“American Badass,” Madsen’s latest book, may give Mr. Blonde a run for his money.
By Patrick Timothy Mullikin / Special to The Malibu Times
Actor and Malibu resident Michael Madsen laughed as he recalled reading an article about the death of tough-guy actor Richard Widmark.
Madsen, a self-described fellow tough-guy actor, was in Canada working on a film when he spotted the Widmark obit in the local paper.
Widmark, Madsen explained, was quoted in the article as saying that while he had made more than 60 films during his career, he was fearful he’d be remembered only as the giggling psychopath who pushed the old woman down the stairs in a wheelchair (in 1947’s “Kiss of Death”). Widmark’s fear was realized; the headline accompanying the piece read: “Giggling psychopath dead.”
The poet in Madsen the actor saw the irony-and humor-in the article-headline combination.
“I’m going through the same thing because of Mr. Blonde,” Madsen said in a phone interview. “I’ve made 145 films, and the only film that anyone ever really wants to talk about is (the 1992 Quentin Tarantino film) “Reservoir Dogs,” about me chopping off the ear of a cop. I can identify with the idea of one movie being isolated and am fearful that that’s going to be the one. Richard Widmark. I wish I would have been able to meet him.”
Madsen did one better.
He immortalized the 95-year-old Widmark in the poem, “Remembering Richard,” one of 41 poems that appear in Madsen’s newly released book of poetry “American Badass.”
The poem ends: Funny that the editor of the epitaph having printed the quote was ignorant/enough to say the very thing/Richard didn’t want said.
Tough-guy actor as sensitive poet?
It’s not quite so far-fetched as it seems, 51-year-old Madsen said from his Malibu home, the day after returning from a film-shoot in Budapest.
“Writing poetry was just a different part of my life, and had nothing to do with movie acting or anything else. What happened was when I started working as an actor, and I started being on long trips on planes and trains, long times of loneliness, long times of being on your own, I started writing things down,” he said. “I started writing things on the backs of matchbooks or on a paper bag. I actually wrote a poem on my leg in the back of a taxi cab one time in New York City because I didn’t have a piece of paper and I was afraid I would forget.”
His penchant for poetry came naturally, he said, and without formal training. (The same holds true for his acting, he confessed. He studied at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. He lasted a month.)
What really sparked his interest in writing, he said, was a book by Loren Eiseley.
“He was a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a poet. His words, everything he said was like a melody. But he seemed to have a sadness about him that I found interesting, almost like a Charles Schulz kind of a thing: this talented person with their humor, but underneath it is some sort of quiet kind of sadness.”
He admits some of his poems, especially those appearing in an earlier book of his poetry, “The Complete Poetic Works of Michael Madsen,” contained some of this sadness.
“If you read some of this stuff, there’s a lot of dark stuff in there, and a lot of stuff I wrote about my childhood, about growing up. I think after people started reading some of it they realized that what I’m really doing is creating a journal of my life.”
The material in “American Badass” by contrast is not quite so dark, though much of it is still autobiographical.
Take, for example, a visit with his “emotionally distant” 85-year-old father in “Untitled.”
“My father stood slightly higher on a curbway/when I hugged him, /so my head rested on the top/of his once mighty chest./It was at that moment,/ 9 years old again,/ I let go,/ forever,/ all the years of anxiety that had haunted me.”
And then there’s his own father-son relationship with his son in “18.”
“Walking up the stone steps from the river,/my son sprinted past me,/only half-way up I was winded./Oh to be 18 again./His whole life ahead of him/and mine slipping away forever./Maybe someday he will walk up those same steps/or some other steps somewhere else and his boy will sprint past him/and he will remember this poem.”
This is heavy stuff, but then again Madsen has a built a reputation playing the heavy-at least in films.
“People always ask me about my books because it seems like the last thing in the world that Michael Madsen would be doing,” he said. “There are people who do wonder if there can be this person who plays these rather violent characters in quite a few films. They forget that I was the dad in ‘Free Willy.’” “American Badass,” (120 pages, 13 Hands Publication)