THE ASTONISHING STORY OF THE♀♀♀♀♀♀
SHEPARD
( And why you’re going to love it )
When I was young, my parents had dumped me with a childminder in the back of beyond in Val-de-Marne, where I languished like stagnant water. It was in this atmosphere, half oppressive, half like roughcast you want to scrape your entire body against, that I found a way to escape. At lunchtime, I went back to her place for lunch. Usually game.
A COWBOY NAMED SHEPARD
Halfway along my route, there was a stretch of wall that was always covered in movie posters. Second-rate films starring David Carradine, or bootleg copies of Conan the Barbarian. It was amid this graphic jumble that I first came across the name Sam Shepard. He was in a film he had written, whose alliterative title had caught my eye: Fool for Love. An Altman. A fallow-period Altman. Somewhere between his peak and his triumphant return with The Player.
But an Altman all the same!
Sam Shepard, an almost-alliterative name. By 1985, he already had quite a career behind him, including his role in The Right Stuff, the finest film about the conquest of space. And Days of Heaven, the finest Terrence Malick. Yes, that’s how I am: I give strong opinions and avoid hedging.
And before that, he’d had another life on the Broadway stage, where he picked up invaluable awards at a very young age.
« The person I had admired since I was 10 was in Paris. »
I met him again when a friend suggested we go see Paris, Texas at the Arlequin cinema during a Wenders retrospective. I was 20. We were alone in the theater, more or less. And we took the opportunity to smoke a few cigarettes, marveling at the film’s stark, painterly beauty. When the lights came back on, after the last note of Ry Cooder’s guitar, the person sitting in the front row got up and came over to us.
And then I was struck by a tremendous sense of vertigo, as if my eyes were split by a dolly zoom like the ones in Vertigo or Jaws, because standing in front of me was the film’s actor. The man I’d admired since I was 10 was in Paris and had taken the opportunity to see his friend’s film, in which he’d shone so brightly. As my eyes did when faced with his lanky frame.
He invited us to have a beer at the café right across the street. One, then twelve. He lit up our souls with his stories of Broadway and Hollywood, and his desire to take on the authors’ scorched-earth politics. He was vigorous, wholehearted in what he said; he wanted to bring the system down and trample it underfoot in order to build a new one.
« Even back then, I wasn’t dreaming of Hollywood or skating down Sunset, »
He was old enough to be my father, maybe even my great-uncle. But he was fascinating and very handsome. And when my girlfriend went home and he suggested we go and polish off the minibar in his seedy hotel in Odéon, I didn’t think twice. Of course, after the first miniature bottle, we were already under the covers. I didn’t care if he thought I was easy. I saw myself as uncomplicated. Always ready to seize happiness wherever I found it, sometimes between a man’s legs. He started promising he’d cast me in his next films. I knew it was a drunken ploy, but it made me laugh to watch him put on a whole show just to get me back into his bed.
Even back then, I wasn’t dreaming of Hollywood or skateboarding down Sunset Boulevard, but rather of thinking about the future of footwear, of never becoming the shoe’s weak point—in fact, quite the opposite. We spent four more days like that, glued to each other. Making each other empty promises. And that was fine; it was part of the romantic game. It did our bodies and our cells good, giving them height and lightness.
I accompanied him to the airport by bus. He found it hilarious to travel with the hoi polloi, and I enjoyed putting him in his place for the length of a Roissybus ride. We never crossed paths again, and I was very sad to hear of his passing. So when this superb model came to mind, it seemed entirely fitting to name it Shepard, in memory of this exceptional human being.
