True West by Robert Greenfield

Author:Robert Greenfield [Greenfield, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2023-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

Six years younger than Shepard, Jessica Phyllis Lange, who could “sing every lyric Dylan ever wrote” because he had been “a transformational artist in her life,” was very much a girl from the North Country. Born on April 20, 1949, in Cloquet, Minnesota, which she remembered as “a worn-out little mill town” about half an hour from Duluth, where Dylan had been born and then lived until he was six, Lange moved with her family twelve times and attended eight different schools before finally returning to Cloquet when she was sixteen. “I was always the new girl in town,” she said, “the outsider looking in. I’ve felt that way my whole life, like I never belonged in one particular place.”

Changing jobs constantly, her father, Al, whom Lange described as “a drinker” for whom “nothing I did was ever good enough,” worked as a traveling salesman, a car dealer, and a teacher. A powerful and charismatic figure who, much like Shepard’s father, had also experienced “a certain degree of disappointment” in his life, Al Lange taught his young daughter how to swim by throwing her off a pier. “The first time I rode a horse,” Lange said, “he gave it a smack on the ass and the horse ran off and he expected you to hold on, and I did.”

After graduating from Cloquet High School in 1967, Lange attended the University of Minnesota on a scholarship. Enrolling in the fine arts program, she intended to “get my BFA, go on to get an MFA,” and then “devote my life to painting.” When she learned that the drawing class she wanted to attend during the second quarter of her freshman year was full, she decided to sign up instead for a class in photography. At some point during the semester, the instructor introduced her to two young photographers who were, in Lange’s words, “leaving for Spain to make a documentary about flamenco Gypsies in Andalusia. And they asked me, did I want to come along? Yes, I said.”

The photographers were Francisco “Paco” Grande and Danny Seymour. Twenty-four years old, Grande had been born in Madrid into a family known for “its long line of distinguished doctors and scientists.” Seymour’s mother was the poet and actress Isabella Gardner. His father was the Russian-born celebrity photographer Maurice Seymour.

Lange and Grande, who by then had become lovers, then set off with Seymour on an international odyssey. After living with the Romany while following flamenco fairs around Seville, Lange was tear-gassed while taking part in the May 1968 street demonstrations in Paris led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit (aka “Danny the Red”), the organizer of the student strike that had shut down the entire country. After a year in Europe, Lange and Grande took up residence in one of the three lofts on the Bowery in Lower Manhattan that Seymour had purchased with family money. Having just parted company with his first wife, Robert Frank moved into another loft and became Seymour’s friend, collaborator, and mentor.

While

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.