My Extraordinary Ordinary Life

by Sissy Spacek

  I never really fell hard for any pop act until I was thirteen and the Beatles crossed the Atlantic. I had the first Beatle book in town. John was my favorite. My mother was the Methodist Youth Fellowship counselor for our church at the time, and she always encouraged us to listen to music. Whenever the MYF met, the church fellowship hall would be packed with kids; we even got the Baptists to come, because we danced, and they couldn’t. We were wild. We drank Cokes and popped popcorn and played lots of Ping-Pong. On the Sunday night that the Beatles were playing for the first time on The Ed Sullivan Show, Mother invited the whole group back to our house to watch it. She was the coolest mom ever.

  I’m still so grateful to her for taking us all home to watch what turned out to be history being made. Afterward, we went back to church feeling very special—like we had a fabulous secret.

  I learned to drive a car when I was still a little kid, seven or eight years old. When Mother took Ed out in the Buick to teach him to drive when he was twelve, I pestered them to come along. I would fret until they gave me a turn, sitting on my mother’s lap, steering down the country road barely able to reach the pedals, and I had to stand up to get the clutch in right. By the time I was thirteen, I was driving all over town with an older licensed driver: Jackie Rushing, who was thirteen and a half and one of my best friends. (Her sister, Ganelle, was the telephone switchboard operator.) It was common for young teens to drive in rural areas. They were needed to help on the farms and ranches; they drove tractors and all kinds of farm equipment. And a licensed driver, regardless of age, could take anyone along (they have wisely changed this rule).

  Jackie and I were talking and laughing and listening to music when the woman in front of me slowed down to turn, and I plowed right into the back of her car. Thank goodness nobody was hurt badly; I just banged my chin. It was bad enough, causing $365 in damage to the Buick, which was a lot back then. My father, once he knew I was all right, didn’t come down to the accident. He was so put out with me, he sent my mother. When the police officer turned on the ignition, the radio came on, blaring pop music loud enough to be heard in the next county. Funny thing, I don’t remember being punished for the accident, but I certainly didn’t drive for a long time after that.

  What I remember most vividly after all these years is that the woman I hit got the traffic ticket, not me. It may have been because my parents worked in the courthouse, who knows? But it was so wrong and unfair that it’s bothered me all these years. If you’re reading this book right now and you were driving the car I hit from behind at Goode and College Street (now known as Sissy Spacek Drive!) in the early 1960s, I am so sorry. I should have gotten the ticket and paid for the damage to your car.

  In junior high I was a cheerleader, and as a freshman in high school, I marched with the band as a drummer. But I developed a nasty staph infection on my knee from wearing a brace for the snare drum and decided to rethink my choice: The next year, I was a twirler with the marching band.

  Becoming a cheerleader or a majorette was the ultimate social achievement for a high school girl in Texas. Majorettes wore short shorts and boots with jingle taps, and worked up fabulous routines, marching while twirling a baton in each hand, much like the Coquettes. We marched with the school band in all the parades, but our biggest performances were, of course, halftime shows at the football games. High school football comes right after Jesus and family in Texas, as anyone who has ever seen Friday Night Lights can tell you. So the pressure was on for the band and the majorettes. The biggest game of the year was homecoming, when the Quitman Bulldogs played our arch-rivals, the Mineola Yellowjackets.

  One homecoming, we prepared a spectacular routine for the end of the halftime show: We had made special batons with asbestos-wrapped tips soaked in kerosene. At the designated moment, each of us twirlers lit the batons and gave the signal for all the stadium lights to be shut off. The band played a drumroll as we marched into the dark center-field, twirling and throwing our double-fire batons high up into the air. The crowd oohed and ahhed as the flames cut figure eights and spun in the black night. We were giddy; it was a triumph. Meanwhile, back in the locker room, our coach was revving up the team with an inspirational speech and a lot of shouting and chest-thumping. The plan was for the Bulldogs to run out on the field, all pumped and ready to play the second half, as soon as our finale was over and the lights snapped back on.

  It all went perfectly as we tossed our fire batons in the air for the last time and gave the signal to flip the switch. The revved-up team burst out of the locker room, into the darkness … and straight into a chain-link fence. Nobody had realized how long it takes for halogen lights to fire up again. And so for the next ten to fifteen minutes, our previously pumped-up team milled around aimlessly in the sputtering half-light, while the coach chewed out our band director in no uncertain terms. I can’t remember whether the team won or lost that night, but we didn’t get to walk the boys off the field. And I don’t think we got to march or play the next few games. We were in the doghouse for a long, long, time.

  When I was a teenager, my life revolved around school, music, horses, and boys. I had a lot of boyfriends when I was in grade school, but Clifford Zack Cain was the first one to break my heart. Cliff’s mother, Imogene, who raised chinchillas behind the tourist court, was one of my mother’s close friends, so he and I had known each other since before we could walk. By the time we were in fourth grade, Cliff had been my boyfriend on and off for years. (I thought it was funny that I had one friend named Hill and another named Cliff.) One day Imogene called Mother. “Gin, Clifford Zack wants to give Sissy a little ring.” They measured my finger, and before long he gave me a beautiful sterling silver ring with his initials engraved on it. CC. I wore it to school the next day, happily showing it off to everybody.

  A few weeks later a new girl moved to town, about four houses down from me. She was really cute, and mature. In fact, she already had breasts. All the boys, including Cliff, started buzzing around her like bees. I was a tomboy and couldn’t compete, but I was still surprised when Cliff asked for his ring back. I reluctantly handed it over. I was devastated when he gave it to her! It was humiliating, because everybody knew that ring was for me. My first broken heart didn’t last long though, and neither did Cliff’s romance with the new girl. I suspect she only wanted the ring in the first place, so she soon got bored and broke up with him. But the ring that had been made especially for me was too small for her and got stuck on her finger. Her father had to get out the tin snips to cut it off. Clifford got the ring back sure enough, in two pieces. Me, I would have sliced my finger off before I clipped that ring.

  I went on my first real date when I was thirteen, while my parents were away on a road trip with some friends. It was their first vacation without us kids. Ed was about eighteen and home from college, so he was keeping an eye on Robbie and me for a few weeks that summer. Mother and Daddy were visiting Washington, DC, and Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia. In those days, long-distance calls were expensive, and when our parents phoned home to check in with us, the conversations were generally loud and fast.

  When they called one evening, Ed and Robbie got on the line, and after the hellos, Mother said, “Okay, let us talk to Sissy!”

  “Um, she’s not here,” said Ed.

  “Well where is she?”

  “Oh, she’s on a date.”

  “She’s what!? She’s never been on a date before! Who let her go on a date?”

  “It’s okay,” said Ed. It was a harmless date, he explained. The boy’s mother had picked me up and we’d gone to the movies together. “We held a family council and decided it was time she was allowed to go out with boys.”

  When we were little kids, the big place to go was Mrs. Huckabee’s Sno-Kone stand. It was just a little wooden shed, the size of a guardhouse, set up off the oil road in front of where she lived. It was only big enough to fit Mrs. Huckabee, a cooler of ice, and a Sno-Kone machine attached by a long extension cord to h
er house. She did a good business on hot school days. When I was in first and second grade, I stopped at Mrs. Huckabee’s Sno-Kone stand almost every day on my way to the Wood County courthouse to see my mom and dad. If I had a nickel for a Sno-Kone, the walk downtown seemed much shorter and a whole lot cooler.

  There was also a drive-in called the Dairy Bar where you could buy a hamburger, French fries, and a Coke for 26 cents. Then, when I was a young teenager, a Dairy Queen opened on South Main Street, and suddenly the entertainment possibilities in Quitman doubled. We could now get into a car with our dates and slowly cruise between the two drive-ins until we got tired of it and went home. There were dances during the school year, but in summer it was either the drive-ins or Shell Camp a few miles outside of town. That was where the oil company built a pavilion for the community to throw big parties. It was where I had my first kiss, in sixth grade, playing spin the bottle then walking around the building with whomever the bottle had landed on.

  My second kiss was on Halloween when I was thirteen. I was dressed up as a flapper; my date, Barry, was a pirate. Barry was the boy who took me to the movies for my first real date. He rode all over town on his turquoise motor scooter. Even though I wasn’t allowed to ride on it, I couldn’t resist sitting on it in the driveway. Barry and his whole family had strawberry blond hair, like mine. When I cut off my pony-tail, that was the end of our romance; he broke up with me. When I was in tenth grade, I started dating Paul Low, a senior and the quarterback of the football team. He was a sweet guy. Paul would call me every night, and the conversations would go something like this:

  “Watchoo doin’?”

  “Nothing. Watchoo doin’?”

  “Nothing.”

  He would drive by in his gray Ford, a four-on-the-floor he called Old Gray, and we’d spend the evening cruising between the Dairy Queen and the Dairy Bar, or head down to Mineola to walk into movies halfway through and stay until we’d seen the whole thing. Sometimes we’d park by the oil derricks way out in the county. One night after a football game we drove to the derricks in his parents’ new Bonneville. My curfew was 10:30 sharp, so at about 10:15 when Paul turned the key in the ignition … and nothing happened, I had to be resourceful. I got out of the car, dressed in my majorette uniform and jingle tap boots, and pushed that Bonneville down the hill and through the dust till Paul could pop the clutch and get it started. I had some explaining to do when I finally got home that night.

  We dated for a while after he graduated, but our lives drifted in different directions. Paul went on to college, then volunteered for Vietnam. When I was in high school, a lot of boys from Wood County were shipping out to Southeast Asia, and some of them weren’t coming back. (Fortunately, Paul did.) All through the mid-to-late sixties, the war was like a faint rumbling in the distance, a reminder that a more precarious world existed beyond the safe cocoon of family and friends and the tranquil streets of Quitman.

  Like many Texans my age, I got my first dose of the real world in November 1963, when John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas. I was in eighth grade, and our big tough junior high principal, Mr. Browning, was crying as he came around to each classroom to tell us that the President was dead and classes were dismissed for the day. My mother drove to school in Ed’s red Corvair to pick up Robbie and me. She was crying, too. We were too stunned to speak. It was like the world was coming to an end.

  With the rest of the country, my whole family sat transfixed in front of the television set watching the awful events unfold. We saw Lee Harvey Oswald gunned down on live TV, and watched as the President’s funeral procession rolled through Washington. I remember feeling so ashamed that the assassination had happened in Texas, and only ninety miles from our front door. I was shocked because I loved Texas so much and couldn’t have imagined something so ugly springing from such a wonderful place. But I had read the papers, and I’d seen the inflammatory full-page ad denouncing Kennedy—paid for by the business tycoons Bunker Hunt and Bum Bright—in the Dallas Morning News on the day the President was shot. It made me so angry that I wrote a letter to the editor. It was never published, but it was my first political act.

  Kennedy was hated by segregationists in Texas and across the South for his support of the Civil Rights Movement. Although the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling had outlawed separate schools and other public facilities since the mid-1950s, integration came slowly to many parts of the country, including Wood County, Texas. Quitman schools were finally, quietly integrated in 1965. It took a few years before the black and white students started sitting together at the lunch table, but there was no serious trouble. And everybody danced to the same music at the prom.

  I think it was because blacks and whites all knew each other so well that we were spared the turmoil that beset so many communities, North and South. Having everybody in the same school seemed as natural as breathing to me. And it was a relief that the last, degrading symbols of Jim Crow were finally gone from my hometown.

  Beverly Waddleton, who was two years younger than me, was the first African-American elected to the student council. She was a brilliant girl, the daughter of Joe Waddleton, my father’s favorite mechanic, so I had known her all my life. After integration, Beverly rose to the top of her class at Quitman High School. She gave the salutatorian speech two years after I graduated. Beverly went on to college and medical school, and then returned to our hometown as a family practitioner. Since then she’s been Quitman’s most beloved doctor and runs the East Texas Medical Center.

  Dr. Waddleton remembers how my father went out of his way to support her and her friends as they navigated the new, integrated Quitman. Daddy used to pick up Beverly and drive everybody to and from the 4-H camp. Beverly thought that was completely wonderful, except for one thing: The kids just wanted to get home at the end of the day, but Daddy insisted on stopping at every historical marker between the camp and Quitman.

  … NEW YORK …

  … 6 …

  Robbie was really the actor in the family. He was handsome, talented, and relaxed; he got roles in all the school plays. I never did. After I won the Oscar for Best Actress for Coal Miner’s Daughter, my mother ran into our high school drama teacher in the grocery store. She must have been feeling a little sensitive, because she pushed her cart right up to Mother’s and said, “Well, I guess you wonder why Sissy never got into any of the school plays.”

  “No, actually, I never really gave it any thought,” said Mother.

  “Well, she didn’t learn her lines!” she said, as she moved on down the aisle.

  Because a career in high school theater was obviously out of the question, I poured my efforts into music. I carried my guitar with me wherever I went, singing for anybody who would listen. I performed for seniors at the old folks’ home, kids at their grade school assemblies, church functions, parties, Rotary Club meetings, between acts at school plays. Late at night, I would sit cross-legged on my bed, hugging that guitar and plucking out tunes, then writing lyrics in a spiral notebook, on napkins, paper bags—whatever was available. I wrote songs like “Tiny People,” about young people wanting to be older, older people wanting to be younger, and nobody being satisfied to be who they are; and “Sweet Cheeks,” about laughing so hard that your cheeks hurt. We had a lot to laugh about in our house, most of it instigated by Robbie.

  As my brothers and I became teenagers, Mother and Daddy would always say, “If you want to drink and smoke, do it at home. Don’t go off drinking and driving in a car somewhere.” So one evening when Robbie was about fifteen, he walked into the den while we were all watching TV and plopped himself down in a chair. He was holding a beer in one hand and a cigar in the other. We all stared at him while he casually lit the cigar. Finally my father said, “Robbie, what do you think you’re doing? Have you lost your mind?”

  Robbie just grinned and took a puff.

  “Well, you said if I wanted to smoke or drink, to do it at home,” he said. “So here I am!”

  My p
arents could hardly get angry; after all, it was their idea. Ed never tried to pull anything like that. He was perfect. I was the sneaky one, but just never got caught—even the time I was playing with matches and set the backyard on fire. But Robbie was an open book. He was always up to something, most of it funny.

  Even though Robbie and I fought like cats and dogs sometimes, we were best friends, even as teenagers. I used to pick out his clothes for him. I didn’t let him pick out mine, but he would stop me from going out of the house if he thought my skirt was too short.

  “You’re not wearing that, Sissy,” he’d say.

  “Why? What’s wrong with it?”

  “Trust me.”

  We did everything together, and we had a lot of the same friends. Most of my girlfriends had crushes on him. He went out on dates, but most of the time he was busy with sports, or hunting and fishing, or just keeping up with his studies.

  School was always easy for me, but not for Robbie. He was dyslexic, although we didn’t know the term back then. All we knew was that he had a hard time learning to read and write, even though he was very smart. If he had to write things down on a test, he struggled. But if you asked him the questions out loud, he got every one right. So he had to work twice as hard as everyone else on his class work to keep from falling behind.

  When we were little, Mother would spend hours with Robbie, helping him with his homework. Before too long, I’d be tugging at her sleeve and making a lot of noise that it was my turn. I needed to read a story out loud to her. “Sissy,” she would say, “why don’t you take your book into my bedroom and read out loud to yourself?” I thought that was a wonderful idea. My parents had a full-length mirror on their closet door, and I loved to sit in front of it and read aloud to myself. I would give all the characters different voices and imagine how they would behave in the stories. I might not have known it then, but this could have been the dawn of my acting career.