Kiefer Sutherland: Heart of Darkness

Kiefer Sutherland is quite looking forward to the day when the creators of the unnerving Fox TV show 24 do unto his Jack Bauer character what they've done to so many others: kill him off, brutally, but with few tears. "Don't get me wrong," he says. "I love what I do." But he's thirty-nine years old, a little pent-up and a lot tired. All he's had for the past five years, ten months out of each year, are endless fourteen-hour days of working on the show, gun in hand, eyes squinted, voice on ultra-incredibly intense, saving the world with methods that might not be right but are never wrong. He has no girlfriend in his life, no affection or release of that sort. Sometimes he feels trapped, caged, really. And then, as a consequence, he occasionally falls into the scotch bottle and ends up making a messy spectacle of himself.

"There's a point that I get to where I just go, 'Fuck it,' " he says one day in Los Angeles, where he lives in the somewhat seedy Silver Lake district, in the vast, open expanse of a former iron foundry. "It's selfish and self-absorbed and it's a dangerous thing, thinking that if you work really hard, you should be able to reward yourself by going out and getting shit-faced. I should be able to wake up in the morning without going, 'Oh, no! Where's my boot?' Or 'Where am I?' Or 'One of your friends didn't happen to bring my car home, did they?' It's not a very clever way to live, and I don't want to live like that. But it's the kind of trade you have to make."

I'd once read that, in public, Kiefer renders "a kind of bluff, surface friendliness that seems to conceal something else." This has also been the gloss on his father, that towering figure of an actor, the great Donald Sutherland, who once helped define eras, with movies like M*A*S*H and Klute. Certainly the two look alike, with their weird, low-slung earlobes, their chipmunk cheeks and their mischievous devil's-work grins. But as far as the son goes, I find him surprisingly forthright, gamely willing to talk about anything you want to talk about -- his two failed marriages, his luckless 1991 engagement to Julia Roberts, his disapproval of foods with certain textures, and assorted other upsets, including drunken run-ins with Christmas trees, his (former) tendency to get into bar fights and that time in his life, just before 24, when he was churning out very bad flicks just for the money.

Right now, though, he's guiding me through his beloved collection of vintage guitars (a '59 Les Paul, a '67 Telecaster, a '68 ES335 and about fifty-five more) and saying guitar-nerd things like "See, this one's got a Jimmy Page switcher, so I could have a double-coil pick-up here and a single coil here and reroute it all the way through. Just amazing tonal quality!"

And then, a few moments later, after easing silkily through some Hendrix on one of his acoustics, he says, "Want to go out? I'll take you on the subway. That's how I get around. We can have a drink that way, because I can't do the driving and the other."

"You can't?" I say.

"Noooo," he says. "That would be bad."

* * * *

As a kid he was tossed about some. One minute he's being born in England, his extravagant dad setting him up in life with the extravagant name of Kiefer William Frederick Dempsey George Rufus Sutherland, the next he's living in Los Angeles. He's three. His mom, Canadian actress Shirley Douglas, and his dad aren't getting along. In fact, his dad is carrying on with Jane Fonda. The marriage dissolves. His mom goes away, leaving Kiefer and his twin sister, Rachel, behind.

It's during this time that Kiefer evolves his first real memory of his father. His father, the larger-than-life movie star, wears his hair long, wild and tangled, with a great big beard to match. A leather coat occludes his shoulders. He drives his son to preschool in a Ferrari he won in a poker game. His father is "different." The other parents stare. Kiefer likes how they stare and by his mid-twenties he will dress similarly, drawing similar stares, albeit from within a 1970 beater Porsche 911, not a Ferrari.

After six months, his mother returns and eventually takes him back to Canada. Over the next ten years he attends seven different schools, learning to make friends by making the other kids laugh. He's insecure, nervous, a compensating cutup but not a great student. In his fifteenth year, he drops out of school, determined to be an actor, despite the usual parental misgivings. Shortly thereafter, he lands the lead in a coming-of-age film, The Bay Boy, and is nominated for a Genie award, Canada's Oscar. With a $30,000 payday in his pocket, he descends on New York and the actor's life. A year later, nearly broke, he moves to L.A. and for a few months lives out of his sweet '67 Mustang. In 1985, he gets his first Hollywood movie, from Sean Penn: a small role in At Close Range (with the greatest tag line ever: "Like Father. Like Son. Like Hell."), most of which ends up on the cutting-room floor. Around the same time, he lands a part in the Steven Spielberg TV show Amazing Stories, and, as he likes to say, "When Steven Spielberg hires you, that's good for three jobs easy." And so it was, first as a gang leader in Stand by Me, then as the most raffishly charming vampire ever in The Lost Boys and as a sensitive cowboy in Young Guns.

He's thinking , "Well, this is easy. I am that good. And it's just going to keep going."

He was twenty-one years old. What else would he think?

But what interests me most about this period in Kiefer's life are those six months early on that he spent separated from his mom. He says it's no big deal -- "It wasn't unusual for any member of my family to go away for quite some time" -- but you have to wonder.

I ask him if he knows where she went.

"I've never been really quite sure," he says. "I think she may have gone back to Canada for a while."

So, he's never asked her about it. "And have you ever talked to your father about his affair with Jane Fonda?"

"No."

"What do you imagine that conversation would have been like?"

"He'd probably say, 'I fell in love.' I understand that. People do. And when they're falling in love, they believe in everything so strongly and passionately, this kind of heightened experience, that it's very hard to judge somebody for it."

That, of course, is what the adult says looking back at the child. How the child might have felt, and how those feelings might have worked on the child in later life, Kiefer doesn't come out and say.