by Martin Sheen
I’ve participated in many such demonstrations and been arrested sixty-seven times. I do it because I love my country enough to risk its wrath by drawing attention to its darker angels, but I never go to a demonstration with the intent or the hope of being arrested. On the contrary. I never know what to expect when I arrive. I often go because I cannot not participate and still be true to myself, but I may have gone about it too seriously in the beginning.
At first I was worried about getting physically accosted and being treated badly in jail. I was most comfortable at demonstrations when women, children, and news cameras were present. If none of the three was there it was a much riskier situation. Soldiers and police officers were less inclined to be brutal with women and children present, and above all they wanted to avoid public scrutiny from being captured on film. It wasn’t until I participated in a demonstration at the Nevada Test Site in 1989 that I started to lighten up. It was spearheaded by Catholic Worker activist Kathleen Rumpf, who led a kick line of women doing the hokey pokey back and forth across the border that demarcated public and private property, finally landing on the side that led to their arrests. They completely disarmed the police in a hilarious show of protest. I’d never seen anything like this before. Even the police officers were laughing. It completely changed my attitude about protest. You’re not going to change the world, for God’s sake, I realized. You do this for yourself, and only for yourself.
The first few years after my return to the church and my entry into social justice activism I felt as if I were clinging to a rock in a rough sea. At the same time, it felt good to have a rock to cling to. Still, I’d ventured out into this place on my own. The rest of the family began to observe me at arm’s length, as if this were a curious fad or phase that Dad was passing through. It took a while for everyone to get used to where I was going.
While I’d been in Paris filming Enigma, Emilio had been starting his acting career in L.A. By the summer of 1981 he’d auditioned and landed a role in his first feature film, Tex, based on the S. E. Hinton book of the same name. Tex was the story of two brothers living on their own in small-town Oklahoma after their mother died and their father left town. Jim Metzler played the responsible older brother and the hotheaded younger one, Tex, was played by Matt Dillon. Emilio was cast as Johnny, Tex’s best friend.
Filming took place in and around Tulsa in the summer of 1981. On his flight to Oklahoma, Emilio sat with Terry Malick who, by pure coincidence, was traveling to visit his parents in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. After a few weeks I headed to Oklahoma, too, to visit Emilio on location for a weekend. A reporter assigned to write an article about me met me there.
On Sunday morning, I looked for a local church for Mass. I’d been going to Mass and Communion every Sunday since my reconversion in Paris and I loved the ritual and the comfort of the sacrament. The regular worship kept me anchored and grounded in a way I hadn’t felt in many years.
But Tulsa wasn’t like New York City where it seems a Catholic church sits waiting with open doors every few blocks. I didn’t know the Sooner landscape, and it was taking a while to find a church and make a plan. Meanwhile, the cast and crew of Tex had the day off and most of them were going on a white-water rafting trip on a nearby river. Not being a big fan of water, and especially not being a fan of rapids, I didn’t have any interest in the trip, but Emilio wanted me to go.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll join you after Mass.”
“They’re leaving now, Pop.”
I shook my head. “I’m going to Mass first. If you can just wait for—”
“Mass?” he said. “This is the only day I’ve got off! And you want to go to Mass?”
“I’m sorry. I—”
“I can’t believe this!” Emilio shouted. “Are you saying Mass is more important to you than I am?”
Mass was more important than anything to me that summer, but Emilio wasn’t having any of it. I invited him to join me for Mass, but he had no interest. And I wasn’t giving in. He had his agenda, I had mine, and the argument escalated into a terrible row in front of everyone—including the reporter who was there to profile me.
Emilio was right to be upset. I’d come all that way just to see him, and yet the most important thing I had to do that morning didn’t include him. I was putting him second when he wanted to be my first priority. But I was right, too. Mass had become essential to my well-being over the past few months and I thought he should accommodate that.
That morning I felt myself shrinking in stature in Emilio’s perception. I’d been showing off in front of him and his friends over the years, trying to cultivate a heroic, macho image of myself to impress them. It was all about my ego, the vision that when he introduced me to his friends they’d have a certain sense of awe that I was his father. I longed for all my children to think of me that way. If the only way they can see what a great man I am is through their friends’ eyes, I would think, then, hey, have at it!
But really: How could Emilio, or any of the kids, possibly think of me as heroic? They were too used to me. They saw me every day, at my best and my worst. Parents are never prophets in their own home. We’re too familiar.
And so slowly I began to let go of the idea that I would be a hero to my kids. I’d walk onto a set and see Emilio acting, or Ramon acting, and before long I’d see Charlie and Renée acting as well, and I’d be the one filled with awe. I’d hold my head in astonishment and say, “Oh, my God. That’s my son. That’s my daughter. Those are my kids!” and I’d hardly be able to contain my pride over what they’d accomplished on their own. That gave me an understanding of where I stood in all this: not as their hero, or their prophet, but simply as their father.
As I let go of the idea of being their hero, I also let go of trying to convert them to Catholicism. That one was hard to relinquish, knowing how the church was providing me with such a moral compass, and knowing the kids would face difficulties as adults that they wouldn’t be able to manage easily on their own. But I understood: Each of the kids had an individual spiritual journey of his and her own to take. Faith meant allowing Emilio and the others to find and follow their own paths.
In 1981, I was forty-one years old, barely middle-aged, and my oldest son was already becoming an adult. In letting go of my image of being his hero, it was time to sort out when to be his mentor, when to be his colleague, when to silently bear witness. I would always be his father, but the ground had shifted beneath us, and the landscape was considerably different now.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
EMILIO
1981–1983
If my father had just been honest with me that Sunday morning in Oklahoma, I might have handled myself differently. I knew he was afraid to go out in white water, and he didn’t want to admit it. “Listen, I have to go to Mass so I’m not going to be able to go on this float trip,” he told me. It had sounded like an excuse and I was terribly let down. He’d shown up for a weekend with a journalist in tow and there I was, with a solid supporting role in my first feature film, acting with Matt Dillon and Meg Tilly as my classmates and Ben Johnson, an actor whom I worshipped from his role in the 1969 Western The Wild Bunch, playing my father. If my own father was making the effort to visit me on set in Oklahoma I wanted to include him in what we were doing. The rafting trip had been planned for weeks, and I’d already told production that he’d be going. I’d wanted everyone on the set to meet him. To be honest, I’d wanted to show him off.
His decision to go to Mass left me with two choices: I could go on the rafting trip without him, but then we’d hardly have any time together before his flight on Monday morning. I could stay behind, but then I’d miss out on a trip we’d all been planning for weeks. Either way it was clear that my father wouldn’t be rafting that day.
We got into an epic fight in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn where I was staying. We were screaming at each other. Cursing. In public. I didn’t even care who saw or heard. It got so ugly that the journalist had to spend the
next two hours walking me around the parking lot while I raged. While my father was at Mass I spilled everything I was feeling to this virtual stranger, and then we went out for a couple of beers. When his article came out a few months later, I got to experience the fight for a second time, this time in print. Reading his account was hilarious and mortifying and gave me my first lesson in what an actor should and should not share with the press.
I wasn’t that angry at my dad. Mostly, I was disappointed. If he’d just said, “This is what’s going on: I’m terrified of the river. I’m afraid to go on it in a raft,” I would have said, “Okay. That’s cool.” Only the most inconsiderate son would pressure a father who doesn’t like roller coasters to go on one. I thought my dad would have known that.
Also, I was surprised and confused by this sudden interest in Mass. Church? I’d thought. Come on. This doesn’t add up. When he came home from Paris I had already moved out of my parents’ house and into an apartment in Santa Monica so that I could have the kind of independence I would have had if I’d gone to college, so he hadn’t shared much with me about his return to the Catholic church. I knew he’d been raised Catholic but I’d never seen him go to church before. I had no frame of reference for him suddenly becoming devout. It was as if he went to Paris for four months and when he came back I was a film actor and he was a Catholic and we had to orient ourselves to the developments that had unfolded while we were apart.
Neither of us went on that rafting trip. The punch line to all this is that, thirty years later in northern Spain, my father ran headlong, willingly, and fully clothed into a raging river for a scene he’d come up with for The Way. Fortunately for all of us, it wasn’t a Sunday.
I celebrated my nineteenth birthday on the set of Tex, where I played the role of Johnny Collins, Tex McCormick’s best friend. Johnny lived on the right side of the tracks in a big house with a domineering father and a younger sister, played by Meg Tilly, who became Tex’s love interest in the film. Matt Dillon, who played Tex, had already achieved a measure of teen stardom as a junior high delinquent in Over the Edge, a summer-camp love interest in Little Darlings, and a high school bully in My Bodyguard. When word got out in Tulsa that Matt Dillon was filming in town, girls started camping out in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn. He should have had a security detail but no one had security back then, especially not a sixteen-year-old, so we would have to make our way through the crowds of girls clamoring to see Matt every time we walked in and out of the hotel.
My character Johnny rode a motorcycle in the film but I didn’t, so I had to learn how. This had always been one of my mom’s nightmares. Her stepfather owned a Honda shop in Ohio and for years I was obsessed with getting a motorcycle of my own. I once tried to mail a letter to my grandmother that said, “Mom and Dad said it’s fine for me to have a motorcycle now. Please send one immediately,” which my mother intercepted just in time.
One day in Tulsa I was practicing on the motorcycle and the director Tim Hunter said, “We’d love for you to do a wheelie in this shot. What do you think?”
“I’ll try it,” I said.
“What about the stuntman?” Susie Hinton asked.
Susie was the author of the book Tex and was a constant presence on set. Over time she became something of a den mother to us, the resident mom/sister/confidante with a posse of adolescent boys she’d half imagined into being.
“It’s okay. I can handle it,” I said. “I’ve been practicing.”
I tossed my leg over the motorcycle seat, adjusted my helmet, said good-bye to Matt, and took off.
Riding a motorcycle is like taming a large animal that sometimes has a mind of its own. Sure enough, the bike got completely out of my control and almost hit members of the crew. When it crashed it came right down on top of my knee.
Everyone rushed over to me. “Are you okay? Are you okay?” Tim Hunter kept asking. I wasn’t hurt badly, but I could have been.
Susie Hinton was furious. She thought it was completely reckless to have let me do the stunt myself. She looked at me on the ground, and she looked at Tim trying to help me up.
“Well, Emilio,” she said, “If you’re a good boy, maybe Tim will let you do that again.”
Susie and I became very close on set. I’d read all of the books she’d published up to that point: Tex, The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, and That Was Then, This Is Now. Francis Coppola had optioned The Outsiders and with Tex already in progress I thought, Wow, this author is going to be wildly popular. That Was Then, This Is Now was her only book still available for a film option and I started making plans from the set of Tex to option it myself. At nineteen, I was already thinking about writing a script, being a producer, and securing an option on a book before anyone else could take it. It would take four years to get that film up and running, which felt like an eternity at the time. Now I know otherwise. In this industry, four years is nothing.
Back home, I discovered that living in an apartment in Santa Monica would have been a better plan if I’d had consistent funds coming in to pay the monthly rent. The apartment was on a month-to-month lease and whenever my money ran out I’d move back into my bedroom at home. After I got paid for a job and could afford to pay rent again, I’d move back down to Santa Monica. When that money ran out, I’d go through the formality of asking permission to move back home again.
“Hey, Mom, Dad, have you rented my room out?”
“No, of course not.”
“How do you feel if I come back for a little while, until my next job?”
“That’s fine.”
I was bouncing back and forth like this in the fall of 1981 when I got an audition call for a lead role in an ABC made-for-TV movie called In the Custody of Strangers. It told the story of a rebellious sixteen-year-old kid from a working-class family who goes for a drunken joyride, hits a police car, and lands in jail. His father leaves him there overnight to teach him a lesson, but one mishap leads to another and the boy winds up spending six horrific weeks inside a system that renders him and his parents powerless.
The role of troubled teen Danny Caldwell was multidimensional, requiring an actor who could play angry, defiant, vulnerable, and despairing. I’d auditioned for a lot of TV movies by that point and the final decision usually came down to a contest between me and an actor named Ike Eisenmann, who was best known at that point for playing the boy lead in Escape to Witch Mountain. Ike and I would show up for auditions at the same time, do our readings, and then he’d get the part. But this time I was cast. The role advanced me a rung on the acting ladder, both professionally and within the family. At the time, made-for-TV movies were treated like independent films are now, with red-carpet premieres and coverage in the industry papers. My father had been a fixture in Movies of the Week for a while during the mid-1970s as he was building his career, and when I was cast in In the Custody of Strangers I thought, Okay, this is a big deal.
Robert Greenwald was the director; he was coming off the film Xanadu with Olivia Newton-John. He later went on to direct or produce more than seventy television and feature films. Almost as soon as I was hired he started pairing me up with young actresses to cast the role of Danny’s girlfriend. Dominique Dunne, the daughter of journalist Dominick Dunne, came in and as soon as we read together everyone knew she was the girl. Beautiful and talented, with several TV movies to her credit, she was cast quickly, but before shooting could begin the ABC executives decided she’d done too many TV movies and they’d rather have a fresh face. I always regretted losing the chance to work with Dominique. It wouldn’t come again. A year later she was murdered by her former boyfriend, at the age of twenty-two.
Another young actress was hired to replace Dominique, and attention then turned to casting Danny’s parents. I went in for a meeting one day about hair and wardrobe, and Robert Greenwald approached me.
“What’s your dad doing these days?” he asked.
“He’s working mostly features,” I said.
“You know, we’d
love to have him play the father in this. Do you think he’d consider it?”
“I don’t know,” I said, which was true. I didn’t know what my father had on his calendar for that winter. “Make him an offer,” I said.
The production company didn’t waste time contacting him. Before saying yes or no, my father came to talk with me.
“You said you didn’t want to go back to television,” I reminded him. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yes, with you, I do,” he said.
Wow, this will be a great opportunity for Dad and me to work together, was my first thought. The second was, Now everyone’s going to think the only reason I got this job was because of him. I knew we’d have a better movie with him acting in it. And I knew the film would get more attention, because he had such name recognition by then. But there’s a part of me that wondered, and has always wondered: Was I being used as a carrot to begin with, just to get my father on board?
The role of Frank Caldwell, an unemployed plant foreman desperately looking for work while trying to extricate his son from an unsympathetic juvenile system, was a good fit for my father. It played close to home for him on several levels: the working-class background, the family to support, the scramble to find work, the defiant teenage son. When the script called for Frank to explode in anger at Danny, shouting, “You ain’t going nowhere! Long as I’m paying the bills around here and feeding your face you’ll do as I tell you!” the exchange wasn’t that far off the mark from ones we’d played out in real life. When Danny raged back at his father, all I had to do was tap into the anger I’d felt in dealing with my own dad over the years. It helped that I was actually looking at him when I did it for the camera.
Jane Alexander was cast as my mother, and she played tough and distraught and patient to a T. My father was brilliant as Frank. In one scene, when he answers the phone to discover he hasn’t been hired for a job, it could have been any one of a number of calls he’d received himself over the years. He played the hope and disappointment and pride in that scene perfectly for his character, just as I’d remembered seeing it myself as a child.