Sam Shepard wasn’t born a cowboy. The actor and writer made himself into one. The dusty blue jeans, cattle drives, and folksy drawl suited his taciturn profile, giving Reagan-era America someone rugged to admire. Yet the people who knew Shepard best poked fun at his Western persona, which began to emerge in the 1970s and endured for the rest of his life. The singer and poet Patti Smith, a former paramour, called him “a man playing cowboys,” and Shepard indeed acted in a number of Westerns. Late in his career, in Andrew Dominik’s movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Shepard portrayed the outlaw’s prickly brother. (He’d named his first child, Jesse, after the legend.) A line of narration from the movie seemed to sum up the complicated man behind the character: “w

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