Yesterday's Idea of a Modern Man

Sam Shepard, a self-made cowboy, was also a poet of masculine angst.

- Michael O'Donnell

Sam Shepard wasn't born a cowboy.

The actor and writer made himself into one. The dusty blue jeans, cattle drives, and folksy drawl suited his taciturn profile, giving Reagan-era America someone rugged to admire.

Yet the people who knew Shepard best poked fun at his Western persona, which began to emerge in the 1970s and endured for the rest of his life. The singer and poet Patti Smith, a former paramour, called him "a man playing cowboys," and Shepard indeed acted in a number of Westerns. Late in his career, in Andrew Dominik's movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Shepard portrayed the outlaw's prickly brother. (He'd named his first child, Jesse, after the legend.) A line of narration from the movie seemed to sum up the complicated man behind the character: "wrought up, perplexed, despondent." The cowboy image may have been cultivated, but it was not false. You might say it was earned, the vaquero as self-made man. Shepard reluctant movie star, poet of masculine angst, and rock-and-roll hero of the American theater-thought Broadway and Hollywood were full of middlebrow nonsense. Born in suburban Illinois and raised in Southern California, he sought out an authentic country, far from New York City or Los Angeles, where he could hear himself think.

He found it in Kentucky, New Mexico, and Texas, places where he lived or set his stories. Framing his work in elemental terms of self-sufficiency, Shepard considered his analog tools: "When you go to ride a horse, you have to saddle it. When you use a typewriter, you have to feed it paper." Like his friend Cormac McCarthywho grew up in a Tennessee suburb but likewise drifted west-Shepard found in open spaces a wellspring of bracing truth.