by Martin Sheen
Our family lived simply, ate simply, and dressed simply. The boys in my grade wore a new brand of jeans called Toughskins that you could buy at Sears. They had built-in kneepads to keep kids from wearing out the cloth, and for that reason mothers loved them. They were stiff and horrible to wear but they were indestructible. My mother would take all of us clothes shopping at Sears in Santa Monica a few times a year. Getting from west Malibu to Santa Monica today is an ordeal down the Pacific Coast Highway with more than a dozen traffic lights and perpetually slow traffic, but in 1972 you could drive all the way there in fifteen or twenty minutes and see maybe a half-dozen cars the whole way. Coming back at night you might not see any at all.
My father was getting more regular work by now, guest spots on TV series and also larger roles on made-for-TV movies. Although his career was starting to get traction, it wasn’t yet up to the measure of success that some of his New York peers had started to achieve. And I think he probably felt like the big roles were passing him by. He was thirty-two and physically looked younger, but he wasn’t getting the meaty roles he knew he was ready for and felt he deserved.
This was a time when my father must have needed his faith, but he couldn’t find his way back to it yet. During this period I didn’t think about God or religion at all, though my parents fought endlessly about religion in the 1970s. My father desperately wanted the four of us to be raised Catholic and to go to Catholic school and learn the rituals. My mother said, in so many words, “Over my dead body. Not going to happen.” She’d been raised a Southern Baptist and never had freedom of choice as a child or the ability to question or express her true self. She wanted us to be able to discover religion on our own. Religion had caused my parents enough trouble already. My mother’s mother thought she’d married the devil by marrying a Catholic and refused to go to their wedding, and my father’s father had been horrified he hadn’t married a Catholic. Frankly, I was relieved that I didn’t have to choose. A religious upbringing would have given me a type of discipline, but I had my own inner discipline. Growing up, I didn’t feel any lack.
The closest we ever came to prayer in our house was a song we sang together before dinner, influenced by my mother’s friends in Topanga Canyon and used by Yogi Bhajan at the end of his yoga disciplines and classes. We would all hold hands around the table and sing:
May the longtime sun shine upon you,
All love surround you,
And the pure light within you guide your way on.
Peace.
That was our equivalent of grace before dinner every night, whether we were at home or in a restaurant. My father insisted on singing it, and loudly. Imagine being ten and doing this with your friends at the table, and nobody in the family eating meat. Not always so easy to explain.
There was no “amen” at the end of our prayer. Instead there was “peace.” Nixon was pulling troops out of Vietnam but the world somehow seemed more godless and chaotic than ever. To my father, our dinner song was a compromise, serving as some measure of acceptable group prayer during troubled times.
That April he packed us all into his 1966 Ford Country Squire station wagon with the faux wood paneling for a ninety-minute drive to the town of Ojai to hear the Indian spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti deliver a public talk. When I tell people that I heard Krishnamurti speak in person in 1972, they ask, “What did he say?” in a kind of breathless whisper. He’s revered now and I suppose he was back then, too. But when you’re almost ten years old and sitting in a hot auditorium listening to a boring old guy going on and on in a high-pitched monotone about the nature of disorder and the need for psychological revolution to save mankind, while your father sits next to you listening in rapt attention . . . well, it’s not exactly an occasion for awe. At some point my father finally gave up and set us free outside. If you listen to that public talk online now you can hear the distant shouts of children in the background. One of them might have been me.
My dad was listening that day for some route to inner peace. About this time, he started doing yoga and meditating, too, but it wasn’t enough. His frustration over work and himself escalated and led to resentment and sometimes rage, which, more and more frequently, he directed at us, leading to spankings. He never used a belt, but when we kids would fight a lot, or complain, he’d shout, “I’ll knock your heads together if you don’t stop!” and occasionally he followed through. It was very painful. Somehow this was considered permissible in the 1970s. We had neighbors whose father used to beat them with a shovel, awful child abuse by today’s standards. In our house it was usually done by hand.
If my father had been able to connect with his Catholic faith in a meaningful way back then, would he have acted differently? Was being estranged from something that was vital to him part of his rage? If he’d had the outlet of his faith, would the family have been spared some of that madness? Ultimately Mass, Communion, confession—they’re all forms of meditation and grace. But if they are absent from your life, where do you turn?
My mother was open to the search herself and in those years was even more spiritually connected than my father. She was always looking for the answer to the great mystery, always striving to guide us toward pure and healthy states of body and mind. As a result, various gurus came in and out of our lives. My mother would plug into somebody and learn what she could from him—for instance, Bikram Choudhury, who was a huge presence in our house before he became a yoga franchise king. He is still revered with great affection in our family.
Even as a child, I was aware that my father was struggling spiritually, and it helped me feel compassion for him. I knew that was why he raged. I understood that. And even when I felt so angry at him and wanted to rage in response, I still wanted to earn his love and approval. I always found a way to forgive. Underneath it all, he loved the five of us with everything he had. I knew that. But he was hurting, and I hated that I had no way to make it better for him.
About that time, my father landed a role in a movie about a military gas leak that kills a rancher’s sheep and also his son. It was based on the true story of an incident in Utah in 1968 where thousands of sheep were allegedly killed by the U.S. Army’s chemical warfare tests. The movie was called Rage. The six-week shoot was taking place in Tucson, so once again we packed up, said good-bye to our classmates, and hit the road. Rage was the directorial debut of George C. Scott, a celebrated actor and my father’s friend from our New York days. Scott also played the rancher, and my father played Major Holliford, a military doctor who lies to the rancher and keeps him sequestered while studying the effects of nerve gas on humans.
Tucson was hot and dry, with fine sand and cactus in every front yard. Instead of renting a house, we lived in a motel, and there wasn’t much to do during the day, so my mother went down to the local elementary school and enrolled us for what she—but not they—knew would be only a few weeks. She had to lie about Renée’s age to get her enrolled in kindergarten. I guess in 1972 when a mother walked into a school office and said, “My kids need to go to school,” it wasn’t hard to convince anyone to take them. Scenes like this would repeat themselves many times over the years as my father’s career took off. I wouldn’t spend a full school year in one place until the tenth grade.
On May 12, 1972, I turned ten. My father was out of town on a job and couldn’t attend the birthday party my mother threw for me, but she gave me presents from both of them, and my grandmother in Ohio sent me a card with five dollars. My mother also gave me two letters she and my father had handwritten the day before on yellow legal paper. I read them on my birthday and saved them to this day.
May 11, 1972
Emilio,
Ten years ago tonight you wiggled into the world and into my heart. My first words to you were, “Look, isn’t he beautiful!” We have grown together over these long and so short years. It seems like yesterday.
Many times you could have tried the patience of a rock but equally as many and even more you have given gr
eat joy.
We’ve both made mistakes and have shed tears at times but if I could change my life I would not—since you might not have been a part of it any other way.
You are still my treasure and great joy and you will be all the days of your life.
Happy Birthday—know that you are loved and be happy.
Love,
Mom
May 11, 1972
My Dearest Emilio,
How very sorry I am not to be able to be with you today and celebrate the day, ten years ago today, that you came into our lives.
I just want to say, however, that I could not have wished for a more perfect son and dearest friend than yourself. I love you so much—Happy birthday little friend and welcome to the double figures.
Love & Peace
Dad
Birthday wishes almost always lean toward the positive and these were no different, but when I read these letters now I’m reminded of how honest my parents always were with me, especially my mother. The letters offer proof that, as young as I was, and as young as they still were, we all understood we were on a remarkable journey together.
That November my father starred with Hal Holbrook in a movie of the week called That Certain Summer. It was about a gay middle-aged divorced man living in San Francisco with his younger lover and the events that unfold when his fourteen-year-old son comes to visit for the summer and learns his father is gay. My father played the lover. A script about a well-adjusted gay couple living like married partners was so controversial for the time that NBC executives turned it down, but Barry Diller at ABC was willing to take a stand and green-light the project.
Watching the movie now is like time traveling back to the early 70s—long Beatles-style haircuts, ribbed turtleneck sweaters, tight jeans—but it was groundbreaking for the time, the first television movie to depict a gay male couple with sympathy and humanity. Until that point, homosexuality had been at best hinted at on television and at worst depicted as a psychological illness. Many gay viewers at the time described watching That Certain Summer as “life changing.”
It was a risky role for my father to take, but I don’t remember him laboring over the choice. He liked the script because, instead of preaching or advocating a lifestyle, it focused on the relationship between two individuals who cared deeply about each other. When a journalist later asked if he’d been afraid that the role would stigmatize his career, he answered, “I’d robbed banks and kidnapped children and raped women and murdered people, you know, in any number of shows. Now I was going to play a gay guy and that was like considered a career ender? Oh, for Christ’s sake! What kind of culture do we live in?”
Touché.
MARTIN
Along the Camino de Santiago
Outside Pamplona, Spain
Second Week of Filming, September 2009
The water level in the River Arga is higher today, and the current is moving fast. Yesterday, when we scouted this location, the river was a mellow stream, too mellow for our purposes. Emilio and David, our producer, went upriver to talk with the operator of a nearby dam and convinced him to release more water for the filming.
Today’s sequence calls for Tom to accidentally knock his backpack off an ancient Roman bridge when he pauses to rest between Roncesvalles and Pamplona. The bag holds everything Tom needs for his journey but above all his son’s ashes, so when he sees it fall into the river and get swept away he heads into the water to retrieve it. Yesterday’s knee-deep water level wouldn’t have conveyed the risk Tom is willing to take to get the bag back.
Still, I wasn’t exactly bargaining for a whitewater situation today.
“Whoa,” I say softly. “Whose idea was this?”
Emilio casts me a sideways glance. He doesn’t have to answer. We both know who came knocking on his front door with this one.
“I have an idea!” I announced as I charged into Emilio’s living room that day, caught up in my own excitement. “The bag falls in the river!”
“Okay,” he said calmly, closing the front door behind me. “The bag falls in the river. Then what?”
“Then it gets caught up in the current and Tom jumps in after it. He rolls this way and that . . .” I acted out the motions for him as I spoke.
“That sounds kind of dangerous,” Emilio said. “You’re really going to jump in the water?”
“Sure! Why not? You can tie a rope around my waist for safety.”
He looked at me for a long moment. “So after a fifty-year acting career, now you want to become an action hero?”
We both laughed. “If I can work it in organically, I will,” he said.
The river scene comes after Tom has dismissed a gregarious Dutchman, played by Yorick van Wageningen, and turned his back on a bitter Canadian pilgrim, played by Deborah Kara Unger in a role Emilio describes as “the only angry Canadian in the history of film.” By the time Tom reaches the old stone bridge to rest he has committed to walking the Camino alone. I was trying to show, and Emilio concurred: You can do this journey, mister, but you’re going to face more obstacles than you can anticipate, and you’d be better off as part of a community.
When the backpack falls in the river, Tom is faced with two choices: let it float away and abandon his pilgrimage, or risk his life trying to save it. He chooses the latter. In Tom’s mind, his son is drowning, so there’s no question he has to jump in and save him.
I also wanted the backpack to be its own character in the film. Generally, pilgrims on the Camino have fascinating relationships with their backpacks. At the start they pack everything they think they’ll need, and then some. After walking a while on the Camino, however, they begin to lighten their loads little by little. The refugios, or pilgrims’ inns, become repositories for extra pairs of shoes, books, cosmetics, and all the other personal items everyone thinks they need at the outset of a trip, before they learn simply to trust. As the pilgrims lighten their physical loads, they often start to lighten their inner loads as well. But Tom’s bag is Daniel’s bag, and he’s not willing to shed any item that Daniel carried to his death.
Before we left for Spain, Janet and I went down to a sporting goods store in Santa Monica to try out hiking boots and backpacks. I was such an inexperienced hiker, I didn’t even know that a backpack straps across the chest and around the waist or how that would affect my balance.
Also, I didn’t train for the walk in advance. “You have to get in shape,” Emilio kept urging me, weeks before we left for Spain. “You’ve got to start walking with a backpack.”
Even if I’d had the time to train, which I didn’t, would I have used it for that purpose? Probably not. Tom didn’t have time to get in shape. He arrived in France to retrieve his son’s body, not planning to take a 500-mile trek with his son’s forty-pound backpack. He wouldn’t have been prepared for all that walking, and so I thought it better for me to be unprepared as well.
In every role, actors have to find the right balance between personally identifying with a character and identifying too much, which can impose our own feelings and idiosyncrasies onto the role. For the past week Emilio has been reminding me of all the ways that Tom and I are different. When I ad lib a farewell or ask for a café con leche on camera, Emilio takes me aside.
“You have to stop playing Martin!” he says. “Remember, you’re Tom. You can’t throw in ‘God bless and all the best!’ when you say good-bye to someone. Martin might do that, but Tom wouldn’t. And you can’t speak Spanish.”
“But I live in California,” I argue. “I’d speak some Spanish if I was from California.”
“Maybe,” Emilio says. “Chances are you’d know a few words if you talked to your gardener. But I don’t think this guy speaks to his gardener. I don’t think he even sees him.”
“Well, in Starbucks I ask for a grande latte,” I insist.
“That’s Italian.”
“Grande is a Spanish word, too.”
“You don’t speak Spanish!” Emilio says. “May
be later you can say a few words. But at this point, you’ve only been in Spain for a couple of days. You’re still a stranger in a strange land.” Then he really drives the issue home. “Remember: You belong to a private country club. You’re a Republican. You never would have voted for Jed Bartlet, your own character on The West Wing.”
Point well taken. Tom and I do have differences, after all. And a big one right now is that Tom is willing to jump in the river after his backpack. Martin, however, isn’t so sure.
Fortunately, David has found a Spanish stuntman, Jorge, who can pass as me from a distance. He will do the more treacherous shots in the water and leave the close-ups for me.
A big, strapping guy with a full head of hair, Jorge reminds us of Johnny Weissmuller, the Olympic swimmer and actor who played Tarzan. He went in the knee-deep river yesterday without a hitch but today he eyes the chest-deep water suspiciously.
When the cameras are ready, I lean back against the edge of the stone bridge and unsnap the buckles on the backpack. I rest it against the ledge and stretch my back, which accidentally knocks the bag over the edge. It hits the water with a big, resounding splash and takes off downstream.
Jorge starts running along the riverbank, tracking the backpack as it floats along. Juanmi, our cinematographer, is in a red boat on the river shooting Jorge from a distance as he plunges into the water and starts swimming toward the backpack. Emilio and I watch as Jorge flails and then catches hold of the bag, gripping it to his chest. The expression on his face is a cross between surprise and a grimace. Except we’re not supposed to see that.
“He’s looking at us,” I say.
“I know,” Emilio answers. “We can’t use it.”
Rule number one for a stunt double: Never look at the camera. The whole idea is to trick viewers into thinking the double is the actor.