Loving friends share Sam Shepard memories
On Monday, July 31, the day the world learned of Sam Shepard’s death, Phil Kaufman, who’d directed him in “The Right Stuff,” and Jeannette Etheredge, who’d presided over Tosca Cafe, clubhouse for the movie’s cast and crew, got together to remember their friend.
“Last night,” said Kaufman on Tuesday, Aug. 1, “Jeannette and I went to Tosca and had dinner in the back room alone, as though we were in Pancho’s in ‘The Right Stuff.’ ” When Etheredge bought Tosca in 1980, “we were there,” said Kaufman.
For Kaufman and Etheredge, Tosca, like Pancho’s after it burned down, is “a place that doesn’t exist anymore,” said the director. Nowadays, the cafe/bar/hangout is a stylish restaurant. The back room was quiet when Kaufman and Etheredge arrived, and they were pretty much alone as they ate dinner and shared reminiscences of Shepard. Eventually strangers joined them in the space that used to be a pool room. “They hardly knew of the whole history of Sam, Ed Harris, Chuck Yeager, the time spent in that bar,” said Kaufman.
He sounded wistful in accepting the disappearance of Tosca as a hangout. What he was having trouble absorbing was the loss of Shepard.
“My feeling is that guy who died isn’t Sam. Sam’s the guy that I know, as Dennis Quaid said, who’s still out there somewhere doing what he always did. Unlike most people who pass away and you can chronicle the events of their lives, Sam is sort of like a spirit ... in his writing, and his acting,” he said.
Kaufman wrote in an essay published in Variety on Tuesday that he’d first laid eyes on Shepard performing at a poetry reading. He’d been having trouble casting the role of Chuck Yeager for his forthcoming movie, and although the tall actor was physically nothing like the compact pilot, Kaufman’s wife, Rose, saw immediately “a sense of honesty” about Shepard, “and a sense of presence.”
The director came to know Shepard as an accomplished musician, rider and rope artist who was, by his own description, “half jackrabbit.” “For me,” said the director of his old friend, “he’s the spirit that lived in the air . ... He’s still out there, going up.”
Etheredge recalled the era when “The Right Stuff” actors “turned Tosca into Pancho’s, and I guess I was their Pancho. That’s what Phil always said. When they started doing the shooting of ‘The Right Stuff,’ the call for the next day’s schedule would come to Tosca, because whoever was doing the call sheet for the next day knew that they were drinking and hanging out at Tosca . ... It was an awful lot of fun.” The actors became “fighter jocks,” she said, and one night when someone snatched a purse at the bar, Scott Glenn and Quaid “tackled the guy who stole the bag and held him down until the cops arrived. That’s the kind of thing that went around . ... And I guess that set the tone of the bar for the next 35 years.”
As to Shepard’s magnetism, Etheredge recalls a night, in the early ’80s, when Bette Midler was in town performing. “She came into Tosca and she was sitting on a barstool ... but she was facing out; she wasn’t facing the bartenders. I remember walking by her and I said, ‘Are you waiting for someone?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I’m waiting for Sam Shepard to come in.’ And I thought, ‘What a great line.’ ”
Etheredge introduced an awestruck Shepard to Studs Terkel; the two spent the rest of the evening in conversation. And when Shepard was writing “Fool for Love,” she pointed out Billy Pearson, jockey, art connoisseur and oft-cited Herb Caen confidante. Pearson was married six times, and Etheredge suggested he might have some ideas for the playwright. The published version of “Fool for Love” is dedicated to Pearson.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” said Kaufman, “but he is a ghost or a spirit in some ways, just like that character he wrote about in most of his plays … his father, moving around and inhabiting the minds of his kids. His voice got inside of me, as it did with a lot of people and certainly a lot of actors in his plays. The uniqueness of his voice and his spirit is still there.”
ALS may have destroyed his body, “but the spirit is up there in the thin air.”
PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “I tried listening to my body, but it’s always saying ‘doughnuts.’ ” Man to woman, walking past Happy Donuts on 24th Street, overheard by Ted Weinstein