by Martin Sheen
When the procession finally began, we walked slowly along the Rajpath with cameras off to the left and right capturing all our moves. The military led the procession, followed by the Bengal Lancers, all of them Sikhs on horseback, and then the caisson bearing Gandhi’s body. The actors playing Gandhi’s family, colleagues, and ashram devotees walked directly behind. Everyone was packed in very tight. The crowd must have been fifty deep on each side of the road.
After a short while, the procession came to a full stop while the cameramen adjusted their equipment. They needed to move everything a few hundred yards up the Rajpath to film the next segment of our walk. The extras lining the boulevard were in a festive mood or maybe just bored with the wait and they began to throw small items at the horses and shout at the mounted cavalry. The Sikhs looked fearsome up on horseback with their pointed lances and military-issue olive-green turbans. I couldn’t understand what the people on the ground were saying, but from the tone of it they seemed provocative, like schoolyard bullies taking jabs at their classmates just for fun.
After ten or fifteen minutes of this, the soldiers abruptly decided they’d had enough and they ordered their horses to charge.
The collective cry of a million people is much louder than I ever could have imagined. As the crowd took off in every direction, I threw myself onto the pavement and tucked myself into a bundle. Oh my God, I thought. All these people will be trampled. We’re going to be killed! And where was Emilio? He had to be down here somewhere in the crowd.
For the next few moments the only sounds I could hear were people’s screams and the horses’ hooves smacking down on the pavement as the stallions reared up and landed once, twice, three times. And then, as suddenly as it had broken out, the pandemonium stopped.
I opened my eyes in the eerie quiet and lifted my head. Before me, at eye level, was a sea of empty shoes scattered across the pavement. Sandals, loafers, flip-flops—every conceivable mode of footwear littered the street. People had scrambled away so fast they’d run right out of their shoes. It was one of the most astonishing sights I’ve ever seen.
Even more amazing was that no one had been hurt, but the horses had scared the bejeezus out of everyone. It occurred to me that the soldiers hadn’t intended to hurt the people, only to frighten them and remind them who was in power. For them, it was also a break in the monotony between takes. As I slowly stood up, I watched the soldiers guide their horses back into formation. The people reclaimed their shoes and settled back into their spectator roles. And, almost immediately, they started harassing the horses again.
This time the soldiers refused to be provoked and stared straight ahead, unmoved, like annoyed parents saying, “All right, you’ve had your fun. Enough’s enough. We’re not going to pay any attention to you anymore.” None of this was caught on film, but the horsemen seemed to know exactly how to act, almost as if the exchange had been scripted. It was third world authority on display, and impressive to watch.
Later, someone explained to me that this was how the common people got their licks at authority figures. The poor in India had few chances to vent their frustration with the authorities, so they did when small opportunities like this one arose. It was a familiar cultural dance to the participants.
As I waited for the cameras to roll, I looked closely at the extras around me, trying to commit their faces to memory. In large crowds in the third world, I’m always struck by the knowledge that, although I’m in close proximity to these particular people now, it’s unlikely I’ll ever see these faces again. In Delhi I’d just witnessed a profound cultural event and I wanted to remember the participants.
From Delhi the majority of the company moved more than 700 miles southwest to Bombay (now Mumbai) on the west coast of India along the Arabian Sea while a small camera crew and a few cast members went on to film a special sequence in Porbandar, the seaside town in the province of Gujarat where Gandhi was born in 1869 and later returned to live. I was needed for a few scenes in Porbandar when Walker comes to see Gandhi in India after many years apart. In one scene they sit on a wall by the sea. “I’ve been all over the world,” Gandhi says, “and I ended up where I started.” He looks at Walker and he looks at the sea and says, “I’ve come home.” In the film, that’s when he gets the idea for the Salt March to the sea to protest the British tax on salt and invites Walker to join him. “It would have been very uncivil for me to have invited you all this way for nothing,” Gandhi explains.
My favorite scene in Porbandar, and one of my favorites in the film, is what we called “the marriage scene.” Gandhi and his wife Kasturba married at thirteen and remained together for sixty years until her death. In this particular scene, Gandhi and his wife re-create their wedding ceremony for Walker to demonstrate the seven vows of a Hindu wedding. The ritual involves a series of symbolic steps the bride and groom take together, to begin a journey that is not just about them, but also about their responsibility to each other and to their community.
“In every worthy wish of yours, I shall be your helpmate,” Gandhi’s wife says.
“Take the fourth step, that we may be ever full of joy,” Gandhi says, slowly circling an imaginary fire.
“I will ever live devoted to you, speaking words of love and praying for your happiness.”
“Take the fifth step, that we may serve the people.”
“I will follow close behind you and help you to serve the people,” his wife answers.
Watching this struck a deep chord within me. Essentially, the man is saying, “I will do this to serve the community,” and the woman is saying, “You are taking the responsibility of going forward and I will make sure you don’t get hit from behind. They’ll have to go through me to get to you.” They promise that they will be there for the community and the community can count on them. Now that they’re a couple they’re not interested in their own agenda. They will contribute to the community as a family.
The final vow of a Hindu wedding is “the seventh step, that we may ever live as friends.” I couldn’t help thinking of my own marriage vows and how selfish they’d been: “I take you to be my wife.” The vows that Gandhi and his wife took seemed ideal to me, and also necessary for the vitality of a culture. They reminded me what it truly means to be married: the end of selfishness.
My friend Dan Berrigan, the Jesuit priest and social justice activist in the nonviolent resistance movement, once told me about a couple who asked him to marry them. “Let me ask you a few questions first,” he said. “I assume you love each other?”
“Yes,” they said.
“Then are you willing to promise to help each other become yourselves?” he asked.
He wanted them to understand that marriage is not about “becoming one” in the romantic sense we ascribe to it in the West but about supporting the truth in each other and being willing to risk a partner’s wrath by pointing out when that partner isn’t being honest. It’s not about “becoming one” as a method of happiness but about helping each other become strong and authentic individuals together.
I began to realize in India that this was the kind of relationship Janet had always wanted with me. For twenty years she was quite willing to risk my wrath by telling me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, all the time. For me, unfortunately, honesty was at best a sometimes thing. And now the consequences were becoming clear as a husband and father, and I needed to make some serious adjustments if I was ever to become my true self.
Emilio and I had already begun a new phase in our relationship when he walked away and left me on the sidewalk in Paris in 1979. It led to our time together in India, which dismantled and reassembled our ideas about poverty and humanity and survival and cemented a relationship of mutual respect and real love and support between us. Because he was eighteen and I was forty, the trip changed us in very different ways. Nonetheless, our shared experiences in India allowed us to have an equal, honest, enduring relationship that persists to this day.
Those five weeks in India had also launched me on a deeply personal spiritual quest that would culminate four months later in Paris, on the first day of May.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EMILIO
India 1981
In India, my father observed, “All of your senses are assaulted here, especially your sense of justice.” I can’t imagine a better description of our time there. From the moment we got off the plane in Delhi we were surrounded by colorful, active crowds of people reaching for us. The smell of the city was multilayered, like a glass of wine. What do you smell in a Cabernet? Hints of cherries, leather, tar, ink, pencil lead? If the Philippines had been a glass of wine, I would have found the aromas of water, wet leaves, and tropical fruit. But Delhi in a glass would have been air pollution, burning garbage, and hot asphalt.
We’d observed poverty in rural Spain, Mexico, and the Philippines but India took it to the tenth power. The population density in the city created sights of unimaginable desperation. Families were living in makeshift shelters; children were begging in the streets. The city center was dusty and dry, brown and gray, a moving organism of more human beings than I’d ever seen gathered in one place. It was hard to be in the midst of Delhi and not see it, feel it, smell it, and taste it, every day. India challenged both of us at every possible level: physical, emotional, spiritual, and practical. It was, in a word, devastating.
It wasn’t like my father says, that I went into the streets with pockets full of rupees to give away to children. I went out with whatever money I had on me, and I found it impossible not to give it all away by the end of the day. The suffering was so visible, it was impossible not to take it personally and want to help. I went to India with a suitcase full of my T-shirts and jeans and I came home five weeks later with just my camera and the clothes on my back. I’d given everything else away.
The way my siblings and I were raised, we recognized poverty but we never passed judgment. All the years that the four of us slept in the same room, I never thought of us as poorer than anyone else. We just lived the way we lived, with no stigma attached. Similarly, when we traveled, if a house lacked in modern conveniences, we accepted that was how people lived in that place, according to their culture and their means. India was the first time I met with situations that exceeded my comfort zone. On a day trip to Agra we stopped at a roadside restaurant to use the restroom. In the tiled floor of the men’s room there were two places to put your feet with a hole between them. Okay, I thought. This is a first. This is foreign. I don’t know how I’m going to manage this one.
As a cultural experience, the country was mind-blowing. Professionally, it was an exceptional experience, too. By eighteen I was auditioning for film roles in Los Angeles, and when I learned that Gandhi would have Sir Richard Attenborough at the helm and a list of phenomenal actors attached, I thought, This is going to be something you want to see. On set in India, I was hired to work as my dad’s stand-in, which meant I’d take his place in costume while a scene was being set up. This kept him from standing out in the sun all day, especially in Bombay, where temperatures even in January hovered up in the nineties.
My dad and I were similar enough in stature and appearance for me to easily do the job. In several scenes he wore a white button-down shirt and an Irish tweed flat cap, so I was dressed in the same shirt, hat, and round wire glasses his character wore. At one point I was standing in front of the camera as the operators were setting up the shot, and Sir Richard Attenborough strode onto set.
“All right. You ready to shoot?” he asked, as he assumed his position.
Wait a second, I thought. Somebody better tell him he has the wrong guy. The resemblance between me and my father must have been that close. Fortunately, my dad and I managed the switch just in time.
I also had an opportunity to meet Ben Kingsley and watch him work—his discipline was extraordinary—and to see another big feature film come together. Gandhi was a gentle epic, whereas Apocalypse Now had been a bombastic one, and the energy on the Indian sets was much calmer and far less dangerous than in the Philippines. Gandhi was also done on a much larger scale. I’d look at the daily call sheet and see outrageous entries like “Today: Extras, 5,000.” “Extras, 10,000.” The funeral scene was phenomenal. The first assistant director in charge of all those extras was a British guy named Dave Tomblin who’d worked on films with large numbers of extras like Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back. On the set of Gandhi he was like a rock star, communicating with and coordinating thousands of people without a hitch. Without a doubt, he was the right guy to have on that job.
The production company had reserved six airline tickets for our family, and the remaining four tickets would revert to the company at the end of the shoot. Nothing said they had to be used by family members, so we gave one to my godfather, John Crane, who joined us partway into the trip. In a conversation with my mother, our friend Roscoe Lee Browne revealed that he was going through a bout of depression. My mother innocently asked, “Would a trip to India help? We have an extra ticket.” Roscoe replied, “Oh, darling, forgive me, but I only fly first class.” She laughed and said, “It is first class.”
Roscoe, who was best known as the chef in The Cowboys with John Wayne and as the butler, Saunders, in the TV sitcom Soap, had met my father in Los Angeles in the early 1970s. A poet, professor, and a former national track star, Roscoe was a brilliant, interesting, complicated cat. He and my godfather were both African-American but opposite in every other possible way. John was six foot five and weighed all of 140 pounds, while Roscoe was compact and muscular, with the build of an athlete even at the age of fifty-six.
They couldn’t bear each other and seemed always at odds about something, like two warring factions my father and I constantly had to referee. We loved Roscoe like an uncle, but we couldn’t deny that he was opinionated, dramatic, and never hesitated to speak his mind. One night at dinner in a restaurant in Bombay he began arguing with the South African playwright Athol Fugard—whom he greatly admired, by the way—and before long they were screaming at each other. The scene went from uncomfortable to excruciating when everyone in the room turned around to watch. As quickly as their argument began, it ended, to our relief. And the restaurant scene notwithstanding, we loved him so much we just took him as he was.
Roscoe was one of a kind. So was John Crane. Influenced by Roscoe and John, their manners of speech, their humor and imagination, and their profound intelligence, I’d use both of them twenty-five years later to create the character of Edward, the African-American sous chef in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, for my film Bobby. Laurence Fishburne played the role, but only after Roscoe’s death in 2007 did I discover that Roscoe had been a mentor to Fishburne for years.
The five weeks in India affected my father in a very intimate, personal way. For me, they had more of a sociocultural impact. India woke me up to everything that Americans take for granted, even things as simple as clean running water. After we came back to the United States I saw excess everywhere I turned—in how big our cars were, in the amount of clothing each person owned, even in the food we scraped off our plates, uneaten. I’d been overseas for only five weeks but I had a difficult time readjusting when we came back.
In India I’d started asking myself big questions like, Why is there such injustice in the world? Is it a responsibility or a burden to notice the suffering? I thought I’d be relieved to come back to the familiarity of home and the relative safety of L.A. Instead, I would drive on the Pacific Coast Highway with my windows down and inhale the clean ocean air, or turn on the tap in our kitchen and have fresh water instantaneously, and I would be flooded by a sense of gratitude. How did I get so lucky? I would wonder. Was it fate? Was it karma? Somehow, these questions were equally hard to answer.
EMILIO
Burgos, Spain
October 23, 2009
The Catedral de Santa María in Burgos, Spain, commands the center of the Old City like a white limestone pal
ace. Begun in 1221, consecrated in 1260, and completed in 1567, the Gothic-style cathedral houses the tomb of the eleventh-century Christian knight Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, also known as El Cid. It’s a significant landmark on the Camino Frances, sitting about a third of the way from St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Santiago de Compostela, and ranks as the third-largest cathedral in Spain after the ones in Seville and Toledo. Burgos residents have a saying similar to the Americans’ “Is it bigger than a breadbox?” They ask, “Is it bigger than the cathedral in Burgos?” Not much is.
We’re here today in this city of 180,000 to film a sequence in which Tom and his fellow pilgrims arrive in Burgos’s Old City and reconnect with pilgrims from earlier in their travels. While we’re having coffee in a local restaurant, a gypsy boy, known locally as a Gitano, steals Tom’s backpack outside and runs off. Tom and his three companions give chase through the city, and while they don’t catch the boy they do meet his father, who makes his son return the bag and invites them all to a community celebration that night.
My son Taylor lives in Burgos with his wife, Julia, whose family introduced us to the real-life Gitanos who appear in the film.
Today’s scene, too, dates back to a Malibu morning in 2008.
Knock knock.
My father strides into my living room, full of enthusiasm after his morning yoga session and a workout on the basketball court.
“I have a great idea!” he announces. “A gypsy boy steals Tom’s bag!”
I quietly close the front door behind him. “A gypsy boy?” I ask.
“Yeah, then they have to chase him through Burgos,” he continues. “They run this way”—he mimes a mad dash to the left—“and they run that way”—he lunges to the right. The aspiring action hero strikes again.