by Martin Sheen
“You’re going to be a star after this,” he told me, “and I don’t want to have to go through hoops or go broke to get you to work in another film. I’m just protecting myself.”
Most of the young actors on the film had already agreed to this deal, but it didn’t make sense to me. Why should an actor my age, with a large family, agree to such a deal? On the other hand, this was the opportunity of a lifetime. Francis Ford Coppola was the most brilliant and successful director on the planet.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll make a deal.”
I would have been honored to work for Francis anywhere, at any time, on any film, and would have considered myself fortunate to have had such an opportunity, but I simply could not feel forced to do so. My agent negotiated throughout the entire filming period and even long after filming concluded, but we just could not reach a mutually satisfactory agreement. Consequently, I never signed a contract for Apocalypse Now, not even to this day.
Meanwhile, back in Rome, shooting wrapped on The Cassandra Crossing and Janet and I went to the Rome airport together and said our good-byes. Everything had happened so fast we didn’t have a plan beyond me heading to the Philippines and her heading back to Malibu with the kids. I boarded a plane to Bangkok with a connecting flight to Manila, and she and the kids boarded theirs to Los Angeles.
A day and a half later I landed in Manila, where Ferdinand Marcos, a corrupt and crafty dictator, was in power and martial law had been in effect for nearly four years. Soldiers with M16s slung across their shoulders patrolled the airport. The city was under curfew from midnight to 4:00 a.m. every day. But the heat, the extreme poverty, and the pollution made the biggest impression on me as I rode from the airport to the high-rise Manila hotel.
That first evening I placed a call to Janet to let her know I’d arrived safely. In 1976 you had to call the operator to request an overseas line and then wait for her to call back with a connection. When Janet answered the phone, it was the middle of the previous night in Malibu, and the phone woke her.
I’d never placed this much time or distance between me and the family before and it was unnerving to know we wouldn’t even be sharing the same day on the calendar for a while.
“What’s it like over there?” Janet asked.
“It’s very hot, so we won’t need any of those winter clothes for the kids,” I joked.
The next day, April 26, 1976, I boarded a small private jet with Francis for a twenty-minute flight to Baler, a coastal village 140 miles northwest of Manila on the Philippines’s main island of Luzon, and began the most extraordinary and challenging adventure of my life. If I had known what lay ahead for me in the coming year, I would surely have “let this cup pass.” Yet life is a progression in a series of mysterious and personal choices that invite us to accept the cup as offered, not altered, although I could not have articulated it this way at the time. All I knew was that I had to embrace whatever was coming if I was ever going to become my true self. I just didn’t know how much Apocalypse Now was going to speed up that process.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MARTIN
Philippine Islands and Malibu, California 1976
The very first scene I filmed for Apocalypse Now took place in Baler, when I hopped out of a Huey helicopter with actors Sam Bottoms and Fred Forrest. With M16 rifles in hand, we ran along the beach tracking after Robert Duvall. It was the middle portion of the most memorable sequence in the movie, sandwiched between an air cavalry assault and a napalm drop on a tiny Vietnamese seaside village, all to accommodate an ideal surfing opportunity for Duvall’s Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore and his “boys.”
The scene on the beach was organized chaos, with Hueys taking off, landing, and kicking up sand as they deposited swarms of GIs; loud incoming mortar rounds exploding regularly all over the beach; thick multicolored flare smoke drifting through the action; oppressive heat from the fires, the choppers, and the sun; and several hundred Vietnamese men, women, and children streaming up and down the sand playing captured Vietcong and North Vietnamese regulars and displaced refugees. The noise was deafening, visibility was limited, and acting was impossible. In fact, no acting was required. We only had to show up and be engulfed in the intensity of the situation that surrounded us.
On the very first take of the scene, while racing along that beach under those circumstances, I stumbled over my own combat boots and fell face first into the sand, embedding the sight of the M16 into my left cheek.
This is not starting off very well, I thought.
A number of similar complex combat action scenes are spliced throughout the film, but that first one is paramount, at least for me, because it set the tone and defined the boundaries of my life for the next year.
Janet joined me in Baler, but soon afterward the vicious Typhoon Didang struck Luzon, wreaking havoc. We waited out the storm in Manila as it pushed out into the South China Sea. Then we drove to Iba on the west coast of Luzon with the rest of the cast and crew to resume production. Suddenly, and unexpectedly, Didang (now known internationally as Typhoon Olga) reversed course and slammed back into Luzon with 115-mile-an-hour winds and three solid days of torrential rain. Tragically, the storm took more than two hundred Filipino lives, caused disastrous flooding, and left many thousands homeless. Most of the film sets were destroyed as well, so Francis shut down production for two months and sent everyone home.
The film was now six weeks behind schedule and $2 million over budget, and it was becoming clear that the sixteen weeks I had signed up for were going to extend, by necessity, far longer. How much longer, nobody knew. But I was relieved to be getting a break from the storm and the intensity of the whole situation. I now had a much better idea of how huge the scope of this film was, and no amount of training or planning could have prepared me for what I’d found. Some valuable time at home would help me acquire at least the basic skills I needed to return. Janet, too, had been ill prepared, but now she had a clear idea of what we needed to bring back with us next time given the possibility of natural disasters, and especially if we wanted to return with the kids. Our game plan, not necessarily in this order, was:
• Order sixty cases of bottled water and have it shipped to the Philippines ahead of us.
• Ship sixteen boxes full of spaghetti, oatmeal, Cream of Wheat, parmesan cheese, and other nonperishable foods that were hard to find over there. (We must have spent nearly all I’d earned so far sending boxes of food and cases of Evian and Perrier into the Philippine jungle, but it was worth it.)
• Learn what a soldier did in Vietnam, how he did it, and why. I had to get proficient with all the weapons. Just the sight of them made me nervous.
• Above all, learn how to swim.
That last one was crucial, given that most of my scenes took place on a boat. The first day we’d filmed on the navy patrol boat, I’d stepped on board, looked around, and asked, “Where are the life jackets?”
Some of the crew members laughed, thinking I was making a joke, but they didn’t realize I didn’t know how to swim. The boat would get top heavy with so many people and cameras on board, and the diesel engine broke down all the time. Nothing about that boat felt safe.
Back in Malibu, I hired Rob LeMond, the local swim instructor who’d taught the kids how to swim, and he started taking me out in the ocean with an inner tube for lessons. Francis also hired a Vietnam veteran to train me as a soldier. I opened the door one day to a dark-haired, broad-shouldered former airborne ranger with a handsome Irish mug and a New York accent standing on my front step.
“Hi, I’m Joe Lowry,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”
I led him through the house and out into our backyard to show him where our training could take place. It was a big, flat open space facing north with the Santa Monica Mountains barely visible in the distance.
“Oh God,” he said. “This looks just like where I got shot.”
Thus began one of the great friendships of my adult life. Born in Boston and raised in
Brooklyn, Joe was a meticulously precise, fiercely loyal, and scrupulously honest aspiring actor and musician who’d been wounded very badly during his tour in Vietnam. His eleven-member unit had been out on patrol when they walked into an ambush. Only two survived. Joe was shot up his right side from his calf to his face. It took several years of surgery and convalescence before he was able to walk again.
For the next four weeks of private boot camp in our backyard, Joe taught me how to hurl a six-inch bowie knife into a tree trunk from a distance of thirty feet and how to throw a hand grenade with equal accuracy. He taught me how to break down an M16 and a .45 automatic pistol, how to shoot them—without live rounds, of course—and how to use an M79, a small grenade launcher I had to fire in the film. I learned how to oil, load, and reload each weapon without a flaw. By the time Joe was done with me, I could take the .45 apart and put all nine pieces back together in under two minutes.
“You’re an officer and I’m going to be your sergeant,” Joe Lowry told me. “So you call me Sergeant, I’ll call you Captain, and I’ll show you how to be a soldier in the ranks and what to do in the field, starting with the morning report.”
Every morning when he arrived he greeted me with a “Good morning, Captain.” Then he brought his hand up to his forehead in a crisp half salute.
“Good morning,” I would answer.
“No, no,” he would say, “Good morning, Sergeant. And you have to return my salute. If you don’t I have to stand here with my hand up like this until you return it or until you leave. That’s standard military procedure.”
Eventually I got the hang of it. Good morning, Captain, Joe’s half salute, Good morning, Sergeant, my full salute, then Joe would complete his salute and we could get down to the business of that day.
This was June of 1976. The kids were just finishing up their school year and our plan was to take them back to the Philippines with us when shooting resumed at the end of July. There was some slight hesitation from all four of them but Emilio in particular was concerned about being back in time for the start of the new school year in September. A conscientious student and an athlete with a close-knit group of friends, he didn’t want to miss any of the ninth grade.
“Dad,” he said. “Please promise me we’ll be back in time.”
“You’ll be home when school starts,” I said.
I wasn’t lying. I also wasn’t in a position to promise anything of the kind. The shooting schedule was far out of my control. Once we touched ground in the Philippines, it was going to take however long it took to finish the film. What if it becomes twenty weeks of shooting instead of sixteen? I thought. So what? What’s another month?
“Give me your word that I’ll be back in time to start school,” Emilio pleaded. He was so serious, and it meant so much to him. I didn’t want to disappoint him.
So I gave him my word. What else could I do? I just didn’t realize how hard it would be to keep it.
CHAPTER NINE
EMILIO
Philippine Islands 1976
The flight from Los Angeles to the Philippines seemed eternal, eighteen hours inside the tube of a Philippine Airlines DC-10 with a layover in Hawaii. When the six of us finally landed in Manila the calendar date was two days after we’d left. Crossing the international date line, a whole day had vanished. Just like that: gone.
The driver who met us at Manila International Airport loaded us and all our bags into the car for the two-hour trip south. We were headed to the town of Pagsanjan, where the production had moved its headquarters and where many of Apocalypse Now’s major sequences would be shot. On the way to Pagsanjan we passed rice paddies, roadside stands made from palm fronds, water buffalos grazing, and countless small fires burning in nearby fields. Some looked like garbage piles that had been set ablaze. In other places, mounds of freshly cut brush crackled with flame. In the middle of the ride, I opened the car window and the smell of fresh smoke filled the air.
Our driver took us up a mountain road and then to the shore of a lake. The film company had set us up at a resort on the other side. We took a short motorboat ride to get across and got out to survey our new temporary home. We’d been to Hawaii for vacation and this place had the same kind of tropical vibe: dense vegetation, high humidity, buildings with thatched roofs. The communal dining hall was a big open-air structure where the incongruous “Rocky Mountain High” played on an endless Muzak loop. They must really like John Denver here, I thought. Our cabana had a living space and two small bedrooms with bunk beds for us kids. The place wasn’t elegant but it was beautiful and comfortable and more than adequate for a fourteen-year-old boy.
As the rest of the family settled into the cabana I headed outside to explore. White orchids, red hibiscus, and coconut palm trees decorated the lawns. Another boy my age, an actor in the film, was also staying at the resort. His name was Laurence Fishburne—he was going by Larry then—and he was there with his mother, Hattie. He was playing the part of Tyrone “Mr. Clean” Miller, the youngest crew member on the navy patrol boat (PBR) that takes Captain Willard, my father’s character, up the river. Fishburne, or “Fish” as I came to call him, was a tall, skinny, fast-talking city kid dressed in the uniform of fourteen-year-old boys nationwide: T-shirt, jeans, and white Pumas with a red swipe. He was smart and hilarious and right on it and reminded me of kids I’d gone to school with in New York. I immediately felt a kinship with him.
Checking out the resort together we discovered little motor-boats that guests could use for bass fishing and touring the lake.
“Let’s take one,” we decided.
Being two kids from New York City and L.A., we didn’t know much about motorboats, but the outboard engine seemed straightforward enough. Pull the cord and start it; doesn’t get easier than that. We cruised out into the middle of the lake and kept going. Near the other side some reeds were sticking out of shallow water, and that was where the boat slid into a thick patch of mud and the engine stalled.
We tried the pull-start to get it going again. It choked a little but didn’t catch.
We tried again. Still nothing.
“I’ll get out and push us back to the middle of the lake,” I offered. “Maybe we can get it started there.”
The water didn’t look deep so I jumped over the side. Very bad plan. I hadn’t considered how deep or how thick the mud at the bottom might be. My ankles immediately started sinking, and the suction was so strong I couldn’t pull either foot out. I slowly sank deeper. It was like quicksand.
I’m in trouble, I thought, as I grabbed on to the rim of the boat. I’m going to drown.
Laurence peered over the side. We’d known each other all of thirty minutes and now he was going to be the sole witness to my demise.
“I don’t know, man,” I said. “I’m going down.”
So fast there wasn’t even time to think about it, Laurence reached behind me with one arm, grabbed me with every ounce of strength in his 120-pound frame, and pulled me up and into the boat. I couldn’t believe how strong he was and how fast and sharp his survival instincts were. He may actually have saved my life that day. That experience bonded us forever, resulting in a friendship that’s lasted more than thirty-five years.
After a few days, my mother decided that ferrying four kids back and forth across a lake to get to and from the set had reached its limit. About ten minutes away on the shore of a picturesque volcanic lake, Lake Caliraya, was a gated summer community, a private retreat for the Philippine rich and elite, with modernized cabanas and immaculate grounds. Marcos himself stayed there sometimes. The film’s producer, Gray Frederickson, had a cabana there as would Marlon Brando, who was scheduled to arrive in early September. Marlon was the big name in the film but my father was the leading man, and my mother pulled whatever strings she could and probably a few more to get us into the same place as Marlon.
As my father says, “Tell Janet no, and she’ll find a way.”
Thanks to my mother’s persistence we woun
d up with two adjacent cabanas down near the lake, one for me, Ramon, and Charlie, and one across the porch that Renée shared with my parents. On the outside, the cabanas looked like authentic native huts but inside they had most of the comforts of home. We converted one bathroom into a makeshift kitchen and laundry facility. Every few days a woman would come to wash our clothes and lay them outside to dry. We’d come home from the set to find our shorts and T-shirts stretched across the grass like colorful two-dimensional lawn ornaments.
Soon after we’d moved into the new place, my mother’s provisions arrived from the States. I went out to the road to help shuttle the boxes across the lawn. Twenty of the sixty cases of water had gone missing—broken or stolen, we never did find out. That left fifty-six boxes in the truck. I was awed by the amount of stuff my mother had managed to ship 7,000 miles across the Pacific. How did she organize this? I wondered, grabbing a box and hoisting it onto my shoulder. Even at fourteen I could appreciate the logistical effort it took to bring a family of six to a developing nation for the summer.
Just then the sky opened up and it started to pour.
This was the end of July, still monsoon season in the Philippines. I’d never seen rain come down so hard. The raindrops were enormous and hit the ground with force. Even more remarkable was how the locals kept going about their regular business in the downpour. The truck drivers kept shuttling boxes from the back of the truck across the lawn to our cabanas as if they barely even noticed the rain.
I swung my box down onto the porch of our cabana and headed back to the truck. The lawn was already so saturated at that time of year that it started flooding almost immediately. Back and forth between the truck and the cabanas, the drivers and I sloshed across the grass with boxes balanced on our shoulders, drenched straight through our clothes, until all of the boxes had been safely delivered.
