by Sally Field
I loved every joyful minute of it. And even though most of Lou’s exercises seemed like silly party games, they were actually a kind of limbering up, stretching your imagination, strengthening your ability to act on a fleeting impulse, and challenging your concentration. The more intense exercises—sense memory, emotional memory, room, and the private moment—I wouldn’t learn until later, all conducted by Lee Strasberg himself.
One Wednesday night during that first hiatus, I was heading home from exercise class with the top down on my flashy sports car, still feeling slap-happy from the evening’s improvisations. I had the 1812 Overture playing loudly on my eight-track—yeah, go figure—when I stopped at a red light on Sunset Boulevard. Pounding on the wood steering wheel as if it were a bongo drum, I noticed a car filled with cute guys pulling up next to me, and for a moment I was just an ordinary girl… in her ordinary blue Ferrari playing the overture of 1812 full blast. So I met their eyes and smiled. Most people my age were looking at either college or the threat of Vietnam, and to them anyone over the age of thirty was under suspicion. They were listening to Jimi Hendrix or the Beatles or Buffalo Springfield, not Tchaikovsky in an ostentatious vehicle, and though I was clearly not over thirty, they immediately recognized me as a participant in that over-thirty world, and of all things, the Flying Nun herself. So to the timing of Tchaikovsky’s thunderous cannon fire, they all flipped me the bird, except the one poor guy who made a wet raspberry sound. I drove the rest of the way home feeling like the ragamuffin again.
Even in the first days of my hiatus I began to prepare for what lay ahead, to smooth out some of the bumps I knew I’d be traveling over as soon as production started again. I gave up my Malibu apartment and rented a big ugly house in Hollywood, ten minutes from Columbia, eliminating the long commute that was not only a waste of my precious time but filled with anxiety, since I never knew when the temperamental Ferrari would overheat on the 101 freeway, forcing me to pull over and wait for traffic to thin before I could limp home. From Kings Road, I could almost coast to work if I had to. This time it was Princess who helped me load up the boxes, staying with me a great deal of the time, helping me unpack as if we were building a new life together.
My twenty-first birthday party, hosted by Screen Gems.
There are no family photos taken during most of those years because there was no family to take them. The only tools I have to unearth memories are the scrapbooks Aunt Gladys devotedly kept, basically documenting my career until 1989, when she passed away, less than a year after her older sister, my grandmother Joy. In the stacks of carefully cut-out articles, clippings, and fan magazine stories (all placed in clear plastic sleeves with the date on the top) I find a paparazzi-style photo of an overweight, double-chinned Sally. With long straight hair and short blunt bangs, I’m smiling gleefully as I stand jammed against two of the Monkees, Davy and Peter. It was my twenty-first birthday party, held at the Factory, hosted by Jackie Cooper and thrown by Screen Gems. I’d hated birthday parties ever since my brother’s fourth-grade no-show, and even though the whole event had been arranged by the studio and was mostly a publicity opportunity, I remember being very nervous. Shortly after the band’s deafening beat started up, a few familiar faces began to appear, mostly the cast and a few executives. But when I looked up to see those two strutting guys walking toward me carrying a big ribbon-bedecked package, I felt a jolt of either dread or excitement, not certain which. (I don’t remember opening that gift, which I’m sure had been put together by Screen Gems.) The contrived stories in both TV Radio Mirror and Movie Mirror dated February and March of 1968 reported that Davy was my date, but whatever it might look like in those photos, I remember that he wasn’t. Behind the smiling threesome, almost unnoticeable, looms my very tall little sister with an “I want to be in the picture too” look on her face. I was turning twenty-one but looked like a chubby fifteen-year-old. Princess was fifteen but looked twenty-one. She was my date.
What my sister was feeling as she stood glowing in my shadow, a statuesque beauty who looked so much like her father—with the same mannerisms, the same gliding gait—I’ll never really know. At the time, I couldn’t see far enough out of my own blur to ask her, and since she tended to balk at the suggestion of introspection, even if I had asked I don’t think she would’ve answered. As I look back now, I can see how excluded she must have felt from the original Ricky/Sally team. Not only was she the baby of the group but she also had a different father. A father whom she adored, whose very presence would turn her ordinary day into a celebration. A wise and supportive man she’d painted in her imagination, then plastered like a billboard over the father she actually had. She never talked about Jocko’s cruelty or neglect and remembered only the times when he had paid her any attention at all. When he had encouraged her to ride down steep hills on her skateboard, watching her careen dangerously around turns, then praising her for the scabs and scars she received, treating her like a chip off the old block because they were gathered without tears. She was long-legged and gracefully athletic, with the same kind of fearless physical prowess as her father. But when her brother began to blaze his way into the science world and her sister was catapulted into the arts, Princess wandered around feeling deficient, like she’d been born without thumbs. By the time she was fifteen, her adored father had escaped into his new life and Baa had hit a depressed, drunken bottom. Princess stopped attending public high school, was in and out of various alternative schools, then finally dropped out altogether, dabbling occasionally in the world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Her life had been a constant slide down without anyone she could hold on to… except me, and I wasn’t exactly stationary either.
We had grown up together, often in the same room. We had never been apart for long, but as close as we were, there was always something thorny between us, something that neither of us could pick our way out of, something we couldn’t even begin to talk about or admit. There were the basic childhood rivalries, and the fact that she was in the heart of her teenage years, that she felt judged by the taskmaster in me and I felt threatened by her free spirit. And the minute I stepped into the spotlight of show biz, our already complicated sisterhood changed in ways that began to define us, to deepen the designated family roles we’d already been cast in. I often became her parent, frowning at her behavior, criticizing and lecturing her about how to fix her life—even though I had absolutely no idea how to fix my own. And everything was muddled with the reality that I now held the purse strings. Whether gifts or hand-me-downs, it all came with a mixed bag of emotions for both of us.
Yet she was my dearest friend. I missed her when she was gone and felt a lift when she walked into the house, sometimes arriving unannounced, dropped off by friends I didn’t know, people I never met. We’d put a Laura Nyro album on the stereo, turn it up so loud that the windows vibrated, and singing at the top of our lungs, we’d dance around the living room until we were drenched with sweat. We may have held each other at arm’s length but our hands were always locked together. She was my family, and I needed her as much as she needed me and we both needed Baa.
So, with an unconscious desire to fix the messy unit that we’d become, I took the three of us on a small vacation before I was sent back to the front lines of work. There we were: my drunken mother, my adolescent sister, and me, sunburned and waterlogged from the day at the pool, sitting in the living area of my room in one of Palm Springs’ small midcentury hotels. Each of us with so much bottled up inside, stuffed to the brim with words that pleaded to be spoken but unable to get the first word out. Like a jar of pickles so packed you can’t pry loose a single pickle.
Princess and I sat on the floor around a small coffee table with our room service order, while Baa sat on the sofa drinking. For most of the meal we laughed; we were good at that. Laughing till our stomach muscles cramped. Laughing at God knows what, something someone said, or someone we knew. Laughter that felt like holding each other, that felt like loving each other. And out
of that safe place, I started casually trying to figure out how we had all ended up as we were, right at that moment. Which, of course, led to childhood moments, and slowly, unwittingly, I stumbled into feelings. I heard myself complaining about Jocko’s treatment of Rick and his attitude toward me, and as I edged closer to the visions in my mind, my insides started to tremble, filled with unexpected emotion. I’d never tried to reveal what was at the heart of my relationship with Jocko and was unable to say the exact words. I inched myself toward something I didn’t want to see, wanting them to get the picture without actually having to paint it, deeply wanting to remove some undiagnosed malignancy from our bond. I don’t know what I said, but suddenly Princess reared up, defending her helpless father against my self-righteous, self-absorbed woes (as she called them) while my mother, who was past the slurring stage, started talking about “the little pixie people.”
In an uncontainable blazing flash, I picked up Baa’s drink and threw it in her face. “I can’t stand this!” I seethed. “I hate you like this. I can’t look at you.” And with that the pickle was out of the jar. Everyone was crying and I was the cause of it. Princess put her arm around our mother, led her to her room and away from me. I was the monster who had caused the pain and had ruined the trip. In some weird way, I felt as though I was filling the space that Jocko had just vacated.
After that weekend, I reached out to my father for the first time in my life, asking him if I could come to dinner. I don’t know what was going through my mind when I climbed into the Ferrari, or how I felt driving for that hour. I only remember that when I finally found his house, one I’d never visited before, and pulled into the driveway behind what I presumed to be Dick’s car, it began to drizzle. My eleven-year-old half sister, Shirley, was the first one out the door to greet me, followed closely by Dick, while his third wife, Peggy, stood quietly in the doorway, watching as I said hello to her pretty blond daughter.
Dick had remarried twice since he and my mother divorced, his second marriage lasting only a few months. Then when I was nine, he married Peggy Walker, a kind but uninvolved British woman whom I was always happy to see but felt no emotional connection with—not from me to her, not from her to me. Soon after they were married, Shirley was born and I became their every-other-weekend babysitter, always assuring them that I loved getting up in the morning with the new arrival. But I didn’t love it. I was already spending a lot of time looking after my other half sister, who was four at the time. And whatever they might think, Shirley was not a playmate for a ten-year-old, she was a baby. I couldn’t say any of that, couldn’t ever tell my father what I was feeling. I could barely tell myself.
But right then, I wanted things to be different, and when I gave Dick a quick hug, I was flooded with how he smelled: not good, not bad, but familiar and safe. Instantly, my throat began to burn, so I put my head down to keep from looking in his eyes, to hide my longing while I followed Peggy into the house. And there, standing in the middle of the bland living room, were six or seven people, adults and children all smiling broadly as they watched me enter. A few had cameras; others carried little leather-bound autograph books or fan magazines with my picture on the cover. Dick was beaming when he introduced his neighbors, making me wonder whether he was proud of them or of me.
After signing everything there was to sign and smiling sweetly during their endless departure, after listening to Dick’s comments about the price of fame and wasn’t that a nice group of folks, after dutifully touring the new house and inspecting the small shrine that Shirley had created in her room with photos and clippings of the big sister she would never really get to know, I finally sat down with Dick and Shirley to watch a golf match on TV. When at last we were called into the dining area, which opened into the kitchen, Peggy was in the midst of delivering plates of food to each of the table’s four place mats with a pleasant “service with a smile” look on her face.
Dick sat on my left, carefully putting the paper napkin on his lap, while Shirley—on my right—never took her eyes off my face. I sat at the head of the table, locked in again, wanting something I couldn’t ask for because I was unable to find my voice. I wonder if my father could feel emotion radiating from me, because he began to talk a mile a minute, telling me how he and another man had purchased a pharmacy, a full drugstore, how it was a great deal, even though he wasn’t sure that he could make ends meet before it was up and running. After taking a few bites of the chicken baked in cream of mushroom soup, he began again. Maybe I’m paraphrasing, but not much.
“I read you made four thousand an episode. How many episodes were there?”
“We made thirty-one, but I only make a thousand per episode, and then my agent takes out his ten percent, so it’s not even that. It goes up to twelve hundred next season, I think.”
“Your car must have set you back some, I bet.”
“No… actually, no… They sort of gave it to me.”
“Well, well. Pretty snazzy, huh, Peg?”
As we sat, mercifully but awkwardly quiet, a pressure began to build inside my mind; maybe I could just whisper how sad I was feeling, maybe he would ask me why, maybe then I’d know how to answer. Go, Sally, go. I opened my mouth to start, and Dick cut me off.
“Sally, I have to tell you,” he said quickly, using his wadded napkin to wipe the grease off his mouth and the tears from his eyes, “I will always miss my children. Do you have any idea how much it hurt me to lose you? You and Rick? I never got over it… never.” He took a sip of water and looked at me. If only I could have said, I’m right here… You never lost me… You never saw me, but I’VE BEEN RIGHT HERE! But I couldn’t. Instead, I put my hand on his shoulder, patted him just as I had when I was four, and instantly turned into the village idiot. “Hey, it’s fine. We’re all fine. Come on, Dick, tell me, who flung gum in Grandpa’s whiskers?”
When the meal was over, the dishes were in the sink, and my promise to return was repeated to everyone, Dick walked me to the front door, stopping at the entrance, where he stood with his arms folded, legs apart as though bracing himself against a strong wind.
“Sal,” he began nervously, “you remember when you asked me to give you the twenty-five dollars you needed to join that workshop? The one where you got noticed? None of this would have happened if I hadn’t given you that money. Your mother didn’t have it. Do you remember?”
“Yes, I remember. I hope I thanked you.”
“Well, you can thank me now. I need to borrow some money. Just five thousand. Of course, I’ll pay you back. I just need it for a short loan.”
“I don’t think I have five thousand dollars. I don’t know. I… I just got a business manager… a few weeks ago, just to help me with taxes and stuff.”
“That’s great. Just great. If you give me his number, I’ll call him. Then I don’t have to bother you.”
“I don’t remember his number,” I said quickly, wishing this would stop. Knowing what it was like to be broke had made me afraid of money—or the lack of it. So much so that I couldn’t look at it, didn’t even know how much I had. But however much it was, I sure as hell didn’t want to give it away.
Dick pushed on. “That’s okay, what’s his name? Tell me his name and I’ll find the number. Then I don’t have to bother you,” he repeated.
I longed to see the interior of my dreaded Ferrari, to feel the safe isolation of my dreary rented home, but I nodded, then jotted the name on the notepad Dick quickly produced, one that still had NATIONAL DRUG CO. printed on the top. As I turned to go, Dick slung his arm over my sagging shoulder, pulling me toward a small bathroom.
“Listen, Sal, I’m your father. I want you to come here anytime, okay? Let me give you some things to take home.” He dashed toward the kitchen, returning instantly with a brown paper bag.
“I got some stuff here that you might need,” he said, opening a cabinet to reveal row after row of stacked boxes and bottles. “Here, some aspirin,” he said, tossing a large bottle of Bayer int
o the bag. “And Vicks VapoRub, large jar. Stick some in your nose when it gets stuffy. Works wonders.” He continued to toss items into the bag with a running commentary: “Decongestant spray? Diuretics? Peggy loves these, gets rid of all the puffies. How about some mood elevators? I use ’em when I play golf. Helps me with my game.” From a large jar he removed a dark green oblong capsule. It was either the twin or a very close relative of the green bombers I’d been given to lose weight, except now it was being called a “mood elevator.”
“How ’bout some laxatives? Here, these are great. Stool softeners?”
I nodded my head at everything, bewilderingly pleased and grateful for each added ingredient, like a kid who couldn’t get enough sprinkles on her ice cream.
I drove back in the pouring rain, blurry and dazed but knowing I had a father who cared enough to make sure my stools were soft. What the hell, it was better than nothing.
Looming on the horizon, like a funnel cloud coming my way, was the Nun’s second season, and I couldn’t find the tools to board up my brain, or the safety of a cellar to withstand the twister of another nine months of colorless nonsense. I felt hopeless, futureless. I desperately wanted to believe that I’d find my way through this, that something was possible on the other side, that someday I’d be offered roles that I’d be proud to play. I wanted at least to be considered for other projects, to have a chance—even if I wasn’t available. But in those days, there was a pronounced class system between the artists of films and the crude laborers of the small screen, especially situation comedy. And I was the Flying Nun, right at the top of the “don’t call us, we’ll call you” list.