THE RIGHT STUFF
“I think without writing I would feel completely
useless.”
— Sam
THE ACCLAIMED PLAYWRIGHT AND ACTOR BATTLED PRIVATE DEMONS AND LEFT A POWERFUL LEGACY
Sam Shepard was a young New York City playwright in the ’60s when he met actress Sally Kirkland. “I said to him, ‘I know you’re an incredible writer, but you should be an actor because you have such charisma,’ ” Sally tells Closer. “He said, ‘No, I don’t want to be an actor,’ and I said, ‘But I don’t think you have a choice.’ ”
She was right. Sam, who died from ALS on July 27 at 73, made his film-acting debut in 1970’s skit-com Brand X with Sally (of Amazon Prime’s Buddy Solitaire). He went on to enjoy a stellar screen career that included an Oscar-nominated turn as pilot Chuck Yeager in 1983’s The Right Stuff. Still, “Writing was his main love until the end,” John J. Winters, author of Sam Shepard: A Life, tells Closer. Adds Michael Townsend Smith, who directed one of Sam’s early shows, “Writing just bubbled up in him.”
Playwriting gave Sam a way to exorcise the demons that were born during his childhood as the son of an alcoholic WWII pilot. “His dad was pretty verbally abusive to Sam,” high school friend Derrald Mead recalls. “But that was the alcohol talking.”
As a teen, Sam got a job on a California ranch, and “a lot of his plays are about the mythology of the American West,” New York Post theater critic Michael Riedel says of shows like True West and Fool for Love. “He was the genuine thing — a real cowboy.”
His breakthrough as a playwright came with Buried Child, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979. The year before, his acting career took off when director Terrence Malick cast him as a 1910s Texas land baron in the drama Days of Heaven. “Sam was like some washed-out, sun-bleached bone you find out in the desert,” co-star Richard Gere says. “Even when he was young, there was something very ancient about him.”
Sam’s 1969 marriage to actress O-Lan Jones brought him a son, Jesse Mojo, now 47, but ended after he had an affair with rocker Patti Smith. He met Jessica Lange on the set of 1982’s biopic Frances and had a turbulent 27year relationship —as well as kids Hannah, 31, and Walker, 30 — with her. “I wouldn’t call Sammy easygoing and funny,” Jessica, 68, said shortly before his death. “But everybody has their dark side, and he always does it with a sense of humor.”
Shunning the NYC/Hollywood spotlight to live in the rural South and Midwest, he battled his family’s curse of alcoholism as well as the debilitating disease that took his life with the same searching spirit he brought to his plays. “Writing has become more and more interesting,” he said. “It’s a thing of discovering. That’s when writing is really working. You’re on the trail of something, and you don’t quite know what it is.” — Bruce Fretts, with reporting by
Katie Bruno and Natalie Posner
A LIFE OF THE MIND