholland Tomorrow, “That’s amazing to me; everyone in my world likes to be liked. He cares about be­ing inspected, but only by people he re­spects.”

Early last year, Henley took on his big­gest activist challenge to date: the creation of the Walden Woods Project, an effort to preserve from incipient development the 2,680 acres of largely unspoiled New En­gland forest in Concord, Massachusetts, where Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden-a piece of literature that Henley says virtually saved his life as a young man growing up in Texas. For more than a year, the bulk of his efforts have been directed at publisher-developer--bon vivant Mortimer Zuckerman, who stands ready to build a $25 million office complex inside the boundaries of Thoreau’s landscape.

“He doesn’t consider this to be a valid or important cause,” says Henley, frequently leaping up from his couch to grab a file folder with supporting documentation. “As he said to me, ‘You have your charities, I have mine’-which is fine, except the irony of it is he thinks he’s a man of letters.” Indeed, in addition to US. News & World Report, Zuckerman is the chairman of The Atlantic “the magazine that published Thoreau in this country and made him fa­mous. You’d think just from a historical perspective he would be a little more sym­pathetic to our cause. But he simply is not."

What in part spurred Henley to hit the road this summer without a new album to support is the financial needs of the Wal­den Woods Project, which will require some substantial funds to accomplish Hen­ley’s intentions. Henley thinks that there is only one way to save Walden Woods, and that is to buy the land. “If somebody owns a piece of property, there is almost no way in hell you can stop them from building something,” he says. “You can march down to city hall with all the little old gray- haired ladies and give your speeches and pound your fist on the podium and raise hell, but it doesn’t do any good.”

So in early 1990, Henley formed the Walden Woods Project to fight both the Zuckerman complex and other develop­ments in the area. To kick off fund-raising for his new organization Henley rounded up some fellow performers-musicians Bonnie Raitt and Bob Seger among them, as well as actors Carrie Fisher and Don Johnson-to entertain at two benefit con­certs. Soon afterward, the Trust for Public Land, on behalf of the Walden Woods Project, began negotiating to buy the site on which builder Philip DeNormandie planned to erect a unit housing com­plex to be called Concord Commons II- only some 1,400 yards from Walden Pond.

Unfortunately for the celebrity preserva­tionists, Concord Commons had an “af­fordable housing” provision, whereby more than a third of the condominiums were ear­marked for middle-and low-income resi­dents. Amy S. Anthony, then Massachu­setts’s secretary of communities and devel­opment, wrote to Henley that his efforts were unintentionally supporting “a thinly veiled attempt on the part of the few to obstruct the construction of affordable housing in a wealthy suburban communi­ty”; her letter leaked to The Boston Globe before Henley had even seen his copy.

The apparent high-concept irony of the situation-out-of-town show-biz lefties raising money to keep poor people from getting decent housing-was catnip to the business press: “AT WALDEN POND, Two LIBERAL CAUSES SEEM ONE Too MANY” trumpeted The Wall Street Journal’s gleeful page-one account. The media meltdown that followed, Henley says, “almost shut my operation down.” Though Henley de­clared his intention, a week or so later, to buy an alternate piece of land for the low­er-income housing, project director Kathi Anderson says “it took a good six months to get people convinced of our sincerity,”

Eventually, DeNormandie agreed to sell his site for $3.55 million, $1.5 million of which came via a loan secured by the Isis Fund, Henley’s federally recognized non­profit organization. In short, along with some $300,000 needed to buy new land for the affordable housing, Henley is personally on the hook for some $2 million. He will donate to the project 50 cents from every ticket sold on his summer tour and plans two or three benefit shows in the East this fall, to which Billy Joel has already accept­ed an invite.

Henley has also cajoled such literary and entertainment figures as E. L. Doctorow, Jim Harrison Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep into writing chapters for a book he and rock journalist Dave Marsh are putting together on Walden Woods, entitled Heaven Is Under Our Feet. “Larry McMurtry turned me down,” he says dis­gustedly. “He said the American people need their malls.” Hunter Thompson sent Henley a chapter from his book, in which he tortures a fox by dumping peacock shit on it. “The note with it said ‘We need to consider the balance.’ "

Thanks to a deal with Waldenbooks ‘we’re getting all royalties,” Henley says, ‘so if we can sell half a million books, we should cover it.” If they can sell half a million books, they’ll be in Kitty Kelley land; the reality of the marketplace is that they’ll be lucky to sell even one tenth as many copies. But even after the $2 million is paid, there’s the Leviathan of Walden Woods to deal with: the Zuckerman prop­erty. Zuckerman has thus far proved to be a far more intransigent developer than is DeNormandie. Zuckerman bought the land for $3.1 million, in 1984, and despite the collapse of the Massachusetts econo­my, says he’ll sell it only for $7.5 million. Henley says he wouldn’t pay that much even if he had it.

“We really don't really feel that we should take a loss on the property,” says Edward Linde, Zuckerman’s partner in Boston Properties. “1 don’t think someone can say, ‘You ought to sell it for less than that.’ That’s asking us to make a contribution to somebody else's cause."

Zuckerman was reported to have pledged $100,000 to Henley’s organization, but Zuckerman says that donation will be in the form of a reduction on the asking price for the land, which, despite some conver­sations, has remained in the $7.5 million range. “Had they been willing to be more constructive, they would have been differ­ent conversations,” says Zuckerrnan. “My understanding is that they are nowhere close to having that kind of money. They’ve only raised $250,000.”

“Total bullshit,” says Henley, who claims his organization has received a host of $100,000 contributions. What’s more, he says, “I guarantee if he brings his price down to $3 million, I’ll have it by the end of the week.”

The question arises: Since the literature will endure and inspire, why save Walden Woods at all? ‘You know,” says Henley, ‘if this place were a battlefield, it would be preserved in a minute. If the cradle of freedom is preserved, why not the cradle of passive resistance?"

So what is a transplanted Texan turned Hollywood rock star doing trying to protect a patch of semi-wilderness so far from his home? “I recognize the absurdity of my condition,” says Henley, “the inappropriateness of my being the guy who is trying to save Walden Woods, And I don’t give a shit, okay? It needs to be done; I happen to be the guy who’s willing to do it-rather than the State of Massachusetts, rather than Yale or Harvard or Princeton. I can’t help but believe that somewhere down the line, Thoreau’s legacy will make a differ­ence to somebody.”

Don Henley is the last male in his family; he has no siblings, no cousins, “really no family to speak of. I mean, my mother and a couple of elderly aunts is about all I have left.” Last Christmas, he found himself walking through a supermarket in Colora­do and he saw a blonde S-year-old shop­ping with her father. “She was pointing at things saying, ‘Daddy, I want this,’ and ‘Daddy, I want that’ . . - and I got all fuck­ing choked up,” he says. “Much to my embarrassment and shock.”

He thinks he’d be a good father, and his friends agree. But he wonders if it’s irre­sponsible to bring a child into this screwed- up world. And where would he raise a child? Not in Los Angeles, certainly, and not in Texas, either; on the other hand, he notes, “Wyoming spends the most on the environment of any state and has the best public-school system in America.” (“He’s very scientific, Henley is,” says his friend Harrison Ford. “He better find himself an old lady.")

For Henley, it is hard enough to choose from the myriad of possibilities-artistic, personal, political-open to him. Once he makes a choice, it’s harder still to convince people that he means well. Henley may seem angry, but he’s motivated by hope. “The whole crux of this Walden Woods thing is that we live in such a skeptical age," he says. "There's so much doubt about good intentions: 'This guy must be saving Walden Woods for some personal reason. It couldn't possibly be because somebody has good intentions.' Goddamn it, we have to get a little more positive than that. I've been accused of being a curmudgeon.......

"But I'm not!" he declares. "I'm a fucking raving romantic!"

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