S1 Ep10 Friends Remembered

Network Sting: MSW Media Media.

Martin Sheen: Hello and welcome to the Martin Sheen Podcast with yours truly, Martin Sheen, of course, and I’m delighted to be your host for this podcast pilgrimage where the destination is 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 begin.

I find myself lately thinking a great deal about the past. And although I am still very interested, of course, to see what new discoveries await just around the corner, I’d like to take a moment with this particular episode to pause and remember many of those dear friends who are no longer with me on this journey.

For the past 40 plus years, I have belonged to a small parish community with a grade school attached to it. While there are a number of high-profile personalities among the congregation, none could hold a votive candle to the two extraordinary Irish clergy who served there.

Our pastor, Monsignor John Sheridan, and the school principal, Sister Mary Campbell. One evening, my wife Janet and I had the special pleasure to attend a dinner with these two beloved friends, just the four of us. When, predictably, the talk turned to Ireland, and then gradually to Irish writers and poets, and eventually, alas, to William Butler Yeats and my favorite Yeats poem, “The Isle of Innisfree.” No sooner had I mentioned the title when Sister Mary began reciting the poem word for word from memory, and I was spellbound.

Her recitation was so simple, so fresh, so honest, and so deeply personal in her soft Irish tone. It was as if I’d never heard the poem before. And when she finished, she smiled shyly and said, I learned it from childhood. It was part of our culture. Tragically, just a few years later, both John and Mary died in a horrible car crash. And when I spoke at her memorial, I shared the story of that magnificent recitation of the Yeats poem. And I read it in her memory. Since then, Sister Mary and that poem are inextricably connected for me. I cannot mention one without recalling the other, and both live with equal joy in my heart’s memory.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats.

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes

dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

William Butler Yeats was born June 13. He was an Irish poet, dramatist and writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish literary revival and along with Lady Gregory, founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. He served as its chief during its early years. He was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature and later served two terms as a senator of the Irish Free state. Yates died January 28, 1939. He was 74 years old.

Consider this a very brief poem from Edna St. Vincent.

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But, ah my foes, and oh, my friends –

It gives a lovely light!

Please stay with us. We’ll be right back.

Welcome back. I’m glad you stayed.

And now.

When I think of Shakespeare’s Sonnet Number 30, I cannot do so without remembering so many of the wonderful actors and actresses that I started out with and nourished my life from the time I began my career in New York City at the age of 18 until this present day. And so I want to dedicate this reading of Sonnet 30 to as many of those good, wonderful, talented people as I can remember.

Joe Papp, Julian Beck, Judith Molina, Vasik Shimek, Warren Finnerty, Leonard Hicks, Michael Hite, Gene Roach, John Coe, Zalman King, Patricia King, Henry Proach, Frank Kalla, Ralph Waite.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

Martha Scott Hurd Hatfield, Warren Oates, Michael Parks, Frank D. Gilroy, Chris Penn, Ramon Birai, Dennis Hopper, Irene Daly, Tony Musante, Roscoe Lee Brown, Edward, Herman. Charles Frank Lawton.

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:

Penny Allen, Anna Strasberg, George C. Scott, Patricia Neal, Johnny Darin, John Spencer Helen Ray

Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,

For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,

And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,

And moan th’; expense of many a vanish’d sight;

Clyde Ware, Marlon Brando, Sam Bottoms, Billy Hootkins, Brock Peters, Frederick Forrest, Buck Grimaldi, Colleen Wilcox, Dom DeLuise, Ava Gardner, Alan Arkin

Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,

And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er

The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,

Which I new pay as if not paid before.

Leo Penn Galt, MacDermott, Carroll O’, Connor, Ruby Dee, Samantha Langevon, Ozzie Davis, Colleen Dewhurst, Richard Harris, Charles Grodin, Jack Albertson, Tom Aldrich

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle. Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I came to this Next selection by W.H. Auden because one day in 1985 I got a call from Joe Papp, founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater and a man I dearly loved. He was calling to offer me the lead role in the London production of Larry Kramer’s hit play the Normal Heart, which was set to open at the Royal Court Theatre in London in January of 1986. Of course, I accepted without hesitation. And thus began one of the most gratifying experiences of my career. In my research, I discovered that the title of the play came from this poem by W.H. Auden entitled “September 1, 1939,” which was the very day Germany invaded Poland and the start of World War II.

Here is

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives on Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid, as the clever hopes expire of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear circulate over the bright and darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives; the unmentionable odor of death offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can unearth the whole offence from Luther until nowThat has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz, what huge imago made a psychopathic god:

I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew all that a speech can say about Democracy,

And what dictators do, the elderly rubbish they talk

To an apathetic grave; analyzed all in his book, the enlightenment driven away,

The habit-forming pain, mismanagement and grief:

We must suffer them all again into this neutral air where blind skyscrapers use

Their full height to proclaim the strength of Collective Man,

Each language pours its vain competitive excuse:

But who can live for long in an euphoric dream;

Out of the mirror they stare, imperialism’s face and the international wrong.

Faces along the bar cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out, the music must always play,

All the conventions conspire to make this fort assume the furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are, lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash, important Persons shout is not so crude as our wish:

What mad Nijinsky wrote about Diaghilev

Is true of the normal heart; for the error bred in the bone

Of each woman and each man craves what it cannot have,

Not universal love but to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark into the ethical life

The dense commuters come, repeating their morning vow;

“I will be true to the wife, I’ll concentrate more on my work,”

And helpless governors wake to resume their compulsory game:

Who can release them now, who can reach the deaf, who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie, the romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street and the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere, ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, on February 21, 1907. He was a prolific playwright and poet who published over 400 poems, including the Age of Anxiety, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1947. He taught at Oxford as well as the University of Michigan and Swarthmore College and became a U.S. citizen in 1946. He died on September 29, 1973, in Vienna, Austria. W.H. Auden was 66 years old.

Please stay tuned. I’ll be right back.

Welcome back.

Now hear this from the open mic. When we had finished recording, I found myself at the open mic sharing impromptu stories with my producer and engineer about my early days in New York and my friendship with Joe Papp.

When you, Joe Papp, taught me everything about Shakespeare. I was supposed to do “Hair”. I told you. I auditioned for “Hair.” The original production of “Hair” was at the. Yeah. In 1968. And I went down and I auditioned and I got the part. I was going to play the guy who goes off to Vietnam and gets killed in the end. And the writers were two homeless kids living in the attic of the theater down in Lafayette street where you used to live nearby. They were writing this play, and Joe Papp kept saying, these guys are up there, they’re writing something interesting. The war is raging and so forth. And he got his friend Galt McDermott from Staten island to write the music. And Galt McDermott wrote “Hair”. And he was working with me on the piano, teaching me how to sing some of the songs. And I came home that day, and your mother said, what do you got there? And I had the script for “Hair.” And I said, I have the most extraordinary play that’s going to be the biggest hit of the year. I wasn’t in it, but because of the, because those kids decided to play it themselves. But because of that audition, Joe called me and he said, I want you to do “Hamlet.”

We’re doing a rock version of Hamlet. And I’m going to do the play at the Public Theater. And you’ll play Hamlet. I said, I will. Thank you. And that’s how I learned it. But it came from “Hair”. There were two musicals that Joe Papp did that saved the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater. There was “Hair” and “A Chorus Line.”

They both came out of the attic of that theater. People going and doing, what they called a workshop. But that was it. And that and the profits from that, it changed the whole theatrical life of the theater in New York. And they started funding it. And it’s still there, still there today. You can right now, in August. They’re running all the way through the end of August into September. I played there twice. Ah, Shakespeare in the Park. You get there in time, you know, first come, first serve, 2300 seats in a bowl type theater. And whoever gets there first, you know. And now it’s become a tradition. You’re waiting in line in the park and musicians are coming and people are selling things. It’s a fiesta. Am I right? Do you ever go up there? Oh, man, I go up there when I’m in New York and they’re playing. Yeah, what’s playing? You know, go, man. It’s just like. It’s such a celebration. So, yeah, I played there a couple times. Wow. And it rains. When it rains, the actors leave the stage and the audience hides under trees or wherever they can. And then it stops. You come back and you take up where you left off. And if it rains again, you leave, and then they come back. If it rains a third time, everybody goes home. I used to pray for rain. I did Romeo, and I was dreadful. And I used to pray for rain. Dreadful.

Yeah, he was something. I adored him. He was just like. He was from Brooklyn. He grew up during the Depression, and he was from a very poor family. And his father. His father was his hero, and he was, and he was from Poland. His real name was Paparusky. Did you know that? Joe’s real name was Joseph Paparusky. And he called and he narrowed it to Pap. But Joe grew up in public school, never went to college, and fell in love with Shakespeare. And he became the most published and Shakespearean producer in the history of the American theater, still to this day. Yeah. That’s amazing. You know how I came to this poem? I got a call from Joe Papp in the fall of 85, and he asked me to take the play the “Normal Heart,” which is a play about the AIDS epidemic in New York City, written by Larry Kramer, which Joe produced at the Public Theater a few years earlier. And it was a huge hit. And he was asked to bring it to London to play, at the Royal. The Royal Court. Then he called back a few days. A few weeks later, he said, “I can’t.”

He was going to direct. And I said, “yes,” of course. He said, “I can’t go to London.” I said, “why?” He said, “Well, keep it, keep it under your hat, but I’ve been diagnosed. I have cancer.” I said, “Oh, okay.”

He said, “Well, will you go anyway?” “I will.” I said, and I did. And it was this great experience.

And I went to London, and they were still sweeping AIDS under the carpet there. And while we were in rehearsal, one of the former prime minister’s son died of aids. And it exploded. And we became the centerpiece for organizing to get help. So it was a great thing. And then when I came back, he called me.

He said, “I came to New York.” I wanted to see him. And so I was having breakfast with him. And he said, “So I hear all these rumors about how you ended the play. What did you do?” I said, well, man, you know, I looked up where the title came from. I just read that thing. It came from Auden’s poem “Sept 1,1939.” Yeah, everybody knows that. I said, yeah, but why didn’t he use that in the play? And he said. And I said, that’s what I did, Joe.

He said, you ended the play with the Auden poem. I said, that part that starts with what Mad Nijinsky said of Diaghilev is true of the normal heart. For the error bred in the soul of each woman and each man craves what it cannot have. Not universal love, but to be loved alone. You’re talking about God. That’s what God does. God loves us alone. One person, one God, one truth. That’s what it. That’s what we yearn for. That’s what God does. God loves us alone. So he looked at Gail, and he said, that’s how we should have ended the play, with that speech rather than what it ended with. A very weak line, which I hated, and I wouldn’t do it. I just changed it. So Joe said, that’s the way we should have ended the play. And then I was in New York in 1991 and Kathryn called me and said, you know, Joe is dying. And I said, I heard. Yeah, he’s not well. And. And I said, will you find out if he’s receiving? I’d love to see. I will. His son died of AIDS in the same apartment at the same time he was dying. His son Anthony. Yeah, I knew him as a boy. Yeah. His father was dying of cancer in one bedroom, and he’s dying in the other room from aids. This was going on, man. It was Shakespearean. And so I was in rehearsal for the play the Crucible in New York, right. The National Actors Theater. And Catherine called me. She said, yeah, Joe wants to see you, so go on down. I said, yeah, I got tomorrow. So I went down and I rang the door. And Gail Lancey, his wife, answered the door, and she said, come in, Martin. And I said, okay. And I sat in the foyer. There was a little just like this to get in before you got into the apartment. I just sat there and this is what I heard. She goes in, “Joe, Martin is here.” Joe says, “Martin, the plumber?” She says, “No, Martin the actor.” “Oh, send him in.” I swear to God. And I went in and I saw him. That was the last I saw him. I just spent three minutes with him, and I kissed him and I blessed him and I thanked him. It was the last time I saw him. And about a week later, we were at his funeral at the theater.

This next selection is my personal remembrance to dear Ethel Kennedy.

There was simply no possible alternative to her powerful, positive spirit. And while her image could be intimidating, her presence was always disarming. And if you had any talent, she seemed convinced you were the most talented of all. And while you were considering that possibility, she was encouraging you to go out and change the world. And while you considered that, she would strongly suggest you ought to get started as soon as possible.

And so, of course, you did just that, or you dare not show your face around her again. That is how many of us came to know and love her. And of course, how we came to know and love each other and ourselves. Ethel Skakel Kennedy was born April 11, 1928.

She died October 10, 2024. Mrs. Kennedy was 96 years old. Although we mourn in deeply personal ways at the loss of a loved one, there is always a common desire in our imagination to picture that person as still living. Some years ago, I found this brief, poem by an unknown author that offers a comforting image we can all relate to.

Whether the departed was young or old, male or female, family or friend

Far away the night is falling and the twilight home lights calling and from open door and window they will greet them as they come.

All the years have turned to hours, all the tears to wayside flowers.

They are one of those who wander down the village street at home.

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 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 themartinsheenpodcast.com.

I want to thank the people who make this podcast possible, our producer and research assistant, Renee Estevez, who assures me that the Internet is a real thing and a safe place if not used off label. And our sound engineer and editor, Bruce Greenspan, the man behind these rich and seamless recordings, and to his dog, Gracie, our studio mascot, who snores in perfect pentameter.

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

Where the 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 depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—

Into that heaven of freedom (my Father) let our country awake. Amen

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September 1, 1939 by W.H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd. Copyright 1940. All rights reserved.

Remembering Ethel Kennedy and Yeats and Sister Mary by Ramon Gerard Estevez AKA Martin Sheen is included here by granted copyright permission.