Personal Life:

“Sam Shepard is what a star is supposed to be- a ball of fire in a black sky. Brilliant, but very far away”

-Marsha Norman, a playwright contemporary of Shepard.

“Too many stars are just too close. They say too much. They smile too much. We know too much about them. Their desperate need for publicity destroys the privacy they need to keep working and clarifies what must remain mysterious if we are to keep fantasizing about them. Sam Shepard makes us guess”[1]

Sam Shepard lived a private life, as the above quotes suggest. He grew up in a small town and was suddenly introduced to the buzz of city life when he settled in New York while on tour with a traveling ensemble. Regardless, Sam preferred to keep his distance throughout his life. He tried to avoid the press as much as he could. In interviews, he usually preferred to answer questions about his work and not his interviews.

Shepard had a bit of misgiving about his background, his town and the family he grew up in. Acting was a means to escape his environment which he somewhat detested.  He said, “in the Rogers Household, nobody was doing anything except fighting” and “In Duarte [the town where he grew up], nobody was doing anything except going to the Alpha Beta supermarket”. He even went on to change his family name, which had been transferred down seven generations. He named his first son Mojo instead of Rogers, the family name.

Anecdotes from close friends suggest Sam Shepard, who was both handsome and charming, had a knack for women. He says of his early days in New York, “I rode everything with hair”.[2] Together with his painter friend Mingus, the son of the famed jazz player Charles Mingus, who gave him his first job and apartment in New York, he also experimented with different types of drugs in his young age.

Sam Shepard came to be known by the public primarily for his acting skill. His popularity in the 70’s and 80’s had more to do with his movie roles than his plays, though his Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child earned him some fame too. An avid fan of Rock ‘n’ Roll, he made friends with Bob Dylan. He was commissioned to make a movie about Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour. He instead wrote a book Rolling Thunder Logbook.

 

 

 

[1]Shewey, D. (1997). Sam Shepard. New York: Da Capo Press.

[2]Crank, J. (2013). Understanding Sam Shepard. Columbia: South Carolina University Press.