by Sissy Spacek
Not long ago, Madison asked me, “Mom, how could you let us ride up the mountain all alone? We were only, like, nine years old!”
“Well, I gave you walkie-talkies.”
And I would do it again. I can’t imagine having a childhood without being left on your own some time and being able to have some freedom. Jumping horses, riding bicycles and skateboards, and climbing trees all involve taking some risks. But how else can you know what you’re made of if you’re never allowed to test yourself? Our daughters both had plenty of mettle, but their personalities were very different.
Madison was a tomboy like me, always running barefoot or swinging off a tree limb with her clothes on backwards. Schuyler was a born performer. When she was about seven, she made her film debut in a dark comedy Jack directed called Daddy’s Dyin’… Who’s Got the Will? After that, she had stars in her eyes. She became convinced that we were ruining her career by not living in LA. During one visit to Los Angeles, she turned to me and said “Mom, why don’t we live in LA like all the other actresses?”
I said, “Schuyler, honey, we moved to Virginia so you’d have a wonderful childhood like I did, riding horses, playing in the woods, swimming in the pond, running around the farm barefoot. We didn’t want you to grow up in a city, with traffic and pollution. We wanted you and Madison to grow up breathing clean fresh air, not smog.”
Schuyler took a great big deep breath of air, threw out her arms dramatically, and said, “But I LOVE smog… I LOVE traffic!” I realized in that moment that I’d met my match.
I explained to her that she didn’t have to live in Hollywood to be an actress. If she wanted to learn to act, she should try out for her school plays. So that’s what she did. (I assumed that she would soon tire of performing and lose interest. But as Loretta Lynn always told me: never assume.) She debuted in Charlotte’s Web. We sat proudly with the other parents as she portrayed a bee with great flair. The floppy wings that her dad had made for her slapped all the other little insects and farm animals in the face as she danced around the stage. When she was in sixth grade, she played the lead in the musical Annie. I cleaned out the downstairs backstage area so the actors could have a safe, comfortable place to wait their turn to go onstage. I also volunteered to do hair and makeup, and curled up one of my movie wigs for Schuyler to wear as Little Orphan Annie. The show was so good that kids from other schools came to hear her sing, “The sun’ll come out tomorrow.” But we didn’t realize what a star she was until Schuyler and I were strolling through a small shopping center in town at Christmastime. Some schoolgirls raced up to us waving papers and pens. We both thought they wanted my autograph until we heard them say, “Schuyler! Schuyler! Are you Schuyler Fisk? You were in Annie, right?” Her whole face lit up as she signed her first autographs.
Schuyler had small parts in several of my films, but when she was eleven, she won a major role in The Baby-Sitters Club. Some mothers might have hesitated to let their child get into the business at such a young age, but acting was in Schuyler’s blood and she had grown up around films. It was as natural to her as chewing gum. We made sure she was safe and kept up her schoolwork. Jack and I traded off traveling on location with her. The whole family moved to Ireland one summer when she starred in My Friend Joe. She played a circus performer, and I’ll never get over the sight of her walking a high wire with a harness but no net. Madison, who was about five, was not in the film but had such incredible balance that the aerialist tried to talk us into taking her to France for training.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “She’s going home to start kindergarten instead.”
Schuyler was a fearless, tough-minded kid, like I was, and very precise about how she wanted things to go. Just as I had worn my father down to get a horse, Schuyler had used a similar technique to have her ears pierced when she was about nine years old. We finally relented and brought her to an ear-piercing booth in a local mall. The whole family got dressed up and came along for the occasion, and Jack took a video for posterity. It’s painful to watch. The machine was supposed to punch a hole in her earlobe and leave a little gold stud behind. But the machine got stuck and the stud broke off. Soon the excitement on her face crumpled and she started to tremble. She was trying to be brave and not cry, breathing in little puffs to control the pain. But within minutes she’d regained her composure and got the second ear done. And she paved the way for her little sister, as all older siblings do for the younger ones. Madison got her ears pierced a short while later with hardly any begging.
Our daughters came along just at the right time in my life, at the height of my success. Kids don’t know you’re famous, and they don’t care. They’ll kick you to the curb every time. You say frog, they don’t jump; they say frog, you jump. When Schuyler cut most of her hair off with a pair of dull scissors when she was about four years old, it sent me into quite a tailspin. When Madison did the same thing at about the same age, I just shrugged and thought, Well at least we have that over with. (Of course neither of these episodes was nearly as bad as when my brothers cut off my ponytail right at the rubber band.)
It was not always easy combining career and family. In fact, it was kind of like patting my head and rubbing my stomach at the same time. I felt like the lady trying to keep all the plates spinning in the air. When I was making a film, I worried about the parent/teacher conference I was missing. When I was in the carpool line, I wondered if I’d ever work again. But I somehow managed to do both, and survived to tell the tale.
We spent most of 1994 in Texas shooting two projects back-to-back: Streets of Laredo and The Good Old Boys. Tommy Lee Jones was making his directorial debut with The Good Old Boys, a cable TV drama about cowboys trying to hold on to the ways of the Old West. Sam Shepard and Frances McDormand were in it, too, along with a newcomer named Matt Damon. The script called for my character to ride her horse sidesaddle, and I wanted to make it look good. So I found a beautiful period Sears and Roebuck sidesaddle and took it to a leathersmith in Virginia who repaired and conditioned it. It was beautifully engineered and built for serious riding and jumping. I worked with a national sidesaddle champion every day for months and before long I was cantering along the trails like I knew what I was doing.
I brought Schuyler and Madison with me for the filming, and they had a great time riding ponies bareback with the ranch kids who lived nearby. In fact, the whole movie felt like a family affair. Sam Shepard’s teenage son, Jesse, was the wrangler on the movie, and he had a special horse and saddle ready for me when I got there. The horse was a handsome paint, but he was persnickety and had been schooled with an old Mexican parade saddle. When I got on him with my own saddle, he started bucking me across the field. I managed to stay on, and eventually got him calmed down. In the end, I came to love that paint horse. But I don’t know if Tommy Lee ever trusted him after that incident.
This was a classic Western, and Tommy Lee and Sam were galloping their horses all over the place. I was only allowed to walk, or maybe trot if I was lucky. It started to bother me, because I had put in so much time learning to ride sidesaddle—and I wanted to ride.
“Tommy Lee, am I ever going to get to gallop in this movie?” I asked one day.
“See all the rocks in this field?” said Tommy Lee.
“Yep.”
“Know what they call it?”
“Nope.”
“Cemetery Field. That’s what they named it after an old boy’s horse threw him here one day, and he hit his head and died. Now, what would I do if I had to call Jack and tell him you got thrown off your horse, hit your head on a rock, and died?”
“Tommy Lee, where I live now, people jump four-foot fences in the woods riding sidesaddle in skirts. I worked hard to learn how to ride this way. I’d rather fall off and hit my head on a rock and die than go back to Virginia and tell everybody that I just walked into the middle of every scene!”
So he let me gallop in one time, but he shot it with me riding straight at the camera, so you misse
d the effect of my flowing skirts traveling east to west. And I thought, Where’s the drama? It was a bit of a disappointment, but my only one. Tommy Lee Jones is a talented director. And I loved working with him.
In Streets of Laredo, shot on the same location, I got a little more drama than I’d bargained for. I drove a wagon filled with children through a raging dust storm and rode across the prairie at a dead run, shooting bad guys off their horses with a Colt .45 revolver. It reminded me that all my childhood experiences on the back of my horse had actually helped prepare me for something.
Madison, who was about four, wanted to be an extra in the film, so we dressed her up in an old-fashioned sailor dress that had been her sister’s, her paddock boots, and a hat. She was so excited, but after hours of waiting in the heat she started to fade. By lunchtime, she was “over it.” We had befriended one of the stuntmen who had also brought his children to the set. When he saw that Madison was losing her mind with boredom, he offered to put her on an old, gentle horse and walk around with her. She hopped right on. When it came time to eat, filming stopped and everyone headed over to the lunch tent, open on the sides because it was so hot. There were about a hundred people seated at the tables. Madison wanted to go faster, so she gave her horse a little kick. Even the mellowest horses have their moments, and this one took off at top speed. Right toward the lunch tent. We all stopped eating and turned to look, utensils frozen in midair, as we heard two set of hooves galloping toward us. Madison was in the lead, and way out front, on a direct path to disaster, when, from far behind, in raced the stuntman. He galloped alongside her, scooped her off her saddle, and pulled her horse to a stop just before it collided with the tent. Everybody applauded, then went right back to eating. Madison walked around with a smile on her face for the rest of the day.
… 16 …
It’s no secret that the good film roles dwindle when an actress reaches middle age. I don’t even know who said it first, but the progression goes like this: At first the studio head says: “Get me Sissy Spacek!” Then it becomes “Get me a young Sissy Spacek!” Then it’s “Sissy who?”
I have been lucky to find so many rich, nuanced characters written for grown women. One of the best was Ruth Fowler, the bereaved mother in In the Bedroom. It was Todd Field’s first time writing and directing a feature, and it was shot for a budget of $I million on location in Camden and Rockport, Maine, two idyllic little towns on the Atlantic coast. Everyone involved was passionate about the project. We always seem to have the most fun on films where nobody’s getting rich and everybody’s there for the right reason: because we love it. With financial limitations, everyone has to be more creative, figuring out ways to do things on a budget. The crew is smaller, and the unit is closer, and everybody pitches in. Schuyler, who was just eighteen, got her first experience in set decoration. Her job was to make a house into a home. She collected children’s drawings (some of them her sister’s) and painted some of her own. She came along with me to all the antique stores, asking if we could borrow furniture for the film. Todd and his wife had their own linens and paintings shipped out to the set, and many of us contributed some of our own clothes for costumes. It was like that scene in the Mickey Rooney musical, where he says, “Hey, kids, we’ve got a barn, let’s put on a show!” We all worked together to make it happen.
Sometimes it felt as if I had come full circle in my career, reminding me of the days when I dressed sets for Jack. It made me proprietary about some of the props. I had chosen a perfect framed picture for my bedside table in the film. We were shooting a scene where I was lying on the bed, and I heard the camera operator say, “We’ve got a glare on that picture.” Rather than change the angle, he sent an assistant over to take it out of the shot. I grabbed it, and a tug-of-war ensued. Guess who won? It was my contribution to what turned out to be an all-but-perfect film, a masterwork that paid off for all of us in every way.
In the late 1990s David Lynch directed a film that would bring us old friends together to work for the first time. The Straight Story is the simple, true saga of Alvin Straight, a retired farmer who drives his riding mower across two states to visit his dying brother. Jack signed on as the production designer, and David asked me to play Alvin’s middle-aged daughter, Rose. It was a challenging part because Rose had a speech disorder. I needed to learn how to stutter through pages and pages of dialogue. I worked with a doctor of speech pathology and I listened to dozens of stutterers on tape. Then I had to learn to stutter with a Wisconsin accent. I used my old standbys, the tape recorder and video recorder. I gave myself headaches—for me it was all about the air being blocked and not flowing smoothly over the vocal chords. I had decided to wear some dental devices during filming to give Rose interesting teeth. So before I left LA, I worked with an Oscar-winning makeup artist named Matthew Mungle. He made me a set of prosthetic teeth and added plumpers, to fill out my checks, and a palate, which is sort of like a retainer, to change my voice and remind me to stutter. He was also able to lower my gum line with this device and give me one crooked tooth, which gave the illusion of a whole mouthful of crooked teeth.
The most important thing I did, once we arrived on location in Iowa, was spend days with Alvin’s real daughter, Diane, absorbing her voice and learning her body language. She’s a very funny person, and I enjoyed spending time with her. She didn’t have a driver’s license and had never driven a car, so we walked all over town together. She was quite an institution around Laurens, Iowa. One day she said, “I’m gonna take you to the cop shop.” I didn’t know what she meant until we walked in on a meeting of police officers and detectives at the police station. They didn’t recognize me because I was in character, but they seemed to know perfectly well who Diane was, and they were not at all surprised by this episode. I just had to convince her not to blow my cover by always introducing me as “the movie star that is playing me.”
Matthew had made me several sets of prosthetic teeth, which we both thought would last for the entire show. From the first time I met Diane, I wore my “movie teeth.” I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by letting her know I was wearing fake teeth to play her, so whenever she took me to the fast-food hamburger place, I would have to eat with my prosthetic teeth in place. Unfortunately they weren’t made for eating. Matthew had to make quite a few extra pair for me before the filming was over.
To help me transform into the character, David Lynch also talked me into cutting off my hair. That was traumatic, and, trust me, I’d only do it for David. We had both wanted to work together for years, and this turned out to be the perfect project. Jack and David hadn’t worked together since Eraserhead. Now they were like schoolboys again. They would walk around inspecting locations. David would mention to Jack that he thought the kitchen of Alvin’s house was a little too small, and before he could blink, Jack would pick up a sledgehammer and start demolishing a wall. Then David would take out a crowbar and join him. David and Jack worked harder than any of us, and always with enthusiasm. I would often find them sweeping the sidewalks before the day’s filming. As a director, David was a dream: a kind, calm person, with a wonderful inventiveness. It made us want to do anything for him. I had one scene where I hauled big sheets of plywood while talking nonstop to Richard Farnsworth, who played Alvin Straight so beautifully. We did that scene all morning, until David said, “You know, Sis, this doesn’t feel right. Let’s change it.” So we reshot it a different way for half of the afternoon, until David announced, “No, it was better the other way.” My arms were about to fall off, but in the end he was right, and the scene was perfect.
It was fun watching him with the other actors, too. There was a scene in a hardware store, where one of the elderly actors was supposed to get something from behind a counter, say a line, then turn back around. He kept mixing it up, and he was getting upset with himself for doing it wrong every time. David was so patient. He told him, “I’m gonna get a little string, and I’m going to tie it on to your belt loop. And every time you sta
rt to go the wrong way, I’m gonna give that string a little tug, and you’re gonna know it’s time to turn around and put that box back on the shelf…” He had everybody laughing, and it calmed the actor down and made him laugh, too. He did the next take just right.
It was easy to see why David has such loyal friends who will drop everything and work with him for minimal pay when he makes a film. Freddie Francis, one of the greatest cinematographers ever, who had worked with David on The Elephant Man and Dune, was director of photography for The Straight Story (and always wore pink cashmere socks). Most of the crew had worked with David for years. We were like a big, happy family on location, all staying together in a shabby little motel in Laurens, Iowa. With Jack there, it reminded me so much of filming Badlands out on the Colorado prairie, when I first realized that filmmaking could be art. Twenty-five years and thirty films later, I still felt like I was at the center of the universe.
Living on a farm, surrounded by animals and weather and hay-fields, our whole family was bound to the natural rhythms of life and death and birth and renewal. Our girls watched as foals were born and pets died and grandparents became frail. They grew up understanding we are all a part of the grand and sometimes heartbreaking pageant of being alive. It was something I had learned as a child, with the loss of my grandparents and the death of my brother Robbie. I have always understood how precious and fleeting life can be. But one time, shortly after Jack and I moved to Virginia, the universe gave me a tap on the shoulder to make sure I remembered.