by Val Kilmer
Glory & Gore
Life in my Malibu cottage was the one thing my life had never been: calm. I’d stay up reading a biography of Samuel Beckett or watching CNN, fall asleep to the sound of gentle waves, wake up, and write about Twain. Cher would wander over for coffee, or I would meet her at her palace, where we’d sit on the patio and survey the gentle Pacific. The postman and local burrito man were my friends. I was a weirdo beach bum, and it was bliss.
Then bliss turned to mayhem.
It happened one fateful day when my body rebelled. This was sometime after the medical emergency I described at the start of this story when Cher put me in an ambulance.
I coughed up coagulated blood.
I presumed this was the day of my death. I was alone. But I was not alone. Strange as it sounds, I felt like a fighter who trains his whole life for a big match. I heard Twain say to me, “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
I really truly believed in God, and this was my chance to prove it. I was both frightened and empowered. Grounded and yet already in angelic flight, shocked but not terrified. What to do, who to choose for this call of calls—my children or my spiritual practitioner? I phoned the practitioner. We quietly prayed, and I felt an instant wave of calm wash over me. I told her it seemed practical to call an ambulance since I could not tell how much blood I had lost and it was hard to move. We prayed a bit more, then she said, “Call your children from the ambulance.”
“Of course,” I said. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Because my aerie home was hidden from the highway, I knew the first responders would drive right past it. I looked up at these giant wooden stairs that led to PCH as blood dripped down my body, my vision blurred, my energy drained.
I called for the ambulance and then crawled, belly on the wood, up those steps and made it to the top, with several dozen splinters to prove it. Even then, the ambulance drove right past me. I called 911 again. Finally, the ambulance located me. I was barely able to stand. When they put me on a stretcher and got me inside, they kept yapping about their recent bowling tournament. I was hardly reassured.
I don’t remember anything after. I woke up at a hospital in Santa Monica. I was given a hotshot doctor who was full of himself. I told him as much. He told me that a tracheotomy was required. That meant drilling a hole in my windpipe. We had a swift decision to make, and we made it.
Cher insisted on making a few calls. She used to be David Geffen’s girl, and David has a hospital. I was transferred to UCLA and put under the care of the brilliant Dr. Maie St. John, supervisor of the head and neck division. She was wonderful and suggested chemotherapy and radiation. I went along with the program, mainly to reassure my children I was doing everything “humanly” possible to be healthy. They had been constantly taught by others in their lives to be wary of Christian Science, and although they had each had several extraordinary healings in my opinion, I respected their skepticism and did not wish to increase their fear in any way.
While I was in the hospital, I ushered Twain and Mrs. Eddy into the room. I allowed audiotapes of their books to wash over me. I let the sound waves swallow me whole. I filled the starkness of the room with a symphonic swell of knowledge and healing. I prayed. I didn’t wrestle with my angels. I sang and danced with them.
Eventually I was able to put pen to paper. I wrote poems. I reread Twain, remembering what is perhaps his most famous line: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” I was indeed alive and, after two months in the hospital, had regained my energy. The fact that my impeded speech could spell the end of my career only served to motivate me. Voice was my central means of creating art. What was I going to do? I called on Wesley to get me through. Wesley arrived. He reminded me that visual art was a medium we’d explored much of our young life. I’d always painted. Painting had gotten me through the stiffness of THE Juilliard School, staying up at all hours and painting canvases on the floor or forgoing canvas and painting right on the walls, letting out my inner Jackson Pollock. I started to reach for pads in the hospital room and draw on them, and then asked my kids to bring me tools—a canvas, some magazines to rip pages from, some paints, and a material that would soon become close to my heart, perfectly neon-pink production tape.
I started ripping and shredding and searching and cutting and sewing and taping things back together. I got in trouble for getting paint and Sharpie marks all over the hospital sheets but didn’t care. I saw them as canvases. Those paintings included pieces of poems, truncated scripture, random thoughts writ large, proclaiming, “The heart feeds the head and the head seeds the harmonies.”
When it was time to check out, I rented a small house in Brentwood that turned hyperactive in a hot hurry. The house became an art factory. I needed help renovating the place and hired a friend whom I called Juan the Magic Man. He started spackling and painting and tinkering and building, and, miracle of miracles, his movements mirrored mine. I asked if he’d be willing to help with my artwork, cutting wooden boards or finding scrap metal in alleys with me, or spray-painting large makeshift canvases. Juan was in. Together, we started making more art than the Brentwood cottage could house, and after a few raw social media posts, we realized there was a market for my art. I suddenly saw my designs as my means of survival.
I wasn’t sure if people actually liked them or just wanted something made by Val Kilmer, but I didn’t care. It was money in the bank for myself and my family, and I was doing what I loved. We hired a few other hardworking folks to set up our all-of-a-sudden art business and became the merry band of misfits I had imagined would fill my life on my forlorn land in Santa Fe. Old theater friends reappeared and never left. Things hummed along. And just when it seemed like the whole operation might close down because of our growing overhead and sagging sales, dumb luck appeared in the form of a serious art collector who fell in love with my work and bought a truckload of paintings and collages. We were back in business.
Denial vs. Denial
The insatiable paparazzi were working overtime to get the lowdown on my condition. I was too busy making art to mess with the press. If they caught me leaving my place, I’d simply tell them the truth: I’d been healed. The cancer was gone. I didn’t have cancer. Reports emerged that I was in denial. Well, denial is a funny thing. I was not denying that I had had cancer but was simply saying I no longer did. And to be honest, it was very hard to embrace my original diagnosis. It was surreal. I didn’t believe I was decomposing, and I wasn’t ready to die. I am not among those who deny the notion that God can heal today just as Jesus healed in his day. I do not deny miraculous healing.
Enter Brad Koepenick, Wesley’s childhood filmmaking friend and the third beautiful wheel in my relationship with Mare Winningham. I could see Wes in his eyes. He had long left Chatsworth to become a respected producer and then sort of a luminary in theater as applied arts. In an era of fame and no Facebook, we had simply lost touch until he knocked on my door.
With Tribeca Film Festival cofounder Craig Hatkoff (left) and Bradley Koepenick at the NOVUS SDG Moonshots Summit held at the United Nations, 2019
“Val, I’ve been looking for you. Don’t say anything. I have something for you. I’ve found these old audiotapes and books on Mary Baker Eddy. I want you to have them. It feels like a sign. They’re for you.”
I was silent. I could say nothing but, “Yes.”
We welcomed each other back and worked together to orchestrate an extensive Twain tour.
I twisted and Twained my way around the country, screening a filmed version of my Pasadena Playhouse performance at comedy clubs and theaters, followed by elaborate and interactive Q & As, for which I appeared fully in character. The play Citizen Twain became the evening of on-screen and off-screen mayhem we called Cinema Twain. I was basking in the bliss of a healthy obsession.
Yet Twain wasn’t created to live on the margins of society, just for know-it-a
lls and cinephiles. No, we had to bring this to the Twains of the world. The rebels. The teenagers who hated school and craved revolution. We created the Twainmania Foundation, and with the help of some of Brad’s former students and mentees, we developed a curriculum and vowed to bring it to schools in the most remote and forgotten corners of the country. Our goal was to ask youth from every gender and race to write responses to Twain, new-age manifestos on life in America. What does it mean to be a real American? We were resurrecting the Mad Missourian. We were resurrecting ourselves.
Through Twainmania, we also helped support other organizations such as the Educational Theatre Foundation, which provides theater in underserved schools across America, and Get Lit, which encourages teen literacy through spoken word and poetry. There are those who talk and those who get things done. We got things done. For this work, I was honored with the Tribeca Film Festival’s Disruptive Innovation Award and an invitation to speak at the NOVUS SDG Moonshots Summit, held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.
Our prayers had been answered. Our collective work now represented our best selves: the curriculum; a foundation; visits to schools; new opportunities for educators and students; an ongoing conversation on media literacy, Love, tolerance, and empathy through the eyes of America’s true patriot, the unofficial narrator of the United States.
The Iceman Cometh Again
I was well enough to go back to making movies. I was cast as a homicidal weirdo in the horror film The Super. Fortunately, my speaking part was limited and my rough voice worked well with the character. The movie unapologetically bites off the setting of Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, a creepy but elegant New York apartment building. Though the B film contains all the trappings of its genre, I found a spiritual gift in what otherwise might be seen as a forgettable role. My character lives with unbearable anguish and unnamed suffering. He became a vehicle for my own anguish and pain. I was able to get the bad stuff out of me and put it in him. And then, oddly enough, the film’s “clever” plot twist is that this superintendent, this frightening figure of moral debasement, turns out to be not a villain at all, but merely an amusing sideshow. I didn’t mind participating in such sideshows.
Actors thrive on work—virtually any acting work. But when there is work that might actually revive their troubled careers, actors become beasts who will beat back the world rather than miss the chance to do such work. That was my gut reaction when I learned Tom Cruise wanted a follow-up to Top Gun. He was calling it Top Gun: Maverick. Well, Tom was Maverick, but Maverick’s nemesis was Iceman. The two went together like salt and pepper. It didn’t matter that the producers didn’t contact me. As the Temptations sang in the heyday of Motown soul, “ain’t too proud to beg.” I’d not only contact the producers but create heartrending scenes with Iceman. Forget the fact that thirty years had passed since I’d seen the ghost of Iceman’s dad. I remembered it like it was yesterday. The producers went for it. Cruise went for it. Cruise couldn’t have been cooler. And the next thing I knew I was back, as the Beatles said, where I “once belonged.” Tom and I took up where we left off. The reunion felt great. As far as the film’s plot goes, I’m sworn to secrecy.
HelMel
I wanted to take the money from Maverick and get a gallery space. I fell in love with a quaint storefront in almost hip East Hollywood on the corner of Melrose and Heliotrope, thus the name HelMel. There was also a giant abandoned warehouse next door, large enough to house a good-size theater.
Then a vision took over, a spirit that commanded me to go for both spaces. We would have offices and a technological hub for the Twainmania Foundation. We would have a proper gallery where our art and the art of those we admired would be displayed in an elegant setting. In the theater, we would host concerts and plays and lectures and film screenings and poetry readings and dance parties. I would save money to build up my New Mexico ranch—I’d managed to keep two hundred acres—and finally make my Twain/Eddy movie.
HelMel became a reality. We penned our mission statement and painted it on the wall. HelMel is a fun, sacred space where eclectic artists gather to collaborate and, through new technology, inspire giving and spark change in our local community. And pell-mell, muses, friends, and collectors came calling. They seemed to find the space by chance or by destiny. Our intimate but lively gallery was soon filled with giant paintings of Bowie and charcoal drawings of the Chateau Marmont by Eric Nash, Polynesian pop art by Bosko Hrnjak, and work by so many other bright young minds, as well as myself, the old dude makin’ it happen.
One night we had a group show, and the whispers were all around. Dylan might come. I sat in my favorite office chair, looked through our skylight in our spotless refurbished warehouse space, and exhaled so deeply I almost fainted. This was what I had always wanted. An enclave in which bohemians and pirates and academics and lovers could congregate and make things and connect. They say when one of your five senses is compromised, you can feel the others become heightened. My speech was compromised, but I was seeing and feeling things I had never seen or felt before.
HelMel Studios & Gallery, Los Angeles
Why? I suppose that’s simply the way the world works.
And we just do not know what is ahead.
Uncertainty, I realized, is holy.
Death may come.
Dylan may come.
And there isn’t much we can do about it. Except sit back, breathe, and enjoy looking at the sky.
There are afternoons in my home high above the Hollywood Bowl when I watch the setting sun and reflect on friends who are gone. Sometimes I laugh from the memories. Sometimes I cry. I think of Marlon Brando. I think of David Warrilow. I think of Gordon Miller. I think of Sam Shepard. I think of Tony Scott.
I think of my mother.
She died last summer at a glorious ninety-three in her longtime home in Wickenburg, where she had become royalty. I love and miss her a lot, even though she was really tough on her two remaining boys. Locals we’re still in touch with in Wickenburg always say how often she spoke so lovingly and fondly of us. I am not so puzzled about this aspect of her inability to relay this Love. It’s a mysterious attribute the Swedes seem to own. They seem to like to be blue. Maybe it’s the weather up there. Mom’s life had been uneven, but her faith had been constant. She had bequeathed that faith to me. Some say you choose your parents. Some say you are given the parents you need. I needed my mother badly. I needed her before the cataclysmic divorce from Dad and I needed her after. I needed her always. I need her still. Today I wear her turquoise necklaces to keep her close to my heart.
With Mom at the premiere of The Saint, 1997
Then only a few weeks ago I lost my dear friend Robert Evans. How I loved Bob! To provide levity after his devastating stroke, I proposed the first all-male heterosexual marriage. Proposal rejected, but I did manage to get him laughing. He was one of the youngest studio heads in history—and the sharpest—who regally commanded the best office on the Paramount lot for three decades. Bob also saw himself as a great filmmaker, though he never directed and didn’t know which end of the camera to look through. During those post-stroke days, I visited him at the UCLA hospital, where he was encased in tubes and could barely speak.
“What do you want?” I asked. “What can I get for you?”
A long and ominous pause. And then his answer, drawn out for what could have been days: “Cocaine.”
He and I laughed so hard he almost blew the tubes out of his head. Bob was the last grand ringleader in Hollywood history. I was so fortunate that he understood me.
So have the women in my life. I miss the company yet am not unhappy. In some ways, Daryl felt like the end of that whole piece of my personality. We loved deeply and fought deeply and every day with her was that unique once-a-decade spring when there’s a beautiful storm followed by a priceless rainbow, the eternal ribbon of hope that once established as part of your day you cannot live without. When we finally broke up, I cried every single day for hal
f a year at least, until I became very concerned about my kids seeing me that way. I thought, Grow up. I couldn’t do it anymore, and I couldn’t do it to them. I am still in love with Daryl but I joke that she really did play the lead in Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman, and that’s just how I felt. Spent. It was no great surprise that she wound up marrying Neil Young. It was a matter of one giant attracting another.
Robert Evans takes calls by his home pool in Beverly Hills, 1978
Those kind of rip-your-heart-out relationships that had become so normal for me were just no good anymore. Love was at the core of my life, that was for sure, but was it the kind of Love that was building toward a life of service? My old friend Gordo, that serious student of poetry, had a famous teacher who once reminded his most promising pupils, “With poetry you have the opportunity to refine your entire life into a single stone, and you must take every hour to press and mold the clay of your life into that stone, and then in the last half of your life just make sure you are polishing the right stone.”
After Daryl, I had nothing left to give except to my church, to my kids, to my art, to my foundation, and to myself. When I stopped focusing on finding that perfect wife, that energy stream was channeled into other equally wild and mystical avenues. I longed for a deeper layer of self-exploration. I made a decision that, rather than looking for Love, I would let Love be me. Let Love be my life. Let Love seep through the pages of this, my life story.
Let it also be known that this story is far from over. I hear Robert Frost saying, “But I have promises to keep / And… miles to go before I sleep.” I hear Twain saying, “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” I hear Wallace Stevens saying, “At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make / Ambiguous undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings.”