In the elder Rogers' case, alcohol and trauma produced a profound transformation; he became paranoid about his family and flew into violent rages. Something about his scrawny teenage son particularly irritated him: “Sam called Steve his nemesis,” Shepard’s mother wrote in her diary. “Sam Sr. came to regard his only son as a woman,” Dowling writes, citing Shepard’s own 1978 letter buried in the archives of the Harry Ransom Center. His father, Shepard wrote, thought he was “not quite a woman, but of a feminine sort… not quite fruity, but suspicious.” Dowling centers her book on Shepard's response—the masculinity he formed around these early wounds.
Dowling is far from the first to write that Shepard struggled with his inextricable antagonism towards his father. You will find this Oedipal flow in countless descriptions and criticisms; you'll find it in other biographies, such as the theatrical savvy of Don Shewy.”Sam Shepard“, published in 1985, and in Robert Greenfield's piquant book “Real West“from 2023. Most of all this can be found in Shepard himself – one of his last plays was “A Piece of Fear (Oedipus Variations).” However, Dowling's book does not limit itself to male silver gorilla fighting as a source of pain. Through analysis and anecdotes, he suggests that Shepard's self-conscious behavior as a “man,” denying his father's deliberate emasculation, is the source of his propensity to shapeshift, his fundamental slipperiness.
In 1963, work in a touring theater company took Steve Rogers across the continent to New York: a year later, at just twenty years old, he began performing under the stage name Sam Shepard, freed from old associations. In New York, as Sam, he became one of the most respected young playwrights of the wild, druggy, ecstatic downtown scene. My favorite parts of Coyote take place in the East Village of the time, when the counterculture Shepard, crazed from various chemicals, had not yet settled on the clenched jaw and thousand-yard stare of his later, dead-eyed image of Sam.
In the Village, Shepard played in bands; he hung out with his roommate Charles Mingus III and his first serious girlfriend, Joyce Aaron, who was his entry into certain echelons of the avant-garde theater scene. Tony Barsha called Shepard's scene “American-macho,” defining it as “lots of weed, lots of women.” Love triangles swirled like mandalas: Shepard dated and then married O-Lan Jones while they were both directed by her ex-boyfriend on the show, and his dramatic works like Mother Icarus (1965) and The Tourist (1967) reimagined the alienation of the Vietnam War period as dark games, prophetic dreams, picnics gone wrong. Watch him play the drums for the Holy Modal Rounders on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In on YouTube. You see a loose, goofy, floppy bob in flares, laughing under a shaggy bob.
He may have had a cowboy mouth, but he hadn't played cowboy yet. That came later when he returned to California in 1974, in his early thirties, and moved his small family to a ranch where he could keep ducks, chickens and horses. For Shepard, the West was both an authentic place (that is, life lived close to the land) and a kingdom of lies (Hollywood). These qualities were closely related. His film career began when Terrence Malick saw him cleaning up trash at a kiosk and, impressed, cast him in Days of Heaven.
According to Dowling, Shepard knew that he had a deeply divided personality – abrasive, short-tempered, prone to crises of “depersonalization.” Shepard struggled with a sense of ambivalence, that “sense of separation between my body and the self,” he wrote in a letter to experimental theater titan Joe Chaykin, a dear friend. Dowling sees his men's game as a necessary unifying armature, something powerful enough to bring these disparate pieces together. And so the snake-hipped, shaggy-haired rock star in fur coats and sunglasses disappeared into California. “Shepard now consciously placed all of his fragmented personalities into one solid shell. For him, the cowboy identity was the strongest choice – masculine, self-confident, silent, born of nature,” writes Dowling, and Shepard refers to his new (and durable) suit: “jeans, scuffed boots, Levi shirts.”
Much of Shepard's writing was “keyed” literature, such that Dowling sometimes takes such stories at their word, leaving us to dig into the notes section to find out where he gets his (often incredibly personal) information. In one striking instance, Dowling uses a slanted piece from the Shepard collection.”Motel Chronicles“as the source of his personal feelings about his budding romance with Jessica Lange. It's a surprising piece of detective work – Dowling figures out that the story dates from the day Shepard was supposed to be returning from meeting Lang on the film's set in Los Angeles – although it requires us to join Shepard in dispelling what is written as fiction as fact.
Shepard wrote and wrote, often writing his thoughts on his sleeve. His stories are confessional; the same can be said of many of his plays and, of course, some of his scripts. He and Patti Smith even performed “Cowboy Mouth.” like themselvesin a theater poster that featured his real wife. (Such sincerity eventually stunned even Shepard; he lost his temper after the first performance.) Do you want to know what it was like for him growing up with his abusive father? Watch his tribute to Eugene O'Neill, 1976's “Curse of the Starving Class,” which dramatizes the terrifying, hysterical outburst (his father kicked down the door after Shepard's mother locked him in) that shaped his nervous, scalded feline spirit. This careful self-examination continued until the moment when illness deprived him of control over his hands. His latest work, a story called “Spy first person“, written with the help of his sisters and daughter, is one of his most beautiful works. It conveys the feeling of being watched from inside your own dying body.
