S3 Ep4 Identity

Network Sting: MSW Media

Martin: Hello and welcome to the third season of the Martin Sheen Podcast with yours truly, Martin Sheen, of course. And I’m delighted to be back hosting this podcast pilgrimage, where the destination is still and always will be the journey itself. Along the way, I plan to share stories and personal memories of some of the many people, places, and events that have helped to shape my lifelong happy and continuing struggle as an artist and a man to unite the will of the spirit with the work of the flesh. I also hope to explore poetry as a powerful form of expression and communication by proxy, as it were, and how poetry is such a vital and necessary component of our spirituality and our public discourse. And from time to time, I’ll invite friends, fellow actors, poets, scholars and family members to join our pilgrimage and discuss what inspires their artistic journey. And so, friends, let us continue.

Martin: What’s in a Name?

I was very proud and pleased to see my son begin his documentary, AKA Charlie Sheen, on Netflix, with the story of his difficult birth, his real name, Carlos Irwin Estevez, after Dr. Erwin Chabon, the doctor who delivered him and saved his life, and an explanation of why he decided to change his name legally. For my own part, my legal name remains Ramon Gerard Estevez, and as it appears on my original Social Security card, marriage certificate, driver’s license and passport, as well as my draft card, by the way. But for nearly my entire adult life, I too an AKA, also known as Martin Sheen.

Growing up, my father was the only one in the family who pronounced my first name properly. Ramon, he would intone, and coming from him, it sounded classical and romantic. But all my nine siblings pronounced it Rimon, or they called me by my nickname, Isaac. From grade school through high school, most of my teachers called me Ray. So did all my friends and the coaches and counselors at the Boys Club, as well as the caddie master at the golf course where I caddied for many years. Even the clergy at Holy Trinity, my parish, called me Ray. But Ray is short for Raymond and could never replace Ramon. However, my last name, Estevez, was another matter altogether. For the record, there are two correct pronunciations, Estevez or the Spanish pronunciation Estevez. But I’m often amused at the interesting attempts addressed to me, such as Esteve, Estevich, Esteban, or the ever-popular Estes, which I always and politely respond to, and I’ll leave it at that.

When I began my career, I had no intention nor any need, so I thought, to consider changing my name. But when I arrived in New York City in 1959, to my innocent astonishment and moral shame, discrimination against the Hispanic community, in particular Puerto Ricans, was rampant. They were considered the new immigrants despite the fact that every Puerto Rican is an American citizen by birth. Nevertheless, they were conveniently labeled the problem and blamed for most of the ills that plagued the city. While I was proud to be counted among them, if in name only, finding work as an actor was hard enough, having a Hispanic surname was not making it any easier unfortunately. And so, solely on my own, without any consultation with anyone, including my father back in Ohio, I made a purely commercial and practical decision to adopt the stage name Martin Sheen. I chose Martin from Robert Dale Martin, the head of casting at CBS TV, who was a great source of encouragement to me when I started out, and Sheen after Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Auxiliary Bishop of New York, whose national primetime TV program Life Is Worth Living was a huge success in the 1950s and made him the first and only Catholic TV evangelist. As a youngster, I didn’t always understand his weekly half hour tutorials on religion and theology or morality in politics. I knew he was conservative. Of course, most public figures were conservative in the 50s. I was impressed with his dramatic flair and striking presence. He was like a Shakespearean actor with powerful charisma, and I admired him greatly.

So it was off with the old and on with the new. And when I tried out the new name with some fellow actors every single one of them agreed it was a better fit since they said I looked far more Irish than Spanish to begin with. Thus, armed with this new name that I assumed would help ease my reentry into the fray, my acting career began again in earnest. But not so fast, Mr. Estevez. There were some problems I did not anticipate. To begin with, I had no official identification for the new name. So when I got my first paycheck for an acting job, I couldn’t cash it anywhere. When I wrote to the IRS and the Social Security office in Washington D.C. they responded to my dilemma with a new Social Security card, same number, new name. From then on, whenever I worked as an actor, I was Sheen and it was Estevez whenever I worked at all the other jobs, like American Express, stock boy, theater usher, messenger boy, soda jerk, or the long running job at the Bay Street Car Wash on Staten Island. The manager there was a wonderful man, a retired New York Fire department captain named Vince Baldesano, and I admired him greatly. I was the youngest guy in the crew and he always looked out for me. One day, after many months on the job, he took me aside in confidence and asked, are you an actor? I am, I replied sheepishly. Well, he went on, do you have another name? I do, I confessed. It’s Martin Sheen. Ah. Ah, well, mystery solved. He laughed. This guy’s been calling here for you. And with that, he handed me a slip of paper with the name and number for Joe Papp, who wanted to cast me in the next production of the New York Shakespeare festival in central Park.

Another problem with a new name change is remembering it and responding in kind. I had introduced myself to my future wife Janet as Martin before I got around to telling her my real name was Ramon. But it was too late I guess. To this day, she calls me Martin.

As the children were growing up, they knew their father was Ramon called Martin. Of course they called me dad or pop. It was all the same to them. But when they reached young adulthood and began to express interest in an acting career, the two different names gave them considerable pause. Emilio was seriously considering the possibility of a last name change only, though clearly Emilio Sheen was an odd fit. I urged him to keep his name and confessed in confidence my lifelong disappointment and regret for changing my name despite never changing it legally. Eventually, he came to his own decision to keep his name as is and remains happy he did so to this day. So too, did my son and namesake Ramon, decide to keep his original name, as well as my daughter Renee. And needless to say, I was relieved and proud of all three. I was no less proud of Charlie, but he flew out of the gate as Sheen so fast and rose so high, there was no turning back. He assured me he intended to honor the name Sheen and me by keeping the legacy alive with his own career and family. And of course, I gave him my blessing. But I must confess, I was caught off guard when he changed to Sheen legally. I thought of my own father, and though he never expressed it, I know how disappointed he was at my name change when I saw him looking up at the marquee where I was playing on Broadway in the subject was roses. Now, I knew how he felt then, and it took me a while to adjust to Charlie’s decision, but in due time, I assured him I accepted his choice and gave him my blessing with great pride and love.

A name is a deeply personal possession. For most of us, it is the only thing we carry from the cradle to the grave, where it is often carved in stone. The importance of one’s own name can never be underestimated, as witnessed in the final scene of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, where the leading character, John Proctor, Is on trial. He has confessed to a blatantly false charge in order to save his life, but he adamantly refuses to sign his name to it. Danforth, the prosecutor, knows it is a false confession, nonetheless, he demands he sign it. Explain, Proctor, he roars why you will not sign John. Proctor roars back, because it is my name. Because I cannot have another one. How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul. Leave me my name. And with that, he went to the gallows. Of course, I have no way of ever knowing how my career or my personal life would have been affected had I not changed my name. I must say, Emilio, Estevez and Charlie Sheen have done extremely well with both names and on both levels. So what’s in a name? Clearly, it all depends on what we think it’s worth.

Martin: Consider This from American poet Charles Bukowski. Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.

Martin: We’re going take a little break here, but I assure you there’s much more to come. Stay tuned.

Martin : And we’re back. Thanks for staying with us.

Martin: When we had wrapped for the day, my producer Renee asked if I’d like to have a chat with her at the mic, and Bruce, our, sound engineer, was kind enough to stay a bit longer to accommodate us. So then, I’m delighted to welcome my favorite daughter and producer to the mic.

Martin: Renee. Okay, now, I’ve got a lot to talk to you about.

Renee: Yikes.

Bruce: You got some straining to do.

Renee: I can start us out if you’d like. Or do you? It’s your show. You can start us out. It’s your show.

Martin: Okay, we’re ready. You ready?

Renee: Oh, great.

Martin: Here we go.

Renee: I couldn’t help but want to get in on the action here, because you’ve been talking to everybody at this mic. You’ve talked to all three of my brothers. Ramon, Charlie, Emilio. You’ve talked to my mom,

Martin: the mama bear. Yeah.

Renee: Janet, your wife.

Martin: Yeah. Okay.

Renee: You’ve talked to your great granddaughters, Luna. Ah. Sarah, Jade. You’ve talked to your grandson and his wife, Taylor and Julia. And you’ve talked with your grandkids, Paloma and her partner, Reed. And you’ve talked with your other granddaughter, Cassandra, and her husband Casey.

Martin: It’s about time you showed up.

Renee: It’s about time I sat down with you and had a little chat. And I feel like everybody has this unique relationship with you in this family. None of us have a relationship that is even remotely like the others.

Martin: Ah, okay.

Renee: You know, and I’m seeing that more and more clearly as I get older. Like, you and Emilio have a very strong friendship as you’re getting older. You two are like two old friends.

Martin: Yeah.

Renee: And you and Charlie have a much deeper creative friendship as you’re getting older. And you and Ramon have some wonderful stories to share and I think some great laughs. You share this great sense of humor. And you and mom still have a lot to fight about

Martin: And a lot of memories to.

Renee: Wait a second. It didn’t happen that way.

Martin: Oh, of course. Yeah.

Renee: Yeah. And I can’t help but being struck by how much literature and art has played a huge part of our relationship, yours and mine.

Martin: Yeah. It’s true. Yeah. I think we are the only ones in the family that have a great love for reading. Given my druthers, I prefer a good book, a soft chair, and no phone or interruption. Because I love to read. And I think you do as well.

Renee: I do. I do. I wish I had more time to do it nowadays. I really do. And it is, it’s like a muscle, when you stop doing, when you walk away from books for a while, it’s hard to come back. I’ve fallen away from reading, and I really miss it. Cause good books were like were like friends in my life. They really were.

Martin: And it inspired you to write as well? No.

Renee: Oh, yeah. Are you kidding? I mean, who wasn’t inspired? Well, I’ll back up a little bit here. You offered me Hemingway when I was a child, particularly the Nick Adams stories. I wasn’t really ready to read, well, I didn’t really care for a lot of his novels for some reason. I just didn’t. Yeah, but I just devoured his short stories, in particular the Nick Adams stories. And also, what writer was an influence by reading the Hills Like White Elephants? That is such a deep and amazing story. And as a writer, you’re looking at it going, wow, that’s some genius right there. But you handed me, the Human Comedy by William Saroyan when I was. How old was I? 10 or 9 or 10?

Martin: Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Renee: We were in Rome for you, doing Cassandra Crossing.

Martin: Yeah. Ah,I remember.

Renee: I think it was around that time. Cause I remember standing on a train platform going somewhere, and your favorite line to me used to always be, whatcha readin’?

Martin: Really?

Renee: After a while. Yeah. You would hand me books, and we’d have a moment. We’d be standing there, and if we weren’t singing a song, you’d be like, what you reading?

Martin: Oh, man.

Bruce: Boom.

Renee: I was like, hey, I’m in the middle of The Human Comedy by Saroyan right now. And it’s just breaking my heart. You know, the story of Homer.

Martin: Delivering the messages, from the telegrams to the mothers during the war of the soldiers that had been killed in Europe and Asia.

Renee: Yeah. And I remember,

Martin: And I wondered if you would relate that story of, I was in Paris in 1981 doing a film. And you and the brothers and your mother were only able to join me at Easter vacation. Cause you were still in school, and you had decided to write William Saroyan a letter.

Renee: I did. I wrote him a fan letter.

Martin: Yeah. Yeah. Tell us about that.

Renee: Well, I wrote it, and we were talking about how do we get it to him.

Martin: And we knew that he was in Veterans Administration Hospital, was he not?

Renee: Yes. And I believe you encouraged me to send it, and I wrote it. And what was it just a few short weeks later?

Martin: It was less than that. It was like a week later when the news came that he had passed away. Yeah. Ah.

Renee: And you and I remember looking at each other going, I wonder if he ever got that letter

Martin:  If he ever got it. Yeah.

Renee: You know, did he get that letter? Did he know somebody still enjoyed his work? Did it mean anything? Did he not get it?

Martin: Well, it wouldn’t have depended on us. I’m sure there were a lot of people that were great fans and cared about him personally. He was beloved.

Renee: I can’t imagine they weren’t. You know, after that. I remember as I got older, just the floodgates opened, and I used to just devour books. Everything. I could find, some very unusual books, some books that were definitely over my head at the time

Martin: Who was your favorite author?

Renee: My favorite? Well, it was a book that changed my life.

Martin: Which one was that?

Renee: On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

Martin: Oh, really?

Renee: I got that book when I was 17. Now, mind you, by the time I was reading it, it was 1984.

Martin: Yeah.

Renee: Yeah. And I remember reading that book and just the images, the friendship, and just the intensity of life. I had never read an author who had stream of consciousness like that before, like that. I had always read things that were almost like prose. And before that, it was F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Martin: Of course, you, prefer nonfiction, to fiction.

Renee: I think I prefer fiction.

Martin: Really?

Renee: Yeah.

Martin: Okay.

Renee: Hm. But I remember reading a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald and just loving that. Absolutely loving that. Particularly, the book that he never finished, The Last Tycoon. There was a line in that book that literally was like, he’s talking about L.A., talking about the entertainment industry, and he says, there are no pretty girls in la. There’s just chorus lines. I was like, wow, what a cynical view of a world that is. And that was 1920s 20s, 30s of Hollywood.

Martin: It was about the producer at MGM who died very young. And that’s who the book was really about.

Renee: No, but I absolutely loved, loved his works. but then, ah, Kerouac came along in my life, and when I found out how he wrote and I read On the Road, it changed everything for me. It changed the way I saw literature. It’s changed the way I read books.

Martin: And then you started writing, too.

Renee: I started writing, yeah. And, But I do remember you used to write a great deal when I was younger. When you were in your 30s, you wrote scripts and poetry, things. I used to run across stuff at yours in the house.

Martin: I wasn’t anticipating anyone ever reading it, honestly.

Renee: But that’s the best kind because you write it for yourself.

Martin: True for you.

Renee: You know, there’s never going to be ears on it.

Martin: Yeah.

Renee: I mean, eyes on it. Or you’re never going to say it aloud. You know, people aren’t gonna hear it.

Martin: So who’s your favorite poet?

Renee: Oh, wow, that’s a tough one.

Martin: Yeah.

Renee: Cause I haven’t read as much poetry as I have until we started this, this podcast.

Martin: No, I’m not.

Renee: I used to read a ton of it when I was back in high school.

Martin: Did you prefer modern poetry to kind of ancient stuff?

Renee: I just preferred free verse. Yeah, definitely free verse. I know you’re not a big fan, but I do dig Whitman. Not all his stuff.

Martin: Sorry Walt

Renee: You’re still going to talk to me, right?

Martin: Okay, no, we would. I, you know, I think he’s an incredible man with an incredible life. I just found his poetry really difficult to record, to read. You know, a couple of them, we did a couple of his poems.

Renee: We did one.

Bruce: We did one, yeah.

Martin: Ok. Yeah. Which poem was that again?

Renee: Something about the Sea.

Martin: Yeah.

Mart: I have to say, when I first started looking at poetry, of course, you know, I looked at Rambeau and, some of the beat poets I liked. I liked Ferlinghetti.

Martin: You met him, didn’t you?

Renee: No. I did go looking for him, though, at City Lights up in, I used to go to San Francisco regularly and,

Martin: Yeah, and you studied up there. So you lived in the city for

Renee: Well, that was many years later. Yeah. but I’m just trying to think, I read a lot of different poets. While everybody was getting into Dickinson and Browning, I never found a simpatico there for myself. I never found a foothold for some reason, very, very rarely. Very, very little of it.

Martin: Did you find the sentiment was too overwhelming?

Renee: Maybe it was. Maybe that’s what it was. I had picked up very early in my life your total, like, just loathing of sentiment.

Martin: Sentiment for an artist.

Renee: You hated that. Yeah.

Martin: Sentiment.

Renee: You said sentiment was the death of art.

Martin: Sentiment belongs to an audience.

Renee: Yeah.

Martin: It doesn’t belong to the artist.

Renee: It’s interpretation, not performance. And so I looked at things and wanted something very real and visceral. but after that, after I left high school and was reading more plays or books, really fell away from poetry. And thanks to you, I am back.

Bruce: Awesome.

Martin: Now it’s my fault.

Renee: In fact, thanks to you, the whole country is back with poetry. So, anyway, I’ll let you go.

Martin: I’ll let you go.

Renee: Are these proceedings concluded?

Martin: These proceedings are concluded. And, thank you so much.

Bruce: Okay, let’s record one now. Okay.

 

Martin: The Poet as thief by W.D. Ehrhart.

Was Prometheus a poet. Rimbaud says he was. Stealing fire from the gods, technology, knowledge, human arts and science. He paid a terrible price for his audacity. Whatever was he thinking? Look what we have done with what he gave us. Okay, we got the Mona Lisa, Hamlet, Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, movable type, and the Brooklyn Bridge. But how about the Spanish Inquisition, the siege at Munster, TNT, mustard gas, the Maxim gun, flamethrowers, the Holocaust, Rwandan genocide, Predator drones, Hellfire missiles, thermonuclear bombs. Thanks a lot, Prometheus. Poor sucker. I’d have to say you didn’t do us any favors.

W.D. Ehrhart is a poet, writer, scholar, and teacher, as well as a Marine Corps combat veteran of the American war in Vietnam. His work is a blend of social commentary and personal experience. He lives and works in Pennsylvania and regularly contributes to the New Hampshire Gazette.

Martin: I invite you to delve further into the works of the poets I shared with you, and I hope you seek out writers and poets whose work speaks to your hearts and minds, with the power to inspire your life. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard here, please subscribe to my podcast, The Martin Sheen Podcast, with your host, yours truly, Martin Sheen. Of course, wherever you find your podcasts. Yeah, I still have to say that. You can find a complete list of the poets and titles of their poems that I’ve chosen at our website, themartensheenpodcast.com

I want to thank the people who make this podcast possible. Our producer and research assistant Renee Estevez, whose explanation of the Internet really gets me thinking… what’s for lunch? And our sound engineer and editor, Bruce Greenspan, the man behind these rich and seamless recordings with the much-deserved nickname the Sound Surgeon. And I especially want to thank you our listeners, for joining me.

And so, friends, we part with the prayer from Tagore.

We are called to lift up this nation and all its people to that place with a heart is without fear and the head is held high where knowledge is free, where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls, where words come out from the depths of truth and tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection, where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sands of dead habit, where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever widening thought and action, into that heaven of, freedom, dear Father, let our country awake. Amen.

Renee: The Martin Sheen Podcast all rights reserved. No part of this podcast may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form without prior written consent of the author and TE Productions.

The story “What’s in a Name” by Ramon Gerard Estevez, AKA Martin Sheen is included here by copyright permission of the author.

The poem the “Poet As Thief” by W.D. Ehrhart is included in this podcast by granted copyright permission of the author, who we thank for this opportunity to share his poetry. W.D. Ehrhart is currently the only living poet on this podcast.