Father, Son Find Selves on World Trek

When a father gives advice to his son, both laugh. When a son gives advice to a father, both cry. . . . --Heard one day on the road

In Monaco, they gabbed with Julian Lennon for a solid hour about what it was like being the son of one of the Beatles--and now, a rock musician on his own but still a relatively young man whose father died far too soon.

In Italy, they chatted up a father and son who were gondoliers on the intricate canals of Venice. Papa had arms like steel pipes. Son was as handsome as any leading man in Hollywood--but stayed home, the sixth generation in his family to work the waterways.

In Cairo, at a great feast on their behalf--platters of brains and liver washed down by orange soda--they heard a son say of his father, “I love him one point. My father loves me 1,000 points.” And saw the father, a gruff and macho police official, wipe away tears.

Chris and Richard Roe of Santa Monica spent six months traveling the world, exploring the bonds between fathers and sons, searching for universal truths in a world buffeted by cultural, religious and ethnic differences.

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Along the way, the aspiring filmmaker and his businessman father discovered they also had embarked on their own voyage of discovery. Together 24 hours a day, often sweaty and smelly and strung out from the travails of the road, they learned for the first time to truly appreciate and respect each other, not just as 56-year-old father and 30-year-old son, but as equals, as pals, as men.

What a gift to treasure on Father’s Day.

“He’s a lot tougher person than I thought he was,” said Richard Roe, the dad.

“Never before did he have to shut up and listen to somebody,” said Chris Roe, the son.

It’s not all that unusual, of course, for someone to set out to see the world. What’s remarkable, according to friends and family, is that these two actually finished their trip--together, in person and in spirit.

“The two of them are like two rocks rubbing together,” said Erik Arnesen, 57, a Westside photographer who was with the Roes on and off during the trip--and who came along with his own perspective on fathers and sons, having donated a kidney a few years before to his grown son.

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Meg Roe, Richard’s ex-wife and Chris’ mom, who lives in a Philadelphia suburb, said of the trip: “We thought this would be great. They were stuck with each other. They were either going to do or die--do it or kill each other in the process.”

Fledgling filmmaker Chris, the middle child among three boys, loves to travel. Friends call him creative, clever and personable--but as strong-willed as his dad. He looks like a younger version of Richard.

“Chris is artistic, sensitive, caring, a great guy,” Richard said. Born in Queens and raised in the Bronx and proud of it, Richard said: “I’m none of those things.”

Bold and brash, Richard used to be a stockbroker for a Wall Street firm at its office in Philadelphia. Then he became the director of a New Hampshire summer camp.

But the job abruptly came to an end. His marriage broke up. His mother died. So did his father.

All of it in just three years.

At age 54, he headed west, moving in with Chris in a rented house a block off the beach in Santa Monica. Richard made new friends easily--a bit to Chris’ consternation. Chris said: “My female friends my age would call the house and I’d answer and they’d say, ‘Hi, Chris, is your dad there?’ ”

It was a fantasy, Richard said. But not the fantasy that really intrigued him.

Plain and simple, he wanted a grand adventure.

Way back in April 1978, after he had spent a dozen years trading stocks, he and his wife had packed up their three sons for a trip that lasted 14 months and took them to 32 countries.

Last year, taking stock of his life, Richard decided that it was time again to indulge in his real pleasure--seeing the world.

The other two sons couldn’t go along--one was married, the other busy at work--so Richard suggested to Chris that they should hit the road together. Though they were already roommates, he believed that a trip would push them into an even closer relationship.

“I wanted to be close again to someone I love and who I knew loved me,” Richard said. “I wanted to be part of my family again. Part of something again.”

Chris did want to go, wanted to “get closer to my dad.” But, he said, because his father’s savings and investments were the primary source of funds for the trip, “I wasn’t sure this was the best idea.”

Eventually, he decided that he would take his video and film cameras along--and father and son hit upon the idea of interviewing other fathers and sons as they traveled.

It might, they reasoned, turn into a movie; prospects are still highly uncertain. Meanwhile, Chris said, the cameras--and the interviews, which they called “conversations”--became the means to another end, a “great excuse to explore a lot of feelings and issues with my father that I couldn’t explore otherwise.”

And so a year ago, on June 6, they were off. Their itinerary included sites they had seen on the prior trip--most of Europe, for instance, as well as China--along with new locales, such as Turkey, Israel, South Africa and Vietnam.

Part of the trip was pure fun. They went bungee-jumping in New Zealand, took photos of wild game on safari in South Africa and rode elephants in Thailand.

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Part of it was not much fun. The schedule was demanding: They took 29 flights and slept in 92 different places--hotels, hostels and, occasionally, someone’s home. In India, Chris fell ill, developed a high fever and lost 15 pounds before recovering.

Part of it was work disguised as play. Richard rounded up prospective subjects for the “conversations”--they ended up with 27 interviews across four continents--by schmoozing in bars and cafes with anyone who would listen.

Some spoke English; some didn’t. Sometimes there was no need for words.

In Budapest, a father who had always wanted to be a piano composer but was forced to serve for years as a radio censor under Communist rule watched his 13-year-old son’s fingers fly across the keyboard, pounding out a piece by Beethoven. The father closed his eyes and sighed in delight.

In Monaco--where Richard used to be related by marriage to the royal family--Chris’ cousin, Prince Albert, the heir to the throne, introduced them to his pal, Julian Lennon.

“When we told him what we were doing, he was excited and opened up to us,” Chris said. Interviewed at a seaside beach club, Lennon said he had begun to edge closer to his distant father in the months before John Lennon was killed.

Referring to his father, according to a transcript of the interview, Julian Lennon said: “He gave more love to the world than he did to me.”

Other father-son confessionals similarly seemed steeped in pain.

On a sheep “station”--a sprawling ranch--on New Zealand’s South Island, a 26-year-old son was asked at the end of an interview if he had anything else he wanted to add about his 51-year-old rancher father. “Maybe the drink,” the son said. “There’s a lot of that. Caused a lot of strife at home.”

The father responded a few moments later: “Drinks never interfered with my work. Never, ever. Which I don’t know if [the son] understands.”

“It’s not [at] work, Dad,” the son countered.

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The father added later: “Quite obviously I didn’t realize my drinking was causing a problem. Nobody ever said that to me before.”

For Richard, such comments bore particular poignancy. There were times when he started thinking of himself not just as a father but as a son. His own parents had separated when he was 13 because of his father’s drinking, he said.

“I had no relationship with my father,” Richard said. “Never played catch with him. Never went to a ballgame together. He wasn’t at father-son dinners. He never saw me graduate from high school, from college.

“If I’d had a ‘normal’ father-son relationship,” he said, “I’d still be working on Wall Street.”

In June, visiting his father’s grave before leaving New York en route to Amsterdam, the first stop overseas, Richard said he thought of his own dad: “You showed me how not to be a good father.”

He added in an interview last week: “I was a crummy son. But I was a good father. I am a good father.”

And almost certainly, he said, he is a better father now. “I have learned my relationship with my sons was not what I thought it was. We heard this over and over on the trip from the sons: ‘He treats me like a kid.’ And I was just like that.

“I didn’t realize what an individual Chris was, Chris is, Chris needs to be.”

He went on: “The bottom line is, how did we make it six months together? We learned to accept each other’s differences.”

Therein, Chris said, lies the truth they had to go around the world to discover--the first step in unlocking the mysteries of a relationship as old as mankind. “The father has a vision of what he wants the son to be. The son has a vision of what he wants for himself,” Chris said, adding, “They’re never the same thing.

“So there’s always this conflict. The father wants the son to be a certain way. The son wants his own certain things. There’s always this tension that can never be resolved.

“Yet underlying that is both the father’s and the son’s desire for love, for respect and for appreciation from one another.”