by Martin Sheen
Or was it the years of Catholic teaching that you shouldn’t be prideful? I didn’t understand what was wrong with being prideful.
Watching my father give up the chance to achieve what I’d thought he always wanted—appreciation, celebration, acclaim—was confusing to say the least. I wish now that my father had been able to be honest with himself. That he’d said, “You know what? I want the careers of my contemporaries.” He was still a struggling actor, rarely number one on anyone’s list. I think a lot of his rage derived from waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for the agent to call with the offer, not getting the job he wanted and having to take one that he had to accept to feed the family he was deeply involved with. My father would take big chances but he wouldn’t devote himself exclusively to his career because we would suffer. He always put family first. But he paid a price for this choice and so did we. The spankings and the rage we endured—where was that coming from? From frustration at not being honest, I think. At not being honest with himself. It would be almost twenty years before my father was nominated for an Emmy again, this time for a guest spot on the TV series Murphy Brown, and he would win. By then he was ready to accept it. For whatever reasons, in 1974 he wasn’t.
He probably didn’t realize it, but I was watching him. I was watching him closely and learning from him, all the time. Both good lessons and others.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MARTIN
1973–1976
Badlands was filmed in 1972 but only those of us who made the movie associate it with that year. Everyone else places it in 1974, the year it was released. That’s an odd discontinuity of being a film actor. Your memories of a film refer to your time on location, not to the date when it enters public discourse. In the gap between filming and release, only the actors know how the material changed them and what capacity it has to change others. I didn’t know if Badlands would be a commercial success when we filmed it, but I knew it was an extraordinary artistic venture that would move people deeply and alter many viewers’ image of American cinema, thanks to its brilliant screenwriter and director Terrence Malick. But I had to wait two years for everyone else to discover it, and a lot of life happened to me in between.
The trip to Ireland in 1973 for Catholics was more than a job and a vacation. It was also my first opportunity to meet the Irish side of my family. My mother’s hometown of Borrisokane was only sixty miles from the house we’d rented in Cahir, so on my first weekend off we piled into a little rented car to tour around Ireland, with the plan to end up in Borrisokane to meet the family. My father, who knew the names and addresses of the Irish relatives, had tried to alert them of our trip by mail. But just like the relatives in Spain, our Irish family didn’t have telephones, and my job in Ireland had come up so suddenly I didn’t know if my father’s letter had reached them in time.
Our rental car was tiny, just a front and a back. The four kids crammed themselves into the backseat, a situation that made fighting difficult and to be avoided. This was the first time I’d driven on the left side of the road, which was an adventure for us all. We drove up to see the Cliffs of Moher along Ireland’s west coast first. The hour-long trip to the Atlantic Ocean, my driving skills notwithstanding, was a spectacular route through gently rolling pastures and past the brightly painted small pubs along the main street of Ennistimon, a small town near the midpoint of our trip.
Out near the cliffs the weather was so beautiful I pulled over by the side of the road so we could all get out and enjoy the view of the sea. A bucolic green field stretched out in front of us, with birds swooping far in the distance.
The kids opened the back doors and out they went, running across the field like puppies set free. Emilio took with him the little 8-millimeter camera we’d brought along on the trip.
“Look at them,” I said to Janet, admiring their lack of inhibition. “Isn’t that great?”
“Martin,” she said quickly. “I don’t see a fence.”
I was out of the car as fast as you could say “catch them.” “Whoa!” I shouted as I took off across the field. “Whoa!” I was very fit from jogging and daily calisthenics, and I overtook them with an added dose of adrenaline. Thank God I did. You couldn’t tell from the car, but we were at land’s end. The field was the top of a sheer drop-off into the ocean.
When the four of them stopped short in front of me, I leaned over to catch my breath. We stared at the 300-foot plunge into waves below. I’d arrived just in time to stop them from sailing over the edge.
From the cliffs we headed east toward County Tipperary past Lough Derg, the third-largest lake in Ireland, to the village of Borrisokane. As we drove into the town in early evening I looked at the simple gray stone houses surrounded by fields and thought, My God. It looks so much like Spain. I had the relatives’ names and addresses from my father and knew the name of the family pub. In such a small town it wasn’t hard to track them down.
My mother’s brother Michael, an IRA soldier, died in 1952, and his widow had been left to raise their nine children, most of them girls. These were all my first cousins. Most of Michael’s children had since moved to London to find work but three still lived in Ireland. Sean Phelan lived in Borrisokane and was the first one we found. He lived with his wife and child just around the corner from the house where my mother grew up.
Sean and his family lived in such poverty it was hard to witness, especially having just moved into our own four-bedroom house in Malibu. Their stone house was tiny, almost like a child’s playhouse, with just a bedroom and a toilet. Sean made us biscuits and tea and insisted on sharing what little they had. And yet there was nothing at all sad about him or his family or any of the other cousins we met on that trip. They were filled with a unique zest for life, with great humor and joy. “How y’keepin’?” they asked us. “How long y’home for?” It was the most extraordinary welcome we could have imagined.
Sean brought us to meet his brother Liam, a pharmacist in the nearby village of Roscrea, and also his sister Theresa who lived out in the country with her husband and thirteen of the sixteen children she’d eventually bear. She and her husband had some acreage and eighty head of cattle. I felt a deep sense of connection to the place—not only because these were blood relatives, but because the Celtic nature of the tribe reminded me of my father’s family in Galicia. They were both big families, deeply loyal to their countries, fiercely independent, and very poor. The places even smelled the same: wet and green, with houses permeated by the smoke of open fires. In Borrisokane, huge indoor stoves burned local peat and stayed warm all day long.
Most of all, both sets of my relatives had a strong Catholic faith and coveted land. If you had land you could have livestock, and if you had livestock and land you could survive. The Celtic influence on Galicia has been disputed, but after I’d stood in Parderrubias and then in Borrisokane, it wasn’t hard to see the same fingerprints on both.
That Saturday we spent the night at Liam’s house, which was the largest and least crowded of the three. The next morning I accompanied him to Mass at a church in Roscrea. As we stepped outside afterward we were approached by a group of young men selling blood-red poppies and collecting donations in a tin can.
“What are these guys, veterans?” I asked Liam.
“Oh, no, sure,” he said. “They’re the lads.”
“The who?”
“The lads, you know.”
“Who’s that?”
“We’ll talk,” he said. Later, in the car he explained, “They’re IRA.”
These would have been members of the Provisional IRA, not the old IRA that had been in existence pre–Civil War when my mother had lived there. May 1973 was only a year and a half after the Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry, Northern Ireland, when British paratroopers gunned down fourteen unarmed Catholic demonstrators, seven of them teenage boys. Support from brethren in the Republic was helping to sustain the new IRA in Northern Ireland, where the Troubles were about to begin. We all knew it would
get worse before it got better and Borrisokane had enough sympathizers to provide support for the new “lads.”
If I’d been raising my boys in Ireland, would they have joined the fight for the cause? Sometimes I could see that fire and determination burning in them. If my mother had raised her children there in Ireland instead of Dayton, among family that had long supported the IRA, would I have joined the cause as well? It was impossible to know.
We adored the cousins and they adored us and they practically tripped over themselves to make us comfortable. At first I thought it was the hospitality of kinship but I soon realized it was more than that. In Theresa’s house a picture of my father hung prominently on the wall.
“My father?” I said. “What’s his picture doing here?” They’d never met, I was sure of that, since my father had never been to Ireland.
That’s when I learned that my father had been helping to support Michael’s widow and her children in Ireland all this time. As little as he earned at NCR, and as many children as he’d had at home, he was still sending small amounts of money every month to both my mother’s family in Ireland and his in Spain, and he’d never mentioned this to us. We were poor in Dayton, it’s true, but the European relatives were far worse off. In my father’s mind, there was no question. This was what you do. You take care of the needy, especially those in your family. I thought of the criticism my father had received from his sons as we grew up, especially the older boys. “Why don’t we have better furniture?” they’d ask. “A bigger house? A car?” They just hadn’t had a clue who this man really was. I hadn’t, either, but when I looked at the portrait of my father hanging on the wall of my cousin’s house in Borrisokane, I gained a new admiration for him, and a new understanding of honor.
When filming wrapped on Catholics, we flew to London and then on to Spain. Charlie, Renée, and Janet had not met my father’s relatives, and by now my sister Carmen was living and teaching in Madrid. She traveled up to Galicia to join us and became our interpreter as well.
Matias, Lorenzo, and Juaquina had built a new, modern house for themselves on their property with money my father had been sending every month. For sixty years, the homestead had hardly changed, and then enormous change had come in the past four. We used Emilio’s little movie camera to shoot footage of the family and their new house and sent it to my father when we got back home.
At the time, I was trying to stay fit by doing daily yoga sessions. One evening the family was setting up for dinner down in the vineyard near the old house. We were staying up in the new house and I hadn’t done my yoga postures yet that day.
I told everyone, “I’m going to take this time to do my yoga.”
My session went on for a while and worked its way up to a posture where I stood on my head. That was exactly when Juaquina arrived at the house to summon me down for supper. I could see her upside down in the doorway, her ruddy face inverted underneath her worn apron and sensible shoes.
She walked into the room and broke into applause.
“Bravo!” she cried. “Bravo!”
I flipped myself back to a standing position and rubbed my hands against my thighs. The blood rushed down from my face. “Thank you,” I told her. “I’ll be right down.”
When I walked into the vineyard and joined the family at the table, they all started laughing, with Carmen chief among them.
“Carmen, what is so funny?” I asked.
She gasped for breath and sputtered, “Juaquina has been wondering all these years since she met you, and for the years she was hearing about you before then, about what you did for a living.”
“Oh, really?” I said. I didn’t have any idea what she was talking about.
“Yes,” Carmen said. “She saw you up there and now she knows. She’s convinced you’re in the circus.”
In the fifteen years since I’d left Dayton, I’d been able to see my father only about a dozen times: once soon after I left home, the next time with Janet after Emilio was born, then when he made that trip to New York after he retired, and once when he visited me on a set in West Virginia. Otherwise I would see him only when I could route a flight through Ohio on my way to or from a job in New York. That averages out to less than once a year, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it wasn’t unusual for an adult in the early ’70s who’d moved away from home and started his own family. Not many of my siblings had the time or the money to travel across the country for visits other than for holidays and special occasions, even when we wished we could go home more.
My father was living with my brothers Mike, Conrad, and Al in the little house he’d bought after he returned from Spain. On my stopover flights in Dayton I’d rent a car and stay at the house for a day or two with him and the boys, where it was easy to slip right back into the family life and join in on the jokes my brothers had going with him. They were like a bunch of rowdies, and he was so responsible that their constant banter was like watching the Marx Brothers engaging with their straight woman, Margaret Dumont. The brothers would poke fun at my father’s tendency to elongate chores—it could take him weeks to paint the outside of the house because he so enjoyed the pure pleasure of the labor—but they’d also take care of him and make sure he got around town safely.
“Do you want a ride?” someone was always asking him.
“Oh, I donna wanta to trouble you,” he’d object. It was like a little dance he did with us, every time.
“Come on, Pop, let me give you a ride,” one of the brothers would insist.
“Oh, thanks,” he’d say. “Nice of you.”
Nice of you—the formality was one of his trademark phrases. When I came to town I’d give him a lift to Mass or to the grocery store and he’d always say, “Thanks, Rrramon. Nice of you.” His gratitude was so simple and so sweet.
On one of my visits to Dayton I recruited my brother Mike as co-conspirator in a plan. I wanted to get my father on tape and have his voice for posterity. I’d brought a tape recorder with me, but I knew he’d never agree to speak into it. He was so shy he would have left the room or even the house if he’d seen it, so we had to record him clandestinely. The best time to do it, we figured, was when he was absorbed in a chore. He could never sit still, always had to be doing something, and he loved to talk while he did his tasks.
One night after supper in the kitchen, he was washing the dishes and drying them endlessly. Mike and I were sitting at the table while Pop was standing at the sink, and we seized the opportunity. We buried the microphone under a napkin and took turns yelling out questions so he could hear us over the running water.
“Pop, how did that happen?” I shouted, in reference to an incident from his childhood. Then Mike would make a comment about what we were talking about so we’d remember when we listened to the recording later.
I still have the tape. I played it for Emilio recently, and he was astonished. He hadn’t remembered my father having such a strong Spanish accent. We could hear the noise in the background while he puttered around the kitchen, drying the dishes and putting them away. I’m grateful to have that tape now. That evening in the kitchen was one of the last times I heard my father talk.
The phone call came from my brother Frank on October 26, 1974. Janet took it on our kitchen wall phone. It was a Saturday afternoon and I wasn’t home. When I walked through the door later that day, she broke the news to me gently.
My father had died? He’d died? It didn’t seem possible. I’d seen him only three weeks earlier. He’d been admitted to the hospital with a heart problem but he hadn’t seemed to be in crisis.
“Hey, you’re looking good,” I’d told him as I walked into his hospital room. It was the truth.
“Oh, chhoney, no,” he said, flapping his hand against the air. “I’m notta feel well, because in here I to do this and I canta do that.” He looked normal, sounded normal, and still had his spirit and his energy. No one had expected him to die.
When I said good-bye to him that day, I leaned down an
d kissed him on the head. “I love you, Pop,” I said. It was the only time I ever kissed him or told him that privately. Three weeks later, I was glad I had.
I called Frank back in Dayton for the details. Four of the brothers—Al, Mike, Joe, and I—were now living in California and I started planning how to get us all home to Ohio for the funeral. At this time in our family, I was the one who had accepted the responsibility and had the means to step forward and bring us all together in emergencies. The rest of the family knew they could depend on me and I took the responsibility seriously. Even when I was drinking I had that sense of duty in tough situations. Maybe that was one of my father’s legacies to me.
The plan was for the four of us to ride in the same car to the airport, get the airline tickets, and fly home to Dayton. On the day of our departure, the phone in our house rang again. This time it was Donna Lopez, one of my sister Carmen’s oldest and dearest friends from childhood, who now lived in New York. Carmen was set to fly to Dayton for the funeral by way of New York, but she’d had a medical emergency on the airplane from Madrid and had been taken straight from JFK to a hospital in Queens. The doctors thought it might be food poisoning, but nobody knew for sure.
The gears in my mind starting turning in the opposite direction. No more Dayton—now I had to figure out how to get to New York. “You stay with her tonight and I’ll be there tomorrow,” I told Donna.
I changed my airline ticket and sent the brothers to Ohio without me. I would go to New York to look after Carmen and then meet up with everyone else in Dayton in time for the funeral. It wasn’t an optimal plan, but it was a plan. And this was a family emergency.
