By Steve Heilig
Peter Coyote was once voted “Marin’s favorite celebrity” by Pacific Sun readers, although he probably wasn’t too excited about that. But there’s no denying his fame. He has appeared in more than 140 films and television shows, and narrated more than 100 projects, including documentaries by the likes of Ken Burns, PBS, National Geographic and more, as well as the Olympic opening ceremonies and many commercials and audiobooks. He’s co-hosted the Academy Awards telecast and much more. But he has always seemed to be something of a reluctant star, even as he undeniably enjoyed some of the trappings of celebrity.
Born as Robert Peter Cohon in 1941 in New York City to an investment banker father, he grew up in affluence where, “I don’t remember anybody being happy.” After elite private schooling, then Iowa’s Grinnell College and a taste of student anti-war activism that resulted in Coyote and his fellow protesters being invited to the White House, he heeded the musical, literary, chemical, political, spiritual and other callings of the early 1960s and came west. After a pot bust and a name change via peyote and a shaman, he became a central figure in the San Francisco hippie or “freak” counterculture, centered in the Haight-Ashbury, both as a budding actor with the radical San Francisco Mime Troupe and as a co-founder of the anarchic collective called the Diggers.
That loose collective, beyond giving out free food and staging all manner of events, “had taken as its collective task the rethinking and recreation of our national culture,” as he wrote in his widely-praised first autobiographical book, 1998’s Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle. Such intentions were not unique to the Diggers, he wrote, as “my generation was struggling openly with problems of racism, grossly inequitable distribution of goods and services, dishonorable foreign policies, and the war in Vietnam.” But by the end of the ’60s, when the Diggers’ lofty goals seemed out of reach and they morphed into the broader Free Family, Coyote migrated into rural West Marin for an experiment with communal living in Olema—an experience that, as recounted in his first book, was, if anything, more anarchic than the Haight.
In the 1970s, after serving as Chair of the California Arts Council during Jerry Brown’s first term as governor, struggles with various addictions and the problem of how to best forge a life after the collapse of so much ’60s idealism and activism, Coyote found a path in acting that eventually brought him fame and relative fortune. After the Olema commune melted away, he returned to San Francisco for a time, primarily to study Zen Buddhism at the San Francisco Zen Center, but has been a Mill Valley resident and family man for more than three decades. His devotion to Buddhism has continued, and he has recently been ordained a priest and teacher—again, seemingly with some ambivalence about those formal roles.
His new, second book has the enigmatic title, The Rainman’s Third Cure: An Irregular Education. While his first memoir delved mostly into the fabled ’60s, this one goes back further, to Coyote’s childhood and upbringing and its lasting impact on his trajectory and struggles. His writing, which has earned him a Pushcart Prize (a prestigious award that honors small presses and authors) in the past, is vivid and compelling, and what is most striking about the book is how revealing Coyote has become about his troubled family and lifelong efforts to come to grips with who he is and who he really wants to be. In some ways, as with so many men, his new book’s story is far from being just a celebrity tell-all, but more a way of making peace with his own “lifetime of unremitting struggle,” especially with his powerful, sometimes scary, distant-yet-ultimately-loving parents, and his “simple luck not to have died.”
We had a long lunch in Sausalito, after Coyote had finished his daily hours of guitar practice and probably, meditation. He admired my dog and noted that after many years, he finally feels ready to get one of his own. He retains his renowned charisma, focused intelligence and yes, movie-star looks, all leavened now by age, spiritual study and discipline. But as revealed here, even that equanimity is not enough to keep him in a rapidly changing Marin, and he is finally fleeing northward, albeit not too far. As for the “Rainman” and his “Third Cure,” well, those interested will just have to read his book—after all, he relates here that producing it was “like crapping a porcupine.”
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So, why another book from you? You covered a lot of ground in your previous one …
Yeah, and especially why another memoir in particular, right? Well, when I looked back at my early life more recently, I realized I had been operating under a world view that was not exactly accurate—I thought there were just two options—a world of love or a world of power—and the trick was to somehow get the mix right. Love without power is flaccid; power without love is brutal. I had all these mentors who have taught me about the world, taught me about navigating the realms of love and power, and from a conventional point of view I’d say I did alright—it’s not an exaggeration to say that for a time I was an international movie star, maybe not of the first magnitude, but my film A Man in Love did open the 40th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival. But it was wanting.
Luckily, I had grown up in the household of a very rich man, in which I don’t remember anybody being happy. So that liberated me from being attached to the idea that true wealth was going to be material in nature. At about age 29, I met Gary Snyder, and he was such an exemplar of an integrated life that I was floored. I couldn’t figure out at first what the trick was, how he linked his family life, his political life, his artistic life, his fame, his family life—all of it, until I realized that Buddhism and Buddhist practice was at the core.
Did you start involvement with Buddhism soon after meeting Snyder?
Not immediately, but maybe five years after I met Gary I began courting a woman who was living at Zen Center, whom I subsequently married, and I began formal Buddhist practice. And I didn’t really stick to it diligently for a long time, you know. I was building a career—I didn’t get my Screen Actors Guild union card until I was 39—and I had a daughter to get through school, and we had to save for college, then we had a son. Also, I had chosen a wife who did not want to live in the back of a truck, so I put a lot of energy into earning a living even though it didn’t engage me all that much.
Do you mean that you really weren’t that into acting?
It was never my greatest gift. I’m a much better writer than I am an actor. I might have been a better actor had I had time to really study, but I started late and couldn’t take a year off to go to England, which I would have liked to do. So in some ways, when I was performing, I always felt a little naked and exposed. I came to understand that because of my childhood I had been really traumatized when I was little and that the way I learned to survive was by cutting off my feelings, and learning to see things in a clear observational, unemotional way. It helped me then, but it’s an impediment to being an actor because it often took me a long time to figure out exactly what I was feeling—and knowing what you are feeling is a prerequisite for a great actor. You don’t actually have to be smart, but you can’t act unless
