Val Kilmer’s Last Tango in Pecos

Would you buy a chunk of riverfront property in New Mexico from this man? He keeps Marlon Brando’s spirit alive at his own Tetiaroa, where his plan for a residential “eco-community-complete with ValZone products-may be coming our way. Joan Didion inner-tubing? Tom Ford stoking the campfire? Julian Schnabel manning the kiln? Lou Reed feeding… chickens? Chickens? What’s not to like? Steve Garbarino says: Send over the papers.

One week after an unflattering photograph of Val Kilmer circulated in the tabloids—earning the actor the nickname “Fatman” in gossip columns everywhere—the formerly swivel-hipped actor who played the rubber-encased Caped Crusader in Batman Forever and the leather-laced Jim Morrison in The Doors, asked me to come visit him at his summer rental in the security-gated Malibu Colony, where the bare-midriff picture had been taken.

“Come out to Val-ibu, in sunny Val-ifornia,” Kilmer said, sounding confident, almost breezy. It is customary for the current co-star of Déjà Vu and the upcoming CBS mini-series Comanche Moon to send up his self-obsessed movie idol image with friends. (“Enough about me, let’s talk about me” is a common refrain; as is his conversation-stopper, “But back to me...”)

A couple of years ago, during one of Kilmer’s more curious career junctures, in which he played 1980s porn star John Holmes in the procedural crime film Wonderland, and an emoting Moses in the theatrical spectacle The Ten Commandments: The Musical, we had met each other, laughed a great deal, and continued speaking regularly. Kilmer said he had a grand plan that he wanted to discuss—something about “an eco-village,” “a self-sustaining community,” the Newman’s Own franchise, and... Mark Twain.

Arriving at the beach shack, crammed like a spring break rental with surfboards and guy stuff, I entered the unlocked garage door to find the house empty. Rooms held messy bunk beds. Out on the sun deck, I watched a dog drag a Frisbee through the high tide. As it turns out, Kilmer was a few doors away, swatting tennis balls on a private court with his 11-year-old son Jack, who has long, blonde, surfer-dude hair and shares his father’s distinctive lips. Given the tabloid jabs, I was expecting some bloated version of Apocalypse Now’s Colonel Kurtz. But Kilmer walked toward me down the sandy drive, looking out of shape, but no big deal. If you’ve spent any time in Hollywood hideaways, everyone from Leonardo DiCaprio to lawn jockey Tobey Maguire have their In-N-Out Burger periods between their superhero fittings. And the “Fat Pack” of Will Ferrell, Jack Black, and Vince Vaughn were all wearing their weight defiantly those days in their respective box office hits. But there it was, that picture, circulating, gaining momentum, like it was “news.”

Kilmer says of it later, “I rented a house to run on the beach, ride bicycles with my daughter [Mercedes, 15], and surf with my boy, wanting to have a healthy summer and get in shape. So it was just bad luck that it wound up being a negative thing. Since there were photographers taking photos of me at bad angles, I was forced to surf less with my son. Knowing there were 30 photographers clicking away and blasting pictures off to the press in eight seconds kept me from enjoying my family and losing the weight. So I grieve about that. I know that if you don’t want to be photographed, you move to the wilderness of Montana. But with my kids, I’d think they’d be more respectful.”

Sometimes a great notion…
Kilmer, who is wearing his ginger-colored hair in a badger cut, owns 6,000 acres of rough-and-tumble land on the outskirts of Pecos, New Mexico, a farming community surrounded by national forest, about 30 miles north of Sante Fe, where he keeps a Pueblo-meets-log cabin spread with a dotting of guest houses, and a recently constructed tree house with wood-burning stove. (It is where he goes to reflect and pray; Kilmer is an avowed Christian Scientist.) It is a lot of work, and a lot of land, and the details are mostly handled by caretaker Pam Sawyer (who also oversees the ranch’s Angling Report website). Well-to-do fly-fishermen—who dole out an undisclosed amount per week to stay in the celebrity’s riverfront fishing lodge, have their meals prepared, and buy into a carefree run of the land—pay some of the upkeep costs. But now, Kilmer, who is restless in his movie career—still no Oscar, despite deserving it on many occasions (The Doors, Tombstone, last year’s neo-noir comedy Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang)—has decided to “share” the wealth by potentially developing (he hates that word) a swath of his sprawl.

The whole idea is pure Kilmer, pure Marlon Brando—the late, great actor and Kilmer intimate (they played opposite each other in 1996’s magnificent disaster The Island of Dr. Moreau). Brando always envisioned his Tahitian atoll Tetiaroa becoming a self-sustaining eco-resort, and the development of The Brando is now underway. (His UFO research center, however, did not make the developer’s cut.)

Kilmer’s plan is equally surreal, but designed with more humor—and profit—in mind than the acting giant’s. The mission statement is sound enough: a development of high-priced homes, constructed with indigenous materials (“Adobe, wood, and stone for natural insulation and heat”), and with the use of solar panels and a windmill system. Each house would be required by its “members” to have its own government-certified organic garden; its fruits would go to a co-op. “You’d also have to purchase space in the communal garden,” says Kilmer. “And, well, look, it’s fun to make plates and cups,” he says, referring to the planned communal kiln. “It’s not hokey. Have you ever done it? Fire them up, and look at that color!” The designer Tom Ford, a Santa Fe neighbor, could possibly help with the look of it all, says Kilmer. Same with hotelier Ian Schrager and Julian Schnabel, other friends of his.

Then there is “ValZone,” the name that Kilmer would like to give his food products and home accessories line, made on the grounds and patterned after the Newman’s Own brand. “I’ll be able to retire early, after I make my reed baskets and sell my bamboo,” he says, half-kidding. “I’ll be on Easy Street, with my Pier 1 Imports.” Testing his pitch, Kilmer says, “It will all be 100-percent organic, 100-percent profit. That’s the slogan. Here’s why: I like my GTO convertible. And if you’ve got a vintage car, you’ve got upkeep. I have two gorgeous children. My son’s school costs more per year than my four years at Juilliard, plus rent and airfare back and forth.” This sort of thing would be inscribed on the small print, akin to the humorous label factoids on Paul Newman’s not-for-profit salad dressings, popcorn, and lemonade containers. Kilmer would detail, on each of his products, where the profits would specifically go in his celebrity life’s incidentals. It’s funny, and at the very least, honest.

But would Newman sue? “Paul Newman’s stuff works because it tastes good. And I’m certainly not in his fame league. But he’s an old dude now, and he might be cantankerous at this time.” Kilmer takes it further. “My idea for the label is to have someone do a prosthetic job on me as Paul Newman, but instead of the drawing, it would be a photograph. I don’t think there’s a lawsuit, because I’m just goofing around with my makeup dude.” He stops to ponder the brand-marketing actor. “Hasn’t Paul Newman been sainted? I mean, he’s even got that organic dog food going.”

So, he asks, do I want to see the lay of the land for myself?

A month later, I fly into Albuquerque, and hit the road in a rental to sleep out under the stars on Kilmer’s grounds. But with plane delays, I arrive in Santa Fe too late, stay in a hotel instead, and plan to see him in the morning. I text-message him accordingly. The response: “Go back home. I’m over you.” Stupified, I write back, “What?” He responds a long ten minutes later: “Kidding.” It’s hardly the welcome mat I am expecting, but as friends of Kilmer know, it is a funny line one can walk with him. Like Brando, he seems to like keeping people on their toes, even friends.

The next day, I navigate the mountain and desert terrain, arriving at the Kilmer compound via a “Bat Cave” made of concrete that my SUV can barely fit through. His current personal assistant Katie (who confides she is hungover from a night of wine and singing by the campfire), the ranch caretaker Sawyer, and his house cook Margaret are all waiting to greet me, along with some some straggly young studio musicians, and his songwriting collaborator Mick Rossi, a diminutive former punk rockerturned-actor. The living room has been turned into a recording studio (one with stuffed raccoons and moose and elk horns, no less). There is a drum kit, speakers, a glockenspiel, and upright piano. Through the living room doors, the view of the river and its surrounding cliffs is nothing short of spectacular. The Waltons would pine for this porch-swing panorama. Miming the winding river—more of a creek for lack of rain—a garter snake drops from sunning itself on a nearby rock, and disappears into the waters. Kilmer has been suffering from a stomach flu, and back troubles, so he’ll be joining us shortly.

A buffalo named James Brown…
While I wait for the man of the house to finish being pawed by a masseuse, Sawyer, tanned and handsome in that Georgia O’Keefe way, takes me in a graffiti-covered Land Rover, along with her shelter mutt, on a bump-and-splash tour of the grounds, passing shaggy llamas and a dusty buffalo bull named James Brown. We cross the river in the truck four times, before returning to camp. There are stately pines, lush fields of buffalo grass, hallucinogenic desert bloom—sun-seared beauty everywhere. Kilmer’s new tree house is a particular treat in its remove and desolation. Celebrity tree-fort builder Roderick Romero did a subtle job of suspending the tin-roofed shanty off a rocky bluff. We stop at Kilmer’s Airstream
trailer; it looks like a UFO landed in the woods.

Back at the house, Kilmer appears in a T-shirt and cargo pants, red in the face from being in the sun. Rossi, formerly of Slaughter and the Dogs, plays acoustic guitar, walking around the grounds with his six-string like a ’70s folk album cover come to life, while Kilmer jumps in singing, throwing a little Lizard King into the mix, baritoning “Roadhouse Blues.” Their songs are emo-pop with Beatles wafts, save for a lovely holiday song, hilariously titled “Christmas Hit (All Over the World).” Others include “Don’t Make Me Have to Kill You,” and the ironic “True Friend.” Sample verse: “One more mortal has let me down/ I’m alone with my rhyming/in an unknown town/alone with poetry and foreign football on hotel/television/and text messages from a troubled kept woman.”

Beers are popped pre-cocktail hour, though Kilmer abstains. It proves nearly impossible to get him to stick to one train of thought, as we jump from his love of Mark Twain to his admiration for Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, from Hollywood peeves to money issues, and from lightning rods to love woes, then back again to stories about a recent visit by Lou Reed. Kilmer is a fan. He always has a new hero when I see him, someone that is inspiring him. Brando is the mainstay. This time around it is Lou Reed, who visited with his longtime companion Laurie Anderson to get out of New York City and breathe some fresh air. It didn’t start out well.

According to Sawyer, Reed got up close in her face, and said, “This is becoming my living hell.” She told Kilmer that in the 25 years she has spent running restaurants and guesthouses in the Sante Fe County area (six years for Kilmer), only four people have been kicked out. “This guy [Reed] would have been one of them.” Continues Kilmer, “He was just spreading the Anti-Christ evil. Everyone was living in fear. But Lou redeemed himself. He’s full of love.” While Anderson went inner-tubing with another high-minded visitor, the spindly Joan Didion (who nearly drowned on the river, caught in a strainer after a rain surge), Reed settled in with the couple’s Jack Russell and was a changed man by the trip’s end, Kilmer says. Now Kilmer has written a song about his friend called “As Cool as Lou Reed” and wants a street to be named after him. “Avenue B should be renamed Avenue Lou.” He’s also named one of his guest abodes “Reed House,” which is where I stay.

“I asked Lou about his writing, and where it comes from, and he said, ‘Jesus. You really want to know? It’s like I don’t really have anything to do with it. I’m like a stenographer, like a paralegal, who comes in, gets in the zone, and it just comes out.’”

Kilmer goes on about how the yogi architect Romero was telling Reed about his East Village neighborhood that has a garden with 40 chickens in it. “Lou just couldn’t let go of that,” says Kilmer, laughing loud. “Chickens?” he says, doing a dead-on impression of Reed’s basso-New York accent. “Then five minutes later, he goes, ‘But chickens? What do you do with them?’ Now ‘chickens’ is the expletive for all things wrong,” says Kilmer, and even his daughter is fond of saying it. “I think the article should be about Lou Reed.”

But it’s about Val Kilmer, and his eco-retreat.

Or is it about him wanting recognition, and finally deciding to play Hollywood’s shell game? “It’s just so great here. But I’m not having any fun running it. And it’s no fun to go hunt for your next script either,” says the actor, sitting on the back porch. “There was a wonderful period in my life when I didn’t have to wait in line. And now I do. I’d be very happy having a junior Robert De Niro second career,” he says, now moving rocks in the river in various configurations to “tune its music.”

Besides, he has a loftier goal in mind. Regarding his self-sustained real estate project, Kilmer believes that it is his “duty” to share the land. “It says something that almost 100 percent of the people who come here just feel… good! There’s a right-ness to developing a community that interacts with the local one. I have to develop it because otherwise it’s really wasting the land.” He tells of his son awaking to see two elk through his bedroom window in the ranch’s apple orchard, of fox playing in his yard, of spotting bears and mountain lions lounging on rocks above him. “I love the gardens of Paris and London. They’re so cultivated and fancy. But a wild garden like this place has that strange, unexpected bouquet. And that one wildflower growing out of a rock has earned its right to exist. Nature,” he says, “makes me happier than what man seems to cultivate.”

Oscar says: Bring me Mark Twain...
And we return to that man-made world called Hollywood. “But back to me, about me playing Mark Twain and being recognized again,” says Kilmer, flashing his Hollywood ivories. A month ago, he hired a special makeup effects technician to transform him into Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, so that he could show-and-tell potential filmmakers. The images are sepia in tone, scratchy, like vintage Edward Curtis shots. And Kilmer, as the movie posters go, “is Mark Twain,” replete in a suit, unruly white hair, and requisite mustachioed scowl. For years, he has dreamed of making a movie based upon the connection between Clemens and Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy. (Kilmer’s father Eugene was a Christian Scientist.) Kilmer says that Twain was quite taken with the New Hampshire–born founder of the Christian Science Monitor, and he even wrote a book about the practice, entitled Christian Science (1903). Instead of sitting around waiting for roles any longer, Kilmer feels compelled to be proactive about this project.

I wonder aloud whether mixing God and the Arts might come back to bite him in the rear as it has Scientologists such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta. (Battleship Earth, anyone?) On the contrary, Kilmer asserts that it’s the kind of leading role that could land him an Oscar.

“I’ve turned down many roles that were Oscar-worthy,” says Kilmer, who entered the esteemed acting school Julliard at age 17. “Not a couple, a lot, because of what I was pursuing at the time: truthfulness. But who doesn’t want to be good, who doesn’t want to be acknowledged? Still, the Oscars are one night out of 365 days. And who are these [Academy members]? Who are they? I’ve been prevented from being acknowledged for my talent because I don’t have an Oscar. There are a lot of actors who have won an Oscar and have gone to jail for hitting a woman, for burning down their hotel rooms, for shooting their girlfriend in the foot, for knocking someone out with a telephone. I mean, it’s a long list. And inevitably, winning one ultimately can destroy careers.”

Fame. That is the story Kilmer wants to tell “from Mark Twain’s point of view. I think that it’s something that audiences will enjoy. I’ve always wanted to please audiences. It’s just now I’m actually planning it. I’m 46, so I want to be practical. I’ve never been practical in business. What I’ve learned in the past few years is how lucky I was.”

Kilmer may in fact have been lucky in his career. But his life growing up had its tragedies and family troubles. His parents divorced when he was nine. “My dad [Eugene] was older when he had us,” says Kilmer, “and his dad was 60 when he had him. So all those people passed on when I was very young.” He grew up in the house that Roy Rogers once owned, showcasing his stuffed “Trigger.” “It’s impossible to watch an old black-and-white Western that was shot in two weeks that’s wasn’t made around the ranch.” The residence was also near Charles Manson’s Spahn Ranch. Kilmer had two brothers, Mark and Wesley. “I had a younger brother. He died. He drowned—epilepsy—in a Jacuzzi,” says Kilmer of Wesley. “It was the night before I was to go to New York City to start Juilliard the next week. So that was obviously the first big event in my life.” He pauses as a rush of wind blows through the house. “The golden leaves swirl over the river. When the next surge comes, I’ll return to my sad story.” But Kilmer never does. In prior interviews, he has said that his performance as Doc Holliday in Tombstone was inspired by his brother. His mother Gladys—whom he describes as a beautiful blonde often compared to Doris Day, but “very Swedish”—has passed away, as has his father, who remarried three times and never flew in planes after being in a bad car crash when Kilmer was young. He describes his father as “a very eccentric, very sweet man, who designed aerodynamics parts.” Then he says, “I’m going to get a fly swatter. They’re swarming.”

The Iceman cometh...
To watch the scene always revolving around him is to watch restlessness personified. Even in Pecos, it is a beehive. But, says Kilmer, “I’ve always tried to allow things to be very simple. And it could just be having to admit that I’m a cliché in that I’m a little bit older now—or a lot older now—the body’s calming down, and it’s not such a struggle to face the inevitable loneliness of a search for yourself. I’ve always loved women, and I’ve always had a girlfriend or been married. I was married for eight years [to actress Joanne Whalley in 1988], and next I had a girlfriend for almost three years.” So he’s not looking for love at this moment, although an old friend, interior designer Dawn Heinsbergen, is staying with him for the weekend. (He tells me they prayed together the night before.)

But the question remains then: why is Kilmer praying for a second coming, since his career has never really died, and he’s allegedly found a degree of peace? In Déjà Vu, a thriller starring Denzel Washington and set in New Orleans, he shares the supporting role with Adam Goldberg. And he has a major role in the upcoming mini-series adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s novel, Commanche Moon. “I play a madman. Maybe he’s a genius, or just plain crazy,” says Kilmer, showing me a still from the film, in which his character Captain Skull sports a bald head. And several other film projects are in the works. But he still laments, somewhat jokingly, “Why Matt Dillon and not me?”

And yet the self-consciousness he exhibits when talking about his acting career hardly crosses over to his own physical presence. Like Brando, he is fond of mooning people, dropping his trousers for a quick laugh. The J.R. Ewing role he has adopted among “the kids” staying at the ranch suits him. He’s like a bear awakening from a nap, amusingly grumpy about all the cigarette butts and beer cans that have been left littering his lair. He’s just a regular guy, a pleasant departure from the Val Kilmer of even just a few years back, the one with whom I hung out until the wee hours in Hollywood and in hotel rooms, with hangers-on letting him pay their tabs. And despite calling himself an “outsider,” he is currently surrounded by friends who seem like, well, friends looking out for him. And the family man role suits him better still (like when he calls me to proudly enthuse that his daughter Mercedes is a Los Angeles County debating champ).

But the Hollywood leading man is always just around the bend. As I pack up to leave Pecos—with my clothes pleasantly smelling of burned firewood and wondering how our actor host can drag himself from the beauty of it all—Kilmer starts to throw his own duffel bags into the trunk of my SUV rental. He’s hopping a ride, along with Heinsbergen, to the Albuquerque airport, having obligations to a film project nearby. Kilmer has brought a great deal of profile and income into the New Mexico film industry, and is currently tied to four movie projects in the struggling state. We are running dangerously late.

Driving 100 miles per hour, with Kilmer talking all the way, singing along to the Raconteurs on the CD player, making us laugh and loosen up, we reach the curbside service, minutes from missing our flight. There is a line. “Here’s where international celebrity comes in handy,” Kilmer says, smiling. Offering to return the car for me—which he does—he yanks my bags out of the trunk, piling them up on the curb. “Hey, aren’t you that guy? You’re that guy, right?” says the bag checker, recognizing a star in his midst, providing me instant VIP treatment. Batman—or is it Jim Morrison?—saves the day.

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