‘You’re just trying to reincarnate ghosts,” Sam Shepard said, sounding much like a ghost himself, his gravelly voice scratchy and faint on a tinny speakerphone.
We were talking about his plays. Listening in with me in Manhattan was the actor Ed Harris, once described by Shepard as his “muse”. The conversation was halting, at times comically awkward, the bad phone line from his Kentucky home only accentuating both men’s discomfort at being asked to address their friendship directly. You haven’t known the meaning of mortification until you’ve asked Sam Shepard to repeat something, five times, that he had said about his working relationship with Harris, while Harris sits next to you, silently shaking his head in embarrassment.
I didn’t think of how much trouble I had hearing Shepard until the news came last week that the 73-year-old playwright and actor had died of complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, one symptom of which is slurred speech.
Then again, Shepard mumbled a lot, and his plays, from the Pulitzer-winning Buried Child in 1979 to True West (1980) and Fool for Love (1983), found a rough music for the inarticulate and itinerant: cowboys and fugitives, drunks and thieves, sons and lovers, in orbit around their fractured families, sparring like exhausted boxers. His work spoke to the fading mythology of the West — its dusty roads and empty deserts, “the whacked-out corridors of broken-off America”, as he put it.
Imagine Sophocles or Aeschylus sitting in a dingy motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert, staring into a tequila bottle for clues to the break-up of his third marriage, and you’re not far from a Shepard play. He claimed to write them on his knee, driving a truck across the desert, scribbling down dialogue while held at red lights.
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“You can play it,” Harris told me about his dialogue. “You’re not spelling out poetry, however poetic it is. It still comes across as vernacular. Dialogue. Human beings expressing themselves. Or not expressing themselves, or hiding whatever it is. Sam’s a master at it.”
Much of his work disinterred the legacy handed down to him by his father, a “maniac, but in a quiet way”, who flew B-24s over the South Pacific and returned to play unhappy families, disappearing for days at a time on drinking binges. He spent his last years alone in the desert, like the drifter in Paris, Texas, the film Shepard co-wrote with LM Kit Carson, which won the Palme d’Or in 1984. “These were men who came back from the war, had to settle down, raise a family and send the kids to school — and they just couldn’t handle it,” Shepard said. “My old man tried to force on me a notion of what it was to be a ‘man’. And it destroyed him.”
“I didn’t go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer
From the titanic internal battle not to follow in his father’s footsteps, Shepard forged 44 plays and 70 screen credits, aided by his extraordinary looks — tall, craggy, dimple-chinned, with azure eyes, snaggle-toothed grin — that at times made the acclaim for his playwriting seem like some sort of conspiracy against lesser men. Forty-four plays! And every one of them absolutely necessary to his psychic survival, was it? How alienated could this man be, exactly? He wasn’t so torn up inside that he wouldn’t pose in the tumbleweed for Vogue with his longtime partner, Jessica Lange. “People want a street angel,” says a character in one of his early one-act plays. “They want a saint with a cowboy mouth.” And he was not such an enemy of happiness as to deny them that.
Women were key to his development, not just because they provided him with material: he was that rare man who was at ease playing muse to creative women. “There’s no comprehending/Just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes/And the lips you can get/And still feel so alone/And still feel related,” Joni Mitchell sang in her 1976 song about him, Coyote. “He was a renegade with nasty habits/ He was a screech owl/He was a man playing cowboys,” Patti Smith said of her ex in the introduction to the play they wrote together, Cowboy Mouth. It is hard to imagine Beckett or Pinter enduring any such collaboration.
This suppleness fed into his screen career, which had the shape more commonly associated with actresses: front-loaded in his youth, then playing second fiddle in films such as Baby Boom and Frances, followed by a comeback in craggy middle age. He made his debut as a Texas farmer in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978). Malick didn’t make another for nearly two decades. What an introduction to movies: a ruinous masterpiece, forcing its creator into hiding, but a strong contender for one of the most beautiful films ever made.
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Shepard was Oscar-nominated for his role as the test pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff (1983), powering his plane into space while the Apollo astronauts suck up the applause. “Is that a man?” an onlooker asks as Yeager walks away from a crash site, wreathed in smoke. “You damn right it is,” comes the reply. It could stand as his epitaph.
That his shake-up of cowboy machismo would bequeath us yet another masculine archetype, albeit in attenuated form — leathery-tough, laconic, wary of show — was perhaps inevitable. On screen, he played as the very type his plays sought to explode, which may be one reason he was disparaging about his screen acting: “I didn’t go out of my way to get into this movie stuff,” he once said. “I think of myself as a writer.”
Towards the end, the roles that drew him away from his farm in Kentucky were precisely the figures he had once railed against so eloquently: a military man like his father in Black Hawk Down (2001); a derelict father figure in Jeff Nichols’s Mud (2012); the absent patriarch in Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County (2013); a man who decides to kill his own son in Cold in July (2014). Buried Child had become a different play by the time it ran in the West End last year, he told me: “The ghosts that you are trying to reveal when you are first writing are not necessarily the same ghosts when you are finished.”
That came through clear as a bell: the sound of a man wrapping up, a life come full circle.