I'm Your Huckleberry

by Val Kilmer

  It was a long six-month shoot that included time in London. Although my approach to Joanne was respectful, it was also tenacious. I was not in the least ambiguous about my feelings for her. She, in turn, was not in the least ambiguous about her feelings for me: zero interest. Thus I decided to make a move about which I am ashamed. It’s the worst thing I have ever done to a woman, consciously. Every time I tell this story, I put a blanket over my head to hide my embarrassment. As you read this, please envision me with a blanket over my head.

  With Warwick Davis in Willow

  I’d had a girlfriend who was the unequivocal ideal of beauty, an American sweetheart with a top note or whisper of exotic power. Cherry pie made with fresh rosewater. And she was a budding star.

  Our romance, a sometime thing, had smoldered and simmered for quite a while.

  And by the time Willow began shooting, she may not have still been carrying a torch for me, but she was definitely carrying a candle. I used that candle to invite her to the set of Willow. She willingly flew across the pond, as blushing and bright as ever. On her arrival, the cast and crew were visibly impressed. This striking starlet had come to visit me. My hope, of course, was that Joanne would be equally impressed. I regret to say—and I am also delighted to say—that she was. Regret because there’s always questionable karma when manipulation succeeds. But delighted because my heart was happy. Eventually so was Joanne. The American beauty, not so much. She was crestfallen. My apologies remain ongoing, in person and in the depths of my soul’s consciousness and conscience.

  Madmartigan and Sorsha fell in love. So did Val and Joanne. At the wrap party, we were already wrapped up in one another’s arms. Joanne is an autodidact with an astute literary sensibility. She herself contains extreme sweetness and unbridled toughness. She was once a lead singer in a post-punk band. She moves with the grace of a seasoned dancer. Madly in love, we decided to chill out in London, where Jeremy Irons lent us his flat. The Willow shoot had been arduous. We were bruised from the film’s physical demands. Dead tired, we slept for days. Then I awoke one morning with a bright idea: “Let’s clear our heads. Let’s go to Africa.”

  Joanne’s response: “Why not?”

  We were still so tired, though, that we had trouble negotiating an itinerary. So we changed plans. Fly to the US, recuperate at my house in Santa Fe, and then head to Africa.

  Joanne was game. I was infatuated. The brothers and their mother graciously welcomed Joanne to Santa Fe. She fell in love with the town. We covered ourselves in turquoise jewelry. We were finally clear enough to figure out an African sojourn—and off we went.

  The Kenyan coast. The sky, the sea, a safari that forbade shooting, a thousand exotic birds, a thousand flighty monkeys, the elephants, the elusive eland and kudu, the mysterious leopard. People spend years searching for a glimpse of the mighty leopard, but somehow the most elusive animals just come to me.

  I wanted to share everything with this woman. We set up a tent in the wilderness, its serenity broken only by the appearance, next to our cot, of a monitor lizard that had to be nine feet long, forked tongue to terrifying tail. Joanne was asleep. I thought of awakening her. I didn’t want her to miss seeing this creature who possessed the physicality of a dinosaur. But I didn’t want her to scream and frighten the beast into action. Approaching our cot, he was nearly tall enough to touch our faces with his forked tongue. He turned his head to examine us. I didn’t move. I wasn’t frozen with fear. I was frozen with awe. He inched his way out as deliberately as he’d inched his way in. After he left, I did arouse Joanne and took her outside the tent so she could see the remarkable creature slither his way into the jungle.

  We slithered our way through the jungle ourselves, with guides, without guides, guileless, unafraid, afraid, excited by all we had seen and were about to see, galvanized by the unknown and the new, girded by our love, pledging that love while realizing it had to be expressed before family and friends in the form of, yes, marriage.

  All this happened in about a year. We married in Santa Fe before a hundred of our friends and family members. The celebration was appropriately raucous. Outside of church, we made a private vow: that we would always be together when each of us made a movie. Otherwise, we knew the marriage would never work. Joanne’s career was advancing beautifully. The following year, her role in Scandal as Christine Keeler, the super-sensuous English showgirl, alongside John Hurt, would win her a slew of well-merited accolades.

  Though I had not yet met Brando, I arranged for our honeymoon on his island in Tahiti, which was more feral than we’d ever imagined. One night during a storm, humongous coconuts flew off trees like hail, and we had to run for our lives. It kept us laughing for a solid month. It was a scene out of Apocalypse Now, and our joke was that Brando, whom we never saw on the island, had commissioned the storm simply to get rid of us.

  Just days after our honeymoon, Joanne went off to England to do Scandal and I headed out to the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, where I played the prince of Denmark. I read George Bernard Shaw, who insisted that if the actor portraying Hamlet does a single ridiculous thing, the entire production turns ridiculous—for the better. Testing that theory, seeing that Hamlet can be intimidating to the point of paralysis, I dropped my pants in front of the cast during the first day of rehearsal to present myself as willing to be nearly naked in front of them (I still had my boxers on), to be as humble as the fourth spear carrier, to show them I wasn’t some Hollywood actor they couldn’t make jokes about. We were a family, as all casts are, for a little while anyway.

  The best play ever written is the hardest to render right. My hope was that whimsy might establish the spirit of the production by loosening up the players. My hope came true. Part of that truth was established when I encountered the only truly brilliant acting teacher I ever studied with, Peter Kass. A protégé of Clifford Odets, Peter had instructed Olympia Dukakis, Faye Dunaway, and John Cazale among so many others, and he convinced me that Hamlet was not some unapproachable towering intellect but actually pretty weak. He does what everyone in the play tells him to do, everyone from his stepfather to his vacuous school friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The ghost of his father instructs him to avenge his death, and he takes about four hours to deliberate it. His equivocation, so deeply and inextricably human, is essential to his status as a flawed hero. Yet he does follow through, however against his nature it is.

  I embraced that quality in Hamlet that is endemic to all human beings yet, for all our ability to think through dilemmas, can never be eradicated: confusion. I allowed Hamlet to be confused. In playing Hamlet, I allowed myself to be confused. I allowed confusion to reign. I channeled confusion so that, in a strange way, the confusion made sense.

  I studied Hamlet for ten years before committing to it. I wanted to play him first in a place where there was no fear of national scrutiny, hence the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. I even practiced every day of my honeymoon—something Joanne was justifiably upset with, as much as she was understanding. She has a nearly photographic memory and couldn’t quite grasp how I had to read the play every damn day. I tried to make it clear to her she had married a simpleton who after ten years still hadn’t quite gotten the thing memorized. If you place all of Hamlet’s monologues together, it’s about two hours to read, depending on the delivery.

  Plus, imagine how silly my Hamlet was when I was twelve, then twenty-four, then twenty-seven. Every month nowadays it feels like my life is completely new. Feels good. Except if I had my way my two grown children would live downstairs and I would sleep in my living room. I miss them every hour, even though I live so close to my daughter I can practically yell her name and she could hear me. I have to give them their space, but I don’t want to. I want to smother them and not care that I might ruin their lives. They are my greatest joy, my proudest achievement, even though it is painfully clear I have just about zero to do with their character. I admit it but I don’t have to like it.

  A promotional pho
to for the 1988 Colorado Shakespeare Festival production of Hamlet

  Where were we?

  The Doors

  French poet Arthur Rimbaud died in 1891 at age thirty-seven. American poet Jim Morrison died in 1971 at age twenty-seven. The term enfant terrible applies to them both. They were rebels who abused drink and drugs; they grew their hair long and scandalized society; they were consumed with the power and potential of artistic expression.

  Rimbaud wrote of the “fertility of the mind and the vastness of the world.” Morrison wrote, “I can become gigantic and reach the farthest things. I can change the course of nature. I can place myself anywhere in space or time.”

  I read Rimbaud in a book but got to play Morrison in a movie. I always connected the two. That’s why when I was cast in the movie, I primarily saw myself playing a poet. My esteemed director, Oliver Stone, wrote his very first screenplay for a solid year in his New York studio apartment the moment he returned from Vietnam, a purple heart in his pocket. And who did he write that film for? Jim Morrison. Imagine how Oliver felt watching Apocalypse Now for the first time, hearing Coppola’s brilliant choice of Morrison’s brilliant tune, “The End.” All about death. Probably Jim’s favorite subject.

  I loved making The Doors and working for Oliver. The truth is that I had the fight of my life ahead of me. But not for the reasons you think. Again, I worked on Hamlet for ten years before I felt I was ready. In the case of The Doors, I used every element inside me to embody this character. Unlike so many instances where I used indifference to excite a casting director’s interest, this time I worked my ass off. I had no choice. Because I had a calling. I could not not play Morrison.

  Initially Oliver pretended I wasn’t quite right for the role, or perhaps he wasn’t quite sure himself. He would dangle the carrot and almost torture me. He loved getting under people’s skin. It was a favorite technique of his to generate or capture something real from an actor, not their prepared role, which often, it has to be said, isn’t very spontaneous. I had auditioned for him before, and when I really wowed him, he would lean in and quietly say, “You know, Tom Cruise really really wants to play this part.” Or Bono. Or Nic Cage. I would tease him right back: “Have fun with that.” But I’d offer ideas and excitement along the way. For example, for the part of Jim I felt the actor had to sing the songs live, to have a cathartic experience that the players onstage evoke, not in advance of the audience, but with them in a moment of unique empathy. The role of the actor is to quell alienation, to recognize that in a way, we are all one.

  Jim was a rare baritone-tenor, so I trained to sing in that range. I rented a studio, worked on the songs for months, and made a basement tape. My idea was simple: Present two recordings to Oliver as well as to the original members of the Doors. One tape was me singing, the other was actually Jim. My gamble was to see if Stone and the Doors could tell who was who. When the time finally came, they couldn’t tell us apart. I had found my inner Jim.

  Oliver was visibly moved and quietly offered me the time to record several records with the brilliant invisible fifth member of the band, the producer of all their music, Paul Rothchild. It was love at first sight. He was even more of a maniac perfectionist than me. Some of the songs weren’t even in the film. We were just getting deep into the ozone of the zone. Paul got lost in the revelry and nostalgia. I got lost in the spirit of the Lizard King. Sometimes he was so technical it drove me crazy. I would be knee-deep in a primal scream and hear, “That was great, Jim, but we’re going to go back to line twelve, second stanza, and clean that up a bit. Just a second while we cue it up.” He really thought I was Jim at moments.

  One time I was upset with a particular song. Which made Paul upset. He turned purple yelling at me down the mic in the engineer’s booth. He was suffering at the time and had to have oxygen on occasion. This was one of those times.

  “Stop it, Val!” he shouted. “Stop it! Stop it!”

  “Hey man,” I started. “Hey man” was Jim’s favorite form of address, and I spoke twenty-four seven in his laconic, ironic, super slow delivery. “Hey man, all I am saying is that this song is the dumbest, worst piece of filth I ever wrote and I don’t want to sing it now or ever.”

  “Val, I’m serious,” Paul said. “Stop it. This is too much. I just can’t.”

  He was visibly upset, and started to shake and weep. He went outside, past my recording booth. I immediately followed and apologized in the best Val voice I could muster.

  “I’m really sorry, Paul. I won’t talk in his dialect anymore. It’s just there’s so little time and for me the best way is just—”

  “No, no, no,” Paul said. “It’s not that. It’s… it’s… it’s what you are saying. I don’t know who told you those things about the song but he said them only to me, and I’ve never told anyone. So I just need you to stop it for a while.”

  As Jim Morrison

  It was impossible for me to convince Paul of the utter truth of the situation, but I had always had a knack for this crazy job of mine, and somehow, through all the months and months of studying Jim, his interviews and video, and talking to his friends and reading all his girls’ manuscripts about their time with him, somehow I was able to like the same things he liked—or in this particular case didn’t like—in a poet or a band or even his own writing, as Paul was now freaking out about. I was torturing Paul with the exact words Jim had used all those years ago when they recorded the song that one and only day he ever sang it. And no, I’m not ever going to tell you which song it was. What if it’s your favorite? Where will that get us? I will say it’s none of their zillion top-ten hits. It’s a pretty crap song. Just accept it. I was right. Jim was right.

  I told Paul to take all the time he needed, and I’d walk down the street to visit a friend of mine and be back soon. This guy I knew was a massive cokehead and happened to live near the studio. The drugs got to be too much for me to be around so I never saw this guy anymore, but he was a real smart guy and knew rock and roll really well so it was a timely meeting. When I returned, I applied some of what he told me about Jim’s amazing presence onstage, and I said to Paul, “Do me a favor and put up ‘The End.’ ”

  Paul took a very long time, out of respect for me as an artist, to tell me he just wasn’t going to do that. We had avoided it forever. I just couldn’t sing it. It was too difficult. I grew more and more assertive, and assured him that I really didn’t mind how badly I sang it—a lie—but I just really needed to for my growth as a character, and it was the best way to move past our earlier fight. Finally, he agreed, and as God is my witness, Paul cried even harder after I had finished. He stopped recording and came into the booth and hugged me for the longest time. We both sat on the floor. As a producer, he had always given notes instantly and immediately and demand the artist follow his instructions to the absolute letter. So this was really weird, this break in his professionalism. Finally, he became settled enough to explain. He looked at me with a look I will never forget. And he said, in a whisper, “That was perfect, Val. Perfect. Just perfect. Except for two places. And I swear to God, those are the same two places Jim messed up. That’s why there are two takes of that song, rather than punching-in.” Which is slang for when a producer has an artist record a portion of a song rather than having them record the whole song over again, because it is near impossible to record a flawless track unless you are a mad genius like David Bowie, famous for his one-take masterpieces, or John Lennon or Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen, artists who grew up playing live so recording “live” is second nature to them.

  Well, I got chills like I never had them before during my time playing Jim. So far I had been shocked many times by how I was able to sing way beyond my talent or range. Especially challenging were Jim’s screams—those primal screams which Jim did better than just about anyone and which I practiced endlessly. But that whole day just seemed to have had a lot of Jim floating around Paul and me. So there were two grown men sitting on the dusty floor of a reco
rding studio near Melrose reduced to tears because of Jim Morrison’s prophetic psalm to himself about dying. Not saving it for the end of his career but beginning with it, just so that there would be no doubt in the listener’s mind. “Can you picture what will be / so limitless and free.” I can. I did.

  People assumed I took drugs to emulate Jim’s state of mind. I did the opposite. I stayed super clean, jogging ten miles a day. To get into Jim’s cloudy mind, I required absolute clarity. My routine was physical exertion during the day and Morrison music at night. I also built what are called tailor’s mirrors, enabling you to see three floor-to-head images of yourself all at once, so you can take a glance at your left side while favoring your right. I focused on how Jim would appear from all camera angles. I had to master his look, as he was so familiar to so many fans.

  Yet while I very much cared about the verisimilitude of appearance, I was just as focused on channeling his soul, took hold of him from the inside out, from the ribs. The story to me was Jim’s glory and then his demise, the Greek fleet waiting to sail him into his fate, to die with rock and roll in one mighty catastrophe. Jester, warrior, performer. Maybe, if I tried hard enough, I could break through and reflect his light, free his mind, and, through some Bacchanalian surge of prowess, offer healing to myself, to Jim and everyone watching.

  With this in mind, I offered an approach to Oliver. I thought there was more to the story than the basic idea of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I thought it crucial to represent Jim as a true poet whose forefather was Rimbaud and, through Rimbaud, the Beat poets Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and Corso. Before Rimbaud was William Blake, the mystic eighteenth-century poet who wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.” Aldous Huxley borrowed Blake’s phrase—“the doors of perception”—for the title of his book about psychedelics. I felt we needed desperately to dramatize how deeply Jim wrestled with words, in much the same way as John Keats, he, too, a poet overwhelmed by beauty yet obsessed with the need to express it, a poet whose early death at age twenty-five in some ways mirrored Jim’s. Why is it that poets feel this need to connect with their ancestors? Is it that we all must identify with a tribe?