by Sally Field
Finally, my long-lost obstetrician appeared. Jesus, where’d he been? He examined me and determined that my wonderful little bundle—who turned out to weigh eight pounds, four ounces and possessed an enormous head—was facing the wrong way. Not breech, with his feet where his head should be, but with his face turned up and not down. So, without word one, my fatherly doctor reached inside me and flipped the little fellow… over! How was that even possible? And finally, after enduring my first labor experience alone with little comforting and no medication—at least none that I was aware of—I was automatically given a spinal block. Not an epidural, as they use today, but a total block, as if I were having both legs amputated. This was the standard treatment in 1969 before the widespread use of Lamaze or natural childbirth, and before the blessed women’s movement came along to break down the doors, demanding that changes be made to this demoralizing, choiceless way of doing things.
After the sensory signals from the lower half of my body had been disconnected, the pain stopped, my chanting stopped, and all feeling came to an abrupt halt. I was then rolled down a bright hallway, through swinging doors, and found myself looking up at the even brighter operating/delivery room lights. A new nurse, with a mask over her face, took one of my arms, pulled it away from my midsection—where I’d been massaging both mother and child—and strapped it to the table where I’d been transferred. She then repeated the process with the other arm. When my legs were placed into the chrome stirrups, she continued with the lockdown procedure by wrapping the two wide straps waiting there around each of my legs. “We don’t want you to move around or touch yourself,” she cooed. Surely I’d taken a wrong turn and accidentally entered a scene from A Clockwork Orange.
While I lay there, totally numb from the waist down and bolted to the lightly padded table, they casually talked amongst themselves, never to me, and when the doctor nodded to the masked nurse standing at my side, she began pushing hard on my mountain of a stomach. Every time the signal was given, this large woman started shoving with her hands, using all her weight, huffing and puffing as if she were the one giving birth. Suddenly something changed—who knew what, ’cause I couldn’t feel anything. There was a moment of bustle, of masked people changing positions, moving quickly this way and that, until miraculously… there he was. My son. Peter.
The nurse held him at my side so I could lift my head to see his beautiful face—which at that moment looked like a pissed-off Inuit, apropos of my chanting, I assume. I reflexively started to reach for him, but quickly realized I was tied down. For God’s sake, people! Let me touch my baby! “We’re going to clean him up and get him all ready for his new life.” I desperately wanted to reply, Cram it up your ass. Give me my SON!!! But no, I didn’t say any of that. I let my head flop back down on the chrome table and closed my eyes.
Two days later, my breasts had become painfully engorged, either because that’s the way my body works or because I was not allowed to nurse Peter except at four-hour intervals. If he got hungry in between, he was given a bottle containing water. Besides that, he had been kept in the nursery, away from me altogether for the first night, so maybe my body didn’t know what the hell was happening or how on earth to adjust to it. I definitely didn’t know what was happening or how to adjust to it.
I did know that to be released from the hospital, I had to be able to urinate, but the thought of that was not a happy one—although having a tube stuck into my bladder was not a cheerful image either. When I finally did pee, blissfully alone without a smiling nurse standing over me, I thought my insides were falling out until I realized that what was pushing against my episiotomy stitches was not a vital organ, but a piece of surgical sponge that had been left inside me. Oops.
Finally, with my boobs packed in ice and my ass on a pillow, I sat in the back next to the baby’s new car seat while Steve slowly drove us home. From then on and forever after, Peter and I would figure it out together. We would teach each other. What I didn’t understand, he instinctually knew. To this day, that remains the same.
During the fourteen months since Steve and I first married, Baa had quietly hovered, worrying that I was still feeling estranged from her and not wanting to step in uninvited. She’d been working, not as an actress but as a part-time florist, learning to make festive chrysanthemum and bird-of-paradise arrangements, and while I had gestated my way through The Flying Nun’s third season, she hadn’t been around much. But I can still see her in my mind, standing in the hospital room doorway as soon as I was out of recovery, holding her jacket closed with one hand and a bunch of flowers in the other. She stood there, not moving, until slowly we began to smile at each other. “I’ve been here all night,” she said softly, and as I attempted to sit up for the first time, she started to cry, whispering, “Oh, Sal.” Then when Peter and I were at home, away from any other supervision, I’d hear her tiptoe in through the back door every day, and feel myself exhale, letting out the breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. She’d then sit on the living room sofa with her knitting, waiting to see if I needed a break. I usually did. Gratefully, I’d hand the baby to her and watch. Never spouting singsong nonsense, she’d look in his eyes and actually talk to him; telling him about her day, wondering how his was, what he had conquered so early in life? She’d walk him around the room, then eventually move outside, all the time explaining things: a leaf, a bird, details of what and why they were. I felt in awe of her, wondering if she’d been like that with me or if I was watching her become something new. Just as I was becoming something new.
I know Steve was feeling the pressure of having a son, feeling he needed to be the kind of man his child would be proud of, and at the same time feeling the absence of his own father, this man’s inconceivable abandonment of him. In the twenty-four years of Steve’s life, his father had never even sent him a birthday card—not that a card would have cut it. With new urgency, Steve started exploring places to put his focus. He was good at hard physical labor, building and construction, gardening and landscaping, was instinctually gifted in these areas. When we’d first moved in, Steve had completely changed the master bedroom, had knocked out walls, enlarged the master bath to include two walk-in closets. But he refused to follow the rules, so if permits or inspections were required—and they usually were—he couldn’t be bothered. (God knows what happened when we sold this house and the new owners asked for an inspection, along with all the appropriate paperwork, because there wasn’t any.) Next, he decided to set up a darkroom in the pseudo-poolhouse hidden in the backyard. He bought all the equipment, plus stacks of books, and began teaching himself about photography. Maybe this was it. Step by step, he could learn to become a photographer. Except he suddenly became enthralled with the idea of going back to USC to get an MFA in theater arts, focusing primarily on writing, an arena where he also had talent. And he was completely dedicated to that for a while, until that energetic burst of enthusiasm faded and he began to lose interest, as though everything he did was only a hobby. Maybe he didn’t feel a pressing need to get out into the big bad world as long as I was making money. And in that way, our marriage hurt him. I wish I could have seen that at the time.
What was his role in the family, then? Steve was always an attentive, loving father, spending time with Peter, sharing in the everyday tasks, but the idea that he would stay home and take care of the baby when I returned to work never seemed to be on the table, and neither of us ever tried to put it there. Maybe it was the era, or maybe it was my own blind distrust of men. I’d never been around a father-and-child relationship, not a good one anyway, so I’d never seen a man interact with his baby boy. I’d try to stand back, to observe as Steve would throw him higher and higher in the air, watch as Peter—not quite laughing—would take a deep startled breath with each toss. Many times, Steve would toss him too high, hitting the baby’s head on the ceiling, or catch him painfully by an arm or a leg when he came back down. I’m sure every mother has stood on the sidelines, trying to allow the male
relationship to be different from that of the female. But I began to hear a hint of mockery in Steve’s laugh when Peter would start to cry, a wordless challenge that chilled my heart, and I’d instantly grab the little boy, often frightening Peter more than his bump on the head. Maybe it was uncalled for, maybe I was overreacting to something I saw through the eyes of my childhood. I don’t know.
I’m calling from the set to check on Peter. Called a hundred times a day.
As each day passed, the inevitability of my having to resume the show was growing, like the Mongols from my dream riding closer and closer. Only a handful of episodes were left to shoot and the chances of the show being picked up for a fourth year were slim—which I couldn’t help but feel was my fault. I’d never actually rebelled against anything except my bangs. As a result, a tiny strip of fake hair had been stitched to my hat, meaning that Sister Bertrille had bangs and I didn’t. Where I was guilty—and consciously didn’t care—was in the publicity department. When the studio began to obliquely imply that if I didn’t agree to do more, they’d be forced to take my car, the blue prima donna, away from me, I thought, Merciful heavens, please don’t frow me in dat dere briar patch.
Nevertheless, my two months of leave would soon be over and I’d have to return to work. How would that be possible? How could I ever leave Peter? I began to understand how painful it is—and always would be—to turn and walk away, even if it’s just for the day. And yet, when I was out the door, back into my life without him, how relieved I’d feel to be free, my own person again. And still, how I’d ache to be back. A totally new and different kind of emotional pickle.
One afternoon, I was sitting on the living room rug watching Peter frolicking on a patchwork baby blanket before me, kicking his newly found feet in the air. Baa was sitting on the stone hearth across the room, leaning over her legs, watching both of us. Without thinking, I asked if she would consider quitting her job to help me. Only after I heard it come out of my mouth did I know how much I wanted it.
Baa and Peter.
“If you do that, Baa, I’ll always take care of you. I can’t do this without you. I’m afraid to leave him with anyone… and it hurts me.”
“I know,” she said.
“But it wouldn’t hurt as badly if I could leave him with you. Please, Mother, will you help me?” I remember thinking how strange, almost embarrassing: I had actually called her “Mother.”
Without hesitation and in a deeper tone than her usual light register, she replied, “Always, Sal. For as long as you need.”
So, for me, and for the love of Peter, Baa quit drinking… ish. And moved back into the center of my life.
PART THREE
I yearn for my work, because it always helps me make sense of things. For never was a horror experienced without an angel stepping in from the opposite direction to witness it with me.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Marianne Mitford
He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
—Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
13
Transition
THREE MONTHS AFTER wrapping the third and final season of The Flying Nun, I was a thin, determined twenty-three-year-old woman with an eight-month-old son. I owned a house in Bel Air, supported a husband in college, wore a Joan of Arc haircut, and had changed so radically it’s hard to look back and see myself as the same person.
For sure, my restless generation was pushing me to rethink everything I had always accepted as “the way things are.” Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique had begun to trickle into my awareness. And I eventually heard the challenges from Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch, inviting women to own their bodies, to examine that mysterious part of themselves by holding a mirror between their legs, to taste their menstrual blood and, most important, to be outraged. But because I could never make myself crack open the books, it felt like a conversation I could hear from down the hall, like I was eavesdropping and never actually in the room.
Much of the change in me had to do with my constant participation at the Actors Studio and the secure place it gave me to experiment with myself. No longer an observer, I had been accepted as a member after doing a scene with Madeleine from A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney. Unfortunately, Mr. Strasberg had returned to New York for the winter and wasn’t sitting in his familiar front-row chair for my audition. Instead I performed for a group of longstanding alumni, which included Bruce Dern—who was frequently the moderator in Lee’s absence and for whose focus and support of me I will always be grateful. Ultimately, I was given a lifetime membership. I was in the club.
And then there was Peter: this tiny creature with huge brown eyes, who lit up when I walked into the room, who reached for me when he was afraid, and who was soothed and comforted by my presence. And in return, I was comforted by him. His existence in my life enabled me to shut the door on the outside world, to be home without feeling lonely. As I took care of him—my all-consuming responsibility—I felt as though I were in command, becoming the more capable, confident part of myself, putting sadness in the back seat and consciously steering away from feeling helpless or powerless, as though I had a choice of what road to travel. With both hands on the wheel, I headed directly toward what I wanted, and what I wanted was as clear as a full moon peeking over the dark horizon: to be an actor, to have the chance to explore where that took me, what places it would push me, lead me, teach me. If I was not given that opportunity, it had to be because I wasn’t ready, that the power to change everything rested in me. Like my stepfather, the industry had decided that it knew who I was, threatening me with failure and the ability to cut off the lifeline I had to myself: acting. But if I could take care of Peter, I could take care of me. If I failed to get a role, let it be because I wasn’t skilled enough or talented enough or because another actress’s interpretation was better; I could fix that. What seemed a harder path to find was how to be given the opportunity to fail when my name never appeared on anyone’s list, when I was systematically dismissed, when no one wanted it to be said that the Flying Nun had been cast in their film.
With my new haircut and my growing son. Onward.
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is the story of a mentally ill young woman trapped in a make-believe world created as a defense against her frightening childhood, and when I read the book in March of 1970, I desperately wanted a chance to play the lead. So when I wasn’t allowed the opportunity to audition, or even to enter the room for a meeting, I took a monologue straight from the book and decided to make my own screen test. Steve operated a rented camera; Lou Antonio—my friend from the Actors Studio—was the director; and another Studio member, Lane Bradbury—Lou’s very talented wife—was our crew. I then sent the footage to Al Wasserman, the New York–based producer affiliated with the project. And the letter I received on April 1, 1970—April Fool’s Day—I still have. Mr. Wasserman writes, “In doing the test I can see you ran into the dilemma that is going to face us during the filming (perhaps even more so, because of the short duration of a test and the need for immediate impact), how to avoid a sameness of performance in playing a character who is ‘stone-faced’ during most of the story; and, on the other hand, how to avoid indulging in emotional pyrotechnics that are not rooted in the truth of the character or the moment. Quite understandably, I think, you erred on the latter side. The director and I screened the test several times in order to make sure we were isolating performance from conception, and we both agreed that you handled individual moments and a range of emotions extremely well. However, as I’m sure you know, we were already well advanced in our negotiations for the part. Your test would have had to carry extraordinary impact—and this, I’m afraid it did not do…”
I have to say—mostly because I’m a spiteful little twit—that for whatever adva
nced negotiations they were deeply into, the film was not actually produced until 1977, and the name Al Wasserman does not appear anywhere on the credits. So there!
This is not to say that I didn’t still have some opportunities. Though the motion picture industry wanted nothing to do with me, television was still interested, offering me several TV films. In the early 1970s, original movies made to be viewed on television seemed like a brand-new concept, but they had probably been inspired by Playhouse 90, Schlitz Playhouse, and all the live shows of the fifties and early sixties, shows where my mother had spent much of her career.
My first—an ABC Movie of the Week airing in February 1971—was probably the best of the lot. With a title song sung by newcomer Linda Ronstadt, Maybe I’ll Come Home in the Spring was directed by Joseph Sargent from a screenplay written by Bruce Feldman (though Steven Spielberg told me years later that he had written the original draft). It attempted to look at the runaways of my generation, the young people who needed to escape the confinement of their families by vanishing into the world of hippies, only to find that coming home again—if they ever did—was not easy. Obviously, this wasn’t something I had experienced in my own life, but I did understand inarticulate, dysfunctional families and, saints be praised, I wasn’t playing a nun.