by Sally Field
Jeff and me in a scene with wonderful Helena Kallianiotes.
Around this time, another recurring dream kept haunting me. This one stays with me through the years and even though it no longer visits me in the night, I can’t leave the images behind. Much of the dream would change, but there was always a staircase and I was always at the bottom of it, looking up, paralyzed with fear. It’s dark and I can see the curtains at the top billowing in and out, sheer and ghostlike, a breathing thing waiting at the top of the stairs. I’m standing there, surrounded by little children, all grabbing my shirt, clinging to my legs, while my arms are around them, gathering them to me, protecting them. But I don’t turn and run. I don’t look for a way out. I know I must go up the stairs to survive and, more important, for the children to survive. There’s no other choice. And as I take the first step, from somewhere deep in my body comes a voice, guttural and primal: “I will not be conquered. I will not be conquered.” With every ounce of life, I roar, “I will not be conquered.”
And there I was, at the bottom of the dimly lit staircase after the housekeeper had invited me in. Bob stood barefoot in the doorway of his bedroom, his shirt open and hanging over his jeans, or was it a baggy gray T-shirt? I don’t remember. He thanked his housekeeper, told her he’d see her tomorrow, then greeted me with “Hey, Sal, come on up.”
To prepare a character, Lee taught me that you have to understand their history, their emotional ingredients, their physicality. You have to know their lives completely up to the moment you walk onstage, but when you do, you forget it all and just be. No matter what happens, if the other actors drop dead or the set falls down, you are that character. And so I was. Did I sit on an armchair somewhere in the room? Or did I throw myself freely onto the bed as M.T. would have? Did Bob offer me something to drink? Was he smoking a joint and did I take a hit? I’m not sure. But, as if it happened ten minutes ago, I remember Bob sitting on the bed, leaning against the headboard, while I sit before him on my folded legs with my feet hanging off the bed in midair, like some part of me didn’t want to join in. I began to relax as I heard acceptance in his voice, as if the audition was over and I was in the film. In the midst of casually talking about the work, he told me to take my top off so he could see my breasts, saying since there was a nude scene in the film, he needed to figure out how to shoot me. Ignoring the sharp jab of emotion that shot through me, I removed my shirt as casually as he had made the request, then sat for his approval with my eyes closed—the only clue that those fingernails were clawing my insides. And when he asked me to go to the closet and use whatever scarves and shirts I could find to play dress-up, I did that too. I was a grown-up version of the child wrapped in plastic dry-cleaning bags, performing while an older man, whose approval I needed, watched. After I put the things back in the closet and my clothes back on my body, Bob walked with me to his bedroom door. “Okay, Sal, the job is yours. But only after I see how you kiss. I can’t hire anyone who doesn’t kiss good enough.” So I kissed him. It must have been good enough.
When I left his house and climbed into the safety of my dark car, my hands were shaking. What was I feeling? Excited and slightly flattered? Bob had responded to me. I had won. Is that not what I had wanted? I thought about the fact that I was in the film, that I was going to be working with Jeff, that I’d beaten down the door. But a quiet part of me felt afraid, tarnished, shamed, and without a voice to scream, Who the fuck do you think you are? I couldn’t consciously see it then, and not for a long time after. I had won the role, yes. But I had lost something important, something I was also fighting for: my dignity.
I packed my bags and kissed my kids goodbye, Baa constantly reassuring me that they’d be fine, reminding me that Steve would be there too, overseeing the completion of the house. Then, feeling like I was leaving half of me behind, I flew to Birmingham, Alabama, where I lived for seven weeks in a squat, crumbling motel along with the other actors, a smattering of crew, plus the director and his brilliant wife, the production designer on the film (and that was the first I’d heard that Bob had a wife, brilliant or otherwise).
In 1966, when I spent the summer in Oregon filming The Way West, I was so young and unfocused, it had felt as though I’d been sent away to the wrong summer camp and half the time I couldn’t figure out why I was there. But on Stay Hungry, I learned that filming on location is like being sent to the front lines of a foreign war; strangers immediately become friends, daily routines and patterns emerge, and everyone is speaking a new and instantly learned language: the movie. It’s what you eat, sleep, and breathe for however long the film is in production—or as long as you, as an actor, are involved with it. I have almost always found it to be both exciting—that single-minded focus—and stupefyingly lonely. I wanted to be with my children and yet I wanted to be an actor. No matter what, one part of me was always going to be aching.
As Mary Tate Farnsworth.
It helped to remind myself why I was there, to focus intensely on the work, and during Stay Hungry that meant being Mary Tate Farnsworth 24/7. Even without the drugs that were floating around in 1975, I felt wired, simmering with anxiety as I constantly hung on to the M.T. parts of myself, shoving every other aspect away. Hovering close to a character, whether in front of the camera or not, is a process I’ve learned to love over the years. But because I’d worked so hard to convince everyone—most especially Rafelson—that this nymphet and I were two peas in a pod, and because he constantly picked at me, hating my mouth, wanting me to hold it up in a semismile, to pout—just be sexier—it made staying in character feel less like an artistic choice and more like something I had to do to keep the job.
And my body was a constant worry. Mary Tate worked in a gym and the bodybuilders were her family. Presumably she’d slept with one of those family members, a character played by newcomer Arnold Schwarzenegger—who at that point was only a bodybuilder without a hint of what lay ahead. I’m not sure if Arnold was there the day that Bob stopped the whole company—the writer, the crew, the actors, the extras, everyone who was within earshot—to take a vote as to whether they thought I was sexy or not. I stood propped against the full-length mirror of the moldy-smelling weight room, my leotard-clad body starving-to-death thin, and looked around at everyone’s slightly distracted faces. Being in the midst of the crew was always where I felt safest, and I didn’t need to spend much time with this specific hardworking gang to know that I already knew them. With a shrug or a wink, they unanimously voted that I was grade-A material, whether they actually thought I was or not. I tried to laugh, to go along with everything, to be all easy-breezy. So when Bob—who was staying in the large suite directly above my tiny nonsuite—showed up at my door late one night, I had no problem letting him into my room and my body. Easy-breezy.
I can’t blame Rafelson—well, yes I can. When I look at it through today’s eyes and my now seventy-one years, I’d like to bash him over the head. But I wasn’t anyone’s victim. I was a twenty-eight-year-old grown-up, and in ’75 it seemed like acceptable behavior on his part. We’re all locked into the drumbeat of our history, but eventually you have to drown out that tune with your own voice. I couldn’t hear my voice. I couldn’t tell the difference between what was the work and what was real life. I felt powerful and important if I could please Bob—and yet I was being humiliated in the light of day by the same man who was happily devouring me behind closed doors at night. The only thing that Bob Rafelson didn’t do was tell me to point my toes.
Where was the rest of me, the pieces that were capable of taking care of a child, of standing up for myself, that didn’t care whether I pleased him or not? Nowhere I could find. I was participating in a secret relationship that in many ways filled me with shame and rage, a relationship that if discovered would be hurtful to Bob’s wife, whom I liked and respected and who was only a staircase away—just as my mother had been only a staircase away in my childhood. None of that ever entered my mind.
16
Sybil
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TIME IS A funny thing. My brother tried to explain it to me once. Why it moves so fast now when it used to move so painfully slow. It has to do with the percentage of your life that each day represents. When you’ve lived 25,915 days, one twenty-four-hour span is a very small part of the whole picture. But when you’ve only got 10,220 days under your belt, each day is a bigger portion of that existence.
After Stay Hungry had wrapped, when I was finally home getting up in the morning with the kids, fixing breakfast, doing all the things I had longed to be doing when I was away from them, every hour moved so slowly I wanted to chew my arm off. And while I can remember that aching impatience to move forward with my life, and I know where I ultimately ended up, I can’t quite put together how I got there. Fortunately, tucked away in several old suitcases, I have over forty years of mental maps: dozens of spiral notebooks, leather-bound journals, and cute little diaries that I endlessly scribbled in. Starting in 1974, I threw up on page after page—well, not literally. I kept my book with me always, traveled with it, hiding with it in a bathroom sometimes to vomit my feelings using pen or pencil or even crayon. I think I always had a fantasy that those barely legible pages would someday read like the journals of Patti Smith or Anaïs Nin or Virginia Woolf. But I regret to tell you, and myself, that they do not. Even so, I’m glad to have them.
I open the book marked ’75 and stop on April 17, where I wrote, “Waiting, waiting, waiting.” Then: “If I don’t get the part in Stay Hungry, I’ll find a way to move on, beginning with a banana split.” Turning the page, I find written in enormous letters, “I GOT IT!” Then on July 16, I wrote about being back home again after we wrapped, glad to be with Peter and Eli but worried about money. And that entry reminds me that my salary on the film was so small I had to beg production to pay my phone bill before I could check out of the motel. In August of that year, I describe how I stood in the unemployment line, determined to get my check while politely signing autographs the whole time. But seven months later, by March of ’76, my whole world had changed: The finished but barely lived-in Chantilly house had sold, Steve and I were in the process of getting a divorce, and a young man named Coulter was in my life. How the hell did that happen so fast?
A few months after production was finished and postproduction began, Rafelson called to invite me to an early screening of the film in Aspen, where he lived. And with some reluctance, I agreed to go. Waiting for me at the airport when I arrived was a man wearing scuffed boots and a sweat-stained cowboy hat, looking more like the resident of a cattle ranch than a ski resort. He was two years younger than me, a foot taller, and at that moment, Coulter Adams was one heck of a lot savvier. He had lived in Nepal teaching English, spent his life skiing and camping, living by hook or by crook, then a year earlier he had begun working as Bob’s assistant/right-hand man/sometimes house sitter/sometimes playmate.
I remember how nervous I was when Coulter took me to Bob’s Aspen house, nerves I never experienced when auditioning. Even though I’d been anxious during the filming, it hadn’t been like this. Now I was trembling, felt shy and awkward. Without Mary Tate to define me, I didn’t know who I was. And when Bob finally walked in, expecting to find the same girl he’d known me to be, I then felt trapped and couldn’t imagine what I was doing there. I kept trying to hide the panic building in me, to buck up and swallow my tears while I calmly told Bob—who thought I’d lost my mind—that I needed to go home. Eventually, in a state of total confusion, I agreed to stay long enough to see a rough cut of the film. After the screening, when Bob stayed to talk with his editor, it was Captain Fun, as Coulter was called, who walked me around town, then took me dancing, showing me his Aspen hangouts. It was a rare moment of feeling young and footloose, with people my age, some of whom had college degrees but weren’t driven by the need to find their place in the world, who wanted to play before they had to hunker down. I’d never done anything but hunker down and had no idea how to play. Coulter was not Steve, not filled with vehement opinions that would wipe out my own, and he was not Bob. I didn’t need Coulter’s approval; he needed mine. If this was fun, then I liked it and I liked him. By March, several months later, Coulter was in California with me and my sons.
Then someone flipped the switch and everything started happening at once. The release of Stay Hungry was fast approaching so I was needed to help promote the movie, which meant traveling to New York to do a few days of press. At that precise moment, the escrow on my house was closing, which meant I was once again MOVING! It meant I was truly walking away from Steve and the beautiful home he had built so that I could live in the inexpensive cracker box of a house I’d found outside of Malibu, in a community aptly named Point Dume. And it also meant that I would be living there with someone I barely knew, not bothering for a moment to think how bewildered my children must have been. Hell, I never stopped to think how bewildered I must have been.
In the midst of that total upheaval, I received a call from Dianne Crittenden, who, once again, wanted me to audition for a role against the wishes of everyone else involved. This time it was for a four-hour NBC miniseries produced by Lorimar, which would air over two consecutive nights: Sybil. Magnificently adapted by Stewart Stern from a book by Flora Rheta Schreiber, and based on a real case (though the accuracy has been debated), it’s the story of a young woman with severe dissociative identity disorder, or multiple personality—and she supposedly had seventeen of them. At the heart of the story is the relationship between Sybil and Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, the psychiatrist who takes on the task of uniting the damaged girl with her fragmented selves.
This was it. The fact that it was a television project didn’t matter. I had worked my whole life—lived my whole life—to play this role, and as I read the two-part screenplay, my hands shook. I knew her. She belonged to me. And though I never consciously saw how connected I was to Sybil, never saw myself as having similar psychological survival techniques, I knew my own childhood difficulties would fuel the work, knew this role was mine even if no one else in the room thought so.
All my energy was directed toward that meeting and not one ounce on the gloomy new house with its low ceilings and ever-present smell of fried food, which no amount of candle burning could eliminate. The entire house remained crammed with stacks of unlabeled boxes, making it difficult to move around the small rooms and impossible to find anything. I uncovered the toys, thank God, and a few kitchen supplies. But I was missing a big box of my old clothes, and that’s what I needed. My task, this time, would be to convince everyone that I was a real-life version of this damaged young woman. And though I had several different personalities of hers to choose from, I knew I had to go into this meeting as the passive, shell persona of Sybil herself: baggy colorless clothes, no makeup, neat but uncoiffed hair. My old ragamuffin look.
To make things worse, at this very moment my mother decided to get her real estate license and hoped to work her way into the lucrative world of open houses and sales pitches. I was barely listening when she chatted on about passing the exam, telling me that she’d met with a few established brokers to possibly begin working with them. Maybe I didn’t listen because I couldn’t imagine her actually doing any of it, couldn’t see her wearing a red blazer and selling anything to anyone. I had always worried that she needed to be independent of me and constantly felt that I needed to be independent of her. But every time we had tried to move away from each other, every time I’d tried to hire someone to help me, Baa would step forward saying, “Sal, I’m the only one you can really trust.” And every time she tried to build a life of her own, I’d get scared and call for her. When one moved forward, the other moved back, then we’d reverse; back and forth the dance continued. Which left her without a job and me—at this exact moment—with no dependable help.
On the day of that first meeting for Sybil, I walked Peter to his new school, leaving him sitting uncomfortably in the first-grade classroom, then returned home to get dressed in some drab clothes with Eli close
on my heels, desperately complaining that he didn’t want to be left with our new housekeeper, that he only wanted his dad. In the midst of my trying to convince him of this woman’s good qualities, the phone rang. It was my new employee, the very housekeeper we were debating about, who was already late and now, because of car trouble or something, couldn’t make it at all. I had no time left and had to get out the door soon or I’d be late too. I ended up pleading with Coulter to look after Eli, but since I wasn’t sure how long I’d be gone, and Coulter wasn’t sure what to do with the disgruntled three-year-old, I broke down and called Steve, beseeching him to drive over. He was happy to do that but it had to be on his own timetable. By the time I got on the road for that hour-long drive over Malibu Canyon to Warner Bros. in Burbank, frantically trying not to be late, I felt like I was losing my mind. Fortunately, I was going to be reading for the role of a young woman who was mentally ill.
Dianne looked slightly concerned as she stood to happily greet the girl she’d last seen wearing next to nothing, the girl who had always been boisterous and flirtatious but who was now dour and reticent. Without looking in her face, I gave a guarded hello, then retreated to the back of the room as though total exhaustion were one step away. I sat, staring down at my hands, until I was finally called into the large generic office and introduced to four people waiting there. It took every ounce of concentration I had to contain the part of me that wanted to entertain them, to become the Gidget girl, energetic and joyful. That part of me automatically took control when I felt shy, had been doing that my whole life, and I could feel myself reining her in, pulling her back, permitting the shy part of me to remain visible.