On Location with Kris Kristofferson

This article originally appeared in the December 1976 issue of Esquirewith the headline “Kris Kristofferson Sings the Good-Life Blues” andcontains outdated and potentially offensive descriptions of sex, gender, and class. To read every Esquirestory ever published, upgrade to All Access.

He is still a reasonable facsimile of a country boy. At least, Kris Kristofferson strives to present himself as one, and if being a Rhodes scholar, an Air Force captain and Nashville’s most literate songwriter hasn’t already dismantled the image of himself he has always propagated—that of a slightly urbanized Huck Finn—then movie stardom won’t either. He would like you to suppose that, anyway. His demeanor remains pleasantly self-effacing and his voice still distills moonshine, though tequila’s his drink. Late at night, he’ll drink it straight.

It’s late at night now, and he passes the bottle as though we faced him around a Texas campfire and not around the cold fireplace of his Central Park South hotel suite, engaged for him by NBC’s Saturday Nightbecause he’s this week’s guest host. The hotel is mutating; at dawn, workmen drilled through the wall four inches from Kris’s sleeping head, the elaborate parquet floor in the big living room is bare of carpet, and there’s only one dim lamp. The effect is Pinteresque, as though The Homecomingis to be performed here, but Kris doesn’t complain. He will not needlessly harass hotel managers or other subordinates, and the setting’s hardly bleaker than others he has known. In the Sixties, there was a series of furnished flats in military towns, all of which seemed to feature burnt orange carpets and drapes. Then there were cold-water hovels in Nashville where he worked sweeping floors. Later came the Hyatt Houses, which are the lot of a musician on the road.

So even in this New York Pinter suite, he’s laughing, with his good buddy Vernon White. Though Vern’s a seasoned movie publicist, he, too, is semi-bucolic. Neither he nor Kris ever wears anything but cowboy boots, disintegrating Levi’s and faded western shirts. They hang out together. In Vern’s presence, Kris does not have to feel like a movie star. Holding delightedly to the concept of themselves as bumpkins at the ball, they get stoned and break each other up, as they’re doing now, discussing the confrontations between Kris, Barbra Streisand, and her hairdresser, lover and producer, Jon Peters, during last spring’s shooting of A Star Is Born.

“This movie, I gotta tell you, was the worst thing I been through since ranger school.” Kris and Vera’s duet of a laugh, actually a good rural cackle, commences pianissimo. “We were in Phoenix, I’d flew my band out at my own expense. One of the reasons I did this picture was ’cause they could be in it. So they’re right off the plane, crammed in this motel room tryin’ music they never played before. Barbra listens ten seconds and tells me we gotta get studio musicians, the ones who read charts, like in a Vegas show! She’d already said she wanted me an’ the band in these glittery clothes, rock uniforms. I’d said, ‘Barbra, you are tryin’ to dress us like something that was either dead years ago or is dyin’ a slow death in a Vegas lounge. I’m not rock ’n’ roll, but that look sure as hell ain’t. Go watch Leon Russell, Joe Cocker!’ Then, when she wants to hire Vegas-type musicians, I started screaming. I yelled, “I ain’t trustin’ my career to the judgment of a Vegas singer an’ a hairdresser!’ An' I stormed out, an’ in the parking lot is Barbra’s limousine an’ this rented piece of shit Vern’s driving.”

His inflection, which can be quite urbane, has become here a Grand Ole Opry parody. “Well, we’d had a lotta tequila an’ laughin’ tobacco, an’ Vera keeps drivin’ over curbs. An’ I yell, ‘Jesus H. Christ, Vernon, here I made this big roarin’ exit in a huff, an’ now you’re gonna blow a tire on these curbs, an’ we will be jackin’ up this lemon by the roadside, an’ Barbra’ll sail by in her limo, and we will look like twelve assholes !’”

They choke, they’re in tears; his laugh literally knocks Vern from his chair to the shiny bare floor.

Though this anecdote, it could be said, concerns status, traditionally Kris has cared little for that, preferring to regard himself as buffoon to the famous and powerful, the klutz at the palace. His laugh, however, has once more ended too soon in a phlegmy cough, and his eyes are clouded. It is clear that if he ever did believe himself to be Huck Finn, he does no longer. He now appears to expend vast energies concealing from others some deep distress.

Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge, 1976.

It is mysterious. Kristofferson is one of the most respected, and his work among the most often performed, of contemporary songwriters. He is highly paid not only for the writing of songs but for the singing of them, and for movie acting, and now, with A Star Is Born, for acting and singing in tandem. When most music names can no longer fill a hall, his concert tours with his stunning wife, Rita Coolidge, are mostly sold out. As a movie name, he’s always working and eminently bankable. For A Star Is Born, his manager requested and got him equal billing with Streisand. From Nashville to Hollywood, people who work with him unanimously adore him. His ranch house in the Malibu hills is a lush, sunlit haven blessed with a fieldstone fireplace, an Olympic-size pool, a double-power Jacuzzi, a knowing, smiling, accomplished wife, flowered acres tended by a knowing gardener, a vast antique brass bed in the master bedroom, an Advent TV screen given him by country singing star Willie Nelson. His two-year-old daughter Casey is as bright and beautiful as her parents. Yet when you ask Kris what could be wrong, he shakes his bowed head. When you ask him is something wrong, he nods emphatically.

It is not just country-singer angst, he’s too honest to carry that offstage. It isn’t his marriage, though last summer that seemed possible. In late June, he became abruptly reclusive, admitting almost no one to his Malibu property, where he’d sit alone, utterly dejected, on the speedboat sofa in his living room, staring through his spotless glass walls at the chalky Pacific half a mile below, and though he’d attempt his Santa laugh, it rang like a cracked bell. His three dogs, especially the mutt puppy, drooped as he did. “Friend ’a ours’ dog had pups. This one wouldn’t quit followin’ me. Rita said, ‘Kris, you’re one of those guys who loves puppies but doesn’t like dogs, so we can’t have him.’ I took him home anyways.”

But this defiance is not the reason for Rita’s current absence, or the ominous hush in the house, or the tentative whispering of the young Mexican housekeeper, Teresa, or the master’s melancholia. Playboyhas just published photos of Kris doing cunnilingus and other somewhat excessive sexual things to Sarah Miles, things he didn’t even do in their elegantly licentious movie, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea.

“Man, that is just about the worst thing I ever have done.” His head is in his hands. “My face where it was for ten million people. Rita’s fit t’be tied; all her friends are callin’ up. People hate me for this; they say I degraded myself and my profession.” He explains that Sarah Miles had promised the magazine, and its photographer kept nagging, and late one night Kris was loaded and said, let’s get it over with. He’d been told he could approve what Playboyprinted, but the ones he said okay to were far tamer than what was used. “Man, I gotta learn to say no. I didn’t want to do that stuff with Sarah, but for these pictures we were actin’ our roles in the movie, an’ I just, uh, got into it, y’ know? An’ Rita's dad is a Baptist minister, for Chrissake.”

But then Kris has a penchant for bizarre situations. Six years ago, Dennis Hopper was directing, or rather wresting from a Peruvian Andes mountaintop, his disastrous The Last Movie. Dennis had heard a tape of Kris’s songs, then entirely unknown and unperformed, and had said that if Kris wanted to come to Peru and write some numbers for the picture, fine; salary would not be provided, only plane fare and a hotel room. “It was my first break ever, that wacko movie!” For Kris, the idea of acting in movies, wacko or not, was as remote as quasars, and though he pretended even then to be carefree, when he brooded, which he often did, there was no doubt why: he’d been sidling around the edges of the music business for more than a decade, had gotten nowhere, was thirty-four and mostly broke. His young son by his failed first marriage was chronically ill, there was a $10,000 hospital bill outstanding. Stretched on the sagging bed of his dusty bargain hotel room on that Peruvian mountain, he’d smoke and drink until dawn, doggedly analyzing his curious obsession with country and western. Though he’d been born in Texas, had always worn his cowboy outfit, and had used in school an inflection determinedly rustic, his father was an Air Force major, and nobody else in the house ever listened to country music or gave it a thought. “The only thing ever interested me,” he’d say hoarsely, “ ’sides football an’ boxing, was Hank Williams records. An’ kids I knew listened to nothing but Patti Page and Johnny Ray. I was a total weirdo. Told my folks I’d be a writer, not a songwriter. I knew they pictured writers wearin’ tweeds and smokin’ pipes, not smokin’ funny stuff in Nashville.”

Original Esquire spread.

Which he would not do for years, in Nashville, anyway. His grades were outstanding, though he can’t recall studying, and to his Oxford scholarship he carried his accent, boots and guitar. At sherry parties he argued William Blake with the renowned don Nevill Coghill, but other Rhodes scholars addressed him dismissively as “Tex.” Home for Christmas vacation after two Oxford years, he abruptly married a high-school sweetheart named Fran Beir, and, to please his father, joined the Air Force.

“Godalmighty, I hated the military. But Fran was pregnant, an’ I had to be breadwinner. What I mostly was was drunk. I never thought, truly, that I’d ever write anything again.” One weekend, on a classic binge, he flew to Nashville, managed to meet Johnny Cash, immediately returned to California and quit the Air Force, brought his wife back to a fifty-dollar-a-month rathole apartment in Music City, got a job as a janitor, and set out peddling the country songs he’d been writing since age eleven. His wife left, taking their newborn; his laugh is a retch at the cliché of it.

In Peru, he’d accompany himself on his ax, his own and Nashville’s diminutive for “guitar,” singing “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” and “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” as if still hoping that somebody, anybody, someday would pay to hear them. Before the Hopper movie was finished, Johnny Cash would wire him asking to use “Casey’s Last Ride” and others on his TV show and to request, almost parenthetically, that Kris be a guest singer on the show. Before the wire arrived, though, he had acquired an air of perpetual resignation; he accepted himself as a failure. Except: one day the horses rented for the movie panicked on the set, and Kris alone among the cowering bystanders, though he knew nothing of horses, grabbed the bridle of the fiercest mare. Before he’d calmed her, she’d trampled his hand. In that one moment, he abandoned his resignation and seemed fiercely determined to press his will upon circumstance.

Now, of course, he’s able to press his will without effort. Now people in a room with him who are not as noted as he is subtly defer to him. Chairs form a circle around his. His jokes are laughed at whether or not they’re funny, although Kris usually is quite funny when he means to be. Just now, in the Pinter suite, he’s anxious to recite a bit he’ll perform on Saturday Night. Though provided with comic material by Saturday Night’s staff, he has worked hard rewriting and improving his sketches.

On the set of A Star Is Bornwith Barbra Streisand, 1976.

“This one,” he’s saying, “I figure, if you’re gonna kid yourself, do it all the way, so I put in parodies of my own lyrics. On camera, I’m sittin’ in this western set holding a book I wrote, Talk Country.” Pacing, he reads from scribbled pages. “‘Howdy, I’m Kris Kristofferson. I guess you’re wonderin’ what a good ol’ boy from Nashville is doin’ on some tutti-frutti New York TV station. I mean, I make a pretty good livin’, I may not be no Bobby Dylan, but I don’t go to work in the mornin’ neither . . . . You can do it, too! Like a lotta you out there, I had a handicap. I was a college graduate with degrees in literature an’ creative writing, an’ I couldn’t get arrested. Then how did I write songs that made me a legend in my time? The answer’s in this book, Talk Country. It’s got a chapter on nothin’ but droppin’ “g”s an’ another one on usin’ double negatives, and one on grammar that tells why nobody wanted a song called “Sunday Morning Feeling Terribly Depressed,” or “Bobby McGee and I.” Don’t let your education stand in the way of stardom, or throw away a promising career ’cause you can’t say “ain’t.” Send five dollars and ninety-five cents to Talk Country . . . . ’”

On the air, he’ll segue here into songs which are travesties of his. “. . . keep a candle burnin’ in the bedroom of your heart, an’ my thirsty boots an’ rangy hips will gypsy back to you . . . in the lonesome concrete music-city canyons of my mind.” But before the room’s extensive laughter stops, he frowns, and so the room, too, frowns silently. His trouble begins to seem explicable. As a poet, he has always been more graceful than Bob Dylan, yet it’s Dylan whom the rock press hails as a generation’s poet laureate. He still lists himself in the directory of American Rhodes scholars as “writer,” but what Kris dreamed of developing as an artist, a lyric craftsman, may now be undermined by the time and energy it takes to be a movie star. As a wealthy pop performer, he’s reduced to parodying himself on a television variety show. He’s accessible enough to be asked about those things, but not now; we’re not alone, and he’s very worried about playing TV comedy correctly.

“In the sketches,” he says, “isn’t it about the same problem as any kind ’a acting? Hell, I dunno, I was never even in a high-school play.” Yet as soon as he’d made it in music, agents started calling, and one asked him to audition for Two-Lane Blacktop. “I’d been partyin’, though, I was wasted, an’ they said the movie was about cars. You know, I can’t even stand to think ’bout cars. I still drive rentals and turn ’em in when the back’s fulla beer cans. But then I got offered Cisco Pike. I read it an’ knew one thing: I truly identified with the guy in it, the dope dealer. I didn’t deal, but his problems were so much like mine then, he coulda been me. I believed him.” And to believe totally in a character, this seemed to him where acting began. “People said, ‘Don’t be in no movie till you take acting lessons,’ but at the time I thought that acting has gotta be just the full understanding of the guy you’re playing, an’ then to play him as dead honest as you possibly can, concentrating on each of his moments, narrowing your peripheral vision till each moment’s honest.”

Undeniably, this instinctive approach has served him well. Mention Kris to Dyan Cannon, for instance, who has just found a movie script for them to do together. “I knew for years he was one of our finest writers—those lyrics, the heartbreak in them—but then I saw him on the screen! Incredible! I’ve never seen a presence like his. When we met, I realized it came from that unmistakable honesty he has. I worship that guy’s talent!” Kris himself isn’t so sure just now. In his early pictures, like Blume in Love, he had only to purvey his ambling, grinning self, but in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymorehe had to play a tough, complex, self-made rancher, which required of him bona fide craft. That the result more or less satisfied him he attributes totally to director Martin Scorsese (“God, that Marty knows how to make actors look so good!”). Then he saw himself in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace, and he was shocked, he asserts, at how far he has to go. “In Portsmouth, where we shot, I lived that sailor, lived in the script, fantasized as a kid does. And I was terrible. Christ, this has gotta be a turning point. I see I’d got a pretty inflated idea of my thespian abilities.”

That he’s cautiously pleased with his work in A Star Is Borndoesn’t much cheer him. Rita Coolidge, who, in spite of her gentleness, can be quite critical of her husband, believes it’s far and away his best performance. “I didn’t think he ought to do it, tell y’ the truth,” she remarks. A Tennessee native, she, too, is smilingly rural. “For one thing, he’s been workin’ too hard, tryin’ to take the band, his songs, the arrangements, in whole new directions. I think on the new album, called “It’s Surreal Thing,” he’s done it. But he’s wearin’ himself out.” Rita feels that if Kris were to choose, she’d like to see him forsake movies for his music, and she doesn’t think Sailorwas much to be proud of (she’s philosophical, now, about the Playboypictures, meaning she’s stopped commenting on them). “I wasn’t sure at all that Starwas going right, either. But when I saw the first print, I swear, I was in tears, an’ I’m not a crier, in the opening scene. I cried all the way through. I caught Kris cryin’ during it, too, an’ he never does.” Kris, when this is relayed to him, shakes his head impatiently.

“But, Christ, if I can’t play the guy in Star, what can I play? A self-destructive musician! I play that every day! No big accomplishment.” Still, playing the self is germane to most movie acting. Maybe he’s overreaching, approaching acting, which Truman Capote has called a “secondary” art, as though it were primary, like, for instance, writing. This premise unsettles him further, but as he considers it, Vern White bounds in, laughing, with fresh tequila and beer. Relieved, Kris instantly brightens, and he doesn’t mention Star again until the next morning, after he has descended in the crowded hotel elevator in his scruffy boots, carrying his morning beer, which offends tourist ladies in Halston copies, and has settled into the pearly interior of the limousine that NBC has provided. Traffic’s caught in freeze frame. Abruptly, he remarks that to understand what occurred as Star was made, it’s imperative to disregard almost everything printed about it so far.

“Everybody got it wrong. I didn’t talk to writers about it before; I was still in shock. But Barbra and Jon Peters and I are friends.” He’d known Streisand for about five years, since his first success, and had gone out with her for a while in 1972, just before he met Rita. At Jon’s Malibu place for the first Star production meetings, Kris had liked Peters instantly—they’re both prizefight fans—and Barbra’s ideas about the picture they’d make. “She wanted t’ get entirely away from the Judy Garland Star Is Born, which was fine with me, ’cause the James Mason guy in that is so weak it’s soap opera. Barbra said my character in ours, this drinkin’, dopin’ music heavy who’s on the way down, was not to be weak or a loser. An’ the girl, Barbra, a singer on the way up, she doesn’t just watch him come apart, she yells, ‘Fight for yourself, goddamn it, protect yourself or I’ll kill you!’” Streisand, he adds, was adamant about doing an honest show-business story, without the form’s familiar stock characters, and she wished to show what the pressures of being a star are really like. “She’d been writin’ in these scenes from her own life. She also wanted to do things in it about male an’ female role playing, an’ I liked that. In this fight scene, I cry. The guy does. We have this one love scene in a bathtub, and she puts glitter on my eyes an’ rouge an’ lipstick on me, and I put soapsuds on her chin to make a beard like mine, then we kiss. . . .”

Also, Kris had admired Dog Day Afternoon, and Barbra had engaged its writer, Frank Pierson, as Star’s writer and director. What nobody, including Barbra, ever told Kris was that Barbra would really be directing the picture, with Pierson first as collaborator, finally as indentured servant. “I mean, Barbra destroyed him. At the start, I knew she was writin’ the picture’s big songs herself, that she was writing the script, and that she had total control of everything and everybody, but Frank was called the director, an’ I figured I’d just do my usual tap dance between two haystacks, tryin’ to satisfy both the director and the star. I never been in no movie before where they turned out t’ be the same person.”

Explaining that, there’s been, in his tone, an odd, abrasive querulousness that was audible the night before in the Pinter suite. He’d begun picking out on the guitar a new song he was working on, when Vern White tiptoed to a phone at the far end of the room to check on Kris’s undelivered room-service order. Kris had broken off, demanding, “Hey, asshole, don’t you ever do that again! I’m just comin’ to the part you wanted t’ hear!” Then he’d grinned. Hastily, quietly, Vern had explained the call, but Kris’s authority, his less than casual reprimand, was not in any other way questioned.

Kristofferson and Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,directed by Martin Scorsese.

“I don’t pretend t’ understand Barbra,” he’s saying, staring glumly out the car’s tinted glass at the alien concrete, “but my problems with her on this movie grew from one thing—that I didn’t speak up! Oh, I could accept her as director, we had to. But she was like a company commander who can’t trust anybody to do his job right. If she wasn’t checkin’ music and sound, she was checkin’ camera angles, lenses, lighting, right down to our transportation! Unbelievable, for a star. And once she’d decided my band would be fine for the picture, she was rehearsing with ’em night and day! And I needed them!” Because he was striving not to play just himself, it seemed best for him to use others’ songs, “and I was very shaky. I needed to work with the music enough to believe, when I acted, that I had written it. Barbra had so much on her mind she just didn’t realize that, and it’s my fault I never said t’ her, ‘Barbra, hey, goddamn it, I’m in this movie, too. You’re workin’ with ’em on stuff you shoot next week, I gotta shoot tomorrow, I need my band!’”

But Streisand has been through too many musical movies not to realize his need, nor to know that whoever rehearses a song most looks best doing it. “No, she knew I’d worked with my boys forever, she just didn’t realize. I never saw her go after all the close-ups or anything, she just wanted what I wanted, an honest picture.” Oh. Pressed, Kris will concede that even before they got to Phoenix, and their first highly publicized blowup, which took place before open microphones at the huge outdoor Woodstock-like concert that’s part of the movie, he had for weeks been receiving two contradictory sets of directions, one whispered in one ear by Frank Pierson, the other rasped seconds later by Barbra into the other. “He’d say, ‘Pick up the phone and look at her,’ she’d say, ‘Don’t pick up the phone and look away.’ It was totally schizophrenic. We’d be all set up for a take, an’ she’d say, ‘You’re supposed to be over there,’ an’ she an’ Frank’d go into it all again, another how many hours is wasted. I’d get five sets of directions in ten minutes from two people and have to relay all of it to my band. I was goin’ rapidly askew. I finally said, ‘You two have got to get your shit together off the set. I don’t care which of you wins, but this way, with two commanders, one sayin’ retreat, the other advance, it’s demoralizing the crew, an’ puttin’ me into catatonia!’”

That didn’t help. In Phoenix, before myriad visiting press, the following exchange took place :

Barbra (to Kris): Shut up, goddamn it, and listen to me!

Kris: I’ll be goddamned if I listen to anything more from you!

Jon Peters: You owe my old lady an apology!

Kris: If I need any shit from you, I’ll squeeze your head.

Happy days on the set of A Star Is Born.

Jon then offered to fight Kris on the last shooting day, Kris said help yourself. Vern reminded Jon that Kris was once Golden Gloves. In the limo now, Kris tries to laugh at this memory, but he’s not enjoying it. Wearily, he mutters that he didn’t tell Barbra to “go fuck yourself,” as columnists said he had. Staring out again, abstractedly, he shakes his head. It obviously disgusts him that instead of talking here of poetry, composition and lyrics, he’s cataloging for the press who in Hollywood screamed what expletive at whom. Not that he blames journalists for the venality of this position. He may be one of the few public figures who find writers generally fair, with the exception of rock critics, who stated, at the release of his fourth album, Border Lord, that his lyrics had grown repetitive and excessively self-pitying, and that their images had become too obscure. His objection is justified: what rock reviewers never have caught in his work is its consistent, undercutting self-satire, its variety, and the verbal mileage he has milked from the notion that things, for all of us, have already been as good as they’re ever going to get. Mention this and he says, “Well, y’know, I’ve never been good at analyzing what I write in any detail. Once a song’s written, the umbilical cord’s cut. What I do, I just keep tightening images, making them specific, till I’m sure I know what they mean. Repeating myself? Just contrast, say, “Jesus Was a Capricorn” an’ “Why Me, Lord?” An’ which images are obscure? Self-pity? Hell, what I pity in all these songs is mankind.”