TRUE WEST

A fresh biography of the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, actor, director, and screenwriter.

In Sam Shepard’s (1943-2017) world, everything is fodder to be twisted into one of his stories—including facts. In this fascinating biography of the larger-than-life theater legend, however, the focus is on keeping the facts straight, which is no small feat. Greenfield, a veteran music writer known for his biographies of the Rolling Stones, Jerry Garcia, and Timothy Leary, masterfully lets Shepard maintain his mythmaking, including his troubled childhood and run-ins with the law, but he balances it with outside corroboration. After he was arrested for DUI in Normal, Illinois, Shepard told the judge he got drunk with helicopter pilots involved in the conflict in Somalia captured in the movie Blackhawk Down, which included Shepard. He hoped he would receive a lighter sentence because of the military connection, but Greenfield writes that the sentence of two years of court supervision and suspended license “would most likely have happened even if he had not elected to commit perjury on the stand.” That kind of fact-finding serves readers well, whether they are interested in Shepard’s off-off-Broadway beginnings, his artistic process in celebrated works like Fool for Love, Buried Child, and True West, or his relationships with Patti Smith and Jessica Lange. Writing about the connection between Shepard and Smith, the author observes, “Completely at ease with one another, they seem to vibrate at an even higher frequency together than either of them could attain on their own.” Greenfield also injects useful real-world issues into the Shepard artistic myth, including how he took movie-acting roles to make money and would sell his letters and other personal papers to avoid debt. Impressively, the author accomplishes his biographical investigation without diminishing Shepard’s legacy as one of America’s greatest playwrights.

A masterful look at the wild life of an enigmatic artist that shows how captivating the truth can be.