In Pieces

by Sally Field

  I never completely focused on anyone in the room, but Stewart Stern’s generous “open to anything” gaze was palpable, and I felt it even without looking at him. Two of the producers were present: Peter Dunne, who stood quietly watching from the back, and a short-haired, no-nonsense Jackie Babbin, who sat with her forearms resting on her knees, as though not wanting to miss a single one of my softly spoken words. Sitting in the most prominent chair was the director, Anthony Page, who seemed the least interested, hovering on the edge of dismissive, allowing the others to attempt a polite conversation. I could barely speak, but this time, my inability to talk was controlled by me, it was my choice. Awkward discomfort seeped out of me like a gas until everyone in the space felt uncomfortable and small talk fizzled out. With Stewart reading the Dr. Wilbur role, there came a nod for me to begin, and as I did I felt the room shift. I got lost in Sybil’s mind, and they watched me disappear.

  Through April and into the beginning of May, every time I returned to read, I’d end up dragging myself out of the office, but leaving behind a roomful of stunned, totally confused observers. How on earth could Sally Field, the girl who had been the Flying Nun, be the best choice to play this challenging role? The director didn’t want me. I’d heard that he wanted Vanessa Redgrave, and who wouldn’t? But Stewart saw the Sybil in me, as did Jackie. I was called in for a final, down-to-the-wire audition, a screen test of sorts, and this time I’d be working with the actor set to play Dr. Wilbur: Joanne Woodward.

  In the midst of this, Stay Hungry opened to mixed reviews, and I worried that somehow it would affect the decision to hire me for this NBC miniseries. Even though I was told that the notices were generally kind to Jeff and me, I honestly never read any of them. But, as is my habit, I kept several. I still don’t want to read them, but I’ll close my eyes and pick one. Variety, April 23, 1976.

  Bob Rafelson returns to the screen with Stay Hungry, featuring an excellent Jeff Bridges as a spoiled but affable rich young Alabama boy who slums his way to maturity through relationships with street-smart characters. Among them is Sally Field, who has now and forever shed her cutesy TV series image… As a lower-class and likeable sexpot, Field is superb.

  Okay, fine. I’ll take it. Don’t ask me to read any others.

  As the weeks moved on, days that were filled with auditions and moving boxes and unreliable childcare, with a new house, a new man, plus an ongoing divorce, I slowly became an emotional jack-in-the-box. I’d enfold myself in Coulter’s lap to be soothed, until suddenly I’d become exasperated, resenting him for leaning on me financially when I seemed to have no trouble leaning on him emotionally, literally hiding in him like a child frightened of the thunder. My sexuality was free to roam with Coulter, but without warning, that part of me would vanish and I’d want to squash him like a bug. I never knew what all-consuming emotion would define me from one moment to the next. Each one was intensely felt, until it wasn’t felt at all, until it was totally wiped off the chalkboard and another was written in its place, in capital letters.

  In one of my journals I found three folded onionskin pages, frantically typed without much punctuation and dated April 1976:

  I just had a fit. The kind I used to have. Flashes of red and yellow, pressure in the backs of my eyes, my body rigid. It builds and builds while my outside stays calm. The only release is when I hit myself hard. Slap myself in the face again and again. At first I’m afraid it will hurt, then when I feel the sting I lose seconds, they flash by me in a color, a fury where I hit myself again and again. My eyes look puffy not from being hit but from the pressure behind them. Peter is screaming at Eli from down the hall. Eli. Eli. Eli, get off the phone. Eli is screaming and crying. I want to talk to my dad. I hold my voice in and carefully tell Eli to get on the other phone and then he can talk to his Dad. I don’t know the number. I don’t know the number. You don’t have to know the number just get on the other phone. Peter won’t let me get on the phone. Peter let him get on the phone. Dad’s not on the phone. Just my friend, David. I want to talk to my dad. I want to talk to my dad. I hit myself in the face mostly on my eye. I want to talk to my dad. I hit myself in the thigh with my fist, three four five times. My wrist hurts. I stand straight, wipe my red puffed face, walk in a blur to the kitchen. Eli, just a baby, only three, stands there tears in his eyes. What is it E.… what is it? I take the phone from him and hear Peter talking to David. Little six-year-old talk. I try to sound sane. Who is this? David. Peter is your dad on the phone? No, I told Eli, it’s not Dad, just David. Oh sorry. I hang up the phone and face my baby. He’s not on the phone right now. Lijah, he’s not there. He will call you when he gets to his house and I will take you to see him. Okay? I speak very calmly very plainly. I punch each word a little too hard, enunciate a little too correctly. I sound like a very bad actor in the fifth grade. As I walk out the door, fleeing to safety, I remember my baby. You’re a good boy Lijah. I can’t give him any more of me. His little dirty face watches as I rush away to finish my tantrum.

  I remember now how I used to call Eli Lijah—until he told me to stop—and how I longed to talk to his dad too. But I also remember how angry I was at Steve. How he had fueled my fear of being penniless by spending money I was sure I didn’t have, how I was so afraid of losing everything, the way it had happened in my childhood, that I sold the house without knowing if I actually needed to or not. More than that, I was furious with Steve for allowing me to hurt him. I walked outside that day, through the sliding bedroom door and around the edge of the house. Standing in an unfamiliar, shabby backyard, I put my arms around my body, whispering, “I’m sorry, Sally. I’m so sorry.” Then went back to get Eli, who was playing with Peter and didn’t want me to come near. Who could blame him?

  Unlike the screen test I’d done for Gidget—on a soundstage with a crew and all their equipment—the three scenes I was told to prepare for Sybil were to be videotaped in the same office where the meetings took place, using a small camera. For the first time, I was glad that my drive took so long because by the time I got there, I was ready. And from the moment we looked at one another, even before our how-do-you-dos, the relationship between the reluctant patient and the watchful doctor was in place. Joanne Woodward, with her intense gray-blue eyes, met Sybil, and I met Dr. Wilbur. We needed nothing else from each other. There was no polite chitchat, no conversation outside of the story we were telling. I can’t remember who was in the room, although I do recall someone taking the video camera off its sticks to follow me around at one point. But the memory I hold most dear is the pure, generous connection I instantly felt from this beautiful, sturdy actor. She was sitting very still in a low upholstered chair most of the time, but during the last scene—which was long and emotional—I jumped to my feet, then scurried under a conference table. Joanne walked to where I had vanished and peeked under, trying to coax Sybil—me—out from hiding. As she returned to her chair, I—Sybil—slowly crawled to sit on the floor by her feet. Not looking at the script, she leaned forward over her lap, her voice kind but unsentimental as she hovered over this emotional girl at her knee. Through the chains of Sybil’s childhood, I felt the need to touch the doctor, but knew that Sybil couldn’t touch anyone, was afraid of being touched herself, so I grabbed the sleeve of Joanne’s thick navy-blue sweater, held it as if it were a precious stuffed animal, then wiped my gushing nose on it. She didn’t flinch—only tentatively, and with great tenderness, put her hand on the top of my head. I later heard that Joanne told the production: If Sally is not cast as Sybil, then I won’t be your Dr. Wilbur. I was cast as Sybil.

  As Sybil.

  I didn’t feel excited when I got the “congratulations, you got the job” call. Everything in me went still, quieted by the thought of what lay ahead. I didn’t doubt myself, but I couldn’t congratulate myself either. I was going into battle, this time on the front lines.

  The schedule was to rehearse for two weeks on a stage at Warner’s, then spend two weeks in New York, shooting the exterio
rs, and a remaining five weeks in the sets built on the studio lot. I needed my mother. I couldn’t leave the kids for the two weeks’ filming in New York without her help. I couldn’t do any of it without her. She had moved out of Joy’s house, was renting a tiny apartment at the beach, and was still trying to beat down the real estate door. But when I called her, she, without hesitation, packed her suitcase. From then on, that suitcase would be kept in the back of her car, packed and ready to go at a moment’s notice if I needed her. She even hovered nearby when Steve had the kids, days that always made Eli happy and Peter achingly homesick—though for what home I don’t know.

  Before traveling to New York to start filming, we rehearsed the four-hour miniseries on an empty soundstage. With white tape on the cement floor to indicate doors and room size, we’d block out as many scenes as possible, then at the end of each day, Mr. Page wanted us to run it all, full out. The process felt more like we were rehearsing to open on Broadway, rather than preparing a project to be filmed one scene at a time. And while I appreciated the information it gave the actors as to the evolution of the story, my instincts also told me to guard against leaving the performance on the rehearsal room floor, as they say. Very different from the discipline of creating and repeating a performance night after night onstage, I understood the magical immediacy of working in front of a camera, understood that the camera just needs to see it once, instant and alive, sometimes only the blink of an eye, or a flash of a thought that can never be repeated.

  Because of that, I’d ask Anthony if I might simply touch on the emotions and not ask myself to land the performance day after day. That would not do. He needed to see all that I had to give, constantly doubting my ability and disapproving—many times vociferously—of my choices. He didn’t like the physicality I was bringing to Peggy—the nine-year-old piece of Sybil who held all her anger. He would say he didn’t believe her, that she was farcical and looked like an old lady golfer (which she actually did). I didn’t know what to do. Rehearsal time needs to be free from the obligation of being a finished product, and I needed to flop around, to try this and that, to find things I didn’t know I was looking for, to let my brain lead me toward behavior I couldn’t have planned. I learned to rehearse at home with Peter and Eli walking in and out, away from his scrutiny and judgment.

  To me the most complicated aspect of Sybil’s condition wasn’t her many personalities, because those personalities, in themselves, were very clear and uncomplicated, each with a different age and separate emotion. To me what seemed most essential was the moment when one self left off and another picked up—the transition. I was given several grainy videotaped therapy sessions conducted with diagnosed multiple personality patients, the same tapes that Joanne had studied when researching her 1957 award-winning role in The Three Faces of Eve. In one tape, the patient looks as though she’s trying to pass a kidney stone before evolving into a personality that doesn’t seem very different from her original one. And in another, the subject reacts so violently when transitioning, grimacing and contorting in such a way that it was laughable, looking very much like a case of bad acting—which was not something I wanted to emulate. In my mind, there had to be a moment when no one existed in the body at all. As if literally no one was home and the body was quiet, waiting for the arrival of its next occupant. But my vision, my interpretation, wasn’t something I could reveal or explore during rehearsals for fear that Anthony would blow his negative directorial whistle and freeze me in my search. I felt protective of some tender part of myself that would not be safe under his gaze.

  If anyone other than Joanne knew how dysfunctional the rehearsal time had been, or of Anthony’s dissatisfaction and my frustration, I was unaware of it. And when I saw Stewart standing in the back of the stage at the end of the third day, then caught glimpses of Jackie lurking in the shadows by the end of that week, I wasn’t sure if it was a good thing, or if the director’s disappointment in me was spreading. But rehearsals continued, and on the last day, Anthony called in all the executives, producers, and anyone else he could find, to watch a full run-through. He wanted me, Joanne, and Brad Davis (a wonderful actor who played Sybil’s friend) to run the whole thing, all four hours, at performance level. Joanne met my eyes, knowing full well what an irrational, unreasonable demand this was—not to mention potentially destructive. She knew that I was trying to tiptoe around the perimeters of whatever performance I had to give, and as we huddled together on the rehearsal sofa, she took my hand. “Do the best you can,” she told me softly. “But don’t throw it away, Sally. We all see what’s happening. Trust us and yourself.” So we stumbled through that agonizingly long run-through, then flew to New York the next day and began shooting.

  A character—any character—can be played effectively more than one way. But however Anthony Page wanted Sybil to be played made no sense to me, and nothing I did seemed to make any sense to him. I was exhausted, but not from the work, from refusing to give up what I saw so clearly in my head and to bend myself into some indefinable shape in order to satisfy the director’s sensibilities. And at the end of the third day, when I was weaving my way through the crew—who were busy wrapping up—the assistant director asked that I follow him down a hallway of the abandoned hospital where we’d been filming.

  Joanne’s dressing room had once been someone’s office but now had a piece of cardboard taped to the door with Dr. Wilbur scribbled on it, and after knocking once, the AD opened it to reveal a small group of conspirators. Handing me a cup of chamomile tea, Joanne told me sternly to drink it, then moved to the back, sitting next to Stewart on a window ledge. Jackie stood with her arms crossed, legs set wide as if she were about to coach a softball team, and for one horrible moment I thought I was being fired. She then moved to the door, locked it, and beckoned me to join them at the back of the room. As we crowded in with our heads together, it felt like the scene from Dial M for Murder when the true killer is about to be revealed. Jackie spoke in a stage whisper, looking straight at me: “Anthony Page will be gone as of tomorrow. We will shut down for one day, and Friday we’ll shoot without an official director. It’s not a tough day, just a lot of establishing shots. Then on Monday, you’ll have a new director. He’s flying in tomorrow, will come to the set on Friday so you can meet. And off you’ll go. How’s that?” I was flat-out stunned. She went on to say that Anthony had not been the right director, that he wasn’t comfortable around emotion and really didn’t believe in therapy in the first place. Then matter-of-factly she added, “He got in the way of your performance.” I couldn’t speak. There had been moments in my life when someone believed in me enough to extend a hand: Madeleine Sherwood, Lee Strasberg, and now these three people. Joanne Woodward, Stewart Stern, and Jackie Babbin.

  In all fairness, Mr. Page was and is a wonderful director of British television and both British and American film, and he has always been an important stage director. The following year he directed the film I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, though I don’t know if he had been connected to the project when I sent my ill-fated homemade test. Maybe the problem between us had all to do with me. Probably. That’s show biz.

  That Friday the whole set was vibrating, everyone pitching in to complete the day’s work under the unusual circumstance of being director-less. Then, like the first sighting of land after a rough voyage, Dan Petrie’s sweet round face appeared after lunch. He made no grand entrance, only stood on the edge of the crew with his hands in his pockets, looking like a passerby who’d just stopped to watch the film company on the streets of New York. I don’t know what he’d been told about the director’s dismissal or about me. He couldn’t have seen enough film to have any opinion about the performances because there wasn’t much film to see, and he hadn’t been present during any of our rehearsal period. So when Dan started directing the project, bright and early Monday morning, he must have been working on blind faith. We would run the first scene of the day for him, a scene that we had already rehearsed in L.A.
but that he’d be seeing for the first time. It was his reaction that I began to trust and rely upon. Through the remainder of the New York work and back on to the Warner’s lot in Burbank everything was changed.

  In the clearest part of my memory, I see myself standing in the hospital set on a soundstage after we’d been shooting in L.A. for about two weeks. That day had been spent filming, in order, the four scenes that occur when Dr. Wilbur and Sybil first meet. In each of the scenes, Sybil disassociates into a blackout, then awakens at the top of the following scene in another room, doing something totally different. When she becomes aware that the doctor has not only been watching but also having a conversation with her during those blackouts, the terror of having her mental illness discovered is momentarily outweighed by her need to survive. And for the first time in her life, Sybil tells someone. Each scene took place on a different set, with the passage of time indicated by a change in the lighting and the progressive chipping away of Sybil’s defenses. It had been a very long day, at the end of two grueling weeks, and as we started to set up the last and most difficult scene, I felt slammed with fatigue. Even though Sybil herself couldn’t cry—had blocked herself from feeling any emotion at all—to play her at this critical turning point in her life, I had to be filled with an avalanche of terror and sadness and yet desperately fighting to keep any emotion from emerging.

  I was preparing on the set, standing in the corner with my eyes closed while the crew worked around me. Without opening my eyes, I heard Joanne quietly moving into her position so filming could begin and suddenly I couldn’t think anymore. I bent forward, putting my hands on my knees as though I’d just finished a race. Immediately, Dan appeared at my side, gently telling me that several more setups would be needed to complete the scene, that it had already been a long, hard week and if I wanted him to pull the plug, we could finish on Monday. I just stood there, trembling as if I were cold, and yet I was sweating. I wanted to say, Yes, please let me go home, but I started to cry instead. And in my head, I heard Lee Strasberg’s last words to me. Where you want to be is where you are right now. All of a sudden, I knew what he’d meant. That you can’t dance on the edge, whether emotionally or otherwise; that you had to drown in the character until it was without thought. No longer acting. That to be excellent at anything, it must cost you something. Without looking at him I said, “No, Dan, this is where I need to be.”