by Sally Field
With reluctance, I pick up the smaller letter and continue reading.
I’ve included the final divorce papers of your parents. As you might notice, it doesn’t take a mathematician to see why it was necessary for your mother to divorce me. For twenty years, I have been hurt and belittled by the media concerning you and now with the days dwindling down to probably a precious few, I had to speak my piece and remind you a little of the past… Happy Birthday. Your Dad.
From wading in until she got over her head.
3
Jocko
BAA NEVER IGNORED us, not like Dick. But during all the many months we were living at Joy’s house, my mother was moving from one job to the next, so even when she was with my brother and me, I’m sure that part of her was somewhere else, thinking about other things. She wasn’t being cast in leading roles, and many times she’s listed as “uncredited”—meaning she had no lines at all. But she was working steadily and gaining ground, appearing in a few major films as a minor character, co-starring in a couple of B movies and beginning to work in the expanding world of television, even starring in the science fiction classic The Man from Planet X. But whether she was preoccupied or not, I always felt thrilled to be in the same room with her, intoxicated by her childlike glee, which was just the same as mine. She was my mother and I know that in a lot of ways the connection between us was hardwired, but that doesn’t completely explain how I felt. I was enchanted by her.
One morning, she packed up Aunt Gladys’s car and drove us kids into the San Gabriel Mountains above Altadena where we found the perfect spot near a stream that we would forever call “our little place.” I can’t remember why that one day, that obscure spot, stayed in our minds, and my brother can’t figure it out either. But if I let my subconscious mind walk back there, I hear my mother laughing while we lie flat on our backs, looking up at the sky. She’s describing a magical, anything’s-possible world, seeing things in the masses of condensed water vapor that I couldn’t imagine. A world where everything has a hidden treasure in it, including Ricky and me. If we ever went back there again I don’t recall, but my brother and I never forgot “our little place.”
And when Baa would occasionally leave for an evening with this man or that, my grandmother would stand with her hand on the knob, preparing to close the front door behind them, sending off a less than friendly air as she loudly sucked her teeth. It was usually too late to build a fort, so when they were gone, Ricky would try to fill the void by listening to the radio—we didn’t have a television yet. We’d lie on the pallet Joy had made for us on the living room floor, a quilt and two pillows spread out in front of the big wooden box, waiting for the creepy voice announcing, “With the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty ‘Hi-yo Silver.’” My brother stayed wide awake and fascinated while I, curled up next to him, fell asleep listening for the sound of my mother’s footsteps on the front porch. Always needing her.
Then Jocko appeared. I was only four and some-odd months at that point, so this shadowy memory may not be a true recollection, but the essence of it is: I see him entering Joy’s house for the first time, making the living room seem suddenly small as he ducks his head to pass through the front door. I hear my mother introduce him to my no-frills grandmother, and watch Joy as she stands in the corner, draping her hankie across her hiccupping giggle, peeking at him over the top like a harem dancer. When I look for my brother in my memory, I find him standing stiff and awkward, keeping his eyes on his feet, stuffing his hands deep in his pockets. And my mother is looking around at all of us, with her focus only on Jocko. Abruptly, giving a loud “ten-hut” laugh, he swoops down and gracefully snatches me off the floor, enfolding my body to his chest in one quick grab.
And shadowy or not, I know this part of the memory is true: When Jocko and I met it was face-to-face, nose-to-nose, high above everyone else in the room. I was looking down at my mother now, watching her, wanting her to take me away from him, to safely plant me on her hip. But I heard her wordless plea—even in my child’s mind—as clearly as if she’d spoken it out loud: Don’t disgrace me by pushing this man away, don’t be frightened.
I wanted to please her, above all else, so I remained tearlessly in his grasp, though clearly terrified. And slowly, I realized that everyone in the room was looking at me—or at least in my direction—making me feel I’d done something wonderful. Maybe to be comforted and admired, I had to be terrified as well, maybe that’s what I was supposed to learn. I watched my mother and this man beaming at each other, while I was caught in the middle. She wanted to show Jocko something appealing about herself, and I, her little girl, was it. Jocko wanted to show her something grand and manly about himself, and I, her little girl who appeared comfortable in his arms, was it. Tag—you’re it.
Early in 1952, my mother and Jocko were married in Mexico, and we became a family. My little sister was born six months later and only now have I done the math.
His name was Jacques O’Mahoney but everyone called him Jocko, and that’s what he was: a jock. Though he was born in 1919 in Chicago, Illinois—the only child of Ruth and Charles O’Mahoney—he actually grew up in Davenport, Iowa, and attended the University of Iowa, where he excelled at swimming and diving. It claims in one of his bios that he had hopes of becoming a doctor, but I never heard him talk about his lost dreams in the medical profession or saw any sign of a diploma, pre-med or pre-anything. I do know that in 1943, when he was twenty-four years old, he enlisted in the Marines, where he learned to fly the airplanes used on aircraft carriers and later became an instructor. But by the time he entered my life, he was no longer teaching men how to get planes off the deck of a carrier and back down again. His troops now consisted of two kids, Ricky and me—and later our little sister, who was born when I was five and a half. “I always wanted my own little princess,” I heard Jocko say after seeing his infant daughter for the first time. So that’s what he named her: Princess.
Baa and Jocko on The Range Rider set. Don’t know why he’s dressed like that.
Jocko looked to me like a cross between Errol Flynn and Randolph Scott, two of the actors he “doubled” during his career as a stuntman through the 1940s and into the ’50s. At that time, stunt work was very different than it is in today’s world of digital possibilities. Stunt people just did the “gags” without the aid of special effects cables or hidden padding, and with little or no safety net. And what “gear” they did use was rudimentary, like falling into a bunch of cardboard boxes instead of the modern, specially designed airbags. In those days, they simply fought the choreographed sword fight, ending with a bouncing roll down twenty-five brutally hard stone steps. Or they leaped—without cables or airbags—from balcony to balcony, thirty feet in the air, or jumped from the buckboard of a runaway stagecoach onto the nearest galloping horse of the rig, then vaulted to a lead horse, grabbing the reins and saving the day.
Jocko preferred quarter horses, never Thoroughbreds. They were big working horses, with long necks held high over sleek muscular bodies, which pretty much describes Jocko. At six feet, four and a half inches, he moved like a horse, his long legs loping forward while his upper body stayed straight, the movement registering in the swing of his hips. He never strolled, but walked with a sense of purpose as if he were needed somewhere, which made people look at him if for no other reason than to see where he was going with such deliberateness. He demanded to be noticed. With a strong sculptured face and classic Roman nose, Jocko’s looks were striking. Everywhere he went he left behind the impression of a very handsome man, whether anyone in the room thought he was or not.
My mother met him in the early months of 1951 while doing a guest spot on his television series The Range Rider, a half-hour show with very little story and a whole lot of horse stunts performed by Jocko and his co-star, Dickie Jones. He and Dickie had a stunt show they performed all over the country, and according to Jocko, he’d broken every bone in his body at least once. One of the legendary tales about h
im was of the night when he shattered his collarbone halfway through the Madison Square Garden performance and just kept on going. Jocko was a stuntman turned actor who was only an average actor but a great stuntman. He was good with the sword, could throw a punch with the best of them, and his horsemanship was nothing short of astonishing.
I found four black-and-white snapshots taken in 1951, photographs that are like pieces of a map, leading to places where memories are buried. One of the pictures is a three-shot taken from behind as the group leans toward the edge of a cliff, looking down to the rushing, boulder-filled river below. The young boy is wearing a camp T-shirt neatly tucked into the elastic band of his shorts and his hands are hanging meekly at his side. Standing next to the boy is a towering shirtless man in white shorts and work boots with a little girl held securely to his bare torso. One of her hands is resting on the big man’s back; the other is out of sight. I suspect the thumb of that hand is in her mouth. He held me a lot. I don’t recall that trip to Yosemite we took as a newly formed family, but when I look at the photo of him holding me, I have to stop. I remember the feeling of that. I remember…
Our first family trip to Yosemite.
I’m looking down at my feet, tiny in his huge hands, the grip so tight it feels like they will fold in half. If I look past my toes, I can see him lying with his back pressed into the patchy grass, his knees bent toward the sky as he holds me high above him. Sometimes Baa will poke her head out of the back door, or glance at us through the window above the sink as she continues doing whatever she’s doing. Always, I wait for her to caution him, to tell him to be careful or say that it’s time to come in, that it’s getting dark or cold or dinner is ready—anything that will bring a halt to these acrobatics. To come and get me. Or at least watch me and be pleased—just watch me, Baa. But she rarely does.
“Eyes straight,” he coaches. “Arms at your side… tight. Don’t look down. I’ve got you. You won’t fall.” He moves his hands together, tightens his grasp, and carefully transfers one of my feet to join the other, until I stand—eyes straight, arms plastered to my side—with both feet in one of his hands. I want to do “good,” to please him, but in equal amounts I also want him to stop. I can’t speak for fear of revealing what a sniveling coward I really am, unworthy of his attention, or anyone’s. I’m in a pickle—a baseball term I’ve heard Dick use—but at least I’m not being ignored. The same choices in this emotional relish dish: to be safe and ignored or to be terrified and seen. So I stay. I look down at my feet and see his sculpted arm holding me securely where I don’t want to be.
My feet. I see them, so small as they cautiously walk on his sore back, his skin warm against my bare soles. At first it took many steps to cover the distance from the top of his shoulders to the curve of his waist, where I’d carefully turn to point my toes toward his shoulders again, never allowing a toe to slip under the sheet that draped over the bottom half of his body. I wanted to look up to the windows of his bedroom, out into the morning beyond, but I also wanted to do a good job. Caught in that pickle again. I longed to focus on the leaves of the big tree outside, to watch their rustling movement, but I kept my eyes down, wordlessly performing my task. When I was seven and eight my feet could almost dance across his back, if I’d wanted—but I didn’t. Later, as my feet got bigger, there was no room to dance and no dancing in my heart.
The first house where we lived as the O’Mahoney family, located on Califa Street in the San Fernando Valley, was small, dark, and rented. That’s all I can remember about it. I could find only two small scalloped-edged photos of that time, not much of a map. One picture is too blurry to uncover anything of interest but in the other I can see a six-year-old Sally, with a pillow and a blanket, nestled on the new sofa in front of the living room window—cheeks flushed with fever and the chicken pox—which leads me to the memory of the delicate pink blossoms on the big oleander bush in the backyard of that house, a wall of leaves that twinkled in the wind and poisoned Dr. Quack, my first pet—obviously, a duck. I remember thinking, Yikes, so this is death. You get totally stiff and smell funny, then you’re stuffed into an old shoe box and buried in the backyard next to the very thing that killed you. Which takes me to the memory of my brother and me hanging over the toilet as Baa tried to make us puke up the rancid ground beef that the babysitter had mistakenly fed us, meat my mother had intended to throw away. Everyone seemed to panic, and though we stuffed our fingers down our throats as best we could, no half-digested ptomaine-laced meat appeared. I never felt sick from whatever it was I’d eaten, but that night I was worried I’d end up in the backyard buried next to Dr. Quack in my own Keds coffin. This is probably around the time I started having meltdowns at school so maybe it’s all beginning to make sense. Part of it at least.
I have a 1953 issue of a fan magazine entitled TV Show. Inside these deteriorating pages is a story called “The Range Rider and His Queen,” which includes thirteen awkwardly posed pictures of us all, photos meant to show a family caught in the midst of real life like only a fan magazine can do. There’s the one showing the three kids sitting directly in front of a television, staring with intense fascination at a round, blank screen, and one of eight-month-old Princess sitting in her high chair, mouth wide open like a baby bird as she waits to get the bottle that is being suspended in front of her by Jocko, looking like a resident of the Ponderosa. Baa—dressed to match—stands on the other side, holding a bowl of something Gerber, both parents beaming with exaggerated adoration toward the camera. Then there’s the picture of my brother and me sitting on the counter next to the kitchen sink, my mother standing slightly in front of Ricky as we watch a now shirtless Jocko scrubbing the bottom of a skillet with an S.O.S pad. Ricky and my mother look intently at Jocko’s helpful hands but I, pressed against the dish rack, have my eyes focused on his face as if awaiting further instructions.
If my mother was the Range Rider’s queen, then we must have been his court.
My favorite photo is an eight-by-ten print of a picture that was obviously taken at another shoot, because my hair is longer, while Baa’s is shorter, and if it was ever in a publication, I don’t have the magazine. In this shot, I’m in the foreground, spinning, arms out straight with the gathered skirt of my dress in midair, and everyone, except Princess—who must have been taking her nap—is in the background watching me twirl. My mother and I are dressed in Navajo-style attire, me with my rickrack-trimmed dress and Baa wearing an enormous turquoise necklace. Jocko looks like the grand marshal of the Tournament of Roses Parade in his fringed leather jacket and huge white cowboy hat, with an “I’ve got the answer, if you’ve got the question” smirk on his face. Poor Ricky sits next to Baa on the new redwood patio bench, drowning in cowboy clothes that are clearly the wrong size and looking as though he’s lost the will to live. What I love about the photo—other than the look on my brother’s face—is the fact that I can see our new backyard, fenceless and carpeted in deep St. Augustine grass, plus I can see all the fenceless yards down to the end of the block. Every one exactly the same.
Twirling in Van Nuys.
This was the place on Hayvenhurst Avenue in Van Nuys, where we lived next. It was a little California ranch–style house in a new development of similar ranch-style houses, the first home we had purchased and the house where Ricky turned nine. I remember my mother filling out the party invitations for my brother’s one and only birthday party, putting them in a bag for Rick to distribute to each of his fourth-grade classmates. Unfortunately, only four of the invited guests showed up and all of them were girls who stood around the paper-covered picnic table looking lost. To this day, my brother insists that the party was a tremendous success, but I’m telling you, it was a life-altering experience. Ricky’s hair was so slicked down he looked like he belonged in a barbershop quartet, and the only entertainment was watching him wandering around the yard blindfolded, determined to pin that damn tail on the donkey’s ass. I vowed, then and there, never to have a party of my o
wn. And since my mother was good at a whole lot of celebratory things but throwing a successful birthday party was not one of them, the vow was easy to keep. My mother was simply not a people person.
Ricky and I weren’t exactly surefooted in the people department either, so our house was never filled with kids from the neighborhood or classmates from school all laughingly full of mischief, and none of this seemed to concern anyone except the woman who lived next door. Shortly after we moved in, she began to gently but regularly invite me to her quiet, neatly kept home, and though it was extremely unusual for me, I slowly began to go. If she was married—and I think she was—her husband was never around, and clearly she had no children. I wish I could remember her name, this nice woman. She wasn’t as pretty as my mother, but she had a careful, eager way. She showed me how to dunk a cube of sugar in my cup of tea—which she served in a flowered cup with matching saucer—then pull the cube out before it melted and suck on it really quick. A sweet treat as we sat at her kitchen table, talking about the day. I started making drawings and little art projects at home, gifts I’d then give to her, my secret friend. I never told anyone about her, especially not Baa. I felt that I was doing something wrong, that there were things about me I should hide. Maybe I worried that it would hurt her feelings knowing that my best friend, my only friend, was a woman her age. I don’t know.
But at that time, both my mother and Jocko were seated in the front car of a huge roller coaster: their lives. Everything was moving at such a dazzling speed—their love affair, the birth of their child, the liftoff of their careers—they must have found it hard to do anything but hang on. Not only was Jocko filming The Range Rider (which ended after seventy-eight episodes) but he was also the lead actor in two B movies and a short film with the Three Stooges. Baa was now working in a constant stream of episodic television, which included performing regularly in the new live television shows, Playhouse 90, Lux Video Theatre, Chevron Theatre, and four episodes of Schlitz Playhouse of Stars. But even if you’re working regularly, being a professional actor doesn’t offer a lot of security. It’s not a nine-to-five job and no two days are the same, no two jobs are the same. When you finish one, you have no idea when, or even if, the next will appear. At that time, however, the work kept coming, and Jocko kept spending the money that rolled in. He also spent the money that hadn’t rolled in.