When Harry Dean Stanton walked out of the desert in the opening scenes of Paris, Texas, he entered a long-awaited stardom far beyond anything he could have imagined during his rural Kentucky childhood.
The film, which took the highest award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984, would be Stanton’s most lauded role. For decades, however, Stanton had been steadily amassing television and film credits. From early appearances in Gunsmoke, Bonanza and The Andy Griffith Show to mature work such as Repo Man, Alien and Paris, Texas, Stanton, who died in 2017, became known for his complexity, authenticity and, of course, his unforgettable face.
Of all his roles, Travis Henderson in Paris, Texas was Stanton’s favorite. “¡Qué lejos estoy del suelo donde he nacido!” he sings in the film. “So far am I from the land where I was born!”
The song “Cancíon Mixteca” was a real-life favorite of Stanton’s and a fitting meditation on his complex relationship with the Commonwealth. Stanton moved to California in 1949, and, in the eyes of some, he never looked back. In reality, though, Stanton’s Kentucky roots indelibly shaped him as a person and as an artist.
“I see it as when you’re truly home, there’s no more suffering,” Stanton said of “Cancíon Mixteca” in Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, a documentary directed by Sophie Huber. “No more leaf on the wind. No more crying. No more crying to get back to where you come from.”
Born in Irvine in 1929, Stanton served in the Navy during World War II (1944-46) and subsequently attended the University of Kentucky on the GI Bill. Encouraged to pursue acting by Wallace Neal Briggs, who directed the university’s Guignol Theatre, Stanton moved to California in 1949 to hone his craft at the Pasadena Playhouse. According to one biographer, he worked in tobacco fields to finance his trip.
“I remember Kentucky, but that was a long time ago,” Stanton said in Harry Dean Stanton: Crossing Mulholland, a documentary produced by fellow Kentuckian Tom Thurman (see sidebar on page 39). “I left home looking for work and found it here in California. I made many friends and outlived a lot of them in 84 years. I’ve been in Los Angeles a long time. Came here in 1949—Pasadena Playhouse. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m here now. That’s all that counts.”
Stanton’s somewhat evasive response might be related to mixed feelings about his Kentucky upbringing. He told Thurman that, even as a child of 6 or 7, he had decided, “Someday, I’m going to get out of there.”
Get out of there he did, with a career spanning nearly 70 years, roles running the gamut from the incidental to the critically acclaimed, and a vast network of personal and professional relationships that included names like Jack Nicholson (a one-time roommate), Bob Dylan, Rebecca De Mornay, Warren Oates (also a Kentuckian) and Sam Peckinpah. Even so, Stanton’s Kentucky roots persisted—both positively and negatively.
In a biography of Stanton published by University Press of Kentucky in November titled Harry Dean Stanton: Hollywood’s Zen Rebel, Joseph B. Atkins writes that Stanton’s upbringing, “with its traditions, and its memories, clung to him like a wet suit. It was there even in his rebellion against it, his rejection of organized religion, in his music, his aloneness, even his cigarettes.”
“It’s kind of a Southern story, in a way,” Atkins said in an interview. “He’s kind of a Southern expatriate. He left Kentucky to go find his calling, and one of his cousins, Ralph Stanton Jr., says he left and he never looked back. But I think he did look back.”
While Stanton’s relationship with the Bluegrass was complex—in part due to a strained relationship with his mother and the fire-and-brimstone religious culture he experienced during his childhood, Atkins said—he always considered himself a Kentuckian.
“He said that, in just about every movie he did, he would get a little piece of Kentucky in there,” said Jim Huggins Jr., a cousin of Stanton’s who befriended him while stationed in Los Angeles as an FBI agent. “He never lost fondness for Kentucky.”
Giving one example of how Stanton would sneak Kentucky references into his work, Huggins pointed to Fire Down Below, a 1997 film starring Steven Seagal. In the film, Stanton’s character, Cotton Harry, uses the phrase, “I sure God thank you!”—a rural Kentucky phrase Stanton remembered hearing from his uncle’s neighbor.
Another enduring influence of Stanton’s Kentucky childhood was music. Far more than a hobby, music was one of Stanton’s deepest loves. As a young man, he had sung in a barbershop quartet with his brothers and a friend, and after finishing his studies at the Pasadena Playhouse, he toured with the 24-member American Male Chorus.
“His Kentucky roots were all over his music,” said Jamie James, a guitarist, singer and songwriter who was a close friend of Stanton’s. “His mother used to sing Irish ballads to him, which he still remembered.”
Even when he was an established actor, music remained with Stanton, running parallel with and often intersecting with his acting career. James, who is lead guitarist for Dennis Quaid and the Sharks and was lead singer of the Kingbees, made several recordings with Stanton that will be released by Omnivore Records on Feb. 12.
“I believe music was Harry’s salvation,” James said. “It was his prayer, his first love, his healer. It wasn’t a business, wasn’t a hobby, wasn’t a side thing. It was something that you and I probably can’t really grasp. It meant that much to him.”
During Stanton’s final decline in the hospital, James learned to sing “Canción Mixteca.”
“I would go in and sing it to him,” James said. “The nurses and the doctors said, ‘Maybe he can hear you; maybe he can’t. We believe he can.’ But I’d sing it to him, and finally, one day, he gave me the thumbs up, standing over his bed with my guitar singing it to him. And I knew that he could hear me.”
Yet another proof of Stanton’s lasting Kentucky connection was his passion for University of Kentucky basketball. “He would always call me when a game was on and say, ‘Hey, are you watching the game?’ ” Huggins said. “I’d say, ‘Yeah, I’m watching,’ and he’d say, ‘OK, we’ll talk later!’ and he’d hang up. Then he’d call back an hour later—‘Did you see that shot?’ We’d watch the game staccato-style. Hang up, call; hang up, call.”
If Stanton never forgot Kentucky, it’s also true that Kentucky has never forgotten him. People don’t always know his name, but they know his face, said Lucy Jones, organizer of the Lexington-based Harry Dean Stanton Fest, and the festival’s goal is to connect the two.
Jones, the daughter of former Kentucky Gov. Brereton Jones, believes Stanton’s rich life experience informed his acting and set him apart from many others in Hollywood.
“He had served in World War II, and he had a number of careers,” Jones said. “He grew up in a world where people had real jobs, and he took that with him. Coming from the land and having family that worked on the land rooted him, in a way.”
Jones’ interest in Stanton was sparked after a midnight viewing of Repo Man at the Kentucky Theatre in Lexington. Growing up on a Kentucky farm, she had watched Cool Hand Luke (the only movie in the house) countless times. During the screening of Repo Man, she recognized Stanton’s face and was enthralled by his performance.
“I was 15, and I remember walking out of the movie theater and just being shaken,” Jones said. “I said, ‘Who was that?’ And someone said, ‘Oh that’s Mary’s uncle.’ As a kid, finding out that this person was from Kentucky resonated in such a special way. I carried that with me.”
In 2011, the first Harry Dean Stanton Fest headlined Hunter Carson, who played Hunter Henderson in Paris, Texas, and premiered Thurman’s documentary Crossing Mulholland. Subsequent festivals featured guests like director Monty Hellman, Dennis Quaid and the Sharks, Crispin Glover and Stanton himself as the guest of honor in 2014.
The 2020 festival was canceled due to COVID-19, and it’s too early to predict what will be possible in 2021. Regardless, Jones is confident that something will work out. It always does.
“The strange thing about Harry was a sense of magic around him—everything always fell into place when you were in his orbit,” Jones said, describing a series of coincidences that led to the organization of the festival. “There’s a magic that surrounds Harry Dean Stanton, and once you are pulled into it, it’s just a fairy tale.”
Behind the Sceneswith Kentucky Filmmaker Tom Thurman
With 36 documentaries under his belt as a producer and director, Kentucky filmmaker Tom Thurman has highlighted many aspects of the arts, from musicians to actors to filmmakers to writers. But it was another form of art that drew him to film.
“I was initially inspired to be a filmmaker because of my interest in painting,” Thurman said. “So, when in high school, after stumbling upon some foreign films on an independent television station in Louisville, I was inspired with the notion of how to make the paintings move. That started it all.”
Thurman has produced or directed documentaries on subjects as varied as independent African-American cinema, traditional mountain music, the 1921 Centre College football team, 19th-century utilitarian art and the Louisville-based Actors Theatre. The majority of his films, though, have centered around people, from Warren Oates to Sam Peckinpah to Robert Penn Warren to Harry Dean Stanton.
While his work is diverse, Thurman says it’s unified by a consistent theme: “That people pay a price to make art, but the payment is returned many times over when you connect with others.”
Harry Dean Stanton was one such soul, marked by solitude and a measure of withdrawal. Thurman said he could be open, prickly, funny and aloof, all in the same interview.
“Harry Dean could keep you at a distance and then let you in when the time was right,” Thurman said. “He would rarely answer my questions. He would give me a great response that I could use somewhere, but he was very evasive. After accumulating years of his evasions, I realized I had a program.”
An “unabashed Harry Dean fan,” Thurman said he was surprised to learn just how strong Stanton’s Kentucky ties remained.
“[The biggest surprise I encountered] was that he indeed had a legitimate tie to Kentucky that was very much a part of who he was, despite the fact that he hadn’t lived here in many, many decades,” he said. “He still considered himself a Kentuckian, and that oozed through the cracks of his characterizations.”
Stanton had an unmistakable reality about him, Thurman said, an authenticity that was recognizable in the documentary and in his many onscreen roles.
“So many times on the screen, there are some people that kind of blend into the background, and you confuse with others,” he said. “You never confused Harry Dean with anybody else, and that’s a great talent to have.” — Joel Sams