There was a story Harry Dean Stanton told sometimes about when he was in the Navy. He told it again a year or so before he died. It’s the spring of 1945, he’s on a battleship out by the Japanese islands, 19 years old, all metabolism and nicotine, smoking since he was seven years old but not a trace of it on him yet, no sir, long before a million last calls at every bar in West Hollywood had made his face look like your father’s wallet, crumpled him low down on some barstool like he’d just lost it all at a horse track. He was a cook on the ship and manned an anti-aircraft 40mm gun too. Late one night a Japanese bomber flew over them, way up there thousands of feet in the air, and all the gunners on the ships in the whole harbor stomped down on the pedal trigger like they were hitting the gas in a getaway car, spraying rounds everywhere, except for Harry, he never fired once, he just sat there in the dark as he bobbed in the Pacific Ocean, doing nothing and looking up at the sky. “I radioed into the bridge, they didn’t know what the fuck they were doing,” he would say. No one put even a scratch on the bomber, but afterward the Navy gave Harry a commendation for his conduct. “Cool under fire,” he said, and that was true, but you could say too that there was something a little nuts about it, a little peculiar almost, to find this holy calm wherever he ended up, all hell breaking loose out there while this kid just waited and watched and let it all happen to him.
The earliest thing Stanton could remember was his mother giving birth to a stillborn baby in the little Kentucky town they grew up in. His father buried the baby in a field behind the house, and when he tells the story he still remembers the name of the country song playing on the radio as his dead headed out the door. Everyone they knew was broke, the whole town was broke, they were packing up and moving all the time. But somewhere out on the road Stanton learns the whole jukebox of Southern accents, all those slick and scheming lowlifes, learns the technical trick of making them sing the way you want them to, but also something like a one-ness with these people, his people, taking them into his heart, the gas station cashiers, the boat operators with receding gums, the crooked lawyers. When he’s eight years old he sometimes waits till the house is empty, gets up on a stool in the kitchen, and hollers out these Appalachian yodeling songs by an ex-railroad worker who’s made it big named Jimmie Rodgers, sad songs about girls, prison, the mountains, and then there he is, Harry Dean Stanton, rollicking right out the real bad time he’s having.
He gets home from the Navy and goes to the University of Kentucky for three years, but drops out before he graduates—does it just for the sick little thrill, some kind of provocation for reasons that make sense only to the young man. “I thought that was a positive, independent kind of statement,” he says later. “I never liked being ordered around.” He goes across the country and studies four years at the Pasadena Playhouse, acting, theater, playing music at coffee shops. He snorts heroin three times and says he comes to understand the meaning of “Everybody’s Talkin’” (“It’s an enlightened state”).
When they ask years later what got him into acting he says the blues. He says, “Well, I’ve always been a searcher, you know, a hunter.” And so in the ’60s and ’70s he’s playing every kind of one-episode vigilante and hustler and smalltime radical you could imagine. He plays three privates, three sergeants, two Jebs, three Jakes, two Slims, a Vern, a Virgil, a Moss, and a Ringo. A fellow named Gant Henchman, even, no joke. Guys with some poorly conceived scheme of their own or rounding up the hostages in someone else’s. The job is killing them, but it’s the only thing they know how to do; they’re not sure if this makes them special or if it makes them a freak, but there’s almost dignity in it. Sure it’s agony sometimes to live like I do, sleeping on the ground, hauling in and out of towns, but imagine if I had to live like you, all you squares, you fake-noble deputies and innkeepers?
He shares a house with Jack Nicholson for two years in the ‘60s and Nicholson calls Harry “one of the truly unpredictable entities on the planet.” Stanton’s up for a part and Nicholson tells him, “I don’t want you to do anything. Let the wardrobe do the character; just play yourself.”
They’re roles that don’t really require more than an erratic kind of guy and the shiny forehead and grog of a hangover, but where other actors squint too tight or hoot too loud around a fire he plays it like a forsaken wanderer, a man with some real honest damage on him, letting the cheeks go slack, letting a mustache and all that jittery lank of his carry the scene. Fifty-one roles and six years into his career he’s still getting shot nine minutes into an episode of Have Gun – Will Travel.
He does this for years. More than that, even—an era of his life. These characters who always have a look of 9–5 exhaustion and resentment, who it seems have found the only towns in the Wild West where there is no fun to be had, only offices with no promotions, no great new man for you to become no matter how hard you try. “I got those roles because I was angry,” he says. “Because that's what I projected. I was angry at my mother and father because they didn't get along, angry at the church. On top of that, I had an extreme lack of self-confidence.” In an episode of The Rifleman he’s the sheriff’s son, going out on freelance for a bounty he saw posted. When he catches up to the outlaws they all laugh at him; they’re standing around a campfire and he cries out, “Everybody thinks because I got a bad leg that I can’t shoot straight? Everybody thinks because I’m a kid and I got a bad leg I ain’t good for nothing?...We’ll see about that.”
And the whole time he’s telling his friends he can’t keep living this way. “He kept saying, ‘I have to get out of this.’” That’s his friend and producer Fred Roos. “I was a man full of rage,” Stanton says. He’s making movies too, but those aren’t much different. He plays a cockfighter, a sidewalk preacher faking that he’s blind, a hitchhiker, John Dillinger’s stalled-out sidekick in a John Milius movie, and Billy the Kid’s sidekick in a Peckinpah movie. In the Peckinpah movie he pulls a prank during a landscape shot and it ruins the whole scene. In another movie some years later he gets into a fight with the director because he insists that he use a real baseball bat in a scene where he beats on a car windshield.
He makes the horror film Christine in 1983, and afterward John Carpenter sets him up to star in a television show where Stanton is supposed to play a private investigator. It’s going to be one of those ’80s procedural behemoths that pay for your second house in Palm Springs, with the bedraggled detective waiting on the pasta water to boil in some pitiful apartment, and Mary Tyler Moore’s production company is aching to produce it. “You’ll be richer and more famous and have more pussy on camera and off than you’ve ever had in your life.” That was what Carpenter tells Stanton, but Stantion is in an odd phase, a Christian time in his life, he wonders if those big plates of fat and fame might be no good for him, and so he passes on it. “I thought that it was an offer from the devil!” Stanton says later.
He’ll tell some version of the story multiple times, unprompted, some of the sequences almost identical even decades later. He loves the line from Carpenter about how much pussy he was going to be getting. “After so many years,” he says, reaching for a half-empty bottle of cognac. “Well, I wondered whether I had the presence, the ability and the sexuality to carry it off. It’s strange how being the romantic lead is such a sacred area—it seems to be such a jealously guarded area.” He hates when people call him a character actor, “Bullshit,” he says, and here finally was evidence of how much else he could have done, how big he could have been—Mary Tyler Moore wanted him to be on primetime, the land of dish detergents and hamburger chains, the American mainstream, and then his face right next to it all, so what the hell could anyone say about him now? I ain’t good for nothing?
About a year after Christine there’s a film festival in New Mexico, and Stanton is getting drunk all by himself down at the hotel bar. Sam Shepard sees him sitting there from across the room. “We were listening to a Mexican band that was playing American pop music instead of Mexican music,” Stanton will recall. “I was just rattling on. I wasn't pitching myself to him or anything like that. I was just talking, because we were both drinking.” When Stanton tells the story it plays almost like he’d known Shepard for ages, two cowboys in from the road confiding in each other, but the thing is that they were meeting that night for the very first time, meeting all by chance, and so what was going on down there was more like pleas from the drifter to the stranger.
And soon they’re doing shots of tequila together, all night right there at the bar, “I told Sam that I was sick of playing heavies and losers and trash,” says Stanton. “I wanted to play something with some love and decency to it. Sam just listened.” And a few weeks after they get back home Shepard has written a lead role just for him. It’s a movie called Paris, Texas; Stanton plays a father who’s just been through a catastrophic emotional event and has come looking for his son. The performance is a beautiful thing. He’s quiet, tender, obliterated and hoping he might build something new from what’s left of him, playing his face like a great instrument, spiritually old, ancient seeming, but in a way that makes him seem unkillable too, like a desert reptile that has learned to survive on the salt it licks off rocks. “There’s a tremendous amount of me in that character,” Stanton says. “I’ve never really had a family. I have two children that I’ve never really known, never really spent much time with.” The film wins the Palme d’Or.
And after all those years of angst blowing around at the center of him he seems to have been left free and smooth now that they’re gone, like they’ve done some kind of exfoliating at the level of the spirit. He gets into Eastern philosophy, deep space, this kind of pseudomysticism; he talks a lot about nothingness. For one interview he saves a sink full of dishes to do while he answers questions. He interrupts another one to climb up onto the roof in his bathrobe to check the solar panels. In an interview in his ’80s they asked him if Westerns could ever make a comeback and he says, “Who knows!” They ask him where they all went and he just says, “It’s just what it is.” In 1996 he gets robbed in his home, tied up and held at gunpoint, and talking about it a few days later he just says, with bruises around his eyes while he puffs on a cigarette, “I was lying there, thinking how it’s going to feel when my head explodes.” Here, so far from Japan, he had built a lifetime of cool nights on the ocean, watching planes go by.
And as he gets older he talks less and less. He mostly plays guitar, “Danny Boy,” Willie Nelson songs, Kris Kristofferson, Linda Rondstadt. He has a pair of binoculars he keeps by his front door so he can check the traffic on the freeway down the hill.
In 2014, three years before Stanton dies, Marc Maron is sucking on a nicotine lozenge and asking him has he ever tried them instead of cigarettes. “No, I don’t wanna stop. Fuck it.” The interview is so sedate and short on revelations and anecdotes that Maron records a preface to the episode with a sort of baffled reflection on interviews as a concept. Was there anything pure about a man’s life that could truly be shared? That could belong to him and that would not, in its offering, be diluted and demystified in some crucial way?
Stanton had made it all the way from Kentucky to Okinawa to Pasadena on a bus, and then out to the Great Wide Open hoping someone would notice him. He had been fucked into oblivion by drugs way up in the California hills and he had fed the coyotes that visited his yard right out of his bare hands. There were years where he got a little too maudlin and ones where he got too religious; too into women and too into nonbelieving. He had learned shame and fury and every different kind of humid stank that could hang on a Kentucky voice and he had chain-smoked until his apartment clouded up like he was frying steaks in there. What else was left to say? All of it had happened to him, it was right there on his face.
John Saward is a writer living in Chicago. You can follow him on Bluesky.