by Val Kilmer
Grandpa Kilmer outside his cabin in New Mexico
When I was still a preteen, Dad took me to what had been the cabin my grandfather built on Zuni land, now a national park in New Mexico, where I stared at a hummingbird. Soon the bird was joined by another. And then another. And then another, until there were at least a hundred hummingbirds flying overhead. I felt as though I had conjured them. I knew that one day, like Grandpa, I would live in the New Mexican wilderness.
Grandpa was also a mountain man. Think The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He lived on beans and berries. Grandma eventually gave up on him and moved to Los Angeles, but Grandpa was always coming to LA and stealing my dad back to the mountains to help him with his prospecting. Eventually my concerned grandmother would hide Dad rather than have her ex-husband drag him back into the wilderness. The danger of freezing to death was real. My father eventually confronted Grandpa. He liked school and was good at it. From what I gathered, this was such an alien idea to my grandfather. He could find no good reason to have that kind of mind around him in the wilderness. Besides, he was getting old. And feeding a young giant was expensive. My father was six foot three by his third year in high school.
When in the sixties I visited Pueblo Park Campground at the northern edge of the Blue Range Wilderness, the cabin my grandfather built was still standing, with arrowheads, pottery shards, and stray bits of turquoise strewn about in the leaves and grass. Dad never tired of telling the story about facing a bear in the woods. It was only a cub, but then again, so was my dad. He screamed and ran like the wind. He couldn’t get the little bear off his mind. Grandpa had gone off on a trip, and Dad felt an obligation to protect his mother. He imagined the cub growing up to become a killer grizzly. He took it as his duty to get that bear before the bear came back to get him. Screwing up his courage, he grabbed his dad’s rifle from the closet when Grandma wasn’t looking and went searching for the creature. He had been gone for hours when Grandma grew alarmed. She could easily track him because a single line in the dirt marked the path along which he’d dragged the rifle, too heavy for his small frame. When his mother found him, he had fallen asleep under a ponderosa pine, cuddling the rifle like a teddy. I love imagining my father, so ferocious in his later life, as a sweet little boy lost in the woods, dreaming heroic dreams of slaying beasts and becoming a man.
More Kilmer lore: Grandpa Thomas delivering his mule to a man whose horse had died, risking his own work and life by giving away this animal but adhering to the sacred code that in the wilds everyone is connected and responsible for one another. You do whatever your neighbor needs at whatever cost to you—a bit more than just bringing over a pie when you move in, which isn’t even practiced anymore in society. It’s a beautiful way of living. I have both offered and received this remarkable kindness from people for all the decades I have lived in the New Mexico wilderness. You are valued by what you do, not who you are or how many cars or backhoes you own.
When they were quite young, I took my daughter, Mercedes, and son, Jack, on a trip to search for Grandpa Thomas’s grave. The return to Truth or Consequences turned mystical. I went to the records office to study the cemetery map soiled with the exotic dirt that had buried our ancestors. It was too dark to go to the cemetery. That would wait till tomorrow. That night the kids and I slept in a rented Winnebago. Mercedes woke with an earache as numbing as a gunshot wound, the pain unbearable, subsiding only enough to let her moan and sweat. A day earlier, we’d gone below sea level into the colorful Carlsbad Caverns, as dramatic an adventure as nature could design, and now we were miles from Western medicine. I did all I could to comfort her.
Meanwhile, I was up most of the night, scrutinizing a copy of the old cemetery map, imagining my grandfather’s flight across Tennessee and Texas to New Mexico as he dreamed of gold. Grandpa found it—or did he? Did he die defending it? No, my dad said. He took his riches to Denver, where the bank burned down, destroying his legitimacy. Another story said he was robbed by his own partners. Sometimes I see that thin line—between truth and pure invention—running through the entirety of my family history.
Morning broke. Fortunately, my daughter awoke with a calm ear and mighty appetite. After pancakes, victory! Back at the records office I found Thomas Kilmer’s death certificate and that same day discovered his grave. My first thought was to exhume my grandfather’s bones and transport them to my ranch in Pecos. I was ready to do it, until I was told by a lawyer that in New Mexico anyone is allowed to visit their dead relatives’ remains, regardless of where the land is or who owns it. I didn’t love the idea of estranged relatives passing through whenever they damn well pleased. Plan foiled. So instead of shepherding a strange but wondrous excavation, I bought flowers. As I snapped photographs of my kids at Grandpa’s grave, I remembered that Dad, although he’d never taken the trouble to find this cemetery, had sworn he’d buy a proper marble tombstone but never did.
The experience was a gentle piercing of the heart. I was unraveling from the carelessness of my ancestors and yet honored and healed by my children, quietly generous and tolerant of this adventure to find a dead man none of us had ever known. We wished him peace.
In the aftermath, a question remains: Why didn’t I order a tombstone for Gramps? Why didn’t I provide that marble Dad had promised? I honestly don’t know. He deserves one. I may have been reluctant because I wasn’t clear on what should be written. I wanted to put more than his name, but I also lacked hard information about him.
It was almost easier not knowing my grandfather than knowing my father, who, on some deep level, I also didn’t know. I wanted to know more than was allowed me. I wanted to understand how his character so deeply informed my own. When he was nine, my father had picked cotton for a dollar a day. He had watched the man next to him drop dead from exhaustion. That served only to make him pick faster. He was a man who never stopped moving. He drove at a hundred miles per hour as though it were fifty. And, whether he was in a boom or a bust phase of his volatile career, Daddy always had a Caddy. During one boom he ripped up the Valley in a lime-green El Dorado. We’d race from Chatsworth to Palm Springs in seconds.
Dad relished breaking rules. He maniacally maneuvered through the world. I perceived that as normal. I inherited his sense of impetuous movement. His spontaneity was exciting. And without spontaneity I would not have lived the life that I cherish. Dad wanted to be big, bigger, biggest. His great dream was to buy and develop hundreds of acres of land north of the 118 freeway. He saw himself a modern-day William Mulholland, a man destined to leave his mark on Southern California.
Magical thinking, magical realism. Magic bound our family together. That’s why we were wild for Disneyland. Three boys, an aspirational dad, an artistic mom, a lonely suburban landscape from which we’d escape down the freeway for fantasy weekends in the less lonely suburb of Anaheim. We went so often it felt like we lived in Disneyland. The only thing that stopped us from staying there for weeks at a time was the monorail. I suppose it makes sense that my father, a man whose vast futuristic vision entailed the ownership of endless acres of land, was claustrophobic. He couldn’t sit inside the smooth-moving monorail, the only route from the hotel to the park.
It wasn’t the costumed characters that charmed my budding imagination. It was Merlin’s Magic Shop shop next to the Sleeping Beauty Castle. That’s where I spent hours playing with unbought toys. They were my first props. In top hat and tails, the wily magician performing in front of the shop enacted the first theatrical role I relished. With sleight of hand, he embodied the beauty of magic and commanded his stage. I marveled at the suitcases and boxes from which he pulled scarlet scarves and snow-white bunnies.
I liked mysterious objects—arrowheads my father brought back from New Mexico, pieces of pottery Mom collected. I studied Uncle Dewey’s ornate cigarette case and stole a half dozen of his Pall Malls. Each seemed a foot long. I found a box of my own, into which I placed each filterless cigarette at an angle. Come sundown, I scurried
up to my treehouse and, for the first time, lit up. The smoke bombed my tiny body. I was probably eight, absolutely oblivious to the catastrophic effects.
I wish I knew even a little of my mother’s history. She knew none of it or cared for none of it. She was in this sense remarkably attentive to some of the more difficult instructions of Mrs. Eddy’s, like not developing any habits about human history, hence her complete lack of focus on it. Perhaps we have unbelievably fascinating Viking history we just haven’t ever explored as a family, or Mongolian, which every Swede has a touch of because when the Huns blasted through and killed all the men, they raped all the women, so there’s a line across all of Scandinavia which marks their blood. It’s no doubt why I have those weird undeveloped molars inside the lower jaw, and why my older brother, Mark, tans until he is as dark as a blackout. We were not encouraged to contemplate or celebrate birthdays, so I got confused every now and again when hers was.
Older brother Mark had a photographic memory for movement. Had he followed my advice and become a dancer, he’d be legendary. In my mind, he still is. He and I competed at every sport possible: football, baseball, bikes, skateboarding, surfing, go-karts, motorbikes, ice-skating, water-skiing, tennis, rock climbing.
Baby brother Wesley was a genuine genius who, at a startlingly young age, wrote, directed, and produced brilliant homemade films. Oh, Wesley! Mark and I loved Tonka toys. Wesley loved art supplies. He had to create. I had to roll. I was a ball of kinetic energy. I was also impish and a bit mean. If I were to attack my brothers, my weapon was a set of pins from Mom’s sewing kit. After I struck, Mark chased me furiously as I hopped over thorny huckleberry patches in our backyard. (I can’t help but note how soon in this story huckleberries crop up.) On other occasions, I might shoot Mark with bullets of cork from an air rifle. Sometimes I’d replace the cork with sesame seeds that would fire at lightning speed. Mark was a formidable adversary. Fast as I was, Mark was faster, so fast he’d always catch me and pound me into submission. Our Cain-and-Abel show got off to a fast start.
The soundtrack to all this speed was sixties music. It hit early and it hit hard. I was obsessed with music. Music from the pre-hippie, hippie, and post-hippie epochs, Stones and Doors, Hendrix and Janis, Cream and Bowie, Dylan and Van Morrison, Sly and the Family Stone, soul queen Aretha and soul king James Brown. And of course the Beatles. Music penetrated my soul, drove my engine even faster. I sang morning, noon, and night. Sang myself awake, sang myself to sleep. My heart never stopped singing.
With brothers Mark (left) and Wesley (right)
From as far back as I can remember, I made up songs. I was thrilled by how love rhymed with dove and semi-rhymed with hug. These early pains and pleasures of creativity were critical to my being. Pains because I couldn’t write music but nonetheless heard lilting melodies and lush harmonies. Pleasures because the words spilled from my heart. The words always involved love and longing.
We owned a used upright. I took lessons but never practiced. By the time we got off that school bus from Beverly Hills it was almost night. I was just too tired to practice. In fact, I never wanted to be in the house. I was blessed to be raised in Southern California, where being outside was as easy as sliding into a pair of swim trunks. Yet that piano became a symbol of my unsung songs as well as the few songs my mother played. They were dark, classic pieces, dirges that suggested discord.
Which leads to the question: with all of these familial complications, why was I so happy? I ask because my childhood bliss was bountiful. I was intoxicated by the wonders of the natural world, as well as the world of books written by sages like Mary Baker Eddy, who declared, “Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need.”
I suppose much of this bliss also had to do with physical exhilaration, the pure thrill of being alive. And then came romance.
Father’s Flying Dream, Facing the Chief
Because the Berkeley Hall theater company was a man short, at age fourteen I was asked to play a small part in The Stingiest Man in Town, a musical about Scrooge. Next came the English comedy The Mouse That Roared, where I got to employ a German accent that elicited great laughter. That was the moment I experienced the enormous satisfaction of making hundreds of people laugh. Angels were kissing me all over. I felt different. I felt present in a way I had never felt present before. I had discovered this gift for wild physical comedy that was always there but not really manifest, at least not in a formal setting. I could always entertain family and friends, but these audience members were strangers I had touched, and having been touched were strangers no longer. That transformation forged my future. Deep down, I knew I’d never be able to hack a regular life. I figured I was born to act, not because I recognized my budding talent, but because it seemed easy and simple and a good way to get the girls.
The other thing that inspired me, the cause of my original love of acting, was Marlon Brando. He was everything. He was an artist and acting was his animal, his craft. He purposely chose roles that were impossible for him. He put himself in culturally death-defying situations; he risked embarrassment and injury to try to do something holy and good. He was called to test the medium and try on personalities in such a strange and intense way that, for a moment, you’re riding on something otherworldly. For some, that would be too out-there. For Brando, it was natural, giving and risking everything. A concentration of a love potion into one tiny drop. I watched him and knew that in an ancient village where your last name was your vocation, we would have been part of the same family, and it was my duty to grow up and join the family trade. Loving Marlon was a kind of adolescent rebellion. My bond with Brando was based on something more than admiration as an actor. Somehow I understood he was also a poet of and for humanity.
It was a Saturday afternoon and I wanted Dad to take me to the movies. We liked seeing films together.
“What do you want to see?” he asked.
“The Godfather.”
“Anything but that.”
“Why?” I asked. “Everyone says it’s great.”
“Too violent.”
My first paying role was a commercial for cheeseburgers. I was probably thirteen. Through a friend’s dad who managed the Osmonds, I was hired by an ad agency for a national TV spot. The director liked my look and gave me the few lines that had to be memorized. The main job was to act like I was enjoying gobbling up the burger. Problem was, I wasn’t. The thing tasted like cardboard. The director kept telling me to put my heart into it. I couldn’t. I didn’t. I walked off the set and never appeared in the commercial and never got paid, my first act of artistic integrity.
Onstage, I felt at home and also not at home. That contradiction was not unpleasant. I had some innate confidence that I could turn myself into a character. In my earliest acting experiences, I saw this contradiction cropping up everywhere. I was and was not the character I played. The character went through me, and therefore was me, even as I went through the character and became him. Pieces of me and pieces of him merged. I’m articulating now something I couldn’t articulate then, but it was something I deeply felt. The excitement was extraordinary. For the rest of my life, I would be fascinated by the process of leaving myself to find a character who inevitably contained elements of myself. I was losing myself and finding myself at the same time.
I jump ahead decades to a Comic-Con convention where Batman fans were eager for autographs. I always appreciate their enthusiasm. Fans donned the costumes of their screen heroes and heroines, generating adrenaline-fueled overheated mayhem. In the midst of this pop culture fury, a Native American with long braids walked up to me, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “What is the nature of acting?”
I was prepared for the question. The answer came in the form of a recurring dream—not a dream of my own but a dream of my father’s that he had relayed to me. I, in turn, relayed it to my questioner: A Native American chief, looking perhaps not unlike the man standing before me, furiously ran after Dad, threatening h
im with a tomahawk. It only makes sense that my father, in his depths of sleep, was reliving the true story of his own father being similarly attacked. In the dream, when Dad was pursued all the way to the edge of a cliff, he jumped toward a sea of water below and then, as he was falling, woke up. Same dream, night after night, until one blessed night my father didn’t jump off the cliff but instead turned to his assailant and said, “Okay, just do it. Kill me.” But when the Native assailed my father, rather than ruin his flesh, he went right through him, went through his body and his spirit. They became one. And together, they began to fly. That’s acting. To inhabit. To be in communion with an invisible force. My new Comic-Con friend nodded. He fully understood.
I have a feeling my father’s dream may have been informed by Little Big Man, starring Dustin Hoffman. Dad took me to see it when I was ten. Director Arthur Penn translated Thomas Berger’s novel into the most arresting Western Hollywood has ever made. That’s because the story doesn’t shy away from the genocidal sin that sits in the bosom of the American adventure. As a wide-eyed youngster, I took it all in. I’ve never forgotten the line Little Big Man’s adopted grandfather Old Lodge Skins utters to express joy: “My heart soars like a hawk.” The film had my heart soaring.
For Dad, raised on John Wayne machismo and Westerns glorifying the slaughter of Native Americans, it was a tough film to watch. He belonged to the school that says real men don’t cry. This time, though, I saw he was on the verge of tears. He couldn’t go directly to the car and drive home. He and I walked around the block several times while he started telling me stories. Those were my first hints that our ancestry was connected to Native Americans, many of whom, according to Dad, had suffered cruel injustice. My father didn’t elaborate. I don’t know whether that was because he simply didn’t want to conjure up a painful past or because he wasn’t in command of the facts. It was all vague, but it really didn’t matter. The film deeply affected him.
