by Martin Sheen
“I can’t let you go any farther,” he told me.
“Why not? I have to be in there with her.” I’d never seen a baby born, and besides, this was my baby being born.
“You’re not trained for this,” he said.
Wasn’t that supposed to be his job? And what kind of training did I need other than to be at Janet’s side?
“I must be in there,” I repeated, but the doctor was adamant and Janet went into the delivery room alone.
In the waiting room, I fought to stay awake as each hour passed. What was happening in there? I had no idea. When the doctor finally pushed through the doors to tell me I had a healthy son, my exhaustion disappeared. I leapt to my feet and rushed to Janet, who looked as euphoric as I felt. Her hair was stuck to her face from the sweat and birthing effort but she was rosy and beaming, as beautiful as I had ever seen her. She was a mother now. Everything had changed.
We had a son. The word felt both completely ordinary and utterly foreign to say out loud. I had a son. It hardly seemed possible. I was still a boy myself, really, only twenty-one. Bursting with energy, crazy in love with my wife, hardly worried that most months we could barely make the rent. And yet here we were, a family. It seemed like a small miracle.
Jan and I met in the winter of 1960, not long after she arrived in New York. Her birthplace was Cincinnati, Ohio, just an hour’s drive from Dayton. The only daughter of an unwed mother, she spent her first six years with her grandparents in Kentucky before moving to Cleveland, where she attended public schools and earned scholarships to both Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Art. When we met, she was on scholarship at the New School for Social Research, studying painting. Auburn haired and petite, a painter of enormous talent, she taught me about classical music, health food, and fine art. Through her, whole worlds opened up to me that had never revealed themselves back in Dayton. She was the most fascinating and cultured woman I’d ever met.
To be an aspiring actor in New York in the early 1960s meant signing up for a patchwork and hardscrabble life. You took whatever odd jobs you could get to feed yourself while trying to pursue your art. Since arriving in New York, I’d worked as a stock boy at American Express, theater usher, messenger boy, and part-time soda jerk while I pursued stage work. I’d landed in the city at a time when discrimination against Puerto Ricans was rampant, and a Spanish surname was no asset. I can’t count how many conversations I had that went like this:
“Hello, I’m calling about the job you advertised.”
“Your name, please?”
“Ramon Estevez. That’s R-A-M . . .”
“I’m sorry. That job is no longer available.”
Finding work as an actor was hard enough. Having a Spanish name became a double liability. So I made a purely commercial decision: My stage name would become Martin Sheen—Martin for the casting director Robert Dale Martin at CBS, and Sheen for Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the auxiliary bishop of New York. His prime-time national television show, Life Is Worth Living, was a huge success during the 1950s, and he became popular as the first television evangelist. With his dramatic flair and striking presence, like a Shakespearean actor, he had a powerful charisma and I admired him greatly.
After ten months in New York, I landed a backstage job at the Living Theatre, the avant-garde theater group founded by Julian Beck and Judith Malina. At first I was a glorified curtain puller and janitor for $5 per week. I worked my way into the cast of the theater’s hit The Connection when the original cast left to make the movie of the same name and got a pay bump to $30 per week. That’s what I was doing when I met Janet, playing the role of Ernie, a wannabe jazz musician and junkie sitting in a Greenwich Village apartment crowded with other junkies waiting for their connection to arrive with a fix.
Janet and I moved in together in the fall of 1960. I think of us now as two crazy kids in New York moving from one apartment to another with a few sticks of furniture between us. Possessions, comfort, security—none of this felt like it mattered. All that mattered was making art, participating in art, and having a creative life. We took for granted that to be artists you had to live very frugally and suffer. Everyone we knew was barely scraping by, and we accepted this as our lot too, because we knew if we didn’t pursue art we would never be happy. Thank God we were young enough and foolish enough to believe in ourselves and our potential because we didn’t have any input or support from either of our families. Thank God for that, too, because if they’d tried to influence our choices we wouldn’t have been free to become ourselves.
I lived so deeply in the world of acting and theater that I didn’t even notice when the weather turned cold and I needed a coat, or that it was time to wash my hair. Janet had to remind me and keep me grounded in these very simple endeavors.
In June of 1961 the Living Theatre was asked to represent the United States in the Festival du Théâtre des Nations in Paris and do a ten-city tour of Europe. I was asked to recreate the role of Ernie in The Connection for the tour and of course Janet joined me. We started in Rome and played at night, so days were free time for us to roam the city. Janet and I got tickets for the Wednesday audience with Pope John XXIII, who would soon usher in Vatican II and change things considerably for Catholics worldwide. We stood inside St. Peter’s Basilica with a crowd of thousands to see him and receive his blessing. This was before the Popemobile, back when a pope would be carried through the crowd on a platform, almost like a throne. Until I was part of that crowd, I never understood why popes were carried like that. Then I realized: It’s because that was the only way for him to see everyone in the crowd, and for everyone in the crowd to see him.
Somewhere in his remarks Pope John made a joke in his native Italian and the crowd had to wait while it was sequentially translated into different languages. Each time it was translated there would be laughter from the English section, then laughter from the Spanish section, and then the French section, and so forth. Each time the laughter rose up Pope John would raise both his hands in a thank-you gesture to the people in that section. It was an utterly human action, and it felt as if the barriers between the pope and the people were being relaxed just a bit as he recognized the humanity in everyone. I was excited to see it because I knew what this guy was up to. He was going to change the world.
Our little troupe from Greenwich Village won the Grand Prix award at the Paris festival and then moved on to Germany. By living very frugally, staying in pensions and scrimping on our meals, Janet and I managed to survive in Europe on $100 a week.
And yet despite all of our striving and struggle just to make it from week to week, sometimes meal to meal, when we returned to New York and learned that Janet was pregnant there was never any panic. We never had any doubt. I’d come from such a big family that when a new baby arrived every year or two we all just slid over to make room. Even though Janet and I were both so incredibly young, starting a family seemed to make sense, as if this was what two people who loved each other naturally did next. We were married on December 23, 1961, in a fifteen-minute ceremony at the altar of the Church of St. Stephen on East Twenty-Eighth Street, sandwiched between an 8:00 a.m. Mass and a funeral. Afterward, we had an impromptu breakfast reception at a Jewish deli in the neighborhood with a dozen friends from the Living Theatre and three bottles of champagne. I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect day.
After the birth, while Janet rested in her hospital room, I took the elevator down to the lobby pay phones and called the operator to place a collect call to my father in Ohio. I wanted him to be the first to hear the news.
“We had a boy!” I shouted when he picked up the phone.
“Wonnerful! Congratulations!” he shouted back. I imagined him standing in the living room on Brown Street with the receiver pressed to his ear, motioning for my brothers to come into the room, and a wave of nostalgia swept through me. I could still picture every detail of that room.
Next I called our good friends Charlie Laughton and his
wife, Penny Allen. He was an aspiring writer, poet, and actor, she a brilliant actress herself, and they were home waiting for my call.
“We had a boy!” I shouted for the second time when Charlie answered the phone.
“Congratulations! What are you going to name him?”
“Emilio,” I told him.
“Ah, I like that,” he said.
Emilio. We had a son. Emilio. We had a son. I had to say it to myself over and over again to believe it was true.
Late that night I rode the subway alone all the way from Sixty-Eighth Street up to our apartment on 203rd Street in the Bronx. I didn’t know it yet, but back at the hospital one floor below Janet the abstract expressionist painter Franz Kline was hours from his death. Emilio had come into the world just as Kline was exiting. It seemed to represent a certain fateful symmetry. In Kline’s family something had left that could never be brought back. For Janet and me something had just been added that could never be taken away.
The next morning was Mother’s Day, and on the way back down to the hospital I stopped at a corner market to buy Janet a bag of her favorite cookies, Pepperidge Farm Milanos. We celebrated her first Mother’s Day in the hospital room with Baby Emilio.
When Charlie and Penny walked into Janet’s room during visiting hours he handed me a typed sheet of paper.
I looked at the single sheet. Free verse skipped across the page. While I’d been riding the subway back to the Bronx last night Charlie had been sitting at his desk composing a gift to mark the occasion. I was so moved I hardly knew what to say. He’d titled the poem “Emilio.” I held up the page and read it out loud:
Emilio
many nights I would walk down that street
and look up to the rooftops—
and a voice would fall from somewhere
calling
E
Mi
Li
Oo oo oo oo oo!
(Emilio must have been a great bandit—
A nocturnal gad-fly—
A purple desperado—
Yes, a bandit many times)
sometimes that voice would bring rain
and I’d put up my collar—
sometimes it would stop before I
reached the corner
and die on the face of a summer sky:
always it ran in ancient blood down my own veins
sometimes I’d hear it till I hit the big Ave—
till I turned the corner
and—
like a toy—
when the spring is sprung—
I sped!
shot zig-zag
down the lights of the City:
and when I came home
I’d know that I too had only Emilio—
only the calling.
when I moved—just a suitcase—
I watched that voice
bequeath its last colors to the setting sun
and unlight the whole street.
I watched my hands go dark.
Charles Frank Laughton is an extraordinary poet who never received due praise for his talent. Thirty-four years later, when I was asked to participate in the audiobook The Silver Lining: Twenty-Three of the World’s Most Distinguished Actors Read Their Favorite Poems, this was the one I chose to read.
To Janet and me, the poem was a heralding that welcomed Emilio into our circle of friends. For all of us, suffering for art meant making choices that had consequences, many of them difficult and some even severe. We weren’t going to own a car, or at least not for a long time. We were going to miss a few meals. And forget about owning a suit. If you were a child joining this kind of community you had to be tough enough to handle it. You weren’t going to be spoiled. You would have to sacrifice because everyone around you would be sacrificing, and you would probably grow up and look around and see that other people had it much better and wonder why you didn’t. But you would be okay with that and you would grow from the experience. Someday, you might even be proud.
Somehow, from the start, we both knew Emilio would be tough enough to handle this kind of life. And he was. We took him with us everywhere. We’d go see shows in dingy little Off-Broadway theaters or movie houses and Janet would breastfeed him throughout the performance. Nobody seemed to mind. Bathing him made me nervous because he shrieked when he felt the water, but I changed his diapers and took him for walks and slowly got to know him as a person separate from Janet and me. And I began to recognize a presence in him that was strangely familiar. That’s the very best way to explain it.
Throughout Janet’s pregnancy I’d known a big transition was coming, a tremendous occasion that would last for all my life. Even as a child, I’d felt that somewhere beyond me was a measure of being that involved me but was larger than myself. It was one of those beliefs I couldn’t articulate but knew to be true, like the one that had told me I was an actor. When Emilio was born, I felt that I had always known him. His presence was that comfortable. Holding him was like being reunited with a part of myself. I would look at him and think, Oh! You’re the one I’ve been waiting for. I didn’t know what form you would take, but now I know it’s you. The part of this story that always astonishes me is that I hadn’t known I’d been waiting for anyone until he arrived.
Years later I would do an interview with a journalist who said, “Tell me about your son, Emilio.”
“Oh, Emilio . . .” I began. “I have known him all my life.”
“Don’t you mean all of his life?” the journalist asked.
“No,” I said. “I meant what I said. I have known him all my life.”
Soon after we brought Emilio home, a big square truck started coming by once a week to our apartment in the Bronx. We lived on the upper floor of a two-family home and the driver would pick up our pail of dirty diapers and carry a stack of fresh ones up to our door. Somehow Janet had known to set this up. She was far ahead of me on the parenting curve. I didn’t even know a baby needed a bassinet. As it turned out, he also needed lots of clothes and bottles and a changing pad and . . . and . . . and. I’d had no idea that having a baby was so elaborate or so expensive. A crib? New sheets?
Me, I would have gotten everything from the Salvation Army or Goodwill. We’d had no problem furnishing our apartments mostly from the curb. “A chair!” I’d shout when we saw one set out for morning trash pickup. “A couch!” I couldn’t understand Janet’s sudden interest in buying everything brand new. He’s a tough kid, I thought. He doesn’t need all this stuff. The truth is, all the spending made me nervous. I didn’t have any work that summer and my residual payments from TV jobs that spring weren’t going to last for long.
Fortunately, Actors’ Equity offered support to struggling actors and their families. One of their programs, called the I Got Shoes Fund, allowed actors to qualify for a new pair of shoes every year or two because of all the shoe leather we burned going to auditions. I obtained several pairs of shoes that way. Another of their programs, called Bundles for Babies, collected used baby items from actors whose children had grown and handed them down to actors with newborns. Janet and I got a secondhand bassinet, crib, and stroller for Emilio this way. But the crib still needed a bumper and sheets, and Emilio needed clothing and formula, and for this we needed money.
One afternoon Janet went down to Macy’s on Thirty-Fourth Street and got a store credit card. For a while it was our lifeline. We used it to buy baby clothes and also a black-and-white TV. Then we started eating at the restaurant in the store and using the card for groceries and formula. It was not, as my father would have said, “responsible,” but that card was all we had.
When the bill came in the mail, I couldn’t believe the amount. It was $600. How could we possibly have spent that much? In 1962 a loaf of bread cost 20¢ and a pair of shoes $3. A $600 bill was staggering. To this day, I still don’t know how we paid it.
And then in July the truly unthinkable happened. I couldn’t come up with the month’s rent and we were evicted fro
m the Bronx apartment.
There would be many moments to come that would test my courage as a father, moments that would require decision-making abilities I could only hope I possessed and moments that would literally bring me to my knees to ask for guidance or help. This was just the first. Responsible. The word had always felt like the opposite of free choice, but now it felt like a mission. Taking care of my new family was more than a task; it felt like a duty. I was my father’s son, after all. And so he was the one I turned to when we had to leave our Bronx apartment and had nowhere else to go.
Janet and I packed what we could fit into suitcases and left everything else behind. We hitched a ride with Dick O’Reilly and Gerry Gellotti, two friends I’d grown up with in Dayton who’d driven out to visit us in New York and then brought us back with them to Ohio. Janet, Emilio, and I crowded into the backseat of their tiny car the whole way. We stayed in the house on Brown Street with my father and brothers while I borrowed money from Cal Mayne, the owner of the Dorothy Lane Market in Dayton and the sponsor of The Rising Generation, who’d become a friend over the years.
The plan was for Janet and Emilio to remain in Dayton with my father while I returned to New York to find us a new place to live. Manhattan was too expensive; New Jersey too far. We had friends on Staten Island, a working-class, family-oriented borough of neighborhoods that made me feel at home. I found a corner one-bedroom at the top of an art deco building at 30 Daniel Low Terrace, a twenty-minute uphill walk from the Staten Island Ferry. I signed the lease and started scouting around for furniture again.
“Another actor lived in this building years ago,” the neighbors down the hall said when they saw me moving in. “You should be as lucky as him.”
“Who was it?” I asked.
“Paul Newman,” they said. He’d rented a furnished room in the basement of that same building for sixty dollars a month when he was starting out in the New York theater. Though he was long gone by the time we moved in, I hoped this was a good sign.