Sam Shepard, American Original

I figure it's more like a game a' pool. You know, the way sometimes you got the feel. You got the touch. All the practice and technique in the world can't beat ya, cause you got magic.

—Sam Shepard, "Geography of a Horse Dreamer"

Drive Sunset Boulevard from the Pacific Ocean as it winds through the palisades, Brentwood, Beverly Hills, and eventually you're in Hollywood. But before that, where the meridian divider shrinks to a white line at the beginning of the Strip, you pass Hamburger Hamlet. The Hamlet isn't actually in Hollywood, but it's Hollywood all the same. For a burger joint, the women's hair is a shade too blonde, the men's shirts open a button too low. All around, people are pushing projects, promoting themselves: The air is heavy with hype.

A tall, lean, leathery type slouches back in his booth. Sam Shepard wears a dark-leather jacket over a T-shirt, with faded jeans and cowboy boots. No one recognizes him, and he prefers it that way. He looks over his shoulder and signals the waitress. Hamburger Hamlet is famous for the elegant burger, the posh burger. Shepard orders catfish.

Rugged individualism—it's what America was built on. If the flacks in this restaurant were asked to sell Shepard, they'd say the story writes itself; you don't even need to breathe hard. They'd call him one of those rare animals, a natural. What a story! A poor kid from a broken family in a two-bit Southern California town who went on to be a playwright—a world-famous playwright. A playwright who was ten times honored with Obie awards for his off-Broadway plays and who won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize. A playwright who, at 40, without even a college degree, would come to be considered by many America's greatest living dramatist.

But that's only the beginning. Then there's Shepard the actor, the guy who stole the movie The Right Stuff with his low-key portrayal of test pilot Chuck Yeager. The flacks would rave about his look: the rawhide frame, the jutting chin, the high, hard cheekbones. (Two actresses who know him nod as they pass Shepard's table. "He's got great bones," one says to the other. "Great bones?" whispers the second. "He's got great everything.") It's a knife of a face, but boyish. Believe me, it can open into an all-American teenage grin. The teeth are irregular and the features a little uneven, but any way you cast it, it's handsome.

But wait, the flacks would say, there's more. He lives with actress Jessica Lange, whom he met while making the movie Frances. Clearly, Sam Shepard is a very hot story.

As recently as 1976, however, he had never even acted in a movie, and they made him a star. He played a Texas ranch owner in Days of Heaven, and he wore the role like his cowboy boots. The critics loved him, and the offers poured in for strong, silent, handsome leading-man roles. So he took the parts in Resurrection, Raggedy Man, Frances and The Right Stuff. When that last film opened, Newsweek said of him: "If he wants it, he stands on the brink of an extraordinary new career in the movies."

And he has music, too. Shepard is a drummer, and he played with a bunch of rock groups in the Sixties. Now, those groups—they called themselves Lothar and the Hand People, and the Holy Modal Rounders—weren't big, but they opened for the big names, such as Ike and Tina Turner and Lou Reed. Shepard sat in for Charlie Watts and jammed with The Rolling Stones. He lived for a year with rock poet Patti Smith. He has written music for his plays. And Bob Dylan invited him on the Rolling Thunder Revue to document the extravaganza.

But there's just one problem. In spite of the fact that his success in The Right Stuff has forced him to deal with the media, Shepard doesn't even like to have his picture taken. And interviews? Forget it. If you try to get him to talk about his personal life, his parents, his family, his relationships, 99 times out of 100, the door slams. Boom. No one home. Do not disturb. And if he finally begins talking, (continued on page 112)Sam Shepard(continued from page 90) he never says anything good about himself. He just keeps cutting himself down. Some star. Some personality. The conversation goes like this:

Q.: How many plays have you written?

A.: Too damn many.

Q.: Which play are you proudest of?

A.: I'm not proud of any of them, but the one I feel least embarrassed by is True West.

Q.: How do you feel about your acting?

A.: I always feel precarious. I don't really have my chops as an actor.

When it comes to self-promotion, Shepard is hopeless. He pauses, he holds back. It seems as if he has nothing to say. But when he gets going on almost any other subject, he's a real surprise—fluid and articulate. Between bites of fried catfish, right now, he's talking about cars. He's talking about a '58 Impala that was chopped and channeled and rode low, a perfect cruising machine when he and his buddies from Duarte High checked out the chicks down at Bob's Big Boy. He's talking about his Ford pickup, with this great four-wheel drive, that he uses to haul horses and ropes and feed around.

If Shepard reminds you of the old West, it finally has less to do with owning horses and riding them and roping cattle—all of which he does—than with constantly pushing on, looking for new challenges, new ground to explore. "The key to the whole thing," he says in his soft, slow voice, "is to keep moving, to always move in a new direction. In order to remain creative, you have to open to new territory. You can't stay in the same little four acres. You gotta move."

And move he does. His latest play, Fool for Love, opened in New York last spring. True West is also enjoying a run there at presstime. There are movie roles (the soon-to-be-released Country, with Lange as co-star); a book of short stories and poems, Motel Chronicles, published last year; a new feature film, Paris, Texas, directed by Wim Wenders; a new screenplay, Synthetic Tears, which Shepard hopes to direct, as well; a collaboration with longtime friend Joseph Chaikin—an important force in off-Broadway theater and the leader of the Open Theater—on an experimental-theater piece.

Shepard seems destined for the limelight. Ironically, he works very hard to avoid it. Just looking at him tonight, slumped back in the booth, it's clear that he is an unlikely star. Although he can now command six-figure salaries for his appearances, he rejects most acting proposals. He declined parts in Shoot the Moon, Urban Cowboy and Reds (the role of Eugene O'Neill, filled by Jack Nicholson), among others. "I'm not interested in becoming an 'actor,' " he says. "I'm interested in working with film makers. Everything depends on the projects."

He turns around, pushes away his plate, lights up an Old Gold and plants his elbows on the table. "You know, I never set out to act in film. It was more or less accidental. It caught me by surprise. I always feel it's kind of dangerous—like walking a tightrope. For the most part, I feel like I'm getting away with it." He laughs. "But it's exciting to discover a new area where you can plunge in."

If Shepard is an unlikely star, he is an even more unlikely playwright, a maverick in the world of theater. "I don't think I've ever written a play that looks like a play," he says. "They look more like apparitions." He ignores most of his colleagues: "I don't read plays. I don't enjoy going to the theater. I find theater disappointing for the most part." He shuns conventional formats: "Who needs well-made plays? I don't want to write drawing-room comedies." John Lion, founder and general director of the Magic Theater, recalls that "Sam once told me he's not looking for actors, he's looking for chance takers." Shepard is a master of the unpredictable. His works—the early ones most markedly—are charged with intense, staccato monologs (which have come to be known as arias) and a fearless theatricality. The stage overflows with images: mounds of corn in Buried Child, scores of purloined toasters in True West. At the end of La Turista, the protagonist exits by running full speed at the backstage wall and smashing right through it.

Shepard has never had a work on Broadway—he has never wanted to: "I don't know who to address on Broadway. I always felt I was writing for people who would understand me. I never had any aspiration to talk to people I don't know. It's a question of strangers versus friends. I'm not interested in speaking to a big mass audience. I don't see the point."

Preferring the small, personal touch, he refuses to inflate his plays or their significance: "I'm not making monuments. My plays aren't for all time, they're just for this time. Eric Dolphy once said that the thing he loved about music was that it went out into the air and it disappeared. That's what I like about theater."

As for winning the Pulitzer Prize—well, "I'm honored and all that," he says, leaning back and blowing out a cloud of smoke. "But that's not the reason I'm writing, to win prizes." For Shepard, the most important thing was to avoid the publicity the award brought with it: "It's mostly getting over it. You know, there's this great line in one of my favorite films, The Hustler. Paul Newman is hustling these guys at eight ball and they start making jokes about his missing shots. And he looks up and says, 'I don't rattle.' I like that stance—you can't pussyfoot around. I'm not going to write anything different because I won a prize."

That's where I was raised, anyway. A small town. A town like any other town. A town like Momma used to make, with lace doilies and apple pie and incest and graft. No. It's not true. I am an American, though. Despite what they say. In spite of the scandal. I am truly an American. I was made in America. Born, bred and raised. I have American scars on my brain. Red, white and blue. I bleed American blood…. I came to infect the continent. To spread my disease.

—"Operation Sidewinder"

There's no doubt that Shepard sees himself as a man of action, not an intellectual. He may mention Christopher Marlowe, Bertolt Brecht and Grand Guignol in passing, but he'd rather talk about farming or playing drums or driving. He talks about "putting aside all the big ideas" and writing about sensory experience, "what it's like to have life reach out and touch you in the shin." He calls himself "a physical writer more than an intellectual one. Like Cesar Vallejo, who called his writing 'the poetry of the purple cheekbone'—of the body, of the visceral. I'd love to write like a European writer; they're so elegant. Take Peter Handke, with that impeccable syntax. But I can't get this American thing out of my bones. It's like those American painters, Franz Kline and all those guys. They have that physical splash that's just unmistakable. They're all over the canvas."

Shepard himself is just as unmistakably American. He has driven Route One and Interstate 685 and collected the pieces. His characters are movie tycoons and cheerleaders, cowboys and rock stars, gangsters and Midwestern families. His plays are attics cluttered with the paraphernalia of American life: Bibles and baseball caps and bottles of booze, drive-in movies and shopping malls, jazz riffs and jukeboxes, back-seat sex and smog and weirdness and paranoid violence.

For him, the United States is a country that has lost its roots, been "cut off from (continued on page 192)Sam Shepard(continued from page 112) the land and the sky." He feels that "one of the biggest tragedies about this country was moving from an agricultural society to an urban, industrial society. We've been wiped out." His America is "screwed up." Throughout his plays, things are damaged, skewed, twisted and torn down. From the dilapidated house of Curse of the Starving Class to the electric chair of Killer's Head, from the shouting matches of Buried Child to the repeated clubbings of Melodrama Play, from the illness of Red Cross, La Turista and Angel City to the apocalypse of Operation Sidewinder, Shepard's vision of America is grim.

Some of the pessimism must surely spring from the scars of his adolescent and young-adult life. Born on November 5, 1943, in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, Shepard logged more weary miles in his first six years than some people do in a lifetime. His father was in the Army Air Corps, and young Sam and his mother dragged after him to Florida and South Dakota, Idaho and the South Pacific. "They would snatch a few hours together," he recalls, "and he would take off again." The family finally settled in Duarte, a small, working-class Southern California town not too far from Pasadena.

Shepard's home life was rarely peaceful. He and his father had a rocky relationship: "My father had a real short fuse. He had a really rough life—had to support his mother and brothers at a very young age when his dad's farm collapsed. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one. It was past frustration; it was anger. My father was full of terrifying anger."

Shepard recalls his high school years none too fondly. He was one of many rebels without causes who hated school and spent their time cruising, drinking cheap liquor and taking speed. Then there were the fights: "In that area, fighting was a kind of badge. I never enjoyed it, but I never backed down. There would be these incredible slug-outs in the park. I remember some guys fought like wild men. There would even be these parties where they'd beat up people's fathers—the father of the girl who was giving the party would get wiped out on the street, with the mother screaming, calling the police."

The high points of that time in his life were the escapes—working on a horse ranch, exploring the foothills and absorbing his father's passion for literature, Spanish culture and jazz. After high school and three semesters at Mount San Antonio agricultural college, Shepard decided to escape for good. He hit the road in 1962, taking up with the Bishop's Company Repertory Players, an amateur acting troupe. "It was a great time. I really learned what it is to make theater. We'd go into churches, mostly in New England, set up lights, do make-up, do the play, tear it all down and leave to go down the road the next day. It really gave you a sense of the makeshift quality of theater and the possibilities of doing it anywhere. That's what turned me on most of all. I realized suddenly that anybody can make theater. You don't need to be affiliated with anybody. You just make it with a bunch of people. That's still what I like about it."

He wound up in New York and briefly tried to make it as an actor: "It didn't take me long to crap out of that. It's terrible running around with a picture and a résumé. It's not acting; it's personal promotion—like being a hooker." He took to supporting himself by odd jobs.

But it was 1964, and in the cafés and the churches of New York's Lower East Side, the off-off-Broadway movement was catching fire. From Caffé Cino to the Café La Mama, the avant-garde of American drama was pushing at the limits of the theater. Shepard was swept up in the energy of the movement, and he began writing plays: His first, Cowboys and Rock Garden, were produced in October of that year at the fledgling Theater Genesis in St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery. "Writing was a kind of salvation for me," he remembers. "If I hadn't had that, I don't know what would have happened to me. I probably would have wound up a used-car salesman. I didn't know what to do."

It was a hard time for him. Living in a condemned apartment, dodging knives on the streets, wired on drugs, he ran wild with his buddy Charles Mingus, Jr., son of the jazz musician. "Sam found New York really harsh," recalls the Open Theater's Chaikin. "He was like a refugee."

Drugs were a big part of Shepard's life, but he was certainly no flower child: "I couldn't figure out what they were smiling about. I wasn't celebrating back then, I was surviving. Plus, I was on different drugs—crystal Methedrine, which has much more of an edge; when you walked down the streets, your heels made sparks." Those years on the streets went by fast, and the plays came out faster. They poured out of him like water out of a busted fire hydrant. When the days began to smash into one another, he bailed out: "I just came to this point where it was very bad news. I wanted to get back into life."

He left for London in 1971, patching up a shaky marriage, discarding drugs and settling down to concentrate on theater. Three years later, he returned to the United States, to Marin County, with his actress wife, O-Lan Johnson, their son, Jesse Mojo, and his in-laws. There was a relative period of calm, during which he experienced family life for the first time. But that marriage failed and Shepard now lives on a ranch in New Mexico with Lange and her daughter from her liaison with Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Shepard's experience with shattered families comes through in his plays. Curse of the Starving Class (1976) shows the disintegration of a household: Weston comes home dead drunk and rips down the front door, Wesley urinates on Emma's Four-H Club project, Ella and Emma scream at each other and Ella runs off with a real-estate swindler. Buried Child (1978) is the next step, where family members don't even recognize one another. Vince, the prodigal son, returns home only to be met by total indifference. Tilden, his father, is too dazed to remember his son. Dodge, the crotchety grandfather, couldn't care less: "You think just because people propagate they have to love their offspring? You never seen a bitch eat her puppies?" Finally, in True West (1980), two brothers, one a writer and the other a thief, are locked in a power play as each tries to take over the other's profession. In the final scene, they try to kill each other.

After True West, Shepard sat down and wrote eight plays and threw them all away. The play he finally wrote, his latest, is Fool for Love. It marks several new directions for him. First, written for two men and one woman, it probes male-female relationships for the first time, instead of male power struggles. In Shepard's words, it's about "what it's like to fall victim to love." Second, he aimed the one-and-a-half-hour one-acter to have a new level of "raw, straightforward testimony. There's been nothing in the theater that can match the relentless honesty of a Merle Haggard song."

Full of faith. Hope. Faith and hope. You're all alike, you hopers. If it's not God, then it's a man. If it's not a man, then it's a woman. If it's not a woman, then it's the land or the future of some kind. Some kind of future.

—"Buried Child"

Shepard smiles. Running a hand through his sandy blond hair, he talks about his role as Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff.

He chose it because he felt close to Yeager, the daring pilot and space pioneer: "The more I talked with him, the more interested I got. He was the ace of aces. He made all the astronauts shake in their boots. He broke the speed of sound, he flipped planes, he crashed them and he walked away."

There must have been something in Yeager, the "natural-born stick-'n'-rudder man," that spoke to Shepard, for as Tom Wolfe describes him, "he was the boondocker, the boy from the back country, with only a high school education, no credentials, no cachet or polish of any sort, who took off the feed-store overalls...and lit up the skies over Europe."

Ironically for someone who portrays Yeager, Shepard never flies, but he rarely minds driving or talking about long, dusty miles through Southwestern deserts. He tells the story of how his screenplay, Synthetic Tears, was conceived on the road as he was driving from the Frances set back to his Northern California home. The tale of a character who tries to rehabilitate his long-lost father and bring him back into his family, "it encompasses a whole period of my life that I had never been able to synthesize, that I had always struggled with. This one trip north, while I was driving, this whole screenplay unraveled in my head—I just let it unravel and watched it, and the entire film rolled out. It was an incredible feeling, because until then, I'd been very frustrated in trying to put this thing into different forms—into a play, a short story, a poem—and all of a sudden, it exploded in this screenplay form."

Shepard's plan is to retain the rights and direct it. Although he has directed his plays in London and at the Magic Theater, he has never directed a movie. Synthetic Tears would be another first: "I couldn't get into a situation where this screenplay was out of my hands. It would be too depressing. Besides, I know I can do it. It's just a question of getting the chance."

As he gets up from the table, he stubs out the butt of one cigarette and, walking out the door, lights up the next. His Ford pickup is at the curb. He settles in behind the wheel with a quiet smile, looking completely comfortable for the first time all night. A turn of the key, the engine roars to life and Shepard pulls into traffic. "You see," he says as he accelerates, "it's not interesting to be a specialist. You get to a certain point and you want to move. I'd like to do a lot of things. I'd like to do some sculpture. I'd like to do some painting. Just to keep experimenting. Why not? Why not try it all?"

" 'I'm not interested in speaking to a big mass audience. I don't see the point.' "

" 'I was on different drugs—crystal Methedrine; when you walked down the streets, your heels made sparks.' "