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.
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| 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).
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| Sam is Chuck Yeager |
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."
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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.
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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
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| 1943-2017 |
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