My Extraordinary Ordinary Life

by Sissy Spacek

  The only disadvantages of living way up there were the steep roads and the constant threat from wildfires. Some nights we would sit on our deck and watch the orange glow creeping along distant ridges. We had some close calls in our part of the canyon. In the beginning, we would evacuate whenever a fire was near. I learned to keep the guitars and family treasures handy, and to hang all my clothes in one direction, so that I could scoop them out of the closet in a single motion. Then I would take a trick from Pancho Villa’s playbook and pile all my belongings on the bed and haul them off wrapped in sheets, just like the bandits did in the Rio Grande Valley back in the day. I figured you could learn from anyone, even criminals.

  Many times we would load our most precious possessions into our cars and sleep in the house, ready to leave at a moment’s notice. Then it dawned on us: LA County used convicts to fight wildfires, while we were placing all our valuables in ready-to-be stolen vehicles left conveniently by the road! We also noticed that the more seasoned homeowners weren’t panicking and running every time there was a fire. Jack and I took a cue from our neighbors and ended up staying behind most of the time, sitting on top of the house drinking margaritas while dousing our roof with the garden hose.

  The steep road up to our house was a daily challenge. For a while we had my brother’s Austin Healey, which Jack and I had driven out to Los Angeles from Texas during an ice storm (but that’s another story). It was scary keeping that car in gear climbing up the mountain. There were places where it felt like we would flip over backward, or slide back down, like my father sometimes did trying to drive out of the spillway at Lake Lydia. Eventually we got used to it, but some of our friends never did. We had a tax accountant who was afraid of heights. We would have to pick him up at the bottom of the hill and blindfold him while we drove him up to our house to do our taxes. Once there, he sat with his back to the windows.

  Jack was always finding interesting used cars for us, and the only requirement was that they make it up the canyon. The worst was a 1968 Ford Fairlane station wagon that was so awful I wouldn’t even let him park it in front of the house. But he redeemed himself when he showed up one day with a pea green 1950 Plymouth in cherry condition, with only thirty thousand miles on it. It even had the original white sidewall tires. The car had only had one previous owner, a studio contract actress named Virginia Grey, who used to date Clark Gable. Her Pall Mall cigarettes were still in the ashtray, stained with red lipstick. We left them there, untouched. This car was so awesome that people would stop on the street to stare at it. When Jack and I drove it to film premieres, and we’d pull up along with the usual Mercedes and Rolls, the valet parking guys would squabble over who got to park the Plymouth. Then one night, driving on Hollywood Boulevard, some jerk rear-ended us and then sped away. The impact knocked Five right into the front seat. We were all okay, but the accident crumpled the trunk and bent the chassis. We managed to drive the Plymouth back to Topanga, where it sat in a field for two years. When a house painter came up to give us an estimate and saw the Plymouth parked in a patch of weeds, he said, “Hey, I’ll paint your house for free if you give me that car.” Jack took the deal, but he felt bad. He hated to take advantage of anyone. But to everyone’s astonishment, he only had to turn the key once and it started right up.

  We eventually sold the Austin Healey, too. It was always a persnickety car, and the fuel injection often stopped working. My dad gave me a little hammer to carry whenever I drove it. When the car stopped on the freeway, I’d have to jump out in the emergency lane in my long hippie skirt and tapestry boots, then kneel down behind the back wheel and tap a little box. That would get the fuel going again. It finally got too dangerous for me to drive the Austin Healey, and we sold it to a collector. Now I wish I had kept it in the family, but back then I was still too young to be sentimental.

  Brian De Palma loved working with Jack, and he hired him as art director for his adaptation of a Stephen King novel called Carrie. By now Brian was one of the hottest directors in Hollywood, and all the young actors in town wanted to be in the picture. I read for all of the female parts, but I wanted the title role of Carrie White, the bullied, alienated daughter of a religious fanatic, who unleashes her telekinetic powers on her high school class. Even though I was twenty-five years old, I still looked like a kid, and I thought I’d be right for the part. But Brian and the studio had a different idea. In fact, they didn’t even want to give me a screen test, because they had already decided on another actress to play Carrie. I didn’t know that Brian had argued with the studio to stop them from canceling my screen test.

  I was unaware of what was going on behind the scenes when I called Brian the night before my scheduled screen test. I had just gotten my first television commercial, a big job for Vanquish headache medicine, and it would pay good money. The only problem was that it was shooting on the same day as my test. I was hoping Brian would say, “Are you crazy, Sissy? Of course, do the test!” Instead there was a short pause on the line and then Brian’s scratchy, deadpan voice.

  “Do the commercial,” he said.

  That made me so mad that I canceled the Vanquish job. Now I wanted this part so badly, I could taste it. I was convinced that Brian only thought of me as Jack Fisk’s wife, the no-talent set decorator, and I was going to prove him wrong. I stayed up all night and reread the whole book. In the morning, I got ready for the test by not showering and smearing Vaseline in my hair. I rummaged through my trunks and found a pale blue sailor dress that my mother had someone make for I me when I was in seventh grade. I looked like a total dork, and that was the point. When I got to the studio, the hair and makeup people started swarming around me, trying to fix me up for the screen test. I ran away from them, yelling, “Nooooooo!” I was already channeling Carrie. She reminded me of a timid girl I knew in school who dressed in hand-me-downs and had a reclusive, skittish personality. But there was a sweetness that I could see underneath her facade. It made you want to save her. That’s what I took with me in front of the camera that day.

  After the film was processed, Brian, the producers, the casting director, and Jack got together at the studio to watch all the screen tests. I had ridden along with Jack, but stayed outside waiting in the car. I was feeling awkward, crouched on the floorboard, thinking, What am I doing here? Then Jack came running out to the parking lot. “Ask for whatever you want!” he shouted. “You’ve got the part!”

  The studio had been so sure that I was wrong for the role that they never bothered to make a deal with me before I tested, which is standard procedure. Brian was shocked as well, because he was so fixated on this other actress. But Jack told me that as soon as I came on screen, they knew they had finally met Carrie.

  We filmed on location all over the LA area, from the desert suburb where Jack and his team found Carrie White’s house, to the track at Pacific Palisades High School, to the back lot at Culver City Studios where Gone with the Wind was made. The cast and crew were wonderful. Piper Laurie was over-the-top great as Carrie’s mother. Then there were my classmates: Amy Irving, William Katt, P. J. Soles, Nancy Allen, and John Travolta, who I knew from my New York days. John was already becoming a big star with his television show, but he had signed up for an ensemble role in Carrie, and he never showed a bit of attitude about it. They were all young and beautiful, and I could see that they were having a great time together on the set. But I was doing my thing, inhabiting the character of Carrie. I kept myself separate and lurked in dark corners of the soundstage, brooding, while everybody else had fun. I decorated my dressing room with religious tokens and played heavy classical music on the stereo. Jack had a book of Gustave Doré’s Bible illustrations that I pored over every day, studying the body language of people being stoned by their persecutors or tortured for their sins. I tried to start or end every major scene in one of those melodramatic positions. Some of Dore’s figures were looking up at the sky without lifting their heads, and I practiced staring up and down like that, so that only the whi
tes of my eyes would show. I was pretty serious back then; I was young and thought I had it all figured out.

  The first days of shooting were the hardest for me, because Brian started with the sequences in the high school girls’ shower room. My scene called for Carrie to be standing naked under the shower, then panicking when she discovers she’s bleeding, which she doesn’t understand is her first menstrual period. I was wracking my brain, trying to come up with a sense memory or an experience in my life that I could draw on to make the scene feel real. I went to my director and said, “Brian, tell me about the scene.”

  He thought for a moment, then said, “It’s like getting hit by a Mack truck.”

  “Got it,” I said. “Like getting hit by a Mack truck…”

  I wandered back to my dressing room, trying to imagine what it’s like to be hit by a truck. Jack was there, and I told him my dilemma.

  “Well, I got run over by a car once,” he said.

  “You did?”

  Jack told me that he was walking home from school one winter evening and it was snowy and icy outside. He found an abandoned sled along the side of the road, and he decided to carry it home with him. It was getting dark and all the Christmas lights were on in the neighborhood. He thought they were so beautiful, reflecting off the snow. With the sled in his arms, he looked at all the houses along the way, with their colorful trees in the picture windows and sparkling lights on the eves, thinking how lovely it all was in the quiet and the snow… when he glimpsed a flash of light. He looked up and there was a set of headlights coming straight at him. He looked away, then back again, and now the lights were right on him. He pulled the sled up just as the car hit him. He went down and the car rolled over him, pinning him to the ground. The sled was splintered, but it had probably saved his life. He tried to get up, but he couldn’t. He imagined that there was a four-hundred-pound man in that car, keeping him down. Then suddenly he heard the car start up again, and he thought, Oh my God. He’s going to back up and run over me again. He thought he was a goner, but when the car moved, he was able to scramble out from under the tires. He was badly bruised, but not seriously injured.

  I listened carefully to his story. And that’s what I used when it was time for the shower scene.

  Brian cleared the set of everyone who wasn’t needed. I took off my robe and stepped under the spray while the camera rolled. Jack was sitting at my feet on the shower room floor, ready to pour fake blood into my hand when the time came. The water was warm, and I thought how Carrie would have enjoyed the feel of a hot shower, because she probably didn’t get one at home. If you think of something, it will register on your face. Then I imagined: I’m walking home from school, and all the Christmas lights are twinkling along the road. They’re so beautiful and I’m thinking how beautiful they all are.... I am soaping my arms and torso and my thigh.... And then I see a flash of light. The headlights are right on me. I can’t bear to see, so I look away. There is blood all over my hands. The car hits me with all its force.… I start to scream. And scream. And then… I run.

  All the beats in that scene matched the rhythms of Jack’s story. It worked perfectly. I was so relieved.

  Then Brian said, “Okay! Great, Sissy. Now let’s try that again.”

  I spent the whole day in that shower. By the time we were finished, I looked like a ghost and felt all shriveled up, like when you’ve stayed in the bathtub way too long.

  I wasn’t the only actor having trepidations about that opening sequence. The script called for all the high school girls to be partially nude as they romped around the locker room at the end of gym class—a fantasy scenario that only a man could dream up. When it came time to actually shoot the scene, some of the girls were balking. According to Brian, there was a lot of weeping and hand-wringing among the cast. That is until we all watched the rushes from my shower scene.

  I had it written into my contract that I would not appear fully nude on screen. But that was a trick of the editing room; the camera saw everything. And as it happened, every time Brian shot another take of the shower scene, the clapper board was placed directly in front of me. And each time the board was pulled away, the camera was right where my contract said it couldn’t be. Now, I’m not a shy person—you can’t be in this business!—but by the time the rushes were over, I didn’t know if I should laugh or crawl under my chair. I decided to laugh.

  “Thanks a lot, Brian!” I said, as sarcastically as I could, as I left the screening room.

  After that, Brian later told me, the female cast members stopped complaining about their topless locker room scene.

  Piper Laurie was so much fun to work with. We had a fabulous time playing everything big—big gestures, big emotions, outrageous scenes. And she was such a good sport. For her death scene, I had to telekinetically impale her with a hail of kitchen cutlery, crucifying her like St. Sebastian. But those were the days before computer-generated imagery, so we had to shoot the scene the old-fashioned way. First the special effects guy put her in a harness with all the trick knives and forks already in place, then they attached them to different locations in the kitchen with wires. On cue, the special effects person would yank each wire and the utensil would come spinning out of her, while she jerked her body in the same direction. Then the editor would reverse the film and paint out the wires, and it looked like she was being stabbed. It was so much fun to watch, but it was time-consuming. The crew had to break several times during the filming. At one point Piper was seen walking to lunch with knives, forks, and potato peelers sticking out of her and her nightgown drenched in fake blood. She casually waved hello to David Janssen, who was filming an airplane disaster movie, while he dined on lobster in his trailer. David waved back without missing a bite.

  Jack was having a great time designing the sets for Carrie. Like Terry Malick, Brian De Palma loved how Jack would create a world for the actors to inhabit, often working around the clock to stay just ahead of the camera crew. Brian said, “Jack’s sets were always wet.” (That came to be known as Jack’s calling card.) The biggest and trickiest was the apocalyptic prom scene where Carrie is voted queen, which was shot on the same sound stage in Culver City that was used for Citizen Kane. The night before Brian started filming there, Jack’s team of “elves,” including Bill Paxton, were busy fashioning tinfoil stars and painting glitter on the decorations for the freshly built high school gym set.

  It wasn’t hard for me to get into this scene, because I’d been to a few proms in my time. I’d even been homecoming queen my senior year at Quitman High School. The lights and music were so familiar to me, and I could easily imagine how Carrie would have been dazzled by the attention. Of course, anyone who has seen the movie knows that Carrie’s moment of glory is destroyed when her enemies drop a bucket of pig’s blood on her head and all hell breaks loose—literally. They filled the bucket with Karo syrup and red food dye. Of course we had to film the scene twice, from every angle. At first the “blood” felt like a warm blanket, but it quickly got sticky and disgusting. I had to wear that stuff for days. And when they lit the fires behind me to burn down the gym, I started to feel like a candy apple.

  The scene where Carrie is buried in the rubble of her house was my first big death scene in films, and I wanted to make the most of it. It was a tricky setup. Jack had built a tall, narrow closet with the roof cut out so the camera could shoot down on me. I was thrashing around on the closet floor, causing an earthquake with my anger. The crew was shaking the closet walls while Jack stood next to Brian and the cameraman, throwing Styrofoam rubble on top of me. I was writhing in agony, focused on the sensation of being buried alive, but evidently I was taking too long to expire. I was almost completely covered up by debris when I heard a familiar, laconic voice calling down from above.

  “Die, Sissy! Just die!”

  Jack also built a quarter-scale model of Carrie White’s house, which was used when the earth swallowed up the naming ruins at the end of the picture. Now, don’t read this
if for some reason you haven’t seen Carrie and don’t want it spoiled for you. In the final scene, Amy Irving’s character visits the spot where the house had stood and where Carrie lies buried. As she kneels to place some flowers on the grave, Carrie’s hand shoots up out of the dirt and grabs her.

  To set up the stunt, Jack dug a hole and built a plywood chamber beneath the soil, with a breathing hole and a piece of Styrofoam for Carrie’s arm to push through. When I heard that Brian wanted to bring in an extra to do the hand scene, I objected.

  “Please, Brian, I want to do it myself.”

  “But Sissy, we’ll have to literally bury you in a coffin in the ground,” Brian said. “Let me hire someone.”

  “No, Brian, I do all my own hand and foot work!” I was joking, but I was also serious.

  He looked at me and then turned to my husband.

  “Jack,” he said. “Bury her.”

  After Carrie wrapped, Jack and I invited Brian De Palma out to have dinner with us in Topanga Canyon. Despite his grumpy demeanor, he is a lovely person and we have always been so fond of him. I wanted to make it a really special evening. I planned a wonderful roast chicken with vegetables, followed by scrumptious ice cream sundaes. On the day of the dinner, a freak winter storm blew into Los Angeles, with freezing temperatures and gale-force winds. Brian, a city boy from New York, managed to make the white-knuckle drive up Topanga Canyon, but by the time he arrived, we had lost electric power. The stove went off, but the bird was nice and brown, so we figured it had to be done. We were all bundled up in our warmest clothes when we sat down to eat. I served our lovely dinner, but when we cut into the chicken, it was still raw. Brian sat there shivering in his great big coat and wool cap, staring down at his plate of cold, bloody chicken.