by Martin Sheen
Most of my friends in the neighborhood would bike over to Point Dume Plaza when a new comic book or new edition of Mad magazine came out. Every week I’d ride over to buy the new issue of TV Guide. I’d stand in the parking lot flipping past the opening articles and then pore through it page by page to see what shows my dad was going to appear in that week and how he was billed. Was he listed as the first guest star, which meant better than second guest star? Did the movie or episode appear inside a little box, which meant it was a highlight? And if not, why wasn’t his show being highlighted? He may not have known this at the time, but I was a big fan, proud of what he did for a living and proud of him.
I’d dog-ear every TV Guide page he appeared on to make sure we could all stay up and watch him on screen. His shows were Event TV for our family. We might have already seen some of the movies at private studio screenings, but it was still special to watch them together in our living room. My father would watch with us and sometimes he’d criticize his performance. “What was I thinking?” he’d laugh, or “That’s an awful angle,” he’d say. “I look terrible!” We watched the shows critically, wanting him to have gotten the best exposure possible. We also appreciated the work it took to put a movie together. We would often have spent time on the set and when we watched together certain scenes would resonate with us because we had seen them being shot. I knew what city I’d been standing in as I watched the cameras roll, but when I saw the finished product I could almost believe I’d been standing somewhere else entirely. I was amazed by the way filmmakers could make audiences believe that what they were seeing was real. To a kid it seemed like a unique type of science fiction.
We had only three network channels back then. If you were lucky you could also get PBS. Ramon or Charlie or I would have to jockey the rabbit ears into just the right position to get reception and sometimes we’d have to hold on to them to keep the signal. Despite the progressive stance some parents took toward television in those years, meaning flat-out banning it, my parents never did. It was obviously what Dad did or wanted to do, so it wasn’t looked at as an evil. Neither was it considered a pacifier or a babysitter. Because there weren’t any restrictions on it, it didn’t become something we wanted more than life itself, which often happens when you put limits on something for children. We did have restrictions on certain foods like milk and sugar, which meant I’d go to a friend’s house and gorge myself on chocolate milk and Pop-Tarts because I knew I’d never get them at home. Maybe because in Southern California we had so many good-weather months to play outside, television wasn’t a big draw. It wasn’t even something a lot of my friends’ fathers worked in at the time. The father of one of my friends played bass for Crosby, Stills, and Nash but otherwise our neighborhood was full of therapists, accountants, police officers, firemen—as mixed a bag of middle-class professions as you’d find in any other suburb in America.
In the spring of 1973, just before my eleventh birthday, my father did a Canadian commercial for Texaco that gave him a sizable paycheck. For the first time he had a chunk of money in the bank. Property values were starting to go up in Malibu and this gave my parents an idea.
“Enough of this renting,” my father said. “We’re going to buy a house.”
He and my mother made a down payment on a sprawling ranch house a few blocks away from our rental. It had three bathrooms, which was a first for us, and four bedrooms, which made it seem like a palace compared to the places we’d lived in before. We four kids didn’t have to share a single room anymore and we had gotten to the ages when we didn’t want to. Ramon and I decided to bunk together. We took the bedroom at the end of the hall with a big window that gave us a view of the front lawn, but more important, it was the only kids’ bedroom with its own bathroom. Charlie and Renée had their own private bedrooms, but with no bathrooms.
Our new backyard was a big, open flat space with patchy grass and lots of weeds. A little old corral had been built to house a pony. Nobody fenced in their land back then so you could pass without interruption through a straight string of backyards to get to your friends. Point Dume was a real community. If you lived there you knew every family, and if you were a kid you knew every kid in that family. Your arm would get tired waving to people when you walked, drove, or rode your bike up and down the street.
Some of the neighborhood kids would become well known in later years, with names moviegoers and TV watchers would recognize: Sean and Chris Penn, Rob and Chad Lowe, Robert Downey Jr. The place was a crucible for young male talent but we didn’t know it then. We were just a bunch of scrappy kids riding around on bikes in our Toughskins jeans, learning fractions, watching The Godfather, and wondering what it took to become a Pacino or a Brando one day.
We’d lived in the new house for only a few weeks, not even long enough to unpack, when my father was cast in an ITV Saturday Night Theatre movie called Catholics. It was based on a novella about a futuristic Catholic Church where most of the old rituals had been banned. An older monk, played by Trevor Howard, was still leading Mass in Latin on a remote island and had attracted an international following. My father played a young priest dispatched from Rome to rural Ireland to bring the monk and his followers back into line. The priest my father played never had to say Mass or hear confessions or wear the Roman collar, which was probably a good thing because my dad wasn’t a practicing Catholic and didn’t have a very keen interest in the religious themes in the script. He’d been attracted to the story of the monks struggling to hold on to tradition in a wild, remote land, and also by the adventure of shooting in Ireland and bringing us all along.
The shoot started in England for a few days and then hopped over to Ireland for three weeks, moving from County Clare to County Tipperary to Skibbereen on the south coast, and then out to Sherkin Island off the extreme southern tip of Ireland. Sherkin Island was tiny—just three miles long by a half mile wide—untamed and remote, with a population of only about a hundred residents. It also had a fifteenth-century friary built from stone, which was the big draw for the film’s location scout. The island’s perpetual cold and wind chilled us all to the bone even in May but added to the austere effect the film was going for.
We moved into a small hunter’s cottage my father found for us near the little town of Cahir. It was also remote and surrounded by farmland. Every now and then a bull would appear in our yard and snort at my father when he did his morning calisthenics. This was enough to drive him back inside to exercise. The cottage had no heater and was so cold at night we had to stuff newspapers into the window cracks and sleep with hot water bottles. We were all furious with my dad for insisting that we have an authentic Irish experience, deprivation and wind chill included, when the rest of the film’s cast was staying at a warm hotel with all the modern amenities.
One day when he wasn’t needed on set he rented a little car and we drove to see the towering Cliffs of Moher near Connemara in western Ireland. It was a perfect, rare May day, with the sun shining brightly and birds swooping above the 500-foot vertical cliffs and out over the Atlantic Ocean.
Before we’d left the States, my folks had bought a new 8-millimeter movie camera to bring with us to Ireland and an 8-millimeter projector for us to play the movies on when we got back home. Before long I commandeered the camera in Ireland and started making little movies with my brothers to pass the time. I called one of them Falling and made everything in the movie fall down, whether it was a tree or a person. We didn’t have any means to edit the film so I’d have to say, “Okay, that’s the shot I want. Hold it right there! That’s the close-up I want! Don’t move!” and I’d cut the film as I shot it. It taught me great discipline from the start because there couldn’t be any waste. Then again, I was eleven. What did I know? I thought this was how films were made.
That day at the cliffs I filmed a bunch of seagulls near the ocean. I held the camera up to my eye and followed the birds moving across the sky. It felt completely natural to look at the world through a lens li
ke that, as natural as riding a bike. I held the camera steady and let the birds fly across the screen. If I stood still long enough, some would float by in one direction and others would return in another. A roll of 8-millimeter film was about four minutes long. I finished one and started a second. I filmed more seagulls and some more seagulls, seagulls here and seagulls there. The folks really had no idea what I was doing: They were probably relieved that I’d found a way to occupy myself.
We didn’t get any of my footage developed in Ireland. We just accumulated rolls of exposed film and brought them all home. At the time, 8-millimeter film was very expensive to buy and to process, about ten dollars to develop one roll. When we got back home to Malibu we dropped off all our film. When it was ready we sat down together as a family to watch the footage from our family trip. My father threaded the first reel on the projector and sat down with us to watch.
A seagull floated across the screen, swooped down, and arced back up. Then another. In fact, the whole first reel was footage of seagulls.
The second reel was seagulls, too.
Reel three? Seagulls.
The group became increasingly more frustrated and, by the end of the fourth roll of seagulls, ultimately angry because of how expensive it had been to process all this footage of birds.
“Emilio!” my mother said. “We gave you this camera so you could shoot pictures of human beings. How could you shoot all this footage of seagulls?”
I think, even though I was so young when I’d been on the set of Badlands, that I’d been influenced by Terry Malick. As a director he pays very close attention to light and weather conditions and the contours of the land. He closely observes nature and works it into his films, sometimes focusing more on the natural world than on human beings. This was very clear in his most recent film, The Tree of Life, and it was already evident on the set of Badlands. One day in Colorado some crew members watched him shoot a spider in a fruit jar for several hours until he felt he’d gotten the angle just right.
That’s what I was going for with the seagulls: the perfect shot. At eleven I’d started emulating the filmmakers I’d been lucky enough to observe, and working with Terry had profoundly affected just about everyone on that film.
Badlands premiered at the New York Film Festival in October 1973 and went into wider release the following year to—once again—uniform critical acclaim but only modest box office receipts. Over time it has developed almost a cult following, but in 1974 the film was considered too quirky and provocative to attract mainstream appeal. While it put my father’s name in more people’s mouths it didn’t propel his career into the stratosphere as many people had expected it would. Six months later, he was still doing TV movies, although now he was more likely to land leading roles.
Sometimes I would stand at the kitchen doors that led to our backyard and watch as he took out his frustration on our lawn. He’d grab a screwdriver and go out there for hours, with his shirt off, tearing at the weeds. I could feel his anger and his disappointment and I shared it. I wanted him to succeed almost as much as he wanted it himself. I knew what he was capable of and couldn’t understand why other people didn’t recognize his talent and give him the acclaim he deserved. He needed that recognition, and not just for his self-esteem. Like it or not, film actors are in an industry where key people need to recognize you to make things happen. You need benefactors. You need the right people to believe in you and get behind you. They need to believe in your potential to help you get to the next phase where you can be recognized by many others.
At the same time, this is a fickle business with desires that change with the seasons. You have to be pretty solid in knowing who you are and what you stand for or you can get thrown off balance and wind up chasing other people’s ideas of what you should be. My father had confidence in his talent and knew who he was, but that wasn’t enough. He didn’t have the support of the industry yet, and he didn’t like to fake friendships for his own personal gain. He wasn’t comfortable socializing with executives or ingratiating himself with the men in suits. Very few of our family friends during those years were people who could further his career. None of them were wealthy and none were players in Hollywood even though that was often the way to get deals made. To my parents’ credit, they chose friends who were loyal, trustworthy, creative people, many of whom were struggling to survive themselves. My folks couldn’t tolerate dishonesty or phoniness in others, but my father also suffered for being unwilling to play the Hollywood game.
“This guy invited you to be his friend!” my mother would tell him. “That guy’s the producer of that show!”
“Well, that’ll be about the last time I talk to him,” my father would laugh. He never wanted anyone to think he was offering friendship because they could give him a job. If he went out for supper with someone powerful or famous he would always grab the check and pay for both meals to make sure his dinner partner didn’t feel taken advantage of. He was a lot like his own father that way. A man of scrupulous integrity. Admirable, maybe, but also potentially lethal in an industry that thrives on the compliment and the back pat and the occasional back stab.
It’s not a big surprise that these were the years when his drinking began to escalate. My uncle Al would come over on the weekends with the big 18-ounce cans of Coors, and I knew when the ice chest came out the twelve-packs of Coors would go in and they’d start drinking on the patio outside. After a couple of beers my dad would start getting hammered. His eyes would roll back in his head and his voice would get louder. Before long they’d become a bunch of drunks sitting around, babbling incoherently about how they were going to change the world.
Watching my father drink was like watching weather patterns blow across the backyard. Alcohol first made him sentimental, then it made him self-pitying, and then he’d get angry. And self-righteous and arrogant. “What did you just say?” he’d shout at us. “How dare you! What was that? Oh, you think so?”
My mom would stand there and roll her eyes. We’d seen it too many times before. Sometimes my uncle Al would rage and laugh and carry on and then pass out on the floor for hours. My mother banned him from the house at one point to protect us kids from seeing that. Several of my uncles got so stupid and juvenile when they drank. My father, too. When he drank he needed attention and if he didn’t get it he’d demand it. He acted as though alcohol gave him license to misbehave, when instead it made him unreasonable. It didn’t make him stronger in my eyes. It made him look weak.
Even as I continued to admire him and want his admiration, I also started to become more irritated and fed up. He would drink to get rid of his insecurities but the alcohol only amplified his self-pity, so then he would drink more. And before long, the worst of him would come out. The whole process seemed like an endless, exhausting loop. You didn’t have to be an adult to figure that out.
In the winter of 1973–1974 my father began filming a made-for-TV movie for NBC. It was called The Execution of Private Slovik and told the true story of Eddie Slovik, a World War II army private and the only U.S. soldier to be court-martialed and executed for desertion since the Civil War. (If you’re noticing a distinct military theme among the roles my father played you’d be correct, though I think that probably says more about what was being produced in the ’70s than the kind of roles that appealed to him most.)
The script was cowritten by Richard Levinson and William Link and directed by Lamont Johnson, the same team that had been responsible for That Certain Summer. Private Slovik was shot almost like a dramatic documentary, in Citizen Kane fashion with cuts back and forth between the present and the past. Gary Busey and Ned Beatty played supporting roles, as did Matt Clark, my father’s buddy from the Living Theatre in New York who had also moved to Malibu and whom we frequently saw at home. Filming took place in Canada and California with the court-martial scene filmed in the Grand Ballroom aboard the Queen Mary cruise ship docked in Long Beach. When shooting was local our family was often welcome on set. Priva
te Slovik also marked Charlie’s television debut when Johnson needed a kid to appear in a wedding scene. One by one, we kids were starting to appear on screen.
As Private Slovik, my father delivered a devastating performance that became known as one of the best of his career. In real life, Eddie Slovik was an ex-con and something of a born loser but my father managed to portray him with both toughness and compassion. The movie’s most famous scene, when Slovik recites back-to-back Hail Marys with the military chaplain as he’s being strapped to the execution post and the black cloth hood is being fitted over his head, still wipes me out every time I see it. The Hail Marys were my father’s idea.
The Execution of Private Slovik won a Peabody Award for NBC and collected eight Emmy nominations, including Best Directing, Best Writing, Best Art Direction, and Best Lead Actor in a Drama. It was my father’s first Emmy nomination and he had heady competition in the category: Alan Alda, Laurence Olivier, Dick Van Dyke, and Hal Holbrook.
But it wasn’t going to be a simple contest, not for my dad.
In the spring of 1974 he was being touted as front-runner for the Lead Actor Emmy, and rightly so. But George C. Scott was a big influence on my father, and Scott believed that actors shouldn’t compete. He’d called the Academy Awards a popularity contest with little artistic significance and brought public attention to the political and social pressures that went into voters’ selections. Scott was nominated for an Academy Award for his starring role in Patton, which he won. But he refused to accept it. Influenced by Scott’s artistic courage and honesty, and to our dismay, my father withdrew his name from the Emmy competition.
There was a great deal of communication between him and his agent and Universal Pictures about this. Of course they didn’t want him to withdraw, but my father was adamant. While his justification for withdrawing was admirable, still it occurred to me that all this might be the result of his own fear. I think he wanted to win but was scared he might lose. All the polite applause you often see nominees giving at award ceremonies when someone else wins is good sportsmanship. Nobody goes there to lose. So was it really that my father wanted to publicly support George C. Scott’s position, or was it that he wanted to go so far the other way that he remained anonymous and immune from competition? If so, why do the film in the first place? Why not take a supporting role instead of the lead?
