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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That’s not exactly what happened, Kris tells me. “We had come back to finish a scene where the two of us were rolling in the mud, and Willie Perez, the wardrobe guy, had wet down some fuller’s earth to look like mud. In the middle of the scene, Barbra stops and tells the director, Frank Pierson, ‘This stuff smells like shit!’ I smelled it and it did. Pierson says he doesn’t want to talk about it, and we go on with the scene. I’ll say this, Barbra took it a lot better than you’d think.
“Barbra opened doors for me,” he acknowledges. “She put me in a whole different category.” After the film premiered, Streisand and Peters gave Kristofferson a silver joint case inscribed, “A superstar is born—let it be an easy birth.” Prophetically, Kristofferson’s movie career skyrocketed.
Kristofferson was convincing as the booze-and-drug-addled superstar because during the entire course of filming, he was stoned. “I was drinking two bottles of whiskey a day,” Kris tells me. He had been riding the whiskey-pills-and-pot roller coaster hard and fast since his early days in Nashville, and now it was catching up with him. Watching his own body on the screen, Kris had a premonition of death. He saw his young daughter Casey standing alone, without him. “The idea of Casey growing up without me was inconceivable,” he says. So Kris’s life made its third hard turn: He stopped drinking and started running seven miles, swimming fifty laps, and working out on a rowing machine daily. He also reconnected with his spiritual life, not by joining a church but by making a private accommodation with God.
It happened while Kristofferson was on tour in Europe. He learned that his daughter Tracy had been injured in a motorcycle wreck and was unconscious and probably paralyzed. A friend in Alcoholics Anonymous had told him, “If you don’t believe in God, ask for something impossible.” Flying to California that night, Kris started making a deal with God, saying, “Please don’t let her be paralyzed.” “When I walked into her room at the hospital, she was in a coma, tubes running everywhere,” he tells me. “A minute later, the doctor says, ‘Look!’ Her leg had moved. I’m thinking, ‘Okay, I’m your boy!’”
Kristofferson’s marriage to Coolidge began to fall apart in the late seventies, just as Kris started filming Heaven’s Gate. Kristofferson always had problems avoiding women: Stand him on any street corner in the world and they will �ock around him like magpies around a tree of ripe apricots. What pushed Coolidge over the edge, however, wasn’t infidelity but the passionate love scenes between Kris and actress Sarah Miles in The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea. The final straw was when Play-boy published the outtakes from the film.
Director Michael Cimino remembers how the divorce devastated Kris during the six-month filming of Heaven’s Gate. He speaks of Kristofferson’s “Lincoln-esque black moods” and says: “There were days when one could almost not talk to him. He was literally at the bottom of the well and one had to find a way to pull him back up to where he could even speak… . A lot of the agony and pain you see on the screen is quite real. It’s something beyond acting.”
The failure of Heaven’s Gate symbolizes Kristofferson’s star-crossed film career, always a step short of greatness. Cimino’s next project was supposed to be a remake of The Fountainhead (1949), with Kristofferson playing Gary Cooper’s part. “Nobody on this planet could have played Gary Cooper like I could,” Kris tells me. But when Heaven’s Gate went south, so did the new project. At the time, Kristofferson was among the ten most bankable stars in Hollywood, right up there with Robert Redford and Paul Newman. “After that,” Kris tells me, “I couldn’t get a job.”
IN RECENT YEARS, KRISTOFFERSON’S music as well as his life has become increasingly politicized, not always to his advantage. Songs about Vietnam, Wounded Knee, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Christ, while noble and well intended, are hardly toe-tappers. Willie has hinted to friends that he dearly wishes that Kris would shut up and play “Me and Bobby McGee,” but of course he can’t say that to Kris. Both Willie and Kris play a lot of benefits for farmers, Native Americans, human-rights advocates, and environmental causes, but Willie does it with a minimum of lectures.
Kristofferson’s reputation as a writer and a performer has diminished to the point that his acting career now subsidizes his music. During the filming of Lone Star, a local production assistant was furious to discover that it wasn’t the hunk Matthew McConaughey she was driving to the airport but some geezer named Kristofferson. Like his other albums this decade, his 1995 release, A Moment of Forever, sold poorly. This is unfortunate because it was produced by Don Was, one of the best in popular music, and contains some good love songs, great satire, and a wonderful tribute to Peckinpah, which opens:
I have been with the best that the bastards could muster
From Danny the Dildo to Sydney the Snake
And I feel like a working girl pausing to wonder
Just how much screwin’ the spirit can take.*
Kris admits that his passion for causes ebbs and �ows. But he once said, “You’ve got to think of the consequences if nobody speaks up. What it really gets down to, though, is living with yourself. If you don’t live by the principles you believe in, then you become this hollow person.”
What finally radicalized Kristofferson was the public reaction to his 1986 television miniseries Amerika. He caught hell from both the right and the left. The film was a fantasy about a Soviet invasion of the United States, with Kris playing the anti-communist leader of the U.S. resistance. The original screenplay, which he rejected, pushed a right-wing agenda, painting the United Nations as a tool of the Soviets. Kris agreed to the role only after most of the negative references to the U.N. were taken out of the script.
This infuriated right-wingers, who accused him of sabotaging the project. Left-wingers were even more ruthless. “Don’t think you can atone for Amerika just by marching with us,” a woman at an anti-nuclear demonstration in Nevada told him. “They acted like I made a film for the Nazis,” Kris says. The experience helped focus Kristofferson’s political ideas. In the weeks that followed, he played a number of human-rights benefits and made several trips to Nicaragua. He got to know the country’s president, Daniel Ortega, who invited Kris to sing at the anniversary of the revolution that put him in power.
On one of his trips to Nicaragua, Kristofferson was asked to visit Eugene Hasenfus, the Air America crewman whose plane was downed while �ying supplies to the contras. Kris took the prisoner a copy of the book Fire From the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista, then told him the story of Tracy’s miraculous recovery and repeated the challenge of faith: “If you don’t believe in God, ask for something impossible.”
Kris tells me now, “All the time I’m telling Hasenfus this story, I keep thinking: Why am I doing this? I knew that the hard-liners intended to make an example of him, that he’d probably serve thirty years, so why am I building up his hopes? That night, Lisa and I �y home to Maui, and when I check my answering machine, I learn that Hasenfus has been released and is already back in this country.” Kris smiles and adds, “I don’t know if it bolstered his faith, but it bolstered mine.”
Kris walks me to the car, his three dogs nosing him for attention. We shake hands and I realize again how much I admire him. I once told Kris that I thought of him, Willie, and Billy Joe Shaver as the Byron, Shelley, and Keats of our time. “I can’t argue with that,” Kris replied. Driving back to the airport in Maui, I keep remembering how the notion of Kris’s being considered for an Oscar was more important to me than it was to him. It would be nice, but it’s nothing that he needs. When you’ve been Kris Kristofferson, what else is there?
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