Val Kilmer, artist

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I asked him if the paintings were a way for him to work through the feeling of being known without being known, to help process the weirdness that comes with everyone looking at you and seeing Iceman or the Lizard King. “It’s not so much me thinking about myself,” he said. “It’s more about the icon. The icon of the warrior. Or the gunslinger—that black-and-white justice that’s part of American history. That’s Doc Holliday. And then Jim Morrison is an iconic rock ’n’ roller, a poet.

“I also found there was a surprising number of fans who wanted original paintings,” he continued, as if to puncture the self-importance of talking about this work in this way. “I sold an embarrassing number of them.”

I think he laughed when he said this; I’m not positive. It was a strange conversation, because there was no way for it not to be. Kilmer, now 60, was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2015. In the opening pages of his new memoir, I’m Your Huckleberry, (Simon & Schuster, April 21, 2020) he has lost his New Mexico home as a result of the 2008 financial crisis and finds himself convalescing at an ex-girlfriend’s place. This is a book of absurd juxtapositions; the home happens to be an Italian Renaissance–style palazzo in Malibu overlooking the ocean, because the ex-girlfriend happens to be Cher. He is there when his condition takes a fateful turn.

“Cher dipped out for afternoon errands,” he writes. “Night fell, and I fell asleep. Suddenly I awoke vomiting blood that covered the bed like a scene out of The Godfather. I prayed immediately, then called 911.” Eventually he endures two tracheotomies. “The cancer miraculously healed much faster than any of the doctors predicted,” he writes, but adds, “It has taken time, and taken a toll.?.?.?.?Speaking, once my joy and lifeblood, has become an hourly struggle.” He describes his new voice as sounding “like Marlon Brando after a couple of bottles of tequila. It isn’t a frog in my throat. More like a buffalo.”

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