by Sally Field
Right before Gidget went on the air in September of 1965, when Steve still thought it was all a fluke and Rick was too busy to even notice, I was sent on a promotional tour, which meant flying to seven different cities in six days, working one day in each city and flying to another every evening, where I’d then spend the night. For a week, I visited local television and radio stations, going on air live, giving interviews to the regional newspapers, then spending the rest of the time doing whatever ridiculous thing the publicity people could dig up before I’d dash to the airport and head to the next city.
Baa went with me. Except for that one quick trip to New York, I had never spent days and days with my mother… alone. And I remember how we laughed. Everything we came across during the day, she’d cram into the big purse she carried on her arm: half-eaten sandwiches wrapped in a cloth napkin swiped from the restaurant, fruit out of the complimentary basket, dinner rolls and pats of butter wrapped in gold foil, plus every tiny bottle of vodka the airline stewardess offered. “You wait and see. We’re going to need this,” she’d say. I’d roll my eyes at her, halfway worried that if anyone saw, they’d think we were poor white trash, San Fernando Valley style. But when we’d get into Tulsa, Oklahoma, or St. Louis, Missouri, late at night, long after room service had closed, we’d sit on our twin beds as she dumped out that day’s stashed goods. We dined on bread and butter, bananas and booze. Actually, I had a Coke from the vending machine—wishing to God they had ginger ale.
Whenever I was near my mother I felt giddy, thrilled to be in her presence, a jolt of electricity shooting through me when her eyes met mine. And now, as we sat cross-legged on our beds, laughing at nothing and everything, the Christmas-morning excitement of my life was magnified because Baa was somehow a part of it. So much of what was happening belonged to her. All the many times she had patiently watched me in whatever living room, in whatever house, always glowing like honey in a glass jar as she sat laughing at my pantomimes, listening to the monologues, handing me something she loved and slowly backing away, as though she’d carried the load as far as she could and it was up to me to complete the journey. Even in the seventh grade I felt it, something unspoken, an intangible bargain between us. And after a performance I’d look for her, wanting to meet her eyes first, to see her see me, waiting for her nod, her recognition of my end of the bargain. But what was in this bargain? Where was the deal memo? And as we sat in this hotel room, late at night, I felt the first inkling of something different. Was it because I was now helping to support everyone with my whopping $500 a week, or because I had suddenly become the gift giver at Christmas, that the family cast was starting to shift, to change roles? I’m sure that was part of it, but only part. At the time I felt a tiny pull, a part of me that wanted to turn, to deny her my eyes, a feeling that grew over time like a minute splinter slowly festering. And I never knew where the wound was located.
After many months of safely exploring the dimensions of my newly constructed acting envelope, I was given a scene to play that stepped—if only a toenail—outside of the mild emotional landscape of situation comedy. In the scene, Gidget’s father has refused to speak to her, marching angrily off to his room, which sends our girl into a complete tizzy. Hoping to be forgiven for something that only midsixties television could define as a problem, she goes to his room to confront the situation and her father.
When we were ready to film the scene, I stood behind the flats of the set, waiting to hear someone say “Action.” And as I looked down at my hand gripping the knob, preparing to enter the bedroom of Gidget’s father, one part of my brain was rehearsing the lines, “Please, Daddy, please…” while another part of my brain went somewhere else. When action was called, I opened the door, stepped into the room, then looked at my father—her father—and began to cry with such force I couldn’t speak, except in hiccupping spurts, while a constant ribbon of snot rolled out of my nose. I moved across the set to sit on the bed—next to Don—just as the scene had been blocked out, saying everything, doing everything we had rehearsed, but suddenly I was trying to control a borderline case of hysteria. Don, looking deeply concerned, began running his hands up and down my arms as though he wasn’t sure if he wanted to continue the scene or stop to comfort me. He continued the scene and I was grateful—still am. Someone in the dark finally whispered “Cut” as though not wanting to wake the baby, and after a long beat the crew began to applaud, while Don held me tight in his arms, rhythmically patting my back, saying without words that he was proud of me. I didn’t know where the emotion had come from, much less how I got to it.
Unfortunately, that first take was in a wide “master” shot, like looking at the scene with the binoculars backward. When we moved tighter, into over-shoulders and finally into close-ups—when the camera can practically see inside your brain—I was unable to find any real emotion at all. I was dry, as they say. But the moment stayed with me. I didn’t know what I had learned, didn’t know if it had been about the scene or about Don, or if it belonged somewhere in Sally. I didn’t realize it then that that’s what acting really is. Any and all of that, mixed together.
Toward the end of production and after the show had been on the air for about five months, I was asked to fly to San Francisco one Saturday to do a haphazard personal appearance. Whenever the studio or the network wanted me to appear somewhere, it was always Bill Sackheim (the “showrunner,” or producer of the series) who did the asking. When I was first hired—the fresh-off-the-turnip-truck newcomer—Bill looked me in the face and sternly said, “You know, Sally, you can’t change your mind.” I couldn’t imagine what on earth he meant, though it did give me a jolt. Bill always seemed friendly and was endlessly avuncular, but everything coming from him felt very little like a request and very much like a demand. Because I was so new, I never thought to ask how giving up my precious weekend, my few days of sleeping past sunup, to host a fashion show in San Francisco for an auditorium filled with high school girls would actually benefit the show. I wish I had.
Gidget even made an appearance at one of Ricky’s gymnastics meets in Berkeley. That trip I loved.
Nevertheless, a few days later, there I was, standing onstage describing outfits very similar to the clothes Gidget wore on the show. Since I wasn’t good at cold readings, I didn’t use the script I’d been handed right before stepping on the stage. Instead, I tried to point out what each young model was wearing as she walked out, just as I saw it—which needed no explanation at all. In between, I filled in with snippets from my day on the set, told the audience about the cute boys hired as extras, confided in them about watching all the kids leave together as I stayed to work through the rest of the day. Which in reality, I never noticed… I don’t think. I shared with everyone the amazing loop-de-loop ride I was on, felt comfortable talking to these young women, something I had rarely felt when talking to the girls I’d gone to school with. And the young women in the audience seemed to accept me, like it was a whole room made up of my friend Lynn, whom I was losing sight of as we traveled in different directions. After the fashion show had ended, I lingered onstage, answering questions, genuinely wanting to talk to everyone.
Slowly they started to move out of the audience, climbing onto the stage with me, chatting at first, then asking me to sign things. They’d hand me scraps of paper or programs, and since I hadn’t signed many autographs, I didn’t know what to write to each of them. When they ran out of paper, they wanted me to sign their clothes or even their arms. As more and more came onto the stage, I felt their friendliness turning into a hunger for something I didn’t have, and as their urgency began to overwhelm me, I tried to push away from them. But instead of moving back they crowded around me, frantically pulling at my clothes and hair, like they were playing a game of “Red Rover,” only now the arms were locking me in, not out. As I bent down, covering my face with my hands, I suddenly felt a huge presence pick me up, effortlessly hoisting me over his head and holding me high in the air. “I gotcha, Gidg,
” beamed the big man as we waded through the crowd, which now looked more like a flock of evil birds than a group of high school girls. I’ve always thought that perhaps this guardian angel was the school janitor because he wore a uniform, but I’ll never know for sure. After he set me down in a utility closet and flipped on the light, he left.
For a moment, I stood at the door, listening to the commotion outside, then turned a small wastepaper basket upside down and sat, my hands still shaking, feeling deeply alone but oddly thrilled. Never again would I walk down the street or push my cart through the produce aisle without being aware of people when they recognize me—and when they don’t recognize me. Either way, I was no longer a member of the club anymore. The Human Club. I was a celebrity.
8
Get Thee to a Nunnery
WHEN I WALKED onto the set—a classroom containing ten or twelve children of varying ages—everyone stopped dead in their tracks and stared at me. Gidget’s happy-go-lucky clothes were gone, and in their place I wore several layers of ankle-length ecru wool, starting with a long-sleeved dress. Over the dress, with its Peter Pan collar, was placed an apron-like panel called a scapular, the front section loosely belted at the waist, leaving the back to flap in the breeze—layer number two. After my long hair had been bound to my head with countless bobby pins, a nylon sock—which looked as though it had once been attached to a pair of panty hose—was pulled down over the top and anchored in place with long straight hairpins. Covering the whole wad was one of my two hat choices, and since this was an interior scene, I wore the smaller, scarf-like head covering with its shoulder-length veil attached to the back.
The camera had already been set up and the assistant director was in the process of placing the children into positions. There was a rote feeling to it all, probably because the scene had already been filmed the week before and they were planning to do it exactly the same. Only one thing would be different: This time I was playing the lead. The director—whom I’d worked with on several Gidget episodes and adored—put his arm around my shoulder with an easy smile and started to explain the shot. Before he could finish, however, the cameraman—whom I had not worked with before—butted in to introduce himself and at the same time began inspecting my appearance. Moving close, then pulling back, he flatly stated that I needed to cut my eyelashes. They were too long.
Mind you, these were not fake, glued-on eyelashes, but the things that grew out of my lids, for God’s sake, the same as my mother’s and grandmother’s. Trying to make light, I laughingly begged him to please let me keep them, saying that I was proud of them and it would be weird to cut them off! Joining the discussion at that point was the Catholic technical advisor, who took her job very seriously. Luckily, she didn’t remain for many episodes, at least not on the set. After giving my face an impersonal examination—everyone leaning in like they were looking at a painting on the wall—they walked to the edge of the set, then huddled together to discuss the serious situation while the crew waited, watching the unfolding drama. When a few uncomfortable moments had passed, it was announced: My eyelashes could stay. Praise be to God. Everyone quickly moved into their positions as the assistant director yelled an unnecessary “Quiet on the set.” Swack, as the director was called, suggested we run it once—then roll film. I was fine with that, and that’s what we did.
Even with my eyelashes in place, I felt defeated before I said my first line.
When Gidget was canceled after that one blur of a season, I felt only one quick painful stab and then it was gone. I’d never read the reviews, wouldn’t have known where to find the Nielsen ratings even if I’d wanted to know what they were, which I didn’t. I was only slightly aware that the show had been a product at all, bought and sold by an industry that needed to see an immediate profit (or the likelihood of one soon), something they didn’t see from Gidget. Maybe the fact that I had lived in a fogbank so long was keeping me from projecting ahead, forcing me to live one day at a time with very few expectations. I don’t know. But when I walked away from the girl I loved so much, I didn’t feel crushed. Gidget was still with me, was me. And living with her so relentlessly that year had given me things I hadn’t owned before: a tiny sliver of her confidence, her willingness to be optimistic, and her daring ability to look toward the future.
I hadn’t had an agent when I was initially cast as Gidget, so Jocko introduced me to Herb Tobias, who seemed like a nice man, though befuddled by the fact that I’d landed the starring role in a television series without any representation at all. And although Mr. Tobias visited the set during that first year of my career, maybe even asked me to lunch—something I have only a vague memory of—I always felt that he thought of me as an energetic flash in the pan. However, when I was asked to meet on two projects immediately after Gidget’s demise, and when those meetings resulted in two very different offers, Herb started calling with regularity, if only to say hi.
The first offer was for the lead in a play being produced at the Valley Music Theater—a short-lived but well-intentioned theater in the round, located in Tarzana… or was it Woodland Hills? Clearly not Broadway, where the play had first been produced in 1961, and later adapted into a film starring James Stewart and Sandra Dee. Take Her, She’s Mine is the story of a feisty teenage girl and her anxious, loving father, very Gidget -like territory. But this would be a stage production, like going back to the familiar drama department, and the father was to be played by the great Walter Pidgeon. I was thrilled. The other project was a movie entitled The Way West, starring Richard Widmark, Kirk Douglas, and Robert Mitchum, to be shot in Oregon all that summer, now 1966. I was to play a feisty teenage girl with an anxious loving father, which sounds painfully familiar, but this time everyone is stuck on a wagon train heading west and when this daughter finds herself pregnant by a creepy older guy, she jumps off the back of her covered wagon, rolling head over teakettle down the hill. This prompts the sweet redheaded boy—who has always loved her—to leap to her rescue, somehow running down the hill faster than she can bounce. Miraculously, he catches her, then marries her, even though he knows she is damaged goods. I chose to do that one.
I’d never been away from home for more than a week, and then it had been to happily stay at Joy’s house in Pasadena. Now I was to spend three months in the dusty Oregon wilderness, not knowing how to occupy myself, stupefied with loneliness if Steve wasn’t beside me. And since he remained in Los Angeles, I was alone. Most of the cast was made up of wonderful character actors, like Jack Elam, Stubby Kaye, Harry Carey Jr., and Peggy Stewart, all people who knew Jocko and my mother, some having worked with one or both. But joining this cluster of actors as they sat around on their canvas chairs between shots, chairs that seemed to magically appear out of nowhere no matter how remote our location, would have felt awkward, like I was sitting in on one of Baa’s fondue gatherings. So I’d smile when they made room for me, sit for a moment, then slowly back away unnoticed, preferring to find a place sitting in the dirt, without their company or a canvas chair.
On location in Oregon with Bob Mitchum.
Once, Robert Mitchum, who rarely sat with the group either, made a sandwich for me, which unfortunately was smothered in yellow mustard—the one food that made me want to retch. He handed it to me grinning from ear to ear, then plopped down, making a dusty spot for himself next to mine—me in my gunnysack dress, Bob wearing nothing but his buckskin pants. I ate every smackerel of it while he joyfully watched, and actually, since we were holding up production—something he liked to do—the whole company watched me eat the revolting thing. But I didn’t care. I would have eaten a whole jar of mustard, one spoonful at a time, because I was crazy about Bob Mitchum, even though I could barely understand a word he said—and he talked to me a lot. I’d listen intently, catching a word or two, sometimes enough to get the gist of what he was saying. If not, I’d smile and nod with a little chuckle, not having a clue how to respond. He once told me I was the real thing, reassuring me softly that I was o
ne of the gang, his gang, and that like him, I’d be around a long time. I would have been overwhelmed to hear Robert Mitchum say that to me, but I wasn’t sure he’d actually said that and I couldn’t make myself say, “I beg your pardon,” or even “What?” I only know that some twenty years later, somewhere in the eighties, I was being presented with a People’s Choice Award and found myself seated at Mr. Mitchum’s table. Without hesitation, he stood, took my hand with both of his, and said in his Bob Mitchum gravel, “I told you so.” Or at least, I think that’s what he said.
Then there was the day that Kirk Douglas read The Little Prince to me as we walked the twenty-minute journey back to base camp after wrap. I always suspected he did that only because Mitchum had made me that sandwich a few days before. I mean, honestly, who carries a hardback copy of The Little Prince with them out into the Oregon plains? I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that either, though I remember to this day the passage he read and how much it affected me. It was about the Little Prince tending his rose and after he had planted it, watered and fed it, he found himself caring for it deeply. He had helped it grow and therefore to him it was “unique in all the world.” How that fit into my life, I can’t tell you.
Michael McGreevey, who played Brownie to my Mercy, was fun and easy to be with, and the only one who appeared to be close to my age—though we acted more like bratty ten-year-old boys than two people in their late teens, which is what we actually were. I had never been a mischief maker, never thought it would be fun, didn’t even have a clear idea of what “fun” was. But at that moment, dropping water balloons out of my hotel window onto the unsuspecting folks below, then ducking down to avoid being caught, seemed a perfect way to spend the afternoon.