In 1982, Kris Kristofferson walked into a gym in Malibu with no plans to fall in love again. He had written “Me and Bobby McGee” and “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.” He had starred opposite Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born. He had also been divorced twice, first from Fran Beer and then from Rita Coolidge, and he had made up his mind about what his life had room for.
There he met Lisa Meyers, a law student at Pepperdine University.
The ploy and the warning
Kris Kristofferson told the story himself to the Irish Independent in 2004. The two of them kept looking at each other, he said, so he borrowed a piece of equipment off her. He admitted it was a ploy. He had seen something there that looked promising.
But in the same breath, he warned her off. He explained that he was a bachelor father, and he described his days to her plainly:
“I take a little girl to school and I pick her up at the end of the day and then we go do whatever she wants to do and I haven’t got room for anything else.”
“That’s how it all started for Lisa and me,” he said.
It is a strange way to begin a love story. It is also an honest one. He wasn’t selling himself as a catch. He was telling her exactly where his heart already was.
The man she met was already sober
One part of this story often gets told wrong. Lisa Meyers did not meet a man in the middle of drinking himself to death. That chapter was mostly behind him.
In a 1998 interview with PEOPLE, Kris Kristofferson admitted that through the 1960s and 1970s he had bought into a dangerous idea. “I thought all serious artists were self-destructive,” he said. He called himself a functioning alcoholic. What finally reached him was A Star Is Born. His character dies after a drunken car wreck, and that scene, he said, made him realize it could easily be his own wife and kids crying over him. “I quit drinking over that,” he told the magazine. “I didn’t want to die before my daughter grew up.”
So the man at the gym in 1982 had already made one hard choice for his family. What he hadn’t done yet was let anyone new in.
A wedding at her school
His resistance didn’t last long. In February 1983, Kris Kristofferson and Lisa Meyers married in a small ceremony at the chapel at Pepperdine University. He was 46. Their first son, Jesse, was born that October.
In the same 1998 PEOPLE interview, he was candid about where his head had been. At the time, he said, he was “gun-shy about any relationship heavier than a one-night stand.” Touring had been his way out. “The road had been my escape, going out and pouring it all into performing,” he said.
Then the children kept coming: Jesse, Jody, Johnny, Kelly Marie and Blake. And something shifted in him.
“As my family started getting bigger, it finally beat its way into my consciousness: ‘Wake up, man. This is what really matters.'”
The family that brought the family back
The new marriage did more than give Kris Kristofferson five more children. In his 2004 interview with the Irish Independent, he credited his younger kids with bringing him back into contact with Tracy and Kris Jr., his two oldest children from his first marriage. He had admitted he couldn’t give those two the attention they deserved when they were small.
Lisa Meyers became stepmother to all three of his older children, including Casey, his daughter with Rita Coolidge.
Maui
Kris Kristofferson had built a house on Maui back in the 1970s, he told The Fader in 2009. By 1990, he and Lisa were living there full time, raising their children far from Nashville and Hollywood. Kris Kristofferson told PEOPLE that moving to the islands and starting a family with Lisa was “the best move I ever made.”
He kept working. He made films, toured, and recorded. But the center of his life had moved. In 2013, he told NPR, “I’ve got eight kids, and a wife that puts up with everything I do, and keeps me out of trouble.”
The last page
Kris Kristofferson died peacefully at home on Maui on September 28, 2024. He was 88. He and Lisa had been married for more than 41 years, longer than his first two marriages put together.
The statement announcing his death came from his wife, Lisa; his children Tracy, Kris Jr., Casey, Jesse, Jody, John, Kelly and Blake; and his seven grandchildren. “We’re all so blessed for our time with him,” they wrote. “Thank you for loving him all these many years, and when you see a rainbow, know he’s smiling down at us all.”