by Martin Sheen
When my father was coming and going it meant he had work. Those were good months. When work was scarce, he was home most of the time. I wouldn’t say we were poor in those years, but we often lived close to the edge. The feeling when I was born, my parents have told me, was that it was the three of us against the world. Being the oldest I was probably witness to more of their early struggles than Ramon, Charlie, and Renée were. I understood they were vulnerable both financially and emotionally, without support from the extended family, and I grew up wanting to make sure that someone had their backs, even if that meant me. They had each other’s backs, but it seemed like no other adults had them covered, not for a long time.
When you grow up the son of an actor you also learn when you’re pretty young how to distinguish between what’s real and what’s art. Watching my father on stage and occasionally on TV helped me understand and appreciate what he did. When I saw the actors backstage after a show and was allowed to walk out on the stage myself afterward, I understood the difference between an actor’s work and private life. In January 1968, when I was five and a half, I saw my father play Hamlet in Joseph Papp’s Public Theater rock-and-roll version of the play, called Hamlet as a Happening, which also became known as The Naked Hamlet. Papp took Shakespeare’s original text and rearranged it around the five main monologues of the play. Galt MacDermot, who’d written the music for Hair, composed the songs. The characters appeared on stage dressed as soldiers with flashlights, or in their underwear, or like garbage collectors. In one scene they threw popcorn at one another. Each time my father appeared on stage he was in a different guise. When he delivered the “To Be, or Not to Be” soliloquy, he walked out as a young Puerto Rican janitor, and when he spoke I heard my grandfather’s Spanish accent in Ohio coming at me from a New York stage.
Papp showed audiences that Shakespeare’s words could be just as relevant in 1968 New York as they’d been in Elizabethan England. Who else would have thought to have the “To Be, or Not to Be” soliloquy coming from the mouth of a Puerto Rican kid? Before the end of the monologue, people around me in the audience were crying. I didn’t understand why, but it gave me a very early lesson in how art could make people react in ways you would never expect.
The New York Times panned the show by calling it “jejune nonsense,” but to me it was outrageous and exciting and inspiring. In one scene Hamlet walked up and down the aisles handing out peanuts and balloons. When my father handed me a balloon I understood that I shouldn’t shout hello. And the next morning, when I woke up and walked into the kitchen, I knew I wouldn’t find Hamlet there. It would just be Dad.
New York to a kid in the 1960s was rumbling from the subways, gray snow in winter, The Flintstones on Channel 5. My godfather, John Crane, who’d been my father’s best friend in high school, had also wound up in New York. So New York to me also meant weekends with John Crane. A towering African-American man, skinny as a pole, John spent his days working for the postal service and his nights reading books and listening to opera. He was one of the most cultured men I’ve ever known. His apartment didn’t have a television but it was lined with full bookshelves, and he loved classical music. On weekends he took me to the opera and the ballet. These were the last places in the world you’d want to sit as a six-year-old, but you have to give the guy credit for trying.
At home, our pleasures were simple and cheap. While our basic needs were met, I understood that we didn’t have money for extras, and I tried not to ask for more than what was essential. But when I was five or six I became obsessed with a pair of construction boots I had seen another boy wearing. I already had shoes, as my mother pointed out, but I didn’t just want those construction boots, I had to have them, desperately needed to have them, and I begged my parents to buy me a pair. When they finally gave in I wore those boots every day, even after my feet grew and the boots became too tight. For weeks I didn’t tell anyone my feet hurt because I didn’t want my parents to have to spend money they couldn’t spare to buy me a new pair.
Even when times were tough, my parents still put education first. I was an extremely curious child, and to give me a proper start at school they decided to send me to kindergarten at a private French lycée. All the students had to wear uniforms, which weren’t cheap, and nobody was excited about buying me a suit I’d soon grow out of, but somehow they rallied up the money for the cause.
The school was tightly structured. The students lined up for everything. Every day we had to sing in French. I lasted from September until March 17, the day of New York City’s big St. Patrick’s Day parade. The school was on East Seventy-Second Street, just off Fifth Avenue, only a half block from the parade route. Knowing that I was related to Ireland on my father’s side, I loved that parade, the marching bands and the oversized shamrocks. But on St. Paddy’s Day that year, there I was at 11:00 a.m. stuck in a stupid French school, wearing a stupid suit, not allowed to go outside. I was sitting in the class just miserable, listening to everyone around me count in French. Finally I said the five-year-old equivalent of “The hell with this!” and got up and walked out the door.
What does a kid know about danger? I’d been to parades before and knew what to expect. There would be people standing three deep on the sidewalk, colorful, loud bands marching by, elaborate floats. None of it seemed treacherous to me. I walked to the corner and angled my way through the crowd to the curb so I could have a good view.
Nobody saw me leave the school and it took the teacher a while to figure out I was gone. When she did everyone flew into a panic—“Where is he? We’ve lost one!” The school immediately called my parents, who rushed across town and into the street to look for me. My aunt Carmen lived in the neighborhood, and she headed out, too. She was the one who found me, standing on the curb in my little suit, minding my own business as the parade marched by.
“What the hell are you doing out here?” she shouted.
“They wouldn’t let me watch the parade,” I explained.
“Everyone in the family’s out looking for you!”
I hadn’t considered that part. I’d just figured I’d watch the parade and go back to school when it was over, an arrangement that had seemed perfectly fair and reasonable to me. The school took care of my return. My parents were told I wasn’t to come back, which was fine with me. I transferred over to PS 166 a few blocks from our apartment, a five-story Gothic-style building with mini-turrets at the entrance. The place had academic cachet as the former elementary school of J. D. Salinger and Jonas Salk, but it just looked like a castle to me.
That’s where I was going to school in 1969 when my father was cast in Catch-22. The film is director Mike Nichols’s adaptation of Joseph Heller’s novel, the story of Captain John Yossarian, a World War II fighter pilot stationed on an island off the coast of Italy who requests to be released from his remaining missions. That’s when he discovers the army’s “catch-22”: that a pilot who keeps flying missions must be crazy, but any pilot who asks for a release from combat must be sane and therefore has to keep flying. Alan Arkin was hired to play Yossarian, and the actors who played the band of jaded, corrupt, and naïve pilots, officers, and nurses in his unit read like a roster of screen icons past and future: Orson Welles, Martin Balsam, Bob Newhart, Charles Grodin, Buck Henry, Anthony Perkins, Paula Prentiss, Richard Benjamin, Art Garfunkel, Jon Voight. And Martin Sheen, although in 1969 he wasn’t yet widely known outside of New York.
The shoot was scheduled for eight months in California, Italy, and Mexico, where Nichols and his art director recreated a U.S. Army World War II B-25 bomber base in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. They hoped that the area near Guaymas, Mexico, would pass as a Mediterranean island on the screen. The Mexico portion of the shoot would take four months, so my parents decided we’d all go down there together. Afterward we’d travel to California, where my father would shoot more scenes, but this time we’d stay there. My father was starting to get steady television and film work in Hollywood, and some of his go
od friends from New York were already heading west to live.
As much as we’d traveled around the United States for The Subject Was Roses tour, I’d never been to a foreign country before. I had no preconceived images of Mexico. The idea of picking up and leaving New York was foreign enough to me. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere without hot dogs from Frankie at the corner, skating in Riverside Park, or The Flintstones on Channel 5. On my last day of school, my first grade teacher asked me to go to the front of the room. “I’d like everyone to take turns coming up to say farewell to Emilio,” she said. “He’s moving away.”
One by one, my classmates came up to hug me and say goodbye. I stood in front of the blackboard staring out at the class, weeping. I felt as if I were being ripped from the only home I’d ever known. New York was my whole world. I never wanted to leave.
We couldn’t afford to ship anything to Mexico so we took only what we could carry, leaving behind all the furniture and nearly all of our toys and books. My aunt Carmen was in charge of selling everything that would generate money my parents could use, but Carmen learned about a needy family in New Jersey and gave everything to them instead. Somewhere in an antique store in Newark you can probably find our whole bedroom full of toys circa 1969. That sounds nostalgic now but was pretty upsetting for a kid back then.
We arrived in Guaymas in January 1969 with one suitcase each and a small trunk of household items. Most of the cast and crew were being put up at the Hotel Playa de Cortés in town, but it was too expensive to house a six-person family there for long. After a week we moved into a house about ten miles away in the rural village of San Carlos, on a peninsula that jutted out into the Sea of Cortez. By now San Carlos has been eaten up by developers but back then it was just the local fishermen and some American families associated with the NASA Manned Space Flight tracking station about 15 miles away.
To a city kid, Mexico was vast and hot and dry. The desert seemed to stretch on forever. I’d never seen so much empty space in one place. The beach was made of fine white sand, and we could walk down to the bay barefoot every morning and watch the fishermen head out into the water. Our house was simple and efficient, two floors of cinderblocks with big, square orange Saltillo tiles on all the floors. My mother was vigilant about checking behind all the furniture and inspecting our sheets before we got into bed every night. She knew a bite from a yellow bark scorpion could kill one of us, especially Renée, who was still a toddler.
The duplex was close to a slaughterhouse, and at certain times of day, we could hear the animals as they were killed by hand. We must have gotten the place for a good price. Still, it had running water and electricity, both of which were luxuries available only for Americans. The local families that lived in the shantytown behind the slaughterhouse had to haul their water in from a communal pump.
My father’s role in Catch-22—Lieutenant Dobbs—was a minor one, and in our four months in Mexico he only needed to be on set for a total of about twelve days. It was a long and difficult production with a large cast on a remote location that included many old World War II B-25 bombers and the pilots and crew to fly them. The weather often didn’t cooperate and sometimes the cast would sit around for days waiting to shoot a single scene. All this meant my father was with us in San Carlos much more than he was on set, and our family became as much a part of the local community as we could. Ramon and I went to a local Catholic school where classes were held in Spanish and I stood out as the only towhead in my class. One of the fishermen who lived nearby had eight or nine children, and after school the eight of them and the four of us would kick around on the beach or run through the dust together. The oldest, Manuel, was twelve and took a special interest in our family. Ramon and I would bring him and his brothers and sisters to our house for dinner and my mother would make big pots of beef stew and vegetables and serve it up in bowls with tortillas for everyone. Anyone who was hungry was welcome. Sometimes fifteen kids filled our house at dinnertime.
One morning we woke up and went down to the beach to watch the fishing boats load up and head out. It was a typical San Carlos morning: dry, salty air, navy blue ocean, a hot sun pressing down on the tops of our heads, except . . . as I ran onto the sand I stopped short. Something had gone horribly wrong. Hundreds of enormous gray fish, some as long as ten feet, were lying on the beach while children darted around them and men bent over the carcasses making fast, deep incisions with their knives.
“¡Mira! ¡Mira!” the littlest kids were pointing and hopping. “¡Delfin! ¡Tiburón!”
It took a moment for my mind to process what I was seeing. Dolphins, porpoises, hammerhead sharks—I’d never seen so much sea life up close and definitely never out of the water. Fish out of water meant fish must be dead; that simple equation came to me in a rush. Groups of older kids were using their bare hands to push and drag the fish and mammals up onto the sand where their fathers tore into the flesh. At eight in the morning already the smell was oppressive.
The first movie I ever saw in New York was Jacques Cousteau’s World Without Sun, and I’d been fascinated by the sharks. Now I saw a small posse of kids rolling a dead hammerhead away from the water’s edge, and I ran down into ankle-deep water to help them push it onto the dry sand. When we finished, I crouched down close to the head and inspected the shark’s eye closely. It was wide and beady and much whiter than I would have imagined. Its other eye was positioned directly on the other side of its head, so far away from the other I couldn’t imagine how this could actually result in sight.
We must have been witness to a red tide that morning, when the water is robbed of oxygen and fish in shallow water suffocate and wash up on shore. At the time it was just one of many episodes in Mexico where, faced with something entirely new and unfamiliar, I accepted it without question, in the way that’s easy to do only when you’re a kid. Kids don’t always stop to judge or analyze an unusual experience unless the adults around them react strongly. Otherwise, they just take in the experience and move on to the next one. When I walked onto the San Carlos beach that morning, I registered the sight of a hundred 300-pound fish scattered along the shoreline, recognized that something different was happening, something very wrong, but the adults on the beach didn’t seem troubled by the situation. They seemed to have it under control. So I ran down to the shoreline and very soon the physicality of the sun and the seawater, the sand crystals adhering to the shark’s tough, rubbery skin, took precedence. Activity. Motion. Experience. For an inquisitive seven-year-old boy that was the gold standard for a good day.
At age seven I was old enough to understand time and distance to a point where I knew it was possible to get on an airplane at home in the middle of winter and get off somewhere else very far away in the middle of summer, but for my younger siblings the move to Mexico was harder. Of the four of us, Charlie was the one who had the most difficult time adjusting. He was only three and the inconsistency of going from snowsuits on a city street to shorts and flip-flops in a desert, where we couldn’t understand the language spoken around us, seemed to hit him harder than it did the rest of us.
Somehow when we were in Mexico, Charlie also came to the realization that everyone has to die. Maybe it was because we lived near the slaughterhouse, or maybe it was something he dreamed about or saw on TV. Whatever it was, most kids learn about the concept of death slowly by losing a pet or a grandparent and gradually accepting their own mortality. For Charlie it all came in a single, terrifying rush and it happened that winter in San Carlos.
Almost every morning my father would wake up early and go upstairs to the kitchen to make pancakes for everyone’s breakfast while we slept. And almost every morning, as my father remembers it, Charlie would walk upstairs into the kitchen, clutching his blanket and screaming, “What day is it?”
“It’s Tuesday,” my father would say.
“What time is it?”
“It’s eight o’clock.”
“Where are we?” Charlie hadn’t learned th
e days of the week yet and didn’t know how to read a clock, but he demanded to know these details as if they were his only source of safety and security in the world, the only buffer between him and annihilation.
Being the children of a successful actor would mean that this type of disorientation and dislocation would become so common that we’d eventually come to accept it as normal. Mexico was only the first of many temporary moves we’d make over the next seven years, the first episode of what I’d later come to think of as the gypsy traveling circus of my childhood. We’d come to town, set up the tent, put on the show, and then pack it all up and go home until the next time. Between Catch-22 in Mexico in 1969 and Apocalypse Now in the Philippines in 1976, our family would go on location together no less than seven times to different places around the world. Film roles are often offered on short notice and it became our norm to quickly load up the car or board a plane and stay on location for weeks or even months at a time. I learned how to quickly adapt to new languages, new schools, and to navigate everything from a tractor in eastern Colorado to the subway system in Rome to martial law in Manila. Up until our time in the Philippines, when it became critical for the kids in the family to have a say in where we were going and what we’d be exposed to, we never questioned the moves, even if it meant picking up and leaving in the middle of a school year. We were a family, and families stuck together. It was a given that, when Dad traveled for work, we all went, too.