by Val Kilmer
I remember when rock and roll hit us and hit us hard. Dad, not being a lover of any music he hadn’t learned around a campfire and so limited to about eight songs, wouldn’t let us buy more than one record a week between the three of us at the height of rock’s steamrolling, earth-soaking prowess. How could we decide between the latest Beatles record and the latest hard-rock experimental Jimi Hendrix experience, or the latest Sly and the Family Stone masterpiece, or Stevie Wonder? Oh, what perfect hell. And this, again, was when my father was making stacks.
Mom in the 1950s
The lack of such structure made it tempting to run away. I once did, when we were still living at the beach. I was three when I asked Mom to show me how to capture butterflies and moths and make the holes in the tin tops to the glass jars we stored fruit in from our couple of trees. But Mom, giggling with a girlfriend on the phone, paid me no mind. I was crushed and decided to leave once and for all. Mom didn’t even notice when I grabbed my GI Joe backpack and tiny plastic tent and indignantly announced that I was never returning home. If she wanted to see my new digs, I’d be living under the tree in the empty lot next door. Still on the phone, she only half-heard my gallant farewell speech. I was burning with anger.
The adventure was arduous, about thirty feet away, and the day scalding hot. The lot was covered in sand. Twenty yards… I was uncomfortable and bored. For a few minutes, I rested, watching a caravan of crawling caterpillars. Then, with the smell of Mom’s insanely delicious melty chocolate chip cookies wafting through the air, I nearly caved, before I swore to stand my ground, and made it another ten yards to the middle of the sandy lot. For ten minutes. Then twenty. Then thirty. Then… enough. The ol’ “make me come home ’cause of chocolate cookie smell” was one thing, but the thought of Mom’s bologna sandwiches with mayonnaise oozing through the crevices of squishy Wonder Bread…
I ran home and felt like I had just docked from New Zealand. But I feigned indifference. She hadn’t even noticed I’d gone. The silly story marks a theme that’s followed me through life, this dialectic of wandering and grounding, of sacrifice and indulgence, of wonder and bread.
I’ve run in and out of insanely intense romantic relationships. I’ve been known to walk through the snow for miles to see a girl or fly across the world at a moment’s notice to sit under the African sun with a woman who I knew would—and did—change my molecular makeup. Perhaps like any kid who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, I saw the world happening somewhere else. Not somewhere over the rainbow, no, just somewhere over the Santa Monica Mountains, somewhere over Mulholland Drive. There was a mighty snobbery to the Hollywood geography.
There were only three types of territory. You had to live in Beverly Hills or the Hollywood Hills, or if you were super wild and renegade but still had to have the recognition of stardom or success, you made the trek in from Malibu. Or maybe the real jewels were those tentacles like the Palisades or Holmby Hills, little pockets of opulence. Opulence is a thirty-foot fence made of ancient trees, planted tight as a wicker imprisonment, keeping the paparazzi out, away from the superstar sunbathing in the back as if she were in the south of France or the hills of Tuscany, the rocky slopes of Greece or the Spanish rancheros of the Southwest, all jammed together in a madhouse of hard-earned purchased taste, French nouveau riche next to a super-modern Case Study House. Then there was always the “old money” of Pasadena, which in California terms meant about thirty-eight years old. Then there was the bastion of smarty-pants like Marlon and Warren and Jack and Coppola, who just didn’t bother deciding who to please and lived on top of everyone on Mulholland Drive. The older smart real estate mogul actors lived near what was really their own private airport at Burbank, and were like the genius businessman Bob Hope, who owned thousands of acres all over greater Los Angeles. I could feel all this secret wealth swarming around, dusted up into the twister from The Wizard of Oz. The studios and the largest backlots were in the Valley as well. I passed Warner Ranch every morning on my way to school. Berkeley Hall on Swall Drive. Boy, I knew it was somewhere else. Even though cowboy superstar Roy Rogers was right next door, he hardly represented what my little heart intuitively understood was deep, soulful acting. Talent, class. My father’s idea of success seemed to be a numbers game. He didn’t give a whit what his home or its contents looked like, or pleasing our mother with the normal gifts a hardworking housewife who was being cheated on received, like diamonds and pearls and new cars and clothes. And what do you do with those things in the complete isolation of Chatsworth? We were in the witness protection program of culture. Although this great show of absence in parenting from our folks also can rightly be seen as glorious trust that we were okay out on a grand trip of discovery, every day of our eternal summer vacation and after school and the weekends. They created in us all or allowed us all to flourish as ourselves, without a single syllable of judgment. I am eternally grateful for this outstanding gift of self-reliance. I see it now in my own children and am very proud they know the difference as well. Being smothered creatively is some kind of terrible crime our youth suffer from today, being locked into the “rules” of apps and games and the weird madness of control that’s clearly out of control these days about our true natures, which are 100 percent evaluated in terms of being a consumer. Well that’s no fun at all. Not really. It’s somewhere else.
I had to get to that somewhere else. I’ve always had a starving, stealthy spirit. I want to get up and out. Even back then I wanted to scream my declaration of freedom, though I was painfully shy.
Mom’s three sons were born within a period of four years, and I was the apple of her eye. I was told that when Mom gave birth to us, without painkillers or other drugs—you know, the way babies have been born since the dawn of time—she did so without a sound.
Mother was very beautiful, likened often to that greatest of natural talents in film Ingrid Bergman, also Swedish. She was at once a strong woman with strong weaknesses. She had her dark side and seemed to be burdened by aspects of life she was rarely able to convey to my big brother, Mark, and me. She and my father shared an understanding of Christian Science, whose underlying premise has an illuminating simplicity: Always turn from the material to the spiritual. From hate to Love. When Love is spelled with a capital L, as I will do often here, it means the Father/Mother Love, the God of All in all. Free of the burden of doctrine that held hell and damnation over the heads of its constituents, Christian Science, founded in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy, provided comfort to my parents. I inherited their faith through hard-fought experimentation and proof.
Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy
I’ve held fast to that faith throughout life, even though my parents never really taught us the practice of it. I recognize, respect, and revere all systems of sacred belief that embrace a golden rule of nonjudgment. Christian Science is simply a modern application of ancient Christianity found in the New Testament. It professes the ethos of unrelenting Love and reasserts the lost element of healing largely left out of almost all Christian faiths today, for some reason. Over time, its power transformed from the unconscious to the conscious in my mind. Seems kind of important and useful to me, being able to heal yourself. As a kid, I felt it brewing. As an adult, it has come to full flower. It’s a subtle religion by nature, as its main tenets are prayer, study, and solitary, interior acts of tenderness. That doesn’t mean I haven’t led a frenzied life. That frenzy is still alive and well. It does mean, though, that I have never lost my faith to what seems to me is a kind of materialism that leads nowhere, nowhere of value anyway. Never met a super wealthy person where money obviated any of the basic challenges of finding happiness in the material world. “Money can’t buy me love.”
My mother’s aloofness made me want to please her even more, and she was unique in that she never exploited unconditional Love, as mothers sometimes do. Her Love was an invisible golden thread, something I couldn’t always sense, but we were close in the psychic realm. Sometimes she suffered f
rom migraines that I was aware of even across the country when I had moved to New York to study acting and she to a new life with a new husband, Bill, the love of her life, in Wickenburg, Arizona. Other times I could see her riding her horse on the wind and it looked like she was flying. Whenever I called her with these sort of visions, they were inevitably true. She was arty but also conservative, and she grew more so with time.
For both Mom and Dad, life in the Valley was monotonous. A couple times a year, they beat back the boredom by laboring over elaborate themed parties at the house. One night, our home was transformed into Monte Carlo’s most sophisticated casino. I snuck out of my tiny bed. I may have even stuffed the bed with pillows, gettin’ the idea from some movie. I spent the night sandwiched in between an itchy wall that scratched right through my flannel PJs and our floral sofa, looking up at the wild transformation of our normally unadorned living room. It was full-on midsixties orange Day-Glo, with cardboard cutouts everywhere. Pin the tail on the go-go dancer. Young moms were letting their hair down, housewives rocking out in their miniskirts, and aerospace engineers letting their long lapels hang low. Everywhere I looked the topography was red, yellow, and leather. I swooned at the dancing, bedazzled by the makeshift costumes, until I was captured and scolded.
We lived next door to Roy Rogers and too close for comfort to Charles Manson. We used to go to Spahn Ranch, where they all lived. It was the closest place to rent a horse for a trail ride. The guy who put me on his horse was Donald “Shorty” Shea, who worked at Spahn Ranch. He was killed by members of the Manson family a few weeks after the Tate-LaBianca murders, though his body wasn’t discovered until 1977. I never saw Manson himself but clearly remember the panic that ran rampant when the grisly murders made international news. It happened when I was eight, but by then the Love vibe, projected by Mom and Dad in different ways, protected us from fear. Whatever deficiencies my parents possessed, they adored their boys.
Roy Rogers was a happier story, mostly. When his ranch went up for sale, Dad bought it and moved us in. When the world’s most famous cowboy was still living there, I’d sneak over and peek through the windows of their great room. Inside were Bullet, the German shepherd, and Trigger, Roy’s beloved trick horse and invaluable costar, perched on two hind legs. Both animals were quite dead but professionally taxidermied. We couldn’t help but worry whether, when his wife, Dale Evans, died, he might stuff her and place her in the kitchen holding a plate of chocolate chip cookies. Fortunately, Dale outlived Roy. Terrible joke, but I was eight. Imagine going to sleep knowing that one neighbor had hanged himself and the other had stuffed two of his three costars.
These hills were home to hundreds of Westerns. Landscapses of imaginary freedom where make-believe cowboys fought fake battles and won real fame and glory. Our local wandering hobo, begging with a paper coffee cup, sang old country tunes. They say your hometown shapes you, and that was mine. The shape had a heroic bent. The lore of heroism, even though it was heroism fashioned by Hollywood, was hidden in the hills above our ranch, etched into the sandstone boulders of Chatsworth, and written on the Santa Ana winds, as Joan Didion describes in her brilliant essay collection on her early times in LA, Slouching Towards Bethlehem—the title coming from that powerful poem by W. B. Yeats.
We lived a much more holistic lifestyle than we realized. Orange groves, avocado trees, and hand-churned butter from down the street.
Roy Rogers with a stuffed Trigger, 1974
We boys were sent to Berkeley Hall, a Christian Science school. And though my father’s relationship to spirit was not salient, I drank in the mystery of faith. As early as I can remember, I curated this notion of an all-loving force, a messiah both male and female. In coming years, I would eventually tear through the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Qur’an, searching for either a new faith or proof that what I was born into was a true solid foundation to build a life on. But I kept coming back to the love of Love, the most reliable rule that I ever knew. I also kept coming back to Mrs. Eddy, who was so egalitarian in her Love that she spent a year writing God with exclusively feminine pronouns. The next year she reverted; her publisher must have realized the world wasn’t ready for a female God. She reasoned that we have much more cause to consider God feminine than masculine, as the leading qualities of Love, empathy, compassion can be more easily found in a woman than a man or a feminine makeup than masculine. I’ve always found women infinitely more interesting than men. Perhaps that’s why we’ve always gotten along so well. I have never suffered the illusion there was any winning with a woman. We are big oafy elephants in the room and they are butterflies. And it takes so long for an elephant to get to asking a question of relevance to a butterfly. Thanks for being so patient, ladies. We’re trying to catch up, we really are…
Grandpa Kilmer’s Grave in Truth or Consequences
I was a feral wanderer, yearning for lightness. I searched for something strange yet wholly comforting. Reading came quickly. The first poem of my heart was written by a distant cousin who had died in 1918. It turned out to be a famous verse because of its profound simplicity. I read Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” out loud to my second-grade class.
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
Kilmer was a devout Catholic and his spiritual nature is reflected in the piece. He was a war hero who sacrificed his life defending democracy during World War I in France, which made his poem all the more easier to be chosen as the first piece representing the genre of writing when our textbooks became nationalized across the USA.
As much as I’ve strived to infuse meaning into the poems and plays I’ve written throughout my life, the fully blossomed tree is the ultimate book, poem, and play. When in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Puck tells his king, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” I believe Shakespeare had himself in mind. The Bard knew that art is essentially artifice—lovely artifice, enchanting artifice, but artifice nonetheless. There’s absolutely nothing artificial about a tree.
When Shakespeare offers his most salient beliefs about how to find value in this life, he suggests through Hamlet that it is the actor’s charge “to hold the mirror up to nature… to show the very age and body of its time, its form and pressure.” The actor’s job, in other words, is to show us who we really are, and as a smarter man than me has noted, if we don’t learn from history we are destined to repeat it. The experience of acting Shakespeare makes clear, throughout his impossibly diverse attempts to clarify and elucidate our souls to us, that we’ve got the best, most condensed shot at understanding the truth of our very spirit through a display or reflection of actions that reveal our habits and folly as well as our nobility and higher strivings. Although he’s a haughty one, that ol’ Bill, he’s a naughty one.
I came to learn that Mark Twain had wisdom not unlike Shakespeare’s. He understood that, like everyone, he fell into foolery. He also saw how artificial language could be. So he changed up the language and made it real. More than a couple of scholars say that’s the start of gutbucket American lit. I didn’t know all that when, as a kid, I first met Huckleberry Finn. All I knew was that I loved his story. First time I read it, I was in what felt like an enchanted forest of pine trees. Leaves fell gracefully on my shoulders; mosquitoes nibbled at my ankles. I was Huck. Jim was my playmate. Together we floated on the raft, the Mississippi holding us aloft. Fleeing the civilized world, scorned by polite society, speaking an intoxicating patois that had my head reeling, I joined Huck and Jim on every one of their crazy adventu
res. Twain struck a visceral chord, perhaps a lifetime’s worth of chords. He railed against divisions of race, class, and age. He was coarse and brilliant and funny and irreverent and honest and, as someone who deserted the Confederate army two weeks after joining, a famous coward. I came to love all these contradictions.
Grandma, a true American, was a character out of Twain. She was down-home and funky. Dad instilled within me a small fear of his mother’s empty coffee can that stood next to her feet. “Never look inside that can,” he warned. And of course, I couldn’t resist. Curiosity over fear.
I must have been three when I approached that forbidden can. Grandma couldn’t stop sucking on her corncob pipe. Beyond smoking like a chimney, she was hooked on snuff. She pinched finely ground tobacco and snorted it right up the schnoz. She also chewed tobacco. Her spittoon was the forbidden coffee can at the foot of her rocker. When I took the plunge and breathed in that dank, brackish, murky muddle of old tobacco chew and sinewy saliva, my stomach churned.
Churning, yearning to bring back memories like Grandma’s scar. They say every scar tells a story. I’d stare at the scar that sat on her right shoulder—it’s one of my first memories—and wonder how it came about. Dad told the tale. His father, whom I never knew, was a prospector. He lived till one hundred. Amazingly, he was sixty when Dad was born. I never asked, but I presume Grandma had to be many more than ten years younger than her husband. A gold prospector, Grandpa Thomas explored, drilled, and excavated mineral deposits.
He died in Hot Springs, New Mexico—later renamed Truth or Consequences after Ralph Edwards, host of a radio game show by that name, promised to broadcast an episode from any town that changed its name to that of the show.
The legend of my grandparents’ past loomed large in my imagination. The camp where they prospected was attacked by Native Americans. An arrow was shot into Grandma’s shoulder, a tomahawk smashed into Grandpa’s skull. Grandma, with the help of a local Mexican, managed to get him in the back of their wagon, hitch the horse and mule, and ride through the wilderness until she found a doctor, who put a metal plate in her husband’s head. Winters used to drive him crazy as the plate was always cold.
