by Martin Sheen
I was twenty-seven years old and already the father of four, but it wasn’t until this moment, when I looked up at my five-year-old son from the depth of a grave I’d dug, that I fully understood how much his love and trust and dependence meant to me.
He peered down at me in the hole, waiting for my response. I knew how important a father’s praise is to a son.
“That’s great, Emilio! I’m so proud of you!” I said.
As attached as he was to me, so I was to him. Our dependence was mutual. I didn’t want to take this journey or any future journeys alone. And thanks to him, I didn’t have to.
Playing Timothy Cleary in the 1968 film version of The Subject Was Roses was significant for several reasons. First, it gave me my first costarring role in a studio feature film and earned me a Golden Globe nomination for best supporting actor. Second, it allowed me to work again with Jack Albertson (who won an Oscar for this role) and this time with celebrated actress Patricia Neal. Third, but not least, it required me to learn how to drive. We’d never had a family car in Dayton, so I’d taken buses or walked wherever I needed to go. New York’s buses and subways had suited me just fine. But to film a scene where Timmy and his father travel back from the family’s lake cabin, I needed to drive a car, so, at the age of twenty-seven I finally got a license to drive.
In the spring of 1968, Jan and I took the kids to visit her mother and stepfather in North Benton, Ohio, at their house near Berlin Lake. On Tuesday night, June 4, I borrowed my father-in-law’s car to take the kids to a drive-in. After the movie, the fog coming off the lake was so thick I could hardly see the road. We crept back slowly. It was a relief to reach the house safely.
After we put the kids to bed, Jan and I checked the news on television. In the California and South Dakota primaries that night, Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy were battling it out for the Democratic nomination for president. Kennedy supporters, we had seen his recent loss to McCarthy in Oregon. The news in Ohio that night declared him a winner in South Dakota, but if Kennedy didn’t win California he would drop out of the race. In California it was only 9:00 p.m., but preliminary poll figures showed Bobby well in the lead.
I’d been following Bobby Kennedy’s career since his days as attorney general in his brother’s administration. His commitment to protect the Freedom Riders, who rode desegregated buses through the South in 1961, moved me deeply, and I considered him a decent, honest, hopeful man with enormous compassion and humanity. I had volunteered for his campaign in 1964 when he’d run for the United States Senate in New York and celebrated when he won. On April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, Bobby spoke to a crowd in Cleveland, Ohio, with a speech that left a lasting impression on me. “Whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children,” he said, “the whole nation is degraded.”
Clumsily. That’s the word Bobby used. We clumsily go about weaving the fabric of our lives. It’s a beautiful sentence because it’s so true. We never know in advance what our next step will be. We just take a step, even if it’s a clumsy, stumbling one. Sometimes we have to admit, “That wasn’t a very good move. I’ll try this instead.” Or “Oops, I didn’t realize how expensive that was going to be.” Or “Oh, dear, I didn’t realize that you loved me.” But through it all we keep walking. We keep living. I didn’t become an actor because I was organized to become one. I became an actor because it was my clumsy attempt to become myself. We, all of us, just keep engaging in these clumsy attempts to realize ourselves. It’s such a perfect expression of what it is to be human.
“He’s going to win,” Janet predicted that night in Ohio, “but it’s going to take too long. Let’s go to bed.”
Six hours later, I wake in my parents-in-law’s guest room to a small hand pressing against my left shoulder. I open one eye to see Emilio standing at the side of the bed. Sunlight streams in through the window behind him, giving his blond hair the aura of a halo.
“Pop,” he says. “Wake up. Pop. Bobby Kennedy was shot.”
I close my eye. “Go back to sleep,” I say. “It’s just a dream.”
“Pop.” He pushes my shoulder again, this time with urgency. “Bobby Kennedy was shot. It’s on TV.”
I open both eyes now. What? Just six hours ago Bobby was about to win the California primary. Jan and I went to sleep certain we’d wake to good news.
“He was shot? On TV?” I say. “Where?” In Los Angeles? At the hotel?
“In the head,” Emilio says. “It’s on TV.”
In the head? Oh, Jesus, don’t make this true. I throw back the covers. This can’t be true. We just got through Reverend King. Please don’t make this be true.
“What is it?” Janet asks.
“Emilio says Bobby Kennedy was shot. He saw it on TV.”
“Oh, my God,” she says, rushing down the stairs behind us.
All the television channels are choked with special reports and updates. Oh God, Emilio was right. What happened while we slept? I flip through the dial. Nobody seems to know anything, but everyone is acting like they do. Shot in the head, hospital, surgery. Is he going to live? Please God, let him live. I pick up the phone to call my friend Matt Clark in Los Angeles. He’ll know what’s going on. It’s three in the morning there, but he’s one of my closest friends. He’ll understand my need to know.
“Pop?” Emilio says. His voice is tiny and unsure, his expression grave. He’s six years old, barely knows who Bobby Kennedy is or what he stands for, but he knows how important this news is to me.
“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s going to be okay,” but the words are as much for myself as they are for him.
Matt’s telephone rings once, twice. Bobby Kennedy. Shot in the head. Please God, no. The news is too horrific to imagine. What kind of lunatic would do such a thing?
I once sat with Bobby for two hours on a stage in New York City, as close to him as Emilio is to me now. It was a Sunday afternoon, October 4, 1964, a month before Election Day. He was running for a U.S. Senate seat from New York. Politicians and political hopefuls from all over the state had shown up that day at the old Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue and Fiftieth Street to rally against the closing of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Nearly sixteen thousand shipyard workers and their families packed the arena. The roster of speakers competing for their votes was staggering: Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York; Robert Wagner, the city’s mayor; both U.S. senators and ten U.S. representatives from New York; the Brooklyn and Bronx borough presidents; and Robert Kennedy, who was facing the incumbent Republican Kenneth Keating in the Senate race.
A small group of Broadway actors had been asked to show their support for the Kennedy campaign, including Buddy Hackett, who was appearing in I Had a Ball; Rudy Vallee from that season’s big musical hit How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying; Jack Albertson and me. I said I’d go if Janet and I could meet Bobby. At the Garden one of his contacts met us backstage and escorted us onto the stage, just a platform with rows of wooden folding chairs. A tremendous banner with a picture of the shipyard and the admonition DON’T GIVE UP hung behind the stage. We took two empty seats and waited. Senator Keating got up and delivered a long prepared speech. “You’ve been stabbed in the back by Navy Department policies!” he shouted, and the room exploded in a cheer.
I heard a rustling noise just offstage, and suddenly Bobby emerged with a small entourage and walked up to the platform. A year after his brother’s death the toll of the loss was obvious. His hair had started to gray and his movements were careful and measured. He was still the handsome young heroic figure we’d come to admire as attorney general just a year before, but he’d become introverted and reflective. His disarming smile was less frequent and his sharp Irish wit was more tempered now.
He was still a man in mourning and the crowd seemed to sense his vulnerability and fragility and treated him with utmost respect. Everyone on stage stood up to let him throug
h. He took a seat in front of us, at the very side of the stage, and when his contact murmured something in his ear he turned around to face Janet and me and extended his hand.
“Mister Kennedy, we’re honored to meet you,” I whispered, and he smiled and nodded in response as he shook my hand.
“Thanks for coming,” he said, and shook Janet’s hand as well.
Politician after politician spoke that afternoon while Bobby waited with his legs crossed and his chin resting in his hand. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Every few minutes he’d reach into his pocket for a pen and paper, scribble something down, and motion for an aide, who retrieved it and then scurried away on an errand. We sat like this for nearly two hours. The crowd chanted loudly between speakers. I began to feel uncomfortable for Bobby—Why were they making him wait so long? I wondered. How dare they do this to him? He was the most important one in the arena, the only one who made any sense amidst all this political claptrap, and they were making him sit for hours and wait his turn.
Finally he was introduced, and when he rose to speak, he held the microphone for no more than five minutes. His speech was brief, humble, and to the point.
“I don’t think it’s an easy problem,” he said, “and I’d be wrong to come to you and say that I do. But I think a major effort by all of us—all of us on this platform—I think that we can make a difference.” After all of the political jockeying and promises of the past two hours, it was almost startling to be spoken to in such a straightforward, honest manner. “I think what should guide all of us is not the fact that the struggle is so difficult,” he concluded, “but what really should guide us is what George Bernard Shaw once said: ‘Some men see things as they are and say, Why?; I dream things that never were and say, Why not?’ ”
He gave a little wave to the crowd and stepped down from the podium. The stadium erupted with cheers and whistles. The crowd just went mad for him.
It’s hard to convey to anyone who didn’t live through that era exactly what kind of emotion Bobby inspired. To many of us, he was the brother we wanted, the son we hoped for, the father we wished we’d had. He was the first rock-star politician my generation had known, with a magnetism that was awe-inspiring to witness. And I realized then that the reason he’d been held for last was because he was the one everyone wanted to see and hear. That was the only way to keep everyone in the building until the rally came to an end.
That’s when I knew he would win. A month later he beat Keating by more than 700,000 votes. It would be hard to stop him if he ever ran for president.
In Los Angeles, in the early morning of June 5, 1968, Matt Clark answers his phone.
“Matt? It’s Martin. We’re out here in Ohio. The news is saying Bobby Kennedy was shot. What’s going on?”
In the brief moment of silence that stretches between us, I get my answer.
“It happened last night,” Matt says. “At the Ambassador Hotel.”
The news that day was grim. One bullet lodged near his brain, one in his neck, one through his chest. All day I prayed for a miracle. I told myself that, if Bobby was in the hospital, he was still alive, and if he was alive, there was still a chance he’d pull through. I went to a local grocery store to shop, then took the kids to a nearby park and tried all day to stay focused. This was Mahoning County, Ohio, rural and conservative. There were no prayer services, no public displays of concern, and when Bobby died the next morning, Janet and I wept alone.
The memorial service and requiem Mass for Bobby were held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City on Saturday, June 8. I had to leave Ohio and travel to New York that day to begin rehearsals for Romeo and Juliet at Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park. I kissed Janet and the kids good-bye at the train station. Settled in my seat, I pressed a little transistor radio tight against my ear. The smokestacks of Youngstown streamed past the window as I strained to hear the ceremony broadcast from St. Patrick’s. I could not even imagine the depth of Ethel Kennedy’s sorrow, pregnant with her eleventh child, or that of the ten other children who had just lost their father. As we sped toward Pittsburgh, Ted Kennedy stepped up to the altar in New York to eulogize his brother.
“My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life,” Teddy said, “to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”
He was burying the last of his three older brothers, a loss almost unbearable to witness. Though I did not know it yet, in less than three months I would be heading back to Ohio for the funeral of my own brother, Manuel, the oldest, a husband and father of two who would die of a heart attack at the young age of thirty-nine.
At 1:00 p.m. the train carrying Bobby’s casket and his family left New York for Washington, D.C. He would be buried in Arlington National Cemetery not far from his brother’s eternal flame. What should have been a four-hour journey from New York to Washington took twice as long because so many mourners lined the tracks all the way through New Jersey and Pennsylvania to pay their final respects.
My train sped on into the night, unimpeded. It would take me a long time—another thirteen years—to discover that Bobby had been right: Every life, even the clumsiest one, is a life of honor.
It would take me even longer—thirty-five years—to discover what Bobby’s death had meant to Emilio, and for him to transform the events of that night into an artistic expression with his film Bobby.
CHAPTER THREE
EMILIO
1967–1969
New York was sirens and hot dog steam in the summer, sirens and the smell of roasting chestnuts in the winter. Soft pretzels all year long. Two dimes, a nickel, and a penny bought you a can of cream soda and a hot dog with sauerkraut and mustard from Frankie the hot dog vendor at the end of our block. I ordered the same thing every time.
We were living on the fifteenth floor of a brick prewar apartment building in New York City the day my father gave me twenty-six cents to go down to Frankie for a hot dog and a soda. It was the summer of 1967 and I was only five, but this was a different New York than New York today. Five-year-olds could take an elevator down to the street and walk to the corner alone without cause for worry. We thought they could, at least.
On the sidewalk outside our building, two of my friends balanced on their bikes, watching pedestrians rush by. I said hello and stood with them for a while. Before long, two older kids, middle schoolers maybe, swaggered up to us. They had the kind of tough attitude I already identified as street smart. I knew this would not turn out well. My friends knew it, too, and took off on their bicycles, leaving me there alone without an exit strategy.
The older kids looked down at me.
“Your money or your life,” the bigger one said.
Something flashed quick and silver near my face. A knife. Not a big knife, but big enough. Not that size mattered. I was five. A knife was a knife.
Okay, I thought. What do I do now? They wanted my money. I’d have to give them some. I slowly took the coins from my pocket and started dividing them up.
A dime for them, a dime for me . . .
Even in kindergarten, I was already looking for parity, aiming for equality. Both of which would later become major themes in my life.
A nickel for them . . .
Smack. One of the kids hit my hand from underneath. The change flew up and scattered across the sidewalk. The kids pounced on the coins and took off running down the street.
I couldn’t understand what had just happened. I was going to give them what they wanted. I thought it had been obvious I was going to share.
I was crying when I entered our building. “What happened?” the elevator operator asked.
“I got robbed,” I said.
He escorted me up to our apartment. “What happened?” my father asked when he opened the door.
“Two boys . . .” I said.
“What? Where?” my father demanded. “How?�
�� He led me back to the elevator by my arm. “Let’s go down there.”
He looked angry, maybe even dangerous. I didn’t know what he might do if he caught those kids. Suddenly, I wasn’t sure that telling him about it had been a good idea.
On the street, everyone was going about business as usual. It was already ten minutes after the incident. The boys were nowhere to be seen. Even I knew they were long gone by then.
“Which way?” my father asked, twisting his head from left to right. I’d seen him get angry like this before, except this time it was directed at strangers. That part was new. “Which way did they go?”
I pointed to the right. He took off like he was running a hundred-yard dash. The only line missing from this scene was “Follow that cab!”
Forty years later my father would remember this day and how bad he’d felt for me, how he’d known that such an incident could steal a child’s innocence and make him afraid to leave the house again. Taking off at high speed wasn’t an attempt to catch the kids—he knew they’d already disappeared—but it was the only action he could take at that moment to help him feel he was righting the wrong for his son and demonstrating that he cared.
While I waited for him to return, my two friends cycled back around the block on their bikes. They tried to act nonchalant, as if they hadn’t just bailed on me during a crisis.
“Where did you go?” I asked. They shrugged but stayed by my side. I knew if I stood there long enough, my father would come back down the sidewalk. That was something I knew I could count on. My father always came back.
When you grow up the son of an actor, you get used to seeing your father come and go. Really, that’s all I ever knew. During rehearsals he’d be out of the house all day and home in time for dinner. When a show went up, he’d be home all morning, leave before dinner, and I’d see him at breakfast the following day. Sometimes he flew to California or Hawaii for several days at a time to shoot episodes of TV shows. At home, my constants were my mother and my siblings. Ramon, Charlie, Renée, and I were so close in age we were playmates as well as siblings. The four of us shared one bedroom until well into my grade school years.