Kris was an army captain, a helicopter pilot, Rhodes Scholar, an actor, a heartthrob and an amazing songwriter. A moment that resonates with me is Kristofferson’s response when Sinead O’Connor was booed off the SNL stage for criticizing the Catholic Church’s deliberate ignoring of child sexual abuse by its own. She ripped up a photo of the pope. Kristofferson was told to get her offstage but instead he comforted her. His kindness is what I will remember most about him.
Articles about Kris Kristofferson, since he died, list his songs and his movies, but none that I’ve seen mentions /The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea/. It was one of the drive-in movies that my friend Jeff Coburn’s mother took us to in their pickup truck with their living room couch lengthwise in the truck bed. She parked sideways across two spaces and we used two speakers. There were plenty of empty spaces in the lot; this wasn’t rude.
ReplyDeleteHere’s how I remember it: Kris K. played a sailor who met a waitress, became friends with her, and stayed at her giant old house when he was ashore. She had a little boy, who I half-remember heard and maybe peeked in on, her and Kris having sex and being happy with each other. Kris and the little boy got along fine, but the little boy had a psychotic, manipulative friend who, for no apparent reason, persuaded him to poison Kris, who talked slower and slower, fell asleep peacefully and died, while the boys watched, on a hill overlooking the ocean. The end. It was puzzling. He fell from grace, I got from the title, but what had he done wrong? Was the movie telling us that he should have stayed on his ship, away from the waitress, and not made the sea jealous enough to mind-control available boys to kill him? Or just that you should always be careful and never eat anything you didn’t make yourself? I leaned toward the second message. I still, whenever someone gives me a brownie, ask them if it’s a normal brownie, not a weed brownie, and if I feel weird about the way they answer I don’t eat it. I’m not unduly afraid of being poisoned to death, I just never liked being high. Some people like it.
I’ll go look the story up later and find out if that was exactly how it went. It was like fifty years ago. Sometimes I see a movie again after decades and find out that a whole important scene I remember from it is not there, or is there but so different in effect on the feel of the movie that it seems like someone sabotaged it. And I’m not talking about movies where there are several versions because of a conflict between the studio and the director, like /Blade Runner/ and /Brazil/ and so on. I’m talking about, for example, /The Whole Wide World/ about Robert E. Howard, inventor of Conan the Barbarian. One scene in particular is totally different from how I remember it, and my way is better (in that case).
Now here's the weird thing. I just looked it up. The movie was filmed in England, not California. There were several boys. The main character boy was intensely jealous about his mother and initiated the plot to murder the sailor. And the movie came out in 1976, years after I'd lost touch with Jeff; we couldn't have seen it together.
Also, you're right, Marilyn. A central image of who Kris Kristofferson was in real life, was the moment with Sinead O'Connor on that stage. And none of the big-market media obits that I saw mentioned that, either.