In the fall of 1989, accompanied by my friends Nat and Wistie Jobe, I drove the 45 minutes from Woodberry Forest School to the no-longer-existing Seminole Square Cinemas in Charlottesville to see Jeff and Beau Bridges and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys. Like every multiplex in the 1980’s, Seminole Square offered a vast asphalt lot for easy customer parking. I pulled into a convenient spot, exited the car with my two passengers, pushed the automatic door lock, and slammed the door just a nanosecond before I realized that I’d left the keys in the ignition. Nat and Wistie laughed, then shrugged: we could worry about the keys later. We enjoyed the movie (a bargain matinee starting circa 5:00 p.m.), and emerged from the theater around 7:00-ish to rejoin reality. My white Toyota Camry was still locked, and the keys were still inside.
Only here’s where this story, though historically accurate, enters the realm of magic realism, of ineffable grace, of astonishing luck, of Hollywood happy endings. While we stood at my car and tugged fruitlessly on the handles of locked doors, a box truck selling specialty tools drove right past us in the parking lot, and Nat flagged it down. Never before or since in my entire life have I seen such a truck, and I still can’t understand why one would be driving through the parking lot of a movie theater early on a Saturday evening. But there it was, as if we were characters in a poorly plotted television movie, and Nat was able to purchase a slim t-shaped aluminum jimmy apparently designed for the sole purpose of enabling car thieves. But this device required some practice and a fine touch in order to catch exactly the right bar at exactly the right spot to work the mechanism that would unlock the car door. Nat and I took turns trying it. We looked somewhat like preppy craftsmen trying to churn tiny servings of butter inside the doors of my automobile.
During one of Nat’s turns a black sedan pulled up beside us, and a couple emerged. It was getting to be time for the next showing of the movie.
“We’re breaking into cars,” Nat said to the emerging occupants of the sedan without looking up.
“You’re arrested,” said the man, and that’s when I recognized the speaker as Sam Shepard. His companion was Jessica Lange, who said nothing, but who looked right at me with a joltingly thrilling smile that astonished me into speechlessness. For that moment I was no longer in an urban parking lot, but away in a vast green meadow at midnight with other deer hypnotized by high beams. Nat never noticed. Wistie grinned.
I thought of that encounter many times over the past couple of weeks as I was reading Robert Greenfield’s excellent biography True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times. The man I glimpsed in the parking lot was cheerful and quick-witted and clearly enjoying the chance to take his partner Jessica to a movie starring her old buddy Jeff Bridges. However, the man I met in Greenfield’s book left me feeling the way I do at the end of any great tragedy: not pity and fear, exactly, with apologies to Aristotle, but pity and awe. The pity arises from the way so many calamities were the result of the man’s own poor choices; the awe, from the astonishing heights to which this kid out of nowhere rose. Shepard was just a couple of years older than I, but when I was 19, I was a sheltered little undergraduate taking English courses and pledging a fraternity. When Shepard was 19—and Greenfield describes this moment in a glorious opening chapter—he arrived penniless in New York City, all alone and ready to make his fortune, but so broke that he had to sell a pint of blood in order to get his first meal. I was in the audience for the disastrous production of Shepard’s True West at the Public Theater in 1980. I was also in the audience at the New York Theatre Workshop to see Shepard perform in Caryl Churchill’s A Number in late 2004. That’s a play about a man (Shepard) who has cloned several versions of his son (all played by Dallas Roberts). I can see why anyone would want to perform in a play by Caryl Churchill, but after reading this book, I think Shepard would have been better cast as the multiple clones. In his polymathic life he achieved fame in a number of incarnations: prolific playwright and screenwriter, memoirist, poet, movie star, rock musician, stage actor, father, philanderer, cover model. The man who played Chuck Yeager in the movie The Right Stuff also won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for writing Buried Child. This robust amalgam of Falstaff, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Randall P. McMurphy, this gigantically vibrant dynamo, died of Lou Gehrig’s disease at age 73. Up to the end he was driving his truck with his knees and elbows when his hands wouldn’t work.
Shepard’s story was a real-life wonder, but I’ve also encountered fictional marvels this month, specifically the final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon Prime, and I must say that the title does not lie. Mrs. Maisel, as played so well by Rachel Brosnahan, truly has been marvelous for all the preceding seasons, but in this one, the best of all, the writing in the show has risen to the celestial. Every time I think I know where a plot is going, I turn out to be delightfully wrong. We faithful viewers have been watching Midge Maisel’s career advance, hit setbacks, recover, hit more setbacks, and painstakingly and hilariously thrive. This season, however, in the second episode, the writers make the startling and, as it turns out, brilliant decision to go all Citizen Kane on us. The episode begins not with a newsreel, but with a piece on Sixty Minutes about Midge’s life and career. No spoilers here. I am about to become quite nonspecific. But, just as Herman Mankiewicz did with Charles Foster Kane, we get the complete story of Midge’s career in a few minutes, and then we spend the rest of the season learning how such a turn of events came to be. And the results are entirely satisfying.
The final episode aired today, May 26, and I just finished watching it. Without spoiling a thing, I can declare with gratitude and relief that the finale rises to the challenge of capping a superb season for a superb series. Some may quibble with the epilogue set in 2005, but I’m already getting over my initial misgivings to appreciate all the subtleties and complexities of the final image before the credits roll. Thank you, Mrs. Maisel, for giving us so much color, choler, cleverness, and craft for five extraordinary seasons. Long may you stream.