Sam Shepard’s "Fool for Love" is riding into town. Jeff
Dawson meets its Pulitzer-winning author.
Is there anyone cooler than Sam Shepard? Pulitzer
prize-winning playwright, Oscar-nominated actor,
sometime musician, he is tall, lean, with a weathered,
Marlboro Man handsomeness. If there is
one image to hold, it’s of Shepard as test pilot Chuck
Yeager in "The Right Stuff", strolling nonchalantly out
of the desert, having survived the crash of his jet: a
man’s man in the ultimate man’s-man’s movie. It is only
halfway through our chat that I discover Shepard had a
phobia about flying, tackled only when the real Yeager
forced him up for a spin. “I thought, if I’m gonna go
down, I’m gonna go down with the greatest pilot that
ever lived,” he sniggers. But let that not spoil the
picture.
Shepard’s film antics, anyway, are a
mere sideshow. It may be the medium that gives him
greater public recognition, but it is as a playwright
that he will leave his legacy. For 30 years, the best of
his 50-odd works have quietly earned their spurs as
modern American classics — plays such as "Curse of the
Starving Class," "Buried Child" (for which he won the
Pulitzer in 1979) and "True West," revivals of which
play nearly continuously.
His milieu of pick-up trucks, dusty farmsteads and
cockroach motels, where long-lost fathers/sons/husbands
seek out absent sons/fathers/wives, has made Shepard a
sort of laureate of the modern West. His best-known
crossover work, the film "Paris, Texas," for which he
wrote the screenplay, has been so imitated that any time
he catches some moody desert imagery with a Ry Cooderish
slither on the soundtrack, he must afford himself a
private chuckle. “I saw some advertisement,” he drawls,
“I forget what the product was, but it started with a
view of the desert, a hawk flies by, twangy guitar, and
you see a guy in an overcoat with a red baseball cap.
And it’s like, they couldn’t have been a little
inventive and disguised this?”
Meeting the laconic 62-year-old is an
intriguing prospect, not least because he doesn’t do
many interviews; more so because we are in Manhattan,
2,000 miles from his literary habitat and half as much
to Kentucky, where, these days, this former rodeo rider
breeds horses on his 107-acre farm. But when I turn up
early for our lunch at a cavernous downtown brasserie,
Shepard is there already, dressed in black, ensconced at
a corner table and scrawling in a leather-bound
notebook. “It’s horrible,” he groans, in an accent as
dry as the dust bowl. “The only good part of New York is
that I’m able to write. I get in the country and there’s
a million things I’d rather do. I’d much rather work on
the farm physically than sit in a goddamn room.”
He is currently toiling at a collection of short stories
and a new play, an array of coloured pens in his breast
pocket, one for each character, suggesting progress.
Shepard is as unreconstructed as his protagonists. He
has an ancient electric typewriter at home. “It must
weigh 50lb.” None of this computer nonsense. “I don’t
like the screen. I don’t like this mystery of the
disappearing page. I like paper, being able to scratch
things out with a pen and write on it. Writing is a
tactile experience.”
This month sees a London production of Shepard’s
celebrated 1983 play "Fool for Love." The story of a man
turning up at a seedy motel (where else?) to reconcile
with his lover, and with a trademark skeleton rattling
in the closet, it is probably the most repeated of his
dramas. I wonder why. “Male/female conflict, which is
eternal,” he says. “And it’s really an actors’ play, in
the sense that actors love to get hold of the material
and mess around with it.” He reckons the main reason his
plays have endured is, moreover, a practical one. “You
can do ’em in a bare-bones situation. It doesn’t require
a lot of sets.” But he is being a tad modest.
Shepard orders his lunch (calf’s liver). He has little
to do with the London production. He rarely does. Not
since the film version by Robert Altman, in which he
starred with “whatsername?”. Me: “Kim Basinger.” He
laughs. “It just dropped out of my head for a minute.”
It wasn’t very good, he admits. The latest update stars
Juliette Lewis, in her stage debut, and Martin Henderson
as the sparring lovers. Shepard is sceptical of “movie
stars” — a term of disdain — trying to get kudos on
stage. He didn’t know it would be Lewis’s stage debut.
“Is it really?” he asks. But, as a musician himself
(currently immersed in guitar and banjo), the fact that
the run will be suspended while Lewis’s band gigs with
the Foo Fighters adds a bit of integrity. “Good for
her.”
Shepard has a deep association with London. His plays
are mounted regularly in the city, and it was here in
the early 1970s he came, fleeing the excesses of sex,
drugs and rock’n’roll. He got work at the Royal Court,
which allowed him to direct for the first time — his own
"Geography of a Horse Dreamer." “It was a great
experience,” he says. “I met some extraordinary actors —
Stephen Rea and Bob Hoskins, before they were (here we
go) ‘ movie stars’.” An inveterate gambler, he
reminisces fondly about his acquired obsession for dog
racing, the words “White City” and “Hackney Wick”
tumbling incongruously from his lips. The White City
stadium is long gone, I say. “Wow,” he mourns. “That was
a great track.” In the end, the weather got to him,
together with “that whole kind of insular thing. I
needed to get back”.
There is little rain where Shepard comes from, the
farming community of Duarte in California. Although he
was born in Illinois and moved around as an air force
brat, it was here that the family settled. Outsiders
were rare, he says, and he didn’t see a television until
1959. Equally influential on his writing was his
relationship with his drunken father (captured most
notably in The Late Henry Moss). “It’s hard to elaborate
on that situation because it’s so extremely violent. I’d
rather the plays speak for that,” he says. He dropped
out of a husbandry course, fell in with the beatniks and
became the driver for a touring theatre group,
eventually dismounting in New York in 1964.
“That was a transformational time,” he says, detailing
the explosion of the underground scene. He was inspired
by bebop jazz and drummed with a rock band, but it was
theatre that captivated him. “Beckett was here, there
was some Pinter stuff coming over, Ionesco — there was a
lotta stuff going on. I said, ‘You know, I can do that,
but I can do it maybe through my own perspective.’” His
channelled stories of western life were both exotic in
tone and everyman in experience. Married to an actress
called O-Lan (it was the 1960s), he soon began an open,
stormy relationship with the proto-punkster Patti Smith,
with whom he wrote and acted in "Cowboy Mouth"; on his
hand, still, is a crescent-moon tattoo from that time.
But “things got kinda out of hand in a number of ways”,
he says. This precipitated his trip across the Atlantic.
Returning, he hung out with Bob Dylan (Shepard’s song
Brownsville Girl appears on the album Knocked out
Loaded). “I mean, we’re friendly, as much as you can be
a friend of Dylan’s,” he clarifies. He went on 1975’s
Rolling Thunder Revue, wrote a book about it and ended
up in Dylan’s bomb of a movie, Renaldo and Clara. He had
had a brush with the film world before, as co-writer of
the hippie trip "Zabriskie Point." Suddenly, film seemed
a new avenue of possibilities. He was cast in Terrence
Malick’s cornfield drama, Days of Heaven (1978); then,
on the set of 1982’s "Frances," he met Lange (they have
never married but have two children, plus one more each
from previous relationships).
But with "The Right Stuff" (1983), for which he was
Oscar-nominated, he became the star/celebrity beast he
so scorned. “I was leery of wandering into it too deeply
because of the writing, you know. I thought the writing
wouldn’t be taken seriously. The writing was more
important to me.” Not that he has been fool enough to
untether the gift horse. “The film stuff was very
lucrative,” he adds unapologetically. Indeed, he
currently has four movies awaiting release and has been
happy to slip into character roles (notably military
ones) in "Black Hawk Down" and "Stealth." “It was
amazing to suddenly be able to make a living, because up
until that point, I was living off grants.” Even at his
esteemed level? “Oh, yeah. You can’t make a living as a
playwright. One movie, and I don’t have to work for a
year — then I can feed some horses.”
There is the odd labour of love, such as the recent
"Don’t Come Knocking, " which reunited him with the
"Paris, Texas" director, Wim Wenders. The film, in which
Shepard stars, was poorly received, but was amusing for
the fact that he plays a cowboy actor who quits the
corny film he’s in and rides off into oblivion. “I don’t
remember a movie where I haven’t wanted to run away at
some point,” he muses.
Fool for Love is unlikely to get the reaction that
greeted "The God of Hell" at the Donmar last year. His
most overtly political work was dismissed, in a rare
tirade by the London critics, as a facile bit of
Bush-bashing. “It was meant to be nothing more than an
exorcising of American demons,” he counters. “I wasn’t
trying to pick sides. Hopefully, the play could be
presented 10, 15 years from now and still have an
impact, because I don’t think the Bush administration is
particularly unique.” You think he really gives a stuff
what the critics think? No, exactly.
Shepard returned to the New York stage in 2004, after 30
years, in Caryl Churchill’s "A Number." But he won’t be
doing that again in a hurry (his stage fright is on a
par with his fear of flying) and will stick with what he
gathers in his precious leather notebook. He is off in a
few days, he explains, to Texas, to do a reading of
western literature with Tommy Lee Jones and Lyle Lovett,
which seems a bit more to his liking. Lunch over, he
gets out a cigar, sparks it up and strolls off manfully.
In a westerly direction, too. All that’s missing is the
sunset.
|