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Jessica In Love: Jessica Lange Tells It Like It Was With Baryshnikov, Sam Shepard, and Life On The Edge Vanity Fair October 1991

Full-Tilt Jessica

Jessica Lange may be an intoxicating star, but she’s never found a better role than the one she plays in real life. What does she think now about her wild bohemian passions, Hollywood, family life in the Minnesota woods, and her coup de foudre romances with Paco, Mikhail, and Sam? NANCY COLLINS has a candid heart-to-heart with Lange, who next stars in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear

“When we started it,” says Jessica Lange, referring to her famous romance with Sam Shepard, “it was never with the intention that we were going to run off, live together, have a family, do all these…regular things. It was just this unbelievably passionate love affair. But then we just couldn’t give it up.”

Lange is sitting at the long, rough-hewn pine table that anchors the cozy kitchen of her Minnesota cabin, remebering the first time she ever set eyes on Shepard, before the shooting started on Frances. “It was one of those horrible meetings in the director’s office…he was talking to a couple of different actors for Sam’s role. I’d seen Sam in Resurrection and there was something about him that struck such a familiar chord, probably because I’d spent the last fifteen years with foreigners, I’d lived with a Spaniard, then this Russian, and there was something about Sam…his long legs…I immediately felt I knew something about him, that wildness, that typically American wildness, a no-restraints outlaw quaility.

“The director introduced us and then he just up and left. We’re both terribly shy and we’re just sitting there. I had Shura [her six-month-old daughter by Mikhail Baryshnikov] in her stroller and Sam looked like he was ready to run out. We were both doing this,” she says, raising her hands as if pushing something away. “We’re both very judgmental, so we were judging each other. Then we went away on location [in Seattle]. Movie sets are the most seductive places in the world–there’s nothing like them for creating an ambience of romance and passion. I had a feeling Sam and I were going to fall in love.”

Which, of course, they did–despite his wife (O-Lan Jones) and Lange’s ongoing relationship with Baryshnikov. “I don’t exactly remember the…uh…footwork,” she says. “Sam was so mysterious in those days. He was always disappearing. He had this whole thing going on with music and nightlife. I never had any idea what this man was up to. I was so completely wrapped up in playing Frances, having a new baby…It was almost more than I could handle.”

But she didn’t expect to be handling it that long; she assumed it was merely an on-set fling. “I thought I’ll go back to my life, which meant Mischa.”

Did Baryshnikov know about the affair with Shepard? “It was like, I didn’t know he was seeing Lisa, you know?” she answers, referring to Lisa Rinehard the ABT ballerina whose long-standing affair with Baryshnikov bore him a son, Peter, two years ago. “I’m sure we both knew, but it was never discussed. Then this thing with Sam just snowballed. It was meant to be, that’s all.”

Soon after shooting on Frances wrapped, the two were secretly rendezvousing at places like the Chateau Marmont. Things got trickier when she flew to New York ot film Tootsie, while Shepard staying in Marin County with his wife and thirteen-year-old son, Jesse Mojo.

Lange, meanwhile, had also decided to divorce her husband, Paco Grande, whom she’d married in 1970.

So–let’s get this straight–she was divorcing Pace, living with Mischa, and sleeping with Sam, right? “Talk about complicated!” she laughs, “I was so overwhelmed that ever since I’ve been trying to simplify my life. It was a mess.

Trying to untangle things, Lange ultimately moved out of the upstate-New York house she shared with Baryshnikov. "I can’t be that duplictious. It’s not my nature. I moved to L.A.”

A happy ending? Not yet. Momentarily reunited, Lange and Shepard soon split. “It was a no-win situation,” she explains. “He was married and I had a little year-old baby. And when we were together we were so wild–drinking, getting into fights, walking down the freeway trying to get away–I mean, just really wild stuff. I didn’t want to keep going in that direction. So we quit talking. Then, through the works of some good friends, we got back in touch and that was it. He left his wife. I was in Iowa doing pre-production for Country, so he met me there, and we drove to New Mexico, and that’s where we settled.” But wait, what about Mikhail?

“When Sam and I ran off together, Misha didn’t know. We were living seperately. I knew he was with Lisa, even though they weren’t living together–that has been fairly recent. But it still came as a great shock when I told him I was in New Mexico with Sam…All the stuff Misha and I had done before, having affairs–he’d had his share, much more so than I–was very European. You’re with somebody else or have some kind of minor dalliance or whatever…that’s acceptable as long as you know where your home is, who your partner is. The fact that he or I was having an affair didn’t alter our relationship. We were still together.”

“But when I called Misha and said I was living with somebody else, that was the ultimate betrayal. He just hung up the phone and we didn’t speak again for two years. It was a painful situation for all of us. I would never want to go through that again.”

Still, Lange feels, they had no choice. “Sam and I were so much in love, so wild about each other and being together. We were absolutely inseperable. We couldn’t even go to the grocery store without each other,” she says, breaking into a smile.

And what is it about him that flipped her life upside down? To anyone who saw Sam Shepard turn gum chewing into an art form in The Right Stuff, Lange’s answer is not suprising. “He’s a great man, a natural man, which is rare. I’ve been with a lot of men and I’ve known a lot of men. And you know I’ve had romances with what you’d call famous men, and none compare to Sam in terms of maleness.”

He is well matched. At forty-two, Jessica Lange remains the epitome of uncontrived female sensuality, a woman whose sexual and emotional heat on-screen has been magnified, if not eclipsed by her private life. Yet her allure is quiet; her glamour resides in the fact that she eschews it. On this rainy summer Thursday, she wears not a lick of makeup, and her short blond-streaked hair, roots unapologetically dark, is more brushed aside than combed. Her baggy beige Bermuda shorts and loose, embroidered black T-shirt camoflouge her curves–which are kept in check, she notes, only by long walks. And while her small round perscription sunglasses look like Armanis, they could just as well be from the dime store. Surrounded by four adoring dogs, she looks like what she is, a mother on vaction with her three kids.

Every Christmas and summer you can find Lange and her family on this 120-acre stretch of spindly poplars, deep in the northern woods of Minnesota, an hour out of Duluth and several miles down the two-lane blacktop from where her mother and sister live. It is, quite literally, The House That Jack Built: Lange bought the property and began constructing the cabin with money she made from The Postman Always Rings Twice, in which she co-starred with Jack Nicholson. It’s a country house Ralph Lauren would kill for; tamarack-beamed ceilings, an antique upright piano, three red-and-green Mennonite quilts from Lange’s large collection covering one living-room wall, and, over the massive stone fireplace that divides the living room and kitchen, a long horn steer skull. Almost everything in the kitchen is made of pine except the silver-and-black wood-burning stove and the refrigerator, which has a child’s crayon drawing Scotch-taped to the door, inscribed “To Dad, Love, Walker.”

Lange would live here full-time, but Shephard feels hemmed in by the forest. “He gets ‘horse eyes’,” she explains indulgently. He is now on location in South Dakota, where he’s filming a role in Thunder Heart, yet another of the movies the “keep him in the horse business.”

Shepard’s passion for breeding horses and playing polo anchors the family most of the year on a 110-acre farm in rural Virginia, where life for Lange revolves around “all that suburban-housewife stuff, getting the kids to school, picking them up, taking them to music lessons,” Shepard, meanwhile, works daily, “when he’s writing” or busies himself with “horse activities.” Both, she says, share in the parenting. “Sam loves to read to them. They’ve been read to practically since they were out of the womb. And sometimes he’ll do their music lessons with them. He’s involved in everything.

"It’s a regular existence,” she says, “but after a couple of months of it I’m ready to go mad. I can’t wait to go on location, start a movie, study a character–anything that gives me a release.”

Nevertheless, Lange hasn’t even considered living nearer to the Industry. “I’ve never felt I had to live out there, and I don’t see that it’s harmed my career,” she says, “If I go to every Bar Mitzvah in Hollywood it’s not going to make any difference. My agent says, ‘You should come out to L.A.’ And I say 'Why? And he says, 'It would be good for you to be seen.’ Seen doing what? Seen at Spago by a half-dozen agents?” She pauses thoughtfully. “Sometimes, I think I have chosen a very isolated existence…

"But there are just so many actresses of a certain age who can carry off a part I’d be interested in playing,” continues Lange, who has been nominated for four best-actress Oscars (Frances, Country, Sweet Dreams, and Music Box) and won once for best-supporting actress (Tootsie).

“There’s Sally [Field], Sissy [Spacek], Goldie [Hawn], Susan [Sarandon]…I can live up here in the north woods and they’re still going to send me a script if they want me. I can honestly say I don’t sit home with envy, thinking, Oh, God, why wasn’t I the nurse in Dying Young?”

She did, however, regret missing out on at least one role; the part of Jake La Motta’s wife in Raging Bull. “I was the first person they were considering,” she recalls. “Then this girl [Cathy Moriarity] walked in who was The Person and she was great in it.” But a year ago, “Marty and Bobby” decided she was The Person for Cape Fear, a remake of the suspenseful film noir, which is due out this winter. (It will be followed by her CBS “Hallmark Hall of Fame” special, O’ Pioneers!, and her Broadway debut as Blanch DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire in the spring.) Marty Scorsese is probably the best American filmmaker working now,“ declares Lange, who plays the wife of a lawyer (Nick Nolte) who is being stalked by an ex-con (Robert De Niro). "He works from the point of view of already having seen the film in his head, so he knows exactly what he needs for each scene.

"I was stunned he didn’t win the Oscar and Goodfellas didn’t win Best Picture,” she adds, “Dances With Wolves was lovely, but Goodfellas was the work of a really fine filmmaker. It’s so ironic. In 1981 when Marty and Raging Bull were nominated, do you know who won the Oscar? Robert Redford and Ordinary People. This year it was 'Well, here’s the next decade’s golden boy and his first movie.’ Ordinary People you remember as a nice movie, but Raging Bull is now in the Museum of Modern Art. But they just love mediocrity. They idolize it because it’s something they can understand.”

Still Lange says she’s had “no bitter experiences in Hollywood. They’ve always been very good to me. I’ve don what I wanted to do. They paid me a lot of money, more than I every imagined possible, and they even let me make a movie or two that I wanted to. So I’ve nothing to complain about.”

In fact, her only objection to the Industry these days is “the business side, accountants turned studio heads making creative decisions,” and movies like Pretty Woman. “Why are they trying to glamorize this prostitute?” she wonders angrily “What’s that supposed to present to young women? They’re going to assume it’s like Cinderella, that you can be sucking cock on Hollywood Boulevard and the next thing be married to a multimillionaire, looking like you’re fress off the farm.

I watched Steel Magnolias not long ago and Julia Roberts has the potential of being a good actress if she doesn’t get sucked into…” Lange pauses purposefully. “Of course, I judge things by my set of ethics, and obviously the commercial side has never had that much sway in my decision-making. Julia Roberts is going to be offered everything now, whether she’s right for it or not. I don’t envy her at all. I’d hate to have been talking to an agent every day at twenty-three. I was having such a great time before I started making movies, living with no ties, no responsibilities. Sometimes I wonder why I ever got involved in this.”

By the time she was twenty-five and a big mechanical ape’s hand hoisted her into noteriety (if not stardom), Jessica Lange had already explored more than one jungle. “From seventeen until I had my first child [at thirty-two], I lived like a madwoman. I really burnt out my cylinders. There is nothing that I fell I’ve missed. I lived everywhere and, and believe me, did everything. I have gone dow the road full tilt.”

The road began in tiny Cloquet, Minnesota, where Lange was born the third of four children, three girls and a boy, to Dorothy and Al Lange. Lange surmises her parents’ attraction to each other was based on something very familiar. “My father was such a passionate man–which is what has directed my life. I have always followed the most passionate course.”

Al Lange’s passion manifested itself in a restlessness that moved his family around Minnesota tweleve times before Jessica was a high-school senior. Though he taught history and worked as a traveling salesman, among other jobs, “there was a certain degree of disappointment” in his life, since he never realized his desire to own a ranch in Montana.

“My father was an extreme personality,” recalls Lange, who is still obviously tender after his death two years ago at seventy-six. “He was a drinker, which is always schizophrenic. When it was good, it was better than anything in the world because he was such a big man, full of love, a great entertainer. People were drawn to him. My mother, on the other hand, was absolutely precious, so gentle. I’ve never her say an unkind word about anyone…She was completely devoted to her children–at the expense of her own life. I never remember her being out of the house.”

The Langes of Minnesota find survival through their families. Jessica proudly points out that her maternal grandparents, both of whom died within the last four years, were married seventy-five years, and that her own parents were married for forty-five years. When the conversation turns to her father’s death, Lange begins to weep softly.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through,” she says, her eyes welling up. “He was so pivotal in my life. Two and a half years ago Sam and I had started fox hunting in Virginia. Like everything, I did it completely backassward. I was on this wild hunt and the horse threw me. I hit my head and had a concussion. When I came to, I didn’t know who I was. I recognized Sam and knew I’d been on this hunt, but that was all. They set me on the horse and we started riding back. I remember staring down at the horse, saying, 'O.K., you’ve got to remember who you are.’ And the first thought that came to me was: I’m Al Lange’s daughter. Now, I’m a forty-year-old woman, I’ve got three children of my own, I’ve lived an entire life, and yet my first identitiy is as my father’s daughter. I told him and he loved it. He loved being the center of anybody’s life.”

“The overwhelming power in my family has always been the bond–how much love there’s been. So a lot can be forgiven…You always wanted your house to be like Father Knows Best. You dad coming in–'Hi, Dad!’–everybody running around and Mom coming out in her little apron. But there’s a whole generation of women in this family who lived with drinkers. It was just part of this life here.

"With my father,” Lange remembers, “nothing I did was ever good enough. With my mother, everything I did was enchanted. Somewhere in between I got a real strong sense of myself…The ability to remove myself when things got tough, to shut out everything else, was my survival technique. That flight into the imagination is what drew me to acting, where I not only had the fantasy, I could make it materialize.”

In 1967, armed with an art scholarship, Jessica left for the University of Minnesota, where she embraced the sixties counterculture with gusto. “Right away I fell in with these S.D.S.-ers, a very interesting group of fringe people, the whole credo of the hippie life-style.” Her college career lasted just over a quarter–or until soon after she me twenty-six-year-old Paco Grande, a dashing, sexy Spaniard whose father taught at the university. Part of a group of experimental filmmakers, Paco spotted Lange in a photography class and “that was it. The chase was on,” Lange says with a grin. “I’ve never met anybody like Paco. He’s always lived exactly the way he’s wanted to, never worked, always been involved in an artistic endeavor. Our life together was completely unconfined. Hew was extremely, you know, double Scorpio.”

Lange and Paco bolted for New York en route to Spain. They made it as far as the Chelsea Hotel before they were derailed. Lange’s mother had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and needed her. “She was a complete invalid who had to learn to speak and walk again,” says Lange. “There were years when it was almost like she was dead. The stroke came at a bad time for me because I was just striking out on my own and my mother figure disappeared. It was like the anchor as let loose–which turned out all right because I took a lot of chances that maybe I wouldn’t have otherwise.”

Lange stayed with her mother for a couple of months, but when she rejoined Paco she suffered from a guilt that “ate away at me for years and years and years. It’s a theme that repeated itself many times in my life: an absolute dichotomy of responsibility and desire. Before I had children”, she admits, “I always gave into desire. There was this horrible yearing to break away and this tremendous love and responsibility that I felt towards my mother. I split the difference, probably cheating both.” In Europe, Paco and Jessica lived for six months with “the flamenco Gypsies,” making “a real film for the sixties.” They drove a motorcycle to Amsterdam by way of Paris, just in time to catch the May 1968 revolution. “That’s when I decided I was going to come back and live in Paris.”

Returning to America, they toured the country, living out of the back of an Econoline van. “The van was like a space capsule,” she remembers. “We had nothing to do with the outside world. We lived on the road for years. Everything was on the edge. Paco was always trading a camera for a car and, suddenly, we’d have a car. We once had this huge old Cadillac with the fins flipped out. One day, it blew up, so we got out, closed the doors, and left it burning in the middle of the street.”

Jessica and Paco married in 1970, but only because “he was busted and the lawyer said it would look good.” Paco was charged with “flying in some grass, a little importation.” His plane “went down inthe desert [New Mexico]…We got married at the end of July because I had to get married while the sun was still in Leo. I was doing everything according to the stars in those days. Isn’t that the best reason for a marriage?” she asks facetiously. “Your old man’s going to trial and you want to do it before the sun’s out of Leo? How could a marriage like that fail?”

It didn’t immediately, even though Lange insisted on fulfilling her dream of living in Paris. Alone. She and Paco had settled in a loft in New York’s artists’ district, SoHo, where she danced and painted, specializing in colorful Formica boxes. But she had heard about Etienne Decroux, the master of classical mime and Marcel Marceau’s guru. “I rushed off to Paris to study,” arriving with a suitcase and $300. “An adventure, that’s all I was interested in. That’s why I did everything–hooked up with all the men I did, tried all the drugs I tried, lived all the different life-styles. I had no fear.”

For two years Lange paraded around Paris “wearing long, black velvet coats, my hair a mass of curls, and a very mime face, almost no eyebrows,” a tribute to here seventy-six-year-old mentor. “To find a great teacher is one of the rarest treasures in life, somebody who so encompasses you, so obsesses you, that you are forever changed. I’ve always been drawn to men who have this powerful presence, the power to obsess you.”

Paris had the same sexually liberating effect on Lange that “it did on Henry Miller. You couldn’t help but have beaux in Paris.” Despite a husband in New York. “Even though we were living seperate lives, there was always the idea we’d get back together. I finally left Paris because he was living with somebody and refused to take my collect calls. That was his last ploy to get me and it worked. I packed my bag, got on a plane, and came back.”

Her reconciliation with Paco was short-lived. While Grande decided to live in Los Angeles, Lange opted for New York. “We never lived together again, full time, after that,” she says.

By then, Grande was rapidly losing his sight, a victim of retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye ailment. Lange vehemently denies she left him because of his illness, as has been reported. They finally divorced in 1982. “It was a bad time because we’d always been such great friends, so crazy about each other,” she says with obvious affection. She eventually ended up paying alimony, “a big chunk of money. There was no reason I had to. There was a moment where it made me real angry. Then I started thinking back and thought, I had the money, he didn’t. This is how we always lived our lives. He would’ve given it to me if he had had it.” (Today, Grande is remarried, has a little girl and “the last I talked to him he was writing a libretto for an opera.”) Lange started studying acting. “I just assumed I was always talented at whatever I did,” she says matter-of-factly. “To tell the truth, things always were easy for me. In acting classes I knew right away it was something I could do. The only time I felt my acting wasn’t up to par is when I’d overthink it. But as long as I did it as thought it were a child’s game, in terms of total commitment of the imagination, then I’d be good at it.”

It is this innate self-confidence that not only fueled Lange but caused many to regard her as “an Ice Queen.” “There never was a haugtiness about Jessica, even then,” recalls a frequent visitor to the Lion’s Head, the New York saloon where Lange waited tables in the early seventies. “She may have been a waitress, but she acted like she was above it all, that she was doing you a favor to drop your hamburger on the table.”

In Paris, Lange had met Antonio Lopez, one of the world’s premier fashion illustrators, who was as well known for discovering talent–including Jerry Hall and Tina Chow–as for the pictures he drew, Antonio eventually hooked Lange up with the Wilhemina modeling agency, where, in 1975, producer Dino De Laurentiis sought out an unknown to play the Fay Wray role in his glossy $25 million remake of King Kong.

Though press releases at the time hyped Lange as a top model, she demurs, “I was a waitress. I was at the agency–if they ever would’ve gotten me a job–but I wasn’t the model type. I was much too short and never thin enough…But Dino called all the agencies, he was auditioning everybody in the world for that part.” Lange and another model flew to California. “Those were the days I had to borrow a quarter to take the subway uptown. Here I was, living in this funky little apartment in teh Village and the limo pulled up and I flew first-class.”

Unintimidated, Lange never doubted she’s get the role, even though it was her first movie audition. “Foolhardily, I believed I could do anything. I walked into this cattle call, weighing 114 pounds, looking different than the other girls–a lot of big, buxom blondes. Just from sight they weren’t interested in me. By the time it was my turn, the director had already gone. I did a screen test with the assistant director, who called the director and said, 'You better come down here and see this screen test,’ and I did it all over again because they called Dino.

"Now I’m thinking, Of course I’ve got the part. So I took off to see my sister, then came directly to Minnesota for Christmas. They were frantically looking for me because they’d just found this girl to star in their $25 million movie and I disappeared. But I had things to do. I knew they’d find me sooner or later.”

The nine-month filming of King Kong on a Hollywood backlot was, says Lange, “extremely lonely,” since “Paco and I, more or less, had gone our seperate ways. It was very sad.” Even more tragic, however, was the reaction to the film, which was creamed by the critics, who singled Lange out for particular ridicule. Her movie career seemed over just as it was beginning. “I never accepted failure at anything,” she says now. “There was no doubt I was going to succeed. But it was a terribly lonely time because I’d been drawn out of my most wonderful and interesting life-style into this moviemaking stuff.”

One of those who helped get Lange through the humiliation was director Bob Fosse, who later wrote her into All That Jazz as the Angel of Death. “There were a couple of men who were crazy about me when they saw Kong,” Lange recalls. “Fosse was one. He got in touch with me. We became friends and lovers. We had a wonderful relationship. We laughed like crazy. I loved Fosse because he was a renegade and there was such a dark side to him. He loved that whole seedy side of New York–Forty-second Street, the strip joints, the live sex shows. Fosse knew it like the back of his hand. We were in and out of places you wouldn’t even know existed.”

Their relationship lasted “on and off for years. There was something very seductive about someone so caught up in self-destruction. It was very much like what you saw in All That Jazz, with his drinking and smoking. But he was unbelievably sweet, tender, and generous. He was so kind at a time when a lot of people had dimissed me.

"There was, about Fosse, something sad. Profoundly lonely. That’s what I connected with more than anything, becuase I understood that lonliness.”

Jessica Lange was introduced to Mikhail Baryshnikov by Milos Foreman in 1976 at a party thrown by Buck Henry in Hollywood. “I remember seeing him standing at the pool,” she says through half-closed eyes. “I had never seen anybody so white. It was like he was transparent.

"I didn’t know who he was,” she continues with a sly smile. “In fact, I confused him with Nureyev. I didn’t know anything about the ballet world; I’d been totally unaware of his incredible defection. I had no idea the scope of his fame.

"I was definitely interested,” she adds, “and I knew he would call me, even though he didn’t speak English. We spoke French in the beginning.”

Baryshnikov was in town to film The Turning Point, but he was no ordinary movie star. “I was stunned at how people fawned over him,” Lange exclaims. “I’d never seen anybody treated the way he was. Balletomanes are some of the worst fans, and I fount it irritating, how people kowtowed to him. I couldn’t stand the attention, but Misha was great about it. And the more dimissive and rude he was, the moer adoring they became. It was an extraordinary phenomenon in this country, his arrival, his 'leap to stardom.’”

For the next seven years they conducted a realtionship the defied time zones and convential morality. “Misha and I ahd a great love for each other, but it certainly never anything you could term traditional. We didn’t share an apartment, didn’t do that whole number, but we had a great romantic life. He’s be on tour and I’d meet him at some wonderful spot, Paris or Brazil. Not falling into husband/wife roles sustained it…Besides, we couldn’t have really lived together–we had these knock-down-drag-out fights.”

Still, admits Lange, there were moments when she wondered if this was what she really wanted. “I wasn’t ready to settle down, but all the time, in the back of my mind, I’d think, Well, maybe we should be living together, becuase I’d come from a very American point of view: you had a man, you lived with him. So this was very European. It was a good thing I’d lived in Paris all those years, because there you just took lovers. And, more than anything, Misha and I were lovers. I always knew he loved me and was absolutely committed to me in his particular way.”

This did not include, she says, any requirement of fidelity. “We didn’t have a monogamous relationship, as far as I was concerned, until toward the time Shura was born.” Baryshnikov’s womanizing cause her little concern. “Every man I’ve ever been attracted to has been a ladie’s man. I like men who love women.”

“I’ve never found a man who was easy to live with,” she continues. “Each comes with his own set of difficulities. There’s a side to Misha that’s very brooding, Russian, melancholy. That romantic Russian-poet kind of thing. On one hand, that can be extremely enchanting. On the other, it can be kind of lonesome.”

Things become more complicated when Shura arrived, “because that was a transition we couldn’t make–into a family, Mom and Dad.” Shura’s conception, Lange says, was an accident but, for several years, Lange had been consumed with the idea of having children. “All my life I’ve been tremendously lonely. Having a child was a salve to my loneliness. You have these relationships with men, are in love and loved, but there’s nothing like the need of a child.” “Who knows? We might still be together if things hadn’t happened they way they did,” she says, clearly haunted by the memory of this failed romance. “But we were both very carelss about the relationship. We were young, you don’t understand how much time something like that deserves. Sometimes I think we should’ve made more of an effort to make it work, beacuse we did love each other so much. I think of him as such a great friend. We’ve come full circle.”

Baryshnikov feels the same pangs about Lange. “I regret that my relationship with Jessie didn’t work out the way we’d wanted and planned,” he told me not long ago. “It’s a big regret that will be there for the rest of my life. She was–and always will be–one of the very few women I have loved in my life. But now we are very good friends. In fact, we have a much better relationship now than we ever had before.”

The link in that relationship, of course, is their beautiful daughter, a willowy blonde ten-year-old who has her mother’s flawless porcelain skin and her father’s azure eyes. This morning, she left the house wearing baggy pants, a sleeveless T-shirt, and tennis shoes laced up with metallic orange ribbon, exuding and elegant sensitivity, “a goodness,” as her mother calls it. “Shura has a great sense of herself,” Lange says. “For a triple Pisces, she’s very grounded…She has an innate understanding that her father and I went our seperate ways…that I found Sam, and Misha found somebody else. Sam has been a great friend and a really good parent on a daily basis, but she’s never been confused who her father is. It’s always been clear it’s Misha.”

For his part, Baryshnikov has made himself a tough act to follow in his daughter’s eyes. “She adores him,” reports Lange happily. “She’ll probably find a man as romantic as her father. He sits down at the grand piano, plays a song he wrote for her, and you think, This is it, it’s not going to get better than this.”

“I’ve never seen anthing like it in a restaurant,” remembers a TV producer who spotted Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard around 1982 at Butterfield’s, a neighborhood restaurant down Sunset Strip from the Chateau Marmont. “They were literally attatched to each other over the top of the table. They kept twisting around, holding hands, then a hand would go up the arm, into Jessica’s mouth. I don’t think a lot of eating was going on, because her mouth was constantly full of his hand. They were just gorgeous and madly, wildly, passionately involved with each other. Once you realized who they were, you were fascinated: 'That couldn’t be Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard because she’s still with Baryshnikov!’”

“You go through life,” explains Jessica Lange, “you’re kind of in love, and then suddenly you have a great love.” She is curled up in an oversize armchair in her family room, ready to talk about Sam Shepard. “The worst part,” about life with Sam, she says, “is the separations. He’s not the kind of man who’s going to follow a woman around. He’ll come see us [she always takes the children], but he’s not going to pack his bags, sit on my locations for three months, and twiddle with the kids….Sam would’ve been happy if I never made another movie, if we could’ve lived together in the wild, idyllic manner we had in the beginning. But I kept wanting to act. Those separations became sources of real, um, difficulty for us.”

Isn’t she concerned that if she’s not with him, another woman might be?

“That’s probably a blind side of me,” Lange answers, “but I never think in those terms–maybe that’s partly the thing with Paco and Misha. I would go away, or Misha would go away, and I’d never imagine he was sleeping with somebody else–of course, he would be. It would never occur to me that Sam would be unfaithful, although he has a long history of it.”

And if she discovered he was?

“I’d kill him,” she laughs. “Absolutely, I consider myself lucky because I fell into the relationship with Sam–the only monogamous realationship I’ve had in my life–right at the beginning of the eighties. I was very lucky not to have been promiscuous during the last ten years. It would’ve been disastrous.”

If Shepard had had his way, Lange muses, he would have kept her “barefoor and pregnant. I was pregnant for three years. Sam’s one of those men who loves you when you’re pregnant–just thinks you look more beautiful than ever before, loves the big belly. It was great, except I get real dark sometimes when I’m pregnant. My mood swings are extreme anyhow, but when I’m pregnant I could be like Medea any moment, I’m so hard to live with. Sam says he went through it twice, he doesn’t want to live through it again.”

When asked to be interviewed for this article, Shepard stayed in character, always the strong silent type. “I’ve decided not to talk, ” he said. “I’ve taken too many risks in that area and been burned too many times. I’m not going to put myself out like that anymore, particularly when it has to do with something private.”)

Lange says their relationship is “constantly changing. I keep hoping that it settles into a certain dynamic where there’ll be no question Sam and I are best friends, which is hard to come by. To me, it hasn’t settled in completely. Because of the the obsessive nature of our beings, the passionate nature of your coming together–and it’s still there, the jealousy, the passion, the insanity–it’s hard to let the other thing emerge. When you’re in the throes of a love affair, it’s about darker emotions. You can sustain that for a while, but you’ve got to find something else at the foundation. We’ve got a lot, a whole life together, but we’ll also be best friends at some point. We’re very close to it.”

And what would she do if Shepard ever left?

Lange laughs, “I don’t think he ever will. You get inextricable connections with people…Sam actually buried my dad–he dug the grave. I was the one who told him his dad died. He was with me when I gave birth to two children.

"I never discard the possibility of anything happening in life, but his leaving,” she says, “would suprise me.”

What has suprised so many people is the way Shepard’s career, so brillian in the eighties, when he added movie-star status to his Pulitzer Prize, seems to have drifted. In May, the production ofhis latest play, States of Shock, a father-son drama revolving around the Vietnam War, was trounced by critics; three years ago, his cinematic directorial debut, Far North (starring Lange), was also panned.

“The criticism was so personal, so aimed at Sam,” says a puzzled Lange. “They create a myth about somebody in America, and as soon as it’s been created, it irritates them. They love him because he’s a Renaissance man, and then, when he branches out, they slap his hands. But Far North was a very personal, funny movie. It has Sam’s mark on it, his way of seeing things. I think Sam is one of the greatest American writers, especially in terms of dialogue, because it’s musical.

"I only saw States of Shock once. When I read it the first time, I was so moved because it was such a strong statement about men, war, this country, fathers and sons. Critics are so stupid. Look at what they did to Tennessee Williams inn the end. Maybe he wasn’t writing his greatest plays, but he was still one of the greatest playwrights. A certain honor should be paid these people. You don’t just dismiss them flat out. When critics are so hard, you get Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals on Broadway and nothing else.”

Lange and Shepard weather these storms together, retreating to the solace of their country life. Even sheltered from the outside world, however, Lange says she goes through black periods of depression, a lifelong problem. “Sometimes, I feel like a borderline schizophrenic because the depressions are so bad,” she says softly. She pauses, fiddling with two simple silver braclets on her wrist. “But it’s something you’ve got to work against–and I have for the last ten years. You have to be diligent, a warrior. It’s a daily discipline, a real concerted power you have to bring to your life to keep it on track.”

“There are time I feel so close to the edge that I could easily tip over. Then, other times, I feel much more centered. If it weren’t for the kids, I could very well be gone, emotionally or physically. These kids have been my salvation.” It is Friday morning and Jessica Lange is tired. The night before, she hosted a sleepover for four of her children’s young cousins, and now she’s giving a full report on the evening’s revelry to her mother and older sister Jane. It was a night of dancing and musical beds. An impromptu “prom” was held in the living room, complete with corsages of wildflowers and dancing to the Rolling Stones, with Lange herself boogying to that family classic “Sympathy for the Devil.”

While her mother grinds coffee beans, Shura Baryshnikov begins dancing around, waging a heartfelt negotiation to spend the afternoon with her grandmother. Lange demurs, saying that Shura will tire “Dotie” (as Jessica and her sister call their mother). In a moment, Hannah Shepard marches into the kitchen, accompanied by her noisy gang of cousins.

There stand, for an instant in the same room, several generations of Lange women. Seventy-eight-year-old Dorothy Lange, dressed in simple cotton pants, and sweater, quietly observes the scene. From the broad forehead and high cheekbones of her softly wrinkled face, you can see where her daughter got her looks. Jessica’s sister Jane, meanwhile, is a knockout in her own right. A big blonde beauty, as tall and long-limbed as her sister, he hair pulled back in a hurried ponytail, Jane has Jessica’s enviable skin and a more classic lovliness, along the lines of Candice Bergen.

Standing together, these women radiate a sense of strength. Though they’ve each been drawn to magnetic, unpredictable men, you feel they are capable of withstanding any crisis, of carrying on, even if only for the sake of their children.

“I’ve lived my life so wildly, without forethought and without repercussions,” Lange says later, “spooning honey into a late-afternoon cup of tea. "You don’t understand the repercussions of your own actions until you see them reflected in your children. That’s where it comes home to roost.”

She describes five-year-old Hannah Shepard as a “powerful personality,” and, indeed, she is all dimples and determination. Her brother, towheaded Walker, is an unusually tall four-year-old whose thin face echoes his father’s.

“I am trying, with all my will, to move these children into music,” says Lange firmly. “But they’re not buying into it.” Shura has studied the Suzuki method for the violin for five years. Hannah has begun the cello. When asked to play, however, Shura purses her lips; “I hate the violin.”

“She hates it because I’m so insistent,” concedes Lange. “It’s so tied up with my will, it becomes impossible to separate for her…She’s going to do whatever she wants to do. If it hadn’t been for his mother’s determination, Pablo Casals said, he might well have been a carpenter. I have that quote pinned to the refrigerator door….She’s very talented, has beautiful form and tone. She could be a violinist if she could get the passion behind it.”

All of her children, so far, “handle all this really well.” All this, of course, is fame, glamour, and the expectations of an impressive gene pool. “Misha doesn’t have any pretense about who he is,” Lange says. “At home he’s just like this Russian kid who loves to eat, sleep, talk and see friends. That’s the side Shura knows. Although she’s gone on tour with him, she doesn’t get caught up in that. The only time I get a sense people look at her is when I take her to ballet class. She has a beautiful foot”–but, no, neither she nor Baryshnikov wants their daughter to follow in his slippered footsteps.

Lange claims having a movie star for a mom hasn’t affected her children’s “choices or behavior. I’ve always taken them to the set, so making movies has been completely demystified. They see it from the costumer’s point of view, what my trailer’s like. I’ve always had the same makeup and hair people, so it’s like an extended family. When we go on location they know who’s going to be there. I’ve tried to expose them in the most practical terms. "This is my work, this is how I make money.”

As for watching their mother on-screen, Lange’s children have seen only Crimes of the Heart, the one video of hers she keeps in the house. “They like the story of the sisters,” she says. Her racier fare will just have to wait. “The Postman Always Rings Twice–Mama fucking on the kitchen table–is one they’ll look at some time on their own in some revival house in New York.”

Lange stops and suggests a walk out to the pond. Though the rain has let up, it’s overcast, cold enough for her to need the faded black sweatshirt she has slipped over her head. As we walk outside, four dogs, including Masah, the thirteen-year-old poodle (named after a character in Chekhov’s Three Sisters), scamper along side. Strolling out onto the narrow wooden dock, Lange explains that when the sun shines she and the children often spend the entire day here, lolling around in bathing suits. Returning, we climb up through the wild grass to the open-air porch.

Depending on the light and the mood, Jessica Lange looks like the fresh-faced thirty-five-year-old or a dangerously attractive woman in her forties. “But I never did think I was pretty,” she says. “There were periods when I liked they way I looked, but most of the time I didn’t. Now I look back and say, 'Yeah, I looked good. I wish I had enjoyed it more.’ I’d like to have appreciated the twenties and thirties more than I did, enjoyed that I was young and looked great, instead of torturing myself about thisn like my soul.” She rolls her eyes. “All that soul-searching, doing grim roles, playing unattractive women…now all I want to do is give up 'acting,’ play pretty women and sexy parts…Now that I’m this age,” she says, half joking, “all I want is to look…PRETTY!

"I find it humiliating,” she continues, “that women in this business are getting all this work done [plastic surgery] because they’re all forty-two. I have aged a lot. And I see it. I don’t like how I look now anymore than I ever did. Sure, I’d like to look like I did when I was twenty-six, but I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to have the face-lift. Fuck 'em. I’m not going to let them dictate that part of my life.”

The night before, awake “on mosquito patrol,” Lange says, she contemplated her career and concluded that, with Hollywood, it’s always good to leave before they tell you you’ve left. “I lay awake last night and thought, Maybe this whole period of my work is grinding to a halt. I began to wonder if it wasn’t time to, maybe, really quit, do something else.

"Within the next five years, I’m going to make a real clean cut. I’m not going to let it peter out, do a part every once in a while, because, ultimately, there won’t be that many to do. I want to have an absolute finishing date. I mean, is Jane Fonda still making movies? Faye Dunaway? It gets into this nebulous area and I like things definate…I’ve done many careers in my life, and suddenly”–she snaps her fingers–“I’m on to my next. Maybe directing, I’d love to direct. I’d certainly be good with actors.”

Whether this is an announcement or just a stray thought on a summer afternoon, Jessica Lange is clearly taking stock. Though she seems to have everything she could hope for–a successful movie career, a great leading man, beautiful children, money,and health–she confesses that happiness still eludes her. “If you looked at my life, somebody outside would say it’s happy, but I’m not a happy person. It’s not my nature. I’ve had a great life. It certainly has been jam-packed with excitement–except for the lonliness and depression. I’ve had a blessed life, very blessed. I can’t say I’m wanting for anything. But what’s your value system? You could say I’ve had a full life, unless you’re looking at it from a Zen Budhist point of view, and then it’s a meager life.

"I still feel there’s something ahead, that I haven’t found what I’m meant to do yet. I’m not going to suddenly become Mother Teresa, but at some point you have to get a selflessness, and obviously I havne’t done that. Having a movie career is not the end-all…”

Still, Lange admits, “I’ve always felt I’ve had luck, certainly in the obvious areas. And now I have the greatest blessing of all–these children.”

She pauses for a perfect beat. Then adds, with a provocative smile, “And I’ve been with great men, real interesting men…Men were always interested in me. If you sense that from the time you’re becoming a teenager…” Her voice trails off. “There were certainly a lot of girls prettier or more available or friendlier, but I just love men. And they like to have me around. But I’ve never gotten anything from the men I’ve been with. They haven’t gotten me any parts. I’m sure I’d be in the same position now if I had not had anything to do with any of these men.”

Still, she can’t deny that a large part of her mystique comes from the men she has known and loved. “They’re certainly the most interesting men I’ve ever met,” she says with a sexy grin. “That’s what I like about them.”

So there remains only one question, the one everybody wants to know: How did she get these guys anyway?

“How did they get me?”

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