He'll Always Have Paris - Chapter33.com

Kris Kristofferson remembers going to Paris when he was 22, with the same dream taht has lured so many young pilgrims. He was a Rhodes scholar studying at Oxford and he was going to be a novelist. As he walked about, he wondered - as others before and since had wondered - if Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller had walked the same streets.

The year was 1958. Kristofferson had taken two top prizes in an Atlantic Monthly collegiate short-story competition, writing about a racial incident and the discovery of a rock formation in the shape of a naked woman.

That was the same year an American novelist named James Jones moved to Paris with his family. Kristofferson would never meet the author of "From Here to Eternity," but tomorrow he plays him on the movie screen. From the prestige-film factory of Ismael Merchant and James Ivory, "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" is adapted from the autobiographical novel by Jones' daughter Kaylie and portrays the rarefied lifestyle of an American literary household on foreign soil. Forty years after his first visit, Kristofferson was at least able to simulate his youthful fantasy.

Busting out of his usual spurs-and-sawdust niche as the bearlike Jones prototype (a role originally intended for Nick Nolte), the 62-year-old Kristofferson brings a measure of warmth and gravity that hovers over the film even when he is offscreen.

Maybe the affinity he has for his subject comes from his own literary triumphs. "I just ran into an old friend of mine at a college reunion who told me that his aunt was on the board that selected the [Atlantic Monthly] prizes," he relates from a hotel suite in Manhattan late last month. "He told me that when they submitted the stories they didn't have the names on them, just numbers, and that I had won the four top places. When they found out they were all by the same guy, they gave me first and third, with two honorable mentions."

Or perhaps his new screen authority in what is a daughter's coming-of-age movie owes to having fathered a brood of children that leaves the Von Trapp family in the dust. With his first wife, Fran Bier, his second, singer Rita Coolidge, and his current spouse of 15 years, attorney Lisa Meyers, Kristofferson has eight children ranging in ages from 4 to 36, and there's one granddaughter for good measure. The five youngest share a house their father built for them on the island of Maui.

Kristofferson affectionately rattles off their names and ages. When asked if he and Coolidge are still in touch, he replies, "As much as we have to be," then erupts into a deep, gravelly laugh. "I always found it easier to get along with the kids than with their mothers."

The Texas-born son of an Air Force major general (of whom he has warm memories), Kristofferson points to Harper Lee's patriarch hero Atticus Finch in "To Kill a Mockingbird" as his own parenting role model, for his "unflappability, fairness and honesty." These were qualities not always present in Kristofferson, who was long absent from his eldest children and led a lifestyle marked by serious drinking and drug use. "I'm a much better father as an old man than when I was younger. Somehow it's turned out right."

Kristofferson takes none of it for granted. He recalls with sober reflection how quickly the ground gave way beneath his feet following the bright promise of those Oxford days. He would notch six years as an Army helicopter pilot in Germany, during which time he organized a folk-rock band called, prophetically enough, The Losers. "I despaired of ever being a writer. I was a breadwinner with a wife and kid to support. I got pretty depressed until I formed the band." H IS STINT IN Germany completed, Kristofferson was about to take a secure post teaching English at West Point when the sirens of Nashville beckoned.

"I fell in love with the whole life, of songwriters hanging out writing songs to each other, and seeing people that I had heard of on the Grand Ole Opry since I was a little kid. I decided to get out of the Army and go back there. To the horror of my parents, my wife, my peers. For about four years they thought I had lost my mind."

During those years, the would-be musician supported his family as a janitor at Columbia Recording Studios, a bartender and a helicopter pilot in the Gulf of Mexico. The marriage self-destructed and Kristofferson was forced to leave his pilot job. "I was violating a lot of rules of behavior. I was drinking a lot at night when I was on shore. I was sitting in a trashy motel with dirt on the floor, looking around at the shambles of my life and the immediate future looked to me like jail.

"Just when it looked like I hit rock bottom, my songwriter friend Mickey Newbury told me about a TV show with Johnny Cash that was the most important thing in Nashville." The pair insinuated themselves on the show's crew and famous guests, who included Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor. "Johnny Cash told everybody we were the best songwriters in Nashville. It was kind of a magic time. Everything I touched turned to gold."

It was during his darkest-before-dawn moment that Kristofferson wrote a song that would be instrumental in reversing his fortunes. "I was driving to the airport, it was raining, and I got this line about the windshield wipers slapping time. And another about a guy on the way to New Orleans from Bourbon City." Roger Miller would be the first to record "Me and Bobby McGee," but it was Janis Joplin's version that made it emblematic for a disaffected generation.

Kristofferson says he never heard Joplin's version while she was alive, but they would become close companions. "I met [musician] Bobby Neuwirth one crazy night; a bunch of us got higher than kites and decided to fly out to California. So Bobby, Odetta and I flew out and he introduced me to her. We just hung out at her house, about a month. We became the things that wouldn't leave.

"She was real funny, and real smart. And a real feeling person. She was very sensitive to other people's feelings. It's funny to think that she was only 27 when she died. She was only a little girl, clopping around the house in high heels and feathers."

Kristofferson stares inwardly as he recalls her final days in muted tones. "The last time I saw her we were staying in a motel in Santa Monica. I was playing at the Troubador and she was about to go off on a train tour with her band. She wanted me and Bobby to come along with them, but I was starved to get my own bookings. After that she called me once more from the Chelsea Hotel [in Manhattan]. She said that `Me and Bobby McGee' was the theme song on the train. The last thing she said was, `You're just going to gypsy on down the road, aren't ya?' "

Kristofferson's gypsy trail would wind between music and the movie business, where he would form alliances with some of the industries' most legendary names. He would be directed by Sam Peckinpah ("Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," 1973), Martin Scorsese ("Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," 1974) and Barbra Streisand ("A Star Is Born," 1976), but he credits John Sayles and "Lone Star" in 1966 for the current renaissance in his film career after a long period of forgettable features (see "Big Top Pee-Wee," 1988) and nearly two dozen TV movies.

On Peckinpah: "Sam was probably his own worst enemy. The films I worked on with him he wasted a lot of creative energy fighting the - - - who were trying to do him in behind his back. He was like an old dog you have to apologize for. But he was trying to make something good as an artist."

On Scorsese: "I was feeling insecure. I had read the character as some kind of grizzled old guy, more like I am now. Like Clark Gable in `The Misfits,' that kind of authority. Marty got me to go through the script and cross out the directions that said `he said angrily' or `he said curtly' and to just say them the way I would say 'em. He taught me a lot."

On Streisand: "When I look back on `Star Is Born,' now I think of Barbra with a lot of gratitude because she put up with a lot of cantankerous behavior on my part. And had faith that I could deliver the goods. And I think it was one of the most successful acting jobs I've done. [The movie] was better than the critics thought. It was the hardest thing I had ever been through but also the most satisfying." A RECORDING artist, Kristofferson would cut 17 albums, including several as part of The Highwaymen, a Mount Rushmore of country and folk singers that also included Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. Kristofferson smiles remembering how he would rattle his fellow Highwaymen with the sort of incendiary political statements that have gotten him into trouble over the years. "I really ticked Waylon off one time when I was haranguing the cold-blooded for killing a quarter-million civilians in Iraq, and Colin Powell was in the audience."

Kristofferson explains that his political comments raised so much flak because he was pitching them to a country music audience.

"The more the rhetoric gets inflated, the more suspicious I get," he explains. "When [Ronald] Reagan started talking about the Evil Empire, or when they start saying how pure evil were the people who bombed the U.S. embassies [in Kenya and Tanzania]. I don't defend that. I only wish people would look at something like the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, look at the extended tragedy from that, and imagine what it was like in Baghdad when we were bombing those poor-for 44 days, with impunity. Terrorism is terrorism, whether from a bomber or missile."

Kristofferson views the country's mood with a mix of chagrin and irony. "Dennis Hopper said that the '90s are the '60s turned upside down. And they really are. It does seem very apocalyptic, end-of-millennium-type times. It bothers me to see them rewrite the history of the '60s. That's what I didn't like about `Forrest Gump.' It trivialized a lot of stuff that shouldn't have been."

He proudly shows off a black-winged lapel pin given to him by the late farm-workers union leader Cesar Chavez. "I can remember reading something in USA Today that said, `All country singers were conservative, with the exception of the left-wingy Kris Kristofferson, who has been dismissed as irrelevant.' And I thought [he lets out a growl of delight], `It's come to this! I've been dismissed by USA Today as irrelevant!' God of misery!"

To the film industry, at least, the question of Kristofferson's political relevance is moot. In addition to his commanding work in "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries," the indefatigable performer plays key roles in the summer smash "Blade" and "Dance With Me." He also recently wrapped a drama about an Indian leper colony, directed by Australian art-house favorite Paul Cox on the Hawaiian island of Molokai.

In his seventh decade, the once-itinerant actor / dad is gratified and relieved to have gotten it right, at work and at home. "I imagine that [James] Jones would have been a different father back before he wrote `From Here to Eternity' than he was after he didn't have to prove who he was. I'm raising some of my kids almost as a grandfather. I'm so old."
Kris Kristofferson laughs his racing carburetor laugh at the odd sound of his admission, then gypsies on down the road.

-Jan Stuart, Newsday