by Martin Sheen
In September Janet and Emilio returned to New York and I finally felt some relief. We’d just suffered through a bout of pennilessness and homelessness and it hadn’t felt like an artistic sacrifice. Not now, not with a baby. Mostly it had felt desperate and frightening. Sometimes suffering for one’s art is just suffering, period.
The next day I would go out looking for a job and I would find one at the Bay Street Car Wash in the St. George neighborhood on Staten Island. It was honest, steady work that helped support us for the next six months until I started getting roles on television and stage. But today I was happy just to have Janet and Emilio back with me, in a place of our own. I led them out to the fire escape and held Emilio while Janet leaned over the railing. If you angled out far enough and looked north you could see the Statue of Liberty, and just beyond her the buildings of Ellis Island, where my mother had landed forty-one years earlier. It was its own small form of welcome. For the next two years this building with that view would be our home.
When I went looking for someone to baptize Emilio that fall, the priest at the Eastern Orthodox church was gentle and kind. I didn’t know much about the Eastern rites, but my lack of experience didn’t seem to bother him. A father wanted his five-month-old son baptized; that was all he needed to know. I was grateful for his generosity. He was the only priest I could find in the neighborhood who was willing to perform the ceremony for a stranger.
He wasn’t like any priest I’d encountered before. Eastern Orthodoxy allows married men to stay married after they’re ordained, which explained the wife who greeted us warmly at their house. Our little group of four standing in the priest’s home office consisted of Emilio, our neighbors Melinda and Gary Dodson, and me. Janet hadn’t come, more because of lack of interest than displeasure. The idea that Emilio had been born tainted with original sin and needed to be cleansed to ensure his salvation was something she neither agreed with nor wanted to devote a Sunday afternoon to. Raised among Southern Baptists, she didn’t have much interest in organized religion as an adult. She did have a highly calibrated radar for hypocrisy, and she zeroed in on mine right away.
“All of a sudden you’re a Catholic?” she said. “Where the hell were you last year when we were living together in sin?”
She had a point. I certainly hadn’t been a practicing Catholic when we met. I was more of a fringe Catholic, the kind who believed the spirit was willing but wasn’t always able to follow up. Still, all my years of Catholic education and childhood practice made the idea of skipping a baptism too difficult to accept.
Janet agreed to the baptism if I took care of the whole procedure myself, so I asked our neighbors Melinda and Gary to accompany me. They were a young married couple like us, actors who couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan. Melinda was Catholic and from the South, and I asked her to be Emilio’s godmother. Gary stood in for my dear friend from high school, John Crane, who was my best man at our wedding and had agreed to be Emilio’s godfather but was not available that day. Melinda and Gary stood by my side as I held Emilio in the priest’s office and answered the required questions.
“What ees the baby’s name?” the priest asked. He had an accent that could have been Russian, Greek, or maybe Armenian. I don’t think I knew even then.
“Emilio Diogenes Estevez,” I said.
“You can spell that, please?”
“Emilio,” I said. “E-M-I-L-I-O.” I waited for him to write it on the baptismal certificate. “Diogenes. D- . . .”
I paused and started again.
“D- . . .”
I looked at the priest. The priest looked at me. He didn’t know how to spell it, either.
Janet and I had chosen Diogenes for Emilio’s middle name after the Greek iconoclast who spoke out against corruption and carried a lantern through Athens searching for an honest man. The guy had courage and pluck. Emilio Diogenes Estevez: It was such a fine name. But it wasn’t until that moment in the priest’s office that I realized I didn’t know how to spell it.
I glanced at the wall where I saw a picture of a saint who reminded me of Saint Dominic. Oh, why not.
“Dominic,” I said. “D-O-M . . .”
“Ah, Dom-in-eek,” the priest said, nodding. He spelled out D-O-M-I-N-I-C on the certificate and signed it with a flourish.
Inside the church, Melinda, Gary, and I waited by the front doors while the priest slipped on his vestments. His outer robe looked like an elaborate white tapestry cape. It was a striking contrast to the plain black robes I knew from the priests at Holy Trinity.
“Who will be speaking for the child today?” the priest asked.
“I will,” I said.
“Face this way,” he instructed us. We all made a quarter turn to the right. “Do you renounce Satan and all his angels and all his works and all his services and all his pride?”
“I do,” I said.
“Do you accept for this child Christ, who is the light of the world?”
“I do,” I said.
The priest made the sign of the cross over Emilio. Together we recited the Profession of Faith and then he handed me the baptismal candle to carry as our little group followed him to the altar. Small round bells hanging from his brass censor jingled as he swung it, chanting his way up the aisle. The smoke drifted out and around us.
Geez, this is getting a little out of hand, I thought. At home they just sprinkled some water on the baby’s head. Here, we were going for the full triple immersion. The baptismal font must have been at least two feet deep. Emilio started howling on cue when he saw it, as if he knew a dunking was imminent and was making his objection known.
The priest motioned for the baby and I handed him over, then watched him lift Emilio toward the ceiling and all the way down into the water—once for the Father, once for the Son, and once for the Holy Spirit. He came up the third time sputtering and blinking, with an expression of “What the heck was that?” When he was back in my arms I wrapped him in a dry blanket and held him to my chest. The priest took a dropper of oil and anointed Emilio’s feet, hands, ears, and mouth in the sign of the cross.
The ceremony was sacred and beautiful and familiar and brand new to me all at the same time. Back in Dayton my father would be happy his grandson had been baptized. If Emilio wasn’t going to be raised Catholic he would at least have this basic foundation. At least I’d have given him that.
We followed the priest single file as he circled the font three times and chanted some more. Then he snipped off three locks of Emilio’s hair with a tiny pair of scissors, and we were done.
Twenty minutes from start to finish in an elaborate church with a priest, two friends, and no family members while Janet waited for us at home. It was as easy and as complicated as that.
After the doctor had blocked me from the delivery room the night of Emilio’s birth, I vowed never to miss seeing another of our children born. Jan was an advocate of natural childbirth, and the process didn’t seem all that complicated to me, so when she became pregnant again later that year we decided to deliver this baby at home, with the assistance of a professional midwife. Our second son was born on August 7, 1963, in the living room of our Staten Island apartment while Emilio stayed with the neighbors down the hall. Unfortunately, the midwife was unavailable due to a family illness and the baby was coming so fast we had no time to get to a hospital. We were left to deliver the baby alone.
It probably goes without saying that birthing a baby is a bloody, painful, messy business, but I didn’t know the half of it. If not for the fear of leaving Janet to cope alone, I would have fainted before it was over. The delivery was complicated—the baby got stuck in the birth canal—and Janet started hemorrhaging. I called for an ambulance but the baby arrived first. At one point I started barking orders like a madman and instinctively rolled my forearm down hard against Janet’s upper stomach to push the baby down. To my surprise, it worked.
While we were waiting for the medics a second baby started crowning. My God. I
couldn’t believe it. We were having twins.
“Janet, there’s another one,” I said, getting back into position.
“What?” Janet raised her head. “Where?”
“Coming out right now.”
“No, you idiot!” she said. “That’s the placenta!”
The ambulance transferred Janet and the baby to the hospital, where they were put under observation and pronounced fine. She gave the baby my name, Ramon, because I was courageous enough to stay the course during his birth. Despite his chaotic entry into the world he was a healthy and content newborn.
Sadly, another baby born that day was not. As I walked out of the hospital to retrieve Emilio from the neighbors the late editions of the New York newspapers were just hitting the stands.
“Extra! Extra!” the vendor at the corner shouted. “Jackie has a boy!”
Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, the president’s second son, had been born earlier that day. Five weeks premature, he had a respiratory syndrome that made him unable to breathe on his own. Two days later he passed away. The president of the United States had access to the best doctors and medical care in America, yet he wound up losing the one thing he’d wanted most. Janet and I were just two crazy kids in a Staten Island living room with a bottle of alcohol and the Sunday New York Times and our baby had survived. I wouldn’t have traded places with the president for anything that day, nor Janet with the first lady. Still, as we held our second son and understood what another family was mourning, it hardly seemed fair. We had no way of knowing, at the time, that in less than four months the president’s family would be mourning another tragic loss, and that this time Janet and I and the whole world would join them.
New York City: early April 1964. Politically, culturally, socially—it was an incredibly turbulent time. President Kennedy had been assassinated the previous November, American aircraft carriers were on their way to Vietnam, and the civil rights movement was about to peak.
In the midst of all this, Funny Girl opened at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway starring the wildly popular Barbra Streisand, who brought the country some much-needed good cheer. And two and a half blocks away at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, I made my Broadway debut with a small part in the short-lived production of Never Live Over a Pretzel Factory. Directed by Albert Marre, it ran for only five previews and nine shows but earned me some positive attention and a few audition calls.
We closed on a Saturday night. After the audience filed out the cast and crew held a good-bye party on the stage. In the play, a band of five musicians follows a Hollywood star home to his apartment and plays a few songs, and the band performed for us at the party that night. Mitch Leigh, who’d composed a few pieces for the band to play, stood next to me on the stage holding a drink in his hand.
“What are you working on next?”
“Oh, I’ve auditioned for this play, a family drama,” I said.
“What’s it called?”
“It’s this thing by Frank Gilroy called The Subject Was Roses. What about you?”
“Well, I’ve written the music for a new show. Alby’s going to direct it.”
“Really?” I asked. “What’s the name of it?”
“It’s a take on the Spanish classic Don Quixote.”
It didn’t sound very promising to me, but I didn’t want to sound critical.
“Well, all the best,” I said.
One year later I’d look back on that conversation and laugh. I got the role of Timmy Cleary in The Subject Was Roses, which became the biggest dramatic hit of 1964. Mitch’s play was the biggest Broadway musical the following season. He called it Man of La Mancha.
With the steady work and $175-per-week paycheck that Roses provided, Janet and I were able to move the family back into Manhattan. We found a fifteenth-floor apartment on the Upper West Side a few blocks from Riverside Park with big windows overlooking Eighty-Sixth Street. When I came home from the theater late at night and looked out our living-room windows at the carpet of sparkling lights, it felt as if I were gazing down at the sky. A wife, two sons, and a costarring role in a Broadway hit: My life was as full as I’d ever imagined it would be. Sometimes it was hard to believe that only four and a half years ago I was selling Christmas trees on a street corner in Dayton.
Back home in Ohio, my father had worked his way up at National Cash Register to become an inspector and was ready to retire at age sixty-six. It had been his longtime dream to return to Parderrubias when his work in the United States was done, and now that my youngest brother Joe had finished high school, my father was ready to go “home.” He hadn’t been back to Spain since he’d left as a boy, but he’d been periodically mailing small amounts of money back to his brothers to build him a modest house on the family’s land. “My castle,” he called it. He bought a ticket on a ship from New Jersey to Spain in the summer of 1964.
“Rrramon.”
I pick up the phone in our New York apartment to the sound of my father’s voice. “I to coming a-there to visit you, on the train, and then I go onna the boat. You be-a there Sunday, Rrramon?”
“I’ll be here, Pop,” I say. I’ve got a role in the biggest dramatic hit on Broadway. I can’t leave town. For sure I’ll be home on a Sunday with Janet and the boys.
“You be-a there? Sunday? You sure?”
“Pop,” I say. “We’ll be here.”
“I canna to stay with you, Rrramon?”
“You can stay with us, Pop.”
“You sure?”
The plan is for my brother Mike, who now lives in Connecticut, to pick him up at Penn Station and bring him to our apartment for the week. I arrange for two tickets for him and Mike to come to the Tuesday show. Monday, I receive some serendipitous news. The first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, is coming to the Tuesday show with her two daughters, Lynda and Luci. This is terrific timing for Mike and my father and it’ll be a memorable night for me, too: I’ll be performing for both the first lady as well as my father, who has never seen me on stage before. I rush home from the theater Monday night to share the news.
“Pop, what luck!” I tell him when I get home. “The first lady is coming to the show tomorrow night and you’ll be in the audience together. What do you think about that?”
“Oh, no.” He shakes his head and starts turning away. “I no to going inna there.”
“What? Pop, it’s the first lady! Her daughters are coming with her. You should be there.”
“I no to going inna there.”
He’s still so shy he can’t bring himself to sit in a theater in the first lady’s presence. He’s still so stubborn that he won’t even try. So I trade in the Tuesday tickets for Wednesday and he and Mike come to that evening’s show instead.
The Subject Was Roses is a play about the emotional triangle between a Bronx husband, played in 1964 by Jack Albertson; his wife, played by Irene Dailey; and their adult son, Timmy, an ex-GI who returns home in 1946 after combat in Europe during World War II. At its core, it’s the story of a son who keeps trying to save his parents’ marriage and finally realizes he doesn’t have that power.
In the play’s final scene, the son decides to move out and the father shouts, “Go, and good riddance!” The son says, “No, I’m not leaving until you listen to me. When I was a boy I dreamed that you died and I went into the streets and somebody asked why I was crying. I said, ‘Because my father’s dead and he never said he loved me.’ ” The father in the play tries to cut him off but the son goes on, “It’s true you’ve never said you loved me. But it’s also true that I’ve never said those words to you. I say them now. I love you, Pop. I love you.” He puts his arms around his father, but his father holds off until the last minute, his stomach heaving as he tries to contain his emotion. Then he finally breaks and hugs his son back. The play ends there with the two of them in tears.
During rehearsals, I had had great difficulty with that scene. I knew the lines forward and back, but I couldn’t find the right emotional pitch. Rehearsals
took place in a warehouse on Fifty-First Street and one day, while we were working on that scene, Ulu Grosbard, the director, stopped rehearsal and pulled me aside.
“What’s the problem?” he asked.
“I can’t get this scene,” I told him. “There’s no reality here.”
“What do you mean, no reality?”
“Boys don’t tell their fathers they love them. That’s just not done.”
Ulu stared at me for a long moment.
“Have you ever told your father you loved him?” he asked me.
“No, I haven’t,” I said. I’ve never even thought about that before, I realized. That possibility has never even occurred to me.
“Neither have I,” Ulu said. “Neither did Frank Gilroy. And that’s why he wrote the play.”
It was exactly what I needed to hear. I walked back across the room to do the scene with Jack Albertson and I never had trouble with it again.
In fact, it becomes my favorite scene and, when we get to it Wednesday night, I play it squarely for my own father in the audience. I’m looking at Jack when I say my lines but the emotions I summon up come from that well of love, admiration, and frustration I feel toward the man I’ve called “Pop” all my life. I play the scene better than I’ve ever played it before, and by the time I get to “I love you, Pop. I love you,” I’m weeping uncontrollably. Jack is weeping and I can hear some members of the audience weeping as well. It is the best performance of my life, before or since.
At the curtain call, we are greeted with thunderous applause, loud whistling, and repeated shouts of “Bravo!” I’m drained afterward but riding an emotional high. I head to my dressing room to wait for Mike and Pop.
I wait, and I wait. Then I decide to clean up and get dressed. Then I wait some more.
Finally, I look out in the hall. It’s empty and quiet. Jack and Irene have left. It’s been a half hour since the play ended, and nobody’s around. I go downstairs.
