by Martin Sheen
“You both needa the money for lunch atta school?”
Clink, clink, clink.
I stole a glance at Alfonso. He looked back at me. An invisible message passed between us: If that spoon hits that cup one more time . . .
“Yeah, Pop, we do,” we said.
He handed us the coins to buy lunch. Then, without fail, he would pour his coffee into his saucer, lift it to his mouth, and slurp the liquid from the plate. He didn’t waste a drop. I’ve never known anyone else to drink coffee this way. Why he did it I don’t know, but for years I thought that’s what a saucer was for.
When he finished he would clear his dishes, put on his hat, say good-bye, and walk out the door for work. My brother and I would rush to the window to watch him head down Brown Street. We already knew which one of us was going to serve Mass that day, but we always watched him disappear around the corner together.
“He’s almost at the corner,” I would say and then—boom—as soon as he rounded out of view one of us would run straight back up to bed.
High school was a time of dreams, when everything felt possible and right on the brink of unfolding. It was also a time of strong community ties. At my school, in the neighborhood, at home, I knew I was part of something elemental and larger than myself, something solid and good. And yet during these years there was a sense of burgeoning separation as well. Every senior at Chaminade had to make up his mind: Was he going off to college, into the army, or into a local factory job?
Four of my six older brothers had joined the service, but a factory job would have been my lot. The military was out of the question for me. I had been injured at birth when the doctor pulled me out with forceps, crushing my shoulder blade and deforming my left arm, leaving it three inches shorter than my right. Though he never made much of it in front of me, my father felt that I had been crippled and he didn’t think I could earn a living as a laborer. Unbeknownst to me until the end of my high school years, he had been setting money aside from every paycheck for me to go to the University of Dayton.
But I had no interest in going to college. My mind and my heart had already committed to another path. I wanted to become an actor.
No, that’s not right. I knew I would become an actor.
No, that’s not quite right either. I knew I was an actor. That explains it best.
Children know essential things about themselves at an early age. They may not be able to articulate the feelings until they gain more language and more experience, but even some very small children know who they are even if their parents don’t yet. That was my experience. I understood something about myself that I couldn’t articulate, a strange, circular sensation of knowing something important but not knowing what I knew. Hmm, what is this about? I would wonder whenever that odd feeling came up. And then, when I was about five or six, I started going to movies at the Sigma Theater, a second-run movie theater on Brown Street between a fire station and a bar. The people on the screen there felt familiar and comforting, and gradually it began to dawn on me: I was one of them. That was the feeling I’d always had about myself.
I was an actor.
If it’s true that every creative person has a second date of birth, the one on which he or she discovers his or her true vocation, that afternoon of realization in a dark Dayton movie theater was mine. Knowing I was an actor flooded me with validation and a sweet sense of relief, and from that moment on I never wavered. I knew, for the rest of my childhood, that I would have to pursue this mystery that possessed me and that gave me possession of myself.
Once I had this knowledge, I then felt the responsibility to act on it. In high school I joined the drama club and started auditioning for plays. The first time I stepped on stage was during my freshman year to play the yeoman court stenographer in Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. I had all of three lines but the experience of sitting on a stage and delivering them in front of an audience was one of the most thrilling moments of my life to that point. I felt like I was soaring. Before long I was earning larger roles in plays like Arsenic and Old Lace, in which I played Doctor Einstein. I became the guy who walked around in high school with copies of plays folded in half and tucked into his back pocket so everyone would know he was an actor preparing.
“Do you have play practice today?” a classmate would ask.
“I have rehearsal, thank you very much,” I’d say.
And then, during my sophomore year of high school, I discovered an actor whose extraordinary talent and onscreen presence changed my life.
It was October 1955. The film was East of Eden and the actor, James Dean.
In downtown Dayton first-run movies cost $1.25, but at the Sigma Theater in our neighborhood, you could see second-run double features plus a newsreel and cartoons for 20 cents, so that’s where my family and friends saw films. East of Eden had already been out for six months before I saw it and, tragically, Dean had been dead for a month by then. On screen, though, he was still a formidable presence and, from the moment he appeared I was riveted. Fascinated. Disarmed. I’d never seen anything like James Dean before. No one had. He completely turned cinema acting on its head. His onscreen persona was so effortless and natural it suggested he wasn’t acting; he had transcended acting to a behavior, a way of existing in the world that spoke to a time and a place and a generation, and it introduced me to the idea that good acting drew from what an actor naturally possessed instead of just what he could mimic or learn. By taking his private pain public Dean offered an emotional refuge to a whole generation of young people. We knew he understood us.
When I was a boy, my favorite actors were Jimmy Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, and Edward G. Robinson, in roughly that order. Growing up as an aspiring actor meant two things: one, if you were lucky you’d meet your favorite actors one day and, two, if you were really lucky you’d get to work with them. Sitting alone in the Sigma Theater that night I was overwhelmed not just by James Dean’s incredible talent but also by the knowledge that, as I was discovering him, he was already gone. There would be no chance to meet him or to work with him, ever. Staring at the empty screen long after the double feature ended, I was left with an equal measure of inspiration and sadness.
I heard that James Dean had participated in the National Forensic League while in high school in Fairmount, Indiana, so I joined the NFL too during my senior year. My category was Dramatic Declaration, which meant I performed a monologue before judges at competitions around the city. I chose the salesman Hickey’s monologue from Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, in which the character tries to justify having murdered his wife just hours earlier by insisting he did it out of love. The monologue is loaded with passion and guilt and despair, a challenging choice for a seventeen-year-old, but I loved the character’s vulnerability and the raw drama of the scene. Our NFL director and coach, Brother Thomas Corbett, edited down the monologue to a shorter, competitive version for me. That last night I’d driven myself crazy trying to figure some way out for her. I went in the bedroom. I was going to tell her it was the end.
I never did win a competition, though I usually came in second to a brilliant and beautiful young actress named Eunice Augsburger from Fairmount High School. She always took home the first-place trophy with her powerful monologue from George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan. We became close friends and remain so to this day. When she began her career in New York she chose the professional stage name Samantha Langevin. Both of our fathers worked at NCR, and in 1997 together she and I helped establish the Augsburger/Estevez Scholarship fund for the Theatre Arts department at Wright State University in Dayton, which continues to thrive.
I began playing larger roles at Chaminade as well as in an adult drama society called the Blackfriars and, soon, people in the neighborhood began to talk about my performances. Still, my father could never accept acting as a worthwhile career. To him it was a hobby, an afterschool activity that kept me busy and out of fights. My brothers came to see me perform in high school, but my fat
her never did.
“I’m going to be doing another play soon,” I would tell him. “You’re coming to see me in the new play?”
“I to going inna there, Rrramon. I like-a to be inna there.”
“Well, I’d have to get you a ticket now. We only play for four performances.”
“Ah, don’t warry. I to going inna there for you.”
“Okay, Pop. I’m looking forward to it.”
It was like a scripted dance, every time. I knew he would never show up. I also knew he wanted to come, but he didn’t want to hurt my feelings by telling me he wouldn’t. Going to our activities wasn’t part of what he did. Maybe there were just too many of us. Maybe he was too shy to go out in public and sit among the other parents. He was in his early sixties by then and maybe he was just too tired. We all knew that he loved and supported us, but we didn’t expect him to show up at our events. We accepted this as part of who he was.
Still, I would always invite him, just because I so loved to hear him talk. His term of endearment for all of us, male or female, child or adult, was “honey.” He pronounced the “h” with a guttural, throat-clearing, Germanic “chh.” When he wasn’t calling me Rrramon, he was calling me chhoney, and often I’d come up with an excuse to speak to him just to hear him say either one.
“Pop, you missed the play,” I’d complain.
“Aw, chhoney, wasn’t possible for me to going inna there,” he’d respond.
As the clock ticked toward my high school graduation, our exchanges became increasingly more contentious. He was holding on to the idea that I might go to college, but in my mind, as soon as I had enough dough in my pocket I was out the door. Arguing was purely academic at this point, but still we went round and round.
“You’ve-a gotta go to school, do sommathing responsible with your life,” my father would say. “You can’t be offa having a fantasy. That’sa nonsense.”
One night we began arguing in front of the TV after dinner. It was our usual back and forth. As we bickered, a black-and-white Western flickered on the television screen. Wagon Train. Robert Horton ran across the screen in a storm to take shelter in a wooden farmhouse.
My father loved Westerns. Every night after dinner he’d plop down in front of the television and watch whichever one was on. Gunsmoke, Maverick, Have Gun—Will Travel. He watched them all. Evenings in our house were usually punctuated by the sounds of gunshots and hoofbeats emanating from the TV.
“Aw, chhoney.” An almost pleading tone crept into my father’s voice. “Why you wanna to go to New York to be an actor in a, what? You canta sing. You donna dance. You donna play the music. What you wanna to do over there?”
“Pop!” I said, exasperated. I pointed at the television. “You watch these shows. Every night there’s another Western on and you love them all! Do you see anyone singing or dancing or playing a musical instrument?”
“Aw, chhoney,” he said, swatting the air in front of him as if that settled the matter. “You canta ride a horse, either.”
You can’t ride a horse. That’s exactly how he thought. So practical. Maybe he was trying to save me from disappointment. Maybe he just didn’t want me to leave home. But at some level he must have known: My time in Dayton was drawing to a close. I spent the last months of high school looking out the window of my classroom at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad roaring by. I’m going to be on that train someday, I thought as the teachers droned on. I’m going to be on my way soon.
Nothing could stand in my way. Nothing. Not even that man I adored above all, my father.
That’s when Father Al stepped in.
Reverend Alfred Drapp, assistant pastor at Holy Trinity Church and School in Dayton. He’d come to our church, his first assignment, when I was fourteen, and he was still young himself, probably not more than twenty-five. He was shy, like my father, but also very energetic, and he made a positive impact on just about every family in our parish. I often served Mass for him, and he became my confessor.
Father Al understood my conflict with my father and he inserted himself between us in order to help us resolve our differences. When I flunked science my senior year, making me ineligible for graduation, my father was furious. I didn’t care much either way—I wouldn’t need formal schooling for what I planned to do—but Father Al gently convinced me to attend summer school so I could get my diploma. He also encouraged me to take the University of Dayton entry exams to appease my father. Begrudgingly, I did both, but I deliberately failed the college exam, scoring only three out of one hundred. My father got the message but still refused to give me his blessing.
That summer I auditioned for a local television show called The Rising Generation, which aired every Saturday night in Dayton. Essentially it was a local talent competition. Singers, dancers, musicians, magicians—all would perform live in front of the cameras, and the home audience would mail in postcards voting for their favorite act. I’d watched the show at home with my family and noticed that none of the contestants ever did dramatic readings. Other than playing golf, acting was the only real skill I had, so I figured I’d give it a try. The piece I chose was “The Creation” by James Weldon Johnson, a black minister who was known for dramatizing the Bible for his congregation. He’d shaped this piece from Genesis, and I was moved by its vivid imagery.
And God rolled the light around in His hands
Until He made the sun;
And He set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.
And the light that was left from making the sun
God gathered it up in a shining ball
And flung it against the darkness,
Spangling the night with the moon and stars. . . .
It was a fabulous piece to work with and I gave it all I had.
For the first time in the show’s history, an actor won. A few months later I was invited back for the season finals and I won that, too. The grand prize was an all-expenses-paid, five-day trip to New York and an audition at CBS Television, an astonishing award for a teenage boy from Ohio. My father couldn’t leave his job or the younger children for that long, so my oldest brother Manuel went with me. We flew on a TWA propeller plane, my first time in the air. The show put us up at the twenty-five-floor Sheraton-McAlpin Hotel in Herald Square, which was the most majestic hotel I’d seen up till then.
At the CBS headquarters on West Fifty-Seventh Street we were ushered into a studio. Robert Dale Martin, the casting director, was there to receive me. At the end of my audition he complimented me for having a beautiful baritone and regarded me thoughtfully. He must have seen some glint of promise in this Ohio kid standing in front of him because he gave me the first piece of solid professional advice I would receive.
“You won’t be able to do much acting in Dayton,” he said. “You ought to give New York some thought.”
“I will,” I said.
“Come see me again if you come back,” Martin said as he shook my hand good-bye.
Back home I focused all my energy on earning enough money to return to New York. That fall I sold Christmas trees on a street corner and even hocked my high school class ring. I figured I needed a few hundred dollars to make a decent go of it in New York. I didn’t have a trade or any prospects for immediate work and didn’t know a soul in the whole city other than Robert Dale Martin. Yet at a very deep level, I understood this pursuit had to be mine and mine alone. And it had to cost me everything. If I’d felt I could go back home at any time I knew I wouldn’t risk everything I had to be successful. I needed to know my next stop would be the street. At the same time, I didn’t know how long I could last if I ended up on the curb. Enough of my father’s practicality had rubbed off on me to know I needed a cushion at the start.
Father Al understood the importance of pursuing one’s calling. Careful not to offend my father, he loaned me $300 out of his pocket to get me started in New York. A few months later he sent me another $200. A $500 loan in 1958 was like giving someone $5,000 today. It was a tremendous amoun
t of money for me at the time, more than two summers’ full work as a caddy.
Had Father Al not stepped in, I don’t know how long it would have taken me to raise enough cash. It would also have been much harder for me to leave home as I did. When Father Al gave me his blessing, it helped smooth the way with my father. It didn’t override his concern or doubt, but it did allow him to let me go without a fight.
On Saturday, January 31, 1959, I boarded a Greyhound bus in Dayton, much as my father had boarded a ship out of Galicia bound for the New World. As the coach pulled out of the station, its tires crunching against the thin layer of ice and snow, I cleared the fog from the window with my coat sleeve and watched the city I’d known my whole life recede from view. Tomorrow, I knew, my father would add an envelope with the name RAMON on it to his stack for the church collection basket. Already, it all felt so far away.
The bus merged onto US-40 heading east and picked up speed. I laid my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes. Behind me lay family, community, history, comfort, home. Ahead lay my own version of the New World: New York City, Broadway, and—even sooner than I could have known—marriage, fatherhood, and all that they would bring.
CHAPTER TWO
MARTIN
1962–1968
When a man becomes a father, the relationship with his own father changes forever. It’s as if his boat leaves the shore. He can still see his father behind him and he knows he can reach back, but he has to take this journey to be independent and free of his father’s influence. At the same time, the father is happy to see his son sail off because that’s what he had to do when he had a child.
This is what happened between my father and me. We didn’t disconnect, but I became independent in a whole new way when Emilio was born. And so even though Janet and I went on to have three more children, that first birth was the most defining event of my adult life, because that was the one that made me a father.
The night Emilio was born—Saturday, May 12, 1962—I felt I could have stayed awake for weeks. Janet and I had sat up together all Friday night while she was in labor. When they finally wheeled her to the delivery room, I ran alongside the gurney, but the doctor stopped me at the final door.
