Bonus Scenes 
A Star Is Reborn
Kris Kristofferson’s powerful performance in last year’s Lone Star still has Hollywood buzzing. But after more than two decades of highs and lows, the Brownsville native knows better than to let success go to his head—again.
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Rider’—he always called me Range Rider—‘do you want to go to San Francisco to see Joan Baez?’ And Odetta says, ‘I want to go too!’ So we head straight for the airport, the three of us, Ramblin’ Jack playing us to the plane and Bobby telling everyone that we’re Peter, Paul and Mary, and Odetta’s been to the islands.”
Somehow, they never got to Baez’s house but went instead to Mill Valley, where Joplin lived with her dog, Thurber. Joplin was a big star at the time, Kristofferson a mostly unknown songwriter: All they had in common was that she had done “Bobby McGee” in concert and people had loved it. Though not physically attractive, Joplin had a sexual aura that could drive men to uncommon acts. “I’ve got a present for you, baby,” Neuwirth said, pushing Kristofferson into Joplin’s arms. A month later, Kris was still there. Joplin had been doing heroin, but she stopped completely during her affair with Kris.
“I lived with her, slept with her, but it wasn’t a love affair,” he tells me. “I loved her like a friend. She was very soulful, a passionate person but very childlike to me, a little girl in dress-up clothes. She was an unhappy person. Even though she was fun to be around, she felt that the only thing that made her attractive to the world was her art, her talent, her stardom. And she was intelligent enough to know that it was temporary. She told me, ‘Pretty soon you’re gonna be gypsyin’ down the road to be a star.’”
Kris tells me about his last night with Joplin. They had started with drinks at Barney’s in L.A., Janis in her famous feathered hat, the world at their feet. A kid came by the table to say how much he admired Janis, and she almost bit his head off. “That night in bed, I just held her all night long. We didn’t even …” Kris’s voice breaks and he looks away, toward the ocean. “I knew she was sad because she believed nobody loved her. She told me if things didn’t get better, she would go back on heroin and off herself. I didn’t believe her. I told her, ‘How do you expect to ever meet anyone if you snap their heads off?’”
Kris was staying at Joan Baez’s house in Carmel when news arrived that Joplin had died of a drug overdose. He believes her death was accidental. The night after she died, at the Landmark Hotel in Hollywood, most of Joplin’s friends met there. On that occasion, Kris heard for the first time Joplin’s version of “Bobby McGee.” Twenty-six years later, he saw a tape of her singing it at Threadgill’s in Austin. “To this day,” he tells me, “whenever I sing that line ‘Somewhere near Salinas,’ I think of Janis.”
In 1970 Kris landed his first gig in show business, opening for Linda Ronstadt at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. A smashing review in one of the L.A. papers brought Barbra Streisand to the Troubadour to check out the young songwriter. Unfortunately, Kris didn’t show up. “I had been out with Hopper the night before, and I fell asleep in the parking lot,” he recalls. “When I woke it was dark, and I was supposed to be onstage.” Streisand came back two nights later, though. When they met backstage, the chemistry was instant. After that, the gossip columns crackled with items about Kris and Barbra.
The affair caused a sensation back in Nashville. “We’re shitting in the tall cotton now, aren’t we, son?” Cash said to Kristofferson. Almost overnight, Kris’s career was moving at warp speed. All the big names were recording his songs. He played Carnegie Hall and did a concert on the Isle of Wight with Jimi Hendrix, which turned out to be Hendrix’s last show. Hollywood began to notice too.
KRISTOFFERSON IS THE KIND OF FORCE that Hollywood has never been equipped to handle, a man who thinks for himself, measures truth by his own reckoning, and talks back. At the 1980 Cannes Film Festival, which held the premiere of Heaven’s Gate, a $36 million �op that nearly wrecked Kristofferson’s career, an executive of the studio that made the film warned, “Unless control is taken away from the creative people, our industry is headed for disaster.” To which Kris responded, “Who do you give it to, the uncreative people?”
Cracks like that don’t win points with the academy. Neither did Kristofferson’s response to the asinine turf war between executives of CBS Records and Tri-Star Production Company over the filming of Songwriter in 1984. Abetted by producer Sydney Pollack’s weak-kneed refusal to intercede, the moguls not only sabotaged an excellent movie but also scuttled a brilliant soundtrack of songs by Kris and Willie. Kris celebrated this show-biz snit by writing songs about the executives, whom he dubbed for the ages: “Sydney the Snake,” “Danny the Dildo,” and “Wally the Wus.”
Kris’s first landmark role was playing Billy the Kid in Sam Peckinpah’s classic 1973 western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The legendary director was throwing knives into his office door the first time Kristofferson met him. Within minutes they were lifelong friends. “We liked the same things—Mexico, women, and booze,” Kristofferson says. “Sam loved being surrounded by turmoil. He used it for energy. ‘F— MGM! Let’s go make a movie!’ Someone once said that Sam looked like a man tracking an animal much larger than himself. That’s a good description.”
At Kristofferson’s urging, Bob Dylan reluctantly accepted a part in the movie. Peckinpah had no idea who Dylan was and protested that the studio had cast him for purely promotional reasons. “The first time we watched dailies,” Kris remembers, “the projector was out of focus, so Sam walked up and urinated on the screen. I looked over at Dylan. He didn’t say anything, but I knew what he was thinking: ‘What the f— have I gotten myself into!’
“There were times when Sam wasn’t worth shooting, but he tried to make real films, and I loved him for it,” Kris continues. When Peckinpah died in 1985, Kristofferson headed up a host of celebrities who honored him. Alan Rudolph recalls that Kris began by chewing out Hollywood for not fully appreciating Peckinpah. “It was a terrific statement about Peckinpah, about Hollywood, and about Kris’s loyalty and convictions,” Rudolph said.
Acting for Kristofferson is more a cause than a profession. He succeeds at it for the same reason he succeeds as a singer and a songwriter: because he knows his range and has true convictions. Radicalized by his experiences, Kris finds political nuances—even messages—in every role he accepts. Kris says that Heaven’s Gate was an attempt to show the fatal �aw in our society: We care for money more than for people. In his mind Lone Star is a dark allegory of the American experience in which the three sheriffs represent three sides of history—the genocidal, the merely bigoted, and the racially semi- tolerant. “Now, if you billed it that way,” he admits, “nobody would come and see it.”
Many of the fans of Lone Star, myself included, believe that the film demonstrates that Kristofferson belongs in an elite class of strong, silent, honest actors like Gary Cooper, Robert Ryan, and Gregory Peck—the three actors he most admires. Kris is believable as the corrupt and murderous sheriff Charlie Wade because he has absorbed a larger measure of the character than meets the eye. Sayles had the good judgment to understand that Kristofferson, like Cooper, is an actor who nails his character through an internal process, that on-screen he does a lot without appearing to do anything. Alan Rudolph, who directed Kristofferson in Songwriter and 1985’s Trouble in Mind, has observed, “As the camera got closer to him, the movie got better.”
In 1974, Kristofferson appeared in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, but his film career got its biggest boost in 1976, when Streisand chose him to play the self-destructive superstar in A Star Is Born. Streisand played the unknown whose star rises as Kristofferson’s fades and dies. Though they were no longer an item—Streisand was living with Jon Peters, who co-produced the film with her—the chemistry was still there, sparking rumors of a renewed romance. There were also stories about how Streisand’s arrogance and overbearing attitude inspired the crew to put human excrement in her makeup.
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