Martin Sheen: Heart of Darkness Heart of Gold
Shit,” says Martin Sheen as the makeup man fusses over him, “I’ve got this deformed left arm, three inches shorter than the right, can’t do a thing with it and, gee, I’m just this little guy, five feet eight, 151 pounds. How can that be a star?” He shrugs his shoulders. “Maybe if I looked like Ray,” he cracks as a member of the crew walks by, “I’d be a star. You know, I have this reputation of being choosy about my roles when, in actual fact, I never got many offers.” He shrugs those shoulders again. “I turned down Magic, but after Apocalypse Now I just didn’t want to do any violence.” Another shrug. “And I turned down Prophecy, but that was easy; had toilet written all over it. I never got offered the biggies. Guys like Tony Harvey, Spielberg, all those other assholes would never hire me. But I tell you, if just one of my pictures had made money, been a hit, I would have had a different career.”
“Relax, Marty,” says director Don Taylor. “You’ll be a big star soon. Whether Apocalypse Now is good, bad or indifferent, it will make you a star.”
We are in Norfolk, Virginia, aboard the USS Nimitz, where Sheen is making Final Countdown. It’s a story about a nuclear aircraft carrier that’s caught in a time warp and winds up in Pearl Harbor the day before the attack, with the military capability to destroy the Japanese fleet and, in the process, rewrite history. As we walk down the long, narrow corridors of the Nimitz, Sheen has words for everyone. He talks nonstop — free associates, really — intense one minute, laughing and joking the next. He looks like someone who’s spent the last few days on speed. He is more attractive than he appears on film, with wonderfully expressive blue eyes and a healthy head of hair flecked with gray.
“I am right about this,” continues Taylor as we make our way through the bowels of the Nimitz. “Apocalypse will make Marty a star.”
Sheen has finished shooting for the day and we are sitting in the dining room of the Lake Wright Motel in Norfolk. He’s making fast work of an enormous bowl of vanilla ice cream and strawberries. It is two p.m. and besides breakfast Sheen has already consumed a bag of licorice, a melon, some cherry cobbler, a second bag of licorice, another melon and cookies. He eats like a pig and has the body of a panther: lean and hard. It helps that Sheen runs a minimum of six miles daily and does 500 sit-ups and 500 push-ups. Moderation seems to be an alien concept to Martin Sheen.
In between spoonfuls of ice cream, Sheen talks about Apocalypse. “I want to tell you,” he laughs, “I was nobody’s first choice.” Indeed. The part of Willard was offered to Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan and Jack Nicholson. Finally Harvey Keitel was cast.
This was January 1976, when Sheen was in Rome making a picture called The Cassandra Crossing. His agent called and said that Francis Coppola was interested in him for Apocalypse. But there was a schedule conflict. Several weeks later his agent called again and told him he must fly to L.A. and talk to someone very important.
“I left Rome on Good Friday,” continues Sheen, “and flew to L.A.” He was to meet the director in the VIP lounge, but by the time he got through customs, only fifteen minutes remained before Coppola’s plane left for the Philippines. Coppola quickly ran down his story and told Sheen he was considering him — along with several other actors — for the role of Willard. “The next day,” says Sheen, “Holy Saturday [he thinks of days in terms of religious feasts], I got a call from Coppola’s associate saying that Francis wanted me.” Sheen said yes (he had not read the script), got drunk with his brother Alphonso, picked up the script on Easter Sunday and flew back to Rome. He wrapped The Cassandra Crossing on Monday, and on Tuesday, his wife, Janet, and their four children flew home to L.A., while Sheen headed for Manila to begin a saga that may indeed make him a star, but very nearly cost him his life.
By this time everyone knows that Apocalypse Now is based loosely on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Sheen portrays Willard, a soldier ordered “to terminate with extreme prejudice” a brilliant Green Beret colonel named Kurtz, who has flipped out and has set up his own renegade army in Cambodia. As Willard makes his journey up the river in search of Kurtz, he makes another journey inside himself. In many ways, Willard’s personal odyssey resembles Sheen’s own life. “Sheen is Willard,” says a crew member simply. “I did identify pretty closely with the character,” Sheen agrees. “Making that film was an ordeal, not just physically but emotionally. I was staying in this hotel, and right outside was all this poverty. Pigs running around, children without any teeth.” He pauses. “God, the world we live in is so strange.”
Sheen got sick, lost weight. He would be all jokes and laughs on the outside, but on the inside he was being eaten alive. “Francis had this way of directing,” says one crew member. “He would tell Martin, ‘You’re evil. I want all the evil, the violence, the hatred in you to come out.’ You tell that to a guilt-ridden Irish Catholic and he hasn’t a chance. Martin is so pliable.
“Francis,” the crew member continues, “did a dangerous and terrible thing. He assumed the role of a psychiatrist and did a kind of brainwashing on a man who was much too sensitive. He put Martin in a place and didn’t bring him back.”
As Apocalypse Now opens, Willard is naked and drunk in a Saigon hotel room, waiting for his mission. He moves around the room doing karate exercises, then stops in front of a mirror. The vision he sees so repels him that he chops out at the mirror, smashing it. His hand is bleeding and he smears the blood over his face and body.
Powerful stuff. “Francis,” continues the crew member, “kept Martin drunk for two days before that scene, kept him locked up. Francis kept telling him terrible things like how evil we all are, that we are all killers. It was devastating.” Coppola’s wife, Eleanor, writes about this scene in Notes (her running account of the making of the film):
Yesterday Francis shot the scene in the hotel room. He let Marry get a little drunk, as the character is really supposed to be. He and Marty both knew they were taking a chance. The first layer of the character Marty played was the mystic, the saint, the Christlike version of Willard. Francis pushed him with a few words and he became the theatrical performer, Willard as Shakespearean actor. Francis prodded him again and he moved to a street tough, a feisty street fighter who has been at the bottom, but is smart, knows some judo, is used to a scrap. At this point, Francis asked him to go to the mirror and look at himself and admire his beautiful hair, his mouth. Marty begins this incredible scene. He hit the mirror with his fist. Maybe he didn’t mean to. Perhaps he overshot a judo stance. His hand started to bleed. Francis said his impulse was to cut the scene and call the nurse, but Marty was doing the scene. He had gotten to the place where some part of him and Willard merged. Francis had a moment of not wanting to be a vampire, sucking Marty’s blood for the camera, and not wanting to turn off the camera when Marty was Willard. He left it running. He talked Marty through the scene. Two cameras were going… finally… Francis and Marty were alone. Marty was lying on the bed really drunk, talking about love and God. He was singing an old hymn called “Amazing Grace” and trying to get Francis and me to sing with him, holding our hands and crying. He was strong and wiry like a boxer. Francis was trying to be with him and see that he didn’t hurt himself. His cut finger had been bandaged. It started to bleed again because he was squeezing our hands, hard, and sometimes hitting the edge of the bed. The nurse came in… Marty asked the nurse to pray and sing and I could see she was praying dead seriously… Janet came with their oldest child and Gary [Morgan]. Marty wanted us to hold hands and pray and confess our fears. There was that stiffness that exists when someone is drunk or on dope and you’re not. They’re in a different space… . Marty was preaching and carrying on, singing. Everyone was trying to sort of ease him toward the car. The Filipine nurse was praying out loud and saying, ‘Jesus loves you, Marty.’ It took about two hours to get him in the car and back to the hotel in the rain.
As Sheen was beginning to fall apart, a typhoon came and wiped out all the sets, closing down production. Sheen and his family returned home to Malibu. Sheen did not want to go back to the Philippines. “I held out,” says Sheen. “I fought for more money.” He smiles. “Never got it, the bastard. Francis and I battled over that and had a very heavy falling-out. We reconciled and I went back.”
Recalls his friend, actor Gary Morgan, “When Marty came home after the typhoon he was real scared. He said, ‘I don’t know if I am going to live through this. Those fuckers are crazy, all those helicopters and really blowing things up.’ It was freaky; at the airport he kept saying goodbye to everyone.”
Sheen’s gruesome premonitions were not groundless. He returned to the Philippines and his heart collapsed. “I nearly died,” he says quietly. “I was alone. Janet had gone to Manila for the weekend. I was under a lot of tension. I had terrible eating habits and I was smoking a lot. I had been up and down like a yo-yo all night. I was reading several books at the time: William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, William Saroyan’s Sons Come and Go, Mothers Hang In Forever, a book on the Fonda family and Tennessee Williams’ biography. I kept getting up and picking up one book and then another, and I had this severe pain in my inner elbow. Then my chest started to hurt and I thought, ‘I’d better quit smoking.’ All the while the wind was howling. The pain grew more and more intense as the night went on.
“At dawn I got up and I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes were down to here.” He points to his cheeks. “I looked bad. Then I really began to feel strange and went into the toilet and started feeling faint. I dressed myself, lying on the floor, pulling on my clothes and my combat boots. I crawled to the side of the road and propped myself up and waited. A public bus stopped and loaded me in. I made myself stay awake because I was sure if I lost consciousness I wouldn’t come back. Then the wardrobe van passed and I was loaded into it. We drove to the production office and Dean Tavoularis, the production designer, stuck his head in the van, looked at me and started to cry. A doctor came in and he looked real worried. I just said, ‘Get me a priest.’ And he came and gave me the last rites. Here I am confessing and he couldn’t understand a word of English.” Sheen looks away. He smiles. “Well, who cares. That’s all right.” He smiles again. “I am one of those cliffhanging Catholics. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe that Mary was his mother.”
Sheen takes a deep breath. Talking about this period remains difficult. He continues, “I just wanted to get to Janet. I was lying there for hours. They were trying to decide if they should risk taking me up in a chopper. I said yes and we flew to Manila. An ambulance met us, and as we drove to the hospital I remember getting up and untying my shoes. The doctors were yelling, ‘Lie down,’ and I said, ‘Don’t say another word until I get my boots off.’ I untied one boot and threw it to the floor and then the other. See,” says Sheen, “when I first went to New York twenty years ago, I was on the Bowery one day and watched these morgue people cart away a dead man. This one guy took off the shoes of the dead man and I’ll never forget that. And all the while I was lying there I kept thinking, ‘Take those fuckers off yourself and you’ll make it.’ “
Sheen not only had a heart attack but a nervous breakdown as well. “I completely fell apart. My spirit was exposed. I cried and cried. I turned completely gray — my eyes, my beard — all gray. I was in intensive care. Janet slept on the floor beside me. She called a therapist in New York and I talked to her every day and those two ladies pulled me through. I knew I would never come back until I accepted full and total responsibility for what had happened to me. No one put a gun to my head and forced me to be there. I was there because I had a big ego and wanted to be in a Coppola film.”
Martin Sheen: Heart of Darkness Heart of Gold, Page 1 of 3