Shattered Love

by Richard Chamberlain

  Though my own inner conflicts hadn’t risen (or descended) to tragedy, I too felt torn and painfully bifurcated. It was as if I were two people who were bound together but unable to be friends. I was dedicated to building my glamorous career and the public image I thought the world demanded, and I regarded aspects of my quite different private self with disapproval and fear. For Ralph the force of rigid Church doctrine was the culprit, for me the bogeymen were the mores and expectations of my public and my own self-rejection.

  So I began to feel akin to Father Ralph, my brother in confusion, and I liked and felt compassion for him from the start. How sad that he was the one thorn bird who, having impaled himself on the sword of his own brilliance, never found his song.

  Playing Ralph’s love for Meggie was a cinch. Rachel Ward was uniquely beautiful, passionate, and blissfully in love. In reality Rachel hadn’t fallen in love with either me or Ralph—early in the shoot she fell head over heels for Bryan Brown, the handsome Australian actor who played Luke, Meggie’s no-good and perennially absent husband whom she had married to spite the perennially absent Ralph. But as Father Ralph it was easy to believe the radiance of her love was for me and me alone.

  The Thorn Birds producer Stan Margulies and our screenwriter Carmen Culver did a masterful job of streamlining McCullough’s novel for its televised incarnation, but we had major disagreements about Father Ralph’s character. As I’ve said, I saw Ralph as torn apart by conflicting, but genuine loves, whereas they saw him as rather a cad, driven solely by lust and ambition. (Secretly I too felt there was a dash of cad in him, but that was far from his whole story.)

  We had fiery meetings and I wrote endless letters concerning several of Ralph’s scenes where I thought he seemed too duplicitous, but they were reluctant to change a word of the script. So speaking their words I did the best I could to keep Ralph’s character on my track. Obviously Ralph was extremely ambitious, but that was just one aspect of his dilemma. I felt he’d be much more interesting and compelling if his incompatible loves for God and for Meggie were both painfully real.

  Despite our literary differences Carmen Culver and I found each other very funny and through our laughter we became good friends. During the last few weeks of shooting the Queensland sugar cane scenes on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, I took Carmen to that rarest of eateries: a really good Mexican restaurant. Over several margaritas I tried for the last time to make clear my ideas about Father Ralph. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “so that’s what you meant. Well, of course I think you were right.” I was struck dumb. After a long pause we both started laughing—me through my tears.

  Barbara Stanwyck’s professionalism was legendary in Hollywood. Along with her astonishing youthfulness at seventy-something, she was known as one of the master craftsmen of film acting. At our first read-through (she was playing the willful Mary Carson) she not only knew all her lines, but every flick of her eyes. Several times she said to our cameraman who was present at the reading, “You will be sure to catch that look, won’t you.” I’ve never seen an actor that well prepared so early in the game.

  Film acting involves shooting the same scene many times from different angles for editing and to get just the right performances. Most actors slightly vary their performance from take to take to keep things alive. But no matter how many times we’d shoot our scenes together, Stanwyck always played every moment exactly the same, even in the beginning rehearsals. And yet her performance was always fresh, new, and strongly related to those of the other actors. I don’t know how she did it, but that was her technique, her method, and it worked like gangbusters.

  She was unflappable. Excepting one scene in which she encounters Father Ralph on the veranda of Drogheda during a tremendous downpour. Ralph, thinking himself alone, has just stripped off all his wet clothes when Mary (Stanwyck) appears and comes on to him. For the one and only time on the whole production Stanwyck flubbed her lines, which surprised her as much as the rest of us. After a stunned pause she murmured, “Well, it’s been a very long time since I’ve stood next to a naked man.”

  She’d usually arrive at work around five A.M., long before the rest of us, and sit around drinking coffee and shooting the bull with the crew. Our cameraman used a lot of atmospheric smoke—really horrible stuff, hard on the throat, hard on the lungs—in the interior sets. Except when we were shooting I’d stay as far away as possible from this artificial smog, but Stanwyck would just sit there in the haze and schmooze while they were lighting. This was, I fear, a big mistake because she’d had pneumonia six months earlier, and I suspect breathing all that phony smoke actually hastened her death.

  Daryl Duke, a craggy, white-bearded Canadian was our superb director. Daryl had more faith in our story and cast than either the network or our producers, and he created a lavish production that none of them were happy to pay for. We actors adored him, but he got himself into deep trouble with the powers that were. Even after the smashing success of The Thorn Birds all over the world, even after the huge profits began to roll in, they resisted giving Daryl credit. I remember when we received various awards for the show, the producers wouldn’t even mention Daryl’s name. By default it was left to me to thank him for his invaluable contribution to our success.

  If revving up your infatuated couple to intolerable heights of desire and then jamming insurmountable obstacles between them makes a great love story, then The Thorn Birds is one of the all-time great sagas of passion. Meggie, the irresistible, meeting Ralph, the unattainable. What woman wouldn’t lust after the beautiful, remote young man who’s given his life to God? What young man of God couldn’t help but long for the forbidden warmth of gorgeous Meggie? This is a love story made in heaven to put its lovers through hell. And yet in their stolen moments together, Ralph and Meggie loved totally, recklessly, absolutely. How many of us can claim to have dared the same?

  The parable that figures so importantly in this story tells us of a particular kind of bird that throughout its life is unable to sing until at the end it encounters a thorn tree. The bird then impales itself on one of the thorns and in its mortal pain it sings a song so beautiful that it stops God in His tracks. He and all the angels turn to listen. In short, only through our suffering can we discover the extravagant beauties of life.

  Obviously there’s some validity in this premise, but I’ve always had trouble trying to figure out why the sacred forces of creation, which I believe are essentially wisdom and love, seem to require so much hardship along our paths toward our wholehearted experience of compassion and truth.

  SHATTERED LOVE

  Relying on a great deal of evidence, today’s astronomers and physicists theorize that a number of billions of years ago, prior to the primal explosion of the “Big Bang” that created our universe, there was nothing: no time, no space, no thing visible or temporal at all. Whatever it was that exploded into all that is was some sort of invisible perfection utterly beyond the understanding of science.

  My premise is that this invisible ground of being, this uncaused cause that preceded existence is divinity itself, the stupendous, immaterial power of creative love. Love is perfect unity, perfect wholeness transcending time and space, beyond the particular, utterly indivisible and impersonal. And yet, the divine contains within the mystery of its perfect wholeness a dynamic creativity and stupendous curiosity.

  Only such perfection, such faultless eternal power would dare to shatter itself into time and space, into every conceivable potential of its nature, into everything it seemed not to be. God seems to be exploring its own being with total fascination and with no reservations whatsoever.

  And that’s where we humans become useful. We are a manifestation of divine curiosity. We are shattered love. We splintered human beings embody a divine inquiry into its own eternal nature. God has shattered its perfection just as a prism shatters the wholeness of white light into the infinite variety of its various wavelengths and resulting colors. It is this divine exploration that has created the destin
y of the thorn bird and us and our experience of the dark side.

  If I am honest with myself, I see that in the right circumstances I would to some degree be capable of absolutely anything any human being has ever done or will ever do—this includes the entire spectrum from Hitler to Saint Francis. Given the right conditions, I might have become a serial killer or the baptizer of Christ. Each of us contains all the possibilities of power. From the most sublime to the most grotesque, all power in this world is a shard of the original holiness of love.

  Each of us is a prism of shattered love. The seven energy centers of our bodies refract divine energy into a surprisingly perfect rainbow of various aspects or qualities of our life force.

  Certain ancient philosophies have been aware of these seven major energy centers (called chakras) for centuries. The first center in the groin has to do with survival, commitment to life, the intense desire to exist in this physical world. The character of this survival energy can range from the bucolic harmony of farming to the brutality of war. Its color (for those who can see such things) is red. The second chakra just above the genitals is sexual, procreative, the intoxicating energies of species survival. The often overwhelming intensity of this energy can vary in quality from love to rape. Its color is orange. The third chakra in the solar plexus is the center of emotion and personal power (we know how various those can be). Its color is yellow. The fourth chakra is within the heart area, and its quality is love. Neither sexual nor emotional (though it can inform both), this energy when awakened radiates the eternal warmth of divine love and is incorruptible. Its color is green. The fifth chakra at the throat is creativity and expression. Its color is blue. The sixth chakra is in the middle of the forehead and is the center of both intellect and insight, thought and the inner knowing beyond thought. Its color is purple. The seventh or crown chakra is at the top of the head and is our connection with the greater divine. Its color is white.

  So each of us is in this sense a stack of divine love shattered into its variously colored component possibilities ranging from the most primitive to the sublime. And we’re rescued from chaos by the placement at the very center of ourselves (the heart chakra) of the balancing, unifying energy of love complete, right in the midst of love shattered.

  The temporal world we live in is also shattered divinity. We are individual laboratories of self-discovery inhabiting the universal arena of divine self-exploration and revelation. Our individual self-discovery is essential to the revelation of the divine nature. We are love exploring love. We are love refracted, discovering all the potential aspects, dark and light, of its holy self.

  THE NINETIES

  The final decade of the twentieth century seemed to me to be in a terrific hurry to get itself over with. Years sped by with reckless nonchalance. The mammoth miniseries like Centennial, Shogun, Wallenberg, The Bourne Identity, Dream West, and The Thorn Birds that dominated earthly television and my career in the 1980s were rendered extinct by the disastrous (for the three TV networks) collision with that hurtling meteor Cable Television. The proliferation of cable channels divided and scattered our viewing audience and thus starved the networks of the abundant greenbacks needed to feed those spectacular dinosaurs of epic television. Though it would take time for me to realize it, the golden age of my long career would begin to fade along with the eighties. And yet a lot of interesting work continued to come my way.

  The 1990s swirled in on the winds of change. Martin and I had been living in Los Angeles and occasionally flying to our Hawaiian beach house for brief holidays. But each time we had to drag ourselves back to L.A. we found it harder to leave our island paradise. So we came up with a plan that shook up our lives big-time.

  We created a Hawaii-based television series called Island Son about a haole (Caucasian) who had been brought up as the hanai (adopted) son of a traditional Hawaiian family. His father was a kahuna (master) of the ancient healing arts. Throughout his youth his father taught his haole son the medicinal secrets of his ancestors, and as an adult he attained a western medical degree to balance his nontraditional medical background. Our idea was to make the show about the real Hawaii, ancient and modern, and its local people. We wanted to share all we’d learned about the wonderful and mysterious aspects of Hawaiian culture that tourists rarely get a chance to experience—their healing arts and spiritual life, their closeness to nature, and the aloha of the land.

  CBS seemed to agree with the plan, but unbeknownst to us they were really planning a sort of Dr. Kildare Goes Hawaiian, which wasn’t what we had in mind at all.

  We moved to Oahu and began shooting Island Son with Martin as island-side coexecutive producer. Unfortunately for us, CBS controlled the mainland producers and writers. Despite our protests, the Hawaiian themes got watered down, and we ended up with a standard doctor show with a Hawaiian backdrop. C’est la vie. Mercifully, at our insistence, the show ended after the first season. On the plus side, Island Son got us to Hawaii full-time.

  A new and unsettling period began for me after the demise of our television series.

  To begin with, some gay activist cowboy started investigating and publicly “outing” celebrity types. He claimed his vision was to offer up worthy role models to gay youth, but I figured his real motivation was envy, anger, and a misguided hunger for power. In any case, the ever-predictable tabloids flashed front-page headlines that I was gay, shoving me right into the middle of my darkest nightmares.

  My fears were threefold. First, I was terrified that this news would alienate fans and topple my cherished career, robbing me of the work I loved and my only source of income. Second, the elaborate and pristine self-image I had created, sustained, and lived suddenly smashed into shambles around my bare feet, sharp edges drawing blood everywhere. And third, I had to begin to acknowledge and deal with my long buried self-loathing and “subjective phobia.” From early youth I had absorbed our culture’s general fear of any sort of gender confusion, giving my utterly harmless sexual orientation the undeserved semblance of villainy. I had to admit to myself that I was as homophobic as the public I sought to please. When we cling obdurately to our soap operas, life has a way of grabbing us by the scruff and beating the daylights into us.

  After almost a decade of personal inner work and work with Martin, the silver lining of these murky clouds has gradually appeared. Very recently it has dawned on me that this whole painful drama of fear and loathing, of guilt and perversity, is a blatant travesty of reality. Sexual orientation is a benign personal matter; it is a total nonissue, of no public importance whatsoever. As I understand it, about ninety-five percent of any society is heterosexual and something like five percent is homosexual. A few heterosexuals are exceptionally fine, creative, and compassionate; the vast majority are hardworking, tax-paying, kind, upstanding citizens; and a few are trouble. A few homosexuals are exceptionally fine, creative, and compassionate; the vast majority are hardworking, tax-paying, kind, upstanding citizens; and a few are trouble. Statistically it’s all about the same. Without the blinders of ignorance and prejudice there is no sound reason we should not get along with each other just fine.

  I learned to dislike gay people, myself included, from my family, and from my peers, who in their youth were frantic to prove their normalcy by quite viciously rejecting anything “abnormal” in themselves and, by extension, in other children. For these kids, the term abnormal included freckles, being overweight, and any obvious signs of intelligence. The problem with those early impressions of “goodness” and “badness” is that they root themselves so deeply in the soil of our psyches and are extremely difficult to dig out. Digging out the false sense of being “better than” is just as arduous and necessary as uprooting the sense of being “worse.” But dig we must.

  The public revelation of me or anyone else being gay is simply a nonevent, just one fact among many. It’s interest as gossip derives entirely from public ignorance and prejudice. Like so much in our media-spun world there’s no substance beneath
the hype. Unfortunately, at the time of this tabloid blitz I hadn’t come to terms with this, and I was a very worried fellow.

  As I feared, my agent’s phone did stop ringing with job offers and stayed silent for about a year. Because my work was pretty much my life, this extended hiatus also worried me. The only reason my joblessness didn’t completely overwhelm me with anxiety was that in the beginning I had no idea my “vacation” would last for twelve months.

  To top it all off, Martin split.

  A few years earlier we found that we were spending too much time apart as actors and felt that something in the partnership needed to shift in order for it to thrive. We decided that two actors in the family were one too many and agreed that when Martin left his budding career as an actor/singer he would move into producing or at least coproducing my projects. This seemed to be the best solution to having a career as well as a relationship.

  Martin had produced our Hawaiian television series Island Son quite brilliantly. Both the network executives in Hollywood and all of us in Hawaii thought he was terrific. Martin was also an invaluable producer on The Bourne Identity miniseries, so by this time he had proved his salt.

  However, established Hollywood executive types are highly resistant to sharing power with relative newcomers. Just prior to my outing I selfishly failed to push hard enough for Martin’s inclusion on a couple of new television jobs. He felt I had double-crossed him, and he decided to move from Hawaii to Los Angeles to pursue his own projects independently. Without fully realizing it, I had in my blundering self-involvement pushed Martin away.

  So there I was in our big Honolulu house, “disgraced” and out of work, and clearly alone. Obviously it was time for some serious reevaluation of my priorities.

  One of the few advantages of the current frantic pace of life is the quick replacement of today’s scandal with the next day’s “shocking revelation” about somebody else. Apart from my yearlong lack of work, my life continued mostly unchanged: Nobody spit on me in the street, and no one burned crosses on my front lawn. The one really important change was positive: I fully realized that the time had come for me to begin to deal decisively and conclusively with my own deep-seated fears. The tabloid headlines in themselves weren’t frightening at all; in fact, they were sort of funny. My problem was my terrified reaction to them. The headlines actually did me a great service by forcing me to finally face and understand and heal my own self-defeating mental stories. As I said, it took me almost a decade with Martin’s help to find my way to this simple truth.