Along the Way

by Martin Sheen

  If there had been a category for Most Original, Lee would have won it hands down. As it was, of the 1,200 students in our class he was voted Best Actor. I won for Prettiest Hair.

  Engle, Espinoza, Estevez.

  My section of the line made its way onto the stage. By the time I reached the principal, nine more names had been called. Then it was a quick shake-hands-take-the-diploma-walk-off-the-stage-shuffle-back-down-the-stairs.

  I opened my diploma holder. Nothing was inside. “You’ve got to turn in your cap and gown to get it,” another graduate told me as he walked by. When I handed over the armful of fabric, a volunteer leafed through a file box until she found a stiff sheet of ivory paper with my name printed underneath the school’s seal. She handed it over to me.

  And that was it. I was officially done with school.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MARTIN

  India 1981

  Watching Emilio perform in Echoes of an Era was an unforgettable experience. When he talked about losing platoon mates in an ambush and broke down weeping, his tears struck me to the core. Oh, my, I thought. He has that invaluable sense-memory well that all artists draw from to share their own fear, anger, pain, and joy. And he knows how to access it publicly. He’s a fellow actor, top grade. It was a stunning revelation to watch him step out on his own and declare himself as such.

  To be honest, I was relieved he was so good. But I also hurt for him. My oldest son would soon enter my profession, and I knew all too well that it would cost him dearly. Anything worthwhile has to cost you. If it doesn’t, you’re left to question its value. What would this choice cost Emilio? Ideally, being a committed actor or any type of serious artist is a deeply personal effort to discover one’s own authenticity and then share it with others. It’s about transcendence. It’s not about ego, money, power, celebrity, or success, and you can take that to the bank, with my compliments.

  Emilio had grown up observing me, and I suspected he knew what he was getting into on every level. As he stood up there on that stage, embodying that Vietnam veteran, he knew I was watching, but he wasn’t leveraging on my name or playing off his good looks. He clearly owned his talent and it was a frightening and beautiful thing for me to behold.

  In early December, Janet, Ramon, Charlie, and I traveled to Kenya, where I participated in the ABC-TV series The American Sportsman. The episode told the story of a young man from Washington State who purchased three retired circus elephants and returned them to their natural habitat in Africa. Our travel included an overnight stay in London before going on to Nairobi, and we awoke to the tragic news of John Lennon’s murder in New York City. The song “Abraham, Martin and John”—about three heroic men, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and John F. Kennedy, all of whom had been assassinated in their prime—looped endlessly in my mind. When would this senseless gun violence in my country ever end?

  Back home I’d been offered a role in Gandhi, a film about the adult life of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the father and chief architect of the Indian independence movement and the inspiration for nonviolent resistance to oppression worldwide. I admired and was very fond of the director, Sir Richard Attenborough, who for twenty years had personally pursued every effort to bring Gandhi to the screen. Now he had succeeded and was gathering an extraordinary cast in India, which included Sir John Gielgud, Candice Bergen, the South African playwright Athol Fugard, and a newcomer named Ben Kingsley to play Gandhi. Without hesitation I accepted the role of Vince Walker, a composite character of the Western journalists who were instrumental in conveying reports of India’s nonviolent resistance to the rest of the world. But the vast majority of my character was based on the real-life American journalist and author Vincent Sheean, whose successful book, Not Peace but a Sword, had been banned in Nazi Germany. Sheean was the only Western journalist who had personally witnessed Gandhi’s assassination, recounted in his book, Lead, Kindly Light. My scenes were scheduled to shoot in India for five weeks beginning in January 1981.

  I asked the production company for extra airline tickets in the hope that Janet and the kids would come with me, but it proved impossible since Ramon, Charlie, and Renée were returning to school and Janet needed to get things back to normal after Christmas holidays and the recent trip to Kenya. That left Emilio, who had already finished school and was still living at home. I longed to share the experience of India with him, but he was reluctant at first.

  “Come on,” I said. “It’s not going to be like the Philippines. We’ll be in India five, six weeks, tops.”

  To my relief he agreed to join me and came to view the trip as a great adventure. We both did.

  We took off for India in early January, just as the other kids returned to school. After stopovers in Tokyo and Bangkok we landed in New Delhi at night, collected our bags, and stepped outside into a sea of humanity. There were throngs of people, many of them wrapped or draped in colorful, traditional Indian dress. My first thought was, Everyone’s in costume! The scene had the same electric energy and constant activity of a staged set. So many people were congregating in and around the airport that at first, I thought a celebrity or an important government official must be arriving or departing soon. But everyone was there to watch the airplanes take off and land. It was a type of free entertainment.

  Emilio and I slid into the first taxi in the line, a tiny cab driven by a young driver with a turban wound around his head. I sat directly behind him, with Emilio next to me. The cab was so small the back of the driver’s head was only a foot or two from my face. I could see bugs crawling around in the back of his hair, going in and out of the turban. He didn’t seem to be bothered by them, or even to notice they were there.

  I looked at Emilio. He’d seen it, too. We’re a long way from home, I thought. It was a portent of what was yet to come, and I sensed that nothing we encountered on this trip would be like anything we had experienced before.

  Our cab traveled through densely crowded urban streets where people lived outdoors in pup tents, cardboard boxes, lean-tos, under trees, near fountains, anywhere they could clear a space. The hotel was like a marble palace rising from the city center, with a lobby the size of three ballrooms. The cool, pristine, spacious interior was the antithesis of life outside. They could fit half the people on the street in here, I thought.

  The next morning when we returned to the street in daylight, we entered a kaleidoscope of action and smells and sounds. A family of five rode by on a bicycle with two flat tires. A donkey with a broken leg pulled a cart carrying three people. The air was filled with the smell of open fires and putrid smoke that stung the backs of our throats. Mules, horses, cattle, camels, donkeys, and an occasional elephant strolled down the street amid the constant stream of bicycles, motorcycles, scooters, and little cars with drivers leaning heavily on the horns. Occasionally a cow would plop down in the middle of the sidewalk.

  And the people, everywhere the people, walking, driving, rushing, sitting, lying in the gutters, some with stubs for limbs; women with smudged bindis between their eyebrows; blind beggars crying out for coins; businessmen striding purposefully past cluttered storefronts; peddlers pushing wooden carts; toddlers traveling in packs, many of them pulling on the clothes of Caucasian tourists and extending empty hands encrusted with grime. This was leagues beyond whatever poverty we thought we’d seen in Mexico or the Philippines.

  Disease was palpable and public. And yet this tragedy coexisted with such extraordinary beauty. The Delhi streets held so much raw, obvious need and yet there was so much life. It was clear to me why some of the first sproutings of intelligence in the human race grew out of this culture. It was vibrant and vital.

  The horrible deprivation was nearly overwhelming, and I had to find a way to embrace both worlds of poverty and privilege and to stay conscious of the boundaries. I’m a visitor here, I thought, I have a passport. I can leave any time. But India can set any Western concept on its heels. Most of the world still suffers from a lack of basic necessi
ties like food, shelter, health care, and environmental protection, and when you see this up close, you also see the need for justice, mercy, and love. And if you are vulnerable to these musings your life may never be the same.

  In India I learned that the West spins one way, and the East the other. I had to make a conscious decision not to be pulled into cycling in reverse. If I started spinning with India, especially for such a short time, I knew I’d get dizzy and I wouldn’t be able to focus on the film. Perhaps a compromise was possible.

  When my scenes began filming I alternated between working for a few days and then having a few days off. At first, during my free time, I’d stay close to the hotel. But Emilio went out to explore every day with extra rupees in his pocket for the many children who swarmed around him. It was such a loving, pure, practical way to try to alleviate the suffering the only way he could, but it marked him as a Western tourist with money, and the children started to recognize him.

  “You’ve got to go into the streets,” he would tell me. “You’ve got to come down with me and experience what’s going on there.”

  I followed him down on my next day off and he was right: The streets jarred me awake. Innocently, as we started giving some money, the crowds pressed into us from all sides, trapping us like a mob. On one occasion we needed the police to get us out. Another time as we were trying to get through a crowd of children, pressing a few coins into their hands, we had to escape the crowd ourselves by pushing our way into a cab. As we drove off I heard a pounding on the back window. Three little girls, maybe five or six years old, were hanging on to the back of the taxi, one with her face pressed up right against the glass a foot away from mine. They were risking their lives. “Stop the cab!” I shouted. We put them inside, turned around, and took them back.

  The people. The poverty. The possibilities.

  Emilio and I would meet many Westerners in hotels and restaurants and on the streets, sincere young men and women who had come to India on personal spiritual quests. “I’m here with Maharishi So-and-so. I’m staying at his ashram,” they might say, or “I’m going to this guru.” It seemed they all had gurus, but they could walk down the street and trip over people without ever really seeing them. Just open your eyes! I thought. These desperate poor are your gurus.

  While I wasn’t looking for a spiritual connection or Eastern mysticism, the experience in India began to reconnect me to Catholicism, which had always been my anchor. The spirituality among those ministering to the poor in India was the same type of commitment I was drawn to in the Catholic activists I admired most at home, like Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker Movement, who embraced the command of the Gospel from the nonviolent Jesus to “feed my lambs, feed my sheep” and who, through her peace and social justice work, had embodied the voice of the poor, speaking truth to power. She had passed away only weeks before, but her dear friend, Mother Teresa, was still very much alive and living in India.

  Sir Richard Attenborough and Mother Teresa had become great friends when he narrated a documentary about her after she won the Nobel Peace Prize. One day he told a group of people on the film that we’d been invited to meet her that coming Sunday after Mass at her home for the dead and dying in Calcutta. I rushed back to the hotel to share the news with Emilio.

  “Who?” he said.

  “Mother Teresa! We’ve been invited to meet Mother Teresa!”

  “Why do you want to do that?”

  “You’re a crazy boy!” I said. “I can’t believe a son of mine is asking this. We’re invited to meet Mother Teresa! We can take the train Saturday night and get to Calcutta Sunday morning. We’ll go right to Mass and afterward Mother will receive us.”

  “Why do you want to do that?” he asked again.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I said. “This is a living saint, for God’s sake! Look out in the world. Who else is doing that kind of work? And we have an opportunity to meet her personally. It’s an opportunity of a lifetime.”

  “I understand all that,” he said. “And I know who she is. But why do you want to meet her?”

  “So I can tell everybody that I met Mother . . .” and then I stopped midsentence. Oh my God, I thought. That was the real reason I wanted to go, so I could brag about having met her. And Emilio knew it. He’d wanted me to admit it to myself. That moment of self-discovery humbled me greatly.

  In a sense, at that moment Emilio became my teacher. He helped me realize that meeting Mother Teresa for the wrong reason would be worse than not meeting her at all, and I decided to pass on the trip to Calcutta. It would be another ten years before I finally met Mother in Rome, and when I told her this story we shared a good laugh.

  A few weeks into filming Gandhi, I gave one of our unused airline tickets to Emilio’s godfather from New York, John Crane. John often joined us on our travels when he could get time off from his job with the post office in New York City. One day the three of us hired a driver to take us from Delhi to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. John was a terrific amateur photographer and he’d gotten Emilio interested in photography. At one point we were standing on the terrace behind the Taj Mahal, looking down the Yamuna River, and John was teaching Emilio how to focus with his new zoom lens. I was standing there, casually watching them, when I noticed Emilio’s face turn completely white. He bent over as if he was going to be sick.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, alarmed.

  “Look through the lens,” he said, handing me the camera. I lifted the camera to my eye, focused, and saw what he had seen: A dead body lying on the riverbank was being eaten by a pack of dogs, as vultures circled overhead. This was a burial site for a certain Indian sect, who brought their corpses to the river. For them it was a normal practice, an accepted part of their culture, but for us the sight was a terrible shock.

  Death, disease, poverty: All of the social ills that were mostly kept under cover in the West were on constant display in India. Later in the film shoot, when we were staying at a hotel near the beach in Bombay, Emilio was walking on the sand when a body washed up. Nobody around him acted as if this was an unusual event.

  Death was all around us on that trip, just as it seemed to be for Indians in their daily lives. They routinely lost their very old and they often lost their very young. Observing all this, I couldn’t help but appreciate how precious life is, all life, every bit of it, and give thanks and praise for mine and my family’s, every day.

  Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on January 30, 1948, and his state funeral took place the following day. Several million mourners lined the five-and-a-half-mile route from Birla House, Gandhi’s home in Delhi, to the funeral pyre along the Yamuna River to pay their final respects. It took five hours for his body to make the trip.

  Attenborough chose January 31, 1981, the thirty-third anniversary of Gandhi’s funeral, as the day to film the funeral re-creation. He needed an excessively large crowd for this scene. Today, the computer generated imagery process known as “flocking” can take a piece of a crowd and duplicate it many times to give the impression of a much larger gathering, but CGI was just being developed in 1981. All the extras in the funeral scene had to be real people on the set, in the flesh. Advertisement fliers were placed all over Delhi inviting residents to celebrate the father of their nation by participating in the scene.

  The morning we filmed the funeral, Emilio and I arrived at the Rajpath, or the “King’s Way,” the ceremonial boulevard that runs for a mile and a half straight from the Indian president’s residence to the National Stadium. The Rajpath had been along Gandhi’s funeral route and is also the site of national parades throughout the year. The sequence was supposed to start at 8:00 a.m. but kept getting delayed. Eleven cameras were in place all over the Rajpath, on top of buildings and down on the ground, to capture as many angles as possible, because with so many extras we would not be able to start over and film the procession twice. From where Emilio and I stood, it looked like thousands had shown up to participate, most dressed in traditiona
l white for a funeral as the flyer had requested.

  I was in costume, in a tailored suit and tie with my head bare to the sun, and the morning began to grow very hot. Another half hour passed, and shooting still hadn’t started. To see if we could identify the problem, Emilio and I walked to the top of the steps, turned around, and looked back. A chill zipped straight up my spine. The Rajpath was jammed with people. That’s what was holding everything up. People were packed shoulder to shoulder along the boulevard. Hanging from lampposts. Dangling from trees. Standing on top of cars. People everywhere, far more than a million of them. The crowd was like a white living organism, moving and shimmering in the bright sun. Attenborough truly had managed to recreate the day of Gandhi’s funeral. It was, and remains, the largest cast of extras ever assembled in the history of film.

  Eventually I had to go back down into the middle of that crowd. I carefully made my way to the place behind the military caisson where the principal characters would walk. A wax model of Ben Kingsley lay on the caisson’s open back, wrapped in a white cloth and covered with pink and yellow rose petals. The wax figure looked as much like Gandhi as Ben Kingsley did. Their resemblance was remarkable. Actors had been cast to be lookalikes of the real individuals, and Kingsley was almost a double for Gandhi, as was the Indian actor Roshan Seth for Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Athol Fugard for British general Smuts. This went a long way toward making the film feel authentic, one of its strongest points. The recreation of the funeral looked so much like the real funeral I imagine the editors could have spliced actual footage from 1948 into our scene and the transition would have looked almost seamless.