by Sally Field
I had hardly thought about the fact that months earlier I’d signed up to do a scene at the Actors Studio, had almost forgotten that the only date I could get was right before production was to begin again. Only now did it dawn on me how close that day really was. I hoped that Madeleine would be back from New York and sitting in the audience, because it would be my first scene performed at the Studio and the moderator would be Lee Strasberg.
I remember feeling dark and depressed, dressed in my ragamuffin clothes as I sat on the floor of the theater arts section at the public library. Flipping through play after play, though not necessarily reading them, I was looking for scenes between two characters when I stumbled upon a long one from Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitute. Without knowing what the play was about, I knew I’d found it: a scene, a character to create, and my rag doll body came to life. Immediately, I asked Paul, one of the actors I’d worked with in exercise class, to play the rich southern bigot, Fred, to my Lizzie the prostitute.
To accommodate the many actors who wanted to perform for him, Mr. Strasberg had handed down an edict declaring that no scene would run longer than fifteen minutes, at which time he would stop it. In the classes that I had attended since Lee’s arrival for his six-month L.A. stint, I’d realized it was not unusual for him to halt a scene long before the fifteen-minute cutoff, which made everyone in the room flinch with the implied blow.
When Lee was the moderator, every scene night was standing room only, and the night I was to perform it seemed especially packed, every chair taken, with the overflow sitting on the floor or leaning against the back wall. I don’t remember watching the first scene that night because mine was up second, and I was only slightly aware of Lee commenting after that scene finished, speaking sharply to one actor and dismissively to the other. All I knew was, we were up.
I was standing on the cheese end of a mousetrap, unafraid or unaware that I could be crushed. I saw it only as a way to lift off the ground, to be catapulted into space, to feel alive. The grubby, worn boards of the stage became the grubby, cheap room where Lizzie lived. The filthy twin mattress, usually stored in a side room filled with props and bits of random furniture, became Lizzie’s unmade bed. I buried my nose in the sheets, into the smell of humans, fully the madwoman down from the attic, and said my dialogue: “ ‘It smells of sin!’ What do you know about that? You know, it’s your sin, honey. Yes, of course, it’s mine too. But then, I’ve got so many on my conscience. Come on. Sit on our sin. A pretty nice sin, wasn’t it?”
As my fellow actor began to grope me, rubbing his hands intimately over my body, the madwoman part of me stayed present, and when he began to choke me—truly lost in the task—the red rage of me pushed him away, while I jumped to my feet crying ragamuffin’s tears, and the rock-solid piece of me said the required dialogue. All the pieces, the voices, the parts of me came together. Worked together. Lived for that moment… together.
Then the scene was over. Lee had not stopped us when our allotted fifteen minutes were up, like he had done with all the other scenes. Our Respectful Prostitute had taken forty-five minutes. As I had seen the other actors do after completing their work, I gathered my things and sat on the edge of the stage, not wanting to meet anyone’s eyes. My partner pulled up a chair, took out a notepad and pen, then sat poised, ready to jot down important instructions and words of wisdom from Lee, while I sat with my legs crossed and my hands in my lap. Lee asked Paul what he had been working on and received a long explanation, which I didn’t listen to because only then did I realize with a jolt that Lee would soon turn to me, asking the very same question, and I had no answer. I wasn’t working on anything. And, sure enough, after commenting briefly and rather blandly to Paul, Lee turned and looked at me. But he didn’t ask me what I’d been working on. He asked, “Why are you here?”
My heart stalled in my chest, and I braced myself to hear him say that I didn’t belong, that I shouldn’t be there.
“You work,” he continued. “A lot of people here don’t and you do. You’re doing very well. Why are you here?”
“Because I want to be good,” I said.
“You are good,” he said. “Good enough to work all the time.”
“Yes, I do work. But… not the way I want. I’m not good enough. I want to know how.”
Never taking his eyes off mine, he sat back in his chair while making little clicking sounds, as though he had a popcorn kernel stuck in the back of his throat. After a moment that felt like an hour, he leaned forward and very softly said, “I let this scene continue. I wanted to watch you. You were quite brilliant.”
My stalled heart would have exploded, but he spoke so softly I wasn’t sure that’s what he had said. He held my look, clicked the back of his throat, and repeated nonchalantly, “Quite brilliant.”
Instantly the room became vacuum-packed, airless and still. No one moved. No one raised a hand to offer comments, as I had seen happen in the past. And my eyes, which had been fastened to Lee’s, began to search the room for Madeleine.
11
Second Season
WHEN FILMING BEGAN on the Nun’s second season—leaving me with no time to attend classes—Lee’s words became fuel, a verbal elixir I would drink over and over in my memory. At the Actors Studio, I felt inside my body. Without that space, without that kind of exploration, I lost the ability to hear parts of myself, as though half of me just vacated the premises. But on the edge of my brain I could still feel that one moment of coexistence, like an echo of harmonizing voices, and one day, after we’d been in production about a week, I surprised myself.
Except for the phone call in which I had initially passed on the show, I’d never had a real conversation with Harry Ackerman, the executive producer on both Gidget and The Flying Nun. I remember seeing him on the Gidget set once or twice and in the convent for short, infrequent visits that sent tense “Big Daddy’s watching” ripples through the entire company. After a few moments of stiff chitchat, I would always find a reason to back away. But when production on the Nun’s second year started up, Mr. Ackerman invited me to lunch in the windowless, hard-to-find conference room known as the Executive Dining Room. It was an hour of forced smiling from me, of pushing the food around my plate while I counted the moments until I could leave. Then, as I was preparing to scurry back to the set, relieved to be finally free, I sat back down. Without knowing I was going to, I asked Harry if it might be possible to have one show written that season about an honest human problem, or even one scene every now and again, adding that it would give me something to look forward to. I hadn’t rolled every word around in my head four thousand times, hadn’t begged myself to speak. I just made a request, plain and simple. And when he replied, “That might be good for you, Sally; however, your audience doesn’t want to be surprised or touched or taught or have to think too much,” I silently nodded my head. Yet, as I walked back to Stage 2, I felt oddly triumphant. Without feeling blazing rage or fear or sadness, I had asked for what I wanted. Getting it seemed secondary.
I never told anyone in production about my dissatisfaction with the show and struggled hard to keep it from showing, except when I was with Baa. If she wasn’t drunk, she was my sounding board, my pillow to scream into, patiently listening to my endless stream of frustrations. Since the first days of Gidget she was always advising me to get to know the camera, to make friends with it—which, instinctually, I had. Sometimes I felt more intimately connected with that mechanical device than with anything breathing on the set. But in that friendship, she warned me, I had better be careful of what I was feeling. She repeatedly drilled it into my head that if I was irritated or impatient or bored or just fed up with the work, the camera could and would see it, implying that those colors were unappealing and would paint me as unlikable. I scoffed at her advice, not because it wasn’t right, but because it seemed as if she was telling me to erase my true feelings, to swallow them, to settle for what I had and never want more.
I have a
little square snapshot of my mother taken around 1936, when she was fourteen or fifteen. She peers over the shoulder of an unnamed young man, with an open joyous laugh on her face and a spark in her eyes like a challenge to anyone who thinks they can stop her. She’s alive and going to take a big bite out of life. Either that or a big bite out of the boy standing next to her, and maybe at that moment, they were one and the same.
Fifteen-year-old Baa with her infectious laugh.
It goes without saying that my mother’s generation had a more confining set of boundaries dictating their behavior than the one I grew up in. And she had been a bit of a renegade in her way, had challenged those parameters, behavior that must have given the women of her family some worrisome, hand-wringing moments. Before taking the career opportunity that had landed in her lap, before earning a living in the foreign world of show business, she’d spent two years in a city college, and quietly knew so much about so many things. Certainly, literature: I could hardly name a book she hadn’t read, and she remembered them all, could summarize the story and talk about the author’s other works. She had read Freud and Jung, had seen a psychiatrist in the early fifties, could spout the theories of most of the important philosophers, studied art history on her own, practiced painting with oils all her life, was proficient in quilt making, knitting, and sewing. And when I tried to learn French in my early sixties, then foolishly attempted to speak to her using my shaky skills, she maddeningly filled in all the words I couldn’t remember, using the correct and exact pronunciation.
What happened? Why was the confidence of her youth so ephemeral? Why is mine? As my mother approached the end of her life, I began to feel a frantic need to know more about her. I pestered and pushed, wanting her to reveal stories and secrets as if that would somehow answer the questions I had about myself, or would heal the wound between us, a wound that only I seemed to feel and pick at. One night she told me how much she had adored her father, loved being near him and felt proud to be the apple of his eye. But when Joy had found her sitting on his lap one day, she’d been furious, wordlessly accusing the little girl of trying to steal his affections. She told me that Joy had always been angry with her because of how much Baa and her father loved each other. It was because of that, my mother continued, that she couldn’t be friends with women. Women always wanted to compete with her, she said, and she refused to compete, she wouldn’t compete anywhere, and to some extent, that had ruined her career.
These tiny slivers of information didn’t quite add up for me, and even though I was in my sixties when I heard this story, I couldn’t yet use it to connect the dots, to connect the daughters. Baa finally ended the conversation by deadening her eyes and reporting that she never thought Joy had loved her, tossing it off by saying that it was a good thing. “How,” I asked her, “could that possibly be a good thing?” And flatly she said, “Because I stopped looking for it. I just accepted it wasn’t there and moved on.” But I know that wasn’t the truth. My mother had devotedly taken care of Joy during the last, difficult years of my grandmother’s life, and I could see how much she loved her, how they loved each other through a barbed-wire fence. And all my mother’s life, she ached to be loved. We all do. But Baa would lose herself in that ache. It became bigger than the rest of her, would eclipse her creativity, her love of words, her strength, and for a time, her children.
Tossed carelessly in a box of memorabilia—treated with disregard but kept all the same—I found a few disjointed pages of a journal that my mother had written when she was newly single and I was working on the Nun. After piecing it together, I read about one tiny, intimate encounter that happened when she’d been invited to a party in Malibu. At that gathering she met a writer whose work she respected, and like a young girl, she confesses that she was in awe of him, thrilled that he had talked to her as though she had something of value to say. Because of that, she admits to feeling nervous around him and says, “I had too much to drink,” something she never would have admitted to me. When the two of them sat in the sand together, unseen in the dark, she writes, he kissed her.
I realize now that my mother at forty-six, and I at twenty-one, were separately feeling the same thing: alone.
When I was on the set every day with the people I worked with, I could be funny and capable, cocky with my position of leadership. But I had continued to push Steve away, so on the weekends if Princess wasn’t with me, I’d pace back and forth in front of the big sliding glass door of my rented house like a caged tiger, longing to have friends and to meet people, but not knowing how. I wasn’t writing in a journal at this time, disjointed or otherwise. But according to Aunt Gladys’s scrapbooks, on Memorial Day 1968, Screen Gems put together a press junket that included actors from their current shows and journalists working for various publications. We were then sent, in one large group, to Mexico City for a weekend of sightseeing and nonstop interviews. I know from the September issues of TV Radio Talk, Modern Screen, and TV Picture Life that I was besieged with idiotic questions about dating Davy Jones, or was I secretly married to him or dating my co-star Alejandro Rey: nothing that was remotely true. Ultimately, I told them that I’d just met someone, that I’d gone out with him before I left to attend the junket, and that I was looking forward to seeing him again. His name was Jimmy Webb, and he was the young songwriter who had become an overnight sensation after composing such songs as “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Up, Up and Away,” and “MacArthur Park.” When they asked me how we met, I can read the same answer in each of the publications, which leads me to think it must be true: His press agent called my press agent to ask if I would accompany Mr. Webb to a composer’s banquet. I don’t remember having a press agent at the time, so maybe it was someone in the Screen Gems publicity department, and even though I have only a dim memory of attending a banquet, I obviously agreed to go. According to one story, when Jimmy called to say hello, I told him to be prepared because I was very shy. To that he replied, “Fine, we’ll be shy together.” I vaguely recall that tidbit, but only after reading it in the crumbling tabloids.
What I remember clearly is waiting for Jimmy to call after I returned from Mexico City. If I wasn’t on the set working, then I was home waiting breathlessly, in proper girl fashion. He must have phoned me again, but if we ever went on an actual date somewhere, I don’t recall.
I have only one clear memory of us being together. Crystal clear. I was in Jimmy’s rented Hollywood house, about five miles from mine, sitting next to him on his piano stool while he played on and on. There I sat, beside that talented boy who was just as young and probably just as lonely as I was. We never spoke. I just sat there listening to him sing his songs as he smoked a joint filled with hash. I rarely smoked pot, which drained me of energy and not only reinforced my inability to speak but left me unable to remember what I wanted to say even if I could. And I had never smoked hash. At that moment I wanted to be someone I wasn’t, someone Jimmy would like, so when he handed me the joint, I smoked it.
I don’t know how long we sat there—it seemed like an eternity—but slowly the colors in the room got vibrant and bright, slightly fuzzy on the edges, and I started to feel disoriented. I stood up, asking for the bathroom, then wandered through his empty bedroom, trying to put one foot in front of the other. I found the room, locked the door, then sat down to pee—even though I wasn’t sure I had to. Suddenly, everything began to tilt, and a black dot appeared in the center of my vision, like a flashbulb had just exploded. Feeling panicky, I curled up on the cold tile floor, wishing I could go home, and passed out. When I woke up, I couldn’t remember where I was, had no idea how long I’d been facedown on the floor, and even worse, I couldn’t feel my arms and legs, couldn’t locate them on my body, couldn’t locate my body. It seemed to take a massive amount of time to finally connect with my limbs, pull myself up, gather my wits enough to move out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, where I could lie down again, perhaps snap out of this horrifying condition. I felt like the chil
d I once was, terrified in the night and afraid to call for help. Very softly, I called out for Jimmy to please come help me, then slid into darkness again. I don’t know what signal he thought I was giving, or if he didn’t need one, or if he was in the same half-conscious dreamlike state as I was (which quite possibly was the case) but when I woke again—an undetermined amount of time later—Jimmy was no longer singing but on top of me, grinding away to another melody. Even though I was barely conscious, thoughts rolled in my head: Maybe I had asked for this by lying on his bed, maybe I hadn’t pulled my pants all the way up so what was he to think, maybe this meant he liked me. Then I couldn’t think anymore.
I woke before it was light, gathered my things but couldn’t find my shoes or my car, until I remembered that he had picked me up at my house so I had no car. With that realization, I walked home barefoot. The sun hadn’t yet warmed the asphalt streets as my feet pounded down numbly, speaking the words my mouth couldn’t, leaving the soles of my feet covered in a thick, solid blister.
When Steve appeared at my front door, slightly out of breath and almost instantly after he called asking if we could talk, I felt like smiling. Here was my best friend, my fingers-crossed, King’s X spot in the world, standing in front of me. We’d been filming the second season for weeks and I hadn’t seen him in all that time. Nor had I seen him during my hiatus, spent mostly at the Actors Studio. In reality, I hadn’t seen him in almost a year, except for the few times I’d come home to find that he had broken into my house and was waiting, wanting to talk to me—something he did no matter how completely I tried to lock him out. This time he’d called.