by Martin Sheen
I’d traded an expansive ocean view for a landlocked property with an enormous lawn, where a landscape architect had designed the front and back yards with plants that required large amounts of water to maintain. In the months that followed I replaced them with drought-tolerant varieties and capped off most of the sprinklers. Then I turned my attention to the house’s interior. I’ll do a little work here and a little staining there, I thought, and I’ll just move these piles over here, and before I knew it I was spending most of my days driving to Home Depot and the old Malibu lumberyard for supplies.
This was all just a way to distract me from what I really needed to be doing, which was finishing the script for Bobby, which I’d started a few months earlier, after Charlie and I had been asked to do a cover shoot for TV Guide at the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
The Ambassador had shut its doors to guests by then and was primarily being used as a location for films, commercials, and music videos. In between setups for the TV Guide photo shoot, Charlie and I wandered around the gardens. The hotel groundskeeper offered to take us on a tour inside.
“Would you like to see the kitchen where Bobby Kennedy was shot?” he asked.
“Of course,” we said. “Let’s go.”
He led us through the Embassy Ballroom. As soon as I saw the arched, coffered ceiling I remembered that this hotel had been our family’s first stop in Los Angeles in 1969. I remembered standing next to my father as he gazed at an empty wall in the ballroom and said, “Kids, a great man, Bobby Kennedy, once spoke here.”
As Charlie and I toured the hotel, I started imagining what had occurred there the day Bobby was shot. What else was going on when everyone had seats on the Titanic, so to speak, and didn’t know it yet? Aside from the famous people, who were the regular people who’d been in the hotel that night?
“What would a movie about that day look like?” I wondered out loud to Charlie. “Who would these people have been?”
That night I went to the screening of a World War II submarine film called U-571. I hardly ever went to film premieres or Hollywood parties anymore, but the actor and singer Jon Bon Jovi, who had a role in it, was a close friend and he’d asked me to come. I went to the theater straight from the photo shoot and arrived early. After walking the red carpet into the theater I sat down in a mostly empty row. While I was waiting for the film to start, someone plopped down next to me. I looked over. It was Bobby Shriver, an attorney, film producer, philanthropist, and a nephew of Robert Kennedy.
What were the chances of that?
“How are you doing?” we said. We’d met a few times before, so we chatted for a while. After the movie, I went home and thought about the random encounter. Had it really been by chance? I didn’t particularly believe in signs, but still, the coincidence was startling.
To research the time period around Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, I spent hours down at L.A.’s Central Library poring through newspaper articles on microfiche. I wanted to learn what had happened in sports, entertainment, and the news on and around the night of June 4, 1968. I discovered that Don Drysdale of the L.A. Dodgers had pitched a no-hitter earlier that night and Andy Warhol had been shot by Valerie Solanas the day before. Five other people had also been shot in the kitchen along with Bobby. What if those five other people were characters that we get to know in the course of a movie? I thought. Viewers would have an investment in the story that’s not just about Bobby, but about the lives that he touched, really touched.
Over the next few weeks I wrote thirty pages, starting with the assassination and the famous image of the busboy who’d knelt at Bobby’s side after he fell to the floor and pressed a rosary into Bobby’s hand. The rest of the film would be told in flashback.
And then I got stuck. What came next?
I carried those thirty pages around in a briefcase for about a year. I couldn’t figure out who the main characters were and what they needed to say and do. And so I let my new house become my distraction to keep me from feeling anxious about a screenplay whose spine I couldn’t crack. Every day I’d wake up thinking, Today I’ll write! and then I’d get in the car and make another Home Depot run. I started hosting parties and salons at the house, surrounding myself with people and distractions.
My folks started getting nervous about my lack of focus. They mentioned their concerns to Charlie, who showed up at my house one day that summer. “Can I see the thirty pages you’ve been talking about for the last eight months?” he asked. “I want to make sure they even exist.”
“Sure,” I answered.
He sat in my backyard and read them. “You’re onto something,” he said. “But I think you need to get away from this house. You need to change your environment and stop throwing parties. All these people will be here when you get back. Just pack up a bag with all your research and get the hell out of town.”
“You’re right,” I said. “No more excuses.”
I took off the next day in the car with my computer, my notes, and a storyboard. All I knew was I was heading for Pismo Beach, a coastal town about a three-hour drive north of Malibu. I’d passed it before on my way up the coast and had thought, Someday I’m going to come here and write. But it was summer now, peak tourist season, and none of the hotels or inns had any vacancies. Around dusk I started heading north on Highway 1 toward Shell Beach, where I saw a semi-dilapidated motel with some prewar charm and a neon vacancy light glowing.
The woman at the registration desk recognized me when I walked in.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I’m trying to get away from everything,” I said. “I’m here to work on a script.”
“Can you say anything about it? Or is it a super-secret project?”
“It’s about the day Bobby Kennedy was shot,” I told her.
The woman looked like she’d just received an electrical shock. “I was there,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I was there that night. I was a Youth for Kennedy volunteer. I was in the ballroom when the shots rang out.”
What were the chances of that? The coincidences were starting to pile up.
“Do you have a room here I can dig into?” I asked. “And if you do, would you talk to me about that night?”
She said yes to both. I checked in and stayed for three weeks. Her name was Diane, and she told me her whole story, including the part where she’d married twice, both times to keep the boys from going to Vietnam. Each one had shipped off to Germany instead of Asia after his classification changed. Diane became the inspiration for the character Diane in the film, who was played by Lindsay Lohan. I finished the script later that year and the movie went into pre-production a few years after that.
Back home, I took a long, appraising look at my lawn. The monthly water bills were still huge. I can’t eat it, I can’t cultivate it, I don’t have kids who want to play soccer on it, and it’s an enormous expense, I thought. What could I do with it?
A family friend, an architect named Carl Volante, was living in a guest house in Malibu on a piece of land where he’d designed and built a house. The house’s owners had allowed a vineyard to be planted on a piece of their land and Carl now found himself the caretaker of a field of overgrown grapevines.
“I haven’t figured out what I’m going to do,” he told me. “I’ve got all this fruit growing and I’m up here by myself. Why don’t you come up and take a look at it?”
We sat outside at his house drinking glasses of wine, looking out over the vineyard he’d inherited. Rows of green grapevines always unlocked a feeling of nostalgia and yearning in me, a familiar feeling of something lost and also something found.
“I have the romantic notion of having my own vineyard someday,” I said to Carl. “But I’ve never had the land before. I always thought it would have to be up in the hills where the Malibu vineyards are, but here you’re doing it right near the ocean.”
I looked out past the vines where the Pac
ific stretched for miles like a vast blue field. Off the coast, a gray whale arced out of the water and landed with a huge splash. Then it breached a second time. And a third.
Again, I’m not the kind of guy who goes looking for signs. But I am the kind of guy who recognizes one when it smacks him in the face. This felt like one of those times.
“I think I need to plant a vineyard,” I said.
Carl laughed. “Where are you going to do that?” he said.
“Where the lawn is now.” As soon as I said it, I knew it was possible. Why not? I had a big, flat space in back and another one in front. “Do you know a vineyard consultant I can talk to?”
“I’ll get some names for you,” Carl said.
Back home, I started pulling up the lawn. A friend of mine had a little Caterpillar front loader tractor and he said, “If you pay for gas and beer I’ll come over and do the lawn for free.” So on April 18, my mother’s birthday, we got off to a start.
One of my mother’s friends, an interior designer, heard I was going to rip up my lawn. “You’re going to ruin your view!” she exclaimed.
“What view?” I asked. “I don’t have a view. I’m going to create one.”
Hers was a common response during those weeks, but the more naysayers I encountered, the more empowered I felt. I pushed the project through out of sheer determination, not out of skill. To be honest, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was just following instinct and banking on luck. The yard would look pretty good with this orientation, I would think, and then I’d plan for rows of grapevines in that spot. When a vineyard consultant suggested that I have the soil tested I said, “Okay, I’ll get around to it,” but I never did.
Vineyards don’t come fully assembled; you have to put them together, piece by piece. Another friend, a plumber, came over to help lay out the drip irrigation system. That was right around the time my parents came over to survey the work.
“You’re out of your mind!” my father said. “What are you doing? You’ve destroyed your yard. All the money that the builder and landscape architect spent on plants, and you just pulled them up. You could have repurposed them!”
He was right, and then I felt guilty. I started going from door to door in the neighborhood, asking if anyone wanted the piles of sod stacked by my driveway. I went to construction sites and asked there, too. No one was ready to lay down their lawns yet, and unfortunately, all of that beautiful, water-intensive grass had to be hauled away as trash.
Those were months of hard physical labor in the sun, and I relished them. Nothing felt better or more natural to me than being outside and sticking my hands into the earth. I’d never had such a tactile connection with dirt before, at least not since I’d played outside in it all day as a kid, and I felt an enormous respect for its possibilities. Progress in the yard was slow, but I could feel and see the results of my work. If I put in the time and the effort, the land responded. Simple, perfect cause and effect.
By June all the vineyard infrastructure was in place and I was ready to order the vines. The best choices for a cool coastal climate are Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. I don’t drink a lot of white wine, so I figured that if Pinot was the only red variety I could grow, that’s what I would grow. I ordered the same rootstock and clones that Carl had on his land, mostly Dijon clones named after their origin in the Burgundy region. In the coming months, I decided, I’d learn as much about Pinot as I reasonably could.
Winemakers call Pinot the heartbreak grape because it can be so difficult to grow. It’s fickle about weather and soil, and its thin skin is susceptible to fungus and mold. Beautiful but temperamental, Pinot vines require constant maintenance to produce a decent yield. Luck helps produce a fine one.
On the Saturday afternoon before the rootstock arrived, I walked into a flower shop in Malibu to buy roses for my daughter Paloma’s high school graduation ceremony. The blond woman working there was someone I’d seen around town at the farmer’s market and the local grocery store. We sometimes passed each other on our morning jogs as we ran in opposite directions on the beach and we’d shared friendly greetings—“Good morning; nice to see you!”—but I realized I didn’t even know her name.
I was horribly sunburned from the past few days I’d spent preparing the vineyard. The woman looked up from the flowers and smiled.
“Hey, buddy,” she said. “It’s called sunscreen. You live in Malibu. You should know better.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m building a vineyard. Sometimes I wear sunscreen, sometimes I wear a hat. Sometimes I forget and wear neither.”
“A vineyard?” She looked interested. “Where?”
I told her where I lived.
“I live near there.”
“I know. I see you around.”
“Well, if you ever need any help, I’d love to know more about vineyards.”
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I have four hundred vines coming to my house on Monday. I’ve burned all my relationships with my family and my friends asking them to work in my yard. Now when I call them they run or don’t pick up the phone. If you’re game, you can come around noon on Monday and help me plant.”
I figured if she worked in a flower shop, she must know something about planting. She figured if I was building a vineyard, for God’s sake, then I must know what I was doing. We were both in for a few surprises.
Sonja arrived at my house that Monday a few hours after the plants had been delivered. We opened a big cardboard box and there was the rootstock, lying inside in tightly packed rows. I’d turned on the drip emitters over the weekend to loosen up the ground and the soil was soft and pliable. Sonja and I spent all afternoon working in the backyard. I dug a hole under each emitter and then she came up behind me and planted a bare root. Slowly and steadily we made our way down the preplanned rows. It was an incredibly efficient system.
By the end of the day, we’d planted half of the rootstock. “Would you be willing to come back tomorrow?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll be here.”
On Tuesday we followed the same routine and finished all the planting. Afterward we opened a bottle of Pinot to celebrate the completion of our work and sat outside talking. It was an amazing two-day first date: sweaty and self-effacing, nothing pretentious or cool about it. We were both covered in dirt and spent long portions of time in a comfortable silence. I hadn’t been looking for a relationship and neither had she, but ours fell perfectly into place. Eight years later, we’re still together.
Soon after we finished the vineyard, Sonja said, “Let’s plant some vegetables.”
“Sure,” I said.
Not “Why?” but “Of course.” A garden felt like the natural next step.
“Let’s put in a chicken coop,” she said next.
“Of course.” There was never any question. It felt like what I was meant to do. Recently, we’ve added bees and Sonja goes out in the yard suited up in her white beekeeper suit to harvest honey. Little by little, we’ve added elements to the land in which we have no formal training, and yet our modest enterprise thrives. Somehow I know how to do the right things. I’ll be out in the vineyard pruning the vines by instinct, and then I’ll stumble upon a book about pruning and discover I was right on the mark.
How do I have this knowledge? It didn’t come from my father, for whom farming was never on the agenda. He laughs out loud when I even joke about this. And yet the skills do filter down through him, I believe. When I visited our relatives in Galicia during the production of The Way, nearly every house I saw had a backyard vineyard, a backyard garden, and chickens running around. The yards in Galicia looked just like my yard in Malibu, and I realized I’d unconsciously created a place that honored my family’s ancestral home.
If there is such a thing as ancestral memory, I feel it at work at my home in the guise of my grandfather, Francisco. I never had a chance to develop a close relationship with my father’s father, who died when I was ten. Yet I feel his influenc
e in my vineyard and my garden each time I pull a vegetable from the ground or check the progress of the vines. The relationship we’re having now, removed from the trappings of time, echoes back to generations of men before us who lived off their land. Unlike my father, I never chose a formal religion to follow, but the connection to the earth and this connection to my grandfather are my form of spiritual sustenance. They aren’t things I asked for but things that just seemed to happen, that slowly revealed themselves to me.
I can feel these connections and I know they’re real, but I struggle to explain exactly how they work. Language is often a poor vehicle for communicating the unknown. By trying to define the experience I run the risk of being ridiculed, so I don’t. Or maybe I don’t want to define it. Maybe the mystery is part of the point.
MARTIN
Santiago de Compostela, Spain
November 5, 2009
During the Middle Ages, cathedrals were often the final destination for pilgrims all over the world. The magnificent spires could be seen from miles away, and sometimes stayed in view for days’ worth of travel. The very first glimpses of their cherished goals heightened the pilgrims’ anticipation and assured their spirits that their long and difficult journeys were nearly over. At last, they were within sight of the gates of heaven.
Some modern-day pilgrims who arrive at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela after long and difficult journeys may not experience that same level of anticipation and transcendence, but a great many do. I am no exception.
Santiago is not journey’s end for The Way but it is a significant milestone for our production. Even though sequences in Muxia and Morocco still need to be filmed, for all intents and purposes Santiago is our goal. We arrive in the Plaza del Obradoiro on a cold, overcast morning in November. Pilgrims mill around the square, admiring the grandeur of the towering Romanesque cathedral as they wait for the Pilgrim’s Mass that is celebrated every day at noon.