by Martin Sheen
I looked over at Emilio and Ramon, running through the wet grass between the graves. Like my father and his brothers, we had embarked on a westward voyage together and California was where we would stay for good. Like true homesteaders we would embrace the culture and traditions of our new home. Janet would start cooking macrobiotic. I would buy a used Ford station wagon and learn how to merge. A year later we would move up the coast to Malibu, an unincorporated beachfront community of twelve thousand people stretching one mile wide and twenty-seven miles long. In 1973 we bought our first house there, which became our family homestead. Thirty-nine years later, we still call it home.
CHAPTER FIVE
EMILIO
1970–1972
If you travel west on the Pacific Coast Highway all the way up to Point Dume, you’ll pass the Pacific View Nursery on your right. At the end of its long driveway lined with one- and five-gallon containers with succulents for sale, you’ll see a white farmhouse. In the 1970s, that farmhouse was red, and it was the first place our family landed in Malibu after leaving the house on Castello Avenue in West L.A.
After a year of city living, my parents wanted to move us into a more natural setting, mostly for better air quality. Cars were running on leaded gasoline in 1970, and Los Angeles, land of the car, had serious air pollution. We considered moving to Topanga Canyon, a mountain enclave up the coast populated by musicians, artists, and hippies, where my parents’ friends lived, or to Ojai, a town with a similar vibe up near Santa Barbara. Eventually we settled on Malibu. The red farmhouse for rent on the Pacific Coast Highway became ours, unfurnished, for four hundred dollars a month.
The name “Malibu” automatically inspires images of surfers and celebrities and multimillion-dollar beachfront homes. It was also a surfer’s paradise in 1970, but with much more of a rural, small-town feel than it has today. Horses. Hippies. Farmers. Lots of people growing pot in their backyards. The place was basically a mix of working- and middle-class locals who’d been there for decades; a handful of successful actors, directors, and studio heads; and new families like us looking for an alternative to city life. The summer we moved there, the for-sale section of the Malibu Times was advertising trail horses and tractors. Articles like “Rabid Skunks Again Found in Malibu Area” made front page news. President Nixon was in the White House and the war in Vietnam was going full-tilt boogie, but the news in Malibu in 1970 was more likely to be about the 4-H Club’s Twelfth Annual Horse Show and Safety Fair and the number of fatal car accidents on the Pacific Coast Highway—where the maximum speed limit was an astonishing 75 miles per hour.
Our new house was bigger than anyplace we’d lived before. And empty. All we owned were the two bunk beds, which my father set up again in a second bedroom, and our clothes and toys. Just as in Mexico, we were starting all over again. We stuck a picnic table in our dining room and shopped garage sales for everything else. My parents found a king-size bed and two dressers for a hundred dollars and a red vinyl couch for the living room. For a while that was pretty much all we had. The farmhouse came with a detached garage and my mother put all our toys and books in there to use it as a playroom when the weather was bad, which wasn’t often. Most of the time, you would find the four of us kids outside on the ten-acre front yard.
Ten acres is an enormous amount of space for a kid who spent his first seven years in Manhattan apartments. The grassy fields surrounding the house were filled with mustard plants and wild oats that grew rampant and had to be cut back every spring. It wasn’t the kind of yard where we would go out and play ball. It was the kind of yard where we could have dirt-clod fights or hunt for arrowheads and, between March and September, we had to watch out for rattlesnakes. Because we had so much outdoor space, we started inheriting animals from people who needed a place to park them. At one point we were hosting ducks, geese, two or three dogs, and a couple of cats. Almost overnight we’d gone from a very urban environment to country living, with all the eco-trimmings.
I loved it.
My mother was way ahead of her time in eating organic food. Her friend in Topanga, the actress Collin Wilcox Paxton—best known for her role as Mayella Violet Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird—was cooking macrobiotic, and that year my mother followed Collin’s lead and put us all on a macrobiotic diet. We ate mostly vegetables cut into matchsticks, brown rice, homemade bread, some fish—a very healthy diet, but limited. Our birthday cakes were apple-raisin pies with no sugar. Most people at the time rolled their eyes at the lengths my mother went to in order to make sure we all ate well, but I recognize it now as a gift she gave us even though we objected, frequently, to the meals. The defining smells of my childhood are fresh-baked bread, steamed brown rice, and nori, a dried seaweed product, which filled the kitchens of every house we lived in.
Hoping to grow her own produce, my mother planted a garden on our land, but the soil had too much clay and the vegetables didn’t get very far. My father would go out in the back yard and hoe up the dirt, hoping to help her along, but then he’d get a job and go off and leave the plot untended until it needed to be hoed again. I started my own small two-by-four-foot garden plot outside, just a little patch of soil with two stalks of corn and some carrots, watching them grow. I was fascinated by the sprouts that pushed through the earth and wiggled their way up and out into plants. I felt the desire within me to have a bigger, more complete connection with nature and, for a short time, imagined myself becoming a farmer like my Spanish uncles, but the yard and my friends were a bigger draw.
That fall I joined the ranks of 2,300 school kids in Malibu when my mother enrolled me, Ramon, and Charlie at Juan Cabrillo Elementary School. On September 25, a few weeks after school started, a three-day wildfire erupted, the largest Malibu had seen in years. My parents, Ramon, and I were down in Santa Monica when it started and Charlie and Renée were up in Malibu with our next-door neighbors, the Beatty family. We tried to get back to them but our car was turned away. It was a terrifying two days before the flames were put out, the roads reopened, and we could be reunited again.
My father was getting work here and there, but nothing steady yet. Catch-22 had been released in June of 1970 to good reviews—Vincent Canby of the New York Times called it “quite simply, the best American film I’ve seen this year”—but much of the public attention for a war film had already been diverted to a March release about the Korean War called M*A*S*H. Catch-22 was a critical but not a commercial success, and Hollywood has always liked numbers. Critics’ darlings are good for dinner-party discussions, but if you want to keep working you have to bring in box-office receipts. After Catch-22 my father did mostly guest spots on TV shows like Hawaii Five-O and Ironside, and he played a Civil War captain in the TV version of the play The Andersonville Trial, about the war crimes trial of Henry Wirz, commander of the Confederate POW camp in Andersonville, Georgia, directed by George C. Scott. His earnings were enough to keep the family going, but barely. Money was always tight.
One day my mom needed to go grocery shopping. She checked inside her purse. Nothing there.
“Can I have some dough?” she asked my father.
He looked at her blankly. “I thought you had the money,” he said. That’s how he said it: “the money.” As if everything they had at any moment was stored either in his wallet or her purse. Probably it was. They didn’t have a savings account. I don’t think they even had a checking account. We survived on a purely cash economy, living week to week.
“I thought you had the money,” my mother said.
They started searching through their pockets. They searched through drawers. They even looked behind the cushions on the red vinyl couch. All of their efforts produced a single dime. One dime! At least that old joke about not having a dime between them didn’t apply. I imagine it was a very sobering moment for them both.
When the mail arrived later that day, my mother opened an envelope addressed to her and my father. It was from a friend in New York who’d borrowed money from them mon
ths ago. Inside the envelope was a thank-you card and the ten dollars returned in cash. That’s what we used for groceries. At Malibu’s Trancas Market in 1970, you could get a dozen eggs for thirty-nine cents and four cantaloupes for a dollar, so my mother managed to buy enough food to last us a few days until my father’s next paycheck arrived. If I were to put this scene in a movie, viewers would say, “Bullshit. Not buying it!” but the truth really can be better than imagination. Sometimes the universe does step up and say, “Got you covered.”
Third grade was also the year I started thinking of myself as a writer. I was an avid reader, especially of science fiction. I belonged to a sci-fi Book of the Month Club for kids and every month I’d sit by the mailbox and wait for the next package to arrive. One of my favorite television shows was Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, his follow-up to The Twilight Zone, in which he told horror stories that were depicted in paintings on the wall behind him. Night Gallery was where you could stay up way past bedtime on a Wednesday night and see stories about a survivor of the Titanic getting rescued decades after the ship sank or about dead people whose shadows refused to die. The stories were spooky but not very elaborate, and they didn’t seem that hard to invent.
So that winter I decided to write an episode for Night Gallery. My uncle Alfonso had told me a ghost story that I used as a basis for an episode. I wrote it out in pencil on notebook paper, really more of a summary than a script. I didn’t have any idea yet how to write a screenplay and had only had glimpses of those my father brought home. Then I got an address for Rod Serling’s office from somewhere and mailed it off.
A few weeks later, my notebook pages came back in the mail clipped to a form letter. Thank you very much for the submission. We are unable to accept unsolicited manuscripts at this time.
That kind of impersonal rejection didn’t discourage me. Instead it made me determined to figure out what “unsolicited manuscript” meant and not make the same mistake again.
At 6:01 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, February 9, 1971, I woke to a freight train rumbling through my room.
“Ramon?” I called out in the dark. “Charlie! Renée!” My brothers and sister were still sound asleep. The wooden ladder on my bunk bed was banging hard against the frame. What the heck was going on? I lay in bed for a few seconds until my mind cleared and I realized it was an earthquake.
I steadied the ladder, climbed down, and ran to my parents’ bedroom. By the time I got there the shaking had stopped.
“Mom! Dad! It’s an earthquake!” I said, pushing against my mother’s arm.
My mother rolled over. “It’s probably just a truck driving by,” she mumbled and went back to sleep.
I walked back to my room and climbed up into my bed. A truck? Was that possible? I wondered about this as I stared at the ceiling from the top bunk. Did minds play tricks on us to that magnitude? We’d done earthquake drills at school and they’d told us what to expect. Then again, they’d also told us to duck and cover under a table with our heads between our knees and our hands on the backs of our necks, and instead I’d bolted for my parents’ room to make sure they were safe. I fell back into a fitful sleep, uncertain about what else might happen before daylight.
What I’d just experienced soon became known as the Sylmar earthquake of 1971, which registered 6.6 on the Richter scale. It claimed sixty-five lives and caused half a billion dollars in damage. In Malibu the impact was minimal—a strong rattling, nothing more. I was the only one in the house who’d woken up.
It’s no surprise that my parents began to call me the family alarm system. After the morning of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, I had fallen into the family role of alerting everyone to danger, a role I took seriously, partly because, as the oldest child, I felt responsible for the others, but also partly because it’s in my nature to be cautious. That probably comes from my mother, whose nature is to be careful, too, but she also had to take that position in order to keep the family balanced. My father has always been more of a happy-go-lucky character, the kind of person who walks through fire safely, shaking peoples’ hands along the way, while the city collapses behind him. He’ll say, “No, no! I’m aware!” but the situations he willingly puts himself into can be mind-boggling to those of us who watch from the sidelines. My mother and I sometimes joke that it’s our job to run along behind him with a broom and dustpan while he obliviously charges ahead. And yet he always manages to emerge safely from every episode. He leads a charmed existence that way.
Growing up, I positioned myself between my parents’ two extremes and kept a watchful eye on everyone. At eighteen, I was the first person in the family to put an earthquake survival kit in my car. I also made sure one was accessible in the house and learned how to use a firearm to make sure I could get us out of any situation. Even at a young age, I was preoccupied with safety and survival. Sometimes it felt like a burden, but it was never something I was unwilling to do, to keep the family safe.
Nineteen seventy-one was a momentous news year by anyone’s standard and a tumultuous one for me. Between January and December we saw Idi Amin go mental in Uganda; ongoing violence between Northern Ireland and Britain; a riot at Attica Prison in upstate New York that left 39 dead; and Charles Manson’s conviction and death sentence for murder. On the other hand, Walt Disney World opened in Florida and The Electric Company debuted on PBS, making it more of an up year for kids.
Throughout all this, war was ongoing in Southeast Asia and any American with a television in the house could tell the situation there was still bad. U.S. forces were by now bombing Cambodia and Laos in addition to Vietnam. The war had been going on for as long as I could remember, and to me it had started to feel like a war without end. By 1971, 60 percent of all Americans opposed it and half considered it morally wrong, including my parents. My father wasn’t as politically active then as he is now, but as a family we were definitely politically aware. My parents talked about Robert McNamara, secretary of defense, who was pushing the domino theory, the idea that, if Vietnam fell, all of Asia might follow. The idea that the conflict could spread to other countries and keep going on and on sounded ominous to me.
Watching television with my mother in our living room that August, we saw a man on the screen rotate a plastic drum and pull out a red capsule with a slip of paper inside it. Then he turned a different drum and pulled out a green capsule that held another piece of paper. He read the writing on them both out loud. It looked a little like Bingo but it wasn’t any game. This was the televised draft lottery for men born in 1952, to determine their order of induction.
My mother bit her lip as we watched. President Nixon was already withdrawing troops by then, but boys were still being drafted. More than 94,000 would be inducted in 1971, down from about 163,000 in 1970.
“December fourth,” the man on the television said. “One.”
I was both fascinated and frightened by the lottery. In Malibu we lived in a protective bubble and war was far away. But my father’s older brother, my uncle John, had been a navy medic in Vietnam in the 1960s, and his youngest brother, my uncle Joe, was going in and out of Vietnam on a naval supply ship, giving our family a firsthand connection to the war.
“May twelfth,” the man on the television said.
My birthday. I whipped my head around and looked at my mother. She looked startled, too. He pulled out the second capsule. “Fifty-two,” he said.
Fifty-two? Out of 366? That sounded awfully low.
It may not have been my birth year that was being drafted, but I felt a certain sense of ownership of my birth date. I knew that if I’d been born on the same day ten years earlier I’d be getting ready to pack my bags now. This war looks like it’s gotten out of hand, I thought. I could be next.
“If this continues, we’re going to move,” my mother said. She wasn’t going to take chances with any of her sons for a war she didn’t support.
Four years later, Saigon fell to North Vietnam, marking the end of the war. I escaped the com
pulsory draft but the memories of the Vietnam War years would stick with me forever. The inner struggles between duty and conscience, between responsibility and free will, between meeting others’ expectations and pursuing one’s own path would become themes I’d soon struggle with on a personal level and would later choose to explore on screen.
By early 1972 we’d moved to another rental house in Malibu, this one on Point Dume, a small triangle of land that juts out into the Pacific Ocean. This house had floor-to-ceiling windows, white walls, and a pale yellow carpet. “Shoes off at the door,” my mother would say. How she kept that place clean with four very active kids running around remains a mystery to me to this day.
We lived more minimally there than we ever had before, even in Mexico. This time it was deliberate. We left the bunk beds behind but Ramon, Charlie, Renée, and I still shared a room, sleeping four on the floor in sleeping bags like caterpillars. Making our beds in the morning was easy: just roll ’em up and stick ’em in the closet. Our living room furniture consisted of bean bag chairs we could sprawl across to watch TV. Our dining room table was low and Japanese style, made out of rattan, and we sat around it on pillows on the floor with our legs crossed. We were still eating macrobiotic, so the aesthetic fit.
We felt no embarrassment over what we did or didn’t have, or any shame. We didn’t have rich friends to compare ourselves to, or if we did we didn’t know they were rich. Hardly anyone on Point Dume back then could have been considered wealthy. We were living in Malibu because it had good public schools and was still a relatively cheap place to raise a family. Our neighborhood had no streetlights. No sidewalks. No fences, no gates. Horses and dogs roamed across the yards. Today the most prevalent sounds on Point Dume are construction and leaf blowers, but in 1972 they were dogs barking and children playing.
