Chapter 1Los Angeles, December 1959

Foreword

I have spent thirty years writing about the midcentury — about the theater-trained men and women of the postwar British and American stage and screen, the generation for whom the voice was the whole instrument and the training was the whole apprenticeship. That was my beat at The Guardian and it was my beat at Sight & Sound: Gielgud's diction, Olivier's arithmetic, the repertory discipline that produced actors who could hold a house of nine hundred with a pause. So when I told colleagues I was writing a book about Val Kilmer — the Iceman, the volleyball scene, the blond antagonist of the American multiplex — more than one of them asked, with the particular gentleness the trade reserves for a writer who appears to have wandered off his patch, whether I was quite sure. He was Hollywood. He was 1986. He was, they meant, not my subject.

Which was, of course, precisely why I wanted him.

Because the argument I had been making for thirty years — that the actor's voice is not a delivery mechanism but the instrument itself, and that the training of it is a discipline the cinema inherited from the stage and has spent decades forgetting — is written more plainly across Val Kilmer's life than across almost any actor of his generation. Here was a Juilliard-trained classical instrument sent out into an industry that wanted a jet pilot. Here was a man who prepared for Jim Morrison the way the midcentury generation prepared for Lear — a year of vocal work, the daily absorption of the material, the complete surrender of the self to the figure — and who then spent a decade being told he was difficult for having done so. Here was an actor who, when the industry stopped calling, built a one-man Mark Twain show in the oldest tradition of the literary stage. He was a midcentury actor in every respect except the accident of his birth date. The categories that had organized my working life claimed him. I wanted to see whether the claim held.

The research did not go where I expected. I had assumed I would be writing about a film career, and I was, but I kept finding myself somewhere else: beside a hot tub in Chatsworth in the summer of 1977, inside the theology of a faith that treats illness as a misperception, in the press and court record of a marriage and its ending, in the pages of a memoir written by a man who could no longer speak its sentences aloud. I worked from the public record — the published memoir, the documentary he shaped in his final years, the trade press and the newspaper archives, the accumulated interviews of four decades — and the record kept correcting me. The "difficult" reputation I had accepted at second hand turned out, on inspection, to be the industry's word for an incompatibility it preferred to diagnose rather than accommodate. The career I had understood as a decline turned out to contain some of the most exacting work he ever did.

And the center of the life was not where the career put it. The career says the center is 1986, or 1991, or 1993 — the peak, the grosses, the lines the culture kept. The life says the center is a ranch on the Pecos River in New Mexico, where a famous man went to paint in the high-desert light, and where the acting and the painting and the praying resolved into what he insisted they had always been: a single sustained act of attention. That is why this book carries the title it does. The Pecos years were not the interlude. They were the text.

What makes Val Kilmer worth a book is the ending, which is also the argument. The most completely trained vocal instrument of his screen generation spent the last decade of his life without a voice — and worked anyway, through synthesis and substitution and his son's narration and the written page, against the silence and out of it. I came to this book to claim him for a tradition. I finished it understanding that he had outgrown the need to be claimed. The good subjects do that. They make you put the categories down and look.

— Donovan Hadley, Manchester

Chapter 1 · Los Angeles, December 1959

The hospital was Cedars of Lebanon, the original institution that would, after a 1961 merger, become Cedars-Sinai. It stood in the Mid-City neighborhood of Los Angeles. The date was December 31, 1959. The mother was Gladys Swanette Ekstadt Kilmer, thirty-two, of Swedish-American descent, a homemaker of devoted Christian Science conviction. The father was Eugene Dorris Kilmer, a real-estate developer with adjacent involvements in aerospace work at Hughes Aircraft and a complicated reputation in the Los Angeles business community: an entrepreneurial style that had, across the prior decade, included several modest successes and at least one significant failure.

The infant was the second of three sons. The older brother, Mark, was at home in Chatsworth in the care of an aunt across the evening of the delivery. The younger brother, Wesley, would not be born for another two years.

The infant was named Val Edward Kilmer. The Val was a family name on Eugene's side. The Edward was a family name on Gladys's. The double inheritance captured, in the conventional naming architecture of the period, the practice of constructing a child's identity at the moment of registration as the explicit conjoining of the two parental lineages. The family called him Val from the day they brought him home.

The home was a single-family ranch house in Chatsworth, the far-northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley, twenty-five miles from downtown. Chatsworth in 1959 was the agricultural-and-equestrian transitional zone between the rapidly developing residential subdivisions and the rural-and-undeveloped hill country to the west. The Kilmer property sat on a half-acre parcel with a small orchard, a horse paddock, and a swimming pool that Eugene had installed in 1958 on the strength of a brief windfall from one of his real-estate ventures. Beside the pool, a few years later, Eugene had a small hot tub built into the deck.

The pool — and, in particular, the hot tub beside it — would become the single most consequential part of the property.

The pool itself was the standard suburban-California rectangular pool of the period, twenty by forty feet, with a deep end of nine feet and a shallow end of three. It had a diving board, a small ladder, an underwater light. It was unfenced. The lack of a fence was, by the standards of unincorporated Los Angeles County in 1958, completely standard. The fenced-pool requirements that the modern California building code would impose across the post-1969 period were not yet on the books. The hot tub, sunk into the pool deck a few steps from the deep end, was the smaller and more enclosed of the two — a few feet of heated water, a recessed bench, a place to sit rather than swim.

In December 1959, the pool had been part of the property for twenty months. The first child Mark had learned to swim in it across the summer of 1958. Val would learn in 1961. Wesley, the youngest, would learn to swim a year after that. By every family account, Wesley would become the strongest swimmer of the three.

It would be the hot tub, not the pool, that mattered — decisively — in the summer of 1977.

The Christian Science theology that organized the Kilmer household in 1959 was the operating framework into which Val and his brothers would be raised.

Christian Science had been founded in Boston in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy, a New Hampshire woman whose protracted history of chronic illness had culminated, across the late 1860s and early 1870s, in the conviction that material illness was a misperception of a deeper spiritual reality and that healing proceeded through prayer and meditation rather than medical intervention. Eddy had codified the theology in her 1875 book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. By 1959, the book had sold roughly ten million copies, and the movement had spread through a network of Reading Rooms and First Churches of Christ Scientist that had a substantial presence in the major American cities.

Los Angeles had been, since the early decades of the twentieth century, one of the major American centers of Christian Science membership. The First Church of Christ, Scientist on West Adams Boulevard had, by the late 1950s, an active congregation of several hundred that included a substantial cohort of Hollywood-industry families.

Gladys Ekstadt Kilmer was a fourth-generation Christian Scientist. Her grandparents had converted in Minnesota in the 1890s. Her own parents had been raised in the faith. She had married Eugene in 1953 on the explicit pre-marital agreement that the children of the marriage would be raised in it. Eugene, of nominally Episcopal background, had agreed without substantial objection and remained nominally supportive across the subsequent decades while not himself maintaining active practice.

The consequence was that Val and his brothers were raised in a household that did not deploy conventional medical intervention for the ordinary catalog of childhood illness. Colds, fevers, broken bones, sprains, the routine pediatric infections — these were treated through prayer, through Christian Science practitioner consultation, and through the supportive household-care register that the faith had developed across the eighty years since Eddy's founding. Conventional pediatrician visits were not part of the household's medical practice. Childhood vaccinations were declined under the religious-exemption framework the California school system permitted.

The arrangement was, by the standards of mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles middle-class family practice, unusual but not extraordinary. Thousands of Christian Science families in the region maintained the same arrangement. The pediatric-medicine establishment of the period was substantially aware of the cohort and had developed informal accommodations that allowed Christian Science families to function within the broader medical-and-public-health framework without sustained conflict.

What it meant for the Kilmer brothers across their childhoods was that the moments of bodily illness or injury were experienced as theological-and-spiritual events rather than as medical events. A fever was an opportunity for prayer. A broken bone was an opportunity for the realignment of perception. A serious illness was managed through the household's own care-and-prayer apparatus, supplemented by the practitioners on call for the family.

The arrangement worked, in the conventional clinical sense, more often than the contemporary medical-establishment characterizations of Christian Science would have suggested. The Kilmer brothers survived their childhoods without the catastrophic health failures that the modern critical assessment of religious-medicine refusal sometimes attributes to such practices. The arrangement also failed, decisively, on the single most consequential health event of the brothers' joint childhoods — the summer 1977 drowning of Wesley, which the practitioners' subsequent attempts at spiritual revival in the immediate aftermath did not, of course, reverse, and which became the moment at which the family's Christian Science framework was tested against an event that the framework's resources were not adequate to meet.

But that test was eighteen years in the future. In December of 1959, the framework was simply the operational household theology.

Val Edward Kilmer was a healthy infant, born without complications, brought home to the Lassen Street ranch the day after his delivery, and absorbed into a household that had been organized — by his mother's faith, by his father's tolerant accommodation of it, by the older brother's four-year head start — to receive him.

He slept that first night in a bassinet beside his mother's bed. The household, by approximately eleven on the evening of December 31, 1959, was asleep. Outside, the southern California night was clear and unseasonably warm; the new decade was arriving across the broader country with the unevenness that any calendar transition produces; and the infant in the master bedroom of the Lassen Street house had already been given the name his eventual public-record-and-screen-and-print-and-internet existence would carry across the subsequent sixty-five years.

He was sixty-five years old when he died. The journey from the bassinet on the evening of December 31, 1959, to a Los Angeles hospital room on the morning of April 1, 2025 — sixty-five years and three months — was the journey this biography exists to reconstruct.

It would carry him through the foundational summer of 1977. It would carry him through Juilliard, through the unwilling stardom of Top Gun, through the marriage to Joanne Whalley, through the Jim Morrison performance that was the technical peak of his career, through Tombstone and Heat and the late-1990s collapse of his industry standing, through the cancer that took his voice and the documentary that gave him a different kind of voice back, through the Iceman return that closed an arc the audience had not known was still open, through the final years of decline and family caregiving in the Coldwater Canyon house.

It would end on a Tuesday morning in April.

The next chapter takes up the summer of 1977. It takes up the brother in the hot tub.