My Extraordinary Ordinary Life

by Sissy Spacek

  Brian De Palma, the son of a New Jersey surgeon, had studied physics before becoming a director. Although Brian is a very talented filmmaker, he is also a famous curmudgeon. It is not easy to make him laugh. If and when you ever did, you felt like you’d won the lottery. I would say to him, “Good morning, Brian,” and he’d growl, “What’s so good about it?” It didn’t take long to realize that his gruffness was part of a razor-sharp sense of humor and a huge part of his charm.

  Brian came to rely on Jack to fill in the gaps in the production. When they realized they needed to create a new record label for the film, Jack designed the classic “Death Records” logo. His inspiration came when he walked out the door one morning and stumbled upon a deceased songbird. He picked up its stiff little corpse and took it to work, where it was photographed and immortalized as the Death Records mascot. (You can still find the T-shirts online.)

  One day Jack was busy with something or other at the next location so he left Sam and me in charge of the set. “There’s nothing much happening today. They’ll be on this scene through most of tomorrow,” Jack told us. “Just watch the set. If they need any props, put ’em in.”

  The minute Jack left, Brian decided that the scene wasn’t working, and he wanted to shoot a different scene. There were no cell phones back then, and no way to reach Jack to ask him what to do. The script supervisor saw that I was starting to panic. She came over to me and said, “Don’t worry it’s the same set. You just have to repaint and redress it.” So I said, “Okay, no problem.”

  We moved the props around as fast as we could and then started putting a new coat of paint on the walls. Brian was sitting in his director’s chair with his arms folded, watching us, which was a little disconcerting. Sam and I didn’t know enough to realize that we had to paint the set with white primer before changing the color. Before you could say presto chango, the blue we were trying to cover began bleeding into the pink, and we ended up with a blotchy magenta mess. I’m sure that if he could have, Jack would have fired us, too. And from that point on, Brian De Palma would think of me as the worst, no-talent set decorator he’d ever worked with.

  Despite the difficulties of the shoot, it was great being back home in Texas. I made a few trips to see my folks, and Jack’s mom, Gerri, flew down from Washington to visit us on location. We’d had an instant connection from the moment we met. I loved her for being so smart and down-to-earth, and she could tell how much I appreciated her son, which was what mattered to her. When she arrived in Dallas, she spent one whole night, all dressed up, sitting in the middle of the empty Majestic Theatre, watching Jack clean and sweep the stage.

  One of the best things that happened to us during that shoot was finding Twerp. We were rummaging around in a storage shed filled with props one day, when we heard the faint sound of a little bird singing. We followed the peeping to a tiny blue parakeet hopping around in a box of broken mirrors, trilling happily at his many reflections, probably thinking he had lots of little blue friends. Jack and I found a cage for him and named him Twerp.

  When we wrapped the film, Twerp traveled home with us to California. By now Jack and I had moved into another rented house deeper in Topanga Canyon, a rugged, twisting passage through the Santa Monica Mountains connecting the Pacific Coastline with the San Fernando Valley. I loved it there. Unlike the more cultivated, shabby-chic grottoes of Laurel Canyon, Topanga had a rustic, back-to-the-land vibe, and the mountains there were filled with miles of trails. I would hike for hours in my flip-flops; you could go barefoot to the grocery store. And I loved living with Jack Fisk. He woke up every morning thinking, Oh boy! What do we get to do today? We were happy as could be with each other, but neither of us was interested in marriage. We thought, Why mess up a good thing? My mother, however, saw it differently.

  “If you love each other and want to live together, why not get married?” she said.

  “Oh, Mother!” I said. “What’s the big deal about getting married? It’s just a piece of paper.”

  She thought for a minute and said, “Well, if it’s not such a big deal, why don’t you just go ahead and do it?”

  I had to laugh. I said, “Okay, Jack! Let’s get married!”

  We took the blood tests everyone needed to get married, then we forgot about it until the day before they were about to expire. When we realized we’d either have to do the deed or get another blood test, we thought, Another needle? No way. We’d rather get married. We called the Cottage Chapel in Santa Monica and set a time for that afternoon. It was April 12, 1974. We didn’t tell anybody what we were planning. I wore old blue jeans, for something old and something blue, and I was carrying a bright new penny.... I think I may have borrowed the penny from Jack. We loaded Five into the car and threaded our way down the canyon to the Pacific Coast Highway, then headed east on Santa Monica Boulevard toward the chapel. At a light, we looked over, and there was David Lynch in his Volkswagen Beetle, stopped right beside us. We honked and waved, and David waved back. “Hey, Jack! Hey, Sissy!” That chance meeting made David our best man; Five was the maid of honor.

  There was music playing when we arrived at the chapel, so we waited outside the door for a long time, thinking someone else must be getting married. Then a nice minister in a suit opened the door, welcomed us in, and began to read the service. Suddenly he pulled back a curtain to reveal a very small organ being played by a very petite woman who craned her neck and gave us a great big smile without missing a note. It was like a vaudeville routine. The wedding was lovely, except for one little slipup by the minister … “and obey.” After that was corrected, we exchanged our vows, then pressed Five’s ink-covered paw onto our marriage license to sign as our “witness.” (Sometime later we got a lovely letter from the minister, talking to us about the sanctity of marriage, and with a P.S.: “And hello to your well-behaved black dog.”) On our way home, we stopped at the A&W for a couple of root beers. And that was our wedding day.

  As conservative as my father was, I was surprised when he encouraged me to keep my birth name. One day he handed me a Time magazine with an article about that very thing. I hadn’t considered changing it anyway; I’d worked too hard for the name I already had. And Jack couldn’t care less about that sort of thing. But I was touched that my father wanted me to keep my identity, which was an advanced idea at the time. In those days, women still couldn’t serve on juries in some places, and in at least one state there were laws on the books giving husbands complete control of joint property as “head and master” of their households. (I swear I’m not making this up!) My dad had always encouraged me to be independent and to manage my own money, have my own career, and be an equal partner in a relationship, so that I’d never be completely dependent on anyone. Jack not only agreed with this, he encouraged it. Eventually he and my father developed a deep respect and admiration for each other (even after he found out about the chicken bone).

  The only time I was ever given any trouble keeping my own name was when I applied for a passport after I was married. For some unknown reason, the woman behind the desk in the passport office felt threatened. She did not want to give me a passport in my birth name. She said I was married now, and that meant my name had legally changed. I could not have my birth name on my passport; no way. I tried to explain that things had changed. I quoted the Time magazine article. I kidded. I cajoled. It didn’t help. I begged. I threatened.

  “Look,” I said finally. “If it doesn’t bother my husband, why should it bother you?”

  She just looked at me.

  “He’s out in the car.” I said. “I’ll go get him and you can ask him yourself!” And so there I was, like a little kid, having to get my husband’s permission to put my own name on my passport! It was 1974, but it felt like the Dark Ages.

  … 11 …

  I have to admit that I was kind of baffled when the excellent reviews we received for Badlands didn’t translate into good jobs. I thought I was going to have to keep a big stick by the door to beat p
eople away, but sadly, that was not the case. (Although I did keep my baton handy, on the off-chance someone asked me to twirl.) I made a couple of forgettable films for low pay, and waited for my next big break. Jack was working all the time, but he couldn’t get into the art director’s union, which was a real closed shop, so his options in Los Angeles were limited. One of the movies he worked on was a blaxploitation parody set in Watts called Darktown Strutters. It wasn’t exactly an artistic challenge, but the money was good. And one of the crew members, a teenager from Fort Worth named Bill Paxton, became a lifelong friend.

  When we met Bill, he had shoulder-length hair and wore a top hat (just like my cousin Sam—it must have been a Texas fashion statement). He was living with his brother, Bob, and another friend in an apartment in West Hollywood, paying the rent by doing odd jobs in the movie business. Like David Lynch, and Jack before him, Bill had a paper route, although his newspaper was the Los Angeles Times. They used to compete about who could throw the paper in the most perfect, accurate arc. Bill had been working on a Roger Corman film as a set dresser when Jack hired him for Darktown Strutters. He was as handsome as the movie star he would later become, and charming as the day is long. Bill was an industrious worker, but he was still a goofy kid who loved to drink beer and listen to music all night when he had the chance. We all became great friends during that movie. And when Jack and I decided we could finally afford to take some time off for a belated honeymoon trip through Europe, we asked Bill, his brother, Bob, and another friend to stay in our house in Topanga and take care of our pets.

  By then we had Five and Twerp and a cat named Strutter, who came from the rough neighborhood where Jack and Bill had been working. They were standing on the sidewalk when somebody pitched a kitten out the window of a moving car. Jack brought him home. Strutter must have been scarred by the experience, because he grew up to be the meanest cat in the world. He would bite your hand and then run away. That is, if you were lucky he ran away. If he thought you were special, when you walked up to the front door he would leap from the roof onto your head and try to tear your face off. So, you see, we couldn’t let him stay with just anyone. Still, looking back, I wonder what on earth we were thinking, leaving our house for five weeks with a bunch of teenage boys and a psychopathic cat.

  The trip was great. Jack and I traveled all over Europe and the Middle East. His sister Susie was living and working in Beirut with her first husband, an Egyptian named Hosni Iskander and their young son, Nasif. It was a beautiful city, right on the Mediterranean, with the clearest, bluest water I had ever seen. Everything seemed so exotic in Susie and Hosni’s apartment. Even simple things, like light switches, bathroom fixtures, drawer pulls, toilets, were like nothing I had ever seen before, certainly nothing I’d ever seen at Lumber City. (See, I was even starting to think like an Art Department P.A.) But I was most captivated by a huge self-portrait of Jack hanging on their dining room wall. It was an incredible drawing, done by Jack while he was in art school. I coveted it for myself, but I was too polite to ever mention how badly I wanted it.

  As we were preparing to leave the States, my parents worried about us traveling to Lebanon, because fighting had broken out there. I wasn’t at all concerned. But then, I was young and naive, and not very interested in international news. I’m afraid my world revolved around what was happening in the entertainment section of the LA Times. Susie had told us it was safe in Beirut; we would be just fine. But after we arrived we learned that even though there was supposed to be a ceasefire, the streets were still dangerous. Large sections of the city were off-limits, and there were many routes that we couldn’t take. We saw buildings and whole neighborhoods pockmarked by bullets and badly damaged from mortar fire. But Hosni, a tall, handsome, gentle man, was fluent in English and Arabic, and had relatives living in the city, so he was the best tour guide imaginable. We saw the country as few tourists could, and we were always greeted with warmth and hospitality—even though I made some grievous cultural mistakes. I had no idea that it wasn’t proper to wear short shorts all over the Middle East. Fortunately, Susie made sure I was covered up when we were in public places.

  Jack and I drifted through the first leg of our honeymoon in blissful innocence, untouched by the events erupting around us. I only remember hearing gunfire one time, while we were lying on the beach enjoying the sun. On the news that night we learned that troops had been landing just down the beach from us. We had no idea we were in the middle of an invasion, right there in our bathing suits.

  We left Beirut just before the cease-fire collapsed and the whole country was caught up in a full-blown, bloody civil war. A few months later, Susie and Hosni had to flee Beirut in the middle of the night. Their apartment was occupied by Lebanese troops, and the soldiers vandalized the huge self-portrait of Jack. That made me want it even more—the layer of graffiti would have made it an even more amazing piece of artwork. But the war dragged on for years, and I never got the drawing out of the country.

  After we left Beirut, Jack and I slowly made our way across Europe. The rest of our vacation was wonderfully uneventful. We had the time of our lives traveling by train on Eurail passes and staying in lovely pensions along the way. We hiked mountains in Switzerland, rode Vespas through Italy, toured museums in Paris, and spent what money we had left shopping in England.

  Then we sent word to Bill and the boys that we were on our way home.

  As soon as I ran into the living room to say hello to Twerp, I knew something was terribly wrong with the bird. He wasn’t singing happily. And he looked different. “Jack?” I said. “Isn’t Twerp blue?” Jack threw Bill a look that was sharp enough to cut his throat. All Bill could do was stammer, “It was Strutter!” Then he told us a half-baked tale about how they kept piling our mail on a stool beneath the bird cage, and that the cat was finally able to climb all the way up and get to Twerp. They had thought it would ease our hearts if they bought us another parakeet.

  It sounded kind of suspicious to me, but I was relieved that Five and the cat were in good shape and the house was relatively clean. “Not Sissy clean,” as I pointed out. But good enough for forgiveness.

  The full details of what happened while we were in Europe remained shrouded in mystery for the next thirty-four years. Bill Paxton would guard his secret well, even as he became an accomplished art director, working on big pictures with his friend the director James Cameron. He uttered not a peep when he switched to the other side of the camera, starring in Twister and Apollo 13. It wasn’t until he was starring in the HBO show Big Love, and I had joined the cast for a recurring guest part one season, that Bill finally spilled the beans.

  “Oh, Sissy, I’m still so sorry about Twerp!” he said, shortly after I arrived on the set. Then he proceeded to spin the story of Twerp’s demise, except it was different from the version I had heard in 1974. Bill is a great storyteller, and a group of cast and crew members gathered around as he set the scene.

  “Strutter was the meanest cat in the world and he was always trying to kill Twerp,” said Bill. “He would just sit all day under the birdcage, staring up and twitching his tail. So it wasn’t a safe situation for the bird, anyway. Meanwhile, my brother Bob and I and our friend Danny were really enjoying living at the house. We would stay up all night messing around and blaring music as loud as we wanted, and then by the time it was getting light, we’d be wanting to go to bed. But Twerp would just be waking up, the bird was like a rooster in that house. He’d be whistling and chirping and we couldn’t get to sleep. So, we thought, the solution would be to hang the cage in the downstairs shower and close the door. Let that bird just sing its heart out. That worked out great for a while, until one night Strutter got in there. The next day we found feathers everywhere, and Twerp was gone.

  “We panicked. Here we were, entrusted to take care of this beloved pet, and it was eaten. Then we thought, hell, parakeets kind of look alike. So we drove over to a pet shop in Tarzana and bought a parakeet that we thought looked
sort of like Twerp. We figured that it had been a while since Sissy had seen it, and maybe she would think it was molting. So we brought it home. That bird just dropped dead, overnight. We didn’t know why. (Twerp #2 probably took one look at Strutter and had a heart attack.) So we went back and bought another bird, Twerp #3. We got him set up in the cage just as Jack and Sissy walked in the door....”

  Bill looked over at me and saw the look on my face. I think he went a little pale. He may have even glanced around to see if Jack was going to pop out of the shadows and fire him. Then we both doubled over laughing. The truth was out.

  “It was a cover-up!” I said.

  “Aw, Sissy,” Bill said. “We just made up that story about the mail to make it look like we weren’t completely negligent.”

  I forgave him again. I just hope Twerp went quickly, without any suffering.

  And Bill forgave me for the first time he hosted Saturday Night Live and, because he was my friend, they dumped a bucket of pig’s blood on his head.

  After we got back from our honeymoon, Jack and I went house hunting. We found a simple ranch house on a ridge at the summit of Topanga Canyon. It only cost $55,000, but we needed help guaranteeing a loan, so we asked my dad to come out and have a look at it. Daddy walked through the house, inspected the foundation, and took a stroll around the property. It was an ugly yellow stucco tract-type house, but sound. Jack already had big plans for the place. Best of all, you could see all the way across the canyon, over pine, eucalyptus, and chaparral-covered peaks. “Well, Jack,” said my dad. “What you’ve got here is a $5,000 house … with a $50,000 view.” He agreed to help us buy it.

  Not long after we moved in, Jack started renovating. One weekend, using only a hatchet and a crowbar, he gutted the house and tore down three of its four walls. How it was still standing, I don’t know. The only room he didn’t tear up that weekend was our bedroom, so I went in there to get some sleep. When I woke up, I found Jack in what used to be the living room, sitting cross-legged like an Indian on top of a huge pile of rubble, reading a book titled How to Build a Wood Frame House. Of course, this was a man who could build anything for a film set, from windmills to dungeons. Before long, he turned that little tract house into a hilltop paradise, with vaulted ceilings and skylights and stained glass, an outdoor dining room and a wraparound deck with a hot tub and sauna.