From A Moral Frame of Reference
When the President is late, nothing much happens. Martin Sheen, who plays President Josiah Bartlet on "The West Wing," is snarled in Los Angeles traffic, which means his colleagues -- actors Rob Lowe and Allison Janney, and executive producer Aaron Sorkin among them -- can only sit and wait. The instant Sheen arrives, though, the vibe of the whole cast shifts. The task at hand is only the read-through of a new script, but it's as if the real Commander in Chief just stepped into the room. The President is here. Let's get going.Sheen isn't the President, obviously -- he only plays him on TV. But he provides the glue that holds together NBC's top-rated Oval Office drama, now finishing its third season. The show was a favorite at the Clinton White House, and the Bartlet Administration's politics led pundits to dub it "The Left Wing."
Sheen's personal politics are even more liberal than those of his TV alter ego. His positions, the actor says, come from his deep Catholic beliefs. His is the faith-in-action of a true believer, devotion to a vision of social justice that goes way beyond once-a-week Mass. In the last 20 years Sheen has been arrested more than 60 times, during protests supporting the United Farm Workers or gun control or opposing nuclear power or U.S. foreign policy.
His personal history is a classic American success story. Both parents, Francisco Estevez and Mary Ann Phelan, were immigrants, he from Spain via Cuba, she from Ireland via Ellis Island. They raised a family of ten in a three-bedroom house in Dayton, Ohio, getting by on Francisco's salary as an inspector at National Cash Register.
After high school the kid born Ramon Estevez left for New York City, adopting the name Martin Sheen in part because he admired fiery preacher Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. He married his wife, Janet, in 1961, and early experimental theater parts led to steady work on Broadway and TV. By the '70s Sheen was a top Hollywood star. Then came Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's sprawling Vietnam epic. Sheen was a military operative sent to assassinate a rogue American officer, played by Marlon Brando. On location in the Philippines, Sheen, then 36, had a heart attack and nearly died.
The attack set off alarm bells about nearly every aspect of his life. He was working -- and drinking -- too hard, and spending too much time away from his family. Searching for a way to get his life on track, he found himself heading back to the Catholic faith of his parents. That, in turn, led to a spiritual awakening that sustains him still. To interview Sheen, 61, we chose Presidential historian Michael Beschloss.
RD: Your politics began unusually early on. Were your parents political?
Sheen: Not actively. My mother was only 48 when she died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and I was around 11. So I didn't really get a good sense of her. I do know her uncle was big-time IRA, right in the center of the Republic, right in the heart of the Troubles.
My dad thought politicians were all crooks, but he had a great love for America. He came from abject poverty and no hope, and he knew most of the world did too. He'd bitch about the economy and politicians, but you couldn't say a word against the country. You'd get a look from him, man, you'd never open your mouth again.
RD: What was your relationship with him like?
Sheen: He was my first image of God, as our fathers should be. I left home when I was 18 and came back for the first time when I was 21, and I was surprised -- he was only five-seven, and I could look over the top of his head. We would be in public and I'd slouch down. How can you be taller than your father?
We also learned our politics from our association with the upper crust. My brothers and I were caddies at a local country club. I started in 1949. The pillars of the community belonged -- some of them were very nice people, but the majority of them were unconscious. They didn't know your name. You were a servant. You were called caddie.
RD: Did this breed class anger? Did it lead you to think, Why is it that these people are inside and other people are outside?
Sheen: They were all, obviously, well-to-do. They told the most obscene jokes. Jokes that -- I mean, we'd be embarrassed to share. About women and blacks and Jews. So for nine years I was schooled by these people, and I learned what not to do, how not to be. So my conscience was formed, in a moral kind of frame of reference. And I never had any great respect for the rich. Even today, my wife gives me the business. Because if I'm with a wealthy person, I always pick up the check. I always go out of my way to pay my way.
RD: Demonstrations are so much a part of your life now. Were you moved at the time to protest?
Sheen: The only demonstration I ever led was a caddie strike, about 1953, for higher wages. I founded a union, which lasted 48 hours. We picked Ladies Day, Tuesday morning. The ladies had never carried their own bags. They crushed the union and the only members left were my brother and I. He would have stuck with me to the end, but I finally let him off the hook. And he said okay, and we went back to work.
The Honorable Profession
RD: Sometimes people are moved to ambition by an early personal challenge. Tell me a bit about the problem with your arm.Sheen: My left arm was smashed from the forceps at birth. They put me aside to work on my mother. They didn't think I was going to survive. They baptized me, even. My arm never got tended to and it grew withered. My left arm is half the size of my right. It's about three inches shorter. I've learned to carry it so that it doesn't look that way.
When I was in New York, I decided to have it fixed. I went to a clubfoot clinic in New York Hospital. They were very excited. Never saw anything like me before. They were going to cut the tendons so I could turn it. I can't turn it any further than that, see?
I went to the clinic that first morning and was the first one there. Soon the room filled up with people who were really suffering. I got up and left. I said, "I don't have a problem. These guys are the ones who have real problems." I never went back.
RD: Did your father want you to become an actor?
Sheen: He didn't. We would fight all the time. I was in plays and I had made it known that I didn't want to go to college. He'd saved money for me, putting a few bucks aside every week for me to go. And I would try to assure him, "Look, I'm making a living on the golf course. Let me go -- "
"No. You're the one I'm worried about. You've got to work with your mind. Your body's not up to it." The arm really bothered him.
RD: So you went to New York, early '59. Did he try to dissuade you?
Sheen: I almost had to crawl over him to get out of the house. Finally, when he saw that I was determined, he blessed me.
RD: Apocalypse Now, which came out in 1979, marked a big turning point personally and professionally, didn't it?
Sheen: After Apocalypse Now. I nearly died over there. I had a drinking problem I had to come to grips with. My career shot up and I was getting a lot of offers and my life was changing. But I was three sheets to the wind. I had not been a Catholic for many years, so the children were not raised Catholic. They had no spiritual values. They had moral values, they were good people. But they had nothing to fall back on. So for lack of a better word, I went on a journey to try and unite these parts of myself.
RD: Was there a sudden revelation?
Sheen: It was a cumulative thing. In 1981 I was shooting the film Enigma in Paris. I was just back from India, it was winter, and I was very depressed. I ran into [director] Terrence Malick. He was on his own spiritual journey, and he knew something was going on with me. We talked, and talked, and he gave me books and other things to read. One day he gave me The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. At the end of the book I realized I was in need of a faith, of a grounding, that I was still really a Catholic, and that I must return.
I was starting to go to a little church in the Avenue Hoche. On May Day, 1981, I went down to the church and pounded on the door. The priest came and I said, "I've been gone for a long time. I want to come home." He said, "You come on Saturday, and you better be early because I've got a wedding at 4 o'clock. We'll look after you." And he did. I've been a Catholic ever since.
The next twenty years were the most difficult of my life, but by far the happiest. I came back to the church of [Catholic activists such as] Mother Teresa, Daniel Berrigan and Dorothy Day, and began to get involved in social-justice issues.
RD: Why were the next twenty years the most difficult?
Sheen: Because religion, if it's real, can't be a sometime thing. It can't be a Sunday thing. Christ was killed because -- well, because he was a rebel. They didn't kill him because he was a nice guy. He was a troublemaker. He was changing the law, the letter of the law, because he changed the heart.
Martin Luther King said the church is the place to go forth from. Even his fellow preachers said, "Hey, man, what are you doing in the streets?" He said we've got to take what we believe into the streets. If it has moral value, we have to live it and lead.
You know, I was praying that our church would condemn the violence in Afghanistan, and not give the imprimatur to the war, and remain nonviolent, as Jesus was. And they did not. But still we have to go on.
RD: But what do you say to some guy who writes you and says that to respond to September 11 with non-violence means that the violent people will eventually take over the earth?
Sheen: I wrote a prayer the day of the attack, it's here on my door. It says, "Let us pray. First let us choose our enemy well, for he is who we will become. Therefore, let us not pray for vengeance. For surely only darkness and despair are the gods of such idolatry. Rather, let us pray for justice and that we may become worthy of the long promised blessing reserved for the merciful. Amen."
I only have one enemy. That's me. I'm the only one that I fight to change, and I have very little success. The bottom line is, I don't know anything. I believe a lot of things. Do they work? I haven't really had enough faith to move that mountain. There's that old saying, "We shouldn't be critical of Christianity. We've never tried it."
RD: So what does it say that there's a big audience for The West Wing?
Sheen: It's very gratifying that viewers do care, that politics is not a sometime thing, that people are deeply concerned about major issues. A lot of young people have been inspired by the show and are getting interested in public life as a result. We like to think we have an influence there, that we have made people feel it's an honorable profession to be a servant for your country.