Wanted: Kris Kristofferson

Jack Mathews

And he keeps right on a changin' for the better or the worse, Searchin' for a shrine he's never found - Never knowin' if believin' is a blessin' or a curse, or if the goin' up is worth the comin' down -

Kris Kristofferson wrote the opening lines to his country hit "The Pilgrim; Chapter 33" in 1970. It was a whimsical tribute to a bunch of friends, some of them fellow Nashville songwriters, who had all just turned thirty-three - supposedly the age of Christ at the crucifixion. It was a pivotal year for Kristofferson, who was also thirty-three and on the verge of becoming a major music and movie star.

Since then, Kristofferson has gone up, come down, and gone up again. In the '70s, his soul-searching voice spoke to a generation liberated by the '60s, and his rebel image pushed country music into the countercultural mainstream. He also became an A-list Hollywood star, working for such hot directors as Sam Peckinpah and Martin Scorsese and sharing a marquee with Barbra Streisand. Then came Heaven's Gate (1980) and the Reagan era - and with them, the coming down.

A chance role in John Sayles' Lone Star (1996) reversed direction for Kristofferson, and two years later he's barely able to catch his breath between acting assignments. He's done six films In quick succession, claiming costarring roles with Wesley Snipes in the current Blade and Mel Gibson in next year's Payback, and the starring role in James Ivory's heartrending A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, adapted from Kaylie Jones's fictionalized portrait of her father James Jones, the author of From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line.

Kristofferson spoke to us by phone from his home in rural Hawaii, where he lives with his third wife, Lisa Meyers, and their five children. He was squeezing in what time he could there, between shooting a movie adaptation of a Tom Clancy novel, Net Force, in Los Angeles and working on a film about Father Damien, the leper-colony palest, in Molokai. He was due soon in Alaska to begin work on Sayles's Limbo.

JACK MATHEWS: Have you ever been busier?

KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: No, I really haven't. It's kind of ironic, too. Right when I get very happy with where I am, with my family and my home here, I'm away from them a lot. But I can't complain.

JM: You played a cold-blooded killer in Lone Star, and the critics loved you. Were you surprised by their reaction?

KK: I was surprised that the movie was so well-received, because a lot of the people who write criticism seem conservative or more oriented toward the big studios and the big movies. Lone Star wasn't a big movie.

JM: Did you come away from that feeling you were in a position to see good material again, and work with people like James Ivory?

KK: Absolutely. It's a blessing to get work like that; I feel very blessed at this point in my life.

JM: Bill Willis, the James Jones character in A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, seems to fit you like an old shoe.

KK: I really felt lucky to get a shot at that role. I loved the script, and the more research I did on James Jones, the more I felt I could identify with him - with his love-hate relationship with the military, his devotion to his kids, his need to fulfill his destiny as a writer. I feel all the same things.

JM: Let's talk about your destiny to be a writer. When did that urge hit you?

KK: It was what I was aiming at ever since high school when I started writing stories. When I was at Pomona College, I submitted four stories for an Atlantic Monthly writing contest. They told me that they were the four best stories, but they didn't want to give me four awards. So, they gave me a fast, a third, and two honorable mentions. I felt pretty stoked.

JM: Most writing professors tell you to write about what you know.

KK: Yeah, so you gotta go out and get to know something. I remember the first rejection I got was for a novel I was working on while I was at Oxford. They passed on the book, but they said they were definitely interested in anything I'd do after I'd lived a while.

JM: You were writing music then, too?

KK: Yes, but I viewed it as a sideline. Then, when I was over at Oxford, I got hooked up with a guy named Paul Lincoln, who was managing some rock 'n' roll acts. He got me a record contract and they changed my name to Kris Carson and I was going to be a rock 'n' roll star. Fortunately, that didn't pan out.

JM: You ended up in Nashville trying to sell country songs.

KK: Yeah, after I got out of the army, I went to Nashville and fell in love with the songwriting scene. I wrote prolifically for about five years, but it takes a while for people to take you seriously down there. They had two thousand registered songwriters in Nashville. They called us bugs.

JM: Meanwhile, were you getting some of those life experiences?

KK: I tried to get as many varied experiences as I could, different jobs that didn't take any kind of brains: gandy dancer, forest firefighter, bartender. I got a job working in the Gulf of Mexico on an oil rig.

JM: And what changed?

KK: If there was one thing that happened, it was me getting fired from that job in the Gulf. I left there on April 15, 1969, and I went back to Nashville, thinking I'd be sent to jail - I had a lot of child-support obligations. But I called up a songwriter friend and told him I'd lost my job. He said, "Great, Johnny Cash is doing a new TV show down here, so we can just pitch songs to him." And that's what we did. During the first month, I had four songs on. Roger Miller did "Me and Bobby McGee," Ray Price came out with "For the Good Times," Johnny recorded "Sunday Morning Coming Down" on the show, and Sammi Smith cut "Help Me Make It Through the Night."

JM: Your early songs talk a lot about loneliness and freedom and living in the moment. They seemed to speak to a generation adjusting to their own revolution.

KK: Yeah, what I was going through myself at the time was sort of a free fall away from the security of my background. Christ, I'd been a student all my life. I'd been in the army, and would have been a major in a year and a half had I stayed in. I had a secure direction that I could have gone in, and I alienated a lot of my family and friends when I abandoned that. So, loneliness wasn't just an abstract notion. But there was also a freedom in being alone that was exhilarating; it gave me a creative impulse.

JM: Didn't you find that young people were all calling for freedom at the same time, rebelling against authority, and that they were looking not just to music, but also to movies, books, art, and journalism, trying to make sense of what was happening to them?

KK: I was looking at it from a different perspective because I was about ten years older than all my peers. Also, I came into it from the military background. I wasn't part of the antiwar movement; I'd become radicalized by my experience in the army. But I definitely felt a link to the people that I was meeting when I was out there - Janis [Joplin] and those people.

JM: You didn't start performing yourself until you were in your thirties.

KK: My first gig was in June 1970, at the Troubadour [in Los Angeles]. One of the people who worked on The Johnny Cash Show knew somebody there and talked me up, and they asked if I wanted to Open for Linda Ronstadt. I said,"Is that a trick question?" But it went well, and from then on, I was sort of on the roller coaster of performing. Within a few months, Harry Dean Stanton brought me a script and I got an offer to do my first film, Cisco Pike [1972].

JM: You got to work with Stanton again on Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid [1973] for director Sam Peckinpah. in fact, you did two other movies with Peckinpah in the '70s [Convoy (1978) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)]. Tell me about working with him. The stories of his drinking on the set are legendary.

KK: They're true, too. I had to take a pistol away from Sam once: He was lying sick in bed and took a shot at Harry Dean Stanton and my piano player, Donnie Fritts. I got a call about it and went over there and said, "All right, where is it?" He was heavily anesthetized with Mescal or something. Sam was a good man; he just needed turmoil around him.

JM: The '70s was a pretty heady time to be suddenly rich and famous and hanging out with excessive people. How did you discipline yourself against the temptations? Or did you?

KK: It was just a process of facing the temptations and trying them out, trying the different directions. For years, I was thinking of William Blake's quote "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." That leaves you a lot of room for error. I'm sure that I drank too much, smoked too much, and did a lot of things too much, but if you are going to survive, you eventually learn what you can handle.

JM: Throughout the '70s, you were that rare pop crossover, a marquee name in both music and movies. Then came the New York premiere of Heaven's Gate in 1980.

KK: Oh, God, I was there! I was in the rest room during intermission, and nobody said a word. Nobody knew what to say. Then as soon as the first review came out, which was horrible, they all jumped on it. To me, Heaven's Gate was assassinated.

JM: You wrote a song called "Shipwrecked in the '80s." You were referring to the Reagan era, but personally, you must have felt a little shipwrecked after Heaven's Gate.

KK: That was a terrible year. My agent, Stan Kamen, died, my manager was dying, my record company went bankrupt and took my last album with it, and my old lady [Rita Coolidge] split. I was kind of adrift in the '80s.

JM: Well, things are happening now. You had a successful album with Moment of Forever in 1995, and then came Lone Star, and the rest, as they say . . .

KK: I have John Sayles to thank, and I've got an agent now, Steve Chasman, who's got a plan for me.

JM: You also have a new family.

KK: We've got five little ones here. The youngest is three and the oldest is fourteen. I've got eight kids altogether. My oldest daughter is thirty-seven.

JM: That's quite a range.

KK: Yeah, it's irresponsible, but I love it. It's so different raising kids when you're older. You can give them the attention they deserve. When you're younger, you're scrambling, still trying to be whatever you turn out to be.

JM: Bill Willis in A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries is a successful writer dealing with young children, too.

KK: I feel like my life has really prepared me for this role. I feel a real kinship to that guy and I'm pleased that Kaylie [Jones] felt I was a lot like him. She was in tears when she saw the movie.

JM: People tend to put "Rhodes scholar" in front of your name as if it were a jaw-dropping modifier for a country songwriter. Do you look back on yourself as an overachiever or underachiever?

KK: I've always felt like an overachiever. Back when football was important to me in college, I made first string because I had the desire. I always knew I wasn't good enough to be out there, but I was. I think I've gone through a lot of my performing the same way, knowing I didn't really deserve to be on the same stage with Willie [Nelson], Waylon [Jennings], and Johnny [Cash], but I was there. And at least once in every film, I'm convinced that I'm uniquely unequipped to do the job, that I should never do another one. But I get over it.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning