Along the Way

by Martin Sheen

  Just before I left the Philippines we received news of a devastating accident on an airstrip in the Canary Islands. A Pan Am 747 had collided with a KLM 747, killing 583 of the 644 people on board. Everyone on the KLM flight had died. It was—and still is—the deadliest crash in airline history. I’m a nervous flier even under the best of circumstances, and reading this news didn’t help. A few days after the crash, Ramon and I boarded a plane for our flight to California. My parents had decided to keep Charlie and Renée with them until my father’s work was done.

  Ramon and I made our way down the aisle to our seats. I sat down, buckled in—and that’s when I noticed the airline logo stitched into the back of the seat in front of me: KLM.

  “Oh no,” I said to Ramon. “We’re doomed.”

  I thought of the last time I’d flown out of Manila, five months earlier. I’d been going home alone that time. Because I was only fourteen, the airline required that an adult guardian accompany me, and neither of my parents could act as chaperone. The singer-songwriter Jackson Browne was in the Philippines to talk with Francis about doing some music for the film and he was about to head back to L.A. My mother asked if he’d fly with me to Hawaii, where I’d then be allowed to continue on my own. He said sure.

  I knew that Jackson Browne was a musician, but I didn’t know anything about his work. My musical tastes veered toward Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Back home, Jackson was a big deal and about to get even bigger. His last album, Late for the Sky, had gone platinum the previous year and his next one, The Pretender, would be released in November, rise to number 5 on the Billboard charts, and earn a Grammy nomination. I also didn’t know that he’d just lost his wife to suicide and was raising their two-and-a-half-year-old son. To me, he was just a really friendly, laid-back guy with brown hair hanging in his eyes who smiled when I showed him the bag of mangoes my mother had given me for the trip.

  “You brought mangoes! Far out, man,” he said.

  As the plane took off I confessed that I didn’t like flying. And that in fact, the possibility of crashing terrified me. He had no fear of it any more, he said.

  “Hey, man, neither of us is going to die in a plane crash,” he said.

  “Okay. Because?”

  “Because we both have way too much work to do still,” he said. “Our work here is not anywhere near done.”

  I can dig that, I thought. I also believed everyone was here for a reason, and that our task was to live up to that potential. Jackson talking about destiny and purpose resonated deeply with me. Which is probably why I’ve remembered that conversation nearly word for word for more than thirty-five years.

  Jackson and I talked the whole way to Hawaii. A fourteen-year-old junior high school kid and a famous twenty-eight-year-old, platinum-selling musician: we had much more in common than I would have guessed. We got along so well that Jackson changed his connecting flight in Honolulu so we could keep traveling together to L.A. I never saw him again after that trip, but every time I get on a plane I still think about what he said.

  I stared at the KLM insignia on the seat back in front of me as the plane started taxiing down the runway. My usual anxiety about flying started to bubble up. I pushed it back down. Tomorrow I’d be home in Malibu, and the day after that I’d be back at school. Soon to come were a class picnic, my ninth-grade graduation, and the annual Renaissance Faire, where I hoped to one day get a job.

  Yeah, I don’t think my work’s done here, I told myself. Not yet.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MARTIN

  1977–1979

  I left the Philippines in June of 1977 a very different man from the one who had flown there from Rome in April of 1976. Apocalypse Now taught me the limits of my endurance as an actor and a man. Looking back, I wonder if the heart attack wasn’t a subconscious attempt to remove myself from the craziness of the situation.

  It wasn’t just the grueling physical toll the film took on me, though that was surely part of it. The oppressive heat, anxiety, and sickness—fourteen months of that could have forced anyone to his limit. But the movie also extracted a psychological toll. The role of Willard had mystified me and I couldn’t get a handle on who he was. I’d never been a soldier, didn’t know anything about the physical or mental aspects of war, and despite Joe Lowry’s assurances to the contrary, I don’t believe I would have survived combat. I couldn’t imagine killing anyone, for any reason, though I also couldn’t deny that under extreme circumstances, such acts are possible for anyone.

  “You’re Willard,” Francis had told me, which was both intriguing and frightening and, ultimately, impossible to accept. It seemed that to truly embody Willard I had to accept as fact that all human beings are innately hostile and aggressive, especially men. On the set Francis advocated this Freudian philosophy as a motivation, but at home Janet advocated the opposite. She believed that we are all born loving and compassionate, and that we learn how to be hostile and aggressive through fear. I agreed with her wholeheartedly, but that philosophy was hard to hold on to when the character I needed to inhabit was in the Vietnam jungle on an assassin’s mission to kill.

  Years later, when I read Viktor Frankl’s 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning, I found a writer who articulated my beliefs about human nature. Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who survived three years in Nazi concentration camps, believed humans are innately compassionate beings and community builders. He wrote that, if Freud had seen prisoners taking care of one another at Auschwitz, he might have revised his whole philosophy. Even in Auschwitz Frankl saw repeated proof of man’s fundamental goodness. If anyone had reason or motivation to be hostile or aggressive toward his fellow men surely it would have been those inmates. And yet they weren’t. Many of the men in Frankl’s barracks were loving and compassionate despite their circumstances and did whatever was within their limited power to help one another survive.

  So there I was in the Philippines, on the set for eight to twelve hours a day with Francis urging me to be more aggressive, and then bringing that back to the cabana at night, where Janet would say, “What the hell’s the matter with you?” I had to learn how to come home and get mellow, then go back to the set and get crazy, then return home and get mellow, then return to the set and get crazy again. It was a completely fractured existence, a Jekyll and Hyde act, and while it sounds very funny now I wasn’t laughing then. Nobody was.

  After the third and final leg of the film, Janet, Charlie, Renée, and I left the Philippines and stopped off in Hawaii on our way home. I needed a few days to pull myself together before returning home and reuniting with the other boys. When we landed in Hawaii I was very thin, insecure, and emotionally fragile. I’d taken to wearing black Vietcong pajamas everywhere because they were so comfortable, and I can only imagine the impression I must have made when I walked into the upscale hotel lobby in Honolulu: skinny, jumpy, disheveled after the long flight, and wearing what looked like last night’s pajamas. Of course the front desk clerk refused to give us a room.

  Exhausted and furious, I started making a scene.

  “What do you mean, we can’t have a room?” I shouted. “Isn’t our money as good as anyone else’s?” I could feel my rage threatening to get out of control.

  “Calm down,” Janet said, and that’s all it took. I had only to remember that just hours after the heart attack I was airlifted to Makati Medical Center in Manila and was being raced down a corridor on a gurney with fluorescent lights streaming overhead. Suddenly, Janet’s face appeared above mine like a vision. She smiled, leaned down, and whispered in my ear, “It’s only a movie, babe.”

  Oh my God, I thought. She’s right. Yes. It is only a movie. And at that moment I started to recover.

  I’d already survived the physical part of the heart attack. Now Janet was helping me start to heal psychically. The bond that had formed between us when we delivered Ramon together in 1963 was solidified in Manila that day.

  The desk clerk in Hawaii finally did
admit us, and I spent most of that week in the room, reflecting. I was sensitive and weak and seemed to weep at the slightest provocation, sometimes from despair, sometimes from relief, sometimes from pure joy. Like a deep-sea diver coming back up to the surface I had to slow my ascent to keep from getting the bends, and come up in stages to integrate back into regular life slowly. I couldn’t jump straight from Manila to Los Angeles. Hawaii was a necessary stop. I wished our soldiers returning from Vietnam had such a respite. Instead, many of them came out of combat and in less than forty-eight hours were back in what they called “the world” without any time or preparation for transition.

  Soon we were back in Malibu. I gladly returned to the same neighborhood, the same trees, the same house that I’d left in January. The physical geography had remained static, yet monumental changes had occurred in the country over the half-year that I’d been gone. Jimmy Carter had become president and pardoned Vietnam draft dodgers on his first day in office; the California state legislature had voted to restore the death penalty; and antinuclear protests were heating up all over the country, especially in New Hampshire, where 1,414 protesters had just been arrested and charged with criminal trespassing. In our family, Emilio had turned fifteen and was moving on to high school; all the boys were bigger, stronger, and seemed to need me less; and Renée was becoming an accomplished equestrian already at ten years old.

  I had changed profoundly, as well. The heart attack was a serious wake-up call, but it was also a serious confidence crusher. I felt less certain about my abilities, including my ability to fully recover, but even as I went through the necessary convalescence with exercise, good diet, and rest, an insidious form of self-pity had started to snake its way into my psyche.

  Self-pity is a terrible disease. Its focus is self-absorption. What about me? Look at me! There’s no joy in self-pity. It pulls us away from our true selves into egocentricity and isolation.

  But I didn’t know this in 1977. All I knew then was how vulnerable I was, and how good it felt to be back home.

  August arrived, and with it a publicity trip to Paris to promote Sweet Hostage, a film I’d done for American TV now being released in France as a feature film. I’d be spending my birthday in Paris with Janet, who persuaded Emilio to join us. The production company put us up in a suite at the Plaza Athénée. It was the kind of hoity-toity hotel I never would have stayed in on my own, but for those few days it was Paris at its finest, all five stars of it every day.

  On August 3, my thirty-seventh birthday, Emilio and I took the elevator down to the lobby and headed out for a morning walk. I stopped at the hotel registration desk as usual to pick up a copy of the International Herald Tribune and scanned the front-page headlines.

  “Oh, my God,” I said.

  “What is it?” Emilio asked.

  “Francis Gary Powers. He died in a helicopter crash two days ago. Oh, no.”

  Francis Gary Powers had been an American pilot working for the CIA in 1960 when his U-2 spy plane was shot down by a Soviet missile after it was spotted in Soviet airspace. His capture provided incontrovertible proof that the United States was spying on missile sites inside the USSR and its Warsaw Pact neighbors. The event had brought the 1960 Paris summit between the superpowers to a halt. Powers spent nearly two years imprisoned in the Soviet Union before he was released as part of a prisoner exchange between the United States and the USSR. I’d met him at a party in California a few years back and we’d stayed in touch since. He’d wanted me to play him in a TV movie about his life. “All I ever wanted to do was fly airplanes,” he told me the night we met. Recently he’d been working as a helicopter pilot for KNBC doing traffic reports. That’s what he was doing when he went down. Heroically, he managed to divert the helicopter away from a populated area before it crashed.

  After all he’d been through and survived, now this?

  I went back upstairs to call his widow in California. When she answered the phone at their house in the San Fernando Valley, it must have been the middle of the night.

  “Mrs. Powers . . . it’s me . . .” I said, my voice cracking. “It’s Martin.”

  I was so broken up I must have frightened her. “Who is this?” she demanded. She must have been exhausted as well and had no doubt been taking calls all of the previous day.

  “It’s me, Martin Sheen, and I just wanted to say how sorry I am.” But the static on the line was awful and we could barely hear each other.

  “Whoever this is, please don’t call here again!” she cried, and hung up.

  On the street with Emilio later that day, I couldn’t shake my deep feeling of sorrow. Francis Gary Powers was gone in an instant. Life could end, just like that. It could happen to me, too. It almost had. What would prevent it from happening again? I tried to explain this to Emilio, but it came out all wrong.

  “You don’t understand,” I argued. “You’ve got to realize how vulnerable I am.” My voice became more insistent. I wanted something from him, some kind of validation, I suppose, but I wasn’t reaching him.

  “I could drop dead at any minute, and you wouldn’t have a father anymore,” I went on. “One day, maybe, you’ll understand.”

  I felt my chest start to tighten. Please—not again.

  “Oh, dear, forgive me, but I have to . . .” I said, as I sank down to the sidewalk. “My heart . . .”

  The way I remember the story, I sat on the curb. Emilio remembers me actually lying on the sidewalk. Either way, I was on the pavement on Avenue Montaigne and he was standing above me, looking down.

  I knew exactly what I was doing. I was trying to get Emilio to show some concern. In truth, I was trying to get him to feel sorry for me. If he thought I could drop dead at any minute, he might give me the attention and appreciation I thought I deserved.

  “Oh, get up and stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Emilio said. He was impatient and embarrassed, a fifteen-year-old boy who didn’t want to be part of a public drama.

  “What’d you say?” I asked, though I’d heard every word clearly.

  “Get up,” he said, looking around to see who might be watching.

  “Look at me,” I moaned. “I might never work again.” I pressed my hand against my chest for added effect, even though my chest pains were clearly not a heart attack. They were pains of the ego, and Emilio saw right through them.

  “I’ve had enough of you and your crap!” he shouted, waving his arms for emphasis. “The hell with you—you’re fine! You don’t need me!”

  And then he walked away. Just like that, he walked away.

  I sat there on the sidewalk, stunned. Emilio? Walking away from me? Leaving me in the gutter by myself? Emilio? Of all four of the kids, he’d always been the one most willing to let me off the hook, who accepted my flaws and always forgave me, who never held a grudge. I’d known I had that going for me, and I’d been taking advantage of it, as I’d done many times before. But this time was different. He had completely had it with me. I lifted my head to see if he’d really gone. There he was, marching away down the sidewalk. He knew I’d been playing on his sympathy, trying to get something I thought I desperately needed for myself, and he wasn’t going to tolerate it anymore.

  I felt a rush of deep, crippling disappointment mixed with anger and resentment as I watched him disappear into the crowd—how could he do this to me?—and then I felt a rush of something else. Pride. I was proud of him for taking a stand and walking away. Good for him, I thought ruefully, as I slowly sat up and brushed myself off. I mean, what was he supposed to have done? Picked me up and carried me back to the hotel? He knew that if he got sucked into the grip of my self-pity he’d wind up there next to me on the sidewalk, feeling sorry for me. I had to hand it to him. He’d made the better choice by far.

  Weak people don’t realize they’re weak until they’re in the presence of someone strong. Emilio became the strong person for me that day. I owe him that moment in Paris when he had the courage and the strength to walk away. What lat
er became known between us at the Paris Sidewalk Incident was a watershed moment for both of us. It marked the beginning of a new phase in our relationship.

  Children instinctively know more about their parents than we think they do. They know all the colors of our characters, and they’re onto us the whole time. They know when we’re being dishonest, and it alters the relationship. In Paris, Emilio helped me see that I couldn’t hide anything from my kids. They all knew me too well.

  By walking away, he also showed that he wasn’t afraid of my disapproval. Most kids are afraid to rock a parent’s boat because their sense of security is wrapped up in the parent’s approval and acceptance. They’ll shy away from confrontation because they don’t want to risk being pushed out. It takes a great deal of courage for a child to call a parent’s honesty into question. That’s what Emilio did to me that day. Ramon did it too, Charlie and Renée as well, all in their own time. But Emilio was the first, and when he took a stand, he forced me to look in the mirror. I realized I had to change the way I was behaving. I couldn’t keep inflicting my self-pity on anyone, especially the family. Once I knew that, I started to get strong again in body, mind, and spirit. I still had a long way to go, of course, but it was a start. Thanks to Emilio, it was a start.

  I may have left the Philippines in June but I hadn’t left Apocalypse Now behind. Not by a long shot. Over the next two years I made at least three trips up to Zoetrope Studios in San Francisco to record the narration for the film and did several more such sessions in Hollywood as well. Francis hired Michael Herr, the author of the brilliant, best-selling Vietnam memoir Dispatches, to write the text for Willard’s voice-overs and we experimented with many different interpretations to see how it sounded when it was cut into the editing process against the picture. Sometimes these sessions would go on for many hours, often stretching into the next day.