Sam Shepard's stardom didn't come that easy

A new biography on the EGOT-level talent focuses more on his demons than his work.

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SAM SHEPARD attends Sundance in 2014.

Coyote The Dramatic Lives of Sam Shepard By Robert M. Dowling Scribner: 480 pages, $31

"Theater is a big bust," Sam Shepard told Newsweek in 1967, just as his star was rising in the off-Broadway world. "Nobody is taking big chances." It was a bold statement for Shepard, who in the years to follow tried to avoid media attention and often faced crises of confidence.

But as Robert M. Dowling demonstrates in his Shepard biography, "Coyote," the playwright was more than just a study in contradictions he was a tangle of confusions, with his life shaped by frustration and failure and self-destruction as much as success on the world's stages and movie screens.

In Dowling's hands, Shepard emerges as an artist who became an EGOTlevel talent while making it look easy. (He earned Oscar, Emmy and Tony nominations, and won a boatload of Obies and a Pulitzer in 1979 for "Buried Child.") Born in 1943, Shepard was raised in the San Gabriel Valley by a two-fisted father with a clutch of World War II medals, the source of the playwright son's lifelong obsession with American might and masculinity. In the early '60s, Shepard escaped to

New York and with lightning speed infiltrated offBroadway, inspired by Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee and a host of experimental playwrights.