My Extraordinary Ordinary Life

by Sissy Spacek

  Loretta loved the movie, but she’s said she can’t watch it anymore. The scenes of leaving her father and mother are just too painful to relive, she told Michael Apted years later. “There’s too much real in it.” It was also hard for her to watch the scene of her nervous breakdown, when she collapsed onstage after touring nonstop for years. She had missed watching her children grow up, missed out on her own life while she was stuck on the spinning merry-go-round of fame and obligations. The lessons weren’t lost on me. I saw how easily it could happen. And I didn’t want to give up all that she did for my own career; I wanted to keep some privacy. It’s been important to me to live a regular life, around regular people, because these are the characters I portray in films: regular people, like me.

  But after Coal Miner’s Daughter came out and offers started rolling in, I was faced with more dilemmas. Do I keep making big studio movies and build on this new momentum? Do I stay in Los Angeles, in the belly of the movie beast, stoking my career, or find a place of sanctuary, a place where I can live a real life? I wanted to stay up in that tree, and I wanted an orange. So I waited for a sign.

  … VIRGINIA …

  … 13 …

  An actor’s work doesn’t end when the film wraps. We are expected to support it by attending all the red carpet events and giving interviews to the media. Dozens and dozens of interviews. I enjoy meeting journalists, but it’s hard trying to answer the same questions over and over in new and interesting ways. By the end of a publicity tour, I’m usually staring off into space, in a corner of my hotel room, unable to remember my own name. Once, after a very grueling press junket across Europe, I had an out-of-body experience on the most popular nighttime talk show on English television. Every day I did countless back-to-back interviews. Every night I flew to a different country, and every morning I started the daylong interview process all over again. I was exhausted after several weeks of this on top of fractured sleep and terrible jet lag. I loved the studio press people I was traveling with, but by the time I arrived in London, I was fried. So when they asked me to do one more, very important talk show, I knew I wasn’t up to it, but I hadn’t the strength to even refuse.

  When I arrived at the live show, I was thrilled to meet Gloria Swanson, a great actress and movie icon. She was a tiny woman, but formidable. She was there to promote her memoir, and we chatted for a while backstage. I’ll never forget how kind she was to me. She could see how exhausted I was, and she was concerned that I was in no shape to do the show. She went on first, and I waited my turn. When I heard the music swell and felt a tap, I walked out to take my place beside Ms. Swanson. After that, things got strange. The host appeared to be talking, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I felt like I was watching television with the sound turned down. I could see his lips moving, and then he would cock his head. I assumed he was waiting for an answer to a question that I hadn’t heard. I had answers—but unfortunately none that went to any of his questions. I think he must have thought I was on drugs, which was not the case at all. Apparently he was ripping me to shreds. And although I appreciated what appeared to be Ms. Swanson’s attempt to defend me to the host, I couldn’t understand anything she was saying, either. I was too far gone. The next day at the airport, as I walked up to the long line of Americans waiting for the flight back to the U.S., they looked at me with sympathy and concern. I even heard a few of them murmur, “Awwww....” It must have been pretty bad.

  So when I was asked to fly to Brazil for the opening of one of my films in South America, I was feeling more than a little trepidation. I called my mother to tell her the latest news.

  “Yeah,” I sighed. “It looks like I’ve got to go to Brazil and do a bunch of press.”

  “Oh really!?” she said, her voice filling with excitement. “You get to go to South America?”

  “Well sort of,” I said, “I don’t really get to go; I have to go.”

  “Oh, Sissy, that’s the chance of a lifetime!” she said.

  “It is?”

  “Well yes, of course it is! You’ll have so much fun!”

  “I will?”

  “Of course you will! Just think of all the things you’ll get to see.”

  I thought for a moment. It was beginning to sound like fun.

  “Do you want to go?” I asked.

  So off we went to South America to meet the press. With her, I saw everything in a different light. Even the long flight to Brazil seemed amazing: “How luxurious!” she said. “We get to go on a plane and stretch out on a seat that’s just like a bed!” And once we arrived, she was right. We had a blast. We were all dressed up one day and looking lovely, when our young host suggested we climb to the top of the most popular mountain in São Paulo. It was a challenging climb, especially in our high heels, but Mother and I were both game, and we made it to the top without too much trouble. After that, I don’t know what came over me, but once atop São Paulo’s highest peak, standing on a large wooden ramp used to launch hang gliders, I felt compelled to jump off that mountain holding on to nothing but the harness of some very handsome young Brazilian. I was one step away from flying into the abyss, when fortunately, my mother grabbed me by the collar and wouldn’t let go. “This is not a part of the plan,” she said through a clenched jaw. “You are here to talk to journalists!” Well done, Mother!

  Once I reached my thirties, I appreciated my mom more than ever. We were long past the push and pull that daughters go through with their mothers as they assert their independence and adulthood. I realized that so much of what I had, I owed to her. She was my confidante and my friend. And when it came time for me to play Nita Longley in Raggedy Man, she literally became my role model.

  Jack had honed his craft as a production designer while working with some of the best directors of our generation. He knew filmmaking inside and out. And he had always wanted to do a film about a woman like his mother, Gerri, who had struggled to raise small children on her own. So when a writer from Austin named Bill Wittliff showed us his original screenplay about a divorced mother raising two young sons in rural Texas during World War II, we both knew it was the perfect match. In 1980, we spent six months on location in Texas, making Raggedy Man.

  Actually, we hadn’t expected to spend that much time on one picture. But that summer the Screen Actors Guild went on strike for three months. We had to shut down on the first day of production. There was nothing to do but wait around until we could go back to work. For me, it was heaven to be back home. Jack and I had rented a place on Lake Austin, not too far from our location in Maxwell, Texas. The lake is actually a dammed section of the Colorado River, cut through limestone, winding its graceful way through Austin. We spent every day water-skiing nine miles up to the dam and then nine miles back down. At the time I was also running five or six miles a day and following a strict vegan diet. Sugar didn’t touch my lips. I was so fit, you could bounce a quarter off me. (Although I was occasionally known to break rank and have a margarita or two.) When the strike was settled and it came time to start shooting again, I weighed about ninety-five pounds, and I was afraid I would look too skinny in the one scene where I took my clothes off to bathe.

  Times had changed, and we were no longer as nonchalant about nude scenes. The sixties and seventies were definitely over. During the actors’ strike, Jack and I had nothing but time, so we rehearsed in the little house where my character, Nita Longley, lived. I was sitting in the galvanized tub, and Jack used a video camera blocking out the camera angles so that we could suggest nudity without actually showing anything. It was going great when we heard a knock on the front door.

  “Yoo-hoo! Anybody home?”

  It was a group of neighborhood women, coming to bring us some fresh garden vegetables to welcome us back to town. They took one look in the house and scurried away, leaving their carrots and cucumbers on the front porch. But the people of Maxwell rolled with the punches. We also had fabulous luck finding the boys to play Nita’s young sons from a local radio ca
sting call. Neither eight-year-old Henry Thomas nor five-year-old Carey Clyde Leebo Hollis (“I’ve got four names!”) had ever acted before, but you would never have known it. In a scene at the dinner table, Henry was so angry that he raised one eyebrow at me. I thought, Oh great, blown off the screen by an eight-year-old. What was it W. C. Fields said? “Never work with children or animals.” (Later, when Jack was editing Raggedy Man, he showed Steven Spielberg some footage of Henry Thomas, and Steven cast him immediately for the lead role in ET. We were thrilled for Henry. We’d known he was a star from the moment we met him.) I loved watching Jack work with those boys. He expected them to deliver like seasoned actors, and they did. He added little things for them to do that came right out of my childhood, like playing with cutout cardboard wings.

  In Raggedy Man, Nita Longley is a plucky, lonely young woman, doing her best to get by in a dead-end job as a telephone operator in a small town where people look down on her for being divorced. Then Teddy, a handsome young sailor on leave, played by Eric Roberts, wanders into her life and turns her world upside down. To play Nita, I reached back into my grab bag of memories for the voice of Ganelle Rushing, Quitman’s telephone operator. I drew on what I knew about Jack’s mom and the screenwriter’s mother, but most of all I used my own mother’s spirit and her gestures to create the character. Sometimes, Mother would eat her meals leaning over the sink to save dishes and catch crumbs, so Nita did that, too. And I wore my hair up like my mother did during the war. In my favorite scene in the movie, I am pinning laundry onto the clothesline, just as I had seen Mother do it a thousand times. (We even have a home movie of her at the clothesline, dressed so femininely, shyly trying to shoo away my father, who was filming her.) When Teddy and the boys beg Nita to come fly a kite with them, at first she says no, brushing them off with a friendly wave that says “don’t be silly.” Then she gives in and runs to them, but not before stealing a glance at herself in the reflection of a window and fluttering her hands over her hair to make sure her pins are in place. It’s a gesture I’d had seen my mother use many times, and I knew it by heart. My entire performance was an homage to her.

  After waiting so many years for just the right film projects, great parts came tumbling in one after another. I was finally portraying real, flesh-and-blood women in serious, thought-provoking roles. The day after I won the Academy Award for Coal Miner’s Daughter, I flew off to Mexico to film Missing with the director Costa-Gavras. It was another script based on a true story, this one set in 1973 during the military coup in Chile. I played the wife of a young journalist, Charlie Horman, played by John Shea, who disappeared in the violence following the overthrow of Salvador Allende. Jack Lemmon played Charlie’s father, Ed, who flew to Chile to search for his son.

  I have to admit that I knew next to nothing about the political turmoil going on in South and Central America during the 1970s. But preparing for this film was a quick education. I was shocked and disillusioned when I learned of our government’s complicity in so much brutality and suffering. What really got to me was a short film I watched about the Chilean folk singer Victor Jara. He had been swept up by the military in the aftermath of the coup and was held prisoner with thousands of other Allende supporters at the National Stadium in Santiago. For days, Jara was tortured by his captors. They smashed his fingers then taunted him to play his guitar; instead he sang a song he had written for Allende. He kept on singing until they shot him dead. That was the kind of cold savagery the Horman family was up against.

  Costa-Gavras was a fascinating director, full of surprises. Once he had someone fire a gun off camera while Jack Lemmon was doing a scene, without telling him beforehand. Jack’s startled reaction was real, and exactly what Costa was hoping for. Then there was an even bigger surprise—for all of us: Someone on the street fired back at us with a real machine gun. We dove for cover, then scrambled to get out of there. Sometimes Mexico City felt like the Wild West.

  We were lucky that gunman wasn’t around when we were filming a huge outdoor night scene. The camera was shooting down a very long street and there were lots of extras and soldiers, along with the principal actors. In the scene it is supposed to be getting near the evening curfew in Santiago, and everyone is rushing home to get off the streets. Many, including my character, are afraid of being caught out after dark and are scrambling to find refuge. People are running, guns are firing, helicopters are flying overhead, and a beautiful white horse runs loose through the streets. It’s a very dramatic moment in the film, and many things had to be coordinated for everything to work. Finally we heard “Roll camera!” I was waiting to hear “Action,” when suddenly Costa called, “Cut!”

  The director ran across the street to an old man, who had been on his hands and knees scrubbing the sidewalk. Costa leaned down and helped him to his feet, took away the scrub brush and handed him a broom so he would be standing upright in a more dignified position. Then Costa walked back to the camera and we began again. The AD shouted, “Horse in place again, actors ready, roll camera.” I was bowled over by Costa’s compassion; there are very few directors who would delay a major action scene to preserve the self-respect of one extra.

  Costa was born in Greece but had lived in France for many years and spoke beautiful French, Spanish, and English, but still there was a slight language barrier between us. After one particularly harrowing scene, he came up to me to ask if I was okay. “I need a hug,” I said. He looked at me quizzically, then turned and walked away. I thought, Uh-oh, maybe I’ve offended him. But the next day when I saw him, he threw his arms around me, and every few minutes throughout the day he would walk over and give me a big hug. Sometime later a friend, an American costumer named Pam Wise, also working on the film, told me that Costa had walked up to her and said, “Please, could you tell me … what is a hug?”

  I needed a lot of hugs during that film. It was emotionally exhausting, trying to imagine what these characters were feeling. I worried myself sick. I was amazed at how Jack Lemmon could turn his acting on and off at will. Jack would be telling us all a joke and stop in the middle when the director yelled “Action!” Then he would deliver an incredible, emotional performance. And as soon as he heard “Cut!” he would finish the joke. I, on the other hand, would stew all day long if I had an emotional scene coming up. If the scene was at five o’clock in the afternoon, I would start winding myself up hours before, getting ready, and by the time the scene finally rolled around, often I would already be spent. Jack sat me down one day and offered some advice. “You know, you’re really good, kid, but you should trust yourself more,” he said. “The scene will either work or it won’t, and no amount of thrashing and nailing around will help. Go easy on yourself. You know what to do. So just do it.” He was an inspiration to me, and living proof that all great acting doesn’t have to involve suffering.

  Nevertheless, I still relied on some of my time-worn tools to get myself into character. One time I was flummoxed by a scene that called for me to face down a table filled with American diplomats who weren’t doing enough to find my husband. I was supposed to be in control of the scene, but I felt like I didn’t have anything to draw from. I sat there for a while, feeling intimidated by all these men in dark suits. Suits, I thought, wracking my brain, dark suits, dark suits. Then it dawned on me. Of course! Suits! These guys look like agents. After that, I thought, Okay! You’re working for me! This is what’s going to happen now!

  I became friends with the Horman family while we filmed Missing, and I’ve kept in touch with Charlie’s widow, Joyce, the model for my character. She has never given up her quest to bring his killers to justice. Joyce credits our film with helping to keep his case in the spotlight. New evidence keeps turning up, including once-classified State Department documents indicating the possible complicity of the U.S. government in Charlie Horman’s death. A judge in Santiago ordered the arrest of a Chilean intelligence officer in connection with Charlie’s execution, and in 2011, a former U.S. naval officer was indic
ted for his alleged role in the killing. But nearly forty years after his death, the full story of what happened to Charlie Horman is still unknown.

  Another reason the shoot was so difficult was that my mother had become seriously ill. In fact, she was undergoing treatments in Texas for a malignancy while I was accepting my Academy Award. As soon as we wrapped Missing, I flew back home to spend as much time with her as I could. I had no illusions anymore about finding miracle cures. I understood now that for all of us here on this earth, our days are numbered, and I didn’t want to waste a moment. I wanted to be as close to my mother as possible, for as long as possible. So I would crawl onto her bed and curl up next to her, like I had done as a child, when she read me to sleep for my afternoon naps.

  Jack and I were traveling in early November 1981, when we got a call that we’d better come quickly. She had taken a turn for the worse.

  When we arrived at her bedside, Mother had already begun the journey. I don’t know if she could always understand what we were saying, but she knew we were there. One of the last things she said was “Where’s Jack?”

  “Oh, I’m right here, Gin,” Jack said, and Mother smiled.

  Daddy told us about the morning he took her to the hospital, when it was clear that was where she needed to be. My father was saying, “C’mon, Gin. It’s time to go, sweetie.” But she kept walking around the house, looking at everything. This was the place she’d loved best. This was where so much had happened. All those chickens she’d fried and the scrapes she’d bandaged. Susan and Peggy and Imogene at the kitchen table drinking coffee, hearing the morning school bell and rushing us into the car and off to school. The laundry she’d hung out while the marching band played … and all those sugar sandwiches. I’ll bet that’s what was flooding through her mind that morning, all those sweet memories. She stood in the living room for a long time, Daddy said, just taking it all in. Then she took a breath and turned to go.