The New Kings of Nonfiction

by Ira Glass

  But he is weird.

  He’s weird in ways that are expected, and he’s weird in ways that are not. I anticipated that he might seem a little odd when we talked about the art of acting, mostly because (a) Kilmer is a Method actor, and (b) all Method actors are insane. However, I did not realize how much insanity this process truly required. That started to become clear when I asked him about The Doors and Wonderland, two movies where Kilmer portrays self-destructive drug addicts with an acute degree of realism; there is a scene late in Wonderland where he wordlessly (and desperately) waits for someone to offer him cocaine in a manner that seems painfully authentic. I ask if he ever went through a drug phase for real. He says no. He says he’s never freebased cocaine in his life; he was simply interested in “exploring acting,” but that he understands the mind-set of addiction. The conversation evolves into a meditation on the emotional toll that acting takes on the artist. To get a more specific example, I ask him about the “toll” that he felt while making the 1993 Western Tombstone. He begins telling me about things that tangibly happened to Doc Holliday. I say, “No, no, you must have misunderstood me—I want to know about the toll it took on you.” He says, “I know, I’m talking about those feelings.” And this is the conversation that follows:

  CK: You mean you think you literally had the same experience as Doc Holliday?

  KILMER: Oh, sure. It’s not like I believed that I actually shot somebody, but I absolutely know what it feels like to pull the trigger and take someone’s life.

  CK: So you’re saying you understand how it feels to shoot someone as much as a person who has actually committed a murder?

  KILMER: I understand it more. It’s an actor’s job. A guy who’s lived through the horror of Vietnam has not spent his life preparing his mind for it. Most of these guys were borderline criminal or poor, and that’s why they got sent to Vietnam. It was all the poor, wretched kids who got beat up by their dads, guys that didn’t get on the football team, guys who couldn’t finagle a scholarship. They didn’t have the emotional equipment to handle that experience. But this is what an actor trains to do. So—standing onstage—I can more effectively represent that kid in Vietnam than a guy who was there.

  CK: I don’t question that you can more effectively represent that experience, but that’s not the same thing. If you were talking to someone who’s in prison for murder, and the guy said, “Man, it really fucks you up to kill another person,” do you think you could reasonably say, “I completely know what you’re talking about”?

  KILMER: Oh yeah. I’d know what he’s talking about.

  CK: You were in Top Gun. Does this mean you completely understand how it feels to be a fighter pilot?

  KILMER: I understand it more. I don’t have a fighter pilot’s pride. Pilots actually go way past actors’ pride, which is pretty high. Way past rock ’n’ roll pride, which is even higher. They’re in their own class.

  CK: Let’s say someone made a movie about you—Val Kilmer—and they cast Jude Law6 in the lead role. By your logic, wouldn’t this mean that Jude Law—if he did a successful job—would therefore understand what it means to be Val Kilmer more than you do?

  KILMER: No, because I’m an actor. Those other people that are in those other circumstances don’t have the self-knowledge.

  CK: Well, what if it was a movie about your young life? What if it was a movie about your teen years?

  KILMER: In that case, I guess I’d have to say yes. No matter what the circumstances are, it’s all relative. I think Gandhi had a sense of mission about himself that was spiritual. He found himself in political circumstances, but he became a great man. Most of that story in the film Gandhi is about the politics; it’s about the man leading his nation to freedom. But I know that Sir Ben Kingsley understood the story of Gandhi to be that personal journey of love. It would be impossible to portray Gandhi as he did—which was perfectly—without having the same experience he put into his body. You can’t act that.

  CK: Okay, so let’s assume you had been given the lead role in The Passion of the Christ. Would you understand the feeling of being crucified as much as someone who had been literally crucified as the Messiah?

  KILMER: Well, I just played Moses [in a theatrical version of The Ten Commandments]. Of course.

  CK: So you understand the experience of being Moses? You understand how it feels to be Moses? Maybe I’m just taking your words too literally.

  KILMER: No, I don’t think so. That’s what acting is.

  I keep asking Kilmer if he is joking, and he swears he is not. However, claiming that he’s not joking might be part of the joke. A few weeks after visiting the ranch, I paraphrased the preceding conversation to Academy Award-winning conspiracy theorist Oliver Stone, the man who directed Kilmer in 1991’s The Doors and 2004’s Alexander. He did not find our exchange surprising.

  “This has always been the issue with Val,” Stone said via cell phone as his son drove him around Los Angeles. “He speaks in a way that is propelled from deep inside, and he doesn’t always realize how the things he says will sound to other people. But there is a carryover effect from acting. You can never really separate yourself from what you do, and Val is ultrasensitive to that process.”

  Stone says Kilmer has substantially matured over the years, noting that the death of Kilmer’s father in 1993 had an immediate impact on his emotional flexibility. “We didn’t have the greatest relationship when we made The Doors,” he says. “I always thought he was a technically brilliant actor, but he was difficult. He can be moody. But when we did Alexander, Val was an absolute pleasure to work with. I think part of his problems with The Doors was that he just got sick of wearing leather pants every day.”

  Kilmer and his two kids are playing with the cats. Because there are two of these animals (Ernest and Refrigerator), the living room takes on a Ghost and the Darkness motif. While they play with the felines, Val casually mentions he awoke that morning at 4:00 a.m. to work on a screenplay, but that he went back to bed at 6:00 a.m. His schedule is unconventional. A few hours later, I ask him about the movie he’s writing.

  “Well, it’s a woman’s story,” he says cautiously. “It’s about this woman who was just fighting to survive, and everything happened to her.”

  I ask him if this is a real person; he says she is. “Her first husband died. Her own family took her son away from her. She marries a guy because he promises to help her get the son back, and then he doesn’t. The new husband is a dentist, but he won’t even fix her teeth. She ends up divorcing him because he gets captured in the Civil War. She meets a homeopathic guy who’s probably more of a mesmerist hypnotist. For the first time in her life, at forty-two years old, she’s feeling good. But then she slips on the ice and breaks every bone in her body, and the doctor and the priest say she should be dead. But she has this experience while she’s praying and she gets up. People literally thought they were seeing a ghost. And then she spent the rest of her life trying to articulate what had happened to her. How was she healed? That’s what the story is about: the rest of her life. Because she lived until she was ninety and became the most famous lady in the United States.”

  His vision for this film is amazingly clear, and he tells me the story with a controlled, measured intensity. I ask him the name of the woman. He says, “Mary Baker Eddy. She died in 1910.” We talk a little more about this idea (he’d love to see Cate Blanchett in the lead role), but then the conversation shifts to the subject of Common Sense author Thomas Paine, whom Kilmer thinks should be the subject of Oliver Stone’s next movie.

  It is not until the next morning that I realize Mary Baker Eddy was the founder of the Christian Science Monitor, and that Val Kilmer is a Christian Scientist.

  “Well, that is what I am trying to be,” he says while we sit on his back porch and look at the bubbling blueness of the Pecos River. “It is quite a challenging faith, but I don’t think I’m hedging. I just think I am being honest.”

  There are many facets to
Christian Science, but most people only concern themselves with one: Christian Scientists do not take medicine. They believe that healing does not come from internal processes or from the power of the mortal mind; they believe healing comes from the Divine Mind of God. Growing up in Los Angeles, this is how Kilmer was raised by his parents. This belief becomes more complex when you consider the context of the Kilmer family: the son of an engineer and a housewife, Val had two brothers. They lived on the outskirts of L.A., neighbors to the likes of Roy Rogers. Over time, the family splintered. Val’s parents divorced, and he remains estranged from his older brother over a business dispute that happened more than ten years ago (“We have a much better relationship not speaking,” Val says). His younger brother, Wesley, died as a teenager; Wesley had an epileptic seizure in a swimming pool (Val was seventeen at the time, about to go to school at Juilliard). I ask him if his brother’s epilepsy was untreated at the time of his death.

  “Well, this is a complicated answer,” he says. “He was treated periodically. There is a big misnomer with Christian Science; I think maybe that misnomer is fading. People used to say, ‘Christian Science. Oh, you’re the ones that don’t believe in doctors,’ which is not a true thing. It’s just a different way of treating a malady. It could be mental, social, or physical. In my little brother’s case, when he was diagnosed, my parents were divorced. My father had him diagnosed and Wesley was given some medical treatment for his epilepsy. When he was in school, they would stop the treatment. Then periodically, he would go back and forth between Christian Science and the medical treatment.”

  I ask him what seems like an obvious question: Isn’t it possible that his brother’s death happened when he was being untreated, and that this incident could have been avoided?

  “Christian Science isn’t responsible for my little brother’s death,” he says, and I am in no position to disagree.

  We’re still sitting on his porch, and his daughter walks past us. I ask Val if he would not allow her to take amoxicillin if she had a sore throat; he tells me that—because he’s divorced—he doesn’t have autonomous control over that type of decision. But he says his first move in such a scenario would be to pray, because most illness comes from fear. We start talking about the cult of Scientology, which he has heard is “basically Christian Science without God.” We begin discussing what constitutes the definition of religion; Kilmer thinks an institution cannot be classified as a religion unless God is involved. When I argue that this is not necessarily the case, Val walks into the house and brings out the Oxford English Dictionary; I’m not sure how many working actors own their own copy of the OED, but this one does. The print in the OED is minuscule, so he begins scouring the pages like Sherlock Holmes. He pores over the tiny words with a magnifying glass that has an African boar’s tusk as a handle. He finds the definition of religion, but the OED’s answer is unsatisfactory. He decides to check what Webster’s Second Unabridged Dictionary has to say, since he insists that Webster’s Second was the last dictionary created without an agenda. We spend the next fifteen minutes looking up various words, including monastic.

  So this, I suppose, is an illustration of how Val Kilmer is weird in unexpected ways: he’s a Christian Scientist, and he owns an inordinate number of reference books.

  I ask Val Kilmer if he agrees that his life is crazy. First he says no, but then he (kind of) says yes.

  “I make more money than the whole state of New Mexico,” he says. “If you do the math, I’ve probably made as much as six hundred thousand or eight hundred thousand people in this state. And I know that’s crazy. You know, I live on a ranch that’s larger than Manhattan. That’s a weird circumstance.” Now, this is something of a hyperbole; the island of Manhattan is 14,563 acres of real estate, which is more than twice as large as Val’s semiarid homestead. But his point is still valid—he’s got a big fucking backyard, and that’s a weird circumstance. “The thing I’m enjoying more is that there are lots of things that fame has brought me that I can use to my advantage in a quiet way. For example, a friend of mine is an amazing advocate for trees. He’s so incredible and selfless. He’s planted [something like] twenty million trees in Los Alamos. I actually got to plant the twenty-millionth tree. And we got more attention for doing that simply because I’ve made some movies and I’m famous.”

  Kilmer’s awareness of his fame seems to partially derive from his familiarity with other famous people. During the two days we spend together, he casually mentions dozens of celebrities he classifies as friends—Robert DeNiro, Nelson Mandela, Steve-O. Val tells me that he passed on the lead role in The Insider that eventually went to Russell Crowe; he tells me he dreams of making a comedy with Will Ferrell, whom he considers a genius. At one point, Kilmer does a flawless Marlon Brando impersonation, even adjusting the timbre of his voice to illustrate the subtle difference between the ’70s Brando from Last Tango in Paris and the ’90s Brando from Don Juan DeMarco. We talk about his longtime camaraderie with Kevin Spacey, and he says that Spacey is “proof that you can learn how to act. Because he was horrible when he first started, and now he’s so good.” We talk about the famous women he’s dated; the last serious relationship he had was with Darryl Hannah, which ended a year ago. During the 1990s, he was involved with Cindy Crawford, so I ask him what it’s like to sleep with the most famous woman in the world. His short answer is that it’s awesome. His long answer is that it’s complicated.

  “Cindy is phenomenally comfortable in the public scene,” Kilmer says. “I never accepted that responsibility. If you’re the lead in a film, you have a responsibility to the company and the studio. With a great deal of humor, Cindy describes herself as being in advertising. She’s an icon in it; we actually talked about her image in relation to the product. And I was uncomfortable with that. We got in a huge fight one night because of a hat she was wearing. The hat advertised a bar, and I used to be so unreasonable about that kind of thing. I had a certain point of view about the guy who owned the bar, and I was just being unreasonable. I mean, she knows what she’s doing, and she’s comfortable with it. But I knew we were going to go to dinner and that we’d get photographed with this hat, and I was just hard to deal with. It was a really big deal.”

  This is the kind of insight that makes talking to an established movie star so unorthodox: Kilmer remembers that his girlfriend wearing a certain hat was a big deal, but he doesn’t think it was a big deal that the girlfriend was Cindy Crawford. Crazy things seem normal, normal things seem crazy. He mentions that he is almost embarrassed by how cliché his life has become, despite the fact that the manifestation of this cliché includes buffalo ownership. However, there are certain parts of his life that even he knows are strange. This is most evident when—apropos of nothing—he starts talking about Bob Dylan.

  “I am a friend of Bob’s, as much as Bob has friends,” Kilmer says. “Bob is a funny guy. He is the funniest man I know.” Apparently, Dylan loved Tombstone so much that he decided to spend an afternoon hanging out in Kilmer’s hotel room, later inviting Val into the recording studio with Eric Clapton and casting him in the film Masked and Anonymous. Much like his ability to mimic Brando, Kilmer is able to impersonate Dylan’s voice with detailed exactness and loves re-creating conversations the two of them have had. What he seems to admire most about Dylan is that—more than anything else—Bob Dylan never appears to care what anyone thinks of him. And that is something Val Kilmer still cares about (even though he’d like to argue otherwise).

  “I never cultivated a personality,” he says, which is something I am skeptical of, but something I cannot disprove. “Almost everyone that is really famous has cultivated a personality. I can safely say that no one who has ever won an Oscar didn’t want to win an Oscar. I think that Bob Dylan would have loved to win a Grammy during all those years when he knew he was doing his best work. Advanced or not, he was certainly ahead of his time, and he was more worthy than whoever won. . . . Dylan was doing stuff that was so new that everyone
hated it. Like when he started playing the electric guitar, for example: he toured for a year, and he was booed every night. Onstage, I could never take three performances in a row and be booed. I just don’t think I’m that strong. I think that I would just go to the producers of the play and say, ‘Well, we tried, but we failed to entertain here.’ But Dylan spent a year being booed. They were throwing bottles at him. And he still can’t play it! Forty years later, he is still trying to play the electric guitar. I mean, he has a dedication to an ideal that I can’t comprehend.”

  On the shores of the Pecos River, nothing is as it seems: Kevin Spacey was once a terrible actor, Bob Dylan remains a terrible guitar player, and Val Kilmer is affable and insecure. Crazy things seem normal, normal things seem crazy. Gusty winds may exist.

  HOST

  David Foster Wallace

  1

  Mr. John Ziegler, thirty-seven, late of Louisville’s WHAS, is now on the air, “Live and Local,” from 10:00 P.M. to 1:00 A.M. every weeknight on southern California’s KFI, a 50,000-watt megastation whose hourly ID and Sweeper, designed by the station’s Imaging department and featuring a gravelly basso whisper against licks from Ratt’s 1984 metal classic “Round and Round,” is “KFI AM-640, Los Angeles—More Stimulating Talk Radio.” This is either the eighth or ninth host job that Mr. Ziegler’s had in his talk-radio career, and far and away the biggest. He moved out here to LA over Christmas—alone, towing a U-Haul—and found an apartment not far from KFI’s studios, which are in an old part of the Koreatown district, near Wilshire Center.