LOS ANGELES (AP) — If Kris Kristoffersons If life were fiction, it would feel a little unbelievable.

He was a Texas-born Golden Gloves boxer and star football player, a Rhodes Scholar and a U.S. Army helicopter-flying captain who left a faculty gig at West Point to briefly become a janitor and at the Path to becoming one of the greatest American singer-songwriters of the 20th century.

And as if for fun, he became a devilishly handsome major movie star who could play either a rugged outlaw or a romantic leading man.

Kristofferson, a father of eight who was married to his third wife, Lisa Meyers, for the last four decades of his life, died Saturday at age 88 at his home in Maui, Hawaii, surrounded by his family.

He had a master’s degree in English from Oxford and could quote the poems of William Blake from memory. One of his best songs, “The Pilgrim,” was probably performed in “The Pilgrim’s Progress” by an even older English writer, John Bunyan. Kristofferson’s title character could be a description of himself:

“He is a walking contradiction, part truth, part fiction, taking every wrong direction on his lonely journey back home.”

Although the “lonely” part certainly wasn’t true. Kristofferson never lacked for friends, including heroes who became mentors and close companions, such as Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson.

While leaving the Army, he swept floors and emptied ashtrays at Columbia Records in Nashville to get close to stars, including Cash.

He told the Associated Press in 2006 that he probably wouldn’t have had a career without the Man in Black, who recorded the best-known version of Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down.”

“He kind of took me under his wing before he cut one of my songs,” Kristofferson said. “He recorded my first record, which was record of the year. He brought me on stage for the first time.”

Kristofferson was a major artist and hitmaker in his own right, but never had the golden voice that some of his friends had.

Nelson used an entire album of Kristofferson songs to showcase his vocal prowess, and some – including “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)” – became lifelong live festivals.

“There is no better songwriter than Kris Kristofferson,” Nelson said in a 2009 awards tribute. “Everything he writes is a standard.”

Kristofferson moved more comfortably than anyone between the worlds of classic country music and baby boomer-hippie culture. Janis Joplin was another close friend, and her howling rendition of Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” became a hit soon after her death in 1970. It was probably the best-known version of all Kristofferson songs, and he used her arrangement of it when he played the song live.

Kristofferson also welcomed like-minded people from younger generations Sinead O’Connor.

A critic of the Roman Catholic Church long before allegations of sexual abuse became widely known, O’Connor was loudly booed at a tribute to Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden in 1992, two weeks after he held up a picture of Pope John during a performance Paul II had torn up “Saturday Night Live.”

Kristofferson would come out and accompany her off stage in solidarity and comfort. Years later he recorded “Sister Sinead,” in which he wrote, “And maybe she’s crazy, maybe she’s not, but so was Picasso and so were the saints.”

His left-wing politics may have been the biggest of his “contradictions,” according to an Army country singer from Brownsville, Texas. He was a staunch supporter of the Palestinians and vigorously condemned from the stage many military actions in Central America and the Middle East, sometimes to the chagrin of the audience. He clashed at times with more aggressive stars like Toby Keith, although he counted many conservative country stars among his friends and supporters.

Kristofferson said during an interview with the AP in 1995 that he remembered a woman complaining about one of his songs about killing babies in the name of freedom.

“I said, ‘Well, what made you mad – the fact that I said it or the fact that we did it?'” Kristofferson said. “For me, they got mad at me because I told them what was going on.”

For him there was no contradiction; his political thinking was a reckoning with his military past.

“When you question some of the things that are done in his name,” he told the AP in 2006, “that was particularly painful.”

However, the blue-eyed look of the man on the screen didn’t bother anyone. The legendary western director Sam Peckinpah saw him as the perfect young outlaw, who he was able to cast alongside James Coburn in 1973’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid”.

However, he is best known for his roles as handsome lovers in films about strong women: Ellen Burstyn in Martin Scorsese’s 1974 version of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Barbra Streisand in the version of A Star. from 1976’s Is Born,” a role Bradley Cooper took on in the 2018 remake.

Streisand said on Instagram that she came up with “A Star is Born” when she saw Kristofferson on stage at the Troubadour in Los Angeles.

“I knew he was special,” she wrote.

Scorsese said Monday that Kristofferson was “a damn fine actor, a remarkable screen presence. Spending time with Kris when we filmed ‘Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore’ was one of the highlights of my life.”

The director said in a statement that he listens to “Me and Bobby McGee” “just like half the world.”

Kristofferson became a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2004, but he had already been canonized beyond his own contentment when he became a member of the supergroup The Highwaymen in the mid-1980s alongside Cash, Waylon Jennings and Nelson, the only member now living. For Kristofferson, it meant that the men he most admired saw him as his equal.

“To not only be taken in by them, but to be friends with them and work side by side, it was just a little surreal,” Kristofferson told the AP in 2005. “It was like seeing his face on Mount Rushmore.”

Nelson and Cash’s daughter Rosanne were among the many artists who attended one 2016 tribute concert for Kristofferson, accompanied him on stage to perform his song “Why Me”.

Kristofferson thought long and hard about how he would like to be remembered.

Another friend, Leonard Cohen, wrote in liner notes to his greatest hits collection that Kristofferson once told him he wanted the first lines of Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” on his tombstone: “Like a bird on a wire.” “Like a drunk in a midnight chorus, I tried in my own way to be free.”

It’s apt enough, but another Kristofferson line from “The Pilgrim” could serve just as well:

“The climb was worth it.”