Along the Way

by Martin Sheen

  One by one the men stepped through the doorway and approached the altar. By the time I reached it, the pile included hundreds of flowers and rocks and pieces of fruit. I placed my stone on the top. And with it, I committed to laying down my burden and moving forward as a father without a place for that guilt in my life.

  Almost twenty years later, I would see a similar symbolic pile of rocks while on a location scout for The Way, when I saw the Cruz de Ferro (“Cross of Iron”) outside the city of Ponferrada on the Camino in northwest Spain. Cruz de Ferro is a simple iron cross on Monte Irago, the highest point on the Camino, and a place where pilgrims ritually lay down a stone they’ve carried with them the whole way to represent a relinquishing of their burdens. The pile is enormous, taller than two men, maybe even three. In The Way, the character Sarah pulls a stone from her pack with a note wrapped around it, but she’s unable to read it without her voice breaking up. She hands it to Tom, who steps in as a father figure to read it out loud for her: Dear Lord, May this stone, a symbol of my efforts on the pilgrimage, that I lay at the foot of the cross of the Savior, weigh the balance in favor of my good deeds some day, when the deeds of my life are judged. Let it be so. Amen.

  In 1990, I had no way of knowing I would make a film about a father and son, or about the Camino de Santiago, or that my six-year-old boy would grow into a man who would seek his future in a country 6,000 miles away. I knew only that it felt good to symbolically lay down a small personal burden with a group of men committed to doing the same.

  From the altar, we were guided into a field where Bly and Meade led us in a group song, and then we lay on our backs side by side. Several of the myths we’d heard that day involved descent and going down into the earth and the hard ground and small pebbles pressing into my back felt solid and right, a firm reminder that we all came from the earth and we’d all return to it one day. The stars overhead were spectacular without interference from ambient city lights. A half moon cast a faint glow on the field.

  “Imagine that these stars live inside us, that a speck of stardust exists in each and every one of us,” Meade said. “We may be earthbound beings, but we have imaginations that reach from the earth all the way to the stars, and part of the purpose of humanity is to unite heaven and earth.”

  Bly read us some poems, and then the field fell silent until, off to my right, a man started quietly weeping. Another one started sobbing off to my left. And then another. In a short while, the field was filled with the sound of men crying, but it wasn’t uncomfortable to lie in the midst of it. Everyone there felt moved for a different, personal reason.

  I lay on my back and looked up at the stars, feeling the firm, stable ground under my shoulders and my head. I was part of this earth, part of my family, part of a lineage, part of this group of men. I was an actor and a writer and a filmmaker, a storyteller and a storymaker, a son and a father and a man.

  Do you feel limited by your fathers? Meade had asked us. Or do you feel that you’ve received some gifts?

  That’s when I realized: My mother might have been wrong about my father and me. He may not always have been available to me emotionally because of his work but he had passed down some very valuable knowledge. He hadn’t gone off to a nameless factory to build widgets. He’d done something personal and artistic, and he’d always included us in his life and shared his experiences. He’d insisted on keeping the family together and had taken us to places where we could observe him creating a character in a different time and place. I did get to learn at his side, as much as his profession would allow. I learned how to conduct myself on a set and how to treat everyone on a crew with equal respect, from the director right down to the interns. He’d led me through whatever rites of passage he knew how to share, from helping me prepare for auditions to teaching me that good work is more valuable than fame to insisting that my relationships with my children were more important than any other relationships in my life. Where he may have failed in the eyes of others, maybe even in his own, he hadn’t failed in mine.

  Three or four mornings a week I’d pick up my kids at their mom’s house and drive them to their schools. I had the kind of cookie-cutter arrangement that weekend dads were often awarded through the California family court system, meaning I saw the kids every Wednesday and on alternate weekends, but I knew I needed to be more present to them than that schedule allowed. The drives to school gave us extra time together to connect. It meant spending almost two hours in the car every morning just to be with them for forty minutes, but it was worth it to see them regularly, and I tried to make the most of our time together.

  The Monday morning after the Ojai retreat, Rowdy, my Rhodesian ridgeback, leapt into the back of the car—he loved any kind of road trip—and we drove off to pick up Taylor and Paloma as usual. My head was still buzzing from the weekend. I’d never experienced the power of narrative quite that way before and I wanted to share it with my kids.

  We’ve got to tell stories, I thought. We’ll either make them up as we drive along or we’ll breathe new life into old stories and myths.

  I could hardly tell them, “Your grandfather and I just went into the woods with four hundred men to hear stories” and expect them to understand what that meant. They were much too young, only four and six. Instead, I started tapping on the steering wheel, the same rhythms that four hundred men had pounded on their drums in the dark just a few nights earlier. When I had the beat going, I started telling them a story.

  “There once was a young prince named Taylor,” I would begin, or “There once was a young princess named Paloma.”

  Storytelling in the car became our morning tradition. Some days Charlie’s daughter Cassandra rode with us, and she’d listen, too. I’d tell serious stories and silly ones, trying to engage them and make them laugh, and on mornings when I couldn’t think up a new story I’d fall back on old ones I remembered from childhood, or simplified versions of ones that Bly and Meade had told over the weekend. Some stories were true and some made up. They were all a way to help me connect with the kids, to share values and teach them life skills, and to help them parse out fact from fiction. Most of all, they were a way to help them learn from me, by my side.

  I’ve always loved road trips. Give me a car, a full tank of gas, and a long stretch of open road and I can be happy for days. When I had a little house in northwestern Montana about fifty-five miles from the Canadian border, I used to drive there straight from L.A., stopping only at a rest stop outside of Salt Lake City to catch a few hours of sleep. The ride took a full twenty-four hours and with no cell phones, Internet, or GPS, the biggest decision I’d have to make was, “Is it going to be I-15 or I-5?”

  In 1992, I married the pop star Paula Abdul and we bought a bigger house in Montana on a lake. Paula wasn’t a big fan of long road trips, so we would usually fly to Montana rather than drive. Two years later, as the marriage was ending in divorce, the last thing I wanted to do was spend a summer at home feeling sorry for myself. I had the kids to myself for a month, and I thought, Let’s get out of town.

  Long road trips were a large and memorable part of my childhood, whether we were driving from Mexico to Los Angeles; Malibu to Colorado; or to other locations in the West for my father’s work. Sometimes we’d stop along the way to see sights like the Grand Canyon but we were always destination oriented and never camped. My father didn’t know how to start a fire or pitch a tent and I wanted to make sure my kids had the experience of sleeping in the woods, hiking, and connecting with nature. Most of their travel to that point had involved airplanes, not the open road.

  I was determined to show them the national parks because, one, I wanted them to know the natural beauty of the West and, two, I hadn’t seen a lot of them myself. Rowdy and I had made the trip between Los Angeles and Montana many times, but we rarely stopped along the way. So that summer of 1994 I rented a Winnebago and planned a two-week road trip for the kids and me through the southwestern and mountain states, leading us all the way
north to the house in Montana.

  My parents thought I was out of my mind. Taylor was ten that summer, Paloma was eight, and their favorite pastime was fighting. They would constantly push, poke, kick, shout, shriek, hit, and scream at each other. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if I were their father or their referee. Sibling rivalry is a rite of passage; I knew that from all the years that Charlie and I had fought like animals as kids, and now as adults we made movies together and took care of each other on set. I knew Taylor and Paloma would eventually grow out of this phase, and I also knew that much of their rivalry was a competition over me. By doing a long road trip together, I figured, they wouldn’t have to fight for my attention. They’d have it all the time. I wouldn’t be on the phone or in the middle of a film.

  “Let’s do this,” I said. They seemed game. So we loaded up the Winnebago and headed out toward the I-10 East, the same highway that had carried my family west into Los Angeles in 1969.

  My mother had made a promise to Taylor and Paloma. “I’ll give each of you a thousand dollars cash if you manage not to fight for the whole trip.” That was an enormous amount of money in 1994. It’s still an enormous sum today. “Okay, Grandma,” they’d said. She must have known her chances of having to pay up were slim. We weren’t even out of Malibu before the yelling and kicking in the back of the Winnebago began. I gripped the steering wheel and took a deep breath in and out. The Winnebago was less aerodynamic than I’d bargained for and I had to keep both hands firmly on the wheel to keep from getting blown all over the road. I couldn’t let myself get distracted.

  “Move over!” Taylor shouted.

  “Stop touching me!” Paloma screamed. “Stop looking at me! Daaaaaaad!!!”

  It was going to be a very long drive.

  Our route took us to the Grand Canyon and then over to the Anasazi ruins at Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico before heading up to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming; Mount Rushmore in South Dakota; and the site of General Custer’s Last Stand and Glacier National Park in Montana. It was an ambitious itinerary, but we were prepared. The Winnebago was a self-contained unit, with a shower, a toilet, and some beds. It even had a television for Taylor and Paloma to watch on the long desert drives.

  It was a miserable trip. Miserable! The kids fought the entire way while I tried to navigate an RV the size of a small bedroom through mountain passes buffeted by wind, screaming at the top of my lungs, “Sit down and stop fighting or we’re all going to die!” They knew how to push my anger buttons just as I’d known how to push my father’s, and they pushed every one of mine on that trip. I took the most striking photo of Paloma standing at the site of Custer’s Last Stand. I’d physically pulled her and Taylor off of each other to get her to pose for the shot. In the photo she’s in front of the most extraordinary Montana sunset, with a historical marker visible in the background, and she’s standing there scowling with her arms crossed tightly, completely unaware of anything but her own anger. It was an awful moment but it made for a hilarious photo.

  And me? My most vivid memory of our Winnebago adventure is the drive back. My father had flown up to Montana for our last four or five days at the house. I might have sent up a flare to say, “I can’t handle this by myself!” or he might have just wanted to spend time with me and the grandkids. Probably both. He decided to drive back to Los Angeles with us, so we all packed up the Winnebago together. Our route this time was to take US 93 in Idaho all the way down through Nevada until it hit I-15 outside of Las Vegas, and then cut over to L.A. I estimated it would be three full days of driving.

  On the road, I thought we should try to hit I-15 sooner than Las Vegas, which meant taking a minor two-lane road along the Salmon River in Idaho for a while. This would have been fine had the road not been under construction, which I hadn’t known. Without a shoulder on either side, the road was narrow and the river ran right up against one side. We hadn’t been on it long when the rain and wind began.

  By then, I’d spent enough time at the wheel of that enormous vehicle to know how to maneuver it pretty well. Even on a narrow road with two kids fighting in the back, I was all right, though I was struggling against the winds. My father, on the other hand, didn’t have any experience riding in a box on wheels that was getting blown around. He’s never comfortable in precarious driving conditions, and this situation was making him nervous. It didn’t help that the kids had started fighting again in the back.

  “Come on, guys,” he said to them. “Come on, come on. Keep it down back there.”

  A strong gust hit the side of the Winnebago, making us swerve slightly toward the side of the road. I struggled to regain the vehicle’s stability. My father glanced at me nervously.

  “You okay?” he said.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Gimme that!” Taylor shouted in the back, and Paloma let loose with the piercing scream of a child who’d just had an object ripped from her hand. It would be mere seconds, I knew, before she tried to grab it back.

  “Keep it down!” my father shouted over his shoulder. “Your father’s trying to concentrate!”

  Another gust hit the camper, this one threatening to push us closer to the river. It took most of my strength to keep us in our lane. In the rearview mirror, I could see Paloma heading for Taylor in the back.

  “Sit down!” I shouted.

  “Get away!” Taylor shouted at Paloma.

  “Idiot!” Paloma screeched. “Stop touching me! Daaaaaaaad!”

  That’s when my father lost it. He spun around in his seat.

  “STOP IT!” he screamed, as loud as he could. “STOP. IT!”

  It was effective. They stopped fighting, immediately. It was probably necessary, too. The kids were completely unaware of the stress I was under trying to keep the Winnebago on the road, and of the consequences if I couldn’t. My father was unloading a dose of what I probably should have given them earlier in the trip. At the same time, hearing him yell like that made me shrink emotionally until I felt the size of a ten-year-old, too. A ten-year-old driving an enormous Winnebago. It dialed me right back to the scene of many crimes.

  I learned a valuable lesson on that trip, which was never to take my kids in a Winnebago for two weeks by myself ever again. I also learned that these are the kind of experiences from which childhood memories are made. Taylor and Paloma, now in their mid-twenties, still remember our Winnebago trip in great detail and, somehow, they remember it fondly. They remember hiking down the rim of the Grand Canyon on a diabolically hot day and running into an Australian tourist who shouted at them to stop feeding the squirrels. They remember spending a night in animal-skin teepees along the Rio Grande at the home of the artist Mark Rendleman, the friend of a friend, who was diving into the river, naked, as we drove up. For years afterward, they referred to him as “Naked Mark.” And they remember white-water rafting on the Flathead River in Montana, where we stayed at our house for ten days, the longest leg of the vacation.

  They also remember me yelling at them in the Winnebago, and they remember my father exploding at them on the road in Idaho, but they laugh about that now. Fortunately, their good memories far outweigh the difficult ones. I’m grateful to have been able to give those good memories to my kids and for my father to have shared in so many of them with us.

  I may have gone off to work every day when my kids were young, and sometimes gone on location for months, but, just as my father did, I took my kids with me whenever I could. Taylor flew up to Vancouver in 1993 when I was shooting Another Stakeout and spent time with me on the set. He and Paloma traveled with me to London in 1995 when I had a small part in the first Mission: Impossible movie, and that year Paloma was also with me in Austin, Texas, for The War at Home, in which she appears in a scene at the end. And in 1999 Taylor, then fifteen, flew to Toronto where Charlie and I were shooting Rated X, a film I wrote and directed, to play my character as a boy when the actor we’d hired had to back out at the last minute. Taylor was terrified to be on film and kept
forgetting his lines, but he ultimately did a terrific job and I felt enormously proud of him for facing his fear.

  Knowing what my father gave me, I can see what I’ve been able to pass on to Taylor: courage, determination, kindness, gratitude, curiosity, love for family, and a passion for everything we do. This may not have been the kind of male knowledge Bly was talking about, but it’s the kind that works for us.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  EMILIO

  2000–2012

  Four events occurred in quick succession in the spring of 2000: I celebrated my thirty-eighth birthday; I sold the house at the beach; Rated X aired on Showtime; and I lost Rowdy, my faithful canine companion of thirteen years.

  I was heartbroken by his death. Since the day I’d found him in a Montana animal shelter when he was just two years old, Rowdy had been my road trip copilot, my running partner every morning, and a quiet friend when I needed to be left alone. Everyone had loved him. A friend once said Rowdy was such a civilized dog I could probably take him to the movies, put a bucket of popcorn and a drink next to him, and no one would object. I couldn’t bear the thought of long drives without Rowdy or of running alone the following morning. I buried him under a young plum tree on my new lawn.

  My new home was a spec house on the same street where I’d grown up and where my parents still lived—“spec house” meaning that a builder had gutted and remodeled one of the original 1950s ranch homes, hoping to find a buyer who’d like the new design. I’d had only thirty days to vacate the beach house because the new buyers wanted it for the summer season, and the ready-made Mediterranean villa for sale on my parents’ street came at a good price. I closed the deal and moved in quickly.