by Sally Field
I lost track of how many times I walked into that waiting room, because from that point on, the entire summer of 1964 was sprinkled with meetings. And with each meeting, more and more people would crowd into the room to watch whatever I was asked to do, while there were fewer and fewer hopeful young women pacing the waiting room floor, listening for their names to be called. Finally, the group was down to eight and I was asked to do a “personality test,” which consisted of sitting, then standing, in front of a camera while answering random questions asked by Bob—my reading partner in every previous meeting. By August, when it was down to three—and I was lucky enough to be one of them—we were asked to do a screen test.
On that day, after having greasy dark makeup applied to my face and my hair put in pigtails, I was led through one of the huge soundstages and into the middle of a bedroom that had only two walls. Where the other half of the room should have been were big pieces of equipment, most of them on wheels, all being pushed and pulled into place by busy, bustling guys. With genuine curiosity, I turned to Bob, who was standing at my side, and asked, “Which one is the camera?” I had visited a set only once before, one of Jocko’s when I was about eleven, and five-year-old Princess had come with me. But we hadn’t seen much because we sat squished together on one canvas chair, hidden away in a darkened corner.
Jocko is behind us, covered with oil from the scene he was filming.
In reality, most of any soundstage—a huge airplane hangar of a space—is nothing but darkened corners. Only the center, the actual stage, radiates with light. People move around on the rim of it or in the shadows or on the wooden walkways suspended from the high ceilings above, but their focus is always on the light’s center, even if they aren’t looking at it. And for the first time, I was standing inside that light where it was loud and bright, so searingly bright it was hard not to squint as you looked around the two-walled room. Someone asked me to move to the side, out of the dangerous hustle, so I walked off the set and waited, standing in the dark. I have learned to love the darkness on the edges of that bright world. In those dark safe seconds, before stepping into the glow, I’ve lived and relived every moment of my life, the good ones and the bad ones—over and over.
In 2004, I received a large manila envelope from my manager, Judy Hofflund, with a note saying: This was sent to me in hopes that I would send it on to you. You probably don’t know this person but he says he knows you and wanted you to have them… so I’m sending it on just in case. Thinking it was nothing, I casually ripped it open, dumped out the contents, and immediately felt as if I’d jumped into an icy pool while holding exposed electrical wires. It was filled with letters written by a seventeen-year-old me to a boy I’d met that summer, and all these years later he was sending them back. A very kind thing to do. I looked at the letters from my young self and did what I have done my whole life—I hid them in a plastic box out of my sight. But again, I didn’t throw them away. I have to admit I still haven’t read them, don’t know that I ever will.
That summer was the first time—though not the last—that my life went into spin cycle. Things began to come at me all at once, situations I couldn’t see until they flew into my face, until I was overwhelmed with events. Sometime shortly after graduation, right before I started the Film Industry Workshop and when Steve was out of the picture, I met a boy who was a few years older than me. And although I remember precisely what the Screen Gems lobby looked like, I can’t remember where I met this young man, can’t even see his face in my mind. But that summer, in ’64, as I was going from meeting to meeting at Screen Gems, each audition more important than the last, I was also spending time with him. Most of it I don’t remember; some of it I will never forget.
I remember sitting in the back seat of a car, blankly watching the landscape of Los Angeles roll by, then San Diego, though I felt no movement at all. We must have been in that car many hours, but I had no sense of time. I didn’t know where we were going and I didn’t ask. I just sat—suspended—with my mother by my side. We didn’t touch. I never met her eyes.
Directly in front of me sat Patti, with her short curly hair, dark but not black like Baa’s. And next to her, in the driver’s seat, sat Dr. Duke, her mega-masculine husband, silently driving his new state-of-the-art baby-blue Cadillac. Duke and Patti were family friends, or at least friends of my stepfather. Baa didn’t seem to be truly close to anyone who came to the occasional gatherings they had, evenings when four or five couples would sit crammed together on the big purple-and-green sectional, plunging cubes of bread into the bubbling cheese fondue and constantly refilling their drinks.
I had only seen Dr. Duke outside of my own house twice. Once, in the eleventh grade, I had gone to his office in Tarzana to have him painfully remove the plantar warts from my right foot. Then, in September of 1964, just as I was waiting anxiously to hear the final decision from Screen Gems, I sat in his office as he told me I was pregnant.
I couldn’t look at him when he announced the urinalysis results or when he gave me the first injection, with clear instructions to come back for another the following day, and then one more the day after that. I just numbly nodded my head as he said maybe this would solve the problem and maybe it wouldn’t. The only thing I felt was the glare of the summer sun bouncing off the parked cars, slapping me in the face as I walked toward the roasting interior of my mother’s blue Corvair, which I had borrowed under some false pretense. But this trusted family doctor had neglected to tell me that in approximately five minutes, while I was driving cautiously on the Ventura freeway, my vision would blur, or that by the time I miraculously drove the car safely into our driveway, my tongue would become so swollen, it would be difficult to talk. He also forgot to inform me that my whole body would then convulse. It took all the concentration I could muster to somehow get from the car, past my mother, and into my room without allowing her to register my condition or without collapsing in a total panic. And that was day one.
After each of the panic-laced injections, I held my breath and waited, even prayed… but there was no change in my condition. I couldn’t lie or invent another world or push it out of my mind, couldn’t run away because I had nowhere to go. I was locked into a nightmare and couldn’t wake up. The life-changing ramifications of my situation were painful enough, but my deepest dread was in the knowledge that I’d have to explain my disgrace to Jocko.
Even now, I wonder why I didn’t just pull my mother aside to talk to her alone, but I didn’t, and one evening I asked if I could talk to them together. As if it were yesterday, I remember sitting on the purple shag rug with my legs folded beneath me, staring at my shaking hands, unable to speak as tears dripped into my lap. I can still hear my mother’s voice, usually so unchangingly sweet, now sounding panicked and shrill as she sat on the sofa next to Jocko. “What? What is it? Jock, what’s happened? What?” she kept repeating over and over until he sternly commanded her to shut up, taking over like it was the helm of the Caine and only he could steer the ship out of the storm. I couldn’t look at him as he began talking to me softly, saying, “I know, Sal, I know. Doodle, I know. You don’t have to say anything.” Was he telling me that I didn’t have to utter the words? Was I being rescued, airlifted off the battlefield? He motioned for me to move to his big lap with a “Come here, baby.”
I’d been “called to him” countless times since he first entered my life thirteen years earlier, but I hadn’t stepped into my stepfather’s shirtless embrace since I was fourteen, and we’d been locked in battle ever since. Feeling the familiar clawing on my insides, I climbed into his arms, hiding my face in the musky smell of his neck. And more than anything, I wanted my mother, wanted her to talk to me from under the closet door, wanted to be held by her, not by him. Why did I have to go through Jocko to have my mother?
I don’t know what words I was able to get out, but he knew, somehow he knew and started cooing, “It’s okay, baby. Don’t talk. I’m going to make it okay, my little Doodle. Your o
l’ Jock is here.” I didn’t want to hear, couldn’t stand his imperceptible note of triumph. If he’d been hoping for my downfall, and I felt sure he had, then this was it. I wasn’t aware of anything else but that. No right or wrong, no other living being involved in this catastrophe, only me and defeat.
When I got up the next morning he was gone—a casually mentioned personal appearance somewhere. Maybe that’s how he got the money. I’ll never know.
Less than a week later, I sat in the back seat of Duke’s hermetically sealed four-door with my mind safely tucked in a blank fog. Eventually, the Cadillac pulled over on the edge of a roughly paved, treeless road. Instantly, Patti’s incessant chatter stopped and my mother’s eyes went to her lap. Dr. Duke hooked his arm around the back of the seat and turned to look at me, carefully explaining that he couldn’t go in, that I had to go alone. He told me that they knew I was coming and gave me a large envelope with instructions to hand it to the people at the desk. “When you’re finished, get back here to me as soon as you can. Do you understand?”
I met his eyes for the first time and flatly told him, “Yes.”
Across the street—which smelled slightly rancid, like the odor coming from the men’s bathroom at the beach—stood the low brick building that Dr. Duke had pointed out, and when I stepped from the bright midday sun into the dimly lit waiting room, with its flickering fluorescent lights, my eyes needed a moment to adjust. I don’t recall if anyone greeted me or how I got from the door to the chair where I sat, but during an acting exercise years later, I did remember how I stared at the large fish tank that stood in the center of the dim room. I remembered the sound of the bubbles pumping tiny amounts of oxygen to a family of ordinary little fish gliding through their murky glass world, remembered so clearly watching those fish as if they mattered, until a man appeared speaking thickly accented English. He led me to a room with big dirty windows and a long metal table positioned in the center, then pointed to a small alcove in the corner, partially hidden by a limp curtain. Inside I found a cot where a folded dingy-white gown waited, obviously for me. The man then handed me a paper cup and a white pill, which I washed down with the tiny amount of water held in the cup. It was barely enough to moisten my mouth—but since this was Tijuana in 1964, drinking the water was probably not a good idea anyway. I removed my clothes in a hurry, not wanting to be caught in between; out of my clothes and not completely in theirs.
I can see myself climbing up onto the shiny table, feel the cold slap on my bare bottom, remember awkwardly lying down and looking up at the ceiling. And even though I remember everything, I know that part of me wasn’t in the room anymore. I had left rooms many times before, and the transition between being present and being gone was a familiar glide away. Some piece of me was there, responding to their instructions, and the rest of me went off somewhere else, somewhere I wasn’t in danger anymore, even though the girl on the table probably was.
I’m sure it was all terrifying, but she didn’t feel afraid. She just lay still as a mask was periodically placed over her mouth and nose, emitting the unmistakably noxious fumes of ether, which she remembered from when she’d had her tonsils taken out at the age of five. She tried to pull the numbing gas into her lungs, gulping as much as she could, but each time the mask would be removed before she could inhale enough to ease the tearing, scraping pain that was impossible to get away from. She could take in only enough to make her head spin, only enough to disconnect her from her arms and legs, leaving her unable to move. And always she felt the pain, a dangerous deep invasion.
Then something else. She felt something else and tried to focus, to turn her mind to that “something else.” What was it? The ether was being administered by the man she had followed from the waiting room and as he stood at her side, hoarding the anesthetic with one hand, with his other he had shoved aside her gown, exposing her right breast, and he was now in the process of rubbing and fumbling with it.
The realization blew a whistle in my dizzy head and the taskmaster in me woke up. Move, Sally, move! the voice in my head said over and over. Move your arm. You can do it! Think, move your right arm. Move it! Gathering as much force as I could, I batted his hand off, then turned my face away from the ether. I was done with that. I didn’t want any more. There was obviously a price to pay for relief and I would not pay it.
When all the nameless equipment was finally removed, I tried to curl into a ball, wrapping my arms around myself as best I could, but the two men wanted me to get down, aggressively helping me from the table. With tiny steps I walked back to sit on the flimsy cot, then vomited in a pan on the floor, and as I slowly started to dress, one of the men pulled the curtain aside, telling me to leave. I couldn’t stay any longer. I must go, now. So I did.
I didn’t lay my head down on my mother as the day faded into night. I don’t know why. She was sitting right next to me in the car, but I didn’t. I sat up straight, leaning my head on the clean, automatically powered window. If I slept, it didn’t give comfort, and where there had been Patti’s mindless gay chatter on the drive down, there was a heavy silence the whole way back.
I couldn’t possibly see the lifelong path that was opening up before me that summer and early fall of 1964, just as I couldn’t see the 405 freeway during the long trip home on that day in September. I don’t remember saying goodbye or thanking anyone when I pulled myself from the air-conditioned back seat, stepping dazed onto the summer-thrashed Bermuda grass. I most certainly should have said something, because at that time, Dr. Duke had been risking his profession for me. Maybe my mother made up for my neglect when she climbed out behind me, though I have no memory of her walking into the house at all. I guess she must have, probably looking for the comfort only vodka seemed to give her.
When I finally looked toward the door, longing to be inside and away from the day, there was Steve, sitting on the front step, waiting. My heart split open as he stood and wordlessly enfolded me. Had I told him? I don’t know. But I didn’t expect he would be there and I instantly hid my face in his chest, feeling safe as he led me into the house, opened the door to my room, and carefully put me to bed. When I cried, it was not my mother who held me. It was Steve. I felt I was changed, forever tainted, and I grieved deeply for the loss of something I couldn’t name.
Six weeks later, in early November, three days before my eighteenth birthday, I began my career. Wearing a dreadful pink swimsuit, I stood on a cold Malibu beach, looked directly into the camera, and said my first line of dialogue. “You see before you, me. Gidget.”
PART TWO
Who knows anyway what it is, that wild, silky part of ourselves without which no poem can live?
—Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook
I promise there will always be
a little place no one will see
a tiny part deep in my heart
that stays in love with you
—“Where Do You Start,” Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman, Johnny Mandel
Photo from TV Star Parade fan magazine of Baa shortening my skirt.
7
Gidget
A PILOT IS ONLY a pilot. It means next to nothing unless the network decides they want it on their schedule for the following season, and since countless pilots are made every year, resulting in very few “pickups,” it’s probably not a good idea to count on it. But until the network makes their decision, you can’t walk away and forget about it either. This was my first big lesson as a professional actor: “Learn to labor and to wait,” in the words of Longfellow. And so, with one foot in my childhood and one unsteady foot on a path under construction, I waited… off-balance.
Actually, there was nothing sturdy to stand on, anywhere. Jocko’s career was going downhill fast, with the deadweight of his marriage to my mother not far behind, and by early 1965 he was hardly working at all. Plus, it seemed that my mother had gradually stopped, never even occasionally going out on an audition—or interview, as they were called back then. Years later when I as
ked her why, she told me she’d given it up to be with her children, and maybe that was true, but it made no sense. We weren’t little kids anymore—Ricky wasn’t even living with us—and at that point we needed all the money we could get. When we were forced to sell our home in Tarzana, this time moving into a rented house on the cusp of Encino, I know Baa felt silently disgraced. But whatever feelings of loss or fear might have been running through her, they never showed. She energetically, and almost single-handedly, loaded everything we owned into boxes we’d gathered from the market, then unloaded it all into a lightless, musty-smelling place that always felt like it belonged to someone else—probably because it did. And though he never said anything either, I know that this house, with its empty, pool-less backyard, was another demotion for Jocko. But since my bedroom was separate from the rest of the house—an awkward add-on above the garage with lots of windows and a lock on the door—it was all fine with me.
Ricky was in his third year at Berkeley, Steve in his second at USC, and I was waiting by the phone. But happily, my one and only boyfriend was back in my life, and at night, I was the recipient of shadow classes in history, literature, and philosophy, hearing about the books Steve was reading, listening to him passionately pore over passages or to his long explanations of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, as close to a formal education as I would ever get (something I long for to this day). Steve’s appetite for learning was endless but he could never find a place to actually put all that education, except in my lap.