by Martin Sheen
We need him to get the tenor of the scene just right, so I make him do another take. This is the only big, showy scene Tom has in the film, and I want him to nail it. The rest of his performance is so phenomenally restrained, it hardly looks like he’s acting. When the dailies come back from Madrid each day, I see how much quiet dignity he injects into the role. The other actors have noticed it, too.
“Working with Martin is like taking a master class in subtlety,” Jimmy Nesbitt says nearly every day. “It’s a master class in not showing your work.”
Of the four actors sitting at the bodega table, Yorick van Wageningen is the one who seems most like his character, the affable Joost. Joost’s biggest downfall is food; he’s walking the Camino to lose weight, but his quests for the perfect goat cheese and an exquisite plate of roast lamb keep getting in his way. Joost is actually modeled after a friend of mine, a boisterous winemaker from the Netherlands who has said some of the lines I gave to Joost, such as “We Dutch are always looking for the quickest way to get to the next party” and “If it ain’t Dutch, it ain’t much.”
When David and I were casting for Joost, we wanted to find a middle-aged Dutchman for the role. There wasn’t a deep bench to choose from. Eight days before we were scheduled to start shooting in the Pyrenees we still didn’t have a Joost, who, because he’s the first fellow pilgrim Tom meets, needed to appear on our second day of filming. Dave and I were sweating about this in our hotel in Madrid, trying to figure out what to do.
“I found five guys on the Internet,” he said at one point. “It’s down to this. Pick one.”
I looked at the options. “I like this guy a lot,” I say, pointing to a photo of Yorick, who had a long résumé of film and TV work in the Netherlands. “Let’s bring him in.”
We made the arrangements for Yorick to meet us in Madrid the next day, where we waited for him at the hotel. Hours passed. No Yorick.
Then his agent called, apologizing. “We’re so sorry,” he said. “We thought you were in Barcelona. He can be in Madrid tomorrow. Please don’t leave yet. Stay and meet him.”
“All right,” we agreed. Really, what else could we do at that point? We were now six days from shooting, and we still didn’t have a Joost.
Yorick showed up in Madrid the next day, exhausted, disheveled, and contrite, dragging his suitcase across the plaza. Dave and I looked at each other. Oh, no, we thought. This didn’t look good.
“Guys, I’m so sorry,” Yorick said. “My gosh, I’m so sorry, the screwup. But it wasn’t a total loss.”
“Really?” Dave asked. “How so?”
“I had the most amazing lamb dish in Barcelona.”
This time Dave and I looked at each other and smiled. We had our Joost.
In the bodega scene, Joost sits with Sarah and Tom while Jack stands at the head of the table, pontificating about the virtues of the “true pilgrim,” one who lives off the land and eschews creature comforts. Tom, who by then has had one glass of wine too many, lays into Jack about being a “true fraud” on the Camino with his wallet full of credit cards. “Fraud!” Tom shouts hoarsely to the two police officers lounging across the street, “Police! Over here, gentlemen! Arrest this man for being a fraud!” As Tom becomes louder and more disruptive he slips and falls. The police officers rush over and, when Tom takes a swing at one of them, they cart him off to the station.
The police officers on film are real police officers from the nearby city of Logroño. They show up on set in their black and yellow Policía Local uniforms with the caveat that they can film only until noon because they go back on duty at 1:00 p.m. As skilled as they are at their jobs and as official as they look, it becomes clear that they don’t know how to stage-fight, so my dad and I demonstrate how to duck a wild punch on screen. On duty, the officers probably would have used a baton against any pilgrim who tried to hit them, so teaching actual police officers how to avoid getting hit by my dad was an education in itself.
We get the shots of the officers lifting Tom from the ground, of him taking a wide swing that misses one officer’s head, and of them leading him away. Then we move the set to the main police station in Logroño to film the officers bringing Tom in while Joost, Sarah, and Jack hurry behind them. The camera crew follows the actors through an archway and down the street while Tom, hands cuffed behind his back, struggles against the policemen as they lead him to the station. “I speak American!” he shouts. “God bless America! Call the American embassy! Tell them I’m being kidnapped on the Camino!” He breaks into a loud rendition of “God Bless America” as the officers force him through the station doors.
Townspeople and members of the local press have lined up on the other side of the street to watch the commotion. They recognize my father from his role as President Bartlet in The West Wing, which began airing in Spain in 2003 as El Ala Oeste de la Casa Blanca. A local newspaper photographer snaps some shots of the policemen pulling my father down the street.
The next day’s paper in Logroño features a photo of my father being led away in handcuffs under a headline in Spanish that says, “The President Is Arrested.” We all get a good laugh from that one.
Seeing my father get hauled off to jail isn’t uncommon for me. In real life he’s been arrested sixty-seven times for demonstrating nonviolently for social justice and environmental causes. From his first arrest in 1986, when he demonstrated against President Reagan’s so-called Star Wars program, which proposed putting nuclear weapons in space as a defensive shield, to the most recent one at Vandenberg Air Force Base in 2002, his presence has often turned an event into a news story. My mother and I would often see him on television, loudly reciting the Lord’s Prayer or shouting the lines to Tagore’s poem “Where the Heart Is Without Fear” as the police hauled him away. Many times he’d look like a complete lunatic, a man possessed, and at first I felt embarrassed to see him like that. I would shake my head, but over the years, as I watched him get arrested again and again, I started admiring him, not totally understanding and yet understanding at the same time. I came to realize that shouting those lines as he was being pushed into the back of a paddy wagon was an expression of both his commitment and his fear.
I participated in the grape boycott of the 1980s and I’ve come out for various environmental and social justice causes, but never to the extent my father has. By giving Tom this arrest scene in The Way I wanted to show a scene where an American who behaves badly in Spain, the typical Ugly American, gets his comeuppance. The scene offers instant karma when Tom emotionally levels his companions by telling them exactly what he thinks of each of them, only to be humbled almost immediately by the embarrassing arrest. The people he just railed against become the ones who bail him out of jail. In that moment, everyone realizes how much they need one another to complete their personal journeys.
This is a common story on the Camino: Many pilgrims encounter people they can’t seem to get away from, but by the time they all reach Santiago de Compostela they’ve discovered the lessons they needed to teach one another along the way. From Sarah, Tom learns compassion; from Jack he learns honesty; and from Joost, kindness and tolerance. My father already has these personal qualities, and shedding them to play Tom, and then trying to acquire them anew for the camera, has been one of his biggest challenges in this role.
The rain stopped long ago and the sun hangs low in the sky. This day of shooting is drawing to an end. We don’t know it yet, but this will be the last day of rain we’ll encounter on this shoot. Forty days and forty nights in northern Spain in September and October with only two days of rain. If I didn’t believe in miracles before, I would have to believe in them now.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EMILIO
1976–1977
When I returned home from the Philippines in October 1976, Mr. Thacker welcomed me back into the drama club. A slim man with short-cropped dark hair, some days he’d walk into our drama class in a dark suit with a white shirt and a tie. The next day he’d show up
in casual slacks with Converse gym shoes and a floppy white hat. His first name was William and his wife was a home economics teacher: That was all we knew about his personal life, but he could get four ninth graders at Malibu Park Junior High to transform into completely different people using only an empty stage and two folding chairs for props. It was like magic to watch.
While I’d been gone, a ninth grader named Jeff Lucas, a wiry guy with wavy brown hair and a long, thin neck, had emerged as the most talented actor in our class. Like a throwback to another era, he was a master of physical comedy in the vein of Charlie Chaplin or Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy. In 1976, the year of Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro, Jeff’s favorite actor was Rudolph Valentino. For Halloween, he dressed as Clark Gable. In ninth grade he was getting cast in every play, and I knew I could learn from working with him.
“Hey,” I said to him at school one day. “I heard you’re the actor guy here. Do you want to read some plays together?”
That was drama-class speak for “Let’s play around with some characters, run lines, put something together for the stage.” Mr. Thacker encouraged students to pick their own material, believing we’d have as much or even more passion for projects we chose as for ones that had been chosen for us. Mad magazine was wildly popular at the time and some of the drama students created parodies of films to perform on stage, but Jeff and I were more interested in classic and contemporary plays. My parents kept a stack of playbooks in the house from plays my father had done and ones they’d seen together, and I would leaf through them looking for scenes that Jeff and I could practice.
My mother had arranged for a woman named Mary Arnold to stay with me at the house until the rest of the family returned for Christmas. Peripherally connected to Apocalypse Now, Mary was the girlfriend of an assistant film editor and also the sister of Sam Bottoms’s wife. She was only nominally in charge at the house, since there wasn’t much to do other than cooking dinner. The school bus picked me up every morning and brought me back every afternoon and I spent weekends at the beach or making short films with my parents’ camera and my neighborhood friends. The arrangement at home worked out well enough and after a few weeks my parents decided to send Ramon back to Malibu, too. That autumn we lived in our shared bedroom, did our homework, and watched television at night.
I was relieved to be home though of course I missed the rest of the family. I was right on the cusp of independence, functionally able to care for myself but still in need of minimal guidance and protection. The week I returned to school a girl I’d had a crush on in eighth grade—and still did—saw that I had hair growing on my chin.
“That looks terrible,” she told me. “You’ve got to shave.”
I hadn’t even realized it was noticeable. Later that afternoon I found one of my dad’s old razors in his bathroom and taught myself how to shave. Afterward, I rubbed the smooth skin of my chin. It seemed this was the kind of thing a father should teach a son but my father had never been the kind of dad who made a show of walking me through male rites of passage. We never talked about girls, never had the sex conversation or did a driving lesson together, though he did try to teach me—several times, without success—how to tie a tie. I wonder now if he was unable to hand down his knowledge effectively or if he was still very much a kid, like me. Somebody would have had to tell him, “It’s time to have that sex talk now with your son,” and he would have woken up and said, “Oh, I guess that’s . . . is that my job?” Luckily I had my mother. Whatever keys to manhood I received during those years I either got from her or figured out on my own.
That’s not to say my father wasn’t affectionate. He was, greatly so, and much more than other fathers I knew. I once saw Steve McQueen drop his son Chad off in front of school. When they said good-bye, they shook hands. I stood on the sidewalk and cocked my head to one side. It seemed like such a disconnected, formal good-bye. That never would have happened in our family. My father would have hugged and kissed me. On the mouth. He didn’t come from a family that showed physical affection, but when he was in high school he saw his friend’s dad hug and kiss him good-bye and thought, When I have children I’m going to always hug and kiss them. I’m going to make sure they know they’re loved. That year my father was 7,000 miles away from me, whenever I saw a father and son give each other a formal good-bye I would miss my bear-hugging dad powerfully.
We’d all hoped that Apocalypse Now would wrap before the holidays but by November it was clear that wouldn’t be the case. The new plan was to break for Christmas and New Year’s and then go back to the Philippines with a smaller crew. For the holidays we all met up in Hawaii, on the island of Maui. My parents, Charlie, and Renée flew in from Manila and Ramon and I flew in from Los Angeles and we all stayed in Hana for a week. Freed from the pressures of school and set, we could focus exclusively on being a family for the first time since we’d left for Rome nearly a year before. We stayed at the Hana Maui resort, which is a high-end destination now, though back then it was ramshackle and affordable and gorgeous, with bunk beds in the guest rooms and communal meals. Guests had to eat at designated times or they’d miss being served, and every day we’d come running from far-flung corners of the property, laughing, and scramble to get a table so we wouldn’t overshoot the meal. My father remembers that vacation as one of the great weeks of his life, to be reunited with all of us in such natural beauty and to have such fun.
After Hawaii and a few weeks back in Malibu, my parents headed back to the Philippines in January for the third leg of filming. Figuring it would be for just another month or so, they decided all four of us kids should stay home and go to school. Joe Lowry and Jimmy Keane were also back in Los Angeles and they were recruited to help Mary take care of us at the house. From a one-adult, two kid household we’d now grown to a three-adult, four-kid mini commune. Advantage: kids. No doubt the adults started losing their minds trying to keep us all in line until my parents returned, whenever that would be.
That winter I immersed myself in drama club, appearing in the musical Bye Bye Birdie and other smaller productions. One afternoon at home I was looking through the stack of my parents’ plays, searching for something Jeff and I could perform. I pulled a book of two Harold Pinter plays off the shelf, The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter. A piece of paper fluttered to the floor. It had been tucked into the back of the book. Dear Miss Templeton, it began. It was a thank-you note from the actor Donald Pleasence to my mother. In 1961 she’d written him a fan letter after she and my father saw him star in The Caretaker. I thought, Well, this must be a sign. Settling on the couch, I flipped through the book.
The Caretaker was a three-act, three-character play about a mentally disabled man who lives with his brother and the homeless man he brings back to their house. The Dumb Waiter was a one-act, two-man play about two hit men waiting in a basement for their next assignment. That one had potential for me and Jeff. Before long, I was absorbed in the story of Ben and Gus, arguing in a basement while a dumbwaiter in the back of the room mysteriously kept sending food orders down to them.
The next day at school I sought out Jeff Lucas. “This Pinter play, The Dumb Waiter, it’s a two-hander,” I told him. “A small production. We wouldn’t have to burden anyone. We could just put it on together.”
“Great,” he said.
Jeff took the role of Ben, the older, experienced hit man. I would play Gus, the younger protégé who annoys Ben with his running stream of questions. The play was quintessential Pinter: an absurdist plot with few characters set in a sparsely furnished room. It would be an easy one to stage.
For the next couple of weeks we rehearsed at Jeff’s house. We rehearsed at my house. We ran lines during lunchtime at school. With only two characters carrying the action we had to memorize long passages of rapid back-and-forth dialogue. We rehearsed that play more than any other production I’d rehearsed to that point. We rehearsed it until I could practically recite Pinter’s lines in my sleep.
During
the day, the auditorium at Malibu Park Junior High functioned as both cafeteria and assembly room. At night it became a stage with audience seating for five hundred and a better than adequate sound system. It was an impressive venue for its time.
The Friday night that The Dumb Waiter premiered, I watched the students and their parents filter into the room and take their seats. Almost everyone I knew from school was there to see Jeff and me perform. I peeked through the curtain and saw Mr. Thacker sitting proudly in the front row. Every Sunday when my parents called home from the Philippines, I’d talk with them about the play and how much I liked the language. They would want to hear a blow-by-blow of the performance. In two days I’d give them the full report.
Backstage, Jeff and I looked at each other and nodded. We were ready to go. We knew the play forward and backward by then, but still, my palms were sweating. The lights in the theater went down, and Jeff and I took our places on stage. Curtain went up, stage lights came on. And then it was just the two of us in a basement room, with Pinter’s carefully scripted stage directions.
Jeff, as Ben, is lying on a bed, reading a paper. As Gus, I’m sitting on a second bed, unlacing my shoes. My character is supposed to be bothering him with the activity, and Jeff/Ben rustles the paper to show his annoyance. The audience sits quietly, watching us begin the scene without words. I walk off stage, and the audience hears the sound of a toilet trying to flush. When I return Jeff slams his newspaper down hard on the bed.
“Kaw!” he says. He picks up the paper again. “What about this? Listen to this! A man of eighty-seven wanted to cross the road but there was a lot of traffic, see? He couldn’t see how he was going to squeeze through. So he crawled under a lorry.”
“What?” I say. The correct next line is supposed to be “He what?” but I fumble it. Jeff doesn’t seem to notice.