by Martin Sheen
“Martin, try this now.”
I’d say, “Okay,” and I’d try it again . . . my way.
“Try this now? Would you do this?”
“Okay,” I’d say. “Sure,” and still do it my way. I could be stubborn.
“Marty, could you try this for me? Just try this.”
“Okay.” Same result. Francis’s frustration would mount.
Sometimes I’d get it just as Francis wanted, but more often I didn’t. One day I flew up to San Francisco for a Saturday morning recording session and went straight from the airport to the studio. I was sitting there in the booth when an enormous blond fellow with a bodybuilder’s physique walked in from the outer room.
“He’s got something for you,” Francis said through the microphone.
This guy walked into the booth and looked at me. He must have been in his early forties and stood at least six foot six.
“Maybe this will help,” he said. There was very little light in the sound booth and I couldn’t see what he was offering. Was he giving me a cup of coffee? I reached out, and he placed an automatic .45 pistol in my hand.
I knew right away what it was from the feel of it. I’d carried one throughout the film and Joe Lowry had taught me everything a soldier needed to know about a .45. I knew that weapon better than any other. I knew how much it weighed when it was empty, and what it felt like with a full clip. And as soon as this one was put in my hand, I knew that it was loaded.
I looked down at the safety. It was off. This is insanity, I thought.
The guy, it turned out, was a Vietnam veteran, Special Forces, who’d come to witness this session of narration, and I was led to believe that he’d actually done some of the things that Willard had done in the film. I suppose Francis thought this guy would help me get in the proper spirit of the narration. But it only made me nervous and pushed me further away from violence in any form. Oh yes, sometimes I could be very stubborn.
Early in 1979 I was hired to play John Dean for the TV miniseries Blind Ambition, which would air in four two-hour segments. As special counsel to President Nixon, Dean had been at the heart of the Watergate cover-up and had written a book about his experiences. His wife Maureen had also written a book called Mo: A Woman’s View of Watergate and the miniseries was a compilation of the two.
We filmed at CBS Studios in Los Angeles. Filming a miniseries is different than filming any other type of TV show because you usually cover long stretches of historical time on screen. The filming happens quickly, and that typically means shooting scenes out of sequence, according to location. If the beginning and end of a film take place in the same location, for example, those scenes would be filmed on the same day so that the cast and crew don’t have to return to the same spot later. When you shoot the end of a film like that, you have to pretend that you’ve already done the whole movie by that point. Hair and wardrobe have to be intricately coordinated so they’re the right style and fashion for the particular year in the first shot, and then everything has to change to be accurate for the time period of the next scene you shoot.
When Dean was arrested and charged with obstruction of justice and taken to a run-down city jail in Washington, D.C., he was perfectly coiffed and wearing a three-piece suit. The scene in our script called for me as John Dean to walk into the cell with my hair done and my clothing perfectly tailored. It was scheduled to be filmed on a day when other, unrelated scenes were also being shot on the same soundstage. I did my first scene that day, a lively one, and as soon as it was finished I walked across the soundstage to a separate set. This one recreated a little cell the size of a large closet. It had been stripped to its bare essence: just a toilet and a bed. The script called for me to walk into the cell, turn around, and have an emotional breakdown.
No one else was in the scene, just me and the cell. There was no time to fuss about anything. The gaffers were setting up the lights, and the camera crew were getting into position.
“All right, Martin,” said George Schaefer, the director. “Your back is going to be blocking the camera at first so that when you walk away from us we’ll realize that you’ve walked into the cell. You’ll go all the way up against the wall, then turn around and face the cell door. I’m going to have the camera dolly right up to you for a moving close-up. That’ll be it. That’s the scene.”
“I have to weep in this scene?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. A complete breakdown,” he said.
“Easy for you to say,” I replied.
I surely would have passed that cup if I could have. There are certain days when you should shoot a scene like this one, specifically days when you’re already feeling bad. Not when you’re still coming off the high of a previous scene.
How in heaven’s name am I going to pull this off? I wondered.
While I stood there trying to figure out what to do, the wardrobe assistant called my name and said my three-piece suit was ready.
“Be right there!” I called back.
Inside the cell, a set decorator was preparing the space. He was writing graffiti on the walls with a thick marker as if prisoners had scrawled it there, counting off days, signing their names. I watched the guy scribbling, then suddenly I knew exactly what I had to do.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Could I borrow that pen?”
I walked to the far wall with the marker in my hand and turned around to face the cameraman. “When you get into here, how much are you seeing?” I asked as I raised my hand midchest. “Is it here?”
“Right there,” he said.
“Okay.” I raised my hand with the pen above my head. “How much are you seeing above my head?”
“I’m seeing right there, where you’ve got the pen.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”
I turned around. In the spot on the wall right above my head I scrawled RAMON. Then I handed the pen back to the set decorator.
“Call me when you’re ready, not a minute sooner,” I told the assistant director.
By the time they were ready to shoot I was, too. I walked to the set where everything was in place. The lighting was on, the cameras ready to go. We did one technical rehearsal to make sure everything was properly marked and measured, and then I came back to the starting point.
“Make sure we’ve got this now,” I said to no one in particular, “because I’m only going to be able to do this once.” Then I turned my back to the camera and waited.
“Action!” George called out, and I walked into the cell. When I looked up, all I could see was a single word on the wall: RAMON.
Only three people in my life had ever called me Ramon: the director Joe Papp, the actor Roscoe Lee Browne, and my father, Francisco Estevez. In 1979, Joe and Roscoe were still living. Francisco was not. Having missed his funeral, I’d never taken the time or given myself the license to mourn him. It occurred to me that day on that set that I’d been suppressing those feelings for more than four years. There was a deep pain within me that I hadn’t expressed because I hadn’t allowed it to surface. I can do it now, I thought. I’ll allow myself to celebrate his memory and thank him for everything he gave me.
I had an artistic responsibility in that scene to portray John Dean’s desperate situation honestly, and I had a personal need to finally mourn my father. I looked at the name RAMON scrawled on the wall, turned around, and wept uncontrollably. That was it. In one take, thanks to my sense memory, the most invaluable emotional tool available to an actor, I was able to fulfill both requirements at the same time.
“Transference” is the term often used for this common acting technique. An actor delves into his own personal memory to conjure up an appropriate emotional state required for a particular scene. It’s a form of self-hypnosis. One of the most astonishing examples of this I’ve ever seen was a performance by Alan Arkin in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, based on the Carson McCullers novel of the same name. Alan played a deaf-mute boarder in a southern rooming house whose best friend, also a deaf m
ute, had recently been institutionalized. Every week Alan would go visit his friend, until the week he arrived at the institution and discovered his friend had died. He goes to the cemetery and stands at the grave, where he’s so overcome with grief, all he can do is stagger around and make signs from his heart. The character’s private grief and Alan’s ability to convey it without words is a stunning moment in film. He was nominated for an Academy Award for that role.
When I turned around in the jail cell, the viewers may have thought, John Dean, look what happened to this guy. He was riding high, handsome young lawyer to the president, flying around on Air Force One, and now he’s stuck in this toilet. Look at him now, alone, brought low and weeping in a cell. But I was the only one who knew it wasn’t just John Dean bemoaning his fate in that scene. It was also a boy named Ramon finally mourning his father, Francisco, in a deeply personal yet public form.
In May of that year, Apocalypse Now had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in France, where it received a standing ovation and co-won the prestigious Palme d’Or prize. I heard that the scene in which I punched the mirror, that scene of such personal anguish, was not included in the Cannes version of the film and I was relieved. In that moment, on that set in the Philippines, I thought I’d wanted the moment captured on camera, but three years later in a more sober state I didn’t want anyone to see that part of me on the screen. There’s a limit to how much personal pain you can bear to take public.
But the gap between a world premiere and a U.S. premiere offers time for additional editing, and a few months later I heard that Francis had decided to open the film with that scene intact. Now I was concerned. I didn’t want to see the film knowing those images would be in it so I made sure I was busy on another film at the time of Apocalypse Now’s U.S. premiere in mid-August. That film was The Final Countdown, in which I played a civilian observer aboard the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz on the day the ship gets caught in a vortex and travels back in time to December 1941, just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The movie required me to be on location in Norfolk, Virginia, and offshore aboard the real USS Nimitz. The production ran over schedule when the ship’s nuclear power source malfunctioned and it had to stay in port for nearly two months for repair. Joe Lowry had a part in the film as well, and when Apocalypse Now opened we were both conveniently otherwise occupied somewhere out on the Atlantic Ocean.
As soon as The Final Countdown finished shooting I took the family to Hawaii for vacation, a deliberate move. It kept me unavailable when everyone else associated with Apocalypse Now was doing publicity and the film was opening in Los Angeles, New York, and Toronto. By the time we returned, a huge groundswell of interest had developed around the movie, particularly among Vietnam veterans, including my younger brother John, who had served four years in the U.S. Navy as a third-class hospital corpsman and done a tour of duty in Vietnam from 1965 to 1966, much of it with the Seventh Marine Regiment in Chu Lai. “You want to know what it was like for me over there?” he said. “Go see the film.”
Critical reviews were mixed but popular support slowly started to grow and by mid-October, when the film was about to open nationwide, I knew I couldn’t avoid doing publicity any longer. That fall I flew to New York for some interviews. The film was still playing at the Ziegfeld Theatre on Fifty-Fourth Street where it had opened and my dear friend from high school John Crane, who was both Emilio’s and Ramon’s godfather, urged me to see it with him.
“All right, John,” I said. “We’ll see it together.”
The Ziegfeld Theatre seats more than 1,100 and was completely sold out for the show. We sat about three-quarters of the way back in the audience. Nobody recognized me, and I was relieved for that. I don’t know how I got through the opening scenes. I must have divorced myself from any personal connection to them. It felt painful and humiliating to have been so vulnerable and to have revealed it so publicly.
During the film, I thought people were coming into the theater and talking during the show, but then I realized that the voices were coming from a new kind of soundtrack, surround sound. Oh, my God, I thought. I’m engulfed! I’m right in the middle of this thing again. I was so overwhelmed by the horrific helicopter attack on the village, the sight of all those innocent people being slaughtered, juxtaposed with Wagner’s triumphant “Ride of the Valkyries,” that I wept. Those scenes had been filmed long before I arrived in the Philippines so I hadn’t seen them, but they resulted in one of the most powerful film sequences I have seen in any movie, ever, and still evoke the same emotional response in me when I watch the film today.
Nineteen seventy-nine became one of the most challenging years of my adult life. By that fall I was drinking heavily, and Janet couldn’t bear it any longer.
“You’re an asshole and a bore, and I’m not sure where this is going,” she told me. “I’m not holding you back. I can’t go anywhere, but you can. Why don’t you take a break and give me a break for a while.”
I couldn’t come to grips with moving out. I couldn’t see myself ever leaving the family. At that time Burt Reynolds had his dinner theater in Jupiter, Florida, and he offered me a part in Two for the Seesaw with Julie Kavner. “Come down and do this play,” he said. “It’ll keep you occupied.” It seemed like a perfect solution: Janet and I would get time apart and I could go back onstage.
So I left for Florida, where I went from bad to worse.
Two for the Seesaw is William Gibson’s 1958 two-character play about a lawyer on the brink of divorce and a dancer he meets at a party one night. Henry Fonda and Anne Bancroft originated the roles of Jerry and Gittel on Broadway, the part that made Anne Bancroft a star. As Gittel, Julie Kavner became my anchor on that show. Once I was separated from the family, I couldn’t stop drinking and I didn’t study my lines so how could I expect to know them? On opening night I was drunk and improvised most of the show. I think I even did an impersonation of Al Jolson in the middle of the second act. It was a mess. Poor Julie had to carry me through.
Afterward, I felt so disgraced and humiliated I tried to sneak out of the theater to avoid the opening-night party. Burt sent someone down to get me.
“I can’t go up there now,” I said. There was no way I could face all those people. But Burt dispatched a second person to try to change my mind.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll just come up the back steps and say hello.”
Outside, I sneaked around to the back stairs, hoping no one would see me. As I started up the steps, the door at the top swung open and Sally Field appeared. Burt had invited her down to see the show. I must have looked as embarrassed as I felt. I didn’t want to be noticed by another actor, especially one who might feel obliged to say something about my performance that night.
But she just smiled and said, “I know exactly how you feel. Remember, I was the Flying Nun.”
I have adored her from that moment.
Burt Reynolds started his dinner theater with the help of three of his closest friends: Dom DeLuise, Charles Durning, and Charles Nelson Reilly. The three of them would come down to Jupiter, Florida, to direct plays and give classes to the college interns Burt employed. The theater became a place I knew I could go to work and be with friends who would tolerate me even when I was close to hitting bottom.
The next scheduled play at Burt’s theater was Mister Roberts. He asked me to play the title role and asked Joshua Logan to direct. Logan had cowritten and directed the original production on Broadway and also directed the movie version with Jimmy Cagney, Jack Lemmon, and Henry Fonda. I accepted without hesitation, then headed home for Christmas. I dreaded the thought of going back to Florida alone. Then it occurred to me: This might be a good chance for Emilio to act in a professional production, so I asked if he’d like to return to Jupiter with me in January.
“Sure,” he said. “But I don’t want this to be a case of nepotism. I want to audition for any role the director thinks I’m right for, and we’ll go from there.”
“Fair enough,” I said, and we were off.
Emilio was in his senior year at Santa Monica High School by then, so we had to bring his lessons down to Florida for the next six weeks. Burt set us up in an apartment near the theater. Our dear friend Joe Lowry was cast as Doc. Emilio auditioned and was cast as a sailor in the crew. It was a small role but this was a professional production, and even though he was the youngest cast member everyone treated him like an equal. We’d rehearse during the day and often socialize with the cast at night, but other nights we stayed home. We’d cook together or bring in takeout and help each other study our roles. Once the show was up and running we’d go swimming or play basketball or read books during the day and go over to the theater together at night.
Those were good weeks for us, doing Mister Roberts. It was great fun living and working together on an equal footing in our chosen profession for the first time. I was still drinking but far less than before, and I never went on stage drunk ever again. With Emilio I was more steady and reliable. He knew he could trust me now, which revived my confidence and self-esteem. This also paved the way for another trip together the following year, one that would take us to India for Gandhi and change both of our lives significantly.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
EMILIO
1979–1980
From all the months I’d spent on sets, I understood how much planning and effort went into making a movie. After our family trip to Ireland in 1973, Charlie and I had started using the family’s 8-millimeter camera to shoot short movies in Malibu with the neighborhood kids. We wrote our own scripts along the lines of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and made awful, dark horror films where a killer would break into a house and wipe everyone out. Someone was always getting killed. The films that had influenced us most were The Godfather, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, and Apocalypse Now, and basically everything we made was a derivative of one of those, or all four. We did a film we called The Godbrother about diamond dealing and the Mob, where we put the neighborhood kids in their fathers’ hats and long coats. For a murder scene we threw a dummy stuffed with newspaper off the cliff at Point Dume. Without enough weight it became tangled in weeds on the way down and stayed there shedding newspaper for weeks as it slowly fell apart.