by Martin Sheen
You will see that as you venture on through life, you will constantly learn more and more about yourself and your environment. I feel that there are certain things of interest that I should pass on to you, to help you to get a firmer grasp on life. I want you to know things that will help you to build up the foundations of a sound future.
I went on to write a long passage about spiritual awakenings and tried to describe my personal beliefs:
Inside each and every one of us, there is a light . . . a spiritual light that carries you through life. It eats with you, sleeps with you, and experiences all that you experience. In a sense, it is a great force of energy within us all. When you die, it leaves the body and travels on to another material body where it will do new and different duties. And no, Dad has not gone mad or flipped his wig. I’m simply relating to you what I have found and experienced. In your lifetime, you will probably search long and hard for your spiritual being and maybe even without success. Please remember that you must never abandon your spiritual search. If you do, then you basically abandon life.
After a few more paragraphs I concluded with:
I want to leave you with one last thought to remember: you may try hard, but you will never outlive your father, even after I’m dead. I’ll always be in your mind, taking care of you, and making sure that everything is all right.
And then I ended with the same signature my father used in his letters to me, adding my own personal twist:
Keep eating your greens!
Peace & Love,
Dad
The assignment asked us to project our current selves into the future and see what we found, but the letters were more of a reflection of who we were right then, about our core values and long-term aspirations. Having a son and being a parent were such abstractions to me in high school, maybe I was also writing the letter I imagined my own father could have written to me—or wished he had.
During senior year I landed a small role in a school production, and an even smaller role in a larger, professional play. The SaMoHi production was Stage Door, the 1936 play about a group of aspiring actresses living together in a New York City boardinghouse. I landed the part of Sam Hastings, a suitor from Texas. My parents came to opening night, but there wasn’t much of me to see. Sam Hastings had a whopping three lines to deliver in a Texas cowboy accent. I actually spent more time building the sets for Stage Door than working on my performance. Still, it got me up on the SaMoHi stage for the first time.
Not long after, my father left for Jupiter, Florida, to do a series of shows for Burt Reynolds’s Dinner Theater. My parents had been having trouble in their marriage, but I had chosen to remain neutral. Whatever problems they had between them were their business, and I trusted they’d figure it out.
When my father learned there would be a bunch of roles for young sailors in a revival of the play Mister Roberts, he asked if I’d like to go down with him and audition for a part.
“Sure,” I said. I’d taken classes over the past two summers to have a lighter course load during the school year, so I didn’t have a full class schedule as a senior. It wasn’t hard to get a leave of absence from school and bring whatever class work I’d be missing to Florida with me.
As the leading man’s son I had a little edge in the auditions, but I wanted the director, Joshua Logan, to make the decision that was best for the play. On audition day, I walked onstage with a group of other actors and stared into a cavernous, dark space. Logan was sitting in a front row wearing a white shirt, a jacket, and a tie. Always impeccably dressed, even for rehearsals, Logan was a theater legend who knew the play so well he could recite it in his sleep. He was getting on in age by then and during the audition and rehearsals he would sometimes nod off. But if you missed a single word he’d lift his head, say, “That’s an ‘and’!” and then fall back asleep.
For the audition he asked me to read for every possible role he thought I might be right for, and then he’d mix it up and have me try a different part while another actor read the one I’d just done. At the end of the audition he scanned the group and basically said, “You’ll play this part, and you’ll play that part, and the rest of you, thank you very much.”
I was cast as a crew member and every night I’d swagger onto stage in a white sailor’s suit and cap. I had an absolute ball for the three weeks of rehearsal and the three-week run. Dinner-theater audiences would generally be happy that actors showed up, but Burt’s dinner theater was a far more professional operation than most. We played to a packed audience every night. Burt could draw well-known actors to his stage and for me it was an opportunity to be in the company of seasoned professionals. One of Burt’s longtime friends, Alfie Wise, played Ensign Pulver, the Jack Lemmon role in the film, and was hilarious. The Jimmy Cagney role of Captain Morton was played by Simon Oakland, a stage, television, and film actor best known as Doctor Richman in Psycho and Lieutenant Schrank in the film version of West Side Story.
My father and I shared an apartment near the theater for the six weeks in Jupiter. I was already looking ahead to what I’d be doing after graduation and was a little self-involved. We didn’t spend much time together, but I shopped to buy him food and cooked healthy meals for him. We were just two actors living together with separate interests during the day, doing our jobs together at night. They were good weeks together. No conflict and no drama, except on stage, of course. Just good weeks.
I returned to SaMoHi in February ready to appear on stage again. If the drama department wouldn’t cast me, I decided, I always had the option of writing something for myself. Our drama and English teacher, Mr. Jellison, was a careful, meticulous, frighteningly thoughtful native of Maine who inspired a whole generation of SaMoHi actors, including Sean Penn, Chris Penn, Robert Downey Jr., and Rob Lowe. With his aviator glasses and brushed-back graying hair he looked like a middle-aged version of the director John Hughes.
Mr. Jellison encouraged his drama students to discover their passions by choosing their own work. That said, he had his own strong opinions. I once brought him a copy of The Naked Hamlet, part of my campaign to star, like my father had, in the rock-and-roll version of the play. It was a long shot, but I hoped the avant-garde, outrageous remix of Shakespeare would inspire Mr. Jellison the way it had inspired me. In 1980 it seemed like exactly the kind of play the high school should be doing.
A week later he returned the book to me, holding it out between his thumb and forefinger as if it were a turd he’d found in a swimming pool.
“Sacrilege,” he said. “Please take it back.”
I thought his response was hilarious, but I revered him anyway.
Soon after Mister Roberts ended I’d started bouncing around the idea for a two-person play about the aftereffects of the Vietnam War. In early 1980 the Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan, fifty-two American hostages were being held in Iran, and the U.S. government was talking about reinstating Selective Service registration for eighteen- to twenty-five-year-old men. It was an uncertain time to be seventeen years old: The possibility of another war and all that this implied was on everyone’s mind.
I imagined a play where one character would be a hardboiled career soldier working as a military recruiter and the other a Vietnam veteran who’d been shattered by his experiences. How would each man answer the questions, “What does war mean to you?” and “Where are you now, emotionally, after the war has ended?”
I asked Lee to cowrite it and we worked together at lunchtime and after school to bang out a first draft. Ultimately we created an hour-long one-act play we called Echoes of an Era, which involved dual overlapping monologues exposing how both characters, despite their obvious differences, were coming from a place of pain and regret. Instead of doing a regular Friday night, Saturday, Sunday performance, we were able to do two daytime shows for English and history classes and one after-school show for anyone else who wanted to come.
Throughout February and March, Lee and I were writing, directing, and acting in t
he play. At one point we discovered that every writer, and every writing team, reaches a point where they need a fresh, outside perspective. The day we hit that wall we were sitting in my bedroom, stuck in a discussion about how to stage the play, when we heard a knock on my window.
The neighborhood kids were always coming and going at our house, so I was used to this. My bedroom was next to the front door with a big window that looked out over the front lawn, and some of my friends liked using my window instead of the door. Charlie had it even easier: his room had a second door that opened onto the backyard. His friends could come and go and no one in the house ever knew.
On this particular day, Lee and I looked up to see Sean Penn knocking. I opened the window to let him in.
“What’s happening?” he said. He angled his left leg over the hedge and slid through the window frame.
Sean had graduated from SaMoHi two years earlier. For his senior project he’d done a film and enlisted a bunch of kids at school to help. Since then he’d had small roles in a few TV shows but his breakout roles as a cadet captain in Taps and as stoner Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High were still a year or two away. Still, Sean knew something about directing and a lot about acting, and he was a friend—a natural for us to turn to for help.
“Sean, man, Lee and I are doing this play at SaMo and we’re lost,” I said. “I need you to come in and help us stage it because we’re completely at sea.”
He read the script and agreed to come on board as director. We settled on a simple set, a facsimile of an army recruiting office on one side of the stage and a living space littered with beer cans and gin bottles on the other. The venue would be the 200-seat black-box Humanities Center Theatre on campus. I would play Richard Donnelly, the emotionally damaged veteran, who was putting his story on tape for a writer who was researching “our folly in Indochina.” Lee would play the tough-talking Sergeant Collins, telling his story to the same writer over the phone. To write Richard’s long passages about fighting and being injured in Vietnam I drew from Joe Lowry’s story, what I’d seen in war films, and what I’d learned on and off set in the Philippines.
The play went up in April on a Wednesday and Thursday at lunchtime and right after school on Wednesday afternoon. I put advertisements in LA Weekly and the school newspaper ran a photo of Lee and me with a promo for the play, including a quote from Mr. Jellison: “It is inspirational to see what can be done by youthful talent.”
The play was a politically charged and overly earnest attempt to create dialogue about the meaning of war, but the students responded positively. We opened at lunchtime on Wednesday to a full theater. More students came to see that play than any other one that year. We began with a slide presentation of combat shots, period photos, and close-ups of real GIs set to the Simon and Garfunkel song “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night.” Then the lights came up on Richard’s apartment and on me, wearing Levi’s, a stained tank top, and combat boots, holding a half-empty bottle of gin.
“What do you want from me, huh? What are you trying to squeeze outta me?” I began.
With each line, I felt the power behind the words, my words, increasing. I did more than play Richard. I actually became him. And Lee became a convincingly angry, pro-American, pro-war sergeant. We shifted slowly from one long monologue to the other and back again until the very end of the act, when the script cut back and forth quickly between the two actors.
“War is not a cycle! It’s a way of life!” Lee shouted into the telephone.
“I really don’t see war as a cycle. I see it as an obsession,” I said into the tape recorder.
I could sense the audience realizing that the two men were answering the same questions from the same interviewer. Sean’s shaping and direction had worked exactly as we had hoped it would.
My parents came to the Wednesday after-school performance, but I didn’t feel the impulse to pour it on because they were there. I just stood up after the slide show ended and did my part. When the script called for me to weep while I told the story of the ambush that killed the rest of my unit, it felt as natural as breathing.
Afterward, my parents came up to congratulate me. My father wore an expression I couldn’t quite place. It was pride, no question about it, but there was something else mixed in. It could have been pain, but I didn’t have time to dwell on that. I was riding high on the performance. I’d cowritten a play and costarred on a stage, and this time, I’d remembered every line.
In June of 1980, 1,200 high school students in Santa Monica were set to graduate and move on to college or jobs in the real world. My parents threw a graduation party for me a few days after school officially ended. A couple dozen people milled around in our backyard: friends from school, neighbors, and my uncles Mike and Al. My mother ordered a six-foot sub sandwich and bowls of coleslaw from a local deli and my father set up a cooler of beer outside. The drinking began midday, as soon as the guests arrived.
I was already a couple of beers in when the kitchen phone rang.
“Emilio! It’s for you!” my mother called into the backyard. I walked in carrying my beer can and picked up the receiver.
“Emilio? This is Father Bud Kieser.”
Father Ellwood “Bud” Kieser was a Paulist, a member of the Roman Catholic order that brings the messages of the Gospel to the non-Catholic world, doing outreach mainly through print media and film. Father Kieser ran Paulist Productions from a building down on Pacific Coast Highway where he produced, among other shows, a series called Insight. These half-hour segments that aired on Sunday mornings were dramatic shows with a moral message, teaching compassion, tolerance, and generosity without being overly preachy. My father had done a few of them, and a few months earlier I’d made my television debut, if you can call it that, with a walk-on role that involved all of dragging a suitcase into a motel and shouting, “Hello?” I looked so young I had to wear a fake mustache to appear old enough for the part.
“We’re doing a show we think will be very interesting,” Father Kieser said. “The director is here right now. We’d like to have you come in and audition for it.” It was for one of their longer shows, sort of a clone of an ABC Afterschool Special. This one, Father Kieser explained, was about a troubled teenager whose drinking and drugging causes him to butt heads with his father, who essentially kidnaps him for a tough-love rehab camping weekend in the mountains.
I put my beer can down on the counter. I had a good buzz going, but I was sure I’d heard right. Father Kieser wanted me to audition for a lead role.
“Sure,” I said. “When?”
“How does today work for you?”
Three thoughts galloped through my mind. First, Today? As in, right now? During the party? Second, Wow. This is a great opportunity. And third, Uh-oh. How am I going to drive in this condition?
“I’ll be there,” I said. “What time?”
I headed outside to look for my father. Spotting him across the backyard, I motioned him aside.
“Listen, Father Kieser just called me,” I said. “He wants me to come in and audition but I’ve had a couple of beers and I can’t drive. So, would you be willing . . .”
Within ten minutes, we were heading down Pacific Coast Highway in my father’s orange Pacer. When we walked into the production building, everybody greeted him by name. I took the sides—the portion of a script an actor uses to prepare for an audition—looked at the pages quickly, and walked into the audition room. I didn’t have time to memorize any of the lines. I’d have to do a cold reading of a scene where the character was drunk.
I learned a valuable lesson that day: If you’re going to play someone who’s drunk and you are drunk, you don’t have any options. You can play the scene only one way—as drunk as you are. I managed to pull it off, but I don’t recommend trying this one at home.
Afterward, we drove back to the party, where everyone was having such a good time, I’m not sure they even realized we’d been gone. Three hours later, the phone rang. It w
as Father Kieser again.
“You want to go to work?” he said.
“Absolutely.”
The show was called Seventeen Going on Nowhere and it was scheduled to shoot that summer. Ellen Geer, Will Geer’s daughter, was cast as my mother, and Ramon Bieri played my father. He’d appeared in Badlands as the ill-fated garbage collector named Cato and remembered me from back then. My role as the wayward rebel would require me to act sullen, sneak out at night in a souped-up VW Bug, have a fireside heart-to-heart with my father after trading blows, and spill out a tearful confession before the end credits rolled. Filming would take place in the San Fernando Valley and the mountains outside of Fresno. It was a plum job for a first-time TV actor, and I’ve been grateful to Father Kieser ever since for giving me the chance.
But high school graduation came first. A few days later, the official ceremony was held in the Greek Theater on the SaMoHi campus. My whole family was there to see me receive my diploma. I was incredibly proud and happy to have made it through. When I looked back at the past four years, I saw I’d survived the months in the Philippines, almost lost my father, learned how to shoot and edit short films, acted on a professional stage, written my first play, and landed my first television role. When I looked ahead, I saw a long, wide path of possibility.
The graduates were lined up alphabetically as the principal stood onstage and announced each of our names into a microphone. I stood amongst the E’s and looked back at the line extending behind me. Twelve hundred students. Twelve hundred. That is not a small number, no matter how you line it up.
Aran, Arenberg, Armer.
I watched Lee walk onto the stage. He was headed to UCLA in the fall, and although we’d never intend for it to happen, we’d lose touch for many years. A true character until the very end of school, Lee scrawled in my yearbook: Echoes of an Era was really a piece of left-wing propaganda. The more I think about it the more pissed off I get to have wasted all of my lunch time with you on that pile of shit. I wish you would get me a spot in your agency. I have already spoken to your father about being adopted. He said cool as long as I cut the lawn once a month. It’s a shame that there are two people in this school with acting talent. Even more of a shame that you are not one of them. Peace, Love, and Martin Sheen forever. P.S. Emilio, if Ronald R. becomes president, you pay for gas. I’ll drive.