In Pieces

by Sally Field

  Happily, Lane Bradbury—who had helped me with my homemade test—played my younger sister, and since she’d been a member of the Studio much longer than I, we could confide in each other about the work. Playing my troublesome mother was the beautiful Eleanor Parker, who was at the tail end of a wonderful career and to me, she was fascinating. Never in my short time as an actor had I worked with anyone so frantic for control. Every time a scene required us to hug—which for some reason happened a lot—she would automatically turn my face away from the camera, making sure the only things on display were her glowing, tear-rimmed eyes and the back of my head. But Lee had always said, “The best acting is no acting at all,” and since the mother and daughter had a contentious relationship in the text and I didn’t feel exactly bonded with Eleanor, I “used it.” As I watched this actress—who had been extremely successful by anyone’s definition—I realized that she was a cautionary tale for me, a blinking hazard sign. True, she came from a different era of acting, and that was part of it, but as I sat quietly in a corner, observing how she worked, I realized that I never wanted to get to the point where showing my face on camera at just the right angle was more important than the work itself. This work that I was just now trying to understand.

  David Carradine, who played my hippie boyfriend, wore a pair of suede bell-bottom pants that laced in the front, which was fine except that the panel of fabric usually placed behind the laces—like the tongue of a shoe—was missing, and because David wore no underwear, it allowed pubic hair and a great deal of the penis nestled there to be on constant display. But since that seemed to be his only costume in the show, the novelty of that eventually dwindled, and the more hypnotic thing became the forgotten food piling up in his capped teeth. I didn’t much like kissing him, but he was easy to work with and right for the role, so what’s a little visible gum disease between fellow performers?

  To round out the colorful cast was the actor who played my father, Jackie Cooper. Yes, the man who had been an important executive at the studio where I had spent my entire career—all five years—had left his job at Screen Gems, gone back into acting, and was now playing my father. I met him face-to-face as an actor, seeing him for the first time through different eyes. In reality, he was a kind, gentle man, not to mention a good actor with a storybook body of work.

  Right before Maybe I’ll Come Home in the Spring aired, and just after I’d wrapped another TV film—this one about a newly married young couple, aptly called Marriage: Year One—Cecil Smith wrote in his Los Angeles Times column: “It’s doubtful any two films have caused more stir here, partly, I think, out of curiosity about what Sally Field is doing in them. Both are highly complex dramatic roles, demanding the sort of acting resources that Sally never demonstrated flying out of that convent in Puerto Rico.” Mr. Smith went on to say, “Strange, that the production company of Marriage: Year One, Universal Studios, swarms with fine young contract players, highly skilled in drama like Carrie Snodgress, Katharine Ross, Belinda Montgomery, Tisha Sterling, Pam McMyler and yet Sally was brought in from the outside.”

  Well okay, fine. But in the Hollywood Reporter’s review of Maybe I’ll Come Home in the Spring—which I’ve only now read, forty-seven years after it was originally printed—John Goff calls it ABC-TV’s most intriguing Movie of the Week and says it ranks highest largely because of a radical departure in performing material by its star. “Field, with Sargent’s almost delicate direction, shows that she can handle a serious role as well as light comedy. She simply needs more experience at it. With this as evidence she should have no trouble getting it.” Ha.

  Marriage: Year One and Hitched—another NBC movie I made that year—were both two hours of uninspired viewing, as was a third film called Mongo’s Back in Town. And just in case you’re wondering, I wasn’t Mongo. I was his girlfriend, basically a generic supporting role to Joe Don Baker’s lead. The only interesting thing about Mongo’s Back was that the cast included young Martin Sheen, also in a generic supporting role, and Telly Savalas, whose character was not unlike the one he played two years later in his Kojak series.

  After a year and a half, what little cachet I might have had coming off my back-to-back television series was slipping away. I could feel it in my bones. I was repeating the same pattern my mother and stepfather had before me, working but going nowhere. Soon I’d be relegated to a guest spot here and there, to being a supporting player on TV shows I didn’t know or like, and then what? Game shows? That was a horrifying thought. How would I make a living?

  And Steve was still no closer to entering the workplace. He had written and directed a very good short play presented at USC during an evening of student one-acts, and even though he was fired up and engaged during his first semester of a two-year MFA program, he never wrote another play, never wrote a screenplay or produced another project at USC. He talked about wanting to be a writer, to pursue writing as a career, but he didn’t push it anywhere, never explored options, and relied on me to bring home the bacon… and the eggs.

  Then Steve’s number came up. The draft lottery had gone into play in 1969, at which time he’d received a student deferment, but when Peter was not quite two years old, Steve got his notice to report for a physical the following month. And that news presented the possibility of being sent to Vietnam. With Peter on my hip and my heart in my throat, I stood stone still in the living room while Steve read the order again and again. What could we do? There had never been a patriotic, “fight for your country” feeling connected with the war in Vietnam, and by 1971, only a year after protesting students were gunned down at Kent State, angry demonstrations were happening everywhere. Proudly marching off to potentially lose your life in Southeast Asia was not high on anyone’s to-do list. (But as I write this, I’m flooded with great sadness and respect for the thousands and thousands of young men my age who did just that.)

  There was always the chance that when called, you might be rejected from serving for legitimate reasons, even if perhaps those reasons had to be embellished just a little. Steve had been a juvenile delinquent, was arrested several times, and spent a year in a facility for troubled children: These issues were real. Therefore, he requested and received a letter from a psychologist he’d been seeing off and on since he was a teenager. The letter stated that Steven Craig Bloomfield was mentally unstable and unsuitable for the armed services. Though I knew Steve was complicated, I did hope that the doctor was doing him a favor and exaggerating.

  Each morning we woke feeling a little more anxious than the day before, until suddenly, out of the blue, two weeks before the designated day, Steve decided he needed to find his father, whom he only vaguely remembered. He had never reached out to him, hardly ever mentioned him, but after somehow discovering the man was still living in Fargo, North Dakota, Steve turned into a young Telemachus and off he went, in search of his long-lost father.

  He had been gone only a day or two when Princess called to tell me that Jocko wanted to meet my son. Not quite eighteen, my sister had been working in a clothes store in Sherman Oaks, living sometimes with Baa, sometimes with whatever boyfriend she had, and sometimes with me. At one point we even tried to turn my garage into an apartment for her, but no amount of scrubbing could change the fact that it was a raw-walled concrete slab with a washer and dryer in one corner and an electric door that opened erratically and without provocation.

  I hadn’t seen or talked to my stepfather in a very long time, not since he walked out of his marriage with my mother, and the thought of being in the same room with him again made my stomach flip over. But Princess sounded thrilled, excited to include the fact that Jocko wanted me to meet Autumn, the woman he had waltzed away with more than two years before, then married directly after divorcing my mother. And I mean directly—doubt the ink on the documents had dried.

  I was not looking forward to any of it, and when I heard the putt-putt of Princess’s old Volkswagen bug (a hand-me-down from Steve, who had since purchased a motorcycle) I felt
deeply relieved, knowing that we would have an hour together before Jocko’s expected arrival. As we paced around the living room, my sister recounted her time with the happy couple, having nothing but glowing words about her new stepmother and acting slightly giddy about the whole thing. So much so that when he finally swaggered through the front door, Princess was awash in pure, loving approval. With a Cheshire Cat grin, Jocko introduced me to his wife, while I held Peter tight on my hip like a child hugging her doll, comforted by his clinging.

  In one little group, we slid from room to room while I gave them a quick house tour, Jocko walking with his arm slung around Princess’s neck the whole time. Then, awkwardly, he and Autumn (whose name is actually Patricia) sat down with a sigh on the green sofa, and suddenly I felt ill. Autumn looked so frantically eager, like a golden retriever waiting for her stick to be tossed. Pale blond and angular, with a greasy shine to her face, she sat on the edge of the cushion, inching closer to my adjacent chair, focusing on Peter, who would have nothing to do with her. The new Mrs. O’Mahoney oozed warmth, talking of how much she wanted me to meet my new brothers and sisters—her children. I clenched my jaw and nodded, adjusting Peter’s bent leg on my lap. After what seemed like a lifetime, Autumn asked Princess to show her the view from outside, and reached her arms out to Peter, wiggling her pearlized fingernails in his face as if that would seduce him to reach for her. Thank the good sweet Lord, he did not. So, empty-handed, she turned and walked out the glass door toward the backyard with my sister leading the way, leaving me with Jocko.

  What on earth did this man and I have to say to each other? In reality, one hell of a lot, but that would never happen. Maybe it would if I could meet him today, with the sturdy legs of my history holding me up, but not when I was twenty-four with my baby son on my lap. Jocko chatted on, telling me how they were going to Hawaii to live on a bird sanctuary, and then, as casually as if he were requesting a glass of water, he asked if he could borrow $5,000. I thought, Crap, didn’t I play this scene before? But when I noticed that his hands were shaking, I quickly looked away, embarrassed for him, not wanting him to know that I had seen. His voice got louder as I left the room, guffawing at nothing while I sat down on my bed and filled out a check: Pay to the order of Jock O’Mahoney. When he and his new wife said their goodbyes, waving from their white station wagon as it pulled into the street, I held a drowsy Peter on the edge of my hip, closed the door to the entrance garden, then leaned into the bushes and vomited. I was pregnant again.

  Steve and I stood in the kitchen the morning he was to appear for his draft physical, whispering to each other in the predawn darkness, making sure he had everything he needed. He was still exhausted and numb from his trip to North Dakota, still wondering if he should have found a way to tell his father that he was coming. The man had tried to act pleased, glad to finally meet his son, but during the few hours Steve was with him, he had felt an unmistakable “get lost” vibration. So that’s what he did. He came home to his own son, played with our little boy, and didn’t have much to say about the man who had turned his back on him again and forever. He couldn’t erase him from his mind, so he did the next best thing: He legally dropped the name Bloomfield and became Steven Craig. No more, no less.

  Pregnant again as two-year-old Peter hangs on.

  That morning I had packed him a few things to eat, including three of the brownies I’d made the night before. Just as Steve had requested, they were gooey, were filled with tiny bits of walnuts and a shitload of marijuana. He walked out the door with his birth certificate, the doctor’s letter, and his brown paper bag.

  There were no cell phones in those days, meaning I couldn’t hear from him unless he went to a pay phone, and even though I never expected him to call, as the hours ticked by and morning turned into late afternoon, I desperately wanted to know what was happening. When he finally walked through the door, I was sitting on the living room floor next to a playpen stuffed with toys and a toddler who wanted out. Both Peter and I stood up as Steve—looking frighteningly pale, his eyes red and nearly swollen closed—sank slowly onto the foyer floor, put his head in his hands, and sobbed. Maybe it was the brownies he had eaten or the growing fear of being drafted or the bitter blow of his father’s cold shoulder, or maybe it was being sent to military school when he was four, or spending a year in an institution where there was no one to relate to—or maybe it was everything bubbling up all at once. But when he’d handed the psychologist’s letter to the sergeant at the desk, even before the examination began, Steve started to cry, violently. Eventually, someone had to walk him outside and sit with him on the front steps. Even then he couldn’t stop crying, sobbing and sobbing, unable to speak for hour after hour. By the end of the day, he was officially stamped 4-F and allowed to go home.

  I put him to bed, made him drink some water, pushed him to eat some soup, while I kept telling him he was home, he had a family who loved him, no one was going to send him away. He was safe, he was safe. And he went to sleep.

  Steve’s flirtation with drugs, which had begun with pot in the midsixties, was now becoming a slightly more serious relationship, and it bothered me. I remember lying underneath Peter’s crib, listening to the rattle of the toddler’s breathing and the rumble of Steve’s friends milling about in the other rooms of the house. Some of the guests I knew, others I didn’t, and all had been invited that night to drop acid, along with a mix of other drugs, I suspected. But since I was frightened of hallucinogenics, or any chemical that might trap me in my head, plus the fact that I was newly pregnant, I felt comfortable sleeping under my asthmatic two-year-old, listening to him breathe, feeling the butterfly-like movements of the new baby.

  Two things made this pregnancy different from my first: I wasn’t working all day, every day—although taking care of a toddler is its own kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day job. And Lamaze, or natural childbirth, had appeared on the scene, offering classes for expectant mothers and their partners to learn about the birthing process, along with techniques for handling the pain. I didn’t want to be placed in a room alone and clueless again, so six weeks before my calculated due date, I gathered a notebook, a pillow, a stopwatch, and Steve, and off we went to learn about visualization, breathing, and relaxation, about listening to the body and letting go. Tools I’ve used all the rest of my life, though how much I used during the actual birth, I’m not really sure.

  My teacher was the soon-to-be-famous Femmy DeLyser, who in 1982 joined Jane Fonda in her book and video Pregnancy, Birth and Recovery. The Dutch-born maternity nurse and childbirth expert was part of the newly formed Lamaze International and in 1972, when I met her, she had just started teaching night classes at the old Cedars of Lebanon Hospital on Fountain Avenue in the middle of Hollywood. She lovingly explained the three stages of labor and how to recognize each of them, the last being transition. Hitting that final stage of labor, she laughingly told us, we might start demanding that everyone back off or become overwhelmingly irritated with a “let’s call the whole thing off” feeling.

  Like the good student I never was, I practiced the breathing techniques every night. Knowing now that most contractions lasted only a minute, Steve would start the stopwatch, then call out the passing seconds, which allowed me to know how much longer I had, and at the same time he’d pinch my leg as hard as he could in an effort to provide pain for me to breathe through (though the pain of him gripping my thigh and that of my cervix yawning open are not on the same Richter scale). But with whatever pain level we did or didn’t replicate, eventually we were a well-rehearsed team and ready to take the act on the road.

  At three thirty in the morning on May 25, 1972—one week before the due date and shortly after I’d been stabbed awake by a bright, unmistakable feeling—I stood in my mostly darkened bedroom before the full-length mirror with my nightgown held up. As the first contractions began, I could see the miraculous movement of the baby inside, shifting down toward his new life. Femmy had told us that Lamaze was still rath
er controversial in most American hospitals, that the staff might not easily cooperate, much less participate, so it was best that we wait at home, away from the hospital’s rules, until signs of the second stage of labor had begun. She also coached us that once we were in the hospital we should repeat to everyone constantly, “I’m Lamaze. I’m Lamaze.” I had it all in my head while I stood there, marveling at the process, feeling totally in control, not a single piece of me afraid—though I’d begun to notice that the contractions were intensifying.

  Steve had gone to wake Baa, who’d been staying in the tiny guest room for just this reason, while I took my time dressing. I moved nonchalantly, making sure we had everything, including a collage I’d made of fabrics and ribbons, pictures of Peter, and a poem Steve had written to me when we were kids, the focal point that Femmy instructed us to have. I could smell coffee brewing in the kitchen as Baa stood in the doorway with a nervous smile, and when I finally started to walk out the front door, I felt the next contraction beginning to build. My disciplined, rhythmic panting abruptly stopped. I slid to the floor as if I’d been shoved and immediately got angry at Steve, saying, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” When this monstrous wave of a contraction slowly began to pass, we looked at each other: I was in transition. How could that be? This was too quick; the house was a good forty minutes from the hospital. But forty minutes was not very long, surely I could do that. Our leisurely pace cranked into double time, but no sooner had I pulled my bulk into the car than I yelled out as if sighting Moby Dick rising to the surface, “… Here it comes!” Steve started both the car and the stopwatch, keeping track of the seconds and the winding road at the same time. “Ten seconds,” he called. “Twenty… thirty…”