“The thing I’ve learned about Santa Fe is that you never know who you’re talking to, you never know who you’re going to meet or who’s around the corner,” said Gabriel Garcia, whose family has been selling jewelry and leather crafts on the Santa Fe Plaza for more than 60 years.
On Friday, conversations about what had happened to Hackman and his wife always came back to Santa Fe's reputation as a place where celebrities could unwind and live unassuming lives far from the glitz of Los Angeles or New York City — and even some of the more glamorous Rocky Mountain enclaves, like Vail, Colorado.
Hackman, 95, and Arakawa, 65, eschewed fame and made Santa Fe their home decades ago, like many other acclaimed artists, including the former playwright Sam Shepard, actors Shirley MacLaine and Ali MacGraw, and “Game of Thrones” author George R. R. Martin.
He served for several years on the board of trustees at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and wrote a novel about the American West centered on New Mexico called “Payback at Morning Peak” and coauthored one on the Civil War entitled “Escape from Andersonville."
Hackman enjoyed painting and was drawn to the beauty of the hills surrounding Santa Fe and the light of the high desert, Ashman said.
