by Sally Field
I don’t believe I accomplished it throughout Sybil, but it was the first time I had a glimpse of what it meant to be inside a character. Exhaustion now came from the work, a glorious adrenaline-filled climb to catch some part of myself that I didn’t know I knew.
Tucked in a calendar with some of her other memorabilia, I recently found a letter that I had written to my mother throughout the filming of Sybil. I had written it as part of my preparation, a kind of emotional razor blade to scrape myself raw. In the letter, I tell her how important she is to me, how I am doing what I’m doing because of her, how the only reason she isn’t doing the work that I am is because she didn’t have the mother that I do. And at the end of the letter I write simply, Please come get me Baa, please come get me. I remember writing it, remember writing those words before I stepped into the last shot of the day, knowing that Coulter was coming to pick me up because I was too tired to drive home. And yet I wrote that plea to my mother without understanding why.
I had lived inside of Sybil, felt her longing to know who she was, to know the parts that had protected her and the parts that she was afraid to meet. Did I start to know my own selves as I became more capable of calling on them in my acting? When I walked off the stage, away from the work, did I lose the ability to hear them freely, forget they were even there, becoming a version of Sybil’s shell? I don’t know.
At the end of the shoot I wrote another letter. This one was to Lee Strasberg. I know now what you meant. I’ll never forget. Ever. Thank you.
Years later at an Actors Studio celebration with Lee.
17
The Bandit
ONE ROASTING-HOT DAY shortly after Sybil had wrapped, I decided the only way to make my stale, airless new house livable was to remove the sun-bleached fiberglass awning that stood over the minuscule back patio. Coulter was in Montana helping his friend shoot second-unit photography on Terry Malick’s Days of Heaven, meaning he wasn’t around to talk me out of it, or frustrate me by not offering to help. It was Princess who stood by my side, looking up at this stupid sheet of reinforced plastic, nodding her head in total agreement. It had to go.
After finding it impossible to live in Joy’s garage, Princess had moved out and married her boyfriend, a small-time rock-and-roller. But when she discovered, a few months later, that he’d been sleeping with a checkout girl from Hughes Market, she ended the relationship and was now scrambling for a place to live again. My sister had worked in a clothes store and a bar, tried to become a model, an actor, then a real estate salesperson—studying to get her license at the same trade school in Sherman Oaks as Baa. But no matter what was going on in her life, whenever there was a birthday or a holiday, or a task to accomplish—like demolishing the multicolored awning—then there she was.
I’m not really sure why we thought that this bit of aggression was the answer to everything but for whatever reason, we were fully committed. And while Baa played with the kids (both of the boys looking as ragged as the yard), Princess and I climbed to the roof, tools in hand, and began yanking the impossible-to-move awning. Let me just say this: My sister and I could have opened a business together—the Sisters Fix-it. Nothing was too big or too disgusting: dead rats, bugs, walls that needed demolishing or rebuilding, you name it. But this frigging awning almost killed us. We were crisp from the sun, our hands were torn to shreds, and I, for one, was sore all over—mostly from lying on the asphalt tile roof and laughing. God knows what kind of carcinogens were being sucked into our lungs as we spent the day hoisting and tugging, planning and figuring, being what we had always been. Sisters.
When the day finally slanted toward evening and the awning hung straight down, only half-removed, we collapsed onto the small stretch of crabgrass which was generously referred to as the lawn, both of us spread-eagle, looking up at the sky. I felt defeated by the hopeless mess that was now my backyard, disheartened by the greasy-smelling structure I was living in, until Baa sat down at my side. Looking at the day’s work she said, “Just sell the damn place and chalk it up to ‘Oops, I made a mistake.’ Go find someplace else to live.” It was like being given a get-out-of-jail-free card. Even before I had finished unpacking, I could simply sell it. How about that? I wasn’t trapped. I hadn’t been looking in the right direction, that’s all. There were no bars on the other side of the jail cell.
And as if deciding to sell my house had flipped the switch again, the moment Princess and Baa—using their new real estate expertise—put my now mostly awning-less house back on the market, everything began to spin. My newest and most supportive agent, Susan Smith, called with a “guess what?” tone to her voice, saying that I’d been offered a film. No auditions necessary.
The offer came from Universal Studios and director Hal Needham, who had been one of the primary stuntmen on The Way West when I was nineteen, doubling for Kirk Douglas. Since then Hal had moved from performing the stunts to choreographing stunts, to directing the second-unit photography on several movies with big action sequences, to now directing his first film, which he was offering to me. But before he sent me the script to either accept or decline, the star of the film—a newly minted sex symbol—wanted to give me a call, presumably to explain what was not on the pages I was about to read. And though Susan thought the screenplay was an undecipherable piece of poop, she felt that starring opposite the man who was on his way to becoming one of the most popular actors in America made it worth considering.
How can I write this? I walk around and around but can’t make myself sit down and start. Can I find some truth in the shreds of my memory, or the gibberish in my journals, in the letters I wrote and never sent, or the letters he wrote and I kept? Can I paste it all together and make any sense out of it? And how can I dish out these thoughts, this reassessment of a time that was so private and confusing, when in my mind’s eye, all I can see is the press circling around, like sharks smelling blood? I want to protect him from that, from their ongoing titillation with him, protect him from me. But I can’t. I’ll write it. Maybe I’ll leave it. Maybe I won’t. Problem is, even if I delete it from the page I can’t delete it from my mind, my history, or my heart. If I write it down maybe I’ll understand it, finally.
August 26, 1976
I’m on an airplane on my way to Atlanta for five weeks. I’m to do a picture with B. Reynolds called Smokey and the Bandit. The script stinks but when I talked to Burt he told me we would “improv” our way through it. I can’t figure out why he wants me. I don’t seem like his kind of leading lady. He said he hadn’t seen Stay Hungry but always liked me in Gidget. What?? And that’s why he wants me to sit opposite him in a car for five weeks? I feel guilty about leaving the kids, of course. I hope they’ll come to see me. Coulter is still in Montana. Everything always happens at once. I just sold the house. Was it for enough money? I don’t know. I guess if you make a mistake it’s not the end of the world.
August 27
I arrived in Atlanta yesterday thinking he would be here to meet me. Wrong. He doesn’t arrive until today. He called this afternoon, ‘Hello, Burt Reynolds movie star here. What are you doing for dinner tonight?’ I tried to spar with him on the phone to cover my nerves. God, Field, get a hold of yourself. This was the conversation.
‘Pick you up at 8:00, or someone will. I won’t be able to come to your room to get you.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s hard for me to walk through that lobby.’
Oh, of course, I thought. How stupid of me.
‘You drive by the hotel at 8:00 with the car door open and I’ll dive in.’
Nothing but crickets on his end, which didn’t matter because I couldn’t hear anyway, my hand was shaking so badly the phone was never fully on my ear, always beside it or under it, pressed too hard, too soft. I tried to keep it still by holding my elbow with the other hand. Maybe his hand was shaking too. I doubt it.
‘My bodyguard will come get you.’
A bodyguard? Ugg, he just called again. He’s going to be
late. Swell.
‘I’m a gentleman, thought I’d call my date.’
‘Is this an actual date?’
‘Yes!’
‘Are you gonna bring me a corsage the color of my dress?’ And there was nothing.
Now I wait… tick-tock, tick-tock. I wonder how many actual dates I have been on in my life? Not many.
August 28
Then the curtain went up. I walked through the dreaded lobby with the bodyguard, Pete… something or other, out the hotel entrance into the parking lot. I was standing on the top step. Where was he? There, leaning in a car window talking to the people inside, part of our group. I had imagined we would be alone. He seemed much smaller than I had thought, maybe ’cause I was standing on three stairs. He’s handsome but different. Wearing my black velvet pants and orange—slightly see-through—blouse I stamped my feet in a wide “come and get me” stance. He sauntered over, grabbed me. He must have felt my heart. I could no longer be responsible for it.
He was incredibly charming, adored at the time for being who he was: a funny, self-deprecating good ol’ boy. A normal guy on a big ride and getting one hell of a kick out of it. But he was also a man engulfed by a massive wave of seemingly instant notoriety, a sex symbol, and when this tsunami of the collective unconscious slammed into him, he couldn’t breathe. He also couldn’t talk about it, couldn’t articulate how it made him feel both empowered and terrified. He had been brought up by his very southern, well-meaning parents to act like a man, and he spent his life trying to prove to his father that he was a man worth loving. He once told me that when he was a senior in high school, the varsity football team—of which he was a proud member—won the state championship. It was a hard-fought, emotional win, and when Burt—or Buddy, as he was called—stood on the field with his victorious team, he started to cry. That inflamed Big Burt, his father, who thundered onto the field to slap his son upside the head. Buddy needed to act like a man, a real man.
And now that man had become the heart’s desire of all the people who wanted a dream figure, the quintessential definition of masculine pulchritude to emulate or fantasize about. But the human inside that dream figure was just a good-looking, ordinary person, frantically trying to fulfill everyone’s expectations and always waiting for the Big Burts of the world to smack the daylights out of him if he failed. He tried to hide everything about himself that he saw as being imperfect, to camouflage himself, which meant that he got locked into the stressful trap of faking it. In my own way, I knew what that kind of public pressure felt like, but my solution had always been to isolate myself, or to hide behind my children or in the Actors Studio, or just to put my head in the sand. But Burt seemed to wallow in it, both loving the focus and spinning from its assault. By the time we met, the weight of his stardom had become a way for Burt to control everyone around him, and from the moment I walked through the door, it was a way to control me. We were a perfect match of flaws.
It was instantaneous and intense. Blindly I fell into a rut that had long ago formed in my road, a preprogrammed behavior as if in some past life I had pledged a soul-binding commitment to this man. On our second date we were no longer with a group of his friends but had dinner in his suite—at a more expensive hotel than mine—and except for Norman, his wardrobe man, who constantly walked in and out of the connecting rooms, we were alone. Burt started to fill me in about his life, the kind of thing you do when you want someone to know who you are. And as I started to tell my side, little bits of me, I began to get subtle—or not-so-subtle—hints that he didn’t want to know. That he wanted me to be who he thought I was, and not who I truly was. Immediately, I started clamping down on myself, stuttering when I admitted I’d been living with someone, as if confessing a transgression. Seeming caught off guard, he paused, then said that he was unaware, not discouraged but disappointed. And whether he meant it that way or not, I interpreted his disappointment as disapproval, and felt embarrassed. Without hesitation, I threw sweet Coulter under the bus, telling Burt that I hadn’t been happy with my live-in entanglement for some time, as if the situation had been thrust upon me against my will.
On the set with Burt.
Gently, Burt began to housebreak me, teaching me what was allowed and what was not. If I wanted to tell him what I’d accomplished or talk about my children, or Lord knows, disagree with him about anything, he’d listen glassy-eyed for a moment, maybe offer a distracted comment or two before turning away. Then with a grimace of pain, he’d bend from the waist as he pushed his fingers into his rib cage, quietly belching over and over while gasping for air. Whatever I had wanted to say would be halted by the urgency of his odd attack and the wordless accusation that I was somehow the cause of it. I felt as though I’d been smacked with an invisible newspaper. Automatically, I began to sift my thoughts through a mental sieve, checking for hunks of information or feelings, even words that might trigger another bout, and then preemptively, I’d discard them. I eliminated talking about my struggle with work and money, about Lee and the Studio, about my children and how I ached for them. He disapproved of my prolific use of swear words—something I dearly loved (and still do)—so I eliminated them too. I knew early on never to mention the men who had been in my life, and later became terrified of running into somebody I might have known, whether sexually or not. Burt would pinch my face in his hand, demanding I tell him who the guy was and what kind of relationship I’d had with him. No matter who it was, if I knew him well or only barely, I’d lie with my heart racing as though I’d been caught at the dinner table with pink lips. Feeling that I should, I shared with him only the sunny parts of my childhood and eliminated the darker ones. I eliminated most of me, becoming a familiar, shadowy version of myself, locked behind my eyes, unable to speak.
Three days after our first dinner alone, Burt and I were flying down the back roads of Georgia in that black Trans Am, aided and abetted by Hal Needham and his tribe of stunt folks. I always had an immediate affinity with the crew, any crew, but because I’d grown up with Jocko, a legendary stunt hero, all the stunt guys—and the one stuntwoman—treated me like their little sister, a member of the family. Hal, who not only was Burt’s longtime friend but had been living in his poolhouse for the past twelve years, was incredibly skilled with action: how to plan it, how to perform it, and where to put the camera to capture it, while all the time making sure that the stunt people stayed safe as they accomplished their mind-boggling feats. What’s more, Hal never pretended to be something that he wasn’t: an actor’s director.
Every morning, at the traveling circus of a base camp, Hal would carefully oversee the camera being mounted on the hood of the car, and after he discussed with Burt whose coverage to do first, another camera would be mounted facing the passenger window, or driver’s, depending. Then with a mirror, a powder puff, and a honking goodbye, off we’d go, Burt and I. Which meant that Hal and the camera operator would frequently be left behind. Having only a vague idea of who the Bandit character was or why on earth I was sitting next to him—never mind my character, because I had none—I’d turn on the cameras, clap my hands to emulate the slate, then Burt and I would play the scene with an occasional line of scripted dialogue slipping in along the way. When we’d run out of ideas, Burt would announce into the walkie, “Got it. Heading back.” And whether shooting or returning to base camp, he’d always drive forty thousand miles an hour while peering through the maze of camera equipment clamped and tied and bolted to the car.
The company moved around erratically, in such remote locations most of the time that the civilians never knew where we were until we were packing up to leave. But every now and then, word got out and a huge crowd of rambunctious fans would appear out of nowhere. When they caught sight of that cowboy hat perched atop the Bandit’s recognizable saunter, all hell broke loose. As Burt grabbed my hand, Pete and Tom (his makeup man) would quickly move into position, flanking us while we made a beeline for the safety of his camper. Tom and Pete—blockers to Burt�
��s quarterback—ran interference, pushing the opposing team back long enough for Burt to pop the door open and scoot in, followed closely by his linemen, who would then slam the tin door behind them—frequently leaving me standing on the outside with the clamoring others. Never sure what to do, I just stood there with my head down, hoping all the frantic admirers would think I was one of them (maybe I was one of them) until slowly I’d slink off, maneuvering a path to my own, but rarely used, motor home. And in the air-conditioned quiet, I’d sit alone, flooded with longing for my children and my life. Eventually Burt would realize I was not in his RV—which sometimes took a while—and Pete would be sent to get me.
In the evenings, when we were away from the set and back in the hotel, Burt’s mysterious and painful episodes seemed to be escalating. Regularly, a doctor would appear with bag in hand, and after a quick check of the patient’s vitals, he’d proceed to give Burt a shot (containing God knows what) directly in his chest. This could not have been a good thing, and I couldn’t understand why everyone around him acted so nonchalant while the man was either writhing in pain, panicked that his heart was about to stop, or was having needles jammed into his thoracic cavity. As the others backed away, quietly leaving the room and shutting the door, I stood there, bewildered that his suffering was being treated so cavalierly by his own team. Little by little, I began to step up, doing anything I could think of: giving him a paper bag to breathe into, wrapping hot towels around his feet, on his face, his hands, assuring him that this was an old and trusted remedy. For what, I didn’t know. The only time he liked me sounding knowledgeable was when it came to his health, and on that particular subject, I didn’t have a clue. I soothed him with dedicated calmness as though he were Peter with asthma or Eli with epilepsy, as if I’d known him my entire adult life, not six or seven days.