Harry Dean Stanton 1926-2017

Harry Dean, 2003

This is a story I have about the late and rightly lamented Harry Dean Stanton, who died on September 15 at the age of 91. I met him one evening in Los Angeles in October 2002, when he’d have been 76?

I’d spent that afternoon very cheerfully in the old port city of San Pedro, with Linda Bukowski, widow of the legendary Charles. It was a special afternoon for me, having got a great deal of fun out of Bukowski’s writing during my youth, to pass some hours chatting to Linda in the home she and ‘Hank’ had shared, site of so many escapades. We had a couple of drinks: I was on beer, but somewhat cautiously, as my next appointment was to meet Mr Stanton at his home on Mulholland Drive.

Charles Bukowski

I was aware he wasn’t widely thought to be the easiest man to get to know. I knew Charles Bukowski had said as much to Film Comment magazine back in 1987: ‘Harry Dean’s a strange fellow. He doesn’t put on much of a hot-shot front. He just sits around depressed. And I make him more depressed. I say, ‘Harry, for Chrissakes, it’s not so bad.’’

But Linda knew him well, of course, and assured me all would be fine. She even rang him as I was packing up to go, and told him to go easy on me: ‘You be nice to him now, Harry, OK?’

The skies were still light, or as light as Los Angeles gets, when I left San Pedro, but it was extremely dark by the time I was winding my way down round Mulholland Drive, which had very surely taken on the menacing aspect of a place where David Lynch might shoot a movie.

Harry Dean’s place was a bungalow. I had to step cautiously down flagstones overhung by trees in order to get round the back of the place and ring the doorbell. Before I got there something dark and small darted across my path: in my mind’s eye I remain convinced it was a raccoon.

Harry Dean answered the door in bathrobe and slippers, spectacles on the end of his nose, hair a little wild. He welcomed me in, though there was a wariness to him, a certain senior stiffness. Still his living space was nicely arranged for a cordial chat, big sofas squared round a big coffee table with a big ashtray. In fact I admired his bachelor pad all the way round: open plan, cosily masculine, done in russet shades, a tidy kitchenette behind me, while I could see that to the right of the front door was the master bedroom: a tall mirrored wardrobe door hung open.

HDS in Fire Walk With Me

He didn’t seem keen on interviews - the legend was all true. He asked me to prove to him that my tape recorder was really working. He wasn’t sure I knew his body of work and needlessly listed the directors he’d done time with – Hitchcock he seemed especially proud of. Of course, if we’d had time I would have gladly enthused about everything from Missouri Breaks to Young Doctors in Love to Fire Walk With Me.

Then we were done. He told me he was ‘going out’ but I was welcome to hang awhile, and that we might 'have a drink' once he was dressed and ready? So he pottered off to that bedroom. I checked my tape recorder, reviewed my notes, looked back on my busy day. That was ten minutes maybe. Then Harry Dean re-entered, newly purposeful.

The phrase that leapt into my head, honestly, was ‘Alley Cat.’ (‘Rat Pack’ might have been in there, too.) The man was dressed sharp; and he was tapping a cigarette on a silver case. He’d donned a black suit and a crisp shirt, tie with clip, shoes with a high sheen; and the hair was now slick. Now he was smiling a great deal, like everything amused him, since it was time to ‘go out.’ And I felt I understood it all now, including the story about the date he'd brought to Sean Penn’s wedding in 1985. He fixed us vodka tonics, plenty stiff, and the evening got yet more memorable.

So count me in as a big, big Harry Dean fan, all the way. Too many superb performances to cite, but my favourite, if I had to pick one, is this – this scene, especially.

Un film de Sean Penn: The Last Face

The Last Face (2016, c. River Road Entertainment)

I haven’t been to the Cannes festival in a lot of years, probably not since 1999 (which was a pretty wonderful edition, what with the Dardennes' Rosetta and Bruno Dumont's Humanité.) I do rather wish I was there this week, if only to get an early look at Sean Penn’s new film The Last Face, which is premiering in competition and looks to me like a work of big promise, given its bold big-canvas subject matter (conflict in Liberia and Sierra Leone, international aid and the role of the UN) plus Penn’s considerable artistry as a picture maker.

One of the most purely enjoyable bonuses of my having written a long study of Sean’s life and work with his participation is that I've had a fair few opportunities to watch him at close quarters while he works, both as actor and writer-director. I visited the location of The Last Face in late 2014 and, as usual, found it a hugely absorbing experience to observe the "big electric train-set" in motion; the new element was seeing Penn at the helm, right in the thick of that fast-flowing decision-making torrent that is directing a movie.

Penn’s attention to detail in creative matters is fairly well-documented (not least by me). But artists do define themselves by the things they pay attention to in life (cf. Bresson's injunction to 'show [the spectator] things in the order and the way that you love to see them and to feel them’); and Penn’s special investment in what he does is quite a powerful thing to be around. Here as elsewhere there's nothing 'armchair' about him.

Barry Ackroyd, DP on The Last Face, and Lake Geneva

Movies are made inch by inch, of course, so as a rubbernecker in those situations your sense of the whole is about as refined as what an insect perceives while crawling up a Byzantine mosaic. But while I was knocking around the location I was excited to see some rough assemblies of sequences that Penn’s long-time editor Jay Cassidy was putting together in the now-standard manner of movie production, and they struck me as highly powerful and affecting in their drama. So, here’s to the finished item, or Bonne Projection! as they say in the Palais de Festivals.

It's worth saying that Cannes, the best of festivals in this regard, has championed Sean as a director from the start, and the official brochures for the 2016 edition will note that his body of feature film work also includes The Indian Runner (1991), The Crossing Guard (1995), The Pledge (2000), and Into the Wild (2007). 

These films are full of feeling, made with great verve and command of the tools of cinema (also very characteristic of their maker, who wrote the first two and has had a hand in the scripts of each subsequent project); and I think they repay a look from any discerning film fan.

The People, Our (Anti-)Politics, & Stella Creasy MP

The cover-page of my Esquire piece

Over a few months in the spring I followed Stella Creasy, Labour MP for Walthamstow, around the houses for an interview-based profile that Esquire Weekly had kindly commissioned from me. (If you want to read the piece, published in issue #47 dated August 21 2014, you need to have an iPad or iPhone, but if so please look here.)

The piece was my idea, one in which I was encouraged by a few Labour-supporting friends who, like me, feel that Creasy is an impressively thoughtful and dynamic character who merits a position of prominence in any future configuration of the party’s front bench. But my editor at Esquire, Dan Davies, more broadly endorsed the idea that, over and above any specific debate about Labour’s fortunes, Creasy is of wider interest as a politician actively kicking back against the moody public malaise of ‘anti-politics’ that has been all around us like winter weather for so long now.

Creasy has a public profile and platform for which she has grafted steadfastly and knows how to use. It seems to help that she is a normal human being with musical and pop cultural interests. In the course of our chats I mentioned to her my strong memories of the NME putting Neil Kinnock on its cover prior to the 1987 election (a stroke I fondly imagined would win Labour, oh, millions of votes), and of The Face, the other bible of my 1980s adolescence, diagnosing that what Labour really needed to cure its electoral ailment was a ‘funky politician’. Creasy saw my insinuation coming and met it with a straight sceptical bat. ‘If I’m funky’, she replied, ‘we’re in trouble.’

Another highly significant aspect of Creasy’s profile is her vocal feminism. Esquire is of course a publication mainly focused on the leisure interests of men and when I asked Creasy if she was OK with that she laughed it off easily with a line about ‘manly magazines’, then segued (a special adeptness of hers) into some observations on certain sexually aggressive traits in our society, and how these manifest in young men and even schoolboys. (‘I had an 11-year-old boy tell me’, she recalled, ‘that the problem was that the girls wear all these revealing leggings...’)

So Creasy lacks for nothing in the straight-talking department. As my friend John Rentoul has noted, she possibly talks too fast for her own good, though this may also be the special lament of journalists lumbered with the job of transcribing her. (It could make for other issues, though. I noticed that in public speaking she always has good jokes but doesn’t always time them especially well – that is, in the haste to crack on she doesn’t routinely wait for the audience’s laugh then roll over it, a skill that most top pols quickly get themselves accustomed to.)

The big thing about Creasy, though, the thing that ought to stir Labour hearts, is that she is very much about the people – about forging opportunities for people, and demanding the reform of outmoded systems which obstruct that, and without being sanctimoniously utopian about it. ‘I came into politics to change the world,’ she told me. ‘People are starving now, we need stuff now. So just sitting on the sidelines waiting for perfection? Nah, it’s not going to happen.’ 

I followed Creasy along to three political outings, two of which were described in the Esquire piece. The first was a meeting for her Walthamstow constituents in an oak-panelled room within the Commons, a classic tea-and-biscuits get-together but one on which she put a twist. The aim was to address what she had taken away from surgeries as the most urgent local concerns – ’I can’t get a doctor’s appointment’ and ‘I’m being priced out of the area.’’ So attendees were invited to adorn huge sheets of paper with marker pens, listing their comments and complaints about healthcare and housing, and from the data thus gathered Creasy basically took a floor vote about which issues and suggestions should be acted upon. ('I need your help to challenge them', she told the assembled. 'This is going to work because of you, not us.’)

The second outing on which I observed her at work was at Keble College, Oxford, where she addressed a seminar of digital campaigners: passionate young people, in the main, just as adamant as her in their desire to ‘change the world.’

Ilford, May 2014: The campaign trail

An account of the third excursion had to be cut from what was an already generously sized piece, but this was a sunny May Sunday I spent with her in Ilford (together with the impressive local councillor and parliamentary candidate Wes Streeting) on a spot of local election campaigning - basically, following her down a succession of garden paths as she searched for someone who was indoors and willing to chat, the expending of shoe-leather being another great tradition of our politics. One woman, visibly shattered from working a night-shift, expressed to Creasy a polite indifference as to what voting has meant for her all her life: ‘Whoever’s in power, the same things don’t get done.’ Creasy nonetheless enquired patiently of the woman as to which local issues she rated as important, and persuaded her to have a word with Wes Streeting, too. ‘Turning up on someone’s doorstep is quite disruptive’, Creasy told me later.  ‘But if we can’t find a way to have a better conversation...’

This is really the nub of Creasy’s pitch. ‘You get the political process you deserve’, she told me. ‘If you want to change the world you have to get involved.’ That goes for MPs like her and for people like you and me. There wasn’t room in the piece for the following quote from her but it nicely sums up her thinking:

‘The left has always had within it a very well-meaning strand that says we are fighting injustice for people because they are vulnerable and can’t speak for themselves. My own experience is if you find a way to give a voice to those people they are ten times better at presenting themselves... I happen to think rather than saying, ‘Somebody ought to do something about that’, we should do it together... Our job can’t be just to manage the situation as it is. Otherwise I’m looking at my [MP] email inbox, which is a series of misery and pain, and thinking, ‘The most I can do is mitigate some of this.’ We’ve got to be a lot clearer about how we can work with the public, because that’s the best way Britain can succeed. It’s challenging to traditional politics and to the public too. In my experience it’s more positive and constructive, and it has good results. And it’s a more exciting way to work.’

Creasy is associated strongly with the political use of social media and online rallying cf. the Sharkstoppers campaign to cap the rates of 'payday lenders.' But as the journalist Matthew d’Ancona has put it, ‘Representative democracy is not an app.’ And Creasy is entirely aware of the inherent problems of e-petitions and ‘hashtag activism’ where a pious click or retweet, however felt, becomes the sum of the citizen’s investment in the cause, and so leads precisely nowhere. On that she told me this:

'The payday loans campaign was successful not because we said ‘Payday loans are a problem’ but because it said ‘Capping the cost of credit is a solution.’ It was offering not just an anger but an action that would make a difference. Online communications allow you to have conversations about what are the actions that will make a difference and how do we get there much quicker and have a broader group of people with us. But you have to have a sense of purpose and not just say, ‘Right, who’s angry? Who can make a great joke about Wonga?'

On this form Creasy could remind one of Tony Blair’s injunction that Labour should be ‘the seekers after answers, not the repository for people’s anger.’ Lazily, perhaps, I am also reminded of someone else about whom I write regularly. Back in 2010 when I was speaking to Sean Penn about his humanitarian efforts in Haiti, and his not unrelated disdain for the internet, he gave me a candid opinion of our wireless society and its capacity for change. 'There are too many people out there doing this' – he mimicked fingers dancing over laptop keys – 'and thinking that they're doing something. And they're not.'

In brief, so as to not be on the fence, as it's no sort of a place to be, I should say that I would be quite content to see Stella Creasy lead the Labour Party at any appropriate point in the future (such as tomorrow, for instance), and lead it into government. But, clearly, an awful lot of anti-politics, well-meaning strands and same old things not getting done would have to be waded through first. At any rate, this is how I ended the Esquire piece:

'Rather than her exit from politics, most journalists who have written about Stella Creasy have been more concerned with her prospects for advancement. But I wonder if the highest office would necessarily be the most progressive outcome of her political mission. She might just as vitally be a lightning-rod for luring new talents into politics – both female and male, within Labour or maybe even without, but people who are on the side of people, and don’t seek power for personal gain but, rather, in order to give it away.'

A new and updated edition of my 'Sean Penn: His Life and Times' from Faber & Faber in 2015

I’m pleased to report that I am now properly at work on a new and updated edition of Sean Penn: His Life and Times, originally published by Faber more or less exactly ten years ago, and so certainly due for a fresh lick of paint.

‘Time is a funny thing, huh’, as Tom Waits says in Rumblefish. ‘Time is a very peculiar item...’ I first met Sean Penn in 2001 and later that year secured his consent to do an interview-based ‘oral history’-style book about his life and work. I began work on that book in the autumn/winter of 2002 as Sean was shooting Mystic River with Clint Eastwood and then 21 Grams with Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. One day in the midst of that I called his office to check his whereabouts. ‘Baghdad,’ came the unexpected – unexpectable? – reply. The first Faber hardback edition of Sean Penn: His Life and Times came out in October 2004, six months after Sean won his first Academy Award. A paperback edition followed a year later, with updates that concluded as Sean embarked on a journalistic assignment to Iran and secured the film rights to Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild.

So that was then and this is now, a good while later. Of course, lots of people lead very lively lives, whether or not they have the attention of a wider public, but Sean is livelier than most, and so the new section of the book detailing 2005-2015 is going to have plenty of good and all-exclusive meat in it. I hope it will appear around the same time as the release of The Last Face - Sean’s fifth feature as director, starring Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem, on which he is presently at work, the progress of which I have had a fortunate glimpse, and for which – based on the quality of the material, cast, crew, and the calibre of Sean’s previous productions as ‘helmer’ –  cinemagoers would surely be right to entertain high hopes.

Sam Shepard, and qualities past compare

Shepard & Lange by Bruce Weber, 1984

I wish someone had told me Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange broke up, because I’m nearly sure that, oh, thirty years ago or whatever, their getting together was the chief reason I started to believe in romantic love. Of course you have to grow up sometime, and I’d have missed a big point about Shepard’s celebrated writing if I clung too close to a comforting shadow. But then you may perhaps recall the special allure of the Shepard/Lange story.

Circa 1981, he was married, but not happy. (In a poem of the period he wrote feelingly, ‘I’ve about seen/ all the nose jobs / capped teeth / and silly-cone tits / I can handle // I’m heading back to my natural woman.’ This was reproduced in a book to which we will shortly turn, and next to a photo of his first wife...) As for Lange, she had a daughter (named Shura!) from another relationship (with Mikhail Baryshnikov!). But then she and Shepard crossed paths, and that was that. ‘No man I've ever met compares to Sam in terms of maleness’, Lange was quoted a few years down the line. Patti Smith, a former Shepard flame, had formed a similar impression: ‘He was just everything that one could want... he had this animal magnetism. It was almost visceral... He was born for rock n' roll.’

That’s a very high bar to set in terms of ‘maleness’; and I just can’t think of a man who wouldn’t be impressed by these estimations, coming from such estimable women. But here’s what really got me dreamy about the Shepard-Lange fandango. In an interview he gave to The Face around 1984 – which took place in some diner, likely close to the locations for a movie he was making with Lange called Country – the reporter recorded Shepard noticing Lange pass outside the window, maybe 20 yards or so away, whereupon he pushed open a slat in the window (one of those windows, see) and shouted for her to come over and give him a kiss. Playfully she fended his request away for some moments, but he kept imploring, unabashed, and at last she sashayed his way, and he tried to lean out the window, only those damn slats proved too obstructive. So Shepard spend a minute or so wheedling a slat right out of its frame. So he could lean out and Lange could give him a kiss. Which she then did.

Now, we should all have that kind of relationship: it’s what God wants.

As late as 2010 Shepard was telling the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr that he and Lange’s relationship was ‘tumultuous’: ‘Yeah, well, we're definitely an incredible match. But, you know, not without fireworks… although at this point, you know, she's the only woman I could live with... What other woman would put up with me?’ Now it appears as if the relationship may well have been over when that interview took place. Must all things change, et cetera?

I found out this distressing news from googling about after reading a Paris Review interview with Shepard about his craft, which, like every Paris Review writer’s Q&A I’ve ever read, is utterly superb and constitutes a lesson in how and why to write.Shepard, it has to be said, is a more striking and compelling figure of a man – has led a rather more intriguing life – than the average scribe; and it’s a very easy thing to get pulled into his laconic, reticent telling of the way he’s gone about things.(Consider, too, this fine Details interview with Jeff Gordinier in which Shepard's  very succinctly right reflection on what age will do (‘It’s crazy, you know. Time is just nuts’) leads him without fuss into an anecdote about resuming his friendship and working relationship with Patti Smith, including a recording of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' on which Shepard played guitar, which is quite a thing.)

In fact, the more I think about Shepard, the more I feel as if he’s been – if not everything to me – then a very great many things.

(i) Frances (1982) was one of the first grown-up movies I saw, and aside from being generally impressed by its grit and pathos, I felt about the 'chemistry' between Shepard and Lange the way people talk – and I appreciate but don’t see – about Bogart and Bacall (since Bogart was no pin-up, whereas Shepard in his prime looked... well, like Patti Smith said.) The Right Stuff (1984) drove this 'attractiveness' thing home. Of course Shepard has offered many great variations on why he never felt like being a movie star, turned down umpteen big films, quite often because he ‘couldn’t be bothered to take his shirt off.’ We should all be so lucky to be so unbothered.

(ii) When I was 13 I had a car-windscreen sticker stuck onto my schoolbag that read I ❤ Paris Texas: arguably the ineffective and yet greatest piece of movie marketing ever attempted. (Bravo, Palace Video.) And I can’t say the lads in the schoolyard were very impressed. But I really did love Paris Texas: adapted by Shepard from his book Motel Chronicles, and possibly the first ‘art movie’ I ever saw, and the one that sort of instructed me in the near-mesmerically uneventful rhythm of those kinds of pictures. One sort of knew it had been made by a foreigner, which also seemed to explain the presence of Nastassja Kinski. Yet it was equally clear to me that it was a Western; and that may be why for a few years I preferred Paris Texas to the kinds of Westerns that had cowboys in them.

(iii) On account of this Paris Texas love, I went out and bought my own copy of Motel Chronicles, possibly the first book I owned from the imprint of Faber and Faber. Young people have always got besotted by America because of its art, even terse and tough and non-ingratiating art such as Motel Chronicles, because wide open spaces under big skies where still one can connect nothing with nothing have their very own poetry. Motel Chronicles had that effect on me. (A dozen or so years later, once I had the extraordinary good fortune to be published by Faber and Faber myself, I learned about the key role in all this of the influential figure of Walter Donohue, who had worked with Shepard on the Paris Texas script, overseen the picture’s green-lighting at Film Four, and acquired Motel Chronicles for Faber once he took up an editor’s chair there. Like many things to do with Mr Donohue, that is another story. The main point is that a link to Faber must have been quite important for Shepard – because they published his hero, 'Mr Beckett'.

(iv) The first Shepard plays I saw were filmed versions, beginning with True West, on television, starring the Chicago Steppenwolf boys, Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.(Shepard has called Malkovich – and I agree – ‘one of my favourite actors on stage because he is so outrageous. I mean, he just doesn’t give a shit.' And True West could instruct a young man how to write a play, if not necessarily a good one. As Shepard says of the play’s brothers: ‘I mean, basically they’re the same person. It’s just a split. I just wrote ’em as two characters, but they’re basically two conflicting parts of one person...')

Then came Robert Altman’s theatrical film of Fool for Love, which, you can see even by this trailer, wasn’t particularly good. But then Shepard was never sure about the play, which was sort of about him and Lange: ‘More than anything, falling in love causes a certain female thing in a man to manifest, oddly enough’, he told Paris Review. ‘I had mixed feelings about it when I finished. Part of me looks at Fool for Love and says, This is great, and part of me says, This is really corny. This is a quasi-realistic melodrama. It’s still not satisfying...’

(v) The play of his I finally got to see on stage was Lie of the Mind, around 1987, at the Royal Court. It’s 25 years ago now but I can still see and hear in my head the stunning coup de theatre where Beth (Miranda Richardson), beaten half to hell by her husband and comatose since, sits up in her bed with a terrible shriek.

(vi) The first exchanges I had with Sean Penn over my effort to persuade him to approve my writing a book about his life and work were in autumn 2000, while he was rehearsing Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss in San Francisco, with Nick Nolte and Woody Harrelson. Sean raised his eyebrows when I told him the book might take as little as three months of his time, if it were done with passion. Three years later I was still dogging him around Marin County... And round that same time Harrelson explained to me why autumn 2000 was a testing time for Shepard, who had been drinking too much for a while, an illness that beset his father and which, by all those references to ripple wine in Motel Chronicles, the reader might have feared. This is what Harrelson said:

'Sam was going through some stuff. Within a week into it, Sam doesn’t even come to rehearsal. We all come in, he’s not there. Comes in the next day, he’d had some major deal with his heart... And the doctor’s told him he can’t smoke any more cigarettes, but – but [laughs] – a glass of wine in the evening can help to thin the blood, you know? Well, he didn’t know who he was dealing with... The good thing about Sam, even though he was smoking cigarettes like a fiend, he wasn’t drinking. Well, once the doctor opened that door for him, it was a whole different ball of wax...'

(vii) A musical score for Henry Moss was composed and performed on the stage by T-Bone Burnett, the brilliant songwriter-musician-producer who can even be forgiven for turning Bob Dylan on to Jesus. Back then I’d loved Burnett’s contributions to records like Elvis Costello’s King of America and The Golden Palominos’ Blast of Silence without putting down the money for his solo albums. The one I finally bought, quite recently, was The Tooth of Crime, a set of songs that he wrote originally for a mid-1990s staging of Shepard’s play about a war of style between two rockers young and old, Hoss and Crow. It’s a wonderful record and it puts you strongly in mind of the moods in Shepard’s work. This song is 'Dope Island.' 

(viii) And now it turns out that a whole new record of songs has been released, inspired by Motel Chronicles. It’s by The Dark Flowers and called Radioland. The Dark Flowers are a loose ensemble and for this project they’ve enlisted vocal talents ranging from Jim Kerr of Simple Minds and Peter Murphy, once of Bauhaus – bands I listened to before I even saw Frances – to Dot Allison and Catherine AD, whose work is held in high regard around this parish.

(ix) There’s a view that over the last 20 years Shepard has acted in more movies than have been useful to his productivity as a writer. Though I don’t think Shepard takes that view himself, and I am not qualified to comment. I do wish I had seen States of Shock, written around the time of the first Gulf War, and The God of Hell, which was timed for that year’s US presidential election. Maybe the chance will come again. I wouldn’t want to just read them, that’s for sure.

(x) In 2009 Shepard gave Paris Review some new vignettes in the style of Motel Chronicles, including the one known as ‘the one about Shania Twain.’ His voice is inimitable.

(xi) In 2010 he told Carole Cadwalladr: ‘The funny thing about having all this so-called success is that behind it is a certain horrible emptiness. All this stuff is happening. And yet it is not what you are after as a writer... there's this feeling… what is it, then? And, I guess, it's the writing itself which is important.’

(xii) And right at the front of this extract from a PBS documentary (below) we return to where it probably all began for Shepard, and where, as it happens, Shepard began for me, and for so many people: Shepard on his father, from Motel Chronicles.