My Extraordinary Ordinary Life

by Sissy Spacek

  Once I learned the songs, Loretta turned me over to the legendary record producer Owen Bradley. Owen had worked with all the greats, and he was quite a guy—warm, funny, and extremely talented. First he set me up in the studio with her actual recordings, but with the vocal tracks removed so I could sing her part. Then he brought in Loretta’s band to work with me. He also told me great stories. One day I said, “Owen, Loretta has all this vibrato in her voice. I don’t have any vibrato.”

  “Don’t worry, Sissy,” he said. “Loretta doesn’t have any vibrato in her voice either!”

  “What do you mean? I can hear it.”

  “No,” he said. “She’d just hold that note for a long time and then shake her arm while she was holding it.”

  I still don’t know if he was pulling my leg, but I did try it, and it worked!

  Finally, Loretta made the ultimate gesture of faith: she invited me to sing with her at the Grand Ole Opry. I knew that it was an incredible honor, and an opportunity to complete my transformation into her character. But I was more than intimidated. In fact, as I stood in a corner of the stage, watching Loretta and her band, I was scared stiff. Literally. I could see her beckoning me to join her at the microphone, but I was kind of frozen in place. Then I felt a gentle nudge in the small of my back, followed by a slightly bigger nudge. Suddenly Doolittle Lynn was pushing me out on the stage, just like he had done to Loretta the first time she played at the Opry. I joined Loretta onstage and we traded verses of one of her songs—I can’t even remember which one, I was so terrified. But she later said that Opry members couldn’t tell when she left off and I began, we were that close. I started to tease her, telling her that someday I was going to hijack her bus and wear all her dresses and go out on the road as Loretta Lynn. Looking back, I wonder if it wouldn’t have been a relief for her. She was still working two concerts a night, staying for hours after the lights came on to make sure everybody who wanted an autograph got one. “I never forget,” she told me, “it’s the fans that gave me this career.”

  Loretta and I became as close as sisters during those months. I drew on what we had in common, the mutual love for our families and a deep sense of our roots. “Take me as I am,” she would say. “Never change. If you have to change to be something, why do it? It’s hard enough to be yourself, why be somebody else?”

  She is a wise woman.

  Loretta’s support was crucial for me, and for the production. Everybody in Nashville and the country music world loved her so much that they welcomed me and the movie with open arms. She was the reason we were treated so royally. She made it happen.

  Once Michael Apted was on board as director, the production started coming together. Michael had the brilliant idea to cast Tommy Lee Jones as Mooney Lynn. I hadn’t known Tommy Lee before working with him on this film, but I grew to love the man dearly. At first he seemed like the good old Texas boy that you’d expect him to be: smart and funny and more than a little wild. But underneath all that is a sophisticated scholar who graduated cum laude from Harvard. I can honestly say he’s always the smartest person in the room. Tommy Lee had great instincts about the film. He was the one who brought in his friend Levon Helm to read for the part of Ted Webb, Loretta’s coal miner father. It was an inspired idea.

  Levon was a founding member of the Band, and although he’s a world-class musician, he’d never acted a day in his life. But he knew that character in his bones, and his portrayal has such dignity and grace that it literally anchors the film. To play Loretta’s mother, Clary, Levon in turn recommended the mountain singer Phyllis Boyens, who was also incredible in her first acting role.

  As the locations were being chosen and the sets constructed, Tommy Lee was hoping to develop a relationship with Mooney along the lines of the one I had with Loretta. But he got off to a poor start.

  A limo was sent to the Spence Manor in Nashville to drive Tommy Lee and Levon out to Hurricane Mills to meet Mooney for the first time. Tommy Lee brought along his Australian cattle dog, Travis, who went everywhere with him. Along the way, Levon wanted to stop at a recording studio to visit some friends, so they left Travis in the car with the limo driver. The way Tommy Lee tells the story, the driver was “a little bit goofy”—whatever that means—and all he could remember was that he was supposed to be in Hurricane Mills at a certain time. So he left Tommy Lee and Levon behind and drove to Mooney’s place with Travis.

  Mooney had been waiting around with some of his ranch hands, expecting to meet the movie version of himself, when the limo driver pulled up and out stepped Tommy Lee’s dog. By the time Tommy Lee finally got there, Mooney had gone. One of the ranch hands pointed to a hill behind the house, and Tommy Lee could see him on a bulldozer, knocking down one tree after another.

  It took a while, but the two eventually became good friends. Mooney taught Tommy Lee how to drive the old bulldozer used in the film, steering it with brakes. He also showed him how to get the most speed out of the WW2-era jeep that Tommy Lee drives in the scenes where he is courting me. Tommy Lee got so good at it that he about scared me to death careening along rutted roads and crashing through creeks. I dreaded hearing Michael’s smooth British voice saying, “Okay, let’s try that again.” And after a day of getting bounced around and splashed with mud, I was so mad at Tommy Lee, I could spit. He must have been doing it to get a rise out of me, just the way his character did. That’s part of what made it so great to play scenes with him. Sometimes all I had to do was react. He elevated my performance in everyway.

  We were all so lucky to work with the cinematographer Ralph Boda, who gave the film much of its visual richness and realism. Michael would rehearse a scene with the actors until we were all happy with it, and then he and Boda would watch the final run-through and design the shot around what we had done. It sounds ordinary, but many directors do the opposite: they design the shot first and then have the actors play the scene within their parameters. Michael Apted trusted his actors. It felt extraordinary—even revolutionary.

  The first part of the film was shot on location right where it took place, in the mountains where eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia converge. It was a close-knit cast and crew, made even closer because there were so many musicians among us. The production was based in Wise, Virginia, about seventy miles, as the crow flies, south of the real Butcher Hollow, and we stayed in a historic white clapboard hotel called the Wise Inn. I had a room on the very top floor, filled with antiques and a claw-foot bathtub where I could soak off the mud and dirt I’d be covered with at the end of a day’s shooting. All night long we could hear coal trucks rolling through town, rattling the hotel’s old glass windows. Levon took over the basement taproom most nights, filling it with guitar players and banjo pickers, singing the old mountain songs that sprung straight up from the land that surrounded us. It was pure magic, and the music washed over us, spilling back and forth, in and out of the production.

  I’ll never forget the funeral scene, where Loretta comes back to Kentucky to bury her daddy. Ted Webb was waked right in his cabin, and the scene called for Levon to lie in an open casket while his family gathered around him and sang. Levon had a touch of claustrophobia, and at first he was a bit spooked by the scene. To reassure him, Michael Apted laid himself in that coffin for the rehearsal, just to show him it would be all right. Finally, Levon settled in for the scene, and the cast and extras all stood around in mourning, then started to sing “Amazing Grace.”

  Suddenly, Levon bolted upright from his coffin in full death-mask makeup.

  “Cut!” Michael shouted.

  “You’re singing it wrong,” said Levon. “It’s got to be done the old-fashioned, traditional way.”

  Luckily, we had Phyllis Boyens there playing Loretta’s mother, and she had brought along her father, Nimrod Workman, one of the most revered traditional musicians in Appalachia, and a famous union organizer. In the film, you can hear Nimrod’s voice in the background, calling out the lines of “Amazing Grace,” whil
e we sing them back to him.

  Having Phyllis and Nimrod in the cast went a long way in helping the mountain people accept the production company in their midst. One of the wonderful things about being a filmmaker is that you get to live all these different lives, in different places, sometimes for three or four months. You get to experience an area, not as a visitor, but as somebody who’s trying to sink down into the bedrock of the community and get to know what it’s like to be a local. People are pretty good about sharing and helping you figure that out as long as they know you’re sincere. Michael and the producers and set designers bent over backward to make sure the film was an honest and accurate portrait of life in the coal towns and hollows. They weren’t going to sugarcoat or romanticize the poverty, but they made sure they didn’t fall into the clichés about ignorant hillbillies living in squalor, either. The costumes were perfect and the sets were exquisitely accurate, from the corn cribs in back of Loretta’s home place to the newspapers used for wallpaper inside the cabin to keep out the drafts.

  The people of Appalachia have been misused and misunderstood for generations, and they are rightfully wary of strangers poking around their business. The production team took great pains to make sure all the advance work had been done before we arrived to film in various locations, but they couldn’t always reach everybody ahead of time. And there were some locals who were downright hostile.

  The roads in eastern Kentucky wind through the mountains and coil along creek beds so that it can sometimes take hours to go three miles as the crow flies. One day we were moving the whole unit, with a big generator the size of a city bus, crawling up along twisted, rutted mountain roads, until we finally reached the place where we were supposed to shoot. Out of the woods stepped a rough-looking man with a shotgun who shouted, “Get off my land!”

  “But we’re shooting a movie, sir!” explained the assistant director.

  “I said, get off my land!” the man repeated.

  We were all remembering a local legend that had been told in the taproom of the Wise Inn a few nights before: An old man from the holler was riding to town with his wife in his horse-drawn wagon. The horse stumbled on a rock. The old man stopped the wagon, looked down at his horse, and said, “That’s once.” The horse walked on, and after a while he stumbled again. The old man gripped the reins in his hands. “That’s twice,” he said. He told the horse to walk on. But after a while the horse stumbled again.

  “That’s three times.”

  With that the old man pulled out his gun and shot the horse dead. His wife was stunned, but after a moment she began to scream and holler, “Are you out of your mind? How could you do such a thing, you crazy old man!? Now how are we supposed to get home?”

  The old man looked over at his wife. “That’s once,” he said.

  So while the AD and the mountain man stared each other down for a moment at the entrance to the holler, we all started shouting from our cars, “Come back! Come back! He’s already said it twice! Don’t let him say it again!”

  We finally got the generator turned around and nobody got shot.

  We filmed my concert scenes at both the Ryman Auditorium and the Grand Old Opry with as many of the real performers as we could. I was backed up by Loretta’s band members, while Minnie Pearl, Roy Acuff, and Ernest Tubb made cameo appearances. Tubb, “The Texas Troubadour,” had recorded duets with Loretta back in the early sixties. He was a full-blown country legend, famous in Nashville for his habit of getting drunk on his tour bus, firing his band members, and throwing them out, one by one, on the side of the road. Eventually his manager learned to follow in a car to scoop up the stranded musicians and drive them to the next gig. Luckily, he had quit drinking by the time we made Coal Miner’s Daughter.

  My parents visited the set while we were filming at the Opry and they struck up a friendship with Ernest Tubb. He was from Crisp, Texas, a small town thirty-five miles southeast of Dallas, so they felt like neighbors. Daddy told him to stop by and visit if he was ever passing through Quitman, and sure enough, a year later Tubb’s tour bus pulled up in front of their house. It stretched the length of our front yard, from Edna Lipscomb’s to George Tom Shaw’s place. People stopped their cars to gape at the spectacle while Ernest and his band were inside drinking coffee.

  Mother and Daddy took all the attention in stride. They were proud of me, along with the whole town. In fact, after the release of Coal Miner’s Daughter, Quitman declared May 31, 1980, Sissy Spacek Day. Jack and I flew in for the celebration in Jim Hogg Park that featured a country-western band, a presentation by the reigning Dogwood Queen, a performance by the Curley Q Square Dance Club, and a host of games and competitions. My favorite notice: “Children participating in the frog and turtle races are reminded to bring their own frogs and turtles.”

  People brought baskets of fried chicken, coleslaw, and homemade fruit pies, and spread them out on picnic tables in the shade of the old oak trees. I spent all day visiting with friends and signing hundreds of autographs. But before all of this had a chance to go to my head, a drive to Mineola brought me back to earth. The Select Theater, where I’d spent so many teenage date nights, was showing Coal Miner’s Daughter as part of the celebration. But when I looked up at the marquee, I saw they had billed me as “CISSY SPACEK.” The theater had run out of S’s.

  Deciding to do Coal Miner’s Daughter changed my life and the trajectory of my career. The film was a commercial and critical success, and between us we won a slew of awards, including a Golden Globe and an Oscar for me as Best Actress. Loretta sat in the audience at the Academy Awards and cheered as loud as my own mother would have when I walked out onto that stage. Her only regret, she said, was that Tommy Lee didn’t get a nomination, too. I agree. He was so good in that role, and I’m convinced that without him, I wouldn’t have gotten any awards at all.

  I had written out an acceptance speech, just in case, but it’s true that your mind does go blank as soon as you hear your name called. Luckily, I think I thanked everybody I wanted to, but most of all, Jack. I also thanked my parents, who were watching it on television back home. I’ve never been much of a party person, but we did go to quite a few of them that night. When we got home early the next morning, I found dozens of yellow roses waiting for me at my front door, sent from all of my friends in Quitman. It made me feel like I had won for the whole town.

  But perhaps my favorite accolade of all was a telegram Dolly Parton sent me shortly after the film opened. It read, “Dear Sissy, I hope you make millions of dollars from Coal Miner’s Daughter so that you can get a boob job and do the Dolly Parton story.”

  The Oscar recognition made me a bona fide movie star, which is a weird thing to be. It can be a lot of fun—I mean who doesn’t like flying first class when you can do it?—and the fact that you’re considered a box office draw brings whatever roles are out there your way. There’s also the ability to get a project made just by attaching your name to it, not to mention getting the best table in a restaurant. But it’s harder to stay grounded when everybody suddenly recognizes you on the street, they want to do you favors; they know your work and your face, so they feel they know you.

  The loss of privacy unnerved me at first. I was having lunch with my mother at a restaurant in Texas when one person after another came over to ask me for an autograph or to pose for a snapshot. I was hungry and trying to finish my salad, and I must have rolled my eyes or muttered something to my mother because she reached over and touched my arm and smiled.

  “You are so lucky,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?” I said, feeling more besieged than blessed at the moment.

  “Well, all you have to do is smile or sign your name, or look somebody in the eye, and you can make them happy,” she said. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

  I’ll never forget that moment. Sometimes you just have to hear it spoken to make the obvious clear.

  In the end, the hardest part about Coal Miner’s Daughter was giving it all
up. It was kind of sad to go back to my old self. I was so funny as Loretta! I had my own bus and band and millions of adoring fans! I loved being her.

  The film’s success transformed Loretta’s life as much as it did mine. It opened up her music to audiences that might not have listened to her before, and helped keep her in the spotlight. We knew while we were making the film that it might be pretty good, but we didn’t know it would be so beloved. Thirty years later, people still come up to me on the street and tell me they’ve seen it ten, twenty, thirty times or more. They’ve connected with the film in such a personal and enduring way, and they’ve kept it alive for new generations. That is a testament to Loretta.

  Loretta Lynn, like many country stars, gives so much to her fans that she often loses the distinction between her public and her private lives. Loretta collected all the props and sets from the movie and had them hauled to Hurricane Mills to create a museum and tourist attraction called the Loretta Lynn Ranch. She and Mooney rebuilt the house from Butcher Hollow and the church where they were married in the film, and rent it out for weddings. Tourists pour in by the busload and hitch up their RVs in the campsites. Visitors can view the Cadillac where Loretta wrote her hits, and see all the fabulous flouncy dresses I wore in the movie, along with her own costumes and memorabilia. Until his death in 1996, Mooney and Loretta lived in the same white-columned antebellum mansion where we did a lot of the filming. It was also opened up to daily tours, like the White House, and still is, although Loretta now has built a separate place on the property where she can have more privacy. She says that if anything is out of place in the mansion, different than the way it was in Coal Miner’s Daughter, the tourists kick up a stink, they know the picture so well.