by Val Kilmer
Actors who decry the entertaining aspect of acting miss the mark. To act is to entertain. Brando was an outrageously enjoyable entertainer. Cher even more so. In my romantic life, I was Cher’s boyfriend. That was a big deal.
To most of Hollywood, I was not yet a burgeoning talent but “Cher’s lover.” I have dog ears and could often hear industry folks whispering about us in fancy restaurants. Although not in Matsushia, where it was so loud with the joy in the room from the customers and waiters you could never hear any gossip even if it was happening at the table next to you. Cher had discovered this unknown establishment owned by Nobu Matuhisa, his first restaurant. He and I enjoyed each other from the beginning and are friends still. Perhaps that’s why he still has movie posters up in the hallway to the bathrooms. That kind of Hollywood is almost all gone. It was fun while it lasted.
But back to Cher and gossip. Most of the time it was actually kind. She’s still got it. But if you can believe it, we were less lovers and more best friends. Right from the start, it was all about curiosity and intellect. What really is the aurora borealis? Have you been to see the Northern Lights? What about the Grand Canyon? You should go there.
To star in a mainstream movie was nothing to sneeze at. Cher was mainstream. Airplane!, a hit comedy, was mainstream.
Meanwhile, my serious side got more serious. Back in my hotel room, I began writing poetry. I was rereading Ulysses, which Cher thought was somewhere between performative and ridiculous. The starting point had been “Sand,” the verse that had helped me get into THE Juilliard School, which was followed by dozens of poems, some long, some short, some abstract, some narrative. My poems were necessary—even urgent—expressions of unformed ideas. I wasn’t under the influence of any particular school of poetry. I liked Rimbaud, Yeats, Wallace Stevens. I liked Shakespeare’s sonnets. But I wasn’t a self-conscious writer.
Cher and I needed a moment. We would ebb and flow, separate and come back together, like two shiny fish. Enter… Michelle. I’d met Michelle Pfeiffer a few years earlier when we were both in an ABC Afterschool Special, One Too Many, about the dangers of teen drinking. Mare Winningham, also in the cast, got me the audition. I landed the role as a young alcoholic. Director Peter Horton and I spoke the same language. He was a Christian Scientist and also married to Michelle, who had an uncanny resemblance to Grace Kelly. Michelle and I became friends. She has a gentle, innocent soul. When her marriage to Peter hit a rocky patch, she confided in me.
Because he and I shared the same faith, I understood how Christian Scientists can display what seems like detachment when they’re trying to commune with the Spirit. I had felt that distance in my own parents. I could talk to Michelle about that frustration—how I never felt the closeness to Mom and Dad that my heart desired. The secret pain that Michelle and I shared created an intimacy between us. She had no one else to talk to about Peter; I had no one else to talk to about my parents. Plus, I had an all-consuming crush on Michelle’s younger sister, who did not seem to reciprocate, even a little. In fact, she seemed to not even know I existed.
With Michelle Pfeiffer in the ABC Afterschool Special One Too Many
* * *
The minute Top Secret! wrapped, I felt I needed a break. My mind was swirling with affection for Cher, adoration for Michelle, and admiration for Joanne, the muse whom I’d never met. I needed fresh air. So I took all the per diem money I’d saved and backpacked through Europe. That silly little comedy had me half-crazy with excessive energy. I needed to unwind. I also saw that, as the star of the film, I had been getting spoiled rotten. When you have fifty people asking you ever so politely—remember, I’m in England for my first film at the world-famous Pinewood Studios where all the 007 films were made—when fifty people ask you all day long, “Is there anything you would like, Mr. Kilmer?” after a while, you start to answer them. When I woke up to this, I needed solitude. I needed to fend for myself. So I was off on my own, first to Scotland—Inverness, to be specific, the majestic city in the Highlands—then to Ireland, with an edition of Yeats in my back pocket, traipsing through the green countryside and reading out loud the poet’s immortal “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”
I could see myself living alone forever, or at least for a few weeks. On the continent, I fell in love with Rodin. The photographs of his sculpture had not prepared me for the lyrical magnificence of the real thing. I discovered Calder. I loved the bustle of Europe but it wasn’t until I set sail for the Maldives that I could really relax into the beauty of the sea. On the high waters of the Indian Ocean, I dreamed of meeting a young woman and set down my feelings in a poem I called “We’ve Just Met but Marry Me Please.”
The Maldives are formed by coral curling into itself. The islands are tiny, convincing me that heaven must be tiny, a miniature world of flying fish of fantastical colorations, massive bundles of silver shimmering in the sunlight. I snorkeled until I was drunk with joy; my eyes ached from the beauty but my head ached for a seafaring Maldives experience that brought me to Malé, the main island. There I found the captain of a fishing vessel willing to take me to far-out ports. I explained how I had to be back in time for my flight to Africa, where I had booked a safari. Hemingway was much on my mind. The captain was cool but his crew wasn’t. They were pirates whose thievery I narrowly escaped.
It was so surreal. I had never been on an island of pure natives, and most of the children had never seen a white man. As soon as we landed my crew vanished. After twenty-four hours I was more than nervous as I could not miss my flight, and it took much longer to get to the island than they told me. I couldn’t find anyone who spoke English, and I realized the only way I could make any kind of statement and attract whatever authority was on the island was to deny their incredible hospitality. Virtually every hut I went to, trying to find my hiding crew, someone invited me to eat and enjoy what little they had. By refusing, this seemed to awaken in them the sense that I was somehow upset. On the morning of the third day, I was delirious and started to hallucinate from lack of food. I had a dreadful sense that I was in real trouble.
Perhaps I haven’t mentioned it was against the law to go to an island that wasn’t a “hotel island,” which is exactly why I wanted this adventure. But this was more adventure than I had bargained for. I was in one of the huts, sweating and rocking in a hammock, when my first bit of hope arrived. It was a man who spoke English. I poured my story out in short bursts of dialogue, exhausted as I was by not eating. The kind man explained to me that there was no way off the island except for the crew that brought me. The reason he gave for them all disappearing was simply that they only came home once a year or so, and they were all off with their wives. Every one of these women with a beautiful daughter had been coming by my hut wanting me to marry them. I was also told by my new best friend that no one on the island could understand why I wasn’t taking all these beautiful girls as my brides. “Brides?” I asked him. I didn’t know much about their culture but I didn’t recall polygamy as part of the program. He said no, it wasn’t that—that all I had to do to get divorced was sort of clap my hands and wave them away and I was divorced. I explained I was rebelling against all manner of kindnesses like eating, until I met the chief or someone in authority who could help me. He said he could arrange a meeting with the chief and me.
“Great,” I said, “the sooner the better,” and at that moment I thought I heard a motorboat.
“No,” my new friend said, “no engines here.” The only way off the island other than the motorboat I came in was to go to the convict the authorities had put on this island to run the shortwave radio. He was taking a sailboat in a couple days, and if I had the money he could get me a passage on his sailboat to Malé, which would take three days.
“Impossible,” I said emphatically.
Eventually the second of five daily prayer sessions rang out, and the friend said it was time to meet the chief. All the children followed me and rubbed my skin to see if it would come off. They laughed and laug
hed. It was impossible not to love them. All the English anyone knew was “Military? USA military?” My interpreter explained the war ships that passed through were all anyone knew of a white man. It was the first time I was made aware of the global power of our country. And how complete our reach was. Little children saw the white man and “military” was all they knew of us.
We arrived at the meeting hall, a simply constructed building with no partitions and a large roof that housed, I would guess, about a hundred people. It seemed the entire island showed up to watch the white man who refused to eat or get married.
My interpreter said, “The chief would like to know why you are here and what your problem is with your crew,” pointing to my crew, which seemed to materialize before my very eyes. I told the chief my story, and then this Old Testament–style rhetoric just flew out my mouth.
“I want you to know, my kind host and these good people’s king, that I will not ever use this crew or their boat, as they have been dishonest to me and might make me miss my airplane flight. I have no money to stay in the Maldives, but this is the truth, I will leave this island without their boat and its crew, and I challenge this young man”—I pointed at the smug young skipper of the boat—“I will pray to my God, and I ask him to pray to his, and if after praying to do what is right he still does not feel he has to give me back the money I gave him for this round trip and for gasoline I will not use, I will ask my God to deliver me from this island today.”
Well, that sure got everyone’s attention. The second my interpreter said “God” in his native tongue, the entire room fell silent. Then the afternoon prayer bell rang, right on cue. I’ve always had that sense of timing.
The chief spoke briefly to my former crew, after the interpreter finished, and pronounced our meeting finished. The children didn’t follow me back to my hammock. The mothers did not bring their favorite beautiful daughters by. I fell in and out of consciousness and awoke out of a delirium thinking again that I heard an outboard motor, about half an hour before sunset.
The interpreter suddenly appeared out of breath and quite flustered. In my delirium I joked, “I could have sworn I heard a speedboat. Boy, I think I have to eat something.”
“You can now, and you did,” the interpreter said. “It’s a miracle. There’s a speedboat just docked on our landing.”
I didn’t waste a second, although I thanked my God for such a vivid answer to my prayer. Or edict. I have been told by spiritual practitioners it is sometimes all right to demand a sign.
After walking about a hundred yards, I kindly asked my friend to carry my backpack, as I just couldn’t carry a full pack now, even heavier with beautiful seashells, remembrances from the Maldives, and whatever I had picked up in Europe. I came out of the village area with perhaps half the island occupants behind me. I have a clear memory that none but my friend would walk in front of me. It was either respect or fear or both that kept them all from making eye contact. And now comes one of these magical realism moments that I have myself made sure even in the moment to record in some forever part of my memory, knowing as I do that the brain plays tricks and it’s easy to make believe or believe a dream as time moves on, but this is exactly what happened: The men and women who were singing on the beach, moving the catch of the day into baskets from the various nets from their fishing boats, all stopped singing as I came upon them, and parted as if in some well-rehearsed scene from a Cecil B. DeMille epic, and all in exact unison. Even as I remember remembering it I thought, “Never forget this happened exactly the way this is happening because in time you won’t believe it.” And then as the sun lit up the water and the sky simultaneously as it seems to do only in the most romantic seas and islands of the earth, the impossible revealed itself. Onto the cement dock where the good island people continued to part as if I were the alien I indeed now officially was, there floated before me with this impossible sunset behind it a massive double-decker speedboat, with two smiling Asian men discreetly but clearly wealthily dressed in casual sports clothes.
The one behind the wheel laughed and said loudly in perfect English, “You must be the American we have heard so much about!”
I snapped back as I took over my blue backpack, hoping to throw it on board without permission, “Yes, I am. And you must be the speedboat I thought I had dreamed of hearing a little while ago.”
“Would you like a lift to Malé?”
“Yes, would you mind very much if I come aboard and hear your story on our way home?”
They agreed with much bright-eyed laughter and I bade my friend goodbye, never asking his name and never thinking I should let him hear the story of this miracle arrival as he was the one who spoke this prophecy to his island and his chief. It was a simple story. At the moment as I proclaimed to the chief that I would pray to my God, one of the Asian men, who owned a construction company that was contracted to build schools throughout the Maldives, got a call that his wife was headed to the hospital to have their baby. He hung up and suggested to his partner that instead of going to the closest school, they should go to the one farthest away for a final inspection. The man whose wife was going into labor could not say to his friend and partner why he wanted to go to the farthest one, especially because he had been anxious for days that he might miss the birth of his child unless he got on a flight right away. But now he was serene, he said to me.
“I told him, ‘Everything will be fine and I will make it home to Japan in plenty of time.’ ”
I remember feeling warm, and I suppose the easiest way to say it is out of body. I just had a deep and abiding sense that I was in the presence of God, or Love, the love of Love. I felt a deep connection to this woman in Tokyo, and the baby inside her. And this man, and his partner who readily went along with his strange plan that would surely ruin his ability to make it to his wife on time.
Across the Indian Ocean we flew on this double-decker outboard motorboat of exceptional design. Perhaps my nameless friend had told them that I had not eaten in half a week, because before long a curry appeared before me. This simple meal is one of the great meals of my life. The great sushi chefs seem to relish the idea that they know just how to bend the minds of Westerners when they say, “Great sushi is always about the rice.” But if you had eaten this curry and this rice that this ever-smiling man served me, the fluffy white rice that seemed to be made of warm snowflakes… I don’t know how to describe the fluffiness of this rice. It was like eating cumulous clouds covered in chicken and curry sauce. I remember reminding myself to eat slowly. I remember that I did, before falling asleep, mid-chew, which is another thing I don’t think I had done in days.
The wind, the sound of the twin motors, the laughter of the Japanese schoolhouse contractors, the joy of a full stomach: I could always know from this moment on that God is ever present, and the human picture just does not matter. That miracles are normal and to expect them. That this is not an arrogant act. It is, at times, a required act, demanding the presence of God. What an adventure.
I do not remember if I went to a hotel or straight to the airport. I remember that I had looked so many times at my airplane ticket that I thought I had actually gone mad, because I seemed to have refused to remember the date, or couldn’t face the fact that I was going to miss my flight, and I had imagined all sorts of horrors. I had heard of jails and court hearings for American backpackers because of all the drug smuggling, and that they just assumed that’s what you were doing if you weren’t on a hotel island. I am so grateful for the answer to my prayer and wonder if I had obeyed the laws there, whether I could have had such a rare occurrence. I have to believe I could have, but I don’t know how.
An early selfie at sea
I scurried through the airport and made my flight. And then, after some ten hours in the air, for the first time I set foot on the continent that, more than any other, put me in touch with elemental forces that deepened my sense of the divine. Africa spoke to me in a voice as ancient as it was new. Nature assum
ed a grandeur I had not before experienced. I don’t know how I had first fallen in love with Africa. I would like to say it was my whole life, as that’s what it felt like, but it was likely sometime in high school. And then often in college I would fantasize about it with my brother Mark, how we would go on long safaris together once we were done with school. But we never did. When you dream dreams when you’re young, do them before you have a reason not to. When you are young, that is when all the dreams come true. Believe me, do them all. Nothing bad will happen to you and all things good.
Africa was thrillingly complex and at the same time startlingly simple. It was basic. It was raw beauty. It was a polyphony of tribal and cultural currents I couldn’t begin to comprehend. But I could observe. I could breathe in the air. I could gaze at the sky, watch the flight of exotic birds, hear the distant cries of animals, see the leopard, the tiger, the lion, the zebra, the gazelle, the giraffe, the noble elephant. Pay homage to all creatures. Thank God for this venture into territory that, once I arrived, would stay with me forever.
Sometimes when I go off on the crucial need to spend time with wildlife and sense I have lost my audience, often within seconds of my beginning, I circle back to the idea of shapes and sizes. I’ll liken the creatures to cars or furniture or football players if that’s what my listener is into, something that immediately engages the imagination, that seems to help explain why the simple experience of viewing fifty elephants in their train cross impossibly slowly across the savannah can change your life. They are magicians and force you somehow to look away, and suddenly when you look back at them they are miles and miles farther away from you. I know this is real because the giant dainty travelers have done this to me too many times to be coincidence. Perhaps it is their speech that’s too low of a frequency for us to hear, that messes with human brainwaves. Perhaps some smarty-pants scientist has come up with the answer to this and I just haven’t kept up on my African lore lately.