Bird on a Wire: Kris Kristofferson (1936-2024)

Almost exactly forty-seven years ago, I saw Kris Kristofferson for the first time when my two primary interests as a four-year-old bled into each other. On the September 23, 1977 season three premiere of “The Donny and Marie Show.,” a variety show I watched with a ritualistic, almost religious dedication, I was favored with a sketch riffing on the just-released “Star Wars.” Donny was Luke Skywalker, Marie was Princess Leia, and Kris Kristofferson was Han Solo. Released in May, I had already mainlined and internalized “Star Wars.” So I knew this wasn’t Harrison Ford, but even a four-year-old recognizes charisma when they see it. That night, Kristofferson also performed his song “The Legend” and got to do a duet of Lou Rawls’ “You’ll Never Find” with Marie. Oh, how I wished it were me up there with Marie. I asked my dad who this guy was and my dad, an immigrant who spoke in broken English who had embraced classic country and western music like a native son, warbled the chorus to “Me & Bobby McGee.” Kris Kristofferson. I had a name for a new role model who was also my archrival in love. Hell hath no fury like a four-year-old’s jealousy.

Even so, I didn’t think much about him again until I was sixteen, seeking out Michael Anderson’s “Millennium” after learning it was a stealth adaptation of one of my favorite sci-fi novels as a kid, John Varley’s Air Raid. The premise concerns people from the future harvesting humans from their past in order to rejuvenate their gene pool—the trick being they need to abduct people about to die lest they change the course of history. Kristofferson is the best part of a largely-forgotten film. He plays wizened, world-weary NTSB investigator Bill Smith who discovers a few hinky things around a deadly crash of a passenger plane leading him to the impossible conclusion that none of the corpses, burned up beyond recognition, are who they’re supposed to be. He snaps at a woman bringing him coffee, catches himself, smiles out of embarrassment and absolutely nails the nearly-invisible but unmistakable posture readjustment of a man who realizes he has the attention of a beautiful woman. I recognized him immediately, that physical ease, that too-smart gaze. It was Kristofferson.

I went through my dad’s record collection and there he was again, all over it, attached to my favorite songs by Kenny Rogers, Waylon Jennings, Roger Miller and Ray Price. I began to think of him in the same company as singers like Bob Dylan who relied on their lyrics to carry their uneven, unconventional voices; and Gordon Lightfoot who told intricate and terrifying-to-me tales of sunken ships and sneaking around backdoors. Kristofferson’s words, intricate and ambitious, haunted me in the same way.  His breakthrough as songwriter, made famous by Johnny Cash, “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” has a lyric that I think about a lot. It goes “Somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringing/And it echoed through the canyons/Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.” In terms of the poetry of a lost America, it ranked for me then with “I saw a shadow touch a shadow’s hand” from Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bleecker Street.” I learned later that in order to get Cash to listen to his work, Kristofferson landed a helicopter on the Man in Black’s front lawn. As a singer, he released his first single “Golden Idol/Killing Time” in 1967. It failed to find an audience then, but he plays it during a party scene early in his debut film, Dennis Hopper’s “The Last Movie” (1971), and it has since become, for that context and its rawness and the uncompromising darkness of its description of what happens to beautiful women seeking fame, a standard track in my personal rotation.

Over the next few years, I watched as many of Kris Kristofferson’s films as I could find. He has the same quality as an actor as he does as a singer. He isn’t polished. He’s not affected. He is absolutely only himself: the embodiment of the complexity and contradiction of the myth of the American man. He was a riddle I was intent on solving, uncomfortable as I was in my own skin. I saw in him a model for how to be absolutely, unquestionably masculine while being driven to write existentially despairing poetry disguised as song lyrics like “they’ll blind you with their wine so you won’t even realize/’Til you watch the face you’re washing disappearing down the drain.” He wrote my favorite Willie Nelson song, the aching “Help Me Make It Through the Night;” my favorite Waylon Jennings’ song, too, “The Taker,” in which he dissects exactly the kind of cad Kristofferson might be mistaken for, given his easy charm and way with the ladies. Maybe there’s a hint of confession in the song. Married three times in his life, he described himself once as having had trouble at times getting along with wives, but never with his children.

Kristofferson’s writing is vulnerable and self-knowing. Some would say “self-excoriating.” In it, he reveals a man one step ahead of his devils; haunted by the passing of the age of highwaymen and outlaw rebels which he celebrates in word and deed. On film, though, he’s easy. He’s cocksure and generally of good humor. He is a contradiction and there is a schism to him that is never entirely resolved by his performances. Though he often sits quietly, he’s never still. When the story proper begins in Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate” (1980), the bad guy played by Christopher Walken is introduced bloodily shotgunning someone into a dressed cattle carcass and even though Kristofferson’s character is introduced sleeping on a train and putting on his boots, we know immediately they’re evenly matched. I don’t know if he was a good actor, but he was an incredible presence.

Before “Heaven’s Gate” chills his rise as a fascinating actor working with smart directors, his popular screen breakthrough comes as self-destructive, doomed John Norman Howard opposite Barbra Streisand’s Esther Hoffman in blockbuster awards-season darling “A Star is Born” (1976). Though not the first choice for the role (that honor belongs to Elvis Presley), Kristofferson’s willingness to play a rock star deep in his cups and on the downside of his career makes him a memorable counterpoint to Streisand at the peak of her bombast. In an interview with People from 1998, he describes how he had “a half quart of Jose Cuervo in my icebox that they never let get empty” during the shooting of the film, and how he couldn’t imagine any creative living a rock-and-roll lifestyle at that point without dangerous indulgences. He credits seeing his character’s death scene in “A Star is Born” as the moment he quit drinking. “I remember feeling that that could very easily be my wife and kids crying over me… I didn’t want to die before my daughter grew up.” It may seem the obvious platitude, but Kristofferson’s willingness to be open about his struggles with addiction, his failures as a husband, the disappointments and rewards of a long career in show business up to and including his regret at not having fulfilled his lifelong aspiration to write a novel, are always poignant. More than poignant, for a man who was an army ranger, a helicopter pilot, firefighter, a Golden Gloves boxer to also be a Rhodes Scholar in literature who credited a philosophy professor as his greatest influence, is, at the very least, aspirational.

At his best, Kristofferson is the mold in which we all wish to have been cast. His divorced rancher David in Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” (1974) appears in an abused single mother’s life as not some Prince Charming, but as a rough-hewn, blue-collar guy, imperfect but essentially decent and unapologetic about the value of loyalty and the precious rareness of immediate and thunderous attraction and love. Scorsese pays tribute to Kristofferson as the paradigm for a specific kind of romantic when he has his Travis Bickle buy Kristofferson’s The Silver-Tongued Devil and I album for his inamorata Betsy after she quotes a couple of lyrics from the song “The Pilgrim” to him. What I know is when Kristofferson smiles that smile and his eyes crinkle the way they do, I’d stay in Tucson to live with him, too. Not because he’s beautiful, though he is, but because he exudes decency. He is only ever what he is and has no shame about sharing the contents of his heart. Scorsese recognized Kristofferson’s contradictions: the romantic lead, the tragic hero, the man out of time desperate to settle down but restless even in repose. He gets that Kristofferson, despite all of his gifts, was attracted to playing failures: those haunted by regret, ruined by too much knowledge and destroyed by the rudeness that comes with the passage of an era ruled by the honor of a man’s word to one overrun by the venal, the ordinary, and the desperate and ignoble. Look at his doomed ex-cop/ex-con Hawk from Alan Rudolph’s “Trouble in Mind” (1985), replaying the role as potential stepfather to another pair of lost souls. Look at his besotted Jim from Lewis John Carlino’s stunner “The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea” (1976), who is so blinded by the intensity of his love for Sarah Miles, misses entirely just exactly how twisted her young son has become. Hell hath no fury like a fourteen-year-old’s jealousy, either.

I love him as retired drug dealer Cisco Pike in Bill Norton’s “Cisco Pike” (1971), trying to stay clean and get a producer interested in his musical demo tapes while a dirty cop (Gene Hackman) blackmails him into laundering a few dozen kilos of pilfered dope. Pike is a good times guy, a good ol’ boy with a dream trying to get straight and betrayed at every turn by his honest intentions and the grasping incompetence of others. And I love Kristofferson as another outlaw, Billy the Kid in Sam Peckinpah’s rapturous elegy for the death of the Old West, “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid” (1973). One of three films he did for Peckinpah, the director who ultimately understood Kristofferson’s appeal the best, he’s clearly too old to play Billy the Kid (he’s 37 when the kid was 22) but Bloody Sam saw in him a confidence that comes with being absolutely certain of who you are. Billy’s asked early on why he, a sociopathic mass-murderer, doesn’t just kill the man who has promised to chase him down when given the chance and Billy grins that grin and says “Pat? He’s my friend.”

My favorite Kristofferson performance though, is a supporting role in John Sayles’ masterpiece “Lone Star” (1996), another of several films featuring Kristofferson with Oedipal implications (I wasn’t the only one who saw his patriarchal perfection as a challenge, it seems). In it, he plays the vicious sheriff Charlie Wade who rules with a murderous, draconian fist over a small Rio County, Texas town whose skeletal remains are found as the film opens. In flashback we watch Kristofferson corrupt his voluminous presence from something warm and light into storm clouds and the promise of unpredictable gouts of violence. He is, in this film, the romance of the American male reflected through the black prism of white nationalism, manifest destiny and cultural genocide. Charlie Wade is the horror of America played by a man who is all the hope of it. I have read anecdotal tales of audiences screaming when America’s dad Henry Fonda appears as the rapist and pillager in “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968). I confess I thought those stories were exaggerated until I caught myself in an audible gasp when Kristofferson’s revealed as the monster in Sayles’ elegiac western.

In an interview with Laura Hamilton for the Washington Post in 2014, Kristofferson says “I am sorry if I hurt anybody’s feelings along the way. It wasn’t intentional. I tried to be a good person. I think I did all right.” He says “I am grateful every morning I wake up. I’ve a big family full of kids, who laugh all the time and love each other. I feel very grateful with my life, being as public as it has, that I am able to have this now.” I think of what he said after “Heaven’s Gate” tanked in a legendary way, taking an entire studio down with it in what Kristofferson referred to later as an organized hatchet job. Despite the harm its failure did to his film career, Kristofferson said “sure, it put me out of work for a while, but poor Cimino hasn’t done anything since then.” And I think about how he said that he’d like his gravestone to be engraved with the first few lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on the Wire:”

Like a bird on the wire

Like a drunk in a midnight choir

I have tried in my way to be free

The rest of the song apologizes for any unkindness the author might have perpetrated, asks for forgiveness for any “untruths” because they were never meant to be personal or hurtful. He says he’ll make it up to you if he’s transgressed in some way. He promises he’ll make mistakes but he’ll own them and redress them if he’s able. He died on September 28, 2024, surrounded by a family that adored him. He leaves behind a legacy of how we would like to see ourselves as Americans, of how we actually are, and of who we could be and what we could accomplish if we could brush aside the anchors and hooks that attach us to our pettiness, self-interest and fear…of who we could be if we were only as free.