Just a Good Ole Rhodes Scholar

Kristofferson stood still, gazing blankly over the other man's shoulder. Most of the time he is loose and easy, the deep blue eyes level and good-humored. But tonight he was tight, stiff. He was backstage trying to get up for the concert, but his friend Dennis Hopper had introduced this New Mexico politician who was running for governor. A big bespectacled man wearing a black suit all pasted up with stickers bearing his own name, he was jawing earnestly at Kristofferson. Kristofferson was trying, but he was having that kind of day.

Things had piled up the way they seemed to frequently in the life he was leading lately, the sort of life that occasionally gets so full it clogs. He was making a movie with director Martin (Mean Streets) Scorsese, working long hours and pitching in with script-rewrite ideas. The movie was called Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore; it was his fifth film (after The Last Movie, Cisco Pike, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Blume in Love) and a good role, working with an actress he respected, Ellen Burstyn.

Someone had asked him to appear on a telethon in Tucson and he had arrived so weary and stoned that he could barely talk. His telephone would ring and the caller, star-struck, bashful, mute, would mutter something and Kris would grin and buzz dully: "Shit, man, one of us gotta say something."

The night before, there had been a Charlie Rich concert followed by a pleasant reunion of old friends, a late and liquorish picking session in Rich's suite. For weeks Kristofferson had been vibrating to the tensions of performing, had been unstrung by travel, booze and unrest, descended upon by hordes of what he variously called wackos, nutcakes and wimps. An endless side show of spooky ladies turned up at his door bearing notebooks, pet bobcats, grandiose schemes of various sorts—one talked her way in and made a crazed telephone call to some faraway husband who picked up his phone to hear the shrill, if invented, news that his darling bride was runnin' off with Kristofferson, by God, and so there. All this, while back home in Malibu waited his wife, Rita Coolidge, and their new baby girl, a few weeks old and seldom seen by her father. And there were radio people and writers, everybody trooping in and out and everybody wanting—wanting intimacy of some sort, a roll in the hay or a soul-illuminating quote and enough bizarre behavior to make a readable piece. Piece is right. Step right up and rip off a piece of the beleaguered star.

"The funny thing is," he had said in Tucson, "people think you're more famous than you are." Then he had looked startled, cocking his head. "But if they think you are, you are, aren't you?"

So he had flown to Albuquerque from Tucson, napped awhile, emerged a little rested—and then received confounding news. It had been on the radio. A process server was staked out backstage, waiting for him. And now, as the politician rambled on, the process server was clearly the main thing on Kristofferson's mind. Over the politician's shoulder, he could see the man back there in the shadows, dark and patient in a rumpled suit, the heavy sheaf of papers in his hand.

"And mention I'm moderate on marijuana," the politician was saying, Kris having agreed to introduce him to the house.

The singer finally spoke. "You know, half this audience is probably red-necks. This is country music."

The pol looked enlightened at last and hastily bobbed his head, eyes shining with understanding.

Kristofferson smiled wearily and turned away, heading for the man with the papers. He collected them privately, with a polite handshake. Striding back, glancing through them…. Suddenly he looked up, grinning. "Shit, I thought it was for that deal with the kid. It's only some dude who claims he wrote Help Me Make It Through the Night."

Which was good news. There was a girl in Nashville and a cute little blue-eyed boy. Denials of fatherhood. Some money being paid, nonetheless, in a spirit, he (continued on page 122) Good Ole Rhodes Scholar (continued from page 95) says, of friendship. Such things can get rough. But—he grins—great, all the dude wanted was $2,000,000.

He carried his relief into the dressing room, where he slumped now, surrounded by the band and visitors, pouring Jack Daniel's into a Coke can, cracking: "This looks like a team that's about to get its ass kicked." In funky brown suede, he looked rangy and tanned, not as fleshy and rounded as in the films and photos, and a little older. Not as tall, either, perhaps 5'10" or so and slightly soft at the middle but not paunchy, retaining at 38 the boxer's muscular arms. His face has a refinement of feature uncommon in male country singers—the prosperous California family had passed along kind genes. There is that good, wide, white, all-American-boy grin he displayed so frequently as Billy the Kid, but the truly arresting items are the eyes and the voice. The eyes are clear blue and curiously small, deeply set over high cheekbones. The voice is a growly, buzzy purr, raw brown sugar laced with a hoarse hint of danger, a voice women love and lean closer to hear because sometimes it does not carry well.

• • •

"You look," he said, grinning back over his shoulder, "like a bookend in need of a book." It was the previous afternoon in Tucson, in Vernon White's room. White, the Warner Bros. publicity man, had been saying how Kristofferson was "real"—invariably the first thing you hear about him—when the singer came in, snapped open a beer, clambered onto a bed and began chatting about acting, boxing, boyhood. A few minutes later, Toby Rafelson, the film's production designer, arrived and arranged herself cozily back to back against him like, well, bookends. She grinned back as he talked about stylish fighters he had admired and then slipped into a boyhood reminiscence.

"Back in Brownsville, they weren't mean to the square people or the dumb people. But in California, in junior high, I can remember starting a fight. That's what you did. I knew I'd win and I did. Christ!" he said, staring into his beer. "I'm still ashamed of that. I can see the kid all bloody; I couldn't hit him anymore…." He shook his head. He had been boxing since the age of ten, hitting the garage wall. "I still have fantasies of fighting in Madison Square Garden."

He was tired that day but wanted to make the Charlie Rich concert, so we drove over in a rusted-out Chevy station wagon belonging to Vernon Wray, a local friend of his. Kristofferson bought the tickets for the whole entourage; and then, inside, he slumped in a seat with his jacket rolled over his arms like a man waiting for a plane late at night in an empty airport, sitting up to do shrill two-finger whistles and heavy pounding claps after each song of Rich's, Bobby Bare's and Barbara Fairchild's, trying to help crank up a slow audience. Fairchild sang a Hank Williams song and Kristofferson leaned over. "Can you believe that guy? He's been dead since 1959 or something [1953] and they're still doing his songs!"

In Rich's suite later, the lights were off, people sprawled around the room-service cart of beer, shrimp cocktail, Scotch and guacamole dip, joints were lit and circling like fireflies, with a guitar following more slowly. Petite, blonde, big-eyed Fairchild was beside Kristofferson on the couch, leaning toward him in tiny slow increments. She took the guitar, did a song she wrote: "When you want something different you come home to me." Kristofferson grinned widely. She has a rich, butterscotch country voice and the sentiment of the song, simple though it was, was the real stuff. You could see Kris marveling as the guitar went past him. He passed it himself.

"You want to close the show, Kris?" somebody asked wryly from a dark corner. He was the only one who hadn't performed. The eyes were on him, waiting. Yet there was a reluctance, a kind of aw-shucks forelock tugging. He looked startled, then hurt, then (reluctantly, it seemed) took the guitar, strummed, sang: "Who do you have to screw to get out of this place?" Everybody laughed.

A blond kid from one of the backup bands took the instrument and began pitching his songs to Kris, the way you know Kris remembers doing when Johnny Cash was around. The kid kept looking eagerly at Kris, who finally growled, pleasantly enough: "You're gonna be a fuckin' star, man."

Rich went to bed. Bare did a funny song, popped another beer and then turned quiet, wearing his cowboy hat and a little smile. Kristofferson, in a corner, somehow seemed to be in the center of the room. The eyes on him....

"I never dreamed it'd get this big," he had said. "Five years ago, I was hopin' to make ten or fifteen thousand a year and pay my bills. Now I can make that in a weekend." Last year he paid a quarter of a million in income taxes. One song, For the Good Times, earns $70,000 a year. Help Me Make It Through the Night does nearly as well. He stars in films, does concerts at will, the phone rings and it's a rep for Sinatra begging for a song. He's on the cover of the Rolling Stone.

• • •

The name on his pay check is Kristoffer Kristofferson and he tells interviewers that the first feeling he remembers is loneliness—"a separateness." Yet, when you try to picture him as one of those sad-assed mopers you knew in high school, the imagination fails. The presence he has in films comes through even more clearly in person and he seems always to have been the one you envied—handsome, smart, witty, strong, the girls all over him, the eyes always upon him. There are other contradictions, one of the most obvious being that he writes country songs, but he was never a bumpkin. Kristofferson grew up in Brownsville and San Mateo, the son of an Air Force and Pan American pilot, a major general. Pomona College, where he played football all four years while majoring in creative writing. He organized a rugby team, boxed Golden Gloves, wrote sports pieces for the paper, platoon commander of the R.O.T.C. unit, made Phi Beta Kappa, was written up in Sports Illustrated—clean-cut, well rounded, popular, talented. He won four of 20 prizes in Atlantic Monthly's collegiate short-story competition, wrote part of a novel, was chosen a Rhodes scholar and sailed off to Oxford, where he studied English literature, became enamored of William Blake and argued poetry with gay dons at genteel literary sherry parties.

And wrote country songs. And was signed up by a British promoter who changed his name to Kris Carson and set about creating a new teen idol, a one-man Led Zeppelin. Time did a story.

And he dropped out. Joined the Army's air arm, went to flight school, jump school, Ranger school. Stationed in Germany, he assembled a country-music band consisting of himself (a captain) and a group of enlisted men—an unseemly familiarity that was invariably noted in his efficiency reports. And drank and smoked. And totaled two cars and wrecked four motorcycles. Was ordered to West Point to teach English. But along in there, he had met a cousin of Marijohn Wilkin's, a Nashville songwriter (Waterloo, Long Black Veil) then launching a new publishing house, Buckhorn Music. He sent her a tape. She replied: Stop by if you happen through town.

He took leave and visited Marijohn and not long after resigned his commission, moth-balled the captain's uniform and equipped himself with Levis and cowboy boots. He was 29, poor, talented, a Nashville cat. "Hoping we could take it 'til we'd make it to the top."

Ken Lambert, his roommate in the early Nashville days: "I never thought he'd be a star. He was good, but a lot of us were good."

His mother: "Don't you think your old friends'll think you're gutless, don't have what it takes?"

Fran, then his wife: angry, mystified, hurt.

Marijohn: "I signed him on a $35-a-week draw, all I could afford then. There's a feeling you get. Some people have an aura."

Kristofferson: "It wasn't easy."

Marijohn suggested a teaching job at (continued on page 170)Good Ole Rhodes Scholar(continued from page 122) Vanderbilt, but he said no, it would interfere with his writing. He found construction jobs instead, emptied ashtrays at Columbia studios, tended bar and drank beer at the Tally-Ho tavern, made his eager rounds with a battered guitar and taped demos of his songs. The first of the new breed, he encountered the same old hopeful faces everywhere he went. Marijohn was one, in a way, though older than most and with more conventional songs. College-educated, she had spent her first years in town trying to remember to drop her gs so as to fit in. She introduced him around. He met Chris Gantry (Sundown Mary and Dreams of the Everyday Housewife) , Mickey Newbury (Just Dropped In), Tony Joe White (Polk Salad Annie, Rainy Night in Georgia), Dennis Linde, Steve Davis, Billy Swan, Donnie Fritts, Vince Matthews, Red Lane.

They were big, strapping, handsome guys in Levis and boots, beginning to smoke dope and get all haired over in the fashion of the times. They could be raw and touchy as Hell's Angels yet warmly supportive of one another, hugging as unaffectedly as they fought or seduced or drank or wrote songs—most of which didn't go. "We weren't commercial," Kris says wryly. "That was a dirty word, because we weren't."

Marijohn says his first melodies were so reminiscent of Hank Williams' work that she had to warn him about it. She was scheduling demo sessions for him, but she thought his voice too unusual, too distracting, and persuaded Mel Tillis and Johnny Duncan to come in and sing. So all over Music Row he toted his demos, his own songs in other men's voices.

Two of his side-kicks were Lambert, tall and easygoing, with blond ringlets and a talent for leathercraft as well as for songwriting, and Vince Matthews, big and intense, with lank black Indian-looking hair, dark intelligent eyes and a way of talking effusively into your ear, more damply as the evening wears on. Matthews never finished high school and Kristofferson still marvels at how adroitly he handles concepts such as alienation and angst, frequently mispronouncing words because he has encountered them only in print. The two in a way are not much different from Kris. Both have written songs as moving and witty and insightful as many you see on the charts, and both perform. As members of the new breed, they'll probably never appear on Grand Ole Opry, but then, Kris never did, either.

He moved in with Lambert and Lambert's girlfriend. It was a two-bedroom $50-a-month apartment. "There was no furniture," Lambert says, tipping back a Buckhorn beer. "There was only one bed and somehow—I don't know—Kris got the bed."

Matthews joined in the laughter in a way that said this told you how Kris was. Looking awed even now, he said: "From the moment that fucker hit town, he was a star. From that first party, everybody was talking about his songs."

Lambert: "Yeah, he'd already been touted as a boy superstar. And guys at the Tally-Ho were always talking about what they were gonna do, you know? They're still there and still talking. But Kris was doing it....He was a great gift giver. I was making leathergoods and I guess half of it went to Kris for gifts, usually to high-powered people." But not always. Pat Floyd, who used to work in Marijohn's office, still has one of those leather purses.

Lambert stubbed out a Salem. "You know, he wouldn't smoke anything but Bull Durhams. There are only three or four cigarettes that are hard to get like that, Picayune, Home Run. But he chose one of those."

"He had this way of reluctance, you know?" Matthews said. "Like, he was reluctant to record, then he was reluctant to perform or be interviewed. He was always reluctant. Reluctant with chicks, too. Hell!" Matthews guffawed admiringly. "He knew what he was doing."

"I used to call him Golden Boy," Lambert chortled. "Used to piss him off and he'd say he was gonna punch my lights out. That was a saying of his. Billy Swan, he's got one eye and he pissed Kris off one time and Kris said, 'Billy, I'm gonna punch your light out.' "

"He was a duker," Marijohn said.

"A hitter," Lambert said, and he recalled a time when he was working an out-of-town club and Kris was in the audience. A couple of beefy red-necks were heckling Lambert, who finally had enough and called them out. Kris went along. "He didn't have to and it ended up we didn't fight. But Kris was ready. He was ready."

Yet not many actually saw him fight. Marijohn said it happened once at her house, with Faron Young. According to Kris, Young had called him a phony, kept it up and a tussle ensued. It was called out of respect for Marijohn's furniture after they ended up sprawled in the fireplace.

"How do you two feel about him now that he's made it?" I wondered.

Lambert: "I'm behind him. I like him. I'm jealous of him."

And Matthews rolled back on the carpet, nearly toppling his beer, and laughed uproariously. "Yeah! Riiight!"

"What is it he has, besides the talent?"

Matthews never paused. "He's pretty, man. He's pretty and sexy and brilliant and talented and rich and famous—he's a star, man."

• • •

The Tally-Ho tavern has a new name now, the Country Corner, but it's the same place—a Southern tavern, loud and smoky and harsh, with touchy Southern male egos bumping around like snooker balls on a threadbare table, the sort of place long-hairs wisely stayed out of in the Sixties. A hand-lettered sign on the wall reads: Patience/My Ass/I'm Goin' Out/And kill Somethin'.

Among the glossy photos of country-music stars is one of Kris, grinning, inscribed in his angular scribble to the owner: "Cathy, I love you, but I'm glad I don't work here no more."

Beside me at the bar is a chubby, round-faced man in a sport shirt, drinking Budweiser from a sweating can. He introduces himself over Waylon Jennings' jukebox voice. He remembers Kris.

"He was real clean-cut then, not like some of the others. I only knew him to say hello, but we got into an argument once. It was right when Luther King was killed and I was popping off about the colored people and finally Kris said he had some black blood, his grandmother, or great-grandmother, I don't know. I don't know if it was true. But I felt bad."

The man went quiet, sipping. "But he was the cleanest-cut guy ever came into this place. I guess he's not that now."

• • •

Kristofferson, in yesterday's jeans, is on the plane to Albuquerque, sipping a bloody mary and talking about his last days in Nashville. His songs had sold from the start, he conceded—Dave Dudley had recorded Vietnam Blues and Roy Drusky had done Jody and the Kid—but after that came long dry spells, the last of which had stretched itself out until he thought it would smother him.

"I had written Help Me Make It Through the Night and it wasn't going. Man, I pushed it to everybody—girls' duets, comedy acts; shit, anybody. I knew it was gonna be a hit someday, but it looked like it was gonna be after I was dead.

"Our second child was born with a birth defect and I ran up a $10,000 medical bill and I had $500-a-month support payments to make. I went down to the Gulf and took a job flying helicopters out to the oil rigs. I commuted to Nashville."

When his contract at Buckhorn expired, Marijohn suggested that he move to Combine, a bigger house. He did, and just about then it all broke open. He and Shel Silverstein had written Your Time's Comin' and a forgiving Faron Young recorded it. Jerry Lee Lewis recorded Once More with Feeling, Bobby Bare did Come Sundown, Ray Stevens did Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down and Chet Atkins, on whose good side is the only place to be in Nashville, liked it and said so. Roger Miller cut Me and Bobby McGee, Kristofferson met him and Miller recorded more of his songs. Johnny Cash, always a mentor of the new breed, did a song on his TV show. Combine paid Kris's debts. Gordon Lightfoot and Janis Joplin did Bobby McGee and Dennis Hopper heard it, liked it, phoned Kris and invited him to Peru for The Last Movie. Kris was seen at Janis' funeral (they had been close for a time) and was cast as Cisco Pike. He won the Country Music Association's Song of the Year award for Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down, appalling the traditionalists when he showed up for the ceremonies, they thought, either drunk or stoned. He says he was tired.

"And I was hot," he said, sipping his bloody mary again. "I ain't worked a lick since."

He ain't done nothin' since but work licks, actually. He is as busy as anyone in show business, though he seems to have found spare moments for reflection. "I have no illusions about being a heavyweight," he said. "Back when I was a Rhodes scholar, I thought I was, but you gotta get over that or it can keep you from doing anything…. Right now, I'm having a little burst of energy. I had one three years ago. But it won't last."

• • •

"Shit, my voice." He came off the Albuquerque stage, moving like a manacled octogenarian. The politician and the process server were dealt with and the first set done, but he was still down. He thought his voice wasn't going where he sent it. The audience didn't notice; they were up, pounding on their knees and smiling. Now John Beland, one of the band, was onstage, doing some of his own tunes, and the audience had turned a little restive, and Kristofferson was remembering another time like that at some college in Oklahoma. "One of the guys was performing and the audience wasn't paying any attention and finally somebody hollered out, 'Anybody got an egg?'

"I went back up and took the mike and said, 'Hey, you speak English?'

"He yelled back yeah, and I said, 'Well—fuck you.' "

He was staring down at the board floor as he finished the tale. "President of the college sent a letter around: 'Don't hire Kristofferson, he's hostile and narrow-minded.' " He laughed bitterly.

Kristofferson thought the second set went even worse, though again the audience was pleased. He came off pale and drained, looking like one of his own favorite lines—nearly faded as his jeans.

Jim Meeker was there, a Fort Worth investor Kris had known in Europe, saying things like "He made his environment conform to his fantasy" and urging Kris to run for public office. It was Meeker who had introduced Kris to a girl in Europe, a girl he fell for and traveled with, soaking up the feelings that went into Bobby McGee.

Later, in Meeker's Hilton suite, a dull heaviness hung in the air and Kristofferson slumped in the center of the room, drinking morosely and getting progressively quieter. Finally, he went into the bedroom, stretched out on the bed and picked up the telephone. He dialed. The call went on for a long time. He was on his back, forearm thrown over his eyes, as if to shut out the whole day he'd just been through, voice murmuring muzzily.

Then, suddenly, he is up and urging us to go down to the lounge and hear Jody Miller, who was playing there. "I hear she's good." He is always positive about other performers.

But only one drink into her show, he leans over and says, "You wanna go?"

"Yes."

Somebody in the meantime has sent for a round. The drinks line up on the little plastic table. Jody belts out some Vegas-style country, then does a Kristofferson song. Kris looks weary. A friend leans across the table and says, "Remember the time Wayne Newton was doing Bobby McGee on television and I saw you shaking your head—you know, wincing? And I said, Listen, fucker, you're gonna hear your stuff on Muzak in the shopping center….' "

Kris leans over and burrs, shaking his head slowly, "Ah'm drunk a' shit," and settles lower into his chair. Then he leans back again and mutters, with a truly moving bitter-sad twist in his voice, " 'Cause I'm hostile and narrow-minded. Yeah."

A song on his newest solo album has the line "Findin' out the bottom ain't so different from the top." The song is called Same Old Song.

• • •

It is the next morning and the sun is pouring in through the motel window when the telephone rings. "You want to get together?" I go next door and Kristofferson orders up Cokes. He looks cheery and vital, which seems odd in a night person who is often bearish in the morning (a Nashville acquaintance had observed, "He wakes up with a left hook"). But now some wheel had ponderously turned over and brought up the shining side again, and he was briskly dressing, wearing a white grin.

"Hey, I just talked to Rita. She said I called her last night, said I was talkin' about tigers. Yeah, tigers." ("Tiger! tiger! burning bright"—William Blake.) "Shit, I don't know, this about tigers, that about tigers." We laugh. "Yeah, after a while, she said it was like 'Tiger yeller ribbon round a ole oak tree.' " He laughed again and shrugged into a shirt.

I wanted to ask about the Jesus thing, how an obvious intellectual had gotten into writing a Gospel song like Why Me (Lord) and doing an album called Jesus Was a Capricorn. Some of it is ironic, of course, and some critics have said Why Me (Lord) is a kind of parody. Kris had even been quoted as saying so himself. Even so....

"I don't like to talk about it." He stopped moving around the room. Then: "People call me up and say, 'I hear you've been saved.' I don't even know what it means. I'm even embarrassed now to sing Why Me (Lord)."

He stopped again and then said, "It was just a personal thing I was going through at the time. I had some kind of experience that I can't even explain."

He had gone into a fundamentalist church in Nashville. Jimmy Snow, Hank Snow's son, was the preacher. Kris hadn't been inside a church in a long time, perhaps years, and went now only to please some friends. But they sang Help Me (Lord), a Larry Gatlin song.

"It really moved me; I never thought I needed help before. I was feeling pretty lost, but you know, I'm not the type to do a public display of emotion...."

He paused again and looked up. "I ain't talked to anybody about this. Well, they're reading the Bible and all and the guy says, 'Is anybody feeling lost?'

"And I'm sittin' there and—up goes my hand." He looked up with a self-conscious smile. "I'm sittin' there like this"—slumped, head down, a frozen picture of despondency (as he had seemed the night before)—"but my hand goes up.

"I thought, 'That's enough, just to admit you're wasted.' The last thing you'll catch me doing is—and I went down there, down front. He says, 'Are you ready to accept Christ? Kneel down there.' And I've seen movies of Marjoe and all, and I'm not that type of dude. But I'm kneeling down there.

"And he says, 'You're not guilty.'

"And I carry a big load of guilt around; I can feel guilty about the weather. And I was just sort of out of control, crying. It was like a release. It really shook me up. I was so shaken on the way out I could hardly light a cigarette." He lit a cigarette.

"And then I went off and wrote Why Me (Lord) and the news flashed around that Kristofferson got saved, and now everybody wants to talk to me about Jesus or sign their Bibles, and I don't want to."

I remembered an earlier talk. "I'd like not to be disappointed in myself and others. I get bitter. You know, no matter how much you try, it seems like people are only interested in their own bag. Like, I was up for the concert and then here comes the guy with the papers, Dennis with the guv, a guy wants me to meet his old lady—everybody wants a piece of you. Ultimately, they'd like to see you disembowel yourself onstage. And your friends understand that—so you don't see your friends."

He had seemed to think a moment, picking up a near-empty Bull Durham pack and weighing it in his hand. Finally he had grinned again. "See, there's the danger. Talking like that when most of 'em just come up and say you're great."

There's a line in one of his songs that he had quoted to me the night before in his room, when he was down and almost out on his feet but still trying to "do an interview." "God ain't dead, you motor scooter, can't you hear him laughin'?" I remember thinking, on my way out the door, that he must have gone to sleep with that laughter in his ears.

• • •

"Rita keeps him off the streets," says a friend of the Kristoffersons, sipping Planters' Punch at the Tonga Lei on Malibu Beach. "Like, Kris has a family now. He hasn't been close to his family for a long time. They've seen one another lately but not too much. He digs his brother Craig. Craig is in the military, did everything the family wanted him to do but make a million dollars." The irony makes him laugh. "Kris did that.

"Anyway, Rita is really a family person. The house is usually full of in-laws when they're here. Her sister is married to Booker T. [Jones] and they come down. Her parents have a house, Rita's grandmother—God, I wish you could meet her. She's like 90 and remembers every day of her life. Came out here in a covered wagon. Kris wrote a song for her birthday and you should have seen her face when he played it.

"But Kris is still a loner. He's always been moody. Sometimes you see him and he's got a new joke and he can't wait to play a new song for you. Other times you know you're just not getting through. He always tries, he's always polite. But he just gets withdrawn. Inside, he's still a loner."

It is a few months after Albuquerque and the next day I follow Vernon White up the Malibu Canyon Road to spend the day with Kris and Rita. Nothing was planned, no interview. We were going to sit around, drink beer, listen to music, watch TV, have dinner. On the road, Kristofferson had been open and friendly, if occasionally tense and depressed, which had seemed perfectly natural in that unnatural situation. One wondered how he would be at home.

He was sitting by the Jacuzzi, shirtless and barefoot, beige Levis drooping on his hips. He had lost some weight and looked trim. When we walked up, he was puffing a Bull Durham filter tip and reading about the Nixon pardon, growling: "Nixon and Agnew oughta form a road company."

Behind him was a big blue swimming pool, beyond that in the trees a new kennel, nearby the new Jacuzzi built as a surprise by friends while the Kristoffersons were away. White helped out and says it's just about the biggest Jacuzzi he has ever seen, all lined with tile. "It'll hold eight therapeutically," he said, "and twenty socially." Kris grinned and told about a friend who sat in the hot water for 12 hours one day, so stoned he forgot to get out, emerging at last looking like one of those little pale raisins some people put in fruit salad.

Kris had finished a new album and we went inside to hear some of the songs. He and Rita have owned the house since last February. This was September. They'd spent three weeks there. The living room is enormous, with a fieldstone fireplace and a great view of the Pacific that fills the big windows. There's a playpen in the living room, tape players and speakers and a few books on the shelves, a handful of knickknacks that might have come with the house.

Since Albuquerque, they have done a tour of Australia, New Zealand and Japan, recorded two albums, Kris finished the Alice movie and did a cameo role as a rapist in Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia—an enterprise for which he has caught flak from friends. It was, some thought, "unseemly." "It was a favor for a friend," he says flatly. He had also been in Muscle Shoals, coproducing an album for friend Donnie Fritts. Then Johnny Cash's son was hurt in an accident and Kris went to Nashville to help out, so he ended up getting home later than he had planned. Now they had all of a week off before Kris was due back in Nashville to help out on a Vince Matthews album—another favor for a friend. Vince, in fact, had just phoned. He wanted to apologize to Kris for taking me to the home of the blue-eyed boy in Nashville—an act of mere forgetfulness that Vince had begun to see as the grossest lapse in loyalty. He was forgiven.

Kris went to a tape player: "I want you to hear this one." It was a new song called Slow Down. He grinned at White. "You know Mickey Newbury? When he heard that song, he said: 'Whyn't ya listen to what you're sayin'?' "

When the next tune came on, he was standing in the middle of the floor with a Bull Durham between the fingers of one hand and a yellow home roll in the other, describing how they were going to dub in some wailing Cajun fiddles. The chorus came on and he went, "Deoot-deoot-deOOOOO!"—Cajun fiddle style—bouncing, conducting, jamming his arms out and his hips forward. "Ain't that gonna be great?"

He also had some news. The complainant's lawyer had dropped out of the case concerning authorship of Help Me Make It Through the Night, relieving Kristofferson of a nuisance. He had been offered over $ 100,000 to make a TV commercial for stereo equipment—and turned it down. "I've got a more romantic view of the music. So much of our lives is bullshit already." (Another friend had quoted him as saying, "I'll make a commercial when Dylan makes one.") And he had signed to do a film that he calls Son of Star Is Born, about the rise of a rock star.

The music and the movies are moving closer together now, he was saying, each becoming a part of the other to the point where neither is now more important in his career than the other. I reminded him of his hope to do a film Bergman style and asked if he had had further thoughts about it. No, not really; he wasn't ready for such a step. But then he said, "Hey, I've got a scene I'd like to put in it...."

A band gets onstage (goes the scene) and is doing the sound check, tuning up, going about its business. But soon the audience begins to chatter, clap, heckle. The band starts to play and suddenly clumps and clots of vegetables come zinging up—rotten tomatoes, cucumbers, heads of lettuce like cannonballs, radishes like pellets of shot going ssssss past their heads, the tomatoes going smush-boom as they hit the drums, hit the musicians. But the band goes on into the set as if nothing were happening. They play, really working out, but the flying vegetables get thicker, the people down front start closing in and spitting, showering them with saliva, vilification, vile curses. But the band, blithely, placidly, earnestly, plays on. Now the audience is on its feet, throwing sticks and brickbats, laying about themselves with clubs and night sticks, clambering over the stage and busting up speakers and amps. The place is a shambles. But the band plays on obliviously. And as they're about to wind up the set, the audience really unlimbers the artillery, pulling the pins on grenades and lobbing them onto the stage; tracers go arcing by, smoke rises and the stage is starting to crumble as the drummer does a final riff and rim shot, ka-choonk-ching-bop, shutting down, and the leader of the band—guess who—is taking a bow and saying, growling politely, "And I'd like to thank the sound people and the lighting man and, of course...."

Kris was breaking himself up with this. The whole thing had a kind of Marx Brothers quality, an innocent old-fashioned slapstick obviousness. It was also a very neat, perhaps even unconscious metaphor for what Kristofferson must sometimes feel his life is like. We applaud.

Rita came into the room and the atmosphere changed. It was Home now—the friend was right. She carries it with her. She is bright and hip, but calming, too, pale, with luminous dark eyes and a graceful, unself-conscious way of moving, a low gorgeous voice and an educated drawl. With her was Casey, five and a half months old, dressed in bright yellow and white. Big dark luminous eyes and the shape of a good grin around her mouth. Rita smiled at her. Kris smiled at her. On the table was a copy of Dr. Spock's baby book. Casey smiled back and Rita announced, "She has a new tooth." And leaned over to Casey and confided dryly, with no trace of baby talk: "You'll have tacos for breakfast."

Everybody grinned foolishly, the way people do around babies, and Kris took Casey on his lap, holding her hands up so she could stumble around there. He winced occasionally as tender parts got trampled, smiling into her eyes, bending to rub his grizzled face into her belly and saying, approximately: "Gaaaaaa-gaaaaa-gaaaaa." When he straightened up, Casey had hold of his nose with her plump fist as if it were a bagful of jelly beans. He rolled his eyes at her and she chortled.

"I think I liked the way she talked, you know what I mean? We laughed at the same time," he said when Rita had gone shopping for dinner. They had met at the L.A. airport, sat together on the plane and talked. They knew each other's names but nothing about the other's music; Rita had been singing rock with people like Joe Cocker and Leon Russell. She was going to Memphis, he to Nashville. But after a while, he said, "I wish you were going to Nashville."

And she said, "Well, why don't you get off in Memphis?"

So he did.

"It wasn't like looking at some beautiful chick. It felt like I was comin' home."

Kristofferson is a Cancer, if you like to meditate on such things. Cancers are supposed to be creative and self-contained but domestic and home-loving, about half of which had seemed to fit the Kristofferson on the road. Yet now here was the other half dandling his daughter, romping with his dogs, drinking beer with his shirt off, watching a football game on TV, the whole Dagwood number, a whole new Kristofferson. Even the intensity had pulled far back into his eyes like a fox going cozily into hibernation in a cave.

Rita came back and the enchiladas were cooking when Kris's new Irish setter came trotting in through the big country kitchen, sliding awkwardly on the floor and getting laughed at—a gawky, rangy red pup, all legs, big feet and wet adoring eyes.

"Gotta name that dawg. We're thinkin' of naming him Beauregard for the one in Pogo. Call him Beau for short."

"Beau-weau," pronounces Rita with a soft smile.

Kris breaks up. "Yeah!"

"Beau-weau-weau!"

"Yeah!"

"Or call him Ralph." And somebody barked the inevitable, obligatory "Ralph! Ralph!"

"Call him Bo Diddley," Kris says, still laughing. "Call him Diddley for short."

There was more of this nonsense, some of it even sillier. There was the football game, which Kris Monday-morning-quarterbacked knowledgeably from the front six inches of the couch, and there was Maude with a cameo appearance by John Wayne, who lumbered around and growled in his famous John Wayne impression as we ate the big Mexican dinner and finished the last of the Coors. There was some Tia Maria, and then there was a report on Evel Knievel. It was heavy on the machismo, Knievel relating with his customary bravado how much courage his life required and how possible was his death. Kristofferson watched it intently. Then he set down his plate and picked up Casey. He shook his head. "And they say rock musicians are self-destructive."