by Martin Sheen
“What are you still doing here?” the stage manager asks.
“Waiting for my father,” I say. “I don’t know what’s taking him so long.”
It’s odd he’s not coming backstage to see me—surely he’s coming back to see me—so I wait some more. Finally, I call home from the pay phone backstage.
“Oh, Pop’s already here,” Mike says.
“Why didn’t you bring him backstage?”
“I couldn’t,” Mike says. “You know Pop.”
I don’t expect my father to offer congratulations or praise. He’s never been the kind of father who offers it freely. Whenever he sees me on television he calls and jokes with me as if I’m still in character. “I dinna teach-a you to be doing that. Where did you learn thatta language? You beena drinking?” he’ll say, and I’ll laugh. That’s his way of saying, “I saw you,” but tonight I wanted him to really see me. I can’t dance or sing or ride a horse, but I can act, and tonight I put everything I had into that performance for him. It’s a great play. It will win the Tony Award for Best Play and the Drama Circle Critics Award next year and will win a Pulitzer Prize for Frank Gilroy. I’ll earn a Tony nomination for my role, and Jack will take the Tony for Best Actor in a Play.
Why didn’t he come backstage after the show?
By the time I return to our apartment, the boys are asleep and Janet and Mike are puttering around in the kitchen making late-night snacks. It’s a heavy, hot August night and we don’t have air-conditioning. The big windows facing Eighty-Sixth Street are wide open to encourage a breeze.
When I walk in my father is slowly pacing the apartment, waiting for his snack. Pacing is his form of meditation. He paced through the rooms in our house on Brown Street throughout my entire childhood, sometimes throughout family conversations. He would pace into a room, offer a few comments, and pace back out again.
As he paces across my New York living room, I want to know what he thought of the play, why he didn’t come backstage, and what he thinks of my career choice now, but I don’t dare ask. I’m exhausted from the show as I sit on the couch and rest my elbows on my knees, letting my forehead sink into my hands. Behind me I hear Janet’s low laughter and the soft clinks of knives and plates in the kitchen. All I can see from this position are the straight planks of the wooden floor. If we’re going to talk, my father will need to speak first.
I hear his feet in the living room before I see them. Boom, boom, boom, in a slow, rhythmic cadence. We don’t have much furniture, just a couch and a few chairs, and his pacing takes him straight across the room to the windows. In my peripheral vision I see his shoes cross the hardwood floor and pause at the windows, then turn and head back to the kitchen. Boom, boom, boom. He goes in and out of the living room again. And again. I lose track of how many times he walks to and fro without a word.
Suddenly, the sound of his footsteps stops. I glance sideways toward the windows. He’s not there. If he’s not behind me and he’s not over by the window, where . . .
He’s right in front of me, I think. What in heaven’s name is he doing?
I lift my head. He’s looking at me like I’m someone he’s never seen before in his life. Our eyes lock. My heart is pounding, but I don’t dare say a word. It’s as if he’s trying, with great effort and determination, to figure out who I am.
And then, without a word, he paces out of the room and, a week later, he boards a ship for Spain. We never speak about the play before he leaves. I’m simply left to wonder.
The Parderrubias my father returned to in 1964 was remarkably similar to the one he’d left in 1916. Chickens still ran across his family’s courtyard. The women still cooked over open fires. Each tree, each house had been perfectly preserved in his mind all these years and they were still in the same places. Only he had changed in the intervening years.
He settled into a “castle” far more rustic than the one he’d thought he was building. Watching Westerns on television was out of the question. The house didn’t even have electricity. At night he carried an oil lamp to light his path to bed. I imagine him lying there under the blanket alone, enveloped by the kind of dense silence that never filled the house on Brown Street. In a darkness unbroken even by shadows he stared at the ceiling and thought, This is notta working for me. He’d returned to Galicia as an American citizen, a man accustomed to modern conveniences. Plus, he missed his children more than he’d anticipated. All the years he’d been raising us alone, he’d dreamed of the simple, quiet life of Spain. Now that he had it back, he discovered that the good-natured chaos of Brown Street was where he belonged.
He lasted six months in Parderrubias. That winter he returned to Dayton and bought a little house in the Kettering section of town. Three of the brothers moved in to keep him company.
In The Zoo Story, the playwright Edward Albee observes that, sometimes, we have to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly. He might have been talking about my father.
Performing on Broadway meant working six-day weeks, eight shows per week, with only one day off. I spent every day off I could with Janet and the boys. One Sunday afternoon that summer, Frank Gilroy invited the entire Roses company for a picnic at his home in upstate New York. Janet and I welcomed the chance to be outside in the country and let the boys run free.
Frank Gilroy and his wife Ruth had three sons: Tony, the oldest, and five-year-old twins, Dan and John. I loved being in Frank’s company. He was and still is one of the most positive, talented, compassionate, generous people I’ve ever known. This was a man who’d seen heavy combat in Europe during World War II and helped liberate one of the concentration camps. He’d witnessed true brutality and horrible examples of man’s inhumanity to man, and yet he was always upbeat. In the months leading up to the debut of Roses, he worked relentlessly to patch together the financing to open the show, and later to keep it running. At our lowest moments when we would all be thinking, We’re going to get the ax here. This show is not going to survive, he’d lift us back up with his infectious energy and sense of humor. I’ve carried that lesson with me to this day, to always look for a bright spot even in the darkest of times.
That Sunday afternoon he and I sat together on a picnic bench and watched our five boys run around together across the lawn. One twin chased Emilio, who ran after the other twin, while Ramon, who’d only recently learned to walk, toddled good-naturedly behind them. Their play was so innocent and uninhibited, it was a joy just to sit in the warm sun and watch them.
“Do you think our kids will be friends when they grow up?” Frank asked me.
“I’m sure they will, if they still know one another.”
“No,” he said. “I mean, do you think our own kids will be friends with one another?”
What an odd question, I thought. I’d grown up in a house packed with siblings and, while some of us were closer than others and nearly all of us fought, we always had one another’s back. We loved one another without question and without reservation. But did we all consider one another friends?
“I never thought about that,” I told Frank.
“I wonder about it sometimes,” he said. “You know, it’s not always a given.”
When I looked at Emilio and Ramon playing together on the grass, I couldn’t imagine a time would ever come when my children wouldn’t seek out each other’s company or rush to each other’s aid. They were brothers, and family is the most important tie we have.
Janet gave birth to our third son, Charlie, on September 3, 1965, just five days before we began the nine-month national road tour of Roses, which continued its run on Broadway with a replacement cast. Meanwhile, Martha Scott joined Jack and me as we opened Roses in Los Angeles to start the tour.
Looking back, I’m amazed by how little actual planning I did during those years. I never had a life plan that was more detailed than being an actor, husband, and father. Whenever a new opportunity or challenge came along, I’d just figure out how to make
it work in real time. Let’s see if we can get these two things to come together, I’d think. Okay. Yeah. That’ll work. I can handle that. Let’s do that!
The benefit of living this way is you become flexible and resourceful. The downside is that the line between spontaneity and stupidity can be very thin. You often wind up making the most ridiculous choices and the dumbest mistakes, and then you have to find your way back out. But you learn best from personal experiences, and making peace with your mistakes is a measure of maturity.
We went on the road with Roses in September 1965 with three children under the age of four. The tour was among the last of the traveling road shows and put us on the move frequently. In Los Angeles, we set up house for three weeks in the Montecito Apartments, a beautiful 1930s-era Art Deco building right in the heart of Hollywood. I would walk to and from the theater every night as the late-summer heat started to cool. I would have been perfectly happy to keep the show in Los Angeles, but our next stop was a month-long run in San Francisco. Then came Denver, and next we headed to the Midwest for shorter runs. Our train would pull into a city at odd hours, we’d do a few shows, and then we’d pack up and move on to the next town. Split weeks like these were brutal with three kids because we had to unpack and pack and uproot and unpack again in such short bursts.
Somehow Janet managed to keep us all together by feeding and clothing three small boys, one of them a newborn, for seven months while I performed for rooms full of strangers in cities like Kansas City, Des Moines, Milwaukee, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, D.C. Charlie spent most of the first year of his life carried around the country in a wicker basket. Chicago was so cold in January, if you spit on the sidewalk it would turn to ice before hitting the ground. Janet had to keep the kids inside the whole time. One night we pulled into Cleveland well past midnight and had to wake up the sleeping boys. I had to maneuver Emilio and Ramon off the train with them literally hanging on to my legs as we went slurping through the depot.
In the cold early spring of 1966 we rolled into Boston for a three-week run. Back on the East Coast, closer to home and near the end of the tour, our spirits lifted. We took the boys to the Boston Public Garden and watched the swan boats float by on the lagoon. One Sunday I went to Mass at a beautiful old church downtown. I hadn’t been to Mass in years. Vatican II had occurred in the meantime and I was astonished by the changes it had ushered in. Growing up in Dayton, I’d served countless Masses where the priest faced the altar and said the Mass in Latin. This priest was facing the congregation and he kept looking up nervously, as if he were self-conscious about suddenly being exposed. And he was saying the Mass in English. Everyone could participate and for the first time I understood everything that was going on. Oh, my God, I thought. This is extraordinary. It made all the difference to feel like I was on the inside of the Mass instead of feeling like an observer on the perimeter.
We ended the nine-month Roses tour with a long run at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. Emilio was about to turn four by then, and one night I asked Janet to bring him to the play. He had come backstage before, but this would be the first time he was old enough to sit in an audience and watch me perform. Before the show I peeked through the curtain and saw the two of them sitting up in a box, his little blond head barely peeking over the railing.
That night I played my heart out for him. When I said the final line—“I love you, Pop”—I imagined Emilio as an adult saying it to me. When an actor reaches down into his emotional well and pulls up a deeply personal response, the audience can sense something special is going on. They may not know exactly what they’re seeing, but they recognize it as authentic. I felt grateful that Emilio was there to see it happen on this night. Even if he didn’t understand it right then, maybe the scene would somehow lodge itself in his memory. One day, maybe, he’d remember the image of his father on a stage saying, I love you, and realize how important it was for fathers and sons to say those words to each other.
After the play, I waited backstage for Janet and Emilio, but they never came. I walked back to the hotel to find Janet reading in bed while the boys slept.
“What happened?” I asked. “I looked for you two after the show.”
“Oh, he fell asleep during the first act,” she said. “I had to bring him home.”
Oh well, I thought. Like grandfather, like grandson.
As challenging as it was to travel with an entourage of three children, I much preferred it to traveling alone, because I didn’t do well by myself on the road. Despite the success of Roses and the Tony nomination, I was back to living from job to job, struggling to pay the monthly bills. I was talented and I worked hard. So why wasn’t I getting more work, or being celebrated the way I thought I deserved? And when I got into that self-pitying frame of mind, usually I drank.
Growing up in a working-class Irish neighborhood of Dayton, drinking had been an accepted social activity. We got drunk at weddings. We got drunk at funerals. We got drunk on front porches, in kitchens, and at neighborhood poker games in Dick O’Reilly’s living room. Only after I started working at the Living Theatre and dating Janet, though, did I start going to bars to drink. By my mid-twenties I knew I should avoid being alone whenever I could and that I had better avoid alcohol altogether.
On April 2, 1967, our daughter Renée was born in New York City. Janet had been hoping, and I had been praying, for a girl. What a special blessing! Once again, we all moved over to make room for a new addition to the family. And yet everything changed with a baby girl in the house as we started all over again, this time with pink clothing and fluffy toys.
In the fall, I landed a guest-starring role on the television series FBI. All the storylines on FBI were based on real-life cases, and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. played the inspector who investigated them. Ed Asner and I were hired to play an uncle-nephew team that kidnaps the youngest son of a prominent family and hits up his older brother for ransom. The older son was played by Russell Johnson, fresh from a three-year run as the Professor on Gilligan’s Island.
The episode was shooting on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank for two weeks. Janet and the kids couldn’t accompany me, especially with a new infant in the house. Even with my sister Carmen now helping with the kids, managing four children under the age of six was often more than a two-person job. I convinced Emilio, who was five, to travel with me to California ostensibly to ease the load on the women, but really so I wouldn’t have to travel alone.
Today, it’s unusual for an actor to show up on set with a five-year-old son in tow, but 1967 was a different era of television production. “Bring him along!” the producers said. They even helped find a preschool nearby that would take him during the day while I was working.
I didn’t know how to drive, so the show put us up in a motel in Burbank, walking distance from the set. The first day of shooting, I woke Emilio at 5:30 a.m., helped him dress, and walked him the few blocks to the school. The buildings in Los Angeles were lower than the ones he was accustomed to in New York and the streets weren’t as noisy or as crowded, but the place was unfamiliar to him and he held on tightly to my hand.
Oh, no, I realized as we headed toward the preschool. Kids needed to bring lunch to school, didn’t they? This was the kind of thing Janet would have remembered, but not me. I’d forgotten to pack a lunch for Emilio.
At that hour, only a Bob’s Big Boy burger place was open. Out front it featured a larger-than-life-size statue of a chubby guy with a pompadour and checkered overalls, brandishing a fake plate with a fake burger above his head. It was exactly the kind of food Janet would never feed our kids. I said a fast and silent prayer that she wouldn’t know, and if she did find out, she’d understand and forgive me. The food would be cold and soggy by Emilio’s lunchtime, but I didn’t have another choice. I ordered him a hamburger-and-fries combo for eighty cents to go.
When we got to the preschool, Emilio wouldn’t let go of my hand. Trying to ease the separation, the teacher introduced us to the resident my
nah bird.
“Good morning, Albert!” the bird said as we approached his cage. “Good morning, Albert!” His name must have been Albert, and he was repeating the children’s greetings he heard. Emilio was so fascinated by the bird I was able to slip away without incident.
That week we slid into an easy routine. In the mornings I would get Emilio a donut and an orange juice and walk him to school on my way to the studio. He would race over to the mynah bird and I would leave for work. After school, drivers for the show would pick up Emilio and bring him back to me, because we often shot until 6:00 or 7:00 p.m. The drivers wore Brooks Brothers suits and dark sunglasses and drove squared-off black Ford sedans. For most of grade school Emilio believed the real FBI had picked him up from preschool every day in L.A.
One afternoon Ed Asner and I were filming a scene in the studio that ran into late afternoon. Ed’s character had me digging a hole that was going to become my grave, but my character didn’t know it yet. In the Warner Bros. studio the floorboards could open and you could dig in the space underneath them. I was down about four feet in the ground going at it with a shovel, dirt flying up in the air, when I looked up to see Emilio’s little blond head peering down at me.
“Pop?” he said. He sounded small and unsure. “Pop?” Much later he would admit he thought Ed Asner was trying to kill me that afternoon.
“Emilio!” I said. I leaned casually against the shovel and tried to look as normal as possible, given the fact that I was standing in a grave I’d just dug for myself. “How was school today?”
He pointed to a gold star affixed to his shirt.
“Because I listened to them,” he said.
Because I listened to them. The sentence cracked open a place deep inside my chest. I had to lean harder on the shovel to stay steady. I’d been so focused on doing my job and just making sure Emilio had a place to spend the days that I hadn’t stopped to think about the emotional toll it took a five-year-old to fly across the country to a city far from home and go to an unfamiliar school alone for a week. He did it all so eagerly, just to please me. I’d leveraged his love and dependence to get him to come with me so I wouldn’t have to travel alone, and then I’d left him there with a soggy lunch in a room full of strangers. And he hadn’t complained. He’d been such a good sport about it he’d even been rewarded.