‘Cowboy Mouth’: Patti Smith and Sam Shepard’s onstage autopsy of their love
Life imitates art, and art imitates life. And, when two artists fall in love, the two things crash into one. It can be beautiful, it can be painful, it can be disastrous. However, in the case of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard, it was all three within one-act.
It was 1970. “No one expected me. Everything awaited me,” Patti Smith wrote about moving to New York City in 1967, and three years later, it was still true. Living in the Chelsea Hotel, embedding herself in the city’s artistic scene, Smith was only just getting started. She was writing more, beginning to make a name for herself, but mostly, she was living.
There was an honesty to her life then. She did her work, followed her whims, tried new things, met new people, and fell in love with them. In 1970, she fell in love with Sam Shepard, with no idea who Sam Shepard was. Though he was yet to truly break through into big-time cinema, Shepard’s name was already known. He was already an award-winning playwright and a writer that people were interested in. He had friends in high places, and he also had a wife—again, Smith didn’t know this.
To her, Shepard was a mysterious stranger she was enamoured with. For a year or so, their lives collided in passion, plumbing a deeply special connection. It was one of those perfect affairs that sent two artists hurtling into each other’s lives, resulting in art on all sides; Smith inspired Shepard, while he empowered Smith to take her writing more seriously. And together, they wrote Cowboy Mouth, a one-act play or an autopsy of the end of their affair, played out live on stage.
According to Shepard’s friends, Cowboy Mouth was “one of the wildest autobiographies he ever produced”, and both writers would have admitted to that. What had started as an artistic endeavour, with Shepard simply encouraging Smith to “Say anything,” telling her, “You can’t make a mistake when you improvise”, became something altogether personal.
Maybe that’s why the relationship between two artists is so fascinating and intoxicating—can they keep themselves off the page? Is it possible for the love of two artists working together to ever be anything but a reflection of their relationship? Written over one night, at the tail-end of a tumultuous love, as Smith uncovered the truth of Shepard’s life, the two sat together and basically wrote themselves a mirror.
“Sam was right. It wasn’t hard at all to write the play. We just told each other stories,” Smith wrote in her book Just Kids about how it came about. “The characters were ourselves, and we encoded our love, imagination, and indiscretions in Cowboy Mouth.”
Shepard’s character was called Slim, the nickname he used when he introduced himself to Smith. Smith called hers Cavale, borrowing from her favourite book, La cavale, but also from the French word meaning “escapade”. And that’s really what the play is about—Slim is avoiding his life, and Cavale becomes his escape, but because of that, their connection cannot last. As the play meanders through different conversations and ideas, with the two characters doing exactly what the writers were by telling each other stories, the core remains that despite the strength of their love, it will end.
“Perhaps it wasn’t so much a play as a ritual. We ritualised the end of our adventure and created a portal of escape for Sam,” Smith said. In hindsight, their play was a marker of that ending. If the love had to be cut off, they could mark it with something they made.
And they marked it with equal drama. Not only did they write the play, but they performed it, too. In 1971, the show was scheduled for a three-night run with Smith and Shepard playing their own characters. At the end of the play, Slim returns to his family. On the third night, Shepard did just that, failing to show up to the performance—and that was that.
