A Star Reborn

 

In a picture of paradise that Gauguin might have painted, a small blond boy and his sister, both barefoot, emerge from a thicket of guava trees and dash up a grassy hill. The girl veers off to pick passion fruit while the boy, heading full speed toward his dad, yells at the top of his lungs, "Who wants to go into the hot Jacuzzi?" It's enough to bring a laugh to the weathered face of the father, Kris Kristofferson, whose lanky frame is stretched out on the porch steps.

But after his five kids have headed off to volleyball practice and a beach near their Japanese-style home on the Hawaiian island of Maui, Kristofferson, 62, turns contemplative. "I never could have imagined this," he says, stroking his golden retriever Flower as mynah birds cry in the macadamia-nut trees. "I sit right here and think how it could have turned out so differently. I never thought I'd live past 30. I could have ended up dead."

That's not poetic license. Even in the substance-abusing '70s, Kristofferson was as well-known for his hard partying as he was for his eclectic career. A former helicopter pilot and Army captain who studied literature as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, Kristofferson went on to star in films such as Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. If that weren't enough, as a singer-songwriter he wrote such generational anthems as "Me and Bobby McGee" and "Help Me Make It Through the Night."

For a while there, Kristofferson needed all the help he could get. His errant ways helped destroy two marriages--the first, to high school sweetheart Fran Beer, produced Tracy, now 36, and Kris, 30; the second, to singer Rita Coolidge, gave him daughter Casey, now 24--and led to years of sporadic depression. "I thought all serious artists were self-destructive," he says, "that anybody worth their salt was going to be out there living on the edge."

Today, the only edge he's living on is hewn from volcanic rock and borders the expansive, Eden-like acreage that he shares with his wife of 15 years, Lisa Meyers, 42, an attorney, and their five children, Blake, 4 (after the English poet), Kelly, 7, Johnny, 10 (after his friend Cash), Jody, 13, and Jesse, 14. And two years after a role as the sadistic sheriff in John Sayles's Lone Star jump-started his stalled acting career, the only alternative realities he's exploring are his characters'--a hardened vampire tracker in the current hit Blade, and a writer based on WWII-era expatriate author James Jones in this month's Merchant-Ivory offering, A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries. For release next year, he has already wrapped a role in Payback opposite Mel Gibson. In his current incarnation, "Kris is very tranquil, relaxed, a Zen man," says his Blade costar Wesley Snipes. "The way he moves, the way he talks, it's like a man who has come to some resolve."

It's been a long time coming. Back in 1965, Kristofferson, a Texas-born Air Force major general's son whose mom was a homemaker, jettisoned a promising military career to work as a $58-a-week night janitor at Columbia recording studios in Nashville. It took till 1970, when Johnny Cash recorded "Sunday Morning Coming Down," for his dream of becoming a songwriter to begin to pan out. And then some. "He brought country music songwriting into its own. Before Kris, most of the songs didn't have that much depth to them," says country veteran Waylon Jennings. "His songs were about sex, but the undercurrent all the way through was love."

Not that you'd always know it from the life he chose to lead. In 1969, not long after his eight-year marriage to Beer collapsed, he met blues queen Janis Joplin following a late-night Manhattan meander with folk singer Odetta. "There was a lot of tequila and various stimulants going on during the course of the night," he recalls, "and we decided we'd go to California to see Joan Baez." Instead, the party landed at Joplin's house outside San Francisco, where he and the hostess "hit it off right away," says Kristofferson, who wound up living with Joplin for a month. "I don't know what you call a love affair, but we were real close. I liked her sense of humor. I was doing a lot of drinking then.... And she was trying to kick [heroin]."

Unsuccessfully, as the world would soon find out. In October 1970, while playing at a Big Sur music festival, Kristofferson learned that Joplin had died of an overdose. He rushed to Los Angeles, where her body had been found. The next day at a local studio a record producer played him Joplin's version of "Bobby McGee." "It tore me up," he recalls. "I never did hear her sing it while she was alive."

But not even Joplin's death served as a wake-up call for Kristofferson. At the time, "I was a functioning alcoholic. For a couple of years it was Jack Daniels, then it was tequila, then it was anything," he says. "When I was performing, I couldn't imagine getting up and doing it without drinking." And as for women, "Every girl in Nashville thought Kris was going to take them home and marry them," says his friend Jennings. "And he took full advantage of it."

Among his dates was singer Barbra Streisand, whom he met while performing at L.A.'s Troubadour in 1970. "We went out a couple times, me and Barbra," he says, "but it was impossible for me to have any kind of permanent relationship with anybody because I was on the road. We were kind of different people too. She had a lot of people around her all the time." But six years later, after his 1974 role as an archetypal sensitive male in Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Streisand helped cast him as a doomed rocker in her remake of A Star Is Born. Despite critical darts toward the film, it proved redemptive. During production, "I had a half quart of Jose Cuervo in my icebox that they never let get empty," says Kristofferson. But when he saw his own death scene on film, "I remember feeling that that could very easily be my wife and kids crying over me. I quit drinking over that. I didn't want to die before my daughter grew up."

Despite his new sobriety, Kristofferson's six-year marriage to Coolidge ended in 1979, and he spent the next decade working small clubs in an effort to revive his singing career. "My agent died. My manager died. My record company went bankrupt, and my own family fell apart," he says. "The saddest time in my life was when I was 50."

By then he'd married Lisa Meyers, a Pepperdine law student he'd met at a Malibu gym in 1982. "At the time, I was gun-shy about any relationship heavier than a one-night stand. The road had been my escape, going out and pouring it all into performing," says Kristofferson. But the two married a year later, "and as my family started getting bigger, it finally beat its way into my consciousness: 'Wake up, man. This is what really matters.'" Today, eight years after moving his family to Maui, Kristofferson says that his greatest regret in life is "that I didn't get to hold Kris like I hold Blake. I was gone by the time he was born."

It is a life lesson that the Rhodes scholar, it seems, has finally learned. "There was a time when I thought the best thing I would leave on this planet would be my songs," says Kristofferson, staring out at the Pacific. "But moving out here and having these kids was the best move I ever made."

-Susan Schindehette Elizabeth Leonard on Maui