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Lahr Sean Penn Fact.L.Indd

Lahr Sean Penn Fact.L.Indd

PROFILES CITIZEN PENN

The many missions of . BY JOHN LAHR

n San Francisco one day last June, at attended prayers at a Tehran mosque, a the middle of the hurricane. He’s not 7:45 A.M., an hour when even the women’s-rights demonstration, meet- taking a secondhand opinion. He really Ipanhandlers on Geary Street were still ings with dissidents, a photo op with wants to know what’s going down.” In asleep, Sean Penn was standing in front former President (and then Presidential 1992, during the Rodney King riots in of me, in sneakers, gray chinos, and candidate) Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsan- , Penn drove into the thick denim work shirt, the quiff of his full jani, and, perhaps inevitably, an award of the pandemonium and got a shop- brown hair catching glints of sun, alert ceremony for his acting, at the Film ping cart thrown through his wind- and ready to go. “I’m not so much an Museum of . On his travels, he told shield for his curiosity. In 2002 and early riser as a non-sleeper,” he said, me, he had been “very aware of the ugly 2003, he travelled to (once before peering over the top of his sunglasses. American,” particularly in the reporto- the American-led invasion and once af- The day before, Penn had flown back rial ranks. “There’s a consistent insensi- terward), in order to observe life there— from Tehran—where, as a correspon- tivity,” he said. “I watched journalists. and, on the second visit, to write about dent for the San Francisco Chronicle, he They could only ever be seen by their it for the Chronicle. “My trip is to per- had been covering the run-up to the Ira- subject as the person with a deadline. sonally record the human face of the nian elections—in order to attend the It’s ‘breaking news,’ literally. By the Iraqi people so that their blood—along junior-high-school graduation of his time you get the news, you’ve broken it. with that of American soldiers—would fourteen-year-old daughter, Dylan. You don’t get a chance to investigate not be invisible on my own hands,” he This morning, he had dropped his stories. These journalists live half the said at a Baghdad press conference in twelve-year-old son, Hopper, at school. time in the Internet café, filing a story.” 2002. In Penn’s opinion, his shift from Now we headed off to Union Square, Penn described his own form of report- actor to correspondent was “seamless.” for some of Sears Fine Food’s Swedish age as “tournalism.” “It’s not an obliga- “You wake up in the morning with an pancakes. tion of the tourist to observe experience interest in listening and expressing,” he Penn, who is forty-five and a com- so much as to have it,” he said. “For me, said. “It all feels the same to me. Acting pact five feet eight, is at ease in his body. a greater accuracy of perception comes is Everyman-ness, and loving Every- There is nothing hunched or furtive in out of that.” man. Finally, you’re reaching out to his bearing—he emanates what in ear- A veteran of some thirty-five films, people’s pain.” lier times would have been called “back- Penn is renowned, in the acting profes- Because of his activism, Penn is often bone.” “The feeling you get about him sion, for the meticulousness of his re- caricatured as a showboating celebrity is that you can’t call his bluff, because search. “Sean is a guy who doesn’t want liberal. “It’s as if Ernest Hemingway he’s not bluffing,” said to analyze a character too much,” Ale- made sweet, sweet love to Jeff Spicoli about Penn, who starred in his 1999 jandro González Iñárritu, who directed before our very eyes,” the media blog film “.” At the Penn in “” (2003), has said. Gawker said when the second install- same time, Penn has a very specific “He wants to be as the character.” For ment of the Iran piece came out. In gravity: reserve is part of his strength his portrait of the stoned surfer Jeff “Team America: World Police,” Trey and his seduction. He is warm but no Spicoli, in “Fast Times at Ridgemont Parker and ’s 2004 mario- hail-fellow, polite but without that High” (1982)—the role that made him nette film parody of Bush’s war on ter- come-hither thing. “You see me from famous, at the age of twenty-two— ror, a bubbleheaded Penn puppet says of ten feet away, everyone thinks I’m gonna Penn lived out of his car at the beach; Iraq, “Before Team America showed up bite or something,” Penn said. On first to play a cop, in “Colors” (1988), he it was a happy place. They had flowing meeting, he gave no semaphore of greet- apprenticed to an L.A.P.D. officer; for meadows, and rainbow skies, and rivers ing—no handshake, no smile, no small the role of Emmet Ray, “the world’s made of chocolate where the children talk. His presence was his hello. second-greatest guitar player,” in “Sweet danced and laughed and played with Over breakfast, he handed me an Ira- and Lowdown,” he studied guitar gumdrop smiles.” Penn shot back a “sin- nian candy. He was preparing to write fingering. In his forays into politics and cere fuck you” to the filmmakers, in a an article about his trip. (The piece, journalism, Penn relies on the same letter that was reprinted on the Drudge which was twelve thousand words, ran strategy. “Sean’s an investigative re- Report; he also offered to retrace his in the Chronicle in five installments in porter of his emotional life and our steps with them. “We’ll fly to Amman, August.) He had a tantalizing array of world,” , who directed Jordan, and I’ll ride with you . . . twelve incidents from which to draw: he had Penn in “Colors,” told me. “Sean goes to hours through the Sunni Triangle into PHILIP BURKE

48 , APRIL 3, 2006

TNY—2006_04_03—PAGE 48—133SC. Penn’s angry bravado is the key to his appeal. Woody Allen says, “Women want to take care of him and men find him heroic.”

TNY—2006_04_03—PAGE 49—133SC.—LIVE ART R14990_RD—PLS PULL KODAK FOR COLOR APPROVAL. Fallujah and Baghdad and I’ll show you a movie about,” he said. On the other Life”: “In the time of your life live,” it around,” he wrote. “When we return, hand, he added, “if there’s anything re- begins, “so that in that good time there make all the fun you want.” ally valuable for me in the craft of act- shall be no ugliness or death for yourself Early in 2005, Penn completed ing, it’s maintaining the skills to hold on or for any life your life touches.” Penn filming for Steven Zaillian’s remake of to the passion I started with.” Acting, he has the confidence of a man who be- “All the King’s Men,” which will open explained, was like parachuting. “If you lieves that the world will provide what later this year, and in which he plays jump out of an airplane, you love the he needs when he needs it. “It’s trusting the mesmerizing and corrupt Louisiana first thousand feet. Now you’re ready to your instincts and your experience,” he kingpin Willie Stark, Robert Penn War- land, but you’re not gonna slow down says. “Call it fate.” ren’s fictional version of . just because you aren’t interested any- He is also a fighter. In his gun- His plan now, he told me, was to take a more. The craft is there to make sure toting, paparazzi-punching, midnight- couple of years off from acting. (This that when you jump you’re propelled rambling Hollywood years, which wouldn’t be the first time that he had properly to keep going full speed.” spanned the eighties and early nineties, taken a break from performing. In the he took regular pleasure in publicly bit- nineties, he quit for a few years, and enn is an entrepreneur of his own ing the hands that fed him. “What’s the threw himself into directing instead.) edge—a roiling combination of rage, difference between yogurt and Los An- “I’m out of fuel,” he said, adding, “You Pbuoyancy, tenderness, and hurt. His geles?” he liked to joke to the press back want to be aware of the impact in terms struggle to contain this combustible emo- then. “Yogurt has a living culture.” But of just how much you put out there. You tional package makes him at once dan- after Penn’s wife, the actress Robin want to maintain the potency of aspects gerous and exciting. In his art and in his Wright Penn, was carjacked in the drive- of yourself—marshal your forces, select life, he takes chances. (“Sean is batty as way of their Santa Monica home, with things you can put your heart and soul a loon and is prone to taking extraordi- their two young children still in the car into. Have time to evolve and re-inform nary risks in foreign towns,” the late (no one was hurt), in 1996, the Penn mé- the creature who’s doing it.” He said Hunter S. Thompson, who knew some- nage decamped for the picturesque tran- that he sometimes has difficulty sustain- thing about recklessness, wrote.) He has quillity of the Bay Area, to a tidy patch of ing his passion over the hard slog of a been known to hand out to cards suburban normality about forty-five min- film shoot. “You turn on the news, and on which he has printed the epigraph to utes north of San Francisco, where they there’s something else you want to make William Saroyan’s “The Time of Your live now in a tile-and-stucco hacienda, surrounded by a large wall that Penn constructed. Penn likes driving. He’s been known to take long, freewheeling car trips around America, especially after a film has wrapped and he gets that “big fucken school’s-out-for-summer feel- ing,” he told Richard T. Kelly, who published the fascinating oral history “Sean Penn: His Life and Times” last year. “Give me a car and a country I can zigzag through . . . and I’m a bird,” he said. Even on the short trip back to his house after breakfast, he seemed to enjoy the glamour of himself in mo- tion. He leaned forward over the steer- ing wheel of his black S.U.V., cupping his hands around his lighter as he lit a Marlboro. I remarked that he seemed like the kind of person who would roll his own cigarettes. “Oh, no, then I’d be a real smoker,” he said. “These give me the illusion that I can quit.” With the cigarette dangling raffishly from the side of his mouth, he was a snapshot of casual, at least until he spot- ted a police car in his rearview mirror. “I always think it’s me. ‘Para-fucking-noia, Eddie,’ ” he said, quoting a line from David Rabe’s “.” (Penn ap- “I had to do it, Jeb. He was grilling zucchini.” peared in the Los Angeles première of

TNY—2006_04_03—PAGE 50—133SC.—LIVE OPI ART A11192—#2 PAGE—TEXT CHANGES the play, in 1988, and also in the 1998 film has said expresses “the dark part of Sean’s ered me,” he said. “I wanted to be version.) He fumbled through the glove character . . . this feeling for lost souls transparent, so as to be understood. I compartment. “I have a driver’s license,” and the kind of green-tinted late-at- knew that my intentions were good. It he said, “but I don’t have it on me.” night quality.” Penn, of course, has a seemed to me I could give a lot more Penn has had his share of run-ins wide range of well-placed friends, but and be more productive with people with the police. In Macao in 1986, dur- he seems to be happiest in the company who could see who I was.” He went on, ing the shooting of “Shanghai Surprise,” of what Baerwald calls “the demi- “I didn’t want to be charming. I didn’t he was arrested for helping to deter an demimonde—the kind of people who want to have to be funny. I didn’t want intruding paparazzo by hanging him by might follow Al Capone around.” In to have to be flawless. I wanted to be his ankles from the ninth-floor balcony this demotic scrum—“I’m just another able to know that my heart was in the of his hotel room. (Penn subsequently American who appreciates a little right place and not do a big song broke out of the jail where he was being color,” Penn once wrote—he feels and dance to display it.” Penn’s held on charges of attempted murder safe. “I hang out with guys who are kindergarten teacher dubbed him and escaped from the country by jetfoil.) very comfortable not looking at “.” “The only com- In 1987, he served thirty-three days of a me and not having me look back plaint that teachers ever gave me sixty-day sentence in the Los Angeles at them,” Penn told Playboy in about him was ‘Is he happy?’ ” Ei- County jail (twenty-three hours a day in 1991. “It’s like being by yourself leen Penn said. “He seemed to be solitary) for violating the probation he’d without being by yourself.” so quiet.” been given for punching a fan who tried “You have to protect your In high school, Penn learned to get too close to his first wife, Ma- edges,” Dennis Hopper said, ex- that his unreachable quality could donna. In 1988, herself sum- plaining why Penn keeps much of be used to both provoke and se- moned a SWAT team to the couple’s the world at arm’s length. “James duce. “Being shy brings atten- house in Malibu, after the two had Dean said to me when I was young, tion—it brings my subjects to fought. (“She developed a concern that ‘The giant sequoia tree in its be- me,” he explained. “It works the if she were to return to the house she ginning is very small inside but the same way it did on the quad in would get a very severe haircut,” Penn, bark is very large. The bark is a foot thick high school. There’s a lot of noise, a lot who was not arrested in the well-publi- but doesn’t get bigger. The bark is there of alpha dogs plying their trade. Then, cized incident, said later.) to allow the inside to grow. An actor is there’s you, bouncing your tennis shoes For a mile or so, Penn kept careful like that.’ Every time you do an emo- off the brick on the planter you’re sitting watch on the police car behind us while tional scene, you’re exposing yourself. on. At some point in the school year, a he chatted about his children—Dylan’s The second the scene’s over, you have to pretty girl reaches a moment of reflection transfer to a private school, Hopper’s shut it back down and put your bark back where that becomes more attractive skateboarding obsession. Then the po- on. If you walk around without it, you’re than the alpha dog. You’ve got a lot of lice car swung into the express lane and just a wounded tree—you’re going to die, stuff that will be new to share.” pulled up alongside us, and the officer because there’s just too much stuff com- Onscreen, Penn parses his own soli- driving it motioned in Penn’s direction. ing into you. Sean goes deep into his tude. Almost all the characters to whom At first, it seemed that she was signal- emotional inner life. He allows you to see he has been drawn are to some degree ling Penn to pull over, but she was only it, then he closes it back up. He has to, or cut off from the world, whether by mur- pointing at his seat belt. Penn strapped he wouldn’t be able to survive.” Woody derous obsession (Samuel J. Byck, in himself in. The police car sped away. Allen agreed. “He’s not easily accessible,” “The Assassination of ”; “That’s nice,” Penn said. He turned to he said. “It’s hard to get through to him, Sergeant Tony Meserve, in “Casualties me and allowed himself a smile. and you feel that at any minute he could of War”; Matthew Poncelet, in “Dead Penn’s office space—two capacious blow up at you. It makes it so interesting. Man Walking”; Jimmy Markum, in rooms built above the garage of his Women want to take care of him and “”), by mental or physical house—has its own entrance, with a men find him heroic.” damage (Sam Dawson, in “”; doormat that reads “Witness Protection Eddie Quinn, in “She’s So Lovely”; Program.” He refers to it as his “after- enn’s elusiveness was established at Paul Rivers, in “21 Grams”), by drugs hours editorial facility”; a “bunker” is an early age. Penn’s mother, the ac- (Eddie, in “Hurlyburly,” Spicoli, in what his close friend the musician David tressP Eileen Ryan Penn, told Richard “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”), or Baerwald calls it. This is where Penn Kelly that, as a child, “Sean had his own by artistic self-absorption (Emmet, in comes to write, edit, drink, carouse, and private little world going.” “I don’t think “Sweet and Lowdown”). But the fury wheel and deal. It is also a visible mani- that I really spoke outside my home till that fuels Penn’s performances—“the festation of Penn’s guarded nature. The I was five,” Penn told me. “I remember wonderful homicidal quality of his rooms—decorated in a sort of bordello plenty of conversations, but they were rage,” as the screenwriter Nick Kazan burgundy, with burgundy velvet wallpa- all with myself. If I ever felt loneliness, describes it—is examined in even greater per, burgundy baize on the pool and it was in a group.” Penn’s shyness, by his depth in the three films that he has di- poker tables, and burgundy chairs—have own admission, was also a kind of stra- rected (he also wrote the first two): a crepuscular gloom; they reflect the tegic retreat. “When I realized that peo- “” (1991), “The “downtown quality” that ple could not see into me—that both- Crossing Guard” (1995), and “The

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TNY—2006_04_03—PAGE 51—133SC.—LIVE SPOT ART R14979_A PLEASE INSPECT AND REPORT ON QUALITY—#2 PAGE—TEXT CHANGES Pledge” (2001). On the surface, Penn’s for me, and Leo and his gentle charm than four hundred hours of prime-time well-told tales seem disparate. How- filled the room: TV, winning an Emmy in 1973 for a ever, the issue at stake is almost always When I was eleven, my mother—who was special episode of “.” But there maybe four foot ten—and I occupied the his own: the desire both to connect back seat of a Greyhound bus and drove to were times when Sean heard in his fa- with and to elude people—to be, in nonstop, where my father had ther’s badinage a hint of disappoint- other words, a kind of respectable out- been for a year, squeezing oranges to make a ment: “I’d say, ‘What are you up to?’ living. And I’ll never forget that trip. That had law. Penn addressed this division most a large impact on my life because it was so He’d say, ‘Ah, you know, trying to make directly in “The Indian Runner,” which joyous. And this was during the Depression, a better piece of shit out of a worse piece was inspired by ’s when the gap between rich and poor was not of shit.’ ” what it is now. We were all in the same boat, song “Highway Patrolman.” The film and we all had a blast on that Greyhound Leo had been betrayed by the coun- tells the story of two brothers, one a bus: people playing guitars and singing songs try that he’d fought for with distinction. dutiful family-loving deputy sheriff, and relating to one another. . . . As a bombardier in the Second World I went to war. I was away four years. the other a violent, unreachable jail- While I was here—came back on I guess it War, at a time when a pilot’s life ex- bird. “I think both things exist in me,” was overseas leave—I was invited to do a pectancy was around fifteen missions, Penn said, adding, “If we’re of any use, play at U.C.L.A. . . . It went very well, and Leo had flown thirty-one, including suddenly I was getting phone calls—and I then we have blood on our hands.” The was still in the service. I was getting calls from three over Berlin, and won the Dis- film takes its title and its central visual agents. I thought, Jesus, is it possible to turn tinguished Flying Cross and the Air trope from a game of hide-and-seek this into a profession. . . . I did a screen test. Medal. “He had about ten years of hard- To my amazement they put me under con- that the brothers play as kids in the tract. . . . Life was very rosy for a while. . . . I core flashbacks and sleeplessness,” Penn cornfields. “I’m the Indian runner. I’m worked in the theatre; for some of the time has said. “As a tail gunner, you saw the a message, and the message is ‘Bet I had a soap opera on radio. . . . Then I was face of your enemy. You saw the devas- under contract to a B-movie company called you can’t find me,’ ” the wayward Frank Monogram. I did one picture. They didn’t tation of the rounds at the end of your tells his older brother, Joe, as their like my [last] name, and I refused to change gun. That was a big thing for him.” chase begins. The tale ends in a standoff; it. . . . I changed my first name to Clif- Many of the hallmarks of Sean’s artistic ford ’cause I liked Clifford Odets. They Frank is gone and Joe has given up the didn’t like Clifford ’cause they said he was a career—his fascination with outsiders, chase. The short-film director Matt Communist. his rebelliousness, his hatred of injus- Palmieri, who has been a close friend of tice, his suspicion of authority, his flir- Penn’s since elementary school, agreed Although Leo was not named in the tation with heroics—are informed by that the characters represent the two House Un-American Activities Com- the legends of Leo’s life, of both his sides of Sean. “One part of him is the mittee investigations, his progressive military and his political travails. “One responsible, clearheaded, thoughtful leanings, his refusal to testify, and his thing that the children of blacklisted older brother, the guy who kind of takes support of the Hollywood Ten got him people know is that on many levels ac- charge in a crisis,” he said. “But, on the labelled as a fellow-traveller. By 1952, ceptable polite society is just another other hand, he’s angry, wild, rambunc- he couldn’t work on the West Coast. fraud,” Baerwald said. “Leo should have, tious—definitely highly aggressive.” He moved back East, where, he said, could have, and certainly wanted to do “it took roughly two years and I was work of more substance than he did. s Penn and I talked in his office, he dead in New York, too. I couldn’t do ei- Life was much diminished.” noticed me glancing at a plastic ther film or television.” Nonetheless, Nowadays, when Penn invokes his ABarbie-like doll propped against the Leo built up a considerable reputation father’s memory, he recalls the smile in fireplace. “An Ann Coulter doll,” he ex- as a theatre actor; in 1957, he replaced his eyes. “He could have very strong plained, referring to the neo-conservative in the legendary Circle in opinions and see all sides of an issue at TV pundit. “We violate her,” he said. the Square production of “The Iceman the same time, but there was always that “There are cigarette burns in some funny Cometh.” He soon fell in love with a sparkle thing,” he told me. Leo’s work, areas. She’s pure snake-oil salesman. She beautiful, outspoken actress in the com- however, usually took him away from doesn’t believe a word she says. She men- pany, Eileen Ryan, and they married in home at dawn and brought him back tions Leo in her book ‘Treason.’ ” 1958. after dinner. “He was a good week- , Sean’s father, was a movie The Penns were socially conscious, end father,” Penn said. “Once Dad got actor, whose career was blighted in the resilient survivors. “We didn’t have the home, it became about the couple. Ba- early fifties by the Hollywood blacklist. money to get me out of the hospital sically, that was their time. Our family (He died, of lung cancer, in 1998.) Ac- when Michael was born,” Eileen Ryan time was the weekend.” When Penn cording to Penn, Leo was “the king of Penn said of her first son’s birth, in was a child, his parents’ bond was com- comfort in his own skin.” (He was bur- 1958. “We laughed a lot about it.” The plicated but palpable. “We adored each ied in his iconic mufti: sandals, Hawai- Penns moved to California, and settled other,” Eileen has said. “We had a great ian shirt, and baseball cap.) Every Fa- in the San Fernando Valley, in 1959. marriage. We were never bored with ther’s Day, Penn shows his children ten When Leo was offered the chance to each other. We grew together.” Penn minutes of a video of Leo, made two try his hand at directing for television, remembers his mother and father sit- years before his death, in which he re- he accepted. He loved the camaraderie ting late at night on their patio in Mal- counts his eventful life to a group called of the job, and he was good at it; over ibu, looking out at the Pacific. “If you Women in Film. Penn cued up the film the next thirty years, he directed more sneaked out for a snack or something,

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TNY—2006_04_03—PAGE 52—133SC. “I have my pants put on one leg at a time.” •• they’d just be sitting there, lights out,” was like my mother—falling down the any woman!” She explained, “My father he told Kelly. “She’d be sound asleep cellar steps, me coming home from was so protective, so worried if I ever did with her head on his lap, and he would school with a friend and she’d be half something that he thought was danger- be rubbing her hair. And that was very hanging out of her nightgown . . . Sean ous. So I just wanted boys who could go common—nearly every night.” never experienced any of that with me.” out there and do anything they wanted As we were driving, Penn returned But Sean’s younger brother, Chris, also in the world.” to that memory, but with an additional an actor, who died accidentally, after detail: “He’d drink a bottle of J&B at taking a combination of prescription n the way to his house, Penn had night; my mother’d polish off a bottle of and over-the-counter medications, last suddenly pulled the car off onto a Smirnoff. She never started drinking till January, at the age of forty, saw a differ- slipO road and switchbacked down to a we were in bed. They could both get up ence between his father’s attitude to- spot below the Golden Gate Bridge so early the next morning and function.” ward alcohol and his mother’s. “I think that he could show me where the break- Penn recalled a night when he was a my father was a hard drinker,” he told ers were sometimes large enough for teen-ager and he and his brother Mi- me last year. “I don’t think he was an al- surfing. “I don’t know this break well, so chael sneaked home late. He turned off coholic.” And his mother? “I won’t go I don’t know the times of the year that the engine of his beat-up Mazda at the into it,” he said. it shoots up,” he said. “I’ve actually seen foot of the driveway and they pushed it Eileen Penn is of Irish and Italian it come through these piers when it was thirty yards, to where the family house descent, and she has a particularly vola- a real crazy squall.” was nestled beside a coral tree. As they tile intensity. After obtaining a bache- When Penn was nine, in 1969, his crept up, they could see their parents on lor-of-science degree from New York family moved from the Valley to a ram- the patio in their usual entwined posi- University to please her parents—her shackle fifty-seven-thousand-dollar tion. “My mother had fallen asleep— mother was a nurse—she followed her beach house with a view of the ocean, call that ‘passed out,’ ” Penn said. “My own dream by going to to near Point Dume, in Malibu. Today, dad had taken the ship’s wheel off the sing in a bar, then becoming a success- the plot is worth millions, and Barbra wall.” (Leo had a fascination with the ful actress Off Broadway. She gave up Streisand lives at the end of the road. sea, and the house was decorated with performing when she had children. Back then, the community was almost boating paraphernalia.) “He had my “All the passion I had for acting went rural, and Penn loved it. “The newness mom’s head in his lap. Above her head into being a mother,” she has said. She of the world. The smell of the creeks. was the ship’s wheel. My brother said, wanted only sons. When Michael was That stuff did not get old to me. I can ‘Dad’s steering the house!’ ” Eileen Penn being born, she yelled at the nurse, “If still smell Point Dume, 1969,” he said. told me, “Leo and I drank equally. We it’s a girl, push it back in! I’m not going He surfed throughout his teen-age enjoyed the drinks. I’m not sorry. If I through twenty-four hours of labor for years, and the sport has had a lasting

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TNY—2006_04_03—PAGE 53—133SC.—LIVE OPI ART A11318 influence on him. “I defined surfing then as an art form,” he said in 1991. “It was truly about matching the en- CASSANDRA, IRAQ ergy of the wave. It was a harmony, and 1. there was poetry to it. There was a spir- She’s magnificent, as we imagine women must be itual aspect to surfing.” At the age of who foresee and foretell and are right and disdained. eleven, Penn signed up for the gruel- ling regimen of Junior Lifeguards, This is the difference between we who are like her which included a sixty-eight-buoy in having been right and disdained, and we as we are. early-morning ocean swim. (“He al- ways put himself through tough stuff: Because we, in our foreseeings, our having been right, very stoic like that,” Eileen has said. are repulsive to ourselves, fat and immobile, like toads. “He can take a lot of discomfort.” “I liked it,” she told me of his grit.) An ar- Not toads in the garden, who after all are what they are, ticle published in the magazine Surfer but toads in the tale of death in the desert of sludge. by the former pro surfer Alf Laws, who oversaw Penn’s training, became a kind 2. of inspirational text for him. “I’ve In this tale of lies, of treachery, of superfluous dead, thought about it thousands of times, it were there ever so many who were right and disdained? was about being able to adjust, how to apply yourself,” he said. Laws wrote, With no notion of what to do next? If we were true seers, “One must possess two important qual- as prescient as she, as frenzied, we’d know what to do next. ities: confidence and go-for-it attitude. In aggressive surfing, one must believe in himself and his ability to make it début performance: “I played a part in a was the only problem I ever had with through any situation. No hesitating stage version of ‘The Young Savages.’ Leo. I couldn’t get him mad. I couldn’t allowed, boy, punch it! Tune yourself My mom comes backstage. She took my get a fight when I wanted one. Maybe to the energy the waves are creating, face in her hands. She looked me in the that’s why I fought with Sean.” Chris, and create some tracks of your own. eye, and she said, ‘You were just terrible. who was five years younger than Sean, You’ll feel righteous.” Surfing taught You cannot do this.’ Meaning acting. spoke of his brother’s “turbulent” ado- Penn both the pursuit of excellence and That’s my mom.” Penn added, “About a lescent relations with their mother as the habit of bravery. According to his hundred per cent of my friends were “a very hurtful time for me because I former fiancée Elizabeth McGovern, definitely afraid of her.” loved them both.” One time, when Sean who was his co-star in “Racing with the “He had to fight me growing up,” was particularly cruel to his mother, Moon” (1984), it “was a sort of parable Eileen said. Penn emerged from the Chris remembered, “I basically told him for his whole life. He’s always riding the battle with an unusual carapace of feroc- to leave the house, after throwing him crest.” ity, charm, and strength. “When I was a around the kitchen, smashing his head “We were roaming kids,” , young man, she was a greater source of against the wall. It wasn’t a kid’s fight. It who also surfed, rode horses, and some- confidence than my father,” Penn said. was a real fight.” Of Sean’s tendency to times slept overnight on the beach, told She was also the template on which close himself off, Chris added, “I can tell me. “We had a lot of freedom.” Sean Penn based what he calls his “unyield- you this: that unreachable thing kept me said, “From the time we were very young, ing attention to what we would perceive angry at him until my father got sick, in it was all about expanding your imagina- as injustice.” To the suggestion that his the late nineties. It was confounding. tion.” Eileen’s gospel, according to her, mother was a kind of fanatic, Penn an- I don’t think it was intentional. Now “wasn’t ‘Aim high’; it was ‘Aim out—to swered, “I would say that lovingly, but when he does it—he still does it, he al- life.’ ” She set her children a feisty exam- I do confirm it as such.” “There were ways will—it doesn’t bother me any- ple. “She was a lioness,” Penn said. “Boy, times when being dramatic was needed,” more.” “I don’t think Sean goes into de- she could dress down those authority she said. “I needed to get it out. I wasn’t pression,” Eileen told me. “He creates figures. She was unintimidatable.” She always perfectly in control. I just blasted pain in others so he can fix it. If it isn’t was also tough to the point of scathing. away.” Eileen was fiercer with Sean than there and it doesn’t need to be fixed, he “She was a grinding wheel,” Baerwald with her other sons because, as she said, can’t be the hero and fix it.” said. “I mean, to make a knife, you’ve got “he was more like me.” He certainly had “I’m damaged,” Penn told Rolling to have a hard surface.” He added, “I get her forthrightness—“He’s nobody’s can- Stone in 1996. “I recognize that.” Penn the feeling she was really, really, really, didate for Secretary of State; he’s not very told me that he “still hadn’t sorted out” really, really, really rough on Sean.” After diplomatic,” Baerwald said—and her ap- the source of his rage. “A couple of girl- high school, Penn apprenticed at the petite for conflict. friends ultimatumed me into therapy Group Repertory Theatre, a ninety- “Anger feeds my brain,” Eileen said. things,” he said. “I tried but it just didn’t nine-seat house in North Hollywood. “If you’re justified in it, it’s exciting. It play.” Baerwald told me, “The stuff he He described his mother’s visit to his makes me feel alive—a good fight. It has shared with me indicates to me

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TNY—2006_04_03—PAGE 54—133SC—#2 PAGE TEXT CHANGES. ing down at those boots, knowing that I’m going to do what he’s going out We’d , as she did, like birds; we’d warble, we’d trill. to do tonight. I’ll like this life. I know But what would it be really, to twitter, to warble, to trill? I’m good enough that I’ll be an actor when I’m forty. Not a failed actor. Not Is it ee-ee-ee, like having a child? Is it uh-uh-uh, like a wound? a successful actor. I’ll be an actor. It’s an Or is it inside, like a blow, silent to everyone but yourself? adventure.’ ” At the outset of his career, accord- 3. ing to Chris, Penn “didn’t have a flam- Yes, inside, I remember, oh-oh-oh: it’s where grief boyant or entertaining presence at all,” is just about to be spoken, but all at once can’t be: oh. but he “worked as hard as an Olympic athlete.” “The thing Sean had was guts,” When you no longer can “think” of what things like lies, Eileen has said. “The talent came later.” like superfluous dead, so many, might mean: oh. From the age of eighteen to twenty, five hours a day, five days a week, Penn Cassandra will be abducted at the end of her tale, and die. trained with the diminutive method- Even she can’t predict how. Stabbed? Shot? Blown to bits? acting coach , who counted among her clients , Mi- Her abductor dies, too, though, in a gush of gore, in a net. chelle Pfeiffer, and Jeff Goldblum. Feury That we know; she foresaw that—in a gush of gore, in a net. was “interested in how are you gonna bring yourself to the material rather —C. K. Williams than the material to you,” Penn said. “I felt that Peggy was very personal with me. She’d teach you how to graph your that he was a mighty, mighty confused pended singularly on what was different work. I was wary of anything that was teen-ager. I mean might-y. There’s one about you.” By then, ’s gonna fuck with my precious fucking way he could reach his parents—by be- performances had captured Penn’s imag- instincts, but she just got to me. It was coming ‘Sean Penn,’ and fulfilling both ination. “He made excellence a moving gentle, very gentle.” their dreams.” Chris agreed. “Once Sean thing,” Penn said. “This wasn’t a guy On his nineteenth birthday, Penn got out and started acting, it changed,” who was born with fireworks in his got his first professional part—on “Bar- he said. pocket. He didn’t have a conventionally naby Jones”—and his Screen Actors handsome face. He didn’t have the me- Guild card. A year later, in 1980, he cting allowed Penn to turn his tur- lodic voice of . He didn’t went East looking for work; almost im- moil to advantage; it also allowed even have an interest in having those mediately, he landed a part in a Broad- himA to live up to his mother’s notion of things. He was a totally unique crea- way play, Kevin Heelan’s “Heartland.” his singularity. (“He was her protégé,” ture and spoke of his time.” He added, When the play opened, the Times panned Chris said. “She absolutely lived a lot of “One knew how invested he was in it as a “hackneyed melodrama,” and said her career through Sean.”) Once, as a what he did. It also struck a chord in that Penn’s character “mopes around child, Penn asked his mother if she me. I needed to do something one hun- the house like a sick gerbil.” Still, the loved him the same as Michael, who is dred per cent. I hungered for a process play marked a seismic shift in his life. now a musician and songwriter. “No,” that would leave no stone unturned.” “He said that for the first time he felt she said, “you’re an original. There’s Penn recalled being backstage during like himself,” Baerwald recalled. “He only one Sean and only one Michael.” his apprenticeship at the Group Reper- could understand what being himself Penn was obsessed with the Watergate tory Theatre and watching a middle- was.” Two years later, he was cast in a hearings, and dreamed of becoming a aged actor get ready to go on. “He had cameo role in “Fast Times at Ridge- lawyer, but he lacked the grades. By his a pretty good TV career going,” he said. mont High”; after the early rushes, his senior year of high school, he was cut- “I had seen him in a lot of things. He role was expanded into a star turn. Penn ting classes and toting around a Snoopy didn’t have to be at this theatre, for zero contributed his own surfing argot— lunch box full of film paraphernalia for money.” Penn continued, “I watched “tubular,” “gnarly,” “awesome”—to the Super 8 movies that he was making with him take off his cowboy boots to get script; he also brought his own ward- Chris and friends like into his costume; I followed his eyes robe to the set, including the black- and . After a brief stint down to the boots, and I said to myself, and-white Vans that became a fashion at Santa Monica Junior College, where ‘You know, I’ll be O.K. at forty look- statement for a generation. , he studied car maintenance and cine- one of the film’s producers, told Richard matography, Penn found himself drawn Kelly, “The famous scene where Spicoli back to the theatre. “Acting is the only comes late to class and Ray Walston rips field I could find where it was all about up his card, and Sean says, ‘You dick’— not having a precedent,” he said. “For Ray Walston didn’t know who Sean better or worse, it was one that de- Penn was. So he says his line, ‘I think

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TNY—2006_04_03—PAGE 55—133SC.—LIVE SPOT ART R14979_B PLEASE INSPECT AND REPORT ON QUALITY you know where the principal’s office is.’ part,” she said. “You don’t need all that daring of Penn’s technique. In it, he And Sean says, ‘You old, red-faced moth- makeup.” Later that day, Penn called condensed the turbulence of his young erfucker . . .’ Ray Walston turned beet her and invited her over to his house. adulthood into an almost visionary em- red and got crazy pissed-off, like ‘How When she got out of the car, a man bodiment of Rabe’s hilarious and horri- dare this kid?’ ” Linson continued, “But came to greet her. “Hi, Mrs. Penn,” he ble portrait of moral collapse. “Twenty Sean, even then, was trying off-camera said. She vaguely recognized him, think- years ago, it was internal combustion,” to get a rise out of him that would be ing “he was probably some friend of Penn told me of his own life. “There great for the moment. That’s a pretty Sean’s from school.” “ ‘Remind me, I wasn’t anything that resembled peace in audacious move for a kid who no one know you, I know you,’ ” she recalled my spirit.” had heard of yet.” “Fast Times” made saying. “And he’s walking toward me. In 1996, Penn and Wright, after six Penn a renegade legend and won him ‘You’re . . . Oh my God, you’re my years together, followed by a fraught pe- instant membership in the fledgling son.’ ” He was wearing the makeup he riod of separation, were married (their Hollywood talentocracy known as the planned to use for the part. “Gotcha, children were five and two). The new- . Mom,” he said. found maturity of his private life has “Each time, Penn comes as a com- But it wasn’t until 1988, when he was been reflected in the range and depth of plete surprise,” Pauline Kael wrote in playing Eddie, the coked-out Holly- his screen performances as well. Over her review for this magazine of the 1983 wood casting agent in “Hurlyburly,” at the last decade, his restraint has be- film “Bad Boys,” in which Penn played the Westwood Playhouse, in L.A., that come more elegant, his reservoir of feel- a teen-ager in juvenile detention exact- Penn achieved, in his eyes, a balance ing more profound. The breakdown of ing revenge on another inmate. She ex- of discipline and expression. “Charlie the death-row killer Matthew Poncelet, plained, “He gets so far inside a role that Parker—or one of those guys—once in “Dead Man Walking” (1995), and he can make even a sociological confec- said he played an A chord for half an Jimmy’s grief-crazed fury over the mur- tion such as this hero . . . someone an hour before he heard it,” he said. “I was der of his daughter, in “Mystic River”— audience can care about.” Penn often playing the chords of this stuff for some for which Penn won an Academy Award approached characters from the outside years, and then, within the course of for Best Actor in 2003—are among in, which was a bone of contention with that play, I heard what it was I was try- the high-water marks of contemporary his mother. When he was about to go ing to say and why I was trying to say it.” acting. Penn has drawn frequent com- on location as a drug dealer spying for At the intermission on opening night, parisons to , who was a the in the 1985 film “The the actor Robert Culp tapped Eileen on friend of his. Brando, however, was Falcon and the Snowman,” Penn told the shoulder. “You’ve got a Stradivar- never known for his light touch; Penn Eileen that he would be changing his ius,” he said. The film version of “Hur- has one if he needs it. “I know I haven’t hair and teeth for the role. “Just act the lyburly” brought out all the emotional shared as much joy—pure joy—and humor as I might experience in life,” he said. “I’m predisposed to hold back.” But, as he demonstrated in “Sweet and Lowdown,” his reticence can be spice to comedy. “Sean can do lighter mate- rial,” Woody Allen says. “He can de- liver a line if he has to. He’s just lucky that way.”

enn was driving me back to San Francisco when his cell phone rang. PWright needed the car by two. “So let’s have dinner tonight,” I said. Penn mum- bled something about making a start on his Chronicle article. “I’ll get back to you,” he said. At around five, the hotel phone rang. “Meet me at Tosca’s at five-thirty,” Penn said. He told me that he had made a dinner reservation at a Vietnamese place near Tosca’s, a nondescript saloon in North Beach, which serves Penn var- iously as watering hole, mail drop, and clubhouse. When I walked into the dim glow of the bar, he wasn’t there. I took a stool, ordered a beer, and settled down “I need you to line up by attention span.” to watch the only two other people at

TNY—2006_04_03—PAGE 56—133SC—LIVE OPI ART A11329. the bar, who were going through the rit- and bring home the food. So what’s left? pages. “First rough,” he said, and in uals of a first date. After fifteen minutes Violence. That’s it. There’s no identifi- hushed tones he began to read: or so, I asked the bartender, “Sean been able venue for the system of alpha.” The Jet lag had cut me down around midnight the day of my return from Tehran. But my in?” “Yeah,” he said. “He and the boss waiter took away our plates. Penn pushed fractured body clock sounded its alarm at went out for dinner.” himself back on the banquette. “I’m full,” 4:30 A.M., the following morning. I got up, About half an hour later, Penn he said. “You want anything else?” I de- went to the kitchen, flipped on the TV, and surfed my way through the channels, landing walked in with Jeanette Etheredge, murred. Penn called for the bill; he in- on CNN’s “American Morning” with Sole- Tosca’s owner and den mother. “Ev- sisted on paying. It seemed that I was the dad O’Brien. . . . She reported me to be cur- erybody needs a bar in their life,” Eth- venue for alpha. rently in Tehran for the San Francisco Chron- icle. . . . Then as footage of me from a eredge said; over the decades, hers has Back at Tosca’s, where the habitués well-meant farewell given me by the Iranian played a part in the carousing lives of were now three deep at the bar, arms Film Society played, she observed that I Hunter S. Thompson, Francis Ford were raised not to cheer on the Giants looked to be playing a journalist. So here we begin, as I sit in my kitchen in northern Cali- Coppola, Dennis Hopper, and Wil- on the TV above the bar but to hold up fornia, she’s reporting me to be in Tehran. liam , among others. Penn cell-phone cameras as Penn made his She looks at the film given her by a producer told Etheredge that he’d be back soon, sprightly progress to the back room. and jumps on the bandwagon of attack. . . . Let’s set the record straight, shall we? From and then, without mentioning that When he paused to talk to Etheredge the moment the international press became he’d already had dinner, he headed out at the end of the long bar, a young aware of my presence in Tehran, the predict- with me to the Vietnamese restaurant. Asian man shoved a phone into his able misreporting began deluging Web sites, newspapers, television, and radio in the At Tower Valet Parking, Penn prof- hand and asked him to speak to his fa- United States and around the world. The in- fered some bills in the direction of ther, who was celebrating his birthday. accuracies ranged from claiming me a pro- the attendant. “Don’t let him pay,” an- “Your son really should watch his drink- Iranian, anti-American lefty, to a continuous and lazy presumption that my first and other attendant shouted from across ing,” Penn said into the phone. “Happy highly criticized trip to Iraq had been sup- the lot, before persuading Penn to pose birthday.” ported by the San Francisco Chronicle. . . . for a photo. As Penn finally approached The back room was as cramped and What’s disturbing here goes to the heart of the misunderstandings throughout the world his car, a tweedy middle-aged couple musty as a shebeen. The space was lit by and to the heart of freedom. And the free stood quietly on the sidewalk watching a yellow neon sign that said “Tosca” and press is only free when it is bold and accu- him. “We’re just ogling,” the woman the green glow of a shaded bulb over the rate. And while the dismissive and trivial at- tacks on me may be the bickering of details, said. pool table, which kept the denizens the number of dead and the purpose of war Over dinner, I repeated a story that crowded against the walls. Film posters are not. his mother had told me, about talking haphazardly plastered to the walls added to Woody Allen on the set of “Sweet to the room’s subterranean panache. Penn read for about ten minutes, and Lowdown.” “Woody said he’s al- Penn was at home. After he’d had a glancing up occasionally to see my reac- ways wanted to work with Sean but couple of vodka-and-tonics, his mood tion. After five pages, he was just about couldn’t figure him out,” Eileen had lightened and his guard lowered. At one to disembark from the plane in Tehran. said. “I’ll sum it up for you, Woody,” she point, talking about his friendship with I suggested that perhaps he should get replied. “He’s embarrassed at having the magician David Blaine, Penn leaned to Iran earlier in the piece. He nodded, had a happy childhood.” Speaking of his across the table and said, “Why are we but said nothing. (Stripped of some of mother earlier that day, Penn had said, close friends? I don’t ask. I don’t want to its vainglory and verbosity, the edited “She has rewritten history quite a bit.” know. Love the mystery. Don’t want to version of Penn’s essay became the Chron- (In Kelly’s biography, for instance, Ei- know why I’m here, per se, in life. Feel icle’s most read story of the year, with leen claimed to have kept watch while it, follow the feeling. But don’t want the more than half a million hits on the news- her eleven-year-old son surfed. Penn answer. Don’t believe I’ll get it. Don’t paper’s Web site.) categorically denied this. “At that age, want the safety net of ‘Am I gonna have Back downstairs, Penn made a bee- the idea that your mother would stay at an afterlife or am I not?’ ” He continued, line for Gavin Newsom, the mayor of the beach to watch: impossible,” he said. “Somebody says there’s a God, I think San Francisco. He was soon in ani- “It was a drop-off.” He added, “Maybe it’s a kind of funny notion. Somebody mated conversation with Newsom and she was taking too many chances with says there’s not, I think it’s a funny no- his then wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle New- her kids. How did I survive?”) tion. To know is a funny notion. And som, a former lingerie model who was He was just about to comment on the so, you know, if I’ve got a religion, it’s an anchor for Court TV. Penn, as the story when his cell phone rang. “I’m the mystery of the thing.” world knows, likes a good time; he is sorry,” he said. “I’m on kid call.” After he After a while, Penn led me upstairs also expert at provoking one. When hung up the phone, Penn looked down to another dingy inner sanctum, where things get slow, according to Matt at his half-eaten appetizer; the sight two off-duty policemen were sitting at a Palmieri, “he’ll tell a joke, sing a song, of food led him to a meditation on bare table, discussing the recent suicide recite a limerick. His most famous thing “the hunter-gatherer aspect of things.” of one of their cohorts. Penn knew the is to get up and say, ‘Does anyone here “Hunting isn’t necessary in the world men and asked if they minded our pres- want to see an interpretive dance?’ Then we’re living in,” he said. “A man can go ence. They waved us in. We settled into he’ll proceed to do a hilarious little and hunt elk if he wants. But the woman a plywood alcove. Penn reached into his dance.” There was no dancing that can get to the market sooner than that pocket and pulled out a sheaf of typed night, but, toward the end of the eve-

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TNY—2006_04_03—PAGE 57—133SC. ning, there was a song. Penn smiled, open on the coffee table beside him. Be- adrenaline, the bewilderment (“You drink in hand, and leaned close to me as fore we talked, he insisted that I read kept thinking, like you did watching he intoned the lyrics to one of Baer- something he’d written for Rolling television, Any minute now the cavalry’s wald’s compositions: Stone. “Watching the scenes of devasta- coming”). A preacher called Willie from Fifteen long years tion on my television set was like stand- Noah’s Ark church, who knew of forty on a losing streak and a lot of bodies unburied ing behind the tape line at a traffic acci- kids trapped in a school, became the and there comes a time dent and watching a child slowly bleed navigator on Penn’s boat while Penn when you cannot turn the other cheek to death unattended,” it began. “I’m not manned the bow, watching for sub- you have got to ride the ferry past the battered old bodies gonna tell you I wasn’t very, very pissed merged cars. It was a beautiful day; the of dead dead dreamers off,” he said about the press coverage of water was black. Bloated bodies floated past the tethered and fettered and his rescue mission. “The whole reason I by—“all in the same position: face down, desk-bound schemers the punks and the drunks and the didn’t go sooner was that I worried I’d spread-eagled.” People waded through bad guitar players and the dewy-eyed be in the way. I was not in the way. Lis- water, foraging. “One guy had a big teen-age dragon slayers . . . ten, most of the rescues were done by ci- ham.” Penn, who had been vaccinated ever hopeful and ever blue we do the things that we know we have to vilians.” He added, “It’s so disheartening for infectious diseases for an African sa- do that people are diabolically detached.” fari earlier in the year, had no problem and though we all know deep down in As the hurricane was unfolding, spending nine hours in the contami- our hearts that someday this will all fall apart Penn, who had spent some time in New nated swamp. “I saw three non-civilian for right now, let’s just be Orleans (and has “NOLA Deliver Me” boats,” he said. “What was surreal was heroes. tattooed on his right forearm to prove the lack of presence of official people— it), stayed in regular contact with the po- the National Guard, the United States he next time I saw Penn, he was a litical pundit , who is also Army, the state, the New Orleans Po- hero. It was September, and he one of the executive producers of “All lice Department. There just weren’t Twas on my television screen, wading the King’s Men,” part of which was shot nearly enough of them.” chest deep in a New Orleans sump, try- in New Orleans. At first, Penn was as- Penn didn’t stop to draw breath. He ing to reach a survivor of Hurricane sured that everything that could be done recalled a two-story building that had Katrina. Over the next forty-eight was being done; then the Superdome lost its entire front wall. “You were hours, I caught fleeting sight of Penn lost its roof, and it became clear that the looking right into people’s bedrooms,” brandishing a rifle; lugging old people city was imploding. “Carville at a certain he said. “And, upstairs, in his boxer out of his boat; bailing out the boat; point said, ‘Fuck it, do what you think,’ ” shorts, was this Middle Eastern guy and, later, just off the plane to San Penn said. He told his family he was with a shotgun and with Islamic sym- Francisco, cleaned up and remarkably going to the Astrodome in Houston and bols painted on the walls. He didn’t composed, being interviewed by Larry maybe to Baton Rouge. “I didn’t tell want anything to do with us.” Penn took King. By then, although Penn had them I was going to New Orleans. I a drag on his cigarette. He recalled a helped to rescue about forty people, the didn’t know I was gonna get in but I had schizophrenic woman who had been press and the bloggers had done their a feeling.” He also organized a small jet days without her medicine, chest deep sneering. “Sean Penn, International to fly to Baton Rouge with supplies: in water, groping toward a helicopter as Man of Action,” it was reported, had water, bug spray, athlete’s-foot spray— it descended noisily toward her. “We come to New Orleans with his “entou- “a lot of people who’d come out had wet were yelling at her to turn and come to rage,” including a photographer; the feet”—Gatorade, Balance Bars. us,” he said. “She didn’t hear us. Shin- boat he was seen bailing out was widely As Penn told his story, he still seemed gles flew off roofs and all that kind of reported to have sunk. None of this to be trying to make sense of the expe- shit. The water was like an ocean. I proved to be true. When King pressed rience; words tumbled out of him in a turned my back because the water was him about the story of the sunken boat, sort of Cubist report of fractured time kicking the hell out of us. Somebody Penn responded with a bet. If the and vivid details: the prop plane he took starts screaming. I turned around and newspaper that had first reported the from Houston to Baton Rouge; the po- she’s gone underwater because of all this sinking—the Melbourne Herald Sun— lice car that carried him into New Or- turbulence. That’s when I ended up in could produce any evidence of it, he’d leans; the surreal darkness of the city; the water. We got her. We got a few pay out a million dollars; if it couldn’t, the empty streets; finding a boat; the others on that run.” it should pay a million toward disaster At the end of the day on the water, relief for the Katrina victims. The story Penn returned to a landing area in the went away, but, as I discovered a few Garden District where he and his days later in San Francisco, Penn’s irri- friends had ferried the people they’d res- tation did not. cued. All of them were still waiting at In jeans and a black bomber jacket, the water’s edge. “Nobody was there Penn was sprawled barefoot on his office for decontamination, nobody was there sofa when I arrived, around midday. for medical relief, nobody was there Dazed and unshaven, he looked rough. to transfer these people out of there,” Bottles of vodka and red wine were Penn said. He spent the rest of the night

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TNY—2006_04_03—PAGE 58—133SC.—LIVE SPOT ART R14979_C PLEASE INSPECT AND REPORT ON QUALITY shuttling the rescued victims to a clinic. Now that the situation in New Or- leans was no longer about emergency response, Penn declared himself “a little depressed about it.” He said, “When it was about pulling people out of water, that’s a no-brainer.” But “where do they go? How do you feed them? How do you get them to start their own lives back up again? How do you figure out who’s the child molester? Now I’m as confused as the government about what to do.” He said, “I struggle with the no- tion that my mind doesn’t go far enough. I’m always frustrated by intellectual re- strictions. My frustration’s with my brain, not with my heart. My heart’s clear. I don’t have a problem there.”

hether by accident or by design, Penn has cast himself on the worldW stage as a sort of one-man Citizen Watch. In his interview with Larry King, Penn had pulled his punches about President Bush and his late re- sponse to Katrina—“Clearly there’s a lot of political issues that are surrounding this that’ll come out in the wash” was his only rueful comment. Nonetheless, over the years he has consistently sought to get right up under Bush’s chin. For his pieces in the Chronicle, Penn tried, and failed, to interview the President; in the “You’ve been eating again.” run-up to the invasion of Iraq, he fa- mously paid fifty-six thousand dollars to publish an open letter to Bush on a •• nearly full page of . “Many of your actions to date and those of innocence, which my father to a de- five-year investigation. Did I violate the proposed seem to violate every defining gree had. I think I’m a little too cyni- embargo by going to Iraq under Hus- principle of this country over which you cal. Most heroes get killed.” Baerwald sein? Did I spend money? Did I use my preside: intolerance of debate . . . mar- agreed. “I think there’s a part of Sean American passport to get there? All ginalization of your critics, the promot- that isn’t gonna be happy until he gets those things. The answer to those ques- ing of fear through unsubstantiated murdered by the Republican noise ma- tions is no.” He added, “We know it rhetoric, manipulation of a quick com- chine,” he said. “Until he finds out what came from the . My law- fort media, and the position of your ad- it’s like to feel like his dad.” yer in Washington knows that.” Penn ministration’s deconstruction of civil Penn took me downstairs to the has been told by friends in the L.A.P.D. liberties all contradict the very core of kitchen, where Hopper was studying an that he is under surveillance. the patriotism you claim,” he wrote. earth-science textbook at the vast blond- On the way out, Penn had paused at In the same letter, Penn invoked his wood kitchen counter, waiting for his a side table. “There’s a cool picture of father (“He raised me with a deep belief father to check his homework. “Give my dad here,” he said. “That’s him di- in the Constitution and the Bill of me a few minutes,” Penn told Hopper. recting.” In the photograph, a viewfinder Rights”). “My dad was a hero to all of Turning back to me, he said under his was hanging around Leo Penn’s neck; us,” Chris Penn told me. “I think it’s breath, “I used to hate doing home- his jaw was tight and his chin assertively easy to say that Sean wants to be a hero. work.” He poured some Cracker Jacks thrust forward. We stood together for a I see what he does around the world, into a bowl and led me out of earshot, to moment scrutinizing the image of com- and, you know, I think that his heart’s a patio overlooking a walled garden and mand, and I thought of something that always in the right place. And is some of the pool. “I’m under investigation by the Penn had told me earlier in the day. it wanting to have a little credit as a Office of Foreign Assets Control, the “My dad loved humans and humanity,” hero? Maybe. I think there’s also a kind Treasury Department,” he said. “It’s a he’d said. “I’m good on humanity.” 

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