SAM SHEPARD: A Life

 

Once upon a time, I shook hands with Sam Shepard.

I suppose that most people who remember Shepard remember him as a movie actor; but that was only one facet of his professional life -- and it wasn't even the most important.

He first made his mark as a playwright and his talent led New York Magazine to name him the greatest playwright of his generation.  In fact, three of his plays were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and one of them, Buried Child, won.  He also directed a number of plays.

He even co-wrote a song with Bob Dylan, Brownsville Girl.  It was eleven minutes long.  It was said that it was either Dylan's longest song or Shepard's shortest play.

You can watch an interesting video of the song on YouTube that features scenes from two Gregory Peck western movies.  Also, Dylan changed the title to Danville Girl, because, he said, there were already too many songs about Brownsville.  The link is : 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mLlNoilSqA

Shepard also wrote poetry and prose, prose that is difficult to categorize, because, as with many of his plays, it is experimental; also because Shepard admitted he found it easy to write dialogue, but struggled when it came to narration.  All his life he was a rambling man and his prose which is always semi-biographical bears that out.

Sam, age 21, already an accomplished playwright

When he began acting he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of famed test pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff (1983).

Sam is Chuck Yeager

He didn't win; instead the Oscar went to Jack Nicholson, who ironically played an ex-astronaut in Terms of Endearment.

During the years in which he was in great demand as an actor he continued to write plays, directed a couple of films, and wrote screenplays.  His best script was for Paris, Texas (1984), a film that won three prizes, including first place, at the Cannes Film Festival.

All and all, "not bad for a Southern California kid whose greatest dream had once been to be 'a veterinarian with a flashy station wagon, and a flashy blond wife, raising German shepherds in some fancy suburb.'"

Although he was uniquely someone who was simultaneously an accomplished playwright and movie star he once said, "I didn't go out of my way to get into this movie stuff.  I think of myself as a writer."

Furthermore, "being a writer is so great because you're literally not dependent on anybody.  Whereas, as an actor, you have to audition or wait for somebody else to make a decision about how to use you, with writing, you can do it anywhere, anytime you want.  You don't have to ask permission."

However, he said that while nobody could make a living as a playwright he was able to make enough money from one movie that allowed him to spend a whold year concentrating on his writing and also be able to feed his horses.

Shepard placed a high premium on his privacy and guarded it with a vengeance and therefore refused to cooperate with Winters -- or any other biographer.  He did, however, leave a mother lode of written material that Winters was able to mine and that allowed him to accomplish his goal of revealing "the chasm that exists between the Shepard the public sees and thinks it knows, and the man himself."

******

Some of what I have written I already knew before reading his biography.  I knew that he was an impotant playwright, but I was much more familiar with his film career.  That's partly because we don't have many opportunities in the Missouri Ozarks to take in plays staged by professionals.  That's an ovestatement; we don't have any opportunties

If, however, I had known then what I now know after reading the book, I might have been in such a state of awe that I would have been unable to say anything to him.

It was in a coffee shop in Santa Fe in the fall of 2015 that I shook his hand.  I was there with my son, who manages a well-known western hat store just off the plaza.

Now, unlike me, my son is accustomed to seeing celebrities, since Santa Fe has become a magnet for actors, writers, and entertainers who want to escape the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles.  And sometimes they wander into his store.

I was at the coffee shop because I was in the middle of a road trip and had stopped for a couple of days to spend some time with my son and his family.  It was a weekday and it was my son's routine to go to this coffee shop each morning before going to work.  It was a popular place that served good coffee and you had to stand in line to be waited on.

We're standing in line and my son nudges me in the ribs and whispers "Look, look."

So I looked, but I didn't see what he saw.

And then I heard him say, "Hello, Mr. Shepard."

And I turned my head and Sam Shepard was standing in front of me.

My son knew more about Shepard than I did, especially about his literary career.  And because he will talk to anyone and everyone, he was able to engage Shepard in a conversation that had not yet gotten around to his films, which I could have commented on.

But I noticed that Shepard was carrying a book, and I asked him what he was reading.  It was Empire of the Summer Moon, a biography of the last Comanche war chief, Quanah Parker, a book that I had read earlier that year.  So now I had something that I could add to the convesation, one that lasted a good half hour.

We were still standing in line, but people were stepping around us and finally Shepard said that he should be moving on, that he was keeping us from getting our coffee.  We shook hands -- and he left.

Less than two years later, he was dead.

******

The cause of death was complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly called Lou Gehrig's Disease.  I had a friend who died from the disease so I know something about it.  It is an insidious disease in which the mind outlives the body, with the victim living on the average two to four years after contracting the disease.

Although his handshake was firm and I didn't notice that he was experiencing any difficulties in walking, in all likelihood Sam Shepard was already in the early stages of ALS, and yet he paused to pass the day with two of his admirers.

"I could go on and on about death.  One of my favorite subjects -- so long as you can keep it at arm's length." -- Sam Sheperd

1943-2017

    

 

ELMER KELTON (1926-2009)

"My dad wanted to make a cowboy out of me, but every time he turned around to see where I was, I was reading a book."

Crane, Texas (1940s)
"In an oil-patch town like Crane a boy who excelled in English and won spelling bees was automatically suspect."

No writer ever knew West Texas better than Elmer Kelton.  No, that's not quite correct.  Let me start over.  No writer ever knew west Texas as well as Elmer Kelton.

After all, he was born on a west Texas ranch where first his grandfather and than his father was the foreman.  He grew up near the town of Crane on the McElroy Ranch located in Upton and Crane counties where his father, R.W. "Buck" Kelton, was employed for over thirty years.  His mother was Neta Beatrice "Bea" (nee Parker).

Kelton wrote in his autobiography, Sandhills Boy: The Winding Trail of a Texas Writer (2010), that:

"Dad gave me every chance to learn to be a cowboy.  I was probably the greatest failure of his life.  I was always better talking about it, and writing about it, than I ever was at doing it .... By the time I was eight or nine years old, I fantasized about someday writing the Great American Novel."

A good listener, Kelton was quoted as saying that "Cowboys, especially in the days before television, were pretty good storytellers.  As a kid I loved to sit around and listen to them talk.  I soaked it up like a sponge."

After high school he attended the University of Texas at Austin and was a semester shy of graduation when he was drafted into the army during WWII and served in the infantry in Europe from 1944 to 1946.  A Bronze Star was among his ciatations.

After the war he finished his degree in journalism at the University of Texas.  Beginning in 1948 he wrote for over forty years about farming and ranching in west Texas for various agricultural newspapers and journals, before retiring in 1990.

Kelton's mother, a former school teacher, encouraged him to be a writer, but his father was rather dubious about his son's career choice.  His response was "That's the way with you kids nowadays, you all want to make a living without working for it."

When asked if he had any advice for young writers, Kelton said: "Keep your day job.  Read, read, and keep on reading.  Write, write, and keep on writing."

Kelton took his own advice.  He kept his day job.

During those four decades as an agricultural journalist he wrote fiction in his spare time, in the evenings and on the weekends.  He began writing short stories for pulp magazines and published his first novel, Hot Iron, in 1955.

He went on to write more than forty novels, all westerns, and, with few exceptions, set in west Texas.

His first real recognition was due to the publication of his novel, Buffalo Wagons (1957), which received the highest honor that a western novel can receive, that being a prestigious Spur Award from the Western Writers of America.

That was just the beginning, for six of his later novels would also win the award.  They are: The Day the Cowboys Quit (1971); The Time it Never Rained (1973); Slaughter (1992); The Far Canyon (1994); Eyes of the Hawk (2001); and The Way of the Coyote (2002).

In addition, three of his novels have received Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.  They are: The Time It Never Rained (1973); The Good Old Boys (1982); and The Man Who Rode Midnight (1987).

Note that The Time It Never Rained is the only Kelton novel to be honored by both organizations.  This is only fitting since it is his most popular and most critically acclaimed work, as well as being his personal favorite.

In 1995, The Good Old Boys was made into a TV movie on TNT, starring Tommy Lee Jones, who also directed and co-wrote the script.  To date, it is the only Kelton story to be adapted for film.

That same year Kelton's peers in the Western Writers of America organization voted him the "All-time Best Western Author."  I don't know where the two biggest selling authors, Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour, placed, but it was somewhere behind Willa Cather who finished a distant second.

When asked in an interview how he felt about the vote, he said, "I'd hate to have to stand up and defend that in front of a jury.  I appreciate the compliment, but I can't say that I believe it."

Kelton's primary theme in his novels "has always been change and how people adpt to it or don't adapt."  Never is this more apparent than it is in his most acclaimed novel, The Time It Never Rained.

It is the story of an actual drought that occurred in west Texas during the 50's, one that lasted seven long years.

During those years the ability of ranchers to adapt was severely tested year after year.

Kelton not only wrote about the drought in his novel, he lived it.

He said that "I could never have written it without my experience as a reporter.  That drought was my daily running story as an agricultural writer for seven years."

Charlie Flagg is the story's primary protagonist.  Kelton said, "I have heard Charlie described as a mythical character representing old-fashioned ideals of rugged individualism and free enterprise.  To me there was nothing mythical about him.  He was real."

And so were you, Mr. Kelton.