Father and son tell their stories in chapters that often alternate. Sheen was born in Dayton and graduated from Chaminade High School. His father, Francisco, was born in Spain. His mother, the former Mary Ann Phelan, came from County Tipperary, Ireland.
Sheen was their seventh child. At the time of his birth, the family lived on Brown Street and his father was a drill-press operator at NCR. In this compelling memoir, father and son take turns offering their viewpoints. In so doing they reveal the depth of generations of paternal bonds forged along the way.
Emilio Estevez recently turned 50. Martin Sheen is now in his early 70s. The pair collaborated on another project, a 2010 film called “The Way,” about the pilgrimage of a father and son in Spain. Estevez directed the movie. Sheen portrayed the father.
The book opens with recollections of working together on that movie. Then it proceeds chronologically along the lifelines of both writers. Nuggets of fatherly wisdom gleam throughout these pages.
Sheen observes that “sons absorb messages about manhood at their fathers’ sides, much of it through osmosis, and I observed my father closely whenever I could. All of us lads did. There was such joy in just being with him. At night we would crowd into the house’s single bathroom to watch him shave.”
His father didn’t think much of Sheen’s ambition to become an actor. Undaunted, Sheen took the Greyhound out of Dayton in 1959 to follow his dream in New York City. He was not an overnight success.
Three years later, in 1962, his wife, Janet, had their first child, Emilio. Around the same time, Ramon Estevez took the stage name of Martin Sheen. The family struggled to make ends meet. Acting jobs were scarce.
At one point, Sheen writes, “I couldn’t come up with the month’s rent and we were evicted from the Bronx apartment.” They returned to Dayton to regroup: “We stayed in the house on Brown Street with my father and brothers while I borrowed money from Carl Mayne, the owner of the Dorothy Lane Market.”
Sheen’s role in the film “Apocalypse Now” made him a star. His retelling of this period in his career is spellbinding. When Sheen landed movie roles, his family often went with him on location. They were in Rome when Sheen got the call offering a role in “Apocalypse.”
Sheen had assured his son that shooting on the film would be completed by September so that Emilio could return to high school in Malibu, Calif. After numerous delays things came to a head, and father and son engaged in a physical altercation that had to be broken up by Marlon Brando.
Some transcendent moments in this book exemplify the potency and strength of fatherhood. Many of them relate to Sheen’s father. At one point the actor took his two eldest boys to the remote village in Spain where Francisco was born. The three of them spent the night in the very bed where Sheen’s father was born.
When his father died, Sheen was unable to attend the funeral. Years later he was asked to play a role in a film that would require a sudden outpouring of grief. He was inspired to tackle this role by thinking about his dad.
His father called him Ramon. Sheen wrote his name on the wall. As the cameras rolled, Sheen admits, “I had a personal need to finally mourn my father. I looked at the name RAMON scrawled on the wall, turned around, and wept uncontrollably. That was it. In one take, thanks to my sense memory, the most invaluable emotional tool available to an actor, I was able to fulfill both requirements at the same time.”
In the final chapter, Emilio tugs gently on the thread that holds this story together. He writes: “Our family is not unique in terms of dealing with alcoholism or competition or arguments about faith. But we may be unique, at least by Hollywood standards, in that we’re still together. So many families around us have fragmented and dismissed and abandoned one another. That’s something my father has never done.
“He always hung in there, with each one of us, through everything we’ve faced, and he always finds the will to forgive. That, I think, is his greatest lesson of all.”
Vick Mickunas of Yellow Springs interviews authors every Friday at 1:30 p.m. and on Sundays at 11 a.m. on WYSO-FM (91.3). For more information, go online to www.wyso.org/programs/book-nook. Contact him at vick@vickmickunas.com.
About the Author