by Sally Field
At some point along the way, Ricky had stopped crying, had swallowed his tears and quietly begun propelling himself to beat Jocko at his own game. Knowing that there would be no financial support from our parents, my brother had worked toward and received a gymnastics scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley—eventually ranking second all-around in the nation. But when he was a junior his left biceps pulled away from the elbow, taking part of the bone with it, forcing him to quit. Rick then went on to become a high-energy elementary particle physicist. A first-class athlete and a world-renowned scientist, two things Jocko would never be.
By the time my own graduation rolled around, Ricky had been in college for two years and yet I never saw him as an example, never thought to make any plans of my own for the following September—or any day after that. All thoughts of my future were shoved out in the mist that vaporized everything I couldn’t deal with, while I floated around in a cloud, seeing only the few things that were manageable. I was a seventeen-year-old varsity cheerleader—or songleader, as we called it—and queen of the drama department. That was pretty much it.
Everywhere else in school, I felt slightly shy with a strong baseline anxiety, either unconscious of or uncomfortable with most people and always wary of the girls. Too many times in my middle school years, eighth and ninth grade, I was the one they decided “needed to go” and I’d be kicked out of the club (there actually was a club, the Shondells). Once, during an eighth-grade slumber party, after the girls had TP’ed a neighbor’s lawn, then turned on the sprinklers, they decided it would be fun to rub peanut butter all over my underdeveloped body, throw me into the swimming pool, lock all the doors, and wait for me to panic. I wasn’t sure if I hated being treated that way or liked it. I was somehow an integral part of everyone’s good time—though uncomfortably gooey—and being thrown in a swimming pool was nothing new. I didn’t enjoy being humiliated but at least I was familiar with it. And maybe this was the price I had to pay to be liked, to have friends.
These were the girls who became the heart of the A group, the three or four supremely popular girls who were certain to break through to safety in any playground game of life, or that’s how it felt. And the biggest jewel in the crown, for any of the girls, was to become a songleader—a feat that had always seemed like a foregone conclusion for the A’s, as if they didn’t even need to try out. For me, it was the first thing I remember deeply wanting, and I—not shrouded with foregone conclusions—was thought to have zero chance. But I’d already spent a fair amount of time onstage by then, and knew what it was like to stand in front of an audience, to risk failure, and to fall into a place that meant more to me than popularity. Without hesitation, I reached out to Lynn, a tall, sweetly awkward girl who hovered on the edges of the A group, exactly where I hovered. And after practicing day in and day out for weeks, we found we had kicked and pranced and laughed our way into becoming best friends—certainly the best I’d ever had. We also became songleaders for the following year. Whereas the others did not.
Jumping up and down on the sidelines of a football field was never-endingly fulfilling, but it was the drama department where I felt most alive. Inside that school auditorium I was clearheaded and focused on the task in front of me, or the pages in my hand, or the performance coming up. It wasn’t that I was particularly good. I don’t think I was. But when I was onstage, I could hear my own voice talking to me, asking me questions, forcing me to be present at that moment: aware of my hands, my mouth, my heart rate. And at the same time, I would watch the other actors, meet them fully in the eyes, react to them in whatever way they affected me—ultimately behaving in ways I was unable to do offstage.
Varsity song leader.
But just because I could lock eyes with my fellow actors didn’t mean I wanted to work with them. The term play, which we performed each semester, was the teacher’s responsibility; he chose the text, then directed and cast it. But throughout the semester each student had to select several scenes to work on: scene study. Like a thirsty person needs a glass of water, I needed to explore this world of acting in every way I could. I never thought about being nice, never spent an ounce of energy concerned about other students’ feelings. Which meant that if I felt no one in class was serious enough or even good enough to join me in a scene, then I’d choose to do a monologue. If I couldn’t find a monologue, I’d pick a scene and cut out all the other characters, resulting in some very long monologues.
Midway through my junior year, the teacher, Mr. Kulp, called me to his office, not to praise me for my efforts but to ask if I would please be more sensitive to the other students. I remember feeling stunned, ashamed to see myself as being blindly ambitious and hungry, embarrassed as though I’d been caught with my hand in the cookie jar. After that, I started doing scenes with more than one character, but even though I tried to be friendly and appreciative of the other students, my gnawing appetite kept me at the head of the class table. And like it or not, my reign continued. I wanted to do theater in the round, so we did theater in the round. I wanted to do children’s theater and we did that too. The auditorium was my spot. It’s where I went for lunch, during every break or free period, and often when I should have been in another class, like Algebra.
At the beginning of my senior year, the school counselor informed me that if I didn’t go to night school to make up for the classes I’d either missed or done too poorly in to be counted, I wouldn’t be graduating in June with the rest of my class. That was all he said. He had never called me to his office in the eleventh grade to suggest I take the SAT, never inquired if I was planning to go to college or helped me to see what options I might have, and through my foggy brain the thought never penetrated. Certainly, it wasn’t a topic of conversation around the family dinner table, where the ongoing drama had nothing to do with continuing my education and everything to do with finding the money to put food on the table. Jocko had been cast in two back-to-back Tarzan movies, no longer playing the bad guy but now portraying the ape man himself. In 1962 there was Tarzan Goes to India and in 1963 Tarzan’s Three Challenges, which was shot in Thailand—a harrowing location where Jocko almost died. But despite a case of dengue fever and dysentery, losing over fifty pounds and looking like a hairless cat, he kept shooting, breathing through an oxygen mask between takes, which was either heroic or stupid. Or maybe the man was fighting to hold on to his career the only way he knew how.
Whatever money he’d made from those movies couldn’t have been much because the endless anxiety over how to make ends meet never seemed to ease and much of the time the proverbial cupboards were bare—literally. I remember looking for something to eat one morning before driving my mother’s car to school and finding nothing but a white Styrofoam box containing half of a sandwich that Jocko had brought back from the Screen Actors Guild board meeting, where Ronald Reagan was the president—not of the USA but of the SAG. I cut the half in half again and shared it with Princess, who then walked to the corner where the school bus would pick her up.
In all this family stress and scramble, I felt slightly separate, safe because I had someone to talk to, someone to take me to the movies or to get a hamburger when there was nothing in the house, many times bringing Princess along. Steve had graduated from Birmingham the same year as Ricky, and by the time I was a senior he’d finished a year at Pierce Junior College and received a scholarship of his own, a track scholarship to USC. But even with classes and workouts, he somehow managed to spend more time at my house than I did. He was woven into my family, everyone’s confidant, aware of every argument and all the problems.
But he wasn’t there for them. He was there because of me, because of the bond we had with each other. From the beginning the sexuality between us had felt both exhilarating and frightening. But as the sensations grew, I could feel myself pulling back, hanging on the shore, disconnected but performing, as if I were repeating the pattern I’d learned with my stepfather. Steve could feel my hesitance and thought
it was simply who I was. Slightly asexual. I didn’t know that some part of me, some important part, would not allow herself to be seen. She simply never showed up in Steve’s presence, and since I’d never been on a date with anyone else, I was not aware of her existence either. My body was out of my reach as well.
Then, in the middle of the twelfth grade, something inside me began to simmer, eventually coming to a boil in the last weeks of high school when I abruptly pushed Steve away, told him I needed to break up, maybe see other people even. After that, for very short, shocking bits of time, someone completely new would be standing in my shoes. I’d find a boy I barely knew, a boy who wouldn’t notice the drastic difference between the reticent, sexually passive girl I had always been with Steve and the playful, if not downright aggressive, person I became. Nowhere in sight was the careful part of me with her cautionary advice. Maybe that’s how every adolescent brain works. Maybe. But I’ve never been able to remember these episodes clearly, only a distinct feeling of changing gears. After they occurred, I felt so ashamed I’d force them out of my head, lock them out of sight in my brain’s attic, like Rochester’s mad wife. Slowly I would lose the memories, and with them the opportunity to get any distance, maybe even a little perspective from which to look at this young, sexual side of myself. I was afraid of my “madwoman in the attic.” The pinched face of my grandmother, wordless messages from my mother, and the constant shadow of my stepfather had built a maze around my healthy sexuality, which was lost somewhere in the center. But there was more to it than that and at the time, I couldn’t see what it was.
As if I were imitating the gobbledygook going on in my head, I put together a slapstick performance of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass for the senior assembly. My best friend, Lynn, whom I’d convinced to join the drama department, played Alice, while another theater student and I waddled around the stage, falling and smacking into each other playing Tweedledee and Tweedledum. As a result, I was named “Funniest in the Class” in the 1964 Tomahawk, the school yearbook.
But when the curtain came down and the pom-poms were dumped in the trash, when the last notes of “Pomp and Circumstance” faded away into that June day, the reality of what lay ahead of me began to penetrate the fog. I had no stage. Without that I didn’t exist. I had to find a place where I could act.
The Film Industry Workshop was a small organization located on the lot of what was then Columbia Pictures, in the heart of Hollywood, and one night a week the group was allowed to hold classes on a soundstage. FIW was not well known in the acting community and I can’t imagine it was well regarded. Its classes primarily focused on teaching students how to hit their mark, which was a piece of colored tape stuck to the floor. You were expected to find that smidgen of tape without looking down to see where it was located, while at the same time performing in front of a make-believe camera, simulating close-ups and over-shoulder shots. The scenes were handed out at the beginning of each class, material taken from an episode of one of last season’s television shows. Not exactly Ibsen.
I’d never heard of the workshop but then I hadn’t heard of anything. It was Jocko who stepped up, saying that he knew someone who knew someone, which was enough for him to tout the workshop, suggesting I audition to see if they’d accept me. Unfortunately, the workshop charged a twenty-five-dollar fee for the opportunity to perform in front of its panel of experts, and that was twenty-five dollars which Baa didn’t have. This meant that I either had to give up the idea or force myself to call and ask my father—whom I was still visiting, though less frequently. For all of Dick’s shortcomings, he had always found a way to show up for an evening performance of my term plays, sometimes driving an hour to get there. And when I surprised him with my request, he surprised me by immediately sending a check.
A week later, in front of a half dozen people sitting at a long table, I performed a two-character scene from Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic, with my mother playing opposite me. I hadn’t bothered to read the play, stopped after finding the one scene, so I don’t know what the hell I thought I was portraying. But whatever it was, I was admitted to the workshop. And on the following Thursday evening, after my first—oddly unchallenging—class, I stood on the corner just outside the gates of Columbia waiting for Ricky to pick me up, since I wasn’t allowed to drive at night.
Just as my brother had promised two years earlier, every June he came home from Berkeley for a few weeks, though that summer I’d hardly seen him. Most of the time he was with a girl whom he had met years before while competing in a gymnastics match against Garfield High. Beautiful, slightly shy Jimmie was the student who held the scorecards in the air after every event, cards that always had my brother on top. After graduating, he reconnected with her and that fall, Ricky would take Jimmie back to the Bay Area with him, where she was to be a freshman at the University of San Francisco. Eventually Jimmie would become his wife, which she is to this day, devotedly.
As I waited on the corner, watching all the cars whiz by on busy Sunset Boulevard, I noticed a man heading toward me with such purpose he made me wonder if I’d left something behind.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Are you Jock Mahoney’s daughter?”
“Yes,” I said meekly, then reconsidered. “Well, no. Actually, I’m his stepdaughter.”
The man smiled, then continued quickly, as if trying to keep me from running off like a scared rabbit. “I know your stepdad. I know Jock. I’m Eddie Foy the Third. I saw your audition last week. Tried to catch you in class tonight but just missed you.”
“Hi,” I said with as much ease as I could muster.
“I work here,” he continued. “I’m head of casting for Screen Gems, the television division of Columbia, and I’d like you to come on an interview tomorrow.”
I just stood there with my teeth hanging out, saying nothing. I couldn’t believe this was real. Mr. Foy watched me searching for something to say, then handed me a little card with his name and the Screen Gems logo on it, asking if I had an agent he could contact. When I shook my head with an incredulous no, he told me to show the card to Jock and to come to his office tomorrow at eleven.
“Can you do that?” he asked, as if I were a five-year-old.
I reached for the card like I was afraid it might bite me and said in a voice so high only dogs could hear it, “Okay…”
“Great.” And as he began to walk away, he stopped, then turned back. “Tell me your name again.”
With eyes as big as pie pans, I answered, “Sally. Sally Field.”
“Okay, Sally. See you tomorrow,” and he walked away.
Something had reached out of nowhere to change my life, just as it had for my mother and even my grandmother before her. For one moment, I could see out of the fog and into my future, then it was gone again, and the only thing I knew for sure was that Ricky was very late.
If there was a tiny part of me that felt relieved when Jocko insisted on accompanying me to that meeting the next day, it quickly vanished along with any hope I might’ve had of sitting quietly in the corner, unnoticed. When he sauntered in with a protective swagger, then immediately treated the receptionist as if they were intimate friends, loudly laughing at some remark he whispered in her ear, I wanted to crawl under one of the sofas lining the reception area. I tried to act as if I didn’t know the man, smiling nonchalantly at a few of the young women who filled the room. Most of them were holding eight-by-ten photos of themselves; some even had zippered portfolios, which I presumed were stuffed with pictures and résumés of their vast experience. All I had was a wallet containing a few snapshots of God knows what, which was lost somewhere in the tangle of stuff crammed into the big straw bag I held at my side.
When I was finally asked to step inside Mr. Foy’s office, Jocko walked in before me, shaking hands with everyone and blasting a baritone greeting in such an alpha male display he might as well have lifted his leg on the furniture. But after a moment, he relu
ctantly backed out, closing the door behind him, leaving me to face four men dressed in suits—two on a sofa, one in a large chair, and one in a smaller desk chair. After an awkward beat, they began asking me questions: How was graduation? Where had I been acting? Did I have any plans for the summer? And even though they were watching me, I knew they weren’t really interested in my answers, I knew it was about something else. Like flipping a switch, I began to bubble. I told them about going to the beach later that day, that I had my bathing suit with me, that Jocko was dropping me off at my friend Lynn’s house so she could drive us in the old beat-up Ford she’d been given for graduation—the car that would soon be sitting in Lynn’s family garage as she headed off to her freshman year at San Jose State College and slowly moved out of my life.
A little later, I sat perched on the chair opposite one of the men, Bob Claver, who was my reading partner, and we ran the three-page scene they had given me to study for a few minutes in an adjacent office. Rarely looking down at the slightly crumpled pages, I recited all the dialogue with an avalanche of raw energy—not knowing how to contain it, or even that it needed to be contained. And as I said the last line, I looked at Bob, then crossed my eyes—actually used the facial expression as a punctuation mark. I don’t remember ever doing that in a conversation before. I mean, yes, I was a champion eye crosser. I could cross them, then move one eye at a time, as if one was crossed and the other was watching a tennis match. This time I performed a simple cross, hold, and release. And they laughed. Effortlessly friendly and entertaining, I radiated pure delight, because that’s all I felt. The slivers of me that were nervous or unsure watched from a great distance, until they seemed to vanish altogether and I was without fog or fear.