Along the Way

by Martin Sheen

  I brought as many of my close friends and family members into Cadence as I could. “Come to Canada with me!” was my invitation. In addition to Laurence and Ramon, I also recruited Matt Clark to play Private Bean’s father; Joe Lowry, my technical adviser on Apocalypse Now, to play McKinney’s drinking buddy; and a close friend from childhood, Eunice Augsburger (known professionally as Samantha Langevin) to play a small role at the funeral in the beginning of the film.

  We all headed north to a former air force radar station outside Kamloops, British Columbia, in June of 1989 for a two-month shoot. Kamloops was way up in the Okanagan Valley, the heart of Canadian lumber country, bucolic and peaceful except for the nearby lumber mill that made the valley smell of sulfur. The base was perfect for the purposes of our story because it was isolated and small, removed from civilization and surrounded by nature. It looked exactly like the kind of place no one would want to get sent to, so for a young army private, it would surely have looked like the middle of nowhere. To me, it was the center of the universe for the next two months. I shared a rental house with Ramon, Joe Lowry, and a talented newcomer named Harry Stewart. I couldn’t have picked a more beautiful location or a better cast for the film, or so I thought.

  The filming would have progressed smoothly and as planned if not for complications that developed with the story’s leading antagonist. About ten days into the forty-day shoot we parted ways due to creative differences with the actor who’d been hired to play the abusive Sergeant McKinney. This left us with a gaping hole in the cast and no way to fill it in time to finish the film.

  “You have to play McKinney,” Charlie told me. “Otherwise, we’ll be throwing the money away.”

  “How am I going to do that?” I said. “I’ll have scenes with both you and Ramon in them and none of us are related in the film. How are we not going to look like a family?”

  “Don’t worry,” Charlie said. “Nobody’s going to care. It’s the only way to finish the film.”

  I knew he was right. There was no other solution. Before then, I’d been planning to play a small role as a JAG military officer and that role would now need to be filled by another actor. We didn’t have time to fly actors up to Canada to audition for the part. I’d have to rely on an actor I already knew and could trust to do the job. Charlie, Ramon, Matt, and Joe were already in British Columbia with me, which significantly decreased the number of people whom I could call. In fact, it left only one who I knew for sure would help me.

  I picked up the phone and called Emilio.

  “I’m in trouble up here,” I explained. “We just lost the lead antagonist and I have to take his place in order to keep the film from going under. So I need you to come up here and play the role I was going to do.”

  “I’m sorry,” Emilio said. “I can’t do it.” He was in Tucson, Arizona, at the time, shooting Young Guns II during the day and editing Men at Work at night.

  “Please,” I said. “I need your help.”

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated. He was sympathetic to my plight, but he wasn’t willing to bend his schedule to accommodate me. As a professional I respected that choice, but as a father the refusal was painful and disappointing. I was up in the woods of Canada with a full cast and crew, trying to save a movie. Emilio knew what a jam I was in. It honestly hadn’t occurred to me that he’d give me a flat-out no.

  Much later Emilio told me the real reason he’d said no was because he thought I’d lean on him to help me direct, and he wanted the film to remain my vision. He was probably right about that. Without a doubt, I was looking to him to get me off the hook. However, as I stood in the production office in British Columbia holding the telephone in my hand, I was astonished to discover Emilio’s loyalty was to his work, not mine.

  What? I thought. You’re refusing me in my hour of need?

  Afterward I called my friend F. Murray Abraham and asked him to come up to play the JAG attorney, and he agreed on a moment’s notice. After Cadence was completed, I could look back and feel gratitude that Emilio had turned me down. He’d made the only choice he could have made and he’d been honest with me: he simply wasn’t free, and he couldn’t let family loyalty or feelings of guilt bring him up to Canada and compromise his own work back home. We were father and son but we were also working professionals and he had kept those boundaries clear.

  When I made that phone call from British Columbia, our roles as father and son had reversed. I’d been the frightened child looking for someone to fix my problem and he’d been the parent who knew I was able to handle the situation myself. He’d essentially told me, “I can’t swim for you. You’ve got to swim on your own, and you know how. Just go and do it.”

  I thought I’d raised Emilio to always come to the aid of family, and I’d been disappointed that he hadn’t. That wasn’t true at all. Emilio had been raised to be honest, even when he knew that honesty would cost him. He knew his own mind and he followed it, and I admired that in him. I hadn’t had that quality at his age. I’d been too easily swayed by external factors in my family and my career, mostly out of fear. When I understood Emilio’s refusal to come to Canada as an assertion of his own strength rather than as rejection of me, my admiration, respect, and pride for him increased a thousandfold.

  With my return to the Catholic church, I’d committed to a personal path of honesty and social justice activism. It would have been tidy and convenient if all my behaviors had immediately followed suit, but lives never change in an instant, for good or ill, except in novels and films. In real life, change is often gradual and slow, if at all. That was the story with my drinking. After my reconversion in Paris, I drank a little less although with a much better attitude.

  I still drank a lot of beer, but my drink of choice in the 1980s was Irish coffee, which is essentially a cappuccino mixed with a couple of shots of whiskey. It was an upper and a downer at the same time, strong enough to get me drunk but caffeinated enough to keep me alert for driving home. The coffee masked the taste of the alcohol, and sometimes I would down six or eight Irish coffees back to back without realizing how much whiskey I’d consumed. I would have terrible hangovers the next day, of course.

  In 1985 I played the father in Shattered Spirits, a TV movie for ABC about an alcoholic named Lyle Mollencamp whose drinking and domestic violence spiral out of control, to the point where he loses his wife and three kids and is forced to join Alcoholics Anonymous to regain the privilege of seeing them. The job happened to come along at a time when I was drinking heavily, but I couldn’t see myself in that character. Talk about denial. I was drinking for every scene, and a couple got more than usual. For a scene where Lyle gets swacked and mows the hell out of his front lawn in the middle of the night I really had a fun time out there with the lawn mower. I wasn’t out of control or falling down. I was just being my alcoholic self.

  Vincent Canby of the New York Times said I portrayed Lyle with “chilling conviction,” which may well have been true. Doesn’t it often take one to know one? Still, when I saw that film on TV a few months later it didn’t motivate me to quit drinking.

  A few years later, I was filming at Universal Studios and at the end of the work day I stopped at a bar with a few friends for a drink on my way home. Afterward I got in my car and took the Ventura Freeway, heading to Malibu.

  I don’t know how long the sheriff’s cruiser was following me, but at some point I noticed the flashing lights in my rearview mirror and pulled over to the shoulder of the highway. A young deputy sheriff got out of his car and approached my driver’s window.

  “Officer,” I said.

  “Your license, please.”

  I fumbled around in my pocket for my wallet. My driver’s license has my real name, Ramon Estevez, which sometimes causes confusion or problems. I handed the license to the officer, who took it back to his car. When he returned he said, “This is your real name, but you’re that actor. You’re Martin Sheen, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am,” I said.
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  He stared at me for a long moment, and when he spoke, his voice was thick with disappointment.

  “I used to admire you,” he said. He spit the words out with such disgust. “But I don’t want to see you ever again. You know you’re drunk. Get the hell off the road and get some coffee. And don’t ever do this again.”

  As he walked back to his car, I rested my forehead on the steering wheel. I was a man in my forties, a husband, a father of four, a grandfather of three, a successful actor. What was I doing? The disappointment and shame the officer conveyed became my own.

  That brief encounter gave me a shocking look at who I’d become and what I didn’t want to be. Regrettably, I didn’t stop drinking that night and wouldn’t stop for another few months, but the officer’s personal outrage was a pivotal moment that helped push me in that direction. I never forgot it and I never drank and drove again.

  I finally stopped drinking in December of 1989. With the holidays approaching I couldn’t bear the thought of going through another Christmas with alcohol stirring up the sad memories and battles it always stirred up at that time of year. I didn’t want to put my family through it again, and I had no great desire to go through it myself, either.

  Drinking no longer gave me the feelings of bravado and invulnerability it once had. Instead of lifting me up, it had begun to drag me down. I was reminded of the line in Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh, when the saloon owner Harry Hope tosses down the drink Hickey the traveling salesman offers him and then complains, “What did you do to the booze, Hickey? There’s no damn life left in it.” By 1989, I’d arrived at the same point. Alcohol didn’t have the effect on me that it once had, and what it did give me, I wanted less and less of. The difference between Harry Hope and me was that I knew it wasn’t the booze that had changed, it was me.

  Christmas arrived and I thought, This is a good time to go without a drink, so without making a big deal of it, I just didn’t drink. I’m not sure anyone even noticed. January came and I went a week without drinking, and then it was a month, and one month built on top of another and another. Before long it was the summer of 1990 and I’d been sober for half a year. But by then it had become clear that my son Charlie was in trouble with alcohol and drugs.

  I knew a few things about drinking but I had no insights into drugs, and Charlie was struggling with both. We planned an intervention for early August but I knew I didn’t have the skills to help Charlie get through this to the other side. My friend Matt Clark, who’d gotten sober many years earlier, had been encouraging me all along to join Alcoholics Anonymous. “You’ve got a problem,” he would tell me. “You’re an alcoholic.” When he learned about Charlie he insisted I join Al-Anon, the program for family members of alcoholics. “You’ve got to get in there and learn some skills to help him,” he said. That’s finally what brought me into a Twelve Step program: the desire to help my son.

  At my first Al-Anon meeting I sat on a folding chair in a room filled with people. I was astonished that so many relatives and friends of alcoholics were there to seek help, and to help one another. I was equally surprised to discover the program, which was nondenominational, had a spiritual component and freely used the word “God.” How do they get away with that? I wondered. They also talked about the existence of a Higher Power, a force greater than ourselves that guides and protects us no matter how far from grace we’ve fallen, which was also my long-held belief.

  When a member of the group read the Twelve Steps out loud, I was struck by how similar some were to practices I followed in the Catholic church. The step about taking a searching and fearless moral inventory of oneself: That’s what Catholics call an examination of conscience. The step in which we admit the exact nature of one’s wrongs to another person? That’s confession, or the Sacrament of Reconciliation. The step to make amends wherever possible is the Catholic concept of penance. Example: If you steal money you have to pay it back; that’s both your penance and amends.

  When I heard the steps I thought, I can do this. I’m already doing this. Catholicism’s got this down.

  At the end of the meeting, the group held hands and said the Serenity Prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I’ve grown to love that prayer for its implicit message that we are not asking for advice about how to act or what to do. It’s assumed that we already have the power, and that if we can tap into it the answers will become known. That prayer is really saying, “God, give us the courage to unleash our power,” but first we have to accept the responsibility for knowing our strength, and that’s often when fear comes in. We have to get over the fear of living up to our own potential.

  I joined AA about eight months after I stopped drinking. Though I was already sober, I hadn’t yet addressed the core issues that had led me to drink. There’s an old saying in AA that if an alcoholic horse thief gets sober, he’s a sober horse thief. If you don’t understand why you steal horses in the first place, you’ve got a lot more work to do. The Twelve-Step Program is what helped me stop stealing horses.

  A good guest knows when to leave the party. In my case, I left the drinking party late. I was forty-nine years old. Alcohol had been my companion of default and a reliable partner for almost thirty-five years but it was no longer a friend. It had caused rifts in family relationships and diverted my energies away from what mattered to me most. One of the many beauties of the Twelve Step program is that it helps us release the negative judgment about ourselves and others that prevent us from healing. There is never a bad time or a wrong time to stop drinking. Neither is there a best time. There is only the day you stop, and everything good that follows.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  EMILIO

  1990–1994

  In January 1990, the Bill Moyers television special A Gathering of Men aired on PBS. In the ninety-minute segment Moyers interviewed the poet Robert Bly about the workshops he was leading for men around the country. Using mythology, poetry, tribal stories, chanting, and drumming, Bly was taking participants on three-day explorations of manhood, men’s roles in society, and their inner lives.

  The Industrial Revolution, Bly explained, had removed fathers from the homes and the fields where sons had once learned by their sides and sent them into factories and offices during the day to return exhausted, irritable, and disconnected from their families at night. Soon after the special aired, Bly published the book Iron John: A Book About Men, which became an instant bestseller and established him as the leader of what became known as the mythopoetic Men’s Movement of the early 1990s.

  At the time, I was living in a house on the beach in Malibu with my dog, Rowdy, a big, friendly Rhodesian ridgeback I’d adopted from a pound in northwestern Montana in 1987. Demi and I had ended our engagement a few years back, and I looked forward to Wednesdays and every other weekend when I got to spend time with my kids. The year 1990 had been crazily busy for me. Men at Work had been released in early August and Young Guns II, the sequel to a film in which I’d played a fictional version of Billy the Kid, came out just a few weeks later. I’d also just finished filming the futuristic thriller Freejack, about a race-car driver catapulted into the future.

  That September I was taking a breather to think about what would come next, when my mother called to say she had a VHS tape for me to watch. It was a tape of the Bill Moyers special, and she thought Ramon, Charlie, and I would all get something out of seeing it. She’d been concerned for years that our father hadn’t passed down the coping skills his sons needed to be men. She thought Bly’s work might offer some insights and explanations that could help us all.

  I watched the tape and was profoundly moved by Bly’s message. Standing and working beside their fathers all day had once given sons vital knowledge and awareness, a special type of male nourishment, he said. Now that fathers went to a workplace outside the home, the average American father was spending only ten minutes a day w
ith his son. When sons and fathers interact only at the end of a work day, Bly said, a son is exposed only to his father’s temperament—which has been shaped by stress at work, humiliation from his boss, and competition with other men—and not his teachings. Modern men were grieving that loss but didn’t have a language or forum for talking about it.

  This all made a lot of sense to me.

  My mother learned that Bly was coming to Ojai, California, to lead a weekend workshop in late October. “You guys need to go,” she said.

  Many times during my childhood, my parents had made me attend events I wasn’t keen on or was too immature to appreciate. The Krishnamurti lecture immediately comes to mind. My mother presented the Bly workshop the way she’d presented other ideas to me in the past: “It’ll be good for you,” she said. “It’ll be chicken soup for the soul.” This was one of the few times I said, “I think you’re onto something. I connect with these ideas, and I’ll go.” My father was a fan of Bly’s poetry and also of Bill Moyers’s work and, though he was unsure about what the three days would hold, he was intrigued and agreed to try it. So my mother signed up all four of us—me, my father, Ramon, and Charlie—for the workshop, hoping it would teach us something about fathers and sons.

  The Friday afternoon we were supposed to leave for Ojai, Ramon, my father, and I waited for Charlie at the house for hours. He was supposed to meet us there so we could all drive together. When it became clear he wasn’t coming, the rest of us got in the car and drove there without him. We arrived at the workshop almost at dusk and the event had already begun.