My Extraordinary Ordinary Life

by Sissy Spacek

  Barbara had five beautiful sisters back in Texas, all popular girls and all honor students. I visited that family often when we were kids. The Blalocks lived out in the country, and we would take walks together and play for hours in a field we called “The Boneyard,” littered with the bleached bones of long-deceased cows. The Blalock house was much livelier. All six girls slept in two rooms in double bunk beds. There were always boys from town hanging around, clamoring to be invited in for the yummy cakes and pies that were forever being baked and for the beautiful sisters who baked them.

  Barbara was a great roommate. We only had one disagreement in the short time she stayed with us. She thought that the fruit in the bottom of Dannon yogurt was the prize you got to after finally eating all that icky plain, unsweetened yogurt. I thought it should be stirred up. Turns out I was right, Barbara, but other than that one thing, you were perfect.

  The other roommate? Not so perfect.

  This girl, whom I’ll call Club Girl, worked in an office by day and went out to nightclubs every night. Club Girl was strange. She would borrow my clothes without asking and return them dirty. I put a lock on my closet to keep her out, but when she asked me for the key, I didn’t have the guts to tell her that she was the reason I put the lock on in the first place. Maybe she thought I was protecting my clothes from intruders. Despite her faults, I still agreed to move with her to a larger apartment on the Upper East Side after Barbara decided to return to Texas.

  By then I had quit my job singing in the steakhouse, and I needed some extra cash. When Club Girl told me I could fill in at her office for a receptionist who was on leave, I jumped at the chance. After I had worked there for a few weeks, the regular receptionist returned and I went on my way. I never gave it another thought until a few weeks later, when my roommate came home from work, wide-eyed.

  “We’re in trouble, Sissy,” Club Girl said. “They caught us.”

  “What are you talking about? Caught us doing what?”

  She explained that the corporate office didn’t stop sending my paycheck after I left the receptionist job. Club Girl was the office manager and she was taking those checks, signing my name, and cashing them at the bank. She kept the money and never told me a thing.

  “You did what?!” I said, sputtering mad. “No, we’re not in trouble. You’re in trouble!”

  I went straight into the office the next morning and told them what had happened, that I hadn’t been getting the checks. When I got back to the apartment, she had changed the locks on the door and thrown my clothes—except the ones she wanted—into the hallway. She also left my guitars out there. I guess she knew I would have busted down the door for them. But she did keep all the furniture.

  I had no place to go, so I stayed with friends for a few nights. Kenny Laguna had a girlfriend named Meryl Feldman who was thinking about moving to the city, so she and I decided to rent an apartment together.

  We found a beautiful second-floor walk-up on East 19th Street, near Gramercy Park. Meryl’s mother was a decorator on Long Island, and she turned our little apartment into a showplace, with bentwood chairs and a couch made from a sleigh bed. I brought up a little antique table that I found in an abandoned house during one of my trips home to Texas. It reminded me of my roots.

  In the summer of 1969, Meryl and Kenny went to the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York. I could have gone with them, but the weather report said rain, so I said no thanks. I wasn’t the kind of girl who liked to camp or use Porta-Potties. And I loved the idea of having the apartment all to myself for a whole weekend just to write songs and play music. I wasn’t all that much of a counterculture person anyway. And even though I was strongly opposed to the Vietnam War, I wasn’t much of an activist. I went to a few demonstrations in New York and I joined some friends in Washington for a march on the Pentagon, but I wasn’t politically committed, like some people I knew. My parents were alarmed when they found out I was going to protest in Washington, even though I assured them that for me it was nothing more than a long weekend trip with good friends. But there were other things that I never told them about that would have given them plenty of sleepless nights.

  Manhattan in the late 1960s was not the same tourist destination that it is today. Instead of the Disney Store and the Hard Rock Cafe, Times Square was lined with peep shows and crawling with addicts and hookers. The crime rate in New York was through the roof. Once when I was waiting for a bus in Times Square, a thief grabbed my guitar case and took off down the sidewalk. Without thinking, I ran him down and wrestled the case out of his hands. He would have had to kill me before I would give up that guitar. I didn’t think for a minute how dangerous that might have been.

  Another time when I had just arrived in New York, I got locked out on a balcony while escaping from a record producer who gave me the creeps and was trying to get me to do drugs. I had on a little white dress and was carrying a big Martin twelve-string with me. When he turned his back, I’d taken my guitar and slipped out a door and closed it behind me. I found myself locked out on a fire escape balcony with no way down. But I didn’t dare knock on the window. And it was not in the kind of neighborhood where you would want to shout for help at night. So I just sat down on my guitar case and waited. I was covered with soot and shivering cold when a building watchman found me the next morning. I didn’t have a dime on me, so the kind man gave me money to get a bus back home. I was dirty, but I was okay. And getting out on that balcony may have been the smartest move I ever made.

  I had another close call near Times Square. I was going to a recording session with a hot new group called the Cherry People. But as usual, I didn’t have enough cash to get to the studio. So I opened my piggy bank—yes, I had an actual piggy bank—and grabbed a handful of change, enough for a taxi to and from the session. My parents had given me a full-length rabbit-fur coat for Christmas that year, so I would be warm and stylish for the New York winter. So when I stepped out of the cab on Eighth Avenue, one of the neighborhood muggers must have thought I would be a rich mark. He followed me into the lobby and ran to get on the elevator with me. I politely held the door for him.

  As soon as the door closed, he turned to me and whispered in a threatening voice, “Give me all your money!” Something in his tone convinced me I’d better do what he said. He had his hand out, so I opened my purse and dumped all my change into it. The coins went everywhere. He cursed and instinctively bent down to try to scoop up the coins. I used that moment to take off the ring I was wearing, an heirloom that had belonged to Big Mama, and put it in my mouth.

  When he stood up again, he had a better look at me and realized I had no money and wasn’t worth the effort. When the elevator doors opened at my floor, he ran out and disappeared. I rode that elevator back down to the lobby and waited for a long time to give him a chance to escape before heading back up to the recording studio. Mostly I was shaken up, and embarrassed that my good manners had gotten me into all of this. I swore I would never, ever hold a door for a mugger again.

  There were other strange encounters, like the time a guy invited me and some friends back to his apartment, where he had a butcher’s knife attached to a chain hanging from the ceiling. He entertained himself by sailing the knife around the living room, slicing through the air just over our heads. The only time I’d ever seen anything like that was at Kreuz’s (pronounced “Kriteses”) barbeque place outside of Austin. But they were friendly there, and they used the knife to slice barbeque, not terrorize guests.

  Mostly, though, I was having wonderful adventures. One of my friends, Jonny Podell, was a song runner—an independent promotion man, like my brother Ed. He would take me along on trips to radio stations all over the Northeast. In the morning I would climb into his tiny sports car, which was filled with stacks of 45s, and end up in Philadelphia or Boston by noon. Then I’d be back in New York for another night at the recording studio.

  He introduced me to his girlfriend, Monica Faust, who became one of the best friends
of my life. She was beautiful and smart and mischievous—the hippest girl I had ever met. One time we hitchhiked around Manhattan just for fun. We would walk into fancy department stores, like Bergdorf’s, and speak to the salesclerks in gibberish, pretending to ask for the ladies’ room in a foreign language. They would try to find translators for us, to no avail. Most days Monica worked in an office, but every night when Jonny came home from his job, she would have dinner on the table. When I was really hungry, I would go to their house.

  Jonny quickly morphed into one of the most powerful music moguls in the industry, and before long he was managing just about everybody who was anybody. He managed the Allman Brothers Band, and he introduced me to them when they came to New York for their very first show, at the Fillmore East. I think Jonny thought that since I was Southern and they were Southern, we might all get along. He was right. They were great guys, extremely talented, and so young they seemed fresh off the peach truck. Plus, they had good Southern manners. Gregg and I jammed a little back at my place. And as much as he liked my accent, he loved my twelve-string guitar even more.

  The Fillmore was my favorite music venue in New York, and it was within walking distance from our apartment. The other hot spot was Max’s Kansas City, which I walked past all the time. Occasionally I would press my face against the glass and try to look inside. (It’s hard to look cool with your face smashed up against the glass.) Pretty soon I started hanging out with my friends at Max’s. It wasn’t too hard to get into the club itself, but it was next to impossible to get into the back room, where all the “it” people were. You either had to know someone or be really, really cute or cool. I made it back there once by accident, but had forgotten my glasses, so I couldn’t even see who the “it” people were. I did hear someone say that Mick Jagger walked by, but I missed it.

  By now I was starting to feel a long way from Quitman.

  I had a recurring dream in the years after my brother’s death: Late at night I’d drive the Austin Healey to the cemetery, where Robbie would be waiting for me. I’d climb over to the passenger seat and Robbie would drive us around all night. We’d talk and laugh like we always did. Before dawn, he’d pull back into the cemetery and get out of the car. As he walked away, he’d turn and put his fingers to his lips and smile.

  In another dream, Robbie walked into the kitchen at home in Quitman, where the whole family greeted him with surprise.

  “Robbie! Where’ve you been?”

  “You forgot me!” he said.

  In fact, he was as present in my life as ever. Once I was browsing in a card shop in New York, when I saw a pair of familiar hands sorting through the cards next to me. I knew those hands as well as my own—the olive-colored skin, the long fingers and wide nails. They were Robbie’s hands. I stared down at them for the longest time. I never looked up to see the face of the person they belonged to, not even when he walked out of the store.

  So much was happening to me so quickly that I sometimes felt like my life was spinning out of control. I’d sit in my apartment at night, looking out the window at all the lights in the city and thinking about home. It reminded me of being stopped on the top of the Ferris wheel at the Old Settlers’ Reunion, suspended motionless in the dark, while the carnival just kept on going down below me, with all of its music and motion and noise. New York City was like that carnival; it never stopped. I was the one who needed to slow down occasionally and take a deep breath to remind myself who I was and what I was doing. Whenever New York started to overwhelm me, I knew it was time to go back home and get my bearings. I would stay for a few weeks, sometimes a few months. And when I felt like myself again, off I would go, back to the carnival.

  I was experimenting with the way I looked and dressed, and Mother and Daddy never knew which Sissy would be coming home each time. One day I showed up in a micromini-dress and boots. My mom opened the door and said, “Oh, Sissy! What a nice blouse.”

  “It’s a dress, Mother!”

  One time, a vanload of hippie friends stopped by to visit me on their way through Texas. The counterculture hadn’t caught up with East Texas yet, and we attracted a lot of attention. My urban friends were fascinated with rural Texas and wanted to photograph everything they saw, especially the bucolic-looking cows grazing beside the road. But someone called the police to report “some strange-looking people” out in the pasture, bothering the cows. That took a little explaining, but luckily I was a local, even though I looked like a hippie, too. It certainly helped that my father, the agriculture agent, was in good standing with the local farmers.

  I took my friends swimming at Lake Quitman, and, like a scene out of Easy Rider, some burly guys drove up in a hot rod and started yelling, “Hippies, go home!”

  It embarrassed me to death that anyone would talk that way to my friends. I had told them how wonderful and friendly Texas was, and now they were being scared to death by a bunch of shirtless teenagers. I was so mad that I marched right up to the car in my bathing suit, determined to straighten things out. As I got closer, I could see that the ringleader was someone I’d gone to school with.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sakes!” I said. “Why are you being so mean to us? You know better than that!”

  “Sissy Spacek?” he said in a little voice. “I’m sorry.... I didn’t know it was you.” He was normally the sweetest guy in the world. I still don’t know what came over him.

  My parents always gave me plenty of space when I came home to visit, and sometimes gentle doses of good advice. My father would tell me, “Sissy, you’ll meet the same people on the way up that you meet on the way down, so act accordingly.” My mother would remind me, “We are a product of our choices.” It’s advice I’ve never forgotten. But the best part of being at home was to be caught up in the simple rhythms of my parents’ lives, how they woke up early and watched the sun come up together while they had their morning coffee, and how they enjoyed every day. After spending time in Texas, I would always come back to New York refreshed, my confidence and strength renewed, ready to tackle the next challenge.

  One of our friends was a fashion photographer who took a lot of pictures of me for his portfolio. When he showed one of my head shots to his agency, they sold it to Chanel for an ad campaign. I got $25 for being the face of Chanel No. 5 that season—and since it was the only perfume my mother ever wore, I figured it was a good sign. I developed a lifelong love for that perfume.

  It was the beginning and end of a short-lived career in modeling. Dovima, the former supermodel who ran the modeling department at the agency, wanted to meet me, so I showed up at her office with my guitars in tow. She took one look at my five-foot-two-and-a-half-inch self and let me down gently. “We love your pictures, but you’re much too petite,” she said. “Perhaps we can set up a meeting with the theatrical side of our agency?” And that was where I met Bill Treusch.

  All the times I felt like I was spinning my wheels trying to get ahead in New York, and all the times I would call home tired and discouraged, my mother would say to me, “Sissy, as soon as you meet someone who’s smart enough to realize how talented you are, you’ll be on your way.” Bill Treusch turned out to be the person she was talking about.

  The day I met Bill, everything changed. I dragged my two guitars into his office, and we talked for a long time, and then I sang and played a few songs for him. Before I knew it, we were having dinner together and meeting some of his other clients and going to the theater. We just clicked from the first moment we met. He believed in me from the start and right away began sending me up for auditions. I only remember Bill being at Dovima’s agency for a short while. He moved into an office in the small yellow house on East 30th Street where Marion Dougherty had her casting agency. Marion was amazingly talented, one of the most highly regarded and successful casting directors in New York. Bill and Marion gave me the professional seal of approval that I needed to get a leg up in the business.

  Bill had a warm smile, and he always wore a crisp white shirt.
He was an insatiable reader, and he saw every play in New York and every movie. He didn’t just appreciate film and theater; he was a huge fan, and he loved artists. He made his clients feel like they were special, brilliant, undeniable. I never dreamed I would be invited to join such an exclusive club. Through the years he represented Christopher Walken, Eric Roberts, Carol Kane, Melanie Mayron, Mary Beth Hurt, John Heard, and Diane Keaton.

  I used to hang out at the offices on 30th Street. It was like visiting a favorite relative’s house. The parlor was warm and cozy and filled with antiques. And wherever Bill was, I always felt welcome.

  One afternoon I was visiting with Bill when Marion Dougherty popped her head out of her office and said, “Sissy, come on in and meet Bob.”

  Bob? I walked in and saw her standing next to Robert Redford. I was so discombobulated that I shook his hand and said, “Hello, Bobert.” He laughed out loud.

  That old saying “the journey’s the thing” is true. When I met Bill Treusch, mine took a positive turn. I finally felt like I was heading in the right direction, my course was set. It was Bill who suggested that I might try acting.

  Rip and Gerry had both studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, so I decided to take some classes at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute near Union Square. The closest I ever got to Lee Strasberg himself was riding up in the elevator with him on my way to class. The technique taught there is known as Method acting, which boils down to using your own life experiences to bring truth to the characters you play. You learn to relax, concentrate, call up specific memories and the emotions they bring, then impose them on the thoughts and actions of your character—a technique called substitution.

  I admit that I was more than a little intimidated in class. Everybody seemed so intense and so, well, urban. I imagined they had come from broken homes, or had been to reform school, or had some other traumatic personal history to dig into for their exercises. I was a former majorette from a loving, stable family. What kind of angst could I bring to the table?